I have spoken before of my rather feeble attempt to kill Richard Lisle, some five lives before I took the train from Leningrad towards a situation which, even then, I felt could only end in blood. Lisle had killed Rosemary Dawsett and he had killed me. I suspected, though of course my death had prevented me from pursuing the investigation, that after my demise he had killed many more and never been caught.
He had killed me in my eighth life, and in my ninth I pursued him. Not the hot pursuit of a righteous avenger, nor the sly chase of a spy waiting to be caught. I had just over thirty years in which to consider my attitude towards him, thirty years in which hatred could cool to practical, business-like assassination.
“I understand why, but I’m not sure I can condone.”
Akinleye. Born some time in the mid-1920s, at her oldest she had lived to see planes fly into the World Trade Center. “I remember thinking,” she would say, “how frustrating it was that I wouldn’t live long enough to see what happened next.” But she interrogated the kalachakra of the Club, the younger members, those born in the 1980s and 1990s, who shook their heads sadly and said, “You’re not missing anything.” Akinleye’s father was a Nigerian teacher, her mother a Ghanaian secretary “who ran the hospital she worked at and everyone knew it, but she was a woman in the 1920s so they called her a secretary anyway”. Unlike most of our kin, she didn’t require rescuing from her childhood. “My parents give me an unconditional love which I have yet to meet from any adult,” she explained. We were lovers whenever our paths crossed, except once when she was giving homosexuality a go, “To see if it’s me?” and once when she was married. Her husband was Sudanese–tall, thin, he towered over the room without ever dominating it and was linear and mortal and wildly in love.
“I’m thinking of telling him the truth,” she confided one day. I told her about Jenny, the woman I’d loved, and how that had ended, and she tutted and said, “Maybe not then.”
From what I heard later, their relationship was long, happy and deceitful until the day he died.
“This man you want to kill,” she said, “has he murdered?”
“Yes,” I replied firmly. “Not in this life, but in the last.”
“But within the course of his living memory, not yours–has he murdered?”
“No,” I admitted. “Not as far as I know.”
We had met in 1948 in Cuba. She was just blooming into her twenties and spending this life, whatever number it was, doing what she had done for every life I’d ever known her–travelling, shopping, wining, dining and having emotionally fraught liaisons with unsuitable men. She had a yacht, and the locals stared as this young Nigerian woman with her flawless English and her perfect Spanish drifted down the quay towards a white beast of a thing, a shark padded in leather and plated with chrome, which she pushed towards any tropical storms with a merry cry of “Give me rain!” I had agreed to stay with her on the open seas for a couple of nights, on the understanding that this was not yet the hurricane season and I had things to do.
“What things?” she demanded petulantly.
“I’m joining the British secret service,” I replied, ticking the points off on my fingers; “I want to meet Elvis before he dies; and I need to kill a man called Richard Lisle.”
“Why are you joining the spies?”
“Curiosity. I wish to see if there are any truths behind the conspiracy theories I keep reading about during my old age.”
Not many women can drink rum disapprovingly, but Akinleye could. “I don’t understand you, Harry,” she said at last. “I don’t understand what drives you. You have wealth, time and the world at your feet, but all you do is push, push and keep on pushing at things which really don’t bother you. So what if Lisle killed a few people? He dies, doesn’t he? He always dies and never remembers. Why is it your business? Is it revenge?”
“No. Not really.”
“You can’t expect me to believe you’d go to all this trouble for a few linear prostitutes?”
“I think I can,” I replied carefully. “I’m afraid I must.”
“But prostitutes are murdered all the time! Report Ted Bundy, track down Manson, find the Zodiac–why do you have to waste your time on this one man? Jesus, Harry, is this your idea of making a difference?”
“I can’t make a difference, can I?” I sighed. “There’s no tampering with major established events. Ted Bundy will kill; the Zodiac will terrorise California. These things have been and, by the creed of the Cronus Club, must be again.”