The Trouble With Time

by Lexi Revellian

  Jace took photographs while Farouk summoned the van with the equipment. When it arrived, they unloaded ladders and a platform, put on vinyl gloves and systematically examined every inch of the ceiling, looking for a concealed hiding place behind a loose brick. Grit fell in their eyes as they worked and the dust made them sneeze. Finding nothing, they moved on to the machines and workbenches.

  There was only one small piece of excitement all evening. Jace was testing hand power tools on one of the benches to make sure the TiTrav wasn’t hidden in any of the casings when Farouk, on his knees behind the kitchen units, jumped up and used an expression that had not been heard to pass his lips before.

  Jace said, “Fuck me, that’s a first. I thought swearing was haram?”

  “He got it from you,” Kayla said. “You’re a terrible influence. Are you okay, Farouk?”

  Farouk kicked the cabinet. His foot went straight through the flimsy panel. “A bastard mousetrap got my fingers!”

  Quinn looked up from the computer screen and told him to calm down. Ryker cracked his only smile of the evening, which drew Quinn’s attention to him.

  “I’m finding a surprising number of TiTrav resources in your files. Technical stuff, service software, updates, diagrams, coding . . . I doubt our own technicians have as much. I’m wondering why anyone without a TiTrav would need this.”

  “It’s interesting,” Ryker said. “It’s my hobby.”

  They applied stickers as they went, a different colour for each operative, so that nowhere would be missed or gone over twice. These were left in situ. By the time they’d exhausted every possible hiding place – and many impossible ones – it looked as if a hurricane en route from a giant’s wedding had spread confetti through the workshop. The team communicated in monosyllables, working mechanically, longing to get home. Two unproductive searches in one day was two too many. When they ran out of places to search, they stood in a disconsolate group, tacitly admitting defeat.

  “We’re done here,” said Quinn.

  “Happy now?” said Ryker, standing up. “I suppose there’s no chance of an apology for time wasted and nuisance caused. If you lot will bugger off I’ll tidy up and go to bed.”

  “Mr Ryker, on behalf of IEMA I apologize,” said Quinn. “Once again you emerge without a stain on your character. Few people have been so frequently subjected to repeated scrutiny and found to be blameless. I can only congratulate you on your record and hope you retain it.”

  They were halfway to the door when Quinn turned. “Perhaps I should tell you, as you were his friend, that Peter McGuire resisted arrest this morning. So we shot him. Dead. Goodnight.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Scott

  The elevator reached the tenth floor and Jace opened the door to his rented studio flat, three hundred square feet and a balcony in Hoxton. Fleetingly, he considered having a shower, then decided in favour of immediate sleep. He pressed the button to lower the bed out of the wall and took off his jacket.

  The doorbell rang.

  Cursing, he walked to the entry phone. Scott’s face filled the screen.

  “What is it?”

  “Can I come up and talk to you?”

  “At this hour? What about? Can’t it wait till morning?”

  “I’d really rather talk to you now, if you don’t mind.”

  Jace pressed the lock release, then went to the kitchen area and put the kettle on. He heard the clunk of the lift doors and went to let Scott in.

  “Coffee?”

  “No thanks. I’ve been in the bar over the road all evening waiting for you to come back.” He smiled nervously. “Too much coffee.”

  “Take a seat.” Scott sat on the edge of the sofa. The kettle boiled and Jace made himself coffee. He put it on the table in front of the sofa, then got out the bottle of brandy and a couple of glasses.

  “Shoot. Brandy?”

  “Oh, thanks, yes please. Did you find anything at Ryker’s?”

  “Not a solitary time travelling sausage.”

  There was a lengthy pause. Scott sipped his brandy. Jace glanced at the clock. Jesus, 3.10. “Look, it’s been a long day, so if you could get to the point . . .”

  Scott jumped. “Sorry, yes. Okay. I don’t know if you know this, but my mother married an American so I lived in the States for a while.” Jace shook his head. “I went to college there. My stepdad was a pistol shooter, very keen. I did a lot of shooting with him. I think he hoped I’d take it up professionally. He’d won the World Speed Shooting Championship in 2035, and he reckoned I was good enough to follow in his footsteps. I didn’t want to take it that seriously, I had other priorities, but I did a lot of practice.” Scott finished his brandy in one gulp and met Jace’s eyes. “Which means that when I shoot a man who’s sixty feet away intending to hit him in the lower arm, then that’s where I hit him.”

  There was a pause. Jace said, “So you’re saying Quinn killed McGuire?”

  “I know I didn’t.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?”

  Scott flushed. He looked down, then up again. “Nothing, I guess. If I’m honest I just don’t like everybody thinking it was my bad aim that killed a man, when it wasn’t.”

  “Well, now I know it too.”

  “Really? You believe me?”

  “Maybe.”

  Scott frowned, hesitated and said, “Analysis of the bullets would prove whose gun fired which shot.”

  “Right. They won’t do that as a matter of course. You’d need authorization.”

  “Who from?”

  “Ah well. Quinn.”

  Scott’s face fell. Jace said, “Probably not the best idea, three weeks into a new job, to try to prove your boss got something wrong. Won’t improve your promotion prospects. I’ll have a think about it, but maybe don’t mention it to anyone else for now. It might be best to let it go. Quinn’s made it clear he’ll ensure you don’t get into any trouble over it.”

  After Scott had left, Jace walked to the window and stared out at the city lights, wide awake again, analysing, balancing probabilities. Scott had clearly believed what he said; but on the whole, Jace was inclined to think him mistaken. He might be as good a shot as he claimed, but he had been nervous and excited, and had never fired at a human being before.

  There was another reason the team had all believed Scott’s shot to be the fatal one. Quinn was good with a pistol, too; seven years before, he’d been part of the British Olympic shooting team in Detroit, and won gold.

  CHAPTER 4

  Bullets

  When Jace arrived for the meeting on Monday morning, only Kayla had got there before him. Quinn, sitting at his computer, glanced up and smiled. “You’re early too.”

  He returned his attention to the screen, and Jace sat at the round table with Kayla to wait for the others, trying not to yawn after the short night. Quinn’s office was cool; he had a weakness for elaborate clothes – the jacket he wore was black damask, with a high collar, and rows of silver buttons – but he liked his furnishings plain. The only decoration in his office consisted of contrasting textures of marble, glass, slate and steel. A clutter of transparent plastic on one end of the big desk added an incongruous note. Always inquisitive, Jace got up again to see what it was.

  Individually packed in tamper-evident bags were McGuire’s possessions that had been taken from his body. As well as the items from his pockets Jace had already seen, there was the microchip from his arm, two small bar-coded bags containing cartridges, and two similar bags each containing a bullet. The labels read:

  IEMA Pathology Department 1/2

  NAME: Peter William McGuire

  DATE OF DEATH: 14th May 2045

  ITEM: bullet

  LOCATION: lower arm

  NOTES:

  IEMA Pathology Department 2/2

  NAME: Peter William McGuire

  DATE OF DEATH: 14th May 2045

  ITEM: bullet

  LOCATION: heart

  NOTES: 2/2 bullets, c
ause of death

  “His effects should have gone straight to Records,” Quinn said, seeing Jace pick over the bags. “I doubt he had family. The taxpayer will be funding his funeral.” He removed the dataphone, put everything else back into a larger bag and moved it to the top of a cabinet.

  While he was doing this the door opened and Scott and Farouk walked in together. Quinn joined his team at the table, switched on the vidcam and opened the meeting.

  “As you all know – with the possible exception of Scott – McGuire’s TiTrav is the first we’ve had wind of in the UK for nearly six months. I don’t need to tell you the potential consequences of having one of these things on the loose. Our absolute priority is to find it, and we need to do that within the next few days. Everyone in IEMA has their eye on us. If we fail, the Americans will send a team, and there is no way I am going to have that happen while I am running this department. So, let’s have your ideas.”

  Kayla said, “McGuire may have had no family – and I’ll be checking that – but he must have had associates besides Ryker. He got his drugs from someone, for one thing –”

  She was cut short by a knock on the door. Quinn looked up in irritation as the door opened and a young woman entered. “Mr Quinn, I’m sorry to interrupt, but Sir Douglas would like you to come to his office immediately.”

  Sir Douglas Calhoun was IEMA UK’s chief executive. Quinn got to his feet and looked round the table. “We’ll finish this later, by which time I’d like you to have come up with some leads.” He ripped McGuire’s dataphone out of its plastic bag and handed it to Jace. “You can start by checking out every contact on here.” He followed the young woman out of the room.

  The others stayed in the office for a few minutes, discussing possibilities, then got up to go.

  “If only McGuire hadn’t got himself shot. A man like that, he’d have told us anything we wanted to know if we only surrounded him and frowned a bit,” Farouk said tactlessly. “Would have saved us a lot of work.”

  Scott stirred but said nothing.

  Jace said, “At least it’s not one of the early TiTravs. If someone’s got it we’ll know the minute they turn it on. Which makes it pretty useless, really.”

  There was another knock on the door and a man’s head appeared. He looked around. “Mr Quinn not here?” He pointed to the bag of evidence. “Do you know if he’s finished with those yet so I can take them down to Records?”

  “Yes, take them,” said Jace.

  The rest of the day they spent attempting to trace McGuire’s contacts. It turned out he did have one living relative, a daughter. She was seventeen, and her name was Saffron McGuire. It seemed a surname was all he had given her; her parents had not been together for long, and never married. Her mother had brought her up alone. Jace sent Kayla to see Saffron, with the idea she might find a female cop more sympathetic. She’d just lost her father, after all, even if they’d had little contact.

  Kayla returned an hour or so later. Jace looked up from his online search, which was not going well. The only promising lead from McGuire’s dataphone turned out to have been in prison for the past six months. “How did you get on?”

  Kayla dumped her handbag on Jace’s desk and pulled up a chair. “I didn’t see her. She locked herself in her bedroom and wouldn’t come out.”

  “Did she say anything through the door?”

  “Yes. ‘Fuck off’.”

  “Ah. What about her mother?”

  “She was quite friendly. She’s got a boyfriend who lives in the flat. They’ve been together for five years.”

  “Did she say anything useful?”

  “No. She was happy to chat, she made me a cup of tea, but she hasn’t seen McGuire for years. Said she should never have got involved with him, he was always a waster, but she was just a teenager and didn’t know any better. He was good-looking, apparently, when he was young. She wasn’t surprised he’d come to a sticky end. Nor particularly upset, either.”

  “Did you ask about the TiTrav?”

  “Yes, and she tut-tutted and said he never had any sense.”

  “D’you think by any remote chance he might have given it to his daughter to hide?”

  “Gwen – that’s the mother – said Saffron hadn’t seen him since her birthday three weeks before.”

  “As far as she knows. It’s a pity you didn’t get to talk to the girl.”

  “I really doubt she’d have it. Even McGuire wouldn’t be irresponsible enough to involve his child in timecrime, surely.”

  “True. I have a feeling we won’t find it. I reckon it’s just a matter of time till we’re all trying through gritted teeth to be very polite and welcoming to our American counterparts.”

  Before leaving the building, Jace went down to Records to collect McGuire’s two thousand pounds. He had downloaded all the data from McGuire’s phone, and intended to deliver it and the money to the daughter on his way home. Of course, these items could just as well be handed over with the meagre belongings from his rented room, once the team had finished with them, but Jace had an ulterior motive. He’d need to log her chip to acknowledge receipt, and he couldn’t do that through a door. Maybe face to face she’d find it harder to refuse to talk.

  The man in Records peeled open the big plastic bag and tipped the contents on the counter. “Just the money, sir?”

  “Yes . . .” Jace picked it up. That left four bags. He frowned – surely there had been more than this when he last saw them? He rifled through them: drugs, chip, cartridge 1/2, cartridge 2/2.

  “Is this everything?”

  “That’s what I collected this morning from Mr Quinn’s office, sir.”

  Jace hesitated, said, “Thanks,” and turned to go.

  The two tamper-proof bags containing the bullets that had been removed from McGuire’s body were missing.

  CHAPTER 5

  Deductions

  Outside Records Jace thumbed Quinn’s number into his phone, and reached his voicemail. This was not a surprise. Quinn did not like being at the beck and call of a dataphone, and frequently turned it off. Jace didn’t leave a message. He ordered a pod and went to call on Saffron McGuire.

  Saffron and her mother lived in a tower block in Haggerston dating from the 1960s. The flats, originally built for allocation to council tenants rather than selection by buyers on the open market, lacked any sort of visual appeal. They were surrounded by muddy grass bordered by metal barriers redolent of a prison. He rang the bell and told Saffron’s mother who he was; the release clicked. The lift ground its way upwards in slow motion. Jace deliberately hadn’t rung to say he was coming, and he hoped Saffron wasn’t descending in one lift as he rose at a stately pace in the other. He reached the seventeenth floor and a plump woman in her thirties with a pleasant smile opened the door. Jace explained his errand and Gwen asked him in. He followed her into the living room, where a man watching television looked up briefly, then back to the screen.

  The flat seemed huge, compared to his own – though with low ceilings and badly-proportioned windows, and of course no built-in robotics.

  “I don’t know if she’ll talk to you,” Gwen said, apologetically. “She was quite rude to the lady who came this morning. Teenagers, what can you do? Of course, you have to make allowances, she’s upset over what happened to Peter – her dad. Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “That’s very kind, but no thanks. Would you tell Saffron I have her father’s phone for her? I’ll need to log her chip before I hand it over.”

  Gwen went back into the hall and called through a closed door. “Saffy?” Jace moved a little so he could see her. “There’s a gentleman from IEMA wants to talk to you.” A brief muffled response came through the door, which Jace couldn’t make out because of the noise of the television. “He’s got your father’s phone, if you’ll come out.”

  After a moment or two the door opened and Saffron emerged, a small whirlwind of colour and fury. Jace’s eyebrows went up. In a world where women�
�s fashion dealt in understatement and elegance, Saffron’s appearance was arresting, to say the least. Her hair was a mixture of blonde, red, pink and black, her eyes were black-rimmed in a pale face, and there was a stud through her lower lip. She wore a black string vest and a multi-coloured full skirt, teamed with black tights full of holes, and heavy boots that laced up to the knee. Her eyes narrowed as she glared up at him.

  “My name is Jace Carnady, Miss McGuire. I’m sorry about your loss.”

  “No you’re not. You’re just saying that. Give me his phone.”

  “I’d like to have a quick word with you first, if you don’t mind.”

  “I do mind. I’ve got nothing to say to any of you time police scum.”

  “Saffy!”

  “It’s all right,” Jace said. He didn’t blame the girl. But for his team’s errors her father would be alive. If he’d only told Quinn the man was unarmed and not wearing a TiTrav instead of assuming he knew, or if Scott and Quinn had both hit his arm like they should have done, he wouldn’t be here. She hated the lot of them, and she was right to do so. This had been a wasted journey.

  He got out his dataphone and brought up the reader. Saffron turned so her upper arm faced him. She had a circle tattooed round the faint dimple that indicated the site of the chip, decorated with skulls and roses, with a scroll saying FREEDOM DIED HERE and an arrow pointing at the circle. With a beep, the reader identified her and Jace put his phone away. He got out McGuire’s phone and the two thousand pounds and gave them to the girl. She started towards her bedroom, then turned and came back, right up to Jace, staring into his eyes. Her face was pretty, he realized, in spite of her expression of contempt; heart-shaped, with big eyes and full lips. She was so close he could see that beneath the black makeup, her eyes were swollen; bloodshot too.