The Detective's Secret (26 page)

Jack had momentarily forgotten he was in the room where the man had died. Not a room then, a concrete tank that for a year had served as a tomb. The place on the floor where the body had been was in shadow. The glow from his laptop drew the curving walls closer. He thought of a cardboard tube rolled tighter and tighter until there was no room to breathe.

He went to the door and, getting down on his hands and knees, shuffled across the floor. Oak boards laid over the concrete base were warm. A heat-exchange system took water from the Thames to cool and heat the tower.

In 1987, little had been done to the 5,000-gallon tank. According to Lucie’s notebook, slats beneath the ceiling, glazed with red-and-yellow-coloured panes of glass, were part of that first tranche of development and not in the original tank.

The tower’s designer – given its function Jack presumed it was an engineer rather than an architect – would have dispensed with conceits like a cupola on the roof. Access to clean the tank would be through a hatch in its ceiling; there was no sign of it now. The ceiling was over a metre above Jack. He was tall and could easily get to a hatch using a stepladder, even a chair. In 1987 the man had only a champagne bottle. If there had been a hatch it would have been out of his reach.

Why was he there? In the second article covering the inquest, Lucie – keeping within legal bounds – speculated on suicide. As she had told him, the man had no identification, a typical suicide trait. He had bought the champagne either with the right money, or returned to his home after buying it and left his wallet there before going to the tower. Every so often there were stories of people lying dead in their homes for months, even years. Neighbours would claim that the person had kept themselves to themselves. The inoffensive, it seemed, were less missed than the argumentative, boundary-disputing ones. Neighbours had assumed they were on holiday or had moved without saying goodbye. Glove Man must own his home or the police were right and he had no home. Otherwise someone was chasing some serious rent arrears.

If he had been murdered, a careful killer would remove anything incriminating or that would hasten the identification of the victim. The body was the biggest clue in a murder. Lucie believed it was murder and eventually Terry had agreed.

Jack rubbed his eyes. It was ten past three and he was driving in a few hours. He reflected that cases were like number-nine buses, not like trains: you waited for hours, then two came along at once. A man in a tower and a man under a train.

Lucie was convinced that the killer was a woman, whoever had shared the champagne with the victim. She had conceded that the man might be gay, but attributed the tidy scene to the feminine touch. Terry had agreed. A tidy man himself, Jack didn’t share this logic.

Why not take everything with her? Terry had countered. Lucie had thought of that. She said the imagination behind the killing was a woman’s. Carefully, she had constructed a suicide scene for the police. The man climbed the tower once. At the top, he had opened the bottle and toasted himself and his shit life. He had swallowed a handful of tablets and drunk the contents of the bottle until he lost consciousness. But his attire suggested panache, respect for style and ritual, ‘strolling out’ rather than going out with a bang. The killer hadn’t legislated for a heart attack brought on by terror or the grazed and bloodied fingers. Lucie’s notes reached a definite conclusion: Glove Man was having an affair and was murdered by his lover. One day Lucie would write the book, she said.

Jack saw there might be something raw and romantic about drinking champagne and making love in an abandoned water tower high above the city. The lack of windows would put him off, but there would be no need to give false names at a hotel or make up some story that the staff clearly did not believe. It was also possible that their relationship was legitimate: sex in a tower to spice up a stale marriage.

For the past few hours he had been dwelling on a case that wasn’t just cold, it was cryogenically so. Apart from hiding in a cupboard from his co-detective in the house of a possible suspect, he hadn’t progressed the Frost case for which they would be paid. All he had done was to betray the person he cared for most in the world. He could at least look at what he had found there.

He grabbed his coat from the bed and went through the pockets. The piece of paper with the marks on the desk was not in any of them. He flopped on to the bed, head in hands.

The sink’s glugging brought him back to the present. He went into the kitchen. The tap wasn’t dripping, although the bottom of the sink was wet. He hadn’t run the tap since he came home. The last time was when he washed his Shreddies’ bowl at 5 a.m. yesterday morning; it couldn’t be damp from then. There must be a problem. He would have to contact the consortium about getting in a plumber. He hadn’t the spirit to appreciate the humour of there being a leak in a water tower. To stop the glugging, he did as Stella had and turned the tap on full and then turned it off. The pipes made a dull clunk. Stella had explained it was an airlock caused by two taps in a building being turned on at different times. At the time he had accepted her explanation about two sinks, but it didn’t make sense: there was only him. His father would have understood how the tower worked. They had never had to call in a plumber or electrician when he was alive.

Jack returned to his laptop. He opened Outlook and addressed an email to Stella. Too late to text: she would be in bed.

Let’s meet to take stock of what we have so far,
he pecked at speed with two fingers, using one of Stella’s phrases to reassure her.
Tomorrow. I’m on the Wimbledon line, finish late afternoon.
He was about to say he hoped the cleaning was going well, but she would think that odd. She cleaned somewhere most days.

I’m upset you didn’t tell me you had changed your mind about pretending to be a cleaner
— Jack stopped. He was about to say Stella was his lodestar and she had let him down. He pressed ‘delete’ and the cursor chewed up the last sentence. Better to say it in person. He sent it off and, returning to the Missing Persons’ site, picked up Lucie’s file.

There was nothing in any of her pieces or on the website about a used condom. ‘On the right as you go in,’ Lucie had told him, keen for Jack to match up his new home with the ‘murder’ scene. Terry’s theory, she said, was that the man and his companion arrived and left separately, her first, leaving him to clear up. It explained the bottle and condom (only once, poor chap, Lucie had crowed): he had been about to stuff everything into the bag when the door shut. Later someone had taken the bag away. It had never been found. It would be at the bottom of the Thames, Lucie said.

She had said the door couldn’t have blown shut in the hurricane and, looking at it now, Jack could verify that. It was at the top of the spiral staircase, out of the draught.

The prime suspect was an absence. Another kind of missing person. In the intervening decades no one had come forward to rule themselves out or hand themselves in. Perhaps the person had not intended to kill the man – he or she had expected him to get out. Or had planned to return but the hurricane had stopped them. People had died that night – perhaps the phantom companion had been one of them? Terry had conjectured that it might have been kids messing about and, finding the man dead, they had fled in panic, one of them dropping a glove. Lucie had decided that the glove was a ‘red herring’ left by kids who had nothing to do with the man being trapped. They had never claimed it for fear of being accused of murder.

The police had appealed to local sex workers, asking if anyone had had a client who had taken them to the tower. All had said no and that if asked they would refuse the job however high the pay. This made it unlikely that a woman had murdered her client.

The glove, black leather with a popper fastener and a crown motif indented on the cuff, came from Marks and Spencer and according to the label fitted boys aged between ten and fourteen. Terry had told Lucie it had lain along the man’s spine, fingers pointing towards his head. The police withheld this information, as possible leverage with a suspect. Jack was surprised he had told Lucie. Being a journalist, she couldn’t boast trustworthiness among her good points.

The police traced all the customers who had bought gloves in this range from the Marks and Spencer on Chiswick High Road with cheques, Access, Visa or American Express, but it yielded no leads. With such a wide time frame for culpability, alibis were meaningless. Nine of the 121 children for whom the gloves had been bought had lost one or both since purchase. Of these, three boys and a girl lived near the tower and of them, three – not the girl, Jack was gratified to read – were frightened of heights so incapable of making the precarious climb. The girl had lost her glove on a trip to the science museum. Lucie had added in the margin of her notes that Terry said her glove was later found.

Nearly thirty years later, he imagined Mr Glove Man still filed unidentified in a drawer at Hammersmith Mortuary.

Jack scribbled ‘glove owners’ list’ on his pad to follow up. The man hadn’t been wearing a ring; no spouse had reported him missing. Perhaps they were separated or the woman had already died and he was a widower looking for new life. Too many possibilities.

The website had a picture of the Timex watch and, as soon as he saw the simple dial, Jack recognized it. He shut his eyes and saw the ‘TIMEX’ written under the twelve. Like Glove Man’s, this one had only a six and twelve with no date.

Jack’s first watch had been a wind-up Timex. His father had had a Timex given to him by a German client, but it had a chequered band across the face. The trouble with having a photographic memory was that his mind was full of images most of which were of no consequence. In the eighties, there must have been lots of men, apart from himself, his father and the dead man, who wore Timex watches.

Jack gave a long-drawn-out yawn and his eyes watered. He looked again at the details on the database entry. No tattoos. For an organization seeking to identify corpses, the more marks or scars on a body the better. Tattoos, a moderately contentious form of expression in life, were a welcome clue in death. He had a scar on his thumb – so deep it must have scored the bone, Lucie said.

Jack looked to see if Stella had replied to his email, knowing she would not have. Although she frequently worked late, this was so late it was early. A thought occurred. She hadn’t invited him over because she was with her Brand-new Brother. He would be making himself at home in his father’s old house. Stella’s house. He would be sizing up its worth.

His email to her was still in the Outbox. Jack was sure he had pressed ‘Send’. He did so now. He received an email about money-saving tips, but the email to Stella remained unsent.

He confirmed there was a blue light on the router before remembering he had had incoming mail. There were five bars at the bottom of the screen depicting an ‘excellent’ signal.

His laptop wasn’t connected to his router. It had jumped on to the one called CBruno that he had been offered when he first connected to the internet. The owner – C. Bruno presumably – was clearly not savvy about security. While he was using this connection, Jack’s own account was not secure. He clicked to the dropdown list of routers – his and C. Bruno’s – and as he did so, noticed the CBruno router script. WPA2-PSK. The code indicated a secure router, which meant he shouldn’t have been able to access it without a password. Yet he had. Given this, why hadn’t his email to Stella gone? He sent it now.

Jack heard a sound. If he hadn’t worked it out from the silence, Lucie’s information about the Glove Man told him that in the conversion the tower had been soundproofed. He could hear a buzzing, intermittent and insistent.

It was his phone. His imagining the Glove Man dying in panic and distress centimetres from his bed had upset him, his nerves were on edge. A blue subterranean light from his phone sent an insidious glow across the curving walls. He saw the room as the concrete tank it had been that night.

Open the door.

Jack dropped the phone before he had seen whom the message was from. He heard a distant boom: someone was banging on the flat door. He caught himself in the wardrobe mirror, a poster boy for a horror film, mouth and eyes wide open, hands clasping the sides of his face.

Far off, through the thick cladding, he heard his name being called. Without pausing to consider if it was safe, he flung the door open.

Stella was on the spiral staircase with Stanley in her arms. Never had Jack felt so warmly towards the dog, although from the fathomless brown eyes, it was unclear if the feeling was mutual.

‘Lulu Carr is his wife!’ Stella marched past him into the flat.

Saturday, 26 October 2013

‘Stella I need to tell you—’ Jack started as he shut the door.

‘We’ve made a breakthrough!’ Stella had intended to confront Jack about coming to her flat, but, reassured by his email saying that he wanted to ‘take stock’ – they were a team – she let it go. Jack would have had his reasons; best not to probe.

She dropped on to the chair by his desk and swivelled to face the room. Stanley sat at her feet, eyes on Jack. She didn’t trust his mood and fished a liver treat from her anorak, popping it in his mouth. Jackie said Stanley got jealous of her giving Jack attention. Stella had disagreed. She and Jack were ships in the night – or day; she saw more of the dog so no problem. Besides, he was just a dog.

Jack went to the window, arms folded, his hands under his armpits. ‘I wanted to explain why I was—’

‘I’m cleaning Rick Frost’s house. Lulu Carr is his widow!’

‘We already know his wife is called Tallulah Frost.’ Jack pushed off the window sill. Stanley got up, tail whirling.

‘She’s using her maiden name and a diminutive of her real name. Lulu is short for Tallulah. Tallulah Frost says she wants a fresh start, like we offer at Clean Slate,’ Stella ploughed on.

‘Is this your client whose husband left her?’