Unfinished Sympathy

by Andy Conway

  Table of Contents

  About This Book

  Dedication

  Introductory note

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  — Coda —

  Next in the Touchstone saga

  Thank you...

  Acknowledgements

  Historical Notes

  FREE DOWNLOAD

  About the Author

  Copyright Notice

  About This Book

  To live for you, to die for you...

  Searching for his long lost love, reluctant time traveler Mitch finds himself in 1908 New York, caught up in a dark case of blackmail and secrets with famous composer Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma.

  Investigating a mysterious threatening letter, Mitch must walk two contrasting worlds: uptown high society where opera-loving millionaires plot and scheme, and downtown ghettos where Jewish mobsters battle Chinatown gangsters for control of jazz clubs and nickelodeons.

  Featuring a teenage Irving Berlin, jazz pioneer James Reese Europe, a young Duke Ellington, corrupt police chief Charles Becker, and notorious gangsters Big Jack Zelig and Mock Duck, Unfinished Sympathy is a gripping thriller of murder, blackmail, adultery and scandal set in the last days of New York's Gilded Age.

  Dedication

  To Jack Finney

  to whom gratitude

  time and again.

  Introductory note

  UNFINISHED SYMPATHY might be fiction, but it purloins many real people and historical events. As with all my Touchstone novels, I try to be as true to that history as possible while letting my fantasy take me where the story wants to go.

  The story is not the history.

  So any historical inaccuracies are conscious decisions made to service a fanciful tale, and where I’ve changed history for the sake of entertainment, I’ve tried to hold my hands up in the Historical Notes at the rear of the book.

  In short, none of this happened. But it might have.

  — 1 —

  MITCH RIPPED THE POSTER down from the antiques shop window and read it one last time. A photocopy faded by sun. A grainy old photograph of a smiling girl.

  Missing: Veronica Wethers.

  Last seen in the vicinity of the old Kings Heath station site.

  There was a date. Several years now. No one thought of her anymore, except her mother, and perhaps even she had given up all hope.

  Why had he kept it in the window so long?

  Guilt, perhaps.

  Pete Wethers’ granddaughter had disappeared just like Pete had disappeared.

  And Mitch might have been responsible for both.

  He screwed it up and tossed it into the black bin bag of rubbish ready to be thrown out and looked around at the empty shelves. Just a counter, a couple of boxes sitting on it, and a laptop. The kettle and the tea service too, which would be the very last thing to leave.

  He sat behind the counter and stared at the photograph of Eleanor, facing his own, enclosed in a silver Victorian locket.

  Rain lashed at the windows of the antiques shop and thundered on the roof of the little extension that jutted out from the main building, next to the Prince of Wales pub.

  A flash of lightning, electric blue, and a vicious crack of thunder right overhead made him jump.

  Was this how he might die?

  No. Not yet. Not before he got back to Eleanor.

  He scanned the holiday let advert on the laptop on the counter before him.

  He dug his pocket watch from his waistcoat. Four pm. He switched the electric kettle on. She would be here any moment.

  A woman with a red umbrella rushed up to the shop but ran into the pub next door. A 50 bus sailed past, spraying the gutter.

  He read the holiday let description again.

  Just a few hundred yards from a secret cove, this traditional holiday cottage has plenty of space for all the family and enjoys an enviable position near the famous Strumble Head lighthouse.

  He could flit to someone’s unused villa in the sun somewhere. All he had to do was find a location and a time when he could be sure it was vacant, then concentrate hard and just be there.

  But this wasn’t a holiday.

  This was the cottage he’d waited for years to come online. He’d put a Google tracker on it and waited for the alert that would tell him someone was letting the cottage out. Then he had done what normal people did: reserved it with a few clicks, made a phone call, packed a bag. This afternoon, he would drive for hours along the motorway and then narrow country lanes till he reached his holiday destination.

  Like a normal person.

  Not a freak who could breach time and mess it all up and destroy lives.

  His gaze shifted from the laptop to the cardboard boxes of vinyl records on the counter. Just this one last thing to do and he could go where no-one could find him, no matter how hard they hunted.

  A sports car pulled up outside. An Iris blue MGB Roadster. A girl climbed out, holding a raincoat over her head, and scampered to the shelter of the shop door. She peered through the glass panel, her hazel eyes above the CLOSED sign.

  He went to the door, slid the bolt, opened it and said, “Hello, Rachel.”

  — 2 —

  SHE BUSTLED IN AND hugged him, her perfume smothering him so much he reeled, dizzy. Not perfume; the overwhelming sense of her — all the things she’d been through. Poor girl. Lost in time and fighting to get her life back. And the deep, dark power she possessed. Greater than his, or Mrs Hudson’s, or Pete Wethers’, even greater than Kath Bright’s. Greater than all of them.

  She shut the door behind her and the bell chimed.

  Mitch staggered back, hand to his forehead, reeling with shock.

  “Are you all right?” she said, alarmed.

  “I’m fine. Just give me a moment.”

  He put up a barricade, a levee to shut himself off from the tidal wave of emotion. A radiation suit against her infection.

  “You look ill, Mitch. Have you been to a doctor?”

  “Doctors can’t help with my condition.”

  There. He was safe. The kettle came to the boil and clicked off. He looked at her, standing nervous in the middle of the empty shop. Her raincoat stained dark, a red polka dot vintage dress underneath, black stockings and Oxford shoes. Deep purple lipstick
.

  She reached for him and rubbed his cheek.

  “You’ve got lipstick. Sorry,” she said.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  She glanced out to the car. “Can’t stay long. My dad.”

  “Is he all right out there? He can come in.”

  “He’s fine. Listening to his old 80s music. He doesn’t mind. He does anything for me now. Because he thought I was dead.” She shrugged and stepped up to the bar stool on the other side of the counter.

  “Has he asked you yet? About disappearing for two years?”

  Rachel shook her head. “He’s not going to dig for trauma.”

  Mitch spooned tea leaves from a caddy into the Art Deco teapot and poured hot water in. “Yes. I can see that. Sometimes it’s just enough to have that person back. So much you won’t ask questions.”

  “Sometimes I think he knows. That I was lost in time.”

  “Really?”

  “He’s not as dumb as he looks, my dad.”

  Mitch nodded. An awkward pause.

  “How are you?” he asked, though he knew — he’d felt it, in that moment when she’d hugged him — she was wounded, she’d been to Hell and back, she was living the quiet repose of the war veteran, just getting on with putting one foot in front of another, existing in quiet moments of joy, just breathing and delighting in that.

  Like himself.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “It’s good to be home. But strange.” She turned to look outside again and lowered her voice, as if her dad might hear her. “I’m just happy being with my dad, and my Nan. Being normal, you know? But I can feel it inside me. It’s so strong. It’s like I’m holding a dam and it’s about to burst, you know? Do you have that feeling too?”

  “Yes,” he said. Another lie. He couldn’t have that feeling as much as Rachel. No one could. “Just hold onto the here and now. Stay in the moment. Think of what you have at home, and how much you longed for it.”

  She nodded, looked back at Mitch and slapped her thighs, changing the conversation. “So these are the records?”

  He waved a hand at the two cardboard boxes on the counter and she rifled through them.

  “This looks good.”

  She pulled out a Charlie Barnet compilation. The one that had Haunted Town on it.

  “It is,” he said.

  The only tune he would take with him. His phone could apparently hold a thousand songs, but he had just one mp3 file on it. The only song he would need.

  “Oh, there’s lots of classical here,” she said, frowning, flipping through. “And is it all this Gustav Mahler bloke?”

  “Most of it.”

  “Some are the same. You’ve got one, two, three Unfinished Symphonies.”

  “Yes, different recordings, different versions.”

  “You must like him a lot.”

  There were composers whose works had filled his youth. Mitch had been a young fogey — a teenager who dressed like someone’s granddad, flicking through the stacks in Birmingham music library, taking out vinyl albums every week. He’d devoured the great composers, until his empath abilities had made the likes of Beethoven, Schumann and Mahler too emotionally overwhelming. Their music drew him into universes of pain, overwrought with psychological suffering, so he’d cut music out of his life altogether. A Mahler movement could leave him struggling to hold onto the present, but also have him bedridden for a week, exhausted from exposure to raw human angst.

  “I was a bit of a Mahler expert when I was your age,” he said.

  Rachel looked him in the eye, amused. She held up an album, scanning the sleeve notes on the back. A cheeky smirk. “Okay, what’s his wife’s name?”

  “That’s easy. Alma.”

  She read some more, her smile falling. “Ooh, this is sad. He had a child that died. What was her name?”

  “Putzi. He thought he’d killed her with his music.”

  “How?”

  “When everything was going well in his life, he wrote a tragic symphony and put in three great hammer blows. After that, his daughter died, he was hounded out of his job and diagnosed with a fatal heart condition. One, two, three.”

  “And he thought his symphony caused it all?”

  “Music has a tremendous power. That’s why I can’t listen to it anymore.”

  “Does it?” she said absentmindedly.

  “It’s easy for you. You’re not an empath.”

  Rachel let Mahler’s Unfinished Symphony fall back inside the box and bit her thumb, her feet swaying in the air. “There were some old 1930s songs from Charlie’s record collection that used to take me way back,” she said. “Not physically back. Not that. But it was like the curtain falling between now and then. Almost like I could see him again.”

  Her eyes brimmed and he thought she was going to blub. He poured the tea, using a strainer. He couldn’t risk her emotions. If her longing was so strong, she might pull him in, and before he knew it he’d be back in 1966 with her and Charlie.

  “Sure you don’t want a cup of tea?”

  Rachel shook her head and smiled and sniffed and brushed the tears away. “I sometimes wish I could go back to him. Poor Charlie.” She looked out of the window at the car parked outside. Her dad sitting out there. “But you can’t always get what you want.”

  Mitch stirred his tea, the spoon chiming in the bone china cup.

  “So, where are you going?” she said, forcing a smile. “What are you up to?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just a holiday. A little cottage in Wales.” A lie. Don’t tell her. Let her be normal. Let her be.

  “I’ll miss this place,” she said.

  “It’ll still be an antiques shop.”

  “Yes, but you won’t be in it.”

  He smiled and shrugged and sipped his tea. Bitter.

  She patted one of the boxes. “I’ll take the jazz, but not the classical.”

  “No deal. All or nothing. I’m literally shutting up shop and this is the last thing to go. Let me lock up and walk away.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Okay, go on then. Gimme a hand to the car.”

  He put on his trench coat and fedora and carried the box of classical records out to the car. Rachel popped the trunk open, they shoved the boxes in and stood in the rain.

  “This is goodbye, then” he said.

  “Not forever, though. You’re coming back?”

  The rain was pouring off her mac, held over her head.

  “Of course I am,” he lied.

  “Call me after your holiday,” she said. “Happy New Year.”

  She kissed his cheek, jumped into the car and her dad sped off with a roar.

  Mitch watched the MGB Roadster slide off down to Moseley village, all the way to the Bulls Head, where it turned off up the slip road.

  He was wet through and hollowed out.

  And now there was only one thing left to do.

  Disappear forever.

  — 3 —

  HE PULLED INTO THE Trefiwen hamlet at about four in the afternoon. New Year’s Eve. The rain following him all the way. The owner had left the keys in the mailbox, as instructed.

  He fumbled the door open and switched the lights on. The cottage looked much as it had 35 years ago when it had belonged to his Uncle Tony. A week here alone in 1984 as a teenager away from home for the first time.

  A week in 1941.

  But it had none of the same furniture, except for the old grandfather clock in the hallway by the kitchen, still solemnly ticking time away. A different smell to the place. Not the mustiness he could almost recall if he thought hard enough. This was aerosol Pot-Pourri air freshener and Febreze.

  Still in his wet overcoat and fedora, he slumped into the lumpy grey sofa. The old fire grate was the same. There was that.

  He had planned to do it as soon as he got here, but knew now there was no use. He yawned and rubbed his eyes. It didn’t feel right. A day of packing, and driving, and meeting Rachel had taken it out of him. His
head would be clear in the morning.

  He went to the bedroom. It wasn’t the same bed he’d slept in 35 years ago. He couldn’t sleep in that.

  He had to do it now.

  He hadn’t brought food and there was nothing in the kitchen except a few complimentary tea bags and a bottle of milk in the fridge. That was enough. He made a pot of tea and looked around the place.

  There was no television and no Wi-Fi. Unusual for a holiday let. The owners had cut corners. The cutlery was from the 1980s, with bright green plastic handles, the kitchen utensils were a cheap, plastic set with a missing spatula, the microwave was so old it didn’t have a digital display. Little things that pointed to taking the cheap option.

  He would write a bad review, if he cared.

  But he didn’t care.

  He wasn’t going to stay much longer.

  There was an old transistor radio in the kitchen. He switched it on and twisted the chrome dial through waves of interference. It was important to avoid stations that played music.

  He had one song and one song only.

  He found a station of talk and left it bubbling away in the background like a slow-cooking soup: just enough human warmth to fill the empty shell of a cottage and anchor him to this time while he sipped his tea.

  Three cups and he felt awake again. He threw on his overcoat and walking boots, wrapped a scarf around his neck, pulled his felt fedora hat tight so it pinched his forehead, and walked up the lane.

  Night was falling. The rain lashed his face as he trudged up the slope. A cruel wind, icy even. He had to hold onto his hat when he reached the top and the sea wind blasted in. He could barely see the lighthouse down there through the blur. The steep banks either side of the lane afforded him some protection from the blast. Fingers frozen already.

  Wild ponies in the field staring blankly.

  He opened the iron gate to the field and slipped in, his boots sinking into sludge.

  This was where he’d first seen her. This was his ground zero with Eleanor. Leaning on a bicycle and turning to him. Smiling.

  He took out his phone and thumbed up the music player. Untangled the earphones and pushed the buds into his ears.