“By 1973 the attacks on our kind were slowing, thanks to the methods employed for our own protection, but those survivors who were not exemplary in their security still risked exposure and the Forgetting. In 1975 a final bulletin was issued from the Beijing Cronus Club, urging all surviving members to take their own lives at once, to evade any pursuers in this life. Regrettably–” a twitch in the corner of her mouth that might have been sorrow “–we did not predict that after the mass Forgettings inflicted upon us our enemy would then seek to destroy so many pre-birth. We believed our attacker to be a linear agency, perhaps a government apprised of our existence. We did not realise that the perpetrator could be one of our own. The loss has been extraordinary. We tried to find out who was attacking us, who was bringing us down, but this… crime… was planned, organised and executed with a stark brutality that left us reeling. We had grown complacent, I believe. We had grown lazy. We will not be caught so off guard again.”
For a while we walked in silence. I was still too stunned to speak. How much had I missed, courtesy of my early death? And to what extent, I wondered, had Vincent’s all-out attack on the Cronus Clubs been a consequence of my actions, of my refusing to cooperate and threatening to expose him once and for all? Clearly the attack had been planned for a long while, but was I not partially responsible for bringing it to a head?
“The pre-birth murders,” I said at last. “If they’ve been going on since 1896 of this life, that gives you over fifty years to investigate them. Do you have any leads?”
“It’s been difficult,” she conceded, “our resources limited. Those who died–we did not know their points of origin and can only conclude that they have been murdered by the simple fact that they have not been born. However, we have made some progress and narrowed our list of suspects down. In its way–” a wry smile now, as humourless as a tomb “–the loss of life among our people makes it easier to predict who might be our villain. By focusing on a specific time, a specific place, there are only so many candidates for this deed.”
“Do you have names?” I asked.
“We do, but before I tell you all, I must ask you, Professor, what it is you intend to offer me.”
For a moment I nearly told her all.
Vincent Rankis, the quantum mirror, all our research together.
But no. Too much danger, for where could knowledge of this have come if not from me?
“How about a vast organised criminal network that spans the globe,” I said, “capable of finding anyone, anywhere, and buying anything, at any price. Will that do?”
She considered.
It would do.
She gave me a name.
Chapter 64
I met Akinleye several times after her Forgetting. Once, in the life that immediately followed, I went to the school where she was studying, shook her hand and asked her how she was doing. She was a bright teenage girl, full of prospects. She was going to move to the city, she said, and become a secretary. It was the greatest ambition a young girl could have, a towering pinnacle of hope, and I wished her luck with it.
In the life after that I visited her again, this time when she was a child of seven. She’d come to the attention of the Accra Cronus Club–who in any case were keeping an eye out in that general area–as a child her parents called mad. They’d tried everything, from the shrieks of witch doctors to the chanting of imams, and still, they cried, Akinleye, their beautiful daughter, was mad. Already, the Accra Club proclaimed, Akinleye was a suicide threat.
I went to visit her before that could happen and found she had been given over to the care of a doctor who kept his patients shackled to their beds. Epileptics, schizophrenics, mothers who’d seen their children die, men with limbs hacked off, driven mad by infection and sadness, children in the last throes of cerebral malaria, their bodies twitching, were all kept together in the same ward, to be treated with one spoonful of syrup and one spoonful of lemon juice every half-hour. My fury at the doctor was so great that, on leaving the place, I requested the Accra Club to have it torn down.
“It’s like this all over the country, Harry,” they complained. “It’s just the times!”
I wouldn’t take no for an answer, and so, reluctantly, and to get rid of me, they had the building knocked down and a neat, square hospital put up in its place, where one fully trained psychiatrist cared for thirty patients, whose numbers swelled to nearly four hundred in the first three months.
Akinleye, undersized and underfed, stared at me wildly when I came to visit.
“Help me,” she sobbed. “God help me, I am possessed by a demon!”
A seven-year-old girl, rocking in despair, possessed by a demon.
“You’re not, Akinleye,” I replied. “You are whole; you are yourself.”
I took her with me back to Accra that very night, to the Cronus Club, whose members greeted her as the old friend she was and gave her the greatest meal of her lives so far, and showed her luxury, and told her she was sane and well, and welcome among them.
Many years later I met Akinleye in a clinic in Sierra Leone. She was tall and beautiful, trained as a doctor and wearing a bright purple headscarf in her hair. She recognised me from our meeting in Accra and asked me to join her on the terrace for lemonade and memories.
“They tell me that I chose to forget my life before,” she explained as we sat and watched the sun set over the shrieking forest. “They tell me that I had grown tired of who I was. It is odd knowing all these people have known me for hundreds of years, yet they are still strangers. But I tell myself it is not me they have known–it is the last me, the old me, the me that I have forgotten. Did you know that me, Harry?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I did.”
“Were we… close?”