‘Vivid. I feel like I’m there.’ Odette described her experience at the coroner’s court, and her parents’ house, and all the other occasions in between when she had lost track of her real surroundings. Dr Rebello asked questions at intervals, continuing to take notes until Odette had finished, then put down her pen.
‘During a traumatic event, memories aren’t recorded normally,’ Dr Rebello remarked. ‘One theory for why this happens is that stress suppresses the hippocampus. I think you may have been traumatised – and that’s affected how you’re recalling the event. You’re re-experiencing the moment that you found the body, rather than remembering it. To your mind, finding the corpse isn’t something that happened in the past. You keep reliving it.’
‘So what do I do?’
‘We’re going to construct a narrative of what happened when you found the body. As we do that, you’ll probably feel you’re slipping back in time, but I’ll keep you in this room by asking questions about what you notice in the here and now. Piecing together your story will allow you to lay down proper memories, so that you can recollect the incident without panicking you’re still there.’
This sounded a sensible course of action. Dr Rebello’s calmness was what Odette needed. If Odette had confided in Maman, nobody would have stayed calm. Despite Odette’s resistance, Papi had been right to say she should talk to a professional.
Yet one thing troubled her.
‘I can’t tell a story of what happened,’ she said. ‘Because I don’t know why it happened.’
Dr Rebello put aside her notebook and studied Odette before speaking.
‘Explain to me what you mean,’ she asked.
‘I want to think this woman killed herself,’ Odette said. ‘It’s terrible, but it’s better than the alternative. Because if it was homicide – if someone murdered her – the killer escaped an underground room without unlocking the door, and they’re still free. How does that story make any sense? I have so many questions. About what happened. About why.’
Dr Rebello picked up her notebook again and wrote something down.
‘The why doesn’t matter,’ she said quietly, without looking Odette in the eye.
And Odette thought: she doesn’t believe that. She’s lying. She doesn’t believe that at all.
10
JUNE 1969
Angharad and Barbara
Angharad Mills, the medical engineer who had advised Margaret, was still working for the space programme. But there were no other senior women on staff, and she was tiring of her employers’ chauvinism. She was therefore intrigued when she received an invitation to the Conclave. At their previous meeting, Margaret had hinted that a job might be available. Angharad didn’t hesitate before accepting the invitation.
When the day came she arrived in the Conclave foyer and paused before approaching reception, to read the great directory sign displayed by the entrance. The departments were listed by floor. The basement was home to medical clinics and a series of laboratories – which included pathology and forensic sciences, as well as the physics labs which were so central to the Conclave’s work. At ground level, there appeared to be a visitors’ shop; the workers’ bar and social area; the hall of time machines; the gardens; and a rear exit leading to the time travellers’ accommodation. On the floor above, there was a range of offices shared by commercial services, public relations, administration and personnel. The legal, criminal investigation, justice and intelligence departments were on the second floor. A library, archives, Beeline’s radio operators, and a lecture hall were on the third floor, along with Lucille Waters’ office, which she occupied as Head of Knowledge. And finally, Margaret Norton oversaw the running of the Conclave from her rooms at the very top of the building.
As soon as Angharad reported to reception, Margaret’s secretary came to greet her. They took the lift, which was lined with mirrors and red suede, to the fourth floor. The secretary led Angharad into Margaret’s office: a high-ceilinged round room with heavy velvet curtains. Margaret sat at a dark oak desk. She had back-combed her hair into smooth immobility, and wore a string of pearls over a cashmere top. She looked presidential.
‘Welcome, Angharad,’ she said. ‘Do take a pew. What do you think of the Conclave’s new home?’
‘It’s very impressive,’ Angharad said truthfully. ‘How’s time travelling treating you?’
‘You might say I’ve hung up my boiler suit. My main priority now is to be the best leader to the Conclave that I can – and making strategic decisions is considerably easier from a fixed vantage point.’
‘You’re not time travelling at all?’
‘No, it muddies the mind… all that toing and froing hither and yon. I have a clarity, a linearity, of thought that active time travellers can struggle to maintain. Lucille does the donkey work of compiling dispatches from the future. Bless her heart, whatever information I want from the future she fetches it.’
‘I look forward to meeting her.’ Angharad was hopeful that Margaret’s renewed contact was paving the way for a job offer, and was keen to demonstrate her willingness to fit in.
‘You’ll meet Lucille, and Grace, in good time, I’m sure. Perhaps there’ll even be an opportunity before you leave today. But in the meantime, I’d like your perspective on a matter of policy.’ Margaret took a file from her desk drawer and splayed it open on the blotter.
Angharad leant forward to read the contents. The uppermost page appeared to be a psychometric questionnaire, for measuring anxiety levels. It wasn’t a test that Angharad had seen before, and some of the questions were decidedly eccentric.
‘The tests in this folder are a monitoring tool,’ Margaret said. ‘We use them to capture signs of anxiety and depression in time travellers. They won’t be developed until the middle of the twenty-first century, but a psychologist of that period has placed them at my disposal for us to check on employees’ mental health after every time-travelling trip. Might I ask you your initial impressions?’
Turning the pages, Angharad said, ‘They contain a lot of questions about death – and the fear of death.’
‘Yes. Time travellers are constantly encountering people who are alive in one timeline and dead in another. According to the psychologist – her name is Dr Joyce – death usually stops being tangible to them. Most time travellers adjust by developing a… casual disregard… for their own and others’ mortality. It’s quite a healthy adaptation, in my opinion, because it allows them to do their work. A minority of time travellers never learn to cope with this movement between the living and the dead, and can be quite incapacitated by it.’
‘I see.’
‘So during the hiring process I would like to detect which candidates show the most anxiety about death – and rule them out. These tests can play a part in that, but I wondered if you might have some supplementary strategies.’
‘You want employees who don’t care about their own mortality?’ To Angharad, this sounded like a fast track to hiring risk-takers and nihilists. But Margaret wasn’t inviting criticism. She wanted solutions. And if a Conclave job was in the offering, Angharad would provide solutions. ‘You have two options. The first is to administer a more nuanced test at the recruitment stage. If the questionnaires aren’t sufficient, people may be lying in their responses. They might not admit their true feelings about death, because it’s a personal topic. So I’d suggest something more… physiological… than a questionnaire.’
‘Go on.’ Margaret picked up a fountain pen and filled it with ink.
‘Play a showreel of images relating to death, along with more neutral pictures. You can determine if the candidate finds the death images more distressing by tracking physiological data, like pupil dilation – or brainwaves, if you want to use EEG technology. That kind of test is much harder for candidates to fake their responses.’
Margaret wrote down Angharad’s suggestion. ‘You mentioned a second option.’