The Detective's Secret (28 page)

‘Stella, I was—’

‘It might be a phone number or a password, although nineteen is too long for a phone number even with the country codes. Then I wondered if it was an IP address, but that’s too long too.’

‘I should have seen.’ Jack knelt on the bed, the paper before him. ‘These gaps are deliberate!’

‘What gaps?’ Jack made life decisions based on the set number allocated to his trains: all numbers were signs. However, like Stanley and his missing biscuits, Stella was learning to trust that he seldom got it wrong.

‘These ones between the numbers. Frost must have been off guard because I got that almost immediately. Or he made it deliberately easy.

Jack scrambled over the bed and held the paper so Stella could see it.

‘19 9 13 15 14  19 8 21 20  20 15 23 5 18  4 15 15 18’.

‘It could be the serial number of the computer in his study,’ Jack mused.

‘Stupid if it’s meant to be secret. You’re always telling me to memorize passwords, not to write them down. He not only scratches it into his desk, but he takes a rubbing from the scratches and then drops it in a cupboard. So much for security!’

‘The thing is, Stella, he didn’t actually—’

‘His wife has no sense of security. She left two keys outside the door.’

‘If he did it in a hurry on the only available surface…’

It was nearly four o’clock. Far across the river, she saw faint lighter streaks of dawn. Jack seemed to have woken up while she was becoming as befuddled as the case – two cases now.

‘I need to grab some sleep.’ She got to her feet, rousing Stanley. At the door she stopped. ‘I nearly forgot.’ She told Jack about her mother’s idea that she should invest in Dale Heffernan’s business. She was quite aware that by telling him as she was leaving, she was making it seem unimportant because he would be bound to object. Jack was careful with money. So she was surprised when he merely nodded, but made no comment. She wondered suddenly if he was afraid. The place was very quiet. Creepy really.

‘You OK staying here? You could come back with me.’ Jack must have come to her flat earlier because he was afraid, and then, unable to admit it, had left. She would not embarrass him by bringing it up.

‘I’m fine.’ He pulled on his shoes, leaving the laces trailing. ‘I’m doing a day shift tomorrow, it’s easier to set off from here.’

Stella opened the door, noting the handle on the inside. At least Jack wouldn’t be trapped in the tower.

‘Yuk!’ She clamped her hand over her nose. The smell on the landing was greasy and cloying. Like a decomposing body, but that was long ago.

‘It’s an olfactory hallucination.’ Jack was behind her. ‘A ghost smell.’

Setting off down the stairs, she heard the ping of a text and saw a series of numbers, no name.

Please can we meet? We need to talk.

‘No we do not!’ she retorted out loud.

‘You all right?’ Jack was behind her. Stella breathed in detergent, fresh cotton and clean wool. The smell in the cupboard at Lulu Carr’s. Jack used the same detergent as Rick Frost.

‘Yes.’ She felt far from all right.

On the metal walkway, the wind was stronger. Reaching the staircase cage, she struggled down the first flight; then, looking up, she yelled over the howl of the wind, ‘Lulu obviously hasn’t told William I am cleaning for her. Let’s say nothing to him while he’s a suspect. Agreed?’

‘Yes.’ Jack waved at her. ‘Brilliant work, Stell!’

He craned over the gantry, hair streaming like a young king in a fairy tale. She was getting as fanciful as Jack.

‘It was a coincidence. I had no idea it was Frost’s house.’ Stella made laborious progress down the vibrating metal stairs, eyes ahead because to look down would be fatal.

‘No such thing as a coincidence!’ came Jack’s vanishing cry.

Stella had forgotten to show him the photographs from the station booth. It was too late to go back now, she felt dead on her feet.

Had Stella gone back when she thought about it, she would have seen that she wasn’t Jack’s only visitor that night.

Saturday, 26 October 2013

Jack didn’t think he had slept, but the blue lit numbers on his alarm said four fifty and he couldn’t account for his thoughts since he had gone to bed after Stella left. He had been hugely relieved that she hadn’t lied. But he hadn’t confessed to hiding in the cupboard, nor had he admitted that he had rubbed the numbers on to the paper. That he had confessed to visiting Lucie May netted him nothing; Stella wouldn’t consider dishonesty up for barter.

Stella didn’t claim to be flawless. She had transgressed in the past, but he had never thought she had lied to him. Why had he thought it this time? The answer was Dale Heffernan.

Four fifty-one. The digits on the clock floated on the inside of his eyes. He feared Stella would be influenced by the Brand-new Brother. Jack was certain the man had come for her money. He had passed up the chance to meet Heffernan, knowing that in a week he would be gone. A mistake: Stella never saw the enemy coming; Jack should judge Dale for her.

He rolled on to his back. He heard birdsong far below in the gardens of Chiswick Mall. He lay listening to it, and then was puzzled. He had shut the windows before he went to bed, wanting absolute silence. The tower was high above the trees, too high up for birdsong. It was another auditory hallucination. His mind was busy compensating for what he had lost.

The pale blue light of dawn outlined his binoculars on the north window sill. When Stella had looked through them on her first visit, she had said she could see one of her client’s houses. Although she had many clients all over West London, he was sure the house she meant was Lulu Carr’s. If Stella had pointed out the house to him, he would have recognized the address when William Frost gave it to him and the whole cupboard thing needn’t have happened. If—

He shut his eyes. This case was different to the others because a client was paying them to solve it. It mustn’t make them change how they operated. Jack met subterfuge with subterfuge; he looked for minds like his own and inhabited them. He read the signs. His eyes snapped open. He had a sign.

He reached over the side of the bed and pulled the steam engine from his bag. He switched on the bedside lamp. Post-office red with ‘Golden Arrow’ painted in yellow on the boiler. Below this were the emblems of the Union Jack and the French Tricolour. The engine was the same model as the one he had lost in the Thames as a boy.

Jack got out of bed and padded into the kitchenette. He placed the toy on the south-east window sill overlooking Hammersmith Bridge.

He returned to the main room and, opening his cupboard, fished out the biscuit tin in which he kept his treasures. He laid them out on the bed. Tokens from True Hosts; a teaspoon; a chip of green glass; three milk teeth (not his own); two postcards; a pure white butterfly pinned in a box; postcards from his dad’s work trips abroad, including the one of Fremantle cemetery. He put aside the pack of passport photos held with an elastic band, faces he carried in his mind. Lastly, he found the lock of his mother’s hair. A musty smell of damp dust, stale perfume and of all the homes he had stayed in drifted up from the open box.

The newspaper cutting lined the bottom of the tin. It was dated Thursday, 22 October 1998.

STUDENT MUGGED IN GRAVEYARD

By Lucille May

A woman walking her dog found what she thought at first was the body of a young man lying across a fallen headstone in Chiswick Cemetery just before 07.00 a.m. yesterday morning. However, when the police arrived at the scene, they detected a pulse and the man was rushed to Charing Cross Hospital.

The man, identified by a cheque book and later confirmed by his distraught father as Simon Carrington, aged 20, of Corney Road, Chiswick, is in a critical condition at Charing Cross Hospital with his family keeping vigil by his bedside.

Detective Inspector Terry Darnell of the Metropolitan Police is appealing for witnesses.

T
here it was in a small square of black and white. Leaving the cutting on his desk, Jack shut his box of treasures and returned it to the cupboard. Unbidden the words came into his mind. Dead people can’t kill.

You are safe.

It was not what he thought, Jack told himself.

Returning to bed, he found he had a text. Lucie May.

Ring re RF inquest. LM.

In the dead of night, Lucie was on the job. As she had been when she worked with Terry. The police detective and the hard-nosed reporter swapping notes and information, both of them restless and stubborn, unable to let the mysteries lie. Jack shuffled further under the duvet. He hadn’t told Stella his suspicion that exchanging information about an unsolved case was not all Terry Darnell and Lucie May had done into the small hours.

The sink made its glugging sound. Living up here had blurred the line between reality and dreams. As if to illustrate this, the Smiths’ song ‘How Soon is Now’ drifted back into his mind.

Jack dreamt that Stella was there at the foot of his bed, holding her dog. ‘I wanted to be your friend.’ She had the voice of a boy.

‘We still can be.’

‘You denied you knew me. Three times.’

‘No, that was Peter, the disciple.’

‘I know your name.’ It wasn’t Stella, it was—

Jack was dully aware that he was dreaming and tried to wake. He forced open his eyes, the lids heavy with exhaustion. There
was
someone at the bottom of his bed.

‘
Stella?
’

He tried to speak but sank back into sleep. This time he didn’t dream.

Saturday, 26 October 2013

It was ten o’clock and the streets were quiet. Stella had insisted on fetching Lulu Carr; she wouldn’t put it past her to go earlier than an agreed time and tackle Nicola Barwick before Stella arrived.

Barwick turned out to live around the corner from Jackie in Corney Road in Chiswick. Although Jackie had brought her the case, Stella didn’t want to bump into her on the job. Jackie belonged to the bright world of cleaning and tidying, not to the mess of an adulterous separation and a wife confronting a possible mistress.

They parked opposite a modern terrace house in Pumping Station Road, a quiet street parallel to the Thames. According to Lucille May’s article, the development of detached and semis had replaced the light industry and wharfs that had occupied the stretch on the north side of the river for over a century. Stella knew the terrace; one of her first clients had lived here.

‘She killed him to keep him.’ Lulu had said this several times on the journey from Hammersmith. She was regarding the house opposite with malevolence.

‘You don’t know that.’ If Lulu had killed her husband, it made sense to point the finger at someone else. Stella was trying to resist prejudice or preconception about the suspects, but she rather liked Lulu and didn’t want her to be guilty. This was not thinking like a detective.

‘I need to hear her say, “I was sleeping with your husband.”’ Lulu batted at the dashboard pettishly.

‘She won’t say it if she wasn’t.’ Stella looked over at the house. A light glowed through diamond-patterned glazed glass in the front door. It briefly dimmed; someone was in the hall.

Stella remembered the client because the woman had called the police to report that she had seen Stella going into the DHSS on Shepherd’s Bush Road. She accused Stella of claiming benefit while earning. Unknown to Stella at the time, Suzie had gone to the woman’s house and ‘frogmarched’ – Suzie’s word – her to Shepherd’s Bush Road. The woman had mistaken the police station for the benefits office; Stella had been visiting her dad. Terry confirmed this. The woman withdrew her complaint, but never apologized or paid her bill. The latter was the point of the exercise, Suzie believed; she had taught Stella to be circumspect about customers: they were not ‘kings or queens’, they were humans and didn’t have to be obeyed. The episode had resulted in Terry and Suzanne Darnell meeting in the foyer of Hammersmith Police Station, united in their determination to clear their daughter’s name. It was the last time they saw each other.

Stella reached behind, unclipped Stanley and plonked him on her lap. She shouldn’t have brought him, but Jackie was vetting new office spaces and Beverly was at the dentist.

‘How could you have seen him with Nicola Barwick the other day? You knew Rick was dead, you went to his inquest,’ Stella asked.

‘Yes, how could I?’ Lulu perked up, apparently enlivened by a mystery she herself had invented.

Stella nearly shouted with exasperation. Was this what Terry’s life had been like? She expected people to give straight answers. She yearned to be applying a cleaning agent to a cornice or wiping dust from the slats of a Venetian blind, tasks both fiddly and satisfying. Being a detective was like looking for hens’ teeth.

‘Look at this!’ Lulu pulled a ball of paper out of her pocket and smoothed it out on the dashboard. ‘One of Rick’s “surveillance reports”. He followed me around Marks and Spencer’s on King Street, then met me for coffee at the Lyric Theatre as if he’d been there all along. Typical.’

‘Did he give it to you?’ Stella tried not to judge clients, but what with William’s descriptions of his brother, and now Lulu’s, she wasn’t warming to the man.

‘I found it in his jacket. He had the handwriting of a twelve-year-old. The mind of one too.’

‘Maybe he told Barwick he wouldn’t leave you,’ Stella was mindful of keeping Lulu calm for the confrontation with Nicola Barwick. ‘After all, he didn’t.’

‘So she killed him. Better he’s dead than with me.’ Lulu patted Stanley on the head – a dangerous move for he was head-shy. ‘You know when a person has fallen out of love. That warmth you’ve taken for granted vanishes. You’re feeling low and he chivvies you to buck up instead of kissing you better. He points out food on your lip and orders you to wipe it off instead of doing it for you. You ask if he’s OK and he intimates you’re mad. You believe you
are
mad. That’s what you think, isn’t it? That I’m mad! You must have felt that cold breeze of dying love, the gritty sick sensation of betrayal!’ She bashed the dashboard again. Stanley tensed.