Touchstone Season One- Complete Box Set

by Andy Conway

  She brushed herself down, checked herself in the mirror one last time, unable to look that stranger in the eye, and set off for St Mary’s church.

  — 20 —

  DANNY THOUGHT HE LOOKED quite the part in his 1940s suit as he walked through the churchyard. As soon as he’d passed through from his own time, he’d been overwhelmed by the smell of burning, almost choking on the thin film of acrid smoke dust that hung in the air.

  If he was right, it was late November 1940. He knew exactly where Amy Parker was; he had a list of every bomb that would fall on Birmingham for the duration of the war; and coins with the king’s face jingled in his pocket.

  “Hands up!”

  He turned, alarmed and raised his palms above his head, even though he’d heard the voice and knew it was a child’s. Seeing the air raid the other night and being seen by that ARP warden who’d chased him back into the churchyard had made him fearful.

  The boy was a raggedy kid in shorts, with jam jar bottom specs and he was pointing a stick.

  “Hands up, Jerry!”

  Danny smiled and glanced around nervously, hoping there were no adults there to hear. No one else seemed to be around, except a little brunette girl in a raincoat and beret.

  “Hey there, chap,” he said. “Don’t be scared. I’m English.”

  The boy lowered his stick. “That’s all right then. Thought you was a Jerry.”

  “At ease, Corporal,” he said, and the boy put his stick by his side and saluted.

  Danny reached into his pocket and pulled out something wrapped in silver paper.

  “You look like just the man who can help me,” he said.

  The boy smiled nervously, curious.

  “Now, I bet you’re a clever boy, aren’t you?”

  The boy nodded.

  “And I bet you can tell me what date it is today.”

  “Thursday,” said the boy as quick as a flash.

  The girl still stared and said nothing.

  “That’s the day, yes,” said Danny. “But what month is it?”

  The boy looked at him like he was mad. “Don’t you know what month it is, mister?”

  “Well, yes, of course I know what the month is, and the year, but I’m asking you. It’s what a private is supposed to say to his superior officer. Name, rank and date. Everyone knows that.” He opened the silver paper to reveal a slab of dark chocolate. “And if you tell me, you can have some chocolate.”

  The boy’s eyes widened and so did the girl’s. Danny wondered if they’d ever tasted chocolate. He’d decided to bring a few bars along as possible currency. It was easy to buy cheap bars of chocolate and throw away the wrappers. He’d also bought a few pairs of nylon stockings too, procured in a fit of embarrassment from a local boutique whose clientele was almost exclusively old ladies. They were also apparently useful currency, and he thought they might make a decent gift for Amy Parker.

  “Ron Bell, Corporal, 21st of November, 1940, sir.”

  “Good lad,” said Danny, breaking off a square each for them and handing them over.

  Ron had his in his mouth instantly but the girl looked at hers for a while, watching it melt against her fingertips. She sniffed at it and bit a corner off and puckered at the bitter taste. He thought she was going to spit it out, but the sugar hit her tongue and she smiled and nibbled at the rest.

  “Okay, Corporal Bell. Thank you very much. I’ve got to go now. Important mission.”

  He saluted and marched off up the graveyard. He felt uneasy about taking the back gate into the alley after seeing the warden last night, so he thought it best to leave the churchyard through the lychgate onto St Mary’s Row, where he could walk on up Wake Green Road and circle round the backstreets of Moseley to where Amy Parker lived. He only hoped he would get to her before Rachel.

  — 21 —

  RACHEL THOUGHT OF DANNY for the first time, just as she was entering St Mary’s church. He passed through her mind like the shadow of a bomber passing over your house. He would be here, she thought. He would have followed her through, knowing she’d come to kill Amy Parker.

  But so far no sign of him.

  She stepped into the church and the clamour of the rest station. It seemed there were more people than yesterday, some of them clustered in the dark pews now.

  Of course. More bombs, more people homeless. She wondered where they were going from here, where they would be rehoused, and how long that might take.

  Winnie bustled among them, handing out mugs of tea. Their eyes met but she gave no smile. Rachel went over to the tea station, took off her coat and set to work.

  “Good morning, Sleeping Beauty,” Winnie said when she came back. “Or good afternoon I should say. Near enough, anyway. Didn’t think you were going to bother today.”

  “Sorry, Winnie,” Rachel said, wondering why she felt she was in Winnie’s bad books. “I was out all night, working on ARP with Charlie. Don’t think we got back till dawn.”

  Winnie stopped short and looked her up and down, as if she’d just said she’d been out clubbing. “What’s a girl like you doing that for?”

  “There are lots of girls like me doing that.”

  “Yes, and I didn’t think you were that sort.”

  “That sort? I don’t understand. There’s lots of women working for the war effort. Just like we’re doing here.”

  “Well I think you can either work day or night, but you can’t work both, if you don’t mind me saying. You can do your bit and no more. That’s what I think.”

  It was guilt. Winnie was babbling on to cover the uncomfortable feeling that other women were doing more than her in the war effort. It was as if it was a voluntary job and no more than that. She clocked off from making tea for bomb survivors and then went home and knitted cushion covers.

  Winnie plonked a newspaper on the table. “Look at that. Nothing about it in the paper. Like it didn’t happen. It’s got to have been worse than Coventry last night, and we’ve had it two nights in a row.”

  “Perhaps it was too late at night to make the morning edition,” Rachel said, a wave of exhaustion sweeping over her.

  “Nothing on the radio either. Our own newspapers and the radio, they won’t tell us the truth. It’s all propaganda. If you want to know if your street’s being bombed tonight, listen to Lord Haw Haw. He’ll tell you. And he’s always right.”

  “Perhaps they don’t want to let the Germans know they’ve hit their targets.”

  “Pfft. As if they don’t know.”

  It was all sickeningly familiar. She was a clone of her mother, even spewing out the same dreary arguments. And this is the family line I’m trying to save, she thought.

  Then she corrected herself. It’s me I’m trying to save, not them. They will all carry on with their lives. Winnie will bring up her daughter, Olive, and Olive will have a son, Martyn, and he will grow up exactly the same way, but he just won’t meet Lorna Foster and have a girl called Rachel, and somehow the reason is Amy Parker and her daughter, Maddy. This family line will carry on exactly as it did in the stack of photographs in her pocket. It was just Rachel who wouldn’t be born. In this, she thought, she was just as selfish.

  “Well, Coventry is finished,” said Winnie, “and Birmingham’s next. Won’t be long. It’ll be a blessed relief once Hitler invades. Then the bombing will stop.”

  Rachel slammed a tin mug on the trestle table top, sudden fury burning in her. She said, “Oops,” to mask it, but felt no less angry. Mary Lewis had gone home from the secret meeting, the Top Secret invasion committee meeting, and blabbed it all to her daughter while they sat and crocheted the night away.

  Had Mary Lewis told her daughter that Rachel wasn’t Charlie’s cousin from London, but an agent from Control; could she have been that stupid?

  There was nothing in Winnie’s manner that suggested it. Quite the opposite. Winnie only seemed annoyed at her being late, and having ideas above her station by putting more into the war effort. Perhaps, Mary Lewi
s hadn’t been that indiscreet, but she’d blabbed about Official Secrets and that was criminal.

  In her own time, Rachel recalled stories of people who’d served at Bletchley Park – those civilians were serving there right now, trying to crack Nazi codes – and no one ever knew about their war work. Most of them took the secret to their graves, never told a family member, never wrote about it. They were the secret heroes of the war and kept it to themselves, even forty, fifty years after the war. And here was Mary Lewis, hastily conscripted into the Secret Intelligence Service and blabbing about it to her family over dinner.

  She had a tray of ten mugs filled and set out to distribute them.

  “I’ve done all the camp beds,” said Winnie. “You can take that lot to the pews.”

  She ignored her, enjoying the peace and quiet as she dispensed tea and sympathy. It took two trips to cover everyone cramped into the pews, and just as she’d finished, Amy Parker arrived with her girl, Maddy.

  Rachel felt a wave of sympathy flood her soul. She puzzled over what this silly feeling might be, and realized it was camaraderie. They had spent the night out there together under the roar of the bombs, trying to save people.

  And now she’d gone and made a friend of her enemy.

  “Here she is,” said Winnie. “The Queen of blooming Sheba. Turning up when it pleases her.”

  “Do you know she works as an auxiliary ambulance driver all night?”

  She hadn’t meant it to put her straight at all. She genuinely wondered how much of a secret it was.

  Winnie ruffled and took the news in her stride. “I mean, who does she think she is, trying to fight the war all on her own? There’s plenty of men here to do it. The whole blooming British army just came crawling back from Dunkirk. They’re fit enough and qualified enough to fight it. Stuck up cow.”

  Rachel ignored her, getting the urn ready for a second wave of tea.

  “Not that I’m calling you that, miss. You’re new here and don’t know any better. Amy Parker knows what she’s doing and she’s put a few noses out of joint, that’s all I’ll say on the matter.”

  Rachel nodded and forced out a bitter grin, as if she were joining in on Winnie’s malevolence.

  This was what she’d have to do now.

  It was the stupid ramblings of a bitter, narrow-minded, petty woman. Who could imagine that here, in the rubble of the Blitz, there was still this kind of childish squabbling?

  But anything that deepened the rift between Rachel’s family and Amy’s was to be encouraged. She would have to join in with that snobbery, that petty bullying. She would have to run with the pack; whisper malicious gossip about how she wasn’t fit for decent company.

  “You should probably keep Olive away from her, in case they become friends,” she mumbled.

  “What was that?”

  She had said it, but Winnie hadn’t heard. Even whispered, the words tasted of bile on her tongue. She poured herself a cup of tea to hide the taste.

  She would have to be as narrow and petty as Winnie, but could barely get the words out without feeling sick. She’d come here to kill Amy Parker, but couldn’t even bitch about her. Grimacing on bitter tea and trying not to throw up, she knew she had to do more.

  She walked away, still holding her tin mug of tea, up the steps to the tower, turning in circles as she ascended, dizzy by the time she reached the top and the relief of open sky and cold wind.

  “Oh, I was just thinking about a nice cup of tea,” Gilbert said. “Thank you.”

  He reached out for the brimming mug and she let him have it. She couldn’t drink it anymore anyway.

  “You must get a bit cold up here, standing doing nothing.”

  “A lot better than how I spent the last war.”

  No self pity in his keen grey eyes. The amusement of a survivor, a man who’d come through the worst the world could throw at him.

  She nodded to the skyline. The barrage balloons floating over the city. Columns of smoke still rising here and there. “It’s a different kind of war,” she said.

  “Oh it is that,” he said. “The people at home didn’t know anything about the war we were fighting. But this time the home front’s the battleground. We’re all fighting it, not just the young men.”

  Gilbert took a slurp of hot tea and gasped. “Aaaah, that’s hit the spot. You’re a proper angel of mercy, miss.”

  She leaned over the battlements, to hide her shame, and wondered if she was going to puke.

  She had woken with the dream of being an angel of death, a cold assassin who could kill a woman and her child and go home and eat corned beef for dinner.

  But now even malicious gossip turned her stomach. It was hopeless. She was incapable of doing what needed to be done, and that meant she was as good as dead.

  It meant she had killed herself.

  The graveyard down below, and the touchstone. A couple of children running away up the path. Was that Olive? A brunette girl in a raincoat and beret.

  When they’d discovered the touchstone – what was it, only four or five days ago? – she’d had this secret thought of spending so much time getting to know the people on the photographs in her coat pocket. Her ancestors.

  How had it come to this that she could no longer stand Winnie and Mary Lewis after just a day in their company?

  A flood of guilt again.

  She wanted to spend the day avoiding her great-grandmother as much as possible, but she couldn’t hide up here. There was work to be done.

  She said goodbye to Gilbert and climbed down the stone steps to the clamour of the church.

  — 22 —

  AS DANNY STRODE UP Wake Green Road, he held his slip of paper in his hand — his printout of bombing locations. It was a tip he’d picked up from a book he’d read about personal accounts of skiving during the war. It had always fascinated him because the real-life testimonies had been so at odds with the films he’d always seen about the war, where everyone was a noble hero doing their bit to beat the Jerries. The people who talked about the war in this book had talked about skiving, and bunking off, and the black market, and sex, and it had made you realize that they weren’t particularly bad people, just normal people who thought about themselves more than others. Normal people in a war, who could die any day and sometimes needed a release from the stress of it all.

  One particular testimony he’d always remembered was a soldier who used to skive off by walking around barracks with a slip of paper in his hand — a chitty — which made it look like someone had sent him on an errand.

  Danny wasn’t sure it would work as well, with him being dressed as a civilian, but he’d thought it best to avoid any type of military costume because he had no experience to bluff his way as a soldier or ARP warden. He wouldn’t know who he was supposed to salute.

  He was managing to look reasonably preoccupied and normal, except for the two kids trotting behind him, carrying little bags of shrapnel. These seemed like their prize possessions.

  The girl was called Olive. It was Ron who’d told him this because she had still said nothing, Ron doing the talking for both of them. He hadn’t stopped talking since the churchyard.

  “Mister, what’s your name then?”

  “Okay. It’s Danny.”

  “Where are you going, mister?”

  “I’m going to find an old friend.”

  “And where did you come from, mister?”

  He’d had enough of the kid’s badgering and thought, sod it, say anything. He’s six. It doesn’t matter.

  “The future.”

  Ron took it in his stride. “Is there a war in the future?”

  “No. Not this one, anyway.”

  “So this war’s finished then?”

  “Oh yeah, long finished.”

  “Who wins? Us or the Jerries?”

  “We do.”

  “Yay!”

  The street looked quite normal. It was a typical English row of terraced houses. The only difference was the ga
ping hole that was now there, as if a couple of houses had exploded and spilled their contents out onto the street, leaving a giant pile of smoking bricks and scorched wood. Fire wardens and home guard troops picked through the rubble.

  Danny had intended to walk by swiftly, give no one a chance to talk to him, challenge him, arrest him, but he couldn’t help slowing down to take in the devastation. A few other civilians had crowded round to watch and were gossiping about what had happened last night and who’d been bombed.

  The men on the pile of smoking bricks suddenly were shouting, clustering around a certain point, excited, urgent, dragging something out of the rubble.

  Danny couldn’t make it out, just their backs, but he saw the moment when their excitement, their hope, turned to defeat. He saw it in the slump of their shoulders, the sudden sense of despair that came off them like steam on a cold night.

  One by one, they parted, drifted away, turning to go work elsewhere on the pile, heads down, leaving just a couple of them, and something that looked like a burnt doll.

  But it wasn’t a doll. After a few seconds, he saw that it was the fat, limp, bruised lump of a naked baby, blue eyes frozen, still, dead.

  The crowd of civilians groaned, the women shrieking and covering their eyes. The men took off their hats.

  The two rescue workers who’d been left with it gawped at it for a while until one of them whipped off his jacket and threw it over it and turned away and wiped his mouth, his fist shaking so violently that he snatched it with his other hand and looked like he was praying.

  Danny felt his face go cold and a familiar swell of nausea sweep through his body. He turned and remembered the kids, who were just gazing at the scene and seemed unmoved. He wondered how many times they’d seen this. He shoved his slip of paper in his pocket and waved his hands out like a worried goalkeeper trying to cover their eyes and turn them away.

  “Come on,” he said. “Don’t look.”

  The boy suddenly shouted, “Rat!” and scrambled for a half house brick in the rubble. He was so fast he had it and had thrown it before Danny had seen the rat skittering away.