The Wraiths of War (20 page)

I stared at her. After all that had happened in the past ten minutes, my mind was such a whirlwind of thoughts and emotions that much of her little speech was swept up and tossed around like dead leaves in a November storm. I was so intent on trying to pluck her words from the maelstrom, to make sense of them, that when Clover laid her hand over mine I jumped, having forgotten for a moment she was sitting beside me.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

Her eyes, fixed on mine, were soft, concerned.

‘Yes, I… I’m fine… I…’ I put my free hand on my hot forehead. It was blessedly cool, and seemed to momentarily calm my thoughts, if not clear my mind. ‘Tell me again,’ I said to Paula. ‘That last part. What was it my older self said?’

She carried the tray to the table and set it down, then slid into the seat next to her husband. There was a pot of tea and five china cups on the tray, along with a sugar bowl, a jug of milk, five plates and a Victoria sponge cake on a glass stand.

As Clover poured the tea and Adam cut the cake, Paula said, ‘He said you could change the past without changing it, and that you didn’t need to be a victim any more.’

‘Change the past without changing it,’ I repeated. ‘What does that mean? It doesn’t make sense.’

Clover was still pouring the tea, but all at once she put the teapot down heavily enough to draw everyone’s attention. There was an expression of dawning realisation on her face.

‘Yes it does,’ she said.

‘How?’

Instead of answering me, she glanced at Benny, who was still leaning against the sink on the far side of the room. ‘What is it you’re always saying to me about luck, Benny?’

He frowned. ‘Fucked if I know.’

‘Don’t you always say there’s no such thing as being lucky or unlucky?’

Now he nodded. ‘That’s right. The concept of luck is a load of bollocks. A man makes his own luck in this world.’

She turned triumphantly back to me. ‘You see?’

From her expression I felt as though I
should
see, but I was still baffled.

‘Sorry. I think you’re going to have to spell it—’

And then, all at once, it came to me – and it was a real light bulb moment.
Ping!
I think I may actually have jerked back in my seat as though I’d been slapped. Then I started to laugh, and had to clap a hand over my mouth to make myself stop.

Paula was smiling indulgently, and Adam was nodding in relief – which I guess meant they were already ahead of me, having been briefed by my older self. The only one of us who still looked puzzled (and pissed off about it) was Benny.

‘You going to let me in on the joke?’ he growled.

Looking at him, I realised I must resemble a kid who’d just been shown the best magic trick ever.

‘All this time,’ I said, ‘I’ve been looking for Kate, frantic with worry because I thought the Wolves of London had taken her; because I thought she was a prisoner of the Dark Man.’

Benny’s face was like stone. ‘And?’

‘And she wasn’t!’ As it unfolded in my head, like the petals of a lily that had been tightly budded for what seemed an age and had now suddenly and gloriously come into blossom, the words started to tumble out of me. ‘Don’t you see? It was
me
all along! Me who arranged to have her taken away! To keep her safe! To keep her out of the Dark Man’s clutches!’

‘You’ve lost me,’ Benny said. ‘So you’re telling me you arranged to have your own daughter abducted and then… what? You forgot?’ He scowled at Clover. ‘Am I being taken for a ride, Monroe?’

‘No.’ Clover shook her head. ‘Not at all, Benny. It’s… complicated, that’s all. There’s a lot of it you won’t believe – that you won’t
want
to believe.’

He snorted. ‘Try me. I’ve already been forced to believe a lot of fucked-up shit these last few weeks, and it’s all been because of him.’ He pointed at me. ‘Those fucking freaks in the crypt. That…
thing
that attacked my house.’ He rubbed his temple above his right eye as if he had a knot of pain there. ‘There were times I thought I was losing it. Going seriously doolally. Times I thought…’ He shook his head, as if deliberately derailing that train of thought. ‘But I’m an adaptable man. I’ve had to be. And seeing is believing. However fucking crazy it might look.’

Clover nodded almost affectionately. ‘Yeah. Sorry, Benny. For dragging you into all this.’

‘It’s not you I blame, Monroe. It’s him.’ He jabbed a finger at me again.

‘All the same,’ said Clover. She finished pouring the tea, then stood up and carried one of the cups over to him. ‘Drink this. I think you’re going to need it. And promise me two things.’

He narrowed his eyes. ‘What?’

‘When Alex tells you what he’s going to tell you, try not to have a meltdown. And try not to shoot anybody.’

‘It’s that bad, is it?’

She nodded sympathetically. ‘It’s a bit… out there.’

He sighed, but to my relief he slipped his right hand out of his jacket pocket to take the cup she was offering him. As Clover walked back to the table to sit down, he took a swig of tea and fixed me with his ice-blue eyes.

‘Go on then,’ he said almost wearily. ‘Let’s hear it.’

I looked at Paula and Adam Sherwood, who looked back at me expectantly, and then I looked at Clover, who gave me a single encouraging nod, as if to say:
It’s time.

And so I began. When I’d entered this cottage I thought I’d be the one listening to a story – or rather, an explanation of how and why Kate happened to have ended up here with the Sherwoods – but as it turned out, I was the one telling it, the one with all the answers, even though I hadn’t
realised
I had them until today.

As my story unfolded – Candice’s boyfriend’s debt; contacting Benny; meeting Clover; Kate’s abduction; stealing the heart and finding out what it could do – something fundamental occurred to me. Something which had resulted in too many convolutions, had been too bound up in cause and effect, to occur to me until now.

I realised that the reason I had been drawn into this whole tangled mess in the first place was not because of outside forces, but because I had been
caught in my own trap
. The Dark Man aside, I had stolen the heart to try to get Kate back – but because it was me (or would be me) who had had Kate abducted in the first place, that meant I had been forced back into a life of crime purely as a result of my own actions!

But, of course, I had only arranged for Kate to be abducted (or
would
only, because it hadn’t happened yet) in order to prevent the Dark Man from taking her. Because what my future self had been trying to tell me was that with the heart I could
create
my past, rather than being a victim of it; in other words, I could be the manipulator rather than the manipulated.

The problem, of course, was that by creating my past, I was also wrapping heavier and more numerous chains around myself. Because now, to maintain the timeline that would lead to this moment, I presumably would have to set up the rest of it, starting with the message I’d have to send to Clover, claiming to be Kate’s kidnapper and giving myself instructions as to what to do next. Which in effect meant I would have to move my past self around as though he (I) was nothing but a piece on a chess board; a pawn in an elaborate, inescapable game.

All of this was whizzing round my head as I told my story, and had the paradoxical effect not only of freeing my mind, of furnishing me with possibilities, but also of making me realise how irrevocably tied into the web of my own past I was, and of how my actions might unwittingly have had a devastating effect on those around me.

Was it because of my future involvement in my own past, for instance, that Lyn had endured five debilitating, draining years of mental illness? Because if I hadn’t become enmeshed in this web I’d created, if I’d somehow found a way to avoid becoming the owner and guardian of the heart, wouldn’t the Dark Man have left us alone – or rather, left Lyn alone? Hadn’t it been entirely
because
of my involvement that he’d used the heart to go back in time and plant the seeds of madness in her mind? But
why
had he done that? Out of spite? Or were there still questions to which I didn’t yet know the answers? Or perhaps answers to which I didn’t yet know the questions?

‘Time travel?’ Benny said. ‘Do you honestly expect me to swallow this shit?’

Even as my story had been spilling out of me I’d become so preoccupied with my inner voice that I’d almost forgotten I had an audience. Benny’s contemptuous interruption snapped me back to the here and now. Before I could gather my wits enough to answer him, Clover jumped in.

‘I told you it was a bit out there.’

‘There’s out there and there’s fucking taking the piss,’ Benny retorted. He put his cup and saucer down with a clatter on the draining board behind him and swiped a hand through the air as though crossing all our names off some invisible list. ‘I don’t know what you’re on – and that includes you, Monroe – but I don’t have to listen to any more of this bollocks. I’ve done my bit, and I expect to be paid accordingly.’ His eyes, fixed on mine, were like daggers of ice.

‘You will be,’ I said.

‘Oh, I know I will. I have no doubt about it. And now I’ll leave you to your fairy stories.’

Abruptly he turned from the sink, stomped across to the door and yanked it open. He stepped out into a squall of rain, then reached back and pulled the door shut behind him. After he’d gone the four of us looked at each other, a little taken aback by the suddenness of his departure. It was Clover who broke the silence.

‘Well,’ she said chirpily, ‘at least he didn’t shoot us.’

I could hardly blame Benny for his reaction. He had only responded with such venom because, underneath it all, he was scared. There was a time when I’d thought nothing could scare someone like him, but the fact is he was an inflexible man who’d believed that what he took to be reality was as inflexible as he was. Finding out that he was wrong had pulled the rug from under him. And although it had pulled the rug from under me too, unlike Benny I’d been able, after a period of adjustment, to alter my thinking, to adapt.

I realised that with Benny’s departure there was no more reason to delay.

‘I’d like to see my daughter now, please,’ I said.

Paula nodded and stood up. Clover’s left hand snaked across to my right one, grabbed it and squeezed.

‘Big moment,’ she murmured. ‘You ready?’

Now that the time had finally arrived the knot in my belly had untied itself and was now thrashing about inside me like an angry octopus.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I might throw up.’

‘Have some tea and cake. It’ll settle your stomach.’

I grimaced. ‘I think it’d make me want to throw up more.’

I watched Paula move across the room, pausing only to switch on a couple of lamps. It was late afternoon now – early evening, in fact – and getting dark. Rain was still throwing itself against the cottage outside, though the walls were so thick, designed to withstand fierce winters, that we could only hear it against the windows. As Paula opened the door at the bottom of the stairs and started up, the wooden steps creaking beneath her, I shuddered and muttered, ‘Please don’t let this be another trick.’

‘It’s not a trick,’ said Adam. ‘You know it’s not.’

I heard a creak above me. Then another. Then footsteps descending, softly at first.

My mouth was suddenly very dry. My eyes burned. It was stuffy in the kitchen, the fire giving out plenty of heat, but I was shivering. I tried to swallow, but couldn’t. I stared at the wooden door at the bottom of the stairs. It had swung to behind Paula, leaving only the thinnest of black lines around the frame. The stairs were creaking under the weight of… how many bodies? The door started to open. Paula stepped through it, smiling.

‘There’s someone here who wants to say hello,’ she said.

The little girl was holding Paula’s hand and concentrating on negotiating the last few steep wooden steps, the tip of her tongue poking out between her teeth. Her curly brown hair had grown since the last time I’d seen her, and had she got taller too?

I felt waves of heat, or perhaps euphoria, rushing through me; felt my arms and legs tingling; felt my head swimming, as though I was about to faint. As if she knew exactly how I was feeling, Clover squeezed my hand, anchoring me. She slid out of the wooden pew, tugging me behind her.

Stepping off the bottom step, the little girl looked up, wrinkling her nose as though that might help adjust the pink-framed spectacles perched there. Her blue eyes fastened on me and widened. Her cute little bud of a mouth became an ‘O’ of surprise, then stretched into a huge smile.

‘
Dadeee!
’ she squealed. She yanked herself free of Paula’s grip. At the same moment Clover let go of my hand, allowing me to drop to my knees as my daughter raced across the kitchen towards me. Kate threw herself into my arms and I hugged her tight, feeling the wonderful, wriggling warmth of her, breathing in her familiar smell – fresh, uncategorisable, unique.

If I had any doubts that this was really Kate, they were dispelled in that instant. Even so, after all I’d been through, all the heartache, it was hard to believe we were back together, and that she was safe, and all was well. It was the moment I had yearned for, the moment I’d feared might never come.

‘Daddy!’ she cried. ‘Daddy! Daddy!’

She was an eel in my grip. She wriggled free and looked into my face, as if to check it was definitely me.

‘Kate,’ I said, laughing even as my vision blurred with tears. ‘It’s so lovely to see you, scamp.’

She frowned and touched my face, then examined her wet palm.

‘Why are you crying?’ she said. ‘You should be happy, not sad.’ She shook her head, tutting in weary exasperation. ‘You really are a very, very silly man, Daddy.’

‘Still awake?’

I jerked upright from my seat by the fire, which provided the only light in the room. I hadn’t been asleep, but I’d been far away, my thoughts roaming. Blue-green images of the flames I’d been staring into were still dancing in my vision as I turned to look at Clover, framed in the darkness of the staircase doorway. She was wearing clothes that Paula had lent her to sleep in – a white T-shirt with a Hollister logo on it and pink shorts, under a white towelling dressing gown that was hanging open as if she’d thrown it on in sleepy haste.