What Time Devours

by A. J. Hartley

“Did ‘trying it’ involve the use of this?” said Hodges.

  He produced a clear plastic bag containing Thomas’s out-of-date MasterCard.

  “I mention it because it seems scratched,” said Hodges, pretending to discover the damage for the first time. “And see there? There’s a notch in the bottom edge, as if someone forced it . . .”

  “Yes, I used the credit card,” said Thomas.

  Hodges sat back in his chair, considering him. For a moment he didn’t speak.

  “Your passport says you’re a teacher,” he said. “That right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry, you’ll need to speak up a bit.”

  “I said yes, that’s right,” said Thomas, raising his head.

  “And this detective thing you’re doing, that’s like a summer holiday, is it? A bit of a lark before you go back for the autumn—sorry, the fall—term.”

  He used the word like it was something shiny he had just picked up.

  Thomas shrugged.

  “I was trying to help,” he said. It sounded pathetically inadequate. “I wanted to clear Escolme’s name, to prove that what he had said was true. He was my student . . .”

  Silence.

  “And you didn’t remove anything from Miss Church’s property?”

  “Nothing,” said Thomas. “You saw me as soon as I came out. You have my things.”

  “Nasty bruise you’re getting there,” said Hodges, peering at Thomas’s forehead.

  Thomas rubbed it self-consciously.

  “I had a bit of a fall. By the watermill at Warwick Castle.”

  “And you carry your shoulder funny,” said Hodges. “That a fall too?”

  “No. I got shot. In Chicago. You can check with Polinski.”

  “Quite a life you lead, isn’t it, Mr. Knight? I mean, for a teacher.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say to that,” said Thomas.

  “Did you find what you were looking for, at Miss Church’s?”

  “Not sure what I was looking for,” he said. “No, I don’t think so. I now know that Dagenhart—an old professor of mine—knew Daniella Blackstone at the time of the fire, but I pretty much knew that already.”

  “So just your arrest to show for the day’s work,” said Hodges. “I hope the rest of your holiday—sorry, vacation—goes better.”

  “Is it likely to?”

  “Well, let’s see,” said Hodges, looking over a sheet of notes. “We have you on suspected burglary . . .”

  “I told you,” Thomas inserted. “I didn’t take anything!”

  “Burglary is a complex crime,” said Hodges. “You don’t have to have stolen anything. Section nine, subsections one A and B of the Theft Act say that burglary has various possible ingredients, which include theft, but also might include rape, grievous bodily harm, or unlawful damage.”

  “I didn’t do any of those things.”

  “You don’t need to have actually committed any of those offenses if the intent to commit them was part of your unlawful entrance.”

  “Why would I be looking to attack Elsbeth Church or smash her property?”

  “I can’t say, can I?” said Hodges. “But I can tell you this. You could be charged with various crimes pending consultation with the homeowner. At the very least, civil trespass. Or we could go back to the venerable English common law—a law preserved not through statute but practice from time immemorial—and charge you with conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace. Or we can get really creative, and charge you with being found on enclosed premises for unlawful purposes, as per the 1824 Vagrancy Act. But we’d have to clear you of burglary before we started trying those, and we’re a long way from having done that, aren’t we? So no, Mr. Knight, to answer your question: I don’t see your vacation getting any better.”

  CHAPTER 82

  Hodges asked if he thought English law didn’t apply to him. He wondered aloud if Thomas was relying on his citizenship to save him from trouble and if as an American he was used to thinking that he was somehow above the law and custom of other countries, that his own interests and desires—however frivolous or absurd—somehow trumped all other concerns. If he did, said the policeman, he was sorely misled.

  Thomas said little, merely shaking his head and periodically saying, “No, sir, I don’t think that.”

  The policemen were being studiously polite and methodical, but Thomas couldn’t help wondering if he had touched a nerve. He had seen enough of the U.K. papers to catch a recurrent preoccupation with American high-handedness on the global stage, a tendency to act on their self-declared moral authority regardless of what the rest of the world thought. He knew this rankled a lot of Europeans. They didn’t think much of that America-as-policeman-of-the-world stuff. They probably weren’t too keen on Americans playing world private investigator either . . .

  The last thing Hodges said to him was a cliché, offered halfway between explanation and defiance:

  “You ever hear the phrase, ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’?”

  Thomas said he had.

  “Well,” said the policeman. “There you are then.”

  Thomas was taken back down the hallway, escorted by a tall black officer who watched him impassively, as Hodges and the sergeant continued their conversation elsewhere.

  Thomas was allowed to call the American consulate, but whatever he expected that to produce, he got only frosty acknowledgments and a reminder that a U.S. citizen charged with a crime on foreign soil was subject to the laws and systems of punishment of the local authorities, not his native country. He considered mentioning Kumi’s name as a contact in the State Department, however irrelevant her area and function, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  Not that he had a choice. As soon as he hung up with the consulate he realized he had just used his phone call. He needed to call her, not to tell her what had happened, but to see how she was doing. That was more important.

  “Can I make another call?” he said. “I’ll pay for it.”

  “Who to?” said the sergeant.

  Thomas checked his watch. It would be late in Tokyo. The prospect of waking Kumi to tell her this was too much. He hated to hide it from her, but she had said she wanted normalcy.

  “Never mind,” he said.

  “Perhaps tomorrow,” said the sergeant.

  Thomas was nodding when he realized what he had just heard.

  “You’re keeping me in overnight?”

  It wasn’t outrage so much as weariness and something close to despair.

  “Pending further enquiries,” said the sergeant.

  “About what?” said Thomas, flaring up. “What else is there to find out?”

  “When you were brought in, before you admitted entering the house illegally,” the sergeant explained, “we set about trying to locate the householder to inquire about the condition of the back door when she left it.”

  “But I already admitted that I forced it. Why do you need her to corroborate that?”

  “We don’t now,” said the sergeant. “But we didn’t know that at the time, did we? But in looking into Miss Church’s whereabouts we found something that rather complicates your predicament.”

  “Which is what?” said Thomas.

  “We can’t find her,” said the sergeant. “And if we continue not to find her, as it were, your poking around her place starts to look like more than a public-order offense now, doesn’t it?”

  Thomas stared at him.

  “You can’t think that I . . . that I’m somehow responsible for . . . whatever . . .”

  “Step this way, please, sir,” said the sergeant.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’m going to have to ask you to change into this, please.”

  He produced a package wrapped in plastic and shook it open. It contained a white jumpsuit made of what looked like paper.

  “I’ll need your clothes, please, sir.”

  “What for?” Thomas asked.<
br />
  “Forensic examination.”

  CHAPTER 83

  It wasn’t the first time he’d been locked up, he reminded himself, thinking back to his holding cell in the Demier cellars. He had been afraid for his life, then. He had been running with a gang of pickax-wielding men at his heels and had walked into the body of the movie producer, Gresham, so he had had good reason to fear for his own safety when he woke up cuffed to the bed.

  In this little cell, by contrast, he was safe. He would not be beaten, tortured, or killed, trussed up, and dumped in some abandoned French quarry . . .

  So why does this feel worse?

  He felt no imminent danger, but this sense of humiliation and failure was deadening. Again he thought of Kumi and, again, pushed the thought away.

  He lay on the mattress facing the wall, not turning around when he heard the spy hole in the door slide open, which it seemed to do about every half hour. The mattress smelled of rubber and disinfectant. He tried to sleep, not because he was tired but because he wanted to stop thinking about the situation, but the more he tried, the more alert he felt. The zip-up paper suit crinkled as he shifted, and he had to keep his eyes closed so that the look of it—his body laid out like an astronaut or a skier—could be forgotten.

  He had no watch and nothing to occupy his mind but his own thoughts. After some time—perhaps two hours, though he had no way of knowing for sure—he heard shouting, a man’s drunken bellows, so distorted by dialect that Thomas caught only about one word in five, every one an expletive. That lasted about ten minutes, then went away. After that, nothing for at least another hour. Not having his watch was infuriating. Then he heard one of those heavy doors clang shut. Then silence again, till the next time the spy hole in the door slid open. The ceiling light dimmed a little. And then, finally, he slept, albeit shallowly.

  He woke feeling sick to his stomach, but he knew that was more mind than body. When an Indian or Pakistani policewoman offered him breakfast on a plastic plate, he turned it down. He was taken to the bathroom, then returned to the interview room, where Hodges and the custody sergeant joined him. Moments later, the duty solicitor arrived, a foam cup of coffee in one hand, apologizing for being late and talking about traffic in the town center. The smell of the coffee turned Thomas’s stomach, but he said nothing.

  “So, Mr. Knight,” said Hodges once the recorder was running and the introductions had been made. “Anything you’d like to add to your statement from yesterday? Now that you’ve had chance to sleep on it, like.”

  “Have you found Elsbeth Church?” said Thomas.

  The question seemed to surprise Hodges.

  “Why?” he said.

  “I want to make sure she’s okay,” said Thomas, shrugging.

  He felt different this morning. He was used to the idea of his arrest, and however bad things might still become, he had resolved to meet them head on. He had never been especially good at self-pity. It had also occurred to him that if this had happened in the States, he was pretty sure he would have been screaming for lawyers, shouting about his rights, and fighting them on every point. He was rarely cowed by authority.

  So it struck him as strange that he had felt so small and defeated. It was, he thought, something to do with being here, away from what he knew, in an environment that was strange if not actually hostile.

  No home field advantage here, he thought, imagining the Cubs on the road in Philadelphia or—worse—New York.

  But it was more than that. He was drained, and had things on his mind that had nothing to do with lost Shakespeare plays, and wasn’t making much headway on those things that did.

  But he was done feeling embarrassed by his stupid little indiscretion. Could they make life hard for him? Sure. Here and back home, probably. But he had done nothing very wrong, and morally, he had decided, he may yet be in the right. It was, after all, a small thing to force someone’s door, if it led to exposing a murderer.

  So he switched into righteous mode, choosing to ignore the fact that he was no closer to exposing a murderer. The mind has to shape reality, he thought.

  There is nothing either good or bad, he thought, but thinking makes it so.

  And Hamlet should know. If ever man made perception reality, it was Hamlet. That such perception led to a stack of bodies, Hamlet’s included, Thomas chose to ignore. Instead, he came out swinging, at least rhetorically.

  He told Hodges he was being treated in a way grossly disproportionate to his alleged crime, that he was being victimized by a xenophobic campaign of intimidation, and that the station should expect to hear from the consulate any moment. Hodges, who had doubtless faced weightier allegations over the years, chose not to respond directly, but calmly answered Thomas’s original question.

  “Elsbeth Church was located in Stratford, alive and well,” he said. “The custody officer will explain what happens next.”

  “Am I free to go?” said Thomas, not bothering to conceal how badly he wanted to get out.

  Hodges frowned, looking at him, then nodded. “We’re releasing you on Part Four Bail,” he said, “pending the determination of charges in accordance with section thirty-seven of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 as modified by Schedule Two of the Criminal Justice Act of 2003. Since you are of no fixed abode in the United Kingdom, you will report to this police station every third day, and your passport will be held as surety of bond. If you fail to abide by these conditions, you will be committing an offense for which you could be fined, imprisoned, or both. Within two weeks, probably sooner, determination of charges will be made and submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service, after which trial specifics, if appropriate, will be set. Do you have any questions, Mr. Knight?”

  “Do I have to pay—for bail, I mean?”

  “That’s not how we do things here, Mr. Knight,” said Hodges. “Any other questions?”

  Thomas shook his head.

  “Your clothes and personal effects—minus the passport—will be returned to you. When you have changed, an officer will return you to your car. I look forward to seeing you again on Wednesday.”

  CHAPTER 84

  Thomas bought another phone card and caught Kumi at home in Tokyo. He didn’t tell her about his arrest or the incident at Warwick Castle, and kept the conversation focused on her. He felt no guilt or doubt about withholding the facts this time. It was, he was sure, the right thing to do. She was, she said, doing well. The radiation was tiring, but not as bad as she had feared. All things considered, things were as good as they could be.

  Thomas drove back to Hamstead Marshall, not so much because he wanted to go there, but because he didn’t know what else to do. He had eaten almost nothing since being arrested and was suddenly very hungry. He pressed on through the village and then spotted The Green Man near the motorway. He parked, went inside, and sat at the bar. It was late for lunch and the place was deserted, but the barman consulted his wife, Doris, and declared they could “rustle something up.” Thomas studied the menu with its now familiar dozen or so pub standards, and ordered the steak and mushroom pie and chips, along with a pint of Fuller’s. When the pub’s background music dried up, Thomas asked the barman if he had any XTC.

  “Now there’s a blast from the past,” said the barman. “Haven’t listened to them in years. Hold on, let’s see what we’ve got.”

  He emerged a moment later with a stack of discs and read off their titles.

  “The Big Express, Mummer, Skylarking, English Settlement . . .”

  “English Settlement,” said Thomas.

  “They’re local, you know.”

  “Yes, I heard that.”

  “Never really made any money, the way I heard it,” said the barman. “Screwed by the label and a dodgy manager. One minute they were touring with the Police and Talking Heads, next, vanished. Still recording and all—even the odd hit—but never what you’d call stars. I suppose that’s the way it goes. Course, they did stop touring. That probably hurt.”


  “I guess so.”

  He sat and listened as the familiar songs played, waiting for his food. American radio played little more than the bewildered and angry “Dear God” and the joyfully lightweight “Mayor of Simpleton,” so it was good to hear these songs again. They took him back, as only music can do, to specific moments, long ago. The exuberance of “Yacht Dance,” the plaintive introspection of “All of a Sudden (It’s Too Late)” . . .

  Just what I need, thought Thomas. More rumination on time and mortality.

  His food arrived, courtesy of Doris, a round, pink woman with a kindly smile. Thomas thanked her and dived into the pie, which was rich with a flaky crust, and fat chips that he doused with vinegar. He felt like he hadn’t eaten in days.

  As he sat there eating and listening to the music, Thomas replayed those questions about what might be in the play that was so troubling that people would kill to keep it hidden, considering Robson’s speculations about the authorship question or Shakespeare’s religious and sexual orientation. What secret might Love’s Labour’s Won reveal about the man who wrote it that someone wanted kept quiet?

  The conclusion he came to was really his old gut instinct kicking in. There was nothing in the lost play, he decided; no great secret, no coded truth about life, the universe, or the author. No cipher about religion, no world-changing biographical details. He just didn’t believe it.

  As a teacher, as a graduate student, as a reader he had always resisted the notion that art and literature could be boiled down to some single truth, what his students called a “message” or “hidden meaning” and what the publishing world had come to call a “code” or “secret.” Any book that could be reduced to such a single meaning wasn’t worth reading. He had always felt so, and the current fashion for novels and movies that found clues in paintings or statues, maps on the Declaration of Independence, and so on, had only confirmed his instinct. Art was layered, complex, susceptible to a thousand different readings, the source of questions and ruminations, not tidy solutions. Literature was as multifaceted as history itself, which shifts with the light of perspective, and the idea that literature used its stories and characters merely as a vehicle to point up some hidden truth reduced all text to the thinnest of allegories. It was absurd, and if some art did do that, that only diminished it in Thomas’s mind. He would not believe Shakespeare capable of such a thing, and if that made him an old humanist, so be it. Shakespeare did not treat his plays as fields in which to bury treasure. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe it.