She tipped the almond out, picked it up and popped it into her granddaughter’s mouth. Ruby bit it cautiously.
‘That’s definitely a sugared almond,’ she said.
‘A time-travelling sugared almond,’ Barbara said. ‘And you’ve eaten it.’
Ruby dropped a second almond into the machine. The almond began to dematerialise – but then stopped, and shot straight up out of the box, with enough force to shatter on the ceiling.
Ruby jumped. ‘That’s the design flaw that took it off the market.’
‘You’re lucky it didn’t hit you in the eye,’ Bee said.
She made a few adjustments to the Candybox that she said should improve the reliability, and then she attached various pieces to the side of the machine, taken from her apparatus. Ruby passed tools, periodically shooing Breno from under the table. He was scouting for crumbs and the pickings were rich due to Ruby’s relaxed housekeeping.
‘I’m probably going to sound dim,’ Ruby said. ‘But what exactly are you doing?’
‘I’m making a fuel converter and connecting it to the Candybox,’ Bee said.
‘Why?’
‘So we can run it on time machine fuel.’
‘You said that was expensive.’
Bee gave Ruby a sideways glance. ‘There’s something you don’t know.’
‘What?’
‘When I was talking about expensive fuel…’ she whispered. ‘I have some.’
‘I don’t understand. How did you afford it?’
‘I stole it.’
‘Granny!’
‘Not deliberately. I had two briquettes in my pocket when I left the Fells. But I didn’t return them.’
‘Why not?’
‘Keeping them made me feel better. I’d come away from the project with nothing, Ruby. No job, no friends. The pioneers even had my pet rabbit. So it felt satisfying to keep something that belonged to the lab. I know it sounds petty.’
‘The other pioneers must have noticed the briquettes had gone.’
‘Oh, they did. The police came round to my house, actually, and searched for them. I’d hidden one beneath a patio slab, and I hid another behind some loose bricks in the chimney stack. They only found the one under the slab.’
‘Oh, Granny. You might have gone to prison.’
‘There was some talk of pressing charges,’ Barbara admitted. ‘But I wasn’t fit to stand trial.’
‘You would be now, though. You could have returned the fuel after you recovered, but you kept it, and while you were in your right mind. How much is it worth?’
‘About half a million, in today’s money.’
Fucking hell. Even Breno stopped in his scavenging to look up at Barbara, no doubt sensing a change in emotional temperature.
‘There must be a black market in fuel,’ Barbara pondered. ‘D’you think I should sell it instead of using it in the Candybox?’
‘No. No I don’t think you should sell it. What are you thinking? It’d be traced back to you. You can’t just make half a million pounds without someone asking questions.’
‘I suppose you’re right. But, Ruby, it’s been fifty years. A lot of the people who’d put two and two together are dead.’
For a mad second Ruby thought about what they could do with five hundred thousand pounds. Then she checked herself.
‘No. Any risk of you being arrested is too much. And I won’t be able to sleep until we’ve disposed of it.’
‘Fine, my love,’ said Bee. ‘Let’s use it in the Candybox. That’ll burn up some of the briquette, and then I’ll discard the remains, I promise. Although I wish you’d let me buy you a house instead.’
‘Don’t spend your ill-gotten gains on me! I’d never be able to relax. Let’s use the fuel right away, if that’s the quickest way to get it off your hands.’
With difficulty, Bee rose from the sofa and fetched the fuel briquette from the bedroom where she’d left her bags. The briquette was quite a mundane-looking thing, not unlike a tablet of charcoal, and was about the size of Bee’s palm.
Bee sat back down and adjusted her spectacles. She slid the briquette into the Candybox through the fuel converter. Ruby watched the machine steam and vibrate. The steam smelt pleasant – rather like fresh laundry. But Ruby was apprehensive about having a nuclear-powered machine in her flat.
‘It is definitely safe, isn’t it?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes. I’ve lined the fuel converter with lead. So what should we send through time?’
The engagement ring was still on Ruby’s finger. She slid it off.
‘You can’t send that,’ Bee said. ‘Somebody picked it out for you.’
Except Ruby didn’t know why. Grace’s tokens had perplexed her, and she was tired of feeling confused. It felt freeing to drop the ring in the machine and watch it vanish, albeit temporarily.
‘When will it come back?’ Ruby asked.
Bee pencilled some sums on a piece of scrap paper. ‘Forty-eight days. I hope whoever picked the ring won’t be hurt if it’s damaged in transit. You’re heartless, Ruby.’
‘There’s a swinging rock in my chest instead. Red and stony, like my name.’
Bee shook her head and sighed.
15
SEPTEMBER 2018
Odette
Some questions wouldn’t leave Odette alone, no matter how diligently she followed Dr Rebello’s advice. Odette asked herself again and again: how did the woman in the basement die? If the pattern of injuries couldn’t be self-inflicted, how did the murderer escape a room locked from the inside? And who was she?
The very day that Odette completed her last session with Dr Rebello, she contacted the coroner’s office. Inquest documents were available to researchers, and Odette requested copies so she could check the finer points. They arrived the following week. She stacked the documents neatly on her desk, in three piles. She read the reports several times, marking the pages of most interest to her with neon tabs.
Missing person records were also available to read online. Odette ran numerous searches for women in the right age range, with the right physical characteristics, and made a note of approximate matches, but none of the women had a scar below the neck as a distinguishing feature.
Claire, Odette’s mother, was concerned. She regularly invaded Odette’s room without knocking, and stood by the desk, shaking her head, picking up the nearest dog-eared page.
‘This isn’t healthy,’ Claire said. ‘You should have moved on from this by now, Odette. When are you going to start looking for a job?’
‘I am looking for a job.’ When Odette wasn’t poring over post-mortem results, she’d been seeking a good graduate role, but nothing seemed right. The majority of schemes underwhelmed her. She thought she might enjoy crime investigation if she only trusted the police. When Odette first came to England she’d considered herself light-skinned, but here she was black, and she’d witnessed the police pull her father over more than once. So she didn’t fancy applying for a job with them. Intelligence work – the only other field that appealed – was open solely to UK nationals. Odette was a Commonwealth citizen.
Claire pinched Odette’s chin. ‘Looking for a job isn’t enough. You have to apply for them. As long as you have too much time on your hands your head will fill with nonsense.’