The Detective's Daughter (46 page)

His mobile buzzed. He ignored it; he never spoke to anyone on his journeys, real or virtual. He had yet to respond to the message Stella had left; she would break his concentration, he needed mental space to understand the signs.

On Clockhouse Lane, being straight, it was easy to manoeuvre the mouse. In this parallel world there was no snow; on this Clockhouse Lane the fence and scrubland were drenched in sunlight. Jack enlarged a line of white print at the bottom of the picture and read: ‘August 2008’; two and half years before his visit to the Lane.

He was halfway along the Lane before he noticed the motorcyclist. A figure in black, face obscured by a helmet, visor down. Jack zoomed in and the image fuzzed to coloured squares like an Impressionist painting, but he could distinguish a jacket zip, a buckle on the boot and the bike’s headlight.

Each time he clicked forward along the road, sometimes in leaps, sometimes in minute steps, the bike was coming towards him. He magnified the photo: there was the zip, the buckle, the anonymous rider approaching but never passing him, while Jack made good progress along the lane.

He reached the recreation ground where yesterday he had stepped off the map and sat drinking his milk. The biker disappeared as if he, like Jack, was invisible. Jack used the screen’s quadrant button to navigate and swung back the way he had come. He expected see the motorbike driving off, having overtaken him, but the road was clear.

He swivelled to face his original direction and there was the bike coming towards him. He inched along, keeping it in his sights. The view swooped when he accidently hit the down section of the quadrant button, filling the screen with the mottled grey of tarmac. Jack spotted a puddle – a bluish-coloured wrapper was half submerged in its centre – pooling in the gutter. At edge of the screen he read the words: ‘Image date: November 2008.’ He jumped a couple of feet forward and again the biker had gone. He paused and angled the picture to show the kerb with the puddle: it was dry and there was no litter. He had returned to August 2008. Despite his coat, cold crept into his bones, but Jack did not think to light a fire.

With one click he had entered a different time: three months after the biker had ridden down the road. The photographs of Clockhouse Lane – after Rosa Avenue when the bike vanished – had been taken in the winter of 2008 on a day when it had rained, when there was a motorcyclist and a blue wrapper floated in a puddle.

The car capturing Street View images would have been in front of the bike, both travelling in the same direction. A passenger watching out of its back window would see the bike following. When Jack mouse-clicked counter to the direction of the camera-car, he saw what had been behind it as if it was approaching him. Street View captured this perspective for its vast tapestry. The tapestry was static but Jack could ‘walk’ in it, going in any direction he liked within a different month and year to his own.

Jack wound the clock back with every mouse-click: he was going where the motorbike had been, while moving forward in his own time. When he turned back and headed in the same direction as the biker, he of course vanished: he had not yet reached that point in the road. Jack had entered the biker’s future.

Jack rubbed his eye sockets. Walking the street atlas had not been a waste of time. It proved that what he had told Stella was true: time measurement was the invention of humans; it could be manipulated. When Jack mouse-clicked along a street – in the past, the present or in the future – he eliminated time. This was the feeling he had when he walked the actual streets at night.

Simon had been wrong. Jonathan Rokesmith was not a coward. He had not run away; he had been trying to save his mummy by running back into her past. He had belted down Black Lion Lane, looking for her on the route they had walked together: along the subway tunnel hooting like a train, up the ramps on the other side to where he had snatched his steam engine off her. At the Leaning Woman he shouted ‘Boo!’ to his mummy in the time before
it
happened. If he could find her in the ‘before’, he could stop it happening.

Ever since that day, Jonathan who became Justin who became Jack had tried to go back in time – through tunnels beneath the city, along roads using a defaced map – to undo what could not be undone.

Jack shrugged out of his coat and, letting it drop to the floor, rolled up his sleeves. He lit the wood in the grate and sat down again. His mouth twitched and he sniffed, hands poised over the keyboard, readying himself. He would start where the detective had ended. He keyed ‘Broad Street Seaford’ into Street View’s search bar; he spelt the Seaford wrong: time wasted.

He was at the intersection of Broad Street and Sutton Road, the light was dull, signposts made no shadow and there was no one on the pavements. A broken window in the Pound Shop was crudely mended with cardboard and gaffer tape. A man, perhaps smoking a cigarette – his hand was blurred by movement – perched on a bench beneath a lamp-post decorated with baskets of trailing flowers. Along the kerbs were parked vehicles; a bright yellow van stood near the Co-op where Terry Darnell had died. Despite the flat light, the date the images had been taken was July 2009.

At Woolworths Jack focused in: the store had shut down and through the glass he panned over empty shelves, some on their side. Leaflets, free newspapers, takeaway menus lay amidst a confetti of leaves curling on the mat; evidence of another past.

By the building society called the Abbey – in Jack’s present renamed Santander – the sun came out and the vehicles, including the yellow van, were replaced by others. He had travelled back eight months to November 2008. Jack moved forward one step and the yellow van was there; it was July of the following year again. He had entered two different years in the past while in his own present.

Jack knew enough about cars to identify the make and model of the car parked by the kerb of Broad Street in July 2009. Despite the efforts of Google to fuzz out plates and manufacturer badges, this was a BMW X3. If the registration details were visible Stella would have given him the year, but his own knowledge of the series put it as brand new for that year. He zoomed in on the silver four-by-four.

A four-by-four had been exiting the A259 onto the lane at Bishopstone the day they came to see Kate’s grave. Jack had seen it only for a second as they waited at the junction.

He clicked rapidly away from the Co-op, back the way he had come, to the junction with Sutton Road, which lay on the A259. He charged through the time when it had been sunny to when the light was bleak; storm clouds were brewing beyond the supermarket. He clicked left on to Sutton Park Road and past the station. The BMW – like the bike in Clockhouse Lane – was coming towards him. Jack was in its past; he was going where it had been.

It was falling into place; he did not need to travel back in time to know that the silver car that had stopped at the zebra crossing on Earls Court Road the night he stepped on the crack in the paving was a BMW. Jack had sensed the driver had a mind like his own, but was diverted by his mistake. It was a sign and he had ignored it: a much bigger mistake. The car had waited at the zebra, although there had been no one waiting to cross.

He swooped the cursor over the Buckle Bypass to the junction with Bishopstone. The snow and the darkness of his and Stella’s time in the graveyard, while in his own past, still lay in the photographed world’s future. The BMW disappeared. He clicked back and forth around the junction, making it reappear and then vanish again. He frowned. The light remained the same. Despite the fizzle and crackle of flames from the grate, he could not get warm. The time frame had not changed, so where was the BMW?

He forced himself to concentrate. Grey and white clouds spread above the Downs, their pattern illustrating perspective, the vanishing point at the port of Newhaven in the distance. The BMW had disappeared, not because the months in which the pictures were taken were different, as was the case with the biker on Clockhouse Lane and some of the vehicles on Broad Street in Seaford, but because the silver four-by-four had turned off at Bishopstone. Jack clicked back to the junction and took the same turn-off as the BMW had done the afternoon when he came with Stella. There was the silver four-by-four.

Jack clicked along after the car towards the village. The church spire protruded through the trees; he stopped where Stella had parked Terry Darnell’s Toyota, or where she would park in Street View’s future. Out of range of the camera a bunch of fresh roses would be propped against his mummy’s headstone. In the screen-world – the scene, bright with green trees, dappled sunlight and azure sky – Terry Darnell and Isabel Ramsay were alive, but his mother was still dead.

There was no BMW.

Jack had entered a new time frame – November 2008 when there had been no silver car: it belonged to the dull July day in 2009. The trail had gone cold.

He was out of time – off the map – alone in the village where Katherine Rokesmith née Venus had briefly lived and where now she was buried forever. Jack was nowhere.

He grabbed his phone and dialled Stella. He got the engaged signal and closing the line saw that she had called him again, but left no message. It was nearly four in the afternoon: he was due at Sarah Glyde’s in five minutes. He snatched up his coat and ran out of the house.

Jonathan Rokesmith took the same route to the corner house by the Bell Steps as he had walked with his mummy before it all happened.

Monday, 24 January 2011

Martin Cashman put back one rasher of bacon, a concession towards a diet, and shoved his tray, heaped with a full English breakfast, along the rails to the drinks machine. He poured himself a coffee. No milk, no sugar.

He had awarded himself this late afternoon’s breakfast because he had completed the General Register Docket on an aggravated burglary. This, along with the Paul Bramwell Docket, could be put away. Such days were rare. In the past month he had handled two sudden deaths that had been suspected murders but were not. Coincidental, he considered as he crammed his mouth with egg, sliced sausage and a square of bacon, that Stella Darnell had been tied to both ‘nominals’. In his job Cashman had learnt not to read much into coincidence. Stella was like Terry, she didn’t suffer fools: she had defused the first murder to natural causes by explaining away evidence and she had neither wasted his time nor got too emotional about the second.

She wanted little to do with the force; Cashman was used to that. He had attended two funerals where the widows, fuelled by fortifying drink, had lost it at the wake, letting rip how a husband in the police was worse than him being with another woman. One said his death would be more of the same, he was never there anyway and now at least she knew where to find him. Cashman had assumed Stella Darnell would agree; Terry’s wife had bailed out early. He had been taken aback when she asked for a favour and said no.

Terry Darnell would not have refused one of Cashman’s girls a favour. He had looked after his own.

Martin Cashman left half his food uneaten and ran upstairs. In his jacket pocket he still had Stella’s reg plate. He punched in his access code to the police database and typed the number into the search box.

The owner had no previous convictions, not even a traffic offence, and meant nothing to him. He flicked through his card index for Terry’s contact details. He could not bring himself to throw them away. Stella was Terry’s next of kin; there were three numbers: her work, her home and her mobile phone.

The receptionist told him Stella was out for the rest of the day. Cashman tried her mobile but a recorded voice said the number was no longer in use. He called the home number and it went to answer machine. He toyed with trying later to tell Stella in person and hear her pleasure that he had changed his mind, but in the end left a message with the registrant’s name and address. He insisted that if there was anything he could do, Stella must always ask.

When Cashman returned to the canteen, his plate had been cleared away.

Monday, 24 January 2011

‘She’s not here. Can I take a message?’ The mobile phone line was breaking up. Jackie was patient, knowing better than to offend a potential client. So far she had made out that the man was Colin something and wanted Stella about plaster. She circled ‘plaster’ on her pad: that must be wrong.

‘It’s ter-rib-ly hard to hear YOU!’ she bellowed into the mouthpiece.

‘… she said core …
crrr
if I thore … of … anythi …
crrrrrrrrrr
membered …
crrrrrrrrrr
about
crrrrrrrrrr
… okesmith’s …
crrrrrrrrrr
ncle … childhood
crrrrr
… freh … I told
crrrrrrrrrr
… poli …
crrrrrrrrrr …
Miss Darnell wanted …
crrrrrrrr r
…’

The line went dead. Jackie replaced the receiver. If it was urgent he would call back.

‘Where was that from, Australia?’ Beverly the admin assistant was kneeling on the carpet surrounded by filing.

Stella had said she would be in mid-morning after meeting a new client. Jackie had found no record of this client on Stella’s calendar – the flouting of a Clean Slate rule Stella was hot on – and it was now afternoon. Stella had not come to the office for days. She was, Jackie believed, losing interest in her business. Grief did funny things. In the meantime Clean Slate had to carry on.

The man was probably a time-waster. Many people badgered either herself or Stella with questions over several calls and then went with another company. The message provided her with an excuse to find out what Stella was doing.

‘Earth to Jackie?’

‘It was for Stella.’ Jackie pulled up Stella’s mobile on the quick-dial menu.

‘Stella rang.’ Beverly was banging metal cabinet drawers like sporadic gunfire as she filed.

‘When?’

‘Ages ago, she said to say she’s working from home and not to disturb. I was going to tell you.’

‘In your own time, I’m guessing?’