‘I’m in Germany.’
‘Where? Are you still with Wolfgang?’
Jem scratched her eyebrow with a thumb, mulling over Saskia Brandt and feeling tired.
‘Not exactly. I’m going to Milan.’
There was a blast in her ear. Danny had sighed across the receiver.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I’ve met someone. I don’t mean Wolfgang.’
‘Who?’
‘She’s called Saskia.’
Another silence. Then he said, ‘Saskia,’ slowly, as though he were writing the name.
‘She wants me to go to Milan with her.’
‘Well, that sounds peachy.’
Jem laughed. A chuckle came back from Danny.
‘Do we get to meet her?’ he asked.
Jem looked at the departure board. She had left Saskia at the gate more than ten minutes ago, too long for her excuse of a toilet break to work any longer. Soon, Saskia would come looking for her.
‘Danny, I have to go.’ Jem spoke her next words with the knowledge that they might undo the good work of the conversation. ‘I shouldn’t have called.’
‘Then why did you?’
‘I’m…’
‘You’re what?’
‘…Worried.’ In a whisper, she continued, ‘There’s something strange about it.’
‘Jem, are you in trouble?’
‘It’s not that.’
‘I want you to stay in Berlin. I’m coming to get you. Stay right there.’
The tears made a shore at her eyes. She looked at her feet. She hated herself for the shame. She did not have to feel this way. The situation was not her fault.
‘Don’t, Danny.’
‘Let me get this straight. You don’t call us in months. When you do, it’s to tell me you’re worried about some new friend.’
‘I love you.’
‘Now I’m worried.’
‘Bye,’ she said. ‘Look… Bye.’
‘I love you, too.’
Jem replaced the receiver and stared at it for a moment. She closed her eyes and listened to the boarding calls, the wailing babies, the laughter, but she did not turn. In the private darkness, one future emerged. Anxiety, guilt and fear were washed out. Her escape from the airport would fix her. She could re-establish a certain version of herself.
Saskia would become a memory, if that.
Escape, then.
She left the airport.
At a café near the gate, Saskia Brandt sipped her coffee. She looked, mind stalling, at the great space above the concourse. The roof looked like the inner framework of a Zeppelin. She smiled. Whales of the air. She let her eyes move across the crowd. There was refuge in the mathematics of their movement and form, but her thoughts turned to the coming departure of the flight to Milan and the fact that Jem should surely have come back from the toilet long before now. Saskia looked at the crowd and blinked. There were seven hundred and ninety-one people on the concourse. Jem was not one of them. This understanding, the maths of it, was no antidote to her anger at the realisation that Jem had abandoned her.
I shouldn’t have let her find the gun.
And I should have told her about the other time traveller.
It was absurd that this loss should upset her. They had lived together for a month. Not such a long time. Saskia put her fingers on the ticket in her pocket. There was strength in loneliness, she decided, and she would regain that strength as her loneliness returned, like an appreciation for a cold, mathematical music.
She looked again at her coffee and the reflection of the roof upon it.
End of, as Jem might say.
Chapter Two
Berlin, earlier that morning
There was nothing, thought Jem, like the first flush of trespass. Her stomach bubbled with it. Her body could not decide if the sensation energised or paralysed. She made fists, opened her hands, made fists. She was a gunslinger about to draw. An artist poised to brush the first stroke.
Part of her wanted to return to bed, the better to be discovered by Saskia when she returned from the market with the promised breakfast. Instead she remained on the threshold of the room Saskia had asked her never to enter, and blinked at the muted sunshine that passed through the window. She listened to the lifebloods of the building: water moving through pipes; the tick of warming radiators; the muffled scrape of a faraway chair. And, now, in this room, the unmistakable hum of a computer.
Somewhere in this room was the answer to Saskia Brandt.
‘Arctic, Jem,’ she whispered. ‘Cool as.’
It was larger than the master bedroom where Saskia and Jem slept. She could make out a sofa, sagging in the middle, and an Ikea bookcase, same as the one from the family house in Exeter. Saskia had packed hers with large volumes. Elsewhere, there was a weights bench, a yoga mat, and the desktop computer. The practicality of the room mirrored Saskia. The impression of Saskia’s most private space was that of a nest. Jem recalled Saskia’s expression when she believed nobody was looking: hawkish, alert. Thinking on a distant threat.
She began with the bookcase. It was stacked with texts on neuroanatomy that meant nothing to her and classic computing volumes and journals that Jem half-understood from the computer science degree she had abandoned, ignominiously, two years earlier. She did not touch the books. She had an idea that Saskia would notice their disturbance. She moved to the Tryten Computer Locker. She touched the keyhole, thinking. Power tools would be needed to cut through the steel box that protected this computer. The desk was a long, fine bureau with a glass top. There was a passport (Frau Doktor Saskia Dorfer, born 1974 in Berlin; visa stamps for Turkey and Brazil), a digital camera, one ticket for a West End show in London (The Handmaid’s Tale), and an exercise book entitled Krimskrams with notes in German and occasional English snippets: ‘Forsyth method?’ and ‘Spain—do it!’ and ‘How can I ask David?’.
Jem opened the leftmost drawer.
Game fucking over.
It contained a gun.
The barrel was smaller than Jem would have expected. There was a cylinder attached to one end. A silencer.
Something touched her bare calf. She gasped, imagining Saskia’s premature return, and her sudden anger, but it was only the cat.
‘Shit, Ego.’
The honey-coloured animal corkscrewed into her ankle. His eyes gorged on the room and Jem realised that he had never been allowed in either.
‘You’re curious, too, aren’t you, sunshine?’
Curiosity killed the cat.
She looked again at the gun.
Satisfaction brought him back, baby.
Jem tried to smile at Ego as he strolled towards the weights bench and nosed the stack of discs over and over. Turning back to the desk, her eyes caught the doorway and a chill travelled her spine as she saw Saskia Brandt standing there, silhouetted against the brighter hall and black as the gun. She held bags of shopping in each hand. Her mouth was open.
‘What the fuck are you doing, Jem?’ Her voice was hard.
‘It’s OK, really,’ Jem replied with a confidence she didn’t feel. She walked over to Saskia, leaving a metre between them. ‘Just having a look around.’
‘How dare you? I locked the room.’
‘Listen, I’m just wandering about, no harm…’
Jem talked. She had filibustered people before, and with this confidence she dealt word after word. Though Saskia’s expression did not change—only the direction of her gaze as she looked around the room, checking—Jem maintained her verbiage. Covering fire, she told herself, shooting from the hip, but that only returned her thoughts to the weapon. The idea that Saskia kept a firearm in her apartment could not be positively spun. For Jem, the most worrying element was the addition of the silencer. Was Saskia a policewoman? A contract killer? How did that fit with the extraordinary events of the previous evening?