Simon Clark - The Fall

Sam looked at Carswell. The man’s face was expressionless. It was hard to find a response to such a story. He found himself hoping that Jud would speak first. As it was, the voice came from another part of the room.

‘Excuse me, sir.’ A man had come to stand by the table. Despite the heat of the evening, he wore a brown woollen suit that looked a size or two too small for him. Even his chin rolled over his shirt collar to hide the knot of his tie as he looked down at Sam. ‘Sorry to trouble you. But could I have your name, please?’

Sam looked up, surprised. Two thoughts vied for prominence. One, that he’d been mistaken for someone else. Two, that the man thought he was from the circus in town and was trying to poach a couple of free tickets.

Sam nodded. ‘Sam Baker. And you are?’

‘Oh, my name isn’t important, Mr Baker.’ Abruptly he stood back. In the doorway were two uniformed policemen; their high helmets made them look huge in the low-ceilinged bar.

Then the man in the brown suit turned to the man in glasses who’d been sitting in the bar earlier and had returned unobtrusively.

‘Mr Blakemore. Is this him?’ the man in the brown suit asked sharply.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Quite sure. I took the photograph myself two years ago. It was the night of the big Whit Sunday raid.’ The man in the glasses fixed Sam with a direct stare. ‘Well, you’re a cheeky bastard, aren’t you? I never thought you’d be brass-faced enough to come back here after what you did. They were my neighbours.’ With that the man lunged forward. At first Sam thought the man would attack him. Instead he threw a folded newspaper onto the table.

Sam stared at it, stunned. He heard the brown-suited man say, ‘Read the charge, Sergeant.’

‘Yes, sir. Samuel Baker, I am arresting you on suspicion of…’

Now Sam hardly heard a word of it. Because he was staring at a photograph of himself – an impossible photograph – plastered there halfway across the front page of the newspaper. It showed him looking back over one shoulder as if caught by surprise.

WANTED FOR MURDER ran the headline in monstrously dark print. DO YOU RECOGNISE THIS MAN?

In sheer astonishment he found himself reading the story as the policeman recited the charge in a monotonous voice: ‘That on the night of May 26 th1944 you did, with malice aforethought, unlawfully kill…’

Gazette photographer Sandy Blakemore discovered the bodies of the Marshall family in their home in the Rookery, a quiet suburb of Casterton, Sam read on, stunned. Even hardened police officers were appalled by the brutality of the crime…

Then the newspaper was yanked away from him by the man he now took to be Blakemore. ‘You bastard… They’d done nothing to you…’

The detective held out an arm to gently push the man back.

At that moment another policeman stepped forward.

Dumbfounded, Sam watched the cop snap handcuffs onto his wrists. The only rational thought going through his head was how heavy they were. And how cold.

Blakemore shouted, ‘They’ll hang you, do you realise that? You’ll hang… and I hope you feel it – I hope you feel the agony when that rope breaks your neck!’

Sam Baker sat looking down at the heavy steel cuffs clamped around his wrists. They were tight, cruelly tight, and already the fifth fingers that served as his thumbs were starting to tingle. The oval scars where the thumbs had been removed soon after his birth, normally a pink colour, had turned a bloodless white.

The detective said, ‘Sergeant, we’ll take his two companions in for questioning, too. Birds of a feather and all that.’

It had to happen. Looking back, Sam saw that it had, after all, been only a matter of time.

Carswell pulled the gun.

‘Carswell, no!’ Jud shouted.

Carswell stood up, pushing the table to one side; glasses crashed to the floor, splashing beer against the policemen’s legs. ‘Lie down on the floor,’ Carswell ordered, holding the muzzle of the gun so it was pointed at the centre of the detective’s face. ‘Lie down on the floor!’

The detective shook his head. ‘No, I won’t do that, sir. Give me the gun.’

‘Lie down!’

‘No, sir.’ The detective’s voice was very low, soothing almost; he looked Carswell calmly in the eye. ‘I think it best if you give me the gun.’

‘ Damn it! ’

‘You know you’ll hang if you shoot a policeman. Now, give me the gun.’

Sam saw the muscle tension begin in Carswell’s shoulder. It was as if he was watching it all in extreme slow motion and extreme detail. The muscles coiled, bunched and tensed beneath the white sleeve of the suit. Carswell was squeezing the trigger.

Sam watched as the tensing muscles actually created a ripple in the fabric of the sleeve, running from shoulder to wrist to trigger finger.

The dark blue metal muzzle of the automatic shook slightly.

‘Sir, hand me the—’

Sam swung his manacled hands upward, hitting Carswell’s arm just below the elbow.

The gun jerked up at the same instant as it boomed. Sparks seemed to fill the bar; acrid smoke flooded Sam’s nostrils.

Above the detective’s head the bullet hacked a chunk of timber from the ceiling beam.

‘Bloody idiot,’ Carswell screamed. For an instant Sam thought he’d turn the gun on him; instead, Carswell tugged his shoulder. ‘Run!’

As Sam blundered through the fog of gunsmoke, he glanced back to see Carswell and Jud following.

Carswell paused again to fire the gun.

But this time he fired into the wall of the bar, adding to the confusion of the customers, who shouted as they scrambled under tables for cover, knocking over glasses and chairs.

Suddenly, Sam found himself outside. A policeman had left the patrol car and was running towards him.

Sam froze, expecting the cop to pull a gun.

But British cops are unarmed, he reminded himself. They don’t carry firearms.

Even so, the constable was drawing his truncheon.

Sam turned and ran past the side of the building into the back garden.

A family was there, the father pushing a girl on a swing that hung from a tree branch. ‘Get down on the floor!’ he yelled as Carswell came running across the grass, firing the gun in the air.

Sam heard Jud shout, ‘Carswell, throw that damn thing away. Someone’s going to get hurt!’

Carswell didn’t listen. He vaulted over the fence and ran. Jud climbed over the fence and followed.

Sam saw policemen pouring through the back door of the pub. The photographer was there, too. Straightening the glasses on his face, he was hollering, ‘Don’t let them get away!’

Sam ran at the fence, ready to vault over it. It was only as he put out his hands to grasp the top rail that he remembered his hands were manacled together.

The chain links of the cuffs caught on a protruding nail, but already the momentum of his body was carrying him forward.

He made it over the fence, but the chain snagged against the nail, throwing him of balance.

He fell face forward.

The turf came up at him in a green blur.

It looked soft, but the blow it struck was hard.

As he groaned and rolled over, the chain on the cuffs clinking, he looked up at the sky. Coloured lights streamed from it as static electricity crackled across his arms and through his hair.

That was when he realised he’d not been knocked senseless by the blow.

But whatever mechanism had hauled that little group of people back through time was starting all over again.

Just moments before Nicole Wagner was flung into temporal backflow for the slide down through the months and years to who knew when, she had walked into the wood.