by Alex Marks
She finally opened the door wider and stepped back into a tiny, coffin-like hallway. 'Yeah, well, only for a minute. I've got to go out.'
And that's a lie, I thought, having just seen her come in from doing her shopping. I pushed the door shut behind me and followed her into the flat's sitting room. It was half-furnished with cast offs, and smelled of damp – a vibrantly green succulent in a tiny scarlet pot the only incongruous note. Susie perched anxiously right in the middle of the cheap sofa and so I pulled up a tatty dining chair and sat on that, facing her.
'Thanks for speaking to me,' I said, trying that reassuring smile again. Her face with its enormous feral eyes still regarded me warily. 'It's great to meet you in person,' I lied, 'Sarah talked about you a lot.'
Immediately Susie's expression flooded with warmth, softening her face. 'Did she?' she said, 'did she really?'
'Lots of times,' I nodded, hoping desperately she wasn't going to ask for details, 'so I know that you two were close.'
'Yeah, that's right, we was mates.' She leaned back on the sofa, and reached out a cigarette from a pack beside her. 'She was lovely, she always listened. Not like some of them there.' She lit the ciggie and took a long drag.
'Yes, she was lovely,' and very soft, I found myself thinking, always looking for the best in people, always trying to rescue them. Susie was eyeing me through the smoke, as if making up her mind.
'She told me things,' she suddenly went on, 'stuff that had happened to her. Cos it happened to me too, so I understood.' A wave of pure rage seethed up through me like petrol in my bloodstream. Sarah had confided to Susie? She'd told her about the abuse, but she hadn't told me? The anger triggered off that hot, strong feeling I now recognised, and I found myself clenching my fists as I tried to breathe, all the while nodding and pretending to listen to the stream of autobiography that spewed out of the woman's mouth. I watched her lips moving, and imagined what it would be like to smash my fist into them.
'But why do you think she was murdered?' I said instead, cutting across some impassioned description. Susie jumped, as if she'd forgotten I was there, and gave a faltering 'What?'
'You told Katie that you knew that Sarah had been murdered, that it hadn't been an accident, didn't you?' She nodded, wariness returning, those prey-animal eyes blinking, 'so why did you think that?'
'Because she was going to speak out, wasn't she? She was going to tell about it. And they can't let you do that.'
'Who can't?'
'Them, the people in charge. The fucking government. They don't want anyone to know what those MPs and judges and all that are up to. They're all in on it. And they send those SAS, MI6 blokes to take out anyone who says anything.' So that's all it was: a fucking conspiracy theory. Disappointment bit into me. 'That's why I don't talk about it, cos they'll find out where I live and put voices in my head again, then I'll have to move,' her eyes flittered across the marked walls and the dirty carpet, settling on the tiny green plant on the window sill, 'and this is all I got, this and Kenny.'
My head sank down onto my chest as I processed this extinguishing of hope, the crushing of the possibility that someone else might know something, might be able to help. I realised that Susie had stopped speaking, and then she startled me by standing up.
'Get out!' her voice was shrill, and I stood up slowly, hands out, placating.
'What's the –'
'Get out!' she was shaking now, trembling all over, her arms clutched around her thin frame like she was holding herself together, 'There's something wrong with you! There's something wrong!'
'I'm sorry, I'm just a bit tired...'
'No!' she drew herself up and I realised she was quite a tall woman. Her face was on a level with mine, bloodless, her eyes just silver glitters. 'You aren't – right, somehow, I don't know what it is, but you don't belong here. You're in the wrong place, and you've left something behind, something important...'
I went cold. Did she mean the time travel? How could she know that? Could she see it, like Blake's hangman's mark?
Her voice faded to a whisper. 'You're frightening me.'
I stepped back, and back again into the little hallway. Susie remained in the sitting room, her eyes now glassy and her lips moving, and I wondered if she was having a seizure. I hesitated, not sure whether to go or to try and help and then she made me jump by shrieking 'Get out! Get out!'
I turned and opened the front door, and half ran along to the stairwell. I took a few steps down as a man's voice I recognised as Kenny's came from the walkway behind me, calling to Susie, then becoming muffled as he went into the flat. I hammered down the stairs, burst out into the melee of the shopping centre and then jogged back to the bike. I got it going and roared back onto the street, letting the current sweep me down the main road and away, trying not to think, trying not to feel that that crazy woman had just told me what I knew already, that something had changed, that something was not right.
I rode slowly back home.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Saturday, 4 April 2015. 04:19
Another deep, dreamless sleep. I woke refreshed but unsettled, superstitiously jumping out of bed and away from what felt like a definable void in the world. It was just dawn, and too early to be heading into Oxford, so I dressed and made myself a black coffee and sat cross-legged on the floor to watch a brilliant moon decline slowly across a blue and green mineral sky.
It was thirty seven days since Sarah had died. Not a big number. Not decades and centuries and eons, not enough time for civilisations to rise and fall, planets to crumble to ash, suns to sputter into darkness. But enough time, nonetheless. Thirty eight days ago I'd been an ordinary man with a lovely wife, a decent job, a house, a car... just normal, everyday, perfect happiness. I'd mowed the lawn and moaned about the weather, and cooked, and watched telly, and fucked, and laughed, and planned for a future that was never going to happen.
Memories of Sarah rose vividly in my mind, and I couldn't believe that it wasn't possible to just reach out and touch them. She was there, always slightly out of reach, one hand-stretch away. I'd been instinctively shying away from any more time travel, I realised. I felt less substantial with every passing day, and could only imagine that my reality would be stretched even thinner by jumping back those thirty seven days. And yet, almost without realising it, I pulled over a piece of paper and a pen and began sketching out some calculations. Just wind the clock back thirty seven days and I could stop my wife from even getting in the car. She'd be safe, and alive, and everything would be alright again. I'd happily let Richard and Maggie get on with their twisted lives and pack Sarah off to another country, to America, Australia, somewhere far away and keep her safe forever. And me? Dispassionately I imagined meeting my innocent, earlier self and just – what? A bullet in the brain? Well, why not? It would hardly be suicide, would it? Bugger the paradox, the Grandfather problem was never this personal.
I looked at the page of calculations in my hand. How innocuous they looked, little scratches of ink. For the first time since my jump I let the practicalities of making them workable breathe and unspool in my mind. Then I went down to the workshop.
I dug the time kit out of the bum bag and spread it out along the bench. I figured the batteries would be pretty dead by now, so I disconnected them and plugged them into the wall socket to re-charge. Actually it would be a good idea to have some way of telling how much energy they had left, so I quickly wired up a new circuit with little green and red LED bulbs that should give me a bit of warning before the whole thing powered down. On further thought I also fixed in a cut-out that would automatically disconnect the power packs once they'd delivered a big surge of juice... this would save me having to pull them out of the housing every time I made a jump. Not that I was expecting to be hopping around, but I remembered my white panic of fumbling with the batteries after Richard's little visit the other night, and didn't want to go through that again.
I threw an old oilcloth over the bench and the re-c
harging batteries, and glanced at the window. The sun had risen whilst I'd been working, and I peered up through the grimy glass, between the leaves of the plants rambling across the wall outside, and up into a clear blue sky. Mornings have always fascinated me, their perfection, the offer of a new day untouched by anything. Was this a new day, though? I'd been through Saturday 4 April once before, and if I adjusted the time kit lying in front of me on the workbench, I could experience it again, and again. And each time it would feel this fresh and clean.
Since I'd made the jump back a week I'd been avoiding the temptation to go straight to the 27th of February and pull Sarah out of her car before she'd even turned the key in the ignition. In the clear yellow light of early morning I acknowledged that this had been simple fear – fear of travelling again, fear of the strangeness, the wrongness of it. I was just a monkey, a mammal, with a brain designed for the rudimentary basics of life and not for this impossibility, this opening of routes in and between and around reality. I felt like Einstein, realising that light wasn't a stream but was made up of particles, only now the particles were time. And I could see that these individual dots of experience were scattered with voids and interstices, tiny navigatable spaces into which the 122 could stealthily insert itself like a cancerous cell.
I put my hands to my head as everything swooped and plunged around me: if I thought about this hard enough would the fragile surface of what still felt like reality crack and splinter? Would I drop through into the dark confusion of - what? What was underneath? Quantum foam? Vishnu, lying on his lotus, forever dreaming? Another bubble of a multiverse?
I clenched my fists and took a deep breath. I mustn't think about this, must push it away. The workshop was warming in the morning sun and it suddenly felt stifling, and I stumbled to my feet and pushed open the door. A slice of cool air slipped inside, and I stood gulping it in, trembling like I'd sprinted a thousand yards, breathing and breathing until the darkness edging my vision faded and pulled back. I pushed the door closed again, and slumped against it, ribs protesting. I needed to focus. I'd done this – strange, impossible – thing to find out more about Sarah's father, to do the investigation that the police wouldn't do, and I should concentrate on that. I was walking a rope bridge across a terrifying void and I had to keep going, I mustn't look down.
I plodded back up to the attic, bright now with the sunshine, and I made myself eat an energy bar and drink a bottle of water. Eat, drink, piss, sleep, I needed to pay attention to them all or I would crash, and I couldn't afford for that to happen. Mechanically I bit and chewed the tasteless slab, swallowed, bit, chewed, swallowed... Eventually it was done and I flopped back on the floor, looking at the sky through the little window. A white hot temptation to get the time kit and jump forward to Wednesday 8 April, to rejoin my own storyline, to go and stay with Dave and forget about anything else burned in my chest. I fought it down, closing my eyes and focusing only on the sun's warmth on my face, the sound of the birds outside, my own breathing as it slowed. I felt something like acceptance spread through me as my body unclenched, and I slipped into a light doze.
When I came round only half an hour had passed, but I felt restored. My mind was clear, and I could tread confidently across the stepping stones of this reality, ignoring the swirling blackness underneath. It was still early, so I risked a toilet visit to the house, and grabbed a notebook and a few bits and pieces from the study as I was passing. I then settled down again with the laptop in the workshop to see what I could find out about Marley Video Supplies.
After about ten minutes I began to recognise the slight misdirection that had marked the online presence of Haverford Vintages. Marley Video Supplies did have a website, which again promised a new one soon, and again it was listed on the Companies House directory with a series of innocuous-sounding directors... one of whom was a certain Richard Graham Holland. Despite the alternate spelling of the second name it seemed fairly clear this was another guest appearance of my father-in-law. The energy bar turned to ashes in my mouth as I realised what use a video making company would be to the Hollands, Gillespies and Naismiths of this world. Would this be enough evidence to get a proper police investigation? Much as I hoped so, I didn't feel optimistic.
That just left plan B – the press. Grimly, I knew what I had to do. I flicked open a new browser window and looked up the main local newspaper: The Oxford Mail. A quick search of their garish website revealed article after article about Operation Greenland, and scrolling down I was unsurprised to discover that most of these had the by-line of Tessa Davies. I clicked on the thumbnail image and stared at the photo of a woman in her mid-thirties with a determined expression.
After a moment to think about exactly what I was doing, I picked up my new phone and dialled the number shown on screen.
'Hello, Newsroom?' the swift answer, early on a Saturday morning, took me aback, and it was a second before I could stumble out a request to speak to Ms Davies. There was a click, and then a loud female voice said 'Yes?'
'I have a story related to Operation Greenland.' I began.
A long pause. 'What's your name?'
'Does that matter?'
'I like to know who I'm dealing with.'
I thought for a moment. 'Call me –' I was going to say 'nemesis' but that sounded pretentious. 'Norman,' I eventually said.
The voice at the other end of the line was dry. 'Carry on then, Norman. What's the top line?'
'Another paedophile ring operating in Oxford.' I could feel the journalist's attention snap to my words, 'from addresses in Cowley, Headington and Summertown.' I took a breath. 'The names of the people involved are Richard Graeme – spelled G R A E M E - Holland, Ian Gillespie and another man called Naismith. Holland and Gillespie are directors of a bogus company called Haverford Vintages, which lists six figures in its accounts and supposedly operates from a lock up garage in Temple Cowley. They are all also members of the Sandwich Estate golf club in Kidlington, and yesterday afternoon were playing a round of golf with Detective Inspector Nigel Walters, who is leading Operation Greenland.'
There was a small noise from the end of the phone, a tiny grunt of journalistic excitement. 'How do you know this?'
I took a breath. 'It has been going on for years, and there has been a – statement – made by one of the group's victims.' Now for the plunge. 'They may also be implicated in the disappearance of Helen Holland, aged eight, in 1985.'
'And how do you fit in, Norman?' I could feel her suspicions down the phone line. My face flushed and I gripped the phone tightly.
'I have the statement.'
Another long silence. 'Can we meet?'
'No. But I can get you some information that will help your investigation.'
'Including this statement?'
Did I want to do this, did I want to be the person who leaked Sarah's heart-breaking video to the public? I ground my teeth. 'Yes.'
'When?'
'Today. I'll send it to you by courier.'
'How soon?'
Saturday, 4 April 2015. 11:40
I parked up outside the newspaper's office building, situated in a run-down business park off the Botley Road. I'd made a stop at a large, anonymous copy shop on the way over and in my hand I held a padded envelope that contained copies of the photos I'd taken, print-outs of the Companies House information and the articles about Helen's disappearance. And a USB stick with Sarah's tape on it. I gripped the envelope, unable to hand it over and let other people see her terrible pain. And shit – I hadn't even found the video till later tonight, so I couldn't give it to the journalist today. I hastily flipped the envelope over and peeled it open, sliding the stick into my palm before tucking it into the pocket on my leathers.
I swung off the bike and marched up the main doors, entering a tatty lobby with a scuffed reception desk. Beside the desk was a woman in a business suit, fidgeting anxiously. She saw me coming and cut me off before I could get half way across the room.
'Delivery for
Davies?' she asked, her eyes flicking over my closed visor, my plain black leathers, the cheap courier bag. I just nodded, and handed it over. Then all her attention was with the envelope, and I turned to go, hearing tearing sounds as she ripped it open.
'Hey!' her hand grabbed my arm and swung me round. 'Where's the video? There was supposed to be a USB?'
I shrugged, not daring to speak in case she recognised my voice as Norman's. Frustration danced across her face and she whirled impatiently away, digging out her mobile to ring – bloody hell, my phone was in my pocket and the ringtone was on. I strode quickly out of the foyer, and dug the mobile out and pressed the cancel button just as it started to light up with Davies' incoming call. In a few strides I was back on the bike, and I rode out of the car park, down and around the mini roundabout and back up the road to a small playground before stopping again and taking out the phone. There were already three missed calls.
'Where's the USB?' she answered immediately I dialled her number.
'You'll get it tomorrow,' I spoke over her anger, 'I'll send you a link to a secure file storage in the morning.' Then I disconnected, and turned the phone off. If I sent her the tape first thing then conceivably it could have been leaked by the police, and I wouldn't be the automatic suspect. At least, I hoped I wouldn't be.
I kick-started the bike and drifted back into town, heading along Worcester Street to get back to Summertown for some more Richard Holland watching. As I was coming through St Giles the church clock struck the hour and glancing up at it I was shocked to see that it was a quarter past twelve. Today was the day that Bill Gilbert had tried to take the unbibium sample, and I now realised that it must have been me who'd whipped it out of the safe. I cut across the traffic and out onto the Banbury Road just ahead of a white van, which treated me to a long blast of the horn. I turned the corners blindly, pulling up outside my own building. There was no time to think now, and on autopilot I grabbed a plain sheet of paper from my bag and wrote the message: