The Winning Side

by Lance Parkin

  Title Page

  TIME HUNTER

  THE WINNING SIDE

  by

  Lance Parkin

  Publisher Information

  First published in England in 2003 by

  Telos Publishing Ltd

  17 Pendre Avenue, Prestatyn, Denbighshire, LL19 9SH, UK

  www.telos.co.uk

  Digital Edition converted and distributed in 2011 by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Telos Publishing Ltd values feedback. Please e-mail us with any comments you may have about this book to: feedback@telos.co.uk

  The Winning Side © 2003 Lance Parkin

  Cover artwork by John Higgins

  Time Hunter format © 2003 Telos Publishing Ltd

  Honoré Lechasseur and Emily Blandish created by Daniel O’Mahony

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  This digital book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on any subsequent purchaser.

  Prologue

  One in the morning under Hammersmith Bridge has always looked the same and will always look the same.

  Always black silt, always the slow, grey Thames. The warehouses on the opposite bank could have been built derelict, their windows glazed and smashed the same day by the same men, as bricklayers set fires against the walls before their cement was dry. Before the bridge, before man, megalosaurs must have come down to the mud banks to drink, their calls like the foghorns here tonight. Their bones lie under the mud, below the shards of flint, below the discarded Roman coins and the pieces of Tudor pottery.

  And then, on a cool, crisp, December night – for the merest moment – something happened that had never been seen before.

  The woman and the man were suddenly there, with just the faintest crackle of blue light.

  After that, there was nothing unusual to see. She was dressed in thin, drab overalls that were too large, and overwhelmed her slight figure. She had long, chestnut hair. Her name was Emily Blandish. He was broad, shaven-headed; his suit had been made for him, and it just about looked like it. This was Radford.

  There was a moment or two between their arrival and the murder. Radford looked around, sniffed the air. If he noticed that Emily Blandish was shivering, he gave no sign of it.

  ‘We’re here?’ he asked. ‘We could be anywhere. You’re sure we’re here?’

  ‘We’re here,’ she told him.

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I can. It feels right.’

  Radford shifted, leaving a fresh footprint. It hadn’t occurred to him until that moment that there would be a set of tracks leading back to the shore, but no tracks down here. If anyone noticed that, they’d assume they’d arrived by boat. But that would have left impressions in the mud, too. Would that pique someone’s curiosity? Lead them to ask questions?

  The mud was already sucking itself flat where his first footprints had been, the evidence erasing itself.

  And so he broke the woman’s neck, watched her drop into the mud, and left her alone under Hammersmith Bridge.

  1

  Honoré Lechasseur wasn’t the ideal man for this job.

  A suspicious wife wanted to find out why her husband was a couple of hours late coming home on Tuesdays, and sometimes Thursdays. The husband was a man of routine, but recently that routine had changed. He was a civil servant, and the wife had rung his office one evening when he was running late, only to be told he’d left on time. When he’d returned, he’d lied, said he’d been held up at the office. He was already secretive about his work, as civil servants are wont to be, even to their wives. Rather than just ask him, the wife had let this carry on for a month, then another month. She suspected him, of course, but found it easier to hire a detective to follow him than simply talk to him.

  She was a customer of Mr Syme, a bookseller on Charing Cross Road. She knew, vaguely, that Syme had ‘contacts’. Perhaps the two of them had been discussing detective fiction, and he had let slip that he knew a detective or two.

  Lechasseur wasn’t a detective. There wasn’t really a word to describe what he did. ‘Spiv’ came closest, but he wasn’t that. He preferred ‘fixer’. Four years after the war had ended, the skyline was full of cranes as the bombsites became buildings again, but London still hadn’t been put back the way it had been. People had moved out and not returned, rationing was still in place, priorities had changed, some of the old trading routes no longer existed. There was a new society being formed, right here at the heart of Empire. With rationing, everyone ate the same. In military service, the social classes met, even if they never quite mixed. The government were building a new state, ‘the welfare state’, where everyone went to the same hospitals, travelled in the same railway carriages, went to the same schools. Lechasseur had seen a gap in the market, seen a niche for himself. For a price, he could find the little luxuries that the shops were always running out of. He had contacts. The natives couldn’t see past the new buildings, the new spirit. It took an outsider, like Lechasseur, a black man who qualified as an outsider even in his native Louisiana, to see that London was still London, that not everything had changed. What he hadn’t predicted, but was obvious in retrospect, was that his knowledge would quickly prove to be his most valuable commodity. Plenty of people knew how things were meant to work, like the Underground train system, or the drains, or the police, or the insurance companies. Lechasseur was one of the few people who knew what really made the heart of the city beat.

  Until recently, that had been enough. He wasn’t a rich man, but he was making a living. What he did wasn’t run-of-the-mill, but it wasn’t illegal. He liked London, maybe because it was big and dirty and complicated enough that you could make it your own, whoever you were. It was a big pond; there was room for plenty of small fish.

  Then he’d met Emily Blandish.

  People who knew what they were talking about had called him a ‘time sensitive’. He’d had an accident that had damaged his mind. Or perhaps it had fixed it. Now he saw things in a different way. As yet, he wasn’t sure what else it meant.

  Except his eyes had been opened, his horizons had been broadened, and he knew he shouldn’t just be here, playing detective for some friend of a bookseller.

  Lechasseur was in a side road in sight of the British Museum. He’d followed Brown, the errant husband, a few stops down the Northern Line from his office. Like the fool he was, Lechasseur had brought his bicycle with him. Being a black man tall enough that his head poked through the jostle of commuters, with a long leather coat – the only one like it on this side of the Atlantic – and a distinctive fedora, just wasn’t enough. He had to bring a bicycle with him, struggle down and up the crowded wooden escalators with it. That way, Lechasseur was truly unique, almost impossible to miss or forget seeing. Brown was on foot, so Lechasseur was only pushing the thing around anyway; he wasn’t riding it.

  But incredibly, Brown hadn’t seen him. Lechasseur guessed it didn’t even occur to most people that they could be being followed. He wasn’t sure what Brown did in the civil service – even Mrs Brown was unclear on that point – but Lechasseur hoped it wasn’t something that depended on intuition or observation, or it would be a while longer before the country got back on its feet.

  An hour ago, Brown had stopped abruptly at one of the doors facing onto the street, just to the side of an antiques
shop, and pressed the second – third? – doorbell. Then the door had opened, and he’d gone in, and presumably upstairs. Lechasseur was left outside. The evening was dark, but only the first floor curtains were closed. The lights were on behind them. So, don’t assume anything, but assume Brown’s gone up into the first floor flat above – directly above? – the shop.

  This was Bloomsbury, a part of London that Lechasseur knew little about. He’d never even been to the Museum. He had vague associations – writers lived here. The flat didn’t look like much from the street, but some of these terraces were deceptively large. This was an expensive place to live.

  Lechasseur had propped his bicycle against the shop front and gone into the shop. Whatever Brown was doing, he was doing it about ten feet above Lechasseur’s head. Don’t assume anything, but assume he’s at least half-naked by now.

  The plan was to feign interest in antiques, and hope the shop was open for a while longer this evening, then make a note of when Brown left. In practice, Lechasseur had one eye making sure no-one was trying to steal his bicycle.

  ‘Sir?’ the shopkeeper asked.

  A small, youngish man.

  Objects, all objects, had height and depth and breadth and... anotherth. It was only Lechasseur who could see that fourth direction, but he couldn’t always see it, he couldn’t control what he saw.

  Here, surrounded by antiques, he felt a little dizzy, almost like he was drunk. Each pot, each statue, each coin spiralled back through time. So much history in the room, and he could see it all.

  ‘Sir?’ the shopkeeper – too young to serve in the War, was at Cambridge, a minor public school before that, the third son of a... – said, and Lechasseur snapped out of his reverie.

  Lechasseur smiled what was meant to be a disarming smile, but he knew it probably just added to the impression that he was drunk.

  ‘Does that interest you, sir?’ the shopkeeper said, but what he meant was are you in here just to shelter from the cold?

  ‘That’s Roman,’ Lechasseur told him, pointing at a brooch. ‘Made in Britain, I mean, but during the Roman occupation.’

  ‘It was made in France, sir. Gaul. Imported here.’

  ‘England,’ Lechasseur assured him. ‘Bath. 318 AD. From Cornish gold.’

  The shopkeeper smiled indulgently. ‘It’s fourth century, sir, yes.’

  A door closed outside, and Lechasseur spun round.

  Brown walked straight past the shop window, head down. Ten minutes – Lechasseur confirmed that with a quick glance at his watch. He’d been expecting Brown to stay up there longer than that. He felt almost embarrassed for him.

  ‘Going?’ the shopkeeper was asking, a little redundantly, given that Lechasseur was already outside and had one hand on his bike. Brown was turning the corner. Lechasseur hesitated – rather than follow him, no doubt back to the Underground, and then off home, there was another choice: he could ring the doorbell. Brown had left alone, so the woman – Lechasseur presumed it was a woman – would be in.

  He looked back inside the antiques shop. It was almost freezing outside, but back in there it was warm, inviting. British shops were often like that – the proprietor appearing more keen to talk to his customers than do anything so vulgar as sell things to them. Syme’s bookshop was the same – Lechasseur had spent hours in there, just talking. Then he’d leave, and having bought three books, two of which he’d never have dreamt of buying if left to his own devices. He realised that the shopkeeper hadn’t been trying to get him out of his shop just now; he’d simply been trying to start a conversation.

  He’d better follow Brown, before he found himself spending ten pounds on a Roman oil lamp.

  Brown had, as Lechasseur predicted, headed straight home. Once he was sure of that, Lechasseur had returned to his own place. He had the address of the flat in Bloomsbury that Brown was frequenting, and tomorrow he’d follow that lead. He’d done enough for one day.

  There were a couple of uniformed policemen waiting for him.

  Lechasseur realised that his lips were dry, and tried to suppress any reaction, knowing they’d be looking for any sign of panic. If they’d searched his place, they would have found the last box of smuggled cigars, nothing more. There were, of course, any number of past misdemeanours that might have come to their attention.

  Then he saw that they were the ones hiding something. Their grave expressions. One of them removed his helmet.

  ‘Honoré Lechasseur?’

  If they had a description of him, any description at all, they must have known who he was. This was no time for a cocky ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  The policeman nodded. ‘You’re a friend of Miss Emily Blandish?’

  ‘I suppose I am.’ He hadn’t known her very long, but they were friends.

  ‘What’s the nature of your relationship?’

  ‘We’re friends, like you said.’

  Neither of those observations was a question, but Lechasseur found himself shaking his head anyway.

  ‘Her landlady said you were the nearest thing she had.’ The policeman was trying to be discreet.

  ‘We’ve been through a lot together.’

  ‘Care to explain?’

  ‘I helped her out.’

  They wanted more.

  ‘She was found on a bombsite,’ Lechasseur explained. ‘She’d lost her memory. She was wearing pyjamas, she didn’t have anything that could identify her, none of the locals recognised her. But she spoke English, she knew her name. Once the doctors had finished with her, she was discharged and... well... she had nowhere to go. I tried to find out more about her.’

  Failed, too, Lechasseur didn’t add. And he’d pleased himself with how straightforward he’d made it all sound – amazing how missing a few little details out made Emily’s life story sound almost normal.

  ‘She has no relatives,’ the other policeman said. ‘No family.’

  ‘That’s my understanding,’ Lechasseur confirmed.

  The policeman looked at him with such pity that Lechasseur was suddenly terrified.

  ‘She was discovered this morning, sir. Please could you come with us. We need someone to identify the body, and it looks like you’re our best candidate.’

  He knew it really was Emily before they pulled back the sheet.

  Don’t worry about how she died, yet, he told himself. Let’s see the evidence, let’s poke a finger into the wounds.

  ‘Ready?’ the pathologist asked, not waiting for Lechasseur to nod.

  She was naked. He hadn’t expected that, and found himself staring at her. She was older than you’d think from looking at her. She was in her mid-twenties, but looked almost adolescent. She was even more slight without her clothes. He’d seen corpses before, in Normandy. They hadn’t been as intact or scrubbed clean as this, but he recognised the colour, or rather the lack of it in the lips, the skin, the nipples. Her brown hair was just as vivid, though. It was meant to keep growing after death – a myth, he’d read somewhere; something to do with the skin contracting as it stiffened.

  They’d closed her eyes, laid her out, arms at her side.

  He tried looking at the body another way, the way only he could. He’d see her history, he’d see who had done this to her, and then he’d find him and kill him.

  Lechasseur brushed his hand against Emily’s stomach. It was cold, stiff, like a side of meat, not a person. Could you get used to seeing human beings like this? It wasn’t normal. Even the War, and all those millions of dead bodies, hadn’t changed that, thank God. But a young girl like this... someone who could reasonably have expected to live to see the twenty-first century. How could that be anything but a crime against history?

  The pathologist was looking at him sternly.

  Lechasseur guessed it wasn’t the done thing to touch her. But if he wa
nted to see it, then it often helped to touch.

  Not this time. Damn this – he could tell the life story of a Roman brooch, but not her, not when it mattered.

  ‘Is it Miss Blandish?’ he was asked, in what passed for a gentle tone.

  ‘Yes,’ Lechasseur said. He hesitated for a moment.

  ‘No,’ a familiar voice chipped in.

  Emily Blandish was standing in the doorway.

  ‘I was running that errand for you all afternoon. I got home and everyone looked like they’d seen a –’

  She’d seen the body, and couldn’t finish the sentence.

  The pathologist was puzzled. ‘You have a twin?’ he asked.

  ‘No...’

  ‘You don’t sound sure.’

  ‘Miss Blandish doesn’t know much about her past,’ Lechasseur told him. ‘It’s a long story.’

  The pathologist held up his hand. ‘Of course. I remember the papers – knew I recognised the body from somewhere.’

  Emily was oblivious to everything but the corpse.

  ‘It isn’t me.’

  ‘Of course not, my dear. A terrible way to discover you had a sister, but –’

  ‘Where was she found?’

  ‘Under Hammersmith Bridge. Early this morning.’

  ‘You cleaned her up, then?’ said Lechasseur. He should have noticed the smell of soap before.

  ‘She was covered in mud.’

  ‘And naked?’ Emily asked.

  ‘She was wearing overalls. They’re in the other room.’

  ‘Just overalls?’ Lechasseur asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘No jewellery?’ Lechasseur elaborated.

  ‘I don’t own any jewellery.’

  ‘No jewellery. No personal effects. Not even underwear.’

  Emily was blushing.

  ‘This isn’t you,’ Lechasseur reminded her.