The Thief of Time

by John Boyne

  ‘Was he?’ asked Lee, as if the very idea was news to him. ‘That’s good to know. I didn’t really know him very well, to be honest. We weren’t close. He was always too caught up with work to be interested in any of us, which is why there are only two of us here.’ He spoke as if this was the most natural conversation in the world, as if this type of scenario, this very setting, was one in which he took part on a regular basis. ‘Can I get you another drink at all?’

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ I said as he refilled my wine glass anyway. ‘It’s a pity that you didn’t know him better,’ I added. ‘It’s always sad when people die and we haven’t told them how we really feel towards them.’

  He shrugged. ‘I suppose so,’ he said, the epitome of filial love. ‘Can’t say I’m too bothered to be honest. Got to be stoical about these things. It was you who found him, wasn’t it?’ I nodded. ‘Tell me about it,’ he said after a long pause when there appeared to be a battle of wills taking place between us to see who would give in first. Eventually I shrugged and looked over his shoulder slightly as I spoke.

  ‘I came into work’, I began, ‘around seven, I suppose. I went to -’

  ‘You start work at seven?’ he asked in surprise and I hesitated before saying anything.

  ‘A lot of people do, you know,’ I told him cautiously, a friend to the working classes, and he just shrugged his shoulders and smiled slightly. ‘I came in around seven and went to my office to go through my tray. After a few minutes, I went down to James’s – to your father’s – office and found him there.’

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘Why did I do what?’

  ‘Go down to my father’s office. Did you want to speak to him?’

  My eyes narrowed. ‘I can’t remember, to be honest with you,’ I said. ‘Your father always showed up early in the mornings – I knew that he’d be there. I think I just grew weary of all those letters that were sitting on my desk in need of reply, and felt like a cup of coffee to ease me into the day. Thought your father might have some. He usually kept a pot bubbling on his sideboard, you see, throughout the day.’

  ‘So you can remember after all,’ said Lee. ‘Would you like something to eat, Mr Zéla? Are you hungry at all?’

  ‘Matthieu, please. And I’m fine, thank you. So what do you do anyway, Lee? I’m sure James told me at some point but there are so many of you that it seems hard to keep track.’

  ‘I’m a writer,’ he said quickly. ‘And there’s only five of us actually, which probably isn’t as many mouths to feed as my father pretended. He seemed to be under the delusion that he was responsible for the feeding of the five thousand. There’s three different mothers though. I’m Sara’s. The only child as it were. And the youngest.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, nodding. ‘Do the other four gang up on you then?’

  ‘They could try,’ he said doubtfully. There was a silence for a few minutes and I looked around nervously, desperate to get away from him but wondering about the etiquette of deserting one of the chief mourners during his moment in the spotlight. He was staring at me and smiling lightly and I wondered what it was that he found so amusing. I desperately wanted to think of something to say to him.

  ‘So what do you write?’ I asked. ‘Is it journalism like your father?’

  ‘No, no,’ he said quickly. ‘God, no. There’s no money in that. No, I write scripts.’

  ‘Film scripts?’

  ‘Some day maybe. Right now, it’s for television. I’m trying to break in.’

  ‘And are you working on something now?’

  ‘I’m not employed on anything, if that’s what you mean. But I am working on something, yes. A television drama. A one-off, one-hour black comedy. It involves a crime. I’m just in the middle of it right now but I think I’m on to something good with it.’

  ‘Sounds interesting,’ I muttered, a standard response. I am more than used to having writers approach me at parties, offering to tell me their plots and treatments, expecting me suddenly to write them out a cheque there and then for their works of genius. I half expected Lee to pull his manuscript out of his pocket and try to pitch it to me but he made no moves to continue talking about it specifically.

  ‘It must be great to be actually working in television all the time,’ he said, ‘to know you’re getting a steady paycheque from it, I mean. To be able to think up ideas and see them realised. That’s what I’d love to be doing.’

  ‘I’m just an investor really,’ I said. ‘Your father was the man who knew about the industry. I just put up some of the money and don’t have to work very hard. It’s a fine life.’

  ‘Really?’ he asked, stepping a little closer to me now. ‘So why were you in your office at seven a.m. then? Should you not have been at home in bed, or off checking your investments somewhere?’

  We stared at each other and I wondered why he was continuing with this line of questioning, behaving like some dogged detective off an American crime show. For a brief moment I felt as if he knew there was more to his father’s demise than met the eye, but of course that was impossible as the police had gone through the place thoroughly and found no cause for suspicious comment. ‘I was checking my investment,’ I said. ‘I have a lot of money invested in that station. I come in once a week and spend the whole day in there.’

  ‘The whole day? Jesus. That must be rough.’

  ‘Usually I ate lunch with your father on that day. I shall miss that.’ He ignored the platitude as I had ignored his sarcasm and so I continued. ‘I’m afraid when it comes to the actual day to day operations of running a television station, I’m not the man to talk to. My nephew, maybe, but not me.’ I bit my lip the moment those words were out of my mouth but there was no pulling them back in.

  ‘Your nephew?’ asked Lee. ‘Why, does he work at the station too?’

  ‘He’s an actor,’ I admitted. ‘He’s been in television for quite some time. He knows the business quite well, I imagine. Or so he’s always telling me anyway.’

  Lee’s eyebrows shot up and he inched a little closer to me still, the way people generally do when they know they’re talking to someone who has some connection with celebrity. ‘He was an actor?’ he asked, curiously employing the past tense. ‘I mean he is an actor? Who is he? Would I know him? I can’t think of any Zélas in television.’

  ‘He’s not a Z-e-la,’ I said quickly. ‘He’s a DuMarque. Tommy DuMarqu-e-. He’s in some -’

  ‘Tommy DuMarque7.’ he shouted and a few people turned around to look at him in surprise. I swallowed and wished I was elsewhere. ‘Tommy DuMarque from -’ He mentioned the name of Tommy’s soap opera – sorry, recurring drama – and I shrugged and admitted that was the one. ‘No fucking way!’ he roared now and I couldn’t help but laugh. He was his father’s son all right.

  ‘Afraid so,’ I said.

  ‘Jesus, that’s unbelievable. You’re his uncle. That was ...’ He trailed off as he thought about it.

  ‘So to speak.’

  ‘That’s mad!’ he said, running his hand through his hair, incredibly energised by the news, his eyes practically popping out of their sockets in his excitement. ‘Everyone knows him. He’s like one of the most famous -’

  ‘Actually, I’m sorry but I have to use the bathroom,’ I said suddenly, seeing an escape route. ‘You don’t mind if I leave you for a moment, do you?’

  ‘OK,’ he said, deflated now as his speech proclaiming my nephew’s level of fame was prematurely ended. ‘But don’t leave without saying goodbye, all right? I still want to hear about how you found my father. You haven’t told me that bit yet.’

  I frowned and disappeared upstairs to throw some water on my face, knowing full well that my next move would be to take my coat and hat from the hall stand and disappear through the front door without having to see him again.

  May and June turned out to be stressful months. With the death of James, there was a vacancy for the position of managing director at our station and, since P.W.
had all but vanished from our lives, we were suddenly left in a state of some disorder. Alan came in and out to meet with me, usually unable to offer anything constructive by way of advice, constantly repeating the fact that he had most of his money invested in the station until it became something of a mantra for him, much as P.W. had been inclined to do before his disappearance. I returned to work on a daily basis, each day growing longer and longer until I began to think that, if I wasn’t careful, it would start to age me. I couldn’t remember working quite so hard since just after the Boer War, when I had a brief involvement with a hospital for soldiers who had returned from the front unable to cope with civilian life again. As I owned the place and was chiefly responsible for the employment of doctors who could help these boys, I became almost ill with worry myself and came close to ending up as a patient there before I hired the right person to lessen my workload and gradually wean me away from the quotidian business. That was what I had in mind as I was thinking about James’s replacement: someone who could do the job, lessen the workload and turn up before I went quite mad.

  In the second week of May, I received a phone call from Caroline Davison, P.W.’s daughter, who arranged an appointment to meet with me. I suggested dinner in my club but she declined, preferring to meet in my office during the daytime. It wasn’t a social visit, she said, but a professional one and her crisp, imperturbable tone on the phone intrigued me. I didn’t think too much about it, however, and only remembered that she was actually coming in a few hours before she arrived when I noticed her name written in my desk diary.

  She arrived at precisely 2 p.m., a well-dressed young woman sporting a simple black bob, a few strands of which fell down gently over her forehead. She had a very pretty face, with pale brown eyes and a small nose, her cheekbones emerging delicately through a thin layer of makeup. I guessed she was in her late twenties – although if anyone should know that you can’t judge someone’s age by their appearance then it should be me. For all I knew, she could have been 550; she could have narrowly missed out on being the seventh wife to Henry VIII.

  ‘So,’ I said as we sat opposite each other, drinking tea and sizing each other up through polite conversation, ‘have you heard from your father lately?’

  ‘Apparently he’s somewhere in the Caribbean,’ she told me. ‘I got a phone call from him last week and he was doing some serious island hopping.’

  ‘Lucky him.’

  ‘I know. I haven’t had a holiday in two years. I wish I could go to the Caribbean. It seems that he’s met a woman there too, although from the sound of her she’s more of a girl than a woman. Some nineteen-year-old bimbo with a lei, probably.’

  ‘That’s Hawaii,’ I said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Hawaii. It’s Hawaii where you get leis. The garlands you hang around your neck. It’s not the Caribbean. I’m not sure what traditions they have there.’

  She stared at me for a moment. ‘Well, whatever,’ she said eventually. ‘He’s obviously having some sort of mid-life crisis, which is extremely predictable. Did you ever have one of those?’

  I laughed. ‘Yes, but it was years ago,’ I said. ‘I can hardly remember it. And to call it “mid-life” would be stretching a point.’

  ‘Anyway, I doubt if we’re going to be seeing him returning to this miserable city any time soon. Who needs tubes and smog and millions of people and Richard fucking Branson mugging away on the telly every night when you can have tropical beaches, sunshine and cocktails all day and all of the night? Lucky for him that he can afford it. I can’t on my money.’

  She was being remarkably forthright but settled back in her chair after this mild outburst. I stroked my chin as I attempted to size her up. ‘What do you do?’ I asked her, wondering why P.W. had never spoken to me before about this self-assured daughter of his. She was the kind of girl whom most fathers would be proud to call their own.

  ‘Music stores,’ she told me. ‘I’m an area manager with a retail chain. London and the south-east. That’s forty-two shops in all.’

  ‘Really,’ I said, impressed by such responsibility. ‘That must be -’

  ‘I’ve been there since I left school, to be honest with you,’ she continued. ‘Skipped all that university palaver. Been working my way up the ladder ever since. Salesgirl, assistant manager, branch manager. I got the area manager’s job because everyone else who went for it was either incompetent or lazy. Now I’m their boss,’ she added.

  I smiled. ‘And how do you treat them?’ I asked her.

  ‘With amazing fairness, all things considered,’ she said, ‘although I’d give my left nut to see about half a dozen of them leave or lose their footing as they stroll around the top of a very, very tall building. I’m trying to guide them towards alternative careers but they seem settled for life there. I, on the other hand, feel like a change. Ambition is all I really have. It’s what I have instead of a life.’

  ‘And is that enough for you?’

  ‘That and ability. I’m looking for alternative employment, you see, Mr Zéla. I feel I’ve gone about as far in retail as I’m ever going to go.’ Her face took on a slightly sour expression as she employed the dreaded R-word.

  ‘Matthieu, please,’ I said, predictably.

  ‘So this has come as a godsend to me, you see.’

  I nodded and finished my tea, wondering how much longer we would have to chat politely before we could say goodbye when that last sentence finally sank in. ‘What has?’ I asked her, looking up. ‘What has come as a godsend?’

  ‘This,’ she said, smiling. ‘This opportunity.’

  Another pause. ‘Sorry, I’m not with you.’

  ‘This television station,’ she said, leaning forward and looking at me as if I was an idiot. ‘It’s the right opportunity at just the right time for me. I’ve been in the same job for eleven years now. It’s time I got out. Got involved in something different. It excites me. I feel challenged by it.’

  ‘You want to work here7.’ I asked, surprised by the idea, wondering what exactly I could offer her but sure already that she was the kind of woman that it would be good to have on board. ‘But what exactly do you want to do?’

  ‘Look, Mr Zéla,’ she said, putting her cup down on my desk and her cards on the table as she crossed her legs in a quick movement. ‘My father has given me his power of attorney and wants me to represent him in this business. Basically, his shares are now being operated by me. I already work here, you might say. So I will of course want to be kept up to speed with all the company’s plans and transactions while at the same time learn very quickly about the history and needs of this place. You can see that, I’m sure. I’ll need to look at budgets, projections, productivity, ratings, market share, that type of thing.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, very slowly and very suspiciously, as I tried to look quickly into the future and into what all of this might mean. I probably should have expected it but had never considered someone else stepping into P.W.’s shoes until now. I had always assumed that he would remain a sleeping partner, doing no work and drawing on his profits every quarter. He had barely been more than that before all of this business began anyway. ‘Well, I suppose that can be arranged,’ I said. ‘You have all the necessary documentation, I presume.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she replied confidently. ‘There’re no problems there. I’ll bike them across to you later this afternoon for your legal department to read through. No, the important thing is that I want to actually work here. Not just be employed here, not just be paid from here, but to work here.’

  ‘On air, you mean?’ For a moment I could almost see it. She was the right age, she was attractive, intelligent. A possible replacement for Tara, I thought. Weather? News? Documentaries?

  ‘No, not on air,’ she replied with a laugh, knocking that idea on the head immediately. ‘Behind the scenes obviously. I want James Hocknell’s job.’

  I blinked. Although I admired her forthrightness, I was amazed by her arrogance. ‘You
have to be kidding me,’ I said.

  ‘Not at all. I’m perfectly serious.’

  ‘But you have no experience.’

  ‘No experience?’ She looked at me in amazement. ‘I’ve worked in a management role in a high profile organisation for over nine years. I deal with an annual turnover of sixteen million pounds. I have authority over a staff of almost six hundred people. I administer -’

  ‘You have no experience in the media world, Caroline,’ I said. ‘You’ve never worked for a newspaper, a television station, a film company, a PR agency – nothing. You said yourself you’ve been in retail since you left school. Well? Am I right?’

  ‘You’re right, but -’

  ‘Let me ask you this,’ I said, raising a hand to silence her for a moment and she sat back with a slightly sulky expression, folding her arms like a child who hasn’t been given what she wanted. ‘In your business, if someone came to you from another company, a company where they may well have done very well for themselves but in a completely different industry all the same, and asked to be employed at the very highest level, would you consider it for more than a moment?’

  ‘If they seemed like they could do the job, yes. I’d ask them to put together a -’

  ‘Caroline, hold on. Answer me this question as if you were in the very position you aspire to.’ I leaned forward and joined my hands together as I looked her directly in the eyes. ‘If you were me, would you hire you?’

  There was a long silence as she thought about it and realised that the best answer to that question was not to answer it at all. ‘I’m an intelligent woman, Matthieu,’ she said. ‘I’m good at what I do. And I can learn quickly. And at the end of the day, I am a major shareholder,’ she added, a hint of a threat in her voice, as if this was going to swing the vote in her favour.

  ‘And I’m an even more major one,’ I replied without hesitation. ‘And with Alan on my side, as I assure you he will be, I am the majority shareholder. No, I’m sorry. It’s out of the question. James Hocknell may have been many things and he may have come to an unpleasant end, but the man was a professional and absolutely brilliant at his job. He’s helped advance this company and bring it to the point where it is today. I can’t afford to see all that work go to waste. I cant take the risk. I’m sorry.’