The Time Bubble Box Set

by Jason Ayres

  It made for a challenging environment, but she hadn’t shirked away from it. She had a professional and dedicated work ethic that hadn’t gone unnoticed and was rapidly gaining the respect of her more enlightened colleagues.

  Rebecca had been born in Oxford, in 1969, to parents who had emigrated from Nigeria to the UK a few years before. Brought up on the rough end of the Blackbird Leys Estate, her parents had encouraged her to make the most of the opportunities their adopted country could bring.

  Equally proud of their new country, as well as their homeland, they had given her an English first name to go with her African surname. She had blossomed at school, got top results in her A Levels and headed for Hendon, having known from a young age that she wanted a career in the police force.

  And here she was, just a lowly WPC for now, but inspired by Inspector Morse to dream of the day she would be like him, tackling and solving the city’s big crimes.

  “Another what?” she replied to Dan’s question.

  “Another missing person,” replied Dan. “That’s the third one in as many weeks.”

  “So it is,” she replied, her interest piqued. She didn’t mind him dumping this on her. Dan clearly wasn’t interested but she certainly was. The recent spate of people going missing in Oxford had intrigued her eager young mind. She felt the disappearances might be connected and was determined to hone her fledgling detective skills by getting to the bottom of it.

  “I’ll leave it with you, then,” said Dan. “I don’t suppose you’ve made a brew, have you?” he said hopefully.

  “The kettle’s over there, Dan,” she gestured. She had already made it clear in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t the tea girl.

  “In fact, you can make me one while you’re at it,” she added playfully. Dan may have had old-fashioned attitudes, but she knew how to handle him.

  Making her way confidently out to the front desk, she was confronted by an agitated, elderly lady with grey hair tied up in a headscarf. She was trailing a red and green tartan shopping trolley, of the type favoured by ladies of a certain age, behind her.

  “What can I do for you, madam?” Rebecca asked politely, ignoring the brief flicker in the older woman’s eyes that she had seen so many times before. It was a look that just registered that the woman was thinking, quite simply, You’re black. She wondered if a time would ever come when this wouldn’t be an issue anymore.

  “It’s my Ernie,” wailed the woman. “He didn’t come home last night and I’m worried something terrible has happened to him.”

  “And Ernie is…”

  “My husband, of course,” replied the woman.

  Rebecca had asked the question for good reason. In her first week at the station she had dealt with a similar enquiry and hadn’t realised for about the first ten minutes that she was dealing with a lost dog. Since then she had made sure she clarified everything, even if it seemed obvious.

  “OK, I need to get some details here,” she said, pulling out one of the endless forms she was forever filling in.

  After going through the painstaking details of getting the woman’s name, address and other details, Rebecca was able to get on with the more interesting questions.

  It was quiet in the station with no one else waiting to be seen, so she was able to take her time.

  “So, what time did you last see your husband?” she asked.

  “He went out to walk the dog,” replied Mrs Chambers. “It was before we had our tea, last night.”

  “What time exactly?” asked Rebecca.

  “Well, it was before dark,” she replied. “It must have been about half past three. He’s normally gone about half an hour. But last night, the dog came back with his lead trailing behind him and no sign of Ernie.”

  There was a sound of desperation in her voice, and Rebecca knew her next question wasn’t going to be well received but in the interests of having everything crystal-clear it was one she had to ask.

  “Does your husband make a habit of staying out all night?”

  “What are you implying?” replied the woman agitatedly. “He’s never stayed out all night, not once ever since we’ve been married. He’s not like that. Besides, he’s nigh on eighty years of age. He’s hardly likely to go off gallivanting at his time of life, is he?”

  “Sorry, madam,” said Rebecca. “We have to ask these questions. I’m just trying to establish the facts. Now, do you know exactly where he was going?”

  “He normally goes over to Christ Church Meadow,” replied the woman. “It’s not far from our flat. You know, those new retirement ones, down by the river. We only moved in there last year.”

  Rebecca needed to ask another difficult question, but she considered it a valid one, considering the man’s age.

  “Did your husband have any problems with his memory?”

  “He’s not losing his marbles if that’s what you mean,” retorted the woman, angrily. “He’s as sharp as he ever was. He keeps his mind active, you see? He still finishes the crossword in the paper every day.”

  Her anger turned quickly to despair as she wailed, “And now I’m never going to see him again!”

  She began sobbing. This was a part of the job that Rebecca found far tougher than dealing with football crowds and petty criminals. Trying to offer some comfort to someone in this sort of situation was always difficult because in all truth, it wasn’t looking good for the old man.

  Seventy-nine-year-olds disappearing unexpectedly usually spelled bad news. Struggling to find anything positive to say, she resorted to the only thing that she could think of to offer some comfort, the English solution to everything.

  “Mrs Chambers, would you like a cup of tea?”

  Despite her distress, the old woman looked up gratefully. “Yes please,” she replied. “And a biscuit would be nice, too.”

  Rebecca called Dan through and requested the tea, much to his chagrin, but he couldn’t say no in front of Mrs Chambers. She smiled inwardly to herself – now he could play the role of tea boy.

  After a few more questions, Rebecca arranged for a squad car to take the old lady home, reassuring her that the police would be doing all they could to find her husband. But going on past experience, she didn’t hold out much hope.

  Leaving Dan in charge of the desk, she walked through the back office and deeper into the station, keen to discuss this latest case at a higher level.

  Detective Sergeant Adam French was Rebecca’s supervisor, and mentor. Aged about thirty, she had found him approachable, helpful and refreshingly free from the prejudice she had encountered elsewhere.

  On the downside, unlike the maverick cops from TV whom he always ridiculed, French did things very much by the book. This applied both at work and home where he was the archetypal, two-point-four-children family man. He was reliable, but not very imaginative.

  He was friendly and welcoming, operating what he referred to as an open-door policy. True to his word, it was open now and he was as affable as ever as she tapped on the door and walked into his office.

  “What can I do for you, Rebecca?” he said, beaming at her.

  “DS French, there’s something really weird about all these people going missing,” she replied.

  “Not really,” he said nonchalantly. “People disappear all the time.”

  “But so many, in such a short space of time, all in the same area?” she asked. “I think there could be some sort of connection.”

  “I think you’re in danger of spotting patterns that aren’t there,” he suggested gently. “Remember what we said before about overanalysing things?”

  Rebecca respected Adam a lot, but sometimes felt he was a little bit too laid-back. It was almost as if he couldn’t be bothered to delve into the case further.

  “Yes,” was her monosyllabic response.

  “I know you are keen to do well,” he continued. “I think you’re a promising young officer, but you need to remember that this is real-life policing, it’s not non-stop murder
and mystery like on TV. This is the real Oxford. Football hooligans and bicycle thieves, that’s what we have to deal with here, not rogue dons and serial killers.”

  Rebecca could understand what he was saying but she was determined not to be fobbed off.

  “I really think there’s more to this, sir,” she persisted. “Look at what we’ve had in the past couple of weeks. An old man goes missing in Christ Church Meadow on New Year’s Eve. A couple of weeks before Christmas we’ve got a twenty-one-year-old student vanishing without trace. Then there was Tracy Ellis, a married mother with a young family who went out shopping on Christmas Eve and never came back. And the one thing they had in common? They all disappeared in roughly the same area, in or around Christ Church Meadow.”

  “It’s all just a coincidence,” replied Adam. “People disappear for all sorts of reasons, all of the time. Take the old man. He’s probably forgetful and just wandered off somewhere.”

  “He’s still got all his marbles according to his wife,” replied Rebecca.

  “He’s probably had a funny turn then. Have you checked the hospitals?”

  “Not yet,” she admitted.

  “There you go, then. That’s the first thing you check, especially with someone his age I suggest you do that before you start suspecting anything untoward.”

  “What about the others?”

  “A student with Christmas coming up? He’s probably out on the piss somewhere with his mates.”

  “For two whole weeks?” asked Rebecca. “And that woman who disappeared on Christmas Eve? She had a husband and three kids.”

  “We don’t know what goes on behind closed doors. Things might appear rosy on the surface, but for all we know she could have been a victim of domestic violence who had finally had enough and decided to disappear.”

  “Leaving her children behind?” asked Rebecca.

  “Well, maybe she was unhappy for some other reason,” suggested Adam. “Perhaps she suffered from depression. Christmas is a big time for suicides, you know. Or perhaps she was having an affair. There are all sorts of possible explanations.”

  “I think all of those things are unlikely. When we had the husband in to interview him, he was distraught. They are a very close-knit family. He didn’t give the slightest hint that there was any sort of problem.”

  “Look, Rebecca, I know you’re keen to impress but you’re seeing patterns that aren’t there. These people have nothing in common, for a start; an old man, a student and a married woman. Now if it was three nurses, or three young, gay men, then I’d be interested. That would be a pattern. Do you see what I mean?”

  “What about the fact they all disappeared in the same area?” she asked. “And there have been others in the past, too.”

  “You’ve been listening to too much Barry Manilow,” replied Adam. “Christ Church Meadow isn’t the Bermuda Triangle. Now I suggest we draw a line under this and get back to more mundane matters. I’ve got a stack of paperwork here that needs doing. You can give me a hand with it.”

  Rebecca sighed. More paperwork! This wasn’t what she’d envisaged when she’d joined the police.

  It looked like she was going to have to let it drop with Adam – at least for the time being. But she wasn’t giving up. As soon as she got a spare moment, she was going to go back through the files and see what else she could dig up.

  There was a mystery here – one that she was determined to solve.

  Chapter Five

  Josh was standing outside a red telephone box in front of a row of shops on the Abingdon Road. It was two days after his arrival and he was trying to track down Peter. With only twentieth-century technology as his disposal, this was proving remarkably difficult.

  He had been waiting ten minutes to use the phone, but the current occupant, a middle-aged Asian woman, was showing no signs of ending her conversation. He had tried shuffling around the side of the box to catch her eye, but as soon as she became aware of his presence she rudely turned her back on him.

  He had noticed that there were phone boxes everywhere, both the traditional red ones and some more modern glass ones. These were branded with the image of a blue and red piper on the side, which to Josh’s eyes appeared potentially obscene.

  The glut of phone boxes was one of the things he had noticed when he had begun wandering around in 1992. There had still been a few around when he was growing up but most of them had fallen into disuse.

  For many years there had been a red box in the market square of his home town but he couldn’t remember anyone actually making any phone calls in it. It got more use as a hub for local drug deals and as a tramp’s toilet. Most people never went anywhere near it.

  That was only a couple of decades from now but in that very short space of time, the boxes had become practically obsolete. The rise of the mobile phone had seen to that.

  During his first two days in this time period, Josh had only seen one person with a mobile phone. It had been a young man in a grey, pinstriped suit, speaking loudly into what looked more like some sort of Army-issue walkie-talkie than anything from his century. The man had been barking loudly into the phone about an offer he had received on a house in Botley for £49,000. Then he had sworn loudly at being cut off.

  £49,000 for a house sounded ridiculously cheap to Josh because this wasn’t really that long ago. By the time he had been looking for somewhere to live a generation later you could have stuck another zero on that price.

  Josh had thought with so many of the phone boxes around, he would have no problem finding one to use, but he had run into a number of problems.

  Finding an unoccupied box wasn’t easy, and if he could get into one, making more than one call at a time tended to irritate people who were waiting to make their own calls.

  Some simply didn’t work. There were plenty where the handset had been smashed or the cable had been cut through. That was in addition to the graffiti and broken windows. There seemed to be an awful lot of vandalism around in this time period.

  This particular box was the third he had visited this morning, as he had several phone calls to make. It would have been far easier if the younger Mrs Simmonds had allowed him to use the phone in the B&B, but she had refused, insisting that the line be kept open for emergencies. What sort of emergencies she was expecting to hit her modest establishment she hadn’t elaborated on.

  Annoyed at her inflexibility, he had turned to “G” in the phone book and ripped out the page with all the people with the surname “Grant” on it. And there were a lot. Why couldn’t Peter have had a less common surname?

  Peter Grant had been his English teacher at school in 2018 when Josh and Charlie had first discovered the time bubble. They had taken Peter into their confidence and before long, he had been drawn into the adventure, ultimately playing a major part in it. They had been close friends ever since.

  This page of the phone book was the only source he had to try and track him down.

  Just before Josh had embarked on this fateful trip he had spent a boozy evening in The Eagle and Child with Peter discussing what he was planning to do. They had enjoyed many such conversations over the years and Peter’s advice had always proved invaluable.

  This Peter was younger, but still the same man, even if he lacked the years of wisdom of the version Josh knew. If he could find him he was sure he could help him – and also felt if he explained everything properly that he could trust Peter not to interfere with the future timeline.

  There were 212 Grants in total in the phone book. Around a third of those had Oxford addresses as opposed to living in the surrounding towns and villages. Of those there were at least a dozen with the initial P. Fortunately, the many years of friendship and conversations about their lives were going to come in handy narrowing it down further because he knew a great deal about Peter’s past.

  He had told Josh all about his time at teacher training college in Oxford and how he had bemoaned having to move in with his gran in Cowley for a couple of yea
rs to make ends meet on his meagre student grant.

  Josh had scoffed at this, claiming he had had it easy. Peter had been lucky enough to go to university in the days before student loans, when the Government actually paid people to go. It had all changed not long afterwards and most of Josh’s contemporaries had emerged from higher education with massive debts.

  That conversation was going to prove very handy now, as he now had a manageable shortlist.

  In the first phone box, he had tried the two Grants with the initial P who had an address in Cowley but had no joy with either. Initially he thought he had struck gold first time out when the phone had been answered by a lady with an elderly voice, but he was to be disappointed.

  “Hi. Is Peter there?” he asked.

  “Peter!” called the woman. “There’s someone on the telephone for you.”

  Josh heard some barely inaudible reply in the background before the woman added.

  “Yes. I don’t know who it is.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence which seemed to go on for an awful long time before Peter eventually reached the phone.

  “Hello?” said a croaky old man’s voice. Josh realised right away that it was the wrong Peter, but he couldn’t just hang up. That would be rude.

  “Hi, is that Peter?” he asked.

  “Hello?” said the old man. “Sorry, you’ll have to speak up a bit. My hearing aid’s playing up.”

  “I’m really sorry, I think I’ve got the wrong number,” said Josh, at which point a series of beeps sounded in his ear. Josh had no idea what this sound was but a few seconds later he was disconnected. He would later discover what he heard was commonly referred to as “the pips”.

  The next “P” in the book turned out to be called Paul, after which he had been turfed out of the phone box by an irate, tough-looking man who told him it was “one customer, one call”. Josh hadn’t seen any signs to suggest that any rule to that effect was in place but saw no point getting into an argument with one of the locals. There were plenty of other phone boxes after all.