Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series Book Two) (2 page)

He reached out with the hand of a weak, old man. He pushed the mirror-door open and stared into the gloom of the hut.

‘What do you want?’ he said. As ever, his throat felt dry when he spoke. He coughed and spoke louder. ‘Did you hear me? This is private property. What do you want?’

There was nobody there. He noted the swinging, drying animals, smelled their bloods, and saw his bread and cheese on the table. Nothing, as far as he could tell, had been disturbed. He stepped into the room proper. His boots creaked. There was nothing here but his disappointment at the dwindling of his anger, of its replacement with a sense of foolishness. At once, he saw him himself as the Regensburgers must see him: a silly man in a hut on a hill, dying.

But the words came again. This time, from behind.

‘Help me.’

Tolsdorf tried to spin but staggered clumsily, tasting once more the bitterness of idiocy. He had been out-flanked. As he turned, he told himself not to shoot, but the pistol’s trigger was lighter than the one on his rifle, and he loosed a round into the empty corner of the room, left of the mirror.

In the silence and gun smell, he said, ‘Who said that?’

Nothing.

Tolsdorf waited.

Then: ‘Help me.’

He noticed something strange about the words. They were scratchy, ill-defined, like a recording in wax. The idea came to Tolsdorf with a shock of insight as startling as the gunshot. He did not know how the idea had formed. To be sure, it was incredible: The voice had to be coming from the mirror itself. He approached the glass and put the barrel of his pistol against it. When ‘Help me’ came again he heard a second, harsh component in the sound. The mirror was indeed vibrating against his pistol. Though he could not explain this phenomenon, the discovery was nevertheless sweet. It confirmed his intellect was not yet erased; he could question the world and it would answer.

His questions now doubled and tripled. How could a voice come from the mirror? What would it take to do that? He had been a radio operator and a medic during his national service, and he had heard stories of mirrors and tooth fillings receiving radio transmissions. But this did not sound like a commercial radio station. It was a single voice and it was talking to him.

Before his wonder at this visitation could transform into fear, he heard a dull roaring sound from outside the hut.

Tolsdorf hurried to the door, opened it, and stepped onto his porch. What he saw and felt returned him to the morning his family died: the smell of paints, plastics and clothes on fire; the neighbours preventing his re-entry to the house; the certain conviction that his wife and his boys, the twins, were dying in each other’s arms in a wardrobe; and Tolsdorf, raging, shouting calls that remained unanswered.

Here, on the far side of the valley, a mushroom-cap cloud was turning about a yellow core, hundreds of metres high and climbing. A speck of ash fell on Tolsdorf’s tongue. His wonder grew with every gust of crisp bark and blasting air. He looked at the back of his hands. They were bald. The heat reached his eyes, dried them, and he backed against the hut. He put his knuckles to his nose. The hair was gone: burned.

~

He put the pistol on the table and pulled out the first-aid kit that he had never used. Then, feeling the charge of a life not yet spent, Tolsdorf took a blanket from his bed and left the hut. He was not responding to the mirror, he decided. He was investigating the explosion. He crossed the short dooryard and dunked the blanket in the river. Its sudden weight pulled him forward and he stumbled into the water. The cold found his feet through the eyelets of his boots. Old age was making him a clown. All the while, he felt the singeing of his eyebrows and the growing heat on his cheeks. Then he pulled the blanket about himself. It was cool - like night, his best and clearest time. He pulled down the peak of his cap and crossed the river in large strides that recalled the tall man he had once been.

There was a deer path that coiled around the western shoulder of the hill. Tolsdorf set himself upon it. His legs were pained with cramp and his knees clicked, but he walked this path every morning to claim the vantage of the hill, and with the familiarity came ease. His breath quickened. In the shelter here, the heat slackened and his mind calmed. That much fuel, in so isolated a location, could only mean that a plane had crashed. A large one. Tolsdorf shook out his bandana and covered his nose and mouth. Ash and wood cinders were falling through the forest canopy. Larger pieces – he saw a sheet of paper with a letterhead, a deformed plastic cup – pattered on the trees like fat drops of summer rain. And the smell rolled over him: a bloody stink of incineration.

He reached the top of the hill. Through streaming eyes, he saw that the forest had been wiped away. A foggy bowl of dirt remained. There was an ordinariness about the thin layer of debris. It might have been a steaming rubbish dump. Tolsdorf struggled to understand. How could this have been an aircraft? What could have happened to the mass of it? He could see part of one engine. On the far lip of the depression, almost one-hundred metres distant, was a tyre, still inflated. It was certainly an aircraft tyre. Nearer, he saw a paperback novel. He surprised himself by recognising the cream-and-blue cover.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
. Frau Waellnitz had wanted to read it to him months ago but Tolsdorf had dismissed the idea with a grunt, playing fully on her expectations of this backward woodsman. Then, as though the paperback unlocked his perception, he saw the scattered, broken pieces of people. His eyes faltered in the toxic air and the heat. He squeezed them shut and knelt fully, coughing.

Not so old to be useless, Tolsdorf. Move.

‘On three,’ he growled. ‘Three.’

He rose, settled the blanket around his shoulders, and walked into the debris. The surface was hot through his boots but the fires had shrunk to flickering islands. Now the ash fell upwards as well as down. He picked a route that took him from one ruined stump of tree to another, and he sometimes crouched, gasping, waiting for the next roll of smoke to pass, praying he would not collapse. His eyes felt ruined. He wanted to be sick but his retches produced only spit. He did not know what to do. There was no-one alive here. Beneath his boots were plastic cups, seat cushions, wiring, and things he would not name.

He focused on the mechanics of the crash. What would it take for someone to survive this?

It happens. Sometimes it happens.

Ten metres away, beyond an upturned tree, was a long sheet of fuselage. It was sooty and mangled but its windows were intact. For someone to survive, Tolsdorf thought, they would need the protection of a strong structure. They would need a space. Tolsdorf hauled himself towards it. He stepped on one of the windows and scraped away the soot with his heel. It revealed something bright beneath the shed skin of the aircraft. Tolsdorf dropped his first-aid kit and blanket. The renewed heat assaulted his body but, with the last of the fires going out, he felt he could work. His head was clearer. He took wood-chopping gloves from the long pockets of his trousers – they had Kevlar pads, what he needed – and thought about the best way to lever up the fuselage. Then he crouched by the edge that looked thinnest, said, ‘On three,’ and felt his muscles gorge on the sorry old blood. The metal began to lift.

Chapter One

Berlin, some hours before

Jem Shaw made a quarter turn so that the hood of the phone booth was close enough to hide her lips. The airport concourse buzzed behind her. She had taken the middle of five booths. She was anonymous. One woman among many. She swallowed and listened to the ringer of an English telephone. It was the first time she had heard the sound in six months of exile. Dialling the number was a betrayal of the person she had been the previous summer: angry, proud, and leaving the island forever. Stepping from the ruins of her family, dressed to kill. On a mission and Arctic cool.

She passed a hand through her gas-flame blue hair and waited for her brother to answer. Never had she needed to talk to him more. She stamped her Cossack boots. At twenty-four, she felt too old for humble pie.

‘Ahoy-hoy,’ said Danny, and with those words, Jem was transported to Exeter and the crappy, 1980s BT phone that Danny now held. She could breathe the shoes-and-dogs smell of that hallway.

‘Danny, it’s me.’

She could accept any extreme from him. Anger. Contrition. Humour. But mostly anger. One moment she felt ready for him, the next off-balance and unprepared. Her brother was her twin, she told herself. They had shared too many pains. Each must know the other.

‘Where are you?’

His question was toneless. She knew, then, that Danny had lost the anger he must have felt when she ran away. What was he thinking? Was he planning an intervention?

‘I’m in Germany.’

‘Where? Are you still with Wolfgang?’

Jem scratched her eyebrow with a thumb, mulling over Saskia Brandt and feeling tired.

‘Not exactly. I’m going to Milan.’

There was a blast in her ear. Danny had sighed across the receiver.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I’ve met someone. I don’t mean Wolfgang.’

‘Who?’

‘She’s called Saskia.’

Another silence. Then he said, ‘Saskia,’ slowly, as though he were writing the name.

‘She wants me to go to Milan with her.’

‘Well, that sounds peachy.’

Jem laughed. A chuckle came back from Danny.

‘Do we get to meet her?’ he asked.

Jem looked at the departure board. She had left Saskia at the gate more than ten minutes ago, too long for her excuse of a toilet break to work any longer. Soon, Saskia would come looking for her.

‘Danny, I have to go.’ Jem spoke her next words with the knowledge that they might undo the good work of the conversation. ‘I shouldn’t have called.’

‘Then why did you?’

‘I’m...’

‘You’re what?’

‘...Worried.’ In a whisper, she continued, ‘There’s something strange about it.’

‘Jem, are you in trouble?’

‘It’s not that.’

‘I want you to stay in Berlin. I’m coming to get you. Stay right there.’

The tears made a shore at her eyes. She looked at her feet. She hated herself for the shame. She did not have to feel this way. The situation was not her fault.

‘Don’t, Danny.’

‘Let me get this straight. You don’t call us in months. When you do, it’s to tell me you’re worried about some new friend.’

‘I love you.’

‘Now
I’m
worried.’

‘Bye,’ she said. ‘Look... Bye.’

‘I love you, too.’

Jem replaced the receiver and stared at it for a moment. She closed her eyes and listened to the boarding calls, the wailing babies, the laughter, but she did not turn. In the private darkness, one future emerged. Anxiety, guilt and fear were washed out. Her escape from the airport would fix her. She could re-establish a certain version of herself.

Saskia would become a memory, if that.

Escape, then.

She left the airport.

~

At a café near the gate, Saskia Brandt sipped her coffee. She looked, mind stalling, at the great space above the concourse. The roof looked like the inner framework of a Zeppelin. She smiled. Whales of the air. She let her eyes move across the crowd. There was refuge in the mathematics of their movement and form, but her thoughts turned to the coming departure of the flight to Milan and the fact that Jem should surely have come back from the toilet long before now. Saskia looked at the crowd and blinked. There were seven hundred and ninety-one people on the concourse. Jem was not one of them. This understanding, the maths of it, was no antidote to her anger at the realisation that Jem had abandoned her.

I shouldn’t have let her find the gun.

And I should have told her about the other time traveller.

It was absurd that this loss should upset her. They had lived together for a month. Not such a long time. Saskia put her fingers on the ticket in her pocket. There was strength in loneliness, she decided, and she would regain that strength as her loneliness returned, like an appreciation for a cold, mathematical music.

She looked again at her coffee and the reflection of the roof upon it.

End of
, as Jem might say.

Chapter Two

Berlin, earlier that morning

There was nothing, thought Jem, like the first flush of trespass. Her stomach bubbled with it. Her body could not decide if the sensation energised or paralysed. She made fists, opened her hands, made fists. She was a gunslinger about to draw. An artist poised to brush the first stroke.

Part of her wanted to return to bed, the better to be discovered by Saskia when she returned from the market with the promised breakfast. Instead she remained on the threshold of the room Saskia had asked her never to enter, and blinked at the muted sunshine that passed through the window. She listened to the lifebloods of the building: water moving through pipes; the tick of warming radiators; the muffled scrape of a faraway chair. And, now, in this room, the unmistakable hum of a computer.

Somewhere in this room was the answer to Saskia Brandt.

‘Arctic, Jem,’ she whispered. ‘Cool as.’

It was larger than the master bedroom where Saskia and Jem slept. She could make out a sofa, sagging in the middle, and an Ikea bookcase, same as the one from the family house in Exeter. Saskia had packed hers with large volumes. Elsewhere, there was a weights bench, a yoga mat, and the desktop computer. The practicality of the room mirrored Saskia. The impression of Saskia’s most private space was that of a nest. Jem recalled Saskia’s expression when she believed nobody was looking: hawkish, alert. Thinking on a distant threat.

She began with the bookcase. It was stacked with texts on neuroanatomy that meant nothing to her and classic computing volumes and journals that Jem half-understood from the computer science degree she had abandoned, ignominiously, two years earlier. She did not touch the books. She had an idea that Saskia would notice their disturbance. She moved to the Tryten Computer Locker. She touched the keyhole, thinking. Power tools would be needed to cut through the steel box that protected this computer. She moved to the desk. It was a long, fine bureau with a glass top. There was a passport (Frau Doktor Saskia Dorfer, born 1974 in Berlin; visa stamps for Turkey and Brazil), a digital camera, one ticket for a West End show in London (
The Handmaid’s Tale
), and an exercise book entitled
Krimskrams
with notes in German and occasional English snippets: ‘Forsyth method?’ and ‘Spain – do it!’ and ‘How can I ask David?’.