‘Didn’t you see that I was just desperately in love with you, Sarah? And when you disappeared I was as distraught as the rest of them.’
‘I thought you vanished because of the conspiring servants,’ said Ratty.
‘Of course, boy. I did. But the Keo mystery wasn’t the only thing they were conspiring about.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They all knew. Huxtable here couldn’t keep his bloody mouth shut. They all took a frightfully keen interest in our goings on. It wasn’t just Huxtable who was threatening to tell all.’
‘Oh, Mater!’
‘Whether your father used his contacts to have all the servants locked away because of the Keo conspiracy, or because he couldn’t be sure if they’d all been sleeping with me – which, I hasten to add, was not the case – I really don’t know. Maybe it was a bit of both. Either way it changes nothing now. I suspect he thought that having a clean sweep in the manor would remove any awkwardness on my return.’
‘Only you never returned,’ said Ruby.
‘Well obviously, girl.’
‘Enough pleasantries,’ declared Huxtable. ‘As you will surely have guessed, our meeting today is not by chance. I’m here to ask for your help.’
‘Whom are you addressing, Huxtable, old cuckolder?’ asked Ratty.
‘All of you. Please hear me out. I want to tell you my story. Will you permit me that opportunity?’
‘Well at least he’s not interfering with the rocket all the time he’s talking to us,’ said Ruby.
‘You may proceed, old Lothario,’ said Ratty.
‘Thank you. I was born in India. 1938. Final years of Empire.’
‘Not a war baby like Mitford, then?’ asked Ruby.
‘No. My birth had nothing to do with the war. My parents came to India in the Twenties. Big house. A dozen servants of our own. Oh yes, I wasn’t always an underdog, Sarah. I grew up with more staff than Stiperstones has ever seen. That’s why I had the confidence to regard you as an equal.’
‘What rot.’
‘Whatever, Sarah. Anyway, I stayed on after India gained its independence. Easy decision, really, as I’d became rather fixated upon one of the chambermaids. Beautiful girl, but very low caste. Not the done thing, of course. Not that I cared about that snobby stuff, but even her own family would have disapproved. Everyone too set in their ways, sandwiched in their own slice of social class.’
‘Quite right, too.’
‘Mater!’
‘In ’58 my family made the decision to return to England. I had no choice but to come with them and leave her behind. When we reached our cold and damp house after weeks on a ship, there was a letter waiting for me. She was pregnant with my child. She faced becoming a social outcast. Destitute. I stole some money and sent it to her, enough for her to buy a ticket on the next ship. We were to start a new life together in England as soon as her ship docked at Southampton. We were to be a family, devoted to bringing up our baby together. I went to Southampton to meet her. I arrived a day early and waited, but the ship never made it to the dock. Rumours began to spread of an explosion. Finally, the news reached the port that the ship had hit a mine in the Atlantic, close to northern France. It had deviated from its planned course by just two degrees, which had taken it through a stretch of water that the Germans had mined heavily during the war. Ships usually avoided that area, even though minesweepers were supposed to have found, and removed, all of the devices by then. But there was just one mine that they missed. The ship went down too fast. No one was saved. My dreams died that day.’
Everyone looked at him. Huxtable savoured the moment, pausing long enough to conjure the strongest sympathies in his companions.
‘Doesn’t wash with me,’ said Lady Ballashiels, finally breaking the atmosphere. ‘It sounds just like the type of rot Mitford used to spout at me, day in, day out.’
‘I never told you this before, Sarah. Because I never told anyone. I couldn’t speak of it. But the truth is that having been born on the other side of the world, entirely unaffected by Hitler’s destructive power whilst he was at his height, and having returned to Europe when everything should have been safe, my world was shattered by the legacy of war. Even though long dead, Hitler stole my happiness.’
‘Actually, I think you’ll find the evidence points to him being alive in the late Fifties,’ corrected Rocco. ‘He was living on this continent by then, in isolated pockets of expat, Nazi communities. Didn’t die until 1962.’
‘Rocco is rather partial to conspiracy theories, in case you haven’t noticed,’ said Ruby.
‘And that’s why Mitford’s philosophy appealed to me,’ Huxtable continued. ‘Even though his father was responsible for everything that went sour in my life, he had the vision to put things right. He convinced me he could find a way to make amends for his father’s wrongs. It was the only thing I could cling to, however unlikely it seemed. And eventually he found a way. His lifetime of dedicated research into the meaning of Keo finally joined all the dots in history together. He found the solution to the war. He found a way to save millions of lives. And in so doing, he found the way to save the love of my life and my unborn child.’
‘So you are the rotter’s back-up plan, after all?’ asked Ratty.
‘Mitford was no rotter. He was the antithesis of his father. He was a saint. If his plan succeeds, he will have been the greatest saviour of mankind that the world has never heard of. For he would have made the ultimate sacrifice for his fellow men. His own erasure from history. No one will ever know the true extent of the debt they owe to that man.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ said Rocco. ‘You want to stop Keo from launching, just like the Mitford guy? But the difference is that you’ll still be here in the new timeline. Your birth had nothing to do with the war. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.’
‘Not only me, but millions of people around the world. The slaughtered soldiers, the Holocaust victims, the ordinary folk buried in their homes due to aerial bombardment – all of these people have the chance to have lived full lives, to procreate, to populate the world with the men, women and children who should have been here in the first place. The Middle East would be cured of its problems. Great European cities would retain their architectural gems and avoid the concrete monstrosities that filled the gaps caused by air raids. There wouldn’t have been a cold war and so no need for nuclear weapons. We could have had a peaceful, utopian society but for this single moment in 1937 when the word Keo appeared in the sky above southern France. Yes, some who were born as a result of the war won’t exist in that timeline, but surely the cost of their lives has been too high? Surely the greater good is the establishment of a peaceful and happy world?’
‘Mitford’s brainwashing all over again,’ sighed Lady Ballashiels. ‘Heard it all before.’
‘Please help me,’ Huxtable continued. ‘Help me to save millions of people. Help me to undo the suffering of the Jews. Help me to erase this stain on the planet’s history. A single word in the sky, that’s all I want to change. It’s such a simple thing, but I can’t do it alone.’
‘All right for you, old buffer, but you’d still be here if Keo hadn’t happened,’ said Ratty. ‘The rest of us would vanish in a puff of wotsit.’
‘Yes, and who’s to say that out of the millions who would live instead of us there wouldn’t be someone ten times worse than Hitler?’ suggested Ruby.
‘Indeed,’ said the Patient. ‘If there is, as some philosophers posit, a guiding hand in the universe, something that mitigates against the most extreme excesses of man’s free will, it is entirely conceivable that the Hitler episode was the least worst option.’
‘And why just undo that war?’ added Ruby. ‘It seems arbitrary to single out one event. There were plenty of other bad things in history. The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic killed more people than both world wars together. Why not try to fix that? Or Pol Pot?’
‘Or why not go back and remove the ri
ght to bear arms from the United States constitution?’ suggested the Patient. ‘More Americans have been murdered by private guns in America than were killed in all the wars in which that country has ever fought.’
‘Because we can’t,’ replied Huxtable. ‘We have no influence on what has happened. We can only change the future, but the future trajectory we’re currently on will change the past to fit where it all ends up. Do you see? This is a unique opportunity. Nothing like it will ever happen again. Please will you join me and help me to save my child? Please, I beg of you.’
‘What, and see ourselves annihilated? Are you crazy?’ asked Ruby.
‘He’s not crazy,’ whispered the Patient.
‘I say, didn’t quite catch that, old boy,’ responded Ratty.
‘I said he is not crazy. He is planning something.’
‘Well quite. I believe he’s planning to blow up that rocket contraption and he needs our help to do it.’
‘I do not for a moment believe that to be the case,’ continued the Patient. ‘I sense another agenda. His requests are too unrealistic. He knows none of us would help him. And by making his plan clear to us he has put himself at risk that we could restrain him and prevent his plans being carried out. A man who has had so many years in prison to plan this event would not make such a basic error of judgement.’
‘Is this true, Huxtable?’ asked Lady Ballashiels.
Huxtable said nothing. He downed the rest of his lager and remained silent.
‘I take that to be an admission,’ said the Patient. ‘Mr Huxtable does indeed have a different plan to his stated aims.’
‘Goodness!’ shrieked Ratty. ‘I think I know what the ne’er-do-well is doing. He’s stalling us. He’s keeping us here because he needs to, and that must mean –’
‘There’s someone else!’ shouted Ruby.
***
The second bakery was as disappointing as the first. Croissants and baguettes. A total cliché of French rural cuisine, thought Charlie, exported to this South American outpost, authentic even to the point of being closed while people were still hungry. The donut hunt through the suburbs of Kourou would have been a pleasant stroll were it not for the fact that he hated walking. The afternoon humidity was making him sweat to an undignified degree. Admitting defeat, Charlie elected to pause the walk back to the hotel to enjoy a moment of relatively cool shade.
A face in a passing taxi glanced at him and gave an uncomfortable nod of recognition. Charlie closed his eyes and tried to recall the face. A shaved head. Chubby. Double chin. Snappy dresser in an undersized suit. Where had he met that person before?
Some kind of butler to Mitford, he recalled, eventually. The sweaty man who had been present at the meeting in the museum when Charlie had been given his spending money and told about his mission. His name was Grant. Stuck-up English asshole. That meant Mitford wasn’t here alone and Keo could still be in trouble. He had to get back to the hotel and warn the others, but without a functioning cellphone and without sufficient fitness to waddle there in under half an hour, he figured his best chance lay in finding a cab. Across the street sat a nondescript Peugeot saloon with its engine running. Charlie approached it and banged on the driver’s window.
‘Oui?’ asked the frightened woman inside.
‘Taxi?’ asked Charlie.
‘Non,’ replied the woman. She fumbled with the button that locked all the doors from within, but in her panic she pressed it twice and the doors remained unsecured, allowing Charlie to squeeze into the rear seat.
‘I need to get to my hotel. It’s called, er, the Something Hotel. Or the Hotel Something. You know the place?’
The woman looked in her rear-view mirror and saw the stranger babbling at her in English. Charlie offered her some American dollars and pointed in the general direction of where he wanted her to go.
‘No wait,’ decided Charlie, now pointing in a different direction. ‘I’ve wasted too much time. Go straight to the launch site. It’s an emergency. Someone is going to sabotage the next launch. Maybe I can stop him.’ He mimed a rocket taking off and used the bundle of American dollars to mimic an explosion by throwing them into the air.
‘Why do you make a mess in my car?’ she asked with a strong French accent. ‘I do not need your money. Pick it up.’
‘You speak English?’ asked Charlie, scrabbling to collect the unwanted notes from the seats and the floor. ‘Listen, I think I saw someone who wants to harm the second rocket. The one with the Keo satellite on board. This guy’s connected to the man who sabotaged the first rocket. I have to try to stop him. Can you help?’
‘I work for the space agency,’ she replied. ‘I know how tough our security is. There’s no way anyone can get close enough to harm an Ariane. So please get out of my car and leave me alone.’
Charlie felt his face redden. His muscles tensed.
‘You gotta help me, lady!’ He thumped the back of her seat. ‘Come on!’ He wasn’t sure if he sounded aggressive, but there was a passion in his voice, which to an unfamiliar ear might have sounded threatening. It seemed to work, in any case. Charlie felt his back press gently into the seat as the car accelerated. He scrambled for the seat belt and held tight.
***
The crumples in the suit and the dust on the shoes betrayed the urgency and energy with which Grant had been working since he had come to the shocking realisation that Mitford had sacrificed himself on the wrong rocket. When the Ariane had launched, he was sure that in a moment he would awake to a new reality, to a mind free of the aching memories of half a lifetime of incarceration and to a planet free of the legacy of the wrongs bestowed on it by Mitford’s father. And when the rocket exploded, in plain view of the entire town, he had chinked a champagne glass with Huxtable, watched the wreckage and smoke descend gracefully over the Atlantic, and waited.
And waited.
When Grant’s flute had held no more than a bubble and a sweet aroma, he had wanted to say something but the tremble in his lip had rendered him temporarily without speech. Huxtable’s dependable frame remained solid, but his eyes projected an inner disquiet. Years of entrenched beliefs were challenged by the obvious reality around them.
Mitford had always filled Grant with confidence. Mitford had been an idol, an inspiration. Mitford could not fail. And this profound faith meant that Grant had never expected that the crude back-up plan of which he was a part would have to be initiated. Deducing the chain of events had taken no more than a phone call to the publicity department at the space agency to confirm that the Keo satellite was still on the ground and about to be rolled back to the vehicle assembly building pending a revision of its launch schedule.
Grant glanced back and saw a distant car apparently driving towards him at considerable speed. If it really was Charlie that he had just passed, then Huxtable had not succeeded in his plan to keep the blasted Ballashiels entourage in one place. Grant felt the pressure build in his veins. The car was still gaining on him. Pressure turned into a sense of panic. He threw double the amount of the pre-agreed fare onto the front passenger seat and instructed his driver to turn swiftly into a small side road after the next bend and pull up beside the trees. Before the taxi had even halted he leapt out, urgently waved his driver on, and tumbled into the cover of the ferns. The car pursuing him would discover too late that he was no longer on board.
He brushed down his suit and wiped the perspiration from his shaved head. The perimeter of the launch site was still a mile away, but there was somewhere he had to visit first: a cache of weapons, planted two days earlier as insurance against the unlikely event of Mitford being unable to destroy Keo.
As he located the tree beneath which the wooden crate had been buried, his mind filled with memories of Mitford’s life and the times they had spent together. He felt no sorrow for Mitford’s passing, only a sense of calm, a feeling that a lifetime of mental suffering was at an end. Now he simply wanted to do justice to Mitford’s vision, to fulfil the dream of healing
the world of the ugly scar that had grown across its wound.
But he was underprepared. He had never used the weapons that awaited him, never honed his aiming technique or familiarised himself with the recoil and the noise. For that reason, he had to get himself to a point from where he could not miss. Point-blank range was essential. It didn’t matter if he triggered an explosion of rocket propellants that blew him to pieces. And it didn’t matter if ESA security shot at him, provided he got his shots in first. They were welcome to pepper him with bullet holes when his job was done. It also didn’t matter who he had to kill to get there. He knew that whatever happened to him at that moment, he would inevitably wake up in another part of the world, unharmed, having lived a different life and utterly unaware of the parallel history he had just erased.
***
The French woman halted her car abruptly at the security checkpoint on the perimeter of the launch site and opened her window.
‘Great idea,’ said Charlie. ‘Get their security guys on the case. Tell them that asshole Grant is on the loose.’
A gendarme approached the vehicle. The French woman shouted rapidly in French and pointed to the man in her rear seat. Charlie smiled and waved. Remnants of that smile were still in place even as he found himself being dragged from his seat and thrown face-down on the concrete with a semi-automatic weapon aimed at his back. Plastic cable ties were whipped around the wrists and ankles of the suspect and tightened. Charlie’s protestations in English were ignored. Someone was telephoning for back-up. Within a minute an armoured personnel carrier arrived. Soldiers from the 3rd Foreign Infantry Regiment of the French Foreign Legion carried Charlie into their vehicle.
The French woman thanked the gendarmes and soldiers profusely. They assured her that her kidnap ordeal was over.
***
Grant counted at least fifteen technicians coming and going near to the Ariane. He guessed they were overseeing the removal of cryogenic fuel from one of the propellant tanks, either liquid oxygen or liquid hydrogen, prior to moving the rocket back into its assembly building. If he could aim a shot that pierced one of the propellant tanks before it was empty, the effect of his attack would be magnified exponentially. And even if the workers succeeded in draining the rocket before he was ready, there would remain the twin solid boosters – the successful ignition of one of these boosters would create an unstoppable fire. However, the rocket itself was partly obscured by launch site paraphernalia, and he would have to come out into the open in order to begin his attack.
The Dali Diaries (The Ballashiels Mysteries Book 2) Page 28