Dead in Time

Chapter One

Brighton is nice in the spring. It has its charms all year round, but is, I think, at its best when the weather is pleasantly warm, but not yet hot enough to melt the tarmac or encourage otherwise sane men to go out in public in nothing but shorts, sandals, and a sheen of sweat. I lived in a flat on the edge of Kemp Town village—ten minutes to the city centre and only five minutes’ walk to the seafront—and, while I might not have exactly been happy, I’d started getting my life back on track. 

I even had a sea view, just. You had to sit on the window seat and press your nose to the glass, or get someone to hold your legs while you hung out of the tiny bathroom window, but you could see it. Nothing but a murky grey band on the horizon, of course; the suggestion of white caps to swelling waves rather than the panoramic views you got with the expensive apartments further along the seafront. My building—a Victorian townhouse, carved unceremoniously into flats by developers sometime in the Seventies—hardly matched up to those high-class Regency extravaganzas, built like limestone and stucco wedding cakes, but it was comfortable and fairly convenient for the university.

I’d begun the second year of my social history PhD—Ad nauseam: images of women in advertising 1900-1970—hoping less for the thrill of becoming Doctor Ellis Ross than the security of landing myself a junior lectureship. I’d have taken a museum post, too, or even archive work. Anything that interested me, paid a regular salary and wasn’t one of the ‘women’s jobs’ that, aside from marriage, had been the only route out of the home for generations of girls in my family. Old-fashioned, I know, and probably a stereotype I could have fought against more violently if I’d wanted, but however stuck in the mid-twentieth century I thought my family were, I still owed them a lot.

No. Nursing, teaching, and secretarial work; not bad choices, but not my choices. And that mattered.

It also explained why I came to be working so late on Thursday night. And it was late… more specifically, about half a bottle of Rioja and four cups of black coffee away from Friday morning. Perhaps I’d been overdoing it a little bit. Friends had gently reminded me that student all-nighters usually stopped after undergraduate finals, but there I sat all the same, sifting through a pile of facsimile adverts from 1932 for automated floor cleaners.

The top page featured society brides of the preceding year and told the thoroughly modern, independent new women of the sophisticated Thirties that they, too, could be liberated from the shackles of housework in order to look nice for their prospective husbands.

‘Will any of these modern girls be scrubwomen at forty?’ it asked in bold, loud print.

Hmmm. Almost as good as the 1968 slogan for grape-flavoured Tipalets: Blow in her face and she’ll follow you anywhere.

The lies human beings are capable of telling each other—and themselves—had never failed to amaze me. How we worked our way through life as a species like that, founding our worlds on tissues of fibs and porkies, was the central point behind my thesis.

I poured myself another glass of wine. Behind me, Mr. Tibbs dozed peacefully on the sofa. A large, black tomcat of indeterminate age, he’d turned up three days after I moved in and had never left. Beneath his gentle feline snoring and the occasional soft yowl as he disembowelled some many-legged dream critter, the stereo played softly, blocking out the general static of the night.

Stretching, I yawned and wondered if it would be worth going to bed. The stereo whirred faintly, slipping another CD into place. I blinked, briefly confused, because I hadn’t expected anything else in the playlist. The confusion turned to surprise as a heavy four-four drum intro echoed out of the speakers, split by a tight, wailing guitar in the third beat. When the hell had I put that in there?