Ghost Girl (45 page)

‘Tea first!’

David relieved her of the Planet vacuum cleaner. His shirt sleeves were pushed up, revealing sturdy workmanlike arms, surprising since he didn’t strike her as practical.

He had laid the table with plates decorated with dainty doilies, bone-handled forks and real napkins. A candle burned in the centre of a sponge cake dusted with caster sugar. Another of Jennifer Barlow’s creations. Stella was cheered by the cafetière of coffee and a milk jug from which wisps of steam arose. Jack liked cake; if he were here he would see that he had got David wrong.

Stanley was curled up asleep in a bed by the radiator. The dog and the laden table gave the kitchen a homely aspect very different to Terry’s. David slid out a chair for her and then slid it back as she sat down.

Mindful of time – she wanted to check on Jack – Stella glanced at David’s wall clock and stifled a gasp. Surrounding the clock were the pictures and crucifixes from under the downstairs bath. The jacket she had found hung on a hook cleaned and pressed. Stella had worried that David would not refer to her discoveries. He had put everything on display.

‘The cake looks nice.’ She was glad Jack wasn’t witnessing this. At the same time she wished that he was.

‘Last cake.’ David sat down. ‘I’ll have to have a go myself. I’ve got rather partial.’ He patted his stomach, still, Stella noticed, as flat as a board.

The candle flame gave his face a glow, accentuating the start of a tan.

‘Make a wish.’

‘Now?’ she said stupidly.

‘I’ve made mine.’ He laughed merrily. ‘Keep it secret.’

Stella never made wishes, but this was not the time to say so. I wish we could find the murderer. With too big a blow, she extinguished the light and knocked over the candle. Only then did she think she should have wished something about David.

David flapped open his napkin and spread it over his lap. With efficient chops he divided the cake into exact sixths.

Stella bit off a piece. The sponge was moist and tasted of lemons.

‘I bought my Wolseley forty-six years ago.’ Barlow nodded at the pictures. Stella clutched the table edge to stop herself trembling and looked to where he was pointing.

She hadn’t noticed the car. Unlike the other pictures it wasn’t framed but was a print, like the ones Terry did, the colours lurid and dreamlike. David had not mentioned the stolen items.

‘Wolseleys are beautiful to drive, even without power-assisted steering.’ He detached a morsel of sponge with the side of his fork, gathered it up and popped it into his mouth. ‘The smell of the leather, dark red, sumptuous. That shine on the walnut veneer. I was at the start of my career and engaged. At eighteen I was on top of the world!’

‘It’s hard to manage without a car, even in London.’ A lump of cake stuck to the roof of Stella’s mouth. She couldn’t dislodge it with her tongue, so she gulped her coffee. She would have to say something.

‘You’ve made this place as good as new. And God, in the guise of the good people at Porphyrion, will finish what you started.’ He sat back. ‘These pictures, those crosses are shackles. Jennifer stitched me up, Stella.’ He wiped his hands on his napkin and leant forward. ‘She hid them and said we’d been burgled. She was crying, but she never cried. Made me call the police – no, not call, I had to go there. She’s adept at dreaming up new modes of torture even from beyond the grave. Divorce would have spoiled her fun.’ He appeared to be controlling a rage.

‘You had no idea?’ Stella could see he was telling the truth. Her skin tingled. Mrs Barlow was dead. She could harm no one. But suddenly Stella felt as if the woman was in the room with them. A malevolent presence. Something nudged at her leg; she leapt back. Stanley was licking her boot.

‘Don’t feed him. He mustn’t beg.’ David came over and swept the dog into his arms. He turned to her. ‘It’s over, Stella.’

Stella reeled. No one had ever ended it with her. Jackie believed Stella split with up men to stop them leaving her. A shame, Jackie said, because men adored Stella and would never leave her.

‘No more recrimination.’ He was taking the pictures down. He stuffed them into a plastic bin bag, careless, it seemed, of breaking them. ‘Tabula rasa. Clean slate!’

Stella was stunned. That word ‘recrimination’. David Barlow had asked her to deep clean, his second chance. No amount of scrubbing would rub out her theft. She could not hide the printout under the bath.

‘The police used to drive Wolseleys,’ she managed. He didn’t want to end it. She was not relieved. If he knew about the printout, then he would say it was over. Perhaps he did know and was talking about recrimination to encourage her to confess.

‘They did.’ David threw the bag on the patio. It landed with a metallic crash and the breaking of glass.

Stella’s phone rang. Jack. ‘I need to take this, it’s work.’

In the hall, she tripped over a canister of air neutralizer that had rolled out of the equipment bag. She should not have let Jack go on his own. ‘Jack! Are you OK?’

‘Is that Stella Darnell?’ A girl’s voice.

‘Ye-es?’ Stella didn’t know any children. She checked the handset: Caller unknown.

‘Could I see you?’

‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Marian.’

‘Well, to be honest I’m in the middle of…’

‘You said to call if I needed help.’

After the scene in the toilets Stella had encouraged Marian to call and she had meant it. ‘I’m with a client,’ she heard herself say. Marian had a violent husband. Terry would not refuse. ‘I could come afterwards. Are you at the station?’

‘I don’t work weekends. I can’t see you at home.’ Marian was wheezing as if she had been crying. ‘Do you know Dukes Meadows? By the river at Chiswick, not far from where you are now. It’s peaceful. We won’t be disturbed.’

Stella would rather they were disturbed. The shoulder-to-cry-on stuff was more Jackie’s department. She agreed to meet at six-thirty in the car park by a boathouse, presumably a café. Marian rang off without saying goodbye; she was upset. Bang went the supper with David. Disappointed Stella tossed the air neutralizer back into the bag and returned to the kitchen.

David had brewed fresh coffee.

‘Nothing wrong, I hope.’ He asked questions without being intrusive. He leant against the fridge, the dog resting on his shoulder.

‘A client.’ Stella told him she was meeting Marian and how she knew her. Although he would be sympathetic, she didn’t mention the marital abuse. She would not break a confidence, even one that hadn’t yet been shared. She told him this meant they couldn’t have supper.

‘If it’s any consolation, I can’t anyway, something’s come up. I’ll explain another time.’

‘Do you know Dukes Meadows?’ She was mildly surprised David hadn’t said earlier that they wouldn’t be able to meet.

‘Lovely spot for a stroll or a picnic. Not tonight, the weather is forecast to deteriorate.’ The dog cocked its head as if particularly interested. ‘Are you going from here?’

‘Yes, apparently it’s quite near.’

‘Traffic willing, it’s twenty minutes. You’re younger, but for my generation Dukes Meadows has a darker association. They found a victim of “Jack the Stripper” there in 1959. One of the Hammersmith Murders. I was a lad. Me and my pals went to have a nose. There you go, Fluffkin.’ He put Stanley back in his bed and flapped a furry brown bear under its nose. The dog snapped the bear between its jaws and dashed it against the cushion. ‘I go back there sometimes. Can’t help myself.’

‘What happened?’ Stella asked out of politeness, thinking about Marian.

‘A dawn police patrol found Elizabeth Figg propped against a willow tree. She was a twenty-one-year-old prostitute. It was my first body – not that I saw her; they’d constructed a corrugated iron shelter and shooed us away. One officer said she could have been sunbathing, looking over the Thames to Watneys brewery. Was your dad there?’ David was animated.

‘He was a boy.’ Stella was impressed at his recall of an event of over fifty years ago. But then the Rokesmith murder was still clear in her mind from when she was fifteen. She snapped to: this meant David had to be over sixty.

‘Your dad was taken too soon.’

‘His first fatality was in 1966 – a boy killed in a hit and run.’

‘Where was that?’ David snatched away the bear; the poodle whimpered.

‘On King Street.’ Stella took her mug to the sink.

‘I’ll give you directions for Dukes Meadows. It’s hard to find even with a satnav.’

That a woman had been murdered there made Stella even less willing to go. Amanda Hampson’s house was preferable – maybe better the corpse you know. She had no idea how to make Marian feel better. Until David, her relationships were not an example and this wasn’t really a relationship.

‘We should not forget the Elizabeth Figgs and Michael Thorntons; or we forget ourselves.’ David sluiced soap off Stella’s mug under the hot-water tap.

‘You know about Michael Thornton?’ Stella stopped in the doorway. Idle chat was how Terry unearthed clues.

‘The car hit him the day Myra Hindley and Ian Brady got life. Sixth of May 1966.’ He twisted the drying-up cloth around inside the mug. ‘Thornton’s sister watched her brother die. I really hope she has forgotten. Her name was Myra, then after the murders her parents changed it to Mary.’ He draped the cloth on the oven door handle. ‘Myra Hindley was still trying to get released when she died. Jennifer said you can’t ever be forgiven for killing a child. A few years earlier, Hindley and Brady would have hanged.’

Myra Hindley was coming up a lot. Mrs Thornton had killed herself on the fifteenth November 2002. Five days after Jamie Markham, who in turn was five days after the boy Robert Smith on Guy Fawkes Night. Lucille May had built a file on the crashes, supposedly for a book she was writing, and she had gone as far as buying the house that the dead boy had lived in. That didn’t add up. She needed to talk to Jack.

‘Can you?’

‘Sorry, can I what?’

‘Be forgiven for the death of a child.’

Stella was born a few months after the Moors Murderers were sentenced, but she did remember Terry’s frustration when Hindley died, that she had escaped in the end. ‘No. Definitely not,’ she agreed.

She lugged the equipment up to the spare room, a room that was spare because the Barlows had no children. Unlike her other relationships, she and David agreed about key things. He had risked his life to save a dog. He cared for his wife even when he no longer loved her. He was loyal and steadfast. And certainly there was no way back if you killed someone.

Lost in her thoughts, Stella forgot to phone Jack.

62

Saturday, 5 May 2012

Jack stood in Amanda Hampson’s sitting room and listened. Apart from the ticking of the quartz clock on her bureau, the sounds were external. Traffic on the South Circular, an aeroplane’s muffled roar and the chugging of a District line train leaving Kew Gardens station right on time.

His phone rang. Clean Slate.

‘Hello, love, Jackie here, is it all right to speak?’

‘Always to you, Jacqueline!’ He laughed happily.

‘Stop it! You’re at that woman’s house, aren’t you? I’m checking you’re not frightened.’

‘Yes and no.’

‘Say if it’s spooky. I can come out there.’

‘It’s fine. Stella offered too.’ Jack looked about the room. It was horribly empty. Amanda’s absence was as large as her presence. He was suddenly less confident. ‘What about you?’

‘Me? Oh same old… although did I tell you about that woman at the police station? Sent me back, I was a girl again.’ She cackled.

Keen now to keep her on the line, he encouraged Jackie to tell him the whole story.

The memory of the night Jack stood in the garden watching Amanda Hampson through the window made him sad. She was not a True Host, but he was wrong to dismiss her. Grubby though she had let her house become after Charlie Hampson died, she had created a home such as Jack had yearned for most of his life.

He regretted that while Amanda was alive he had written off her theory that her husband had been murdered as unresolved grief. He had let her down. The two cases had converged. A man was avenging children killed on roads by careless drivers. One of those drivers was Charlie Hampson. The obvious person was Michael Thornton’s father, but Lucie said he was dead. Who else cared that the boy had died?

The answer was obvious. Terry Darnell.

Jack needed air. He plunged outside and slammed the French doors behind him. He blundered on to the lawn. Vaguely he registered the grass was cut, the weeds gone. Stella had sent in her garden crew and made it better than when Amanda was alive. Stella made things better.

Frustrated by the lack of action, had Terry taken the law into his own hands? Gamekeeper turned poacher. Jack rubbed his face. No. It could not be. No.

His tiny bead of doubt was not, could not be, to do with Stella’s father. Terry had been a clean copper. Cashman had told Stella the man was his role model. A respected detective, he was not a vigilante. If Terry were the killer he would not have left the folder out for Stella to find. He was too clever for that. Jack let himself breathe.

He looked back into the sitting room. Something was different, even allowing for police and forensics and the urgency of the ambulance crew. The Turkish mat was wrinkled and the dining chairs had been shoved aside to make a gangway for the paramedics to bring Amanda’s body through. The curtain ties hung loose. A cushion lay on the carpet and the occasional table that Amanda kept folded was by the sofa. Jack avoided Charlie Hampson’s cold sardonic stare.

Papers lay on the open bureau, utility bills and junk mail. Nothing about Charlie Hampson’s death or the boy he had fatally injured. Amanda had tidied her file away. The door to the room was slightly open. Any minute she would sail in with coffee, expounding some newly gleaned fact.

‘Bring that table over for your drink, there’s a love.’

She only put the occasional table out for visitors. Neither he nor Stella had moved it. No one else had need to. The table was folded by the door when he last cleaned.

Amanda had had a visitor. She had not put the table away after her guest had gone because by then she was dead.