What Time Devours

by A. J. Hartley

  “A little intimidated by you, probably,” said Thomas.

  “Unlike you.”

  “No, I am intimidated by your intelligence and your work, but I’m not an academic, so it doesn’t matter if I make a fool of myself.”

  “ ‘Those wits, that think they have thee, do very oft prove fools,’ ” she said, quoting from Twelfth Night, “ ‘and I, that am sure I lack thee, may pass for a wise man.’ Do you think that old gentleman is saying something when he quotes like that, that he’s expressing himself somehow? Or is it just words? Sounds he learned by rote?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I don’t know which would be worse. If he was just babbling or if there was a method . . .”

  “. . . to his madness,” Thomas completed.

  “God,” she said. “I’m doing it already. So are you.”

  “I feel like I’ve been doing it constantly for weeks,” said Thomas. “Every second thought I have seems to come as a quotation from Shakespeare. At first it was fun. I thought it made me sophisticated and profound. Now it’s annoying and—I don’t know—limiting, depressing, like every idea I’ve had has been had before. Not too long ago I was running for my life through the ruins of Kenilworth Castle, and all I could think about were lines from Henry the goddamned Fifth.”

  She raised her eyebrows, then leaned into him suddenly and her penetrating eyes fixed him.

  “What were you thinking about before?” she said. “There’s something going on with you,” she said, giving him a shrewd look. “I’m not sure what, but you don’t quite fit in, and not because you aren’t a college professor. I saw you talking to Mrs. Covington, which is a triumph of itself. Most of the Shakespeareans walk right past her, assuming, wrongly as it turns out, that she is somehow beneath them.”

  “Professor Barker . . . ,” he began.

  “Katy.”

  “Katy,” said Thomas.

  “Just don’t call me that in front of your friend. He may have a heart attack.”

  “Did you know Daniella Blackstone?” said Thomas.

  “Ah,” she said. She sat back then and looked at him. “I wondered if that was it. Randall has been positively jumpy ever since he saw you in Chicago. I met her once or twice, but no, I didn’t know her, and I really don’t know much about her. She had strange eyes: different colors, I mean. One was almost purple. It was quite unnerving to look at her, though I think some people—men—found it . . . arresting.”

  “Did you know Randall’s—Professor Dagenhart’s—wife?”

  “Not well,” she said. “No one did. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but she was a difficult woman. Randall said it was the illness. Maybe it was. But she was a bitter person. One of those invalids who resent the healthy. Randall danced attendance on her every moment of every day for almost ten years, but all he got from her was scorn. It was painful to see. When she was finally so sick that she couldn’t leave the house, I think everyone who knew them breathed a sigh of relief. Terrible really, but there it is. It was just too awful to see her and the way she treated him. You felt for her, of course. How could you not? But she was relentlessly cruel. And it was more than the sickness. It was as if she had secret knowledge about him that she used to keep him in line, a kind of constant emotional blackmail.”

  “About his relationship with Daniella?”

  “Perhaps, though I always suspected there was something else. She loved to make dark hints in public around him. It was her only pleasure. By the time she died—about six years ago—Randall was so broken by the endless servitude and humiliation that he never recovered.”

  “And you’ve no idea what it was that she held over him?”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “We’re not that close outside professional gatherings. If you want my hunch, I’d say that it involved Daniella Blackstone and that it went back a long way.”

  “Hundreds of years,” said Thomas, “or about a quarter century?”

  “I’m not sure, but Randall and she were connected on some deep level, the kind of level that only time can build. History, Mr. Knight. That’s what it is about. But what time builds it also destroys.”

  “Cormorant devouring time,” Thomas quoted reflexively from Love’s Labour’s Lost.

  “See,” she said. “You’re doing it too.”

  CHAPTER 74

  First thing the following morning, Thomas called Kumi, then Constable Robson from his hotel. Kumi was back in Tokyo and looking forward to a night’s rest before beginning radiation first thing the following day. She would then, contrary to Thomas’s protests, go to work.

  “If it’s too tiring or painful,” she said, “I won’t go. But I have work to do. So.”

  “You should rest,” Thomas said.

  “See, Tom,” she said, not unkindly, “this is why you shouldn’t come. What I need right now is something like normalcy.”

  “That’s what Deborah said,” he said.

  They talked about her flight, and the Twelfth Night production he had seen.

  “I wish I could have been there with you,” she said, as he struggled to convey why he had liked it.

  “Me too,” he said.

  An hour later Thomas was sitting with Constable Robson in the Kenilworth police station, a worn manila file on the desk between them.

  “You think someone wants to keep the play buried because of something in it?” Robson said. “Like what?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Something big, right? Something that would turn scholarship on its head. So what are the options?”

  “Well, there are a lot of controversies tied to Shakespeare’s biography, like whether he was a Catholic, whether he was gay—or whatever the sixteenth-century equivalent was—the extent to which he supported the monarchy, and so on. Any of them could be a big deal in academic circles if they were proved, but I find it hard to believe that the play could do that: not definitively, not enough to kill for.”

  “But if some scholar was really invested in the idea that Shakespeare was a Catholic, say, wouldn’t the wheels come off his career if a new play proved he wasn’t? Or what if someone didn’t like queer . . .” He caught himself. “Homosexuals . But the play proved Shakespeare was one. If you’re crazy enough, isn’t that a motive to keep it hidden away, so the image of the writer doesn’t get . . . you know . . . tarnished ?”

  “But that’s the thing, isn’t it?” said Thomas. “I don’t see how a single play could prove that, when the rest of his plays don’t. Even if it was a strong statement one way or the other, it would still be just one piece of evidence to be weighed with the rest. I can’t imagine any one play putting any of those controversies to bed completely.”

  “What if it proved that your man Shakespeare wasn’t the author at all?” said Robson. “I read something in the paper about some actor saying that the plays were probably written by some lord . . .”

  Thomas remembered Deborah’s West Wing analogy and shook his head.

  “Even if that were true,” he said, “it wouldn’t explain why an academic was trying to keep that information secret. Fifty years ago, Shakespeareans might have been card-carrying establishment types, but not anymore. Most academics think they’re countercultural progressives socially, politically. Most Shakespeareans have little invested in the man from Stratford. Some of them don’t even like his works that much. More would embrace any hard evidence challenging his identity as the playwright without batting an eyelid. It hasn’t happened because there’s no real evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford didn’t write the plays credited to him in his lifetime. I don’t think the kind of evidence we’d get in a new play would change that at all.”

  Robson scowled.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “If it turned out that all them plays were really written by the queen or something, I’d think that was a big deal.”

  “Maybe,” Thomas conceded without really believing it. He wanted to change the subject. “What were t
he names of the girls who died in the fire with Alice Blackstone?” he asked.

  Robson picked up the file on the desk and flipped it open.

  “That I can tell you,” he said. “The evidence room is full of boxes from this case. CID went over them a dozen times but got nothing they could use. From time to time someone starts poking around again, but they never get anywhere. If it happened now, we’d have CCTV and such, but then . . . Anyway, I don’t think we’ll ever throw the evidence away.”

  He paused and then said,

  “Okay, Alice Blackstone, Philippa Adams, Elizabeth Jenkins, Deborah St. Clair, and Nicola Rogers,” he read.

  Pippa, Liz, Debs, and Nicki. The girls from the journal. The girls from the picture.

  Thomas frowned and drummed his fingers on the table top.

  “What exactly happened?” he said.

  “It was the twentieth of July, 1982. The girls were in the school hall. It was six o’clock and everyone else was gone. They were working on some project or other. They had a slot in an upcoming school concert: a dance routine or something. We never found out the details. They used to meet in an old-fashioned coffeehouse called Bruno’s. It’s gone now: part of a dry cleaner’s. Anyway, they usually went to Bruno’s after school, but they were practicing this dance, or whatever it was, and stayed in the school hall. The fire started at the back of the building. We found accelerants—petrol, specifically—that had been used to start it. Some sort of Molotov cocktail, they thought: a bottle of petrol with a burning rag stuffed in the neck. We think it was thrown in through a window.

  “The girls were all found in what they called a green room behind the main stage. We think they didn’t know the building was on fire till it was completely ablaze, by which time, they couldn’t get out.”

  “Was the main door to the school hall locked?”

  “No,” said Robson. “That was the maddening thing. If they had looked out a few minutes earlier and smelled the smoke, they would have been able to walk right out without a scratch. I mean, a burn, I suppose.”

  Robson, usually so amused and separate, looked rattled. He was remembering it all.

  “There had been a few fires like this in the town earlier in the summer. All in abandoned buildings. Kids, we figured, with nothing better to do, getting their kicks. There weren’t drugs in those days, you know? There was drunkenness and vandalism and random beatings, but . . . I don’t know. Random destruction of property wasn’t exactly common, but we kind of understood it, and if the truth were told, we probably weren’t that good at providing kids with things to do. Still, the school fire was different.”

  “No one was hurt in the other fires?”

  “Nope. And after this one, they stopped.”

  “You think it was the same arsonist in each case?”

  “Well, there’s the question,” said Robson. “The first fires weren’t considered as closely as they probably should have been, so the evidence was patchy, but I know some of the blokes who were on the case, and they thought no, it was different. For one thing, this was the only large, public building, the only one where there was even a possibility of people being inside.”

  “Was it considered deliberate,” said Thomas, “I mean the deaths of the girls?”

  “I don’t see why it would have been. I don’t even think whoever set the fire knew they were inside. And if he had wanted them dead, he would have locked them in. It was pure chance that they didn’t step out—go to the bathroom or something—and see the fire while they could still, you know . . .”

  “Get out,” Thomas completed for him.

  “Right.”

  “Were there any suspects?”

  “No serious ones. We brought in the caretaker a few times because he should have been at work by the time the fire started, but the general feeling was that his only crime was laziness.”

  “Is he still in the area?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Robson. “He’s buried here. Died about ten years ago. Poor bastard spent the rest of his life drunk. Felt guilty for not being around to get them out, I suppose. But no one ever thought he had set the fire.”

  “Can I see those names again?”

  Robson showed him the list and he copied it down, feeling again the frustration he had when he had first heard them. He had been almost sure, but now . . .

  Suddenly he got to his feet.

  “Where’s the nearest bookstore?” he said.

  “There’s a place called Browsers on Talisman Square.”

  By the time Robson had finished giving him the directions, Thomas was already on his way.

  Thomas raced through the store, scanning the signs for MYSTERY, ROMANCE, and CRIME FICTION. He found them under THRILLER and snatched the first Blackstone and Church book he saw from the shelf. He tore open the cover and found the copyright page. In tiny print, under the phalanx of addresses and publisher information, he saw the © symbol. Beside it were the names of Daniella Blackstone and Elsbeth Adams.

  Pippa Adams, he thought, his heart thumping.

  Elsbeth Church wrote under a pen name that she had made official. Her real name was Adams and her daughter had burned to death with Alice Blackstone.

  CHAPTER 75

  Thomas called the Shakespeare Institute and got Mrs. Covington on the second double ring.

  “Is Randall Dagenhart still signed up for that Warwick Castle trip?” he asked.

  “He is,” she said, “though I can’t imagine why. It’s become rather tacky of late.”

  “What time are they due back?”

  “They aren’t going till after lunch—two o’clock—so . . . Let me see,” she said. “Yes, the minibus leaves the castle at six. Why?”

  “Just curious,” said Thomas.

  He considered tailing the minibus in his car, but because he knew where they were going, that seemed pointless. Instead, he drove over to Warwick, parked in the castle lot, and paid the fairly exorbitant admission all before the scholars from the institute were due to leave. Thomas walked down the well-maintained path through lawns and shrubberies to the draw-bridge and gatehouse, and into the castle proper.

  Warwick Castle was about as different from the ruins of Kenilworth as could be imagined. There were no crumbling remains here, no patchy foundations and tumbled-down walls. The building had been fully restored, largely in the last century and a half, and though its walls and towers were impressive and showed what a medieval fortress may have actually looked like, Thomas preferred Kenilworth’s romantic devastation. It didn’t help that the castle was run by the Tussaud’s waxwork group who, as well as pumping millions of dollars’ worth of restoration funding into the castle, had also turned it into a theme park, complete with lifelike effigies of knights and squires, atmospheric sounds, and movie screenings. Souvenirs of one sort or another—plastic swords, catapult pencil sharpeners, and the like—were on sale everywhere he looked. There were people in costume herding tourists into the “ghost tower” (at an extra cost), and various displays were scheduled: jousting and archery, birds of prey, and the firing of a trebuchet across the river. Not surprisingly, the place was packed, particularly with school parties, many of them uniformed, all of them screaming.

  Thomas was glad to have a reason not to do the tour, and found his way to what was called Guy’s Tower—a fourteenth-century, five-story guard post north of the main entrance, accessed by a staircase from the battlements. He climbed the stairs up from the top of the walls slowly and, once at the top, stayed there.

  The tower was massive, unassailable, a twelve-sided look-out that gave him an excellent vantage over both the inner courtyard and the grounds outside the walls. When the Shakespearean party arrived, he’d be able to watch them all the way down to the gatehouse.

  They appeared a little before two thirty. There were eight or nine of them. He saw Dagenhart first, but Katy Barker was there too, as was Alonso Petersohn. There was no sign of Julia, but he was alarmed to see Taylor Bradley trailing the grou
p, trying to be part of it. Thomas didn’t want to be seen. Anyone in the group might recognize him, he supposed, particularly after his antics on the first day, but he would have to steer particularly clear of Taylor, who would spot him a mile away.

  Thomas sat beneath the crenellated tower wall, braced against a chimney stack, and wondered whether he should go down. If any of them came up here, they would see him, but there was a lot to do in the castle, and the top of Guy’s Tower was quite a stair climb. Taylor might be the only member of the group under forty.

  Stay where you are, he decided.

  So he did, and the time passed slowly. The group moved as a unit, which made them a good deal easier to track. By three thirty they had seen the dungeon, what was (somewhat arbitrarily) called Caesar’s Tower, and a film exhibit called “The Dream of Battle.” They then moved on to the main block on the south side of the castle: the chapel, great hall, and staterooms. Thomas was getting restless. After forty minutes, he started to worry that he’d lost them, but at four thirty-five, they emerged and collected in a pool on the central lawn, as if mulling their options.

  Five o’clock, the steward had said. Thomas watched, ignoring the kids who came clambering and shouting up the stairs, shooting imaginary arrows at their friends, turning away only when Katy Barker seemed to scan along the walls and then, as if walking the tower stairs with her eyes, moved up to his face at the top.

  He ducked back and waited a minute, but when he checked back down, they were all still loitering there, talking. Petersohn was pointing, lecturing. Dagenhart checked his watch.

  If he’s meeting the steward somewhere in the castle, where would they go?

  Somewhere quiet, private, away from the mass of tourists but a legitimate part of the site that wouldn’t get them into trouble if they were caught there. Thomas checked his map, considered the possibilities, then looked back down.

  The group had broken up.

  He could just see Katy Barker entering a gift shop with a couple of the others—including, unsurprisingly, Taylor—in tow. Two graduate students were walking toward the “ghost tower,” but the others were gone.