1888

by Andrew Hastie

  He picked up the jar and shook it. Something moved inside with the hollow rattle of bones. Fellows put it into his haversack and swept the floor with his lantern. There was nothing else in the room. The hairs on his neck were standing on end as he left, and he was only too glad to be back in the open air as he descended the ladder.

  ‘Anything useful?’ asked the Colonel when he reached the ground.

  ‘Looks like it was last used by a Stylite, do you want to go up and see?’

  Leake shook his head. ‘Not bloody likely. Never understood those pole sitters.’

  For some inexplicable reason Fellows forgot to mention the jar entirely.

  5

  Morgue

  [Westminster Hospital, London. Date: 1889]

  Sabien stood over the headless body in the morgue, his ungloved hand hovering just above her breastbone. There was always a moment before he made contact with a victim when he hesitated. It was a kind of ritual, like a priest offering the last rites. It was his way of paying his respects to their privacy before invading it entirely.

  He would rather have used something she had been wearing, a piece of shawl, a brooch, even the contents of their stomach in one case, but this one had none of those things. Reading a bloodline was something for a seer, as they were the ones who had an affinity for flesh, although preferably warm and still breathing. Everyone knew that reading the dead could have dangerous consequences. The seers called it ‘reaving’.

  The woman’s skin was grey, and her limbs had lost their stiffness. Rigor mortis, the third stage of death, had passed, which meant she’d potentially been dead for a few days.

  Closing his eyes, he slowed his breathing and let his hand fall onto her chest.

  Ribbons of energy unwound from his touch and her body rose slightly as the muscles tensed. The fingers on her hand twitched as if playing the strings of an invisible violin.

  The tendons in Sabien’s neck stood out and his lips were drawn into a thin white line as he focused on her timeline. Working with organic material was hard, even after all the years on the force, and weaving through the complicated patterns of an individual’s chronology always left him exhausted.

  * * *

  She had been a milliner, making hats for the middle classes. He could feel the needle in her hand as she stitched lace flowers onto the brims of hats she could never afford to wear herself. Moving further forward in time, there had been trouble; her husband had died as had all of her children, in some kind of epidemic — scarlet fever or cholera. The details were too difficult to grasp, but she ended up on the street, selling herself to dockers and drunks.

  It wasn’t hard to locate the time of death. The trauma was so raw and intense that it burned like a star in the lattice of lines that made up her life.

  His mind wove through the other events and closed in upon the moment. He was careful to stay a safe distance from the last few seconds, choosing a moment an hour before and moving inside it.

  * * *

  The alley was narrow, no more than a conduit between two streets. There was no lighting and the cobbles were littered with discarded gin bottles and human waste. Her name was Elizabeth Jackson, and this was her patch, along with half of the whores on Pinchin Street.

  It was a quarter to midnight and the local pubs were beginning to empty. Sabien followed Elizabeth out into Back Church Lane, as she and the other girls went to ply their trade.

  His hand was growing cold as the connection with her dead body was beginning to degrade. A group of men were approaching her. None of them looked the type — there was a swagger to their walk that spoke of nothing more than hard drinking and weak bladders. They passed her by and went to relieve themselves in the alley.

  Sabien caught sight of a shadowy figure as he turned back towards her. A short man in a cloak, keeping out of the glow of the gas lamps, his face covered with a scarf. This was the kind of behaviour he was looking for, someone who avoided attention, one who was afraid to come into the light.

  He watched Elizabeth slowly wander towards the stranger, realising that it would be less than forty minutes before she would be dead. It was a strange feeling to know such a thing. What made it all the worse was that he was forbidden from changing it. The laws of his Order prevented him from altering the past. The consequences of such actions took thousands of hours to calculate, and every outcome had to be considered.

  His fate was to know but never act. It was a curse. There were others who would decide on whether the course of events should be altered, if one life should be saved or another’s ended to preserve the best possible future.

  The stranger had something in his hand. A flash of silver caught the light and she fainted into his arms. No one paid any attention to the couple as he dragged her into the doorway of a nearby house.

  Every house in the street looked the same, small terraced cottages of soot-stained brick, their windows grimy with London ash. Hardly any of them had a lock on their door — they had nothing worth stealing. Sabien knew that many of them were rented by the room, families squeezed into tiny spaces with nothing more than a bed and a fire. The East End of London was home to the poor and the destitute, a grim and unforgiving reminder of how far you could fall.

  He moved through the open doorway. The hallway was dark except for a strip of light that lit the floor from beneath the kitchen door.

  Sabien could hear the sounds of steel on bone before he reached the end of the passageway. A sickening grating rasp that set his teeth on edge. Her head had been severed with a large-toothed saw, the coroner’s report had said, and there was no sign of struggle, no defensive wounds.

  He felt the pain of his nails biting into the palm of his hand as he clenched his fist, fighting back the urge to enter the scene.

  * * *

  Suddenly Sabien was in the mortuary, her headless body still cold on the marble slab.

  He took out a battered old notebook and turned to the case notes. Lines and symbols were flowing across its pages, constantly re-writing themselves as the possible outcomes of events were recalculated. Sabien made a note of the address and watched as the flow changed. Somewhere back in the sixteenth century a department of statisticians was studying the potential outcome of this new information — weeks if not months of work would be spent processing this new data, but to him they would appear to be instantaneous.

  The address led to a name, or rather a pseudonym, one which had been used before — that was one of the advantages of tracing a psychopath, they always tended to follow a pattern. Mr Mayhew had rented rooms in various parts of London, all of which followed the same route as the ‘Torso Murders’. His real name was Charles Bretton and he was a knackerman, a butcherer of horses, working at a slaughter house on Winthrop Street.

  He closed the book and looked down at the body. They had found other parts of her at various points down the river. A mechanical frame had been used to hold them in place and she looked like a broken doll pinned together with metal braces.

  6

  Avery

  [New York. Date: 1930]

  The Ministry of Justice was located in a temporal stasis loop of the Chrysler building on 42nd and Lexington. It was a beautiful building, following in the Art Deco school of design and was the tallest building of its age.

  Sabien’s office was on the tenth floor of the seventy-seven storey building: your status within the force was reflected by how far you had climbed up the floors.

  ‘You’re late,’ grunted his boss, Chief Inspector Avery, as Sabien appeared beside the desk. It was a stupid joke, there was no such thing as being late when you could travel through time. The chief grunted as he got up out of Sabien’s chair. He was a large man, the girth of his stomach a testament to the many years he had spent flying a desk, and the large side whiskers a reminder that he was born in another age.

  ‘I see you’ve located the dissector. I’m assuming it’s better if I don’t ask how.’

  Sabien nodded, shrugging off the gaba
rdine overcoat and hanging it alongside a row of others. His clothes reeked of mortuaries and he was anxious to get out of them, but he knew Avery wouldn’t leave until he was satisfied. The man was a great believer in face to face meetings. The telephone had been invented too late into his life for him to be comfortable with using it and he was not a man for sending memos.

  ‘This was a job for a seer. They’re more comfortable with the dead,’ Sabien said gruffly.

  Avery shook his head. ‘You’re the best we’ve got. No seer would touch this case, hell, half the bloody division wouldn’t.’

  Sabien poured himself a drink. He hadn’t slept in two days and the exertion of working Elizabeth’s timeline had drained him. There was always a cold, gnawing emptiness that overwhelmed him after being so close to a death. He knew it would pass, but until it did there was whiskey.

  ‘Little early?’ Avery said, helping himself to the bottle.

  ‘Not where I’ve just been.’

  Sabien knocked back the drink and held out his glass for another.

  ‘I’ve got some news,’ Avery began, pouring a generous measure into Sabien’s tumbler. ‘We’ve a new recruit coming down from the frontier to work on some older cases. Part of a knowledge sharing program apparently. Wants to learn a few tricks from the old dogs.’

  The frontier was another term for the present, the point at which the future became real. It was generally avoided by most of the Order because it was too close to the unknown. The present was like the wild west, where the laws of the continuum were in a constant state of flux. They had an entire guild of statisticians working on the best outcomes, but no matter how high the probability quotient of the Copernicans was, no one was ever quite sure it would go to plan. Sabien knew one thing for sure, anyone who came back from the twenty-first century to hang out in his department had either royally screwed up or was a tourist with a morbid fascination for gruesome murders and bad sanitation.

  ‘I work alone,’ Sabien reminded Avery, sitting down behind his desk. ‘Find someone else.’

  ‘She’s asked for you specifically.’

  ‘It’s a woman?’

  ‘DC Halli Maddox. She’s got a degree in Criminal Psychology from Goldsmiths. The Chief Inquisitor has high hopes for her.’

  If there was one thing Sabien hated more than the death tourists, it was the PhD brigade. Their constant stream of questions and annoying pretensions of understanding the inner workings of the perp’s mind drove him to distraction. But he knew better than to argue with the Chief Inquisitor; Ravana Eckhart was not a woman to be denied and he was too tired to argue. The booze was starting to take effect and he wanted to get some rest.

  He sighed and rubbed his eyes. ‘How long?’

  Avery shrugged. ‘Couple of weeks at most. Just let her shadow you on the clear-up from the torso case and send her packing. You know what the frontier squad are like, once they’ve had a whiff of the nineteenth century, they soon begin to miss their smart phones and flushing toilets.’

  7

  British Museum

  [British Museum, London. Date: 1844]

  Fellows stood in the Lycian gallery watching the last of the stones of the Nereid Monument being set in place. He had returned to England three years previously and had spent the time collating his journals and specimens into a complete collection which he published and then presented to the board of trustees. Apparently, there was a strong chance of a knighthood for his services.

  Taken out of their native landscape, the stones seemed to have lost some of their mystery, no longer the tombs of long dead kings, but simply carved edifices of marble — a testament to the craft of the ancient stonemasons. He took some pride in the thought that he had preserved something of this lost civilisation, that his work on the languages of the obelisk had been compared to that of the Rosetta Stone.

  History would remember him for that at least.

  8

  Internship

  [New York. Date: 1930]

  DC Maddox appeared in Sabien’s office unannounced. She was dressed in the standard Protectorate uniform, black jacket and trousers, but without the cloak. Her blonde hair was cropped short, so that it hung just above the collar, and her skin had a luminous quality that his Catholic mother would have described as a ‘face that had been kissed by angels’.

  She was nothing like Sabien was expecting.

  Her keen blue eyes surveyed his office as she stood to attention. It had been less than sixty seconds since she had arrived, and he guessed the nausea of the dislocation was beginning to pass.

  ‘Do you need a drink?’ he asked, not bothering to get up from his desk.

  She shook her head. ‘No sir.’

  ‘We don’t do that.’

  ‘What sir?’

  ‘The whole sir thing, it’s not like the movies, you won’t need to curtsy every time someone walks in. Stand at ease. You’re not on a parade ground.’

  She relaxed a little and he could see the colour returning to her cheeks.

  ‘Have you been fully briefed?’

  ‘Yes, s—. Inspector.’

  ‘Sabien will do fine. Now sit down before you fall down.’

  She did as she was instructed.

  ‘I only have two rules,’ he said, standing up. ‘Do everything I say and don’t ask questions. Any deviation from these generally leads to chaos and in some cases death.’

  Maddox went to take out her notebook.

  ‘Don’t write it down! Let’s be honest from the start: I prefer to work alone, it’s nothing personal, it’s just a fact. You’re only here because you have very influential friends up on the seventy-seventh floor. Everyone they’ve ever sent me has transferred out in under a month.’

  Although the expression on her face remained stoical, her eyes seemed to be smiling. ‘Permission to speak freely Inspector?’

  He waved his hand as if he were already bored by whatever she was about to say.

  ‘I know the Chief Inspector has told you about my thesis, but I just wanted to say I’m not here as some kind of murder tourist, nor as a wide-eyed student of criminology. I’ve wanted to work here since I was a kid, it’s why I joined the Protectorate. The nineteenth has a reputation for solving some of the most difficult crimes of the continuum.’

  ‘There’s no forensics, no computer database, no DNA — photography is pretty poor and most of the general population see us as the enemy.’

  ‘Exactly. All we have are our wits and logic.’

  Sabien sighed. ‘You’re one of them, aren’t you? I should have guessed.’

  She frowned. ‘One of what?’

  ‘A Sherlockian. You naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained,’ he quoted Conan-Doyle from memory.

  There was a slight blush across her cheeks. ‘I won’t deny I’m a fan, we prefer the term Holmesian.’

  ‘I’ll give you two weeks.’

  9

  Whistle

  [New York. Date: 1930]

  The quartermaster stood behind the stores counter with his arms folded and a look on his face that would have curdled cream. Dalgleish was something of a legend in the Protectorate, as the only man to have ever been reinstated after the ‘Long Walk’, which was the equivalent of banishment within the Protectorate.

  ‘You want what?’ he exclaimed.

  ‘A mark five,’ Maddox said defiantly.

  His eyebrows furrowed until they were nearly one. ‘They’re in short supply. The mark three is standard issue for your rank. Even the Inspector here only has a four,’ Dalgleish said, pointing at Sabien who looked like he had a thousand better things he could be doing.

  The tachyon Mk V had been ten years in the making, and they were rumoured to have amazing new features, including an adjustable rewind feature.

  In all the previous versions of the device there had been a safety feature that would automatically take you back two minutes. It had saved many li
ves, but everyone complained about the two-minute margin. Many would have liked longer, citing the fact that danger was not something that one always had a window of a hundred and twenty seconds to pull back from.

  Dalgleish handed her a Mk III, a battered old watch that looked as if it had sat in a drawer for years. ‘It’s all we have.’

  Maddox turned it over in her hand, feeling the weight of it. ‘It’s missing the rewind button,’ she noted.

  ‘The homing still works,’ the quartermaster said dismissively.

  The second button on the tachyon was supposed to take you back to your most recent temporal location. Allowing you to return home from any part of the past without the need for a vestige — a local artefact.

  Dalgleish pulled a folded uniform from beneath the counter and placed a small whistle and a notebook on top of it. ‘One set of chameleon robes suitable for nineteenth century, one general service whistle and almanac. Sign here,’ he said holding out a clipboard with a form listing all of her equipment.’

  ‘A whistle? I was hoping for a gun,’ Maddox said, picking up the metal tube.

  ‘Most officers of that period carried one — quickest way to get assistance,’ explained Sabien. ‘No mobile phones where we’re going.’

  * * *

  The chameleon uniform was made from a dark black material with a label that stated the dates in which it was safe to use.

  ‘Pevensey. 11.833-11.920.’

  The robes were chronologically linked to a wardrobe department somewhere deep in the antiquarian guild that could alter them on demand. Pevensey was the name of the dressmaker, all Maddox had to do was send in a request via her almanac and the clothes would immediately change to her needs, such was the nature of retrograde dressmaking.