by Alex Marks
YOU'VE LENT IT TO TONY HITCHENS AT READING UNIVERSITY
I shoved the folded paper into an envelope and printed my own name on the outside, then marched into the foyer and handed it to Norman. My heart was hammering in my chest: would he recognise me? I didn't dare speak so I'd scribbled URGENT on the top corner of the package and as he took it from me I tapped the word several times until he glanced up and said impatiently: 'Yes, yes, urgent, I get it.' He turned away to stow the parcel behind the desk and I slipped out of the foyer and back to the bike.
I didn't go far, however, just firing it up long enough to leave the stretch of tarmac that Norman could easily see from his security desk, and parking up again round the side of the building. The fire escape door was half-hidden amongst the trees and shrubs planted round the perimeter of the car park. I left my courier bag on my bike, took a quick look round to make sure no-one was watching, then pushed through the planting to the door and its keypad. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have known the code to this door, but luckily this was the exit of choice for Dave and other smokers to have a cheeky ciggie – as evidenced by all the abandoned cigarette butts at my feet – and he'd once told me the number. I held my breath as I tapped it into the unit, and then exhaled as the door gave a welcoming clunk and swung free.
I dashed up the stairs to my floor, and gently pushed the door to the corridor till I could see it was clear. Two steps took me to my own office door and I swiftly unlocked it and closed it again behind me. I glanced at my watch: shit! Wright and Gilbert would be showing up soon, I had to get a move on. Terry the hamster came to the bars of his cage and looked at me with interest as I whirled the combination on the safe, grabbed the 122, and shoved it into the front of my leathers. I locked the safe again, peered out into the corridor and then stepped out, locked the office door, and dived into the stairwell just as I heard voices approaching.
That was close! I was sweating like a pig but I didn't dare take off my helmet, just in case someone came into the stairwell. Now there was nothing to do but wait for everything to play out. It was surreal, like watching a play that I hadn't realised I was in: here came Gilbert and Wright, arguing with Dave who valiantly defended my office and insisted that I be called. Then, a little while and many snide comments from my boss and his side-kick later, here was I. I was pleased to see I looked less defeated than I had yesterday, my head was up, my fists clenched at my sides, and I once gave Freddy such a nasty sneer that he actually took half a step back. Then the three of us went into the office and the door closed with a snap.
I sat down wearily on the stairs. I knew how this bit went, and sure enough within a few minutes Bill Gilbert had stormed out with Freddy Wright trailing behind, a furious expression on his face. Finally, here I came, all angry energy gone, heading for the toilets.
I zipped across the corridor, opened the unlocked door and replaced the unbibium in the safe. Then I was hammering down the stairs as fast as I could go, pushing past some surprised colleagues smoking a fag in the open doorway - though, fortunately, Dave wasn't one of them – and was jogging back to the bike. In seconds I'd looped the courier bag back round my neck and was twisting the throttle when I noticed the door to the physics building bang open. To my surprise, Freddy hurried out and walked quickly to the bike racks. Something about his haste drew my eye, so when he cycled out of the carpark and headed down the road towards the centre of town I threw the bike into gear and followed.
He was moving swiftly, zipping in and out of the traffic, and for all my extra horse-power I still found myself falling behind as we snaked through side streets which got narrower and more crammed with University buildings as we went. It was only as he threw himself off the bike in Market Street that I realised that we were heading to the Covered Market. I parked as he was disappearing through the darkened entrance, and I hurried to catch up.
I stepped inside and was immediately assailed by the smell of the fishmongers, and pushed back by the swell of locals and tourists that packed the enclosed space. I was just able to keep Wright's head in view as he cut down one alleyway then another, moving always towards the centre of the building. I lost sight of him for a second, and shoved an elderly Scandinavian couple out of my way as I tried desperately to see where he'd gone, then suddenly the crowds parted and I saw him standing by the red pillar box in the open area at the heart of the market. He was talking to someone, and my heart gave a lurch as I realised it was my father-in-law, Richard Holland.
I was still wearing my bogus courier bag, so I took a breath and tried to act the part of just another bored delivery man, ticking off another drop-off on his route. I rummaged a parcel out of my bag, and, ignoring the adrenalin that was burning through my veins like lit petrol, strolled as slowly as was plausible towards the florists shop next to them, ears straining.
'You're late,' said Richard. A remote part of my brain registered a flash of pleasure as Freddy blanched. 'What news do you have?' Holland was keeping his voice low but it still vibrated with that deep, persuasive, commanding note.
I stopped mid-way across the space, digging my mobile out of my leathers as if I'd just got an urgent text. I felt Wright's eyes sweep over me but I didn't register as a real human being, just a delivery man.
'He's back in the lab, but I'm working on Gilbert to get him out.'
I dropped the phone with a clatter, and dived to pick it up. He was talking about me! The two men glanced at me and I forced myself to walk slowly into the flower shop. The shop assistant was wrapping a bouquet for a customer, but looked up with a curious glance. I gave her a nod, slipped the bogus parcel onto the corner of the counter, and then turned away before she could ask me what it was for. I headed slowly back towards the two men, burning with impatience.
'...gardening leave,' the post doc was saying with some relish. I knew what that was all about. 'We tried to sort it this afternoon, but he's slipped off the hook for now.'
The fucking little traitor had been spying on me for Richard Holland!
'Off the hook is not acceptable,' said my father-in-law in a heavy, threatening tone. Wright swallowed. 'Finish him off. I want him discredited and out on his ear.' His gaze swept round, and looked straight at me. I moved away, heart pounding, trying to look normal. 'Once it's done, there'll be the other half of this.' I risked a glance back over my shoulder, and saw him hand over a padded envelope. Freddy took a look inside and smirked. No prizes for what was in that.
'Happy to help,' he said, grinning.
Richard began to turn and walk away but then his eyes cut to me and he stopped.
'I've seen that courier before – hey!'
All pretence of ambling back to my next delivery was dropped as I shot off across the open space like a jack rabbit and plunged into the crowded lanes of the market, weaving and diving between the tourists. I didn't dare look back, but could feel Wright chasing me, and following on behind like some dark force came Richard Holland.
'Stop! Stop!' shouted Freddy Wright, now just inches behind me. I had to get out of the crowd and onto the street, and then I could lose them in the crowd of afternoon shoppers. With what felt like my last burst of energy I darted away behind a wall of slow-moving German tourists, cutting the line of sight between me and my pursuers. Quickly, I dived into a shop selling cheap Oxford souvenirs. I ripped off my motorcycle helmet and pulled a bright blue hooded sweatshirt off a display, taking it and a dark blue cap to the counter and paying for it whilst wrestling off my leather jacket. The shop assistant folded the jumper neatly and placed it into a large carrier bag, but as soon as he'd handed it to me I pulled it out again, tore off the tags and shoved it over my head, tugging it as far down over my leathers as it
would go.
I pushed the helmet, my leather coat and the courier satchel into the plastic bag, stuck the cap on my head, took a deep breath, and strolled out of the shop and back into the crowds as nonchalantly as I could manage. I was praying that Wright and Holland would be scanning for a bloke in a motorc
ycle outfit with a courier bag, not a tourist with a cap, black eyes, a hoody and a bulging carrier bag of souvenirs.
I walked towards the exit to Market Street, trying not to look around me, and had almost got to the door when I caught sight of the pair of them at the end of one of the parallel alleys. Standing by the grisly display of headless deer carcasses in the window of M. Feller & Son & Daughter, Wright looked miserable and scared, chewing his fingernails like a teenager whilst Richard Holland vibrated with suppressed rage beside him. I couldn't resist slowing my step for a second to look, and I saw Richard dig out his phone and speak urgently into it, but then a large group of people swept between me and the two men and they were lost to view.
Just in case Richard was calling up reinforcements I speeded up and got out of the doors and onto my bike as fast as I could. I had to put the helmet back on, but left my leather coat in the bag – the courier disguise had been good whilst it lasted but was now completely blown. As soon as I got round a few corners I slowed down and fished out the yellow courier bag, chucking it next to a restaurant's huge bin, and then rode back home as fast as I felt I could get away with.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Saturday, 4 April 2015. 17:04
I got back to the house and wheeled the bike into the workshop, then scuffed up the gravel to hide the tell-tale sweeps made by the doors. By my reckoning I had a couple of hours before earlier me was back, so I let myself into the house and took a shower – a long day in leathers followed by a sprint had left me feeling disgusting. When I was done, I wrapped a towel round my waist and examined my face in the mirror. The cuts seemed to be healing ok, but my black eyes were deepening from blue to a hideous purple. I hadn't shaved in three days, but the hospital had cut quite a lot of my hair back to get at my scalp wounds and the combination made me look bizarre and unlike myself. I hoped it was enough to make it unlikely that Richard would have recognised the glimpse he'd seen of me through my visor today.
I bundled up my stinking leathers and threw them back into the spare wardrobe. To replace them I dug out some jeans, a sweatshirt, and a scruffy leather jacket. I laced on a heavy pair of work boots, then reached under the spare bed and pulled free the suitcase holding the pistol. I pulled the Luger out of the case, shoved it into an old rucksack from the top of the wardrobe, and tucked it under my arm. I added some more supplies liberated from the kitchen, and headed back to my temporary camp above the workshop. I'd intended to have something to eat and then start cleaning the gun, but my energy just drained away and I lay down instead, falling immediately into a heavy sleep.
Almost at once I dreamed that I was in a small room with a huge mirror on one wall. Reflected in the mirror was another room, identical to mine, with a man standing looking in the glass, which reflected another identical room, and another and another on into infinity. There was something wrong, but it took me a moment to work out what it was: my reflection in the mirror was facing away from me. In my ear I could hear my heart beat, steady at first but then getting faster and faster.
My reflection, and all its reflections, stood quite still, but then with that horrible inevitability of nightmares, slowly turned until they were all looking right at me. They had my black eyes and unshaved face, but they weren't me. The thousand reflections stared at me, silent, hostile, and then a movement began in one of the further mirrors. Its occupant lifted a fist and began slowly hammering on the glass in front of him. Then the next reflection lifted its fist and started to hit the glass, quickly catching up with the first whose mirror had now cracked and begun to fragment. Now a third started to attack the glass in front of him, then a fourth – I watched in horror as they all hammered away, the series of reflections shattering and splintering. Then the first couple of figures broke through their mirrors, joining forces to attack the glass in front of them, and then climbing through the frame again to team up with the occupant of that room, and so on and so on until countless hundreds of them were coming, climbing and stumbling and crunching on broken glass with the sound of a glacier breaking and shattering.
All this time my immediate reflection just stood and stared at me with angry eyes, but now he was jostled on all sides by other reflection men, newly arrived from their own reflected rooms. He lifted his arm and began to smash at the glass...
...and I woke up with a huge jump, and fell off the camp bed and onto the floor. I scrabbled away on my elbows until I hit the corner of the room, where I managed to get my feet under me, and put my arms over my head. I was shaking, my heart was pounding, and strangely my hands were sore as if I'd been hitting something in my sleep. I tried to reason with myself, saying it was just a nightmare, but I felt instinctively that something was horribly wrong, that the time travel had opened a hairline crack through which I could now glimpse something dark. Sleep felt dangerous, an extra step forward onto that thinning ice of reality or my sense of self or just my fucking sanity. I didn't dare sleep any more.
Outside my window the night was at its blackest, so I sat on the floor and with shaking hands began to clean and oil the gun. It had been a long time since my Uncle had taught me the steps of stripping and rebuilding a pistol, but the concentration and the faintly familiar actions calmed me down, and by the time I was finished I felt alert and my head was clear. So I couldn't sleep, so what. So reality was thinning like a over-stretched elastic band, so what. I couldn't put it back together again, so I might as well move forward.
I realised that I had been trying to keep to my version of life, where there were rules and I was just a regular bloke with a job and a life. But Richard Holland and his sick friends didn't play by those rules, they just used everyone else's compliance to create the spaces to do what they wanted. I'd gone into this thinking I could get evidence to expose their network of perverts, but with a police officer from Operation Greenland implicated as well, it was time to change my game plan. I re-assembled the gun, and slipped it into the rucksack. I needed to step outside my own pattern, away from the reassurance of my life, and go on the attack.
As the sun rose into a cloudy sky, I jammed the time kit into the pack next to the pistol, strapped it all to my back, and wheeled the motorbike out in the cold morning air. I knew that, as of this moment, the earlier me was lying in bed, too crushed by the knowledge of what had happened to Sarah and Helen to move. But that wasn't me now, and as soon as I was on the road I kicked the starter and roared away.
Oxford lay quiet in the early sunshine. The Yamaha took me smoothly through the empty streets and purred up the long slow drag of Headington Hill, the trees arching overheard in their Spring green. I'd decided it was time to take a closer look at number 3 Beechcroft Drive, but I had an errand to run first.
A little village that had once been a few miles outside Oxford, Headington was now just an ugly suburb, crammed with supermarkets and betting shops and cafés and pubs catering for the overspill of students from the nearby ex-poly. Ordinarily the traffic was a bitch, but early on a Sunday morning it was deserted and I easily found a parking spot outside the trendy coffee shop on its main street. Today I needed to send some emails without the fingerprints of my own IP address all over them, and an Internet café, retro as it was, would fit the bill.
The barista was young, hung-over and bored and poured me an espresso on autopilot. I took the cup and walked through the empty tables to the back corner where two elderly computers waited on a table. The machine booted up quickly, though, and in a few minutes I'd set up a new Gmail address, then used that to set up a new cloud storage account. I took a breath, then snapped the USB with Sarah's video on it into a vacant slot and dragged the file into a new folder. It only took a few seconds to upload, which seemed wrong, somehow. But I emailed the journalist a link anyway.
By the time my allotted hour had elapsed, the café had begun to fill up with people on their way out for the day and others on their way home from a big night out. Nobody paid me a second glance as I stepped into the clean air and walked quickly to the newsagent
s on the corner. I had one last job to do. I bought a cheap white envelope and a stamp, and then tore a page out of my notebook to write myself the note I remembered reading on Tuesday. I sealed it up and dropped it into the post box. As I strolled back to the bike I had a moment's worry that Oxford's notoriously crap postal system wouldn't deliver it in time, but then I shook my head as I remembered that it already had. I smiled at the confusion I'd felt (would feel) when I opened it. With that smile still on my lips I shoved my helmet on, and kicked the bike into life. I turned into the gentle traffic and headed round to Beechcroft Drive.
As I rode, my smile turned into a smirk at the thought of Freddy Wright's face when he realised that someone had shopped him to the head of department for falsifying his results. It wasn't sufficient payback for him spying on me to my father-in-law, but it would do, and I was too much in a hurry for anything else. I wondered whether Tessa Davies was already watching the video, making notes, perhaps calling colleagues over to peer over her shoulder at Sarah's sobbing confession. I grit my teeth: I'd had to do it, I reminded myself, I had to try everything to get the world to wake up and notice that they, like me, had missed the predators in their midst.
My mood darkened with these thoughts, and as I turned into Beechcroft Drive. It was quiet, domestic, respectable. I rode slowly down the street, past number 3, and then turned left and left again into the road that ran parallel to it – pleased, for once, that Headington was made up of a soulless grid of identikit 1930s semis. Judging I'd come far enough, I coasted to a stop outside number 27 Melville Road. It was a typical student house, with a scruffy front garden, mis-matching curtains and a recycling box overflowing with beer and wine bottles. More importantly for me, at this hour on a Sunday morning it was as quiet at the grave. I swung my leg off the bike and cautiously looked round: no-one was stirring. My heart hammered in my chest but I threw back my shoulders and adopted a swagger, and then just boldly walked up the garden path and round the side of the house.