Ghost Girl (5 page)

He gave a start. A woman was sitting feet from him. She was looking straight at him. Jack ducked back against the stuccoed wall. He counted to ten and then inched around. The woman was still staring, but not at him. Light from the room would blot out the garden; she could not see him. She must have become aware of her own reflection because she put her hand to her face and brushed back a strand of hair, patting it into place. She was at a desk and now began leafing through papers strewn there, occasionally jotting something down in a notebook.

Keeping below the sightline of the security lamp, he flitted to the other side of the doors, truly excited now. An ample marble mantelpiece below which flickered the flames of a fire. He sighed; he could sit cross-legged on the rug in front of the hearth and make himself at home. His attention was drawn to a picture above the mantelpiece: a middle-aged man with unruly grey hair in a matching grey suit. The modern image, a scan of a photograph, was incongruous in the sumptuous gilt frame. This man was staring at him. Jack shrank back. It was a picture, but he could not shake the impression that the man could see him.

He had seen no signs of evil in the set of the woman’s features, but staring back into the grey eyes in the framed picture, Jack knew he was looking at a killer. It was to stop murderers like him that Jack went on his night-time prowls. He occupied their homes without them knowing and meticulously undermined their plans to take lives. At least he had done this until Stella got wind of it and said he must stop, it was illegal. Tonight when he left his house, Jack had promised himself, he was taking a harmless stroll.

The woman was reading a newspaper. Jack thought her eyes looked tired; lines around them betrayed that she was used to laughing, but deeper grooves around her mouth told him she had not even smiled for a while: misery dictated her mood.

He understood the plethora of papers and the open doors. She was lonely and unconsciously was inviting guests. The grey man in the portrait was dead. Grieving, his widow was struggling with the household admin that was his legacy. Nothing for Jack here, although she might welcome his company.

The woman was jotting something down from the article. Jack stepped closer, but could only see three letters in the headline. They spelled ‘The’. He saw the photograph beneath and stifled a yelp. Stella. Jack could just see the byline: Lucille May. He shivered. The widow was reading about Stella. This was a sign. But of what?

Something struck him on the forehead. He had banged his head on the glass pane. He flung himself flat against the house wall. If she came outside she would see him. He heard clicking: her shoes on a wooden floor. She was coming. He shut his eyes, then snapped them open and cast about. There was nowhere to hide.

Jack broke cover. He leapt across the band of light from the sitting room and bounded along a path that skirted the lawn. He found himself by the outbuilding. He risked looking back. The woman was still at her desk.

He was surprised to find the outbuilding was not a shed, but a circular business of white-painted brick with a domed roof. He tried the door; it was locked. He peeped through a glass porthole, out of sight of the house, and saw only a sweeping white wall. It was empty, yet she had locked the door. A sense of peace overwhelmed him and it was all he could do not to return to the flagged patio and slip inside. He could stay here happily. Jack’s justification for night ramblings was to find men who killed and to stop their work. He must not choose places that made him feel at home. He had promised Stella to stop, but in truth as soon as he stepped on to the lawn he had broken this promise.

Jack did up his coat and, out of the sightline of the camera, returned to the gap in the pyracantha and thrust himself back into the alley.

He jogged along King Street towards Hammersmith Broadway and swore that from now on he would keep his promise.

Jack had reached the Lyric Theatre when he realized he didn’t have his
A–Z
. It must have fallen out of his pocket. He retraced his steps, scouring the pavement.

He crossed Ravenscourt Road. A dark object lay on the pavement outside the gates of the park. He increased his pace. As he did so a figure stepped out of the gloom and picked it up. Jack was close enough to see the white of the cover. It was his
A–Z
. He stopped. He could not ask for it back. It was his policy on his journeys never to speak to anyone. He must not be seen or remembered.

The figure was consulting his atlas as if they had lost their way, slowly turning the pages. Jack could not tell from here if the person was male or female: they stood just outside a circle of lamplight. They wore a coat similar to his, with the collar up. Jack went cold. The person was tracing his journeys, page by page. They could see into his mind. Jack had walked every page of the atlas, treading on unyielding pavements. He knew London’s streets by heart. He avoided high buildings and sprawling concourses where the wind whipped around pillars as they made him feel exposed and robbed him of intent. Instead he went out of his way – all ways were ‘his way’ – to use subways and tunnels where he felt at home. He had completed the journeys traced on the pages in the book last year, but he kept the book with him. It was his companion as he took routes not marked on his map and went where the signs pointed. Without the book he was lost. This person might as well possess his soul.

The figure closed the book and began walking smartly across the road as if a decision had been made. Jack slipped behind a parked van and watched through the side windows. His heart thumped so loudly he had the crazy idea it would be heard.

He had forgotten his shift! Horrified at this lapse he checked his watch. Thirty-nine minutes before he must pick up his train at Earls Court. He should go to the station.

The woman had gone. Jack broke into a run, now heedless of being seen. There was no sign of her. No sign. He darted around a building on the pavement. It had been a public toilet – the words ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ were inscribed above the doors. It was now a café and was closed. She was not there.

To his right were the wrought-iron gates of a mansion he had passed often, but ignored. They were secured with a chain. A notice was fixed to one of the gate pillars:

Mallingswood House

Pre-Prep and Prep School for Boys

Five to Thirteen Years

Through the curling design on the gate he saw a flicker in the forecourt beyond the gates and the figure detached from the shadows of a tree and trotted – a woman, he was now sure – around the gravel turning circle. She went up broad steps to a glassed-in porch and in the muted street he heard her key scratch in the lock and the door shut.

Jack felt a jolt of foreboding. She was not a Host – his name for the killers who unwittingly had him as a guest in their homes – yet something disturbed him. She had too readily pocketed his street atlas.

In front of the gates stood what would once have been a splendid circular stone drinking fountain with a lower trough for small animals. Jack hid behind it; mounting the plinth he edged around it to survey the school.

A substantial square construction that had fallen victim to two extensions either side, the mansion had lost architectural balance. Once obviously a grand family home in parkland that would have stretched to the River Thames, it was stranded between two roads. The wall – bricks charcoaled by fumes – was spiked with broken glass weathered smooth but still vicious. A prefab structure with grilled windows and a scrubbed-out graffiti tag on one panel had been erected as an overspill classroom beside the porch. Despite the dilapidation, the school had pupils.

Jack counted eleven windows on the three floors and seven more in the attics. All dark: the boys would be tucked up and asleep. The coping was chipped and a smattering of roof tiles was missing. A cast-iron gutter had snapped at the joint and beneath it the stucco was streaked with rust and in places had cracked or fallen away, exposing crumbling brick.

There was a carriage mounting block to the left of the porch; it was identical to another block in a bleak quadrangle where plane tree leaves were ripped from branches by a searing wind. A seven-year-old Jack had climbed those steps, slippery with slimy moss: they led nowhere. The harsh weather had expressed a systematized unkindness that infected the boys. He felt his heart clench and straightened. If this was like his old school it should be easy to find his way in.

Jack whispered another verse – to soothe himself, not from joy:

‘
The king was in his counting house,

Counting out his money;

The queen was in the parlour,

Eating bread and honey.’

He would have to decide on a room with care. He had only once stayed in a place with children and then he had slept on the roof. Children knew how to hide and how to find those that hid. And in this day and age he didn’t want his motives misunderstood.

He was staring at a lens. A camera was fixed discreetly to one of the pillars of the porch. Jack had forgotten about CCTV; he was out of practice. He had to hope it held no film or was rarely monitored. Whatever the case, he could not do any more tonight, he must prepare for his visit properly.

He took a last look at the mansion. The woman was different. Most would have discarded the book, tatty and out of date with every page marked. But she had kept it, just as he had when he had found it – in an empty carriage. She had a mind like his own. Like him she would not imagine herself anonymous in a world of strangers, but would expect a random stranger to choose her life to track and her home to live in. She would expect Jack, or someone like him, and she would literally watch her step. The person who had taken his
A–Z
would know what harm was possible. Yes, he must prepare properly.

Three numbers were carved into each of the pillars: ‘231’. Jack felt the ground swoop. He pulled his duty book from his coat pocket; like his street atlas, it went everywhere with him. On the cover was an image of the front of a District Line train; the protective plastic had scuffed, making it seem the train was emerging from a fog. Rainwater had swelled pages already frayed with his frequent thumbing. He ran a finger down the left-hand column of minute figures.

231 was the set number of the train he was to pick up at Ealing Broadway and stable in a siding at the depot at Earls Court. In fifteen minutes. He was never late. Everything was out of kilter. Jack noted the letters ‘ETY’. The pick-up would be empty, a ghost train. Another sign.

The numbers that Jack encountered on his nightly meanderings through London or while driving an Underground train were, as he had once made the mistake of telling Stella Darnell, signs that gave him direction and opportunity. Luckily Stella had not believed him.

Jack did not lead a double life, he explained to Stella under his breath as he strode to Ravenscourt Park Station, an explanation he couldn’t give in real life. This was part of him. Seeking out Hosts was integral to his life. If he saw evil he could not stand by. A trait they shared, he pointed out to her. Now he had to get back what was his. Jack convinced himself that Stella would understand.

On the eastbound platform at Earls Court, he watched the empty train approach, its windows dark. The set number was propped in the cab window: 231. It told him that tomorrow he would move into Mallingswood House.

When he inserted his driver’s key into the control panel and closed the door, Jack began to sing:

‘The maid was in the garden,

Hanging out the clothes,

Then came a little blackbird,

And snapped off her nose.’

6

Monday, 23 April 2012

Stella trawled the streets around Barons Court Station. On her third circuit a car was pulling away outside her mother’s mansion block. With a spin of the steering wheel she slotted her Peugeot into the tight space between a Range Rover and a pizza delivery scooter.

When Suzanne Darnell and her seven-year-old daughter had moved into the top-floor apartment just before Christmas in 1973, parking had been plentiful. Few residents, including Suzie, owned a car. Now kerbs were clear only if the road was being dug up by one utility company or another. Fierce parking restrictions were enforced by slow-pacing wardens whose proximity was heralded by the chatter of their two-way radios.

It was past ten o’clock at night, but the district was in full swing. Pedestrians jostled on pavements, huddled outside cafés under heating lamps, eating, smoking, drinking. Conversation and laughter mingled with the revving engines of traffic on the Talgarth Road. At intervals could be heard the rapid clatter of Underground trains in the tunnel beneath the street. The bustle, a contrast to unpopulated pavements on Terry’s cul-de-sac and his empty house, confounded Stella. On autopilot after her experience in the basement, she turned off the engine but did not move.

Flashing signs advertising a foreign-currency exchange, beacons on waiting taxis, a rolling screen of properties in the window of an estate agent’s and the glow of shop fascias tinged the interior of the van with flickering colour. A late-night supermarket, goods displayed outside on sloping crates and draped with fake grass, was doing good trade. In the ‘Family Butcher’ by Suzie’s mansion block, gleaming metal trays awaited the next day’s cuts of free-range organic meat. The intimacy of the shop’s name belied the transience and anonymity of the neighbourhood. Stella could not remember being happy here.

Suzie Darnell was the only tenant who had lived in the Edwardian redbricked block for over ten years. With a lease over thirty years old and her low rent protected, her presence in what had become a top-flight property was the managing agency’s albatross, she was fond of boasting to Stella. Periodically she gleefully rejected cash offers to vacate. Indifferent though she was to her apartment and its surroundings, she had no better idea of where to live.