The Detective's Secret (6 page)

Justin wasn’t there. Simon faltered and, stopping, he turned right around. There was no one there. Fifty metres back came a straggling line of boys. They were gaining on him. The bright red of their shirts stood out against the browns and greens, the sweep of the Downs. Justin couldn’t have overtaken him. Ahead, the woods were a fringe of dark green and, skirting them, Simon saw Justin. He had cut up around the base of the hill. He had left the designated track. He was entering the woods by the pheasant run.

Plunging after him, Simon smashed through bracken, crushing saplings, slipping and sliding, all tactics abandoned. He ran between the tree trunks, fast and nimble; he couldn’t call out, he would give them both away. At last he stumbled out of the canopy of trees on to a track rutted with tyre tracks and hoof prints.

Two metres away, in sunlight, Justin was sitting on a steep grassy bank. Simon staggered towards him, his lungs bursting. Justin was sucking on an orange quarter and chatting with Mr Lambert. Simon saw he had emerged beyond the finishing line. It was too late to hide: Mr Lambert had seen him.

The sports master handed Simon two hours’ detention for cutting out some of the route, which was cheating. The boy didn’t say that he had been trying to help his friend. Busy with his orange, Justin couldn’t have seen him.

Saturday, 19 October 2013

‘Who’s been murdered?’ Stella stopped outside Gunnersbury station.

‘My brother.’ Frost unclipped his seat belt and turned in his seat to face her. His bulk seemed to shrink the van’s interior.

‘Thing is, I run a cleaning agency.’ Stella wouldn’t be rude, but it didn’t do to lead people on.

‘Jackie said you are a detective.’ Frost gripped the dashboard with his left hand, his other hand around the back of the seat. ‘She said you were good.’

Stella was on the brink of explaining that her previous cases had been her father’s unfinished business, they didn’t count, but then she heard her mum advising that she scope a job before refusing it. A real live murder case, unconnected with Terry, was as good as deep cleaning.

‘How did your brother die? And when?’

‘A month ago. He supposedly jumped in front of an Underground train, near here at Stamford Brook.’

‘Supposedly?’ Stella felt a stirring of anticipation. Stella hadn’t expected to miss her mum, but had found that her absence revealed how integral to her routine Suzie had become. Stella missed the advice on potential new business and new cleaning operatives. No one else shared Stella’s excitement about latest equipment to further increase standards of hygiene. With Suzie gone, Stella needed something else to challenge her. Now she saw that what she needed was a case. Jackie, as ever second-guessing Stella, had sent her one.

‘I want you to find his killer.’ He kept glancing out of the window as if the killer might be out there.

‘Murder is a job for the police.’ A year ago, the police had been her enemy. Her mum said that being a detective had taken her father away from his family. Stella hadn’t thought of it like that, but fell in with her mum’s take on it. By the time she was grown up, she saw her dad a handful of times a year and found little to say to him. After his death two years ago, memories of their time together from her childhood had returned so that she no longer felt antagonistic to the police – in particular Martin Cashman, a man a little older than her who had worked with her dad.

‘They’re not interested. Superintendent Cashman said there was no one else on the station platform and the only two witnesses, both drivers, confirmed Rick ran in front of the train. He was “satisfied” with the suicide verdict.’

‘You don’t agree?’ Stella didn’t want to go up against Cashman. He would suggest she stuck to cleaning and he would be right. ‘Your brother’s death sounds straightforward.’ Wrong word. Jack was better at this stuff. She cast about for the name Jackie had said when she introduced him.

‘Jackie warned me you’d be circumspect. All I ask is you hear me out.’

‘Why do you think it wasn’t suicide?’

‘Killing himself isn’t Rick’s style. He sticks at things.’ He looked away as if overwhelmed by his grief.

‘Did he leave a note?’ He spoke of his brother in the present tense. Perhaps he couldn’t accept the man’s death; in any case, she found his way of putting it unsettling. Odd to be in denial. Jumping in front of a train left little room for doubt that it was suicide. If Jackie hadn’t referred him to her, Stella would give him no time.

‘In the unlikely event that it was suicide, Rick would leave a note. He’s hot on admin.’

‘Was he— Had he had a drink?’ Stella was careful. Not a good start to suggest the man’s brother was a drinker.

‘The post-mortem found whisky in his stomach.’ He raked a hand through his hair. ‘I know how it sounds.’

It sounded like the man had drunk enough to muster up courage to step in front of a train. She would let him down lightly.

‘I have to go.’ If her dad had died under a train she too would have doubted it: he wasn’t that sort. Terry’s post-mortem had been irrefutable. Yet he hadn’t had a day off sick in his life, so his being dead had made no sense. It still didn’t.

‘Do you have siblings?’ he asked.

‘No.’ She hoped he wasn’t about to go down the ‘you can’t possibly understand’ route.

‘I hardly knew my brother. I’d say the guy was a fantasist. When we were boys, he was always playing soldiers. Not with me, I’m three years older. He had a gang, a couple of kids in his thrall. But he rang me an hour before he died. I had no signal so didn’t hear the voicemail until after the police knocked on the door. I failed him once. I won’t fail him again.’

‘It’s not failing.’ Stella saw the time; she had to leave. ‘What do you think happened?’ Terry would have asked this first.

‘Something – or someone – had frightened him. He sounded strange in the message. I hardly recognized him. I think he was murdered.’

Jack teased convoluted meaning from obscure signs; it frustrated her, but he did get results. Terry had followed hunches. Stella preferred the tangible.

‘Can I hear his message please?’

‘No. I deleted it after I heard it. Stupid, I know. The police clearly thought so.’

Stella’s cleaning process was methodical. Stain by stain. She used the same process for detection. Clue by clue. However, this only worked if there was a stain – a clue – to start with. The only clue was the evidence. The man had jumped off a platform: end of, in all senses.

‘I’m sorry Mr Righ um, I don’t see that we can help.’ She turned on the engine. ‘I have to get to the airport.’

‘I’ll come with you.’ He clipped in his seat belt.

May 1985

He executed the plan perfectly. Every strut, every load-bearing beam, every cross fitted. He picked up the last girder – iron slats from a bench he had found behind the greenhouse – and, holding his breath, slotted it in. It held. Balanced on his haunches, he patted down the soil at the base of the stanchions.

Simon was in the kitchen garden. He had found a book on Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the library and he had made copious notes from engineering textbooks: a legacy of the owner of the house before it was a school. At first Simon borrowed books he’d seen Justin read, but soon he was on a path of his own. This afternoon he was constructing a box girder bridge. A present for Justin.

‘It’s the longest bridge in the country,’ he would tell him. ‘I made the arches and the central spans off-site, and erected the segments with a gantry crane.’ He particularly liked the word ‘gantry’. ‘A gantry is a framework of bars, usually steel. It rests on two supports and is used for holding up road signs over motorways or for carrying electrical cables,’ he told the garden. The bit about using a gantry crane wasn’t true, but Justin wouldn’t mind.

Mr Wilson had been thrilled to get a post at a boy’s boarding school in the UK. It would go down well on his CV back home. Full of ambition and passion, he was determined to be the teacher the boys remembered when they were men playing their part in the world. He would be cited in articles, eulogized in biographies; through teaching he would be immortal.

It hadn’t worked out that way. The boys mocked his accent. He had come into the classroom one morning to find ‘Convict’ daubed on the blackboard. It seemed that the English assumed every Australian had been deported from the UK. The fact that his great-great-grandfather
had
set off a spark of fury. Intent on flushing out the little tyke that had written it, he chose Simon as the ‘fall guy’ and accused him of the crime. He’d been sure that this would prompt the actual culprit to confess. He had been wrong. It seemed the boys were happy that Simon take the rap. He couldn’t withdraw the accusation or he would look weak. The thing was a bloody mess.

Simon was the one boy who did what he was told. Out of all of them, in later life, he was most likely to cite Wilson as a key influence. The kid pored over leather-bound tomes; he wanted to be an engineer, not a boring banker or a Board Director or, buoyed by a trust fund, nothing at all.

While most of the boys mindlessly parroted answers learnt by rote or, like the kid whose mother had died, daydreamed, Simon was his star pupil. He read around subjects, told Wilson stuff he didn’t know and made oblique connections. But soon the boy’s adherence to rules got under Wilson’s skin and bit by bit the man’s objective shifted. A mild-mannered man, Wilson had become infuriated by Simon. He saw himself in the seven-year-old, a meek snap of a thing with no friends. Instead of encouraging Simon to find joy in new knowledge, he started to try to catch him out. He vented his annoyance at Simon’s obsequious manner by gratuitously punishing him. He found justification in making an example of an innocent boy: it would bring the others into line.

The afternoon Wilson saw Simon leave the playground and sneak around the back of the kitchens was a gift. He went after him.

Simon walked his fingers over the boarding – he had taken the balsa wood from the workshop – and pressed hard. It creaked, but didn’t break; the pressure was the equivalent of a ton. The spans had give and would withstand strong winds. Justin had explained that to him; he would remind him of that.

The boy was astonished at his achievement. Now he knew how to do it, they could build another bridge, or a tunnel – whatever Justin liked. Ideas raced fast and furious; hands together as if praying, Simon contemplated the breadth of possibility. It would be their secret.

He smiled at the distant thud of the garden door closing. Justin hadn’t learnt his skill of stealthy tracking. Simon would teach him this. He scrambled to his feet, imagining Justin’s face when he saw the bridge. Justin never smiled. Simon supposed it was because his mother was dead. He wanted to make him smile.

‘You shouldn’t be here.’ Justin did a high singing voice. ‘It’s out of bounds.’

‘I made it.’ Simon realized Justin was imitating him. Unaccountably he felt afraid and fluffed his speech. ‘I did the spans like Hammersmith Bridge.’

Hands on hips, Justin surveyed the bridge. ‘The stresses are in the wrong places, it won’t take a significant load.’

‘I tested it,’ Simon protested, his eyes swimming with sudden tears. ‘It does.’ Mentally he scanned his drawing for possible error. An engineer’s mistake couldn’t be hidden. Sir Stephen Lockett, the sanitary-ware millionaire who had wanted to be an engineer, whose house they lived in, had trusted the Tay bridge. It had collapsed. Sir Stephen’s body was never recovered from the river Tay beneath. Forever restless, his ghost was said to roam the library at night.

Simon had imagined Hammersmith Bridge, the looping spans mirrored in the Thames. All he had achieved was a cluster of wood, stuck with glue. He saw it as Justin saw it and pulled on his bad finger. ‘I did it for you.’

Justin’s shoe caught a strip of wood. It broke off and fell into the ‘river’.

‘That’s OK.’ Simon said as if Justin had apologized.

Justin stepped on the bridge and crushed it.

‘See? It can’t take a decent load.’ Justin kicked up a shower of gravel and, turning on his heel, strolled away up the path between the tall weeds.

Simon couldn’t comprehend the devastation. He rubbed his palms on the back of his trousers.

‘What are you playing at?’

Simon wheeled around. Mr Wilson was standing with his hands on his hips as Justin had.

‘I built him a bridge,’ Simon said and then corrected himself. ‘I built a bridge.’

‘You did, did you?!’ Wilson folded his arms, wondering if the boy had whacked his head. He couldn’t see a bridge in the mess of sticks and mud at his feet. ‘Look at the state of you.’

‘I tested it. My sums were right.’

He was dishevelled and pathetic. Wilson’s triumph ebbed; he felt sorry for him and sick with himself.

‘Simon, mate, you shouldn’t be here,’ he said gently. The kid was doing the thing with his finger, twisting and tugging it as if the injury was recent. No one knew how he came to lose his finger. Wilson would have a chat with Madeleine next time she visited the school. It would do him no harm for her to see him showing concern for her son. So many of the teachers here actually disliked children. If the boys knew why, they might stop teasing him. He’d even had it in mind to come up with a hero story in which the kid had saved lives and lost his finger in the process, but couldn’t see how that would work, so had given it up.

‘Come with me.’ He ushered him up the path.

Intent on getting Simon away before another master saw him and insisted he get detention, Nathan Wilson didn’t see the other boy crouched in the greenhouse.

Christmas Eve 1986

At the junction of Goldhawk Road and Chiswick High Road, traffic was nose to tail. Christmas Eve shoppers, weighed down with bags and packages, wove between the stationary vehicles. When the door of the off-licence on the corner opened, a burst of John Lennon’s ‘Happy Xmas (War is Over)’ swelled above the idling engines.

None of this last-minute bustle reached St Peter’s Square where tall Georgian houses, stucco dappled with lamplight, formed a stately contrast to the seasonal mayhem. The square, its park in darkness, was of the past more than the present. Frost sparkling between shadows of branches might be the footprints of ghosts.