Touchstone Season One- Complete Box Set

by Andy Conway

  What if she tried to stop them now, while she was here? There was a chance. She could stop the two children meeting at the World Cup street party in five days’ time. But would it make any difference? It had made a difference to her own mother. All she had to do was make sure Martyn became friends with Lorna Foster, not Maddy Parker. She could do this!

  Footsteps echoed in the ginnel and the door slammed down in the back yard. She listened to Charlie climbing the stairs. He knocked before entering.

  “Rachel? Are you awake?”

  “Yes,” she said and her voice broke.

  He came in. Narrow tie, glasses, rolling up the sleeves on his crisp white shirt.

  “My, you look better.”

  “I think I only just woke up.”

  “You’ve been awake lots,” he said.

  “I don’t remember.”

  He sat on the bed and put the back of his fingers to her forehead. “Your fever’s down.”

  “Have you been at work?”

  “I’ve been coming back to check on you every hour. You must be hungry now?”

  She nodded. “I think so.”

  “Good, I’ve bought more soup. You haven’t eaten for 24 hours.”

  He didn’t move from the bed, brushing her hair from her face.

  “Charlie. Why didn’t you tell me about Esther?”

  He looked down, leaned back, took off his glasses and started to clean them with a handkerchief he whipped from his trouser pocket.

  “I did tell you about Esther.”

  “About Danny being her father. You must have known that.”

  He wouldn’t look at her and became much more interested in the latticed window. “I thought you didn’t want me to tell you those sorts of things.”

  “Things that I’ve already told you, yes. But this? This was something I ought to know!”

  He rose from the bed and walked over to the window, staring out of it. “It didn’t seem appropriate to tell you, Rachel. It was Maddy’s private business.”

  “Do you still think I’m going to kill her or something?”

  “Don’t be absurd, Rachel.”

  “I didn’t kill Maddy when I had the chance. I saved her life.”

  “We both know that isn’t entirely true.”

  Tears sprang to her eyes. “I wouldn’t do that! I thought you knew me better than that!”

  He turned back to face her. “I don’t know you at all, Rachel. Not really. I’ve seen you for what? No more than a fortnight, if we add up all the days. You appear in my life for a day or two and then you disappear for a decade or more and come right back again and expect me to pick up where you left off and put aside every loyalty I have to people I’ve known for the last twenty years. And I do. I do that for you. And then you disappear again.”

  “I didn’t know you felt like that. I’ll go.”

  “Don’t be silly. Where are you going to go?”

  “Back home.”

  “I don’t want you to go. Don’t you see that? I want you to stay. Forever.” He put his glasses back on and couldn’t face her. He looked at the carpet all the way to the door and mumbled, “I’ll get your soup.”

  She wanted to scream. She’d asked Charlie to help her get her life back, but that meant a life without him and he no longer wanted to help her do it. He’d hidden the truth about Danny and his daughter from her: the very thing that had destroyed her life!

  She pushed herself out of bed and reached for her blue summer dress, one of the dresses Charlie had bought for her and placed in her wardrobe: her 1966 collection. She let her silk bathrobe fall to the floor. Had Charlie undressed her? He must have. She blushed as she threw on the dress.

  There was a notepad and pen on the bedside table, like in a hotel, she thought. She was his hotel guest. She scribbled a note, folded it and held it too tightly in her fist as she scooped up a pair of sandals and tiptoed to the door.

  Charlie didn’t hear her pad down the stairs and close the door quietly behind her trying not to make the catch click too loudly.

  Moseley village crossroads was thick with traffic. She pushed her feet into the sandals and crossed over to the green and the dank smell of the underground toilet. She waited for the lights to change, hoping Charlie wasn’t looking out of the window and seeing her cross over to Boots on the corner and down the steep fall of Salisbury road and right into the courtyard behind the shops, hidden from him now, unless he’d seen her and was already chasing over.

  A wrought-iron staircase leading up to a landing and the doors to two different flats. She climbed them, weak, feeling the sweat prick all over her body.

  A name on the door scribbled in faded fountain pen on a small card: Mrs Hudson. The shop below; the old lady who ran the costume shop that wasn’t there yet but would be some time soon. The old lady who had seemed to suspect what they were doing, even though she couldn’t possibly know. Of course. She was behind it all.

  Rachel knocked the door.

  — 37 —

  THE GIRL HAD KNOCKED for a while and Kath had listened, not breathing, peeping at her through the spyhole, hoping Danny wouldn’t hear over the sound of the shower.

  How had she found them? Mrs Hudson was right: she had to get out now – the world was beating a path to her door, all to find him.

  Eventually the girl stopped knocking and pushed a slip of paper through the letterbox. Kath listened to her tramp back down the steps before she picked it up and read it.

  Amy Parker is dying. She’s in Selly Oak hospital. Won’t last long. I thought you should know. I’ve just heard about the child you’ve had with Maddy Parker. She will grow up to marry my father. How could you destroy my life so completely? I’m begging you, please do something to stop this and give me back my life. – Rachel.

  A child. So this was it. He had fathered a child and wiped out the existence of this other girl, Rachel. It all made sense now: his talk about the woman he’d been in love with, his mission to win the money, his desperation to hang on until he had it all.

  She padded upstairs and crept into her room. He had stopped showering now. She could hear the rustle of him dressing in the front room.

  She wrote out her last report and placed it in the Winston envelope along with Rachel’s note and locked it in the safe. She threw her things into the small duffel bag she’d brought with her: her 1966 outfits.

  He walked out onto the landing. “Kath?”

  “Just getting changed,” she called through the door. “See you downstairs.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I feel better now. Much better.”

  He waited for a response, hesitating at the top of the stairs then trudged down them. She heard him go into the front room and turn the TV on.

  She crept into his room. A suitcase and an explosion of clothes. She tossed them all into the suitcase, looking around the room frantically to make sure everything was there. She had to do this. There was nothing else for it. She choked back tears. She had to be strong about this: ruthless. He was in love with another woman. He had a child. He had lied to her about it all; never once mentioned it.

  She left his case on the bed and walked down the stairs ready to pull the trigger.

  He was staring at the TV. Another game about to start: West Germany v the Soviet Union. He’d poured himself a beer.

  “Someone called while you were in the shower,” she said.

  He looked up. The flash of fear on his face.

  “A girl I think you know. Her name’s Rachel?”

  Genuine shock now. He put his bottle of beer aside. Another thing that no one in 1966 ever did: drink straight from the bottle.

  “Rachel?”

  “She had a message for you. Someone called Amy Parker is in Selly Oak hospital and is dying. She won’t last long.”

  A gasp, like he’d been stabbed. But wasn’t it Maddy he was in love with, not this Amy who was dying? He was on his feet, head in hands, pacing.

  “Oh God. Oh no. Dying?”

 
; “That’s what it... she said.”

  “And it was Rachel who came here?”

  “Yes. You need to go.”

  He nodded, trying to think, and she saw him pat his waist unconsciously, making sure he was wearing his money belt. He rushed over to the door and pulled his suit jacket from the hook and shuddered into it.

  “I need to go,” he said.

  “You need to go.”

  He nodded absently and rushed out to the front door. She held it open for him.

  “See you later,” he said.

  “Goodbye,” she said, and watched him run down the steps and across the courtyard.

  She did a sweep of every room to make sure there was nothing left of his and found only a tie pin he’d bought at Rackhams. She threw it in his suitcase and placed it alongside her duffel bag in the hallway. Then she washed up and stacked away every plate and item of cutlery, dried it, stored them all away in their proper places. She closed every window and emptied the bin in the kitchen. She left his suitcase at the top of the wrought-iron staircase outside, where he’d find it later with just a note tucked inside the lid saying I’ve gone home – Kath.

  She dumped the rubbish bag in the dustbin downstairs and marched out of the Victoria Parade alley to the village, the tower of St Mary’s church standing proud above the crossroads.

  She walked up to the red telephone box near W.H. Smith’s. It was warm inside and smelled just like the cigar box in which she filed her reports. She dug the business card from her pocket and called the number. It was the only way left she could think to both stop him and protect him.

  Once she’d put back the heavy black Bakelite receiver and heaved the door open, she took a last look at Moseley village in 1966. Her favourite period; the one she’d jumped at the chance to visit. She was going back to 2012 now. It was a shame her mission hadn’t gone at all how she’d imagined; had mostly failed. She wondered if Mrs Hudson would ever trust her with another. It was such a terrible temptation to go rogue and treat the past like your own personal theme park, as Danny had done, with terrible consequences. So stupid, but she understood the temptation.

  She walked on past Mitchell’s butchers which was now La Plancha tapas bar, Rentaset television rentals, Barrow’s Stores, Pickmere’s off-licence where Mrs Hudson’s costume hire shop would be opened in a few years, then crossed Salisbury Road, heading south towards Kings Heath, and passed Lowther’s Chemist on the corner (Chemists rarely move, she thought; there might have always been a chemist on that corner facing Boots), a florist (again, wasn’t it a florist in 2012? Strange how certain shops always stayed the same).

  She walked up the rise of the hill, past terraced cottages and Moseley Gentleman’s Club which would be a pub in a few minutes when she walked back down this road. Just beyond the telephone exchange, she stopped at the wooden fence and gazed up at the Dovecote.

  The street was quiet. A car chugged up the hill and passed on, heading for Kings Heath. No one could see her. She threw her duffel bag over the fence and climbed over. A couple were walking down from further up the road but they wouldn’t see her.

  If anyone had been watching, they would have seen a woman walk up the wooden staircase on the side of the Dovecote. If they had watched long enough, they might have been puzzled as to why she never came back down.

  — 38 —

  HE STRODE ALONG HOSPITAL corridors looking confident and certain. The nurses all wore light blue blouses with white starched pinafore aprons and black stockings, their hair tied up under white caps. None of them asked him if he should be there and he realized that being male in a sharp suit carried a weight of authority, and he liked it.

  He found the ward and hovered, trying to make her out amongst the lying wounded. It was populated by decrepit old women and he marvelled at how he’d only seen Amy Parker for the first time a few months ago as a teenage girl who stopped his heart with her beauty.

  She was there, at the end of the ward, slumped in her bed, no one around. He crept over to her, as if not to scare her again, his heart thumping like mad, remembering the scream that had made him run like a frightened boy.

  She had looked old when he’d seen her at her door a few nights ago, but now she looked like she’d aged another twenty years. Her skin was yellowing and cracked and a skeletal wrist jutted out of her pink nightdress, obscene in contrast. He tried to face the reality of it: this was Amy Parker, the girl he was in love with, an old woman choking in a bed.

  She murmured through puckered lips, eyelids fluttering open, then widening with alarm at the sight of him.

  “Amy,” he said. Then he didn’t know what to say. Why had he even come here? She was old and dying and hated him and he didn’t know what he’d ever done to her to make her feel that way, only saved her life when her crazy father had tried to kill her. Perhaps that was it: she resented him for putting her father in an insane asylum. Maybe she thought he’d caused it.

  “It wasn’t me,” he said. “It wasn’t me who killed your father. He was always going to end up there. I just stopped him killing you. Don’t you see that?”

  There was panic in her eyes, even though she couldn’t move. She looked at him like he was a stranger, an intruder.

  “I know it’s hard to understand. I barely understand it myself. It’s this time travel thing. You were a girl a few months ago. To me.”

  Whispered mumbling from her mouth barely forming words.

  “I’m going to come back to you,” he said. “Come back to you earlier. I don’t know how. I’m going to try. So we can be together, younger. I promise you.”

  Her lips curled into a spasm of pain, or was it a snarl?

  “No matter who tries to stop me. I’ll come to you. But for now, I’m going to make sure your family are cared for. Your daughter. I’ve got money. A lot of money. In a few more days she’ll have a fortune.”

  Amy’s head rocked from side to side and her mumbling grew louder. He looked around to see if anyone had noticed.

  She raised her bony hand and pointed a finger at him and tried to say something.

  He clutched her fist in his and leaned closer to hear, feeling her stale breath on his cheek.

  “Door... in... grave,” she croaked.

  A wheeze rose from deep in her throat and became a strangled moan that throttled her.

  He jumped back as her arm flopped onto the bed and her throat rattled. Her eyes glazed over and he saw the light leave them.

  Amy was dead.

  He staggered back, a lowing moan rumbling from his chest, and was hit on the shoulder. Wheeling around he looked into the face of Amy Parker as a younger woman and thought for an instant that he was seeing the spirit that had left her body. But her glare of alarm, the blonde beehive and the cup of tea in her hand now sploshing over her fingers told him this was her daughter, the daughter who had answered the door to him a week ago.

  She screamed and dropped the cup. It shattered on the polished floor and he heard nurses running towards him and everyone now looking at Amy’s bed.

  He ran out of there, down long corridors, lost, tears blinding him, running for the square of blackness that promised night and air and freedom, and collided with D.I. Davies and two police constables who had him face down and handcuffed in seconds.

  — 39 —

  IT WAS TYPICAL OF DANNY, she thought. There had been no word from him since she’d left the letter last night. She had written Charlie’s address on it, top right, as her Nan had once taught her to do and she’d never had the opportunity to use, having never once written an actual letter. She’d even printed the phone number. He could have called, even if only to tell her to leave him alone and keep her nose out of it, but nothing. It was what he did: avoid facing up to things.

  She fiddled with the brass clasp of the powder blue trunk and felt its lid breathe out.

  Amy Parker’s house, which was now Maddy’s house, had a gloomy air of mahogany and smelled of furniture polish and making do, but the trunk gave up a
new scent: the tinge of Yardley Lavender and secrets.

  She looked over her shoulder and wondered if she should continue. Maddy had told her to go through it because she couldn’t quite face it herself. Rachel could hear her shuffling through papers downstairs and humming along to an absurdly cheerful tune on the radio.

  But wasn’t that what she’d been doing herself – avoiding facing up to Charlie?

  Since their harsh words she’d barely talked to him and he’d just mumbled and fidgeted and avoided looking at her this morning when he’d left for the office. She’d told him she was going to call on Maddy to help her deal with the funeral arrangements and the aftermath of her mother’s death. It was not out of kindness, she realized, but a much more selfish need to avoid Charlie.

  The trunk was mostly full of dresses: beautiful, old-fashioned dresses from the 1920s and ‘30s. She laid them out on the bed – the bed where Amy Parker had slept until recently – and saw that each one was a snapshot of her youth and blossoming womanhood. The flapper’s dress might have been for the first time she’d stepped out; a slimline peach ball gown with silver brocade from a 1930s dance; a blue woollen dress just below knee height with puffed shoulders – she’d seen her in it in 1940. They looked impossibly glamorous but even to Rachel’s untutored eye the cheapness of the material was obvious. She had saved them her whole life like a box of precious jewels, never hoping to wear them again, but each one reminding her of her lost youth and beauty.

  At the bottom of the trunk was a newspaper, musty and browning. She unfolded it and saw that it wasn’t just the lining of the trunk but an article that someone had cut out and saved.

  The top half of the page was taken up with a photograph of three women sitting on wooden chairs, their backs to the camera. Two of the women looked young and had the same dark, bobbed hairstyle. The other woman looked old and hefty and wore a headscarf – could it be a man? All three sat with their arms tightly folded. It looked like a still from an arthouse film.