Touchstone Season One- Complete Box Set

by Andy Conway

  Again, the hand to her throat.

  Beadle put on a smile. “I noticed the handbill for the talk by Mr Conan Doyle tonight. Are you going?”

  She looked down at her feet. “I don’t think it would be appropriate. He has said all he needs to say.”

  “Mr Conan Doyle paints a very inaccurate picture of crime fighting,” Beadle said, as jovially as he could. “Still, quite a coincidence. Both of them back here at the same time, what?”

  He tipped his hat and edged around the garden gate with just one look back.

  Nothing. Daniel Pearce had not made contact with her yet. If he had, it would be written all over her face. And there was nothing on Arabella Palmer’s face but the ghosts of bad memories.

  — 20 —

  DANNY GOT OFF THE BUS at Moseley village and Rachel followed him across the green.

  “She’s good looking, isn’t she?”

  “What does that have to do with it?

  “If she was a minger you wouldn’t be thinking of saving her.”

  He turned, offended. “Rachel, a girl is going to be murdered and we have the ability to prevent it and all you can say is it’s because I fancy her?”

  She laughed suddenly, not even listening. “Look. We were right here. Last night. A hundred years ago.”

  He looked around at it all with her. Moseley village as it was today, remembering how it had been last night in the gaslight gloom.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s bizarre.”

  “Do you keep thinking it’s not real?”

  “Then or now?” he said.

  He didn’t know anymore. Then seemed more real than this. He saw Amy Parker’s green eyes and remembered how he couldn’t take his own eyes from hers. He remembered how soft her hand felt when he’d reached out to shake it. He’d thought of little else n the last 24 hours.

  They walked up the village to Buygones, the junk shop next to the Prince of Wales pub, and stepped inside. It was a pirate’s cave of objet d’arts and old tat, with a strong 1930s retro feel. The owner, Mitch, was a guy in his forties who dressed in 1930s casual, his moustache waxed up into points. He had a cravat on and a waistcoat and armbands on his shirtsleeves. He was even pouring tea from an art deco teapot and eating from a plate of cucumber sandwiches, cut into triangles. The only anomaly was the laptop on his wooden counter.

  “Hi,” said Danny, putting on his posh voice. “I wonder if you can help. We’re looking for...”

  Mitch held up a finger while he finished pouring.

  “Tea?” he said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I can’t drink it all myself.”

  “Er, no. Thanks. Do you do coins?”

  “I don’t want tea either, thank you,” said Rachel.

  “Old coins,” said Danny. “1912 if you’ve got any.”

  Mitch measured him up for a beat. “1912, eh?”

  “If you have any.”

  “It’s your lucky day,” he said, and pulled out a presentation pack of mint condition coins from under the counter. Danny took it and admired them.

  “Full set,” said Mitch. “Farthing, ha’penny, penny, threepence, sixpence, shilling, the florin... And a half crown.”

  “How much are these?”

  “Fifty quid.”

  “What?” cried Rachel. “There’s only about a pound there.”

  “Actually,” said Mitch. “There’s less than a pound. Your halfcrown is thirty pence, florin’s twenty-four, shilling’s twelve pence and the rest make a grand total of... seventy-six and three-quarter pence.”

  “So nearly a quid then,” said Danny.

  “Not even close,” said Mitch, who was enjoying himself much more than an explanation of old coins merited. “There were two hundred and forty pence to the old pound.”

  Rachel rolled her eyes.

  “And this seventy-seven pence,” said Danny.

  “Seventy-six and three-quarters.”

  “That’s fifty quid in today’s money?”

  “No way,” said Mitch. “But these are. They’re collector’s items. Mint condition.”

  Rachel took charge. “Fascinating as this is,” she said. “Do you have any not mint coins that collectors aren’t interested in?”

  Mitch sighed and pulled out a grubby old Oxo tin full of dirty coins and plonked it on the counter with a clatter.

  “In there.”

  “Okay,” said Rachel. “See you.” She turned and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?” asked Danny.

  “To get dressed,” she said. She walked out, the door chiming after her, and Danny started rooting through the coins, checking the dates. He looked up at Mitch.

  “Do you have any notes as well?”

  — 21 —

  DANNY WALKED INTO MRS Hudson’s dark and dingy vintage clothes shop, rattling his 1912 change in his pocket. He had managed to buy a small pile of coins and a few absurdly large banknotes for less than a tenner, and Mitch had assured him they amounted to the monthly wage of an average middle class head of household.

  The shop had that smell he hated; the smell you got in charity shops: dead people’s clothes and stale perfume. He saw a Ruritanian military jacket and took it off the rack and held it up against him to the mirror, admiring himself.

  “That’s not the year you’re looking for.”

  He turned, startled. Mrs Hudson was about 70 but there was something in her eyes that appeared younger, and stronger. She didn’t smile and Danny felt suddenly uneasy under her gaze.

  “You’d look very out of place in 1912 wearing that,” she said.

  A long silence. How did she know?

  Rachel bustled out of the changing room in a tweed walking suit.

  “Oh my god, it’s so heavy. How did they walk around in this!” She saw Danny and struck a pose. “Well?”

  “Er... Yeah. That looks great.”

  He looked back at Mrs Hudson. She picked up a gentleman’s suit that was draped over the counter and brought it over to him.

  “Now for you,” she said. “This, I think. Much less... conspicuous.”

  He took the suit and sidled to the fitting room, relieved to escape the old woman’s glare. It was like she’d looked right through him and seen everything he was thinking. He threw the suit on and admired himself in the mirror. He looked rather dashing, if he did say so himself, and he realized something that surprised him: he wanted to make a good impression on Amy Parker when he saw her next.

  — 22 —

  AFTER BEADLE’S VISIT, the meeting continued. Arabella tried to brush aside their questions, but she could see that her suffragist comrades might suspect her of being an agent provocateur, so she came out with it: the whole sorry episode from twenty-four years ago.

  She had been running ever since, running to stand still. She had run so that this would never define her. But here it was, all these years later, still haunting her waking moments.

  Seeing that they would talk about this all day, she told them it was something she wished to forget and turned the matter back to their campaigning.

  For an hour, she lost herself in a discussion of the growing militancy of the movement. Holding polite public meetings and smashing windows in London was not enough anymore; now the talk was of setting fire to post boxes and buildings, bombing a canal. Bertha had an idea to walk into Birmingham Art Gallery and slash a valuable painting.

  They debated this for an hour. Could they countenance destroying a work of art? Bertha made an impassioned speech about her own mother’s campaign to bring art to the working classes, but a society whose government denied women the vote, and imprisoned, force-fed and drugged them when they protested, was not a civilisation at all. What’s more, it was a civilisation whose free press attacked its own women and portrayed them as sub-human. This ‘civilisation’ did not deserve fine art.

  When they had gone, she stood in the front room, where Inspector Beadle had sat, staring at the hawthorn bush and the sparrows fee
ding on its berries, her mind in a whirl.

  She must have stood frozen like that for an hour, for she came to, suddenly aware that she had been in a trance, and had long ago stopped thinking of bombing public buildings, but had been thinking of Daniel Pearce.

  She ran up the stairs and emptied the great blue tea chest that looked like it might contain a pirate’s hoard of treasure, but was packed with bed linen and old clothes. At the bottom, wrapped in muslin, was a sketchbook.

  The one thing of Daniel Pearce’s she had saved.

  Slumped on the floor, against her bed, she flipped the pages. Haunting, lurid dream sketches. She had remembered being distraught at his graphic, violent paintings of nudes. They had seemed obscene at the time, though in her memory not so much now.

  These sketches, though, were disquieting for an altogether different reason. The feverish imaginings of a disturbed mind, they seemed to be frantic, obsessive drawings of fantastical figures: a man who could summon up hurricanes and destroy cities; a red-haired woman swooping from the sky like an avenging harpy; a brown-haired girl with stars in her eyes standing by a gravestone, which was clearly St Mary’s churchyard.

  The scariest: a man who looked rather like Daniel, standing on a train platform, wearing a bowler hat, pointing a pistol at a clock, and fading from sight, so that he was half-transparent.

  Scribbled along the side, the words, Young and erring travellers we, All our dangers do not know.

  She knew the words. Yes, from a book she’d had as a girl. A Religious Tract Society novel forced on her by her father. Milly’s Trials and Triumphs. It had been designed to terrify young girls into following the ways of God. What a failure it had been. She remembered Daniel Pearce had been obsessed with the line.

  Young and erring travellers we, All our dangers do not know.

  Hot, woozy, as if the pages had infected her, she reached under the bed for the chamber pot and retched up the undigested tea and cakes of the afternoon meeting.

  Emptying it out in the privy at the bottom of the garden, she wondered at Inspector Beadle’s insinuation. She had suffered a profound trauma and her recollection of that fateful night was unclear.

  Could Daniel have been a murderer?

  This person she was, Arabella Palmer, was supposed to have died. Daniel had saved her life twice over, she was sure.

  Some nights she felt that she did not belong on this Earth. What would happen if one saved a life that was destined not to be? What catastrophe might that unleash on the world?

  She threw on her long coat and broad, ostrich feathered hat and marched down the street, the cold air bringing colour to her.

  She had crested the hill of School Road before she thought of where she was going. But of course, it was obvious. There was only one place to go.

  Turning into Oxford Road, she saw the spire of St Mary’s through the bare trees, then realized, no, it wasn’t. St Mary’s didn’t have a spire. It was the Baptist Church they had built the year he had disappeared. Once she was walking past it, she could see the crenulated battlements of St. Mary’s. At the entrance to the Botanical Gardens on the corner, she crossed the road and marched through the lychgate, taking the path round to the graveyard.

  At the corner of the church, she avoided a certain flagstone. It had always sent a shudder through her, as if someone had walked over her grave. She skirted it and came out to the spacious vista of the churchyard.

  This was where he had always come. It was a place that had seemed to fascinate him. She took the first path along the rear of the church building, passing a freshly dug grave, not stopping, breathless, as if some invisible force were pulling her to the spot at the lower end.

  That grave, shaped like a child’s cot. The one he was always drawn to. Something about it that had always fascinated him.

  She halted, catching her breath, some twenty yards from the gravestone. Looking around, she expected to see him, coming to her through the tombstones. A phantom come at dusk to take her soul.

  The air hummed, pregnant with summer storm static. She had seen no flash of lightning, but cowered anyway from a thunderclap she expected to crash over her head any moment.

  Then the air around the gravestone seemed to fold in on itself and pop. She shrank behind a tall granite monument in the shape of Cleopatra’s needle. Two people stood beside the gravestone. A man and a woman. Arabella checked around. She hadn’t seen them enter. Where could they possibly have sprung from?

  She peered from behind the needle.

  Daniel.

  She shouted his name in a silent scream.

  They did not hear, but skulked away, through the wrought-iron gate and down the alleyway that led to the village green.

  Her knees buckled and she slid down, her skirts ballooning around her. As she wept, slumped in the cold grass, she thought of a book she had at home. It was Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

  It was him. She knew it.

  But it was not the man she had almost married, but the Daniel from that day when, only ten years’ old, she had first set eyes on him.

  — 23 —

  RACHEL AND DANNY WALKED gingerly through the churchyard, awkward in their costumes, hoping no one would be around to see them. They’d both covered up with overcoats so they didn’t look too strange on the way to the church and had their hats in carrier bags.

  “Do you think she believed us, about making a student film?” said Danny. “There was something funny about her.”

  “Funny? She didn’t crack a smile once.”

  “I don’t like her,” Danny muttered.

  “Even after she gave you a discount.”

  They reached the gravestone and took their hats out of their bags, put them on, took off their overcoats and stuffed them into the bags. Danny shoved both carrier bags under a nearby bush.

  Rachel glanced around making sure no one could see them: two Edwardians standing in the local churchyard at night. She tried not to laugh when she thought they’d probably make anyone think they were seeing ghosts.

  “Okay,” said Danny. “Let’s do it.”

  They were through to the other side in an instant, still amazed at the sharp contrast in background noise.

  There was no drunk there this time. The churchyard was as empty as it was in the present, a hundred years from now.

  They pushed through the creaking wrought-iron gate and she noticed for the first time that it was cleaner in this year. She hadn’t noticed it the first time. They walked swiftly down the dark space of the alley, to the door of light at the end.

  They emerged from behind the billboard onto the green and stood, looking around in wonder at it all.

  A busy crossroads with its Edwardian throng, horse-drawn carriages rolling this way and that, a line of carriages pulled up by the cabman’s shelter, the horses silent, brooding. The electric tram sailed through the crossroads, heading for the city.

  No one looked at them. They were right at home. Danny held out his arm and Rachel wondered what he was doing.

  “Take my arm,” he said.

  “Oh.” She slipped her hand in the crook of his arm and they set off up the street.

  The Fighting Cocks pub looked exactly the same but the further up they walked, the more the buildings changed. The bookmakers on the corner was a grocer's. Where the two supermarkets now stood were a row of imposing Victorian redbrick shops with their wares out on the street and colourful hand-painted signs with ornate designs. They passed a fishmonger, a baker, a tiny WH Smith's newspaper agents, a watchmaker, a linen draper, another greengrocer, a china and glass dealer, a boot maker, and then they saw that Lloyds Bank was still there on the corner.

  They crossed Woodbridge Road and admired the imposing Shufflebotham's Stores on the corner with the turret above and a fleet of carts outside. As they walked past more shops, Rachel couldn’t help but stare at the people: a man with the most enormous set of bright red whiskers, wearing a cricket cap; a lady with a pale face and velvet dress
who held a handkerchief to her nose; a one-legged old soldier with a grey beard holding out his military cap. Danny threw a coin in there and the old man nodded and croaked

  “Thank you. God bless you, sir.”

  Danny looked embarrassed, not at all the smug expression she’d expected. She squeezed his arm and then regretted it.

  They walked past the Prince of Wales pub and on over the crest of the hill and began to descend down to Balsall Heath. Everything was so different she now realized, even though they were the same streets. Most of the houses were different, the paving stones on the pavement were different, the drainage grids, the pavements were lower, the kerbs smaller, more rounded, the road surface rougher, the road markings, the lamp posts, the lack of road signs; nothing was the same and if nothing was the same, how could it be the same place?

  Danny crossed over to the other side and she didn’t ask why, just went with him. He seemed to have a plan of some sort. They walked on and he eventually stopped a hundred yards short of the Brighton Road crossroads, beyond which the street seemed to thicken with life, hazy in the distance, as if further on, Balsall Heath seethed with anger.

  Danny nodded at a terraced house across the road.

  “That’s where she lives.”

  She stared and tried to imagine how many people had lived there in the past hundred years and wondered who lived there now, back in her present.

  “I’ve walked past this so many times,” she said.

  “I know. Too weird.”

  “So, what’s the plan?”

  “I’ve no idea,” he said.

  He looked at a loss and she was disappointed in him for the first time. She’d thought he’d have it all worked out and know what to do.

  “You must have thought of something. We’re here now.”

  “All right then,” he said. “I’ll knock on the door and say “Hello, Mr Parker. Your daughter’s going to be murdered on Saturday and you’re going to cark it in the loony bin next month, probably because it’s you that killed her. Oh, did I mention I’m from the future?”“