The Detective's Secret (34 page)

Saturday, 26 October 2013

‘You never lose track of time.’ Jack waited until Dale had shut the front door behind him and they were alone.

‘I lost track of Stanley.’ After her account of her visit to Nicola Barwick’s house and the discovery of a long-lost school friend, Stella described an escalating ordeal in Chiswick Cemetery. It had finished with being stuck in a shed, the gate having jammed shut in the wind.

‘Stanley dragged me in. On the way out, a noticeboard said they don’t allow dogs in at any time!’ She seemed rather excited by her inadvertent transgression, Jack thought.

Stella tossed a treat into the dog’s basket – the only addition to the house since Terry’s death. The dog caught it mid-air, snapped it in his jaws and curled into a ball. If she hadn’t had the dog, Stella wouldn’t have gone into the cemetery, Jack thought. Owning dogs was dangerous. Cemeteries and dark unpopulated stretches of ground in a city were short cuts or choices of murder sites for his True Hosts. Bodies were often found by dog walkers, he knew that.

‘I saw that toy carriage in your bag.’ He was stirring honey into his hot milk. He had briefly entertained the fancy that it was a present for him, but Stella wouldn’t buy him a toy, she thought toys were for children. Jack shuddered. The carriage had given him a bad feeling.

‘I found it in the shed when I was looking for another way out.’ She placed the carriage on the table. ‘I panicked and must have shoved it in my pocket. I’ll take it back tomorrow.’

‘Don’t go back!’ Jack said.

‘It was a kids’ den, it’ll belong to them. I’ve stolen it.’

Stella rolled the carriage about on the table, stopping by the mugs as if they were stations. Jack was anxious to have a go.

‘I’ll do it for you.’ He peered in through the carriage windows. Unlike the carriage he had found earlier that day, this one was full of passengers sitting at the tables on which were glued plates, cups and minute cutlery. Delicately, Jack prised open a door and revealed a steward balancing a tray with a glass of brandy and a cigar. A man sat alone; his table had no food on it – presumably the order was his. Although the dining car must be heated, the figure wore a coat and what looked like a baseball cap. Everyone else was eating or in conversation with fellow diners, while the man looked out of his window, but not with the ruminative expression of a lone traveller: he was looking at Jack. Although moulded in beige plastic, Jack was certain the figure was a model of the man standing in the middle of Hammersmith Bridge he had seen through the binoculars the night he moved into the tower. The same man had watched Jack from the bus on Goldhawk Road just after Rick Frost died.

‘It’s a sign,’ he breathed.

‘A sign?’ Stella echoed. ‘Of what?’

Jack was back in the school kitchen garden. He saw a flash of broken crockery, smashed glasses, stricken faces pressed against jammed windows, lobster thermidor, pâté de foie gras mixed with mud and spliced with the lolly sticks he had used for tunnel struts. The sound of the Smiths couldn’t drown out the screams and cries for help that would never come. In the silence of the aftermath of the crash, he had heard a chinking, like a timorous call for attention and, finding himself alone, he had left the smashed-up tunnel and followed the sound. He had come across a gate leading out beyond the school kitchen garden. It was out of bounds. A dog lead dangled from a post. In the zephyr-like breeze the catch clinked against the wood. Even then he had known it was a sign.

Jack put his mug down. Fingers steepled, he whispered, ‘There’s stuff – I haven’t said.’

He told Stella about the other carriage and the engine on the monitors in the stations. He told her about the length of the tunnel and that the answer, 266.66, was repeated on the engine. His finger trembling, he showed her that it was the same as the number on the side of the Pullman carriage: 26666. He got out the carriage he had found that morning. Another 26666. He coupled it to the Pullman and sent it around the table, stopping at Stella’s mug stations. Stella didn’t interrupt or tell him it was nonsense or that he was imagining things.

St Peter’s church bells chimed midnight. Jack and Stella had been awake most of the last twenty-four hours.

Finally he told her about the boy called Simon who had wanted to be his friend at school. The boy was dead. Jack said he had made himself forget that time long ago. Until the toy train brought it back. Suffused with shame, he found the words to tell her that at his boarding school he was for a time a bully. He had been bullied too, he said, wondering suddenly if that bit was true. Was what Simon did to him actually bullying? Huddled in his coat, his milk gone cold, Jack told Stella all about Simon.

When he’d finished, she took the carriage on another round of the table, stopping at his mug, then at hers, berthing it at the honey pot. She said, ‘School can be a tough place for kids. Jackie says it was hard on you being sent away after your mum—’ She set the carriage off on another circuit of the condiments. ‘Are you saying you think this boy – man – called Simon killed Frost and left you these bits of train? He’d surely have got over you having a go at him by now. Could he be the inspector I met on the station?’

‘No, Simon’s dead. He’s been dead for years.’ Jack put his hands to his ears. He heard the pounding of the sea crashing on some far-off shore. More and more he felt his mind wasn’t his own.

‘How did he die?’ Stella was examining the wheels of the carriage; Jack could tell she was trying to be tactful.

‘He was mugged. Actually in that cemetery you were in tonight.’ He used ‘actually’ to imply it was a coincidence, so as not to worry her. ‘He died later in hospital.’

‘So these toys were left by a ghost?’ She betrayed no sarcasm.

‘No.’
Yes
. ‘Simon was only trying to help me.’ Simon had wanted to be his friend. Jack had never let himself think this before. He had punished him for liking him – perhaps because he didn’t like himself.

‘Anyone could have found the carriages or the engine. It wasn’t your usual route, you drive the Richmond to Upminster line, and I certainly didn’t plan on going into the cemetery.’

‘Someone could have followed you and left the carriage where you’d find it.’ Jack spoke as his thoughts unfolded. ‘Did you hear anyone while you were there?’

He could see from Stella’s expression that she had.

‘I thought it was the wind,’ she admitted. ‘How would anyone know I would go in or that I’d find the hut?’

‘He – or she – could have lured Stanley away from you. Did you happen upon the hut by accident or did Stanley lead you there? The most potent of plans are plotted in chunks and put into action as situations occur. This person didn’t lure you to the cemetery, but if they were watching you, they’d have seen you go in. Cue to set the plan in motion. If you had gone after Lulu Carr to Charbury, they would have left the carriage on Isabel Ramsay’s grave.’

‘I was following Lulu, I mightn’t have visited the grave. How would they even think I might?’

‘Wouldn’t you?’ Jack said levelly. Mrs Ramsay had been Stella’s favourite client.

Stella reddened. ‘Yes, I would.’

‘Such a person will do their homework. They enter someone’s mind and alter the course of their actions. When the time comes, they end their life. We are dealing with a merciless professional.’

Stella grabbed a brush from the corner of the kitchen and began sweeping the floor. ‘Have we now got three cases to solve?’ She didn’t sound fazed by the prospect.

Jack stroked his chin. ‘Not necessarily.’

‘Could this Simon from your school have a relative he told about you?’ Stella scooted a minute scrap of onion skin and a stale dog biscuit into a dustpan, and banged it into the swing bin. She gripped the brush handle like a spear. ‘Is someone out to get revenge?’

‘There was a sister.’ He was impressed at Stella’s lateral thinking – detective thinking.

‘What was her name?’

‘No idea, although I’m sure he told me. I tried to block him out.’ He had tried to disappear Simon.
Simple Simon
. ‘He made us prick our thumbs and press them together so we’d be blood brothers.’

‘That’s silly nonsense – it didn’t make you brothers. What did you do exactly? Why was it such a big deal?’ Stella leant on the brush handle.

The distance that divided them was a metre of lino. It might be a yawning chasm.

‘I said I didn’t know him.’

‘Was that all?’

He didn’t want Stella to understand. He wanted to keep her opinion of him intact.

‘If someone was out for revenge, and quite honestly I doubt they are, then this is a weird way to go about it. Anyone who knows you would see that a train is the perfect present.’

‘True.’ Pleased by Stella’s observation – she knew him – Jack resumed his drink, although it had cooled. ‘Their intention would be to unsettle me. In fact – well, I have to say it’s working.’ He didn’t look at Stella.

‘OK, so this is what we do. I’ll return this carriage to the cemetery; you can hand in the ones you found to Lost Property. We’ll show him or her that we don’t care. We’ve got bigger fish to fry.’

Stella washed her mug, scrubbing vigorously inside it with a scouring pad. She put it on the draining board. The cereal bowl and spoon were back. She had cleaned and put away the empty stew pan after supper. Jack was faintly reassured: Terry’s kitchen was restored; it was as if Dale had never been there.

‘That wouldn’t work.’ Jack couldn’t say that though Simon was dead, he lived on in his head. Getting rid of the train wouldn’t expunge him. Stella’s straightforward and honest solution belonged to a cleaner, sunlit world. ‘You shouldn’t go back to the cemetery on your own. I’ll do that.’

‘Why would that be better? At my primary school a girl stuffed me in the cleaning cupboard. I got Ajax powder in my hair. I haven’t been minded to drop expensive toys around London for her nor can I see anyone doing it on my behalf.’ She looked at Jack.‘She worked for Clean Slate a few years ago. I gave her the top clients; she got into corners and sanitized stainless steel sinks to a sparkle.’ Stella seemed cheered by this recollection. ‘My friend Liz rescued me from the cupboard.’

‘Was that why you launched Clean Slate?’ Jack wanted to steer Stella off cupboards.

‘No.’ Stella cast him a look. She flipped open her Filofax and wrote ‘Rick Frost’ on a blank page and put today’s date. Subject closed. Case meeting open. ‘That text you sent me about asking Lulu Carr about the glove Stanley took?’ She clicked on her ballpoint. ‘What with the drama of Barwick’s disappearance, I forgot. What’s the significance?’

Jack couldn’t say his calculation of the West Hill tunnel had led him to make connections that were intuitive with no basis at all in everyday reality. Stella had been patient when he explained how working out the length had opened up his mind; he wouldn’t tax her patience further.

‘It’s tenuous. Lucie May said that the dead man in my tower was found face down with a black glove placed his back.’

‘You think it’s the same glove?’ Stella was doing her very best to go with him.

‘I know, it’s tenuous, but because of the 26666…’

Stella would consider herself honour bound to contradict any information given by Lucie May. Now was not the time to say that Terry had told Lucie about the glove. As she so often did, Stella surprised him.

‘Tenuous is us. Black gloves are common, but not ones with crowns on them.’ She wrote ‘black glove with crown motif’ in her Filofax and looked at him. ‘Are you thinking the cases are linked?’

‘One connection is Terry, but since he was a police officer, no surprise there.’ Jack silently blessed Stella for the open mind she must have resolved to keep.

‘Jack, if you seriously think there is someone out there looking for you, come and stay in my flat, just till we gauge the lie of the land. There’s CCTV, a London bar and three mortice locks.’

‘I live in a tower, how much safer could I be!’

Jack squinted in through the Pullman carriage windows and gave a yelp.

The dog leapt from his basket and bounded about the kitchen barking, head thrown back. It was the same sound he had made in the tower, and it struck a note of dread in Jack’s chest. Dogs sensed more than humans.

Stella had dropped her pen. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘The man has gone.’

‘What man?’

‘The man who was waiting for his brandy, the one looking—’ Jack gesticulated at the empty table in the carriage window.

‘Oh for goodness— He –
it
– must have fallen out. Shake the carriage.’ Stella puffed out her cheeks. She shooed the dog back to his basket and fed him another treat. She retrieved her pen from the floor.

‘Found him.’ She handed Jack the plastic man. ‘That glove is for a child, but Lulu does have small hands. I’ll confirm it with her. OK, so back to our suspects. Lulu, William Frost, the inspector, Nicola and Nicola’s stalking ex. I really do think we can rule out Lulu Carr. The woman’s impetuous, but I don’t see her harming anyone.’

‘What if she had found Nicola Barwick and is pretending she didn’t?’

‘She’s not that wily. I’m not even sure she believes they were having an affair. I wonder if she’s made it up. She strikes me as inauthentic.’ Stella folded her arms as if pleased with her idea. ‘Mind you, I do think she’s hiding something. She did lie to me about her husband leaving her, but even so I don’t think that makes her a murderer.’

‘And William Frost?’ Jack asked.

‘I don’t trust him. Ever since he brought the case to us, he’s been evasive and unhelpful.’ Stella added William Frost to her task list.

‘What about this man your friend Liz is seeing? He claims to be a close friend of Nicola Barwick’s, but she never told him about moving from Charbury. Nor did she give him her Charbury address in the first place. Now he’s involved with her lodger. Fishy, don’t you think?’

‘People can’t help who they like,’ Stella said. ‘Liz wouldn’t do anything stupid.’

‘Whom.’ Jack said before he could stop himself.

‘Sorry?’

‘People who make mistakes rarely think they are making them.’ Too late Jack realized that Stella would think he was referring to her past; in fact he was thinking of Dale. ‘What’s his name?’ he asked hurriedly.