White Light (12 page)

Friday, 3 April 2015. 12.53

By the time I'd ridden across town and up the long expanse of the Cowley Road the Spring sunshine had faded and been replaced by a sky of polished grey. A cold wind rattled the new blossoms on the cherry trees planted alongside the huge consumer warehouses marking one boundary of Temple Cowley, and the shoppers wrapped their coats closer as they scuttled between the Delight Kebab shop, the twenty-four hour Dominos, the betting shops and the supermarket that clustered under the concrete balconies of the 1970s shopping centre. The whole place was buzzing with people and the roads clogged with cars and buses. I stopped at the traffic lights at the junction of Between Towns Road and Crowell Road, and turned my head to look into the window of the incongruously posh estate agents on the corner. Then the lights changed and I turned left, under a strange first-floor walkway, and then left again into Hockmore Street.

It was a narrow, oddly winding back lane, presumably built to service the businesses along the main street and the poky maisonettes stacked above them. After the bustle of the shopping area it felt sinisterly quiet, but I couldn't tell if that was just my own sense of foreboding. I rode slowly down the row of garages, and it was only when I'd nearly gone past that I realised that Unit 12 was right at the corner near one of the exits of the big shopping centre. Swearing under my breath, I carried on until I reached the far end, did a U-turn in the slightly wider space between a bus stop and some semi-detached houses, then turned back.

This time I kept my eyes peeled left, and when I got within sighting distance of the correct door I pulled into the curb and began my fake rummaging in the courier bag. Opposite, I could see that what I had initially taken to be a crappy garage door was actually something that looked much more modern and secure. It had a person-sized door cut into one side, with an expensive looking keypad and a security camera positioned to look down at whoever was standing there. My hands froze when the camera abruptly moved with a whirr and pointed in my direction.

My pulse accelerated and it took all my self-control not to race off immediately; instead I continued my play-acting, looking at the bogus parcels in my bag, before slinging it over my back and purring off down the street, the very epitome of a bored delivery man... I hoped. On autopilot I turned back onto the main street and did a long circuit up to the junction with the Cowley Road – ironically, right next to the Cowley police station – and then back again. With all the traffic lights the trip took me fifteen minutes and I hoped anyone watching would assume I'd buggered off. Paranoia pricked my mind and I frowned to try and focus. I was anonymous, just a guy on a motorbike, not memorable.

As soon as I could, I turned back into Crowell Road and then under the concrete entrance of the Castle Car Park. When I'd studied the map earlier that morning I'd realised that I would get a pretty good view of the garage from this typical 1970s brutalist multi-story, and I twirled up and around its many levels until I reached one where the twists of Hockmore Street opposite lay spread out before me. I steered the bike slowly into a corner, partially tucked behind a huge concrete pillar, and switched off the ignition. The roar of the traffic on Between Towns Road echoed around the space, filled sporadically with the cars of workers or shoppers, and the cold Spring breeze danced across the floors, rattling the litter in the corners. I zipped my jacket tighter, and pulled the camera out of the bag.

After a couple of hours, several cars had driven slowly up and down the street, and the odd cyclist had slipped by, but nobody had stopped at Unit 12. The sharp wind sneaked into the seams of my leathers, and I wished I'd stopped to buy a coffee as my core temperature ticked lower. At half past three I was fed up and frozen, and I'd begun to reach the camera back into the bag when I realised a white panel van had drawn up outside the unit. The driver, a non-descript bloke in a grey sweatshirt stepped up to the garage door and pressed a button, looking straight up at the camera which twirled down to regard him. After a long moment, he opened the door and stepped through.

I'd fired off a load of shots, and now took some more of the van and its number plate. I glanced at my watch, and timed how long the mystery man was inside. It turned out to be not long, and in less than ten minutes he was back, nodding and saying something to a person I couldn't see. Then the door was shut behind his back and he climbed heavily into his van and drove towards me and the corner, turning left when the traffic allowed and then out onto the main road. As he turned, the side of the van was displayed beautifully for me: it had a red and black printed logo for 'Marley Video Supplies' and a website address. It was past too quick for me to read it properly, so I anxiously flicked the camera to album mode and zoomed in – yes, loud and clear. Well, it wasn't a smoking gun but it was something.

Fat drops of rain began to fall, individually, from the grey sky and I spontaneously decided that I'd had enough. My ribs were aching from all the riding, and the cold had seeped into my bones and was magnifying every twinge, every bruise. Despite the triumph of seeing someone actually go into the garage, I felt flat and disappointed. I hadn't made much headway, or gathered much evidence. I swung my leg back over the Yamaha and got it going, and glided down and around the car park's floors, one more bit of flotsam kicked up by the wind. I idled for a minute at the exit, waiting for the interminable traffic lights to switch round to be my turn, waiting for a stream of people to cross from the retail warehouses opposite – and I realised that I recognised a stooped female figure carrying two plastic bags. It was Susie, the woman who'd vanished, who'd been insisting that she knew what had really happened to Sarah. Of course, this was Friday, before she'd gone missing.

Susie reached the pavement and turned under the concrete awning, heading towards the entrance to the shopping centre. Just as the lights flipped to amber I raced the bike across the road, ignoring protesting horns, and ran it quickly up a dropped kerb and alongside a set of bicycle racks. I threw off my helmet, quickly set the steering lock, and then hurried through the late afternoon shoppers to keep Susie in sight. She turned into the building, and then cut left into an exterior stair-well that led to the upper floors and those dingy maisonettes I'd seen from Hockmore Street. I jogged a few steps and reached the bottom flight of stairs in time to hear the woman's footsteps reaching an upper floor and pausing. As quickly and quietly as I could manage in my motorcycle gear I ran up – as far as I could tell Susie had gone through the door onto the second floor. I reached the top of the stairs and leaned out, and luckily I was in time to see her unlocking the front door on a flat down the walkway, then stepping through without even seeing me behind her.

I caught my breath for a minute, then walked up to the door and knocked. For a long moment nothing happened, and I stared at the cheap, scuffed door wondering if Susie was looking at me through the peep hole. Should I smile? But then, with two fading black eyes and in full leathers, a smile might be even more suspicious. Then the door cracked open, and a narrow face peered at me round the edge.

'What?' Her eyes were huge, exaggerated by her desperately thin body. I did smile then, the sort of smile you'd give a frightened animal.

'Hi, Susie? I'm Adam, Sarah's husband.' I saw recognition flicker. 'Katie from Homes for All said that you wanted to talk to me?'

She stared at me, knuckles tightening on the door. I smiled again, despite a flush of annoyance that she couldn't just tell me what she bloody knew, without all this coaxing. 'Look, here's my drivers' licence,' I said, opening my wallet and showing it to her. 'It proves who I am.' She hungrily leaned forward to check my name and picture. 'Can I come in? Just for a minute?'

She finally opened the door wider and stepped back into a tiny, coffin-like hallway. 'Yeah, well, only for a minute. I've got to go out.'

And that's a lie, I thought, having just seen her come in from doing her shopping. I pushed the door shut behind me and followed her into the flat's sitting room. It was half-furnished with cast offs, and smelled of damp – a vibrantly green succulent in a tiny scarlet pot the only incongruous note. Susie perched anxiously right in the middle of the cheap sofa and so I pulled up a tatty dining chair and sat on that, facing her.

'Thanks for speaking to me,' I said, trying that reassuring smile again. Her face with its enormous feral eyes still regarded me warily. 'It's great to meet you in person,' I lied, 'Sarah talked about you a lot.'

Immediately Susie's expression flooded with warmth, softening her face. 'Did she?' she said, 'did she really?'

'Lots of times,' I nodded, hoping desperately she wasn't going to ask for details, 'so I know that you two were close.'

'Yeah, that's right, we was mates.' She leaned back on the sofa, and reached out a cigarette from a pack beside her. 'She was lovely, she always listened. Not like some of them there.' She lit the ciggie and took a long drag.

'Yes, she was lovely,' and very soft, I found myself thinking, always looking for the best in people, always trying to rescue them. Susie was eyeing me through the smoke, as if making up her mind.

'She told me things,' she suddenly went on, 'stuff that had happened to her. Cos it happened to me too, so I understood.' A wave of pure rage seethed up through me like petrol in my bloodstream. Sarah had confided to Susie? She'd told
her
about the abuse, but she hadn't told me? The anger triggered off that hot, strong feeling I now recognised, and I found myself clenching my fists as I tried to breathe, all the while nodding and pretending to listen to the stream of autobiography that spewed out of the woman's mouth. I watched her lips moving, and imagined what it would be like to smash my fist into them.

'But why do you think she was murdered?' I said instead, cutting across some impassioned description. Susie jumped, as if she'd forgotten I was there, and gave a faltering 'What?'

'You told Katie that you knew that Sarah had been murdered, that it hadn't been an accident, didn't you?' She nodded, wariness returning, those prey-animal eyes blinking, 'so why did you think that?'

'Because she was going to speak out, wasn't she? She was going to tell about it. And they can't let you do that.'

'Who can't?'

'
Them
, the people in charge. The fucking government. They don't want anyone to know what those MPs and judges and all that are up to. They're all in on it. And they send those SAS, MI6 blokes to take out anyone who says anything.' So that's all it was: a fucking conspiracy theory. Disappointment bit into me. 'That's why I don't talk about it, cos they'll find out where I live and put voices in my head again, then I'll have to move,' her eyes flittered across the marked walls and the dirty carpet, settling on the tiny green plant on the window sill, 'and this is all I got, this and Kenny.'

My head sank down onto my chest as I processed this extinguishing of hope, the crushing of the possibility that someone else might know something, might be able to help. I realised that Susie had stopped speaking, and then she startled me by standing up.

'Get out!' her voice was shrill, and I stood up slowly, hands out, placating.

'What's the –'

'Get out!' she was shaking now, trembling all over, her arms clutched around her thin frame like she was holding herself together, 'There's something wrong with you! There's something wrong!'

'I'm sorry, I'm just a bit tired...'

'No!' she drew herself up and I realised she was quite a tall woman. Her face was on a level with mine, bloodless, her eyes just silver glitters. 'You aren't – right, somehow, I don't know what it is, but you don't belong here. You're in the wrong place, and you've left something behind, something important...'

I went cold. Did she mean the time travel? How could she know that? Could she see it, like Blake's hangman's mark?

Her voice faded to a whisper. 'You're frightening me.'

I stepped back, and back again into the little hallway. Susie remained in the sitting room, her eyes now glassy and her lips moving, and I wondered if she was having a seizure. I hesitated, not sure whether to go or to try and help and then she made me jump by shrieking 'Get out! Get out!'

I turned and opened the front door, and half ran along to the stairwell. I took a few steps down as a man's voice I recognised as Kenny's came from the walkway behind me, calling to Susie, then becoming muffled as he went into the flat. I hammered down the stairs, burst out into the melee of the shopping centre and then jogged back to the bike. I got it going and roared back onto the street, letting the current sweep me down the main road and away, trying not to think, trying not to feel that that crazy woman had just told me what I knew already, that something had changed, that something was not right.

I rode slowly back home.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Saturday, 4 April 2015. 04:19

Another deep, dreamless sleep. I woke refreshed but unsettled, superstitiously jumping out of bed and away from what felt like a definable void in the world. It was just dawn, and too early to be heading into Oxford, so I dressed and made myself a black coffee and sat cross-legged on the floor to watch a brilliant moon decline slowly across a blue and green mineral sky.

It was thirty seven days since Sarah had died. Not a big number. Not decades and centuries and eons, not enough time for civilisations to rise and fall, planets to crumble to ash, suns to sputter into darkness. But enough time, nonetheless. Thirty eight days ago I'd been an ordinary man with a lovely wife, a decent job, a house, a car... just normal, everyday, perfect happiness. I'd mowed the lawn and moaned about the weather, and cooked, and watched telly, and fucked, and laughed, and planned for a future that was never going to happen.

Memories of Sarah rose vividly in my mind, and I couldn't believe that it wasn't possible to just reach out and touch them. She was there, always slightly out of reach, one hand-stretch away. I'd been instinctively shying away from any more time travel, I realised. I felt less substantial with every passing day, and could only imagine that my reality would be stretched even thinner by jumping back those thirty seven days. And yet, almost without realising it, I pulled over a piece of paper and a pen and began sketching out some calculations. Just wind the clock back thirty seven days and I could stop my wife from even getting in the car. She'd be safe, and alive, and everything would be alright again. I'd happily let Richard and Maggie get on with their twisted lives and pack Sarah off to another country, to America, Australia, somewhere far away and keep her safe forever. And me? Dispassionately I imagined meeting my innocent, earlier self and just – what? A bullet in the brain? Well, why not? It would hardly be suicide, would it? Bugger the paradox, the Grandfather problem was never this personal.

I looked at the page of calculations in my hand. How innocuous they looked, little scratches of ink. For the first time since my jump I let the practicalities of making them workable breathe and unspool in my mind. Then I went down to the workshop.

I dug the time kit out of the bum bag and spread it out along the bench. I figured the batteries would be pretty dead by now, so I disconnected them and plugged them into the wall socket to re-charge. Actually it would be a good idea to have some way of telling how much energy they had left, so I quickly wired up a new circuit with little green and red LED bulbs that should give me a bit of warning before the whole thing powered down. On further thought I also fixed in a cut-out that would automatically disconnect the power packs once they'd delivered a big surge of juice... this would save me having to pull them out of the housing every time I made a jump. Not that I was expecting to be hopping around, but I remembered my white panic of fumbling with the batteries after Richard's little visit the other night, and didn't want to go through that again.

I threw an old oilcloth over the bench and the re-charging batteries, and glanced at the window. The sun had risen whilst I'd been working, and I peered up through the grimy glass, between the leaves of the plants rambling across the wall outside, and up into a clear blue sky. Mornings have always fascinated me, their perfection, the offer of a new day untouched by anything. Was this a new day, though? I'd been through Saturday 4 April once before, and if I adjusted the time kit lying in front of me on the workbench, I could experience it again, and again. And each time it would feel this fresh and clean.

Since I'd made the jump back a week I'd been avoiding the temptation to go straight to the 27
th
of February and pull Sarah out of her car before she'd even turned the key in the ignition. In the clear yellow light of early morning I acknowledged that this had been simple fear – fear of travelling again, fear of the strangeness, the wrongness of it. I was just a monkey, a mammal, with a brain designed for the rudimentary basics of life and not for this impossibility, this opening of routes in and between and around reality. I felt like Einstein, realising that light wasn't a stream but was made up of particles, only now the particles were time. And I could see that these individual dots of experience were scattered with voids and interstices, tiny navigatable spaces into which the 122 could stealthily insert itself like a cancerous cell.

I put my hands to my head as everything swooped and plunged around me: if I thought about this hard enough would the fragile surface of what still felt like reality crack and splinter? Would I drop through into the dark confusion of  - what? What was underneath? Quantum foam? Vishnu, lying on his lotus, forever dreaming? Another bubble of a multiverse?

I clenched my fists and took a deep breath. I mustn't think about this, must push it away. The workshop was warming in the morning sun and it suddenly felt stifling, and I stumbled to my feet and pushed open the door. A slice of cool air slipped inside, and I stood gulping it in, trembling like I'd sprinted a thousand yards, breathing and breathing until the darkness edging my vision faded and pulled back. I pushed the door closed again, and slumped against it, ribs protesting. I needed to focus. I'd done this – strange, impossible – thing to find out more about Sarah's father, to do the investigation that the police wouldn't do, and I should concentrate on that. I was walking a rope bridge across a terrifying void and I had to keep going, I mustn't look down.

I plodded back up to the attic, bright now with the sunshine, and I made myself eat an energy bar and drink a bottle of water. Eat, drink, piss, sleep, I needed to pay attention to them all or I would crash, and I couldn't afford for that to happen. Mechanically I bit and chewed the tasteless slab, swallowed, bit, chewed, swallowed... Eventually it was done and I flopped back on the floor, looking at the sky through the little window. A white hot temptation to get the time kit and jump forward to Wednesday 8 April, to rejoin my own storyline, to go and stay with Dave and forget about anything else burned in my chest. I fought it down, closing my eyes and focusing only on the sun's warmth on my face, the sound of the birds outside, my own breathing as it slowed. I felt something like acceptance spread through me as my body unclenched, and I slipped into a light doze.

When I came round only half an hour had passed, but I felt restored. My mind was clear, and I could tread confidently across the stepping stones of this reality, ignoring the swirling blackness underneath. It was still early, so I risked a toilet visit to the house, and grabbed a notebook and a few bits and pieces from the study as I was passing. I then settled down again with the laptop in the workshop to see what I could find out about Marley Video Supplies.

After about ten minutes I began to recognise the slight misdirection that had marked the online presence of Haverford Vintages. Marley Video Supplies did have a website, which again promised a new one soon, and again it was listed on the Companies House directory with a series of innocuous-sounding directors... one of whom was a certain Richard Graham Holland. Despite the alternate spelling of the second name it seemed fairly clear this was another guest appearance of my father-in-law. The energy bar turned to ashes in my mouth as I realised what use a video making company would be to the Hollands, Gillespies and Naismiths of this world. Would this be enough evidence to get a proper police investigation? Much as I hoped so, I didn't feel optimistic.

That just left plan B – the press. Grimly, I knew what I had to do. I flicked open a new browser window and looked up the main local newspaper: The Oxford Mail. A quick search of their garish website revealed article after article about Operation Greenland, and scrolling down I was unsurprised to discover that most of these had the by-line of Tessa Davies. I clicked on the thumbnail image and stared at the photo of a woman in her mid-thirties with a determined expression.

After a moment to think about exactly what I was doing, I picked up my new phone and dialled the number shown on screen.

'Hello, Newsroom?' the swift answer, early on a Saturday morning, took me aback, and it was a second before I could stumble out a request to speak to Ms Davies. There was a click, and then a loud female voice said 'Yes?'

'I have a story related to Operation Greenland.' I began.

A long pause. 'What's your name?'

'Does that matter?'

'I like to know who I'm dealing with.'

I thought for a moment. 'Call me –' I was going to say 'nemesis' but that sounded pretentious. 'Norman,' I eventually said.

The voice at the other end of the line was dry. 'Carry on then, Norman. What's the top line?'

'Another paedophile ring operating in Oxford.' I could feel the journalist's attention snap to my words, 'from addresses in Cowley, Headington and Summertown.' I took a breath. 'The names of the people involved are Richard Graeme – spelled G R A E M E  - Holland, Ian Gillespie and another man called Naismith. Holland and Gillespie are directors of a bogus company called Haverford Vintages, which lists six figures in its accounts and supposedly operates from a lock up garage in Temple Cowley. They are all also members of the Sandwich Estate golf club in Kidlington, and yesterday afternoon were playing a round of golf with Detective Inspector Nigel Walters, who is leading Operation Greenland.'

There was a small noise from the end of the phone, a tiny grunt of journalistic excitement. 'How do you know this?'

I took a breath. 'It has been going on for years, and there has been a – statement – made by one of the group's victims.' Now for the plunge. 'They may also be implicated in the disappearance of Helen Holland, aged eight, in 1985.'

'And how do you fit in,
Norman
?' I could feel her suspicions down the phone line. My face flushed and I gripped the phone tightly.

'I have the statement.'

Another long silence. 'Can we meet?'

'No. But I can get you some information that will help your investigation.'

'Including this statement?'

Did I want to do this, did I want to be the person who leaked Sarah's heart-breaking video to the public? I ground my teeth. 'Yes.'

'When?'

'Today. I'll send it to you by courier.'

'How soon?'