She flicked through a coffee table book or two, and dawdled towards some souvenirs at the back of the shop. A few bits and pieces were related to time travel, including a slim tome of time travellers’ slang by someone called Sushila Pardesi. Miniature copies of Grace’s pencil installation were also on sale. They quite charmed Ruby.
She took the phrase book and miniature pencils to the till. The cashier was scanning them when Ruby’s eyes settled on a woman by the entrance. Ruby stared. It was Grace herself, examining a rack of scarves. She wasn’t the white-haired septuagenarian of her oil painting. This Grace looked only a little older than Ruby; late thirties, at a guess. She, too, had been caught in the rain. The water made her hair shine blackly like an otter’s. She wore a cornflower blue trenchcoat and a black polo neck. Her mouth was as bright as a split cherry.
She picked up one of the silk scarves, folded it, and slipped it into her coat pocket. Ruby felt Grace was putting on a show – and sure enough, Grace looked at Ruby, grinned, and raised a finger to her lips. The burnished metal of a time traveller’s watch was fastened round her wrist.
She sauntered through the exit.
‘Are you paying by card?’ the assistant prompted.
Ruby nodded dumbly.
As soon as the transaction was through she ran out into the drizzle. She pushed through the crowds at the riverside, searching vainly for a flash of blue, fearful that Grace was long gone.
‘Ruby!’ a woman shouted. ‘Ruby!’
The voice came from above. Ruby lifted her head to the skyline. Grace was standing on the footbridge over the Thames. And she knew Ruby’s name. Should Ruby have been surprised? Time travellers are privy to all kinds of information we’re yet to provide.
‘Send my love to Barbara!’ Grace called.
Ruby made her way to the bridge steps. But by the time she reached the top Grace had slipped back into the crowds. How unnerving that she knew who Ruby was.
Grace had left the stolen scarf behind – it was knotted round one of the railings, and the tapered ends were snapping like pennants in the wind. Did Grace remember that Bee liked scarves? Ruby untied it. The silk, which had turned translucent with moisture, was printed with a reproduction of Grace’s sampler. Something about it made Ruby uneasy.
She looked at that date again: 2027.
Oh God. She’d been so slow.
If Grace knew she was going to die in 2027 – if she was telling the truth about that – then they wouldn’t hold an inquest into her death in 2018. Ruby felt sick. If Grace’s own death didn’t drive her interest in the case, Granny Bee must be the one who was in danger.
6
FEBRUARY 2018
Odette
Odette was required at the inquest, to give witness testimony. She allowed so much time for her journey she was half an hour early. An arts market lined the street outside the coroner’s court and she occupied herself by looking at paintings and pots. She stopped at a second-hand bookstall. The bookseller was completing a crossword.
‘Back again?’ he said to Odette. His false teeth were a little too large.
She smiled politely. He had confused her with somebody else.
One of the book trays contained foreign language novels. She rifled through the French section, looking for something her mother, Claire, might like to read. Her fingers halted at a tattered paperback, the cover striped in green and cream bands, like an old Penguin crime. La revanche de Peredur. She pulled it out. In the corner, someone had written what looked like O/S in faint pencil. She supposed it could be a zero and a five – a price tag, in old money. She turned the pages. The novel was presented as a parallel text. Half in French. Half in Kreol.
‘How much for this?’ she asked.
*
The inquest room was plainer than Odette had expected. She’d never been to court, and legal dramas had led her to imagine a panelled chamber, rather than magnolia walls and stackable conference chairs. A dozen people were already waiting, scattered like counters on a battleships board. Odette sat at the end of a row. Her nearest neighbour was a man of thirty or so, who was slight, with dark curls. He held a tablet and was frowning at whatever was typed there.
A side door opened to admit the coroner. Earlier in the month Odette had met him for a brief conversation. His name was Stuart Yelland; he was in his sixties, likeable, and he screwed up his left eye when he thought of a question. He took his place behind the table and said a few words about the process to follow.
‘You will have noticed,’ he said, ‘that the inquest announcement didn’t include the deceased’s name. Although DNA, dental and fingerprint profiles were gathered, she could not be matched to a missing person record. Nor were there identifying documents on her person.’
In Odette’s row, the curly haired man sighed and shook his head.
The first person Yelland called to speak was the police officer who had taken statements at the museum. She recounted the police’s initial impressions of the scene, and the body.
‘The deceased was in a basement room, with only one entry point, which had been bolted from the inside. The bolt had been wrenched from the wall, allegedly by the first person on the scene.’
She stared hard at Odette. The memory of the bolt, swinging in the half light, flashed through Odette’s brain. She raised a hand to her mouth.
Returning her gaze to the coroner, the policewoman continued. ‘The deceased was white, female, and of advanced age – in her seventies or a well preserved eighties. At the base of her neck she had a laceration scar, ten centimetres in length, which predated the occasion of her death. She had four fresh gunshot wounds in her stomach, one in her left hand, and one in her head.’
Each detail that the police officer provided made the pictures before Odette’s eyes a little more vivid. Odette’s palms were damp. Her breathing was shallow.
‘The bullets were embedded in the wall behind, indicating she had been shot at the scene. The number of gunshot wounds raises the probability of homicide.’
‘How so?’ Yelland asked.
‘It’s hard to shoot yourself more than once.’
‘Hard – but not impossible?’ Yelland prompted. ‘I’m trying to reconcile how she could have been murdered, then locked the door after her killer’s departure.’
‘Shooting yourself more than once might be possible, but it’s improbable. And in my professional experience, gunshot wounds to the hand are defence injuries.’
To Odette’s relief, that drew the police officer’s testimony to a close. Revisiting the details of the crime scene made Odette nauseous. How on earth was she going to give her own account, if she struggled to hear the police officer’s?
The coroner called the pathologist as the next witness. She enumerated, in slow Yorkshire vowels, the weights and lengths of internal organs, which took some time. Eventually she moved on to the deceased woman’s injuries.
‘Swabs from the wounds revealed some evidence of bacteraemia,’ the pathologist said. ‘The culture was somewhat… unusual.’
‘Unusual how?’
‘We identified two types of bacteria. Deinococcus radiodurans, and a nasty little pathogen called alkalibacterium macromonas. They’re both bacteria that thrive in radioactive environments. Previously I’ve only encountered them in high concentrations at nuclear power stations. My conjecture is that either the deceased had recently visited such a site, or the bullets had been stored in radioactive conditions. The bullets may then have introduced the bacteria to her bloodstream at the point of impact.’
‘Might this woman have died from an infection?’
‘No. Macromonas works quickly, but not as fast as a bullet to the brain.’
Odette twisted the fabric of her skirt between her fingers. She focused and defocused on the dots in the cotton. Anything to root her in the here and now, to prevent her from flying back into that room in the museum cellar.
But she had to return there. Her time to speak arrived.
There w
as a jug of water waiting, when she took her place at the front. Gratefully, she poured herself a glass and took a sip.
‘Please take us through the events as you experienced them,’ the coroner asked.
‘It was two o’clock in the afternoon,’ Odette began. ‘I know it was dead on two, because it was my first day volunteering, and I kept checking the time. The main door was locked. I let myself in, and there was the most awful, rotting smell.’
She paused.
‘Take your time,’ the coroner said. But Odette had only ever heard that phrase from people who wish you to continue. She took another sip of water, and blinked slowly.
‘I opened the windows. The smell was coming from the back of the room, and down the stairs.’
‘Was there any evidence of disturbance?’
‘Nothing but the smell. Everything looked… normal. But I had only been there once before. Everything looked normal till I reached the boiler room door.’
She remembered the maroon stain across the floor.
‘Miss Sophola?’
‘Something had… collected… in a pool… It was reddish, and clotted. I thought my imagination might be running away with me.’ She looked at the coroner fearfully. ‘That’s why I didn’t call the police straight away. I tried the door. It was locked.’
‘Miss Sophola, this is a very important point. The evidence points to an assailant who must have escaped the room somehow. Are you quite certain that the door was locked on your arrival?’
‘Absolutely. When I forced the door, I wrenched the bolt off – I saw it swinging – I saw it—’
Her lip trembled. The discovery behind the bolted door was present and vivid and filled her senses. Stuart Yelland was asking another question, but Odette barely made out the words: she was hearing, again, the boiler ignite in the basement. She could smell the corpse. She was standing in its blood. Without thinking she covered her face with her hands, as if she might still block out the stench.
‘Miss Sophola?’ Stuart Yelland’s voice sounded so far away. ‘I’m going to call a short break.’
Odette felt a hand on her shoulder. It was the coroner’s assistant – a stocky woman in a grey suit. She smiled reassuringly at Odette as she led her to the next room.
*
No further questions were required of Odette once she had collected herself. She was unsure whether to stay for the rest of the inquest. Her desire to understand the case repeatedly collided with the fear she would lose her grip again. In the end she reached the compromise of sitting in the corridor until the close of day.
The attendees eventually filed from the inquest. Stuart Yelland was the last of them. She stood up and caught his attention with a wave.
‘Can I ask how it went?’ she asked, when he approached her.
‘I reached an open verdict.’ He paused. ‘I’m glad I have this opportunity to talk with you. I wanted to recommend that you seek some emotional support, if you haven’t done so already.’
Odette remembered the psychologist who had offered victim support. Maybe she had been rash to refuse her help. Since then, the dead woman had been much in Odette’s thoughts. So much that she sometimes felt, as she had during testimony, that she had never left the crime scene at all. Was a sympathetic ear what she needed?
She didn’t think so. Surely she was struggling to move on because the death made no sense. No one had offered a convincing explanation for how the woman died, and violent acts without explanation were terrifying. If Odette worked out what had occurred in the basement, surely she would feel able to let it go?
‘I don’t need help,’ she insisted. ‘I need to know what happened. Then I can draw a line under it.’
‘But, Miss Sophola, we can’t establish what happened. You must accept that. Please, take my advice. Finding the deceased could have a lasting emotional impact on you. Don’t try to manage it on your own.’
He patted her kindly on the arm and bid her goodbye, leaving her to contemplate what he’d said. That evening she would be catching the train back to Cambridge. Her course books would await her, with her revision notes, and the clear, tangible arguments she was preparing for her exams – a set of discrete, manageable mysteries, to distract her from the bigger mystery threatening to overwhelm her.
7
MAY 1969
Lucille
By the spring of 1969, the new Conclave headquarters – an assemblage of marble buildings close to St Paul’s Cathedral – were complete. The small team of pioneers grew into an elite profession for a few hundred people. And as soon as the new machines were operational, time travellers arrived from the future, too.
Broadly speaking, there were three types of time traveller. The first group were experimental physicists. Of the pioneers, Grace fell into this category. They studied the effect of time travel on physical matter, the creation of causal loops, and the conditions that could prevent time travel. The time machines wouldn’t transport anyone further than three hundred years into the future, and the experimental physicists tried to understand why. It was almost as if the supporting infrastructure disappeared in 2267.
The second group of time travellers used the machines as a means to an end. This group included the spies and military personnel who gathered intelligence from different time periods to inform strategic decisions. There were salesmen, too, open to the new commercial opportunities time travel might bring. The sales team identified products which could be traded between eras, primarily for luxury markets, to secure a revenue stream for the Conclave. And there were also scholars – anthropologists, conservationists and geographers, to name but a few, who studied new eras as they might study an unfamiliar land.
The third and final group of time travellers provided internal services. Administrators and maintenance staff kept the Conclave running. Medics and psychologists monitored the health of everyone who used the time machines. A specialist legal department was established; despite its geographical location in London, the Conclave’s justice arrangements were quite separate from the English judicial system. This was partly necessary because time travellers can move easily between different eras of English legislation. Similarly, if a Conclave employee committed a crime with the help of time travel, the English police force lacked the means to pursue them. As a result, the Conclave had its own criminal investigative team.
Lucille belonged to the internal services division. Her role was Head of Knowledge, and she oversaw the communication and exchange of information between different time periods. It filled her with delight to see the Conclave expand and thrive. But she grew regretful, too, that among the new faces there was no place for Barbara. Long after conceding that they should leave Barbara alone, Lucille continued to hope there was a use for her skills. Accordingly, once everyone had settled in the new headquarters, she devised a proposal, which she brought to Margaret during a routine progress meeting.
‘The engineers have had some success receiving radio transmissions through wormholes,’ Lucille said. ‘It won’t be long until we can set up a Conclave-wide radio communications system. Like the time machines, they won’t be able to contact periods earlier than their own invention. But we’ll be able to chat to people in the year 2260 without leaving the comfort of our armchair.’
‘Go on,’ Margaret urged.
‘We’re finalising a very simple design – the receivers will resemble telephones. The user will speak to an operator who tunes you in to the correct year. When we can call each other across the decades, we’ll drastically cut down on the number of trips we need to take.’
‘Excellent news,’ Margaret said. ‘Radio communication will improve efficiency no end. But I’d query whether it should be Conclave-wide. That sounds rather… uncontrolled. Usage should be a privilege, held by the most senior employees, and sparingly extended to their subordinates. Then we can keep a tighter rein on the flow of information.’
‘If that’s what you want. We’ll need to hire operators. They won’t need to time t
ravel, but they will need to be proficient in time travel technology – and ideally they should be up to speed in superluminal research. I think we should offer one of the roles to Barbara.’
Margaret closed her eyes. ‘We agreed not to contact Barbara. Didn’t we all feel that it would be cruel?’
‘Yes – when she was in no position to work with us. But if we were offering her a way back – an interesting, novel opportunity that would make good use of her skills – that wouldn’t be cruel at all. Don’t you see? Working with radios needn’t aggravate her symptoms at all. Her problem’s with circadian rhythm, and such – isn’t that what Angharad said?’
Shifting in her seat, Margaret replied, ‘I’m not sure it’s so simple. We don’t know whether Barbara has recovered enough to work anywhere. And if she has, she could still fall ill again.’
‘But surely—’
‘Honestly, Lucille, you haven’t thought this through. In the very best case scenario, she would be the topic of Conclave gossip. I won’t have her subjected to that. In the worst scenario, we would have to let her go again at some unspecified point, putting her through the same anguish. You know I’m right about this. Is she ever on staff when you travel into the future?’
She wasn’t. Lucille still wanted to offer Barbara a job. Barbara was free to turn them down; at least she would have the opportunity. Making the decision for her seemed wrong. ‘Barbara is one of the reasons why we were successful. Wouldn’t this be a good way to honour that? To show she’s still appreciated?’
‘Ah! You want to make a gesture.’ Margaret smiled broadly. ‘I have the very thing. Name your radio system Beeline.’
‘Name… the radio system?’ Disappointment crept into Lucille’s voice.
‘I think that’s a fine tribute. Now. Shall we discuss the budget you’ll need?’
The Psychology of Time Travel Page 4