The Prof reaches out, as if to tuck an errant curl of hair back behind my ear. Instead, he pulls out a 50p piece.
“See, told you I’d made progress with the time machine. I put that there this morning, before you even set off!”
I chuckle, even though the trick is basic. It could seem tragic coming from an old man like him if it wasn’t for the spark of obvious intelligence in his pale blue eyes.
“Come on Prof,” I say, “Let’s get you ready to go out. I noticed a new fungus in the woods a few days ago and I need you to ID it before some urban forager snatches it for their next dinner party.”
He chuckles and chats merrily about mushrooms while I shuffle him into his coat and tie up his brogues. The Prof is my favourite customer, but I think the one that needs me the least. Physically, anyway.
“Has my daughter paid you this week?” he asks, as he does every visit. She forgot once and he was mortified. I know he’s trying to look out for me, but I hate that he brings it up all the time; it makes our relationship so transactional. Although I don’t know how I’d classify it if money wasn’t involved, if I wasn’t his carer with a capital ‘C’. Do I think of him like a father, a grandfather? A fun uncle? A friend?
“Once I’ve perfected the time machine, where is the first place we should go?” he asks me. It’s a question we indulge in a lot. Sometimes we’re in the mood for adventures in ancient Egypt, sometimes for the future among the stars, and sometimes just to visit things and people lost. We visit his wife a lot.
*
When I arrive at his house a few days later, I know something is wrong. He doesn’t answer the door, which he usually does within seconds. I ring again and again until I’m hammering on the door. It takes a curtain-twitch from a neighbour to remind me I do in fact have a key, for just such an emergency.
I push open the front door and call to him. I have never entered on my own before, and I don’t want to offend him. But then I hear the wailing and I run up the stairs to his bedroom.
He is covered in blood. He is kneeling on the floor, swaying from side to side, head in his hands, and he is covered in blood. I rush over and kneel in front of him, searching for the source. Then I hear words through the wailing. “I killed him, I killed him!”
“Who?” I ask, dumbstruck.
“Kevin! I killed Kevin!” Her daughter’s husband? I try to pry his hands from his head and get him to calm down so I can check him properly but he cringes away from me, moaning. I’ve never seen him like this. His daughter, Lisa, said when she employed me that he had trouble with dementia but I’ve never seen him so much as forget where his keys are. I thought maybe she meant the time machine stuff, but that was just harmless fun, wasn’t it?
I video call her. She answers within three rings, which in itself is unusual. “What is it?” she asks. “Is Dad okay?”
“No,” I say, turning my phone so she can see him.
“Oh my god! What happened!?”
“I’m not sure, Mrs Atkinson. I found him like this and he won’t let me examine him. He doesn’t seem to be bleeding now, and, well…”
“Spit it out!”
“He keeps saying he murdered Kevin. Your husband… is he okay?”
She gapes at me. “Of course he’s okay! He’s right here!” She swings her phone to show a bewildered but completely unharmed Kevin on the sofa, beer in hand despite it being 10am on a Sunday. “How could my 87-year-old father possibly murder my husband?”
I babble something about violence and dementia, but she cuts me off. “Take him to the hospital right now. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I mumble assent and go back to where the Prof is sitting.
“Professor Horbury,” I say. “Alistair. You didn’t harm Kevin. I just saw him, he’s absolutely fine.”
He sniffles and meets my eyes. “I haven’t killed him yet. I don’t kill him until Thursday.”
“I… don’t understand?”
“The time machine. I used the time machine and went to Thursday and killed him.”
I shake my head. “But why would you do that?”
He covers his face again and wails, “I don’t know!”
*
He’s clean, sedated, and bandaged. His right arm is fractured, but that wasn’t the source of the blood. Nobody’s quite sure what that was. The doctor offered “nosebleed” with a shrug, like old men are always coming to A&E drenched in the stuff and saying they killed someone.
He looks so much older swaddled in the pale hospital bedding. I want to ask him about birds or supernovas or operas or about any of the other thousands of subjects he knows about. I don’t want to think of that mind eroding away.
“What I can’t understand is why he was raving about Kevin,” says Lisa, sitting by her father’s bedside and dabbing her eyes. I thought it was a rare show of emotion from her, but then I realised she is sneezing a lot too. “I mean, I know he’s never really liked Kevin, but he hasn’t liked any of my husbands.”
Kevin is husband number four. I’ve met him only once, where he was delighted to learn my name is Cara and I’m a carer, and ran with that for much of the conversation. The Prof said he was just like the others: workshy, lazy at home, the same laddish ‘charmer’ his Lisa always falls for. As his only child, he wanted better for her. A man who had at least a passing interest in nature or theatre would have been enough.
Lisa sighs. “But I guess that’s the cruelty of dementia; nothing makes any sense. For us or him.” She pats his hand and stands up. “You can go, Cara. I’ll let you know when he’s back home. We might need you a little extra while he recovers.”
“Of course,” I say. I don’t mention that she’s late paying, again.
*
The Prof is discharged the next day, with an inconclusive psychiatric evaluation and a recommendation that he gets more support. I’m round as soon as Lisa calls me, and find him sitting in an easy chair, blanket covering his legs. His eyes are watery blue when they look up at me. He holds out a hand and I take it, thinking it a tender moment before he uses it to pull himself up.
“Lisa wants me to forget about it, to not talk about it,” he says. “But forgetting is the problem, isn’t it? I don’t want to give in to that.”
He leads me towards the garage and I know where we’re going. We sit in the rickshaw he salvaged from a skip some years ago and he pushes a few buttons until the lights and motors in the surrounding contraption flash and whirr. His time machine.
“What do you remember?” I ask.
He pushes a few more buttons to set the fans going then settles back. “It’s hazy. I came down here to tinker as I always do after breakfast. I had an idea about the interferometer, you see. I sat here and fired it up and then… I wasn’t here. Or I wasn’t then. I was upstairs in my bedroom and I knew it was Thursday because Kevin was there and I knew he was going to come and borrow the big suitcase from me on Thursday, before they go on holiday at the weekend.
“We were getting the suitcase out of my wardrobe. Then we were arguing, I don’t know what about. Then it’s just sound, and noise, and movement, and a rushing in my ears and then there’s blood everywhere and then… I’m back here and Kevin’s gone but I know he’s dead and I know I’ve killed him and then you were there…” He’s breathing too fast and his hands are shaking and I feel my own panic rising.
“Maybe Lisa was right,” I say gently.
“Can you come early on Thursday?” he asks. I’m not due to visit on Thursday, but I nod anyway.
*
I have trouble sleeping on Wednesday night. I arrive at the Prof’s house at 8am the next morning, as agreed, right after he has breakfast. Even with one arm out of commission, he still wants to prove he has some independence. And toast doesn’t require much cooking.
He flings the door open as soon as I press my finger to the bell and his face is so immediately close that I can see the toast crumbs on his beard. At first it seems like his normal verve, but there’s something off about his energy; he’s blinking a lot and his smile is twitchy.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
“Yep!” he grins. “Just… could you come up to my bedroom with me? You know, to help me get out that suitcase for Kevin.”
“Of course,” I say, but neither of us move, or even look at the stairs. After a few moments of silence, he makes a gallant gesture with his hand, waving me forward. He’s scared. And so am I. I grip the banister as I climb, treading lightly on the carpet as if trying not to disturb the dead. I hear the Prof behind me, stepping awkwardly as he shifts his grip to his good left arm, refusing to use the stairlift Lisa installed, as usual.
His bedroom door is closed. I reach for the handle as if it’s covered in spiders. I don’t want to touch it, even though I know that spiders can’t harm me. Only the fear is holding me back.
The door opens with a smooth swish over thick carpet. And there, next to the bed, in a pool of blood, is Kevin.
*
I had to call the police. I had to. Kevin was dead.
I emerge now from the police station interview room and see Lisa crumpled into a plastic chair, a cup of coffee dangling from her fingers. Calling her was the second hardest part of the morning. The first was seeing the Prof lose control of everything at once: his body, his voice, his mind.
I wonder if I should just slip away but Lisa looks up and sees me, so I take a seat next to her. I don’t know what to say. ‘Sorry for your loss’ seems particularly stupid, but maybe that’s why we have these stock responses, for something to say.
She rubs her red eyes and says: “I don’t understand any of this. Why did he kill Kevin? Just because he had some hallucination that he did it a few days ago? How does that make any sense?”
She waits and I realise she wants some kind of answer from me. “I don’t know,” I say uselessly.
“And we were meant to go to Spain tomorrow!” she drops the coffee cup to sob into her hands and people bustle over to clean up the spill. I try to help but I’m in the way, so I step out into the incongruous sunshine of a regular Thursday in June.
The police are convinced he did it. Six stab wounds they said, in a pattern suggesting a ‘frenzy’, with the knife lying right there, the Prof’s fingerprints all over it. I admit it looks like he did it. Except, he can’t have done it. At least, he can’t have done it now. I tried to tell the detective that the Prof couldn’t have stabbed Kevin with his right arm fractured, and even if he did, how did he clean the blood off himself? And why did he then lead me to the body?
But when they asked me what I thought really happened, well, I couldn’t say that he time-travelled there from Sunday, could I? They know about that incident alright, Lisa filled them in on his ‘episode’, and I get why she did. Despite losing her husband, she knows her father can’t really be responsible, not in the sense of being – what’s the phrase – compos mentis.
But for myself, I can’t understand how it’s physically possible. Unless it’s possible using physics. I still have the key to the Prof’s house so the next day I let myself in and head to the garage. The time machine has many recognisable parts: the de-wheeled rickshaw, the fans on the sides, and the dashboard inside the rickshaw, which is the radio from a Fiat 500 circa 2001.
But there’s plenty I don’t understand. A metal chamber that looks like an old diving helmet. A slotted table fitted with dozens of precisely oriented lenses. Plenty of things the Prof described as ‘quantum’ in some way. And, between them all wires, wires everywhere.
Theoretically, he told me, time travel didn’t break the laws of physics. And he had been a Professor of Physics. I sit in the rickshaw and think. Lisa and the police are convinced that the Prof’s dementia took a dark turn, that on Sunday he fell and hurt his arm, causing a nosebleed, causing an episode… And then, convinced that he had killed Kevin on Thursday, carried it out to make the world right again in his eyes.
It doesn’t make sense though: why would the Prof kill Kevin? They can say dementia all they want, but until Sunday, I had never seen his mind anything but sharp.
It started with the suitcase, in the Prof’s wardrobe, so that’s where I decide to start. The only problem is that involves going back into his bedroom. The crime scene team have already been and gone, so there’s no physical barrier stopping me going up there, but it turned out the spiders on the door handle were real after all, and I’m not keen to face them again.
They’ve cleaned the blood as best they can, but there’s still a stain. If they’ve cleaned it, I think, then they’re convinced they’ve closed the case.
As for the suitcase, that is open. It’s lying on the floor in front of the wardrobe, sprawled as if discarded during an argument. It’s large, the kind used for long holidays, moving house, or, the last time me and the Prof took it out, for moving a body. His old spaniel, Proton, died a couple of months ago and the Prof wanted to bury him in the woods. Which was against the bylaws of the Common, so we did it under cover of darkness. I wasn’t paid for that either, but then, we didn’t tell Lisa we did it.
I drag the suitcase over and see it’s still full of dog hairs. The smell and size of it trigger a memory: when I found the Prof on Sunday, the wardrobe was open, and the suitcase was not there.
It wasn’t there. Kevin was supposed to come and get it on Thursday, whether time travel was involved or not. So who took it on Sunday? I need to talk to Lisa.
I drive to her house, a neat bungalow in a cul-de-sac, hanging baskets and a red Ford Fiesta outside. Lisa answers the door with a frown.
“What are you doing here, Cara? I’m sure you’ve figured out your services are no longer required.”
“Yes, I know, but the suitcase…” I can see the confusion on her face, especially when I open the boot and pull it out.
“I’m not going to Spain, Cara! I don’t need the suitcase.”
“I know, but Kevin went round to get it, right? Did he go earlier? Like on Sunday?”
“What are you talking about?”
I’m frantic, and as I drop the suitcase in front of her it flings open, releasing particles of poor old Proton. Lisa sneezes.
And then I remember. Lisa was allergic to Proton. She wanted her father to give him back to the shelter, but he insisted Proton was old, and needed a retirement home, and besides, she never visited much anyway. She sneezed if even a single hair got up her nose. And she was sneezing a lot on Sunday morning in the hospital.
She took the suitcase. And that means…
“You did it,” I say. “You’re behind the whole thing!”
She sneezes again.
“Did you give your father your allergy tablets? To make him drowsy? And then realise you should have saved some for yourself when the suitcase was covered in Proton’s hairs?”
Her face darkens. “Kevin was smarter than the other losers I married. He knew I was prone to divorce, so he made sure to protect his assets. Unfortunately for him, he also had excellent life insurance.”
“So you killed him?” I can hardly believe what I’m hearing.
“Who says I killed him?” She touches a hand to her chest. “My father knew I wanted to get rid of Kevin so he killed him for me, it’s kind of sweet when you think about it.”
A neighbour emerges, dragging their wheelie bin to the kerb.
“You’d better come inside,” says Lisa, and like the distracted idiot I am, I do.
I can see how she did it now. “It was you. You set up the illusion on Sunday for your father, making him drowsy and suggestible, with allergy tablets or something more in his morning tea. Then made him believe he had gone to Thursday and killed Kevin. Did you dress like Kevin, disguise your voice? Make up an argument, press the knife into his hand, cover him in pig’s blood from the Asian supermarket?”
It plays out in my mind’s eye. She must have killed Kevin on Thursday morning and took him over in the suitcase. Probably used the stairlift to get him to the bedroom while the Prof was, predictably, in the garage. More pig’s blood. The knife tossed next to the body. The suitcase left there to corroborate the story of an argument.
She stands in the living room with her arms crossed, and tries the classic: “You don’t have any evidence.”
I snort. “There’s so much evidence! There’s enough blood in the carpet still that they can test it and find it’s not Kevin’s. And no matter how much you cleaned up, his blood will be here somewhere. And there’s the disappearing suitcase. For such a complicated scheme you left a lot that could catch you out.”
She uncrosses her arms and takes a step towards me. “The ‘scheme’ was supposed to be so convincing that no-one would look for contrary evidence.”
And there it is, the real question I want the answer to. Because as much as I feel sorry for poor old Kevin, it’s the Prof I really care about. “Why did you frame your father?”
She tries to look nonchalant, but she won’t meet my eyes. “Two birds with one stone.”
“What?”
“Look, I didn’t want him to go to jail, but I can’t support the old man and it’s better if the state thinks he’s just lost his marbles. They’ll put him in some nice facility.”
“His home is nice. And he hasn’t lost his marbles.”
She still won’t look at me. “He’s been batty his whole life.”
“That’s not the same! You just wanted to get rid of him.”
I realise too late she isn’t avoiding my eyes out of embarrassment. She lunges for a wine bottle on a sideboard and smashes it against the wall, then thrusts the jagged edges at me. I stumble back and fall into an armchair. As she leers over me, bottle raised, I close my eyes and the stupid thought runs through my head that at least I’ll die somewhere comfortable.
But the pain never comes. There’s a scream, but it’s not me, it’s her, and when I open my eyes I see her thrashing in the hold of a powerful set of arms.
“Hello love, are you okay?” say the arms, and I see a large bald head peer around the furious Lisa.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Ian. Husband number three.”
*
The Prof is sitting in the rickshaw. I slide in next to him.
“Where should we go?” I ask.
He trails a finger along the edge of the rickshaw. It picks up dust. He hasn’t been here in a while, and I understand why, but it feels like a bit of him has been lost.
“Do you think there’s any time I could go back to, to prevent Lisa from turning out that way?”
I rest my head on his shoulder. “I don’t know. Was there just one moment?”
“Probably not.” “Then let’s go forward,” I say. “Only forward.”