‘Please take us through the events as you experienced them,’ the coroner asked.
‘It was two o’clock in the afternoon,’ Odette began. ‘I know it was dead on two, because it was my first day volunteering, and I kept checking the time. The main door was locked. I let myself in, and there was the most awful, rotting smell.’
She paused.
‘Take your time,’ the coroner said. But Odette had only ever heard that phrase from people who wish you to continue. She took another sip of water, and blinked slowly.
‘I opened the windows. The smell was coming from the back of the room, and down the stairs.’
‘Was there any evidence of disturbance?’
‘Nothing but the smell. Everything looked… normal. But I had only been there once before. Everything looked normal till I reached the boiler room door.’
She remembered the maroon stain across the floor.
‘Miss Sophola?’
‘Something had… collected… in a pool… It was reddish, and clotted. I thought my imagination might be running away with me.’ She looked at the coroner fearfully. ‘That’s why I didn’t call the police straight away. I tried the door. It was locked.’
‘Miss Sophola, this is a very important point. The evidence points to an assailant who must have escaped the room somehow. Are you quite certain that the door was locked on your arrival?’
‘Absolutely. When I forced the door, I wrenched the bolt off – I saw it swinging – I saw it—’
Her lip trembled. The discovery behind the bolted door was present and vivid and filled her senses. Stuart Yelland was asking another question, but Odette barely made out the words: she was hearing, again, the boiler ignite in the basement. She could smell the corpse. She was standing in its blood. Without thinking she covered her face with her hands, as if she might still block out the stench.
‘Miss Sophola?’ Stuart Yelland’s voice sounded so far away. ‘I’m going to call a short break.’
Odette felt a hand on her shoulder. It was the coroner’s assistant – a stocky woman in a grey suit. She smiled reassuringly at Odette as she led her to the next room.
*
No further questions were required of Odette once she had collected herself. She was unsure whether to stay for the rest of the inquest. Her desire to understand the case repeatedly collided with the fear she would lose her grip again. In the end she reached the compromise of sitting in the corridor until the close of day.
The attendees eventually filed from the inquest. Stuart Yelland was the last of them. She stood up and caught his attention with a wave.
‘Can I ask how it went?’ she asked, when he approached her.
‘I reached an open verdict.’ He paused. ‘I’m glad I have this opportunity to talk with you. I wanted to recommend that you seek some emotional support, if you haven’t done so already.’
Odette remembered the psychologist who had offered victim support. Maybe she had been rash to refuse her help. Since then, the dead woman had been much in Odette’s thoughts. So much that she sometimes felt, as she had during testimony, that she had never left the crime scene at all. Was a sympathetic ear what she needed?
She didn’t think so. Surely she was struggling to move on because the death made no sense. No one had offered a convincing explanation for how the woman died, and violent acts without explanation were terrifying. If Odette worked out what had occurred in the basement, surely she would feel able to let it go?
‘I don’t need help,’ she insisted. ‘I need to know what happened. Then I can draw a line under it.’
‘But, Miss Sophola, we can’t establish what happened. You must accept that. Please, take my advice. Finding the deceased could have a lasting emotional impact on you. Don’t try to manage it on your own.’
He patted her kindly on the arm and bid her goodbye, leaving her to contemplate what he’d said. That evening she would be catching the train back to Cambridge. Her course books would await her, with her revision notes, and the clear, tangible arguments she was preparing for her exams – a set of discrete, manageable mysteries, to distract her from the bigger mystery threatening to overwhelm her.
7
MAY 1969
Lucille
By the spring of 1969, the new Conclave headquarters – an assemblage of marble buildings close to St Paul’s Cathedral – were complete. The small team of pioneers grew into an elite profession for a few hundred people. And as soon as the new machines were operational, time travellers arrived from the future, too.
Broadly speaking, there were three types of time traveller. The first group were experimental physicists. Of the pioneers, Grace fell into this category. They studied the effect of time travel on physical matter, the creation of causal loops, and the conditions that could prevent time travel. The time machines wouldn’t transport anyone further than three hundred years into the future, and the experimental physicists tried to understand why. It was almost as if the supporting infrastructure disappeared in 2267.
The second group of time travellers used the machines as a means to an end. This group included the spies and military personnel who gathered intelligence from different time periods to inform strategic decisions. There were salesmen, too, open to the new commercial opportunities time travel might bring. The sales team identified products which could be traded between eras, primarily for luxury markets, to secure a revenue stream for the Conclave. And there were also scholars – anthropologists, conservationists and geographers, to name but a few, who studied new eras as they might study an unfamiliar land.
The third and final group of time travellers provided internal services. Administrators and maintenance staff kept the Conclave running. Medics and psychologists monitored the health of everyone who used the time machines. A specialist legal department was established; despite its geographical location in London, the Conclave’s justice arrangements were quite separate from the English judicial system. This was partly necessary because time travellers can move easily between different eras of English legislation. Similarly, if a Conclave employee committed a crime with the help of time travel, the English police force lacked the means to pursue them. As a result, the Conclave had its own criminal investigative team.
Lucille belonged to the internal services division. Her role was Head of Knowledge, and she oversaw the communication and exchange of information between different time periods. It filled her with delight to see the Conclave expand and thrive. But she grew regretful, too, that among the new faces there was no place for Barbara. Long after conceding that they should leave Barbara alone, Lucille continued to hope there was a use for her skills. Accordingly, once everyone had settled in the new headquarters, she devised a proposal, which she brought to Margaret during a routine progress meeting.
‘The engineers have had some success receiving radio transmissions through wormholes,’ Lucille said. ‘It won’t be long until we can set up a Conclave-wide radio communications system. Like the time machines, they won’t be able to contact periods earlier than their own invention. But we’ll be able to chat to people in the year 2260 without leaving the comfort of our armchair.’
‘Go on,’ Margaret urged.