Dead in Time (The Sara Jones Cycle Book 1)

by Terence Bailey

  ‘Rhoddo?’ she called. Her tightly-controlled voice wavered.

  She flicked on the hallway light and noticed Rhodri’s umbrella stand had toppled over. Thin switches of willow and leather crops were scattered across the mosaic floor. Cautiously, Sara stepped over them, and peered into the sitting room. Rhodri’s jacket, tie and trousers lay neatly over the arm of the sofa. Further into the room, a black leather skirt lay discarded on the floor, like a skinned hide flung to rot where it had landed.

  In the gilt-framed mirror over the mantelpiece, Sara could see the polished wooden stairway behind her. Somehow, the act of concentrating on it sharpened not only her eyesight, but her hearing. Faintly, from upstairs, she heard the repetitive patter of music. She swallowed, felt a wave of irrational dread, and walked towards it.

  Up on the landing, a ripped pair of black panties lay lifelessly next to a thin willow cane. On the peach wall there was a small smear of blood.

  The music came from Rhodri’s bedroom. The electronic buzz of an acid house track.

  ‘Rhodri,’ Sara said in a low voice, ‘I am coming upstairs.’

  She leapt up the remaining few stairs. The door was open a crack, but the room was dark. She pushed the glossy white wood with the flat of her palm. Something was blocking the way. Fear welled inside her, and she felt fifteen again. She threw herself shoulder-first into the door. On the other side, she heard a muffled thud, and a weak groan.

  Sara squeezed through the gap, stumbling over Rhodri’s bare legs. She released a guttural wail: he was sprawled on the glossy floorboards, wearing only an unbuttoned white shirt without cufflinks, and jockey shorts. His skin was as white as the garments he wore. Whiter – the clothes had been stained bloody, deep red splashes spreading outward through the white linen.

  Sara switched on the overhead light. Rhodri was bleeding from deep slice to his left wrist. A small, blood-sticky razor blade lay at his side. The music thrummed repetitively from a speaker dock in the corner.

  ‘Sara, help me,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t want to die.’

  ‘Rhoddo ...’

  ‘I thought I did – I mean ... I’m in trouble, Sara. Help me.’

  Gasping, trying to calm her breathing, Sara bent down and examined her brother’s wound. It was obvious that Rhodri had meant to kill himself: many would-be suicides slashed across their wrists, which was enough to hurt a lot, but usually not enough for significant blood loss. Rhodri had sliced downward, deeply – but, fortunately, he had missed the vein, cutting alongside rather than through it.

  Still, he had lost a lot of blood, and without immediate treatment, he would die. Sara’s mind reeled. She had left her medical kit in Wales ... but she could bandage the wound with a bed sheet.

  ‘Oh, Rhoddo,’ she said through angry tears, ‘you’re so stupid. I’m going to bandage you up, then I’ll call 999, okay?’

  ‘No!’ he gasped. ‘Don’t call anyone ... nobody can know.’

  ‘Rhoddo,’ she said, standing, ‘you need to see a doctor!’

  ‘You’re a doctor,’ he whispered. ‘Help me.’

  She needed to staunch the flow. The screech of the music made it hard to think. She reached to the corner, stabbed Rhoddo’s iPhone into silence, then looked frantically towards the unmade bed ... and gasped. All thoughts of creating a tourniquet were lost as she gaped at the motionless figure that lay tangled in the sheets.

  She closed her eyes. ‘Oh my God, Rhoddo,’ she whispered in sickened horror. ‘Oh, my God.’

  The prostitute was dead. She lay curled naked in a foetal position, the skin of her buttocks a war-zone of welts. Her head was twisted at an odd angle.

  ‘I didn’t mean to kill her,’ Rhodri moaned. ‘Oh, Sara, I’m so sorry. You’ve got to help me. There’s nobody else we can call. Just don’t let me die!’

  What should I do? Sara asked herself. The train of indulgence she had ridden with her brother all these years had suddenly run out of track. Rhodri needed a blood transfusion. He would either face the authorities or bleed to death – and either way, the life he knew was over.

  Sara felt herself swoon, and shook her head sharply to ward off a fainting spell. An odd sensation pricked at her, as if trying to compel her to slip into blackness. She fought it, and worked to dull her emotions. She grabbed the edge of a sheet, tore at it with her teeth, and ripped a strip. She moved back to her brother, and crouched down beside him, taking his icy cold arm.

  ‘Rhodri, you’ve got to tell me what happened.’

  ‘I don’t know!’ he whimpered. ‘I don’t know what happened.’

  ‘You need to think,’ she cried, winding the strip around his forearm.

  At this touch, Sara’s vision began to shimmer. She slumped down to the floor, suddenly unable to control herself. The bedroom about her began to grow very bright, then faded. She felt herself falling through layers of blackness.

  Sara was tuning in ... tuning in to her brother Rhodri. And suddenly, at long last, her search drew to an end.

  Suddenly, she understood everything.

  It is the previous week. Sara finds herself hovering above the harbour in Aberystwyth. The distorted reflection of the moon ripples in Cardigan bay. Ahead, by a broken sea-rail, two men stand.

  Steadily, Sara drifts closer.

  ‘It’s down there,’ she hears one man say. ‘See that crack?’

  She doesn’t recognise him.

  ‘Where?’ the other fellow asks, and Sara gasps. My God, she thinks ... that’s Daffy!

  ‘You’re not close enough. You’ve got to move in.’ The man tugs at Daffy’s jacket.

  This is the night Daffy died – Sara is sure of it.

  She feels the same breathless horror rush upon her that she experienced in her visions of Shrewsbury. But she is more in control now. She steadies herself. She doesn’t know why this vision has come, but she knows she has to watch.

  ‘I can’t see it,’ Daffy is saying. ‘I don’t know where it is ...’

  Sara watches the man push Daffy towards the break in the rail, kicking expertly at his calves. She sees Daffy fall onto his knees, hears him scream.

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’

  A bottle cracks the back of Daffy’s skull, and the assailant shoves him to the cement, savagely breaking the bottle against his face. Now, Sara hears herself scream. From somewhere, Rhodri cries out in response, but the man assaulting Daffy pays no heed.

  Stop it, Sara! Watch. Just watch.

  So she watches. She watches impotently, as the man uses the broken bottle to cut into Daffy’s arteries, and then kicks him over the edge of the seawall, into the tide.

  The man watches Daffy bob and float. Then suddenly ...

  She edges a little farther back in time.

  Daylight in Aberystwyth. The platform at the train station. Passengers exit the two coaches from Shrewsbury. Tourists weighed down by backpacks larger than their backs, students blowing into town for the new term, a woman back from holiday, her suitcase adorned with a tag from Gatwick.

  Passengers for Birmingham wait to board. A woman clutches her young son while Daddy folds the pushchair. A businessman checks his watch and taps a small date book against his thigh.

  Against a brick wall, removed from the small crowd, two men sit on a bench. Sara can drift close without anyone noticing, because here, she is pure spirit. She looks carefully.

  She recognises one as the man she has just seen murder Daffy. The man who will murder Daffy somewhere later in time.

  The other man is Rhodri.

  When is this? she wonders. Sara thinks, and knows the answer. This is last Thursday – the day before her brother appeared in Penweddig. A day he had claimed to be in London.

  The two men speak quietly, their voices camouflaged by the noises of the station. Sara can hear them perfectly.

  ‘You know he’s in town?’ Rhodri asks.

  ‘Oh, he’s in town,’ the man replies with a smirk. ‘I even know where he sleeps. There’s a wooden shelter on the s
eafront.’

  ‘I don’t care where he sleeps,’ snaps Rhodri. ‘I don’t want to know anything about him.’

  ‘Fine, fine,’ the man says with a dismissive wave. ‘You got the money?’

  ‘Of course I’ve got it,’ Rhodri replies, then chuckles sardonically. ‘You can even keep the bag it’s in. Quality bag, that.’

  From somewhere in the distance – from the other time she occupies – Sara hears her brother cry out to her. She must wake up and help him, he says. ‘Please,’ he says, ‘please.’ He is dying.

  But Sara cannot wake up. Once again, she tumbles through blackness, backwards.

  It is early summer, London, and Rhodri is afraid, a fear like anguish – tortured, indignant rage that time could be so cruel as to unearth this relic from days long buried. That was a different Rhodri, he wants to scream. Why are you here? Why are you the same?

  But this man is not the same. No – he’s weak. The years have faded him, used him cruelly, and this foul little shit is no match for Rhodri fucking Jones. You can tear him apart, Rhoddo, no problem.

  The blackmailer who calls himself Daffy stands – stands out, incongruous – in the hallway of Rhodri’s house. ‘You owe me this, Rhoddo,’ he says, his voice high and wavering, uncertain, ‘you owe me a life. It’s taken me years to realise I have a right to this.’

  ‘You have a right to nothing,’ Rhodri spits, his voice just as scared, but more deadly. ‘You’re the reason my life went off the rails, and the fact that I pulled it back on track again is no thanks to you. If you hadn’t run, I’d have killed you then and there.’

  Daffy breathes in staccato jerks. He thinks Rhoddo will strike him, but all Rhoddo says is, ‘I wish I had.’

  Daffy begins to weep, like the terrified young man he was, like a small transgressor turned victim who has paid too high a price for youthful misjudgements. ‘Please,’ he screams, ‘I’m desperate. I can’t live like this any more!’

  ‘Then you can die,’ Rhodri hisses. ‘Just don’t do it in my bloody house.’

  ‘Everyone will know!’ Daffy shrieks. ‘I’ll tell them and you’ll be finished. You’ll be in prison!’

  Rhodri is trembling now, patches of sweat staining his shirt at the armpits, the odour of his cologne thick in the air. ‘I would strongly suggest,’ he whispers through gritted teeth, ‘that you kill yourself tonight. It will be less painful than if I have it done for you.’

  Daffy’s face contorts in silent, wracking sobs and he drops to the floor, his hot tears and phlegm smearing across the cold mosaic. Rhodri kicks him, hard, in the ribs.

  ‘Get out, Glyn,’ he snarls. ‘Or I’ll kill you now.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Sara’s head lolled groggily as she fought her way to consciousness. She sucked a deep breath through her mouth, into her constricted chest, lungs burning from inhaling Rhodri’s sharp cologne. She was pressed against his chest. Coughing, she hoisted up her head in a clumsy jerk; her brother’s eyes were opened, staring blankly at the plaster moulding on the pristine white bedroom ceiling.

  ‘Daffy,’ she breathed. ‘Daffy was Glyn Thomas, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he?’

  Rhodri’s head nodded slowly.

  ‘And you had him killed.’

  ‘Sara,’ Rhodri whispered faintly, ‘I’ll explain. I promise I will. Just help me now. Please. I’m so weak.’

  ‘Why did you kill Daffy?’ Sara asked.

  Rhodri’s eyelids fluttered and closed. ‘He wanted ... to hurt me.’

  ‘He was trying to blackmail you,’ Sara said. ‘Tell me why, Rhodri.’

  Rhodri shook his head from side to side, faintly. ‘He was disturbed. Mentally un ... sound’

  For the first time ever, a dreadful thought crept into Sara’s mind, outflanking her conscious logic with a darker certainty. She felt horrified, as if it made her unclean to acknowledge what she was thinking.

  ‘What did you do to make him blackmail you?’ she whispered, dreading the answer. ‘When we were young, when it all happened. What did you do?’

  Rhodri’s lips moved, but he said nothing.

  She heard the Islington traffic shudder and grind in the distance. They were so far from Wales, so removed from their past. And yet, it was all here, all now, all vivid in front of her. An uncontrollable tingling shimmered through Sara’s body, leaving in its wake a floating numbness, as if she’d been anaesthetised.

  She rolled off Rhodri and pushed herself up, until she was sitting upright. Her new-found lightness made her head swirl, but she forced herself to take a strong breath. She stared at the bandage on the side of his neck, where Eldon had sliced him.

  ‘Rhodri,’ she said in a unflinching voice, ‘I want you to tell me the truth.’

  She reached out to grasp his cold, dying arm, but then her voice broke as she sobbed, ‘Who murdered our parents?’

  Rhoddo sings at the top of his voice as he flies his motor scooter over twisty little lanes. His Walkman plays the same trance track that Duncan had shared just minutes ago. Rhodri is high on everything.

  Trees and hedgerows flash by, and there’s light and love in all of them. When Rhoddo breathes, there is steam in the frosty winter air, and the steam glows brightly. Duncan Kraig understands what love is – something his father never could, not in a million, trillion years. Glyn says Rhoddo’s dad is just a pain in the arse who doesn’t comprehend the majesty of what’s happening in Artist’s Valley.

  ‘Majesty’ is one of Duncan’s words. Glyn’s been using it a lot lately.

  Rhoddo feels pretty majestic too, as he fishtails the motor scooter on the gravel drive and swaggers into the house. He knows from the car that the old man’s home, working upstairs, and hopes he just stays there.

  Trouble is, he doesn’t.

  ‘Rhodri,’ calls the voice. ‘Get up here – I want to see you.’ In Rhoddo’s head it sounds like bubbles underwater, and he giggles.

  Rhoddo peels off his jacket and sheds it in the hallway. Duncan Kraig says, ‘Just be cool about stuff. Say yeah, okay, and do what you want to anyway.’ Duncan’s really brilliant, but then he’s never had to fight with Rhodri Jones Senior.

  Speak of the devil and he stomps downstairs. ‘It’s still school hours,’ Daddy shouts. This is the way it always starts. ‘What are you doing home? I’ll bet I know who you’ve been out with!’

  He looks at Rhodri with just the weirdest expression, and Rhodri laughs and laughs. ‘What have you taken?’ he demands in a low, horrified drawl, shaking Rhoddo by the shoulders. ‘Tell me! What sort of drugs are you on?’

  Drugs? How terribly quaint. What does Daddy know about drugs?

  But, Jesus – Rhoddo must look worse than he thought. There’s part of him, deep down inside somewhere, that’s thinking really straight, that’s lucid and articulate, and this part watches his father watching him, and realises maybe it wasn’t so smart to come home right now. It observes his dad shake him and shake him, and notices how this begins to irritate the non-watching part of Rhoddo, who suddenly feels like sleep. You don’t want to be shaken when you’re sleepy. So he pushes, lashes out. ‘Get off me!’ he shouts.

  The lucid part of Rhoddo that’s watching braces itself.

  Daddy swears, grabs at him, and Rhoddo tries to fight, but his arms aren’t working so well now. They’re like windmills in a gale. Daddy grabs him easily, and frog-marches him upstairs, pushing, jerking his arms, lecturing all the while. Rhoddo’s legs are rubbery.

  Daddy throws him on the bed, slams the door, locks it from the outside.

  He put on that lock a while ago. It’s so insulting that Rhoddo hasn’t been able to admit it to Glyn. He hears Daddy stomp upstairs again, and Rhoddo falls into the strangest sleep.

  He dreams of every fight he’s ever had with his father. He observes years of pursed lips, glaring eyes, disapproval. ‘You’re coddling the boy,’ say his dreams. ‘Stop coddling him.’ Jesus, a lifetime of that – like a prison! And now what? It’s just going to get worse. No more Artists V
alley for Rhoddo Jones.

  He’s numb when he wakes up, but he knows what he’s going to do. It’s all so clear now, that this situation cannot be allowed to go on. Rhoddo’s place is with Duncan and his friends.

  Sara shook her head, gasping, repeating the words, ‘No ... no, no, I can’t, I can’t ...’

  The certainty was so terrible, the dread so tangible, the moment so close and she couldn’t, wouldn’t face it. She needed to cry; she wanted to run. There were two times, two horrors playing out before her. Which horror should she choose?

  But Sara couldn’t choose because the visions did not stop. She was in young Rhoddo’s mind as he climbed off his bed.

  And there’s no thinking needed now. Rhoddo is going to want his gloves – but they’re balled up in his jacket downstairs. Never mind, there’s a spare pair in the drawer under the bed. So, with gloved hands, he edges his window open, and squeezes out onto the flat roof extension. He drops to the cold, dead grass – but he’s still not too well co-ordinated. He falls.

  ‘Shit!’ he hisses, and a burst of steam shoots from his mouth like light. Blankly, he slinks around the house, enters the kitchen, and eases the jangling keys from their hook.

  Daddy’s shotgun is in the shed.

  Getting the freezing-cold gun is easy, but the cartridges will be harder. The old man keeps them in the hall cupboard, at the foot of the stairs which lead to his loft office. No sneakiness or subtlety possible there. The assault’s got to be full-frontal. Dead on.

  Rhoddo returns to the kitchen and walks up the stairs to the first floor. But carefully – his legs aren’t so steady right now. The shotgun cocked over one arm, he pulls open the cupboard door and fumbles with a dusty box of shells.

  ‘Kay?’ his father calls. ‘That you? Go see Rhodri. He’s in his room, and I think you should go take a look at him –’

  His father appears at the top of the stairs, and gasps, mid-sentence. Slowly Rhoddo aims. He pulls the trigger and his father is flung backwards. So is he. There was more recoil than he’d expected, and it’s hurt his shoulder. He catches his balance and stands still for a moment, trying to think. He doesn’t know whether to shoot Daddy again – he’s never done this before – so he reloads just in case, and creeps upstairs. Looking at the body makes him feel ill.