The Winning Side
Page 9
He looked around, sniffed the air. If he noticed that she 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.
He looked at Emily.
She slashed his face, aiming for his eyes, slicing his forehead instead.
‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ she said as he reeled.
She’d blinded him. No... it was blood. It ran down over his eyes, it was already around his nostrils and he could taste it on his top lip.
Emily hadn’t run. She hadn’t moved. So he reached out and punched her in the stomach. He heard her crash down into the mud, and advanced on her, wiping the blood away from his face.
She was laughing.
‘I saw you before. You didn’t have that scar when I saw you before, in the future, and believe me, you’re going to have that scar for a while.’
He kicked her in the stomach. Incredibly, that just made her laugh more.
‘That’s going to be a nasty bruise. And I saw myself laid out on a slab and I didn’t have a bruise on my stomach. I’m not going to die.’
Radford stamped on her head, holding it down in the mud.
‘The precise detail of your death might have changed,’ he told her. ‘That’s all.’
Emily was struggling. Her mouth and nose would be full of soft mud, now. Radford wiped some more blood from his forehead. He was feeling a little light-headed. He couldn’t afford to let this last much longer.
‘You’re not going to die?’ he mocked. ‘Why are you struggling, then?’
He lifted his foot, and Emily spluttered and coughed.
‘Answer me,’ he shouted. ‘You can’t stop this. The Party will rise. It’s happened.’
Emily slashed at his ankle with whatever it was in her hand. He screamed with pain.
She grabbed his leg, pulling him off balance.
If he went down, put a knee on her neck, he’d break it, or at the very least block her windpipe.
‘Think of Lechasseur,’ Emily suggested.
‘Lechasseur?’ Radford echoed.
Emily gripped him tighter, and they felt themselves slipping away.
Radford was fighting her. ‘No.’
Blue energy was crackling all around them. ‘I have to get back, and I need you for that. I’m going back for Lechasseur. And then I’ll leave you where you belong.’
‘No.’
‘Without me, you can just sit in your office, seeing things.’
‘You die. You have to die. You said it yourself: history has been written.’
‘What can be written can be rewritten.’
Emily let go of Radford, who fell away, in a direction she couldn’t begin to describe.
In his place was a ball of blue energy, surging towards her. Raw time, she thought, or maybe the sparks as time scraped its way across the universe. It was pushing at her, like an ocean wave.
She thought of Honoré Lechasseur, she thought of the manor house and she was there.
Lechasseur looked up to see Emily. She was wearing overalls, but he barely noticed that. She was both in the room and not, her feet firmly on the ground and a few inches in the air. There was a ring of blue energy around her. The ring of fire, the sense of something shielding him from light that should be blinding.
An angel.
She held out her hand, her electric wings spreading out behind her.
He hesitated. This was such a beautiful dream, and he really didn’t want to wake up.
‘For God’s sake, Honoré. We don’t have long. Think about going home.’
He touched her hand and they vanished.
And, without Emily there, there was nothing blocking the light, and it shone in the cell, taking it apart, atom by atom, then spread through the whole of the house, blasting through the mortar, vaporising it, then pulling the bricks down from the cell one by one, crazing the glass, throwing the manor house, all its broken contents and inhabitants, out over its own lawns and the surrounding fields and woodlands. A moment later, the house was gone. All that was left were bricks sinking into the mud.
Lechasseur wondered how long it would be before the waiters would serve him. It felt like he’d been sitting in the little café for days.
Emily was opposite him, catching her breath.
They were in the café in the shadow of the British Museum. Any moment now, there would be gunshots.
The two of them held their breath, waiting. But it was quiet out there – or as quiet as London ever got.
‘Did it happen?’ Emily asked. She was in her dress, not overalls. She wasn’t caked in mud and bruises. Lechasseur felt fine, if a little hungry.
‘Why are you asking me?’
‘You were there, too.’
‘I guess that answers the question.’
Emily thought about it for a moment. ‘I suppose... But if I didn’t die, and Radford didn’t come here...’
‘That happened,’ Lechasseur said. ‘I remember it.’
‘I died?’ she asked, not needing to elaborate why she might disagree. ‘It happened and it didn’t? That doesn’t add up.’
‘Does it have to? We can agree what happened and what didn’t,’ Lechasseur said.
‘I hope so.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Is that the future? Is that what’s going to happen?’
Lechasseur remembered the newspaper with its photograph of a female prime minister, a quiet country lane, strong tea in an unchipped mug.
‘No,’ he told her, almost as certain.
Emily cocked her head and listened. ‘No gunshots... Who were those men anyway? Plain clothes police?’
‘No idea. Maybe they got wind of what Brown was planning and were tailing him, and then when Amanda passed the documents to Radford, they followed him, and made their move too late to stop him passing them on.’
‘But that never happened.’
‘Appears not.’
Lechasseur looked around again. The waiters had already polished those glasses. He felt himself getting restless. It was odd. He ought to be tired, but it felt like he’d only just got up.
‘Why aren’t we sitting in here twice?’ he asked. ‘I remember sitting here before...’
Emily shrugged. ‘I guess it’s just what time does... heal itself.’
Lechasseur shook his head. ‘Gives me a headache just thinking about it.’
Emily was watching him. ‘Radford said that someone like me, and someone like you... when we touch, and think about going somewhere, we can go there. We can travel through time.’
Lechasseur looked at her levelly. ‘Doesn’t seem very likely.’
‘Or very scientific.’
‘I’ll take your word for that.’
‘But we both remember that it happened...’
Lechasseur looked at her. ‘Yeah.’
‘... and I think I remember doing it before...’ Emily’s eyes gazed into the distance as though she might be able to bring her memory back. ‘There’s something...’ She sighed in frustration. ‘Why can’t I remember!’
Lechasseur gazed at her. ‘You will... eventually. Give it time. Trust me, I know. Some sca
rs take a long time to heal.’
She held out her hand, waved her fingers at him. Grinning.
‘So where shall we go?’
‘Somewhere they serve food. Somewhere with eggs.’
He took her hand.
About The Author
Lance Parkin is the author of six Doctor Who novels, both for BBC Books and for Virgin Publishing. He also co-authored a novel featuring archaeologist Bernice Summerfield for Virgin, wrote a comprehensive guide to Doctor Who’s timeline (A History of the Universe) and is the author of several Doctor Who related audio and video releases. He was a storyline writer for the soap opera Emmerdale and edited the diaries of one of the characters from that show, penned a novel, Emmerdale: Their Finest Hour, as well as writing two factual books: The Story of Emmerdale and 30th Anniversary Emmerdale. He has written a book about comics writer Alan Moore, a spin off book to the Soapstars TV series, and also a book about the Star Trek series, Beyond The Final Frontier.
The Time Hunter Series