Touchstone Season One- Complete Box Set

by Andy Conway

  At the curved fold of the paper, there was a line of print.

  They sit in the sunshine at Winson Green Mental Hospital, Birmingham. They are three

  She turned it over and saw the giant headline INSIDE A MENTAL HOSPITAL and forced herself to continue reading the small print at the top:

  of the hospital’s schizophrenics. Acute overcrowding makes their treatment specially difficult

  She saw that it was a newspaper exposé of conditions at a Birmingham mental hospital which was typical of scores of others across the country. She opened it out and looked back to see the tiny print across the top right of the photograph: October 24, 1953 – ILLUSTRATED.

  For a few moments, she wondered why it was there and then she remembered: the death certificate of Amy’s father, which had told them he’d died in Winson Green asylum.

  Amy Parker had grown up with the silent shame of her father’s mental illness, never referring to it, trying to forget it, then one day in 1953 she’d opened this illustrated magazine and seen a report on the conditions at the mental hospital where her father had breathed his last. She’d read about the squalid conditions which had been condemned as far back as 1893, and she’d cut it out and kept it. Had it been a comfort to her? Had it shown her that the shame wasn’t all hers – that he might never have died in that place if it had been a little more progressive?

  “What’s that?”

  Rachel folded up the newspaper and tossed it back into the empty trunk. “Just some old newspaper lining the trunk. From ten years ago.”

  The floorboards creaked under the lino as Maddy walked over to see the dresses laid out on the bed. “Blimey, they’re old fashioned.” She laughed a little and her eyes glistened, caught between laughter at outmoded fashions and the memories of her mother, younger, wearing them.

  “Are you sure you want to throw them out?” said Rachel.

  “They’re not coming back into fashion any time soon.”

  “They do look lovely, though.”

  Maddy frowned. “Better off gone.”

  “I’ll take them for you, then.”

  Maddy smiled brightly. She had been strangely cheerful since her mother had died and Rachel wondered if it was a bizarre part of the grieving process, hormones and adrenalin running rampant. Perhaps she would put on that cheerful face until the funeral and then become hysterical.

  Maddy opened a wardrobe and took out a battered suitcase. “Put them in this. They can have the case as well. You’re such a dear for helping me with all of this.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Rachel. “It would be too much for you, on your own.”

  Maddy sighed and sat on the bed. “I’m used to that part.” She stared off into space with a strange look of wonder, far away, and Rachel felt she was intruding.

  “Has he been in touch at all?”

  Maddy came to, as if from a trance, and her face flashed furtive suspicion. She got up and busied herself sorting through a jewellery box. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be nosey. It’s just you mentioned him the other night and...”

  Maddy looked up from the box of cheap jewellery as if remembering that, yes, she had trusted Rachel.

  “He came again. The night Mum died,” she said. “He was at the hospital. He ran off but...”

  “That’s what he does, I suppose,” said Rachel.

  She regretted it instantly because Maddy had seemed to be on the verge of saying something more. Instead, she walked to the window and peeped through the net curtain as if expecting to see someone out there watching her.

  — 40 —

  IT MUST BE TUESDAY night now, thought Danny. England would have beaten Portugal 2-1 in the semis and booked their place in the final with Germany; their date with destiny. His bet was unfolding; the bet that would make Maddy Parker rich.

  He had been in a cell for a whole day, only able to calculate the passage of time through the meals they brought him. He was aware of the change in his personality: he had managed to detach himself, as if shutting down his mind one cell at a time, so that every time D.I. Davies came to interrogate him, he stormed out disappointed.

  His mind was wandering, unhinged, daydreaming. He found he could drift for hours without knowing what he’d thought of and only occasionally try to concentrate and work out some of the unusual things that were happening. Such as why D.I. Davies only came to interrogate him alone, obsessively questioning him about 1940 and what his mission had been back then. Weren’t there usually two people present in police interviews? A good cop and a bad cop? And no tape recorder, no notes. What was going on? What was D.I. Davies up to?

  Sometimes he found himself laughing hysterically. Laughing at himself. It was laughable, really, when you looked at it. Every time he came through the touchstone and visited the past, whatever era it happened to be, he ended up in a police cell. Every time, without fail. He might as well walk straight into the past and offer himself up to the first policeman he saw and say, “It’s a fair cop, guv. You can take me now.”

  D.I. Davies had brought in the suitcase and placed it on the table like it was the Ace of Spades. Danny had thought for a moment of Kath and whether she’d been arrested and hoped she hadn’t; she’d been a decent girl and had helped him out, but there was something about her, something he couldn’t put his finger on.

  But anyway, from the interrogation that ensued it seemed D.I. Davies didn’t know much about her and was more interested in why he had a slip of paper with Amy Parker’s address, just like he had in 1940.

  “What is it with Amy Parker?” he’d shouted, the vein on his temple bulging.

  Other times he came in staring at him like he was an apparition, a ghost. Once he’d let slip in a moment of exhaustion, “But it can’t be you, can it?” and he’d laughed at himself, much in the same way that Danny laughed at himself when it all got too much for him.

  He kind of felt sorry for D.I. Davies, in a way. It was all too much for his plodding police brain and he’d got it all mixed up with wartime German spy business, the poor sap. It was a case he could never solve, any more than a baby could work out how its mother could turn a spoon into an aeroplane.

  The thing he’d thought about most was Amy’s last words.

  What had she meant – door in grave? Did she know about the touchstone, after all this time? Was she passing him a message? The touchstone was a gravestone, and it was a sort of door in that you passed through it into a different place, even though it was the same place but in a different time. It was a door in a grave.

  He thought about it for hours, trying to work out what she’d been trying to tell him, and it made him feel as stupid as D.I. Davies. It meant something but no matter how long he turned it over and over in his mind he couldn’t work out what it was.

  He pulled the rough, grey army blanket over him and curled up on the bench. It was cold. He shivered and fell into sleep and found himself standing in a garden at night.

  There had been a storm. He could smell it. The grass was damp and the dirt fresh in the air.

  He looked around with surprise.

  This was real. This wasn’t a dream.

  He wasn’t in the cell any more, he was standing in a garden.

  A gravel path, bricked off flowerbeds, the night sky clouded. He was standing next to a brick tower that was familiar.

  The Dovecote.

  It stood next to the entrance to Moseley Hall Hospital just up the rising hill that took you from Moseley to Kings Heath. He’d never known what it was. Just a brick tower that locals seemed to think was special.

  A car passed by, sliding down towards the village, its tyres hissing on wet road. It looked old. He must still be in 1966. He had escaped his cell, somehow.

  This wasn’t a dream.

  He laughed. How had he done it? He tried to hold the feeling inside him, remember how this feeling tasted, but he felt it slipping through his fingers like trying to hold rainwater or the fading memory of a g
ood dream.

  The light dimmed and he fell through gloom back to his police cell.

  — 41 —

  D.I. DAVIES SWALLOWED the last of the pork pie as he coasted down the Lichfield Road towards Salford Bridge. He brushed crumbs off his lap and eased his foot off the accelerator a little. He always slowed down instinctively at this point, eager to see the old patch again, the neighbourhood where he’d grown up before the war.

  This time he knew he was possibly seeing it for the last time. He felt tears fill his eyes and choked back the last bit of pastry, thumping his chest and coughing.

  The old newsagent’s with the cold milk machine outside; The Muckman pub where he’d had his first drink, a horse trough outside; Roberries the butcher and the bakery next door. Perhaps he could stop and buy an egg custard for his tea break this afternoon. He swore at himself under his breath and knew that if he stopped and bought one, he’d eat it long before any tea break. He swore again as he drove on because he knew he’d buy something somewhere else.

  The grocers where he’d stolen a potato and tried to cook it behind the shops with a match; the wool shop where his mum had bought yarn and knitted him jumpers and socks; Mr Hill’s sweet shop where he’d spent any pocket money he was lucky enough to get; Hall’s pharmacy, a chip shop. Hadn’t that been a watchmaker’s before?

  He turned into Leamington Rd, out of his way, just to see the place: the café where the murder had taken place; the hardware store where they’d bought paraffin; the old barber’s where they’d sat him up on the leather chair, putting a plank across it, grinning at himself in the mirror, getting barber’s knocks at school the next day. Blokes were growing their hair longer now; you couldn’t tell them from the girls.

  He circled round Bridge Road and Copeley Hill to turn into Slade Road, casting a last glance at it in his rear view mirror. It would all be gone soon. He’d seen the plans. In two years it would be a giant tangle of highways, the whole community wiped out for an interchange that looked like a plate of concrete spaghetti.

  He sped up Slade Road, past his old school and turned up the steep rise of Hillaries Road, the car climbing slowly. At the top of the hill, it levelled off and he pulled up outside the first house after the Gravelly Hill railway bridge. Quiet street, leafy. No one around.

  The three-storey mock-Tudor town house had been converted into three flats. The top name said Pete Wethers. He pressed the bell and stepped back along the path. The sash window flew open up there and a head popped out. The expression on its face changed when he saw who it was.

  Davies listened to him clump down the stairs and pull the door open.

  Pete Wethers made of show of standing there, about to ask what the matter was.

  “Put the kettle on then, son.”

  Wethers sighed and strolled back up the smelly hallway. D.I. Davies followed him up the stairs and was out of puff by the time he got to the top, trying not to wheeze too much and show the lad he was struggling. Wethers had a smug grin on his fizzog though. Davies felt his fingers twitch and clenched his fist so that he wouldn’t punch him.

  He walked around the bedsit, pretending to take it all in, but wanting to get his breath back before he spoke. There was a cubicle curtained off in the corner and he wondered if it was a toilet. He pointed at it.

  “Darkroom,” said Wethers.

  He nodded and decided not to look inside. He could smell the chemicals, and underneath, the faint whiff of reefer. He stalked around some more and examined the photographs hanging up on a clothesline across the room.

  A civic reception. The Mayor. Councillor Piplatch. Bernie Powell. He squinted at it. Yes, that was definitely Bernie Powell. Interesting. Bernie was the new kind of criminal: the respectable kind who never got blood under his fingernails; the kind you put in a room full of politicians and you ended up thinking he wasn’t all that bad.

  “So what is it then?” Pete Wethers asked.

  He looked cocky, arms folded, in his tight trousers and pointed shoes and his polo shirt, his hair was too long by a good three inches and he needed a good slap.

  “Danny Moore,” said Davies.

  Good. He’d managed to say it without wheezing. He wondered for a moment if he had pork pie on his lips. He should have checked in the car mirror before he’d got out.

  “Oh, that. What do you wanna know?”

  “Everything.”

  “I don’t know where he is, if that’s what you’re after...”

  D.I. Davies tried not to smirk.

  “... but I know where he was. And who with.”

  He reached over to a stack of cardboard envelopes on a table full of camera parts. He pulled out one and fanned photographs onto the table.

  The iron staircase. Danny walking down it. And others of the girl – Kath.

  “She was the one who first put me onto him. Came into the Post and Mail building and told me what was going down. Led me to him for that shot of him coming out of the bookies in town.”

  D.I. Davies flicked through them one by one. What was her game? Why had she protected him when he’d first called; pulled the search warrant card when she’d already shopped him to a reporter? And then changed her mind all over again to phone up to shop him again. Women, you could never predict them.

  “Then she changed her mind,” said Pete. “Broke one of me cameras. Silly cow. I found out where she was staying anyway; got myself a nice spot behind the fence. Paid the bloke a few quid to use his garden for the day. Got some good shots.”

  D.I. Davies pushed aside a photo of Kath on the steps.

  The next photo was a different girl.

  “I don’t know who she is,” said Wethers. “She just posted a letter, that’s all. Never saw her again. But he left pretty soon after, and that Kath bird walked out after him.”

  D.I. Davies tried not to let his shock show. He knew exactly who the girl delivering the letter was. He’d seen her 26 years ago.

  She was the girl who was with Lieutenant Eckersley that night in 1940 when the police station had been bombed; when Danny ‘Moore’ had last disappeared.

  And, just like Danny ‘Moore’, she had barely aged a day since that night.

  — 42 —

  CHARLIE PLACED THE yellow chrysanthemum on the shelf between the box files for 1958 and 1959. It seemed the kind of daring, creative move that Rachel might approve of. He hadn’t known which plant to buy and had opted for the one with the nice flowers. That was the idea, wasn’t it? Bright colours.

  He had entered the florist’s next door to Lowther’s Chemist on the corner like a man entering a perfumier’s on Christmas Eve, with no idea what to buy or how to ask for it. The lady, Dorothy she’d called herself, had asked him a lot of questions till he’d blurted out, “I just want something to brighten up the office.” He’d walked out with a chrysanthemum under his arm and crossed the road quickly to his shop, hoping no one would see him.

  It looked a little forlorn there amid the grey box files, like an apple tree in Midtown, Manhattan. It hadn’t really made much of a difference.

  He looked around his office and tried to see it how Rachel had seen it. He’d thought it was a perfectly tidy and professional workplace. Did it really need painting bright colours?

  The radio was playing something by one of the new crooners; someone called Tom Jones singing about how once there was a time. He wasn’t sure he liked the new crooners: they bellowed to themselves, unlike the old ones from the thirties who had whispered and talked only to you. He wasn’t sure he liked it but it caught his mood exactly.

  He had had such plans for them this time and they had turned to dust before his eyes. It didn’t make sense: she was only a girl and he was a man. He should be leading the situation, taking control, being masterful. But she had a way of outmanoeuvring him every time. He ended up in her wake, following her dutifully like a lost puppy.

  At times, he felt rage that she was using him. What did he get out of it? Then he would calm himself and ask himself like a
scolding aunt, what did he actually want? And he was always too afraid to answer that question.

  What stood between them was destiny. He knew this would be the last time he would see her. He would have to carry on without her now. This was the end, hurtling towards him like a truck in the fast lane and he was standing there, frozen in the headlights, too scared to flag it down or jump out of the way. Just knowing it would run right over him.

  This morning, over a painfully silent breakfast, she had suddenly asked about the street party at the weekend, and when he’d told her there weren’t any that he knew of, she’d mulled it over for a while and then said, “I need you to organize a street party before the cup final. Can you do that for me?”

  He’d said yes, of course. He always said yes to her.

  There was a knock at the door and Jonathan popped his head around, always afraid to enter.

  “Someone here to see you, sir.”

  “Yes?”

  “A Detective Inspector Davies, sir.”

  He felt fear rise in his throat. Would Rachel call back? No, she had avoided him all week, using the excuse of helping Maddy with the funeral arrangements. Davies, the man who’d once answered to him, saluted him, now a D.I. Charlie had a flash of that night in 1940: a street full of rats, Danny screaming handcuffed in the back of the car, the police station in flames, Sergeant Webster’s body burning inside it, And Clifford Lees too. Rachel pretending to faint in the bomb shelter so Danny could make his escape.

  “Show him in, Jonathan.”

  Charlie went to his desk and opened a file, putting his glasses on, pretending to be working as Davies entered. He looked up and plastered on a fake smile, the kind of smile you might have for an old war comrade.

  Davies had put on weight and his hair was thinning. They shook hands across the table.

  “Davies, how good to see you again.”

  “Lieut...”

  “It’s plain old Charlie now.”

  He offered him a seat and Davies creaked into the wooden chair.