Chapter 7: Bloody hands

October 1966, age 11

I looked at Grandpa in horror, but his face remained completely impassive. The news said that the police had entered Jimmy Savile’s home after he had been reported missing by his employers at the BBC. They had found him in his bath, wrists slit and an empty bottle of sleeping pills nearby. They had also found an envelope of photographs at the scene, showing Savile engaged in sexual activity with children. The police were appealing for information and, in particular, asked potential victims to come forward. They were treating the death as a probable blackmail and suicide but had not ruled out foul play.

My thoughts were racing. I had no doubt that this was the result of my asking Grandpa to do something about Savile. The photographs must have been taken by hidden cameras, probably arranged by Dan. Had we then confronted him with the evidence? Or had we assassinated him and left the evidence to make it look like a suicide? Was I now a murderer?!

Grandpa was leading me firmly by the hand to his study, and then into the panic room. He sat me down and told me, “Ask me what you need to ask”.

It took a few moments to organise my thoughts into two questions. “Did we do this?”

“Yes,” he answered.

Then the big one. “Did we kill him?”

“Yes.”

Blood drained from my face, and there was ringing in my ears. Grandpa sat beside me and put his arm around my shoulders. “When you asked me to do something about him, what did you think would happen?”

I angrily shrugged his arm off me. “I don’t know! I thought maybe we’d help the police catch him.”

His voice stayed calm and even. “Wouldn’t have worked. Finn, I forget who said it, but there’s a famous line that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. You have great power through your knowledge of the future. You’re like a superhero that makes hard decisions on behalf of mankind. This was a very good decision. You’ve saved countless children from having their lives wrecked by that monster. Don’t shed any tears over the death of a monster, because there are plenty more of them still left in the world, believe me. And I have a feeling, knowing you, that this won’t be the last time you use your power to have a monster dispatched to hell.”

But had he considered that perhaps we were monsters too?

“You achieved something good, by doing something bad. The end more than justifies the means, so don’t ever feel guilty about that. When you go to bed tonight, sleep well with a clear conscience knowing that you’ve used your powers responsibly to make the world a better place. Alright?”

Well, I didn’t sleep well that night, and at breakfast that Sunday morning I was virtually mute. When Caity wanted me to go and play with her, I lied, saying I didn’t feel well.

I spent most of that day alone, deep in thought. Some of what Grandpa had said made sense. Other parts were repulsive. I couldn’t get over the fact that a man was dead because of me. Did he deserve to die? Probably, yes. If I’d been anyone else, hearing the news that he’d abused kids, been blackmailed and killed himself wouldn’t elicit a lot of sympathies. But I was personally involved, and that wasn’t how it happened.

I started down a trail of thoughts that maybe we could undo this huge mistake. Grandpa had a time machine, after all. Would that be the right thing to do? Could we find a way of putting him out of commission in a less lethal way?

I didn’t get as far as reaching a conclusion in that internal conversation, because thinking about using time travel to undo a death prompted a realisation that eclipsed everything else. It hit me like a freight train, and all thought of Jimmy Savile disappeared entirely.

Why hadn’t Grandpa gone back in time to stop my parents from dying?

He could have done, easily. He could have found their car and slashed the tyres, or gone to their restaurant and delayed them. A few seconds might have been enough to remove them from the path of that drunk driver. I could have been at home with them right now.

Why hadn’t he saved my parents’ lives?

An ice-cold hand gripped my heart and wouldn’t let go. He had chosen not to save them.

When I found myself back at school on Monday morning, I may as well have been a zombie walking in the midst of the crowds. Everyone was talking about Jimmy Savile’s death. Everyone but me. My friends couldn’t break through my funk, and there was no way I could focus on school work. During the day, Peter asked me three times what was wrong, and in the end, he discretely went up to Dan and asked him what was up.

At the end of school, Dan didn’t take me straight home as normal. He took me to a park where we sat on a bench and just watched the world go by for a while.

I had way too much going on in my head. Foremost was trying to figure out what would make Grandpa decide not to save our parents. Initially, I had wondered whether it was about giving Caity and me a better standard of life than our parents could have. I’d rejected that. Grandpa wasn’t stupid, or mental, or cruel. He must have had an incredibly good reason for doing things this way, but I could not for the life of me figure out what it was.

The second thread of thoughts was about Dan. Knowing, or rather presuming, that he had arranged a murder radically altered my perception of him. He was still the guy who spent his life looking after me and would happily take the proverbial bullet. He had always been kind to me and had become an important father figure. But now he was also this shady guy with a lethal SAS background, in charge of God knows how many shadows that not only protected my family but would apparently kill on command.

Then there was the whole Savile incident. I had moved beyond my initial horror because, when I was honest with myself, I wasn’t really sorry he was dead. I definitely hadn’t intended it, and I was hugely uncomfortable with my involvement, but I also knew the world was well rid of him. I felt sorrier for myself than I did for him, and in a strange way, my guilt was about not feeling more guilty than I actually did. It was doing my head in.

As all those thoughts went round and round in a disorganised melee, Dan used the infuriating technique of just sitting there waiting for me to say something. In the end, I broke. “How do you live with guilt?”

“Well...” he said, considering his answer. “For me, it’s all about balance. If I do something bad, even for very good reasons, I always feel like I have to do a good deed to balance the scale. ‘Cos when I pop my clogs and find myself standing outside the pearly gates, I want to be able to show St. Peter that my score card has more marks in the ‘good person’ column than it does on the other side.”

That sort of made sense to me. Not that I was convinced by the idea of heaven or St Peter or God or any of that, but the idea of balance was appealing. Maybe I could do that.

“Someday you’re going to have to tell me about the people you employ”, I told him. “But not today. Any more weirdness today and my head will explode. I need a swim. Can we go?”

My relationship with Grandpa was strained, to say the least, so I avoided him whenever possible. I considered just coming out and asking him about my parents, but I wasn’t brave enough to do that yet. I feared the answers I might get. At dinner that evening, Grandpa tried to bridge the gulf between us.

“How would you like a day off school on Thursday to come to a business meeting with me?”

Normally anything including a day off school would be a winner, but these weren’t usual times. “What’s it about?”

“There’s a company called English Electric that’s vulnerable to a takeover. I want to cherrypick some of their best bits before other companies get in and devour them. They own a big block of BAC shares that I want. We already have some, but adding these would give us control. They also have a train-building wing that I want to buy.”

Boring, boring, boring.

I lied: “I’ve got a test at school on Thursday. I’d better not miss that.”