The Trouble With Time (3 page)

“As you all know – with the possible exception of Scott – McGuire’s TiTrav is the first we’ve had wind of in the UK for nearly six months. I don’t need to tell you the potential consequences of having one of these things on the loose. Our absolute priority is to find it, and we need to do that within the next few days. Everyone in IEMA has their eye on us. If we fail, the Americans will send a team, and there is no way I am going to have that happen while I am running this department. So, let’s have your ideas.”

Kayla said, “McGuire may have had no family – and I’ll be checking that – but he must have had associates besides Ryker. He got his drugs from someone, for one thing –”

She was cut short by a knock on the door. Quinn looked up in irritation as the door opened and a young woman entered. “Mr Quinn, I’m sorry to interrupt, but Sir Douglas would like you to come to his office immediately.”

Sir Douglas Calhoun was IEMA UK’s chief executive. Quinn got to his feet and looked round the table. “We’ll finish this later, by which time I’d like you to have come up with some leads.” He ripped McGuire’s dataphone out of its plastic bag and handed it to Jace. “You can start by checking out every contact on here.” He followed the young woman out of the room.

The others stayed in the office for a few minutes, discussing possibilities, then got up to go.

“If only McGuire hadn’t got himself shot. A man like that, he’d have told us anything we wanted to know if we only surrounded him and frowned a bit,” Farouk said tactlessly. “Would have saved us a lot of work.”

Scott stirred but said nothing.

Jace said, “At least it’s not one of the early TiTravs. If someone’s got it we’ll know the minute they turn it on. Which makes it pretty useless, really.”

There was another knock on the door and a man’s head appeared. He looked around. “Mr Quinn not here?” He pointed to the bag of evidence. “Do you know if he’s finished with those yet so I can take them down to Records?”

“Yes, take them,” said Jace.

The rest of the day they spent attempting to trace McGuire’s contacts. It turned out he did have one living relative, a daughter. She was seventeen, and her name was Saffron McGuire. It seemed a surname was all he had given her; her parents had not been together for long, and never married. Her mother had brought her up alone. Jace sent Kayla to see Saffron, with the idea she might find a female cop more sympathetic. She’d just lost her father, after all, even if they’d had little contact.

Kayla returned an hour or so later. Jace looked up from his online search, which was not going well. The only promising lead from McGuire’s dataphone turned out to have been in prison for the past six months. “How did you get on?”

Kayla dumped her handbag on Jace’s desk and pulled up a chair. “I didn’t see her. She locked herself in her bedroom and wouldn’t come out.”

“Did she say anything through the door?”

“Yes. ‘Fuck off’.”

“Ah. What about her mother?”

“She was quite friendly. She’s got a boyfriend who lives in the flat. They’ve been together for five years.”

“Did she say anything useful?”

“No. She was happy to chat, she made me a cup of tea, but she hasn’t seen McGuire for years. Said she should never have got involved with him, he was always a waster, but she was just a teenager and didn’t know any better. He was good-looking, apparently, when he was young. She wasn’t surprised he’d come to a sticky end. Nor particularly upset, either.”

“Did you ask about the TiTrav?”

“Yes, and she tut-tutted and said he never had any sense.”

“D’you think by any remote chance he might have given it to his daughter to hide?”

“Gwen – that’s the mother – said Saffron hadn’t seen him since her birthday three weeks before.”

“As far as she knows. It’s a pity you didn’t get to talk to the girl.”

“I really doubt she’d have it. Even McGuire wouldn’t be irresponsible enough to involve his child in timecrime, surely.”

“True. I have a feeling we won’t find it. I reckon it’s just a matter of time till we’re all trying through gritted teeth to be very polite and welcoming to our American counterparts.”

Before leaving the building, Jace went down to Records to collect McGuire’s two thousand pounds. He had downloaded all the data from McGuire’s phone, and intended to deliver it and the money to the daughter on his way home. Of course, these items could just as well be handed over with the meagre belongings from his rented room, once the team had finished with them, but Jace had an ulterior motive. He’d need to log her chip to acknowledge receipt, and he couldn’t do that through a door. Maybe face to face she’d find it harder to refuse to talk.

The man in Records peeled open the big plastic bag and tipped the contents on the counter. “Just the money, sir?”

“Yes . . .” Jace picked it up. That left four bags. He frowned – surely there had been more than this when he last saw them? He rifled through them: drugs, chip, cartridge 1/2, cartridge 2/2.

“Is this everything?”

“That’s what I collected this morning from Mr Quinn’s office, sir.”

Jace hesitated, said, “Thanks,” and turned to go.

The two tamper-proof bags containing the bullets that had been removed from McGuire’s body were missing.

Outside Records Jace thumbed Quinn’s number into his phone, and reached his voicemail. This was not a surprise. Quinn did not like being at the beck and call of a dataphone, and frequently turned it off. Jace didn’t leave a message. He ordered a pod and went to call on Saffron McGuire.

Saffron and her mother lived in a tower block in Haggerston dating from the 1960s. The flats, originally built for allocation to council tenants rather than selection by buyers on the open market, lacked any sort of visual appeal. They were surrounded by muddy grass bordered by metal barriers redolent of a prison. He rang the bell and told Saffron’s mother who he was; the release clicked. The lift ground its way upwards in slow motion. Jace deliberately hadn’t rung to say he was coming, and he hoped Saffron wasn’t descending in one lift as he rose at a stately pace in the other. He reached the seventeenth floor and a plump woman in her thirties with a pleasant smile opened the door. Jace explained his errand and Gwen asked him in. He followed her into the living room, where a man watching television looked up briefly, then back to the screen.

The flat seemed huge, compared to his own – though with low ceilings and badly-proportioned windows, and of course no built-in robotics.

“I don’t know if she’ll talk to you,” Gwen said, apologetically. “She was quite rude to the lady who came this morning. Teenagers, what can you do? Of course, you have to make allowances, she’s upset over what happened to Peter – her dad. Would you like a cup of tea?”

“That’s very kind, but no thanks. Would you tell Saffron I have her father’s phone for her? I’ll need to log her chip before I hand it over.”

Gwen went back into the hall and called through a closed door. “Saffy?” Jace moved a little so he could see her. “There’s a gentleman from IEMA wants to talk to you.” A brief muffled response came through the door, which Jace couldn’t make out because of the noise of the television. “He’s got your father’s phone, if you’ll come out.”

After a moment or two the door opened and Saffron emerged, a small whirlwind of colour and fury. Jace’s eyebrows went up. In a world where women’s fashion dealt in understatement and elegance, Saffron’s appearance was arresting, to say the least. Her hair was a mixture of blonde, red, pink and black, her eyes were black-rimmed in a pale face, and there was a stud through her lower lip. She wore a black string vest and a multi-coloured full skirt, teamed with black tights full of holes, and heavy boots that laced up to the knee. Her eyes narrowed as she glared up at him.

“My name is Jace Carnady, Miss McGuire. I’m sorry about your loss.”

“No you’re not. You’re just saying that. Give me his phone.”

“I’d like to have a quick word with you first, if you don’t mind.”

“I do mind. I’ve got nothing to say to any of you time police scum.”

“Saffy!”

“It’s all right,” Jace said. He didn’t blame the girl. But for his team’s errors her father would be alive. If he’d only told Quinn the man was unarmed and not wearing a TiTrav instead of assuming he knew, or if Scott and Quinn had both hit his arm like they should have done, he wouldn’t be here. She hated the lot of them, and she was right to do so. This had been a wasted journey.

He got out his dataphone and brought up the reader. Saffron turned so her upper arm faced him. She had a circle tattooed round the faint dimple that indicated the site of the chip, decorated with skulls and roses, with a scroll saying FREEDOM DIED HERE and an arrow pointing at the circle. With a beep, the reader identified her and Jace put his phone away. He got out McGuire’s phone and the two thousand pounds and gave them to the girl. She started towards her bedroom, then turned and came back, right up to Jace, staring into his eyes. Her face was pretty, he realized, in spite of her expression of contempt; heart-shaped, with big eyes and full lips. She was so close he could see that beneath the black makeup, her eyes were swollen; bloodshot too.

“Actually, on second thoughts, I have got something to say to you. My dad was a good man. Maybe not always on the right side of the law, but he did his best with what life doled out to him, which wasn’t much.” Tears came into her eyes and she blinked them away furiously. “When I got older he started to talk to me properly, tell me stuff he didn’t tell anyone else. About his life and everything. He used to wait for me outside school and we’d go to a café or the park.” Jace was aware of Gwen stiffening beside him. She hadn’t known about this. “And according to him, there’s a bigger villain inside bleeding IEMA than you’ll ever find outside of it. You’re all a load of wankers.”

Jace said, “If you have any information –” but Saffron had already spun on her heel and headed for the bedroom. She slammed the door behind her.

Jace was back in the derelict warehouse, except it was darker and smaller and partly his flat. He stood alone on the mezzanine looking down over the railing to where Quinn stood in a pool of light with Scott. At any moment, a bad, a terrible thing was going to happen. As Jace thought,
I have to do something
, he woke, heart pumping fast.

“Light.” He sat up. The clock told him it was a quarter to five. For a moment he didn’t move. He breathed deeply, feeling disturbed. His subconscious was trying to get some message through to his conscious brain. Something wasn’t right about McGuire’s death and the missing TiTrav. He got out of bed, sat at his computer and dictated notes in an attempt to make sense of what he knew. He started with the obvious:

• Unless there is some simple explanation, like they’ve been sent to the lab without the Records man knowing, the bullets from McGuire’s body have gone missing.
  
• Either Quinn or Scott killed McGuire.
  
• Possibility a) Scott killed McGuire, even though he is certain he didn’t. My opinion yesterday was that he did kill him by mistake.
  
• Possibility b) Quinn killed McGuire, but thinks Scott did.
  
• Possibility c) Quinn killed McGuire accidentally, but is too vain to admit it and prefers to blame Scott.
  
• Possibility d) Quinn deliberately killed McGuire, and off-loaded the blame on to Scott. That is why he insisted on Scott coming along on the raid and kept him close, even though Scott is so inexperienced that he was more likely to be a liability than any help. And there is no way to prove whose bullet was the fatal one, since they have gone missing. (Unless of course they turn up again. See first point.)
  
• Saffron said that her father had told her there was somebody at IEMA who was corrupt.
  

Jace reread Possibility d) uneasily. Taken together with the first and last points it seemed horribly plausible; it fitted every fact bar one; the fact that he’d worked with, liked and respected Quinn for three years, and couldn’t believe he would commit premeditated murder. He knew him too well; he’d been to his house in Fulham, met his wife and children. Also, this theory opened up yet more unanswered questions. He carried on dictating, watching the words patter on to the screen.

• Why would Quinn want McGuire dead?
  
• Why did McGuire panic when he saw Quinn (and Scott)? Panic to the point of jumping over a railing, knowing it was a ten foot drop on to concrete? He hadn’t been worried by my arresting him, he was sullen and resigned. Why would two more time cops make such a difference? Time cops he didn’t know. Or perhaps he did . . . Did he recognize Quinn (or Scott)? If so, where from?
  
• What happened to the TiTrav? There definitely was a TiTrav, because the alert told us someone in McGuire’s lodgings had switched one on for two minutes and forty-three seconds before turning it off again. Was there another person present, the real owner of the TiTrav, who had now vamoosed? But that landlady . . . she was so indignant at the idea of anyone in her house committing timecrime and, as she put it, jeopardizing everyone’s future. Selfish and irresponsible, she’d called it. She wasn’t lying.
  

So, if McGuire
had
had the TiTrav on Thursday, where the hell was it now? Ryker hadn’t got it. Of course, Farouk could have been right, and McGuire had hidden it somewhere else, in which case it might well never turn up. But he went to see Ryker, so maybe it had already been sold on through Ryker before IEMA got there. If that was the case, he could dismiss Possibility d) and his nascent suspicions of Quinn – and he really wanted to do that. Jace was happy with his job, and his boss, and with Kayla. He was happy with his life, just as it was. He did not want to rock the boat.

Jace got up from the desk, had a quick shower, didn’t bother shaving, dressed and got a pod back to Ryker’s.

A grey dawn was breaking as Jace reached Ryker’s railway arch once more. The place looked even more decrepit by daylight. He rang the bell, and with a sense of déjà vu amplified by lack of sleep, waited for the dog’s ferocious barking. After thirty seconds he pushed the bell again. The dog stopped barking.