by Jason Ayres
The sleepy market town had never needed much policing and he knew that there were never more than three or four people on-site at any one time. So far he’d only seen D.I. Jones and two others – a male sergeant called Kyle who’d originally arrested him, and a female officer, P.C. Pooley.
She had been present during the interview but hadn’t said much. She was only young and seemed relatively inexperienced. Having clocked her slender body and admired her rear view as she left the room, Dan figured she wouldn’t put up much resistance against a man twice her size, even if she was clearly much fitter than he was.
As for Jones, he was a more formidable prospect, in his late-thirties and pretty solidly built. But Dan would have the element of surprise on his side when it came to dealing with him. He was guessing that people weren’t generally in the habit of breaking out of the station, so they wouldn’t be prepared for what he had planned.
Would there be any consequences for what he was about to do? He hoped not. With any luck, he’d be away before they knew what hit them. Then, all he had to do was to make for the tunnel and find his way back to his own time.
Once back there, he’d be safe from the arms of the law. They’d hardly be able to follow him back to 2041. And then he would make sure that Jess and the others would be sorry for what they had put him through.
When the door finally opened, Dan was ready for action. Jones swaggered into the room, a smug look on his face, and said sarcastically, “Oh are you still here? I thought you’d have popped off back through time by now.”
Dan had no reservations whatsoever about wiping the grin off his face. He leapt up, taking Jones completely by surprise. He barely saw the fist that took him down. The slight frame of P.C. Pooley in the doorway offered little resistance. At one time in the past he’d have had no compunction about punching her as well: that was the sort of man Dan was.
Since Lauren’s death things had been different. Mindful of how she had met her demise, he was far more careful. He simply elbowed his way past the young officer.
“Are you alright, D.I. Jones?” he heard her say behind him. She’d wisely chosen going to his aid over trying to stop Dan.
From the interview room it was a short dash down the corridor to the double doors that led to the reception area. As Dan had suspected, security was lax in the station and the doors were not locked.
“Hey!” exclaimed the desk sergeant, as Dan emerged, also taken by surprise. Dan cast a brief glance in his direction, enough to register that it was Sergeant Kyle who had arrested him earlier. That was good – it meant that there couldn’t be more than three officers on duty.
Before Kyle could react, Dan was past him, across the reception area and out through the front door.
“Well, don’t just stand there, Kyle,” said Jones, emerging from the rear door clutching the bloody nose that Dan had given him. “Get after him!”
“Yes, sir, sorry, sir,” replied Kyle. Jones grabbed a tissue from the desk and dabbed his nose as the two of them headed for the door, but Dan was already on the other side of the car park and heading for the main road.
“What are you waiting for?” asked Jones. “Get a move on. You can outrun that fat fucker, surely?”
Kyle shook his head. “I hurt my knee playing football at the weekend, boss. First home game of the season, can you believe it? I can’t really run at the moment. Shall we take the car?”
“Pathetic,” commented Jones, annoyed to see Dan already running across the zebra crossing and onto the footpath that led towards the town centre. “How can we follow him in the car through there?”
“He moves quite quickly for a fat bloke, doesn’t he, sir?” remarked Kyle.
“Well faster than you, obviously,” replied Jones. Turning back into the station, the harassed D.I. saw that P.C. Pooley had come through the internal door.
Quickly he barked out his orders: “Pooley, stay here, get on the phone and call for some backup. We’ve got a live one on the loose. Kyle, you come with me, if you can keep up.”
Jones raced out into the car park, followed by the somewhat slower-moving Kyle. They headed for the station’s only squad car, parked about thirty yards away. Jones reached it well before Kyle and, using his hand print to open the door, he hopped in and began to give the car instructions.
By this time, the bird had well and truly flown. Dan couldn’t quite believe that he had got away so easily. He raced along the path that ran through the centre of the small park that led towards the town centre.
Kids were playing on the swings in the play area to the right-hand side of the path. To the left, owners were exercising their dogs in the large, open field. It was a refreshingly normal scene and he was glad to see that such ordinary activities carried on just as they had always done, unchanged by the march of progress.
He was getting out of breath. The sprint across the road from the station was taking its toll on him. He was fat, it was true, and he was starting to feel his age.
Slowing to a jog, he looked and was pleasantly surprised to see that no one seemed to be following him. He eased off to a fast walking pace, aware that he needed to conserve energy for another sprint if they did manage to track him down.
He reached the end of the park and crossed a small, stone bridge across the narrow stream that flowed through the town. The park had been refreshingly normal, but the sight in front of him was completely unexpected.
The old supermarket and cinema that had stood on the site in front of where he now stood were gone, replaced by a giant, glass dome, shimmering in the sunlight. It reminded Dan of the Eden Project in Cornwall that he’d once visited as a child. Was this what the town centres of the future looked like?
He had no time to stop and admire the view. Skirting around the new building, he was relieved to discover that the main pedestrianised area of the town centre was largely unchanged.
Casting a few nervous glances around him, he crossed the main street and headed for the road that led towards the railway tunnel. He felt fearful that everyone might be looking at him, knowing that he didn’t belong there.
In reality, although there were plenty of people around, none of them were taking much notice of him. He tried to pull himself together. The lack of sleep and everything that had happened to him over the past few hours was making him paranoid.
He tried to reassure himself, slowed his pace and took some time to look around him. Things were reassuringly normal. He may have been 22 years in the future, but people hadn’t changed much. It was still the same mix of people as it had always been: blokes in jeans and T-shirts, young mums with pushchairs, and elderly people with tartan shopping trolleys.
He did notice that some of the pushchairs and trolleys appeared to be moving of their own accord. If Dan hadn’t been in such a desperate situation, he might have found it amusing seeing the tartan trolleys, full of high-tech gadgetry, but with the same old pattern on the outside.
The trolleys may have been stuck in a time warp, but the elderlies’ attire certainly wasn’t. For some reason, many of the pensioners seemed to be wearing baseball caps. It seemed that flat caps had finally gone out of fashion.
He moved on, joining the path that led to the tunnel, passing the primary school on the right that he’d once attended when Charlie and Josh had still been his friends.
Kids were playing out in the playground as he upped his pace, hearing the wail of a police siren in the distance.
As a half-full HS2 train rushed overhead, Dan entered the tunnel and walked to the far end, praying that he would find himself back in 2041 when he emerged. But as soon as he did, he could see that nothing had changed. Perhaps he needed to go through in the opposite direction. That might work.
So he made his way back to the other end, but still to no avail. Realistically, had he really hoped that there would be? While he had been walking up and down, several people had walked through the tunnel from both directions. None of them had vanished, so why should he be any different
?
Perhaps he needed to examine the walls of the tunnel more closely. There might be a concealed switch embedded there. Ignoring the looks of the passers-by who wondered what he was doing, he walked along very slowly, examining every last brick.
The search proved fruitless. Frustrated, he walked back towards the far end of the tunnel again, the end that led towards the housing estate where he no longer lived. What was he to do next?
He couldn’t go back to the house, as that would bring the police back down on him in no time. He knew they were probably still looking for him, so he was going to have to keep a low profile.
He was also aware that he was still wearing the same clothes he’d had on all day. If they put out a description of him, which was highly likely, then a sensible move would be to get a change of clothes. This wasn’t going to be easy.
He couldn’t risk going back into the town centre to find a clothes shop. There would be CCTV everywhere and goodness knows how advanced it might be these days. The days of trying to identify villains from grainy, old, washed-out images were surely gone.
It suddenly struck him that he was ravenously hungry. He reached into the pocket of his jeans. Although he had not got his wallet, he usually kept his money loose in his trouser pockets.
Thankfully, he had a reasonable amount of cash on him, about £80 in notes and another few quid in loose change. At least he could get something to eat.
Then he’d need to start thinking about how he was going to get out of this mess.
Chapter Eight
September 2063
Without knowing it, Dan was somewhat overestimating the importance the police were placing on him. Back at the station, Jones had called off the search for the time being. He was feeling extremely disgruntled because the call he’d asked P.C. Pooley to put through for backup had been refused.
HQ in Oxford were not willing to invest any time or people into an expensive manhunt for a mystery man who had done nothing more serious than break into somebody’s house. Had he been armed or physically attacked someone, it might have been different. As far as they were concerned, Dan was just a burglar who’d been caught red-handed, whom Jones and his team had been lax enough to let escape.
Jones and Kyle had driven around town for a bit with the siren wailing, but it was clear they had no chance of finding him. It hadn’t occurred to either of them that the siren would be a warning to him that they were looking for him. He was hardly likely to stroll along in plain view under those circumstances. Jones liked having the siren on, though. It made him feel important.
After Pooley radioed them to inform them that no backup was coming, they headed back to the station. On the way they took a small detour to the fast-food drive-thru at the edge of town, seeking solace in burgers and fries for the dismal morning’s work.
Shortly after getting back, the holographic conference screen in Jones’s office lit up, and the image of Superintendent Trafford from the Oxford station appeared in the room. He did not look happy, and his expression darkened further when he saw Jones lounging in his chair munching on a chicken burger.
Trafford was in his mid-fifties, a strong and powerful figure whom Jones found intimidating at the best of times. And this certainly was not one of the best.
“What the fuck are you playing at, Jones?” he asked.
“We’ve got an escaped prisoner, sir. I asked P.C. Pooley to call for backup.”
“I know,” said Trafford. “And I refused it.”
“May I ask why, sir?”
“You may,” replied Trafford. “Put yourself in my shoes. We get a call from one of your officers saying you’ve got an escaped prisoner. So, naturally, we ask for details. Who is this person and what have they done? The usual sort of thing.”
Trafford paused and took a deep breath. Jones knew what this meant. He’d seen it enough times before. He was filling his lungs to capacity, ready for the rant to come.
“To start with, your officer isn’t even sure of the bloke’s name. So we’ve no positive identity to work with, which means no microchip, no implants to track, nothing. The description we’ve got is of a bloke, fortyish, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Hardly narrows the suspect list down much, does it? And as for the heinous crime he’s committed, it seems he’s broken into someone’s house and that’s it. No murder, no rape, no armed robbery. Basically, Jones, you are wasting my time.”
After another pause, Trafford added, sarcastically, “Still, I’m glad to see in all the apparent mayhem that you’ve managed to find time to find yourself some lunch.”
“Sorry, sir,” replied Jones, lamely. “But the thing is there’s something weird about him. He claims to be someone who as far as we can tell died over twenty years ago. I looked up his records earlier, and the person he claims to be has got a lot of form. Superintendent Benson who was D.I. here before me tried to convict him once in a murder case, but she failed. Someone else went down for it instead, but was later acquitted.”
“And you believe all this?” asked Trafford. “Did you DNA test him to see if he was who he claimed to be?”
“Well, no, sir,” replied Jones, realising he was on the back foot. “We were going to, but before we could, he sort of escaped.”
“And that’s another thing I’m not happy about,” continued Trafford.
Although he wasn’t physically in the room, the latest holographic images were very lifelike, and Jones was every bit as intimidated as if he had been standing there in the flesh.
“You let a prisoner overpower you and escape from the station. That would not have happened if you had been following proper security procedures.”
“With all due respect, sir,” replied Jones. “We are very short-staffed here. We’re expected to police an entire town of 50,000 people with only three officers on duty at any one time. Perhaps if you could see your way to letting us have some more staff…”
“Let me stop you, right there,” interrupted Trafford. “Quite honestly, there is very little that any of you do there that couldn’t be performed by the new breed of robotic officers. We are using them here in Oxford and they are proving to be very efficient. One thing they certainly don’t do is let prisoners escape.”
“There’s nothing a robot can do more efficiently than a human,” protested Jones.
“An efficient human, I agree,” said Trafford. “But in your case, I think my dog could run the station better than you. I feel I ought to let you know that we are looking at trialling a fully automated station in one of Oxford’s satellite towns. I was thinking of installing it in Witney, but following today’s performance, I think your town might be a more appropriate choice. Do you hear what I am saying, Jones?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Jones. “I do apologise for what’s happened today. It won’t happen again.”
“I hope it won’t, Jones, because otherwise you’ll find yourself out of a job. As for this mystery man, I suggest you forget about him and focus on the things you should be doing, whatever they may be. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir,” said Jones again.
“Good,” replied Trafford, curtly, and he vanished as he terminated the transmission.
The conversation had left Jones feeling extremely annoyed. This man, Daniel Fisher, if that really was his name, had made a fool out of him and earned him a dressing down from his boss.
He had no intention of letting it go, whatever Trafford had said. The old fool was out of touch and had no idea of the sorts of things he had to deal with on a daily basis. His comment about doing what he should be doing, whatever it may be, was proof enough that he had no idea what the day-to-day job entailed.
Jones decided that he would track the man down, bring him in, and get to the bottom of the matter. There was more to this than met the eye and if he could solve it he’d be on for lots of Brownie points. Then they could stick their automated robot police station in Witney and good luck to them.
His chips had gone cold now and he had lost his
appetite. He threw them in the bin, got up, and wandered over to the filter coffee machine. He poured himself a strong one, and then sat back down to contemplate the day’s events. He was not happy with the way things had gone and he wasn’t going to let this Fisher character get away with this. He’d made Jones look like an idiot and that was not acceptable. He would have to pay.
In fact, paying of a different kind was something that Dan was about to experience considerable difficulty with. Coming to the conclusion that it might be best if he got out of town for a while, he had sneaked into the back garden of a house on his old estate and stolen some clothes off a washing line.
He was now dressed in black jeans and a yellow and black, striped rugby shirt which were satisfyingly different to what he’d been wearing before.
It was well past lunchtime by now, and he didn’t want to hang around any longer than he had to, so, ignoring the rumblings in his stomach, he headed straight for the nearest bus stop. He figured he’d be a lot safer in Oxford where he could be as anonymous as he liked in the crowds.
A bus soon arrived, a shiny, silent, silver model, far superior to anything Dan had seen in his day. As the double doors slid smoothly open, he quickly realised there was no driver. The area where the driver’s cab used to be now housed a touch screen device. As he entered the bus, a robotic female voice, identical to the one of the front door of his old house, enquired: “Please state your destination”.
“Oxford, single,” replied Dan.
“That will be 15 euros, please,” replied the machine.
“Euros?” enquired Dan. “You’re joking. How much is it in pounds?”
“That currency is no longer legal tender. Please pay 15 euros. Cash, card or palm print?”
“Look, I don’t have any euros,” said Dan. As someone who in his youth had fiercely campaigned against continued EU membership, he was incredibly angry to discover that apparently Britain was now in the eurozone.