The Trouble With Time (21 page)

They didn’t see anyone on the way up to the penthouse. In the elevator, they shared a tense silence. Once outside Quinn’s door, Ryker skulked around the corner while Floss rang the bell. When no one answered, she kept watch while Ryker got working on a small tablet, looking jumpy. Her palms sweated. Minutes trickled by. She’d rung Farouk and told him she’d overslept and would come in as soon as she could; she glanced at her watch. She hadn’t realized this would take so long. Still, Quinn would be at work. Immediately she had a vivid image of him sitting inside his flat, looking up as they walked in. But if he was there, he’d have answered the door . . . unless he had been into the future and knew what was going to happen, and was waiting to arrest them. Floss felt hot all over. Why hadn’t they thought of this? She walked towards Ryker to share her fear, and the lock made a small whirring noise, and rotated.

“Suppose he knows we’re coming?” she said in a low voice. “He’s got a time machine.”

Ryker grinned. “Suppose he doesn’t? Let’s find out.”

“Have you turned off the alarm?”

He nodded, opened the door and they went inside. Floss tiptoed to the living room, heart pounding. Empty. Behind her she heard Ryker close the door softly and the lock click and whir. He glanced at her.

“No one can get in. We’ll check out the gaff, then you’ll relax a bit,” he said. “If you touch anything, put it back the exact same place.”

Floss hadn’t seen Quinn’s home before. He’d invited her to come up there for coffee and liqueurs on her birthday outing, but she’d made an excuse. He had a girlfriend, and she had not been totally certain that coffee and liqueurs would be the only thing on offer; she had chosen to avoid the possibility of embarrassment.

The apartment was quite something. Just the size of it impressed, after her studio flat. In the living room were vast expanses of polished marble floor, full-height windows showing a grey sky with clouds whisking by above a city panorama, long sofas and velvety rugs in rich colours. Beyond an archway was a large and pristine kitchen. There were three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a dressing room and a study, plus a terrace on two sides of the building. When they had checked every room, they went back to where they had started.

“Moment of truth,” Ryker said, fishing the transmitter out of his pocket. He pressed the button, and immediately the faintest of beeping noises responded, just audible in the quiet. They exchanged nervous yet triumphant grins and followed the sound.

This must be Quinn’s bedroom, Floss thought. Twice as big as her entire flat, lined in dark hardwood panels that gleamed expensively. The king-size bed had a wolf fur coverlet at its foot that might even have been real. The beep was louder now, coming from behind a panelled door. She stepped through. Beyond the door was a walk-in closet you could comfortably live in, immaculately kitted out with shelves, drawers and hanging rails. Quinn had a lot of clothes, and rows of footwear. At one end was a window, and opposite that an expanse of mirror. Running down the middle of the room was a buttoned leather ottoman, presumably for Quinn to sit on while pulling on his boots.

The beep was coming from the ottoman. Floss crouched and felt underneath until her fingers encountered a slit in the canvas. She slid her hand inside and touched cool metal; the TiTrav, nestled on top of a wooden strut. She handed it to Ryker, replacing it with an envelope addressed to Quinn containing a brief note she’d written earlier.

They went back into the living room. Ryker sat at the computer and fitted some small gadget into a port. After less than a minute’s tinkering with scrolling code, the screen displayed a blue and green underwater scene, with a succession of sea creatures, each eating the one before. There was only time for the octopus, having eaten a starfish, to be eaten in turn by a shark, before Ryker located Quinn’s journal and circumvented the demand for a password.

“There you go. You’ve got a few minutes to poke around while I get this unlocked and sort out the CCTV.”

Ryker settled himself on the sofa while Floss read Quinn’s journal. She was briefly sidetracked when she noticed her own name on the latest page and couldn’t resist reading:

. . .
Floss now displays a certain uncharacteristic sweet timidity when in my company, and the exquisite curve of her neck as she turned to avoid my eye made me want to rip her clothes off and take her then and there on the floor of her tiny flat. But I can be patient when the prize is worth the wait
. . .

Floss recoiled.
Sweet timidity?
And he referred to her as a
prize
? Yuk, gross. She really didn’t want to read this. Besides, Quinn’s delusions about his chances of seducing her were not what she was looking for. She typed ‘disaster’ into the search box. Nothing came up. ‘Humanity’ yielded the same result. What else had he said? “We know there is a problem heading our way. A big problem.” She tried ‘problem’. El zippo.

Floss glanced at Ryker, who was absorbed in his task. The TiTrav was now on his wrist, and he was tapping away at his tablet. She hadn’t got long. While thinking what to try, she scrolled through the pages. Quite a few women’s names jumped out at her . . . Kayla was far from the only woman in Quinn’s life. Did she know he was two – no, multiple-timing her? She’d probably been better off with Jace Carnady. The photos Floss had seen of Jace on the internet came into her mind. On impulse, she typed ‘Jace’ into the box. Lots of results; she chose the entry for 20th May 2045. May 2045 was when the TiTrav had vanished and Jace got the blame. She started reading. Funny how ornate Quinn’s writing style was; he didn’t speak like that at all.

20/5/45

Heraclitus observed that big results require big ambitions. And sometimes big decisions, too. Not the easiest of days, and I was obliged to modify what I flatter myself was an extremely elegant plan. This irked me; Scott was the ideal scapegoat, given he shot McGuire. I wish Jace had not guessed. But at least I encountered him before he’d spoken to Scott, else I’d have had to get rid of both of them, and I’m not sure IEMA investigators would have swallowed the idea that they’d worked in collusion.

It pains me to lose Jace. I liked him a lot, and he’ll be a loss to the Department. On reflection, it’s a pity I let him get under my skin. I hadn’t had time to decide whether to untie him or administer a coup de grâce before I left, and being angry, I did neither. I’d have shot Scott. It wouldn’t have been much of a life for Jace, alone in London, had I released him. The last human died around 2170.

As she read this, Floss became very still. In her brain, synapses and neurons processed new information. She read on.

It’s interesting to speculate in what sense Jace is dying in the London of the future. The ability to time travel changes things. I feel as if he is lying there dying now, since I left him less than an hour ago; though you could argue he will not begin this process for more than a century. But in that case, where is he now? A question for a philosopher
.

“Ryker!” He got up, alarmed at her expression, and came over. “Read this!”

He bent to the screen. “The evil scheming bastard . . .”

“We have to rescue him! He left him tied up, dying slowly of thirst and starvation. We can go into the future and save him.” Floss leaped to her feet, in a fever to be off.

“Hang on a minute. I haven’t sorted out the CCTV yet. Does he say where he left him?”

“London.” Leaning in to the computer screen, Floss scrolled down frantically, as if Jace would die if she didn’t hurry. “I can’t see anything more . . .”

“Perhaps it’s in the history.” Ryker tapped and swiped at the TiTrav’s display. “Nope. He’s wiped it. There’s nothing in here. Does he say the date he left him, I mean the future date?”

“I don’t think so . . .”

Ryker turned his attention from the TiTrav to stare at Floss. “London’s a big place. We can’t rescue him if we don’t know where or when he is. If he’s tied up, we’ve only got a window of a few days to turn up before he’s had it . . . how lucky would we have to be to hit that?”

“It’ll be after 2170. Probably Quinn allowed a bit of leeway to be certain of not meeting anyone. We don’t have to get it right first time. There might be remains and we could work out from the state of them when to go back . . . you finish that, I’ll go on looking.”

She put ‘contraceptive virus’ into Find. As she had guessed, this was the cause of humanity’s demise, and the reason IEMA had thought her responsible. Confirming her theory took only seconds, and she went back to looking for clues to where Jace had been left. She skimmed the journal for place names, then checked everywhere Jace’s name cropped up after May 2045. He got a mention when Quinn went to the Colosseum; then another when Quinn moved in on Kayla and started doing the sympathy routine with which Floss was familiar. It seemed to have worked fine, if slowly, on Kayla. Then a passage where Quinn recounted a recurring bad dream he had of Jace, filthy, in tatters and vengeful, appearing from behind overgrown tombstones and moving menacingly towards Quinn who then woke up. Nothing else.

Tombstones . . . Something clicked in Floss’s brain. She remembered Quinn turning to stare out of the pod window on the way to the restaurant that first evening.

“Bunhill Fields. He left him in Bunhill Fields.”

Ryker set the TiTrav for 2175, June 1
^st
. “Might as well have nice weather for it.”

They were back in his workshop. After checking no traces remained of their visit to Quinn’s apartment, they had left discreetly via the TiTrav. Ryker got out a long wrecking bar, and tucked it in his belt. Floss wondered if she should have a weapon too. Ryker hadn’t suggested it.

“Bunhill Fields is quite big – how will it choose which part to take us to?”

“It’ll go for the clearest space.”

She held his belt with one hand and his arm with the other. He pressed the buttons.

They materialized into a grassy clearing, scattering rabbits. Floss looked around her, and the more she looked, the more astonished she was by the beauty of the place. Left to its own devices, nature had turned this corner of London into an earthly paradise. Dappled sun shone through the leaves of trees that soared, unspoiled by chain saw, towards a blue sky. Different textures and shades of rampant green covered everything, ornamented with the white of bindweed trumpets and the brilliant massed purple of buddleia flowers. The sweet-scented air was loud with birdsong. There was no litter. Litter, like humanity, had been and gone. A movement caught Floss’s eye; a mallard led her six yellow ducklings between ox-eye daisies towards the iron gate.

Ryker was not admiring the view. “We can’t do this,” he said, gazing around. “A dead body would get covered up in no time, even if it didn’t get eaten first. It might take hours to find.”

“I don’t know, if this is the only clear spot, wouldn’t the TiTrav have brought Quinn here too? He’d most likely have left Jace where they arrived, if he was tied up. And even if animals did disperse the remains, there are two hundred and six bones in the human body. Bound to be a few still here. I think we only need to check the edges.”

“Right.” Ryker did not sound convinced. Using his wrecking bar, he began to cautiously part the thicker undergrowth that bordered the clearing. Floss got herself a stick and did the same the other side.

“I’ve found a bone.”

Floss went to see. “That’s a rabbit femur,” she said, remembering old biology lessons. “Let’s try a year later.”

June 1
^st
2176 was grey and spitting with rain. Twelve months’ growth was marked by taller saplings and an advance of the encroaching ivy. The stick she’d dropped the year before was still there, softened by weather and in pieces.

After a quick and unproductive search, Ryker said, “I reckon people think in round numbers. Why don’t we try 2180? Or 2185?”

“Good point. Let’s go for 2180.”

June 1
^st
2180; a breezy, sunny day with scudding clouds. Again, they found no trace of a body. Floss’s first urgency to find Jace had diminished a little; she was losing her feeling that he was dying
now
. She felt curious to see more of London in the future, and wondered if the skyscrapers were still standing. “I’m just going to have a quick look outside,” she said.

“Okay. I’ll carry on poking around here.”

Floss picked her way to the gate and climbed up.
Wow, amazing
. To see nature reclaiming her own was a mixture of entrancing and strangely upsetting. She dropped to the ground, and walked towards a pond that covered half the ruined road leading to the heart of the City. At this distance, the skyscrapers looked much as they had in 2050. The pond was more interesting. Grass and ferns surrounded its margins, with narrow tracks leading through the vegetation. This must be the local animals’ watering hole. A frog plopped from a brick into the water at her approach. Floss walked to the edge and stared below the surface. Newts darted about; one gulped down a tadpole head first as she watched. Her gaze travelled across the road to where the far pavement had once been. A few York stone slabs could still be made out under the carpet of ivy. Sycamore saplings competed with tall grasses and bamboo escaped from a City garden . . . something made her look twice, not sure of what she was seeing. The light changed as a cloud swept across the sun. She stared. The something blinked; a pale green eye, watching her among the undergrowth. Peering, trying to identify the animal, she made out black and white V-shaped stripes some way below the eye, then long tawny forelimbs . . . she looked back at the face. The tiger licked its nose with a big pink tongue, still watching her.

Little by little Floss backed towards the gate, maintaining eye contact, her heart banging about in her chest. If you ran they gave chase, she’d read somewhere, or was that polar bears? The ground was uneven, and tripping would be fatal, literally fatal. Very slowly, hardly moving, the tiger got smoothly to its feet, head lowered, staring at Floss. Still in slow motion, it emerged from cover, looking a lot larger than tigers do on television or at the zoo. From this angle, she could only see the massive head, the hump of its shoulders and the big front paws crossing each other to land softly, almost hesitantly, on the ground as it felt its way, eyes never leaving her. The tiger was imperceptibly accelerating, shortening the distance between them. Pure terror nearly robbed Floss of the ability to move, but she forced herself to back away a little faster. Halfway across the road the tiger dropped to a this-means-business crouch, focused and intent. Floss froze. Suddenly there was a great clanging and shouting behind her; Ryker was running his wrecking bar along the railings like a maniac and yelling his head off. With dignity the tiger rose, turned, and sloped back into the undergrowth.