The Wraiths of War (39 page)

You see where I’m coming from? Wouldn’t such a chain of events suggest that the suit had been created out of nothing? That, stuck in this eternal loop of time, it had simply popped into being?

It was an anomaly, and one of several that I hoped wouldn’t come back at some stage to bite me on the bum. I guess my main fear was that by using the heart I was becoming the temporal equivalent of a deathwatch beetle. I was worried that each of my trips might be creating a borehole through time that would eventually weaken the structure to such an extent that it would crumble and collapse.

But what could I do, except push my concerns to the back of my mind, and get on with the matter in hand? I transferred my notebook and the heart to the various pockets of the tweed jacket, and got changed. Dressing in my new outfit made me feel like an actor about to embark on a role in a period drama – which I guess, in a way, I was. As I pulled on the trousers I discovered something that necessitated me making another note: in the right-hand pocket was a leather wallet containing around £4 (the equivalent of an average week’s wages) in date-appropriate currency, and a theatre ticket for that night’s performance by the Great Barnaby at the London Hippodrome.

I left my own wallet in my jeans, which I laid on the bed in readiness for my return, telling myself that if anything went wrong I’d pick it up at a later date, and then I grabbed a dark-blue gabardine raincoat that was hanging on the outside of the wardrobe door. Before exiting the room I looked out of the window to check the weather. There was the suggestion of a hard winter sheen to the landscape, but I was thankful to see that it was neither windy nor snowing. As I descended the stairs I wondered how I’d get to the Hippodrome – did I have a car? Or if not, did I own a phone so I could call a cab? But no sooner had I stepped off the bottom stair and on to the tiled floor of the hallway than there came a knock on the door.

I opened it to find a short man standing on the doorstep. With his waxy-looking overcoat and his round, bulging-eyed face sprouting straight from the thick folds of his scarf, he reminded me of a toad. He touched a finger to the brim of his cap and said, ‘Cab for you, sir. Ordered earlier today, I believe?’

Something else to add to the notebook. ‘Oh, right. Yes, thank you.’

‘I’m parked just outside the front gate, sir. Mind your step. It’s a bit slippy.’

The cab was a black, gleaming Austin FX3, with an open luggage platform in place of a passenger seat. I’ve never been much of a one for cars, but this was a beauty. Yet despite its immaculate bodywork, the seats in the back were of cracked leather, and the interior smelled strongly of pipe and cigarette smoke.

‘To the Hippodrome, isn’t it, sir?’ the driver said once he was settled in the front seat.

‘That’s right, yes.’

‘Going to see anything nice, sir?’

‘A magician. The Great Barnaby. Have you heard of him?’

‘Can’t say as I have, sir. I’m not much of a one for the theatre, I’m afraid.’

As he drove the driver chatted on – mostly about the London Olympics, which had finished a few months earlier (‘Never seen so many foreigners in me life. Couldn’t understand where half me fares wanted to go. Made a packet, I did, but I was glad to see the back of ’em.’) and the new royal baby (‘Charles they’re calling him – that was me old dad’s name, though everyone called him Charlie.’). I gave monosyllabic replies, most of my attention focused on the streets we were driving through. It was fascinating to see how much was familiar, and how much had changed. The structure of many of the buildings themselves, of course, was largely the same, though some were half-ruined and fenced off due to war damage. What was particularly striking was how few restaurants and cafés there were, and how the storefronts of the mid-twentieth century differed to those of the early twenty-first. There were no supermarkets or megastores – very few chain stores at all, in fact – and the shop signs were hand-painted, and therefore far more attractive than their modern counterparts; there was none of the ugly plastic signage that would proliferate in twenty or thirty years’ time. Some of the buildings were emblazoned with big advertisements for the likes of BOVRIL and EXIDE BATTERIES, and some of the streets – again presumably due to war damage – were closed off. I saw one street being guarded by a couple of London bobbies, who were standing beside a pair of wooden signs propped open at its entrance. One of the signs read ROAD CLOSED and the other DANGER UNEXPLODED BOMB.

My driver dropped me off on the corner of Cranbourn Street, and I joined the throng of people streaming into the Hippodrome, whose impressive columned façade was lit up like a golden palace. Most of the men were dressed like me, in suits, overcoats, trilbies and brogues, whereas the women wore long pleated skirts beneath their winter coats, their hands encased in elegant leather gloves and their carefully curled or waved hair adorned with felt hats that sprouted bows or feathers.

I was pleased to discover that my seat was a fairly anonymous one, in the middle of a row about eight back from the stage. As I took it, noting with incredulity how many people were smoking, I wondered whether the Great Barnaby – or Barnaby McCallum as I better knew him – was aware of my presence here tonight. If I was to make contact with him after the show, then I guess he
would
know, if only because his older self, remembering our meeting, would surely have popped back to warn him I was here. The gift of the poster, and the message that had come with it, would seem to indicate I
had
made contact – though even now I still wasn’t entirely sure what my plan was. I had come here ostensibly to play it by ear, to see what transpired. If it was possible to discover anything useful about McCallum without revealing my presence, then all well and good. On the other hand, there was every possibility I was being manipulated, moved into place like a pawn – though for what reason, only time would tell. But hey, in order to get answers I was going to have to take risks, wasn’t I? Which meant following my nose and seeing where it led.

As I settled into my seat and ran my eye over the flimsy programme sheet – which I was hoping, in vain, might give some insight into the Great Barnaby’s background – I wondered why I was pursuing this line of enquiry. I had Kate back (she was currently being looked after by the Sherwoods, who had returned from Wales and moved into their new London home – which I was still to buy), and my life, to all intents and purposes, was hunky dory, so why was I here?

Was it simple curiosity, or something more? Was it, in fact, a nagging sense of obligation, or even of destiny? Or perhaps it was a fear that if I didn’t follow up this lead – dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s – I would come to regret it? Clearly McCallum had not bequeathed me the poster on a whim, which meant it must be significant. Perhaps it would lead me to an understanding of how to once and for all nullify the threat of the Dark Man. If so, I couldn’t afford to ignore it.

The magic show itself was… well, I guess by 1940s standards it was impressive. Certainly the audience seemed to think so, oohing and aahing and gasping with wonder, bursting into applause at the culmination of every trick.

Watching it from a twenty-first-century viewpoint, it was evident that McCallum had used the heart to travel forward in time and borrow tricks from future magicians, so that here they seemed fresh and startling. There were card tricks, and tricks where handkerchiefs transformed into doves, and tricks where objects donated by audience members somehow ended up inside bottles whose necks were far too narrow to accommodate them. There were also a couple of sequences that seemed to be lifted straight from Derren Brown shows I’d seen on TV – one where McCallum correctly guessed the contents of audience members’ pockets, and another based on what he called ‘the artifice of spirituality’, whereby an audience member, tied securely to a chair and concealed within a curtained box, would supposedly ‘call on the spirits’ to rattle a tambourine or shred a newspaper while he was restrained.

Although the audience lapped it up, what I found most interesting about the performance was McCallum himself, and particularly his use of the heart in his act. At one point he not only levitated it, but caused it to loop and dive above the heads of the audience like a bird. For the finale he set it on a glass stand in the centre of the stage, and then, to the accompaniment of a crash of sound from the musicians in the orchestra pit, he raised his arms dramatically to the heavens, whereupon the heart erupted into life, a mass of writhing tendrils shooting up from it and ascending almost to the ceiling of the theatre, accompanied by shrieks and gasps from the audience.

Both McCallum and his female assistant – who was small and slim, and whose age I was unable to discern from where I was sitting (she could have been anywhere between twelve and twenty-five years old) – wore red eye masks throughout the performance. McCallum also sported a waxed moustache with curled ends, and a luxuriant black beard, which made it impossible to tell whether he and the decrepit old man I’d accidentally killed while stealing the heart were one and the same.

As soon as the performance was over, I bustled outside with the rest of the crowd, then slipped down an alleyway at the side of the building, looking for the stage door. It had started to drizzle at some point during the evening, and within seconds of leaving the theatre the chill, biting rain had made my face feel like an ice mask.

The alleyway was adequately, though not brightly, lit, the semi-circles of yellow light spilling down the brickwork and across the ground from evenly spaced, wall-mounted lamps making no impression on the pools of black shadow that lay in between them. The rain made every surface gleam like plastic, and gave the scene a flickering, scratched quality like old film.

If I was to be ambushed – though God knew by who, and for what reason, unless in some crazily convoluted way the Dark Man was in league with McCallum – then I guess this would be the time and place it would happen. Experience at any rate had taught me to expect the unexpected, to take nothing for granted, and so I kept a tight grip on the heart in my pocket as I pressed yet deeper into the shadows.

About thirty seconds later, the bustle of the London street at the alley’s entrance having receded to the point where it was no more than a glimmer of light and a rumble of distant activity, I was about to step into yet another pool of darkness when a scuffle of movement close to my right foot made me jump. I looked down to see a large black rat cross my path, then dart off into the even more profound blackness ahead of me. I shuddered, then grinned. I’d seen so many rats in the trenches you’d have thought I’d have been used to them by now. Even so my heart pumped a little faster as I moved deeper into the alleyway. Every patch of darkness ahead of me now seemed to teem with frantic life.

After another ten yards the alleyway came to an abrupt end. That’s what I thought at first anyway, but then I took a couple of steps closer and realised that the wall I’d thought marked a dead end was actually set at an oblique angle, like a door pushed halfway open, and formed a right-hand curve that led around the back of the Hippodrome. I followed the curve, and almost immediately saw a shaded light illuminating a plain black door beneath it. Painted carefully onto the brickwork above the door were the words STAGE DOOR.

This was what I’d been looking for. This was McCallum’s most likely exit point out of the theatre. All I had to do now was hide somewhere, and then, when he emerged, follow him and see where he went.

And then what? Confront him? Engage him in conversation? I guess I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

I looked around for a hiding place, and spotted what appeared to be a dustbin set into a recess in the wall of the opposite building, about twenty yards further up the alleyway. I wasn’t
entirely
sure what I was looking at, because the object was nestled in the darkness between one pool of light and the next, and only the vaguest outline of one side of it was visible. The far end of the alley was at least three hundred yards beyond that, and from where I was standing was little more than a slit of orange and the suggestion of faraway movement (would that be Charing Cross Road? I’d lost my bearings). Thinking how eerie it was that a lively city could have so many dead spots, I moved towards the dustbin-shaped thing, slipping from light into shadow, then back into light again.

When I got to the outer edge of the second pool of light, I saw it
was
indeed a dustbin. In fact it was one of four standing in a row in a recess the size and length of a bus shelter. I was pleased to find that if I crouched down behind the last bin in the row, it would not only provide a perfect hiding place and shelter from the rain, but would also give me an unobstructed view of the stage door.

It seemed like a win-win situation, though it wasn’t
entirely
perfect, as I found out when I got close to the last bin in the row, and a couple of rats scampered out from behind it. Glancing back at the stage door, I kicked the bin lightly to frighten off any other rodents that might be lurking in the shadows, and then, wrinkling my nose against the ripe smell that rose up to greet me, I ducked into the recess and crouched down.

Despite the stench of rotting food, though, and the fact that the ground was too wet and filthy to sit on, which meant that my legs and feet soon began to prickle with pins and needles, my little hidey-hole could almost have been described as cosy. In my tweed suit, overcoat and trilby hat, I at least felt warm, and it was kind of nice, even comforting, to hear the patter of rain on the ground outside. After a while of staring at the stage door, I felt myself becoming drowsy despite my discomfort, and I shuffled around a bit to wake myself up and coax some life back into my numb limbs. But within a few minutes my eyelids were drooping again.
Just a quick power nap
, I thought,
to recharge the batteries. I don’t need to stare at the door all the time. I’ll hear it if it opens
.

What seemed like the next second I heard a clunk and a creak, and jerked awake. My head snapped up, and I saw a hooded figure emerge from the stage door. Was it McCallum? No, it was too short and slim, and although it was almost entirely swathed in a dark, hooded cloak, I got the distinct impression it was female.