The Ghosts of Paradise Place

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  About This Book

  Dedication

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  — 33 —

  — Epilogue —

  Thank you

  Next in the Touchstone saga

  Also by Andy Conway

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  Acknowledgements

  Historical Notes

  About the Author

  Copyright Notice

  About This Book

  A Touchstone Origins tale.

  Taking up a new job at Birmingham Central Library, Kath Bright is haunted by sinister occurrences in the brutalist concrete complex.

  It’s 2008 and Britain slides into its first credit crunch Christmas. But money troubles are not Kath's only concern as she uncovers a chilling tale of witch hunts and a Victorian murder mystery from the archives. But this past becomes very real and there's a killer on her trail.

  The dark anti-heroine of the bestselling time travel saga gets her own personal origin story in this novella that reveals how she first found her touchstone.

  Dedication

  To Danny, Steph and Ellie.

  True friends and fans.

  — 1 —

  IT BEGAN WITH A DREAM that wasn’t a dream. The kind so vivid you woke with skin clammy from running, only just escaping through the gate between the world of sleep and reality, a hand snatching at your hair, to wake gasping, wondering whose hand it was that snatched at you, who it was that chased you into morning.

  In the dream that wasn’t a dream, she saw herself, as if outside herself, as if seeing herself through another’s eyes.

  A woman at night in a whirling snowstorm, a shawl that barely covered her bright red hair, a stone tower behind her, whipped by waves of angry snow churning the night sky.

  She turned, eyes flashing dark fire, and for a moment felt terror at her own look.

  And then she was running past the Parthenon columns of the Town Hall in the centre of Birmingham.

  Dark figures in the street, raggedy children in putrid gutters, men in top hats and flat caps and women in bonnets. Snow, deep and crisp and evil.

  A Dickensian Christmas card turned nightmare.

  She caught a flash of a poster on the side of the Town Hall as she ran, proclaiming a reading by Charles Dickens, as if to confirm her dream.

  She ran on down the gaslit street, dark figures chasing her, the pant of their dog breath on her neck, their boots slapping snow and mud.

  An old lady stepped out into the street holding out a hand to stop her. A kind face, warm grey eyes. “Katherine! Katherine, my dear!” she cried. “Wait! Stop!”

  Kath bundled on, hurtling into snowblind fog, skin clammy from running, and just as a hand grabbed at her hair, she woke.

  — 2 —

  LYING AWAKE, SHE WAS aware of the dark before she was aware of herself. A new day, sullen and freezing beyond the curtains.

  The cold she had to face. An intense desire to stay curled up under the warm duvet. She stretched out her leg to the other half of the bed, the empty half of the bed, and felt the sheets cold. She drew her foot back into the heat of her cocoon.

  Why had she taken the bed? She might have left it there with him. Because it was expensive. Relocating had been expensive enough without having to buy a new bed. But it just reminded her of him and his absence.

  She had broken up with Darren four weeks ago, had moved out of their house in Selly Oak, and was renting this ground floor flat on the edge of Moseley.

  The bed was almost the only piece of furniture she possessed. If she hadn’t claimed it, this place would be empty.

  More galling was the box of his stuff she’d accidentally taken with her. A few weeks of sullen arguments by text message had followed, Darren making idiotic accusations. How dare she take his stuff? How dare she give him the hassle of coming a mile to collect it from her? It was almost as if she couldn’t let go and wanted to see him again, he wrote.

  She’d had to rummage through it and list what was in it. And now he didn’t want it anymore. He was happy to let it go, desperate not to see her again.

  She eased her head up and leaned on one elbow, tucking her red hair behind her ears, clutching the duvet around her, unwilling to let the heat escape.

  She should burn it. Burn it in the garden. It would be cleansing. Perhaps before Christmas. Burn his box full of crap in the back garden like some pagan winter solstice ghost-banishing rite.

  No, she thought, that just sounded crazy. Loneliness was turning her into a demented old witch.

  She swung her legs off the bed, her bare feet cringing at the cold floor.

  A new day, a new job. Christmas on the horizon. It was time to banish him and any thoughts of loneliness. If you allowed yourself to dwell on the past, it would consume you in its cloud of depression. You had to forget it all and look forward. Never look back or the devil will get you.

  She shrugged off the duvet and rushed across bare floorboards to the bathroom, and in moments was gasping naked under hot spray.

  — 3 —

  LEAVING HER GROUND floor flat, the door clattered shut, echoing back in the emptiness. She crossed the street, thick with rush hour traffic almost at a standstill, and walked down the hill to the bus stop on the other side.

  A cluster of sullen adults waiting for the next 50 bus into town, a couple of them at the front of the shelter chatting politely. Would these faces become familiar in time, the group that all caught the bus to work at about this time of morning?

  The school behind the bank of trees was already swarming like a hive, the chaos of kids congregating. Insane chatter. Perhaps they were breaking up soon for Christmas, lessons replaced by concerts, games, crafts. She remembered her whole school watching films projected in the assembly hall for end of term and wondered if they still did that.

  The bus came, she showed her pass to the driver and went upstairs, finding a seat alone. The bus eased up the hill in the line of traffic, so slow, and she laughed to herself when it passed her house after a couple of minutes. She could have walked the other way down to Moseley and perhaps caught a 50 that was stuck in traffic there.

  She viewed her new house, a third of a house, assessing it from above and afar, as if she was a stranger passing by. A down-at-heel row of mock Tudor three-storey houses divided into flats. She now lived in that strip of road between Moseley and Kings Heath, which seemed to be neither here nor there. In times past, maybe there hadn’t even been any dwellings here at all. There would have been a cluster of houses around St Mary’s church in Moseley, and another cluster around All Saints in Kings Heath, and this would have been a dirt track between the two, a dirt track over the hill that hid one village from the other.

  She would have to dig out the old Ordnance Survey maps at the Library to see if that’s what it was like. At some point, it must have bee
n. You just had to go back far enough in time.

  She smiled and wondered if she’d ever have time for that, working right there in the place where she’d always researched for the fun of it. If it was your job, maybe you never did it for pleasure again.

  The bus crested the hill and snaked down to Moseley village.

  A whisper at her shoulder.

  She flinched and turned, expecting a passenger behind her. Had someone tapped her on the shoulder?

  No. The seat behind was empty.

  Outside, a stone tower in the grounds of Moseley Hall Hospital.

  The dovecote.

  She shuddered. Something about it. A haunting presence. Brooding.

  It was a quaint little tower, an urban folly. So why did it feel like a gargoyle on a church glowering down at respectable people in their Sunday best, an ugly threat from a dark past?

  She shut it out as the bus sailed on down through Moseley village and headed for the city.

  — 4 —

  SHE WALKED THROUGH the city centre, the 2008 German Christmas Market stalls all the way up New Street opening for glühwein and beer. Christmas lights obscuring the view of the Parthenon-style pillars of the old Town Hall building.

  There was talk of the German market being a failure this year, because of the credit crunch. Banks failing everywhere. But it seemed that everything carried on as normal. People still went to work and got paid and spent their money on Christmas.

  In her handbag she’d packed a peanut butter sandwich. The jar would last till New Year so she wouldn’t have to buy lunch. The bus pass she’d bought would cover her. She had enough money to last till Christmas and they’d promised to give her an advance on her end of month pay. Three weeks of lean times, but she could manage.

  She turned into Victoria Square, so crowded with wooden shacks selling beer and bratwurst that its usual decorations seemed lost. The giant Iron:Man sculpture that stood before the Council House, at a tilt, as if about to fall over, the steps leading up to and around a tumbling fountain, the enormous goddess lying in the fountain at the top of the steps. The Floozie in the Jacuzzi, they called it. A goddess reduced to a stupid joke. Stone gryphon figures guarded the square. She skipped up the steps past the fountain and the carousel, through the gap where the corner of the Town Hall almost touched the corner of the Council House.

  Chamberlain Square hiding behind it. An amphitheatre of concrete steps with old statues of city fathers looking down on the ornate Victorian fountain at the centre, and the Brutalist inverted ziggurat of the Birmingham Central Library ringing the square.

  She paused and took it in. She’d spent her youth here, had dreamed of working here, and now she was starting her first day.

  It didn’t seem like the culmination of a childhood dream.

  It was just the break-up. A dead relationship was like a dead relative: it haunted you. You had to shake off the ghosts and move forward.

  She walked to the glass doors and waved to the security guard who was letting staff in.

  “Morning,” she said. “I’m Katherine Bright. It’s my first day.”

  He checked his list and waved her through the electronic security gate, for the first time as an employee, not a girl just coming to research and hide from the world among the six floors of silent stacks.

  She took the escalators up to the sixth instead of the lift, because it was more pleasant to pass through each orange-carpeted floor and see the vast acres all empty, just a handful of staff setting up for the day.

  A librarian, she thought. I’m a librarian now.

  She suppressed a manic giggle fizzing in her throat at the thought of tying her red hair up in a tight bun and wearing glasses to live the cliché.

  The smile was still all bright on her face as she reached the Local Studies department on the sixth floor, so she squinted to look more serious.

  At the Local Studies reception desk, a man in a tweed jacket and bow tie looked up. “Katherine, welcome. Do come round.”

  This was the moment she would get to see the other side. It thrilled her more than it should. She lifted the flap in the white Formica counter and stepped through to his handshake.

  Too firm, just like at the interview. Timothy. A posh boy. Ruddy complexion. He might be her father’s age, she thought, but his voice sounded younger. She couldn’t work it out.

  He showed her through to a pokey staff room behind the counter, with a sofa and a kettle in one corner, crowded by shelving and box files. Once she’d deposited her coat and handbag, Timothy led her through to the wide-open space of the stacks to an exhibition area, screened off.

  “Might as well show you this right away. This is where Liz is preparing the next exhibition, which opens Saturday.”

  They squeezed through a gap in the hessian screens to a wide oblong of about thirty feet long. A block of wooden chairs laid out in the middle ready for a talk. In giant lettering, old-fashioned like the old BBC logo, were the words Brave New City, each letter in a slanted box with rounded corners.

  “All our exhibitions are focussed around talks and events now. Outreach and such. We need to get people in here, and that means putting on events. They really love a bit of local history. Nice, cosy stories about the past.”

  Giant photographs of the city from the 1960s lined the exhibition space, and Katherine thrilled at the sight of streets she knew transformed through the filter of the past.

  “Liz put this one together. You’ll meet her in a minute. I think of this as our Swinging Sixties event.”

  “It’s my favourite era, the Sixties,” Katherine said. “You know, the styles and the music.”

  “Excellent. That’s the idea. To appeal to young people like us. Get them in here. Of course, we have to do Victorian stuff for the old ones too.”

  So he was the same age as her. Late twenties. It was just that he dressed like her granddad and had the easy charm of a boy who’d always been told the world owed him a living.

  She strolled along the presentation panels. An interesting collection of photographs, all muted orange-browns and clean lines, much like the Central Library.

  “It’s a great find,” Timothy said. “An amazing collection that’s been in an archive for years. Lovely stuff. And she really captures that essence of life during the Swinging Sixties, when the city had an ultra-modern makeover and shook off its old Victorian overcoat. Birmingham was such a go-ahead city then. They built the Rotunda, this library, the Bull Ring shopping centre. All modern and sleek.”

  Kath bent down and peered at a curious photograph. A bunch of people posing. At the centre a man who was clearly the mayor, wearing his ceremonial chain, surrounded by a bunch of sharp-suited men, old and young, and girls who’d walked right off Carnaby Street, holding trays of drinks. Models hired to be waitresses.

  A young man caught her eye, staring out with a gaze that seemed to reach out and grab her. A shiver of déjà vu. Had she seen him before? Was he a film star or something?

  The panel of text beside it said: World Cup 1966, Villa Park. The mayor with town planners at the West Germany vs Spain group game.

  “Of course, they’re knocking all that stuff down now,” Timothy droned. “All those underpasses rather made the city a place for cars, not people. And those ghastly blocks of flats.”

  He paused, as if drifting off to an uncomfortable memory he couldn’t quite reconcile with this moment. Then he clapped his hands, as if to shoo it away.

  Kath blinked and tore her eyes away from the photograph and the haunting gaze of the man within it.

  “But we’re going to concentrate on the positive stuff. It’s all about giving them history in a cosy way. Minis and mini-skirts; that’s what the public want. For the next exhibition, you’ve got to find the Victorian equivalent to that.”

  He took her back behind the reception counter, where a blonde woman was setting up. Katherine recognized her from years of using the library, and now she would be her workmate. She was maybe a few years older
than Kath, possibly thirty. No make-up at all, just a natural, haunting beauty, and Kath remembered how she’d always found her a bit scary, as if she wasn’t quite of this world, serene and detached, like a Botticelli angel. Kath had always felt she wasn’t worthy enough to be bothering this woman with queries. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever talked to her at all.

  “This is Liz. I’ll leave you in her capable hands.” He went off and left them alone.

  Liz shook her hand, her fingers cool and white, like porcelain. “Hello, Katherine. Did he give you the cosy past speech?”

  “Er, yes he did.”

  “He gave me that too. It’s a load of tosh. The past isn’t nice and cosy. It’s mean and brutal.”

  “How do you know?” Katherine shrugged and grinned, making it clear she was joking, not challenging her.

  Liz smirked, and it was the first time Kath had ever seen anything remotely like a smile on her face. “I don’t. But my mum always told me the Swinging Sixties weren’t quite so glamorous when you knew everyone had an outside loo. It looks lovely on the photographs, but can you imagine what Birmingham used to smell like?”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “But anyway, welcome to Local Studies. Let me show you where everything is and get you on this archaic computer system of ours.”

  — 5 —

  HER FIRST WEEK OF WORK went by and she settled into the place like a new pair of shoes. It was mostly handling research requests from the public: the Greys, Liz called them, as they all seemed to be retired. They came and took up the desk spaces all day and pored through the volumes of old city directories, the microfiches of births and deaths, wills, war records, council records. You could piece together every moment of the city’s history if you had a mind to.

  The sixth floor was not in fact the top floor. A spiral staircase in the middle of Local Studies led to an upper research room that was smaller, cosier. She preferred working in this room, luxuriating in the pregnant quiet. It felt remote from the rest of the building. An ivory tower.