Touchstone Season One- Complete Box Set

by Andy Conway

  He was going to call on her, knock her front door and explain everything. Surely honesty would work? She had seemed to understand back in 1912. The moment he’d rescued her. She had surely understood then that Danny Pearce had known something about the future; that he wasn’t just a boy from 1912 who had taken a shine to her?

  That feeling again. Every time he thought about Amy Parker. A strange foreboding sensation. Something awful that he couldn’t quite recall. A premonition?

  It wasn’t the usual feeling he associated with Amy Parker: a yearning, empty void in his belly — a feeling that was probably love. Was that what love felt like? Feeling hungry and sick with hunger and unable to eat all at the same time? That was surely love.

  This feeling was different.

  This was a feeling that something terrible might happen, and that something terrible had already happened, and that both things were the same thing.

  Could it be a symptom of being in 1934? A decade where almost everyone had felt the same. The whole of Europe sliding toward the abyss of war and holocaust and no one able to stop it. He had flicked through many books on the subject so that he had an acute awareness of this sense of doom that everyone seemed to possess in the thirties. Everyone in the decade seemed to know that war was coming, and no one had swerved to avoid it.

  He came to the village and couldn’t help glancing over at the alley that led to the churchyard. A sudden gust of wind howled down it and almost blew his hat off.

  Three figures were clustered at the alley’s mouth, huddled in the darkness. They seemed to be painting something on the wall. A girl and two men.

  He watched them from the other side.

  One of them was Rachel.

  He stepped back into the doorway of Boots, still there, as it seemingly always had been, on the corner. Hiding in a shop doorway and watching a woman on the other side of the road. The second time that day.

  He peered through darkness. It was Rachel.

  He realized now that they weren’t painting. They were putting up a poster. One of the men had pasted the wall; the other unrolled the poster and the first man had pasted it in place.

  Rachel was looking around to see if they were being watched. She looked right across at Danny. He pressed further back into the shadow of the doorway.

  If she had seen him, she had shown no reaction.

  Satisfied with their work, they continued walking up the road.

  Danny looked both ways, allowing a sputtering car to pass, and crossed the village green to view the poster. It was the same poster that Fenwick had given him. He took the poster from his pocket and unfolded it, the photograph of Amy almost falling out.

  Benny Orphan in concert at the Moseley and Balsall Heath Institute, with the syncopated accompaniment of Lester Johnson’s Coloured Jazz Orchestra.

  He examined the photo. Amy Parker was going to be there, at that concert. Amy Parker in her ball gown and looking just like she had this morning. A younger girl with her. Both staring at the crooner, who must be Benny Orphan.

  So, Rachel was behind the concert.

  He followed them at a distance, wondering at their paths crossing again. They stopped to paste up another poster to a lamp post outside the Fighting Cocks pub.

  A small crowd had gathered around them so he felt comfortable in walking closer. The crowd seemed to be drinkers from the pub, and as he inched closer to the fringe of the crowd he heard someone shout, “Go and tell Harold about this!” at which one of the men ran inside.

  There seemed to be a lively debate taking place, drinkers shouting questions at the two men who were with Rachel.

  The one man had a fixed smile on his face and seemed unperturbed, but the other looked nervous and was glancing up and down the street. He whispered something to Rachel. She shook her head.

  Danny recognized him now. Charlie. He had looked older and wiser in 1966 but was nothing but a teenage boy here.

  Here was Rachel, who had her own man she’d fallen for in the past. It was all right for her to do that, but not for Danny. Every time he tried to make a connection with Amy Parker — whatever moment in time it happened to be — there was Rachel. She had opposed him from the start. Had wanted Amy to die at her father’s hand. Had raged that it was altering something that had already happened. Had tried to stop him from pushing Amy out from in front of the tram.

  And then she’d claimed that that act had somehow wiped out her existence. She’d been there at the end of Amy’s life, with this friend of hers, Charlie, both of them policing Danny at Amy’s funeral in 1966 and forcing him back to the present.

  She was always there in whatever past he visited, trying to prevent him from being with Amy. But not this time.

  A mob of drinkers belched out of the pub and crowded round. One of them must have been the man called Harold — a young, wiry, ferret-faced teenager with a sneer on his face. He pushed his way to the front and read the poster.

  “Arr, it’s like that is it?” he shouted, putting it on for the crowd. “Bringing a band of darkies here now, are ya?”

  There was a swell of outrage from half the crowd, jeering Harold on, the other half told him to shut his trap. Everyone was arguing with everyone else. A handful of the men behind Harold were wearing black shirts, some of them polo necks, others wearing a black shirt and black tie combination, including one woman. They were wagging fingers at various members of the crowd who were shouting in their faces.

  “We don’t want their sort here!” shouted Harold.

  A roar went up. The crowd surged like a rugby scrum and Danny was knocked back.

  “Shut up, you horrible racist!” It was Rachel’s voice.

  “What did she say?”

  “Huh?”

  “What was that?”

  It seemed no one had ever heard the term ‘racist’ before.

  The confusion lasted only a few seconds before the mêlée erupted with renewed vigour.

  One of the Blackshirts tried to snatch the bucket from Charlie’s hand. Charlie pulled away. Everyone was shouting.

  “It’s Jew Henry!” shouted the Blackshirt woman.

  The bucket catapulted into the air suddenly and thick-gooey paste hit her face.

  The crowd turned into one great angry mass of fists and shouts.

  Charlie turned and rushed Rachel away. He said something that made her cross the street alone, head down. Danny followed Charlie’s quick glance and saw a policeman running towards them.

  Rachel had stopped on the other side of the road and looked back. She was frozen in surprise, looking right at Danny.

  He had to get out of there.

  Rachel turned and ran into the black entrance in the middle of Victoria Parade.

  The policeman ran for Danny, hand out. Danny recognized him. One of the cops who was going to arrest him in 1940.

  Please, not again.

  But the policeman didn’t notice Danny.

  Of course. He’s never seen me before.

  Constable Davies barged Danny to the side and waded into the thick of the scrum.

  Do not get arrested again. Get out of here.

  Danny about-turned and walked swiftly away from the crowd. More policemen were running towards the disturbance. He looked back and could see that Charlie and the man called Henry were being arrested.

  Danny marched back up the hill to his hotel, an angry wind chasing him, and didn’t breathe easily until he’d closed his hotel room door behind him.

  — 18 —

  “YOU’RE SURE IT’S HERE?” asked Kath, parking her Mini as close to the side of the access road as she could.

  She was technically parking in the entrance to the hospital but they would probably get away with it for a while before anyone moved them on, particularly as they were parked outside the gate house.

  She checked Mrs Hudson in the rear-view mirror. The old lady smiled slightly. She never questioned Mitch’s intuitions.

  Kath could see the top of the Dovecote above the h
edge.

  “Do you think it’s connected to why I use the Dovecote?”

  “No,” said Mitch.

  He was slumped in the passenger seat beside her, wrapped up for winter, even though it was hot, still looking tired. Time Flu made him irritable, she remembered. It made him blunt.

  “It’s just, you know, a bit of a coincidence. He works here in the grounds of the hospital. And the dovecote’s in the same grounds.”

  Mrs Hudson spoke up from the back seat. “Perhaps he’s feeding off its energy, the same as you, dear.”

  Mitch snorted.

  She knew he was a hardliner on the whole touchstone question. Random bits of stone in graves and dovecotes didn’t have any kind of power to send people back in time; it was all an innate skill of the person. She knew he was right, and he was the person most qualified to know, but she could never quite shake it off.

  “He’s coming,” said Mitch.

  They watched the access road that dipped down the hill to the building that had once been a stately home but was now a hospital.

  A figure came walking up, looking at his feet. A man in his twenties with the kind of silly haircut that all men in their twenties seemed to favour these days. He had a canvas bag slung over one shoulder. He wasn’t fat, thought Kath, but he looked heavy. It was like he was carrying a great weight that you couldn’t see.

  “It must be Jez,” said Mitch suddenly, with the force of revelation. “I’ve been hearing Jess in my head. He’s Jez.”

  Jez passed their car without seeing them and walked out of the hospital grounds, turning left, walking down the slope towards the village.

  “Are you sure about this?” asked Mrs Hudson.

  Kath got out and let Mitch slide over into the driver’s seat.

  “I’m not having either of you walking all over Moseley,” Kath said. “Look after her.”

  She patted the roof of the Mini and walked out of the entrance, turning left and following Jez down towards the village.

  He crossed over to the village green and took the east side of the street, turning at Cafephilia, the new coffee shop on the corner of Woodbridge Road. Kath gave it a quick glance. She loved the giant photo they’d put on the wall of the same street corner, back when it was Shufflebotham’s Grocers in the thirties.

  Jez tramped on, past the now boarded up Luker’s bakery and on past Patrick Kavanagh’s. She called Mitch on her cell phone.

  “He’s turned down Church Road. I think you’re right.”

  She followed him at a distance of twenty yards down the steep slope. He didn’t look back once. And then he turned into Newport Road. She called Mitch again to tell him.

  “We’re coming,” he said.

  She hung back by the phone box, not wanting to tail him up a quiet, residential street where it was impossible to hang around without looking suspicious. She craned her neck to see. He turned into the same house, the near derelict one with the faded blue paint.

  Once he was inside, she strolled slowly up the street.

  Mitch drove in from the other end and parked across from the house.

  Kath quickened her step and got in, feeling awkward that she was sitting in the passenger seat.

  Mitch was rubbing his eyes and wheezing to himself. “He’s in there... there’s a... oh, he’s in 1959.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Mrs Hudson.

  “He’s in the house... he’s in there right now, in 2013... but he’s also in 1959. A couple... there’s a couple, arguing. He’s watching them. They can’t see him.”

  Kath wanted to ask him how he could be visiting 1959 but apparently invisibly. And who were the couple? But she didn’t want to break his concentration.

  “They’re coming out... Anger... so much of it...”

  The front door opened suddenly, rickety, unsticking uncertainly, and Jez came out. He walked to the little gate and carried it open, the bottom hinge broken.

  “He’s watching them... the couple...”

  “What couple?” said Kath.

  Mrs Hudson shushed her.

  “Can you not see the couple?” murmured Mitch. “He’s watching them.”

  Jez crept along the pavement cautiously, as if he were watching a pair of microscopic bugs dancing in the air, then he reached out for something.

  “He’s trying to touch her... Oh God, she felt it!”

  Jez disappeared.

  Kath thought she’d blinked, missed him run back in, but no: he had been there, and then he was no longer there, so you thought you’d only imagined him being there.

  “Where did he go?”

  “He’s back inside,” said Mitch, slumped now, trying to breathe deeply.

  “He just flitted back inside?” said Kath. “In the same time zone?”

  “He was in 1959,” said Mitch, as if it was obvious. “Now he’s back here in 2013.”

  Kath stared back out at the pavement where he’d been; where she’d seen him.

  “So we know he’s visiting this old man, Harold Ogborne, now,” said Mrs Hudson. “And he’s somehow flitting back to the past, to see the wife?”

  “She’s dead,” said Mitch. “She died in 1979.”

  “What’s he up to, this Jez?” asked Mrs Hudson.

  Behind everything she said, Kath could still hear the same question: what does this have to do with the night my parents fall in love?

  “I don’t think he knows,” said Mitch. “He’s just attracted to her. She’s drawing him towards her.”

  “And who is she?”

  “Her name’s Amy,” said Mitch.

  “Not Amy Parker?” asked Mrs Hudson. “The one Danny Pearce is so attracted to?”

  “No,” said Mitch. “It’s not her. This Amy is younger.”

  Kath heard herself almost sigh with relief. Danny’s obsession with Amy Parker disturbed her.

  Mitch closed his eyes, exhausted. “Take me home now. I need to sleep.”

  Kath opened her door and stepped out. “You’ll have to slide over. Unless you want to drive?”

  Mitch realized he was sitting in the driver’s seat. He nodded and started to hutch across, like a man who was a good thirty years older than he was. Kath walked round and took the driver’s seat, casting one more glance back at the ruined house. She got in and drove off.

  “This Jez chap can’t be that innocent,” said Mrs Hudson. “We’re detecting a huge disturbance here; something enormous. He’s not just staring at a girl from the past.”

  Kath wasn’t sure if the old woman was only talking to herself.

  — 19 —

  SHE NEEDED MRS HUDSON.

  Rachel paced Charlie’s room, coming back to stare at Moseley village through the net curtains again and again. The morning traffic was still busy. Rush hour had come and gone.

  Or Mitch or Kath Bright.

  She needed them here right now, because she had no idea what to do. Charlie and Henry were probably still in a police cell and she didn’t know if they were coming back. She would have to arrange the entire concert herself now and had no idea what to do about it.

  If Mrs Hudson, or Mitch, or Kath would only come and help her, everything would be fine. But this was what they’d left her to do while they got on with more important business. It seemed such a little thing. Go and make sure this concert happens, Rachel. What could be easier?

  Except since she’d got involved, the concert was now even further away from happening. They’d attracted the attentions of Blackshirts and the police and the only two men who knew how to put the concert on were both in a cell.

  She could go and ask to see them. A few words with them. Perhaps Henry or Charlie could hand her their notes. There would be people she might call: the agent they’d mentioned in London, whoever it was that ran the dance hall. There would be security to man the door. Did the venue supply those? Would she have to arrange a hotel for Benny Orphan? What about for the band?

  The more she thought about it, the more there was to do, till it swamped
her and she felt herself sinking, drowning.

  She couldn’t go to the police station in case Davies saw her. Davies had never recognized her in 1940 so it followed that she had never been to the station in 1934. So not going to the station was the best decision to make and it would all, somehow, work out for the best.

  Unless the concert didn’t happen and Mrs Hudson’s existence was somehow wiped out.

  She gazed longingly across the village green at the entrance to the alley. She could walk right over there and go to the touchstone and be back in 2013. Easily. She could even try to come back here earlier. Make everything better this time. Warn Charlie about the Blackshirts and the possibility of arrest.

  She had watched the disaster unfold from the darkness of the Victoria parade alley. Danny had watched the trouble start and then walked away as soon as the police had appeared. Was he involved with the Blackshirts? Was this how he would sabotage the concert, as Mrs Hudson suspected?

  She had followed him, skirting the shadows on the other side of the street. He had crossed over and walked up the rise ahead of her, not looking back once, and almost run into the Alcester Lodge Hotel.

  By the time she’d walked back to the village, the paddy wagon had arrived and Charlie and Henry were being led away. When the police were gone, the laughing Blackshirts tore the posters down and stamped on them.

  In the end, there was nothing to do but retreat to the flat; thankful that Charlie had given her a spare key.

  There was nothing out there now to suggest any of the trouble that had happened last night. It was a respectable suburban village green straight out of a Ladybird book.

  Peter and Jane Pretend the War’s not Coming.

  A key scraped into the lock. The front door opened in the narrow strip of hall. Footsteps stomping in.

  Would it be the police, come to search his flat?

  The door creaked open and Charlie’s tense face melted with relief. “You’re here,” he said. “Thank God.”