by Andy Conway
“How funny,” said Joe. “We work closer to each other than ever, and I see you less.”
He twisted his cloth cap in his red hands.
“Sergeant. Some tea for us.”
“There’s some on the boil,” said Donaghy. He scooted out.
“Take a seat and warm yourself.”
“Oh, I’m fine. I’ve come straight from home this morning. I’m out in all weathers, so it doesn’t bother me.”
Beadle took his seat and surveyed him. There was something about Joe Rees that looked used up. Like some fickle god had taken his life, screwed it up and tossed it in the waste paper basket without another thought. Beadle wondered if that fickle god might have been himself.
“You look well on it,” he said. “I wish I was out on the street more myself. They have me behind a desk most days now, shuffling papers.”
“Not like the old days, eh?” Joe laughed, a gleam in his eye. “Running down Peakies and sloggers. It was like the Wild West at one point even.”
A shadow passed over Beadle’s heart. “Yes, quite. It’s a lot more serene now.”
“Thanks to you, I suppose,” said Joe. “The best policemen don’t solve crimes, they make sure they never happen in the first place.”
Donaghy came back in with two cups of stewed brown tea and once he was gone and they had shared a few pleasantries, Beadle said, “So, Joe. What brings you here?”
“Yesterday, I saw a... an old friend of ours.”
“Oh? And who was that?”
“Daniel Pearce.”
Joe chuckled, and Beadle was aware that he might have turned white. He took a sip of tea and grimaced. “But that’s impossible.”
“That’s what I thought. But I saw him with these two eyes. Came right up to my stall and tried to steal a paper.”
“I’m not sure what you want me to... do,” said Beadle, aware that he was stalling, trying to think of what this meant.
“I was a police informer for years and this is an unsolved crime.”
“There was never any indication that it was him.”
“Perhaps so,” said Joe. “But we all thought it. You thought it just as much as I did.”
Beadle sipped his tea again, shoved the cup to one side. It was awful, and he suddenly felt quite queasy. “Are you sure it was him?”
“I would normally stake my life on it. But the peculiar thing was, he looked younger than when he disappeared. If that’s possible.”
Beadle sighed. “Had you taken drink?”
“I’m not a drunk, sir. I’ve always drunk in moderation. I had a pint last night to steady me. It was the shock, you see. But that’s a rare occurrence. A bartender has to ask me what I want when I walk in. They don’t pour the usual before I reach the bar.”
“But still, Joe, this is nonsense.”
“I’m not like that Half-Cut Herbert, hugging the bar every night. He was there last night and all. Sloshed, as usual. Couldn’t see a hole in a ladder. Compared to him I was as sober as a fish, and I know what I saw.”
There was something about Joe’s vehemence. What Beadle had taken for the grizzled air of a hungover sot was something else. Genuine shock. He looked like a man who’d had Death brush past him.
“Here’s the thing,” said Joe. “Like I say. I thought it was him. Sounded like him, even. But it couldn’t be. Unless he’s taken to ageing backwards and has been getting younger instead of older. I wouldn’t put that past him, mind. There was always something off about him. You know that.”
“So you saw someone who looked like him.”
“I saw his son. That’s the only explanation. It’s the only rational explanation.”
Beadle felt the room circling like a carousel. He shut his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He feared there was no rational explanation. He felt a merciless riptide pulling him back into a dark ocean.
“His son,” he said. “Yes, that might make sense.”
“It’s the only thing that does make sense,” said Joe.
Beadle opened his eyes and nodded, standing up, quickly to business. Joe put his cup aside and stood, and Beadle walked him out to the reception. Seeing it empty, he sidled up to Sergeant Donaghy and in low tones told him Joe Rees was to have two shillings from petty cash. Donaghy pressed the coins into Joe’s red palm and he pocketed them like a hungry bird taking a worm.
“Thank you, Joe. I’ll follow this up. If you see anything else, give the usual signal. I’ll instruct the constables on the Moseley beat to look out for it.”
Joe tipped his cap and chuckled. “It’s just like old days, sir. I do miss them.”
“I wonder if we’re both a bit too old now for such adventure,” said Beadle.
“No one’s ever too old.”
Joe left with a spring in his step and Beadle returned to his desk, scowling at the pile of reports from Balsall Heath. The truth was he really was tired of adventure. Retirement was tantalisingly close and he was already settling into his slippers.
He stared into space for what might have been a half hour before he caught himself.
Opening his desk drawer, he pulled out a moleskin journal bound with a black ribbon, which he untied. He took out the eagle feather, its white still pristine as new snow, the tip as black as midnight. And a single scarlet spot painted in deep vermilion.
There were some things police reports could not explain away, and he’d seen a few. The redhead girl who’d left this feather behind was one. Daniel Pearce was another.
He’d seen other things, peculiar things, all noted down in this journal, kept from the official reports, but this was surely an old drunk talking nonsense.
He rushed to his bookcase and picked Kelly’s Directory off the shelf. In the Court section, he found her.
Palmer, Arabella. Governess.
She was living in Kings Heath.
Beadle felt the familiar flutter in his guts. The feeling when a big case was near. So near you could taste it. That feeling when you were bearing down on a criminal and just about to collar him. He’d got his man, or woman, almost every time. He had failed only a few times. But those were the ones that haunted him.
And one of them might have swum right back into his net.
He reached for his hat and coat and rushed out of the station.
“I’ll be a couple of hours,” he told Donaghy. “I have to visit a suspect in Kings Heath.”
— 18 —
THE REGISTER OFFICE building was a short walk away, behind Broad Street, and Rachel ran behind Danny as he marched, a man possessed now. She sat in the waiting lounge watching him pace up and down like an expectant father. Only this was about death, not new life.
“Won’t it cause a rift in the space time continuum?” she said.
“You what?”
“That’s what it does in films. You stop her from dying, then we come back to the present and find out the world’s run by monkeys and we’re their pets.”
“That’s Planet of the Apes, stupid.”
“I’m just saying.”
“She looked healthy to me,” he said. “It can’t have been a disease or anything.”
“He recognized you.”
“What?”
“The old man selling the newspapers. He recognized you.”
Danny stopped pacing. “How could he? I’ve never seen him before.”
“Well, he looked like he’d seen you before.”
“That’s impossible.”
“So is travelling back in time by touching a stone.”
Danny looked around. Had anyone else in the waiting room heard that? There were only a couple of young mothers too busy with their new babies, and a podgy guy in a pork pie hat and a goatee beard, but he was staring into space, shell-shocked, red eyed. No one was listening to them.
“Keep it quiet, eh? We talked about it being a secret, between us, yeah?”
The desk clerk signalled him. He rushed over and took the two A4 envelopes. He sat down with her and handed her one. They bot
h opened them and pulled out the green death certificates.
“What does yours say?” he said.
She checked Richard Parker’s name and the panel where it listed the cause of death. “General Paralysis.”
“What’s General Paralysis?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But whatever it is, he gets it in the City Asylum.”
“Struth.”
“What does Amy’s say?”
“Oh God.”
“What?” she said. “What does Amy’s say?”
He handed her the certificate. She stared at the single word in the column.
Murder.
— 19 —
INSPECTOR BEADLE TOOK the electric tram through Moseley and on to Kings Heath. He had a personal coachman on hand, and there had been talk of providing him with a motor car, but he often preferred to walk the streets or take public transport. With a short jaunt like this, the electric tram presented a swift option that was convenient. Sitting side-by-side with real people kept him close to the community he policed. And for a few years now, he had felt more and more remote.
There was something exciting about the electric tram, anyway. The way it hummed, whirred and rattled along, swaying at corners and bends in the road, the rod sometimes sparking above. To be transported this way felt so modern.
He might have been old and ready for retirement, but he had no wish to cling to the old ways.
The tram conductor saluted as Beadle stepped off on Kings Heath High Street, busy with shoppers. He turned into Poplar Road at Lashford’s butchers on the corner, still there after all these years. On Woodville Road, he found he was reciting the names of the villas in decorative plaster relief above each front door. He wondered what their connection might be, other than merely alphabetical.
Xanthus, Whitby, Verona, Ulster, Turin.
Weren’t they all seaports around the world?
Savona, Ramsey, Quetta, Pendleton.
No, some of those were inland. Sites of military victories, perhaps, or great cities?
Olivencia, Newbiggen, Malmedy, Langholm.
All place names, certainly. Though was there any place in the world with the name Olivencia?
Kandapur, Jedburg, Illminster...
They had served as a sequence of identifiers before the street was numbered, of course, but was there a theme? There seemed no logic to it. Could it be a random sequence of names or was there a hidden meaning, a code that might be cracked?
He was a detective and saw a mystery to be solved in everything, but perhaps some patterns in the universe were simply random and were not puzzles to be solved. As he approached retirement, it was a disquieting thought.
He came to Arabella Palmer’s house a little further on, an imposing terrace with a square of garden dominated by a hawthorn bush. He rattled the brass doorknocker and waited.
The woman who answered the door looked surprised, and he thought he had the wrong house.
“Miss Palmer?”
Then he saw it in her eyes. Recognition, followed by the involuntary inward wretch of a bad memory.
“Yes?” she said.
“Inspector Beadle.” He dug in his pocket for his credentials.
“I know,” she said. “I remember.”
“Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “This is merely a courtesy call. If it’s not inconvenient for you?”
She bit her lip and glanced back over her shoulder. The percussion of activity from inside. “It’s fine,” she said. “Do come in.”
He followed her through the Menton-tiled hallway to the rear parlour where five women sat around a dining table, a silver tea service in the centre.
“This is Inspector Beadle,” Arabella said.
The women around the table stiffened. One of them shot up from her chair and shouted, “We’re doing nothing wrong! You can’t arrest us for talking!”
Beadle stared open-mouthed for a moment till he noticed the suffragist pamphlets on the table.
“Bertha, it’s fine,” said Arabella. “I’m sure Inspector Beadle hasn’t come to discuss politics. At least I don’t think he has.”
She turned to him with accusing eyes. They all glared, ready for a fight. He took his bowler off.
“Indeed, ladies, forgive the intrusion. I have come to discuss a private matter with Miss Palmer.”
The woman called Bertha looked to Arabella, whose cheeks had flushed crimson.
“Perhaps we can talk in the front parlour. Forgive me, ladies. Bertha, could you bring the inspector a cup of tea?”
Bertha nodded but did not smile as Arabella showed Beadle back out and guided him to a sofa in the tiny front parlour.
Time had been kind to her, Beadle thought. Though approaching fifty, she still possessed some of the vitality of complexion he remembered from her youth. He wondered if that was due to never having married.
Arabella perched on the adjacent sofa, but no sooner had she sat than she stood again. “I’ll fetch your tea.”
Perhaps she wanted to allay the fears of her friends. Would they think she was a police informer, like Joe Rees? That she was passing on the suffragist campaign activities to the authorities.
Flustered, he wondered if he too had blushed. The thing was, he just wasn’t very confident around people who had been involved in an old case.
Nothing could be worse than death, of course, although the dead were at least, one hoped, at peace with the Lord. Those who had been in the clutches of a murderer, felt his fingers on their skin, his knife at their throat, smelled his stinking breath, there was no treatment for them. They were left to live out their remaining days knowing that Death had held them. His bony fingers still clutched at their ankles, dragging them back to the grave.
In some ways, they were the living dead.
But no one thought of their trauma. All considered them lucky. But Beadle, whenever he had cause to see them – and he did not seek them out – saw it written in their harried eyes.
Beside him on a drum table sat a pile of pamphlets. The Forerunner, Woman’s Journal, Votes for Women. A handbill for a reading by Arthur Conan Doyle at Cornish Brothers booksellers, tonight. Was Conan Doyle coming back to Moseley? No, not the Moseley village shop. The New Street store. But he was here in the city. Tonight. How curious.
Beadle checked the bookshelf. Volumes of Sherlock Holmes. The public’s obsession with bloody gentleman detectives. But she also had leather bound volumes of Austen, the Brontës, Melville, H.G. Wells, and Oscar Wilde.
Life had been reasonably kind to Arabella Palmer, which was good, in view of what she had suffered. She was a successful woman, teacher, political pioneer, and she would not want reminding of the past.
He wished he hadn’t come.
She bustled through with a cup of tea on a pewter platter. He fiddled with pouring milk and adding sugar, wishing he had refused; thinking he might knock the milk jug over. His hulking frame was too big for this room, for this china tea set.
Arabella Palmer perched on the chair across from him, her delicate hands curled in her lap, her back straight.
“I’m sorry that I called,” he said. “I have interrupted your meeting.”
“We are rather used to our activities being disrupted by the police,” she said.
“And I assure you I have no interest in your activities. At least, professionally. You have nothing to fear from that.”
“It is at the hands of your profession that women from our movement are this minute being force-fed in Winson Green Prison. You have just met a woman who has suffered this torture.”
Bertha Ryland. He remembered her now from police photographs.
He sighed and sipped his tea. This wasn’t going how he’d imagined. He had faced down murderers and the most vicious criminals Birmingham had to offer, but a room full of suffragettes made his stomach turn.
“I would hope,” he said, “that the last time we crossed paths, it was my profession that protected you.”
She looked at he
r fingers, twisting a handkerchief in knots. “It was not the law that saved me from the hands of a murderer,” she said. “Not entirely.”
“And this, I regret to say, is the reason for my visit.”
“After twenty-four years, you come with news?”
“He was seen. Yesterday.”
She gripped the frilled collar at her throat. “Who?”
“Pearce,” he said. “Daniel Pearce.”
She heaved a sigh of relief.
“I have had a report of his appearance. In Moseley. Though the report is a little flimsy. The man who was seen bore a striking resemblance. Although it was said he looked younger.”
“Younger? I don’t understand.”
“It was the considered opinion of the witness that the man in question might not be Daniel Pearce, but his son.” His eyes went to the bookshelf. “Unless, of course, the works of H. G. Wells have more truth to them than we know.”
He smiled, but it was a poor joke. Arabella Palmer was not laughing.
“Why would his son concern me?” she said.
“It wouldn’t, of course. I meant no offence.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
He put his teacup to one side, reached for his hat, and stood. “I came to see if you had seen him; if he had made contact with you. I can see that is not the case.”
Arabella looked up at him with eyes glinting tears. “Why on earth would he come to see me?”
“You seem to forget, madam, that Daniel Pearce was a murder suspect in an unsolved case.”
“You know as well as I do that it wasn’t him.”
“None us of know. We are all left in the dark, with our doubts.”
He walked out to the hall and didn’t care if she showed him out or not. The women in the back parlour stopped talking to listen. He had opened the front door and stepped out when he turned to find Arabella right behind him.
“I know you can’t see it,” she said, “but I believe Daniel Pearce saved me from that murderer.”
“I believe that too,” he said. “But his disappearance left many questions unanswered. And what happened so soon afterwards... well, it haunts me, Miss Palmer. It should haunt us all.”