Echoes Of A Fatal Past

Excerpt

Frank was standing on the opposite pavement outside the empty shop that had been home to the very exclusive gentlemen’s outfitters Wilberforce & Nephew until two years ago when, as Frank puts it, they became so exclusive they went extinct. It was a typical double-fronted Georgian house to which some very fine shop windows had been fitted in about 1905.

I waved and lugged my complaining burden across. ‘Hi, Frank. This is Hector, he’s a rescue pup, and I’ll introduce you when he’s been to the vet.’

Frank hunkered down and made puppy-admiring noises through the plastic grill. The whole carrier rocked violently.

‘Vic’s told you the good news?’ he asked when he was vertical again.

‘About the sale? Yes. So fast. Colour me happy.’

Victoria (Vic) Williams, is a builder and works with me on most of my projects. We’d just sold our latest, a Georgian stable-block that had been used as a garage and is now a very smart canal-side house.

‘At that price I’m surprised you aren’t shocking pink with sparklers,’ Frank said. ‘And now I’ve got the business of handling this purchase on behalf of your buyer. She was clearly impressed by my legal savvy.’

He was looking as smug as a small-town solicitor who is a junior partner in a very old-fashioned firm can.

‘Oh, yes?’ I nudged him in the ribs. ‘Well-off business woman, moving out from Town? Redhead with style, Vic says. Good luck with that one.’

‘Chloe Dominic is a client,’ he said with dignity and managed to look pompous, which is quite an achievement when you are in your late twenties. Still, he must get plenty of opportunity to study and learn from the senior partners. ‘We are just going to give the building a final check against her surveyor’s report.’

I snorted and set off again, thinking that the London woman might do a lot worse, not that I’d say so to his face. Frank’s stocky, brown-haired and might look like a stuffed shirt in his three-piece suit, but he plays a lot of sport, is very bright and has a great sense of humour. Oh yes, and he time-travels too, and so does my friend Cassie Lawrence, our Special Constable. Welhampstead is really…quite unusual.

Behind me I thought I heard a faint cry, but when I looked around all was normal and Frank was just vanishing through the door of the shop.

Hector was beginning to complain but, as I’d just brought him back (sorry, forward) from the year eighteen eleven, there was no way I was letting him loose on the streets to spread whatever nineteenth century germs he’d got and pick up some modern ones. Not until the vet gave him the all-clear.

I changed hands and looked back as I flexed my sore fingers. Something was making the fine hairs on the back of my neck prickle in the way I’d come to recognise. Somewhere, close, someone was moving across time.

I have no idea how it works. In my home, the Georgian Clock House, all I have to do is walk through a certain door and into the past. Anyone touching me, or carrying something from my time, can do it in either direction. Frank goes through a room in the vast cellars underneath the firm’s eighteenth century town house to meet up with his look-alike ancestor who hates being a lawyer and frequently skives off, leaving Frank to carry on in his place. Cassie Lawrence, the Special Constable, has something complicated going on with a miniature portrait of her nineteenth century earl.

But Frank was across the road from the solicitors’ offices, I had just seen Cassie walking past at the junction with the High Street, and nobody was in my part of the Clock House. So what was I picking up?

I turned back and walked up the steps of the empty shop. The door was unlocked, so I went in, put down the carrier and looked around.

In the days before anyone worried about planning permission, or Listed buildings, the ground floor had been stripped out to make one large open space with the staircase rising up in the middle. A section had been partitioned off at the back, so I went to look into what had been used as an office with a scullery and a loo in the days the place was a shop. The back door leading off the scullery was locked.

There was no sound from above, but I climbed the stairs quietly, wary for some reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Frank was in here, after all, and presumably his client too.

Vic and I had given the building a very quick once-over when it first came up for sale, but there didn’t seem to be enough scope to add value, so we had left it. As I recalled, the upstairs had been less changed, with four large rooms and some smaller ones, then there was a servants’ back stair from the ground floor to the attics.

There was still no sound of anyone else in the building.

I tried the door on my right into what must once have been an imposing bedchamber overlooking the street. It was as I remembered, bare and empty, except in one place where what I had assumed was a cupboard door had been removed.

Then I realised that it couldn’t have been a cupboard, because it was in the wall that separated the room from the landing. When I moved closer I saw that what the wooden panel had covered was a mirror – full-length and rather attractively marked with age.

A boarded up mirror? Like the drawing room doors had been boarded up before I’d bought the Clock House? And this was Welhampstead…

I began to pull at what was left of the wood around the edges and saw the glass and its frame were fastened securely into the wall.

Mirrors are unchancy things… I peered into this one and, instead of my reflection, saw a room. No, not a room – the landing, the head of the stairs I had just climbed.