Ghost Girl (7 page)

When she returned to the living room, she said brightly, ‘I wondered if you fancied a trip? Maybe to Richmond Park?’ This was where Terry had taken Suzie on their first date. After they moved to Barons Court, Suzie would take Stella there for tea and a slice of coffee cake.

‘It’s bedtime.’

‘I don’t mean now.’

‘Then why mention it?’

‘It would be something to look forward to.’

Suzie gave a vague shrug. She got to her feet and brushed her jumper down. Her attention returned to the television on which were images of a sparse parched landscape that might be Australia. Or Africa. Stella roused herself.

‘If you don’t need anything more, I’ll get going, Mum.’ Again the thought of tucking into her bed next door flashed through her head.

‘Are you rushing off to solve a case? I never fail to see the irony in the attention paid to dead people compared to those of us who are alive.’

‘Mum, I’m a cleaner, not a detective.’

‘You could do better. Get a bigger office, hire more people. Do less cleaning.’ Her fingers tapped out a well-trodden refrain.

‘One step at a time,’ Stella said mildly.

‘All the boys wanted me for their reports. I was the best in the pool. Fastest shorthand and typing speed with no mistakes. PC Darnell was happy to have me spend nights deciphering his handwriting and correcting his English so he could swarm up the greasy pole.’

‘Not now, Mum.’

‘Never now. Always later.’ Suzie moved about the room straightening objects, adjusting jam jars. ‘You get going, that business won’t run itself.’

Sometimes Stella couldn’t tell if her mother was being sarcastic.

‘How is your nice friend?’ Suzie was fiddling with her cuticles now, pursing her lips with the effort.

‘What friend?’ Stella had no time for friends unless she counted Jackie. Perhaps she did count Jackie.

‘That young man. He was a charmer.’

‘Mum, I don’t know who you mean. I’ll give you a ring tomorrow to see about Richmond Park. Otherwise maybe pop out for a paper or fruit? Not cigarettes. Get some fresh air?’ Stella intonated everything as a question to avoid an accusation of bossing. Her mother kissed her palm airily at her and headed for the kitchen where she would undo all Stella’s work.

In the hall Stella gathered up the rubbish, holding it away from her suit, although after the cistern business and Terry’s basement it would need dry cleaning.

Suzie never mentioned men other than Terry. Since Terry’s death her mum had changed: new perfume, more rubbish hunts. Maybe Jackie had a point about grief.

The bins were in a yard kept in permanent shadow by a wall at the rear of the mansion block. Barbed wire discouraged residents from climbing over and falling on to the railway tracks below. Today, the rumble of a train coming out of the tunnel made her think of Jack. He had the Dead Late shift on the District line so would not be driving yet. She heaved the bag up into the nearest bin.

The ‘charming young man’ was Jack Harmon.

She hurried out to her van. Her mother, who recently had been forgetting so much, had not forgotten Jack. In his thirties, he was hardly young but he could be charming.

One evening, over a month ago, Stella had been at Jackie’s desk in the office perusing the latest figures submitted by the book-keeper when two things happened. Jack returned the van keys after a shift and her mobile phone rang. Seeing it was her mother, Stella ignored it, but Jack had not.

‘It says “Mum”. You should answer it.’

He had a thing about parents, probably because he didn’t have any. To top it off, this time Suzie had a genuine emergency. She had slipped and cut her arm on the door of the oven. Stella rushed out the office and Jack had come too.

Jack had been charming. Ridiculously, he had given a bow and then knelt at Suzie’s feet with a washing-up bowl of warm soapy water to sponge the graze on her arm. He had dressed the wound with gauze and cotton wool from the first-aid kit from the van and bandaged the whole of her forearm. Stella had been tasked with sifting the rubbish for Suzie’s reading spectacles, lost when Stella was ten. Jack had assured Suzie that if the specs were there Stella would find them. He had meant well, but set her up for failure because they were not.

For the first time in decades Stella spent a night in her old bed – Jack didn’t think Suzie should be alone after the shock. Unable to sleep, she had traced the pattern of luminous stars, stuck on the ceiling by her dad when they first moved in, as she used to do before falling into a sound sleep.

Suzie appeared to take Stella’s presence for granted and when Stella was leaving, had suggested they go to Richmond Park.

A horn sounded. A driver wanted her space. Stella swished down the seat belt and pulled out into the night-time traffic.

She found herself driving into King Street instead of taking the flyover to the Hogarth roundabout, the quicker route to her flat. She was accidentally following the route to Terry’s. Stella remembered that the last time she had seen Jack, when he had popped into the office a week ago, he had asked when she planned to sell Terry’s house. Stella had changed the subject because she didn’t know.

She hit a snarl-up outside Marks and Spencer’s. Jack would be the perfect cleaner for Suzie. He would amuse her and she might pay attention to his suggestions, which when it came to cleaning were all sensible. Jack seemed good with older women. She let the handbrake off and drifted the length of a car and then came to another stop. A witness appeal board was propped by the kerb, secured by sandbags. Jack once pointed out they looked like piglets. He felt sad for them lolling by the side of the road. He could also be absurd, she reflected. Jack and her mother would egg each other on. In the light from passing headlights, Stella suddenly saw what Jack meant – the two piglets hung over the metal strut of the notice board as if they had passed out. If he cleaned for her mum she would eventually find fault with Jack and Stella didn’t want that to happen. To stop the jangle of this problem she switched on the radio.

‘…a hit-and-run incident in which a seven-year-old boy was killed this afternoon in West London. Joel Evans chased a football across King Street in Hammersmith while out with his grandmother and was hit by a car travelling from the Broadway. He was killed instantly. The driver failed to stop. A workman on Chiswick High Road reported a man checking his vehicle soon after the time of the accident. He walked around it before driving off. The car may have been a Ford Fiesta and was white or a light blue. The police believe the incident may have been caught on the camera of a 27 bus and hope to identify the number plate of the car. They are appealing to the driver to come forward and to anyone who witnessed the incident to contact them…’

Alert, Stella edged the van up to the notice and sure enough it referred to the same incident: ‘16.32 p.m., 23/4/12’. In the gap between her van and the lorry in front her headlights cast a wash of light over a muffled sandy shape. It resembled the outline of a sprawling figure. It must be a trick of the light; the police would not have traced the boy’s outline on the road. A torn strip of blue and white police tape fluttered from a lamp-post. She took her foot off the accelerator and the van coasted past the notice. She needed to get to bed.

With Joel Evans on her mind, Stella knew how easy it would be to speed, so she did not go above twenty-five miles an hour all the way to Brentford. The van’s sensor opened the automatic gates to her estate and she accelerated up to her apartment block. Although the development was protected by steel gates and CCTV, here, as at Terry’s, the lighting was faulty, working during the day and going off at night. Unwilling to park by the dark garages, she put the van in a visitor bay near the foyer.

Stella keyed in the security code, heaved on the door to override the closing mechanism and pushed it shut. A sharp ping made her jump. It was the lift. She had not called it. The door slid open and a shaft of light cut across the marble floor. She waited. No one got out. Cautiously she approached; the interior was empty. Along with the outside lights, the building’s smart controls often went awry and the lift would move without anyone operating it. Stella berated herself for succumbing to frayed nerves and stepped inside as the doors shut. Her discovery of the photos of herself in Terry’s basement had rattled her: all those faces smiling at her. No, not at her, at Terry. She could not smile at him now.

The sparse tidiness of her flat tended to be a relief after her mother’s. Tonight it was not. Stella was alive to the hermetic silence and, with so many flats unsold, to the likelihood that she was utterly alone on this floor. She dropped her keys in a vase in the living room – a policeman’s daughter, she never left them in sight.

In the bathroom she splashed her face with cold water and cleaned her teeth. The battery-operated brush ran down because she had forgotten to leave it on charge. She found a manual brush in the cupboard. Suzie’s muddle was catching.

It was not until Stella was in bed that, disturbed by gripes in her stomach, she remembered that since a hurried hoisin duck wrap from the mini-mart below the office that afternoon she had eaten nothing. She was getting like Jack, who never ate properly. Jack. She did not want him to clean for Suzie: it would lead to complications. She would do it herself. Her mum had asked if she was busy on a case. Perhaps her muddle had extended to mixing up her ex-husband’s job with what her daughter did.

This reminded Stella of the blue folder in Terry’s basement. He had taken fifteen photographs of roads and filed them according to a number order. Everything Terry did was for a purpose, so the pictures must be for a case. Although Terry had retired from the police he had not stopped being a detective.

Stella sat up in bed. She would find out what the case was. Then she and Jack would solve it.

7

Saturday, 23 April 1966

She stood up on the pedals and made them go faster. The wind in the chestnut tree filled her ears and everything flew by. Her dad said it was the wrong time for conkers when Michael asked. Michael was stupid for not knowing and she had been right to tell him that. It had not been right to be told off. Mary did not say that she did not know when conkers were. She did not care about conkers.

She whizzed around the bend in the path and skidded to a stop, her brakes squealing. She looked behind her and saw Michael and her dad huddled by the flower bed. Perhaps they were hiding from her. She grew hot. They had not noticed she was missing.

‘Crocuses!’ Michael had shouted when they got to the park and he had pointed at the hyacinths. Daddy did not say he was wrong because he was unscrewing the stabilizers from Michael’s birthday bike. Michael was trying to stop him taking them off by saying flower names.

Now Daddy was doing something at the back of Michael’s birthday bike, but she could not see from here. Michael had got back on and was wobbling on the saddle, which was set too high, making his frog-legs stick out. Mary held her breath; she knew her brother was scared without the extra wheels. It made her tummy ache and she let out a squeak when the wobbling got worse. Daddy was tall in his brown weekend trousers and his blue and white chequered shirt blew out like a balloon in the wind. She decided he was more like a cowboy with his sleeves rolled up and she wished that he was a cowboy so they could canter off together on horses as if he were her real daddy.

They hadn’t seen her do her skid. Mary twisted the bike around and mooched over the handlebars, her chin on her fists. Daddy was teaching Michael to ride his bike properly the way she could, although he hadn’t said that. It was a secret, one she had decided to keep, that Michael did not like his new present. He’d told her he had wanted a microscope. She actually did think that would have been a nicer present for him and was sorry for him, especially as the bike was too big. All Michael’s things were too big: his trousers, his new blazer, even his shoes. He was supposed to grow into them. What if he didn’t?

Michael had refused to have lessons off her, so now he was being punished because lessons with Daddy were worse. He had to pretend to be big and brave, which he wasn’t. He was too scared to tell Mummy and Daddy that he was frightened stiff of falling off. To them Michael was brave and courageous: their little soldier. They didn’t know he was terrified of everything.

Mary Thornton had tried to prevent Bob and Jean Thornton knowing how frightened their son was of climbing trees, playing football or riding a bicycle. At six that morning he had sneaked into her bedroom and asked her to finish the bedtime story their mother had been reading to them. Mary agreed because she knew he lived in fear of the rattling attic door in the corner of his new room. Then he annoyed her with questions about her new name, so she had sent him packing. When Bob Thornton announced he was taking Michael round to the square to get him used to his bike without the stabilizers, Mary had ignored Michael’s pleading stare and said nothing.

At the park she had ridden around with no hands partly to take Daddy’s mind off unscrewing the wheels and partly to show him she was highly skilled on her bike. But the plan had not worked because he carried on as if she were invisible. He ignored her suggestion that she do things on her bike to show Michael how to do it. He did not see her lift up her front wheel and mount the hump on the path like a cowgirl on a horse and now he had missed the best skid she had ever done. Mary eyed them dolefully from across the grass.

After a bit, she let the wheels meander along the slope to the statue of the Greek Runner.

The statue had no clothes on. Mary was not interested in penises – Michael had one – so she didn’t bother with the nude man and scooted her bike around and around the base. On the last lap she stole another look at her father and brother. Their heads were still close together. Secrets. She was inflamed. Michael was helping her daddy with the wheels. Traitor! Boys will be boys, her mum said. ‘Leave them to it, Mary.’

Her dad arched backwards and stretched. Michael was like a statue. He was staring at the ground, which wouldn’t help him balance. Mary was startled by her dad’s shout: ‘Ready, steady… go!’