by Andy Conway
“That’s a florin, sir.”
Danny shuffled through the coins in his palm and handed him one. The waiter stayed with his hand held out.
“Oh yes,” said Danny, handing him another coin graciously. “This is for you.”
The waiter looked at it like he’d spat in his palm. “Your fortune went down with the Titanic, then?” He marched off, shaking his head.
“Danny Pearce, you cheapskate,” Rachel laughed.
“That’ll be worth a tenner in a hundred years.”
Rachel watched the waiter go back to his bar and say something to a couple of shabby genteel men propped up against it. They looked over and checked out the new arrivals. One of them – glassy-eyed, trying to focus – looked familiar. She tried to place him.
Another fight broke out: two men punching the sweat off each other to general laughter.
“Okay, I admit it,” said Rachel. “I’m scared too.”
Danny peeked over at Mr Parker, watching the stage and seemingly oblivious to the carnage all around.
“Good evening, sir,” he said.
Mr Parker turned in his seat and inspected them but said nothing.
“It’s quite a lively place,” said Danny with a nervous laugh.
Mr Parker seemed to think about it, then said, “Lively. Live. As surely as I live, I will do to her the very things I heard you say.”
Danny nodded, not sure how to respond. He took a shot of his drink and gasped for air. Rachel did the same and her eyes bulged. Danny coughed and recovered, thumping his chest.
“Yeah,” he said. “You live close by?”
He groaned as it came out of his mouth, and Rachel wondered if it was due to the gin or that he’d realized it was such an utterly useless line of enquiry.
Mr Parker leaned closer and fixed Danny with an intense, crazed gaze. “Numbers fourteen eighteen,” he said. “That’s why she will be punished. For my sin.”
They stared.
Mr Parker looked away, completely normal again.
Over by the bar, Rachel saw the drunk collect himself and clench his fists, staring with glassy venom.
A prostitute came over and whispered in Mr Parker’s ear. He rose from his chair, she picked up his bottle and glass and he followed her through the crowd and out of a side door. They caught a glimpse of him ascending the stairs with her before the door closed again.
“I think we better go now,” said Danny.
“But we still don’t know if he’s the one who kills her.”
“Oh, come on, Rachel. He’s insane. Of course he kills her.”
“I’ll kill you.”
They looked up at the drunk towering over them. Rachel recognized him at last. The drunk from the graveyard.
“Get up,” he snarled.
“I’m all right here, thank you,” said Danny.
“I said, get up!”
He swung a punch, his massive fist arcing in slow motion. Danny ducked in his seat. The drunk wheeled round, carried by the momentum of his fist, which smacked into the nearest sot.
“Oy!” the sot shouted.
The sot lamped the drunk and sent him flying against a crowd of inebriates. Almost instantly, the whole bar was fighting, tables and bottles flying.
“Let’s go!” shouted Rachel.
She grabbed Danny’s hand and tried to push through the pile of scrapping bodies to the door. But the graveyard drunk pulled Danny back.
“Where d’you think you’re going!”
He threw another swipe. Danny ducked and threw his own punch with his eyes closed. His fist hit the drunk in the neck and sent him flying sideways, taking several fighters with him. They were free, almost near the door.
Danny turned, ready to run out of there, but another great big hand grabbed hold of him. It belonged to a great big police sergeant.
“You’ll do!” he boomed. “Come on!”
Danny’s feet barely scraped the ground as the bear of a man carted him outside.
Rachel rushed after.
The police sergeant threw Danny into the back of a wagon. She watched helplessly as other policemen stormed in. They took a handful of fighters and threw them in the van with Danny, brushing off the screaming prostitutes.
She wanted to shout out, like them, but her throat was paralysed by fear.
The sergeant slapped the lock on the wagon and it jolted off into the night.
Danny had been arrested.
— 30 —
“MISS PALMER,” INSPECTOR Beadle whispered. “You haven’t come to break windows, I take it?”
“What a low opinion you must have of me.”
“I wouldn’t want to have to arrest you,” he said, trying to make light of it, and then was taken aback at the thought, the very real thrill of holding her. He shuddered as if to shake the feeling off, like a dog out of the rain, and forced himself to look at the famous author.
Arabella Palmer whispered in his ear. “Shouldn’t I long to see the great man of letters talk about this Piltdown Man, seeing as the Daily Express has now taken to calling every suffragette Piltdown Woman?”
She was bitter and distraught. His joke had fallen down a deep well, to echo a very lonely sounding splosh.
A woman in the back row glanced back with a spiteful glare. Beadle leaned in closer to Arabella Palmer, the scent of her skin intoxicating. It had been so long since he’d breathed in the scent of a woman. He was acutely aware that he was cast out from their society now. An ageing widower working his final days in monastic seclusion.
He wondered if he’d really sought her out over a case at all.
“Thankfully,” he said, “we do not all take our opinions from the Daily Express.”
Conan Doyle finished his reading to thunderous applause and then the lizard-looking chairman asked a few prepared questions: about his interest in spiritualism and why it had developed since 1888.
Beadle felt the back of his neck prickle at the date. When he was here last. When it all happened. The thing that dragged them all back, Beadle and Conan Doyle and Arabella. The thing they could not leave in the past.
As he talked about his work with the Society for Psychical Research, Beadle could see Conan Doyle give him the eye.
“I think Mr Doyle might have recognized you,” Arabella said.
“Perhaps it’s you he recognizes.”
“No, he wouldn’t remember me,” she said.
After a few minutes, Conan Doyle’s face coloured and he avoided Beadle’s penetrating gaze.
“There it is,” said Arabella. “He’s remembered.”
The lady in the back row turned again and shushed them.
The chairman invited questions from the audience and a lady near the front asked when the next Sherlock Holmes story was to be published. The chairman tried in vain to keep the talk to theosophy and quell all mention of the Baker Street detective, but it was not to be.
Arabella pulled on Beadle’s arm and he took in her face again. She seemed suddenly sorrowful and lost. She pulled him away a little.
“I saw him,” she said. “Tonight.”
“You did?”
“It could have been his son. In that you are right. But I felt it was him.”
“He looks so young?”
“Have you read The Picture of Dorian Gray, Inspector? It would explain so much. Do you think a good man can turn evil?”
He held her in his arms. It seemed appropriate right then, though it wasn’t, not with him in his position, and she in hers.
“I’ve seen it too often, I’m afraid to say.”
“You’re not really here on police business, though, are you, Inspector? This is a private thing. You are Captain Ahab, obsessed with the great white whale that escaped.”
She pulled away from him and he let his clumsy hands hang limp.
“The whale will pull you under,” she said.
“If you believe that, what are you doing here, with me?”
She stared into his eyes. This
might be the moment to kiss her, he thought, if this were a love story. But they were not in a love story, they were in a murder mystery, and the detective did not kiss the victim in those sort of stories.
But what was in her eyes, he knew, was a torrent of understanding. That they were both being pulled under the sea by this need to put the past behind them.
A peal of laughter broke their gaze and Arabella Palmer looked at the floor, shook her head and stepped back to watch the performance. Beadle stood behind her, one arm around the cool, white pillar.
A journalist in the front row asked about Conan Doyle’s involvement in the Edalji animal mutilations case in Great Wyrley.
“It is living proof,” said Conan Doyle, looking right at Beadle now, “that the prime suspect is not always the culprit. It is not the first time I’ve had to investigate because the police pursued the wrong suspect.”
Beadle put his hand up and the chairman invited him to speak.
“Why is it that so many modern writers portray the police as bumbling incompetents, when the reality of policing in Britain is that your private detectives and amateur sleuths do not possess the special constabulary powers that would in fact be required to enable them to discharge the detective duties about which you write so freely?”
A gasp of outrage rippled through the audience, that someone dare criticize the greatest detective in the world.
Conan Doyle smiled and nodded. “Perhaps we can trace it back to when public confidence in the police was broken forever by their failure to apprehend Jack the Ripper.”
They applauded, and one gentleman shouted, “Hear, hear!”
“Do you think Sherlock Holmes could have caught him?” a lady asked.
“I’m sure he might,” said Conan Doyle. “If only he’d been given the chance.”
The chairman drew the talk to a close and Conan Doyle signed copies of his new book.
Arabella stepped outside onto New Street and Beadle joined her under the gaslamp on the corner. New Street was desolate now. Life was elsewhere.
“I wonder,” he said, “if our author friend ever got over his own disastrous attempt at amateur sleuthing. It would explain his increasingly hysterical portrayals of police incompetence.”
“Perhaps we are all making amends in our different ways,” she said.
Beadle sighed. “You are right. This is personal for me. I have to make sense of it. But I fear an author of fantasies might make much more sense of it than I ever could.”
She nodded and smiled for the first time. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy. Isn’t that what Shakespeare tells us?”
“Through Hamlet, a character who is quite unhinged.”
“I think perhaps he is saner than any of us.”
Conan Doyle came rushing out, the lizard-looking chairman manhandling him across the street to the station. It was his agent, that was obvious.
Stepping off the kerb, the author stopped and turned. “Good evening. Inspector Beadle, if I remember rightly?” he said.
“Mister Conan Doyle. What a pleasure. I don’t know that you ever got to meet Miss Arabella Palmer?”
Doyle gazed on her, trying to fit the face with the woman he had seen only fleetingly 24 years ago. “Good Lord,” he said. “I have no words. I can only offer my condolences.”
“We tend to offer condolences for the dead,” said Arabella.
“What if I told you,” said Beadle, “that your old friend is back, and very much alive?”
Conan Doyle’s eyes widened with shock. Then he smiled and nodded. “I would say that would not surprise me. Sometimes the end of the story is also the beginning.”
He tipped his hat and the agent pulled him away across the street. They faded into the gaslit fog down the slope to the station entrance on Stephenson Street. It was clear that Arthur Conan Doyle knew nothing.
“I am to home,” said Arabella.
Beadle wondered if he should call in at the station. The thought made him despair. It had to be done, though. Pearce had been sighted yet again in Moseley and perhaps Joe Rees had something to report.
He pointed to the line of hansoms pulled up down the slope, forming a train behind Attwood’s statue, which gazed down on the foot of Corporation Street.
“Come. I’ll take you home,” Beadle said.
“No, no, I couldn’t possibly.”
“Nonsense. I have to call at the station and time is of the essence, but I can see you safely home first.”
Beadle took Arabella’s arm and walked her across the road to the cabstand. Down the slope of the hill, Conan Doyle and his agent disappeared into the mist. The horses stamped their feet and shook their manes against the cold.
He stepped up into the hansom cab and held out his hand, rather like Attwood’s statue held out his hand – an eternal, forlorn question seeking an answer.
Arabella Palmer looked up and down New Street, then placed her hand in his and allowed him to pull her up to sit beside him.
— 31 —
THE POLICE STATION was a riot of swearing drunks being processed and photographed. A magnesium flash blinded Rachel for a moment and she heard Danny shout, “You’ve got to let me go! She’s in danger!”
The mob of police constables press-ganged the drunks before the photographer, each one holding up a chalkboard with their name and crime. They processed them swiftly, bullying the details out of them, while a constable scribbled the chalkboard, then shoved them in front of the camera before being frog-marched to the cells.
She had rushed into the reception area just in time to see Danny photographed. The board he held up said, Daniel Pearce — No Fixed Abode — Drunkard.
The grizzled sergeant held up a hand and growled, “Who’s in danger, sir?”
The constable stopped, holding Danny tight. This was Danny’s last chance to convince them to let him go.
“Amy Parker,” he said. “Her father’s going to kill her on Saturday.”
The sergeant didn’t seem surprised. “And how do you know this?”
“I’m from the future.”
Rachel winced.
Everyone laughed but the sergeant. “In you go,” he said.
The constable pushed Danny down the corridor where shouts and screams echoed off the walls.
Rachel walked up to the sergeant’s desk. He was already writing out his report.
“Excuse me, sergeant,” she said. “I’m with him. That last man. Daniel Pearce.”
He looked up and held her gaze with such authority that she lost her voice for a moment and just croaked.
“Oh yes?” he said. “And are you from the future as well?”
“Er... No. I’m... Uh, sorry about him, sir. I’m afraid the gin was a bit too strong for him. He’ll be normal in an hour.”
The sergeant looked her up and down. “He may well be, madam,” he said. “But he’s staying in here for the night. You can stay too if you like?”
“No. That’s fine, thank you. I’m sorry.”
She walked out as fast as she could, looking at her feet all the way until she was outside.
She stood there, stranded, wondering what to do. It was hopeless.
She set off walking up the dim street, hugging herself, not thinking about where she was going. She would have to go back home, to the present, and leave him here. Perhaps they would release him in the morning and he could make his own way back. Guilt gnawed at her. What if he somehow couldn’t get back to the present? What if he were trapped here forever?
Staying here would be no help to him at all. It wouldn’t change whether he could return home or not, and if the touchstone was going to change somehow and prevent them getting back, she would be trapped here too. She quickened her step and dug her hands in her pocket.
She felt the wad of family photographs in there.
A railway bridge over the road. She was taking the long route back to St Mary’s. Her feet had decided to take her via Anderton Park
Road. Her family’s old house. She could see it as it was then. Her ancestors living there.
She marched through the dim back streets of lower Moseley and found the house. She took out the photograph of Mary Lewis, her great-great-grandmother, posing with a baby in her arms. A photograph that would be taken some time next year. She looked up from the photo to the former family home.
Nan was right. A house this big, back then, back now, meant they had money. Lots of money. She stared at the house for a while. The warm glow of light through the windows. The street was quiet and no one passed by.
They are in there now, she thought. The family that Nan remembers. She, Rachel, was the sole heir of this family. A genetic thread wound its way through a century, from Mary Lewis right to Rachel, and here she was, almost able to reach out and touch her.
She was about to carry on walking up the hill to head for St Mary’s when someone emerged from a side entrance and walked towards her out of the gloom.
A young woman pulling on a jacket over her black maid’s uniform. She slowed when she saw Rachel standing there and hovered uncertainly. Rachel stuffed the photos into her pocket.
“Hello,” said the girl. “Are you calling on Mr Harper?”
It was Mary Lewis, quite clearly. But why was she in a maid’s uniform?
“Er, no,” Rachel stammered. “I was... I used to live in this house and I was just passing by and...”
“You used to live here?”
“Well, no. My family did.”
Mary wasn’t sure what to do. She frowned with suspicion and Rachel recognized the same knitting of the brow from the photo.
“Ah,” said Mary Lewis.
“Harper, you say?”
“That’s right. Mr and Mrs Harper. They’ve been here ten years.”
“Not Lewis?”
“Lewis? That’s my name. I’m Mary Lewis.”
“You don’t own this house then?”
“Me? Own it?” she said, almost laughing.
“But that doesn’t... Did you have a baby this year?”
Mary looked horrified and her hand went to her belly. “How do you... Look, who are you?”
Rachel now realized everything: her grandmother’s delusions, her great-great-grandmother’s lies. She backed away. “I’m sorry,” she stammered. “It’s not this house at all. I’m in the wrong place.”