‘I know. But I thought maybe if I saw the body again… now I’m no longer in shock… I’d notice details I missed at the time.’
‘Ms Sophola…’
‘Some witnesses are allowed to examine evidence, aren’t they? Properly Interested Persons?’
‘Relatives, yes, and beneficiaries of the estate.’
‘I found the body. Don’t I count as a Properly Interested Person?’
‘Potentially. That’s at my discretion.’
‘And if I were a Properly Interested Person, I’d be allowed to see the photographs?’
‘I’m afraid I’m not going to permit that.’
‘Why? I was there.’
‘I have to balance your request against this woman’s dignity. Let her rest in peace. It isn’t right, to hand out pictures willy nilly. Don’t you think it would be healthier to speak to someone about your feelings? Last time we spoke, you said you might seek counselling.’
I already have, Odette thought irritably. His swerve into her personal motivations was condescending – and possibly a deliberate distraction.
‘You were first on the scene,’ Stuart Yelland went on. ‘Many people in your position suffer lasting distress. Do you really want to make it worse by poring over unpleasant pictures?’
Odette hung up. Yelland might be a nice old man, but he didn’t understand. She needed to solve this. Until she did the unanswered questions would keep running round her head.
Her manager loomed at the window, tapped the glass and mouthed Odette’s name.
‘Just coming,’ Odette called.
The phone call wasn’t a complete waste of her time. Yelland had let one thing slip: he’d mentioned a journalist, which told Odette she wasn’t the only person interested in tying up loose ends. That was reassuring because she was beginning to feel very isolated. She needed someone to talk to. But not a doctor, as the coroner suggested. She needed someone who could help her solve the mystery. Someone who wanted to solve the mystery as much as she did.
*
It was gone midnight when Odette got home, and she was too tired to do anything besides fall into bed. But first thing the next morning she searched newspaper websites for references to the inquest. She got a relevant hit when she tried dead, inquest and toy museum. This one brief item came from a local tabloid. It had been written in May by a man called Zach Callaghan. The write-up didn’t refer to Odette by name; it said that the dead body was discovered by a museum volunteer. That may have been why it passed under her radar when it first went to print.
From Yelland’s comment, she’d expected the piece to be longer. It didn’t make sense that a journalist would badger Yelland for a few forgettable paragraphs. But Yelland had definitely said the journalist was persistent.
Odette telephoned the newspaper’s editorial assistant and asked to speak to Zach Callaghan.
‘He’s a freelancer, not one of our staff writers,’ the man said. ‘If your query isn’t something our regular team can handle it might be a while before he gets back to you.’
‘Thanks,’ Odette said. ‘I’d just like him to contact me regarding an inquest that took place earlier this year.’
She left her name and number, and turned back to the internet. Maybe she could get a quicker response if she approached this man directly. Odette ran a search on the name Zach Callaghan. It wasn’t super common, but it wasn’t especially rare either. The top hit was for a painter, and the one below was for a head teacher who’d resigned in a scandal. Zach the journalist was number three. He had a personalised website with a Contact Me box which Odette filled out. From curiosity, she clicked on the page marked Articles.
Zach Callaghan hadn’t written anything new in several months. His coverage of the hearing was the most recently dated link. Prior to that, his articles included: an in-depth analysis of Margaret Norton’s alliances with arms’ dealers; detailed investigations into the Conclave’s tax arrangements; and an article on unexplained disappearances of time travellers. All three pieces had been published by national broadsheets, and there were others on similar themes going back years. He clearly wasn’t a court journalist. He hadn’t covered any other inquests.
Why would someone with a sustained interest in the Time Travel Conclave suddenly turn his attention to the body in the museum? Did this man, this Zach Callaghan, know of a connection between the two?
An envelope icon flashed in the corner of the screen, alerting Odette to a new email.
It was only one line long: I no longer have any involvement with this story. The message was unsigned, but came from Callaghan’s address.
16
OCTOBER 1973
Barbara
Barbara stood alone in the toy store, deliberating over plush bears and raggedy clowns. Her baby’s first birthday was approaching. Dinah liked monkeys but Barbara couldn’t see one among the multiple soft toys. She circled the display, and came face to face not with monkeys, but with shelves of dolls: time traveller dolls.
They were meant for older children than Dinah. The bodies were made from hard plastic, and their clothes could be unbuttoned and changed. One looked like Margaret; another like Grace; a third like Lucille. All the pioneers but Barbara.
The dolls were idealised and hyper-real. Their eyes were as large as cherry drops and their cheeks were dimpled. Barbara could tell which doll was which from their hairstyles and the name labels on each breast pocket. Lucille was a different colour, of course. Each doll’s décolletage was debossed with an ornamental pattern. Barbara picked Lucille up, to touch the decorative ridges along her neckline. Maybe the ridges were a mark to show belonging: like a sailor’s tattoo.
In the years after Barbara’s breakdown she’d responded well to treatment, and appeared to get on with life. She’d married. She’d had a baby girl. But sadness at her lost career was always close to the surface. In secret, she read pulp novels about time travellers’ adventures with a kind of horror. She found lunatics galore among the pages. They were Barbara’s legacy. Unlike Margaret, in the early days she never thought of legacy at all. Her only thought was to travel through time, alongside her friends. Looking at the doll in her hand and the companion pieces on the shelf she felt sick with longing for that old dream.
She left the shop with a trio of dolls, her search for Dinah’s present forgotten.
*
Barbara stood before her bathroom mirror, stripped to the waist with a razor in her hand. One of the dolls was propped against the toothbrush mug. Margaret. The ridged, curving pattern on the doll’s neck and chest was clear. Barbara studied the pattern. She held the razor to her clavicle and tried to cut an arabesque into her skin. A line of blood ran down her breast. The cut didn’t hurt, though she imagined it would sting later. She’d gouged a deep groove by the time Antonio, her husband, opened the bathroom door.
His eyes widened and his mouth made a dark O. He caught her wrist.
‘Jesus, Bee,’ he said. ‘Look what you’ve done.’
‘It isn’t what you think,’ she told him.
He stared at her, and didn’t let go of her arm. She could feel his hand trembling.
‘I didn’t do it to harm myself,’ she said.
‘Bee.’ His voice cracked.
‘Look at this doll!’ She pointed. ‘See? She’s a time traveller. Time traveller dolls have these marks. If I have them too, I’ll match.’
‘All right, Bee. All right.’
But he still held on to her arm, so she knew he was trying to mollify her. No matter how rationally she spoke, her illness made her explanations suspect to him. He would think that she was imagining signs where they didn’t exist, because she was psychotic. Her eyes filled with tears. He’d never let her complete the arabesque.
She dropped the razor. Antonio pulled her towards him.
‘I’ll get blood on your suit,’ she wept.
‘It’s all right,’ he whispered to her. ‘It’s all right. We’ll go to the hospital, and they’ll take care of
you.’
Nurses stitched her up, and the psychiatrist increased her medication. They all disregarded her explanation of why she cut herself. The psychiatrist told Tony she was a danger to herself. Eventually Barbara stopped disputing this. She’d tried to recapture the past, with a razor and some plastic imitations of friends. Perhaps, she allowed, that was lunacy.
17
JULY 2017
Ruby
After they had tired of the Candybox, Ruby and Bee took Breno to Clissold Park. They kept him on the leash, because of the deer, but he was good-natured about it. Passers-by stopped to talk with him. Not only to him; Ruby reflected that London was a far friendlier place with a dog. Bee was deep in conversation with the owner of a labradoodle when Ruby felt the buzz of her mobile on her hip.
The name on the display said Ginger.
Ruby picked up. ‘Hello?’
She heard laughter in response. A child’s laughter; then two muffled voices.
‘I can’t hear you very clearly,’ Ruby said. ‘I’m outside.’
‘A loser says what?’ said the child, in an ersatz American accent. More laughter. Then footfall, and an adult voice – deep, Irish – scolding. Ruby thought he said: ‘You’re bad and bold.’ The child kept laughing, then implored, ‘Daddy, no, let me have it…’
‘I’m sorry,’ that Irish voice said. ‘My daughter dialled your number. She keeps taking our phones.’
‘That’s OK,’ Ruby said.
She listened to the dead line for a few seconds.
‘Anything important?’ Bee asked. The labradoodle woman had gone, without Ruby noticing.
‘Just a prank call.’
They resumed their walk. Ruby could sense Bee’s sideways glances.
With concern, Bee said, ‘You look ever so shocked. It wasn’t a smutty call, was it?’
‘No… it was a little girl. Messing about.’
Ruby didn’t want to give any more information than that. Despite her qualms about Ginger’s relationship status, it was upsetting to have her suspicions confirmed. Hearing those voices was like discovering the people in a book were real. Till a few minutes ago, Ginger’s partner had been Ruby’s own intangible invention. The invention was never solid enough to sire children – or to have an accent.
Ruby wondered if he knew and consented to Ginger’s involvement with other people. But the possibility felt fundamentally hollow. Ginger conducted herself like a cheater. They always went to Ruby’s. Ginger never spoke of her home life. Ruby felt like a secret. And if Ginger was with a man, that might mean Ruby was a very particular sort of shameful secret.
Bee paused to look at a grazing deer, and Ruby stopped beside her.
‘I don’t believe you’re upset over some prank call,’ Bee said. ‘Is someone treating you poorly, Ruby? I can always give them a piece of my mind.’
Ruby laughed weakly. ‘I’m sure you would. Best I just forget about them, to be honest.’
‘Well, the offer stands.’
‘Thank you.’ Ruby knelt to ruffle Breno’s head. ‘I need a pet. I’m done with relationships.’
‘At your young age! Don’t make lasting decisions while your heart’s bruised.’
‘Maybe I’ll get a house cat. It’d be cruel to keep a dog in that flat.’
Breno barked, though whether in agreement or contradiction was unclear.
*
That night, as Bee slept in Ruby’s bed, Ruby tried to get comfortable on the sofa. Despite her fatigue Ruby lay there for an hour, unable to relax because she kept thinking about Ginger’s husband. She turned on the lamp and rifled through the paperbacks strewn across the coffee table for something to settle her thoughts. She settled on the book she’d bought at Tate Modern: the glossary of time travellers’ phrases, by Sushila Pardesi.
Ruby had expected the phrase book to contain a certain amount of professional jargon – and it did; consistency principle, common chronology, topology change, et cetera. Many of the words described living life out of sequence. To live an incident you’ve already read about is called completion. Returning to an incident you’ve already experienced is called echoing. Feeling angry with someone for things they won’t do wrong for years is called zeitigzorn.
But the real pleasure of the book was the slang. Quite a few of the colloquialisms defined members of in-groups and out-groups. Newly recruited time travellers are called wenches. People whose personal chronologies match well, because they belong to the same team, swim in the same cut. A time traveller may call their younger selves green-me, and older selves silver-me. And then there were terms for people who don’t time travel. These people, the everyday people, were mostly defined by their march through a shared chronology, earning them the names plodders, or one-way travellers, or emus – who can’t walk backwards.
Pardesi’s short introduction explained that time travellers’ slang is associated with the Conclave’s communal areas – the dorms; the break rooms. These are the places where travellers wait to be debriefed. Their slang is immune to change, making it interesting to linguists. Introducing ‘new’ words is impossible in such a context. A word may be new to an individual time traveller, particularly if she’s inexperienced in the field. But she’ll take it back to her own period, which may pre- or post-date the period where she heard it, and it can no longer be associated with usage in a given year or decade or century. The opportunities for this to happen are multiplied many times over, because there have been hundreds of time travellers, hailing from different periods, congregating in the Conclave since the nineteen seventies.
Ruby’s eyelids were now drooping. One final column of words caught her attention. It was the section on sex and romance. Sushila Pardesi noted that time travelling made it particularly easy to be unfaithful without detection. Adulterers had a term for their conquests in far-off decades: exotic material. Wishing she had closed the book ten seconds earlier, Ruby returned it to the coffee table, and turned off the lamp.
18
SEPTEMBER 2018
Odette
Despite Zach Callaghan’s curt email, Odette didn’t seriously consider giving up. There was no point going to the newspaper’s offices if he was a freelancer, but with some further internet stalking she learnt that Zach taught on the journalism degree offered by a college in central London. Twice Odette went there in person, pretending to be a prospective student, only to be told Zach wasn’t there that day. She was luckier on the third visit. The receptionist made her sign in, gave her a pass, and looked up the theatre where he was lecturing on high-risk reportage.
The lecture hadn’t finished when Odette found the right room. She looked through the oblong of glass in the door and could see Zach speaking at the front. She remembered him now. He had sat in her row at the hearing – the man with the dark curls. When he’d finished his lecture, students swarmed past Odette into the corridor, and she slipped inside to join the few people with questions for Zach. Several times his eyes flickered in Odette’s direction. He recognises me too, she thought.
Soon they were the only two people left in the room.
‘Yes?’ Zach prompted.
‘My name’s Odette Sophola. I want to talk to you about the inquest we both attended in the spring.’
‘Don’t you think it’s presumptuous, tracking me down without an invitation?’
‘Very. Have you never doorstepped anyone, in your line of work?’
‘Are you saying you’re a journalist too?’ Zach unzipped his bag and placed his lecture notes inside.
‘No,’ Odette said. ‘I’m just someone who knows that woman’s death was suspicious. Like you do. Wouldn’t you like to speak to me? I was there.’
Zach ran a hand through his hair. He wouldn’t meet her eye. He was worried, scared, even, Odette realised – that was why he hadn’t written anything in months. Something had happened to shut his mouth.
‘Why did you stop calling the coroner, Mr Callaghan? Did someone threaten you?’
‘No.’ Zach
slung his rucksack onto his shoulder and made for the door.
‘Your family then?’
‘I don’t want to talk about my family.’
‘Please – Mr Callaghan. I can help.’
‘Oh? How?’
She thought rapidly. ‘I can draw the attention away from you. Let me follow the story. Please. Just give me the information you have.’
He stared at her for a long moment, then shook his head.
‘I must be out of my mind,’ he said.
*
Zach insisted they walk to the nearest park; he could be sure they wouldn’t be bugged there. They found an empty bench by the duck pond.
‘I was looking into the Conclave’s finances,’ Zach began. ‘The Conclave is subsidised by tax payers, but it isn’t really held accountable to them – it’s an arm’s length organisation. The money’s spent on military action, commercial development, a bit of academic research – all the kinds of things you’d expect. They also have labour costs. Do you know how time travellers get paid?’
Odette shook her head.
‘They act as contractors. You can’t really give them an annual salary because they might work much less, or much more, than twelve months in any given calendar year. It’s more practical for them to negotiate their payment per mission, and self-assess their tax contributions. Which is all well and good, I’ve no objections there – I self-assess my own taxes – but it’s very easy for a time traveller to exploit the tax system.’
‘In what way?’
‘Time travellers need money across multiple time periods, but the cost of goods inflates and the currency changes. To work round this the Conclave has its own currency, called the achronic pound, or achron for short. Workers are paid with achrons. Whatever the time period, workers can sell their achrons back to the Conclave, for pounds sterling or any of the British currencies that succeed it. The rate’s set by the Conclave. Time travellers don’t hold their funds in a central bank tied to a specific time and place. Rather, they carry their money with them. Whether they go back or forward in time, their personal ledger’s stored in their wristwatches.
The Psychology of Time Travel Page 9