18: STUDYING ODDS

‘Don’t worry, Matey,’ Kai Diamonde assured his colleague who had been frantically consulting his phone as the car they were in made its way back onto English soil having negotiated the bridge. ‘When we reach Bristol we will stop at a bookies.’

‘How do you know I want to bet?’ he asked, somewhat tentatively for he realised another revelation was perched on the horizon and about to be launched his way.

‘Because, Matey, you have not long received a subliminal image on your phone of the windowless house. You and hundreds of other historians. You’ve been fed that picture and now the UN Security Council will keep tabs on betting trends as you historians feel compelled to wager on an odd feeling you have.’

‘I’m still trailing behind the hare with this?’

‘Simples, Matey, the name of the horse that the majority of historians bet on gives the Security Council a strong idea as to what the windowless house means in relation to something changing in history.’

‘But I want to bet on Lass Light the 50-1 shot in the 4.30 at Ripon?’

‘Oh my God!’ Kai Diamonde, exclaimed which prompted Glen Mower to look at the stretch of motorway ahead half expecting an errant motorist to have provoked the driver’s animated response. ‘Lass Light, that’s obviously The Lady with the Lamp, Florence Nightingale. That’s what it’s all about. Amongst the documents we have on Route 1066 is one where a time traveller thought it a hoot to persuade the famous nurse to ditch her lamp in favour of a clamp as it would be more profitable but only if it was a wheel clamp.’

‘What the Hell has a windowless house got to do with the Nightingale?’ Mower asked.

‘Matey,’ he said drawing upon a deep breath for the necessary oxygen to deliver his chilling forecast. ‘One of the triumphs of Nightingale’s life is that her pioneering social and health reforms enabled people to live twenty years longer. Thus, with her being lost to the parking exploitation industry with her bloody clamp everyone is living twenty years fewer. Obviously, when that house was originally built it had windows installed by someone who was already in the last two decades of their life. Life that had been extended by Flo’s reforms. With Nightingale now gone the windows have too.’

Before they arrived at their destination, Kai Diamonde parked up at The Black Castle and provided his travelling companion with more documents to digest that he sent via email.

‘You will need to be up to speed with all this first, Matey. Before we enter the War Rooms.’