The Thief of Time (13 page)

There was silence for a few moments as I waited for one of them to speak. Eventually, P.W. shrugged and looked up at me apologetically. ‘It was just supposed to be a bit of fun,' he said. ‘That's all. We were out for a few drinks. It got a bit rowdy. You know how he liked a drink. Made everyone else drink as much as him. We were getting a taxi. That's when we saw her, that little tart over there.'

‘Fuck off!' she screamed.

‘James went up to her, asked her did she fancy a bit, you know, and she said all right and -'

‘And that's a lie too!' she roared and I spun round and stared at her furiously, at which she sat back in the seat quickly with a whimper and looked like she might never speak again in this world.

‘Go on,' I said to P.W., turning back to him. ‘Tell me it as it happened. The
truth
now.'

‘Well, we got back here,' he said, ‘and we were all set for it, you know. I was going to go first and then let James have a go. He said he'd been having a bit of trouble recently. With the old todger, you know. Said he needed something to help him get it up. Asked her what she had and that's when she produced the heroin.'

‘But that would knock him out altogether!' I said in protest, turning back to look at her. ‘What were you thinking of?'

‘Don't you dare shout at me,' she cried. ‘It's not my fault. You think I wanted that fat bastard banging away on top of me? I told him what I had, he said he wanted heroin, I asked him had he used it before and he swore he had so I gave it to him. I didn't care as long as I got paid. I'm not his fucking
mother,
you know.'

‘Look at him!' I roared. ‘He's dead, for Christ's sake.'

‘He stuck the needle in,' said P.W., ‘and then he just started shaking all over. His mouth was dribbling and he had some sort of fit. Collapsed on the floor and a minute later he stopped moving altogether. That's when I picked him up and set him against the couch. It was no one's fault really. No one can blame either of us. He did it to himself.'

‘Jesus, P.W.,' I said, staring at him. ‘You've hired a prostitute. And she's fucking
under age
at that. You've got drugs here. Hard drugs. And a dead body. There's not a single legal thing in any of those sentences.'

He buried his head in his hands and started to cry some more. I looked across at the girl who was watching him with disgust and who, for some reason, had taken a nail file from her pocket and was sawing away at her nails with some speed. ‘I'm going,' she said when I looked at her. ‘It's got nothing to do with me.'

‘Sit down,' I said. ‘No one's going anywhere. Not ‘til I decide what to do for the best. Nobody moves from this room until I say they can. And I don't want to hear a sound, all right?'

I went out into the hall, like the parent of two small children caught talking to each other late at night, and closed the door behind me firmly. I even considered locking it but the key was on the other side. I sat down on the stairs and thought about the situation as it had presented itself to me. I could just walk away, I thought. I could open the front door, go down the stairs and go home. Leave them to it. It's nothing to do with me, after all. Sure, a taxi driver had taken me here and my fingerprints would be all over the place by now, not least on the hypodermic syringe, but I had a good story. I could explain it away, surely. And whatever happened to those two in there; well it was hardly
my
problem, was it? I
could just walk away.

And yet I didn't. The risk was too big. Life imprisonment could be an awfully long time. I thought about it; I was not an expert on contemporary drug-taking, where one goes to get them, how they are used, the things they result in. I needed someone who knew about such things. I took out my pocket diary and leafed through it for the number, which I dialled from the hall phone. I breathed in deeply and hoped I was doing the right thing.

Tommy arrived twenty minutes later, dressed once again completely in black, but this time with the addition of a dark woollen cap on his head. I knew no one who could be as much an expert on drugs as my nephew. He had surely tried everything that was available to man or beast and had seen situations like this one develop before. He would know how to handle it. He listened to the story and shook his head.

‘You're already involved,' he said. ‘And there's not an awful lot you can do about it now. That fucker should never have phoned you in the first place or you just shouldn't have come. Now you're here you have to solve the problem.'

‘Look,' I said, having been thinking about it while he was
en route.
‘He took the drug himself, yes? And it's not uncommon for that to happen and for people to die of it. All we need to do is find somewhere to leave him that will make it look as if he did it to himself. I mean, he
did
do it to himself of course, but we have to show that beyond a shadow of a doubt. He's in a stressful job, these things happen all the time. You've no idea how many people I've seen kill themselves through the pressures of work. I saw one do it before my very eyes once,' I added, thinking of Denton Irving, my Wall Street friend.

‘His office,' said Tommy, clapping his hands together in excitement. ‘You've got a key. We bring him back to his office, prop him up in the chair behind his desk, and you go in first thing in the morning and find him sitting there. You call the police. No one will think anything of it. They'll think it was his own fault.'

‘That's good,' I said, nodding. ‘And those two in there?'

As I spoke, the door opened and the girl came out. Tommy spun around so that she couldn't see him but it was too late and her face creased up in surprise. ‘Sam?' she asked slowly. ‘You're -'

‘Back inside'
I roared at her and she jumped and screamed. ‘You get back inside and sit down until I tell you to do otherwise. Or we call the police right now, your choice.' She ran back inside immediately and closed the door. Tommy turned back and looked at me in anger.

‘You see?' he cried in despair.

We did everything as Tommy had suggested. We loaded James's body into his car and drove him to the office where I ‘discovered' him the next morning. The girl was gone by the time I got back and P.W. was acting as if nothing untoward had ever happened. It was the headline story in all the papers the next day:
'tV BOSS OD's IN OFFICE', ‘SATELLITE EXEC IN DRUGS DEATH'.
It ran right into pages five and six of the tabloids where the anticipated loss of Ms Tara Morrison to the BBC was cited as one of the possible reasons for the increased stress that James Hocknell had been feeling in recent times. Tara herself did a ‘Tara Says: Just Say No' piece on her former boss in which she praised his talent wildly and despaired – T despair, readers' – for the way the country was turning. I ran through the arranged story with the police a number of times and they believed every word of it, fortunately. Within a week, death had been declared ‘by misadventure' and our former managing director was laid to rest with only about twenty people in attendance at his funeral. Notable by his absence was P.W., who was down with flu.

I reaffirmed my commitment to saving Tommy's own life after this event; if there had ever been any doubt about it before, it was gone now. I would not see him reach this kind of end. I would not let him disappear off the face of the earth like James had, or like so many of Tommy's ancestors had before him. He had come to my assistance, I would come to his.

The guy was dead anyway, all we did was fix it.
Despite Tommy's attempts to salve my conscience, I could not help but feel a twinge of guilt over what had happened. The crime had not been mine, but the cover-up had and I prayed that there would be no further questions to answer on the subject.

We argued over whether we should continue with Furlong's horse and cart or not and in the end it took Tomas to make up our minds for us. To my dismay, Dominique wanted to drive it all the way to London. She was drained by the events of the previous twenty-four hours, and could hardly bear the idea of walking for another three days in order to reach the capital and so the transportation seemed heaven sent to her. For my part, I maintained that it would only draw attention to us, that, if anyone came looking for the young farmer and recognised his vehicle, it would surely land us all in trouble. Certainly, we were not intending to continue in the direction in which he had been headed, but nevertheless there was always the chance that we might come across a relative or acquaintance at some point and it just wasn't worth the risk. Eventually, Tomas's constant whining about the fact that he didn't want to walk any further made Dominique throw her lot in with mine – in order to spite him, I think – and we sent the horse back down the road which would eventually lead him home to Bramling. Without his driver.

We had got no sleep the night before but agreed to walk on for a few more hours before settling down for a rest as we both wanted to be as far away from that dreadful place as possible. After I had killed Furlong, we had taken his body outside and into a clump of trees a few yards beyond the barn. I wanted to bury him, but we had nothing with which to dig, so it would have proved an impossible exercise. Dominique suggested hiding him in the undergrowth, taking his money and making it look as if he had been robbed along the road. That way, she said, there was little chance that we would ever be discovered and we could simply continue with our original plan, to go towards London and to start our lives afresh as if none of this had ever taken place. Although I had been right to kill him – for he would have surely succeeded with his designs on Dominique had I not – there seemed little chance that our adventures would have a happy conclusion if we reported the events of the previous night to the authorities. We were still very young and naturally afraid of the constabulary; there was a chance that we could be separated, all three of us, if a trial ensued. The deed was already done, there was no way that we could alter the events that had taken place; it was for the best that we simply moved on and disclaimed all knowledge of the man from then on.

Having wiped the vomit from his face, we rolled Furlong over on to his stomach and took a small bag of money from his pocket, enough perhaps to help us for an extra few days if necessary. Dominique dropped two guineas a few yards away from his corpse to make it look as if, in the nervous excitement of theft and murder, the villains had carelessly lost some of their reward. We tore his clothes a little and ripped his jacket at the back. Finally, Dominique suggested one final touch.

‘You can't be serious,' I said, growing cold at the idea.

‘We have to, Matthieu,' she said. ‘Think about it. It's not likely that any thief would simply stab him once in the back and rob him. There has to have been a struggle. He was a big man after all. It has to appear as if he tried to stave them off.' Without warning, she lifted her right foot off the ground and drove it into Furlong's ribcage with a ferocity that chilled me. I heard the crack within his body and then she repeated the gesture, this time to the side of his face which lay exposed on the grass. ‘Where's the knife?' she asked, looking across at me and I feared that I would vomit again, although my stomach was well and truly empty by now and showed no signs of being refilled at any time soon.

‘The knife?' I asked. ‘What do you need the knife for? He's already dead.'

She caught the sparkle of the blade beneath my jacket and reached for it quickly. I stepped back as she plunged it into his back several times, before lifting his head off the ground slightly and tearing his throat from ear to ear. There was a deep slicing sound and a whistling release of air that sounded like no natural sound that could be produced. ‘There,' she said, standing back up and running her hand along her jaw roughly. ‘That ought to do it. Now we'd better get moving. Oh, dont look so horrified,' she added, seeing my expression, my pale features grown whiter than usual. ‘We have to survive, don't we? Do you want us to end up at the end of a rope? Remember who started all this, Matthieu. It wasn't you and it wasn't me. It was him.'

I nodded but said nothing and started to walk back towards the barn where we had instructed Tomas to stay while we disposed of the body. He had woken up while we dragged the corpse outside, but his head was full of sleep and it only took Dominique smoothing his hair away from his forehead to send him back to unconsciousness again. He was breathing heavily when I went inside and I lay down close to him, pleased to feel the warmth of his body against my own. My whole being was exhausted and shivering and I longed for sleep. I heard Dominique enter the barn and close the door behind her. She toyed with the fire for a few moments but it had gone out long ago and was giving off no more warmth and it was too late now to relight it. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep, going so far as to begin a light snoring to fool her. I didn't want to talk any more, I didn't want to discuss what had happened. Truth to tell, I felt like bursting into tears, despite the fact that I still believed that I had acted correctly, at least up to the point where I had killed him.

She walked around to the other side of me and picked Tomas up gently, carrying him over to the other side of the barn where she lay him down with a mass of straw beneath his head. He muttered something unintelligible before becoming silent and she came over and lay down in the warm spot beside me where he had lain a few moments before. I could feel her breath on my face and before long the fingers of her left hand were stroking my cheeks, causing me to grow excited, despite the fact that – for once – a sexual encounter with Dominique was the furthest thing from my thoughts. To my embarrassment, I could hear the thick fabric of my trousers pressing outwards as she continued to stroke me and I tried to keep my eyes shut, so convinced was I that she would stop her attentions to me if she thought that I was awake and gaining any pleasure from it. I struggled with the urges of my body and eventually I could hold back no longer, opening my eyes and allowing her to pull me towards her. She took control of me, loosening my trousers and guiding me into her, where I lay rigid for a few moments before beginning that rhythmic movement she had taught me once before on my first night in England, and which I had repeated on countless occasions with the prostitutes and street girls of Dover in the ensuing year. As I grew closer towards a climax, my lips ached for hers but she pushed my face aside whenever I tried to kiss her, never once allowing our mouths to connect. Soon, it was over and I collapsed back on the hay, one arm pressed flat across my face as I wondered how long it would be before we made love again – fifteen minutes or another year. She slid down between my legs and kissed me there before drying me with a little straw and re-tying my trousers. Then she turned her back on me and without a word went directly off to sleep.

I tried to speak to her of these events as we walked along the road that morning, Tomas keeping up the pace a steady ten feet behind us and muttering to himself as he went. He was growing taller, I noticed, and his thin body was starting to fill out a little; for a moment I felt a surge of almost paternal pride towards him and worried about the day that he would no longer be under my guardianship. It was a warm morning and I wanted to take off my shirt but felt embarrassed to appear half naked before Dominique in the daytime, when my body might not take on the Adonis like appearance that I could at least pretend to have at night, in the dark, when we were alone. Instead, I allowed myself to grow warmer and warmer, feeling a trail of perspiration sticking my clothing to my back as we walked. I looked across at her from time to time as I spoke, but she was staring directly ahead all the time, never so much as turning her face to glance at me.

‘He didn't hurt you, did he? I asked eventually, my voice quiet and patient as I stepped closer to her. ‘Furlong, I mean. He didn't hurt you at all?'

‘Not really,' she muttered after a pause. ‘He hadn't even got started to be honest. If he hurt me at all it was when he was holding me down beneath him. He grabbed my wrists a little, my throat. I feel a little sore this morning, that's all. He was heavier than he looked.'

I nodded. ‘So what are we ... ?' I began, unsure how to phrase it. ‘What are we going to do about this? Later, I mean. When we get to London.'

‘Do about what?'

‘About you and me.'

She shrugged. ‘What you and me?' she asked innocently and I frowned at her, refusing to answer her, forcing her to continue instead. ‘Nothing,' she said eventually. There's no chance that anyone is going to discover it was you who killed him. It'll probably be days before he's found and even when he is, who's going to -'

‘No.' I cried in frustration. ‘I mean
you
and me,' I repeated with emphasis.

‘Oh. You and me. You mean ...' She trailed off as she thought about it and for a moment it seemed to me that she had completely forgotten about our lovemaking the night before. No, I thought. You can't do this to me again. ‘I think it's best if we stick to the story,' she added. ‘That we're sister and brother. I think there's more chance that we'll find somewhere together, the three of us I mean, if we stick to that story.'

‘But we're
not
sister and brother,' I pointed out. ‘Not at all. Sisters and brothers don't -'

‘We're as near as.'

‘No, we're
not as
near as,' I cried in frustration. ‘If we were as near as sister and brother then why would we have done what we did last night? What we did the night we first came to England?'

‘That was more than a year ago!'

‘That's not the point, Dominique. Those are not the actions of a sister and brother!'

She sighed and shook her head. ‘Oh, Matthieu,' she said, as if we had gone through this conversation a hundred times already, even though we had never spoken of these matters even once. ‘You and I ... we're not supposed to be together. You have to understand that.'

‘Why aren't we? We're happy together. We rely on each other. And I love you after all.'

‘Don't be ridiculous,' she said angrily. ‘I'm just the only girl you've ever felt anything for other than pure and simple lust, that's all. And so you translate this into love. But that's
not
love. It's just comfort. Familiarity.'

‘How do you know it's not? Last night, what we did, that meant more to me than -'

‘Matthieu, I don't want to discuss this, all right? What happened happened but it won't be happening again. You have to accept that I don't see you like that. It's not what I want from you. It might be what you want from me and I'm sorry about that but it's not going to continue. In fact it's
never
going to happen again.'

I stopped talking and started walking slightly ahead of her, cutting her with my silence. I grew weary of having her in my mind, of feeling that my life revolved around the question of whether we would or would not be together. For a moment, I hated her and wished that we had never met; that Tomas and I had stood on the other side of that boat from Calais to Dover on that fateful day and stayed there, never talking to this girl who had held dominion over my emotions for more than a year now. I needed her to love me or not to exist at all and I hated her for the fact that she could not do either. And yet, despite it all, I could not even imagine a world that she was not part of. I could barely remember my life before she had entered it.

‘There are things about me that you don't know,' she said eventually, catching up with me and linking my arm, her voice soft and warm about my shoulder. ‘You must remember that I lived for nineteen years in Paris before we met; you lived there almost as long. Surely there are many things that went on there that
you
have yet to tell me.'

‘I've told you everything,' I protested and she laughed.

‘That's ridiculous,' she said. ‘You've never said much to me about your parents. You've told me how they died but that's about all. You've never tried to tell me how they made you feel, how it felt to be left alone, what it feels like to be in charge of Tomas. You go along with the plans that I make and you don't tell me what
you
want out of life. You're as closed up as I am. You keep everything in. You don't offer me any more knowledge of yourself than I do to you. All you want is physicality, nothing else. I can't offer you that. The fact is I had a life before we met as well. You left Paris for a reason – well, so did I. And you can't force me to fall in love with you too when you don't even know what my reasons were.'

‘Then
tell
me your reasons,' I shouted. ‘Tell me why you left. Tell me what you're running away from and maybe I'll tell you some of my secrets too.'

‘I left because I had nothing there. No family, no future. I wanted more. I wanted to start again. But believe me, in my own way, I do love you, but it
is
the love of a sister for a brother, that's all. And it's not going to change. Not any time soon anyway.'

I pulled my arm away from her and with a look of contempt dropped back to see how Tomas was feeling. At that moment I saw him as my only real family, my only true friend.

Dominique had asked about my life in Paris before I had met her and she was right on one count – I
had
never spoken to her about my past in any great detail. This was mostly owing to the fact that I had tried to put my old Parisian life behind me from the moment Tomas and I had stepped on board the boat from Calais; when I thought about Dominique and me, it was always with an eye to the future, to the life that we could share together some day. And yet, as close as we doubtless were, it was true that we had in fact shared very little of our separate histories with each other and it seemed like it was finally time to change that.