What Time Devours (30 page)

“I’m sorry, sir, this is the club lounge. Do you have your pass with you?”

For a second he ignored the attendant, watching through the porthole window as Julia walked past without looking in.

“I must have left it in my car,” he said.

“I’m afraid you can’t stay here without it,” said the woman. She was English, perhaps thirty, with hard, combative eyes. She wore a garish uniform, “tan” makeup leaning to orange that made her look like a store mannequin, and black hair streaked with gold.

“Right,” he said. “Can you give me a second? I feel a little seasick.”

She gave him a revolted look, as if he had already thrown up on her shoes.

“Perhaps you should go to the bathroom,” she suggested.

“Perhaps you should give me a moment,” said Thomas. He was stalling, but couldn’t suppress a sense of indignation at the way she was treating him. After all, he thought, she didn’t know he wasn’t really sick.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, the politeness brittle now, “but if you don’t have your pass . . .”

“I can’t enter Valhalla,” said Thomas. “I get it. I’m going. In a second. I just have to be sure I can walk without . . .” He clutched his stomach.

“You can have a minute,” she said, backing away with a grimace. “But I don’t have a mop in here. If you’re going to puke, you should go outside.”

“You are the heart of generosity and compassion,” he said, walking away, still peering through the windows. Julia McBride was nowhere to be seen.

And now Thomas had a new question. Could the footsteps he had heard in the cellars, the cautious pacing that had interspersed Gresham’s purposeful jangling steps, have been a woman’s?

CHAPTER 60

He did not see Julia again, not on deck, not in the boat’s cattle-car restaurant, not at the
bureau de change
or in the lines that began forming for the car deck twenty minutes before they docked. She didn’t appear at the railway transfer point, nor at the Hertz car rental stand. She was gone.

Thomas didn’t know what he would have said to her if she had seen him, or what he would say when they next met. It could be a coincidence, but he didn’t like it, and all the possible explanations he thought of were, in varying degrees, troubling.

He hated the idea that he was dependent on buses and trains again. England might be small, but it was densely populated, and getting from A to B could be extremely difficult if neither were major towns. So he rented another car, only realizing the strangeness of what this would be like when he tried the driver’s door and found he was on the passenger side.

Driving on the left
, he thought.
How hard could it be?

Pretty hard. He had ridden a bicycle in Japan, where they also drove on the left, but the Japanese driving test had a famously difficult writing component that effectively (some said deliberately) prohibited foreigners from driving. He had to check himself at every junction, doubly so at those numerous and maddening “roundabouts”—rotaries—where everyone else seemed to know exactly where they were going and shifted from lane to lane with a discreet flash of their turn signals. Thomas went around two or three times before picking his exit, and people blared their horns at him as he cut across the traffic to get out.

The car was small but the lanes still felt narrow, and he had to concentrate hard to keep the little vehicle out of the way of the trucks and coaches that roared past him with only a couple of inches between their side-view mirrors. After twenty minutes he was stiff with tension and had drifted into the left lane to try to stay clear of the worst of it. Still, he was constantly in the way of people trying to get off the highway, so he moved into the middle lane, tried to keep steady, and put his foot down.

He got off the M25 and headed north on the M40. At Oxford he found what was ambiguously signposted as “Services,” and pulled in to eat, use the bathroom, and make a phone call.

“Constable Robson.”

“This is Thomas Knight. I spoke to you after I was attacked in the castle ruins.”

“Ah, yes,” said the policeman. “The siege of Kenilworth Castle. How could I forget?”

“I told you a little about what I was doing here,” Thomas said. “I’d like to tell you a little more.”

“Okay,” said Robson. “Is this going to take a while, because I was hoping to get a bite to eat soon . . .”

“Order a pizza,” said Thomas.

He told Robson about his visit to the Demier cellars and what had happened there. He gave him Polinski’s contact information in Chicago and suggested that they go through Interpol, or whatever they did, so that they could cooperate with the French police.

“Okay,” said Robson, deadpan. “Look, Mr. Knight, this story of yours is pretty bizarre.”

“Why don’t you order that pizza and I’ll call you back later,” Thomas suggested. “In the meantime, you might make a few calls of your own.”

“Fair enough,” said Robson.

The calls he would make were, they both knew, to check up on Thomas’s story and make sure the policeman wasn’t dealing with a certifiable lunatic.

Thomas bought an apple and a block of white cheddar. The English, it turned out, knew their cheese. He told the cashier as much.

“It’s a place, you know,” she said, “not far from here.”

“What is?”

“The Cheddar Gorge. Where the cheese comes from.”

“Oh,” said Thomas, who had never thought of Cheddar as a place. “Good cheese there, is there?”

“S’pose,” said the girl, shrugging. “I don’t eat cheese. Makes me gassy.”

Thomas called Robson back a half hour later, and though the policeman’s voice was the same, he sensed a different level of seriousness in the way he listened. Clearly he had confirmed the events in Epernay. Thomas begged one piece of information in return for what he gave: the home address of Daniella Blackstone’s erstwhile writing partner, Elsbeth Church.

With that in his pocket, Thomas promised to meet with Robson when he got back to Kenilworth. Then he bought a new map, and returned to his car.

Elsbeth Church’s home was south of Stratford, just off the M4 between Newbury and Hungerford in what was now the county of Oxfordshire but was referred to as the Berkshire Downs. She lived well, but not ostentatiously, on the edge of a village called Hamstead Marshall in the kind of country cottage only England could produce with a straight face: stone, hung with creepers, and tiled with slate, its garden rustic to the point of wildness but dotted with colorful flowers. The house had small, leaded windows, and the walls bulged out of true in ways that could have been ramshackle but were merely quaint. Behind it were meadows running down to a brook, with a massive sycamore tree where some sort of large dove or pigeon called. It was a house off a postcard or a chocolate box.

Robson said she had divorced her brute of a husband the moment she became financially self-sufficient. She had no children and—unlike Daniella with her steward—lived alone.

No one answered the door when he rang. He waited and tried again, but with no better luck. The closest house sat back from the road a couple of hundred yards away. Thomas took one look and saw a net curtain twitch in an upstairs window. Someone was watching him. He considered going over there but guessed that this was not a part of the world where people volunteered news of their neighbors to strangers. He drove into the village and, heading north to the motorway, found a pub called The Green Man.

It was clouding over and the fine day was cooling fast. He went inside, hugging his light jacket to him, took his place at the bar, and ordered a pint of best bitter.

Unlike Stratford or Kenilworth, the pub was unused to Americans, and he was soon engaged in a playful discussion with the bartender about the various merits of cricket versus baseball, and the American “buggering up” of the word “football.”

“I mean, you don’t even use your feet, do you?” he was saying, genuinely bemused. “What’s all that about? And the constant stopping and starting so you can wheel these half-ton monsters onto the field. I mean to say: come on! Those blokes wouldn’t last five minutes in a rugby match—or in a real football match for that matter, when they don’t get to sit down and have a drink on the sidelines every thirty seconds. Taking oxygen between plays.
Oxygen?!
I mean, if there’s not enough in the air, there’s something wrong, isn’t there . . .”

And so it went on. Thomas endured with a grin and a shrug and the occasional obligatory remarks about zero-zero ties in soccer, the impenetrability of cricket, and England’s failure to qualify for the European cup, which was then dominating the sports pages. It was good-natured enough, an excuse for a little verbal sparring rather than an actual disagreement. The barman was a lean, middle-aged man who tended to look off to the side when he talked and whose smile at his own wit was so light you might miss it. Eventually the talk moved on to other things: what the area was like to live in, and why the bartender secretly hoped one day to move to Florida. There was nothing around here, he said. The kids were all migrating away to the city. The farms were dying. Even the tourists didn’t come here.

All of which led neatly into inquiries about what Thomas was doing there and a slightly retooled version of his journalist’s feature on Daniella Blackstone.

“I had made an appointment to meet with Elsbeth Church, but I guess something got screwed up because she wasn’t home.”

“She probably got the wrong day,” said the bartender. “She gets a little confused.”

“Really? I thought she was the brains behind that writing team.”

“That’s what people say,” he confided, “but she was always a bit batty if you ask me, and she’s getting worse. Good at making stuff up, you know—stories—but even with all that cash rolling in can’t seem to keep her life from going pear-shaped. Not that she cares. What time is it?” he checked his watch. “She’ll be at the old house,” he said. “If she’s in town, and it’s not raining. Bound to be.”

“The old house?”

“Hamstead Marshall Park Manor.”

“Can you direct me?”

“Having lived here all my life I might just be able to manage it,” he said, with that sand-dry smile of his. Then, with a shrug and a roll of his eyes that he didn’t explain, he added, “Your funeral, mate.”

CHAPTER 61

Thomas turned the napkin the bartender had written on, but he couldn’t make any sense of it. He’d driven to where the house should be, but there was nothing. The road rolled through open fields and scattered trees. There was a church and an occasional farm building, but nothing that merited the grand title of Hamstead Marshall Park Manor. It wasn’t raining yet, but it would soon, and the light was dropping steadily. If he didn’t find it soon, he would miss the chance.

He drove the stretch of road twice, then stopped and got out. It was cold and a stiff wind was blowing. He was, he realized, looking for something like the Blackstone place—an imposing stately home in expansive grounds. There was nothing of the kind around.

He parked beside the church, a small stone building with a square tower, probably medieval in origin but tinkered with over the years. He walked through the churchyard, hoping that someone might be working there who could point him in the right direction. No one was there.

He walked around the ancient graveyard with its lurching, weathered headstones, looking out over the fields for a sign of the great house, and it was then that he saw something strange. Standing in the middle of the rough and tussocky field was a pair of tall brick pillars with inset niches, surmounted with stone vases. Weeds sprouted from the very brickwork and blew in tangled masses from the urns on top. They looked for all the world like gateposts, but there were no gates, no walls outside the posts, and nothing he could see inside.

Thomas walked toward the pillars.

On the ground was a yellow flower. He took it to be growing there, but its stem was cut as if it had been dropped there. A few feet away was another. He couldn’t say why, but the flowers bothered him.

Thomas walked carefully over the uneven ground, feeling the first raindrop fall from the gray sky and streak down his cheek. When he got close to them, he was even more convinced that they were gateposts, but in this completely open space, they seemed surreal and unearthly, like the monoliths of an ancient stone circle, growing out of the earth itself. He looked around him. The rain was falling steadily now, and the place felt strange and isolated. He entered the gates—insofar as there was anything to enter—and looked about him again, as if expecting a building to suddenly appear before him, like some spectral structure in a fairy tale or a ghost story. There was nothing, and with the cold rain falling harder, he began to think that he should go back to the car. He was clearly in the wrong location. There were more flowers here too, cut and strewn at random or blown about the field, some fresh, some faded, some dried to nothing, but none of them native to this spot.

There was something about the place, something old and elemental. Thomas shivered.

And then he saw her. She was squatting on the ground about two hundred yards away, motionless, her head turned slightly away from him. She might have been a half-submerged rock, but even though she was still, he was surprised how long it had taken him to see her. She was elderly, he thought, frail-looking, her hair long and blowing wildly. He moved closer. She wore a dark overcoat fastened tight. There were flowers all around her. Cut flowers.

CHAPTER 62

What are you
, Thomas thought, suddenly feeling like Macbeth stumbling upon the weird sisters on the blasted heath,
that look not like the inhabitants of the earth and yet are on it . . . ?

He took a step toward her. Then another. She knew he was there. He would bet his life on it. There was a tension to her, an alertness, like a rabbit in open country.