A Year Less a Day

by James Hawkins

  “Why not take the train to Westchester,” Bliss had suggested to Phillips when he had called the previous day. “Then I can drive us up to London and show you around.”

  “Thanks,” Phillips had replied, grateful that he wouldn’t have to get his mind in gear for driving on the left; but as they stand in line for train tickets, he is beginning to wonder if it might not be quicker to rent a car. The line has been at a standstill for several minutes as the front man, an enormous Russian, battles with a belligerent booking clerk who is determined not to comprehend the foreign visitor. Despite the aspersions Trina has cast over her linguistic ability, she finally loses patience and steps in, saying, “He wants three return tickets to Westminster Abbey. Two adults and a child, please.” Then she turns to the new arrival and carries on chatting as cordially as if they were long lost friends.

  “What were you saying?” asks Ruth in awe as they make their way down the escalator to the platform, with the Russian and his wife and daughter in their wake, and Trina sloughs it off. “I’ve no idea, but he seemed to understand.”

  Ruth is mesmerized by the sights as the Heathrow Express zooms them into the heart of London, and she stands on the banks of the Thames pointing out the Houses of Parliament and London’s giant Ferris wheel, saying, “Oh my God. I can’t believe it, Mike.”

  The locals say “Gob-smacked,” according to Trina, and she smiles at the happy couple as they gape at London’s famous skyline, and she prays that the black spectre just over the horizon will turn out to be nothing more than a harmless will-o’-the-wisp.

  The high-speed train from London to Westchester rockets along at over two hundred kilometres per hour, while Tudor hamlets with thatched cottages and Victorian towns with neat rows of brick-red houses fly past the windows.

  “The cars are so cute,” says Ruth, watching the traffic as they run alongside a road for a few moments. “They look like little ducklings zipping along to catch up their mother.”

  The spring sunshine has swept away all but the very deepest drifts of snow, and the fields and hedgerows are bursting with fresh green growth. An ordinarily lazy river rushes with melt-water, snatching and tearing at the branches of a weeping willow as it trails its slender tentacles in the torrent, while another tree, a small oak, has succumbed to the urge and is riding the barrage all the way to the sea. Meadows of spring flowers splash past the windows in smudges of yellow and white, until the lowlands give way to the chalk downs, where the winter wheat has had the weight lifted off its back by the thaw, and is now spurting skyward in a verdant rush to the summer’s harvest.

  “Are you nervous?” Phillips asks Ruth as the train starts to descend into Westchester, and all the joy drains from her face as she suddenly remembers the purpose of their visit.

  “Is it true that if you travel fast enough, you go back in time?” she asks, and Phillips nods. “I’ve heard that. Why?”

  “I guess that’s what I’m doing.”

  “The past is the only thing that prevents you from grasping the future,” says Trina, sounding grandiose as she quotes from Reader’s Digest again.

  “I feel like I did when Mom disappeared,” admits Ruth. “Part of me wanted her to come home, but most of me didn’t.”

  A familiar smiling face greets Mike Phillips at Westchester station’s platform barrier, and Ruth puts on a brave face as Bliss shakes her hand.

  “We’ve brought a friend,” says Phillips, and sees Bliss’s puzzlement as he looks along the near deserted platform. “She’s just sorting out a little problem,” he adds, pointing to Trina who is now crossing the footbridge to the opposite platform with a family in tow.

  Trina has finally hit the jackpot as a saviour of strays and has scored a hat trick. While she had been making her way to the end of the carriage, readying to disembark in Westchester, she had been aghast at the sight of the Russian man, together with his wife and daughter, rising from nearby seats and preparing to leave the train with her.

  “Westchinster?” the man had asked in pidgin English as he’d pointed to the “Westchester” signboard, and Trina’s face had fallen, knowing that, at Heathrow airport, when she had said “Just follow us” in broken Russian, she had meant only as far as the station platform.

  “At least she’s not taking them to the pound,” laughs Phillips while they wait for Trina to guide the confused family to the correct platform for their return to London. Then he looks around, asking, “Where’s Daphne?”

  “She’s probably lining up a ceremonial guard of neighbours for you to inspect,” says Bliss with a smirk. “Although knowing Daphne, it wouldn’t surprise me if we get back to find the Regimental Band of the Royal Marines marching up and down the street playing the ‘Maple Leaf Rag.’”

  “I know someone like that,” laughs Phillips, giving a nod in Trina’s direction.

  Ruth’s nervous silence is palpable as they wait at the gate for Trina, and her striking ebony eyes dart back and forth as if she’s expecting to be attacked.

  “So when do we meet the man in the manor?” asks Phillips, knowing that someone will eventually have to bring up the thorny topic.

  “We’ll have lunch first, so that we can discuss tactics,” suggests Bliss, though he knows that he has no plans other than a brazen frontal attack on the manor’s main gate. “Daphne’s laying out quite a spread in your honour,” he carries on, as he picks up Ruth’s suitcase at the sight of Trina running along the platform toward them.

  Daphne has called upon reinforcements to help with the preparations. Mavis and Minnie are scuttling around doing all the menial tasks, while she puts the finishing flourish on her pyramids of salmon and cheese sandwiches by adding a handful of miniature Canadian flags flying from toothpicks. A flask of rye whisky and several bottles of Canada Dry ginger ale stand on the sideboard and, over a large pan of boiling water in the kitchen, steams her pièce de résistance. Adding a distinctly Canadian twist to a traditional English favourite, she has made a gigantic maple syrup suet pudding, which she will serve with lashings of homemade creamy custard.

  Superintendent Donaldson, in full regalia, pulls up at the house just as the visitors arrive, and leads the charge on the dining room. Trina quickly migrates to the kitchen, offering to help, and finds a soulmate in Daphne.

  “What a brilliant young woman—and we even spoke in Russian,” Daphne tells Bliss, as everyone except Ruth digs in to the sandwiches a short while later.

  “You speak Russian?” says Bliss without a hint of skepticism.

  “I’ve forgotten most of it,” Daphne admits modestly, “but Trina and I did quite well, considering. It’s so nice to talk to someone from another country; you can learn so much. I simply had no idea that Canadians put bananas in more or less everything.”

  Ruth has found a corner and sits as glumly as a convict awaiting sentence, while the others try not to let her depression drag them down.

  “I know it’s Jordan. I always knew he wasn’t dead,” Ruth moans to Donaldson when he gets too close, “but no one believed me.”

  “We’ll soon know for sure,” says the superintendent, and Bliss suggests that it is time for her to bite the bullet.

  “Are you ready, Ruth?” he says as he holds out her coat. “I’ll drop you at the gates, but you and Mike will have to walk up the drive.”

  “Aren’t you coming with us, Dave?” asks Phillips, but Bliss shakes his head. “I think I’m persona non grata. He’d probably come after me with a shotgun.”

  “But what’s Jordan doing there?” Ruth questions, having finally accepted the inexorableness of the situation.

  “Plywood,” replies Bliss; then he tells them of his morning’s chat with the truck driver.

  “I didn’t think he knew much about wood,” claims Ruth, but she doesn’t push the point, realizing that there are a lot of things she doesn’t know about her husband. Then she asks, “What does he look like now?”

  Mike Phillips watches her expression closely as Bliss describes the man
at the manor. “He’s tall, about my height, distinguished looking—like a politician; he’s got blue eyes, and his hair is just turning at the temples. If you had a photograph, I’d soon tell you.”

  “There aren’t any photographs,” says Phillips, though Ruth is more honest as she admits that Jordan had destroyed them all.

  “You might have a problem getting in ...” starts Bliss, then pauses, realizing that there is no delicate way to tell Ruth that her husband might turn her away. “If he sees you on the security camera he might not open the gate,” he continues, but Daphne has an idea, and she quickly trots upstairs and returns with an enormous wide-brimmed straw hat. “He’ll never see you under this,” she says plopping it onto Ruth’s head.

  “I just hope the wind doesn’t get under it,” laughs Bliss, as Ruth uses both hands to balance it, and he’s almost waiting for Daphne to explain how she’d last used it as a parachute to fly a Bulgarian dissident to freedom across the Iron Curtain, or some such spine-tingling escapade, when she confesses that she’d never worn it.

  “You’d better stay here and keep Daphne company, Trina,” suggests Phillips, fearing her presence at the manor could inflame a potentially volatile situation, and the nurse pulls him to one side, whispering harshly. “If it is him, Mike—you drag her out of there by her hair if you have to.”

  The main gates to Thraxton Manor are closed as Bliss drops off Phillips and Ruth, telling them that he will be watching from a parking spot further along the road.

  “You’ll have to use the side gate,” Bliss tells them as he leaves, but as they approach, a snarling bull mastiff throws himself at the fence and Phillips is forced to use the telephone attached to the gate pillar.

  “I’m Sergeant Mike Phillips of the RCMP. I heard a fellow Canuck was in the neighbourhood,” he says cheerily in response to the gruff, “Yep.”

  The remote-controlled surveillance camera swivels their way and Phillips hisses, “Keep your head down,” to Ruth. A silent whistle stops the huge dog mid-bark and sends it running back to the house, and an electronic “click” announces that the gate is now unlocked.

  “Just walk straight up the drive to the stables. Someone will be with you in a few minutes,” commands the voice, and Ruth starts backing away, saying, “I’m gonna throw up.”

  Phillips grabs her, slots her through the gate, and hustles her out of the view of the camera as she heaves up her breakfast, while at the top of the driveway inside the stable apartment, the occupant is looking at his watch and praying that Mort will answer the phone despite the earliness of the hour in Vancouver.

  “What?” yells Mort.

  “What the hell’s going on, Mort?”

  “What’s the f’kin time? An’ I told you—no names on the phone. You never know who’s listening—know what I mean?”

  “I’ve got a pig from Canada at the door, says he was just passing by.”

  “I dunno,” says Mort, still trying to get his mind straight. One of my shit-heads got hauled in by the fuzz for drillin’ a hole in a kiddie’s guinea pig, but he doesn’t know nuvving. In fact, he’s so f’kin useless that he’s gonna have to go—know what I mean?”

  “What do you think I should do, then?”

  “You’d better see what he wants or he might get ideas and blab to the bill.”

  As Mort puts down the phone, a teenager’s hand exploring his groin reminds him that he’s not alone in the bed.

  “What was that about, Mort?” says the young woman and Mort grabs her hair and roughly drags her face up to his. “You didn’t hear anything, right?”

  “Mort. You’re hurting ...”

  “Say it. Nuvving. You didn’t hear f’kin nuvving, right?”

  “I didn’t hear nothing, Mort.”

  “Good,” he says, but he keeps a hold on her hair and slams her face to his groin, adding, “Now be a good girl and you won’t get hurt.”

  “Jeremy Maxwell,” says the occupant of the Thraxton estate a few seconds later as he opens the front door with his hand outstretched and a welcoming smile. “Do come up, Sergeant.” Then he turns and leads his visitors up the stairs.

  chapter eighteen

  The apartment-dweller’s slow Canadian drawl sinks Ruth. On a day when she has been surrounded by the staccato of rapid English, the voice of the man at the door has an all-too-familiar ring, and she vacillates between running and grabbing onto Phillips for support.

  “Come on up,” repeats the voice, ascending the stairs ahead of them, and Ruth inches up the hat rim expecting the worst, then her eyes dance with delight, and she is so excited that she can hardly get the words out as she tugs furiously at Phillips arm and whispers in his ear. “It’s not Jordan.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. I’ve never seen him before. He must be Maxwell.”

  “Everything all right, Sergeant?” asks their host as he reaches the top and turns.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. Everything is just great, Mr. Maxwell,” replies Phillips.

  Daphne and Trina are still swapping recipes in the kitchen when Minnie spies the smiling group walking back up the garden path half an hour later, and with a shriek of delight, she rushes to open the door so that she might give Ruth a congratulatory hug, followed by one for Bliss, as if he had in some way been responsible for placing the right man in the manor.

  Trina is so overjoyed at the news that she kick-boxes her way around Daphne’s dining table, whooping, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” and Minnie invites herself to root through Daphne’s liquor cabinet, saying, “We ought to have champagne.” Daphne, on the other hand, is less enthusiastic, protesting that she simply can’t believe that she had could have been so wrong.

  “I was so sure that little Jeremy was going to turn out nicely,” she says, as the weight of additional guilt bears down on her.

  “Well ... He’s definitely not Jordan Jackson, Daphne. So he has to be Jeremy Maxwell,” explains Phillips, but Daphne is far from convinced, asking, “Then why did he have the other man’s passport?”

  “He could have found it. Maybe he bought the chest of drawers second-hand and it was already in there.”

  “It might be years out of date, and somebody simply chucked it away,” suggests Bliss.

  “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know,” continues Phillips. “We can’t ask him outright without admitting that somebody’s been snooping.”

  “But why was he so horrid to me?” whines Daphne. “He was such a well-mannered little boy.”

  “Daphne ...” says Bliss, taking her to one side, as Ruth finds her appetite and digs in to the salmon sandwiches, leaving the rest of the guests to polish off the maple syrup pudding. “Have you considered the possibility that over the years he’s discovered more about his father’s relationship with you than you might want him to know?”

  Daphne pales. “And you think he blames me?”

  “Everybody else did—or so you said.”

  “They did, David. Believe me, they did.”

  “Well ... As he grew up he was bound to be curious about the fate of his parents. There must have been a time when he realized that the Nile wasn’t as heavenly as he thought it was. Anyway, from what you told me of his grouchy aunt in Canada, it sounds as if she was probably the sort of woman who’d go out of her way to blacken you if she could.”

  “That still doesn’t give him the right to bin my polish,” Daphne pouts, unwilling to admit defeat.

  “To listen to you talk, anyone would think she’d raised him to be a mass murderer,” says Bliss in exasperation.

  “Well, something awful must have happened for him to have turned out like that. She must have poisoned his mind.”

  “Daphne,” Bliss reminds her firmly, “it was just a can of spray polish.”

  “There’s no smoke without fire, David. You know that,” she persists, though Bliss can’t help feeling that mountains and molehills might produce a more apt maxim.

  Daphne’s offer of suet pudding is declined by
Ruth, who pats her now-shapely midriff, saying, “I really mustn’t, Daphne. But thank you anyway. You’ve been very kind.”

  “Oh, don’t mention it—absolutely nothing at all,” she twitters. “I’m really quite thrilled for you, though I must admit that in a way I was hoping that it was your husband at the manor.”

  “Well I’m glad it wasn’t,” says Phillips, as he steps in to put an arm around Ruth’s waist, adding to her, “And I’ve got another surprise for you—if you can take it.”

  The welter of strange experiences in the past twenty-four hours have been so unreal to Ruth that nothing would surprise her anymore, and she looks around the table at the kindly group of smiling foreigners as she stands in the dining room of an aging British agent, wondering why God has decided to turn her world upside down. Then a voice deep inside suggests that maybe he’s turned it right side up.

  “Well,” queries Phillips, “can you take another surprise?”

  “Sorry,” says Ruth unfreezing herself. “Of course, Mike. What is it?”

  Mike Phillips has had the surprise in his pocket for a couple of days, but he’s been holding back, fearful that Jordan Jackson could still be alive. But now, with his mind at ease, he announces that he’s been granted a further three months’ secondment in Vancouver.

  “Well, kiss him for chrissake,” says Trina, giving Ruth a nudge.

  “So what cases have you got on the go at present?” asks Bliss, once Phillips has disentangled himself from his fans.

  “I’ve been working the biker gangs, mainly: drugs, extortion, and porn,” he answers, adding, “But we’re beginning to think we’ve got a serial killer on the loose.”

  “They’re always tricky. What’s the MO?”

  “Hookers and addicts; easy targets—usual thing. No one misses them for weeks or months, if ever, and the trail’s stone cold before we even start.”

  “Any suspects?”

  “Not at the moment. He’s probably some sort of religious nutbar claiming he’s cleaning up the world for God.”