Dead in Time (The Sara Jones Cycle Book 1)

by Terence Bailey

  She was sharp, he admitted to himself. ‘Sara and I talk about you sometimes,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll bet you do,’ she replied.

  ‘She thinks you’d like me if you only got to know me.’

  Ceri arched an eyebrow. ‘Sara sees the best in people.’

  ‘I know you want what’s best for her,’ Jamie continued. ‘So do I. For whatever reason, Sara has decided to spend time with me again ...’

  He stopped short, and made an expression of distaste at his own caution. ‘Not for whatever reason,’ he said bluntly. ‘Because she loves me. And if she wants to be with me, she won’t let you stop her.’

  ‘I could just bide my time and wait for the force to send you packing.’

  Jamie shrugged and lowered his gaze.

  ‘But I don’t think I will,’ Ceri said, ‘because Sara would be unhappy.’

  He eyed her appraisingly. ‘So you’ll help me with the case?’

  ‘Suppose it’s a way to keep an eye on you,’ she said.

  Ceri dug her cigarettes from her handbag and eyed the door. Before standing, she added, ‘I’m not going to let you hurt Sara again.’

  At Sara’s request, the superintendent had withdrawn her private constable; she would have lost him soon anyway. With the policeman gone, Sara no longer felt it necessary to draw curtains and blinds when Eldon Carson visited.

  Sara felt apprehensive about the experiment they were about to try. For the past thirty minutes, she had been stretched on the living room rug, eyes closed, allowing Carson to lead her through basic relaxation exercises. He said it was to put her in the right frame of mind.

  Now, she sat on the love-seat with a pad of paper resting in her lap and a pencil in her hand. Carson was cross-legged on the floor facing her, with a white envelope in his hand and an air about him that was both playful and deadly serious. In the rectangle of sunshine that beamed through the front window, thousands of dust specks sparkled, as if they were electric.

  ‘It has been suggested,’ Carson was saying, ‘that people whose lives have been touched by some sort of tragedy or misfortune are often extremely good psychics.’

  Sara rocked slightly on the love-seat. This was the way she used to feel in school, just before an exam.

  ‘Empathy is a useful trait for psychics – and that’s a talent you display every day in your work. Another is the ability to look at things from unusual angles. Your education, both in medicine and occult studies has prepared you to think in unusual ways.’

  He placed the envelope on the table next to her. Sara knew that inside was a photograph, which he had torn from an old magazine. Her task would be to visualise it in her mind’s eye, sketch what she saw, and describe it to Carson.

  ‘What I’m trying to make you understand is, you’ve already got the skills you need for this little demonstration.’

  He tapped the envelope and grinned. ‘So, relax.’

  It was an odd exam, she thought. More like a game she might have played as a child. But the events of the past few days – and the chilling occupation of the man who sat across from her – made this a game of life and death.

  ‘The way I see it,’ Jamie said to Ceri, ‘somebody must be sheltering this guy. There must be some individual he’s gained the confidence of. That person may or may not know of his guilt.’

  ‘That’s obvious,’ Ceri agreed. ‘The trickier part is finding out who.’

  Jamie nodded. ‘That’s what we need to ask. Who’d take in a strange American who doesn’t want to be seen in public?’

  Ceri pinched her lips together and frowned. ‘It’s got to be someone he shares an interest with,’ she muttered thoughtfully. ‘And I’ll bet this guy doesn’t have many hobbies. What he seems most interested in is killing people.’

  ‘So he may be exploiting someone’s passion for violence?’

  ‘Subversives,’ Ceri said. ‘Anarchists, military fanatics, or extreme right-wingers.’

  ‘That’s possible,’ Jamie said. ‘We might also want to look at the psychic angle. He could be ingratiating himself with local psychic groups – maybe occultists, practitioners of ritual magic.’

  Ceri inclined her head in agreement.

  ‘Presumably,’ Jamie continued, ‘you keep files on these people.’

  Ceri nodded, her enthusiasm growing. ‘We have local intelligence files in Penweddig that cover some of the local freaks ...’

  Jamie smiled. He imagined that Ceri Lloyd had a broad definition of what constituted a ‘freak’.

  ‘... but the information about the really dangerous ones is kept by Special Branch in Carmarthen.’

  ‘It may be that one of those individuals is harbouring our man – or else they’ll know who is. How many subjects does Carmarthen have on file? I doubt we’d be able to visit them all.’

  ‘You and me alone?’ Ceri smirked. ‘It depends on how much of a career we want to make this.’

  ‘That’s why we’ll need to rely on your local knowledge,’ Jamie said. ‘Within the parameters we’ve outlined, who would be likely to shelter someone like our offender?’

  Ceri drained her coffee and crumpled the cup. ‘Let’s find out,’ she said. ‘We’ll stop off at Penweddig, then head down south to headquarters.’

  It had taken Daffy much of yesterday to amble from Aberystwyth to Penweddig, but he’d had nothing better to do. Last Thursday, he had promised Sara Jones that he’d go away and never come back ... but where else did he have to go? And even if he could think of a place, how could he get there? She had frightened him on that rainy day in Aberystwyth. When she pulled that weapon on him, he’d thought she was going to hurt him. Afterwards, as he played and replayed their confrontation in his mind, he had become confused. She was a smart woman – would she have pretended to be that naïve if she were not genuinely ignorant of the facts? How much had he told her? What kind of a person was Dr Sara Jones?

  The day after, he had sat on the pavement on the opposite side of the street from the Drop-In Centre, obscured from view by the snack bar on the promenade. He had intended to follow her – to see where she went, who she met, what she was like. Although he had waited there for hours, she had not shown up; someone else was on duty that day.

  On Monday the Centre was closed. So yesterday, not knowing what else to do, he had walked to Penweddig. He had tramped through the village several times, searching for her bright red car, and was almost ready to lie down in despair when he noticed a path breaking away from a housing estate, with the groove of tyre tracks worn into the mud. He had followed the path to a white pebble-dashed farmhouse, and his heart leapt when he spied her BMW parked on the gravel outside. He had tried to spy inside, but all the blinds and curtains were drawn, so he had spent the rest of the day on the pebble beach, thinking about his life, and cursing his fate. When the tide came in, he had crawled up the hill, and slept in the bracken.

  Now, he cut down from a street on to the beach, and followed it to a path that led up to Dr Jones’ lane. He hoped the curtains would be open today.

  ‘This is an exercise I learned from a US Army psychic,’ Eldon Carson said. Sara looked at him quizzically.

  ‘Oh yes, the army uses psychics,’ he continued. ‘Why wouldn’t they? In fact, the CIA’s got paranormal instruction down to a fine art. What you’ll be learning here is a tried-and-tested formula. I am going to assign a set of coordinates to the location pictured in the photograph. They are arbitrary – they do not relate to any map, or other system of measurement. Their purpose is simply to give you something to focus on, as you try to visualise the location. Understood?’

  Sara nodded.

  Carson shifted his position on the floor, then held still. ‘Here are your coordinates: seven, one, three, zero, four, six, eight, two, five.’

  Sara wrote the random numbers at the top of her paper, and waited. She was not certain exactly what she was supposed to feel. ‘Nothing’s happening,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ he insisted. ‘There
are impressions flowing through your mind at this moment – you are simply shutting them out.’

  Sara tried to concentrate. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I can see a lot of things.’

  ‘Tell me about them.’

  ‘They’re shapes – just shapes.’ She frowned and shook her head. Any imaginative person was liable to invent shapes if asked to.

  ‘Don’t doubt yourself,’ Carson commanded, as if he had read her thoughts. ‘Go with what you see.’

  Sara took a calming breath and looked inward. Now that she had permission to take the impressions she was receiving seriously, there was no doubt – she was seeing distinct shapes. Small ones in front, a large one, like a slab, in back.

  ‘Tell me about it, Miss Sara,’ Eldon Carson said. ‘Describe what you see.’

  ‘It’s a large rectangle,’ she said.

  ‘That’s fine,’ he encouraged her. ‘Draw it now.’

  Her hand began to move uncertainly, outlining a rectangular shape which stretched the width of the page, then adding smaller rectangles inside. At first, it looked no different than the doodles she would sketch absently when she was bored – but as she watched the picture take form, she recognised it what it might be.

  ‘I think it’s the wall of a building,’ she said. ‘It’s light in colour ... beige? Grey? It could be stone, or concrete – I can’t tell.’

  ‘Go on,’ Carson murmured.

  At the bottom of her picture, she quickly added the other shapes, smaller ones that she saw in front of the wall. ‘They’re cars,’ she said in wonder. ‘It’s a car park, in front of the building.’ She hesitated, then added, ‘Judging from the perspective, that building is huge.’

  She paused, holding herself very still. The impression she was receiving were more detailed now.

  ‘There’s also another line of shapes, between the cars and the wall. They look like ...’

  A solid round base, branching off into many lines at the top. Branching. She focused more intently. ‘They’re trees – right here.’ Her hand began to fly across the paper, as she sketched in the trees. ‘They’ve got no leaves,’ she muttered. ‘It could be autumn, or early winter.’

  As she said this, she began to feel a chill. It hung in a breezeless air. ‘It’s definitely cold here,’ she said, ‘but not enough to snow. And ...’ She looked upwards at the massive wall, and noticed a staircase, leading to an entrance. ‘I see an American flag hanging over a door.’

  ‘Tell me what it feels like,’ Carson ordered.

  ‘What what feels like?’

  ‘Try to get a sense of the building’s personality, the mood of the people inside.’

  Sara held still and focused on the image in her mind. Subtly, her mood began to shift, to fall into synch with that of the building. She was pricked by a sensation of calm competence, peppered by small eruptions of anxiety.

  ‘A lot of people are in there, and they’re very busy,’ she said. ‘Administration, routine things ... but also pockets of important activity.’

  ‘Describe it.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can. There are decisions being made.’ Sara furrowed her brow, bit her lip. She felt light-headed, and closed her eyes.

  Several tense seconds passed before Carson said, ‘All right, Miss Sara, you’ve done very well. I’d like you to do just one more thing for me. I want you to rise up into the air, and look at the building from above.’

  ‘Rise up?’

  ‘See it as a bird might.’

  ‘How am I supposed to do that?’

  ‘Don’t think about it, just do it.’

  Sara tried to clear her mind of doubts, and found her perspective shifting. She imagined herself floating up from the car park, until she was level with the flat roof. She urged herself higher, until she could look down on the entire massive shape. The building was a five-sided ring.

  ‘It’s the Pentagon!’ she gasped.

  As Daffy approached the house from the path, he exhaled hoarsely in relief. Not only was Sara Jones’ car parked outside, but her curtains and blinds were open!

  He stopped next to a large willow, and took in all the windows at once, nervously, hoping the doctor was not gazing out. He couldn’t see her; the house was still.

  Daffy approached the house quickly, wincing at the loud crunching noise his old boots made against the gravel. He edged around a corner of the house. The first windows he came to were frosted. ‘The bathroom,’ he muttered. The next set belonged to the kitchen, and from the very edge of the window, he peered in.

  When he saw that the room was empty, he shuffled through a weedy bed of plants until he had a full view. It was a standard farmhouse kitchen, the kind Daffy remembered from his youth: slate floors; cobwebs hanging limply in the corners. The doctor had painted it bright yellow, and hung colourful oil paintings on the walls.

  Daffy eased himself out of the plant bed, and rounded to the front of the house. There was a large shrub under the window of Dr Jones’ living room. He squeezed behind it and crouched down between the shrub and the window.

  He could hear low voices through the single thin pane of glass. Slowly, he raised his head past the peeling wooden frame, until he was peering into the room from the corner of the window.

  In the bright light of several candles, he saw Dr Jones, eyes unfocused, engaged in an animated conversation with someone sitting next to the window. As she spoke, she sketched furiously on a sheet of paper.

  Daffy watched her for several seconds. In his life on the road, he had met a wide array of characters. Some had been good, several more unpleasant, and many insane; as a result, he thought of himself as a pretty fair judge of people. To Daffy’s trained eye, this woman did not appear to be a bad person. In fact, she seemed rather sweet. Could it be true that she didn’t know anything about the killings after all? That she was as innocent as ... well, as Daffy himself?

  Daffy could not make out who her companion was, but he noticed a smaller window on the far side of the room, next to the back door. Slowly, silently, Daffy disentangled himself from the shrub, and backed out onto the stone driveway. He tiptoed around the right of the house, past the stable, to the other side of the living room. When he was next to the small window, he paused and listened.

  Their low voices drifted through the thin, single pane of glass. Daffy held his breath, and risked a glance. On the floor sat a man with shaggy hair and a black T- shirt. Daffy caught a good glimpse of his face, before pulling himself back, and quietly creeping back around the house towards the lane.

  Daffy had never seen that man before. He wondered who he was.

  Sara opened her eyes, and tiny flashes of light shimmered and swirled before her. Patches of sweat on her back and chest clung wetly to her blouse. It was an odd sensation, to emerge into a warm summer’s day, when seconds before she had been shivering in an American winter.

  Carson was grinning like a boy sharing a secret. He tore open the envelope, and tossed a photo torn from Newsweek magazine: one wall of the Pentagon in Washington DC, taken from the enormous car park.

  ‘Convinced?’ Carson asked.

  Sara stared at the picture. She felt as though she could have taken it herself. ‘I don’t know what to think,’ she breathed.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ Carson replied firmly. ‘You know exactly what this means.’

  Sara closed her eyes. She had to resist the urge to believe everything Carson claimed on the basis of this evidence.

  ‘You did this,’ Carson said. ‘You alone. I was only the facilitator.’

  What, Sara wondered, if she could learn to do the things Eldon Carson could do? What if she could read not only hidden elements of the present, but of the past and the future as well? What might she, finally, understand? Sara began to feel the prick of something she had seldom felt before: greed.

  ‘Okay,’ she said warily. ‘I’ll admit I’m curious. That was weird enough to unsettle me, and I’d like to try it again.’ Instinctively, she glanced out the window. �
�But there are some obvious problems.’

  ‘Such as?’ he asked innocently.

  ‘For one, you’re a wanted killer. Every police officer in Mid Wales is looking for you.’

  Carson smiled wryly.

  ‘That’s a bit of a problem, don’t you think?’

  He nodded. ‘But it will be a problem whether I teach you or not.’

  Sara furrowed her brow. ‘If you don’t teach me, you could run away.’

  He fixed her with a mocking, wide-eyed stare. ‘Where? Somewhere people don’t inflict violence on others? A place I’d never need to kill another living soul?’ He stood. ‘No matter where I went, I’d have the same problems. The only difference would be, I wouldn’t have you.’

  He picked up his bag from the floor, peered quickly out the window, and moved towards the kitchen.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

  He turned. ‘I won’t endanger you by staying longer than I have to. I’ll come again soon.’

  ‘Where will you go?’ Sara asked.

  A smile. Leave that to me. He headed towards the door.

  ‘How do you know you can trust me?’ Sara called after him. ‘How do you know I won’t ring the police, and have them waiting next time you come?’

  Carson stared at her as if shocked by the suggestion, then released a throaty chuckle. ‘Because,’ he replied, ‘I can see the future.’

  EIGHTEEN

  In its Carmarthen headquarters, the Dyfed-Powys Police Authority kept files on any individual or organisation who might have presented a danger to the public. They were filed by category – extreme animal rights activists in one, religious fundamentalists in another – although some of the more misanthropic individuals managed to get themselves cross-referenced. Each file contained as much detail about the subject as the police had been able to collect, including background, habits, and associates, as well as any specific reasons that they had for wanting to keep tabs on the person.

  Jamie and Ceri arrived in Carmarthen after visiting Ceri’s own sub-station in Penweddig. There, she had shown Jamie the local intelligence files – her own special rogues’ gallery. ‘Here’s a fellow in Lampeter who runs a group called Celtic Dawn,’ she said. ‘Far as I know, every member is English. I doubt even one of the silly buggers is Celtic.’