The Long and Short of It Page 11

  I breathed a sigh of relief. No flaming sword for me today.

  ‘You’re welcome, Mrs Partridge. See you later.’

  ‘One moment, please, I have a present for you, too,’ and to my astonishment, she handed me a small package, beautifully wrapped in tissue paper. No Sellotape in sight.

  I gently pulled the paper aside to reveal a small but very heavy knife in a battered leather sheath.

  ‘It’s made of meteorite metal,’ she said. ‘It’s extremely old and has quite a history.’ Just for a moment, I thought I saw a gleam of amusement. ‘You would not believe some of the people that’s been in.’

  ‘Cool,’ I said, enthusiastically.

  ‘I thought you would appreciate it.’

  We paused. She looked at her hands. I looked at my feet. Outside, the snow fell silently.

  ‘Well, um … I must be going now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Another long pause.

  ‘So, um…’

  She picked up some papers, stared at them, and then put them down again and looked out of the window, seemingly at a loss. ‘Yes … of course…’

  ‘Um … Merry Christmas, Mrs Partridge.’

  ‘And a very Merry Christmas to you, Dr Maxwell.’

  SHIPS AND STINGS

  AND WEDDING RINGS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I had all sorts of problems with this one. I made the mistake of writing it before I’d finished What Could Possibly Go Wrong, and found myself with all sorts of continuity problems, all of which were compounded further when I started Lies, Damned Lies and History, as well.

  Lesson learned, however. Get the story line of the first book straight before starting on the second. I also wanted to sow the seeds of Peterson and his Special Question that we learn more of in Lies, Damned Lies and History. Short stories are quite useful for this sort of thing.

  I never feel that bloody battlefields are particularly appropriate for Christmas stories, so I thought I’d do something a little gentler this time. Although just because there’s no blood or violence doesn’t mean the situation was any less serious.

  It was an enjoyable book to write. Researching the effects of WD40 poisoning was fun, although one US site I contacted querying what would happen if you sprayed it on someone on a regular basis, emailed me back with panic-stricken disclaimers and warnings, making it very clear that they in no way condoned any intended improper use of this product, so they weren’t a great deal of help. They’re obviously a great deal more responsible with their lubricants in the US than we are in this country.

  Just digressing for a moment, I had a similar response when I emailed a gas appliance company about how to murder someone using a gas fire. Such fun!

  I’ve had quite a few requests for the story of Leon and Max to have a happy ending – hmm. Still thinking about that one – but I thought the least I could do was give them a few moments together at the end.

  Enjoy!

  SHIPS AND STINGS AND

  WEDDING RINGS

  Years ago, when I first came to St Mary’s, Chief Farrell said, ‘You get a feel for when things have gone wrong,’ and he was right. You do. So when Grey, Bashford, Cox, and Gallaccio stepped out of their pod, one look was all I needed to see that something had happened.

  I stood quietly while they were ushered off to Sick Bay for the statutory check-up, waited for everyone else to disappear, and then followed on behind.

  ‘Why are you here?’ said Nurse Hunter to me, ushering Bashford into an examination room. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Absolutely fine,’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’

  ‘You’re here voluntarily, that’s why.’

  ‘I’m just checking up on my people. They’ve returned from a vital and important assignment and I want to debrief them as soon as possible.’

  She consulted her scratchpad. ‘Are you sure? They’ve only been checking out shipbuilding in … Ancient Egypt.’

  ‘Quite sure,’ I said firmly. ‘Where’s Grey?’

  She nodded in the direction of the women’s ward.

  Elspeth Grey was sitting in the window seat, staring at the snow falling silently outside. She turned her head as I entered and I knew I was right. Something had gone wrong. From the look on her face, something had gone badly wrong.

  This wasn’t unknown. We’re St Mary’s – something always goes wrong. To give us our full title, we’re the Institute of Historical Research, based at St Mary’s Priory just outside Rushford. We investigate major historical events in contemporary time. We don’t ever call it time travel because our lives are hazardous enough without deliberately calling down the wrath of our boss, Dr Bairstow, upon ourselves.

  Grey and her team had returned from Ancient Egypt and something had happened. I was at a bit of a loss. They all seemed relatively intact to me. Very sunburned, obviously and with hair like straw, but no one was missing a vital body part, or leaking vast amounts of body fluids everywhere. I had a horrible feeling this was more serious than simple physical injury.

  I dragged up a chair. ‘What’s happened?’

  She was so pale that I was surprised Hunter hadn’t shoved her back into the scanner again.

  She said quietly, ‘I’ve done something terrible, Max,’ and stopped, unable to go on.

  Many terrible things can happen to historians. It was obviously up to me to whittle them down a bit.

  I said, ‘Is anyone dead?’ and waited for her hasty denial.

  It didn’t come.

  I felt myself grow cold. The team was all present and as correct as St Mary’s was ever able to achieve, which only left…

  ‘Elspeth. Is someone dead?’ I took a deep breath. ‘Did you – has someone – killed a contemporary?’

  She shook her head, then nodded, and then said, ‘I don’t know.’

  I’d had enough. If something catastrophic had happened, I needed to know immediately. Before the bloody Time Police came crashing through the door to arrest us all.

  I pitched my voice to bring her back. ‘Report.’

  She pulled herself together. ‘The assignment went well. No one knew who we were. We’ve got masses of good footage.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  ‘It was me. I did it.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  She clenched her hands tightly in her lap. I’m not actually that terrifying. All right, I’m slightly pregnant, but that doesn’t usually reduce people to a state of speechless terror. My husband Leon had actually been quite pleased. And Dr Bairstow had immediately commanded Mrs Partridge to prepare him a briefing on the duties of a godfather. Even I was coming round to the idea.

  I said gently, ‘Elspeth. You must tell me so I can put it right.’

  She took a deep shuddering breath and braced herself. ‘I took a gun on the assignment.’

  I braced myself because I could see what was coming.

  ‘And…?’

  ‘And I lost it.’

  ‘Where?’

  She couldn’t bring herself to say it. ‘Not … here.’

  ‘You took a gun on assignment?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To Ancient Egypt?’

  She nodded, miserably.

  ‘But why? You had two security guards.’

  Yes, she did. One more than normal, but there were special circumstances attached to Elspeth Grey and Tom Bashford. They’d gone missing in 12th-century Jerusalem and were eventually discovered in Roman Colchester, only minutes before Boudicca’s army crashed down upon the town, hell-bent on obliterating everyone and everything within it. Something like that can take some time to recover from.

  Bashford had apparently picked up the threads of his old life with no problems at all, but Grey, who had been the one who battled to keep them both alive while he’d been semi-conscious, had been having problems. It had taken her a year to pluck up the courage to re-enter a pod. I’d selected her for the shipbuilding assignment specifically because it would be quiet an
d uneventful. And I’d allocated her an extra security guard. To make her feel safe. There were no wars, no plagues, no famines, and no civil unrest at that point in Egypt’s history. All they had to do was record the various stages of shipbuilding and anything else they thought might be useful, stay out of trouble, not die, and return to St Mary’s. All of which they appeared to have achieved, no problem at all. And now – this.

  Keeping my voice steady, I said, ‘What did you take?’

  She swallowed and whispered, ‘A Glock.’

  Shit. Glocks don’t have a conventional safety catch. They have safe action designed to prevent the weapon accidentally discharging, should it be dropped or banged, but if you pull the trigger, it will fire. Because that’s what it’s designed to do. And now we had one in Ancient Egypt. Just waiting for someone to pick it up, wave it around, and blow someone’s head off.

  We’re not allowed to kill contemporaries. Think of all the thousands of people who must be descended from one single person living say, three thousand years ago. Now imagine that person never lived long enough to have children. What would happen? Would all those people disappear? Some would never be born. Others would be the product of different parents and all that would work its way down to the present day. Suppose Grey herself suddenly vanished, never having been born. And if she’d never been born then she couldn’t go back to Ancient Egypt to leave the gun that was the cause of all the trouble. What would happen then? At the very least the Time Police would come down on us like the proverbial ton of bricks and at the very worst, we’d be looking at the ‘P’ word.

  Paradox.

  With two security guards to keep her safe, why on earth would she feel the need to take a weapon? At the very most, historians are allowed a stun gun to defend themselves. Our normal defence strategy is to run like mad away from any trouble. Obviously, it would be nice if we could rely on not getting into trouble in the first place, but we’re St Mary’s and that’s not really a reasonable expectation.

  ‘Elspeth,’ I said carefully. ‘Tell me about your problem.’

  The door opened and Bashford entered.

  Without turning my head, I said, ‘Go away.’

  He closed the door behind him. ‘With the greatest respect, Max, no.’

  I’d never actually had someone defy me before. They would stand in front of me and argue themselves to a standstill – that’s the definition of an historian – but I don’t think I’ve ever actually had someone look me in the eye and say no.

  He said, ‘I can explain.’

  ‘No need. Miss Grey is about to do that. Continue, Miss Grey.’

  ‘No, Max…’

  ‘Be silent, Mr Bashford, or leave the room. Continue, Miss Grey.’

  She returned from wherever she had been and focused on me again.

  ‘I took a gun on the assignment in case … in case … he was there.’

  She meant Clive Ronan. The man who’d snatched them out of Jerusalem and abandoned them in Colchester. Abandoned them to die.

  She was continuing, clenching her hands so tightly I could see red crescents where her fingernails were digging into her palms. ‘I can’t … I know … I know it’s stupid to expect him to be everywhere I go. I do know that, but I just can’t rid myself of the fear that I’ll step out of the pod and he’ll be there and I’ll be whirled off to somewhere and this time … this time … there won’t be anyone to pull me out and I’ll die. And yes, I know you allocated an extra guard. And I know there is no reason to suspect anything like that would ever happen again. I know all that. But I keep thinking, Max … suppose you hadn’t found us. Suppose you hadn’t pulled us out in time. Suppose it happens again…’

  Silence fell in the tiny ward. On the other side of the door, I could hear Dr Foster giving Cox a hard time over something or other. She’d be in here in a moment to find out what was going on.

  Bashford stirred. ‘Max, she’s been through enough,’ he said, and put a protective hand on her shoulder.

  It wasn’t needed. I wasn’t going to shout at her. Actually, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I fell back on more questions.

  ‘So, what happened to the gun?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was carrying it in my pack so I could get to it quickly if I needed to. And we stopped for water, and when I looked, it wasn’t there.’

  ‘Could it have been stolen?’

  ‘No. Not a chance.’

  ‘Did you take it out and leave it somewhere?’

  ‘No. I think … I fell … and my pack came undone. I think it must have been then.’

  ‘Did you go back and look?’

  ‘Yes. Three times.’

  ‘So Cox and Gallaccio know what happened?’

  She nodded.

  I had huge sympathy for her, but she’d committed a cardinal sin by taking a gun in the first place and an even bigger cardinal sin by leaving it. My blood ran cold just thinking about a child picking it up, staring down the barrel and wondering what would happen if you pulled this funny bit here…

  ‘Did the others know you had this weapon?’

  ‘No,’ she said, too quickly.

  Another cardinal sin. They should have taken it off her.

  ‘Get them in here, please. Now.’

  Bashford left the room.

  Tears ran down her cheeks. ‘Max, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Good, but don’t cry yet. We’ll think of something.’

  She shook her head.

  I had several options open to me. The correct procedure would be to go to Dr Bairstow who would probably place the matter in the hands of the Time Police. That was their function, after all. To police the time line, hoovering up anomalies. He would also arrest Miss Grey – he’d have to – and she’d be handed over to the Time Police as well. I really didn’t want that to happen. Their opinion of us is not high and the last thing we needed was to provide proof that we really were the bunch of irresponsible idiots they thought we were. Leaving something behind is unprofessional. Leaving behind a gun capable of killing a contemporary is a major crime. They would probably deal fairly leniently with Grey since she obviously had a problem, but we should have noticed this. I should have noticed it. She was in my department. I knew she’d been struggling, but I hadn’t known it was this bad. Neither had Helen Foster, who had cleared her for duty. And it wasn’t really Elspeth’s fault. She’d done everything she could to avoid going back on the active list and I’d stupidly thought that once she got back on the horse – or into the pod – that everything would be fine. And it hadn’t – been fine, I mean. A lot of this was my fault and I was buggered if I was going to hand over the problem to someone else without having a good go at fixing it first.

  Bashford came back with a very sheepish looking Cox and Gallaccio.

  ‘We’re going to fix this,’ I said. ‘Before Dr Bairstow or the Time Police or Major Guthrie have even the slightest idea there’s been a problem.’

  This was an effective threat. Dangling their boss, Ian Guthrie, in front of them focused their minds wonderfully. They would give a great deal for him not to know how badly things had gone wrong on this assignment.

  I got up and opened the door. Dr Foster was heading towards me. ‘What’s going on in there?’

  ‘How plausible do you want your deniability to be?’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Max.’

  ‘Give me an hour or so, and then you need to have a quiet talk with Grey.’

  She sighed. ‘One hour. No longer.’

  An hour was all I needed.

  Still unsure what I was going to say, I sat down again with Elspeth, but my fears were unfounded.

  ‘I know, Max. You don’t have to say anything. I’ll write out my notice and it’ll be on Dr Bairstow’s desk the first morning after the Christmas holiday.’

  I sighed but she was right. She’d had a year to resume her old life and it was very obvious that she didn’t wish to do so.

  ‘Max, I’m so sorry – whatever you’re goi
ng to do, I’m sure I shouldn’t let you do it. Maybe I should confess to Dr Bairstow now and take my medicine.’

  She was underestimating the seriousness of the matter. A loaded gun adrift in Ancient Egypt was far more than a disciplinary problem but there was no point in making things worse for her. Not at the moment, anyway. I tried for optimism.

  ‘It needn’t come to that. I’m going to take Markham, have a poke around, and see what we can find. Who knows – we might be able to pick it straight up and be back here before you’ve even had time to turn around – and if – when – we find it, Markham will have it back in the Armoury before anyone even knows it was missing.’

  ‘Ian won’t be happy.’

  No, he wouldn’t. As someone with a close personal interest in Miss Grey, he would be unhappy she hadn’t confided in him. As Head of the Security Section, he would be incandescent with rage if he ever found out what she’d done.

  ‘We’ll sort that out later as well,’ I said, ignoring all these potential disasters piling up on the horizon like oncoming storm clouds. ‘You were in Pod Five?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Which you have, of course, thoroughly searched from top to bottom?’

  ‘Four times.’

  I thought. ‘Do you have any idea when you could possibly have lost it?’

  ‘There was a day – at the launching – when I dropped my pack and it fell open, but I’m not stupid, Max. I checked very, very thoroughly, and so did Cox who was with me at the time. It wasn’t there.’

  ‘Did you ever leave the pod at night?’

  She just looked at me. Yes all right – a stupid question. If she’d been terrified of Clive Ronan turning up during the day then she was hardly likely to leave the safety of the pod to blunder around in the dark.

  I got up.

  ‘OK, Dr Foster will be in to see you in a moment. Listen to what she has to say, keep your mouth shut to everyone else, and leave everything to me.’

  I went to find Markham and we stood in an empty training room where no one could see us or hear us and had a long talk.