‘Wow,’ said AJ to himself. ‘What a day.’
He laughed when he saw the stagecoaches, beautifully turned out, driving merrily through the streets. There were no traffic lights to stop them. There was no police to keep order. London had a chaos of its own making and it seemed to work. He passed street merchants crying out their wares, things AJ would buy at the local corner shop. Finally he reached St John Street.
He wasn’t sure which house it was that Ingleby had taken him to. He thought he had walked past it until a door opened and AJ recognised the housekeeper, Mrs Meacock. She stood for a moment on the front step but didn’t notice him. Or so he hoped. Picasso could have had this woman in mind when he made his Cubist portraits, for her face had many sides to it and not one would AJ trust. She glanced up at the first-floor window and so did AJ. There stood Miss Esme Dalton.
He waited in a doorway and only when Mrs Meacock had vanished in the direction of Smithfield Market did he emerge to find that Miss Esme was no longer at the window.
His plan took courage. He would knock on the front door and ask to speak to her. But his courage turned from a bulldog into a chihuahua.
Bad idea. Did he think he could just say, ‘Hi, I was wondering if you know anything about these papers your father had? They’re to do with some priceless snuffboxes.’
Even as he said it to himself he realised the whole thing sounded nuts.
‘Gingerbread, hot gingerbread,’ shouted a young lad wearing a hat far too big for him.
AJ was about to walk away but, stuffing his hands in his pockets, he found some coins there.
‘Yes,’ he said to the boy. ‘One, please mate.’
‘Perhaps you would make that two, Mr Jobey?’ said a voice behind him.
AJ turned. Miss Esme stood in the doorway, wrapped in a shawl.
‘Two,’ said AJ. ‘And keep the change.’
He wasn’t sure if he had underpaid or overpaid.
‘I think you have just bought all his gingerbread and the basket,’ said Miss Esme, solemnly.
AJ hadn’t properly seen her before. She was tall, willowy, with a face that looked out of place, belonging more to the twenty-first century than the nineteenth. They walked in an uncomfortable silence and ate the gingerbread.
Why had he ever imagined this would be easy? Nothing – past, present or future – is ever easy.
‘Mr Jobey, may I enquire … ’ she said slowly, then stopped and glanced behind her. ‘Mr Jobey, why have you come here?’
‘To buy you gingerbread.’
She smiled and it was a smile that changed her face into something altogether softer, less corseted. Her eyes were a gentle grey in her pale face; her hair hung straight in two heavy curtains that had resisted all attempts to curl them. He had noticed that the fashion seemed to be for ringlets and bonnets.
‘I thought you were about to go abroad.’
‘A last-minute change of plan.’ And then he said what he shouldn’t have said – it sounded so corny, like something Slim might have said: ‘Can’t resist a pretty face.’
That made her smile.
The further they walked away from St John Street the more she began to talk. Then quite suddenly she stopped, and staring at him said, ‘Do you ever think you were born into the wrong time?’
‘Often,’ he said, smiling.
‘Truthfully? You are not mocking me, Mr Jobey?’
‘No. I think about it a lot. Which time do you think you belong in?’
‘The future,’ she said, without hesitation. ‘I think then women might have lives of their own. Have you read the works of William Blake?’
‘Yes. “Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright … ”’
‘Very good, Mr Jobey, but I was thinking more of his philosophy.’
For a moment he thought she was going to shut up shop and stop talking altogether. Why had he been so stupid? Any fool can quote ‘The Tyger’.
‘Blake talked about doors of perception,’ said AJ.
‘Yes,’ she said, once more alight with passion. ‘“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”’
How right he was, thought AJ. Perhaps Blake’d had a door that led to the future. That didn’t seem as far-fetched as it would have done a week ago.
‘He writes about freedom,’ said Miss Esme. ‘A freedom to be oneself. I tell myself stories about how my life might be. Do you think me mad to believe that in the future there might be hope for women?’
‘No, not at all. I’d just forgotten that Blake … ’ He was going to say ‘was already published’ but stopped himself in time. ‘I’d forgotten that Blake was so wise.’
They were nearing Clerkenwell Green. AJ changed the subject.
‘I must apologise – I should have asked how your father is,’ he said.
‘He died a few hours after you were last here,’ said Miss Esme.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said AJ. ‘This is a bit awkward. You see, your father recognised me but I’d never seen him before in my life. Do you know who he thought I was?’
‘He must have mistaken you for someone he used to know.’
‘But why should that have made him sit bolt upright like that? He was terrified.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There is much that I didn’t know about my father. What I do know is that I didn’t like him and the feeling was mutual.’
‘Do you mind me asking why?’ said AJ.
She said nothing so he started again.
‘Did your father know a Mr Baldwin?’
‘Oh, yes, the lawyer. He dined with my father shortly before he was taken ill. My father was anxious to amend his will.’
AJ wondered if he’d had a premonition that he was about to join the daffodils.
When they parted AJ was none the wiser as to why Samuel Dalton had been so terrified to see a man he seemed to think was Lucas Jobey. Or how he came to have his photograph taken in the twenty-first century.
In a way AJ no longer cared about the snuffbox documentation. If he was fired, so be it. He would live here, in 1830, near to Esme Dalton. He had spent the best afternoon he had ever spent with a girl. He was thrilled by how she thought.
‘If the world is still turning in two hundred years, I hope it will be a kinder place,’ she had said to him.
Oh, Miss Esme Dalton, you could rock my world, he’d thought to himself.
By the time he’d reached the house in Mount Pleasant, AJ had decided that if Mr Baldwin was back in chambers on Monday he would tell him he needed more time to find the papers.
The one thing he knew he didn’t want to do was to give his key to anyone.
Chapter Sixteen
The funeral of Leon’s mum took place the following Wednesday. No horse-driven hearse for her – just a basic coffin, one wreath and three mourners: AJ, Slim and Elsie. No one had seen Leon since his mother had died. It wasn’t for the lack of looking.
AJ had spent all of Sunday searching for him and all he had found were rumours and gossip about Leon being in deep shit.
AJ hadn’t found Leon and he hadn’t found the snuffbox papers, but on Monday he had learned, to his relief, that although Mr Baldwin’s condition was stable he was expected to be in the London Clinic for a little while longer.
AJ had hoped that Leon would be at the crematorium, but he wasn’t. It was off a busy main road and the minicab driver had had to stop and ask for directions at a petrol station. The chapel itself sat adrift among a rocky sea of monuments sanitized with plastic flowers. The crem was nothing more than a clinical conveyor belt where mortal remains were turned into something more manageable.
Slim had said he would meet AJ and Elsie there.
‘Why he wouldn’t come in the minicab with us is beyond me,’ said Elsie. ‘It’s a right trek out to this dump.’
AJ had a feeling he knew the answer. It was all over Sicknote’s Facebook page: pictures of her with Moses, all loved up. “My man, the one and only,?
?? she had written. Elsie was paying the cab driver when Slim emerged from behind a memorial stone, looking like death.
‘Have you eaten?’ said Elsie. She took a sandwich from her handbag and offered it to Slim.
‘No. Yeah. I’m all right,’ he said.
‘Eat,’ said Elsie.
Slim stuffed it in his mouth as the hearse bearing Leon’s mum’s coffin slowly pulled up.
It was a woebegone sight. Wednesdays, thought AJ, are made for woebegone sights.
‘I’m glad I’ve saved with the Co-op,’ said Elsie. ‘When I go, I’m going in style. It’ll all be catered for, down to the last egg sandwich.’
The priest wanted to be done with this cremation. He looked awkward. In his hand was a laminated order of service. AJ reckoned he had picked out the one most appropriate for a drug addict.
‘She was a wonderful mum,’ the priest said in a voice of hopelessness, ‘and will be much missed in her community.’
So much so that she was already forgotten, thought AJ. Her flat had been cleaned out, slapped with paint and was waiting for a new family to move in.
The priest seemed relieved when at last he could press the button, and the curtain opened as Bob Dylan croaked Leon’s mum’s one request. Broken head, thought AJ. Nothing but a broken life.
It was then that AJ saw the sparrow. It must have flown into the chapel by mistake and it settled on the coffin. He wished Leon was there to see it; he would have known it was a sign, a good sign. Just before the conveyor belt started with a judder and the coffin chugged into oblivion, the sparrow flew up and sat on the rafters cleaning its wings.
‘That’s that,’ said Elsie as they stood outside in the rain. There was another funeral party waiting to go in. A family affair with weeping relatives, a huge glass hearse, pallbearers and even a small lad with a bugle to play ‘The Last Post’. So many wreaths. The largest spelled out ‘DAD’ in chrysanthemums.
Elsie had told the minicab to wait. Slim said he would rather go home by tube but Elsie was insistent.
‘There is no tube to Stokey,’ she said. ‘What you going to do, love? Walk back in the rain?’
‘No,’ said Slim. His phone bleeped.
They sat, the three of them, in the back of the car.
‘What’re you going to do about her ashes?’ asked Slim.
‘I’m picking them up tomorrow,’ said Elsie. ‘I’ll keep the urn in the lounge until Leon comes back. I mean, what else can we do? At least she can watch TV with me.’
Slim’s phone bleeped again.
AJ only now realised that Slim’s phone had been bleeping all the way through the service.
Slim looked at it nervously as if the phone itself might attack him. At Stokey Town Hall he asked the minicab to stop. He said he had something to do.
‘I’d better go with him,’ said AJ.
‘You be careful, love,’ said Elsie.
On the pavement Slim was as jumpy as a bag of nuclear beans.
‘What’s up, bro?’ said AJ.
Slim handed him his phone. The last message read ‘if i CU your dead.’
AJ scrolled down. All the messages were to do with the killing of Slim. He handed back the phone.
‘Moses,’ he said.
Slim nodded. ‘Not just Moses – his whole gang are after me. And his dog. Bloody vicious, that dog, a prizefighter. It’d kill a man for a bone.’
They walked together up Albion Road. After a bit AJ realised that Slim was crying.
‘He’s going to kill me and Sicknote doesn’t care. She went back to him. She told me I was pathetic, that I didn’t know nothing about ladies, that I should go back to school and learn the facts of life. Bitch. She put these pictures up on Facebook, of her and Moses. I might as well kill myself and save Moses the trouble.’
‘Don’t say that,’ said AJ.
‘You tried to warn me. So did Leon. I wish I was dead, man.’
‘What? And be stuffed in an urn?’
‘What do I do? Where can I hide? This is no joke.’
It came to AJ in a flash. He still had to find the documentation – there was more than a chance that Mr Baldwin would be back in chambers any day now. Why not take Slim through the door? At least in 1830 there was no chance of Moses getting his hands on him. Yes. It might well work.
‘Can you lay low until Friday?’ AJ asked.
‘I hope so.’
‘OK. On Friday I’ll meet you at Phoenix Place, about six o’clock. Just be there. Oh, and make sure you’ve had all your jabs – measles, polio, typhoid, anything like that. Go to your GP and say you’re going travelling.’
‘What?’ said Slim. ‘He’ll think I’m going to a jihadi training camp. Anyway, I don’t have a passport.’
‘You won’t need one,’ said AJ. ‘Not where I’m taking you.’
Chapter Seventeen
Once you’ve made it over the bump of Wednesday it’s downhill all the way to Friday. And Friday couldn’t come soon enough for Slim. He had phoned AJ to say that he was holed up with a cousin in Dalston. He sounded terrified and said he was too scared to go to his doctor.
‘They’re still after me. I tell you, man, I’m dead meat.’
AJ had insisted. ‘Go in disguise,’ he said. ‘But go.’
By Thursday Leon still hadn’t been in touch. AJ felt weighed down by his friends, work, worry. Ever since he had visited Mr Baldwin he had been as edgy as a dog with fleas. At any moment it might be reported to Morton that there was a thief working in chambers and that the thief was Aiden Jobey. He had looked up the definition of stealing online. ‘To take (another person’s property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it.’ The key had his name on it so legally it was his property, not Baldwin’s or anyone else’s. It struck him – and why hadn’t he thought of this before? – supposing there were hundreds of people who knew about the door and all of them were walking back and forth through time, just like it was an outing to a theme park, and helping themselves to candy? No wonder Baldwin wanted the key. No one would want to lose their free pass.
The image of a beanstalk came to him and he laughed. Jack selling tickets for all those who wished to climb up past the clouds. Somewhere through that door, he thought, a giant is waiting to eat me up. Fee-fi-fo-fum. What he didn’t know was what the giant looked like.
The tension at Baldwin Groat was so thick that morning it could have been classified as toxic waste. Morton’s mobile was superglued to his ear and he was constantly in and out of meetings. Mr Groat, who seldom put in an appearance at chambers, was now there most days except when he was in court on his partner’s cases. The atmosphere was made worse by the presence of the police, who were searching Baldwin’s room again.
Stephen had recovered in time to be back in the centre of the maelstrom, wearing a new suit. He had lost weight and his neck, which was long and permanently spotty, stuck out of his shirt collar. Hunched over his computer, picking at any scraps of gossip and titbits of scandal, he reminded AJ of a cartoon vulture.
‘They say Mr Baldwin’s house is like a museum, full of valuable paintings and clocks from the eighteenth century.’
Stephen said this to the fees clerk who looked none too happy. Mr Baldwin was still in intensive care, though it was reported he’d had a better night and there were slight signs of improvement. But the suspicion that someone had attempted to murder him was proving bad for business.
‘Mr Basil called Mr Groat this morning,’ added Stephen. ‘He’s taking his client’s case elsewhere. Not the first and I doubt it will be the last. There’ll be departures here soon.’
Morton stuck his head round the clerks’ room door.
‘Stephen,’ he said, ‘if anyone is going to depart, you will be the first in line. Aiden, my office please.’
AJ noted that Morton’s office, never exactly tidy, was in complete turmoil.
‘Is everything going to be all right?’ asked AJ.
Morton sighed. ‘I suppose it de
pends which end of the bottle you’re looking through. It’ll be all right for someone but not necessarily us.’
AJ didn’t know what he meant. It took him a moment to realise that what Morton was saying had nothing to do with Mr Baldwin.
‘Mr Groat is summing up a libel case at the High Court. Take him these papers. You are to stay with him unless he sends you back. Oh, and, Aiden, I found this in Mr Baldwin’s office.’ He handed AJ a file. ‘Lord knows what he was doing with it. Would you put it back in the Museum?’
It was the file marked Jobey 1813. AJ looked inside. The map was gone.
AJ turned to leave and Morton followed him into reception where Detective Poilaine was waiting to see him. AJ thought it best to avoid eye contact with her, although he could feel her staring at him.
‘I understand you want to look at the diary,’ said Morton. ‘We have chambers to run, you know. Aiden, what are you waiting for? Cinderella’s coach?’
AJ arrived at the High Court to find Mr Groat pacing up and down the corridor outside, his hands behind his back.
‘Ah, Aiden. At last.’
In his wig and gown he looked even more like the man in the portrait that hung above his desk.
AJ, forgetting his place, said, ‘That painting above your desk, sir – is it of a relative?’
Mr Groat glanced up.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He was a judge at the Old Bailey – sent more men to the gallows than you’ve had hot dinners.’
‘How did he live with himself?’
‘Different times, Aiden. A man – or a woman – could swing for a loaf of bread.’
Mr Groat and his team were acting for a film star who was suing a newspaper. It was an interesting case and AJ watched from the side of the court. It took his mind off the impossibility of the instructions Mr Baldwin had given him. Twice he was sent back to chambers to bring other documents. When court was adjourned for the day, AJ collected the files, packed away the wigs and gowns and made sure Mr Groat had all the correct papers in his briefcase.