by Mark Morris
‘Don’t worry, it’s safe.’
‘Safe where?’
Her eyes flickered to the door, and her voice dropped an octave.
‘It’s back at the house. It’s well hidden.’ She leaned forward, put her mouth to my ear. ‘There’s a box of muesli in the kitchen cupboard. It’s at the bottom of that.’
I had to concede it was a pretty good hiding place, but now that I’d finally got the heart back I felt nervous being so far away from it. Even if I couldn’t use it, it still remained a bargaining tool – though how useful was that in reality? Surely whoever was holding Kate held the real winning hand? I’d give up the heart for her like a shot, and I’m sure my enemies knew that.
In which case why didn’t they just come right out and offer me a straight swap? Kate for the heart? No strings attached, no messing about, just a clean transaction. Despite what I’d said about the world collapsing around our ears if I didn’t set up all I was supposed to, I was pretty sure that if push came to shove I’d be more than willing to risk everything if it meant the resumption of a quiet, normal life with my daughter.
Not that our life would be quiet and normal, of course. There would still be loose ends to tie up. Including…
‘Oh shit.’
‘What?’ asked Clover, alarmed.
‘I’ve just remembered – Jensen. Hulse cut his throat. But the police’ll think I did it. They’ll be after me for murder. And they found the heart on me, so they must already suspect me of killing McCallum.’
Although the door was closed, Clover again glanced towards it, putting a finger to her lips.
‘You don’t have to worry about that. You’re in the clear.’
‘What? What do you mean? How do you know?’
‘I checked your phone after you collapsed – well, not straight after, obviously, but, y’know, once you were here and they’d got you stabilised – and there was a voicemail message from Jensen asking where the hell you were, where you’d disappeared to.’
I gaped at her, the implications of this whirling through my head.
‘You’re sure it was Jensen?’
‘Yep. I called him back. Spoke to him.’
‘What did he say? What did you say?’
‘Like I said, he wanted to know where you were. He wanted to know how you’d managed to walk out of a locked interview room, and how and why you’d absconded from police custody. I told him you were in hospital. I said you’d collapsed with stress and that you weren’t to be disturbed. I said I didn’t know anything about you absconding from police custody. All I knew was that you’d been found wandering in the street not far from the police station in a distressed and confused state.’
‘Fuck,’ I started to grin. ‘And what did he say?’
‘He wanted to know if you had any physical injuries, and when I said no and asked him why he said it didn’t matter.’
‘It must be because of the broken window in his office. Christ, did he honestly think I’d jumped through that, landed on the ground in one piece and walked away?’
‘Well, you did jump through it,’ Clover said.
She started to smile, and I smiled along with her, though it was more out of relief than anything. Did this mean I was in the clear – at least as far as Jensen was concerned? That it wasn’t Jensen that Hulse had killed in the interview room but simply another manifestation of the shape-shifter? Presumably this meant that when the real Jensen had eventually turned up to speak to me he’d found no body, no blood – nothing but an empty room. It also meant that if both Jensens I’d seen at the police station were the shape-shifter, then the real Jensen had no knowledge of the obsidian heart.
Unless, of course, the Jensen who Clover had spoken to had been the shape-shifter and the real Jensen was dead, after all. I asked her whether this was possible, but she shook her head.
‘There would have been something on the news. Your face would have been all over the papers. But there’s been nothing. You’re off the hook, Alex – well, apart from the fact that Jensen is very cross with you for doing a runner.’
‘So did you tell him where I was?’
She gave me a look, clearly disappointed with the dumbness of my question.
‘What do you think? Admittedly he did start to get quite insistent, so I’m afraid I had to cut the poor lamb off in his prime.’
I hooted, and then regretted it as pain crackled through me.
‘He’s not going to like that.’
‘He doesn’t like it. He’s left several messages expressing that very fact.’
Despite the fact that Jensen was angry with me, and no doubt still suspicious of my part in Kate’s disappearance, I felt a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Maybe things did have a way of sorting themselves out. Maybe, if the future we’d been led to believe was ahead of us was compromised, time had a way of compensating, of shifting the pieces around, papering over the cracks.
‘You look tired,’ Clover said. ‘Too much brain overload.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I love you too.’
She smiled and glanced at her watch. ‘It’s half twelve. Why don’t you get some rest, recharge your batteries in preparation for this mysterious visitor at one o’clock? I’ll check up on Hope and be back here at five to.’
My instinct was to protest that I was fine, that I didn’t need to rest, but in truth, ridiculous though it was, I felt zapped.
‘Yes, nurse,’ I said, and closed my eyes. For a moment my head was full of everything we’d talked about, and then it wasn’t. Next thing I knew Clover was prodding my arm.
‘Come on, sleepy head. It’s nearly time.’
She helped me shuffle upright and for the next few minutes we sat, barely speaking, as we waited for our visitor. Though I tried to give the impression I was relaxed, I felt increasingly apprehensive. My eyes kept straying to the watch on Clover’s wrist, which I couldn’t quite see. Was I really about to meet myself again? An older version this time? If I was, how much would the future me reveal about what was ahead? Presumably as much as he remembered his future self revealing when he was me?
What I’d really want to know, of course, was whether he had any news of Kate. And also whether he could tell me the secret of how to keep using the heart without it killing me. But what if he was ten or twenty years older than I am now and he still hadn’t found Kate? The prospect of that – the fear of that – made my stomach curl into itself like a snail retreating into its shell.
Clover glanced at her watch.
‘What time is it?’
‘Two minutes past.’
Maybe he’s not coming, I thought, and felt a surge of hope, of impending relief, rather than disappointment.
There was a knock on the door.
Clover and I looked at each other. She seemed pensive. My guts were doing slow cartwheels. I imagined our visitor entering the room and me greeting him by abruptly and spectacularly throwing up. I cleared my throat.
‘Come in,’ I called, my voice wavering slightly.
The door opened and a man in a pale grey suit entered. I stared at him, surprised by the sense of anticlimax. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t anyone I knew. The man looked at us and his smile of greeting became stiff and a little uncertain, I guess because of the intensity with which we were staring at him.
‘Mr Locke?’ he ventured. He was young and wiry with prematurely thinning hair cropped close to his skull, and a neatly trimmed stubble of beard. He looked as though he ran marathons or went on very long bike rides at the weekend.
‘Yes,’ I said warily.
He turned his attention to Clover. ‘And Miss Monroe?’
She nodded.
Suddenly I had an impression of this neat, young, unassuming man unravelling, erupting into a maelstrom of birds or bats or snakes or deadly insects. The Wolves of London, the Society of Blood: they could be anywhere; they could include anyone among their number. The shape-shifter could adopt whatever form it chose to gain access to wherev
er it wished, to bypass even the most stringent security. And even though we had seen the Dark Man die, that didn’t necessarily mean he was dead now. In one timeline he had apparently owned and used the heart for centuries. So who was to say a younger version of him wasn’t still running things here in the twenty-first century?
‘My name is Daniel Worth,’ the man said, approaching the bed. ‘I work for Coulthard, Harvey and Glenn. We represent Mr Barnaby McCallum’s estate.’
All I heard – or registered at that moment – was the name of the man I’d murdered, and debilitated though I was I immediately felt my defensive hackles rising. Bracing myself to deny whatever accusation the visitor might be about to throw at me, I only vaguely heard Clover say, ‘You’re a solicitor?’
The young man nodded. ‘I am.’ He held up the case he was carrying and beamed at me. ‘And I have good news for you, Mr Locke.’
‘For me?’ I said, surprised.
‘Indeed. May I?’
He indicated that he’d like to put his case down on the end of the bed. I nodded and he laid the case flat just below where my feet made hummocks in the bedclothes, and clicked the catches aside with his thumbs.
The lid of the case sprang open and he reached inside. Another little mind movie danced through my head: his hand would emerge brandishing a gun with a silencer, which he would use to shoot first Clover, then me.
From the case he pulled out a sheaf of papers.
‘Mr Locke,’ he said, still beaming, ‘it is my happy duty to inform you that you have been named as a major beneficiary in Mr McCallum’s will. Specifically, Mr McCallum has set up a private bank account in your name, into which will be paid a monthly sum of £10,000 for the first year, starting on the first day of next month, with this sum then rising by a further ten per cent at the beginning of each subsequent calendar year. What this means in practice is that next year’s monthly sum will total £11,000, the following year it will rise to £12,100 and so on and so forth. This sum, with its annual adjustments, will be paid into the account each month for as long as you live. I have all the paperwork here, including a copy of the original will. All I require from you is your signature on several documents.’
I gaped at him. For a moment I couldn’t take in what he’d said.
‘I… don’t know what to say,’ I muttered.
A smiling Clover said, ‘You could try “thank you”.’
‘Yes. I mean… wow!’ I fixed my attention on the young man and tried to pull my thoughts together. ‘Why me? I mean… did Mr McCallum give a reason?’
Daniel Worth was beaming with satisfaction. He was clearly delighted to be the bearer of good news. Cheerfully he said, ‘The motives of our clients are not our concern, Mr Locke. Our job is simply to carry out their wishes and instructions.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course. Sorry.’
Why was I apologising? I guess because I wasn’t thinking straight. The fact is, I knew why McCallum was giving me the money. It was because I was now the heart’s guardian, and because McCallum felt, rightly or wrongly, that the least he could do to ease my burden was to provide for me, enable me to live comfortably while the heart was in my possession.
The question was, was McCallum doing this for my benefit, for his own (by which I mean was it his way of assuaging his guilt for passing his burden on to me?) or for the heart’s, which he perhaps mistakenly thought could be protected, at least to some extent, by wealth?
The fact I’d been named in McCallum’s will again made me wonder why, and also when, he’d picked me. Had I been carefully or randomly selected? Or had the heart itself, and not McCallum, made the choice? Had McCallum merely used the heart to travel into the future and suss things out, after which he’d carefully manipulated events to ensure that the pieces fell into place as he clearly thought they were supposed to? But what had motivated him? Duty? The fear that some catastrophe might occur if things didn’t happen exactly as he’d been shown they would? And what about my future? Would I have to do the same thing when my time came? But how would I know? Would the heart somehow inform me? And what if I refused to do what it wanted? Would it find a way of making me? Or would it seek an alternate route, go off at a tangent in order to reach the same destination?
Questions, questions, more fucking questions. And really, at the end of the day, they all boiled down to one big question, to that same circling ‘conundrum’, as Clover had called it:
Were our actions the result of free will, or was everything we did preordained and therefore inescapable?
Incredible though the heart was, it was also a burden, a poisoned chalice. It might be the dream of many to hop about in time like Doctor Who, but if there was one thing I’d learned since all this had begun it was that time was a trap, a sticky, clinging web that tightened around you the more you tried to struggle against it.
TWENTY-TWO
A WHOLE NEW WORLD
‘Knock, knock,’ I said, sticking my head round the door.
The room was in semi-darkness, though Hope, sitting cross-legged on the bed, was not. Her face and yellow pyjamas were illuminated by flickering light from the little TV on the wheeled trolley beside her. Her lips were stretched back in a grin of wonder, and her eyes were wide and shone like liquid. Even before entering the room I’d recognised the soundtrack of what she was watching: Disney’s Aladdin, with Robin Williams giving it his all as the genie.
Hope’s head turned slowly and with obvious reluctance towards me. I could hardly blame her. Moving images on a glass screen must genuinely seem like magic to her, cartoons even more so. The difficulty she had tearing herself away from them gave me time to see that the right sleeve of her pyjama top was empty, and that it had been pinned up to stop it trailing loosely by her side. When she finally focused on me her face wore a stupefied expression. Then her smile reappeared, wider than before.
‘Alex!’ she yelled.
She leaped off the bed and ran towards me. ‘Oof!’ I said as she threw her left arm around my waist and turned her head to thump her cheek into my belly. It hadn’t exactly been a full body slam, but even the impact of her slight frame sent shockwaves through my aching bones and muscles. I’d needed a stick, which I was clutching in my right hand, to hobble here along the two corridors I’d negotiated to and from the lift, so we were both effectively one-armed. I wrapped my own left arm around her and bent forward with a teeth-gritted wince of pain to kiss the top of her head.
She smelled… modern. That was the only way I could think of to describe it. The Victorian odour of carbolic soap and rose water, which partially masked the faint sooty sourness that clung to even the most scrupulously clean inhabitant of the nineteenth century, was gone, and in its place was the fresh fruity-floral smell of bath gel, shampoo and talcum powder.
She was a new girl, facing a new life, a new beginning. Despite the fact that she had no official identity – which would be someone else’s problem, not hers – the vista of possibility before her was breathtaking. If she’d been older, even by six or seven years, she might have found the twenty-first century bewildering to the point of being overwhelmed, even traumatised by it. But she was young and infinitely adaptable. Based on what I’d heard about how she’d coped so far, and judging by the enthusiasm with which she’d greeted me, I had a feeling she’d be fine.
She stepped back from me, took my big left hand in her smaller, daintier one and gave it a tug.
‘Come and look at this.’
I allowed her to lead me to the bed. When we got there, she let go of my hand, scrabbled up on to the mattress, shuffled over and half twisted to pat the space beside her.
‘Sit here, Alex.’
I grinned at her confidence, her new-found energy. Even in the dimly lit room I could see how pink and rosy her skin was now; I’d never seen her so healthy.
I plonked myself on the bed beside her, grunting with relief. It was frustrating to be so lacking in energy. Even walking forty or fifty steps up a couple of hospital co
rridors had knackered me.
‘Look!’ she said, pointing at the screen.
I nodded. ‘It’s called a cartoon. Great, isn’t it?’
She looked at me as though I was deluded.
‘It’s called Aladdin. He’s a boy and he loves Princess Jasmine. He has a lamp, which has a genie in it, and he’s blue and funny. And there are songs!’ Her eyes lit up, and the joy on her face was so pure, so unadulterated, that I felt my heart clench.
‘And look, Alex! Jackie brought me these.’
‘Who’s Jackie?’ I asked, but she had already leaped forward on to all fours and scrambled across the bed to the TV. Despite her missing arm she was as swift and agile as a monkey. She dropped on to her stomach and leaned forward, her upper half hanging over the edge of the bed, her left arm reaching out to grab something from the lower shelf of the wheeled trolley supporting the TV.
Her voice muffled, she said, ‘Jackie’s a nurse. She’s really nice. She’s got a boy called Ed, who’s eight, and a dog called Jasper, and she likes swimming and she comes to work on a bicycle.’
She re-emerged, her hair awry and her face flushed, clutching a handful of DVD cases.
‘Look at these, Alex. They’ve got silver circles inside.’ She dropped them on the bed and pointed at the slim black DVD player tucked into its own little slot beneath the TV. ‘You press that button there and a drawer comes out and you put the circle in and then you press that other button with the little triangle on it and the story comes up on there.’ She pointed at the screen. ‘That’s called a Tee Vee,’ she added proudly, emphasising each letter. ‘It stands for t-t—’ she wrinkled her nose, trying to remember. ‘Taller Vision?’
‘Television,’ I said softly.
‘Yes,’ she said with a happy grin. ‘It’s like a story book that moves. And look, I’ve got all these stories to choose from.’
She scooped up the DVDs in her left hand and dropped them in my lap. I started to browse through them – Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Madagascar – and then I froze.
Toy Story 2. Kate’s favourite. I glanced at Hope, and suddenly, for a split second, it was as though Kate was back with me, as though the last three months had been nothing but a strange and vivid dream.