The Detective's Secret (24 page)

‘What do you mean?’ Lulu stiffened and shut her eyes tight like a little kid hiding.

‘I found this.’ Stella laid the driving licence on the table beside the note. There would be time later to explain about her dog. The paper and the licence looked like exhibits from a crime scene. Perhaps they were. ‘Were you having an affair with Rick Frost?’

Lulu opened her eyes. ‘No, I bloody well was not!’

‘Why have you got this?’ Stella was morphing from cleaner to detective in one job.

‘Why have I got any of his things?’

‘You tell me.’ Stella coaxed.
Take your time
, she nearly said.

Stella felt the sensation that Jack often claimed to feel, like an autocue: she saw Lulu’s answer before she spoke.

‘Rick Frost was my husband.’

Friday, 25 October 2013

‘How’s Stella Darnell? Still cleaning for England or cleaning up England?’ Cigarette smoke puffed from between Lucille May’s lipsticked lips.

‘She works hard,’ Jack said levelly. At best Lucie and Stella were openly hostile towards each other.

‘Sure I can’t tempt you with a nippet? No milk, but a whole damn bottle of Tanqueray is cooling its heels!’ Waving her glass of gin and tonic at him, Lucie shut an eye against the smoke and eyed him beadily with the other.

Jack shook his head. ‘No, you’re all right.’ Lucie held a scary amount of drink without obvious impairment to her thinking or her memory. A ‘nippet’ – a triple gin with a splash of tonic – would fell him.

It was ten past ten. Jack had returned from his driving shift that day restless and dissatisfied. Shocked by Stella coming to Tallulah Frost’s house that morning, he had failed – despite his determination to focus on it – to calculate the length of the West Hill tunnel. If he knew the mystery fact, it would unlock other hidden facts.

He hadn’t yet faced examining the steam engine he had found on the monitor. It was a sign of something he had tried to forget.

Stella had texted, saying she had seen him. He was scared to see her and was appalled with himself. He had been called a coward in the past – it was true.

He was taking refuge with Lucie May. Unfettered by a moral code, Lucie pursued her stories with blind ambition. While this wasn’t an attitude he admired, being with Lucie, her diminutive frame lost in a jumper – a relic of a husband divorced along the way – curled on her sofa, substituting smoke for air and consuming gin as if life, not death, depended on it, Jack felt a braver and better person. He nestled in his corner of the sofa. The coffee table was lost beneath piles of back copies of the
Chronicle
, on which Lucie May had been chief reporter for nearly forty years.

Lucie had just filed a story – ‘Hush hush, Jackanory, it’s embargoed until next week’ – so was ‘demob bloody jubilant!’ She had once told him she never drank on the job, but he could see that alcohol was taking its toll. Her skilfully applied foundation didn’t hide a pinkish complexion or the crazy bright of her eyes.

‘You’ve decorated.’ Stella would approve of the newly whitewashed walls. Although with Lucie’s nicotine habit it would not be white for long.

Lucie had reinstated the numerous photos of herself with the great, the good and the royal (the Queen in 1970, Prince Edward in 1985).

‘I’ve scared away the ghosts.’ Lucie contemplated her glowing butt, fitted it between her lips and sucked on it before pinching it out in an ashtray shaped like a woman’s upturned hand. Jack’s own palms tingled.

Long ago, a woman had killed herself feet from where they sat. Lucie had bought the house intending to write a book about the case – her pension plan – but the ghosts had got to her first, so there would be no book. Jack doubted a lick of emulsion would scare them away.

‘Certainly should,’ he said nevertheless. Perhaps, after all, it was a good sign.

‘So what can I do you for?’ Lucie rasped. Swirling her glass, she sent ice whizzing around it, faster and faster. ‘Or is this just a social call?’

He got to the point. ‘What do you know about the Palmyra Tower?’

‘Zilch. Should I?’ Lucie drained her glass and mussed up her expensively dyed blonde hair. Her gestures and tics belonged to a long-ago younger self, but somehow she got away with it. She reached for her cigarette packet on the sofa arm, but then seemed to think better of it. ‘Where is it, Italy? Going on holiday, darling? Can I come?’ She gave a cackle and picked up the cigarette packet.

‘Chiswick Mall.’ Jack was disappointed; he had been relying on Lucie, a mine of information about West London, to shed light on his new home.

‘Oh, you mean Chiswick Tower!’ She flicked up a fresh cigarette, lit it, inhaled and puffed out a swirl of smoke. ‘Talking of ghosts!’ She shifted about happily. ‘Dead Man’s Tower! I knew it was finished. Luxury accommodation! They’ll make a mint from some poor sod happy to climb that scaffold and live in a water tank!’

Jack’s head jerked and he sniffed to cover the tic that rarely surfaced. ‘That’s me.’

‘Say again?’ Lucie’s cigarette hand was above her shoulder, the smoke spiralling upwards.

‘I’m living there.’

‘Lordy-lou!’ Lucie funnelled smoke up to her brilliant white ceiling. ‘Even for you, that takes the biscuit!’ she said eventually.

‘Have you written something on it?’

‘
Wind Drowns Out Terror Screams!
’

Like himself, Lucie had a photographic memory. She could recite from pieces she’d written decades ago, both the headlines and whole passages from the articles. She had facts at her fingertips that no amount of Tanqueray would blur or blot out. Jack felt a buzzing in his solar plexus: dread or excitement, he wasn’t sure.

‘Tell me.’ Jack tucked his own feet up, shoes clear of the sofa – Lucie was house-proud – and prepared for a cracking story.

‘Chiswick water tower was erected in 1940 to protect local industry, the brewery and a shipbuilder’s on the wharf where Pages Yard is now. It was meant to put out fires caused by German bombing, but I don’t think it ever did. Unlike the one on Ladbroke Grove – a bomb hit the cemetery nearby and sent a headstone smashing into the side of a gasometer. But for that tower, Shepherd’s Bush would be a memory!’

Gone were Lucie’s corncrake tones and her brash flirty style. The reporter was cool and authoritative, her mind a fount of fact and folklore. Jack got a glimpse of the professional, brimful of hope and principle, that Lucie had once been.

‘It was decommissioned in the sixties and became a white elephant. One resident campaigned to have it demolished in the late seventies, but the whole community rose up and objected. It might be a concrete monstrosity, but it was their concrete – you get it!’

She went to the cabinet on the other side of the room and, with Faustian precision, put together another nippet.

‘It was listed and in the eighties a company bought it to turn it into luxury apartments. But it was a bridge – or a tower – too far and they went bankrupt. It stayed empty for another couple of years, Chiswick’s own Centre Point. A consortium bought it about five years ago and began redeveloping it. They wouldn’t do interviews – the project was cloaked in secrecy. Even I couldn’t get a sniff. If you ask me, that was the point, talk it up – or not talk – so I gave up. I won’t play that game.’ She dropped a lemon slice into her drink and sucked on another. ‘I didn’t think the place would ever get a tenant. Trust it to be you!’

‘Why? It’s got amazingly detailed views.’ Jack accidentally echoed the leaflet. The sensation in his solar plexus clarified into dread.

Wandering to her French doors, Lucie sniffed her drink with anticipatory delight. ‘Because a man had lain dead there for nearly a year. Sorry, darling.’ She turned around and grimaced at him.

‘There’s no sign of him now.’ Thinking of Stanley’s furious digging and sniffing, Jack wasn’t sure this was true.

‘The police couldn’t identify him. He had perfect teeth, no fillings, nothing, but no dentist had him on their books. Teeth was pretty much all that was left – the corpse was skeletal after all that time. He was discovered by a representative of the consortium. You sure about it? I sure as hell wouldn’t like to live in a place where a person had died.’

Jack refrained from pointing out that Lucie was doing exactly this, or that most flats and houses over thirty years old had witnessed a death.

‘Who was the man?’

‘They never found out. I dubbed him “Glove Man” since that was pretty much all there was of him. The nationals ran with that, not that I got any credit.’ She opened the French windows and seemed to Jack to float on to the patio into the darkness beyond. He got up and followed her.

‘I’m sorting this too,’ she was muttering, glass in hand, as she leant down desultorily and wrenched up a weed, tossing it into next door’s garden.

‘Why did you call him Glove Man?’ In the slant of light from the sitting room, Jack noticed that at long last Lucie had got rid of the rusted swing that had stood for decades in the middle of the lawn. He felt a twinge of regret. He fancied flying up into the night, but on a swing he would have to come down.

‘They found a glove on the corpse’s back. There was some argy-bargy at the inquest about whether he could have placed it there himself. Terry demonstrated it was just about possible, but the question remained, why would he? If he was going to kill himself and make it look like murder, then he should have framed someone. Obvious candidate was the owner of the glove, but that was never established. His fingernails showed signs that he had gone for the door and the walls, but being metal and concrete he had no purchase, nothing to grip, poor bloke. So he wasn’t in a “framing frame of mind”!’ Jack suspected she had made the pun more than once before.

‘What was the verdict?’ Was this another case of Terry’s that had got away? That was the reality of being a detective. If you wanted to truly restore order, you should be a cleaner. He might say that to Stella.
Stella
.

‘Open. The police thought he was homeless. He thinks: set up shop in the tower, but the door shuts. Effectively he’s trapped in a giant toilet cistern! In the old days he’d have got out through the roof, but the builders had stripped out the pipework by then.’

‘Why didn’t you think he was homeless?’

‘Apart from a sleeping bag, there was a champagne bottle in there, a high-class choice of tipple for a guy living on the street – or
above
the street. A used condom suggested he wasn’t alone. They found more than one set of fingerprints, but nothing that figured on police records. Over the years enough people had been up there. I suggested to Terry it might have been a paedophile and his family were keeping
shtum
. What better way to disown him than his being locked in a tower? They might even have locked him in there!’

‘Why did you think he was a paedophile?’

‘The glove was too small for an adult. It wasn’t his.’

‘Could have been dropped by kids afterwards.’

‘That was the official police line. But, as I said to Terry, even a kid knows better than to incriminate himself. Terry agreed, but without cogent evidence he couldn’t raise a budget to take it further. Another mystery that haunted the poor guy.’ She sipped at her drink. Despite her threadbare jumper, she didn’t seem to feel the cold.

‘Sounds like you had the answer. He drank too much, shut the door and was unable to escape.’

‘There was no reason for the door to shut, it was at the top of a spiral staircase, as you know, so could only shut if someone deliberately pushed it. Ergo, someone who intended to lock him in. After so long the pathologist couldn’t pinpoint time and date of death, but they narrowed it to late 1987. As I said, October was the month of the Great Storm, that hurricane that famously wasn’t forecast. The wind was like a tempest – the lead flashings on our house rolled up like foil and we lost a load of roof tiles. It was deafening. No one would have heard Glove Man yelling for help. Even on a quiet night, I doubt the sound would have carried.’

She ground out her cigarette into the grass with the toe of her boot.

Jack was about nine in 1987; he had a hazy recollection of streets blocked by fallen tree trunks, pavements strewn with branches and smashed glass, cars abandoned. It gave him a bad feeling, the same feeling he got when he thought about the steam engine.

‘Hundreds of feet up in a concrete vault, the man must have been stark staring petrified. It was likely he had heart disease, probably undiagnosed. Being a bag of bones they couldn’t verify that. But it’s likely the terror of being locked in a tank miles in the sky did it for him. Bam! His ticker packed up. Terry’s lot did call-outs to surgeries, but drew a blank; no doctor had a missing patient with a dicky ticker. Poor Terry. A literal skeleton in the cupboard!’ Lucie was gazing at the sky; she seemed to have forgotten Jack was there.

‘I swapped notes with Terry. I had a bulging file because of the demolition protests. We kept each other’s secrets.’ She pinched up the lemon from her drink and threw it into the bushes. ‘Stupid bugger, I said he needed exercise.’

‘Who?’

‘Terry.’ She produced her cigarettes from the waistband of her trousers and stuck one between her lips. ‘Stella see much of her mum?’

‘Yes.’ Jack knew the tactic. Lucie would appear to be asking after someone, but everything led somewhere. He wouldn’t let his guard down.

‘Mobile phones were a rarity then and they were the size of houses. So, end of Glove Man.’ Lucie was with the story again.

The door in the tower was original. A man had battered on the galvanized metal before he collapsed with a coronary. The dog had tuned into the frequency of the man’s terror and anguish; Jack, usually so alive to the presence of the dead, had sensed nothing. He had abandoned one set of ghosts – of his parents, of the self he preferred to forget – for a more potent phantom.

‘How old was he?’

‘Between twenty and forty, which gives lots to play with. One clue, he had a receipt in his trousers from the Fullers wine shop, as it was in 1987. That one on the corner of Goldhawk Road and King Street – your old neck of the woods, darling. No CCTV then and no one in the shop recalled the purchase. In that area, getting a bottle of bubbly is probably not a rare occurrence!’ Lucie paused and contemplated the sky, where Jack could just make out faint stars.