Harry spent a frustrating afternoon talking to Christine’s friends, understanding why they were reluctant to tell him anything useful. None of them appeared too concerned she’d left home a week before her sixteenth birthday. That made him think they knew she was okay somewhere.
Perhaps she’s staying with one of them.
He sent a text to Agnes with the addresses of the four teenage girls he’d spoken to.
Can you take a subtle look around these places tomorrow to see if Christine is living in any of them?
Agnes Kaminski was the first person they’d employed at HSD. Harry had met her while working for the police during a chance encounter with an organisation laundering millions through several electronic accounts. HSD needed an expert in computer programming and hacking, and she was the best, so Harry didn’t hesitate to hire her. She wasn’t a trained investigator, but was as good, if not better, than most coppers he’d worked with.
Do I get a pay rise? she replied.
Have we paid you anything yet?
We’ll I didn’t want to mention it, Harry, but since you did…
Then he told her about his meeting with the TA and how they might be rolling in money soon.
The Time Authority! Wow! You better tell me all about it tomorrow.
Harry said he would and signed off.
When he got home, the wine was chilling in the fridge. Opening the bottle as he warmed up yesterday’s food, he drank half a glass, letting it wash down the pasta and prepare him for the night’s work. Then, as he set the automatic sink to clean the dishes, the virtual assistant technology built into the apartment informed him it had found more than one hundred million references to the Time Authority online.
‘Thanks, Bob.’
Harry had disabled the visual option when he’d bought the flat and changed it from female to male. The idea of him coming home – living on his own – after a day of investigating murder, rape, and child abuse to be greeted by the holographic appearance of an attractive woman was too much for him to take. There were multiple displays to choose from, including the shimmering visages of long-dead celebrities. Still, he’d settled on the gruff Yorkshire twang of Bob, hoping it would keep him sane and kill off that niggling desire he had to set it to play random holographic images of his favourite female actors.
He grabbed the laptop and slumped into the sofa, staring across the room at the reproduction vintage film posters on the walls: Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor peered at him from The Maltese Falcon. Veronica Lake and Robert Preston advertised This Gun For Hire. The wine chilled the back of his throat as Harry remembered all the times he’d sat in the family home wanting to see those movies and others while Lily had told him off for being too young.
‘When you’re older, we’ll watch them together,’ she’d always say to him.
Yet they never got the chance.
Before the alcohol and his memories transformed him into a sentimental wreck, he turned to what Bob had discovered about the Time Authority. He ran the details through the computer, displaying them on a holoscreen in the middle of the room.
The Time Authority.
Such a grandiose name for the unassuming women he stared at on the screen: Dr Rose Adler – born 2000; Dr Sally Cohen – born 2001; and Dr Mary Hazell – born 2001. As the media named them, they were the Crucial Three, all renowned physicists. It was ten years ago, but Harry remembered it as if it was yesterday, the eventual uproar at Dr Hazell’s claim of discovering the secret of time travel. Few people saw the TV programme when it was first broadcast on a live late-night science show, but the clip was soon all over the internet and social media.
But it was one thing to say you could travel through time and another to prove it. Once Dr Hazell had dropped her little nugget on national TV about going into the past to see her grandparents, most of the chatter was disbelief and ridicule, mainly from other scientists and physicists, as well as the odd conspiracy theorist throwing in their two cents. The story might have withered away as an internet hoax if a reputable news site hadn’t posted a piece online about the Crucial Three.
The post said the claims of time travel were true, and the British government, with the science community’s help, had suppressed the news to stop the public from panicking. There was a theory Dr Hazell had let slip her claim on purpose. She was only on the TV show to talk about her family and how her great grandparents had been spies during the Second World War when she’d dropped her bombshell. There were other claims that she was drunk and that’s why the information had slipped out of her.
Harry flicked through the search list, finding the original video and playing it. He’d seen it before, not long after its first broadcast, but had never given it much attention. Now, he gazed at Mary Hazell as if she was a suspect in a serious criminal investigation.
‘People say that science has reached its limit on this planet,’ the interviewer said in the clip. ‘There’s nothing we can do to stop the changing environment and we should concentrate on leaving this world in the near future.’
Dr Hazell peered at the man, her eyes rigid like a black hole. She was about to reply when Harry paused the video. He rewound it a few seconds and moved closer to the life-size hologram shimmering in front of him.
Her fingers are trembling. Only slightly, but they’re moving.
Was it because of alcohol? Or was she afraid? Perhaps it was something else.
He restarted the clip, so close to the hologram he could imagine Hazell’s breath on his cheeks as she spoke.
‘Humanity’s future lies not in space, but in time.’
‘What do you mean, Dr Hazell?’ the interviewer said.
She hesitated with her reply, one hand going to her face before gazing straight into the camera – and into Harry’s eyes.
‘Two other colleagues and I have discovered how to go back in time.’
The silence in the TV studio engulfed the flat. Harry could hear his heart beating, feeling its thrust against his ribs as his blood appeared to move through him like lava seeping out of a volcano. He paused the video to pour another glass of wine. The static from the hologram pricked at the hairs on his arms, so he moved from it to the sofa. He sipped at his drink as he watched the end of the clip, observing as the interviewer gently mocked Hazell’s claims of going back in time to see her grandparents.
‘I viewed them from afar, knowing they would die two days after I saw them.’
The programme finished before the man could ask Hazell why she hadn’t saved them.
Harry rewound the video, freezing it at the point where Hazell made her astonishing claim. Then he opened another web browser and searched for any links related to the immediate aftermath of her words.
What were people saying right then, immediately after her TV appearance?
Not much from what he found and most of it was more ridicule, mainly from her peers in the scientific community. He scanned through the comments before returning to the list of videos, locating the next one of Dr Mary Hazell. Two days after her first appearance on the TV, she was back on the same show, but this time with her colleagues. Now, all three of them repeated the same claim. Time travel was possible and they’d all done it.
Dr Rose Adler spoke with a northern accent, gazing into the studio audience.
‘My mother died when I was too young to remember her,’ Adler said, ‘so I travelled back to see what she was like.’
Dr Sally Cohen seemed nervous, her freckled face twitching as she glanced between her colleagues. Then she removed a photograph from her pocket.
‘This is my brother, George. Twenty years ago, I found him lying in the street with a fractured skull. He’s lain in a coma ever since and I needed to know how it had happened. So that’s what I went back to observe.’
Harry expected the interviewer to ask Cohen what she’d discovered, but he asked something else.
‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Do you have any?’
Harry froze the video as the three of them glanced at each other, moving his head closer to the hologram. There was a silent acknowledgement between them as if they knew this was coming and they’d prepared for it, which would make sense if you could travel through time.
Harry started the clip again as Dr Hazell answered.
‘Stonehenge,’ she said.
The interviewer looked surprised. ‘What about it?’
‘The ground inside the stones has been scanned many times, so a complete map of it exists. Cameras have focused on the site twenty-four hours a day since a group tried to blow them up ten years ago. So we’ll go back a thousand years and place a capsule in the middle, six feet underground, and inside will be a copy of this interview and other items from this year, 2040.’
A hush fell over the audience before loud clapping erupted from everyone. The interviewer appeared disappointed as if he’d wanted something fantastic to happen there and then, perhaps wanting one of the women to pull a historical person out of a hat.
This time, the public reaction was greater, with half the people disbelieving, while the other half believed.
Why would respected scientists, renowned physicists, invent such an outlandish claim? That was what many said. Yet others said it was nothing but a hoax, promoted by the women because they sought fame.
Harry scrolled under the clip, seeing the link for the Stonehenge incident. Then he clicked on it. He watched as a group of selected archaeologists scanned the area inside those famous stones. They discovered the box immediately. It was out of the ground and opened five minutes later in front of the cameras. Photos from the TV interview were next to a computer disk that contained the video from the previous TV appearance Hazell had made. Testing on the wooden capsule showed it had been underground for over a thousand years. Some people still claimed the box must have been placed there days or weeks earlier, but nobody could explain how the videos and photos from the day before were in it.
The wine warmed his insides as Harry flicked through the media reaction to the Stonehenge Event, as it became known. Worldwide headlines followed, but many claimed it as a hoax. The Crucial Three said they didn’t care; they only wanted to be left alone with their research. But those who believed them needed to know the nature of that research. Were these women changing history? Who was controlling them? Which government was behind this? Was it the military?
We need more proof, the world said.
So the Crucial Three provided more.
Adler, Cohen, and Hazell returned to the same TV studio, this time to a live worldwide audience, including a collection of their doubting colleagues sitting opposite them – scientists who’d ridiculed and mocked the women for their claims. The presenter showed the Stonehenge footage again to a familiar mixture of gasps and snorts of derision. For many, it seemed that wasn’t proof enough. Harry wasn’t sure if Dr Hazell was the group leader then, but she came across as the most assured and confident. The camera moved into a close up of her, glued to her face. Ten years ago, her hair was long and dark, draped over her shoulders as she sat there like a queen. Even though she was a hologram, Harry could sense her presence.
Hazell got up and addressed the audience and the cameras. And Harry.
‘If the three of us can’t convince you, maybe six can.’
The camera lingered on her face until distracted by the murmuring in the audience. Then every lens panned out to see three people emerging from the spectators, women removing wigs and glasses to reveal replicas of the Crucial Three. Later, the media would nickname them the Secret Six, three older versions of them who had travelled from two days in the future to now. The six of them stood in the middle of the studio, every eye and lens focused on them, as the noise grew into a cacophony where nobody could be heard.
When everything calmed down, the Secret Six took questions from the interviewer and the other scientists.
‘How can you travel through time?’
They wouldn’t reveal that.
‘Who do you work for?’
Only themselves. They’d created the Time Authority three months ago, a company owned by all of them.
‘Who funds you?’
They had their own money. Later investigations would show that family money had started their initial experiments – financed by Rose Adler’s inheritance.
‘Can you change time?’
No. The past can’t be changed.
‘What will you use it for?’
Observation only. Historical research.
‘What happens in the future?’
We don’t know. Travel to the future is impossible.
The video clips were on the official Authority website, with biographies of the three women: they’d met at Oxford University in 2018. Mary Hazell and Sally Cohen were in their first year; Rose Adler was in her second. Their time there appeared to be uneventful, all three of them leaving with First Class degrees, and then moving on to research opportunities in the capital. However, nearly twenty years later, they discovered the secret of time travel together, a secret many had tried to repeat or uncover in the subsequent ten years, but had failed so far.
The lack of personal details on the official site sent him scurrying through the outer reaches of the internet, plodding through rumour after innuendo after conspiracy theory. No idea was too ridiculous: it was a hoax; a government ploy to distract the masses; an alien invasion; a cloning experiment; and on and on. The proliferation of theories was hardly a surprise considering none of the Crucial Three had been seen in public since the attempt on Hazell’s life five months after the appearance of the Secret Six on the TV.
The Authority website made no mention of it, but there were descriptions and reports all over the internet. They all repeated the same details – Dr Hazell was attacked near the river by anti-travellers, as they came to be known. She only escaped when people leaving a gig stumbled upon the attack. Grainy CCTV clips of the incident accompanied most reports, where frames had been scrutinised in intimate detail. Some sites claimed it as another hoax, a false flag event created by the Authority to garner sympathy from a confused public. The anti-travellers gained greater notoriety from it, using the violence as a spur in their attempt to create a national movement opposed to the Authority and the idea of time travel. For a moment, the disparate opponents to time travel came together in unity, but like all groups of their type, in-fighting led to splits.
Harry read the online posts, discarding them as the rantings of those fearful about the implications. Instead, he found other comments more interesting, from scientists – other physicists – who claimed what the Crucial Three said they’d done was impossible.
But even though Harry scanned through another two dozen articles, there was no evidence these remarkable women had done what they’d said. Apart from the Stonehenge revelation and the trick with the “doppelgängers” in the TV studio, they’d provided no proof of the existence of time travel.
There was no law against claiming you could travel through time and not prove it. But, after another hour of online browsing, it seemed to Harry that the people who believed it the most were those against it: the anti-travellers.
Whether it was true or not, the three of them had the money to pay for that shiny new TA building he’d be stepping inside tomorrow.
And then there was Amy Croft.
There’d been no mention of her murder anywhere on the TA website; no links to someone with that name working for the Time Authority.
But he’d seen the reports and watched that video numerous times in the police station.
Harry typed Amy’s name into an internet search, already knowing what would come up since he’d done this before: a singer, an artist, a lecturer, chef, and even a road with that name in Canada.
However, there was no mention of the woman who’d died or an image of her. So he went to the official website of the Metropolitan Police, searching for a link to Special Division, but not finding one. But, he knew they existed – he’d seen their officers.
But what did they work on, apart from Croft’s murder?
That’s if it even was murder.
Harry finished the wine and settled into the comfort of the sofa.
Tomorrow, at his meeting with the Time Authority, he’d have a few questions of his own to ask the Crucial Three.
What had they been doing for the last ten years?
How did their future selves know to travel back to that TV studio?
If travelling to the future was impossible, what had happened to their future selves?
And who was Amy Croft?