by Lance Parkin
An image.
Amanda staring at a picture on a school trip. A naked man and a woman stumbling through a blasted wasteland. In the far distance, a splash of green. Above them, an angel with wings and skin of gold and fire, holding a sword. The Archangel Michael, the guide was telling her.
The guide would be long dead. The painting would have been torn down, slashed and broken.
Lechasseur broke away, pulled back.
‘I have to find Emily,’ he told Amanda.
‘You didn’t answer my question.’
‘Which question?’
‘Why do you look the same?’
Lechasseur hesitated. He wasn’t entirely sure of the answer himself, but it had something to do with Emily. He had to find her, because with her they might just be able to stop this.
‘I think,’ he began. ‘It’s because...’
Amanda smiled. ‘It’s all right. You have to go and find your friend.’
Lechasseur checked his watch. It was five to noon.
6
‘You recognised me,’ Radford reminded Emily.
Emily had been dreading that.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly.
‘How?’
‘I was mistaken. You reminded me of someone I know.’
Radford shook his head. ‘I’ve never been mistaken for anyone in my life, Blandish.’
She looked up at him, saw him grinning a rather crooked grin.
He reached out, brushed her forehead quite gently.
‘1949,’ he said. ‘You saw me in 1949.’
‘Yes,’ she admitted.
He considered this information for a moment or two. ‘I wonder how.’
‘I don’t know,’ Emily told him, summoning up her courage.
‘I’ll worry about that, you don’t have to,’ he told her.
They walked a little further, in silence. Where would she run to, Emily wondered. She wasn’t sure where the village was. Over the next hill or ten miles away? She’d asked Radford the time because she’d had no idea how long it had been since she’d left Honoré in the barn. It had been six or seven hours. There was no way Honoré would still be there. He’d have no idea where she was. He wouldn’t even know where he was himself, and if he was still in the state he’d been in, then his situation would almost certainly be hopeless.
Her best hope was that he’d be arrested and brought here. But she knew that there was no way Radford would let the two of them meet.
Was that the reason for the walk in the woods? Was Honoré being brought to the manor house for interrogation, and she was being kept out of the way?
She dismissed the idea. Radford would want to question Lechasseur himself.
Lechasseur saw Emily.
He couldn’t believe it at first. Amanda had told him about the manor house, and he’d headed up here. But he couldn’t have hoped that Emily would be out here, walking around. She was wearing overalls.
The man from London was there. He looked even larger than before.
He and Emily seemed to be deep in conversation. He didn’t look like he was armed. They didn’t seem to be arguing. She wasn’t handcuffed or otherwise restrained. She was just taking a walk with the man, wearing the same uniform as him.
Lechasseur didn’t know where Emily was from, how she’d come to be in 1949. Was she from the future? Was she back at home? She looked comfortable here, talking to this man.
He remembered the lined faces of the farmer’s wife and of Amanda. He saw the drab overalls. Everything here was worn down, rusted, faded, corrupted. Everything but Emily.
There was a chance he could survive here, fit in, even serve the Party. In 1949, he liked to think he walked the line between the legal and the illegal. Here, where nothing was permitted except by the will of the Party, the obvious way to thrive was to be in the Party. But there were shortages here, so whatever the Party said, there would be people who’d make it worth his while to supply them with whatever it was they needed. He could help them, he was sure of that, if that was his fate.
They’d walked a little further. Emily was in two minds: unsure whether to make a run for it, or continue with the conversation. When she found herself thinking that if she ran and was shot, at least it would be quick, she realised that she was panicking. She wasn’t, as far as she could tell, in immediate danger. Running, she would be. She didn’t think Radford was carrying a gun, but wouldn’t like to rule out the possibility.
Radford was looking at her. Could he sense what she was thinking?
‘So much brightness,’ he said.
‘Brightness?’ Emily frowned.
‘You. You think. You question. It’s unusual. It’s –’
He leant in and kissed her, rather roughly. A moment later, his hand was pushing its way into her overalls, rummaging for her breast.
Emily pulled back, pushed her way out of his arms.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she shouted at him. ‘What the hell?’
She stumbled away from him, terrified.
Radford was coming after her.
Her immediate instinct was to run. She moved away, already realising that she didn’t have anywhere to go, and that he would catch up with her within a few paces, that he could have been carrying that gun.
He was following, she could feel his feet pounding into the ground behind her.
Radford grabbed her shoulder, then she felt him relent, and let her go.
‘I don’t know...’ he started to say.
‘Why? Did you think I... I didn’t want you to...’
Radford stood tall, remembered who he was. ‘You’re my prisoner, and –’
‘So you want to pay me a compliment, then grope me?’
‘You will stand still.’
‘I am standing still. You explain why you did that.’
Radford looked at her for a moment. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry... it’s been so long. If I could go back and stop myself from –’
Emily didn’t have time to flinch as he touched her shoulder.
Lechasseur saw it with his own eyes, for a moment at least.
They’d been walking together, she’d been smiling, laughing even. Then the man – the same man who’d been killing men on a London street – kissed Emily, slid his hand into her clothing. They thought they were alone. Away from the cameras and the microphones.
Lechasseur turned away, started walking in the other direction. They didn’t want him to see what happened next, and he didn’t have any desire to see it. He kept his head down.
Lying on a stainless steel table in a police morgue.
He wanted to protect Emily, but she was going to die. History was written, and it couldn’t be unwritten. Lechasseur didn’t understand why he was so angry. It wasn’t jealousy, he knew that much. He just didn’t think of Emily that way.
It was frustration, he decided. This morning, life had been okay, London was rebuilding, and he was doing all right for himself. Now he knew the future, and was condemned to return to 1949 to live it out. It was like getting on a train he knew would crash. Not just a warning or a feeling. It wasn’t a risk, it was a certainty.
Emily would die. Whatever she and that man were doing now. However he was making her feel.
The shock of seeing her naked body.
She’d soon be dead. The man would break her neck and leave her lying in the mud.
Lechasseur reeled.
The man with the shaved head. He was the murderer.
He saw it now.
The man standing there, boots heavy with mud. Emily dropping to the ground, her body unable to support itself as there was no life, no instinct left. The man stood over her for a moment, utterly without emotion. Killing her had no moral or legal implications. It was just necessary.
He would
kill her, it had already been written.
Lechasseur pitched round, started back towards Emily and the man. Whatever they were doing now, whatever she was consenting to, he had to get Emily away from here. He found himself running, but...
Emily wasn’t there. The man she’d been with was gone, too.
This was impossible. Just a few moments ago, they’d been here. Lechasseur had already passed the point he’d seen them. He whirled around, looking for them in the undergrowth, but – apart from the barely-a-path he was on – this was all nettles and brambles. If they were here, he’d have heard them, and they would have heard him.
Even if they’d broken into a gallop the second he’d turned his back on them (and the reason he’d turned his back on them was that they weren’t about to do that), then he’d still be able to see them.
He suppressed the urge to call out her name.
Somehow, Emily was gone.
He tried seeing her.
She was here, the man’s hand on her shoulder. She was behind him, walking into the woods. She was both. She was somehow both.
Lechasseur reeled, like he’d been given an electric shock.
She was both.
Somehow, Emily and Radford were back on the outskirts of the wood.
He was removing his hand from her shoulder. Turning to look at him, she saw the manor house.
The two of them were unsure where to look.
‘We...’ she began.
Radford was pacing around. ‘What happened?’ he asked her.
Emily stared into the woods. The absurd thought had crossed her mind that she’d somehow see herself in there.
They’d been here just five minutes before.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, replying to Radford. ‘Can you see anything?’
For a moment, Radford was clearly trying. Then he stumbled, dizzy.
Exactly the same thing as had happened to Honoré, Emily thought. The last time she’d been one place one minute, another the next.
They stood there for what seemed like forever. The silence broke as bells started chiming twelve.
Emily and Radford looked at each other. He clearly thought it was some kind of trick she was pulling on him. She, for her part, hadn’t got a theory.
‘Come with me,’ Radford ordered.
Emily had little choice but to obey. They headed back to the house, and she was led back up to her cell.
As the bells chimed twelve, Lechasseur picked one – the Emily nearest him, the one who had walked into the woods with her murderer.
He ran towards them, but neither saw him. Instead, the man was reaching out for her. She was trying to get away.
As the man touched Emily’s shoulder, and Lechasseur ran straight for him, hoping to knock him off balance, he suddenly wasn’t there. Lechasseur found himself running through thin air. Emily had gone, too. If he hadn’t been so alert, he’d have crashed into a tree or stumbled into the undergrowth. As it was, he just found himself standing there.
He couldn’t rely on his eyes here. He should have known that already. He’d already seen there was another Emily. He broke into a run, heading towards her, heading to save her life.
On the other side of the wood was a manor house. Emily and the large man weren’t here, either, but he hadn’t seen them disappear.
Lechasseur began heading towards the house.
She was in there. He had some sense that Emily was in there. If he’d stopped to think, he might have decided it was wishful thinking that she was in the manor house. At best it was a wild assumption.
Two men were coming up to him. One was middle-aged, the other looked like the first’s son – the lad was probably just fourteen. So Lechasseur made sure to knock his dad down first, kicking him in the back just in case he was thinking of getting back up. The lad ran off. Lechasseur was pleased about that, because he really wouldn’t have enjoyed hitting him.
The front door wasn’t locked. It didn’t even seem to have a lock. But as Lechasseur reached for the handle, the boy was already heading back, three labourers following him. One of them carried a spade, and this was the one that made the first move.
Lechasseur dodged it, kicked him in the stomach, wrenched the spade out of his hands and brought it down on his shoulder, probably breaking the collarbone.
The other two charged him at the same time. Lechasseur had the spade up, and couldn’t get any momentum behind it before they arrived and grabbed at him. He dropped the spade so he could grip at the attackers instead. They were both strong, and Lechasseur found himself struggling to break their grip.
Another man was running up the path. This one had a rifle. As he brought it to bear on Lechasseur from about fifteen feet away, the two men holding him relaxed their grip and stepped aside.
The door to the manor house opened, and the large man, the one who was going to murder Emily, stepped out.
The man stared at him, studied him.
‘Where’s Emily?’ Lechasseur asked.
‘You must be Lechasseur.’
‘Where is she?’
Two more guards, both with rifles, were trotting out of the house and taking positions by Lechasseur. The man whom Lechasseur had knocked down first was struggling back to his feet.
‘Don’t kill him,’ the large man said quietly.
The guard nearest Lechasseur obliged, knocking him out with the butt of his rifle instead, on the second attempt.
‘What’s your name?’ Emily asked the girl.
She looked up, with dull eyes. She wasn’t naturally stupid. When Emily had been found on the bombsite, and the doctors had studied her, some had said she was stupid. No, they’d not used that word. They’d said ‘slow’ or ‘simple’.
‘What’s the capital of France?’ they’d asked. She hadn’t known.
‘What’s the name of the Prime Minister?’
‘What’s the name of your street?’
‘What’s your birthday?’
Emily hadn’t been able to answer many of their questions. When they’d shown her a picture of a cat, she’d correctly identified it. She knew what a tree was – in fact, when they’d shown her a picture of a tree, she’d said ‘Oak’, so she’d discovered she knew the names of lots of trees. Her knowledge was there, but it was patchy, inconsistent. There was no pattern to what she remembered and what she didn’t – if there was, at any rate, no-one could decipher it.
One doctor had been particularly rude. ‘If you don’t have a memory, you don’t have a personality, you don’t have an identity. You’re nothing, barely better than a monkey. No more intelligence than a chimpanzee.’
She’d asked him if he had a good memory. He’d told her he did.
‘What’s the capital of France?’ she’d asked.
‘Paris,’ he’d said, impatiently.
‘And you’ve always known that?’
‘I learned it. And remembered it.’
‘When did you learn it?’ Emily asked.
He’d hesitated. ‘A long time ago. I must have been four or five.’
‘But you don’t remember? You can remember some things, but not others.’
He hadn’t accepted the point, so she’d pointed out that a chimpanzee was an ape, not a monkey.
She knew that this girl was uneducated, not stupid. But what angered Emily was that she didn’t seem aware she could change that.
The girl had brought her some food, and had obviously been ordered to stay and watch her eat it. This, in itself, intrigued Emily. The meal was cold tomato soup, served in a bowl with a little tin spoon. Was there really some sequence of events that Emily could set off that involved these items and that would lead to her escaping?
Emily struggled to think of a plan. The spoon was so flimsy that she was pleasantly surprised it survived contact with the soup. She could
break the bowl and use the shards, she supposed.
Emily was vaguely insulted by having this dull young woman guard her. Some faceless administrator had decided Emily was enough of a threat to warrant a guard, but not enough to deserve a real one.
There was shouting from outside. The girl didn’t so much as react, Emily had already set aside her soup bowl, and was at the window, trying to peek out between gaps between the posters pasted to it. But she couldn’t see anything.
The girl was tidying away the bowl.
‘I’ve not finished with that,’ she told her.
‘You put it down,’ was the riposte.
Emily tried to be sympathetic. This girl was like this only because she didn’t know any better. What was the point of learning anything, in a world where the government lied to you and said only what they wanted you to hear? What did they teach them in schools? Science, history, literature, religion? None of that would be of any use here. Mathematics? A little abstract if all you need to know for your job is how to serve tomato soup. Stupidity was probably a rather good survival option here.
Radford watched Lechasseur.
They’d strapped the prisoner to a chair in one of the Conversation Rooms, but – at Radford’s instruction –hadn’t administered any drugs.
‘Emily has told me all about you,’ Radford said, as his opening gambit.
Lechasseur looked up suspiciously. ‘She’s still alive, then.’
Radford smiled. ‘Of course.’
‘You kissed her, started to undress her. I saw it with my own eyes. I don’t care what you did after that. It’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to kill her,’ Lechasseur stated.
‘No.’
‘I’ve seen it happen.’
Radford reached out, brushed Lechasseur’s cheek, saw him.
It was like plunging into an ocean. So much to take in. Normandy. A flash of light, then darkness. Pain. Radford tried to focus. London. Disorientation as he saw someone who looked just like himself, only to realise that it was him. A woman with long hair offering Lechasseur a whisky, Lechasseur seemingly oblivious to the fact she was also offering herself. Emily Blandish, laid out in a hospital room, or a morgue. Marks on her bare neck and shoulder.