by Andy Conway
He took his pocket watch from his waistcoat and checked the time. Ten-thirty. He was late. The horse-drawn tram would be too slow. He would have to get the train.
Standing on a train platform, pointing a pistol at a clock, and fading from sight.
Train stations made him uneasy. But there was nothing for it.
Walking on, with lurid tales of murder under his arm, he shrugged off the bad mood, thinking of warm beds and full life and the promise of happiness in the future.
Till death do us part.
5
“DEATH DOESN’T COME so easily to this part of town.”
Inspector Beadle stepped from the carriage and surveyed the shabby street, the muddy road, the dirty row of hovels, the cluster of men and women peering at them from the beer house across the road, the crowd of children with their clothes all in flitters.
“I don’t know about that, Sergeant MacPherson,” he said. “There’s rather more of it in this part of town than anywhere else.”
Macpherson sidled up to him, his massive bear-like frame almost blocking out the sun. “I meant murder, sir.”
“Now there, you have a point.”
They passed the uniformed officer who saluted nervously, nothing but a kid himself, and Macpherson ducked as they entered the hovel.
They were greeted by another uniformed officer who breathlessly informed them of the occupants of the house. Four rooms downstairs, four up. Fifteen people. Each room let out to a different family.
Inspector Beadle took off his grey derby hat, feeling the closeness of the dwelling crowd in on his consciousness. This part of town unnerved him. The spread of poverty, the filth and the squalor of it, spilling over into his respectable borough from the stench of Birmingham. Right on the border. And now murder coming with it.
“And none of them heard a thing?”
“No, sir.”
“The bloody press heard it soon enough, though.” He slapped a hand on the morning edition and his officer blushed, making him wonder if he’d tipped off a reporter, pocketed a few shillings for an exclusive. The press moved so quickly now. They could have a headline on the street within an hour or two of an incident. He often found himself attending a crime scene while they were already back at their office typing it up.
“Let’s see the mess, then.”
They tramped through to the back room that contained nothing but a bed, a wardrobe and a dresser. The slump of the mattress and the dark stain of blood all over the sheets. A tangle of women’s clothes piled on the floor.
Sergeant Macpherson stood by his side and they surveyed the scene, looking for an answer, as if the killer might have written his signature in the blood sprayed up the wall.
“Looks like a bloody butcher’s shop,” the sergeant sighed.
One of the constables dragged through the landlord and Inspector Beadle turned to face him, keen eyes probing him. A dull, shabby man who seemed unaware of the importance of a murder being committed on his premises. Already thinking of how soon he might let the room out. Not a murderer.
“How well did you know her?” he asked.
The landlord shrugged. “She come in a month ago. Owes me a week’s rent.”
“Don’t think you’ll be seeing that, somehow.”
“Her ability to earn money somewhat curtailed, pal’ Macpherson added.
The landlord shrugged and sniffed and stroked his moustache, and Inspector Beadle had a strong feeling he’d already helped himself to whatever valuables she had. Anger needled his insides and he felt an urgent desire to arrest the stupid dullard for something, anything.
“What line of work was she in? Did she have many visitors?”
“This is a respectable house,” the landlord protested. “I don’t allow no visitors or nothing like that under my roof.”
“And such a respectable roof it is,” Beadle sneered.
His attention was caught by the pencil on the dresser. No jewellery, a few ribbons, a hairbrush, some make-up. He thumbed the graphite, curious.
“She worked in Birmingham, at that art college. She did some modelling. That’s all I know about her.”
Beadle handed the pencil to Macpherson, who seemed surprised.
“Graphite,” he said. “That’s an artist’s pencil.”
He strode out, desperate to get outside and breathe fresh air again, which he knew wouldn’t be possible till he was on the other side of his borough and as far away from Birmingham as he could get.
6
THE TRAIN DEPOSITED Daniel in Birmingham within a half hour and he found Reverend Colmore’s words repeating in his ear, as he walked out from under the giant glass roof of the station and through the grand columns and arches of the Queen’s Hotel, warm sunlight hitting his face as he stepped out onto the broad avenue of Stephenson Street. He paused, taking in the teeming mass of a town that was a city in all but name.
We’ll end up part of Birmingham, and none of us wants that.
It was something that had always puzzled him. He knew that Moseley was a village lying far outside of the city of Birmingham. He knew that it had always been in the borough of Kings Norton. But he had always had this strange feeling that it was actually in Birmingham. He’d wondered if it had once belonged to the town and somehow later declared its independence, or defected to the borough of Kings Norton, but no, the history books said it had never been part of Birmingham.
But in his mind it felt wrong. As if history had been changed.
He paused, as he always did, to stare at the Gaze & Son Railway & Steamship Passenger Agency on the corner. The rare times he came this way it had always seemed to call to him with the promise of adventure and a world out there to explore.
Instead, he crossed to the central reservation between the two busy lanes of traffic, nodding to a woman selling fistfuls of watercress wrapped in newspaper, and took Lower Temple Street, turning at the Trevalyan Temperance Hotel into New Street, throbbing with horses and carts, coaches of every size and shape, threading their way through the busiest thoroughfare on weekday morning.
As he walked up the street, looking askance at the pretentious portico of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, which jutted out over the opposite pavement, his eyes flitted to the blaring signs for Waterloo Bar Billiards and Moore’s Oyster Rooms. He fixed his eyes ahead and enjoyed the sight of the Town Hall’s Parthenon-like columns straight ahead rising to meet him. And as he passed Christ Church and stepped across Council House Square at Peel’s statue, he took in the grandeur of the great Council House building.
But, as always, he turned on the pedestrian island where Priestley and Wright’s statues stood guard, enjoying the sensation of being at the epicentre of it all, and faced Christ Church. There was something about it that haunted him; not only the intense feeling that it shouldn’t be there, but the impressively understated grandeur of its neo-classical style and Doric columns. From its Ionic pilasters right up to its octagonal spire, it echoed with a haunting resonance, reminding him of another church in another place, although he could never think of where that other church might be.
He crested the gentle rise, leaving the clamour of New Street behind, and stalked into Chamberlain Place, feeling the more serene air of the city’s civic heart, where the Chamberlain memorial, like a lost Gothic church spire sitting in a pool, pointed to the blue sky.
Blood.
The pool was red. A seething pot of blood, boiling.
He gagged, red handkerchief to his mouth, staggered, palm to the cool stone of the new City Art Gallery. He could sit on the steps. Would that be unseemly? He held himself up, breathing deeply, slowly.
After a few moments he glanced across at the Chamberlain memorial fountain again. Oh. The water was clear, not red at all. There was no blood. He had imagined it.
Another of his visions.
He wiped his neck, feeling an overwhelming urge to walk over to the fountain and dip his handkerchief in it and press it to his face.
Bu
t he stayed, pushed himself away from the wall, steadied himself and gazed at the square around him.
The same awkward, eerie sensation he always felt here. That feeling that this ought to be a hill, not a square. That the two ornate buildings ahead — Mason College and the Liberal Club — as well as the Central Free Library to his left should be something else. He couldn’t see it in his mind’s eye, only the faint impression of an amphitheatre and a blank mass of stone, like a cliff face, as if waiting for a sculptor to chisel out its detail. He always wondered if he were seeing something from long ago, as if a vision from the past were pushing through the thin membrane of the present. Had there been a Roman amphitheatre on this site, below a cliff face? He had consulted history books in the Free Library but had found no such evidence. But still he expected to see it every time he passed.
He turned away from the square and right into Edmund Street where they were laying more tram lines, a prickly feeling on his back, as if some future premonition were glaring at him. He quickened his step and turned gratefully into Margaret Street and the welcome sight of the Birmingham Municipal School of Art. Its comforting red-brick Venetian styled bulk greeted him and he rushed inside, trotting up the stone steps and into the grand hall, the smell of linseed oil welcoming him, a home from home.
His students were already hard at work, knowing he would be late due to the impending nuptials, and one or two of them smiled knowingly as he took off his derby and jacket. They all intoned a desultory, “Good morning, sir,” not breaking their concentration, except for Sidney, the impertinent grocer’s son who unnerved him always with his silly grin and bare-faced glare, as if sharing a private joke at his expense.
“How do, Mister Pearce,” Sidney sang. “Nice morning at church?”
“Apply more attack to your drawing, Master Sidney, and less to social pleasantries,” said Daniel, biting back the urge to swear out loud.
They were well advanced on their charcoal drawings of the still life he’d set up the previous Friday and he scanned the room, looking over their shoulders, nodding and humming to himself.
They were all young men, with the exception of Louisa Gill, the sole female student. The other chaps were intimidated by her, and he didn’t know why they found it so strange, but everyone in the school seemed to feel the same. Women were regarded as different, somehow, as if they were differently abled, when it stood to reason that anyone could pick up a pencil and draw, regardless of their sex.
“Very good, Miss Gill,” said Daniel. “Your foreshortening is improving.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said, continuing with a proud smile.
He felt the cold glare of Sidney’s jealousy and ignored it.
The Head wandered in, thumbs tucked into waistcoat pockets, and stood guard at the door. Daniel greeted him and they talked quietly.
“All well, Mister Pearce?”
“The rehearsal was fine,” he said. “I have no doubt the real thing will go much less smoothly.”
The Head laughed indulgently and looked around the room, quite satisfied with the industry on show, until his eyes fell on Louisa Gill and he found himself harrumphing.
Daniel braced himself for the latest hint that Miss Gill might be more comfortable in the Needlework class. He had suggested it once already.
“And what of when you present your life drawing class?” the Head said, as if they were in mid-conversation. “What then? Hmm?”
Daniel was caught for a moment. This had come from nowhere. Something the Head had been debating with himself. “Then she will draw the model just the same as everyone else.”
“And she, a woman, should see a naked man?”
“Is it wrong that the men in the class see a naked woman?”
“That is not the same thing at all.”
“No, but perhaps it should be.”
He was tired of this sort of thing. He had been exasperated throughout his two years’ teaching here, impatient, outraged, but recently it had begun to weary him. Sometimes he thought everyone around him so stupid and stubborn, so trussed up with outdated beliefs.
“What it should be and what it is are two entirely different matters, Mr Pearce.” The Head turned and marched out, calling back, “We shall talk more on this presently.”
Daniel clenched his fist and checked the desire to shout. He turned to his class and all the students looked hurriedly at their easels. A sudden scratching of charcoal on paper, like a hundred mice resuming their feast after the cat had gone.
Louisa was staring intently at her own page, her cheeks crimson, tears pricking her eyes. She was the only one not drawing.
Their beliefs weren’t outdated. It was perhaps he who was out of step with the times.
Louisa threw her pencil down and stormed out of the class, brushing past him.
“Louisa, wait,” he said.
He held back the impulse to apologize. It was not his place to say sorry. He was not the one who’d done something wrong.
He chased her down the corridor, their shoes clacking on the parquet, grabbing her arm and pulling her back. She wheeled round and he could see the tears streaming down her cheeks. Tears of rage, not sorrow.
“I shall leave your class,” she said, choking on the words. “I’m sorry.”
“You will do no such thing. If you are forced off the course, then I will leave too.”
She blinked and swallowed and seemed utterly bewildered that he would say something like that. Was it the wrong thing to say?
“I couldn’t let you do that,” she said.
“And I couldn’t let you.”
She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped her face, half-turning away from him. He was still holding her arm and dropped it, feeling discomfort suddenly and then irritation for feeling discomfort.
“You are not the same as everyone else,” she said.
He wondered again where he’d come from, that fateful morning when he’d awoken from his trance.
“You don’t look at me and see a woman. You see a person with the same rights and abilities as any man.”
She said it as if it was something strange to believe. As if she’d noticed he believed that cats should be able to fly.
“Yes,” he said. But she was wrong. He did look at her and see a woman: a very attractive woman. But she was right about her abilities. Why would he think she wasn’t just as talented as any of the male students? She was by no means the best in the class — still raw and unfocussed — but she was good, and surely it was his job, the job of the entire school, to take that rawness and make it mature; to teach her how to focus.
She turned to him again, arms folded, breathing in deeply, sucking in courage.
“You are a remarkable man,” she said.
“I sometimes feel as if I’ve come from a different time, as well as a place,” he said.
She frowned. “I’m not sure I understand.”
He had said too much. Of course she didn’t understand. He was a fool to think of her in any other way than as a student who sought his guidance. He had a fiancée whose job it was to understand him; a fiancée who would soon be a wife. He had Arabella.
“Right,” he stammered. “You shouldn’t. I am wrong. There are other places, right now, where this sort of nonsense is not tolerated.”
“What sort of places?”
He took her arm again, his hand sliding down the chiffon sleeve of her forearm and grasping the warm flesh of her hand.
“There are female artists in Paris, in Montmartre, who paint as well as any man, and who are respected as equals.”
He thought of Suzanne, the tantalising model and painter he’d met in Paris, who counted the great and upcoming artists of France as her friends and equals: Renoir, Lautrec and Puvis de Chavannes all doted on her. She was foul-mouthed in a way that was completely natural (or was it that she swore in French and so it seemed exotic, not vulgar?), knocked back absinthe with the best of them, painted like a demon, and was utterly ravishing.
He’d fallen in love with her instantly, as had every other man in Paris.
“You must go to Paris,” he said. “See it for yourself.”
She blushed, looked at the parquet floor and pulled her hand from his, twisting her fingers in knots. “I doubt I could do that.”
He suddenly felt an irritation for her modesty, wanting to shout Oh, for God’s sake, just do what you want to do and hang everyone else! But he held his tongue. He did that so often. There was forever this violent impulse boiling within him to rage at the world.
“You could do it as well as any man,” he said. He turned on his heels suddenly and marched back down the corridor. “If you work hard. Which means now.”
Just before he reached the door, he heard one of his students skitter across the room from his listening post. Sidney, eavesdropping. As he walked back into the studio, again their faces darted back under cover of their easels.
In a few moments Louisa too returned and walked silently to her station, where she picked up her charcoal and continued drawing with the rest of them.
After a while he walked around the room and admired their work over their shoulders, occasionally nodding and whispering encouragement, pointing out mistakes in perspective, careful always to praise what was good before drawing attention to what wasn’t.
He saw their influences. At this stage they had no personal style and were merely imitating what they thought was the standard expression. How courageous it was, he thought, to reject that and to have the guts to paint as you thought fit.
Even the most adventurous in the class were aping the Impressionists, thinking it daring and modern, not knowing that in Paris, the hotbed of the art world, the newest artists had already moved on.
In February he’d taken the boat to Calais and then the train to Brussels for the annual exhibition of The Twenty. Les Vingt. The Monets and Renoirs of two years’ previous had been replaced by daring new works by artists like Walter Sickert, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, Whistler, Redon. And of course there were still a few Impressionist paintings. The one by Berthe Morisot. He must tell Louisa about her, he thought. There was another woman who stood shoulder to shoulder with the male painters around her.