Ghost Girl (25 page)

‘You found it,’ David murmured, turning from the river as if he’d known she was there.

‘I came here as a kid.’ The memory came out of nowhere. She had cycled behind her dad from the Ram pub, over Hammersmith Bridge, back along to Kew and then past Strand-on-the-Green. Her mum had said it was far too much for a child.

‘I often see children with their fathers here.’ He led them away from the bridge. ‘It can make me feel envious.’

‘You don’t have children?’ Stella was spiked with heat at her temerity and then at her forgetfulness. David had told her he didn’t.

‘Jennifer had a miscarriage soon after we got married and what with one thing and another that was it. I might have liked to be a dad.’ He was briefly wistful.

‘Children are a lot of work.’ Stella appreciated the idiocy of the comment, but fortunately David Barlow went on:

‘What bad parents we would have been. No child should live with two people quietly at war with each other. My own home was happy until Mum died. I was eighteen and already engaged. What was your childhood like?’

‘My parents divorced when I was seven. My mum wanted it, but she complains about my dad as if they’re still married. I think she wanted him to fight it, but if someone asked him for anything he did it. Mum got her way and has been unhappy ever since.’ This unexpected insight was obvious now she had said it. Stella thought of telling Jack.

‘Maybe she wanted him to make her feel loved?’ David was keeping up a fast pace that suited Stella’s long legs. ‘Don’t we all. Oh no!’ He swerved into Stella, holding her shoulders briefly to steady her, then he ran over to the edge of the bank.

A small dog was making its way along the water’s edge. It was unsteady on its legs and perilously close to the river, which Stella saw was rising. Oblivious to danger, it batted and snouted at an overhanging branch above its head.

‘Bloody thing!’ David Barlow flung off his jacket and handed it to Stella.

‘Dogs are sure-footed. It’ll be fine.’ With a shock Stella watched David Barlow shuffle and slither down the steep bank, finding foothold in the merest of indentations in the soil. Stella knew nothing about dogs, but she did know people died trying to rescue them while the dog survived. Going by the speed of scum and flotsam racing by, the current was strong.

‘It’s a puppy, it has no sense.’ He spoke through clenched teeth as he grasped a clump of groundsel. He anchored his foot in a gap in the concrete ballast.

Stella was relieved he wasn’t wearing the Italian loafers of her first visit. Grasping another branch, David whistled at the animal. The puppy cocked its ears and looked around.

Stella cast about either way along the towpath. They were alone. The sun had gone in and a breeze whipped over the water, sending ripples across the grey-blue surface. Deep in conversation and walking fast, they had come a good way and the bridge was out of sight. There was no one to help.

‘Here, Bubsy.’ He clicked his tongue. The dog gave a sudden spring into the air and landed facing the other way, its hind leg in the water. To Stella’s horror, a sparrow flew out of nowhere and alighted between the dog and David. The puppy stared at it with liquid brown eyes. It lifted a front paw and held it bent.

‘If the bird flies off, he’s going to try to follow.’ David spoke in a crooning tone presumably intended to placate the dog rather than herself. He undid his belt buckle. ‘Pull it, Stella.’ Still in the soothing voice.

Stella didn’t move.

‘Quick!’ he gasped, the effort causing him to slide closer to the water’s edge.

Stella put a tentative boot on the mud-slicked stone, dizzied by the sheer incline. She caught the thin leather and gave it a tug. David shifted on the slope. She stopped.

‘I’m OK.’ He nodded curtly.

She pulled again and the belt whooshed out of his trouser loops. The buckle whacked her thigh.

‘Do it up around that branch, on the last notch so the noose is wide.’ He indicated the branch near her with a tip of his head. ‘Don’t fall in.’ He gave a short laugh as if the idea was absurd rather than likely.

The leather was warm from being around his waist. Stella did as he had asked. Slowly, keeping his balance, David felt with his hand behind him and caught the loop. He thrust his arm through and hitched it under his shoulder.

The sparrow, a twig between its beak, shot upwards into the leafy canopy above. The dog launched itself after it, paws flailing, flying over the rushing water, David caught it by the belly and pulled it against his chest. It struggled. He did a pirouette on the bank, dangling by his belt. Then he lost his foothold. Stella grasped at his shirt.

Everything slowed. Sounds were muted. The cloying odour of river mud filled her nostrils, cut with the tang of David’s aftershave. She was pushed backwards and landed heavily on the bank, her palms stinging. Strong hands dragged her to the towpath. The fragrance was stronger now. David’s jacket smothered her. She struggled up. David was crouched in a ball beside her. Two button eyes glared at her through the crook in his arm. His white shirt was streaked with mud and needle dots of red.

‘You’re hurt.’ Stella croaked. A cut ran from his little finger’s knuckle to the base of his thumb.

‘I’ll live.’ He sucked it.

Stella’s phone rang. Jack again. She turned it off.

David helped her to her feet and, clasping the dog, retrieved his belt from the bough. Still with one hand, he rethreaded it through his trousers. Stella looked away as if the action was intimate.

‘You could have died,’ she said eventually. ‘There’s a plaque on Hammersmith Bridge for a man who drowned saving a dog. It could have been you.’ She contemplated the dog: scrawny, with matted fur; it was hard to tell the colour.

‘There are worse ways to go.’ David Barlow did up his jacket and finger-combed his hair back. ‘He’s a poodle. They’re intelligent animals. We’d better take it to the police.’

Stella’s heart sank. She did not fancy turning up at Hammersmith Police Station with a poodle, with anything.

‘Someone’s dumped this little lad. No collar, see? He’s been fending for himself. Let’s eat first. We can’t take him into a restaurant. Are you OK with a takeaway round at mine? Unless that call means you have another mercy dash.’

‘It wasn’t important.’ Stella linked arms with David Barlow and strolled back with him along the darkening towpath.

34

Friday, 27 April 2012

Jack slotted the glass back into the basement window, impatient to get to the streets in the attic. He had been stuck in a tunnel outside Hammersmith Broadway for an hour while a broken-down Richmond train was towed to the depot.

He didn’t consider the miniature cityscape a model; it was another dimension of reality. He knew from his nocturnal journeys that the buildings, roads, alleyways and even the trees were faithful renditions of Hammersmith. He didn’t understand how this was possible. The old man could hardly walk and never left the house.

Jack had divined that the woman, because she had kept his street atlas and had the photograph of the family in her bedroom, was a Host. Yet she didn’t fit the profile. He couldn’t sense evil in her eyes or in her aura. She appeared to show no interest in the streets in the attic and rarely lingered there. She had no idea he was there and, emboldened, he stayed longer working with the old man in companionable silence, as he had with his father. He would not ask about the
A–Z
; he didn’t want his motive mistaken. They repaired roofs and camber, replaced straggling trees with pollarded versions to clear the way for buses and other high-sided vehicles. The old man went to bed at ten and Jack left for his driving shifts. He compiled for Jack a list of alterations and repairs which, returning in the small hours and working by the light of a lamp strapped to his head, Jack completed for when the man started the next morning.

Jack was there under false pretences. He should try to retrieve his
A–Z
– once he had it, he must leave. Lured by the attic streets, he was losing his touch. If the woman was a True Host, capable of killing and feeling nothing, and the photograph by her bed suggested this, he should take action. Yet he did not.

He stopped off in his dormitory. He froze. The difference was minimal: most would miss it; the book that had been on Colin’s bed open and spine up was now closed and by the bed. He should pack up and leave. Stella would be appalled if she knew. In fact he’d been so keen to get here he had forgotten to call her after leaving Amanda’s. She believed they were a team; he was letting her down. He crept over to his bed and, squatting down, punched in her number.

‘Stella Darnell. Please leave a message…’

Jack ended the call. Leaving the dormitory, he went to the stairs and continued upwards.

‘You’re late.’

‘Got held up.’ Jack gathered up the skirts of his coat and ducked into the crawl space.

‘Test the tunnel walls. You made them too narrow. A train was stuck there.’

Jack surveyed the tunnel he had been stuck in. He did not explain about the faulty Richmond train: his father had hated excuses. He depressed the button on the console and set the District line train in motion. It clunked along the track, the sound a replica of life. Jack gripped the lever, the curving brickwork sliding up and over his cab. The dusty yellow headlamps lit the silver rails. The train took the bend outside Hammersmith Broadway and on to Barons Court where Stella’s mother lived. The man was repairing a gas leak on Fulham Palace Road near the hospital. He was wrong about the width of the tunnel, but Jack knew better than to say. His father didn’t brook criticism. For good measure he pared at the walls, careful to avoid puncturing or ripping the gauze.

After this he set to work on the road by the brewery leading down from the water tower. Undergoing conversion to flats, the tower was caged in scaffolding as it was in life. Jack repaired a freeze-thaw crater in the tarmac and meandered down to the Eyot. Here the tide regularly flooded up to the opposite pavement. It was out now, so he cleared away debris washed up from the riverbed: twigs, takeaway cartons, lengths of twine. Using a toothbrush he scrubbed at slime on the kerbs. This time, in tune with the school, he heard the front door shutting far below.

‘I have to go.’

The old man did not reply.

Even before his Host had mounted the stairs, Jack was in his dormitory. He gazed out of the window at the orange-tinted sky noting her step was slower tonight. As he expected, she paused on the landing, but still he tensed. The repositioning of the book told him that, a good housemother, she checked the dorms.

He heard her go on up the stairs and, opening his door, crept along the passage to the landing. Her head was bowed, her breathing stertorous. Jack had learnt to hide with scant cover. Most people looked in obvious places like attics, cupboards and wardrobes in spare rooms and did not consider shallow alcoves or pools of shadow. Jack hid in what amounted to nowhere, where not even a True Host with a mind like his own thought to check.

Her shadow receded on the wall; the angle of the light made her monstrous, the curving shadow of the balustrade providing a backdrop as if she was caged.

There was a bang and then a knocking. An object shot down the stairwell and bounced against a banister. It skittered on to the tiles in the hall below. Jack melted into the black of the corridor and flattened himself beside the open fire door. She made her laborious way down the stairs. He knew enough about his Host to perceive that tonight she was untypically clumsy.

She was talking; he couldn’t catch the words. His mouth went dry. There was someone with her. Surely he would have felt their presence. She had dropped her telephone and the banister had broken its fall. He glided down the stairs and stopped at the turn in the staircase before his own shadow projected on the wall.

Her voice dropped, Jack only caught snatches: ‘…sorry… full diary… Cheltenham…’ Her soothing tone implied a lover. True Hosts rarely had partners.

She said goodbye. Jack took the stairs and gained the landing ahead of her. She was wheezing and he was tempted to race back down and lend her his arm. From his vantage point by the fire door he watched her pass by, her phone in one hand and a book in the other. He imagined she was a ghost, condemned to wander the corridor of the building forever. She stopped. She sensed him.

Jack had forgotten to switch his own phone off. He got few calls: from London Underground and from Stella. Both could ring anytime. He willed it to stay silent. If he reached for it she would feel a shift in the air. From two metres away she must hear his heart smashing against his ribs. She was fumbling with a book, fanning the pages as if she had lost her place. His London
A–Z
. She was writing something in a flipover pad like a police officer’s.

Jack saw why she went out at night. The woman wasn’t following him. She used his street atlas to collect details of London to report back to her father so he could adapt or change buildings, signs, minor details on his model. She had probably walked every street in Hammersmith. Jack felt an oblique envy. His Host’s journeys had tangible purpose.

She switched on the landing light. All she had to do was look to her left and she would see him. Jack was paralysed by thrilling fear. She knew where he went; she had his journeys.

Upstairs she would quietly confirm her suspicion that her father had received a visitor. In absolute control of events, she would turn back her father’s bed, lay out his incontinence pads, boil a kettle for his nightcap. She would bide her time.

It was pitch dark when Jack eased into bed. He wrapped his coat close; it crackled. He felt in the pocket and found the newspaper cutting he had taken from Amanda Hampson’s house that morning. He had not told Stella his suspicions about Charlie Hampson: she would be annoyed he was, as she would put it, ‘up to his old tricks’. He must ring, or she would wonder where he was.

Jack dipped under the blankets and for the second time that night dialled her mobile. He imagined Stella pottering about her father’s house inventing tasks, reasons to stay. She was unable to move into or to sell Terry Darnell’s old home.