44
There was software on the Time Billionaire’s computer screen which he had written himself. It brought up analogue clock faces for cities in every time zone in the world. He was staring at it now. ‘Taking stock,’ he suddenly said aloud, then grinned at his joke.
Through the window he could see the dawn sky slowly lightening over the city of Brighton and Hove. It was coming up to five here in England. Six in Paris. Eight a.m. in St Petersburg. Eleven in Bangladesh. One in the afternoon in Kuala Lumpur. Three in the afternoon in Sydney.
People would be getting up here soon. And going to bed in Peru. Everyone in the world was subservient to the sun, except for himself. He had been liberated. It made no difference any more to him whether it was day or night, whether the stock exchanges of the world were open or shut, or the banks, or anything else.
There was one man he had to thank for that.
But he was no longer bitter. That was all packed away in another box that was his past. You needed to be positive in life, have goals. He’d found a site on the internet which was all about living longer. People who had goals lived longer, simple as that. And those people who achieved their goals – well, their life expectancy hit the jackpot! And now he had achieved two goals! He owned even more time, to lavish on whatever he liked.
Steam curled from the cup of tea beside him. English Breakfast tea with a little milk. He picked the spoon up and stirred the tea seven times. It was very important to him always to stir tea exactly seven times.
Turning his attention back to the computer, he tapped the command for another piece of software he had created for himself. He had never been happy with any of the internet search engines – none of them were precise enough for him. All of them delivered information in the sequence they wanted. This one of his own, which linked and trawled all the major search engines, obtained quickly for him everything that he wanted.
And at this moment he wanted an original workshop manual for a 1966 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.
Then he sucked the back of his right hand. The pain was getting worse, the stinging sensation deepening, which was what had woken him and prevented him from going back to sleep. Not that he was much of a sleeper anyway. He could see a slight swelling around it, which seemed to be affecting the movement of his thumb, although he might be imagining that. And his chest was still stinging.
‘Bitch,’ he said aloud.
He walked into the bathroom, switched on the light, unbuttoned his shirt and opened up the front, then peeled back the strip of Elastoplast. The fresh scratch, over an inch long, crusted with congealed blood, had been gouged from his chest some hours back by a long toenail.
45
Shortly after five a.m. Roy Grace left Cleo’s house, in a trendy, gated development in the centre of Brighton, closing the front door as quietly as he could behind him, feeling terrible. The breaking dawn sky, a dark, marbled grey streaked with smudgy, crimson veins, was the colour of a frozen human cadaver. A few birds were beginning a tentative dawn chorus, firing off solitary tweets, briefly piercing the morning stillness. Signals to other birds, like radio signals beamed into space.
He shivered, as he pressed the red exit button on the wrought-iron gates, and let himself out of the courtyard into the street. The air was already warming up and it promised to be another blistering summer day. But it was raining in his soul.
He hadn’t slept a wink.
During the past two months of their relationship, he and Cleo had never exchanged a solitary cross word. They hadn’t really tonight either. Yet tossing and turning during these past few hours, he sensed that something had changed between them.
The street lighting was still on, useless orange glows emitting from each lamp in the rapidly encroaching daylight. A tabby cat slunk across the road ahead of him. He walked up past a line of cars, noticed a Coke can lying in the gutter, a pool of vomit, a Chinese takeaway carton. He passed Cleo’s blue MG, covered in dew, then reached his Alfa, covered in less dew. It was parked in what had become his regular spot, on a single yellow line outside an antiques dealer that specialized in retro twentieth-century furniture.
He climbed in, started the car, blipped the accelerator, the engine snuffling, running lumpily and unevenly for a few moments until the damp burned off the electrics; the wipers clopped the dew from the screen. A hiss of static belted out from the radio; he punched a button to switch stations. Someone was talking, but he didn’t listen. Instead he turned and stared at the closed gates, wondering whether to go back and say something.
Like what?
Cleo saw Sandy as a threat she could not deal with. He knew that he needed to get his head around that, to put himself in Cleo’s position. What if she’d had a husband who’d vanished and it was she who was off to Munich to try to find him on Sunday? How would he be feeling?
He had no idea, that was the honest truth. In part because he was too dog tired to think straight, and in part because he didn’t know what he was feeling about the prospect – however slim – of seeing Sandy.
Ten minutes later he passed the red pillar box on New Church Road, which had been his landmark for twelve years, and made the next left turn. Apart from a milk float halted several feet out from the pavement, Grace’s street was deserted. It was a quiet, pleasant residential avenue, lined on both sides with semi-detached mock-Tudor houses, most of them three-bedroomed, with integral garages. A few had rather ugly loft conversions and some – not his own – had hideous secondary double-glazing.
He and Sandy had bought the house just over two years before she disappeared, and sometimes he wondered if the move had had something to do with it, whether she hadn’t been happy there. They’d been so content in the small flat in Hangleton that had been their nest in those first years of marriage, but they’d both fallen in love with this house, Sandy even more so than himself because it had a good-sized rear garden and she had always longed for a garden of her own.
Buying the place and then doing it up had stretched them both financially. Grace had been a detective sergeant then, still qualifying for overtime, and had worked all the hours he could. Sandy had been a secretary at a firm of accountants and had put in extra hours there, too.
She had seemed happy enough, taking charge of gutting and modernizing the interior. The previous owners had lived there for over forty years, and it had been drab and dark when they had bought it. Sandy had transformed it into light, modern spaces, with touches of Zen here and there – and she seemed so proud of all she had done. And the garden had become her pride and joy – although it was now in an embarrassing state of neglect, Grace thought guiltily. Every weekend he promised himself he would spend some time on it, sorting things out. But in the end he never seemed to have enough time – or the inclination. He kept the grass under reasonable control, and had convinced himself that most of the weeds were flowers anyway.
On his car radio, which he had tuned out of his brain for several minutes, he now heard a man earnestly explaining EU agricultural policy. Turning into his driveway, he pulled up in front of the single garage and switched off the engine, the radio dying with it.
Then, letting himself into the house, his solemn mood was suddenly replaced by a flash of anger. All the downstairs lights were on, burning brightly. So was his original juke box.