Time and Time Again

18

THE NEWS THAT an English lady travelling alone had somehow managed to fall from the train spread through the carriages while Stanton was having lunch in the dining car. Some passengers to the rear had spotted what had looked like a falling woman and alerted the guard. A search of the train revealed a first-class passenger to be missing and the door of her private compartment to be open.

Stanton had just ordered the lobster and the dessert soufflé.

Fuck her. Let her rot in hell.

If he could have the moment of killing her again, the moment where her eyes had met his in mute appeal, he’d gouge them from her skull with his fingers before tossing her out of the train.

That murdering bitch. That evil bitch.

He’d been on his way home. To make it right with Cassie. They could have had nine more months together. Nine months of happiness and love, before being evaporated, oblivious, into time and space along with the rest of humanity. They would have been stars together. Him, Cassie, Tessa and Bill, twinkling in the same firmament. Instead, because of McCluskey, they had never even existed and he was exiled in a different universe.

Why couldn’t she have chosen someone else? The regiment was full of hard men. Resourceful men. More experienced assassins than him. MI6 was busting with bored wannabe heroes desperate to get into the field but stuck behind computers because they couldn’t speak any African or Asian languages. Why not choose one of them? But of course any other guy would have far more dependants and emotional loyalties than he did. His life was unique in its isolation. No parents, no siblings, no kids by previous partnerships. A loner by circumstance and later by choice. All he had had in the whole world was his own tiny little family. They were his world.

And so easy to kill. Two little kids, clinging to their mum. How simple is that? Knock the lot off at once.

Any other guy McCluskey and her murderous crew of skeletons might have set up would have put two and two together at once … Hang on, they’d have said to that lying witch, you needed a man without ties and now all my loved ones, devoted friends and extended family have been knocked off separately over the last six months. Something fishy here.

They’d have shot the disgusting old Gorgon where she stood. In her study, in front of her fire, cognac in hand.

But his whole life could be dispensed with in one simple car crash. God, McCluskey must have punched the air in joy when she settled on him. He was absolutely perfect.

‘I’m sorry, Cassie,’ he whispered to himself, as he pushed the soufflé away untasted. ‘I’m sorry, Tessa and Bill. It was me those bastards wanted. But you paid the price.’

Stanton kept pretty much to his compartment for the rest of the journey to Paris, ignoring the bar carriage and the occasional efforts of other passengers to make conversation with the tall, handsome loner when he took his meals in the dining car. There was, of course, some consternation over McCluskey’s death. The express made an unscheduled stop at Lüleburgaz where police joined the train. Everyone in first class was interviewed, including Stanton, but since he and McCluskey had been careful to book and board the train separately and he had not been seen entering her private compartment there was nothing to connect him. The lady had been elderly and travelling alone. An opened bottle of brandy had been found in her bag and it was concluded that she had suffered a terrible accident while trying to open the window under the influence of alcohol.

Nonetheless it had been a close-run thing. Another potentially disastrous action which could so easily have ruined everything. Stanton imagined how he would have felt if he’d had to watch the oncoming disaster of the Great War while awaiting trial for murder in a Turkish prison cell.

More than ever he needed urgently to hide out. He needed to find a place where he would do no harm and where no harm could be done to him for the twenty-seven days that must elapse before he could begin his mission. On the spur of the moment he decided he would return to the shore of Loch Maree in the most remote part of north Scotland, the place where he’d first received McCluskey’s email and his mission had begun. He decided he’d travel there directly, Orient Express to Paris, boat train to London, sleeper to Inverness and pony and trap to Maree.

There was a comfort in the plan too. In the excitement of the last thirty-six hours, Stanton had been finally starting to readjust to his bereavement. He’d even been on the verge of taking up smoking again. But the revelation of McCluskey’s brutal treachery had torn savagely at a wound that had begun to heal. He knew he missed Cassie and the kids as much as he had in the first moment of his loss, and to this deep sadness was added the furious guilt that in a way he had been the cause of their deaths.

Of all the places in the UK he could visit, he imagined that distant Loch Maree would be the most similar to its twenty-first-century state. He’d been there only a few months before, trying to come to terms with his bereavement; he would return there now and spend another week or two saying goodbye to what he’d lost.

He made only one small exception to his plan.

On arriving in London he made a detour between Victoria Station and Euston Station, when instead of going direct he took the underground to Camden Town.

He hadn’t intended to do it but on arriving at Victoria off the boat train he’d been seized with a sudden and fervent desire to do what he had been planning to do when he had jumped ship in the Aegean, on the morning he had put Cassie’s emails in his wallet, given up smoking, resigned his job and headed for an airport.

To go home.

It was the underground map that made him do it. A very different map to the one he was familiar with but nonetheless featuring stations he knew, including his own, Camden Town.

He could still do what he had done so many times before when arriving at some London station. Just hop on the tube and go home.

To the same street. To the same house.

It was still there, he knew that. Or more accurately, already there.

In St Marks Crescent, in Primrose Hill. A nineteenth-century street. The very bricks and mortar he had bought with Cassie during their brief period of wealth after the webcasts took off. The home they’d shared. It actually existed in this new world he was living in. There was no real connection, of course; he knew that. The house was over a century younger than the one he’d known and nothing that he had ever touched or loved existed in it. But it was there. His house, just the same, or at least the exterior would be the same because it had been protected under its Grade 2 listing.

In fact, he’d seen it. Cassie had bought a print of the street circa 1910 at Camden Lock Market and it had hung in their hall. That picture had only been taken four years ago.

There was no Victoria line and wouldn’t be for fifty years but the District Line was there, which he took from Victoria to Charing Cross, where he picked up the Northern Line for Camden Town. His line, although they had called it the Hampstead Line then.

He counted off the stations: Tottenham Court Road, Goodge Street, Warren Street and Euston. Half closing his eyes and ignoring the unfamiliar rattling motion, he told himself for a moment that it was 2023 and his family were at home, looking forward to his arrival. A week earlier such a fantasy would have tortured him but somehow now he embraced it, allowing himself to love the memory rather than grieve over it.

Mornington Crescent.

Camden Town.

He was home. His station. He was a North London boy. Camden had been his station as a kid and it had been his station when he became a father. The long escalator to the surface was in the same place; he stood on it at the same angle. He could have walked home blindfold.

Up Parkway, over the railway line and right just before the canal.

He stood for a moment before turning into St Marks, looking beyond the canal bridge, along Regent’s Park Road to the church. It had been there that Cassie and the children had died. Or would die. Or now would never die. Depending on how you looked at it.

He turned into the crescent and walked along. The cobbles and the flagstones were different but the curve and façade of the houses were much the same as on all the many previous times he’d walked that street. There were even a few cars parked outside, the first trickle of a tidal wave that was to come. No need for parking permits yet.

He stood outside his own house for a moment or two, wondering if there were children inside, a loving wife waiting for her husband to come home. Almost certainly there was a family; it was a family house. There would be servants too, no doubt; a couple at least. That much had certainly changed.

He thought about waiting, eating an apple he had in his pocket and seeing if he could catch a glimpse of them. That family who were the distant predecessors of his own. But then he saw that there was a policeman approaching on his beat. That had changed: no friendly bobbies in his day, just endless sirens in the night. The copper was eyeing him now with a somewhat dubious expression, as well he might. Stanton was a tough-looking man and he had two holdalls in his hand. What would such a figure be doing standing staring at a prosperous dwelling?

If that policeman asked him what he had in his bags, he was in trouble. It was time to move on.

‘Goodbye, Cassie,’ he whispered under his breath. ‘Goodbye, Tessa and Bill.’

And then he turned away.