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There was an ambulance outside the police station. Pitt knew, as soon as he saw it, that he’d been too late. He shouldn’t have slept in, he shouldn’t have taken so long around the house. Why had he fought the uneasy feeling, rather than reacting to it?
He parked the car across the road and sat for a second. He was in the eternal moment. It was not impossible that the ambulance was for someone else. An ambulance at a police station need not be a rarity. Or something had happened to Ju, but the ambulance had arrived in time. And while he sat in the car, before he had entered the station, anything was possible. Yuan Ju was still inside, waiting to be released, waiting for him to rescue her.
How long could he live in this moment, without facing the truth? A moment when Ju was still alive, a moment when he was about to take her away from the station, a moment when they would be travelling later that day to France.
He wound down the car window. A perfect summer morning. Perfect to start a new life. Perfect to end one.
The finality of the summer rested heavily upon him. It was not quite August, but this summer was over. However long he lived – and at no time in the past thirty years had longevity ever been a consideration for him – this would be the summer when his life changed, this would be the moment after which nothing would ever be the same. And the summer, the great changing, was over.
Pitt sat in silence. From a distant field there was the faint smell of slurry. Occasionally a car drove past. A small plane droned, low in the sky, to the south.
He felt nothing. The breeze touched his neck. The smell of the country washed over him and he did not even notice. There came the buzz of insects from a nearby hedge.
He thought about the three vines he had stripped and which were now sitting in the back of his car. All that was left. All he had in the world. Except for this moment, when he still had Yuan Ju.
The police station was at the edge of the village. In front of him there was a dip in the road, a hedgerow on either side. At the bottom of the slope, the road turned and rose and was lost behind a small copse. There were fields, gently sloping away, on either side. One of them was empty, but had been cut and rolled so that it looked immaculate, like a golf course, or Wembley before the Cup Final. The other side was not so manicured. There were sheep dotted around, grazing in the morning sun. Some of them lay on the ground.
Time stood still. Like it so often did when he sat in the cellar. Like it had when he’d held Ju.
How long had he stood with her in his arms? That defining moment, the one that separated his two lives.
The buzz of insects seemed to die away; the pitch became lower and lower until it vanished. Time really was slowing down. Why couldn’t it? Why couldn’t he stay in this moment forever? What was time? What was it that drove events ever forward?
Pitt stared straight ahead. Silence engulfed him. He held his eyes so steadily on the road that his vision began to cloud over.
Life pirouetted on a spinning coin.
Heads, Ju was safe, shortly he would enable her release, and by that evening they would be sitting outside a café in Paris drinking coffee.
Tails...
He had no thought of tails.
The insects had stopped. He glanced at the hedgerow. His sight cleared. He could see one bee, paused in flight, as if undecided which way to go or how fast it needed to be flapping its wings.
He looked up at a blue sky scattered with white. There was one plane overhead, high above. It seemed to have stopped moving. He kept his eyes on it for a few moments, but could discern no movement against the solid blue that surrounded it.
He felt nothing. Looked back at the clock. It didn’t seem that it had moved for a while, but he wasn’t sure. Didn’t time slow down, after all? Couldn’t it stop altogether?
What would happen if he turned on the radio?
He had never turned on the radio. Perhaps it wouldn’t know what to do. Pitt stared dully at the dial. Why was he thinking about the radio?
He was drifting in silence, fighting off reality. Perhaps time had indeed stopped, but he could not stop the creep of fear and desolation that was seeping through him. Almost a physical manifestation, it was crawling from his stomach up through his body, descending from the top of his head down through his brain, covering his eyes.
Here was grief, come to take Pitt to join in Ju’s great romantic tragedy.
The bee buzzed. He could hear the sound of the plane as it travelled high overhead. A car passed by, already accelerating towards the speed limit sign.
Pitt looked over at the police station. She was in there. Ju was there, dead or alive, and she needed him. He got out of the car, closed the door but did not lock it, and walked across the road.
Time was in that car, he thought. Accelerating away.
There goes time.
The noise was sudden. When it finally broke through, the shrill chirp of the robin was like a syringe stabbed directly into the side of his head.
He straightened up, his eyes widened. Absurdly, hope flooded into him like the morning sun. The sound of the bird did not diminish. He did not turn and look for it, his eyes on the door to the station. He walked quickly forward, suddenly aware that the moment was coming to him, rather than the other way round.
The pounding of several sets of feet. The door crashed open, a paramedic came through backwards, pulling a stretcher on a trolley. Another paramedic followed him through. On the stretcher lay Yuan Ju, pale and beautiful. She seemed lifeless, and yet her face was not covered, and she was hooked up to two drips. Saline and blood.
The trolley was pushed towards the rear of the ambulance, Pitt stood little more than a couple of yards away.
‘Is she all right?’ he heard himself asking.
‘Who are you?’ asked the paramedic. Opening the ambulance rear doors, barely looking at Pitt.
Pitt stared blankly at him. He looked down at Ju’s arms, which were lying still on top of the white sheet. Heavily bandaged at the wrist. The paramedics pushed the trolley to the rear of the ambulance, lifted it easily, pushed it inside. One of them leapt in beside Yuan Ju, the other closed the doors, ran round to the front.
Pitt turned round; Inspector Malcolm was standing in the doorway to the station, looking at him. The same lugubrious eyes, the uncomfortable case of Yuan Ju having become even more entangled.
‘You’re not going anywhere,’ said Malcolm. ‘I’ll speak to you in a minute. Come inside.’
The ambulance started up and quickly headed off. Pitt glanced at Malcolm and barely gave it any thought. He turned. He ran to his car. He got in. He did not look back.
Malcolm stood and watched him go.