What Time Devours

by A. J. Hartley

“She probably got the wrong day,” said the bartender. “She gets a little confused.”

  “Really? I thought she was the brains behind that writing team.”

  “That’s what people say,” he confided, “but she was always a bit batty if you ask me, and she’s getting worse. Good at making stuff up, you know—stories—but even with all that cash rolling in can’t seem to keep her life from going pear-shaped. Not that she cares. What time is it?” he checked his watch. “She’ll be at the old house,” he said. “If she’s in town, and it’s not raining. Bound to be.”

  “The old house?”

  “Hamstead Marshall Park Manor.”

  “Can you direct me?”

  “Having lived here all my life I might just be able to manage it,” he said, with that sand-dry smile of his. Then, with a shrug and a roll of his eyes that he didn’t explain, he added, “Your funeral, mate.”

  CHAPTER 61

  Thomas turned the napkin the bartender had written on, but he couldn’t make any sense of it. He’d driven to where the house should be, but there was nothing. The road rolled through open fields and scattered trees. There was a church and an occasional farm building, but nothing that merited the grand title of Hamstead Marshall Park Manor. It wasn’t raining yet, but it would soon, and the light was dropping steadily. If he didn’t find it soon, he would miss the chance.

  He drove the stretch of road twice, then stopped and got out. It was cold and a stiff wind was blowing. He was, he realized, looking for something like the Blackstone place—an imposing stately home in expansive grounds. There was nothing of the kind around.

  He parked beside the church, a small stone building with a square tower, probably medieval in origin but tinkered with over the years. He walked through the churchyard, hoping that someone might be working there who could point him in the right direction. No one was there.

  He walked around the ancient graveyard with its lurching, weathered headstones, looking out over the fields for a sign of the great house, and it was then that he saw something strange. Standing in the middle of the rough and tussocky field was a pair of tall brick pillars with inset niches, surmounted with stone vases. Weeds sprouted from the very brickwork and blew in tangled masses from the urns on top. They looked for all the world like gateposts, but there were no gates, no walls outside the posts, and nothing he could see inside.

  Thomas walked toward the pillars.

  On the ground was a yellow flower. He took it to be growing there, but its stem was cut as if it had been dropped there. A few feet away was another. He couldn’t say why, but the flowers bothered him.

  Thomas walked carefully over the uneven ground, feeling the first raindrop fall from the gray sky and streak down his cheek. When he got close to them, he was even more convinced that they were gateposts, but in this completely open space, they seemed surreal and unearthly, like the monoliths of an ancient stone circle, growing out of the earth itself. He looked around him. The rain was falling steadily now, and the place felt strange and isolated. He entered the gates—insofar as there was anything to enter—and looked about him again, as if expecting a building to suddenly appear before him, like some spectral structure in a fairy tale or a ghost story. There was nothing, and with the cold rain falling harder, he began to think that he should go back to the car. He was clearly in the wrong location. There were more flowers here too, cut and strewn at random or blown about the field, some fresh, some faded, some dried to nothing, but none of them native to this spot.

  There was something about the place, something old and elemental. Thomas shivered.

  And then he saw her. She was squatting on the ground about two hundred yards away, motionless, her head turned slightly away from him. She might have been a half-submerged rock, but even though she was still, he was surprised how long it had taken him to see her. She was elderly, he thought, frail-looking, her hair long and blowing wildly. He moved closer. She wore a dark overcoat fastened tight. There were flowers all around her. Cut flowers.

  CHAPTER 62

  What are you, Thomas thought, suddenly feeling like Macbeth stumbling upon the weird sisters on the blasted heath, that look not like the inhabitants of the earth and yet are on it . . . ?

  He took a step toward her. Then another. She knew he was there. He would bet his life on it. There was a tension to her, an alertness, like a rabbit in open country.

  “Miss Church?” he said. “My name’s Thomas Knight. I was hoping I might talk to you . . .”

  And suddenly she turned and he thought, Oh my God. It’s Margaret!

  It was the woman he’d seen by the river in Stratford, the woman who had cursed Randall Dagenhart with such fury that she had reminded him of Margaret of Anjou in Shakespeare’s early histories. The shock stopped him cold, and he stood there in the rain with his mouth open.

  The fury he had seen in her then was gone, and her face, though distant, was quite composed. When she spoke, her voice was low but clear, despite the wind and rain.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m looking into the death of Daniella Blackstone,” he said, the truth spilling out unforeseen, “or rather, I’m looking into the death of a friend of mine, David Escolme, who represented her and was murdered shortly after she died.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she said in a voice that was almost dreamily uninterested.

  She turned away, staring blankly into the rain.

  “I just wanted to ask you a question or two,” he repeated.

  She sat quite still, unanswering.

  “Miss Church,” he said. “I’m sorry if this is a bad time, but I’m over from the States and I can’t stay too long . . .”

  She sat motionless as one of the monolithic gateposts, as if she did not even know he was there.

  “Daniella was a friend of yours,” Thomas ventured. “You worked together for years. What did you fall out over?”

  The woman didn’t look at him and said nothing.

  “I found her body,” he said, suddenly angry. “I found her in my yard. I never asked to get involved in this. I didn’t want to.”

  “Did she die quickly?” said Church, still not looking at him.

  “I think so,” he replied.

  “Well,” she said, “I suppose that’s something.”

  She stood up abruptly, and Thomas saw that she wasn’t as old as she had first seemed. She moved slowly but with control. She walked toward him, and Thomas remembered just enough of her fury with Dagenhart that he had to stop himself from taking a step backward.

  “I didn’t kill her, Mr. Knight,” she said. “We disagreed over a lot of things—ultimately, of course, money—but I did not kill her. I did not want her dead. We disagreed, but there was a lot we had in common.”

  “Can we get out of the rain and talk a little? I could take you to the pub. Chat a little. Have a drink.”

  “I have a bicycle.”

  “You could put it in the trunk. Get you out of the rain.”

  She considered him with wide, frank eyes, and Thomas had to force himself not to look away. It was like being close to a bull or a fox, her black eyes full of an unknowable instinct, a sense of self so foreign it barely seemed human.

  “You can drive me home,” she said.

  She walked past him, and for a moment he was left standing in that unearthly space inside the gateposts, alone in the elements, surrounded by cut flowers.

  CHAPTER 63

  “What was that place?” he asked, as soon as they pulled away. He had to be cautious in his questioning and thought this might be a sufficiently indirect starting point. He could feel her presence beside him in the passenger seat, a little too close, smelling of rain-sodden clothes and earth.

  “It was a great country house. It burned down in the eighteenth century.”

  “Why do you like it?” he asked. There was something about her voice he found unnerving, a distant, reflective quality that sounded like an old recording echoing through time
and static. It was like she wasn’t really there.

  Like Margaret, he thought.

  Shakespeare’s vengeful French queen who first appeared in Henry VI, part I was still hissing curses three plays later in Richard III, during events that occurred long after the historical Margaret had died. She stayed around by the sheer force of her vengeance and malice like a ghost out of Seneca.

  “I like the quiet,” she said.

  It wasn’t true. He was almost sure it wasn’t, but it was all she was going to say.

  “You and Daniella fought over money?”

  “Daniella was always better at the public stuff,” she said, still reflective but more immediate now, more there, “the interviews and book signings and TV appearances. They loved her in the States, with her cut-glass accent and ancestral home. I didn’t mind. I preferred to be out of the spotlight. But the weight of the touring, getting up in the night to do live interviews for stations six time zones away, the constant smiling for cameras, it all got too much for her. Or rather she began to feel it more than she had. She felt she was doing the lion’s share of the work.”

  “But you were the one actually writing the books!” said Thomas.

  Elsbeth Church laughed softly, and Thomas felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. It was a knowing, bestial chuckle that came from deep in her throat.

  “Yes, but writing is only part of what makes a bestseller, particularly when you have a celebrity writer,” she said. “Daniella felt that her public profile was actually more important to our sales than the contents of the books. She had a point. Many of the best books make no one any money, but put a star’s picture on the cover, some ghostwritten memoir by a former talk-show host, sportsman, or politico, and you can rake in millions. Daniella’s face—those strange, remarkable eyes—painted a thousand words and rather more than that in pounds.”

  Thomas had almost forgotten Daniella’s eyes, one green, one uncannily violet. Even in death they had been unsettling. He could only imagine what they had looked like when she had been alive.

  “But you disagreed,” he said, shoving the memory away with a shudder.

  “It was what you might call a leap of faith or principle. I knew that in real terms, in what they call market terms, she was probably right. But I still felt that a book should be about what’s in it, the sentence-level stuff, not how it’s sold.”

  “So you separated and she couldn’t sell another book.”

  “Ironic, isn’t it? The market loved her, but they also loved that double-barreled author: Blackstone and Church. The publishers thronged to her, but when they saw what she had written, they pulled back, cut her adrift. ‘Too risky,’ they said, particularly since she expected a colossal advance. Sad. When I first heard she was dead, I thought she must have killed herself. Daniella so wanted to succeed.”

  She still sounded distant, like a sleepwalker or someone under hypnosis, but she seemed less strange and alien to him now. Maybe it was just being in the car instead of that strange, desolate place. Maybe he was just getting used to her.

  “Was Daniella fond of Shakespeare?” said Thomas.

  Church hesitated, staring at the rain-swept road ahead.

  “Not especially. Why?”

  “I just thought, you know, a writer living so close to Stratford . . .”

  Thomas let the statement trail off, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Have you ever heard of Love’s Labour’s Won?” he said.

  “It’s lost,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” he demanded, excited.

  “It’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, not Love’s Labour’s Won.”

  “Oh,” said Thomas. “My mistake.”

  “We’re here,” she said, as the stone cottage hove into bleary, rain-streaked view. “I won’t invite you in.”

  She offered no explanation for that, and Thomas couldn’t think of a reason to argue.

  “Another time, perhaps.”

  “Perhaps. Could you open the boot, please?”

  Thomas gave her a blank look.

  “The boot,” she repeated, her dark eyes flashing again. “My bicycle.”

  “Oh,” said Thomas. “The trunk. Right.”

  He fumbled for the release lever and heard the trunk pop open. He started to get out but she grasped his wrist with one strong, thin hand. He flinched, then became quite still as she gripped his arm and stared into his face.

  “I can manage,” she said. “I’m a very capable woman.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” he said.

  “Stay out of the rain.”

  She turned to get out of the car, and her wild, wet hair brushed his face. He caught again that musky, animal scent of hers, and thought it again:

  What are you, that look not like the inhabitants of the earth and yet are on it?

  CHAPTER 64

  Thomas bought a set of bolt cutters from a hangarlike DIY superstore on the Warwick Road, then drove to the Castle Lodge and the best night’s sleep he had had since leaving the States.

  The following morning he feasted on Mrs. Hughes’s obligatory “full English breakfast” and checked Kumi’s arrival time. He had more than enough time to do this one thing in town before heading out to the airport to meet her. The bolt cutters were still in the car. With luck he wouldn’t need them, but at least he was prepared.

  From the road Daniella Blackstone’s house looked the same as before. The castle in the distance seemed to brood a little more, though whether that was the gray day or the memory of his last visit, Thomas wasn’t sure. There was no sign of the steward’s car. Thomas drove back around to the castle lot and parked there.

  He trekked back to the house, the bolt cutters swinging heavily in the store’s flimsy plastic bag so that he had to actually hold the handles to stop them from tearing through. A hundred yards from the drive up to the house he clambered over a stone wall and jogged through trees and across the lawn to the back of the building. A cluster of brick chimneys marked the kitchen, and over to their right he saw a small wooden shutter, painted a gloss green: the coal hatch. It was, as expected, padlocked, but the lock was rusted and immobile. He doubted that even the key opened it now.

  The bolt cutters chewed the steel loop through in two squeezes. Thomas reset the cutters and did the same to the other side. He glanced around before opening the hatch. He had moved, he knew, from the inquisitive, even rude, to the downright criminal.

  You had better be right about this, he thought.

  Which overstated the case somewhat. It wasn’t like he just needed a bit of evidence to prove a theory. He had no theory. He had only a gut-level hunch that amounted to little more than the sure knowledge that he had missed something important.

  The hatch creaked open. It was dark inside and smelled musty, damp. The little door was at ground level outside, but was at least six feet off the cellar floor within. Thomas backed in, lowered himself as far as he could, doing his best to pull the shutters almost closed behind him, then dropped, leaving the bolt cutters outside.

  He rubbed the coal dust from his hands and stared up at the telltale crack between the shutters. If anyone who knew the house came around the back, they’d see they were open. He looked around for something he could use to pull them shut, decided he wouldn’t be able to do it properly without locking them from the outside, and went up the stone stairs to the kitchen hallway.

  The office door was unlocked, and Thomas was unaccountably glad he didn’t have to break in, as if this made his crime less. On the wall was a board of keys on hooks. They were not labeled, but he knew which one he needed. It was, like most of the others, a large, old-fashioned key, but it had tarnished from disuse.

  Miss Alice’s room, he thought, in the steward’s voice.

  He paused in front of the portrait of Jeremy Blackstone wearing his First World War uniform in the sitting room, that confident smile looking, Thomas now thought, defiantly optimistic. Then he moved quickly up the two flights of stairs to the tow
er room that had been locked during his last visit.

  The key was stiff, but it turned. He stepped inside, and closed it behind him.

  He wasn’t sure what he had expected, some Miss Havisham-esque shrine of dust and cobwebs, perhaps, but this was not it.

  This was bright, airy, and dustless, with windows on three sides looking out over fields from a significant height, and though it was effectively a kind of turret befitting some nineteenth-century folly, it was also the room of a teenager, circa 1982. There was an England soccer shirt in shiny white fabric, its shoulders trimmed with blue and red tacked over the door. There was a flyer for an “End the War” rally to take place May eighteenth in Reading. There were other political notices: “Thatcher Out,” and one adorned with peace symbols and the acronym CND: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The war in question, judging by an article cut from the Guardian dating from June of that year, and celebrating its end, was the Falklands conflict.

  The place was like a time capsule. Another newspaper from July tenth reported a break-in at Buckingham Palace by an unemployed Irishman who had managed to find his way to the queen’s bedroom and sat talking to her for ten minutes before the alarm was raised. In pride of place over the girl’s bed was a poster-sized copy of XTC’s English Settlement album cover, the disjointed but somehow cursive sketch of an animal (a horse?), stark white against flat green. Thomas stared at it, remembering Escolme’s interest in the band and the copy of the disc he had seen in what he had taken to be Escolme’s hotel room.

  But it hadn’t been Escolme’s room, it had been Blackstone’s, and the CD was almost certainly hers: a memento of her daughter carried with her wherever she went. Thomas found himself moving quietly, not because he was listening for sounds of the returning steward, but out of respect. The ordinariness of the room—its stuffed animals on the bed, its outmoded fashions hanging in the open closet, its heaps of childish jewelry on the dresser—made him feel more like an intruder than he had when he cut the lock off the coal hatch door.

  There was one further violation to be committed, however. He had seen it as soon as he came in, but he considered the rest of the room first, as if hoping that what he learned from the walls would make the other thing unnecessary. He leaned into a photograph stuck above the desk: five girls together. The one in the middle was, almost certainly, Alice Blackstone. She had her mother’s uncanny violet eyes, though hers matched. There was a trace of the hauteur as well, a faintly aristocratic profile that could have been cold and hard, but wasn’t. She was laughing, her arms around the other girls. Thomas wondered how much longer she had had to live when that was taken.