by Winona Kent
• • •
“Oh!” said Charlie’s mum. “Where’ve you two sprung from? We thought you’d gone back to Stoneford.”
“Without as much as a goodbye hug,” Auntie Wendy added, pointedly.
They were surrounded by an accumulation of Nana Betty’s things: papers and books, boxes and baskets, ornaments, lost items of jewellery—now found…random bits of stuff that had been saved for reasons known only to her.
“We were… distracted,” Mr. Deeley replied. “We undertook an adventure. Our utmost apologies.”
“What day is it?” Charlie asked.
“You really have been distracted,” said her mum. “It’s Tuesday. You’ve been gone since Friday.”
“We went up to London.”
“Shopping for vintage clothing?” Auntie Wendy inquired. “I like that outfit, Charlie. Very 1940s. Is it the real thing?”
Charlie realized she was still wearing Betty’s olive green and cream crepe de chine dress, the one she’d loaned her the morning they’d met Silas Ferryman for lunch at the Bedford Square Hotel.
“It is absolutely the real thing,” she replied. “In fact, the woman who’d originally owned it was the one who gave it to me.”
“She must have been very old,” her mother remarked. “Mum’s age, at the very least.”
“She didn’t look it,” Charlie said.
“We’re just packing up for the night,” said Auntie Wendy. “Mum collected so much stuff, it’s unbelievable. I can run you over to Clapham Junction if you’re thinking of catching a late train back to Middlehurst….”
Charlie glanced at Mr. Deeley.
“Would you mind if we spent the night here instead?” she said. “I’m exhausted. I don’t think we could face a two-hour train journey.”
“We don’t mind,” said Charlie’s mother, “and I’m sure Mum, wherever she is, won’t mind in the least. Although she was always a bit funny about the idea of men and women co-habiting without the benefit of a marriage certificate. Ironic, really, when you stop to think about how I got my start.”
“Separate beds!” Auntie Wendy warned, not entirely seriously, waggling her finger at Mr. Deeley.
• • •
Dinner was Chinese, collected from the takeaway down the road, eaten at Nana Betty’s big antique dining room table and washed down with a bottle of plonk from Naveed’s Wines and Spirits on the corner.
Mr. Deeley had discovered some long beeswax candles in a drawer in the walnut sideboard and placed them in a pair of silver holders from the mantle over the fire. He’d lit them with the Swan Vestas from his trouser pocket; they now flickered romantically on the dining table, illuminating their meal.
“And you say I was dead?” Charlie mused, in between mouthfuls of king prawn chow mein. “Actually dead?”
“For the better part of seventy-three years,” Mr. Deeley replied. “And it is only through my dogged determination that you are sitting here now, enjoying a glass of wine and a conversation with your most excellent supper companion.”
“I don’t remember being dead.”
“Your death was in the other 1940. A parallel universe, as Nick called it.”
“And there was another Nick, and another Auntie Wendy…?”
“Indeed. However, your mother was not there. Wendy had no brothers or sisters.”
“How peculiar. And you actually saw where I was buried?”
“I did, Mrs. Collins. Your grave was located in the very same place as the grave belonging to Thaddeus. I might venture a guess that it might have been the very same headstone, although the name which had been carved there was your own, and not that of my son.”
“No,” Charlie said. “No, I definitely don’t remember anything about being dead. Although I’m not quite sure what a memory of death should be like. I remember Silas Ferryman. He had hold of me and he dragged me off onto the northbound platform… and I remember trying to reason with him… and then you arrived… and I remember you giving me a shove and shouting at me to run. And then… were you injured? Did Ferryman cut you with his knife?”
“He did.”
Mr. Deeley rolled up his sleeve to show Charlie his bandaged left arm.
“Poor you. Does it hurt?”
“I am in utter agony.”
“Have another king prawn, then.” Charlie speared one with her chopstick, and fed it to him across the table. “They’re well known for both their healing and their anaesthetic properties.”
“Do you have a memory of an enormous explosion?”
“Yes, and the lights went off and people were screaming and scrambling to get out… and after that I don’t remember anything at all except you grabbing my hand and the two of us running up the stairs to the road. And then… we were here.”
She paused.
“When was it that I actually died?”
“In that moment between the enormous explosion and the ensuing darkness, and my reaching for your hand, Mrs. Collins. It was but a few seconds… but contained within those few seconds was a span of more than seven decades.”
“And Thaddeus died too?”
Mr. Deeley nodded, his eyes filling with sadness. “Silas Ferryman cut his throat. He bled to death on the southbound platform. To have known him so briefly… and to have delivered him to such an unjust end….”
He contemplated the dancing candle flames.
“If there was a purpose to our journey, I am unaware of its providence. We have ended up in exactly the same place that we began. Nothing has changed.”
“Are you sure? Silas Ferryman did face a kind of justice because of what we did. Because of what you did, he was buried under the tunnel when it collapsed.”
Charlie investigated another of the Chinese food containers, then transferred a helping of stir-fried vegetables onto Mr. Deeley’s plate with her chopsticks.
“And anyway, you were dead too.”
“I have no recollection of that at all. In fact, I have no memory of anything that happened between the moment the ceiling collapsed in the Bedford Square Hotel, and the moment Thaddeus was stabbed in the tunnel at Balham. I recall the wretched act by Silas Ferryman, and what happened next. But nothing before. I have no idea what caused us to be there.”
“Then we’ve a good deal to catch up on,” Charlie said. “And I’m awfully glad you visited Fenwick Oldbutter. Because if you hadn’t decided to interfere the second time, imagine what might have happened to us.”
“I would rather not,” Mr. Deeley replied, trying to arrange the chopsticks with his fingers, so that they worked. “You must convince me of the advantage in using these implements, Mrs. Collins. They are altogether hopeless with fried rice.”
He put the chopsticks down and instead picked up a spoon.
Charlie smiled, opened her bag, and found her mobile. She switched it on. “Absolutely dead,” she said. “Unlike me.” She dug out her charging cord and plugged it into the wall socket beside the walnut sideboard, and then looked inside her bag again.
“Where’s my shrapnel?”
“Ah.”
Mr. Deeley got up, and disappeared into the front hallway, then returned, lump of metal in hand.
“Overcoat pocket,” he replied, giving it back to Charlie. “Take good care of that, and do not allow it to influence your imagination. Therein lies the secret of its power, according to Fenwick Oldbutter.”
“I’m not even going to ask how it came to be in your pocket.”
“Therein lies a further paradox,” Mr. Deeley replied. “I discovered it in your bag—the same bag which contained the card that directed me to Mr. Oldbutter. The same bag which was buried in the mud with you, in the wreckage of the Underground station, and which was returned to Betty when your body was dug out weeks later, and identified. And yet, as you can see, you have your bag with you now, undamaged by time or catastrophe.”
Charlie sipped her wine.
“And one further paradox. Silas Ferryman cut my arm during our first
encounter. When I went back the second time, I pushed him over the edge of the platform before he could use his knife upon me. And yet… the injury persists.”
“Too many paradoxes,” Charlie decided. “They’re making my head ache.” She paused. “I wonder whatever happened to that suitcase.”
• • •
It was not in the air raid shelter.
“It wasn’t there when we first arrived, either,” Charlie said as they climbed out and stood in the garden, which was now lit by the moon. “We’d have seen it. And anyway, my brother and sister and I never saw a suitcase in all the years we played in there when we were kids.”
“But it was there in the other reality,” Mr. Deeley reasoned. “And quite well preserved. Betty’s only daughter was forbidden entry. The shelter remained a chamber of utmost privacy.”
“Did you look inside? And did it have the same things in it that I saw, in 1940? A camera and a box of jewellery? And a couple of newspaper cuttings?”
”It did,” Mr. Deeley confirmed. “And the camera still had film in it, and we took it to the gentleman who lived next door—Mrs. Firth’s grandson—and he developed the photographs.”
“That’s interesting,” said Charlie. “What did they show?”
“The places where Silas Ferryman left the bodies of his victims. A copse of trees and wild grasses. The remains of two bombed buildings. A row of brick railway arches.”
“That’s four,” Charlie said. “I thought he only killed three women in 1940.”
“He had taken pictures of all of his victims, without their knowledge. Angela Bailey. Deirdre Allsop. Violet.” Mr. Deeley stopped, and looked at her. “The last photograph was of you. You were standing in the road, observing the damage to Mrs. Crofton’s house. It was the morning we travelled up to London for lunch.”
Charlie shivered. “Oh God,” she said. “I was next. After Violet.”
“I believe you would have been, yes.”
Mr. Deeley stopped, and put his hand in his trouser pocket.
“This belongs to you,” he said, placing the silver necklace with the pendant that said MRS. COLLINS in her hand. “I discovered it at the bottom of the gas mask box, with the other jewellery. I was certain that Ferryman had killed you, and taken that as his trophy.”
Charlie reached up to her neck.
“It must have dropped into the box when I was looking inside it at Strand. The clasp’s broken. See?”
She showed him.
“I shall arrange for it to be mended once we return to Stoneford,” Mr. Deeley promised.
“So,” Charlie reasoned, “in that 1940—in that parallel universe—Thaddeus, Ferryman and I all died at Balham station. But in the 1940 that belongs to this universe, our present reality, I didn’t die. You rescued me. So how can we be certain Thaddeus and Ferryman didn’t escape as well?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Morning, sleepyheads!”
It was Charlie’s mum, calling up the stairs from the front hallway.
“We’re in here,” Charlie said, poking her head out from the dining room.
Auntie Wendy closed the front door, and carried the box of cleaning things she and Charlie’s mum had brought with them, into the kitchen.
“We’ve been up for hours. We’re having breakfast. And we slept in separate beds.”
“I was joking,” Auntie Wendy said.
“Mr. Deeley was on his best behaviour,” Charlie assured her, as her mum joined them in the dining room, and sat down at the table.
Mr. Deeley poured her a cup of tea.
“Does the name Thaddeus Quinn means anything to you?” Charlie asked carefully.
“Nothing at all,” her mother replied. “Should it?” She turned in her chair and addressed the serving hatch in the wall. “Did you ever hear Mum talk about someone called Thaddeus Quinn?”
In the kitchen, Auntie Wendy shook her head.
“Unusual name though,” she said. “I quite like it. Is he well-known?”
“In some circles,” Charlie replied. “Can we borrow your car, Auntie Wendy?”
• • •
“I haven’t driven in ages,” Charlie admitted, starting the engine of Auntie Wendy’s Ford Fiesta. “Not since Jeff died, anyway. We won’t be saying anything about that to Auntie Wendy, will we?”
“Perhaps I should be sitting in the back,” Mr. Deeley replied.
“If it were up to you we’d be going by horse and cart. Put your seatbelt on, Mr. Deeley. My motoring skills are excellent. It’s the other drivers I don’t trust.”
The cemetery was ten minutes away, and the midmorning traffic was relatively easy to navigate. Charlie ignored Mr. Deeley’s feigned fear each time she overtook a bus or a slow lorry, and admonished him severely for letting out an unearthly shriek as she sped through an amber traffic signal.
She parked Auntie Wendy’s car close to the cemetery gates, and together they walked along the path that had taken them, on Friday, to the place where they had discovered Thaddeus Oliver Quinn’s grave.
There it was. Charlie recognized the bench under the tree. She knelt down on the damp grass and brushed away a mound of brown oak leaves.
“Look,” she said,
Mr. Deeley knelt down beside her.
“There’s nothing there,” he said. “The grave marker is gone.”
• • •
Mr. Deeley was sitting with Charlie in Nana Betty’s garden. Charlie had brought out two deck chairs from the cupboard under the stairs so they could take advantage of a pale noon sun. Inside the house, her mother and Auntie Wendy were conferring over what to make for lunch after their morning’s work scrubbing the kitchen.
“So,” said Charlie. “No gravestone for Thaddeus….”
“And no gravestone for you,” Mr. Deeley said, with some relief.
“You do know what this means, don’t you? We have, in fact, changed the outcome. That grave marker was there on Friday. So perhaps Thaddeus didn’t die, after all.”
“If we have indeed returned to the same reality,” Mr. Deeley reasoned, “then perhaps we ought not to assume anything at all, Mrs. Collins.”
“I believe I might be able to help you.”
Charlie and Mr. Deeley both turned around. The voice had come from behind them, from the other side of the wooden fence which separated Nana Betty’s garden from the one next door. There was nobody there. At least, not anyone that they could see.
They stood up, walked to the fence, and peered over it.
Sitting in a wheelchair was an ancient woman, her cheery face filled with wrinkles, with a shock of straight white hair that looked like an overturned bowl on top of her head.
“Ruby!” Charlie shouted.
“Gosh yes. Jolly good. Lovely to see you two again. Very pleased you turned up alive in the end, Mr. Deeley, and not dead.”
“Not as pleased as me,” Mr. Deeley replied.
“And me,” Charlie said, slipping her arm around his waist.
“Would you like to come and have a word in the sitting room? I enjoy over-the-fence chats as much as the next person, but at my age it’s jolly windy round the old joints, and I’m prone to catching a chill if I spend too much time out of doors. No point in tempting the Fates.”
• • •
Ruby’s sitting room had been adapted for sleeping, with a comfortable-looking bed and cupboards, and all manner of things to assist an elderly person in her day-to-day living.
“Have you been here all along?” Charlie asked, suddenly aware that in all of the years she’d been coming to visit Nana Betty, she had never once set eyes on Ruby Firth.
“Oh yes,” Ruby supplied. “But, you know, I have been travelling rather a lot. I’ve had to give it up now, of course. I’m far too indisposed to manage the wherewithals. But I’ve had some jolly good adventures.” She leaned over. “I got much better at it over the years. Less of the accidental popping in, unannounced. More of the landing as intended.”
�
�Does a gentleman named Andy also live here?” Mr. Deeley inquired.
“Andy? Yes, yes, of course. My grandson. He takes very good care of me. He’s the one who arranged to have the extension built on the back. It’s got a lovely little washroom for me… and a darkroom for himself, so he can indulge in his favourite hobby. All the mod cons.”
“In the other present that I have just come from,” Mr. Deeley said, “Andy informed me you had died some years ago.”
“Did he?” Ruby mused. “Have a Jaffa Cake.”
She offered a plate, and then, without further comment, wheeled herself out of the room, and into the hallway.
Charlie could hear her rummaging around in the cupboard under the stairs.
“Here we are,” she said, coming back in. Across her lap lay Silas Ferryman’s black and tan suitcase. “I think you might be wondering about this.”
“We were,” Charlie said. “Where did you get it?”
“Betty gave it to me a few weeks after the tube station tragedy. She wanted me to keep it safe. And she never mentioned it again. Let’s have a go at opening it.”
Mr. Deeley placed the case on Ruby’s bed, unbuckled the straps and flipped the latches.
Inside were two boxes—one a cardboard carrying case for a gas mask, the other a yellow and black carton which was the packaging for a Brownie Box camera.
Charlie opened the yellow and black box, and lifted out the camera.
“It’s still got its roll of film inside,” she said, looking through the little glass window.
“My Andy’d be jolly interested in that,” Ruby said. “I’m quite certain he could have a go at developing it for you.”
“I believe we ought to,” Mr. Deeley replied, “although I am positive I know what the pictures will show.”
“I shall give it to my grandson the moment he comes in. What’s inside the other box? Is it a gas mask? You could put that on display in your museum.”
Mr. Deeley unfastened the cardboard lid.
Inside were two newspaper cuttings, brown with age. He unfolded them carefully, knowing exactly what each was going to tell him.
