What Time Devours (38 page)

Then where?

Thomas stood there, listening to the rooks cawing in a distant oak, and he had no idea. If it had been put into some conventional storage—a safe-deposit box, say—official representatives of the Blackstone estate would surely have uncovered it. If so, the steward would have it. But that seemed impossible. And besides, other people were looking for it, and—if the episode in the Demier cellars was anything to go by—in pretty unconventional places. Thomas wasn’t the only one who thought the little quarto had been concealed where someone else might find it.

But there was something else that made him think that the play wasn’t simply in a locked drawer somewhere. The two novelists had fallen out immediately before Daniella had started whispering about the play to other people. Elsbeth now claimed no knowledge of the play, but the two women had worked together for years after the fire, intimately bound by loss and grief.

Elsbeth said it was about money, but that seemed unlikely, unless money was only part of a larger issue. Blackstone had certainly been looking to profit from the play once it was clear that her solo career was going nowhere. Could that have been it from the start, the source of the tension between them? Had Daniella wanted to cash in on the value of the play and found Elsbeth defiantly adamant? If so, perhaps the original intent had been to keep the play secret as a kind of private memorial to their dead daughters.

Yes
, thought Thomas, his stride quickening.

If they had pledged to keep the surviving manuscript to themselves in memory of their daughters, then Daniella’s desire to go public with the text might have seemed like a violation of that promise and, by extension, a cheapening of Alice and Pippa’s deaths. If so, the play would have been hidden somewhere symbolically fitting not to their deaths, but to their lives. The play would have been concealed somewhere the girls had valued, not somewhere linked by vague historical association to their deaths in the fire. He didn’t know where it was, but Thomas was sure that he would never find
Love’s Labour’s Won
on the grounds of Hamstead Marshall Park, even with a fleet of industrial excavators at his disposal. He tried to remember what he had read in the diary, the places they had gone together, the things they had done, but all he could remember was a bunch of references to concert venues and something about “scouring” a horse. Perhaps Pippa’s family owned a stable.

He stood quite still and looked out over the empty plot where the manor had once been, and he felt a sudden and unexpected sadness that made his breath catch. He thought of Elsbeth Church’s pilgrimage to this spot, made almost daily for years, wondering how long after Pippa’s death it had begun. He and Kumi had had only one viable pregnancy, which had failed to produce a child. The miscarriage had scarred them for life, had—for a time, at least—sent fissures through the base of their marriage till they had not been able to live on the same continent as each other. What the loss of a teenaged daughter would do to a person, he couldn’t begin to imagine.

The thought came gusting out of the chill air. It stopped him.

“She’ll be okay,” he countered, aloud.

He looked down at the earth with the cut and drying blossoms, and the thought he had been holding back since she had first told him about the treatment options finally broke through.

It was beyond obvious, but the fact was that he hadn’t known till now. Not really. Not even when he had been lying on his kitchen floor with a bullet in his shoulder and his lungs filling with fluid. Not even then.

When she had first told him, something had started buzzing in his ears, something terrible and ordinary. For the first time, he knew what it was. It was the sound of a clock ticking off their remaining time together.

Love’s not time’s fool
, he thought,
though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle’s compass come . . .

But that wasn’t true, was it? And when things die, everything about them is lost. They become unimaginable, as if they never really existed.

That was the worst.

“She’ll be okay,” he said.

He rubbed his bruised forehead, then took a breath of the cold air and felt it sear his lungs. He began stalking back toward the car, eyes focused like a blinkered horse, convinced he had to get out of this place, as if the air were infected.

CHAPTER 79

After the episode at Blackstone’s, Thomas hardly needed to remind himself of the dangers of breaking and entering, but he was in no mood to play it safe as he pulled up in front of Elsbeth Church’s stone cottage. Somewhere, in some dark, unreasoning place in his mind, something that worked by an obscure system of symbolic association instead of actual logic, he thought that if he could solve the mystery into which David Escolme had propelled him, it would somehow make other things better. He didn’t dare think of Kumi’s name in this context, because to make the vague assumption even that specific would make it absurd, but he thought it anyway.

But as a kid Thomas had dreamed up all kinds of absurd superstitions: that it would be a good day if he did not look back until he reached the bus stop, that three cardinals in the tree outside his house meant that his parents would get home early, that avoiding cracks in the sidewalk really kept his mother’s back from breaking . . . or something. It was usually vague, privately gleeful, something he never discussed because he knew that to put it into words would make it stupid. Now a small, unreasoning part of him clung to the childish certainty that if he could get these wholly unconnected things
right
, then other things would follow suit. Unravel one set of knots—Escolme, Shakespeare, champagne—and the one he couldn’t untie—Kumi—would somehow resolve itself. Stupid, he knew, but still . . .

So he rang Elsbeth Church’s front door hoping that she would not be in.

She wasn’t, which was a relief of several kinds, and he was able to move quickly around the back, looking for an open window, or a flimsy door. A coal hatch was too much to hope for, but there was no sign of an alarm system. The house across the street looked quiet and the curtains didn’t twitch when he looked at it.

Thomas checked his wallet and fished out an expired MasterCard. He worked the corner of the plastic into the crack between the jamb and the back door. He had never tried this before, and wasn’t sure what he was doing, but he pressed the card hard against the latch and was amazed at how easily it snapped free. He opened the door, heard no beeping or barking, and stepped inside.

He smelled it instantly, that aroma of damp earth and leaves, and something muskier underneath it, something animal. It made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

He was in a stone-flagged kitchen that looked like it hadn’t been upgraded since the turn of the last century. It was clean but spartan, boasting no implement that postdated the Second World War. Ancient iron cookware and heavy knives were laid out on a scrubbed stone counter. Thomas turned and flinched as he brushed up against something that shifted, something that seemed to generate that outdoors scent, but underwritten with a darker note: blood.

He flinched away before realizing what it was.

From a ceiling rack hung two gutted rabbits, head, eyes, and fur intact.

Thomas backed away from them, steadying his nerves with an effort.

He moved quickly from room to room, and the smell followed him. Every room was the same, swept and dustless spaces without character. They were like those rooms in castles, uneven plaster walls and open wood or stone floors with a few hulking pieces of rough-hewn furniture. There were no pictures on the walls, no drapes, no paint other than the default whitewash, no TV, no couch, no shades on the light-bulbs, no carpet, no sound system of any kind. It could have been a house from four hundred years ago, except that Thomas would have expected the period to somehow stamp itself on the place: a piece of tapestry, an obsolete tool, an inkwell . . . Something. This place had no period, no context. It was a space in time.

All but two rooms.

One was where Elsbeth wrote. It was still spare but there was an absolutely modern computer sitting silently on the desk, and there was a
Concise English Dictionary
beside it. On a pine shelf was a complete Shakespeare and a set of her own books. Nothing by anyone else.

The other fully furnished room was upstairs. It was unlocked. As soon as he stepped inside, Thomas was sure that this was Pippa Church’s—or rather Pippa Adams’s—room, but it couldn’t have been further from Alice Blackstone’s. The shock of it rooted Thomas to the spot. For a long moment, all he could do was stare, gazing around the walls in horror.

The room was papered with details of the school fire. There were newspaper cuttings circled and underlined in red. There were grainy, faded pictures of the funeral, stoic mourners in black and stunned locals with out-of-fashion raincoats and umbrellas. There was a photocopied blueprint of the school hall, with red felt-pen arrows indicating, Thomas assumed, the path of the flames. There were evidence memos tacked up, crime scene pictures, even a pathology report that talked in terrible, clinical terms about “smoke inhalation” and “extensive postmortem burns.” Only one thing tied the room to Alice’s. Over the coverless bed was the same XTC album cover, the white horse outlined against green.

Thomas left.

In thirty seconds, he was down the stairs, through the rancid kitchen, and out, sucking in the cool, misty air and fighting the impulse to throw up.

But standing out there beneath a vast horse chestnut, Thomas knew he had seen something, that the visit hadn’t merely been a violation of Church’s terrible monument to her daughter’s death. The pictures of the funeral had shown the childless parents as a confused huddle, as if segregated from the others by grief. At the edge of that group, not quite of it, but somehow in it, was a quarter-century-younger Randall Dagenhart.

He felt a rush of exultation. His hunch had been right, and he had managed to prove it without climbing out windows and over rooftops like some overgrown chimp . . .

Thomas started to turn exactly as the hand clapped his shoulder. He flinched, but the hand was heavy and its grip was firm. He heard the voice before he saw the man:

“All right there, son?”

He was a large man—his shoulders looked a yard apart—and he had short red hair and pale eyes. He was wearing a black jersey and a peaked cap with a black-and-white diced band around the headband.

A policeman. There was another behind him.

“What?” said Thomas, half feigned innocence, half genuine surprise.

“Neighbor reported a strange car,” said the policeman. “Is that your house, sir?”

“Er, no,” said Thomas, looking past them to the house over the road where the net curtains were now being held open.

“Can you tell me what you’re doing here?”

“I was just . . .”

Thomas’s mind went blank.

“I was passing,” he said.

“Were you passing
through
the house?” said the policeman. “Only I just saw you come out.”

“Sorry,” said Thomas, “I was hoping Miss Church would be in, but . . .”

“I’m afraid you’re nicked, mate,” he said, smiling as if at a private joke.

“I’m sorry,” Thomas began. “
Nicked
. . . ?”

But the policeman cut him off in measured, no-nonsense terms, and he wasn’t smiling anymore.

“I’m arresting you for suspected burglary. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention, when questioned, something that you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Please step this way.”

PART IV

When I consider every thing that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and checked even by the self-same sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay,
To change your day of youth to sullied night;
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.

—Shakespeare, “Sonnet 15”

CHAPTER 80

Thomas was walked to an inappropriately cheery “panda” car—white with borders of blue and white checks but slashed with luminous yellow and red—handcuffed to the second officer, and given a seat in the back. It was a small car, a toy by American standards, but the situation more than made up for that. Thomas was in trouble.

As they drove the rural roads to the Newbury police station, Thomas tried to figure out just how much trouble. In any circumstances, an arrest was bad news, but in a foreign country, he thought, it could be devastating. He knew he wouldn’t be tortured or beaten in an English cell, or thrown into prison indefinitely, but he suspected he had just walked into difficulties of another kind, difficulties that were likely to cost him money and dignity at the very least.

And time. How long would it take to straighten this all out? Days? Weeks?

God
, he thought,
what a screwup.

“Listen,” he said, “I really didn’t do anything. I know Miss Church. I talked to her just the other day. This is crazy . . .”

But the two policemen said nothing, and though a part of him wanted to laugh off the absurdity of the thing, the surreal feel of it all was starting to settle like lead in his gut. As they approached the station—a nondescript brick building as unassuming as the car—and the road swelled with houses, shops, and traffic, Thomas found himself huddling lower in the seat, staring ahead to avoid the eyes of the people they passed. A woman with a blue plastic stroller gave them a long look as they stopped at a traffic light, and Thomas looked down, feeling stupid and humiliated.