Nina Allan’s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year Volume Six, Solaris Rising 3, and the Shirley Jackson Award-winning Aickman’s Heirs. Her novella Spin, a science fictional re-imagining of the Arachne myth, won the BSFA Award in 2014, and her story-cycle The Silver Wind was awarded the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire in the same year. Her debut novel The Race was a finalist for the 2015 BSFA Award, the Kitschies Red Tentacle, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her second novel, The Rift, will be published by Titan Books in July 2017.

TEN DAYS

Nina Allan

 

Ten days, ten hours, ten minutes. A man is murdered and a woman is charged. The hangman winds his watch and then goes home. I don’t suppose you remember that old Cher lyric, you’re too young. If I could turn back time, if I could find a way. My best friend from law school, Frieda Solomon, used to play that track at the end of every party she ever threw, when we were solidly pissed and everyone was dancing, even those of us who never danced, when discussion had dissolved into barracking and all the ugly home truths began to come out.

The song is about someone who’s said something stupid and wishes she hadn’t. Hardly a crime, when you think of the appalling things people do to one another every day and can’t take back. What are mere words, you might ask, in the face of deeds? I’m not so sure, myself. What if the person Cher is singing to happens to be some hot-shot international trader with revenge on his mind? Or a fighter pilot? Or a president with his finger on the button? Who knows what someone like that might do, if you caught them at the wrong moment?

One thoughtless comment and it’s World War Three. Who knows?

If I could turn back time, my dear, I wouldn’t change a thing.

It takes about two minutes for a time machine to get going, in my experience. Nothing happens for what seems like forever, then just as you’re telling yourself you were an idiot to believe, even for ten seconds, that such a thing would be possible, the edges of things—your fingers, your sight lines, your thoughts—begin to blur, to stumble off kilter, and then you’re gone. Or not gone as such, but there. Your surroundings appear oddly familiar, because of course they are. The time you have left seems insubstantial suddenly, a peculiar daydream fantasy. Vivid while you were having it but, like most dreams, irretrievable on waking.

There was a man who lived next door to us when we were children whose house was stuffed to the rafters with old radios. The type he liked best were the wooden console models from before the war, but he kept Bakelite sets too, and those tinny little transistors from the nineteen fifties. His main obsession was a hefty wooden box full of burnt-out circuits and coils he claimed had once belonged to a wireless set used by the French resistance in World War Two. He was forever trying to restore the thing but I think there were pieces missing and so far as I know he never got it working again.

I used to spend hours round at his house, going through the boxes of junk and watching what he was doing. Our mother couldn’t stand Gary Tonkes. She would have stopped me having anything to do with him if she could. Looking back on it now, I suppose she thought there was something peculiar about his interest in me, but there was never anything like that, nothing you could point a finger at, anyway. When I was thirteen, Gary Tonkes was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. His house was infested with rats, and he kept insisting that one of his radios had started picking up signals from Mars. I remember taking pictures of the house afterwards with the Kodak Instamatic Uncle Henry had given me for my tenth birthday, pretending I was working for MI5. I still feel bad about that. I think now that Gary Tonkes’s radio might have been picking up not signals from Mars, but the voices of people who had lived in the house before him, or who would live there in the future, after he’d gone.

Time doesn’t give a damn about the laws of physics. It does what it wants.

I think of Helen’s basement living room in Camden, the ancient Aubusson carpet faded to a dusty monochrome, the books, the burnt-orange scent of chrysanthemums. I sometimes wish I could go back there, just to see it again, but I know I can’t. I’ve had my turn. And stealing more time could be dangerous, not just for me and for Helen but for you as well.

When I was eighteen, I contracted leukaemia. I was very ill for about ten months and then I recovered. Against the odds, the doctors said, and only after the kind of clichéd regime of brutal chemo you read about in the colour supplements. And yes, there were times I wished they’d give up on me and let me die. I suspect—in fact I know—it was my brother Martin who persuaded me to stick around. His white face at my bedside, I can still see it now. His terror, that I wasn’t going to pull through, I suppose. I don’t think I’ve mattered like that to anyone, before or since, and that includes Ray. I hung on and hung on, until suddenly there I was, washed up on the shore of life once more and the tide of those months receding like some lurid sick joke.

But there were side effects. I’d been offered a place at Cambridge, to read mathematics. Following my illness I found something was missing: the instinctive affinity for numbers I had taken for granted as an inseparable part of me was, if not vanished, then noticeably blunted. It was like thinking through gauze. My professor seemed confident that I was simply exhausted, that any diminution in my ability would soon be restored. Perhaps she was right. I’ll never know now, will I? The university offered me the option to defer my entry for a further year, but I refused.

I turned down my place, partly from the terror of failure and partly to match the drama that was playing out inside my head with something concrete that could be measured in the world outside. I was having a breakdown, in other words, and in the aftermath of that I switched to Law. I know it doesn’t sound like much, when you put it like that, but the decision hurt a lot at the time. It felt like the worst kind of defeat. I won’t say I ever got over the loss, but I learned to live with it, the same as you do with any bereavement. And in time I even came to enjoy my legal studies. There is a beauty in the law, in which the abstraction of numbers is countered by the wily and intricate compromises of philosophy. Call it compensation, if you like. An out-of-court settlement that, if not generous, has at least proved adequate.

I’m good at my job, I think, and it has provided me with a decent living in return. And whenever I find myself growing maudlin for what might have been, I remind myself that the law has also provided me with what Martin sometimes jokingly refers to as Dora’s file on the doomed: an interest that began as a tree branch of curiosity and grew into a passion.

If I am known to the public at all, it is for my articles and radio broadcasts on the subject of capital punishment, and the fatal miscarriages of justice that have been associated with this barbaric practice. For many years, the essays I wrote for various history and politics journals formed the limit of my ambition for my researches. It was Martin—of course!—who first suggested I should write a book, and the more I thought about the idea the more I liked it.

My first thought was to write a monograph on capital punishment in general: a philosophical treatise, to be accompanied by a thorough debunking. A literary bollocking, if you like. I soon came to realise how dull such a volume would be, unless you had an interest in the subject to begin with, which would make the whole thing pointless, a sermon to the converted. I came to the conclusion that a more personal approach would work better, an in-depth study of specific cases, of one specific case even. What better way to demonstrate the brutality of state-sanctioned murder than to tell the story of one of its victims? To show that murder is always murder, even when enshrined in law, with the same practical margin for error and moral depravity that murder entails?

My decision to write about Helen Bostall was made quickly and easily. As a story, her case had everything you might look for in a decent thriller. The condemned criminal was also a woman, which made the case a cause celebre, even at the time. People are fascinated by women who kill in much the same way as they are fascinated by genetic freaks, and with the same mixture of self-righteous indignation and covert repulsion.

For my own part, I became interested in Helen because I admired her writing, and also because from the moment I first encountered what passed for the facts of her case, I found myself convinced she was not guilty. Not that I would have ceased to admire her, necessarily, if she had been a murderer— Edwin Dillon was an arrogant prick, if you ask me—but her innocence made her the perfect candidate for my thesis. I would do her justice, I decided, if not in deed then in word, at the very least.

I’ve read interviews with biographers in which they wax on about having a special kinship with their subjects, a personal relationship across time that could never have existed in reality. I would once have dismissed such speculation as sentimental codswallop.

Not any more, though.

Helen Bostall was born in 1895, in Addiscombe, Croydon. Her father, Winston Bostall, was a doctor and lay preacher. Her mother, Edith, had worked as a teacher, though she gave up her career entirely after she married. The two were well-matched, forward-thinking people who gave their only daughter Helen every opportunity to develop her intellectual awareness of the world and her place within it.

I might have been content, Helen wrote in her 1923 pamphlet essay “On War, on Murder”, content to take up my place among the teachers, preachers, poets, and painters I had learned to admire as a very young woman, to speak my protest, but timidly, from inside the very system I was protesting. It was the spectacle of war that made me a radical, that fired in me the conviction that the system I was protesting had to be broken.

The war, and more specifically the death on the Somme of her cousin, Peter Arnold Bostall, the son of her father’s brother Charles. Peter and Helen, both only children and of a similar age, had been close throughout their childhoods. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Peter had just graduated from Oxford and was considering whether to take up a junior fellowship offered to him by his college, or to embark on a research trip to Madagascar with his other uncle, his mother’s brother, the entomologist Rupert Paxton.

It is not known whether Peter and Helen had plans to marry, although judging by the letters the two exchanged while Peter was at Oxford it is certainly a possibility. There is no doubt that Helen was devastated by her cousin’s death, locking herself away in her room for several weeks afterwards and ultimately falling ill with pneumonia. She emerged from her illness a different person, determined to play her part in creating a more just society, a society in which a death such as her cousin’s would not be possible. When the war ended she took up lodgings in Hampstead, close to the house where John Keats once lived, and began taking in private pupils. During the hours she was not teaching, she was studying and writing. She also joined a suffragist group. Her parents, though initially upset by her abrupt departure from the family home and concerned for her health, were tentatively supportive of her aims.

Until she met Edwin Dillon. Then everything changed.

Edwin Dillon was thirty years old, a journalist on the Manchester Guardian who had written a number of inflammatory articles on the employment conditions of factory workers in the north of England. He had lost three fingers of his left hand in an unspecified industrial accident, although there was some talk that he had inflicted the injury himself, to avoid conscription.

He came south to London in 1919, quickly establishing links with the community of Russian anarchists and dissident Marxists living there in exile from the Bolshevik revolution. It was likely to have been Dillon’s views on free love that set Helen’s parents so thoroughly against Dillon, although it could simply have been that they didn’t much like him.

Hector Dubois, the proprietor of the Liberty Bookshop in Camden and a former associate of Dillon’s, testified in support of Helen Bostall at her trial. He described Edwin Dillon as ‘a man you needed to be careful around, a man who held a grudge.’ There were also rumours that Dillon’s original motive for coming to London had to do with a woman he had made pregnant in Manchester and later abandoned. Attempts to trace this woman ended in failure and so the rumours could not be verified.

Whatever the reason, Winston and Edith Bostall were determined that their daughter should have nothing more to do with Edwin Dillon. When Helen announced that she was intending to move into Dillon’s rooms in Camden, her parents threatened to cut all ties with her. Perhaps they hoped to call her bluff. If so, it was a gamble that backfired. In February of 1927, Helen gave up her Hampstead lodgings and moved into the basement flat at 112 Milliver Road.

I soon found myself accruing vast amounts of information, not just on Helen Bostall but on her whole family. I can imagine many editors dismissing most of it as irrelevant—who cared about Winston Bostall’s run-in with a colleague in 1907 (over the involuntary committal of an unmarried mother to a mental asylum, if you’re interested) when the incident had zero connection to the case in hand? But the more I dug into the private lives of the Bostalls and their circle, the more I became convinced that they were important. Crime does not arise in a vacuum. A murder is simply the flash point in a gradual accretion of narrative. The various strands that make up that narrative—Winston Bostall’s mortal hatred of violence, Edith Bostall’s inability to conceive another child, Peter Bostall’s ambiguous relationship with his uncle, Rupert Paxton—may all be contributing factors in its final outcome.

And besides that, I was interested. The Bostalls were an unremarkable family, on the face of it, and yet their lives provided a snapshot of an entire era. In the conflicts and setbacks they encountered, it was possible to discern the birth of the modern age and the decline of empire, the fireworks and anxieties that occurred when the two collided. Was it any wonder that a woman like Helen Bostall—educated, resourceful, and unwilling to settle for the life that society had preordained for her—ended up finding herself directly in the firing line?

The shadow side of my researches was the strange vacuity surrounding the person of Edwin Dillon. Information about the Bostalls proved plentiful, and easy to come by. This was partly because of the crime, of course—call someone a murderer, and suddenly every detail of their life becomes interesting, becomes evidence—but that was not the only reason. The Bostalls—Helen herself, but also Winston, Edith, Peter, Rupert, and especially Rupert’s wife Marina, who was Russian and embraced the literary arts as the birthright they were—were all copious, inveterate letter-writers and journal-keepers. Their histories remained bright, remained present. Searching for information about Edwin Dillon came to seem like staring into a black hole. I became convinced that if Dillon hadn’t been murdered, he would have disappeared from history altogether. I turned up odd pieces of his journalism here and there, but finding images of the man himself was another matter. Aside from the blurry photograph that so often featured in the newspapers at the time of Helen’s trial, Edwin Dillon might as well have been invisible.

In the end I decided it would be better to set all the background material aside for the moment and concentrate on the timeline of the case itself. It was like working on a proof, in a way—carry one distinct line of enquiry through to its logical conclusion and the rest will follow.

The actual order of events was easy enough to assemble from the trial records. A little before eight o’clock on the evening of the 20th of January 1928, a Mrs Irene Wilbur, a widow who lived in the ground floor apartment of 112 Milliver Road, was disturbed by what she called a ‘furious altercation’ in the flat below. Concerned by what she heard—“It sounded like they were bashing each other’s brains out,” was what she said on the witness stand—she left her flat and hurried to the Red Lion public house, approximately a minute’s walk away, helping to enlist the aid of the publican in locating a police constable. When asked why she did not call at Dillon’s apartment herself, she insisted she was afraid to. “The noise they were making,” she said. “It was as if the devil had got into them.”

The publican of the Red Lion, Gerald Honeyshot, confirmed that Irene Wilbur came into the pub soon after eight o’clock. He left with her more or less immediately and they walked together to Camden Town underground station, where they were able to secure the services of PC Robert Greystowe, who passed by the station regularly on his beat.

The three then returned to 112 Milliver Road, where on entry into the hallway they found the house silent, and the door leading to Dillon’s apartment standing ajar.

“I knew straight away there’d been a murder done,” Irene Wilbur claimed in her statement. “You could feel it in the air. Something about the silence. It wasn’t right.”

At this point, Greystowe gave instructions for Wilbur and Honeyshot to remain upstairs in the hallway while he entered the basement apartment alone. He called out to ‘Mr and Mrs Dillon’ as he entered, but there was no reply. A short time later he re-emerged, and informed Wilbur and Honeyshot that they would need to report to the police station on Highgate Road immediately, in order to give their witness statements. He did not offer them any further information at this point, but by the end of the evening both Wilbur and Honeyshot knew that Edwin Dillon had been murdered. According to PC Greystowe, he had discovered Dillon within moments of entering the flat. He was in the kitchen. His clothes were soaked with blood, and more blood was spreading in a large puddle across the kitchen tiles.

Edwin Dillon was pronounced dead where he lay. He had been stabbed five times. Two of the wounds were serious enough to have killed him.

There was no sign, anywhere, of Helen Bostall. An officer was left on duty outside the house, and when Helen eventually returned home at around eleven o’clock she was taken immediately into police custody. On being asked where she had spent the evening, she said she had been at the house of a friend, Daphne Evans, who lived in Highgate. Daphne quickly confirmed Helen’s alibi, but when officers asked if they might search her flat, according to PC Greystowe she became agitated.

“I suppose you have to come in,” she said in the end. She had been about to go to bed. When asked why she was reluctant to let police officers enter her apartment, she said it was because she was in her dressing gown.

The apartment was tidy, with no signs of disturbance, let alone the murder weapon. Two porcelain teacups—according to Daphne Evans they were the same teacups she and Helen had been drinking tea from earlier that evening—stood drying in the drainer beside the sink. It was only after half an hour’s searching that officers discovered the small valise on top of the wardrobe in Evans’s bedroom. The valise contained clothes that were later positively identified as belonging to Helen Bostall, together with a forward-dated ticket for the boat train from Victoria and a number of notebooks and letters, either addressed to Helen Bostall or filled with her handwriting.

It was clear that Helen Bostall had been planning her getaway, that she had been keeping her plans hidden from Dillon, that she had not intended for him to accompany her on her journey. When asked why this was, she stated that she had decided to break with Dillon permanently and was determined not to get into an argument with him. “Edwin’s temper had become unreliable. I didn’t want there to be a scene.”

When the prosecuting counsel pressed her on whether she was, in fact, afraid of Dillon, she hesitated and then said no. “Edwin was domineering, but I was used to that,” she said. “He would never have done me physical harm.”

When questioned about the row she’d had with Dillon on the evening of his death, Helen Bostall seemed completely bemused. “I barely saw Edwin all day,” she said. “I was working in the library for most of the morning, then in the afternoon I saw three of my private pupils at Milliver Road. I have no idea where Edwin was at that time. He came back to the flat at around six o’clock. He seemed tired and irritable, but no more so than usual. I told him I was going to Daphne’s, that I would be back around eleven. Those were the last words I spoke to him. I left the flat soon afterwards.” She hesitated. “We really didn’t have much to say to each other any more.”

The police seemed determined right from the start that Helen was the killer. She had a motive—Dillon’s coercive behaviour—and she had her escape already planned. A further breakthrough came the following day, when the murder weapon—a serrated steel kitchen knife with a scratched wooden handle—was discovered jammed into a crack in the wall separating the back garden of 112 Milliver Road from the garden of 114. The blade was caked in dried blood, later proved to be of the same blood type as Edwin Dillon’s. Three clear fingerprints were found on the handle—all Helen’s.

Helen freely admitted that the knife was hers, that it had come from her kitchen. She strongly denied that she had used it to murder Dillon. When asked who she thought had killed her lover, she said she didn’t know. “Edwin was always falling in and out of love with people. He thrived on dissent. He didn’t have friends so much as sparring partners, political cronies, most of them—people he knew from before we met. I gave up having anything to do with them a long time ago.”

When asked why that was, Helen Bostall stated that she no longer cared for their company. “They were all men, obsessed with themselves and their own self-importance. They barely knew I existed. I’m sure some of them hated Edwin—he could be obnoxious. Whether any of them hated him enough to want to kill him I have no idea.”

For two or three days, attention veered away from Helen as the police went in search of Dillon’s political associates, many of whom, as Helen had suggested, turned out to have grievances against him. Then on February 5th, just as things were starting to get interesting, officers received an anonymous tip-off concerning a Louise Tichener of Highgate Village. This person—or persons—insisted that Miss Tichener had been conducting an affair with Edwin Dillon, and that Helen Bostall had known about it. When found and questioned, Tichener, who belonged to one of the suffragist groups also attended by Bostall, readily confessed to the affair, with the additional information that Dillon had been planning to leave Bostall, and marry her.

“We were going to leave London,” Tichener said. “We were happy.”

Helen confirmed that she knew Tichener by sight from the women’s group, but denied she knew anything about an affair between her and Dillon. She reaffirmed that her own relationship with Dillon was as good as over, and the idea that she might have murdered him out of jealousy was ridiculous. “What Edwin did with his time or his affections was none of my business,” she said. “If it is true that this young woman put her trust in Edwin, I would have been afraid for her.”

But the tide had turned. Louise Tichener’s evidence, together with Irene Wilbur’s statement, the clothes and travel tickets hidden at Daphne Evans’s flat—the evidence seemed damning. Paradoxically, Helen’s fortitude under questioning—her refusal to break down on the witness stand—may actually have helped in securing a conviction.

Helen Bostal was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. She was hanged at Holloway prison on the morning of August 14th, 1928. Three weeks after her execution the hangman, Arthur Rawlin, resigned from the prison service and took up a position as a warehouseman for a minor shipping company part-owned by friends of his brother, a decision that meant a considerable drop in his standard of living. More than one enterprising journalist clamoured for Rawlin’s story, but he refused to comment, saying merely that he was done with the hanging game and that was that.

I found that interesting. Rawlin wasn’t the first hangman to lose his stomach for the profession, either. John Ellis, who executed Edith Thompson in 1923, ended up committing suicide. Although some said it was his alcoholism that did for him, most people agreed that Ellis never got over the appalling brutality of Edith’s execution. There have been others, too—look them up if you don’t believe me. It was thinking about Arthur Rawlin that prompted me to call on Lewis Usher. Lewis was an old client of mine—I’d helped him fight off the property acquisitions company that wanted to tear down the historic Methodist chapel that backed on to his home in Greenwich and turn it into a Tesco Metro—and it was during our war with Sequest Holdings that I happened to find out he was an expert on British murder trials as well as an enthusiastic collector of murder memorabilia. I always enjoy going to see Lewis—he tells the most amusing anecdotes, and his house on Crooms Hill contains more weird and wonderful collectibles than you’d hope to see in most provincial museums. When I visited him on that particular afternoon in late November, I was hoping he might have something enlightening to tell me about the Bostall execution and I was not disappointed.

“Do you think Arthur Rawlin gave up his job because he came to believe that Helen Bostall was innocent?” I asked him.

“It’s a strong possibility,” Lewis said. “There was more to it than that, though. People gossiped that Arthur Rawlin was in love with Bostall, that he believed he was, anyway. The prison governor reported that he used to visit Helen Bostall in her cell, during the run-up to her execution. There was a strange little article about it in the Evening Standard afterwards. You’d probably put his behaviour down to Stockholm Syndrome now, but it really was quite odd.” He spooned more sugar into his tea. “You do know I have his watch?”

I felt my heartbeat quicken. “Arthur Rawlin’s watch? The one he used to time his executions?”

“I think you’ll find it was Albert Pierrepoint who used to do that. Rawlin might have copied him, I suppose. There was certainly a cult of personality around Pierrepoint at the time. It’s Rawlin’s watch though, definitely, whatever he used it for. I have the full provenance.”

“Could I see it?” I found myself becoming excited in a way that seemed completely out of proportion with what Lewis had told me. It was just a watch, after all. But it was as if I knew, even then, that I was about to make a significant discovery, not just about Arthur Rawlin but about Helen Bostall.

“Of course. Won’t be a tick.” He eased himself out of his chair and shuffled off towards the side room where he kept most of his collection. I couldn’t help noticing he relied on his cane more than he had on my last visit. Still, he seemed in good spirits. I gazed around the living room—the ancient red plush sofas, the fake stuffed dodo in its glass case, the walls and mantel shelf crowded with photographs of his wife, the stage actress Zoe Clifford, dead from a freak bout of pneumonia some ten years before. The place had become something of a haven for me during the Sequest case, which had happened to coincide with the first stage of my breakup with Ray. How glad I had been to come here, to escape from my own thoughts and misgivings into this cosy little corner of theatre land, where the fire was always lit and the stories were always larger and more preposterous than my own.

A place suspended in time, a lacuna in the fraying fabric of the everyday world.

“Here it is,” Lewis said. I jumped, startled. I’d been so absorbed in my thoughts I hadn’t noticed him come back into the room. He was carrying a small bag, made from yellow silk with a drawstring opening. “I can show you the papers too if you’d like to see them, but this is the watch.”

He passed me the bag. I reached cautiously inside. Things inside bags make me nervous. You don’t know what you’re getting into until it’s too late. In this case, Rawlin’s watch, which was a full-case silver pocket watch about two inches in diameter. The front of the case was engraved with a lighted candle. On the back was a skull, the eye sockets and nasal cavities etched out in darker relief. The classic vanitas, life and death, light and darkness, the universal allegory for time’s passing.

Perfect for a hangman, I thought.

“He may have commissioned the engraving personally,” Lewis said, as if reading my thoughts. “Although the design isn’t unusual for the time. The Victorians were heavily into mourning jewellery, as you probably know.”

“Yes. Though it’s more my brother’s area, to be honest.” I flipped open the front of the case. The watch’s white enamelled face was simple and plain, as if in deliberate contrast to the gothic extravagance of the case. There was a date stamped on the dial, 1879, and a name, I supposed of the maker—Owen Andrews. The name meant nothing to me but I made a mental note to ask Martin about it later.

“It’s a tourbillon watch,” Lewis added. “Very expensive, even at the time. An ordinary working man like Rawlin would have had to save several months’ salary to purchase this.”

“What’s a tourbillon?”

“A means for stabilising the watch’s mechanism, so that it doesn’t lose time. Here.” He opened the back of the watch, revealing its workings, which resembled a complicated mechanical diagram, all gears and levers. “Have a look at this.”

He angled his hand, showing me the inside back of the watch’s case, and the photograph that had been secreted there. The image showed a young woman, with short dark hair and light eyes, a narrow, straight nose and a high lace collar: Helen Bostall.

“There is a possibility that the photograph was placed inside the watch later—after Rawlin’s death, I mean,” said Lewis. “It’s unlikely though. You won’t read much about this in the newspapers, but if you delve a little deeper you’ll find there are several contemporary accounts, from colleagues and family and so on. All of them agree that Rawlin was living in a fantasy world.”

“About him and Helen being in love, you mean?”

“Yes, that, but it went even further.” He chuckled. “I read one letter from Rawlin to his younger brother where he was going on about travelling back in time to prevent the execution he himself had carried out.”

“That’s ridiculous. Poor man.”

“Plenty would say he got what he deserved. Not everyone would feel sorry for a hangman.”

I did, though. We can’t all choose our jobs, and was Rawlin so different from the soldiers sent out to kill other soldiers on the battlefields of World War 1? I tried to imagine how he must have felt, becoming properly aware for the first time of what his job meant, what it was he did. The imagining was not pleasant.

“Too bad we can’t bring him back to talk to the Americans,” I said. I smiled to myself, thinking how Martin would disapprove of my poor taste in jokes. He would love to see this watch, though, I thought, which gave me an idea. “Please say no if you want to,” I said to Lewis, “but could I possibly borrow this? Just for a day or two? I’d like to show it to my brother.”

“The watch?” He fell silent, and I was fully expecting him to demur, to begin explaining how he didn’t like to let items from his collection leave the house, especially not an item such as this, which was valuable even aside from who had once owned it. “I’d like you to have it,” was what he actually said. I felt so surprised and so shocked that for a moment I couldn’t answer him.

“Lewis, don’t be silly. I couldn’t possibly. I’m sorry I asked,” I said, when I could.

“I mean it,” he insisted. “I’ve been wanting to leave you something—in my will, I mean. To say thank you for being such a good friend to me. But it’s difficult to know what someone might like. If I know you like this, then you’ve made my task easier. You’ll be doing me a favour.”

“You’re not ill?”

“Dying, you mean? No, no more so than usual. But I am eighty-six.”

“Lewis,” I said. “Thank you.”

“It’s my great pleasure. So long as you don’t use it to go running off after repentant hangmen.”

We both laughed at that. Both of us, at the same time. But I’ve sometimes had the feeling—call it hindsight, if you want—that neither of us actually thought it was funny.

Helen’s defence rested on the fact that the evidence against her was circumstantial. No one—not even Irene Wilbur—claimed to have seen her in the vicinity of Milliver Road at the time of Dillon’s death, and no matter how many times the prosecution cross-examined Daphne Evans over Helen’s alibi, she never deviated from her original statement: Helen had arrived at her apartment just before seven, they ate some sandwiches Daphne had prepared and talked about Edwin. Helen still felt guilty for what she was planning—to walk out on him without a word of warning—but Daphne remained adamant she was doing the right thing.

“I never liked Edwin,” she said. “He wasn’t trustworthy. I was glad when Helen decided she was leaving him. I knew she wasn’t happy.”

When asked whether she considered Dillon to be a violent man, Daphne hesitated before replying and then said yes, adding: “I would have said he could be capable of violence. I was afraid for Helen, just sometimes, but she always told me I was being foolish so I had to believe her.”

The prosecution’s most important witness was Irene Wilbur. Her insistence that there had been a ‘furious altercation’ at 112 Milliver Road just before eight o’clock was more instrumental in securing a guilty verdict than Helen Bostall’s fingerprints on the murder weapon. You didn’t have to be a lawyer to understand that anyone could have used that knife, that the killer would have been likely to grab the first weapon to come to hand, especially if the murder had been opportunistic rather than planned. That Helen Bostall kept a carving knife in her kitchen drawer was hardly damning evidence.

On the other hand, Irene Wilbur was adamant that she had heard two people yelling at each other, that one of them had been a woman. And she had Gerald Honeyshot of the Red Lion to back her up regarding the time.

Why would Irene Wilbur lie? When asked by the prosecution if she had any reason to dislike or resent Helen Bostall, if there was any previous bad feeling between them, Wilbur was equally adamant that there hadn’t been. “I barely knew her,” she stated. “I’d not been living at Milliver Road for more than a fortnight. I’d seen her a few times to say hello to but that was all. She seemed friendly enough. A bit aloof perhaps but not what you’d call unpleasant.”

In fact, Irene Wilbur had been resident at 112 Milliver Road for just ten days. The defence did not appear to find anything suspicious in that, and why would they? People move house all the time. Wilbur’s assertion—that she had moved to Camden from Putney in order to be closer to grandchildren and because she had numerous friends in the area—seemed entirely reasonable.

I don’t know what kept me picking away at Irene Wilbur, but I did. I didn’t like the way she had been so relentless in the way she’d given her evidence, so determined, almost, that Helen was guilty. Wilbur had persisted, even while knowing that Helen might face a death sentence if convicted. Why such animosity towards a woman she claimed not to have known? I didn’t get it. Those who thought to criticise Wilbur at the time did so on the grounds that she was a natural attention-seeker, altogether too enamoured of seeing herself in the newspapers. An interesting hypothesis, but I wasn’t so certain.

Was it possible, I wondered, that Irene Wilbur had been a stooge? Most newspaper accounts of the trial made mention of Wilbur’s ‘smart’ attire, and several made particular mention of a jade and diamond broach she wore. Everyone seemed to agree she was ‘a handsome woman.’

After pursuing the matter a little further, I discovered that Irene Wilbur had moved away from Milliver Road less than a week after Helen’s execution, that she had returned to her old stamping ground of Putney, and to considerably smarter lodgings than she had occupied previously.

If Irene Wilbur had been paid to provide false evidence, it suggested not only that Dillon’s murder had been carefully planned, but that Helen had been intended to take the blame all along.

If this was so—and once I stumbled upon the idea I found it difficult to give up the conviction that it was—then Irene Wilbur would have to be connected with Edwin Dillon in some way, or rather with his enemies, who would scarcely have risked employing a stranger to do their dirty work.

On top of my research into the lives of Helen Bostall and Edwin Dillon, I now found myself grubbing around for any information I could find about Irene Wilbur. I soon discovered she had been married at the age of twenty-one to a Major Douglas Wilbur, who had been killed at the Battle of Amiens in World War One. They had one child, a daughter named Laura, born in the February of 1919, a full six months after her father’s death.

Those dates seemed odd to me. Of course it was entirely possible that Major Wilbur had been afforded leave prior to the Amiens campaign, that Laura could have been conceived then, but it didn’t fit somehow, not to my mind anyway. Douglas Wilbur had been an experienced, valuable, and loyal officer. It was inconceivable that he would have left his post immediately before such a crucial offensive.

There was also the fact that Irene Wilbur was thirty-eight years old at the time of Laura’s birth, that during the whole of her twenty-year marriage there had been no other children.

What had changed?

If Douglas Wilbur was not in fact Laura’s father, who was?

I looked back once again over the trial records, focussing on any mention of Irene Wilbur’s home life, no matter how minor. Which is how I came to notice something that had not registered before, namely that Laura Wilbur had not been resident at Milliver Road, that at the time of the murder she was staying instead with a person Irene Wilbur described as a ‘near relative’, a Mrs Jocelyn Bell, close to the Wilburs’ old address in Putney. When questioned about why her daughter was not in fact living with her, Irene Wilbur said it was a matter of Laura’s schooling.

Once again, it was possible. But by now I was coming to believe it was more likely a matter of Irene not wanting her daughter anywhere near a house where she knew there was going to be a murder. Wilbur would not be staying long at Milliver Road, in any case. Far better to keep Laura at a distance.

I was filled with a sense of knowing, the feeling that always comes over me when I understand I have discovered an insight into a case that has hitherto kept itself obstinately hidden. I knew that I was close to something, that the pieces of the truth were more than likely already assembled, that it was simply a matter of arranging them in the correct order.

The first step, I decided, was to try and find out a little more about Jocelyn Bell. And in the meantime I still had to talk to Martin about the hangman’s watch.

People say we’re alike, Martin and I, but I’m not so sure. We look alike, and I suppose what our mutual friends might be picking up on is our shared tendency towards poking around in subjects no one else gives a damn about. We both like finding things out. Of the two of us, though, I believe Martin is the better human being. Martin cares about people, which is why he is so good at his job. When I tell him this, he always insists that I must care about people too, or I wouldn’t put such time and effort into fighting their corners.

Perhaps he’s right. But I still think what I enjoy most about my work is the thrill of argument, the abstract battle of opposing forces. If ‘doing good’ happens to be a side-effect of that I’m not going to knock it, but it isn’t the driving force behind what I do.

I don’t think so, anyway. You’d better ask Martin.

I hope he meets someone else. He’s borne up remarkably well since Miranda died, but that’s Martin all over, never one to make a fuss.

I was always the one who made a fuss. Getting cancer then going crazy then marrying Ray. Martin was there for me through all of it, no matter how much I managed to screw up.

He can cook a mean curry, too.

“Have you ever heard of a watchmaker called Owen Andrews?” I asked him once we’d finished eating. I poured us both another glass of wine. It was odd, the way his face changed. A lot of people might not even have noticed, but I’m used to watching other people’s body language and I know Martin back to front. The moment I said the name Owen Andrews, it was as if someone had suddenly switched a light on inside him, then just as rapidly flicked it off again. Something he didn’t want to talk about? Or felt uncertain of? Could have been either. I’d been telling him about my research, my various theories about Irene Wilbur. I’d deliberately held off mentioning Arthur Rawlin because once you get Martin on to the subject of watches it’s difficult to get him off it again.

I knew he’d be interested, but the extremity of his reaction surprised me, all the same.

“I’ve heard of him, yes,” Martin said finally. “But what does he have to do with Irene Wilbur?”

This is going to sound strange, but I decided more or less in that moment that I wasn’t going to tell Martin I had Rawlin’s watch in my possession. Not yet, anyway.

It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him. I would trust Martin with my life, and perhaps that was the problem.

It was as if—and I know how bizarre this sounds, especially coming from an unreconstructed rationalist like me—I sensed already that something was going to happen, something involving the watch. I think I was afraid that if Martin got wind of what I meant to do, he would say it was dangerous and try to stop me.

I’m not good at taking advice—once I have a mind to do something, you might as well try advising a stampeding mare with a swarm of bees on her tail. No one knows this better than Martin and normally he’d stay out of it but in this case?

Let’s just say I wanted to keep my intentions under wraps.

“Nothing,” I said. “At least nothing directly.” I told him about Arthur Rawlin and Arthur Rawlin’s posthumous obsession with Helen Bostall, and then added that my old client Lewis Usher knew someone who knew someone who’d purchased Arthur Rawlin’s watch in a private auction.

“It’s by a London maker, apparently, this Owen Andrews,” I said. “Lewis seems to think that Rawlin attached mystical properties to the watch, that he believed it could reverse time, or something. He’s going to try and dig out the documents for me—Lewis, I mean. I wondered if you knew anything about this Andrews guy, that’s all.”

“Only that he trained in Southwark, and that his watches are vanishingly rare,” Martin said. He sighed. “There are entire internet forums devoted to Owen Andrews. He’s one of those people other people are always talking about, probably because we know so little about him. People are still having arguments over exactly when he was born. There’s speculation that he had access to Breguet’s late notebooks. I don’t believe it myself. I don’t see how he could have done. The notebooks weren’t in the public domain for at least a century after Breguet’s death.”

“Who’s Breguet?”

“Abram Louis Breguet, a Swiss watchmaker. He’s best known for making a watch for Marie Antoinette and almost losing his head for his trouble. But for horologists, Breguet is most famous for inventing the tourbillon.”

Martin went off into a long-winded explanation of what a tourbillon was and how it worked, how before Breguet, no pocket watch could keep accurate time over a long period because of gravity, which acted as a drag weight on the mechanism, speeding it up or slowing it down by as much as sixty seconds in every hour. Breguet placed the whole mechanism inside a revolving metal cage he called a tourbillon, or whirlwind. The tourbillon kept the mechanism in stasis, twirling it around its own axis like a sidecar on a fairground ride.

The tourbillon watch was like a planet, spinning in space. In every sense that mattered, it was weightless.

“Think of a tornado,” Martin said. “A wind itself has no substance, but it has incredible power. It renders everything weightless before it, even massive objects like houses and cars.”

I zoned out a bit towards the end, not because what Martin was telling me wasn’t interesting, but because I couldn’t see how any of it related to Arthur Rawlin and a possible time machine. Then Martin said something else, something jaw-dropping. I was dragged back into the conversation with a physical jolt.

“What was that about the notebooks?”

“Breguet’s notebooks,” Martin repeated. “His doctors always insisted he was senile by then, but according to his son, Breguet was lucid and rational right up until he died. His late writings suggest he had been trying to create a kind of super-tourbillon, a mechanism he believed would eventually enable human beings to travel through time. He called it the time-stasis. I can’t believe anyone would take it literally, quite honestly, but some of the people on the forums believe Owen Andrews made it his mission to put Breguet’s theory into practice.”

“To make a watch that could turn back time?”

Martin shrugged. “If you like.”

“That’s incredible.”

“If it were true, maybe. But I’ve seen some of Andrews’s pieces and they’re just watches. Andrews was gifted but he wasn’t a magician. All that time travel stuff—it’s just the horological equivalent of urban myth.”

I thought there was something heroic about it, nonetheless—the lone mechanic, pitting himself against logic like a gladiator fighting a tiger. I reminded myself that all the most radical advances in science seem like lunacy before they are proven.

“It’s a beautiful word,” I said to Martin. “Horological.”

“Are you still convinced Helen Bostall was innocent?” he asked.

“More than ever. And I believe Arthur Rawlin thought so, too—that’s why he felt so guilty over her death.”

“You’re determined to prove it, aren’t you? Through your book?”

I laughed. “I suppose I am.”

I didn’t just want to prove it, though—I can admit that now. I wanted to change it. But I wasn’t about to blow my cover to Martin.

Three days later I performed an experiment. Just one little trip back, five minutes or so. Brain of Britain was on the radio, which made it easy to tell if anything had actually happened. I had a second go at some of the questions, which would have upped my score if I’d been keeping tally, which I wasn’t. It would have been cheating, anyway.

Jocelyn Bell turned out to be Jocelyn Leslie, an artist. She won a scholarship to study at the Slade, and when her father—a successful Yorkshire businessman of a conservative cast of mind—refused to let her go, she continued to paint in secret, making her own way to London two years later. She enjoyed moderate popularity for a time. Although there were those who dismissed her efforts as ‘primitive’ or ‘naive’, Lavinia Sable, who wrote art criticism for several London papers under the pseudonym Marcus Fell, insisted that in spite of having almost no formal training, Bell’s work showed a keener understanding of European modernism than many of her better-known contemporaries.

I liked the sound of Lavinia, who apparently attended private views and press gatherings for years as Marcus, with no one being any the wiser. Lavinia was easily interesting enough to fill a book in her own right, but Lavinia was not my mission and after spending a day or two reading up on her I laid the material reluctantly aside and went back to the matter in hand, namely Jocelyn Bell.

On arrival in London, Jocelyn found work first as an assistant housekeeper at a private boarding school for girls, then as a secretary and assistant to the curator of one of the more progressive galleries on Cork Street. It was here, I’m certain, that she first encountered Leonard Bell, who was friendly with several of the artists represented there.

Leonard Bell was actually Leonid Belayev, a Russian émigré and a member of the radical socialist group based in Camden called the Four Brothers. The group was founded in the 1890s and, unlike many similar loose associations that fractured and splintered at the outbreak of war, the Four Brothers remained intact as a group well into the 1920s.

At some point during 1924, Edwin Dillon began attending their meetings.

Here at last was the breakthrough I’d been searching for. Jocelyn Leslie married Leonard Bell in 1902. They had one son, Malcolm, in 1903, although letters sent by Jocelyn to a friend in Manchester reveal that differences were already making themselves felt between the couple and by 1905 their marriage was over in all but name. Leonard Bell kept in close touch with his family, though—I think he was probably still living under the same roof for some years after he and Jocelyn separated, a fact that would almost certainly have led to gossip amongst the neighbours. Not that Jocelyn or Leonard gave much of a damn for bourgeois convention. They remained friends, and when Leonard eventually began a long-term affair with another woman, the woman quickly became Jocelyn’s friend, also.

That woman—and you can imagine my satisfaction when I was able to prove this for sure—was Irene Wilbur. There were in fact several dozen letters from Leonard to his lover, preserved amongst Jocelyn Bell’s papers at the Women Artists Forum in Hammersmith.

As a bonus, the letters also revealed to me the identity of Malcolm Bell’s soon-to-be fiancée: Louise Tichener.

Frustratingly, I was never able to find out much about Irene Wilbur herself, and I can only assume her willingness to go along with the murder plot had more to do with her wanting to protect Leonard Bell than with any active animosity towards Helen Bostall. The true identity of Dillon’s murderer also remained hidden from me, although I’m more or less positive it wasn’t Bell himself. Leonard was a hardened activist—he would have known better than to put himself directly at risk.

After weeks of rooting around in various archives of obscure research papers, I came to the conclusion that the most likely suspect was a much younger man, Michael Woolcot, who seems to have known Dillon when he was living in Manchester. The two had some sort of falling-out—either in Manchester or soon after Woolcot’s own arrival in the capital. So far as I know they were never reconciled, although mysteriously there was one final meeting between them, in a Camden public house, just ten days before Dillon’s murder. The meeting was remarked upon by a moderate socialist named West, a journal ist who wrote a satirical column for an independent newspaper called The Masthead, lampooning many of the personalities associated with the more extreme wing of the movement.

They say that if you sup with the devil you should use a long spoon, West wrote in his January 20th column, just one week before the murder. Judging by the outbreak of cosy camaraderie at The Horse’s Head last Thursday evening, it would seem there are those who set little store by such sage advice, even those we might consider our elders and betters. West goes on to reveal the identities of both Dillon and Woolcot, referring to the latter as ‘an upwardly mobile cur of the Belayev persuasion’ and to the meeting itself as ‘a council of war.’

Which can only beg the question, West writes, of who exactly is at war here, and with whom?

Whether the police were ever made aware of West’s column, or possessed enough insider knowledge to make head or tail of it, I have no idea. Leonard Bell was questioned briefly, along with two dozen or so other regular and irregular members of the Four Brothers group, though the comrades’ universal disdain for the official forces of law and order would have meant the chances of anyone letting anything slip were practically nil.

Helen Bostall’s ticket for the boat train was forward-dated to February 3rd, a date that turned out to be less than a week after Dillon’s murder. It seems likely that someone—someone friendly with Leonard Bell or one of his cronies—knew about Helen’s travel plans. For Bell’s plan to succeed, it was crucial that Dillon be killed well in advance of Helen’s departure for the continent. I believe it was Dillon’s meeting with Woolcot, staged by Bell as an opportunity for reconciliation, that set the stage for the murder. No doubt Woolcot had been instructed to arrange a second, more informal meeting, to take place at Dillon’s flat.

Putting all the evidence together, it finally became clear to me that it was those ten days that formed the crucial time period, the ten days between Dillon first meeting Woolcot at The Horse’s Head, and his eventual death.

If Helen Bostall could have been persuaded to bring her journey forward— to leave London soon after New Year, say—then Bell would either have had to shelve his plans, or risk being exposed as complicit in Dillon’s killing.

Regardless of Dillon’s fate, Helen Bostall herself would have been saved.

If only someone could have told her, I thought, and almost immediately afterwards I thought of Arthur Rawlin. Had he tried to use the watch? I wondered. If so, he had obviously failed.

As to why Bell wanted Dillon dead in the first place, the reasons remained obscure to me. All I could think was that it must have been down to some intricate power struggle within the Four Brothers. Truth be told, I didn’t care much. Not then.

I knew from the start that the best place to approach Helen would be at one of her suffragist meetings. The very nature of such gatherings meant there would always be new faces in evidence, strangers who might turn up for a couple of meetings and then disappear again. It ought to be relatively easy to mingle with the women without drawing undue attention to myself. The main thing was not to go overboard in trying to fit in. I chose clothes that were unobtrusive rather than authentic: the three-quarter-length coat I normally wore to court hearings in winter, a dark, paisley-patterned skirt I hardly ever wore but couldn’t bear to throw out because I liked the material so much, a pair of black lace-up shoes. Plain clothes, in every sense of the word.

By now you’re either wondering what on Earth I’m talking about, or if I can possibly be serious. Which is fine.

I kept putting off the actual—journey? I told myself I needed to do more research, which was at least partly true. To keep myself safe, I had to know that particular bit of Camden well enough to be able to walk around it blindfold, if need be. But mostly I was just scared. Scared in case the watch didn’t work and scared in case it did.

Five minutes and a hundred years were not the same thing. What if the watch refused to bring me back, or marooned me in a time that was not my own?

I wanted to know though, I wanted to see. The closer it came to the date I’d set myself, the more impatient I felt. Impatient with my fear. Impatient with my delaying tactics. When Ray phoned me the night before to ask me if I was going to some private view or other his agent was organising, I almost bit his head off.

“Are you okay, Dottie?” he said. He hadn’t called me Dottie for years, not since we separated.

“I’ll be there, don’t worry,” I said, not answering his question and not knowing if I’d be there, either. “I’ve got a lot on at work, that’s all. Say hi to Clio for me.”

Clio is Ray’s daughter, the child he has with Maya. I should make more of an effort with Maya, I suppose, but it’s difficult. We’re such different people, and although chumming up with her ex-husband’s new wife seemed to work for Jocelyn Bell, I’m not sure it’s for me.

Clio, though. She’s eight years old and a miracle. I could never tell this to anyone, not even Martin, but occasionally it breaks my heart that she isn’t mine.

There is a lever inside the watch, a silver pin that slides from side to side inside a moulded slit—imagine the back of an old wind-up alarm clock, the little lever you use to engage the alarm function, or to turn it off. There is no clear indication of what the purpose of this lever might be, and when you first engage it, nothing seems to happen. Say ‘nothing happens full stop’, if you like. I won’t mind.

I once had a conversation with Martin, years ago when we were kids, about whether ghosts existed. When I asked Martin if he believed, he said it didn’t matter. “If ghosts exist, they’ll go on existing whether we believe in them or not.”

It’s the same with this. And if I tell you that what time travel reminds me of most of all is the time before my illness, I wonder will you believe that either? The time when I was so in love with numbers—when I could listen to numbers conversing the same way you might listen to music, when I felt the thrum of numbers in my blood, intricate as a crystal lattice, sound and rhythmic and basic as the beat of a drum.

I turned the lever, and the rush of numbers filled my head, blazing in my veins like alcohol, like burning petrol. The music of the primes, du Sautoy called it, and I could hear it again. I closed my eyes and counted backwards. I could feel the boundaries of reality expanding, unfurling. Bobbing deftly out of reach of my hands, like a toy balloon.

I ducked under the boundary wire and followed. Time filled me up, chilly and intoxicating.

Yes, but what’s it like? I can hear you asking.

Like a triple slug of Russian vodka that’s been kept in the icebox, that’s what it’s like.

I started going on practice runs. Just silly things: walking past my front door in the middle of last week, going to a concert at the Barbican I’d wanted to attend when it was actually on but happened to miss. I thought that getting the timing right would prove difficult, but in fact the mechanism was extremely accurate, once you got the hang of it. I found it mostly came down to imagining: knowing where you wanted to be and forming an image of the place and time inside your mind. This sounds irrational I know, but that’s how it was.

I spent a lot of time in Camden, just walking around. You’d be surprised how little it’s changed. Even when houses, whole streets have been torn down and built over, the old shadows remain.

The city has a shape. You can sense it, if you feel for it, even if you’re sleepwalking and perhaps especially then, London’s presence wrapped closely around you like a blanket.

The suffragist meetings took place in rooms about the Quaker meeting house, on Bentley Street. During the day it was mostly quiet, but in the evenings things livened up considerably, mainly because of The Charlady, a public house and pie shop on the corner of the street opposite. I went in daylight the first time, just to be safe. Muggings were common then in this part of London and I saw no point in exposing myself to unnecessary risk.

You think of the past as cleaner, but it really isn’t. Horse shit, engine oil, smoke, blood, piss, beer, the rotting detritus from the market, piled at the kerb. Not London as it might be in a theme park, but a London you’d recognise instantly, just from the stench. Cars are creeping in already: hackney cabs and omnibuses, gentlemen’s conveyances. And the bikes—the thrilling tring of bicycle bells, boy couriers speeding along. Oi Miss, get on the pavement, why dontchyer? Bleedin’ ’eck. A flower and matchbox seller, a puckered scar across one cheek and her left hand missing. I reach into my pocket to find the right coins, then remember I don’t have the right coins, not at all. Exactly the kind of stupid blunder I’m supposed to be on guard against. The peddler gazes at me with tired eyes and I look away in shame. The next time I come I bring her a paper packet of corned beef sandwiches but she is no longer there. Not in the same place, anyway. I remind myself of what I’m here for, and move swiftly along.

Another time, I stand in a shop doorway opposite and watch the women arrive for their meeting. I’m amazed to find that I recognise some of them, from the letters I’ve read, from the blurred photographs in the Women’s Studies archive in the British Library. One of them, a young poet named Kathleen Thwaite, is accompanied to the door of the meeting house by her husband, Austin Gears. I know that Kathleen is to die in 1937, on a protest march against Franco’s fascists in Madrid. It makes my heart ache to see her, and the urge to do something, to warn her in some way, is all but overwhelming. I turn quickly away, hoping to catch a glimpse of Helen Bostall instead. On this occasion at least she appears to be absent.

Has my being here, even to stand motionless in the street, altered things somehow, and for the worse? I push the thought away. It is coincidence, that’s all. She will be here next week, and if not then, the week after. It need not matter.

The next time, I file inside the hall with the other women. No one talks to me or takes particular notice but many smile. I feel accepted as one of them. More than that, I can imagine myself as one of them. Almost as if I have experienced this life, this version of my life anyway, this Dora Newland who attended suffragist rallies in Hyde Park, who conducted furious arguments with her uncle about being allowed to travel down through Italy with another woman friend. Casting Henry—dear Henry, who indulged our every whim when we were children—in the role of domineering guardian makes me smile.

We sit on hard wooden chairs in the draughty space—three small attic rooms that have been converted into one larger one—and listen to a Mrs Marjorie Hennessey tell us about her experience of studying politics at the Sorbonne. She is an impressive woman, commanding and authoritative, and I cannot help wondering what happened to her, how come she failed.

So many women. It is depressing to consider how many of us have been discouraged, disparaged, forced to reconsider, turned aside from our dreams.

I want to rush up to Marjorie Hennessey and tell her not to give up, not to drop by the wayside, not to fall silent.

“She’s wonderful, isn’t she?” It is the interval and we are queuing up for tea. The woman who speaks to me seems shy and rather young, and I have the feeling this is her first time here also. Her cheeks are flushed pink.

“Admirable,” I say, and for a second I experience a sensation close to vertigo. I am here, and I am speaking to someone. I hug my bag as if seeking support from it. Inside the bag are the keys to my flat, my purse, my Kindle ereader, my mobile phone, all those other insignificant trifles that don’t exist yet. I come from the future, I think, in what Martin always calls the MGM voice. I want to laugh out loud. I glance over at the chalk board, where Marjorie Hennessey has been drawing diagrams illustrating the economic implications of women withdrawing their labour from the home.

I wonder how my new friend in the tea queue would react if I were to tell her that almost a century later we’re still fighting the same battles. Again, I want to laugh. Not that it’s funny.

“We need more like her,” I say instead, because that also is still true. Now, more than ever, we need more anger, more knowledge. “Shall we sit down?”

We take our tea and sit at one of the wooden trestles at the side of the hall. The woman tells me her name is Barbara Winton and she’s a socialist.

“They say there’s going to be another war,” she says. “We have to join with our sisters in Europe—we must prevent war, at all costs.”

She is learning German, and corresponding with the daughter of a friend of her father’s, who lives in Frankfurt. “Her name is Gisela. She’s a sculptor. Don’t you think that’s marvellous? She’s asked me to go out and visit her and Daddy says I can. It feels—I’m not sure how to explain—as if a whole new life is beginning.”

“I hope you’re right,” I say. I tell her that I’m studying law, that I am hoping to practise at the bar. I see confusion on her face—my age, proba-bly—which is swiftly succeeded by a kind of wonder, mixed with mischievous delight. Women have been allowed access to the legal profession for less than a decade, after all.

“Well done, you,” she says. “I think that’s marvellous.”

Her excitement is contagious. It is only as we are about to resume our seats for the second half of the programme that I finally catch sight of Helen Bostall. She is near the back of the room, talking to a woman with an upright posture and hawkish nose whom I recognise at once as Daphne Evans.

I gaze at them, dumbstruck. I feel like a spy. As I move towards my seat I see Helen turn, just for a moment, and look directly at me.

Instead of the blank, flat gaze of a woman casually scanning the crowd, what I see in her eyes—indisputably—is recognition: you’re here. I feel cold right through. My hands begin to shake. I’m going to drop my cup, I think, then realise it’s all right, I no longer have it. Barbara Winton has taken it from me and returned it to the tea bench at the back.

That was when I lost my nerve. Instead of sitting down again I pushed through the crowd to the door and then rushed down the stairs, almost tripping over the paisley skirt in the process. Once outside I felt better. There was the usual rowdy hubbub coming from The Charlady, the same stink of greasy Irish stew and overloaded dustbins. I made my way to an access lane between two rows of terraces and took out the watch. I engaged the lever without looking at it—not looking had become a kind of superstition with me—and stood there in the dark, counting primes and feeling that odd, trembling dream state take hold until I became aware of the sound of traffic—motor traffic, I mean, buses and police sirens—on Camden High Street.

I was back. I breathed in through my mouth, tasting exhaust fumes and the tarry scent of someone’s spent cigarette. I stood still for some moments, letting the world come back into focus around me and feeling the relief I felt each time: that I had conducted an extremely risky experiment—heating flash powder in a petri dish, say—and managed to get away without blowing my hands off.

I never experimented with going forward, not even by one day. I had a terror of it, a paralysing phobia. It was a deal I made, I suppose—with God, the devil, myself, Owen Andrews? Bring me safely home, and I’ll keep our bargain. Well, I guess it worked.

The next time I went back, I was prepared. So, it seems, was Helen. She was waiting for me this time, at the bottom of the stairs outside the meeting house. She told me later that she’d waited there at the start of every meeting since she’d first seen me, knowing I would be returning but not knowing when.

“Dora,” she said quietly. “You’re here at last.” She caught my hands in both of hers. Her fingers were cold. It was December, and she was smiling in a way that suggested she was greeting an old friend, someone she knew well but hadn’t seen in a while. Pleasure, and sadness, as if she knew our time together would not be long.

“I don’t understand,” I said, and sighed. Who was I to talk? “How did you—how do you know me?”

“Knowing everything you know—do you need to ask?” she said. “The order in which things happen doesn’t matter, surely? Just that they happen. I’m so pleased to see you.”

She leaned forward to embrace me, and I found myself almost believ-ing—there was such joy in seeing her, such emotion—that this was indeed a reunion and not, as I knew it to be, our first meeting.

“Come,” she said. “We can go back to the flat. Edwin’s away—in Manchester. That’s what he says, anyway.”

“You don’t think he really is?”

She shrugged. “Edwin tells me what it pleases him to tell me. Sometimes it’s the truth and sometimes it isn’t. I had to give up caring which a long time ago.”

We came to Milliver Road. I’d been to the house of course—what I mean is I’d stood outside it many times. I knew 112 as a spruce, bay-fronted terrace with replacement windows. The house in Helen’s time seemed smaller, meaner, the exterior paintwork chipped and blistering. A flight of steps led steeply down to a basement forecourt.

“We’ve had problems with damp,” Helen said. “The woman who lives upstairs says there are rats, too, but I’ve never seen them.”

“Mrs Wilbur?”

She gave me a puzzled look. “Mrs Wilbur? Mrs Herschel lives on the ground floor. There’s no Mrs Wilbur.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. So my researches had proved correct—Irene Wilbur hadn’t moved in yet. There was still time.

“Let’s go in and get warm,” Helen said. “I’ll light the stove.”

“We were happy here once, Edwin and I,” Helen said. The stove was well-alight. Soft lamplight threw shadows on the whitewashed walls of the cosy front sitting room. Framed prints, showing images from a Greek bestiary. An orange-and-green Aubusson rug. Books, books everywhere, overflowing the alcove shelving and piled on the floor. A stack of handwritten pages lay fanned across a low wooden table. It was a good room. A room I felt at home in.

I also knew I’d been here before.

“Have you eaten?” Helen asked.

I laughed. “It’s been a hundred years at least,” I said.

“I can warm up some soup. I made it yesterday.”

“That would be lovely.” I wasn’t hungry—quite the opposite—but I was curious to see how food might taste here. In fact, it tasted like potato soup, thick and nutritious and well-seasoned. We ate, dipping bread into our bowls, and I asked Helen what she was working on.

“I’ve been helping to edit a collection of essays by women on the subject of war,” she said. “I want to include writing by German women as well—letters, memoir, whatever I can get hold of. The publisher was against this at first but I managed to persuade them how important it is, essential even. You don’t think it’s too soon?”

I shook my head.

“I’m glad. We have to use every weapon we have.”

“Weapon?”

“To make people understand what war really is. The madness of it.” She fell silent, head bent. “Dora, I know I shouldn’t really ask you this, but do we succeed? Do we succeed at all?”

I know I shouldn’t answer, and I don’t, not then, but the following week, when I know that Helen will be at her meeting, I return to Milliver Road for one final visit. I have an envelope with me, addressed to Helen. I post it through the front door of the house, hear it fall on to the scuffed brown linoleum of the communal hallway. Inside is a second-hand copy of John Hersey’s memoir, Hiroshima in the original Pelican edition, its pages faded and brittle but clearly readable, the most concise response to her question that I can think of. What good will it do? None at all. But Helen asked me a question and she deserves an answer.

“That doesn’t matter now,” I said in 1927. “What I mean is—it matters, but there are more urgent things to think about. Urgent for you, anyway.”

“You’re frightening me.”

“In a month’s time, Edwin is going to be murdered. If you stay here you are going to be blamed for it. There will be a trial and—”

“You’re telling me I’m going to be hanged. For a crime I had nothing to do with.”

I stared at her, horrified.

“I thought it was a dream,” she said, more quietly. “That man. He sat on the edge of my bed and told me about it. He was crying. He seemed quite mad. When I told him to go away he did. I wish I’d been kinder.”

Arthur Rawlin. So he had used the watch to try and save her, after all.

“None of that is going to happen,” I said quickly. “But you must leave London, and Edwin. You need to pack your things and get as far away from here as you can.”

She nodded slowly. “I’ve been planning to go, anyway. To leave Edwin, I mean. Whatever we had—it’s over. I could say he’s changed but really I think it’s me. I see him differently now.” She paused. “I see everything differently.”

“Can you think of any reason why anyone would want to kill Edwin?”

She was silent for a long time, lacing and unlacing her fingers. Finally she sighed. “I really don’t involve myself with Edwin’s business any more, but I do know there are people in the Four Brothers he’s fallen out with. Badly. Edwin believes—I don’t know, that we should do something to signal the start of the revolution. Something dramatic, something violent even. He says he has people standing by—bomb makers.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how much of this is true, and how much is just talk. The more he drinks the more he talks, Edwin. That’s something I’ve noticed. Not that half the brethren would see much wrong if Edwin really is planning to blow people up. I think mainly it’s about power within the group—who has it and who doesn’t. There are some who see Edwin as a threat, who think he’s getting above himself. I’m sure they’d be more than happy if he were out of the way. Can you believe that?”

“I can more than believe that.”

“They don’t like him because he’s clever, because he doesn’t give two hoots about their old hierarchies. Because he’s from Manchester, even.” She turned to look at me. “I keep asking myself if it’s partly my fault, that things have gone this far. If I could have talked to him more, maybe? But I’ve come to understand that Edwin never cared about what I thought, not even at the beginning. He wanted an audience, that’s all. Now that I no longer listen, he cares even less.”

I was tempted to tell her about Ray and me, but decided that would be unfair. Ray’s no bomb maker, just another man with an ego who needs it stroking. Now that I no longer have to live with him, I can even enjoy his company from time to time. “Where will you go?” I said instead.

“I have a friend, Elsa Ehrling, in Berlin. She says I can stay with her as long as I need. I can teach English. And there are other things I can do to make myself useful. Elsa says workers for peace need to make their voices heard in Germany, now more than ever.”

You’d be right there, I thought, but did not say. I’d interfered enough already. Besides, she would be safe in Berlin, at least for a time.

“I would wait until the new year—but not much longer,” I said. “And tell no one what you are planning—not even Daphne. You can write to her from Berlin. She will understand.”

“I know she will. And Dora—thank you.”

We talked of other things then: the book she dreamed of writing on poetry and war, my love of numbers and the loneliness I’d always felt in having to abandon them.

“But you never did abandon them—your being here is proof. You can see that, surely?”

She was right in a way, I suppose. But I’m no Sophie Germain.

The stove gave out its warmth, and we sat beside it. I understood that this was the moment of change, that if I had indeed met with Helen before, I would not do so again. That I had done what I had come to do, and that this was goodbye.

I felt time tremble in the balance, then come to a standstill. There are moments when time lies in stasis, and this was one of them. But time always moves on.

“I’m pregnant, by the way,” Helen said as I was leaving. “Edwin doesn’t know, don’t worry.”

My heart leapt up at her words. I think I knew this was your story, even then.

Edwin Dillon lived. With Helen gone and his plans in ruins, Leonard Bell must have decided that murdering him was too much of a risk. Or perhaps he waited, hoping for a better opportunity and never finding it. A year later, the Four Brothers disbanded. Leonard Bell went to Germany, where he became part of the communist movement dedicated to getting rid of Adolf Hitler. He was arrested and deported back to London in 1934. Edwin Dillon headed a splinter group, also calling itself the Four Brothers, and believed to be one of the main instigators of the notorious plot to assassinate Oswald Mosley in 1936. He served four years for his involvement and, although it is not known whether it was prison that made him lose his appetite for radical politics, he cut loose from all his Four Brothers contacts and after the war returned to working as a freelance journalist. You can find feature articles by Edwin Dillon in the archives of The Times, The Guardian, and the Glasgow Herald, among other places. He died in 1971.

He was briefly involved with the Irish writer Eena Mowbray, with whom he had one son. Douglas Mowbray also worked as a journalist, and was known to be a fervent supporter of the IRA. Douglas died aged thirty-one, when he killed himself and his young daughter Gemma by driving off a bridge on the outskirts of Belfast. His son Padraic, who was also in the car at the time, survived. I have been unable to trace his whereabouts. There is every possibility that he is still alive.

Real history is a mass of conflicting stories. According to the official records, Helen Mildred Bostall was tried and found guilty of the murder of Edwin Patrick Dillon and was sentenced to death. The execution was carried out on August 14th, 1928. History seems content with this judgement, though there are many, including myself, who would argue that capital punishment is never justified.

There are also anomalies, if you care to look for them. The Library of the Sorbonne records the publication, in 1941, of a pamphlet by Ellen Tuglas with the title On War: the imaginary reminiscences of hell’s survivor. The work was originally written in English, although a French translation was provided by Ivan Tuglas, a Russian exile resident in Paris since the 1920s and Ellen’s common-law husband until his death in 1952.

On War is a peculiar work. Lodged halfway between fact and fiction, it has aroused some interest among scholars of World War Two literature because it appears to predict the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima. I remember where I was when they told me, states the unnamed narrator. I have never before felt able to speak my feelings aloud, but what I wanted, when I heard, was simply to be there. To be not guilty of this thing, to help one person up from the rubble, even if such an action brought about my own destruction. I yearned to haul myself

across bleeding Europe with my coat in tatters and no money in my purse. You will say that these feelings were selfish and I would not blame you for saying so. Some crimes are so huge there can be no recompense.

On War is dedicated to Ellen’s daughter, Isobel Elsa, who was eleven years old at the time of its publication.

I knew Ray’s mother was called Isobel, but she was old, and living in Paris, and I never met her. She died three years ago. I know that Ray sent her photos of you when you were born. I imagine they were there beside her bed on the day she died.

Ray was always meaning to take you over there, so she could get to know you. It’s too late now, but that’s Ray all over. He loses track of time.

Dearest Clio. We can only cheat time for so long, and I knew when I went back to Milliver Street that final time it should be the last.

Your great-grandmother, though: Ellen Tuglas, whose name was once Helen Bostall. I should have guessed she would find a means of letting me know our escape plan succeeded, and that her name would be Clio. Clio, the daughter of memory, the muse of history. I should have known that— through you, Clio—Helen and I would one day meet again.

I carried on writing the book, of course I did, my account of Helen Bostall and how she was hanged for a crime she didn’t commit. I’d come so far with my research I didn’t feel like giving up—and as a story, as I say, it had everything: bomb plots, political feuding, affairs of the heart, as many double crosses as you might find in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. My editor at History Recollected even thinks she’s found a publisher for it. I doubt it’ll make me rich but it should do all right.

You can read the book when you’re older. Make of it what you will. Godmothers can be boring, can’t they, especially godmothers who also happen to be lawyers? At least you can tell yourself that your boring lawyer godmother once changed the world. A little bit, anyway. I don’t imagine you’ll be telling anyone else.