Ripples of the Past

by Damian Knight

  The scientist cocked his head to one side and stroked his chin. ‘Given the nature of my former employment, I’m inclined to. But funding was withdrawn after Dr McHayden’s death. There is no Tempus Project anymore, Sam, and I’m out of a job. Which begs the question of what exactly you’re doing here.’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ Sam said. ‘I’m looking for Tetradyamide.’

  ‘So, another interested party then?’ Fairview muttered. ‘And what makes you think you’ll find it here?’

  ‘There’s a metal cabinet full of the stuff in the basement. Or there used to be, at least.’

  Fairview shook his head. ‘Not in this timeline. I produced a couple of trial batches last year, but in the absence of a subject to test it on we had no way of establishing whether or not the stuff worked, meaning production was never stepped up.’

  ‘Oh,’ Sam said, his shoulders dropping as he realised this was yet another unintended consequence of his decision to alter the timelines on Christmas Eve.

  ‘That’s not to say I didn’t keep a little back, however.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Purely for research purposes, you understand.’ Fairview smiled mischievously. ‘Why don’t you come over to my place tomorrow morning and we can discuss things in more detail?’

  11

  Sam emerged from Notting Hill Gate underground station to pavements still busy with people making their way to work. A group of nuns near the exit were collecting for the construction of a new animal hospice. After dropping a couple of pounds in their bucket and accepting a leaflet, Sam asked for directions and then stepped back as they bickered over the shortest route to the address Malcolm Fairview had given him. He thanked them and, as he turned away, pulled out his phone, opened the maps app, typed in the postcode and followed that instead.

  Although he hated lying to her again, he had told Chrissie that he didn’t want to fall any further behind with his studies and was visiting the library, and had then left the house and rode the rush-hour tube across London. He hadn’t really known what to expect in returning to the Tempus Research Facility yesterday evening, but the best he had hoped for was some clue as to where he might find Fairview: a payslip or a list of employees’ addresses or something along those lines. That he would actually run into the man himself went far beyond anything he had imagined, and a fluttery, nauseous sensation now bubbled in his stomach as he made his way down roads lined with tall, flat-fronted houses. After believing his only connection to Tetradyamide had died along with McHayden, he was, according to the app on his phone, only ten minutes from the prospect of gaining more.

  Going slowly to avoid the slippery patches where the sun had yet to melt the frost on the paving slabs, Sam told himself that things would be different this time. Without the Tempus Project guiding his actions, he could use his ability to fix his own problems. He would find Eva again and win her love for a second time, make enough money to keep a roof over his family’s heads and pay for his mum’s treatment in America and, somehow, undo the Thames House bombing and bring Esteban Haufner to justice. At the moment he wasn’t quite sure how he was going to manage all that, but once he had Tetradyamide again pretty much anything was possible.

  Eventually he reached a crescent that curved around and out of sight to the left. He followed it until he came to number 47, another flat-fronted house with an unruly, bare-branched tree that was beginning to crack the bricks in the wall of the front garden. After stepping through the gate, he trotted down the steps that led to the basement flat: 47C.

  The blinds behind the front window were closed, but there was muffled classical music coming from somewhere inside. Sam raised his finger to the doorbell, took a deep breath and pressed it. There was a thump that sounded like someone knocking over a chair in one of the rooms. He waited a minute, but the door remained unanswered. Judging by the size of the house, the basement flat couldn’t have been particularly big, so perhaps the bell wasn’t working.

  He gave it a few more seconds and then rapped on the door with his knuckles. Again, there was no answer.

  Sam glanced at his watch: it was still a few minutes before ten o’clock. He was early, so it was possible Fairview had popped out and forgotten to switch his music off.

  After climbing the steps to pavement again, he glanced up and down the road. Apart from an elderly lady peering at him through the window of the house next door, there was no sign of Fairview or, for that matter, anyone else, so he stomped down the steps again, took a pen from his backpack and wrote a short note on the back of the leaflet the nuns had given him, which he then folded in half and dropped through the letterbox.

  He was about to leave when he realised he had nothing to go home to. Chrissie had already told the college that Sam wouldn’t be returning until next week, and the prospect of sitting around empty-handed in his room was too disheartening to even contemplate. No, he decided; having already come this far, he was going to wait.

  He sat on the bottom step, propped his elbows on his knees and rested his chin in his hands. After a while he noticed there was a gravel path leading beyond a set of wheelie bins, so he stood up again, slung his bag over his shoulder and followed it around the side of the building until he found himself in a large back garden. Winter had worn the lawn into a muddy sheet covered by a threadbare layer of grass. A trellis fence supporting several flowerless rose bushes topped the wall at the far end, but the middle panel had become dislodged and lay broken on the ground. Behind him, a short flight of steps led down to a patio, where, on the other side of a bird-feeder and a picnic table, he could see the back door to Fairview’s flat.

  Sam climbed down and, cupping his hands around his eyes, peered through the glass panel in the door. He found himself looking into the kitchen, where two mugs of tea sat on the worktop, teabags bobbing near the surface of the water.

  When he tried the handle, to his surprise the door opened. ‘Hello?’ he called, stepping in. ‘Anyone home? Malcolm? Mr Fairview?’

  There was no reply, only silence interrupted by an intermittent scratching noise.

  He walked under an archway and into the sitting room. Matching striped sofas were positioned at opposite ends of a frayed Persian carpet that stretched almost to the skirting boards. Against the far wall stood an old oak bookcase, the shelves of which sagged under an extensive collection of books, scientific journals and vinyl records. The scratching noise was coming from an old-fashioned turntable on a dresser behind one of the sofas. He walked over and lifted the needle from the central groove of the record, which was still spinning on the plate.

  It appeared as though his first guess had been spot-on and Fairview must have popped out and forgotten to switch his music off, probably to get milk for the cups of tea stewing in the kitchen, come to think of it. Which meant the scientist could be back at any minute and perhaps might not be best pleased to find Sam lurking inside his flat rather than waiting out front like a normal person.

  Shaking his head at his own thoughtlessness, Sam hurried to collect the note he’d just posted through the door. A couple of months ago the idea of letting himself into someone else’s home would have never occurred to him, but now he’d just done it without thinking twice. It seemed as though his experiences with the Tempus Project in the December-only-he-could-remember had changed Sam, and he wasn’t all that sure it was for the better.

  He lifted the folded leaflet from the doormat, stuffed it in his pocket and turned back. As he made his way down the hall again, he cast a quick glance through the open door of what looked like a bedroom. A pair of worn brown brogues protruded from behind the bed, soles out as if attached to the feet of someone lying on the floor.

  Sam did a double-take and stepped in, then skirted around the bed before stopping and letting out a gasp. Fairview was flat on his back, perfectly still, his blank eyes staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘Malcolm, are you all right?’

  Fairview didn’t move.

  Sam rushed over, d
ropped to his knees and took the man’s hand in his own. The skin was warm to the touch, but when he pressed his fingers to the inside of Fairview’s wrist he couldn’t feel a pulse.

  Another dead body, then. The first was Chrissie, killed by Agent Steele’s stray bullet, then the guard McHayden had shot later that evening, followed by Doug, stabbed in the neck by Clarke a few seconds after. Although Sam had always liked Malcolm Fairview, he felt strangely numb inside, as though the sight of so much bloodshed in a single night had hardened him to death.

  He let go of the scientist’s arm, which dropped limply to the floor, and clambered to his feet. His head was beginning to throb and he could detect a hint of burning caramel in the air. There was a telephone on top of the chest of drawers by the door. Hoping to reach it before another seizure came on, he staggered over, snatched up the handset and dialled 999.

  After a couple of rings a woman’s voice said, ‘Emergency services, which service do you require?’

  ‘Ambulance,’ Sam said. ‘I need an ambulance.’

  ‘One moment please.’ There was a pause and a click before the operator spoke again. ‘And your location?’

  ‘Er, 47C Beaumont Crescent, Notting Hill. I just stopped by to see someone and…and…I think he’s dead.’

  ‘Okay, a unit has been dispatched. And your name is?’

  Sam lowered the phone. On the chest of drawers were several packets of the tablets Fairview had pulled from his pocket at the Tempus Research Facility yesterday evening. He picked one up and turned it over. The label said, Isosorbide Mononitrate: use for the treatment of angina and related heart conditions. Keep out of reach of children.

  So, a heart attack, it appeared.

  Sam returned the packet to its place and lifted the handset again, when all of a sudden he spotted a small brown pill bottle in amongst the collection of cough syrup, eau de toilette and eczema cream amassed around the base of a mirror on the chest of drawers. There was a chip in the glass near the lid and the label was beginning to peel away in one corner. He picked it up, popped the lid open and gazed down at the yellow pills it contained. The smell of burning caramel immediately receded.

  ‘Sir, are you still there?’ the voice on the end of the phone asked. ‘I need a name.’

  Without another word, Sam hung up, dropped the bottle of Tetradyamide into his backpack and walked out.

  Chapter III

  Easy Money

  1

  April 1919

  Spring arrived late in 1919, winter stretching its icy fingers well into the month of April. It was almost two and a half years since Stephen Rutherford had woken in a hospital bed to find his head strapped in bandages and his body numb below the waist. In addition to a cranial injury, he had broken his back on that fateful night on the North Sea and been carried to a lifeboat by another sailor as their ship, the Northern Star, went down, making him one of only forty-two survivors from a crew originally twelve-hundred strong. Joseph, the brother he had sworn to protect, had been lost at sea.

  The initial prognosis on Stephen’s injuries was not encouraging; he would likely spend the rest of his days a cripple, and a month later had returned to the family home in Lower Blinkhorn confined to a wheelchair. As he continued his rehabilitation, the first of his funny turns had reared its ugly head. To begin with these were terrifying and perplexing in equal measure. His mother, who witnessed the third such incident, afterwards described how Stephen had suddenly gone limp in his chair before being seized by a bout of violent tremors. She had run from the cottage screaming, uncertain whether to summon the doctor or the parish vicar.

  Stephen’s own experience of the incident had been decidedly different; one minute he was sitting in the kitchen, watching his mother prepare cheese sandwiches for lunch, and the next he was lying in his bed, surrounded by pitch-blackness. After a bewildering five minutes trapped in the night either before or after, he had come to in the kitchen once again, back in his wheelchair with a huddle of concerned neighbours looking on.

  Each of Stephen’s turns after that had only served to strengthen his conviction that God was in some way testing him, and he began to document them in a journal. But since they rarely took him more than a few hours into the immediate past or future and with no obvious purpose, he failed to comprehend their significance. They appeared to be connected to feelings of anger, fear or regret, so much so that Stephen had hidden the photograph taken of him and Joseph on the day they had joined the merchant navy, since it brought on a turn nearly every time he looked at the thing.

  By avoiding situations that might provoke such emotions and adhering to a strict regime of prayer and silent contemplation, Stephen had been able to limit the occurrence of his turns to such an extent that, at times, it was almost possible to forget the ominous shadow they cast over his existence, and as the months wore on he was pleasantly surprised by the return of some sensation to his legs. At first this was no more than a vague, intermittent tingling in his toes, but by the turn of 1918 he had begun to take his first tentative steps, and a year later, with the ink still wet on the Armistice of Compiègne, he had finally felt strong enough to begin searching for employment again.

  His return to health sadly coincided with his mother’s fall from it. What started as a cough, innocuous enough at first that he barely questioned her assertions that it was just a passing cold, had become progressively hacking and violent as the fever and night sweats took hold, and when he secured a job as a junior porter at the train station in nearby Upper Blinkhorn shortly after his eighteenth birthday, she was an emaciated shadow of herself.

  On the Friday of his second week at the station, Stephen cycled home with the late afternoon sun on his face. The countryside had at last roused from its slumber in a single, glorious outpouring of colour, and the air was filled with birdsong and the scent of freshly mown grass.

  Upon reaching the cottage, he leaned his bicycle against the low stone wall, latched the gate behind him and began up the path, the jacket of his Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway uniform slung over his shoulder. As he stepped through the door, he was greeted by an eerie silence.

  ‘Mam?’ he called. ‘Where are you, Mam?’

  He opened the door to the drawing room and found her seated in her favourite armchair, her head lolling to one side and her fingers, scrawny as twigs, clenched around a blood-soaked handkerchief. When she did not stir, he rushed over, crouched beside her and shook her gently by the shoulders. Without a sound, his mother slumped lifelessly into his arms.

  Letting out a cry that seemed to emanate from the very base of his stomach, Stephen eased her body back and went to stand. His head suddenly throbbed and his vision became spotted by stars. He felt his knees tremble beneath him as his memory flitted back to the moment he had spotted Joseph’s oilskin hat bobbing up and down on the surface of the fiery sea. The impotent frustration was too much to bear.

  As he took a step back, Stephen felt himself falling. He blinked, but instead of hitting the floor was, without warning, back in the saddle of his bicycle, the wind in his face as he sped along the road in the direction of Upper Blinkhorn.

  The shock of the transition sent him snaking into a ditch, where the front wheel caught, catapulting him over the handlebars and into the bordering hedgerow. Dazed, he disentangled himself, clambered out and, after brushing a few of the larger items of foliage from the folds of his uniform, assessed the damage. The bicycle appeared miraculously unscathed, as was Stephen, aside from a few scratches to his face and hands.

  As he straightened the handlebars, a thought occurred. He pulled out his father’s gold fob watch and flipped it open. It was just after half past seven and, in light of the fact he had the weekend off, this could only mean one thing: he had been transported back to that morning, less than fifteen minutes after he had left the cottage, in fact, at which time his mother had been very much alive.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Stephen jumped in the saddle and turned towards home again, pumpi
ng the peddles with all of his might. By the time he reached the house of Dr Shuttleworth, the village doctor, his face was streaming with perspiration. He ditched his bicycle by the roadside and hammered on the door with his fist.

  Shuttleworth opened wearing his undershirt, his braces hanging by his knees and a cup of tea in his hand. ‘Stephen?’ he said, blinking through the lenses of his spectacles. ‘It’s not eight o’clock yet, son. What can I do for you?’

  ‘It’s my mam,’ Stephen said. ‘Please, sir, it’s urgent. She needs your help.’

  With a nod, Shuttleworth went to fetch his case and then followed Stephen on foot, wheezing as he struggled to keep up.

  ‘Mam?’ Stephen called as he burst through the door of their cottage.

  There was a hacking from the direction of the drawing room. He followed the sound and found her in her armchair again.

  ‘Stevie?’ she said, and slid her handkerchief into her sleeve in an attempt to conceal the bloodstains. ‘What are you doing back so soon, flower?’

  ‘I—’

  At that moment Shuttleworth arrived. He took one look at Stephen’s mother and placed a hand on the young man’s shoulder. ‘Why don’t you give us a minute, eh? I’ll wager she could do with a cup of tea.’

  Stephen nodded, returned to the kitchen and filled the kettle. It had yet to boil when the doctor stepped out of the drawing room, shaking his head.

  ‘Well?’ Stephen demanded.

  ‘She’s badly, son. It’s consumption, and quite advanced by my reckoning.’

  ‘Please, there must be something you can do.’

  Shuttleworth dipped his head. ‘Not at this stage, my boy. I’m sorry, but she’ll likely not make it through the weekend.’

  Stephen nodded and returned to the drawing room, a hollow sensation gnawing at his insides. ‘Why didn’t you tell me it was so serious?’ he asked, kneeling by his mother’s chair.

  ‘Didn’t want you fretting, flower,’ she said. ‘If it’s my time to meet my maker then so be it. I’ll be with your brother and father soon enough.’