Ships and Stings and Wedding Rings (2 page)

Another cardinal sin. They should have taken it off her.

‘Get them in here, please. Now.'

Bashford left the room.

Tears ran down her cheeks. ‘Max, I'm so sorry.'

‘Good, but don't cry yet. We'll think of something.'

She shook her head.

I had several options open to me. The correct procedure would be to go to Dr Bairstow who would probably place the matter in the hands of the Time Police. That was their function, after all. To police the time line, hoovering up anomalies. He would also arrest Miss Grey – he'd have to – and she'd be handed over to the Time Police as well. I really didn't want that to happen. Their opinion of us is not high and the last thing we needed was to provide proof that we really were the bunch of irresponsible idiots they thought we were. Leaving something behind is unprofessional. Leaving behind a gun capable of killing a contemporary is a major crime. They would probably deal fairly leniently with Grey since she obviously had a problem, but we should have noticed this. I should have noticed it. She was in my department. I knew she'd been struggling, but I hadn't known it was this bad. Neither had Helen Foster, who had cleared her for duty. And it wasn't really Elspeth's fault. She'd done everything she could to avoid going back on the active list and I'd stupidly thought that once she got back on the horse – or into the pod – that everything would be fine. And it hadn't – been fine, I mean. A lot of this was my fault and I was buggered if I was going to hand over the problem to someone else without having a good go at fixing it first.

Bashford came back with a very sheepish looking Cox and Gallaccio.

‘We're going to fix this,' I said. ‘Before Dr Bairstow or the Time Police or Major Guthrie have even the slightest idea there's been a problem.'

This was an effective threat. Dangling their boss, Ian Guthrie, in front of them focussed their minds wonderfully. They would give a great deal for him not to know how badly things had gone wrong on this assignment.

I got up and opened the door. Dr Foster was heading towards me. ‘What's going on in there?'

‘How plausible do you want your deniability to be?'

‘Oh for God's sake, Max.'

‘Give me an hour or so, and then you need to have a quiet talk with Grey.'

She sighed. ‘One hour. No longer.'

An hour was all I needed.

Still unsure what I was going to say, I sat down again with Elspeth, but my fears were unfounded.

‘I know, Max. You don't have to say anything. I'll write out my notice and it'll be on Dr Bairstow's desk the first morning after the Christmas holiday.'

I sighed but she was right. She'd had a year to resume her old life and it was very obvious that she didn't wish to do so.

‘Max, I'm so sorry – whatever you're going to do, I'm sure I shouldn't let you do it. Maybe I should confess to Dr Bairstow now and take my medicine.'

She was underestimating the seriousness of the matter. A loaded gun adrift in Ancient Egypt was far more than a disciplinary problem but there was no point in making things worse for her. Not at the moment, anyway. I tried for optimism.

‘It needn't come to that. I'm going to take Markham, have a poke around, and see what we can find. Who knows – we might be able to pick it straight up and be back here before you've even had time to turn around – and if – when – we find it, Markham will have it back in the Armoury before anyone even knows it was missing.'

‘Ian won't be happy.'

No, he wouldn't. As someone with a close personal interest in Miss Grey, he would be unhappy she hadn't confided in him. As Head of the Security Section, he would be incandescent with rage if he ever found out what she'd done.

‘We'll sort that out later as well,' I said, ignoring all these potential disasters piling up on the horizon like oncoming storm clouds. ‘You were in Pod Five?'

She nodded.

‘Which you have, of course, thoroughly searched from top to bottom?'

‘Four times.'

I thought. ‘Do you have any idea when you could possibly have lost it?'

‘There was a day – at the launching – when I dropped my pack and it fell open, but I'm not stupid, Max. I checked very, very thoroughly, and so did Cox who was with me at the time. It wasn't there.'

‘Did you ever leave the pod at night?'

She just looked at me. Yes all right – a stupid question. If she'd been terrified of Clive Ronan turning up during the day then she was hardly likely to leave the safety of the pod to blunder around in the dark.

I got up.

‘OK, Dr Foster will be in to see you in a moment. Listen to what she has to say, keep your mouth shut to everyone else, and leave everything to me.'

I went to find Markham and we stood in an empty training room where no one could see us or hear us and had a long talk.

When we'd hammered out the details, he said, ‘What about Peterson?'

‘What about him?'

‘Isn't this our Christmas tradition? We steal a pod – usually Chief Farrell's – make an illegal jump to put something right and everything ends happily. So far, we're well on track, but there's always the three of us. You, me, and Peterson.'

I sighed. ‘We really shouldn't involve him. He's going to be Deputy Director. And he's not fit enough yet.'

Peterson had sustained a terrible wound in 15
^th
-century France. His arm was healed and he'd regained some movement – enough to come third in the Security Section's Annual All Comers One-Handed Bra Unfastening Competition (or SSAACOHBUC for short), but if things went south, he might not be able to defend himself. I saw the scene again – Peterson sprawled on the floor, soaked in blood, dying under my hands …

Markham said gently, ‘Surely it's his decision to make, Max.'

‘It's not one we should ask him to make. We'd be putting him in a difficult position.'

He shrugged. ‘It's just you and me, then.'

‘Just you and me. Do you know what you have to do?'

He nodded.

‘Right, we'll meet in the paint store in … thirty minutes.'

I raced around the building like a madwoman because I didn't have time to be discreet. I strode into Wardrobe and requisitioned what we needed. Confidence is the key. I'm the Chief Operations Officer and head of the History Department. If I can't march around helping myself to all the equipment needed for an illegal jump to save a colleague, preserve the reputation of St Mary's, and protect the timeline, then who can?

I deposited everything at the back of the paint store, safely concealed behind the tins of Sunshine Yellow, and went off to see what had happened to Markham. I found him in what the Security Section likes to refer to as their nerve centre, which was a fancy name for a small, windowless room with a kettle, seven mugs, two tins of biscuits, a calendar picturing two fluffy kittens sitting in a slipper, and the petty cash box lying open on a shelf and bulging with IOUs. Half a dozen monitors showed various views from around the building. A giant fuse box with a zigzag lightning bolt painted across it was attached to the wall.

Markham was festooning strings of fairy lights around the security monitors. A cat's cradle of wires connected them to each other and the fuse box.

I opened my mouth to demand what the hell he thought he was playing at and then remembered to whom I was talking.

‘Pretty,' I said.

‘You don't know the half of it,' he said. ‘When this is over I'm going to rig them to flash on and off in time to “White Christmas”. Now stand in the middle of the room and, for God's sake, don't touch anything metal. In fact, put your hands in your pockets.'

‘Why?'

He threw a switch. There was a white flash, followed by a bang, followed by the smell of burnt fish. I just had time to register that all the monitors had faded to black with only a little white dot in the centre, when all the lights went out. Then the fire alarms went off.

Hat-trick.

‘Deary, deary me,' he said, in a voice of immense satisfaction. ‘I wonder how that could have happened.'

In the distance, I could hear my husband Leon, the unit's Chief Technical Officer, demanding to know which idiot was responsible for … the last part of the sentence was lost as a door closed somewhere.

‘How long have we got?'

‘Well, speaking from personal experience, evacuating St Mary's is a bit like herding cats. No one will be able to find Professor Rapson. Mrs Mack won't move without Vortigern.' (Vortigern is her beloved kitchen cat.) ‘And he won't move at all if he can help it. No one will be able to remember where the assembly point is. Someone will fall into the lake. All the historians will just stand around looking stupid and refusing to budge because it's snowing out there and they don't want to get their precious selves cold and wet. A good hour, I reckon.'

‘Brilliant,' I said in awe. ‘Absolutely bloody brilliant.'

‘Yeah,' he said modestly. ‘Aren't I?'

‘On this occasion – yes.'

He produced a torch and we slipped out of the door.

It was chaos out there. It's bedlam at St Mary's when the lights are on. It's a hundred times worse when the lights are out.

All around us was a maelstrom of raised voices shouting conflicting instructions, supernova-bright torches blinding everyone they shone on, dreadful language, and the odd scream as someone fell over something. We crept cautiously along the corridors, but quite honestly, they wouldn't have noticed if Napoleon's army had swung through on their way to Moscow, singing the 1812 Overture scored for full chorus, twenty-one cannons, and a tambourine.

We battled our way through the crowds. ‘Like salmon swimming upstream,' said Markham at one point, eventually arriving at the paint store. We oozed inside and closed the door, shutting out the noise behind us. In the sudden silence, I heaved a sigh of relief. Difficult part over with.

No it wasn't. Peterson was waiting for us.

We stopped dead and everyone looked at everyone else.

When it became apparent he wasn't going to speak, I said, ‘How on earth did you know?'

He raised his eyebrows at me, his expression enigmatic. At that moment, he looked very like Dr Bairstow. He was going to make a wonderful Deputy Director.

‘Is that a serious question? It's Christmas. The two of you are whispering in corners looking mysterious. Grey's in tears. Then, mysteriously, the lights go out. Why didn't you just make a public announcement?'

Markham shuffled his feet and muttered something.

I sighed. ‘Does everyone know?'

‘If you mean Chief Farrell and Major Guthrie – Leon's racing around trying to get the lights on and the fire alarms off, and Guthrie's gearing up for the invasion he's convinced is imminent. Of course, neither of them is going to be pleased when they discover the true cause of the emergency.'

‘I may have to live abroad for a while,' said Markham gloomily.

‘You should live so long. So, what's this all about?'

I was uneasy for him. ‘You oughtn't to be involved.'

‘Tell me or I grass the pair of you up to Dr Bairstow right now.'

‘You tell him,' I said to Markham, and pushed my way past them to retrieve our equipment and load up the pod.

Pods are our centre of operations. We use them to jump back to whichever time period we've been assigned. We live in them and work in them. Occasionally, we die in them. They're small, cramped, and smelly, and that's even before you add a couple of historians to the mix. Leon's pod is a single-seater, so this one was even smaller and more cramped than usual. I activated the screen and watched the two of them indulge in a heated discussion while I laid in the coordinates.

When I emerged, task done, Markham was just finishing. ‘And let's face it, it wouldn't be Christmas if we weren't stealing Chief Farrell's pod and breaking all the rules for a good cause.'

‘Once. We did that once.'

‘All traditions have to start somewhere.'

Peterson sighed. ‘So how is this going to work, then? Don't tell me you haven't got a plan?'

‘We jump to the original coordinates. Very carefully ensuring we are not seen by Bashford and his gang, we shadow them. We follow their every move. With luck, we can identify the exact moment the gun goes missing. As soon as they're clear, we swoop in, grab the bloody thing, and jump back to St Mary's. Markham will get it back to the Armoury and no one ever knows a thing about it.'

There was a brief silence as we contemplated all the many things that could go wrong with this simple plan.

‘If they catch sight of us …' said Peterson doubtfully.

‘They won't,' I said with a confidence worthy of a much better scheme.

Peterson shook his head. ‘You'll go too far one day, Max.'

‘Very likely, but not today. Shall we go?'

That's the thing about time travel – or investigating major historical events in contemporary time, of course – once we were actually in Ancient Egypt, we were off the clock. We could take as long as we liked to find this bloody gun and still get back less than an hour after we jumped. We climbed into the pod.

‘There are only rations for about a week,' announced Peterson, rummaging through the lockers. ‘If we haven't found it by then we might have a problem.'

‘We'd have less of a problem if you stayed behind,' I said, pointedly.

‘And more food, too,' added Markham.

‘Drag your mind away from your stomach, will you?' said Peterson.

‘Hey, I'm not the one jeopardising the entire mission with my unwanted presence,' said Markham.

‘Shut up, the pair of you,' I said in my newly acquired role of mission facilitator and peacemaker. ‘Let's get out of here before anyone comes looking for us.'