Time's Echo (2 page)

Drowned
. The word closed around my throat like a fist, and I was back in the water, eardrums screaming, lungs on fire, while the wave tumbled me round and round and round. It was a
moment before I could speak.

‘What happened?’

‘There’ll be an inquest, of course,’ he said, ‘but there’s no evidence to suggest that it was anything other than an accident.’

Then he astounded me by saying that she had made me joint executor with him. I hadn’t seen Lucy for years, and was sure it had to be a mistake, but John Burnand was very precise.

‘Miss Cartmell made a number of pecuniary legacies, and it’s likely that her house will need to be sold in order to fulfil them, but the residue of the estate will come to
you.’

For a fee, he said, he would deal with everything for me. ‘Or would you prefer to make arrangements to come to York and sort things out yourself?’

I could have said no, but I didn’t. I’d been in Indonesia two years, and I was restless and ready to move on. Mel was in Mexico. We’d taught English together in Japan, and had
a wild time, and she’d been lobbying for me to join her for months. I gathered from John Burnand that by the time the house was sold and the legacies paid, I wouldn’t come into a
fortune, but when he mentioned a possible sum, I nearly dropped the phone. It sounded an awful lot of money to me. It would certainly buy me a ticket to Mexico City and mean that I could travel for
a while before finding a job.

So I said yes without really thinking about it. The smallest of choices have consequences. It’s easy to forget that.

But standing there at the bottom of the stairs, I wished for a moment I’d taken Mel’s advice. Then I told myself not to be so wet. I was just tired. If it was dark up on the landing,
all I needed to do was switch on a light.

Putting down my backpack, I searched around, found a likely-looking switch and pressed it. All the lights promptly went out with a huge crack that sent my heart lurching into my throat.

‘Shit!’

There was a horrible banging in my chest and my ears rang. I made myself take a deep breath. A fuse had gone, that was all. I had to find a torch, find the fuse box. No need to panic.

Turning to grope my way back to the kitchen, I fell over the backpack.

‘Shit,’ I said again as I knocked over the suitcase in my struggle to get up. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

No sooner was I up than I tripped over the backpack again, and I spent the next few minutes blundering around in the dark, getting more and more disorientated. The last time I fell, I cracked my
knee on the tiled floor, which was painful, but at least did the job of making me stop and pull myself together.

Rubbing my knee furiously, I scowled into the dark. Now I’d stopped crashing around, I could hear the faint sound of classical music through the dividing wall. One of my neighbours at
least was awake. And then I saw that it wasn’t completely dark after all. Dim orange light from the street outside filtered through the stained glass above the front door and I could
orientate myself. I used the case to haul myself to my feet and limped towards the light. Stubborn independence was my normal mode, as more than one ex-boyfriend had complained, but on that dark
evening I was prepared to make an exception.

His name was Drew Dyer. He opened the door looking distracted, a middle-aged man with glasses and hair that was beginning to recede. Feature by feature, he wasn’t
attractive, but he had a good-humoured expression that meant that somehow he was, and something in me jumped oddly at the sight of him.

‘You must be a relative of Lucy’s,’ he said when I apologized for interrupting and explained that I had just arrived next door.

‘Her god-daughter. I’m Grace Trewe.’

We shook hands. His palm was warm, and I felt a little jolt of recognition as my flesh touched his. Probably just because I was so cold. The night was spitting an unfriendly mixture of sleet and
rain at me, and I was shivering in a T-shirt and a thin hooded cardigan. I hadn’t been in England for seven years and I was ill-equipped for the vagaries of a northern spring.

‘I really just came to ask if I could borrow a torch,’ I said, tucking my hands back in my armpits and trying not to look too longingly at the bright warmth of the hall behind Drew.
‘A fuse has blown, and I can’t see what I’m doing.’

I’m not sure if he picked up on the shivering or the yearning looks, but he stood back and held the door open. ‘Come in,’ he said, and I limped gratefully inside.

‘Thanks.’

He showed me into the front room and waved me to a faded armchair. It was a much more inviting room than Lucy’s. The walls were lined from ceiling to floor with bookshelves, and on the
desk opposite the mantelpiece a computer glowed blue. Bending my knee hurt, and I winced as I sat down.

‘You’ve hurt yourself.’ Drew looked at me rubbing my knee, and I took my hand away self-consciously.

‘It’s nothing. I fell over my case, that’s all. I hope I didn’t disturb you with all the shouting and swearing,’ I added. ‘I’m afraid I had a bit of a
lapse on the stiff-upper-lip front.’

‘I didn’t hear you,’ Drew assured me. ‘I’ve been in sixteenth-century York.’

I gaped at him. ‘
What?
’

‘I’m a historian.’ He had one of those smiles that aren’t really smiles at all, hardly more than a deepening of the crease in one cheek and a crinkling of the eyes.
‘I’ve been absorbed in my records,’ he explained. ‘I’m writing a paper for a conference, or trying to.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’ve interrupted you,’ I said a little stiffly, embarrassed at having made it so obvious that for a second there I’d actually thought he was talking
about time-travelling. I was usually quicker on the uptake.

‘To be honest, I’m glad of the distraction,’ he said, taking pity on me. ‘It’s not going very well. It’s not going at all, in fact.’

I sat back and made myself more comfortable, not sorry to put off the moment of going back to Lucy’s dark, empty house. ‘What’s it about?’ I asked, noting regretfully
that Drew Dyer had chosen to lean against the edge of his desk rather than take the other armchair. He might say that he welcomed the distraction, but it didn’t look to me as if he was
settling down for a chat. He answered readily enough, though.

‘I’m looking at neighbourliness in Elizabethan York.’

‘Did they disturb each other by knocking on the door and asking to borrow torches in the middle of the night?’

Behind his glasses his eyes were starred with laughter lines. ‘They were more likely to eavesdrop on each other’s dirty secrets at night.’

‘Sounds like fun.’

‘Actually, they spent most of their time fretting about the state of the roads and rubbish disposal. Not so different from today, as you’ll discover if you ever meet Ann Parsons in
number four. She runs a one-woman campaign about the communal bins, and will try and get you roped in to writing to the council, so make sure you’re always in a hurry when you go past that
gate.’

‘Thanks for the warning,’ I said. I’d never given waste disposal much thought before. I rented accommodation six months at a time, so I was never tied to a place for too long,
and although I wasn’t normally short of opinions, rubbish collection wasn’t something I could talk about for very long. I wouldn’t have minded being able to prolong the
conversation, though.

‘I was sorry to hear about Lucy,’ said Drew. ‘It must have been a shock for you.’

‘Well, yes,’ I said doubtfully, ‘but to be honest, the bigger shock was finding out that she’d made me an executor. I hadn’t seen her for years. You probably knew
her better than I did.’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’ I could see him choosing his words. ‘We’d exchange good mornings and a comment about the weather if we met in the street, but that was about
it. Sophie always liked Lucy, though,’ he went on.

‘Sophie?’

‘My daughter. She’s very into all of Lucy’s weird ideas,’ he said, and I gathered from a certain rigidity in his expression that his daughter’s friendship with Lucy
had been the source of some conflict. ‘Sophie spent quite a lot of time with Lucy,’ Drew went on. ‘She was very upset when she heard what had happened.’

‘It’s nice to think that someone was,’ I said carefully. ‘I know Lucy was a bit eccentric, but she had a good heart, or so my mother always used to say, anyway. I
certainly never expected her to entrust me with her affairs, though. I feel a bit bad I didn’t make more of an effort to keep in touch now,’ I confessed. ‘I sent her the
occasional postcard, but that was about it.’

An enormous yawn caught me unawares in the middle of the sentence, and I wished it hadn’t, when Drew clearly took it as a signal that I wanted to go. He levered himself upright.

‘Let me find that torch for you.’

He came back a few minutes later with a serviceable-looking torch. By that time I was nearly asleep in the comfortable armchair and the house felt warm and safe.

Safe?
Where had that thought come from?

‘Thanks.’ I mustered a smile as I got reluctantly to my feet and took the torch. ‘I’ll bring it back straight away.’

‘I’ll come and give you a hand,’ he said, dragging on a sweatshirt.

Of course I protested, but not too hard. I would go back to being independent the next day, I vowed. Until then, it was dark and cold and I was very tired and my knee hurt, so I let Drew Dyer be
a good neighbour.

He fixed the fuse with a minimum of fuss and the lights sprang back on, revealing my heavy suitcase tipped over on the tiles, and the backpack, which lay abandoned where I had last tripped over
it.

‘Like me to carry that upstairs?’ he said, eyeing the case.

I followed him up to the bedroom. Lucy had decorated in a deep, dark blue and there were stars on the ceiling. Just right for an adolescent. For a woman in her fifties it felt a little odd, but
that was Lucy for you.

‘Thank you so much,’ I said gratefully to Drew and then broke off as a name drifted through the air.

‘
Bess . . .
’

I frowned. ‘Who’s Bess?’ I asked Drew.

‘Who?’

‘Didn’t you hear that?’

‘Hear what?’

‘I keep thinking I hear someone calling for Bess.’

He shook his head. ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘Oh. Well, I must be imagining it,’ I said after a moment.

‘You must be tired,’ said Drew.

It was true, I was. Too tired to think clearly, that was for sure.

I thanked Drew at the door and, when he asked if I would be all right, I didn’t even hesitate. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

But now it was the middle of the night, and the nightmare was still roaring in my memory and I didn’t feel so confident any more. Shakily I threw my legs over the side of
the bed and sat up, dragging my hands down my face, as if I could pull the horror of the dream from my mind.

It had seemed so real: the churning river, the chime of the bell, the downward drag of my sodden woollen skirt. The desperation and the grief. My throat felt raw where I had tried to scream and,
as I rubbed it, my fingers found the pendant I always wore, and I twisted the braided silver chain until it dug into my flesh. It reminded me of what was real.

‘
Bess . . . Bess . . .
’

There was desperation in the whisper that trickled through the air, and my heart stuttered in alarm before I remembered that Bess was the child in my nightmare. I let go of the chain before I
choked myself. The words were just a hangover from the dream, and the dream tied up with the voice I had heard calling earlier.

‘
Bess . . .
’

There it was again. I rubbed my palms over my ears as if I could rub out the sound, and then pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. It was a nightmare – that was all, I reminded
myself. I wasn’t properly awake. I was exhausted and jet-lagged and in an unfamiliar house. Small wonder my mind was playing tricks on me.

But my hand was shaking as I reached out for the light and clicked it on. It was only a small lamp, but I shrank back from the glare as the room leapt at me.

‘It was a nightmare,’ I said out loud, and I cringed to hear the quaver in my voice. ‘It’s over.’

It’s hard to fix the moment when a story begins. I used to think that you could lay time out in a straight line, see one event following another in a steady forward
march. But it doesn’t work like that. There is nothing orderly about time. Sometimes the past loops forward, or turns back on itself, weaving present and future together, until the threads of
time tangle into an impenetrable knot of countless choices and coincidences and consequences.

At first, I thought the nightmare was when it began, but it’s impossible to disentangle the stories that went back and back and back, endless turning points and decisions that led to me
being wrenched awake in Lucy’s bed that night.

I wasn’t like Lucy. I liked fact, not fantasy. Given the choice, I would always go for the rational explanation. Lucy always revelled in the mysterious, but it made me uncomfortable. So
when I woke from that nightmare I tried straight away to make sense of it. And it
did
make a certain kind of sense. I’d never been to York before, so I was in a strange place,
sleeping in a strange bed. Even in my befuddled state it seemed obvious that my usual drowning dream was muddled up with thoughts of poor Lucy drowning in the Ouse, while the niggling disquiet of
hearing someone calling for Bess had been transformed into the small girl (
my daughter
) I had imagined with her apron and her stiff skirts, her face bright beneath the linen cap.

As for the clothes in my dream – well, my brief conversation with Drew Dyer about Elizabethan York had clearly lodged in my subconscious. True, he had talked about rubbish collection
rather than clothes, but dreams weren’t always logical, I reasoned. There was no reason to think it was anything but a nightmare.

Still, I’ll admit I was spooked enough to get up and find a glass of water. I was very thirsty and my throat was as sore as if I really had been screaming. I squinted at my phone. It was
twelve minutes past three in the morning, the loneliest time of the night, and beyond the pool of light from the bedside lamp the world was dark and muffled in silence.