And the Rest Is History(29)

‘The plan is that the three of you spend the next few days here,’ said Dr Stone. ‘To give you an opportunity to get to know each other again. Tonight, however, I suggest you and Chief Farrell take some time together. Have a talk. Get some rest. The next few days aren’t going to be easy for any of you.’

The two of us walked silently back to our room. Leon closed the door behind us. We stood and looked at each other. What now?

Foremost in my mind was the thought that I had run away. I couldn’t look at him.

‘Leon, I’m sorry I ran away.’

He put his arms around me. ‘It was a shock. I know. It was a shock when I first saw him and I knew what to expect.’

‘Tell me. It is him, isn’t it. There’s no possibility of a mistake.’

My little baby holding out his arms to me…

‘None. The Time Police tested his DNA. It’s him.’

I was very, very careful to prevent any hint of criticism creeping into my voice. ‘How did this happen?’

He sat on the sofa and pulled me down beside him.

‘It was hard, Max. Even with all their technical equipment, we just couldn’t get close. Every time we landed, we had to spend hours searching the entire area because there was always the fear that he’d just abandoned Matthew somewhere. We had to be thorough so, of course, it meant we were getting further and further behind with each jump. Nobody actually said it, but there was a real feeling we were never going to get him back. And our power reserves were way down and the pod was beginning to drift. You know, the way they do.’

I nodded. Pods need regular servicing otherwise they begin to drift. A decade in one direction – one hundred miles in another. Four or five jumps are usually about the limit before they need some care and attention. That’s not usually a problem, because after four or five consecutive jumps, the pod is not in half such bad condition as the historians inside, who by this time are generally in need of care and attention themselves. To say nothing of a couple of stiff drinks.

‘Anyway, one day, we had no choice but to stop and recharge the batteries. The pod’s and ours. We made ourselves a decent meal, took the time to shower and shave and, in sheer desperation, we sat down and brainstormed. Nothing was discounted, because we had to think of some other way than just blindly trying to pursue Ronan up and down the timeline and only ever getting further behind. Ellis suggested we return to Time Police HQ and throw the problem at them and no one could come up with anything better, so we did. They have all sorts of resources there – most of which I’m not even allowed to think about, let alone tell you – but it seems they have a few whizz kids whose main purpose is just tinkering with the Time Map, and one of them had a bright idea. I don’t know what she did – she did try to explain it to me but I lost her half way through the second sentence, which was embarrassing. Anyway, the upshot was that they modified the Time Map to show traffic, rather than actual historical events. They eliminated everything except pod movements. It took them a couple of days, and what they were left with was a tangled network of coloured lines. It was then just a case of filtering out all St Mary’s jumps – they’re blue, by the way, and there are a lot of them.’

He paused and chugged back more beer.

‘The next step was to fade out their own traffic – their jumps are purple. That left a mish-mash of tiny jumps; mostly illegal – homemade pods trailing radiation, amateur catastrophes – all that sort of thing. All in varying shades of red and brown. They took all that out and that just left a tangled maze of green stuff. They matched it with the radiation signature I’d given them and said most of it was probably Ronan’s pod. It should have taken weeks, but apparently the whizz kids put their phones away, plugged in their personal soundtracks and got stuck in. I’ve no idea how they were able to disentangle things, but they did. They took a close look at the patterns and…’ He stopped.

I felt myself grow cold. ‘And what?’

‘They superimposed our jumps over the top and confirmed we were slipping further and further behind. We were never going to catch them. Commander Hay held a conference, and they said they’d identified what they were convinced was Ronan’s latest jump. To 19th-century London. They concluded that either Ronan was still there – or…’ He very put his beer down very carefully and spent some time turning it around and around, not looking at me, ‘… or that both of them had remained there for some reason.’

‘Or died,’ I said.

‘Or died there before we could catch up with them. To cut a long story short, it was decided we would take a chance, stop following them, and jump directly to those coordinates. Even though it meant…’

Even though it meant that Matthew would no longer be a baby when they found him.

‘We landed in the East End. Once we were there, it took us three days to track him through the worst slums imaginable. We questioned, we bribed, we threatened. Sometimes we … I … got physical, but we found him in the end.

There’s an alleyway – Grit Lane. With a courtyard at the end. Tall narrow houses, one of which was occupied by Jeremiah Scrope and his wife, the very unlovely Ma Scrope. They lived in the downstairs rooms. I’ve no idea who was above them.’

He stopped talking. I offered him another beer. He took it but set it down unopened.