What Time Devours (12 page)

Same old Deborah
, he thought.

“Is Kumi in town?” she asked.

Thomas shifted.

“No. Still in Tokyo,” he said. “Why?”

“Well, you being shot and all.”

“Oh, you know how busy she is,” Thomas fudged. “And I’ll be out of here by the end of the day . . .”

“You haven’t told her.”

It wasn’t a question. Thomas looked away, then said simply, “No.”

Deborah shook her head and drew her knees up.

“I don’t get you two,” she said.

“You’ve never met her!” Thomas replied.

“How could I have?” she fired back. “You’re never on the same continent, except of course when you are running from snipers. I’m surprised she’s not in the next bed.”

“I don’t want her involved in this,” said Thomas. He didn’t want to talk about it.

“You’re protecting her?” she said, smiling coolly. “From what I’ve heard, she doesn’t need protecting.”

“Maybe,” Thomas conceded. “It’s just . . . difficult.”

He had told Deborah before about his uneven marriage, the miscarriage that had torn them apart, the trial separation that had slid into years of isolation, the bitter long-distance phone calls that had finally dried up, and the years of silence. Deborah knew firsthand of the events last spring that had gone some way to healing the rift, but how do you properly fix a decade of mistrust and alienation when you were never together for more than a few days? Deborah was right: he and Kumi were almost never on the same continent.

“We’re just not there yet,” he said. “We’re getting there, I think, but we’re still very separate people. We’ve had a lot of time to get used to that. It’s hard to change it. I don’t want her to worry. I don’t want her to
depend
on me,” he said, finding the word. “We’re not ready for that.”

“Just don’t leave it too late,” she said. “Life is short. You of all people should know that.”

CHAPTER 22

A half hour after Deborah left, promising to stay in touch, Thomas threw his few things into a bag and kicked it when it fell off the bed. His shoulder was still bound, if less tightly than before, and it ached when he moved. As he was completing his discharge paperwork, a hard-faced nurse brought him a large manila envelope.

“This came for you today,” she said, apparently affronted. “Left at the front desk.”

Thomas’s name was written in careful block capitals. Inside was another, smaller envelope and a handwritten letter.

I’m sorry, Mr. Knight,
it said.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

There was more, but Thomas’s eyes dropped to the signature at the foot of the second page:
David Escolme.
Anger surged up in him like a rearing horse, and he wanted to tear the letter or ball it up and hurl it across the room. Instead he took a breath and read on.

 

The only Poets’ Corner Thomas had heard of was in Westminster Abbey in London. Thomas stared into space, then opened the other envelope. Inside was an open return ticket to London Gatwick and five thousand dollars in cash.

“You have got to be kidding me,” he said. He was getting angry, rereading the letter, his teeth set.

Escolme had lied to him, set him up, left him with a corpse at his back door, and then gotten him damn near killed in his own house. Now Thomas was supposed to put all the pieces together to save his neck? He could forget it.

Thomas remembered the note he had posted on the Drake’s conference message board and figured he had done the right thing after all. He wanted nothing more to do with David Escolme. If he ever saw him again, it would be too soon, and if the guy wound up in jail for the rest of his life, that seemed no more than fair to Thomas. Escolme wasn’t a kid anymore, which meant that Thomas hadn’t been responsible for him in any way for a decade.

The phone rang. Thomas answered it.

“It’s Polinski,” said the cop. “You still planning to check out today?”

“I’m on my way out the door right now.”

“Good. Can you come down to the beach at the end of Church Street?”

“Are we going to picnic to celebrate my discharge?”

“No,” she said. “I need you to look at something.”

Her tone was businesslike, clipped. Thomas felt a sudden chill.

“Something?” he said.

“I think we might have found David Escolme.”

CHAPTER 23

“A couple who came down here to watch the sunrise over the lake found him,” said Polinski.

He’d been in the water about six hours, they thought, and dead a little longer than that. He had been shot through the heart at close range with what looked to be a .38.

“The same gun?” asked Thomas.

“Too early to say,” said Polinski, “but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Thomas frowned. An hour ago he would have greeted Escolme with a volley of insults, maybe more if his temper got away from him. The guy had exploited him, made a fool of him, and put him in firing lines both metaphorical and literal. But looking at him now, half wrapped in a tarp, his boyish face pale, wet, and shrunken, Thomas could see only the bond that had connected them in the first place. Escolme was, after all, still a kid, and a screwed-up kid at that. He had done some stupid things, even some scummy things—the word floating up in Thomas’s mind from the letter—but he didn’t deserve this. Thomas’s rage drifted away on the waters of the lake, and he felt unaccountably guilty, as if this is what he had wanted.

Thomas stared out over the water, his left hand stuffed into his pocket, his right in a simple sling to keep his wound from reopening. He was suddenly tired beyond words.

“Any chance it’s self-inflicted?” he heard Polinski say to a man Thomas took to be the coroner or medical examiner.

The man muttered doubtfully in response.

“It’s not suicide,” said Thomas. “He wasn’t ending anything. He was in the middle of it.”

“And how would you know that?” said Polinski.

Thomas could feel the envelope with the ticket in his pocket, but he didn’t draw it out.

“Just a hunch,” he said. “Am I done here?”

“You’re done.”

“You need me around—in town, I mean?” said Thomas. “I’d like to get away.”

Polinski considered him, her eyes narrow.

“Like where?”

“Don’t know,” Thomas shrugged. He avoided her eyes. “I just need to be . . . away. I’ll check in.”

“You’re not a suspect,” said Polinski, matter-of-fact. “You were under guard at the hospital when Escolme died.” She sighed. “Yeah, you can go. Just make sure I can reach you.”

Thomas nodded and turned, tramping wearily up the beach, then turned back to the cop.

“Polinski,” he called back.

She turned, shading her eyes from the glare off the water.

“You know anything about where Blackstone had been before she came here?”

“Is there a reason I should tell you?” she said.

“No,” said Thomas. “Just trying to help.”

“Just take it easy, Mr. Knight. Rest up.”

He nodded, but before he had a chance to turn away she seemed to think better of her decision.

“You know she was a Brit, right?”

“I figured that, yeah.”

“Her passport says she flew here from Paris.”

“Huh,” said Thomas, thinking of the champagne bottles in the room he had thought was Escolme’s.

“That mean anything to you?”

“Not yet,” he said.

It could have been a mistake, that suggestion that it might mean something to him in the future, that he wasn’t done with this case, and he caught a watchfulness in her face. She opened her mouth to say something and he pretended not to notice, raising a hand in farewell and turning up the beach. He walked purposefully away, his strapped shoulder aching, his right hand still clutching the airline ticket in his pocket.

PART II

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

—Shakespeare, “Sonnet 64”

CHAPTER 24

Westminster Abbey was overwhelming. It wasn’t the scale of the place—the vast, vaulted nave thronging with tourists—or even, strictly speaking, its age. It was the history that announced itself everywhere you looked. It was, Thomas thought, impressive to the point of being oppressive.

In this building every monarch of England had been crowned since William the Conqueror in 1066. The core of the building was actually older, a tenth-century Benedictine abbey for which King—later, Saint—Edward the Confessor had built a magnificent church. Edward’s remains still lay here, as did the bodies of countless other monarchs including the giants of Shakespeare’s day, Elizabeth I and James I. All this and a good deal more Thomas could learn from his guidebook, but the wealth of information—of history—made the abbey walls crowd in, so that visitors with an ounce of sensitivity to such things started to feel like the slender columns on which rested the tons of stone above. It was too much to take in.

Every inch of the place seemed to memorialize some long-dead dignitary or statesman, so that even the tombs of such colossi as Richard II and Henry V—both known to Thomas almost exclusively through Shakespeare’s depictions of them—could produce little more than muted shock. The depth of the antiquity, the weight of it, was unlike anything Thomas had ever experienced. Here were buried the scientists Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin; the composer Handel; the actors David Garrick, Henry Irving, and Laurence Olivier; the writers Aphra Behn and Ben Jonson; the prime minister William Pitt; the engineer Thomas Telford . . . The list seemed endless.

Thomas drifted through Henry VII’s chapel, where lay Elizabeth; her Catholic half-sister, “Bloody” Mary; her successor, James; and James’s mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth had had beheaded for treason. He walked slowly, still bruised from the fight in Evanston, one arm still suspended at his waist in a sling. His invalid speed made everything about the place register more fully. As he exited the chapel he was confronted with the battered throne of Edward I, used in every coronation since 1309, now astonishingly disfigured by graffiti and carved initials, so that it could have been some forgotten chair at the back of any school hall.

Thomas stared at it, feeling the collision of the remarkable and the contemptibly familiar. How could anyone treat so revered an object with such casual disdain? But then how could anyone sustain a proper sense of awe in a place that strove to outdo each monument with something still grander, still more redolent of the distant and mythic past.

The abbey was a microcosm of the city itself, each corner of London stacked with a history so deep and layered that it dizzied the mind like vertigo. Maybe the whole country was like this, each square foot overwritten with the footprints of kings and writers, soldiers, politicians, artists, and heroes of all kinds, from the Saxons, Romans, and Vikings all the way through the Medieval and Renaissance periods through to more modern epics like the Second World War. On this spot, or close to it, had stood every Londoner for a thousand years: queens, princes, nobles, priests—first Catholic, then their Anglican equivalents—tradesmen, beggars, prostitutes, all seeking God or history, many of them tourists like himself. King George II. Oliver Cromwell. Winston Churchill. Jack the Ripper. Almost certainly.