The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(36)
It’s rare to see a gathering of the Cronus Club. Members drift in and out all the time, but a full regional assembly–invitees summoned by cards with gold trim, agenda: the end of the world–is a sight to see. At six years old I was the youngest. At eighty-two, Wilbur Mawn was the oldest. As a child Wilbur had met the Duke of Wellington, and when growing up as a young man in London he had swapped cards with men who had fought for, and against, revolution in France. Now he was to be our next messenger, a man shortly due to die, who could, by his death, bring the message back to 1844–the world is ending and we don’t know why. So what are you going to do about it?
“Nothing!” declared Philip Hopper, son of a Devon farmer with a taste for adventure that had led him to die in the Second World War six times, the Korean War twice, and Vietnam once, as a rather decrepit war correspondent no army would employ. “The factors are too many, the information too vague! We either need more information or nothing at all, since we can’t begin to determine what’s at work here.”
“I think,” suggested Anya, a White Russian refugee who tended to abandon the White Russian cause for a more comfortable life abroad in 1904 with a sigh of inevitability, “the issue concerns the speeding-up. The end of the world is speeding up–it is happening earlier in every life. That implies that the cause is changing, and what, we must ask, is the cause of change?”
Eyes turned to me. I was both messenger boy and, by dint of being the youngest, the most widely assumed to be in touch with modern scientific reasoning on the subject, if you considered the 1990s to be modern.
“In every life we lead, regardless of every death we pass,” I said, “the world around us is unchanged. There is always rebellion in 1917; there is always war in 1939; Kennedy will always be shot and trains will always be late. These are linear events which do not vary, as far as we can observe, from life to life. The only variable factors are us. If the world is changing, we are the ones who change it.”
“Against the rules of the Cronus Club!” interrupted Charity furiously, never one to be distracted by the bigger picture.
“The question therefore becomes,” I went on, legs dangling from the chair on which I was perched, “not why is the world ending. But who?”
Chapter 30
Killing an ouroboran is hard, but I would argue that killing a linear mortal can often be harder, for you cannot simply prevent their birth in one life and have that serve as death for all. Each murder must be conducted each life, a matter as routine as brushing teeth or trimming nails. The key is consistency.
It was 1951 and I was living in London.
Her name was Rosemary Dawsett: she was twenty-one years old and liked money. I was lonely and liked her. I won’t pretend it was a profound relationship, but it was, in its own way, reasonably honest. I didn’t ask for exclusivity, and she didn’t attempt to extort, though she could see that I was a reasonably wealthy gentleman. Then one day she missed our meeting, and I went to her lodging and found her, in the bath, wrists slashed. The police called it suicide, dismissing her as one more dead tart, but I looked and I saw. The blade had gone too deep into her right wrist, slashing the tendons; she couldn’t have been strong enough to hold it for the next cut on her left, and besides there were no hesitation marks, no signs of doubt, no note, no shuffling around as she tried to get the angle right or worked up her courage. As someone practised in the art of self-destruction, I knew a murder when I saw it.
The police refused to investigate, so I took over. The evidence was sickeningly clear to find, once you looked. Fingerprints, one even in the blood itself, and the madame downstairs had a list of all Rosemary’s regulars and thought she had seen one Richard Lisle leaving as she had come home. Getting his address was a matter of a few polite phone calls, getting his fingerprints was a case of approaching him in a pub, buying him several pints and listening to his ramblings, which ranged from a discussion of fine art taken from a textbook to loud and raucously cheered remarks about the bloody Pakis and wogs. His voice was the overly slippery upper-class accent of a middle-class man with aspirations and elocution lessons. In thirty years it would be a parody accent, used by comics to expose the sad cliché of the lonely man who believed that Ascot was sacred and could never quite get a ticket. In a merciful mood I might have felt sorry for this little man, striving to be accepted by a portion of society that didn’t just ignore him, it didn’t even notice him knocking. Then I took his beer glass home and checked his prints, which matched the print in the blood on the side of the bath, and any sympathy I might have felt was gone.
I sent my evidence–beer glass, analysis of the blood patterns, the fingerprint in the blood–to Scotland Yard, to a detective called Cutter who had a reputation for imagination and prudence. He interviewed Lisle two days later, and that, from what I could tell, was the end of it. Two days after that another prostitute hanged herself, and there were self-defence marks on her wrists and arms, chloral hydrate in her bloodstream. This time, though, warned by the visit from the police, Lisle had been careful and left not a fingerprint behind.
I had not committed murder at the time, although I had killed. By this point I knew of seven men I had killed directly, six of them in the Second World War and one in self-defence. I also calculated that I had contributed to the deaths of many hundreds more, through acts as banal as fixing the wheel on a B-52 or proposing a more reliable timer which could later be used on a bomb. I considered whether I had the courage to commit actual, cold-blooded murder, and concluded with mild regret that I did. I informed myself that I had the decency to be ashamed, but what little comfort that was compared to the certainty that I would commit this act. I would kill Richard Lisle.