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As soon as the door closed I breathed a sigh of relief. My heart was going like a trip hammer but at least I still had my liberty.
'I'm sorry about Mr Kaylieu.'
Stiggins shrugged.
'He was not happy, Miss Next. He did not ask to come back.'
'You lied for me,' I added in a disbelieving tone. 'I thought Neanderthals couldn't lie?'
He stared at me for a moment or two.
'It's not that we can't,' he said at last. 'We just have no
reason to. We helped because you are a good person. It is enough. If you need help again, we will be there.'
Stiggins's normally placid and unmoving face curled up into a grimace that showed two rows of widely-gapped teeth. I was fearful for a moment until I realised that what I was witnessing was a Neanderthal smile.
'Miss Next—'
'—Yes?'
'Our friends call us Stig.'
'Mine call me Thursday.'
He put out a large hand and I shook it gratefully.
'You're a good man, Stig.'
'Yes,' he replied slowly, 'we were sequenced that way.'
He gathered up his notes and left the room.
I left the SpecOps building ten minutes later and looked for Landen in the café opposite. He wasn't there so I ordered a coffee and waited twenty minutes. He didn't turn up so I left a message with the café owner and drove home, musing that with death by coincidence, the world ending in a fortnight, court charges for I don't know what and a lost play by Shakespeare, things couldn't get much stranger. But I was wrong. I was very wrong.
9
The more things stay the same …
* * *
' … Minor changes to soft furnishings are the first indications of a sideslip. Curtains, cushion covers and lampshades are all good litmus indicators for a slight diversion in the timestream – the way canaries are used down the mines or goldfishes to predict earthquakes. Carpet and wallpaper patterns and changes in paint hues can also be used, but this requires a more practised eye. If you are within the sideslip then you will notice nothing, but if your pelmets change colour for no good reason, your curtains switch from festoon to swish or your antimacassars have a new pattern on them, I should be worried, and if you're the only one who notices, then worry some more. A great deal more… '
BENDIX SCINTILLA – Timestream Navigation for
CG Cadets Module IV
Landen's absence made me feel unsettled. All sorts of reasons as to why he wasn't waiting for me ran through my head as I pushed open the gate and walked up to our front door. He could have lost track of time, gone to pick up his running leg from the menders or dropped in to see his mum. But I was fooling myself. Landen said he would be there and he wasn't. And that wasn't like him. Not at all.
I stopped abruptly halfway up the garden path. For some reason Landen had taken the opportunity to change all the curtains. I walked on more slowly, a feeling of unease rising within me. I stopped at the front door. The boot-scraper had gone. But it hadn't been taken recently – the hole had been concreted over long ago. There were other changes, too. A tub of withered Tickia orologica had appeared in the porch next to a rusty pogo stick and a broken bicycle. The dustbins were all plastic rather than steel, and a copy of Landen's least favourite paper, The Mole, was resting in the newspaper holder. I felt a hot flush rise in my cheeks as I fumbled in vain to find my door key. Not that it would have mattered if I had found it – the lock I used that morning had been painted over years ago.
I must have been making a fair amount of noise because all of a sudden the door opened to reveal an elderly version of Landen complete with paunch, bifocals and a shiny bald pate.
'Yes?' he enquired in a slow Parke-Laine sort of baritone.
Filbert Snood's time aggregation sprang instantly – and unpleasantly – to mind.
'Oh my God. Landen? Is that you?'
