Touchstone Season Two Box Set

by Andy Conway

  He turned on him and slashed, the knife a streak of silver light.

  The father dodged and blustered past him, between him and Arabella, protecting her. Did he not know that no one could protect her now? Did he not know that no one could avert her fate?

  Their screaming and bawling drove him through the open door and he was flying down wooden stairs and out into the night before anyone could stop him.

  28

  HE WAS DREAMING OF his wife’s gravestone when they came and woke him. Her name was clearly chiselled into the stone, but he could not make out the date of her death. The stone was broken and was like a paving stone. He was standing on it. Standing on his wife’s gravestone.

  They came and dragged him out of his cell, and he didn’t hear what Arthur shouted to him as he was press ganged along a dark corridor and thrown into a chair in an interrogation room.

  But she wasn’t his wife, he thought, as they manacled him to the wooden chair. She never would be his wife.

  A lamp was shoved close to his face and he blinked against its piercing light.

  Beadle and Macpherson were in the room, and other constables. He wondered if they would beat him.

  This must be a ploy of theirs. Let the suspect wait all day before questioning him, and then drag him out after sleeping. It must work to disorient him, make him feel weak and powerless. And it was successful, because he felt all of those things keenly.

  Someone grabbed his hair and shoved the lamp in his face and he saw a familiar image swim towards him in the dark: a woman lying on a bed, her limbs coiled and twisted.

  His painting. They had his painting.

  “Take a look at that,” said Macpherson. “Your bloody handiwork. Quite a job you done on her, pal.”

  “You won’t be painting anymore.” This was Beadle now. “Not where you’re going. No paints and brushes and palette knives. Not on the condemned wing. No canvases. No point. It’ll only be a few weeks before they hang you.”

  The fist that had his hair pounded his head forward and his forehead bounced off the wooden table, springing back.

  He saw that his paintings were lined all around the room, with one of them on the table. The one Arabella had seen herself in. It was here. He couldn’t deny it.

  Candlelight licked at his work, his crimes, and he hated the sight of them.

  “Just look at them,” said Macpherson. “That’s the work of a deranged mind, is that.”

  “They really are quite disgusting depictions of the fairer sex,” said Beadle.

  “I wouldn’t call them the fairer sex,” said Macpherson. “They look like whores to me.”

  Beadle turned with mock surprise. “Is that true, Mr. Pearce? Are they whores?”

  “Do you pay them to pose like that for you?”

  “He must do. No decent woman would pose like that. No lady on Earth would.”

  “Only a whore would do it.”

  “Do you know lots of whores, Mr. Pearce?”

  “Do you know Balsall Heath well? Highgate? Lots of whores there.”

  “The place is teeming with them.”

  “It’s a modern Babylon.”

  “Sodom and Gomorrah. Do they disgust you, Mr. Pearce?”

  “It looks like they do. Just looking at these... daubings. These...”

  “You can’t call it art.”

  “Good God, no. It can’t be art. Isn’t art supposed to elevate the human spirit, Sergeant Macpherson?”

  “It’s supposed to be about beautiful things. Pretty things, Inspector Beadle.”

  “I have to confess, I don’t really know what’s art. But I do know what I like. And I do not like this.”

  “It’s ugly.”

  “It’s vile.”

  “Deranged.”

  “Filth.”

  “It’s not art.”

  “Not to me.”

  “I wouldn’t wipe my arse with it. Excuse the expression, sir.”

  Beadle had him by the collar now, choking him. “Is that what you do? You pay these whores to pose for you, then you murder them because they disgust you? Is that right?”

  “No!”

  “Then how comes it that they’re the same women in your pictures?”

  “The same women. The same rooms.”

  “You murder them, you pervert, then you go home to your little summer house and you paint it from memory.”

  “Just admit it.”

  Daniel shook his head, but no words would come from his mouth.

  “We know you did it.”

  He fell back and crashed to the floor. Macpherson had punched him. He hadn’t seen or felt the punch, but he knew it must have happened. He was lying on his back, still sitting in a chair.

  “Just admit it. You cut those girls up, didn’t you!”

  They dragged him up.

  “We know you did it.”

  He was punched again, Macpherson’s massive fist square in the stomach. This time he felt it, all the breath flying from his body, leaving him wheezing, choking. He fought for precious oxygen, but nothing would come, his mouth an open silent scream.

  Before he could take a breath, another fist came through the air and put all the lights out.

  29

  TOM CONWAY THREW THE razor on the bed and screamed in frustration, clutching his hand, bleeding, stinging. He snatched his red neckerchief from his throat and wrapped it around his wound, smiling at the irony that it would at least not show the blood stains.

  It was gone.

  He had taken his clothes off again and cut open the lining of every garment, even down to the band of his trilby.

  It was gone.

  He stood naked in the room, his clothes almost in ribbons, and still the ticket was nowhere to be found.

  Disconsolately, he dressed again, putting on the clothes that had betrayed him.

  He had looked everywhere. He had pawned everything he carried with him simply to have the money for his friend’s wedding celebrations. A wedding he had every intention of sabotaging. He slapped his forehead, then punched himself on the cheek.

  Why hadn’t he sewn his pension book into the lining of his jacket? Why had he left it in the bag? He’d pawned away his future. And now the ticket was lost.

  But how had he lost it?

  He slumped on the floor of the hotel room, trying to blot out the footsteps along the corridor outside, the stifled laughter, the muttered assignations, trying to retrace his every step since leaving the pawnbroker’s in Sherlock Street.

  Wouldn’t that be what Arthur’s detective would do? Retrace his steps. It would lead him back to the crime, back to the criminal.

  He had been spooked. Arriving in Birmingham on the train at New Street Station and that feeling he’d been followed. Something that didn’t feel quite right. That haunting presence all the way on the train.

  He’d walked to Sherlock Street, to the pawnbroker’s, and again unable to shake off that feeling of being watched.

  Had it been Catherine’s man? Now that he thought about it, he thought he’d seen him, when he’d glanced around and caught a pair of eyes watching him only to dart away and disappear in the street crowd. And it had surely been him on the train.

  But that was the kind of memory one might construct out of fancy. He was fooling himself into believing he’d seen it, when in fact, he’d taken a cab back to New Street, feeling much more flush, and that was when he’d thought he’d seen Catherine for the first time — a flash of recognition in the street — a woman who looked like her, and then gone in the crowd. But he’d shaken it off. That kind of thing happened all the time. It had happened in London often enough. You’d see a woman you thought was her — that moment of panic gripping your heart — and then you’d see it was just some other woman.

  But then, not half an hour later, as he’d walked along Colmore Row, marvelling at all the new elegant buildings that had sprung up, she’d walked right out of the crowd.

  Catherine Eddowes, who sometimes liked t
o call herself Katie Conway, even though they’d never been married. But all those years, and the three children, plus the first that had died, perhaps that gave her the right to think of herself as his wife. He felt it too.

  She’d walked right out of the crowd, smiling that smile, like an apparition. He’d stood frozen, thinking for a moment that she had died and was a ghost saying her farewell to him, but she’d hugged him and felt real enough.

  “Tom Conway! Fancy meeting you here! Of all places! Such a small world!”

  Holding him too tight. He’d squirmed to be free of her — always that feeling of her wanting to be too close and him having to push her away — and she’d held him tighter, even clawing at him, till he pushed her back and her finger had caught on one of his pockets, and she’d looked hurt.

  “No,” he’d said, shaking his head, and turning and walking away, wondering when he’d ever be free of her.

  And then his name called in the street. A moment of fear, thinking it her, but finding it Daniel, whose wedding he’d come to celebrate.

  Oh God.

  Catherine had picked his pocket.

  She’d taken the pawn ticket. It was no accident that she was in Birmingham the same day as himself. And that man who was with her. She hadn’t simply met him on the street and got him to tag along for protection. They were in it together. They’d planned it all. They’d followed him all the way from London.

  She’d lifted his pension book from his pocket.

  He threw on his jacket, its lining now open and ragged, and reached for his hat, stuffing all his possessions in his socks because his pockets were slashed open: money, return train ticket, the new razor.

  There was only one thing for it now.

  He had to go find Catherine Eddowes and get it back.

  30

  IN THE BLACKNESS. THE darkness. He knew he was standing. Cold night air on his skin. He turned all around, searching for light, searching for some feature that might tell him where he was.

  A pinpoint of yellow far off. A gas lamp. His eyes growing accustomed to the blackness now, he could make out the passageway beyond it, dim light bathing its walls. A barrel under the street light. The broken down corpse of a wagon, a wheel shattered like a dead gull. Puddles on the ground. Cobbles. He was standing on wet cobblestones. A square, hemmed in by tall buildings on every side. He could make out the windows now, but there were no lights in the windows.

  Another street lamp to his left, and another entrance to an arched alleyway. Two possible escape routes, neither of them inviting.

  He turned, looking for another way out. There. The square opened out to a road that ran parallel. No traffic. No sound at all. It must be the middle of the night. Had he escaped his cell somehow and found himself here? Was that possible?

  He stepped towards the road and halted. A presence. Something that broke the silence. Over there to the left on the pavement that curved around the square’s darkest corner. Something there. A presence. Something that breathed.

  He crept forward. A dark shape emerging from the blackness. What was it: a pile of rags? A dog feeding on something? The dark outline of a body. Was it a child? No. A man, on his haunches, crouching over something. It was the dark back of a man. The man grunted with effort and there was a sucking sound, then a rip of fabric.

  He peered closer, leaning in, almost looking right over the man’s shoulder and a pale face came into view. The face of a woman, staring up at him, bruised and bloody, small cuts to her cheeks, eyelids, nose, and a bright scar across the right side of her face.

  He knew her face. He knew her even so disfigured.

  He recognized the dead face of Catherine Eddowes.

  The man bent over her turned, sudden and vicious. A flash of the knife in his bloody hand. Daniel fell back, trying to see his face as he did.

  But he was running. He was running away down cobbled streets, without seeing the killer’s face. Wanting to go back, confront him, stop him, but his legs pounding the cobbles, carrying him onward.

  And there up the street ahead, the same scene. A shadowy male figure crouched over a prone woman. He halted, breathless. Is this a dream? One of those dreams where you are confronted by exactly the same terror no matter which way you run.

  But no, this was different. A different man bending over a different woman. And somehow Daniel sensed that this was a different place and a different time.

  Has this happened before?

  He crept towards the dark figure hunched over the woman. The black shape of him writhed with evil, as if he were made of flies, buzzing obscenely.

  I must stop this, he thought. I must confront this.

  He stepped forward, hand reaching out to grab the monster, to pull him off his victim. Then there was a flash of blue light and they both flinched with fear and the monster turned his head and Daniel saw his bearded face, which he recognized. A killer’s face he’d seen in a book once.

  A girl had appeared in a flash of blue light. A brunette. She was glaring at the killer, and Daniel knew somehow that she could see the killer but she couldn’t see him. He was invisible to them both.

  Her eyes flashed anger and she shouted, “Stop!”

  The killer fled, running up the street along cobbled stones. The woman on the floor groaned. Alive.

  The girl who had appeared leaned over her and gasped, and then she too disappeared.

  He knew her. He’d seen her in his dreams. He’d sketched her in his notebooks. He’d painted her as the biblical Rachel, weeping in exile, and, he remembered it now: he’d chosen that theme because he’d known her name was Rachel.

  Then this must be a dream, he thought. Another dream. Another nightmare.

  He willed himself awake. But there was no escape. He stumbled along cobbled streets coated in blood, tearing at his hair. This mysterious girl he’d called Rachel, who haunted his dreams — he’d seen her, choking for life, lying on a bed. He’d seen her underneath him as he tried to kill her.

  It came to him with the vivid truth of a buried memory bursting back into the light of consciousness.

  Some time before he’d awoken into his new life, with no memory of the first twenty years of his life, he’d known that girl. And he’d tried to kill her.

  He was certain now.

  It wasn’t his friend Thomas Conway who was the murderer. It was he, Daniel Pearce.

  31

  CATHERINE EDDOWES SOBERED as she walked out of Moseley and tramped the long road towards her beer house kip. Her heart would have quailed at the long walk back, if she hadn’t been so drunk. And so angry. She expected to see Bury, but no man with a deerstalker hat appeared on the long road ahead. He must have taken a different route. Or maybe he knew she was onto him and had run. He was such a touchy young buck. There was something not right about him. Marching off like that and forgetting his jacket.

  As soon as he’d left, she’d gone through it and found the pawn ticket was gone.

  She’d rifled through every single pocket but it wasn’t there. It especially wasn’t there in the secret inner pocket where he’d ceremoniously placed it, saying, “I’ll keep it safe and sound right here.”

  She’d tried to keep it herself — after all, she was the one who’d lifted it. And she was the one who’d planned it all. Bury was only the man she needed to draw the pension. So it made sense that she should keep it. He was just a man who could forge a signature. That was all he was.

  But he’d snatched it from her. He was the man. He would take care of things. She’d protested but he’d put on a face of such fury and hatred that she’d cowered from him. And then he’d been sweet as a cachou straight after, like he could change his moods at the snap of a finger.

  There was nothing in the secret inner pocket except two rings. One cheap looking, the other a bit more expensive. Worth a couple of bob at least.

  But the ticket was gone.

  He hadn’t changed it to no other pocket neither. There would be no point. And he’d been giving h
er that embarrassed look all day, his short fuse burning low, every time she’d asked about it.

  He’d lost it. It was clear as day.

  She knew when a man was lying to her and she knew when a man had something he was trying to hide from her. She could read them like a chapbook. He wasn’t hiding the ticket from her, he was hiding the fact he’d lost it.

  She arrived at the beer house near Highgate so quickly, storming in like thunder, expecting to see him sitting alone in there, hunched over an ale.

  But he wasn’t there. The place was heaving with old codgers and tarts. But no Bury. One of the old blokes on the nearest table smacked a copy of the Gazette, and held it open for his fellow drinkers to see. Second Terrible Murder! the headline screamed.

  “Right round the corner, it was!”

  “Sliced them both up, I heard.”

  “The police think it’s a Jew.”

  “Well, I was just talking to old Jim Donaghy whose brother’s a peeler up Kings Heath way and he said they arrested some artist nob for it this afternoon.”

  “English?”

  “As roast beef.”

  “English? And a toff? Nah! It’s a Jew, I’m telling you. No English man’d do summat like that!”

  She pushed through the men and the smoke and the stink of them, and climbed the stairs to the lodging room they’d shared last night, pretending to be man and wife. Bury had slept on the floor. Hadn’t tried to touch her neither. She thought he was being faithful to his wife but, the more she thought about it, it looked like he wasn’t interested in women. Not in that way. He had that sneer she’d seen in certain types, that sneer every time you mentioned a woman. He hated women for some reason. God help his poor wife.

  He wasn’t in the room.

  She lit the stub of candle and surveyed the quiet hovel. His modest collection of things laid out on the old dresser. His razor.

  He hated women, but did he hate them that much?