The Detective's Secret (7 page)

Anyone watching from a window of a house on the west side, indulging in this fancy, might decide that the boy hopscotch jumping between the cracks in between the flags by the park railings was one such phantom. Nothing betrayed him as a child of the 1980s, when loads of money didn’t so much talk as shout. He had stepped out of a Narnian wardrobe in polished brogues, his gabardine mac collar down despite the biting wind, hair in a precise side parting.

Many downstairs windows were a showcase for Christmas. Splendid trees were festooned with lights and quaint decorations in reds, gold and silver. Lanterns burned on sills; candles flickered on mantelpieces; darts of light bounced off glasses of red wine and port. Indeed, quintessentially Dickensian, the boy, suitably diminutive and pale, observed the tableaux through misted glass, quaking in the icy cold.

He arrived at a house on the south side. The curtains were closed. Perhaps the residents were away or perhaps they eschewed the festivities; the unruly box hedge and fractured plaster on Doric columns supporting the porch hinted at indifference.

An eagle was poised on the porch, wings spread. Timidly, his shoulders hunched, Simon regarded it as if it might devour him as easy prey. He scurried up the steps to the front door.

Simon had had no doubt that Justin would be pleased to see him. He would tell him he had left his boarding school too, that he lived near to him. They could see each other every day. He bent down and raised the letterbox flap. Inside was a fusty smell like the room under the school library. A black cloth had been pinned to the door, blocking his view.

‘It’s me,’ he whispered. ‘Your friend.’

Saturday, 19 October 2013

‘Thank you.’ Stella took the ticket from the machine and stuck it between her teeth. Talking to machines was more Jack’s thing. Luckily William Frost – as she had finally remembered he was called – hadn’t heard.

She found a space on the car park’s third level. In the lift to the Arrivals hall, she questioned her wisdom in letting Frost come with her. Suzie wouldn’t approve; she was unhappy about Stella ‘playing detective’, like her father. Nothing William had said on the journey to the airport – or his long brooding silences – gave her confidence that he would win Suzie over with charm as Jack had.

‘What do you think we could find that the police haven’t?’ They were alone in the lift.

‘The truth. You finding the killer will be worth the money.’

Stella hadn’t considered charging a fee. Their last two investigations – the Rokesmith and Blue Folder cases (not counting a missing cat Jack found in an empty house he was cleaning) – had been Terry’s cold cases. No money had changed hands.

Frost was expecting to pay for a service Stella probably couldn’t fulfil. She had built a successful business by avoiding risks, expanding only when there was the capital and demand. She had not taken on bigger offices or rewarded herself with a higher wage. She paid her operatives properly and invested in the best equipment. She had stuck to what she knew. She was not a detective.

‘If the police couldn’t find proof that your brother was murdered, I can’t see how we can.’

‘You clean for Hammersmith Police Station, don’t you?’

Jackie would not have told him.

‘I saw you in the compound.’ He stopped beneath the Arrivals board. ‘You wouldn’t have that job if your firm wasn’t thorough. Jackie assured me you leave no corner unclean. My brother was murdered. I know you will prove it and solve the case.’

‘Perhaps it was a cry for help that went wrong,’ Stella persisted, feeling every inch the pretend detective.

‘A cry for help is taking tablets then texting someone. It’s not jumping off a platform in front of a fast train.’

‘He did call you.’ She had to say it.

‘He asked to see me, if he meant to kill himself, why do that?’ Frost was adamant. Jackie had given him airtime, Stella reminded herself. She refrained from saying it was possible to survive a fall on to the rails: a client of hers had slipped off a platform when he was drunk and got away with a gash in his arm. Still, she supposed living to tell the tale – he told it whenever she cleaned for him – was unusual.

‘You didn’t get the call. Maybe that tipped him —’ Stella stopped herself crashing into the unfortunate pun and, turning away, scanned the Arrival’s indicator. The question surely is, did your brother have a reason to kill himself.

‘Baggage hall’ was listed beside her mother’s plane. She took up position at the mouth of the gate.

The first passengers – identifiable by suntans and summer clothes – straggled out, battling with trolleys bulky with cases, bags, surf boards, giant stuffed kangaroos. Many were hailed – cries and whoops – by people waiting by the ribbon. Stella edged around a man with a square of cardboard against his chest for a clear view of the exit.

‘He did.’

‘Who did what?’ She kept her eyes on the passengers.

‘About a month before he died, Rick remarked that long ago he made a mistake that had come back to haunt him.’

‘Doesn’t that make suicide more likely?’

‘He isn’t the type.’ Frost was a stuck record. ‘He said it in passing, I ignored him, felt like saying his whole life was a mistake, now I see he was trying to tell me something.’

Stella risked a glance at the man. In the stark airport light, his complexion was grey, eyes red-rimmed. She felt rather sorry for him.

Passengers were streaming by, jostling with trolleys, heaving bags, rolling cases into each other’s paths. Jack wouldn’t need proof: he would follow instinct, pay attention to his precious signs; he got results. She should have called him when she saw him in the cemetery. What was he doing there?

‘Could someone have pushed him? Did they see anyone on the CCTV?’ Her mum would be last off the plane; unused to travel, she would have mislaid her passport or got stuck in her seat belt.

‘They saw no one on the film, but not all the station is covered. Whoever did this would know that.’ Frost was animated. ‘He has a car. I found it parked a couple of streets from his house. Why didn’t he drive to see me? Obvious, because he didn’t want to be seen leaving.’

‘Who might have been watching?’ Stella wondered why taking the Underground made it less likely he would be seen leaving, but felt it rude to pick Frost up on every point. She would never question a client’s cleaning requirements.

‘Is that your mother waving?’

A woman in a wide-brimmed straw hat that hid her face was sailing along wearing one of those billowing coats with bat-wing shoulders Stella associated with Australia. Suzie. Her trolley was heaped with makeshift bags. She was going so quickly other passengers had to veer out of her path. Stella couldn’t see the suitcase Suzie had taken with her, and she had three times the luggage she’d set out with. She was waving, not just at Stella, but at everyone waiting. Stella leant out to get her attention. Her mother snatched off her hat and flung it on to her tower of bags.

The woman’s face was scored by lines; her tan suggested she never saw the inside of a house. She wasn’t her mother. Stella’s relief was brief, for behind the woman was an expanse of floor. There were no more passengers. Her phone buzzed. Distracted by Frost, she had missed Suzie. Stella read the text.

Staying in Sydney for two weeks. Feed plants. Mum x
.

‘She’s not coming.’ When she finally spoke, Stella’s voice was gruff. ‘I should have seen this coming.’ She turned on her heel. ‘She’s had an accident – or worse.’ What was worse? Her thoughts were racing.

‘People often act out of character and surprise us,’ William Frost said.

‘Like killing themselves.’ She stopped. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that.’

‘Fair point. Rick took the train when he had a car and he shouldn’t have been at Stamford Brook. I live on the Goldhawk Road, near Shepherd’s Bush Green – he was out of his way. He asked to see me, then he went in front of a train. It doesn’t add up.’

‘Went out of his way?’ Illogical behaviour generally had an explanation. They took the lift back to the car park. Stella forced herself to concentrate. Despite her text, she was on the lookout for her mother.

‘His nearest Tube was Hammersmith, he should have got a train to Goldhawk Road station. I’m three minutes from there.’

‘We need to pay. Stella nodded at a bank of ticket machines.

‘Let me.’ Frost began feeding coins into the slot in the nearest machine.

‘You needn’t.’ Everything was slipping away from her.

‘I’ve taken your time, let me recompense you.’

Jackie had ‘sent’ William Frost to her. Stella trusted her judgement; Jackie wouldn’t set Stella up for a fall. Watching him pick out the right change from a pile of coins in his palm, she deemed the man calm and practical, perhaps not the sort to get stuff out of proportion.

‘I’ll talk to my Jack, my partner, and let you know our decision,’ Stella said.

‘Do you want a deposit now, and an advance on expenses?’

‘That’s not a “yes”. If we do agree, it’s “no win no fee”.’ Jackie wouldn’t like that, but Stella would explain it was a trial. She wouldn’t say that she balked at charging anything for detection.

‘Who is this Jack? Are you together?’ Frost startled her. ‘Sorry, that’s not my business.’

‘Jack’s a colleague,’ Stella said sharply. ‘He has a lot of experience.’ She didn’t say that he had been lurking in the cemetery earlier; there was much Frost didn’t need to know about Jack. There was much she didn’t know about Jack. Her mood dropped further. Jack had broken his promise.

‘Will he agree?’ William sounded anxious. ‘I’d be happy with you if he doesn’t.’

‘We are a team.’ Technically, Jack being in the cemetery wasn’t breaking his promise. A graveyard wasn’t a street.

On the roundabout Stella came up with a horrible idea. Dale Heffernan, the man who liked Bruce Springsteen, was Suzie’s Mr Right. That was why she had flown to Sydney at the drop of a hat. Stella overshot the London exit and, circling it again, she told herself this could not be. Mr Right did not exist.

September 1987

On a chill Saturday afternoon in London, an insidious fog made wraiths of the lamp-posts and telephone poles in Corney Road, a suburban street near Chiswick House grounds. It wiped out wires slung between the poles and lent the gates into the grounds a ghostly aspect. Emerging out of the grey, traffic on Burlington Lane was a procession of indistinct smudges of yellow.

Built in the 1930s, Corney Road was one line of terraced houses. Even with the tiled roofs and gables wreathed in fog, the houses retained the comforting appearance of a hot-chocolate advert. Threads of smoke wending from chimneys hinted at a crackling grate and leaping flames. Clipped hedges and shingled paths suggested domestic stability. Twenty minutes’ walk from the nearest Underground station, the houses fell within the buying reach of lower-grade professionals: teachers, middle-ranking police officers and council workers such as planning officers and auditors.

The homely atmosphere didn’t extend to the other side of the street where wrought-iron railings bounded Chiswick Cemetery. Angels with broken fingers and chipped wings gazed heavenwards; sublime Madonnas overlooked headstones. A breeze pushed at yew trees and set a chain looped around the gate into a Newton’s cradle motion. Rhythmically it chinked against the post, the lightly pitched sound spelling doom in the quiet.

From Burlington Lane two black shapes clarified to a woman with a pushchair and a boy, belted into a gabardine mac, hurrying along. The boy had one hand on the bar of the pushchair, revealing that much of his middle finger on his left hand was missing. They were talking and joking, lending cheer to the damp and gloomy afternoon. The child in the pushchair, a girl of about two, was asleep, her head lolled to one side, her thumb slipping from her mouth.

They stopped at a house outside which was parked a lemon-yellow Triumph sports car. The front door opened and a man in a black wool suit hugging a battered leather briefcase came out. Strands of over-combed hair were lifted by the breeze. His sallow, gaunt features and stooping posture might look more at home processing coffins into open graves across the road than behind the wheel of a shiny TR7.

‘Off to the funny farm for me!’ The joke was perfunctory. He loaded his briefcase into the boot.

‘Drive safely, doctor,’ his wife replied without humour.

Blowing her a kiss and nodding to his son, the man folded himself into the front seat and drove off towards Corney Reach. When the throaty exhaust faded to nothing, she hugged her son to her.

‘Just you and me, darling, let’s have a cosy “lap” supper!’

‘What larks!’ Simon gave a skip.

‘Ever the best of friends; ain’t us, Pip!’ She completed the ritual exchange and, stroking back his hair from his face, handed him the key to the front door.

Simon’s throat was constricted with joy. His father was away; his sister didn’t count. It was a year since he had left his boarding school and was living at home all the time. Since his first visit on Christmas Eve last year, he had knocked on Justin’s door in the tall house with dark windows every week, but got no answer. He refused to give up hope. Justin had to answer one day.

Tonight his mum had talked to him in their special secret way. It was a sign. For the rest of the evening Simon didn’t let her out of his sight.

Monday, 21 October 2013

‘Dale Heffernan, 38 Fisher Ave, Vaucluse. Likes sailing and B. Springsteen. Dislikes having time on his hands!’

Stella reread her mum’s scrawled note for the umpteenth time while she waited for Mrs Carr to answer the door. This was her second visit. She could hear footsteps scurrying about inside and guessed her client was tidying up, as some of Stella’s clients did when she was expected. But given the mess on Saturday, she was surely not bothered what Stella thought.

She was no nearer to discovering who Dale Heffernan was. Her mum had replied to her text asking if she was ‘OK’ with ‘yes’. The name made her think of Engelbert Humperdinck. Her mum often said ‘Please Release Me’ might have been written for her. Maybe Heffernan was a pop singer from the sixties that her mum had Googled. Unlikely.