Stella looked at the end of the sofa where Jack always sat. She had bought a pint of milk, but he hadn’t been back so it was still in the fridge. She wanted to tell him about the plastic.
She lifted the camera from the floor and balanced it on her stomach. After a bit she closed her eyes, and pictured Terry’s car by the church gate. In the light of the interior lamp above the dashboard she had examined his camera.
The memory card had been there then.
Stella rang Jack. She got his voicemail and asked him to call. She waited a moment and then dialled Ivan Challoner’s number. When she got his voicemail too, she did not leave a message.
54
Monday, 24 January 2011
Jack was in his study, the fire unlit. He huddled in his coat, although it was damp from the night-time walk. He pulled out the A–Z and tossed it on the desk; it fell open at page 144, his last journey. He had spent three-quarters of an hour on Google’s Street View nursing the cursor – Jack imagined the clicks as ‘paces’ – along the route ending on Clockhouse Lane that ‘in real life’ yesterday had taken him a long time to walk. Street View’s photographs were stitched together to create a seamless virtual landscape of streets, houses, open space, roads and sky.
His mobile buzzed. He ignored it; he never spoke to anyone on his journeys, real or virtual. He had yet to respond to the message Stella had left; she would break his concentration, he needed mental space to understand the signs.
On Clockhouse Lane, being straight, it was easy to manoeuvre the mouse. In this parallel world there was no snow; on this Clockhouse Lane the fence and scrubland were drenched in sunlight. Jack enlarged a line of white print at the bottom of the picture and read: ‘August 2008’; two and half years before his visit to the Lane.
He was halfway along the Lane before he noticed the motorcyclist. A figure in black, face obscured by a helmet, visor down. Jack zoomed in and the image fuzzed to coloured squares like an Impressionist painting, but he could distinguish a jacket zip, a buckle on the boot and the bike’s headlight.
Each time he clicked forward along the road, sometimes in leaps, sometimes in minute steps, the bike was coming towards him. He magnified the photo: there was the zip, the buckle, the anonymous rider approaching but never passing him, while Jack made good progress along the lane.
He reached the recreation ground where yesterday he had stepped off the map and sat drinking his milk. The biker disappeared as if he, like Jack, was invisible. Jack used the screen’s quadrant button to navigate and swung back the way he had come. He expected see the motorbike driving off, having overtaken him, but the road was clear.
He swivelled to face his original direction and there was the bike coming towards him. He inched along, keeping it in his sights. The view swooped when he accidently hit the down section of the quadrant button, filling the screen with the mottled grey of tarmac. Jack spotted a puddle – a bluish-coloured wrapper was half submerged in its centre – pooling in the gutter. At edge of the screen he read the words: ‘Image date: November 2008.’ He jumped a couple of feet forward and again the biker had gone. He paused and angled the picture to show the kerb with the puddle: it was dry and there was no litter. He had returned to August 2008. Despite his coat, cold crept into his bones, but Jack did not think to light a fire.
With one click he had entered a different time: three months after the biker had ridden down the road. The photographs of Clockhouse Lane – after Rosa Avenue when the bike vanished – had been taken in the winter of 2008 on a day when it had rained, when there was a motorcyclist and a blue wrapper floated in a puddle.
The car capturing Street View images would have been in front of the bike, both travelling in the same direction. A passenger watching out of its back window would see the bike following. When Jack mouse-clicked counter to the direction of the camera-car, he saw what had been behind it as if it was approaching him. Street View captured this perspective for its vast tapestry. The tapestry was static but Jack could ‘walk’ in it, going in any direction he liked within a different month and year to his own.
Jack wound the clock back with every mouse-click: he was going where the motorbike had been, while moving forward in his own time. When he turned back and headed in the same direction as the biker, he of course vanished: he had not yet reached that point in the road. Jack had entered the biker’s future.
Jack rubbed his eye sockets. Walking the street atlas had not been a waste of time. It proved that what he had told Stella was true: time measurement was the invention of humans; it could be manipulated. When Jack mouse-clicked along a street – in the past, the present or in the future – he eliminated time. This was the feeling he had when he walked the actual streets at night.
Simon had been wrong. Jonathan Rokesmith was not a coward. He had not run away; he had been trying to save his mummy by running back into her past. He had belted down Black Lion Lane, looking for her on the route they had walked together: along the subway tunnel hooting like a train, up the ramps on the other side to where he had snatched his steam engine off her. At the Leaning Woman he shouted ‘Boo!’ to his mummy in the time before it happened. If he could find her in the ‘before’, he could stop it happening.
Ever since that day, Jonathan who became Justin who became Jack had tried to go back in time – through tunnels beneath the city, along roads using a defaced map – to undo what could not be undone.
Jack shrugged out of his coat and, letting it drop to the floor, rolled up his sleeves. He lit the wood in the grate and sat down again. His mouth twitched and he sniffed, hands poised over the keyboard, readying himself. He would start where the detective had ended. He keyed ‘Broad Street Seaford’ into Street View’s search bar; he spelt the Seaford wrong: time wasted.
He was at the intersection of Broad Street and Sutton Road, the light was dull, signposts made no shadow and there was no one on the pavements. A broken window in the Pound Shop was crudely mended with cardboard and gaffer tape. A man, perhaps smoking a cigarette – his hand was blurred by movement – perched on a bench beneath a lamp-post decorated with baskets of trailing flowers. Along the kerbs were parked vehicles; a bright yellow van stood near the Co-op where Terry Darnell had died. Despite the flat light, the date the images had been taken was July 2009.
At Woolworths Jack focused in: the store had shut down and through the glass he panned over empty shelves, some on their side. Leaflets, free newspapers, takeaway menus lay amidst a confetti of leaves curling on the mat; evidence of another past.
By the building society called the Abbey – in Jack’s present renamed Santander – the sun came out and the vehicles, including the yellow van, were replaced by others. He had travelled back eight months to November 2008. Jack moved forward one step and the yellow van was there; it was July of the following year again. He had entered two different years in the past while in his own present.
Jack knew enough about cars to identify the make and model of the car parked by the kerb of Broad Street in July 2009. Despite the efforts of Google to fuzz out plates and manufacturer badges, this was a BMW X3. If the registration details were visible Stella would have given him the year, but his own knowledge of the series put it as brand new for that year. He zoomed in on the silver four-by-four.
A four-by-four had been exiting the A259 onto the lane at Bishopstone the day they came to see Kate’s grave. Jack had seen it only for a second as they waited at the junction.