The Runaway (2 page)

Stella had interpreted Terry Darnell's silence as proof that her mum was right. She was not the daughter he had wanted. Eventually he had said, ‘I made a mistake – it's hardly the crime of the century!'

‘I'm sure you know what your reporter friend likes.'

‘Stop it, Suzie,' her dad had whispered, but Stella, sitting on the top stair unseen by either of them, heard everything.

‘It's not about memory; it's about what you think important. Your child is not as important to you as climbing up the greasy pole.'

‘You know that's not true!'

I don't like pink!

Stella stopped herself shouting the words down to them. Skilled at treading the fine line of peace between her parents, she knew that if she said them, she would upset her dad. Yet if she said she liked pink her mum would be upset.
And
it would be lying, which detectives must not do. In the end Stella had gone down and taken the suitcase from her dad. She had carried it back up to her bedroom and packed it with the dolls and toys.

Stella would have been astonished to know that she had achieved her goal. Shocked at the sight of Stella toiling up the stairs, the new case banging against her bare legs, Terry and Suzanne Darnell ‘made up'. Obliquely, they were each aware that their daughter was the prime casualty of their tumultuous relationship and, if clumsily and wide of the mark, each tried to make amends. Terry bought Stella presents and Suzanne cooked. She declared Stella loved scones, cakes, chicken supreme, and gateaux – unaware that her daughter would have been happier with ham, egg and chips followed by ice cream.

Their previous truce had been at a parents' evening the week before. Stella's class teacher, a young woman just out of college who placed flights of fancy and curiosity above obedience and discipline, had expressed concern that Stella was ‘perhaps a little too well behaved'. In the playground afterwards, their bewilderment briefly united them. They sat on a diminutive bench that gave them the look of visiting giants and asked each other how was it possible for Stella to be too well behaved?

Crouched on the bottom stair, Stella rubbed at a mark on her monkey boot with the base of her thumb and retied her laces. Oxblood red, her boots with curving stitching and thick-tread soles were another present from her dad. He had given them to her after they told her about the Fresh Start in Barons Court.

‘They're “bovver boots”! She'll be teased. Did you even think of checking that they fit?'

‘She can take a bit of nonsense, can't you, love!' Her dad had ruffled her hair. ‘They'll all want a pair when they see them.'

‘Is that what you think happens when kids get jealous? Will it stop them breaking her pencil box? Her life will be a misery!'

‘What do you mean? What happened to her pencil box?' Terry was suddenly alert.

‘I told you. You didn't listen. Like I said, you never do!'

Stella had been horror-struck – how did her mum know about the pencil box? Kathleen Perry had called her ‘teacher's pet' for cleaning the blackboard without being asked, and when Stella came top in spelling, Jane Masters had snapped the lid of her pencil box. A girl called Liz had tried to mend it, but the glue wasn't strong enough and it had fallen apart. Stella wiped away bad things as she had the words on the blackboard and, not one to tell tales, had told no one about the incident.

Suzanne Darnell would have gained no satisfaction from knowing that she was right: the boots did attract attention. Kathleen Perry and Jane Masters asked if she had joined the army or was she in the police like her dad. Stella said no to both these questions. Liz told them to ‘leave Stella alone', which surprised Stella, who, impervious to what others did or said, hadn't thought that she needed ‘leaving alone'.

The following Monday Jane Masters came into school wearing black monkey boots and the teasing, such as it was, ceased.

Stella gave her boots a buff with the palm of her hand and, standing up, wandered down the passage to the kitchen. The breakfast plates were heaped by the sink. Mechanically, she began to wash each one. She sluiced them under the hot tap, wincing as the water scalded her hands, then slotted them in the dish rack. She dropped the cutlery into the holder, knives in one compartment and so on.

This Wednesday was special for the nation as well as the Darnells. It was a bank holiday and Stella's school was closed. Terry Darnell would be taking his daughter to the Metropolitan Police social club to celebrate the wedding of Princess Anne, the Queen's only daughter, to equestrian Olympic gold medallist Mark Phillips.

Terry had promised Stella they could watch the wedding live on a big television and she would play games with the children of other officers. There would be souvenir party bags to take home. This had only made Stella think that she didn't know where she would be taking her bag. This worry was overtaken by another: the news that there would be cake and Coca-Cola. Stella disliked sweet things and fizzy drinks and was no good at any sort of game as most of them relied on fast response. When the music stopped, Stella was still pondering the best course of action. Unlike her mum, she thought Mark Phillips quite handsome, but she didn't want to go to a party because of him.

While she was getting on and off a chair, putting each plate back, one by one, on the pine dresser next to the fridge, Stella mused that a wedding couldn't be special. Her mum and dad had had a wedding and now they were going to live far away from each other. They would not see each other again. Stella had understood that the Access Weekends were only for her.

After the party Stella would be going to Barons Court. She was fair-minded and it wouldn't have occurred to her to have a preference for either parent. However, she did suppose it would be easier if she stayed with her dad. All her things could have stayed in their places too and she would know where they were. Her dad would know where she was. She worried he wouldn't find Barons Court even while supposing that, being a policeman, he would easily know the way. Yet if she stayed, her mum would be in Barons Court having her Fresh Start all by herself. Many times since her parents told her they were splitting up, Stella had been troubled by this conundrum.

When she returned to the hall, the dog was leaping and jumping by the door, mewing like a cat. He wanted a walk. Mechanically, Stella took his lead down from the end coat hook and clipped it to his collar. She reached up and retrieved her parka with the fur-lined hood. Grasping the lead, she opened the front door and stepped outside. She pulled the door shut behind her with a click of the latch.

This was a starting gun for the dog. He rocketed down the path, jerking the lead taut, wrenching Stella's arm. She struggled in his wake as he took off across the little cul-de-sac and made for the scrap of land between Black Lion Lane and the Great West Road, with its paths framing some scrubby grass. He led Stella along one of the paths. Clutching the lead in both hands like reins, she skidded and tripped over the damp asphalt.

He stopped by the railings that protected the ramps down to the subway under the Great West Road and Stella panted to get her breath.

Above her the cross on St Peter's Church spire was silhouetted against a blue November sky with not a cloud in sight. The shadows of the bare boughs flitted across the pavement. On the Great West Road, cars, lorries and coaches streamed into London, banking up at the approach to Hammersmith Broadway. A driver in the near lane glancing to her left noticed a little girl with flyaway hair and a dog. This prompted a fond memory of her daughter when she was little and she gave the ghost of a smile. A lorry driver in a British Leyland truck laden with iron girders spotted a man near a church doing up his shoelace some metres away from the little girl. While David Cassidy sang about being a daydreamer in the rain on his cab radio, the man fell into a daydream of his own. The man must be the girl's dad, because he kept glancing up to check she was in sight. She was waiting for him to catch her up. Letting out the clutch, the driver revved past the church and fell to thinking about his own daughter and how whatever happened he would never let her down.

However, most drivers on the Great West Road at eight-thirty on that November morning didn't see Stella Darnell lingering with her dog by the subway railings. And those who had, quickly forgot.

Stella had no recollection of how she found herself shivering in the crisp cold beside the Great West Road. She tugged the dog away from the railings, intending to lead him back to the house. This brought the animal to life and with huge force he dragged her away from Rose Gardens North where she lived and down the ramp to the subway.

‘Heel!' She deepened her tone in imitation of Terry Darnell, but the dog wasn't fooled and propelled her onwards. Stella careered towards the mouth of the tunnel.

The rumble of engines bounced off blue-tiled walls either side of the ramp. Confused by the cacophony of sound that seemed to come from all around her, and intent on keeping hold of the lead, Stella forgot the safety drill.

On their walks Terry would teach his daughter to be a detective. Together they spotted clues and he encouraged her to draw conclusions. He taught her to truly observe: to note minor changes in the street, the colours of cars; to pick up the slightest nuance in behaviour. When they were going into the subway it was Stella's job to check the mirror above the tunnel. Not a proper mirror, it was a circular sheet of metal tarnished with starbursts of oxidation like lichen, angled to reflect the inside of the subway. Relishing her task, Stella would crane up to make out the pools of bleak light drifting from lamps in the tunnel ceiling between the tiny encrustations on the metal. She would then ‘report in' on what she could see to her dad. Never did it occur to her that he could see perfectly well for himself.

If Stella didn't see the square of light at the end of the tunnel, it meant someone was there blocking it out. She must hold tightly to Terry's hand and keep close to him all the way through. There was no question of danger, because Terry Darnell was a policeman and he caught criminals. If the person was a criminal, then Stella believed her dad would catch him and take him to Hammersmith Police Station. So far – to her disappointment – this had not happened.

If the mirror reflected the lamps in the tunnel and she could see the square of light, Stella could run in all by herself.

Now, chasing along with the dog, Stella didn't do the check. Mindful only of the leather lead cutting into her palms, she plunged into the gloom of the underground passage, her footsteps drowned by the engines above.

*

In the glare of the low autumn sunlight, the figure close by the embankment wall might have appeared, to a casual observer, insubstantial – perhaps a blackened post or a stain on the high brick wall discoloured by two centuries of mud and slime. The ‘stain' moved; it was a person. A tall woman in a long black coat, dressed inappropriately for the muddy shoreline in black boots with platform heels. Her glossy dark hair was twisted up into a bun and this, together with a somewhat obdurate expression, gave her a look of overarching authority, as if she might stop the receding tide should she wish to.

Sparks of light flickered on the Thames as a breeze chased ripples over its surface. Trees on the far bank, a display of reds, golds, ambers and yellows, reflected a kaleidoscope of colours in the water. The woman stood in the lee of a moored barge in a suntrap. The bright winter light showed a fine-boned beauty that the years would only refine.

Isabel Ramsay shut her eyes and, feeling the warmth of the sun on her cheeks, let herself believe it was summer, her favourite season and the only time she felt alive.

A bird crossed her sightline, the whirring of its wings loud in the immediate quiet. She traced its flight towards Barnes Bridge, leaning slightly in the direction it had taken as if she might fly after it. The bird was larger than a seagull; a bird of prey, she hazarded. Mark would know. She furrowed her brow at the memory of Mark's quizzes on the interminable car journeys to their house in Sussex and his insistence that the children stay awake and spot a Doric column or a Gothic arch, or correctly identify flora and fauna or the make of some car. He had been as ruthlessly intent as the Hanging Judge, his father.

Lucian had made up for lack of intelligence with diligence and sensibly mugged up in advance. Elly, always off in some dream, was lucky to scrape a point and never won. Gina only knew about horses, which Mark, who didn't ride, discounted. If he was in a good mood he might toss her a point or two for a gelding, a hunter or some bloated piebald nag. Mark would know what the bird was.

Isabel Ramsay reminded herself that, with Elly at boarding school, they had all as good as left the nest, like the bird now vanished in the sky. There was just her and Mark.

Isabel had longed for the time when she would be free to go for a walk by the river without Lucian splashing in the muddy shallows or Elly poking about the beach like a mudlark. She'd be able to bask in the sun and in the full attention of the Poet or the Playwright or the Artist or whoever. No chance of that now. The Poet was dead, the Playwright had found some young thing to leave his wife for and the Artist had stopped pleading for her to leave her husband in 1968.

She found herself wishing that one of her children were here. Not as the intractable young adults that in their different ways they had become, but the cherub-cheeked creatures she had adored.

Today Isabel Ramsay was thirty-nine, one year off forty, and to escape this deadening fact – her son and eldest daughter had called her on the telephone that morning and Mark had sent lilies – she had fled to the river. It was no escape. Wherever she looked, there were shadows of lost people: ghosts of the living, as well as of the dead. The older you got the more there were. Pushing forty, she was too old to be anyone's muse. Elly had once asked whether you could be a parent if your children were dead. She had laughed with Mark about that at the time – now she wondered. Her children had left her. What was she?