by C. R. Berry
“Good job I love you.” It was late anyway; she could resume in the morning. Some fresh air would be nice, actually. She went to get Kimmy’s lead. The pup had an aversion to doing a number one or a number two in the garden, meaning she always had to take him down to the woods near the house.
They headed out. It was a warm, clear night and that lovely smell of mowed lawns was still in the air. As usual Sophie went at Kimmy’s pace rather than her own and her continual instructions to heel were lost on him.
When they got to the woods, Sophie let Kimmy off the lead, switched on her torch and rubbed the ball of her shoulder from where Kimmy had been trying his utmost to pull her arm off. She stood and waited while he did a wee and investigated some new smells. Despite not knowing how to heel, he was a good boy in the woods and didn’t stray too far, particularly if it was dark. He liked to stay close to Sophie and her torchlight.
Except for tonight. Sophie saw Kimmy scamper behind some trees. A few minutes later she still couldn’t see him. She walked forwards, scanning the area with her torch, but Kimmy was beyond its reach. She stopped, waited a minute longer. When he’d still not come back to her, she called, “Kimmy? Kimmy, where are you, boy?”
She whistled to him, waved her torch. Nothing. No sign of him. Her heartbeat quickened. Where had he got to?
She walked forwards again, deeper into the woods than she’d wanted to go. Then she saw something. A flicker in the bushes ahead, caught in the periphery of the torchlight. She cast the full glare of the torch over the bushes but they were still. She heard rustling in a different direction and hoped to God it was Kimmy and not… well, something else.
She walked in the direction of the rustling, then stopped. In the near distance she heard the low hum of a car engine, the crackle of tyres over gravel.
She switched off her torch. Someone else was here.
Not wanting to draw attention, she lowered her voice to a whisper and called, “Kimmy…”
She moved forwards carefully, stepping lightly and using her feet to feel for large twigs and clusters of leaves so she could avoid them.
An old streetlamp began to ease the thick darkness of her path. Then, fifteen to twenty feet ahead, half-hidden in foliage, was a little creature with a prominent head and huge, curtain-like ears, softly silhouetted against the streetlamp’s dim, orange glow.
There you are.
Kimmy sat watching something intently, panting. Sophie gently approached him. She followed his stare through the trees to the narrow, overgrown, disused road that wound through the woods, flanked by the streetlamp that no longer served a purpose but was helpful to dog walkers.
There on the road was a white Fiat Uno, engine now off. A tall, hulking man in a dark suit was standing next to it, looking around.
Why would someone bring a car through here? The road met a dead end, where the woods literally absorbed it. There was nowhere to go.
And so late? She checked her watch – it was nearly half one.
Curious but worried she might be seen, Sophie quietly clipped Kimmy’s lead to his collar and ducked down beside him, her arm arched over his back.
The man stuffed his hand into the left inside pocket of his blazer and took something out. It was flat and rectangular and the man started tapping the front of it with his fingers before lifting it to his ear – it was obviously some kind of mobile phone.
Sophie peered hard and listened. She was about a hundred feet away and Kimmy was panting in her ear, but she just made out, “Yes, ma’am, it’s done.”
His voice was deep and heavy and he spoke in English, with an English accent. There was a general air of menace about him that made Sophie shiver.
“The book is destroyed,” the man said.
Intriguing – what book?
“Yes, ma’am. It can no longer harm us.” After a short silence, “I’ll wait for your call.”
Sophie’s ear popped as she swallowed. The man lowered the phone from his ear, tapped it and slipped it back into his blazer.
Then he bent down and Sophie caught the outline of a huge metal can near his feet. He picked it up, unscrewed the lid and tipped its contents over the Fiat Uno. She figured the clear liquid gushing from its neck was petrol. After wetting the roof and windows, he opened the doors and doused the seats.
It was then that she noticed a dent and large slash of black paint across both passenger doors, and saw that the tail light was smashed. Perhaps the white car had collided with a black one?
The man lit a match, tossed it through the open driver’s door, and stepped back. Flames erupted from the car, but they were like nothing Sophie had ever seen. Green. The fire was bright, fluorescent green.
What on earth?
Kimmy started whining. Both of them could feel the heat of the blaze. Sophie shortened his lead and tightened her arm around his back, in case he tried to run off. Fortunately the coarse roar of the fire masked his whines.
Then the unfathomable started happening. Whatever was in that ‘petrol’, it was powerful. The car’s entire structure was caving in on itself, crumpling like a cheap children’s toy. Dark green smoke swamped the air and Sophie was hit by a whiff of chemicals that made her eyes water and the back of her throat sting. She wanted to cough but swallowed the feeling and threw her hand over her nose – not that it did much good.
In mere moments, the powerful green fire had devoured the car and, well, disintegrated it. What sort of liquid could do that? It was like something off the TV.
When there was nothing left to burn, the fire withered to crackling green embers.
I really should go.
There was a very faint buzzing, then the man took out his phone again and answered, “Yes, ma’am, did it work?”
Sophie was hankering to know what this woman was saying to him. But all the man said next was, “Understood,” and hung up again. Sophie was no closer to the truth.
The man replaced his phone in the left inside pocket of his blazer, then stuffed his hand into the right one and took out a small white bottle, pills rattling inside. Medication? After what she’d seen, Sophie wouldn’t be surprised if it was more than that.
She was sweating, the heat from the fire lingering. Kimmy had stopped whining, thank God. The man might’ve heard him now the fire had stopped raging. But his panting escalated and whines would soon follow if she didn’t head back soon.
She couldn’t though. She was aching to see what he did next. So she hugged Kimmy, stroking his back and rubbing his ears to try and calm him, and waited a little longer.
The man unscrewed the bottle, took something out and placed it on his tongue.
Oh, so perhaps it was just medic –
A startling burst of light shocked the sight from her eyes. She toppled from her crouched position, landing on her backside, legs sprawled out in front of her. Yanking the lead from her grip, Kimmy charged away, paw steps rustling furiously into the distance.
The mantle of white that hung over Sophie’s eyes gradually fragmented and fell away, her eyes readjusting to the darkness. She climbed to her feet to see what had happened.
The man was gone. Whatever that bright flash of light was, it had taken him with it.
Sophie switched her torch back on and scrambled through the trees, calling out for Kimmy. She couldn’t see him anywhere. That light must’ve really spooked him.
Perhaps – hopefully – he had run back to the house. He knew the route well.
Thank God. She got home and found Kimmy circling the porch, panting and shaking, lead dragging behind him. She cuddled and stroked him. “It’s alright, baby, it’s alright. The scary man’s gone.” The words were a comfort to herself as well as the dog. “Come on. Let’s get you inside.”
There was a wheeze in her breathing, she noticed. She needed her inhaler – the last half-hour’s events had irritated her asthma.
As soon as the front door opened, Kimmy bolted into the kitchen, leapt into his brown tweed bed and slipped beneath his b
lanket to hide. Sophie dug her inhaler from her handbag in the hallway and took a couple of puffs. Her breathing steadied and she brought Kimmy some doggy treats.
After a short while, Kimmy calmed down, came out of hiding and ate his treats. He made his bed on Sophie’s lap as she settled in front of the TV. It was gone 2am now. She really ought to have gone to bed, but she knew she’d dream about the sinister disappearing man, the green fire and disintegrating car, and the ‘book’ – she needed to fill her brain with something else.
A film she saw years ago, a musical, was playing. She liked musicals, and this one was quite good, although she couldn’t remember the name.
She fell asleep with the TV on and woke up in a ball on the sofa, Kimmy in his bed, at – she checked her watch – 5.05am.
Sleepily, she stretched her limbs and rose to her feet. She went to turn off the TV.
What?
Her tired eyes sprang open and she dived to grab the remote control and ramp up the volume on the news.
There had been a car crash. Bad one. In the centre of Paris.
Diana, Princess of Wales, was dead.
10
October 23rd 2019
The moment the clock on her phone hit 13.00, Jennifer was up and out of her chair, scurrying out of the office as if flames were licking her ankles. When she was at Actuate Solutions she watched the clock out of boredom. Now, at Dunbar & Associates, the corporate law firm in Reading where she’d been working for the last four weeks, she watched it out of desperation.
‘Like a rat out of a cage!’ That’s what one of her bosses – Gloria Dunbar – would’ve said if she’d caught Jennifer leaving the office for lunch with such haste. She’d said it once about the secretaries when they bolted for the door at half five on the dot, no more enthusiastic about being there than Jennifer was.
If you didn’t make it feel like a cage, perhaps everyone wouldn’t be so desperate to leave, Jennifer thought at the time.
She walked out of the building onto Oxford Street in Reading town centre and was hit by a squall of cold air that was actually quite refreshing. The place was heaving with harassed-looking men and women in suits on their lunch breaks, diving in and out of cafes and bakeries as if time was always against them, and Jennifer realised, miserably, that she wasn’t far off becoming one of them.
She began her usual circuit. She wasn’t even that hungry. She just needed air, freedom, and to vent to someone. She took out her phone and called Adam.
“Hey!” he answered jovially.
He was always so happy, the lucky bastard. “Are you on lunch?”
“Yup. What’s up?”
“I’m seriously considering murdering my employers.”
Adam laughed. “Ah. Are they – ?”
“Still arseholes? Oooh yeah.”
“What have they done now?”
“Hitler had another go at me” – that was Jennifer’s nickname for Caroline Ward, the partner she most despised – “this time for not using a tray when I was carrying the tea. Even though I’m twenty-two, apparently I’m not capable of carrying a cup of tea without spilling it on their precious carpet tiles.”
Dunbar & Associates was the latest job to have fallen into Jennifer’s lap. Just days after losing her job at Actuate, her old college friend Alison Fawke – the long-suffering trainee solicitor at the firm – messaged her saying they had an opening for an admin assistant. Jennifer had no intention of getting into law long-term but while she was still short of a career plan and waiting for a light bulb moment, the job paid well and was more interesting than being a call centre agent.
That was how she felt after the first day, anyway. It dawned on her pretty quickly the sort of place it was. The partners – Gloria Dunbar, Michael Herrington and Caroline ‘Hitler’ Ward – were walking corporate lawyer stereotypes. Rich, old-fashioned, authoritarian snobs who treated their staff like naughty children. The kind of people who’d greet you first thing in the morning not with, ‘Good morning, how are you?’ but with, ‘Is that report finished yet? I need it – hurry up.’
“Are you going to stick it out?” asked Adam.
Jennifer sighed. “For a bit longer, yeah. It’s good money. And I need to make up my mind about what I want to do with my life before I chuck in another job. It’s just getting harder and harder to bite my tongue.”
“They do sound like dicks. But you don’t wanna get fired again.”
“I know. How’s your day?”
“Yeah, same old. Hasn’t been that busy in-store, so I’ve been able to be geeky and fiddle about with some software on my MEc.” ‘MEc’ meant ‘Million Eyes computer’. Adam was an IT technician for Million Eyes, now the biggest computer company in the world after purchasing Apple at the beginning of last year. Adam worked at the ‘MEstore’ in Basingstoke.
“Glad one of us is having fun,” Jennifer said. “Fancy a pint down the Kipper tonight?”
“Sounds good to – shit!”
“What?”
“I’ve just seen Hannah go into WHSmith. I’m gonna go chat to her.”
“Wait – is Hannah the one you’re banging or the one you want to be banging?”
“The one I want to be banging. Rachel’s the one I’m banging.”
Jennifer rolled her eyes. “Rachel. Of course. How could I forget?”
Adam had changed so much since Jennifer first knew him. Back in school he was timid, shy, awkward and more likely to sprout a new head than chat up a girl. But college, uni and a close friendship with Jennifer (or so she liked to think) had brought Adam out of his shell – far out of his shell. He was a lot more confident now. Too confident in some cases.
Not that confidence equals aptitude. His chat-up lines were straight out of the 1980s and he still had moments of old-Adam-awkwardness, normally at the least opportune times. He also needed the odd pep talk from Jennifer as to the way women’s minds worked. She wondered if any of these were the reason this Hannah girl still wasn’t sleeping with him.
“I’ve gotta go,” Adam said. “Kipper tonight then? Say eight?”
“Eight works,” said Jennifer.
“Cool. Try and have an okay afternoon.”
“I won’t. But thanks. You too. Good luck with Hannah. Try not to say anything stupid.”
“I won’t!”
Jennifer hung up and popped into the nearest newsagent for a sandwich. She still wasn’t hungry, but she needed sustenance if she was going to get through the rest of the day. She picked up an egg mayonnaise and cress baguette and sat on a bench to eat it.
She checked Facebook and her emails. She saw that Gregory Ferro had posted a new blog. He was writing a lot more lately and had posted several blogs since she saw him on the train last Thursday. She’d not read all of them, but this one caught her attention like a smack in the face. It was called Princess Diana was murdered by time travellers. What on earth could he have found this time?
Curiosity itching, she clicked through to the article. Ferro said he’d spoken to a witness with information about the white Fiat Uno that had fleeting contact with Princess Diana’s Mercedes during the crash, but had never been traced by the authorities. Having read Ferro’s blog, this witness, unnamed in Ferro’s article, believed that the car belonged to the same time travellers responsible for the death of William II. She said she’d seen it being disposed of in some woods by a ‘man in black’, who talked on the phone to someone and mentioned a ‘book’, before taking a pill and vanishing in front of her eyes.
Having met him twice now, Jennifer didn’t think Ferro would fabricate this woman. The question was whether she was doing the fabricating. There were plenty of fantasists, hoaxers and con artists out there, cooking up wild stories with the intention of corroborating a conspiracy theory.
Still, her interest was piqued. What if this woman really did see those things in the woods? Over twenty years had passed since Diana, her partner, Dodi Fayed, and their driver, Henri Paul, were killed in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel i
n Paris in August 1997. Jennifer had learned a lot about it from journalists, authors, filmmakers and Wikipedia. The French had concluded that it was an accident, but many people still believed she was murdered. In 2007, a coroner’s inquest concluded that there was no conspiracy, the final verdict being that Diana was killed by the grossly negligent actions of Henri Paul, allegedly three times over the French blood-alcohol legal limit, and the paparazzi pursuing her at the time of the crash. Scores of people – both hardened conspiracy theorists and ‘normal folk’ – didn’t buy it. Jennifer was on the fence.
She searched her contacts for Ferro’s number and called him. He answered after two rings, “Hello?”
“Ferro! It’s me, Jennifer. I’ve just read your Diana blog!”
Ferro laughed briefly. “I thought that might get your attention. Weren’t you supposed to call me last Friday?”
“Shit, yeah. Sorry. Had a lot going on.” A bit of a white lie. In truth she’d been persuaded not to by Adam. After discussing with him what Ferro had told her on the train – about Edward IV and the Princes in the Tower – Adam fired off a load of technobabble about the physical impossibilities of time travel, arguing that while Ferro himself might be for real, the evidence he’d found was most likely a collection of hoaxes. Having seen some of the evidence herself, Jennifer wasn’t entirely sure she agreed, but Adam’s arguments were enough to persuade her that these unlikely stories about time travellers hundreds of years ago probably weren’t worth getting sucked into.
Now Ferro was saying that time travellers killed Princess Diana. That changed everything.
“So – Diana,” Jennifer said. “Is this woman legit? The one who saw the man in the woods?”
“I believe so,” said Ferro. “She has nothing to gain from lying to me, particularly as she won’t let me publish her name. What do you make of it?
A good question. What did she make of it? She hesitated before answering, “Well, I’d need to know exactly what she said. But if she really is legit, this is huge. A game changer for sure.”
“Okay. Well I have a recording of our meeting. Would you like to hear it?”
