The Detective's Secret (31 page)

‘Justin’s an engineer, he’s passionate about his work. Gary was down on everything so it’s refreshing.’

‘How do you know he’s a friend of Nicola Barwick’s? Despite what he told you, he could be the ex.’ Detectives had to take risks, even if it meant losing the friend she had only just found. If Lulu was right and Nicola Barwick had killed Frost, she had gone to some effort to cover her tracks.

‘If you met him you’d understand. I trust Justin.’ Liz filled the kettle and flicked down the lever; it began to hiss. ‘He and Nicola were close, he says.’

Stella wasn’t sure she trusted anyone. Not even Jack, it seemed.

‘Were?’ she echoed.

‘
Are!
’ A shadow passed across her face. ‘Justin talks as if he’ll never see her again.’ Liz put the bottles of mineral water back in the fridge.

‘I thought you said he did see her.’

‘He says she’s stopped answering his calls. He’s upset she doesn’t trust him – as I say, he thought they were close.’

‘Is he sure she’s OK? Suppose this man has found her?’ Stella said.

‘She told him not to contact her again. She says it’s a risk.’

‘What’s the name of this ex?’ Stella mentally put him at the top of their list of suspects.

‘Nicola didn’t say.’

‘Doesn’t your guy know? Justin.’

‘He says she never introduced her men to him. I can imagine that; Nicola never talked about her private life to me either.’

‘Do you have a number for her?’

‘She only left a postal address. She told me to take any repair bills off the rent. I had a problem with the boiler, but Justin sorted that. He doesn’t just build bridges and tunnels, he can turn his hand to anything!’ Liz was fiddling with the fridge magnets. She straightened two and closed the gap in the top row that had irked Stella, who had forgotten that they had shared a liking for order.

‘That’s odd.’ Liz held up a bright red magnet.

‘What is?’

‘Nicola’s address isn’t here.’

‘Are you sure?’ Stella might suggest that leaving the address on the fridge for all to see was unwise, but then Jack said that the best place to conceal something was in plain sight.

‘Yes.’ Liz got down on the floor. Sensing a game, Stanley beetled over and snuffled around her. ‘It can only just have fallen off, I found it last week and finally posted off a letter that’s been sitting here for weeks, making me feel guilty.’

‘You said this man – Justin – has it. Couldn’t you have asked him?’

‘I couldn’t admit I’d lost it; he’s adamant that we must tell no one. Now I’ve lost it again!’ she wailed.

‘It must have fallen off.’ Stella doubted this as soon as she said it.

‘Maybe it’s losing strength.’ Liz examined the magnet as if she could tell by looking.

‘Magnets last forever if you keep them away from power lines and don’t expose them to high temperatures. It must be here.’ Stella dragged the chairs away from the table. In the snugly fitted kitchen there were no crevices or cavities. The truth dawned.

Lulu had not received a text from her brother. She had gone looking for a clue to where Nicola Barwick might be and she had found it on the fridge. She knew where to look: she hid keys in plain sight. She hadn’t been near the toilet. She had got Nicola Barwick’s address and would be on her way there now.

‘Liz, there’s something I need to tell you.’ Stella took the plunge and told Liz who Lulu was and how she suspected Nicola Barwick of having an affair with her husband. She left out the bit about Lulu accusing Nicola Barwick of murdering Frost – no need to make Liz feel worse than she did.

‘Where did you forward the letter to?’ she asked Liz.

‘I can’t remember.’ Liz clamped the magnet back on the fridge.

‘We need to warn her!’

‘I’ve only sent on one letter.’ She was staring at the magnets.

‘Try to think, was it in this country?’ Stella must not hurry her; Liz had always thought before she spoke, a trait Stella respected.

‘It made me think of drawing,’ Liz said eventually.

‘What?’ This was like being with Jack.

‘The word was something you use for a… charcoal, that was it!’

‘Is it a place?’ Stella pulled out her phone; she would call Lulu Carr and hold her off.

‘It’s not the name, it’s what I associated with it.’

Stella got Lulu’s answer machine.

‘I’m in mourning, I can’t talk. Please don’t leave a message after the beep, I shan’t call back.’

Stella prevented herself letting out a wild scream.

‘Charbury!’

Stella dabbed Charbury into Google Maps. There was one near Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire and one in East Sussex.

‘What was the county?’ She forced herself not to shout.

‘East something.’

East Sussex then. Stella knew the name. Two years ago, Isabel Ramsay, her favourite client, had been buried in the churchyard at Charbury. The Ramsay family had invited Stella to the funeral but, unable to face another funeral so soon after her dad’s, Stella had done a cleaning job instead. Jack had gone alone. For a mad second Stella believed that if she had gone, she wouldn’t be facing this problem now. She should leave the magical thinking to Jack. The length of the journey to Charbury – one and a half hours each way – had been her excuse for not going. Lulu had been gone over five hours, ample time to find Nicola Barwick.

Saturday, 26 October 2013

Jack laid the tray on the wood veneer table. Tea for Darryl Clark and hot milk for him. The canteen wasn’t large, about twenty-six metres by ten, and today there was only one other person there, a middle-aged black man in a blue driver’s polo shirt reading an
Evening Standard
by the serving hatch.

The staff canteen at Earl’s Court was a bland combination of pinkish quartz screed flooring and salmon walls, with faux wood tables and red plastic chairs. Fluorescent lights chequered a tiled drop-ceiling, casting an even light and ensuring that drivers relaxed, yet remained alert.

A used tea bag lay soaking into a napkin on the table, a plastic stirrer placed beside it – like items of evidence in a crime, Jack found himself thinking. Pulling himself together, he gathered up the tea bag and tossed it into a flip bin by the food hatch. He caught an item on the noticeboard. Three flats for rent in West London, all apparently within easy distance of the District line. Nothing matched the Palmyra Tower; he had been lucky.

The driver by the servery lounged with his chair tipped back, arms folded, seemingly unaware of Jack. Nevertheless, to avoid their conversation being overheard, Jack moved closer to Darryl Clark.

Clark sat like an obedient child, hands on his lap, the shadow of a smile on his face as if determined to be cheerful. Jack recognized a man suffering from trauma. Clark unloaded the tray and propped it against the table leg, but made no move to drink his tea. Instead, he picked up his stirrer and with trembling hands swirled it back and forth in his tea, although he hadn’t sugared it. He stopped abruptly.

‘How are you doing?’ Jack asked softly.

‘OK now.’ Darryl lifted the mug with both hands and drank in gulps. ‘I started back on the Piccadilly, but coming out of Hammersmith, I felt like shit. That was with a co-driver doing the driving. At Stamford Brook, I swear I felt the train go over a bump where he fell. I kept quiet about that, didn’t want them thinking I’m mad. Bloody feels like it.’ He blew too hard on his tea and, without noticing, slopped it over the side. ‘They fast-tracked the transfer to the Wimbledon line.’

‘You’re not mad.’ Jack swept away the spill with his napkin.

‘You OK? Were you off work too?’ Clark’s eyes flicked from side to side.

‘No, but it’s different for the driver.’

The man cleared his throat. ‘Have you had one before?’

Jack understood Clark’s need to ask a question that only a driver who had had a One Under could ask another.

‘No.’

‘It’s my second. About twenty years ago.’ Clark snapped his stirrer in two. ‘A young woman. Joanna Hayward, she lived in Barking. She “got off” at Earl’s Court.’ He had a stolid expression. ‘Turned out it was her third attempt. She was alive when she went down. They often are. I shouted down to her to keep away from the rail, the juice was still on. She never took her eyes off me as she put out a hand and grabbed it. Just like that.’ He snapped the stirrer into smaller pieces. ‘In those days, as I remember, they had you back on the trains sharpish.’

‘Tough,’ Jack agreed.

‘Yes and no. I was young, I was pissed off with her for choosing my train!’ Clark shook his head. ‘It’s like cooking with a knife and then slitting your wrists with it. Or, well, maybe not—’ He picked up Jack’s stirrer and broke it in half.

Jack was reluctant to join in, unsure it would help Clark to discuss the pros and cons of suicide.

Shaking his head, Darryl picked up the remaining sachet of sugar and poured it into his tea. The man was on autopilot.

Jack remembered Clark had sought him out. ‘How are you now?’

‘It hits me at night, like a film going on in my head. You get that?’

Jack didn’t say he had a song replaying every night when he went to sleep, or mention the hum on the spiral staircase, the mythical birdsong and the glugging sink. Clark wouldn’t want to know about his ghosts. He looked over at the hatch: he might get an apple muffin to take to the tower. Two even.

‘It was harder for you. You were with him,’ Clark remarked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘All that time waiting for the train and then he jumps. Did you see anything odd about him? I had him for a split second, so in my statement for the inquest I couldn’t even say what he looked like. You were waiting on the platform with him.’ He looked hostile, as if Jack had been remiss.

Jack felt a change in the air. He glanced again at the hatch. It was shut. The other driver had gone. The only witnesses to the death had been himself and Darryl Clark. The novice driver in whose cab he had travelled hadn’t seen a thing. Still, he had been affected; he had since handed in his resignation.

‘I wasn’t on the platform.’ He was careful not to embarrass Clark by pointing out his mistake. ‘I was in the District line train.’

‘I saw you.’ Darryl was implacable. He snapped Jack’s stirrer into splinters.

‘You saw me afterwards. I was in the office.’

‘You were on the platform, at the Hammersmith end. I didn’t know you were with the Underground until I saw you clearing the station.’

‘I was on the other train,’ Jack repeated gently. He put down his mug. ‘Are you saying there was someone else on the platform other than Rick Frost?’

‘Was that his name?’ Darryl Clark’s drink was midway to his mouth. ‘I tried not to hear.’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s nobody to me. I don’t want to know why he did it, or anything about him.’ Clark’s voice grated.

‘But are you saying you saw someone else on the platform with him?’ Jack had seen this before: drivers who didn’t want to know that the person who had been killed by their train was human, with a name, a home and a family.

‘He was looking at the dead man, before he died, I mean.’ Clark gave a mirthless laugh and rounded up the snaps of plastic.

‘Did you tell the police or the station staff?’ There had been nothing in Clark’s statement about another man.

‘I assumed you’d tell them it was you.’

‘It wasn’t me,’ Jack said again, more to himself.

‘Nowadays I’m checking every bloody passenger for a sign they might top themselves.’ Clark wiped a hand down his face and took a shaky sip of tea.

Clark hadn’t been at the inquest; his manager had read out his statement. He had described the ‘deceased’ as ‘flying out of nowhere’. He had followed protocol to the letter. He had left his cab, turned off the electricity and escorted his passengers off his train.

In the deserted canteen, Jack heard again the squeal of brakes and the piercing whistle Clark had sounded to alert station staff. Since moving to the tower, his mind was full of new, unfamiliar sounds. Maybe the recurring Smiths’ ‘How Soon Is Now?’ was his brain’s way of blotting out the soundscape of Frost jumping in front of a train.

‘Another drink? A muffin maybe?’ He had forgotten the server was shut.

‘Food sticks in the craw. My wife’s got me on Complan! The counsellor says it’s a long haul.’ He flashed Jack a smile.

A bad death would be hard: ghosts were the restless dead unable to make peace with themselves. Jack wondered if, like many drivers, Clark believed in ghosts. He saw all sorts of phantoms, wraith-like figures flitting about the platforms of the ghost stations.

‘I keep thinking, could I have dropped the handle sooner, hit the brake quicker?’ Darryl Clark leant over the table and Jack caught a tang of hair product; Stella would identify it instantly, he thought irrelevantly.

‘I’ve killed a man. My kids’ dad is a murderer. I repeat that every morning in the mirror.’

‘You didn’t kill him.’ Every time they climbed into the cab of a train they risked a One Under. The incidents were rare, but it could always happen and they knew it. In that sense Darryl
had
killed Rick Frost.

‘It’s on the cards every time I’m in that cab.’ Darryl had read his mind. Jack felt queasy; since living in the tower his mind wasn’t his own.

‘It was suicide, not your fault,’ Jack insisted. No need to muddy matters with his suspicions of murder. ‘What did this other man look like?’

‘Like you, since I thought he was you.’ Clark’s patience was clearly wearing thin.

This had to be Stella’s inspector, the man dressed in black she had met at the end of the platform. Jack wanted to text Stella, but with Clark there, it would seem insensitive.

‘That bit of track after Hammersmith used to be my best bit of the journey,’ Clark said ruefully.

Drivers didn’t usually refer to their shift as a ‘journey’, that was Jack’s word. Jack warmed to him.

‘You were at the inquest.’ Clark sat back in his chair. ‘What did he say?

‘He wasn’t there.’ Whoever was on the platform hadn’t come forward. He and Stella had established that the area where she had met the man was a blind spot, out of camera range. Jack tried to recapture the faces of the passengers he had ushered out of the station. None fitted Stella’s description; no one had looked like himself.