Time and Time Again (38 page)

So he had time.

But not if Bernadette recovered consciousness, which she most likely would do quite quickly. He looked at her prostrate body. Stretched out on the floor. Her blouse still unbuttoned, her silk slip on display, one breast half exposed, a dome of flesh falling backwards towards her chin. It rose and fell evenly: that was good, her breathing wasn’t disturbed. He didn’t think she’d suffered much harm from the blow.

She moaned a little, she was stirring.

Reaching into his bag of equipment he drew out his medical kit, the one that Bernadette had brought to the hospital and thus saved his life. He took out a needle – not one of his antibiotics, a sedative. He knelt down beside her and, using his left hand as a tourniquet, found a vein and injected the sedative.

‘Sorry,’ he said again. It seemed to be becoming a habit. But he truly was, both for her and for himself.

He buttoned up her blouse and put a pillow under her head.

Then he shouldered the one bag he’d allowed himself, went to the window and climbed out. This was the moment of maximum danger. One of the police or soldiers five storeys below had only to look up and the chase would be on. But they were all pretty occupied and also trying to be discreet, his room was on the top floor, and the climb should take him less than a minute; he reckoned his chances were good. He got out on to the window ledge and reached up for the guttering. He was still stiff and weakened from convalescence but his wound had pretty much healed and he’d been diligent in doing his stretches and physio since leaving hospital. He hoisted himself up over the gutter without too much pain and scrambled on to the tiled roof from where he was able to traverse the whole length of the street and descend beyond the barricade.

He’d escaped the trap. But he’d had to assault and drug Bernadette to do it. The thought filled him with despair.

Having returned to street level he walked briskly out of Mitte towards the Lehrter Bahnhof. He stopped at the first decent hotel he could find and took a room, readily accepting the stern warning that since the hour was early and the maids had not yet begun their work he must pay for the previous night. Stanton was, in fact, counting on the earliness of the hour as the principal factor in enabling him to assemble a disguise. He was aware that Bernadette would be able to describe his clothes and so he hoped to find replacements among the returned overnight laundry. He expected that by now it would have been left outside the rooms but that the occupants would not yet have opened their doors to collect it.

He was in luck, and as he made his way along the corridor towards his room he was able discreetly to collect a whole gentleman’s wardrobe. Once he was in his room he laid the clothes out on the bed and set about changing his personal appearance as best he could. He took his shaving kit and his multi-tool knife (which contained scissors) from his bag and, pouring water into the wash bowl, began shaving his head. It’s not an easy thing to do oneself, and Stanton was anxious not to draw attention with a skull covered in cuts and scabs so he forced himself not to rush. Fortunately the mirror, which stood on the dresser behind the wash bowl, had two hinged side flaps, and so by twisting a bit he was able to get sight of most of his head. He shaved all his hair save for a patch on top, which he fashioned into a very short crew cut, German military style. In Stanton’s view probably the ugliest male hairstyle ever devised.

Once he’d finished with his head, he shaved his face. During his time in hospital his beard had grown. He hadn’t shaved it off because Bernadette had liked it. ‘Every Suffragette secretly wants a caveman to drag her about,’ she’d said dryly, ‘or so the
hilarious
cartoons in the papers tell us.’ Now he shaved himself fully leaving only a small moustache, which he trimmed down into a neat military style. The German identity that Chronos had supplied him with was made out in the name of Ludwig Drechsler, a German
Junker
brought up in East Africa. When creating the character McCluskey and her team of forgers had decided that, just as with the Australian back story they had given him, a colonial past would mitigate any strangeness in his accent and his language.

When he’d finished shaving, Stanton took the water bowl, which was full of hair and whiskers, to the communal bathroom at the end of the corridor and carefully disposed of it in the lavatory. He didn’t want them looking for a shaven-headed man. Then he packed up his bag and left the bedroom. It was barely thirty minutes after he’d entered it. He locked the door behind him and put out the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign. Then, avoiding reception, he left the hotel via a back entrance and walked directly to the station, which was just five minutes away on foot. He bought a ticket to Prague, which was the first southbound train available. Stanton only managed to catch it by running along the platform and jumping on as the train pulled away.

As he sat down in his seat, he glanced at his watch. It was less than seventy-five minutes since Bernadette had returned to their apartment with the bread.

By the time the police decided to break into the apartment and found her unconscious body on the floor, he was already halfway to the German border.

Two days later he was back in Constantinople.

STANTON’S CAB CLIP-CLOPPED
through the darkened streets from the Pera Palace Hotel and headed down to the dockside area. The last time Stanton had made the journey he’d been in a Mercedes limousine with McCluskey beside him. The memory seemed already strange and distant. He was becoming an early-twentieth-century man.

The cabby spoke a little English and a little German and was inclined to chat, particularly when he heard the address that Stanton was heading for. It seemed that the hospital had only recently been the venue of a terrible double murder. There had been a break-in and a doctor and a night nurse had been killed.

Stanton was a little unnerved. Break-ins happened from time to time of course and they sometimes turned violent. But that one should have occurred in this
specific house
, Newton’s house, seemed somehow
ominous
.

He asked the cab driver if he could recall the date.

‘A couple of months ago,’ came the reply. ‘The end of May or the beginning of June … yes, that’s it. The morning of the first of June. I remember it was my wife’s name day.’

Stanton swallowed hard.

The break-in had happened on the morning of his arrival.

He had been there. Just shortly after midnight. The house had been so peaceful and but for the gramophone record so quiet.

Yet now it seemed that had Newton’s coordinates been timed to occur only a little later, Stanton would have stepped from the future into the middle of a violent crime.

His mind went back to the nurse he’d seen, bent over her desk as he’d crept past her half-open door. Had she been a victim? Almost certainly, she had been the only person up. He recalled thinking that she was the first human being he had seen in his new world. Now it seemed that he was also the last person who saw her alive. Except for her killer. Stanton remembered the bearded man he’d surprised at the front door as he dragged the semi-conscious McCluskey out of the house. Not long after that encounter the man must have become the killer’s other victim.

Stanton felt cold. Was it him? Had he brought death with him?

To a doctor and a nurse in Constantinople?

To the Jews of the Russian Steppes? The Socialists of Germany?

The flower girl in Sarajevo? To Churchill? The man so crucial to the salvation of the previous twentieth century but already dead in this one?

Somewhere a bell was chiming. It was 2 a.m.

What passing bells for these who die as cattle?

The opening line of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem For Doomed Youth’.

Stanton whispered it under his breath. A reminder of why he had done the things he’d done. Yes, many were dying now, but their numbers were as nothing compared to those who had died before. A whole generation would not now ‘die as cattle’ as Wilfred Owen’s had done. And Stanton would leave his warning in Newton’s cellar lest any future Chronations act in haste to change another century. Stanton wished he had brought the Owen anthology with him to leave in the cellar beside his letter. No document could better demonstrate the appalling human capacity for self-inflicted disaster or show how bad things could really get.

He paid off his cab and walked up the same street that he’d escorted McCluskey along two months earlier. Approaching the same door from which he’d emerged into the early twentieth century.

The house looked completely quiet. Just the same as when he’d left it, apart from the fact that the windows were now barred. He hoped very much they hadn’t added bolts to the door. His skeleton keys wouldn’t help him if they had.

But the door opened and he slipped inside.

He crept along the familiar corridor and past the half-open door. Glancing in he saw that a nurse was sitting at the table as before, but this one was older and grey-haired.

He looked away. He had never been a remotely superstitious man but nonetheless he couldn’t help wondering whether it had been his evil eye that marked that other nurse for death. Fate avenging itself against the efforts of Chronos to cheat it?

He told himself he was being a fool.

Fate? Evil eyes? Ridiculous?

But no more ridiculous than a man breaking into a house in order to visit its cellar in the hope that a hundred and eleven years hence somebody might read the history of a century that never happened.

Stanton crept to the cellar stairs door, unlocked it and made his way down. He moved the wardrobe, unlocked the second door and slipped back inside Newton’s cellar.

It was pitch black but he’d brought his torch and in its bright LED light he could see the footprints he and McCluskey had left, and the mark in the middle of the room where she had lain at his feet. He flashed his torch about; he was looking for the not yet broken chair and the table. His idea was to put his letter on it.

But as he walked further into the cellar, something caught his eye on the edge of his torch beam.

Something dark a little way across the floor.

A line of marks in the dust.

Playing his torch on them Stanton recognized them for what they were. Another set of footprints. Footprints that most definitely had not been there before. Somebody had been in this cellar since Stanton had last been here.

For a moment a sort of panic gripped him as if he’d seen a ghost. It was an unusual sensation for Stanton and he mastered it only with difficulty. His heart had begun to beat furiously; he gulped for breath. He struggled to get a grip of his thoughts. There had to be a logical explanation, and of course there was one.

Those marks must have been made by the intruder. The man who broke into the hospital and had killed the doctor and the nurse. No ghost, just a house breaker.

But why had he come down here?

What was he hoping to find?

Stanton played his torch along this other line of prints. They seemed to lead nowhere. They began at the door and then … stopped. As if the man had entered the cellar, explored it for a few steps and then … disappeared.

Stanton took a step towards the prints, his free hand closing round the handle of the pistol in his pocket. Was the intruder still in the cellar? How could that be? The break-in had happened two months ago.

But if the man wasn’t still there, why did his footprints stop in the middle of the room? Where had he gone? He couldn’t have just evaporated. It occurred to Stanton that billions of people had done exactly that in the century from which he had come. Evaporated into thin air. But those billions had taken their world
with
them. They had left no footprints.

Where was the man who had left these?

Stanton’s body tensed, as if expecting some furious killer to leap from the darkness as he stared down at the line of marks in the dust.

And then he realized.

Heel – sole – heel – sole.

The footsteps weren’t leading from the door into the middle of the cellar.

They were leading from the middle of the cellar to the door.

The intruder hadn’t made them and then disappeared.

He had
appeared
and then made them.

IT WAS JUST
after 7.30 in the morning on what the pre-Liberation calendar had referred to as Christmas Eve.

The year was One Hundred and Three.

Or 2024 in Old World Years.

The dawn was bitter cold. There was a thick mist on the road and the People’s Revolutionary Army road marshals were out in force waving their reflective paddles and their luminous batons.

The PRA was in the process of shifting the whereabouts of its South Eastern Mobile Missile Defence Shield and the frozen morning air of what had once been called Cambridgeshire was thunderous with the roar of diesel engines. The massive missile carriers lumbering across the county took up the majority of the width of the road and the marshals were nervous and aggressive. The tarmac was thick with ice and they didn’t want one of those bad boys skidding off into a ditch.

Stuck between two of the enormous transports, trying to weave a way through, was a Mercedes van which displayed the markings of the Department of Internal Security. Every paddle-wielding squaddie on the road jumped to attention and delivered a flurry of salutes as it passed by. Nobody dissed the Department of Internal Security. Failure to show sufficient respect to any Department of State, let alone the DIS, was considered a failure to show respect to the Party Secretary. And they put you in a camp for life for disrespecting the Party Secretary. If you were lucky.

Inside the van there were four female security officers and one manacled prisoner in the uniform of the Stornoway Gulag. Stornoway was the most notoriously brutal re-education facility in the British Precinct of the USSR. Its uniform was a thick coarse blue overall incongruously trimmed at the wrists and pockets with tartan.

The prisoner was female also, manacled at her hands and feet, her ID number tattooed on the dome of her shaven head. None of the guards spoke. Each of them seemed to be cowering in their respective corners of the van, as if they were trying to get as far away from the prisoner as possible.