The Detective's Secret (35 page)

‘I’ve forgotten.’ Stella looked annoyed with herself. ‘I’ll ask her more about him.’ She noted ‘Liz Hunter’s man’ down on her list.

‘What about this brother of Lulu Carr’s? If Frost was cheating on her, the brother might be unhappy – that’s a motive.’

‘It’s a big step from being unhappy to killing a man.’

‘That’s the kind of thing brothers do. Goodness knows what Dale Heffernan would do on your behalf.’ Jack was being sarcastic. Immediately ashamed, he wished the words unsaid.

‘Dale isn’t my real brother,’ Stella said in a small voice.

‘Yes he is.’

‘I know
you
better than I do him. Blood isn’t everything.’

Jack hid his pleasure. He opened the carriage door and slotted the little figure through and tipped up the carriage until he was back at his table awaiting his drink. He took the carriages around the ‘stations’ again.

‘Lulu Carr says he’s protective,’ she said. ‘That means he might do anything.’

‘What’s his name?’ Jack heard himself repeating the question. ‘The inspector, the brother, the boyfriend: we need names and faces for these people.’

‘Is he a suspect?’ Stella was arch, although he hadn’t meant it as a dig.

‘Until we cross him off.’

‘Lulu didn’t say. I might ask William rather than make her curious.’ Stella noted this down and sat back contemplating the growing list with evident satisfaction.

‘After what Darryl Clark – the driver of the train that hit Frost – said, we need to focus attention on your inspector at the station,’ Jack said.

‘I keep forgetting to show you.’ Stella fiddled in the pocket in her Filofax and brought out a square sheet. ‘What do you make of this? I found it in the photo booth the night we went to Stamford Brook. Someone must just have left the booth before we came down from the platform. You’d gone to get your train.’

Jack stared at the four images. They were of the back of a man’s head. His hair, thick and brown, fell just below his collar. He was wearing a white shirt. He looked at all four pictures although they were repeats of the same shot.

‘His back is to the camera,’ he said at last.

‘Er, yes!’ Stella was impatient. ‘Who does that? I wondered if it was the inspector-man I met? I heard the machine going just as we were going up to the platform. I thought then it was an odd time to get your picture done. The timings would fit. He probably dived into the photo booth to avoid us seeing him.’

The corpse in the tower had been face down. When Simon had come to say sorry about the things he said in the room below the library, Jack had turned his face to the wall.

You denied me you knew me. Three times.

Stella was still talking. ‘—I thought at the time it was a funny mistake to make. I’ve had duds in those machines when the flash goes before you’re ready but I always face the right way! It does look a bit like him.’ She held up the pictures.

‘I thought you said you didn’t see the man’s face.’

‘I didn’t, but as we’re keeping an open mind—’

‘I didn’t see him at all.’ Jack pushed the pictures back. ‘We need to see him from behind.’ He was thinking out loud now. ‘There’s an Agatha Christie story in which the murderer is seen from the back, in fact it’s on a train—’

‘Jack.’ Stella’s patience had run out. ‘Would you go back to Lucie May and ask her what else Terry told her?’ She called Stanley out of his bed and fastened on his lead.

Another of Stella’s surprises. While he’d been worried about upsetting her, she was concentrating on the case. He was sure she didn’t know there had been anything serious between Lucie and her father. She was able to put aside personal feelings for the bigger picture. He could only dream of being like her. Inchoate with emotion, Jack could only nod.

‘What shall we do about the toys, since you don’t want to hand them into Lost Property?’ Stella asked. ‘You shouldn’t go back to the cemetery on your own.’

‘Let me check a few things.’ Jack wasn’t ready to share the idea he was forming. He wasn’t ready to take it on himself. He jumped up and rattled at the handle of the back door. ‘Where’s the key?’

‘Same place as usual, with the forks in the cutlery drawer.’ Stella slung on her rucksack. She knew him well enough not to ask why he was going out the back way.

‘Lock up after me.’

On the patio an icy blast stung his cheeks. Stella stood by the door, the dog at her side. Behind her the kitchen looked cosy; an aroma of stew lingered. Hauling himself up onto the wall at the back of the garden, Jack imagined going back with her to her flat and drinking hot milk on her spotless cream sofa.

‘Be careful.’ But his words were flung away by a powerful gust. Balanced on the garden wall, he turned to wave. The kitchen was dark.

He caught the distant slam of the van door, the engine firing, the sound drowned by the howling wind.

Sunday, 27 October 2013

The south-east window in Palmyra Tower looked out on to the looping spans of Hammersmith Bridge. On the sill were sticks and coils of twine that Jack had collected from the riverbank as a child. These were shored up by flint and limestone washed smooth by the Thames. On top of the ‘embankment’, Jack had laid the steam engine.

He took out the two carriages from his workbag and coupled the new rolling stock to the engine. He repositioned everything on the ballast. He had a train. He contemplated his tableau.

He heard the sneeze of the funnel and shaded his eyes from the smoke. The hot furnace made his skin smart and his arms ached from heaving shovelfuls of coal. At full pelt, pistons racing, the engine could do fifty-four miles per hour.

The sink glugged. He went over, ran the hot tap and chased out the airlock. Yet again the water was cold – he must email the consortium – but then it went warm again, and the issue lost its urgency. He returned to his train and became aware of the buzzing he heard intermittently and had vaguely attributed to a trapped fly or wasp. A red light winked on the burglar alarm sensor above the window. The instrument should be pointing to the front door to catch an intruder at the only possible point of entry. It was pointing at him.

Jack was about to reposition it, but it was delicate, he could break it. It would be there for insurance purposes. As he had told Stella, the tower was safer than anywhere. Elbow resting on the table, chin on his cupped hand, he imagined tucking into Dale Heffernan’s lamb stew in the Pullman car.

This fantasy was shattered by the memory of earth and stones raining down. The tunnel had caved in on the train. Jack had blamed himself for the miscalculation of width and roof strength. But he never made stupid errors.

He fetched his binoculars from the north window sill. He trained them on the beach by Black Lion Lane where he had gathered the flotsam and jetsam. No one there. He swung the glasses away and tracked the towpath along through Furnival Gardens to the bridge. A lone car was making its way across to the Barnes side.

Jack lowered the instrument. He picked out a cotton bud from a pot on the table and dipped it in a pot lid filled with steam oil. He loved the delicate smell of the oil. Holding the engine steady, he travelled the bud along the coupling rods and over the crosshead and sidebars. In a hoarse voice he spoke to Glove Man’s ghost: ‘Dust is the enemy of wind-up clocks and steam engines. It must be kept out of the mechanism. Oil enables smooth working, but the paradox is that it also attracts dust.’

His memory of that afternoon in the kitchen garden was visceral. He could see every step of his construction. The roof struts had been strong; he had designed the width of the tunnel to allow for wide rolling stock. He had made no error in tension or loading. Simon had hijacked the engine and driven it too fast into the tunnel.

Few had known Jack had lost his red steam engine. One of them was Simon. He had made the mistake of confiding in him: he had hoped that if he told Simon a secret it would get him off his back. But Simon was dead; he
was
off his back. Jack had tried not to be relieved when his father showed him the newspaper cutting, but he had hoped that his bad memories would die too.

As if to reassure himself, Jack went to his desk for the cutting. He shifted his laptop, moved aside his
A–Z
and the lamp. No cutting. He looked underneath the desk, widening his search to the floor and under the bed. No cutting. He emptied out his treasure box on to the bed, but the cutting wasn’t there, nor had he expected it to be. He remembered leaving it on the desk. Stanley must have taken it. Jack tried to remember if Stella’s dog had visited since he had taken the cutting from his box, but his sense of time since moving to the tower was unreliable. Yesterday seemed years ago. Years ago uncomfortably close.

Jack scratched day-old stubble on his cheek. He didn’t need the cutting to know that Simon was dead. For a long time he had relegated him to a dark unvisited place in his mind. Someone else must know about his red steam engine.

You denied me you knew me. Three times.

His mind was not his own.

The Smiths ‘How Soon Is Now?’ drifted into his head. Jack stuck his fingers in his ears, not expecting it to work since it was inside his head, but it did lessen the sound.

Jack found his phone. ‘Lucie, it’s me.’

‘Of course it is,’ Lucie May crooned. It might be three in the morning, but Lucie was, as he expected, wide awake.

‘Please would you search your files for a mugging in 1998?’

‘Honey, there’s been a few of those!’ She guffawed. ‘Drill down for me, would you?’

‘A teenager called Simon was found dying in Chiswick Cemetery that year.’

‘Why didn’t you say? “
Body Found in Graveyard!
” Come!’

The line went dead. Jack left the tower.

Sunday, 27 October 2013

‘It was mistaken identity.’ Lucie May was eating a carrot, still with a flourish of leaves attached to the end, as she leafed through a bulging file.

A fire burned in the grate, drawn curtains shut out the damp gusty night. Jack sipped the mug of hot milk and honey she had presented him with on arrival and nestled into his corner of her sofa.

‘Proof, if we need it, that life is stranger than fiction.’ She handed Jack a photocopied sheet on which she had scrawled, ‘
The Sun
, Saturday 24th 1998.’ She took a bite of the carrot. ‘I played a blinder with that story, straight into Fleet Street, it paid for a new boiler. Called myself Lucille to please my mother! God rest her.’

DEAD MAN WALKING

By Lucille May

Two sons. Two futures. One life. Madeleine and Harry Carrington kept vigil for hours by the bedside of the young man they believed was their 20-year-old son Simon until he died.

Found badly beaten in Chiswick Cemetery on 20 October by a woman walking her dog, the man never regained consciousness. The dog owner, Joan Evans, told us she assumed he was a tramp until she saw his ‘nice shoes’. Her neighbours’ son wore an identical pair. His face hugely swollen, he was identified by Harry Carrington for his shoes and light blond hair. Blinded by tears, he signed permission for his only son to have emergency surgery on his internal organs.

The young man battled for his life. His 13-year-old sister read him messages from pals, family and our readers. His mum read articles about bridges and tunnels – Simon was to be a civil engineer after graduating from the University of Sussex. The family played his favourite song, the Smiths’ ‘How Soon Is Now?’ and told Simon they loved him until his heart stopped.

When the pathologist, Dr Peter Singer, was preparing to conduct the post-mortem he noted the medical records. Simon Carrington’s eyes were brown, and he was six feet one inch tall. The body on Singer’s slab had blue eyes and was five foot ten. Simon was missing half a finger on his left hand. The dead man’s fingers were intact.

That night 20-year-old Simon walked through the door, toting his dirty washing, asking, ‘What time’s supper, I’m famished!’

Detective Superintendent Terry Darnell told a crowded press conference, ‘We are overjoyed that Simon is alive. However, someone’s son has been murdered. We must establish his identity so his family can grieve. We will work to bring his killer to justice.’ Asked if the police had any leads, he declined to comment. Darnell dismissed any connection between the man found dying in Chiswick Cemetery and the decomposing body of a man discovered a stone’s throw away, locked in Chiswick Tower, ten years ago almost to the day, in October 1988. That man has never been identified.

‘
So how come you missed this?’ Lucie sounded as if she was astounded Jack had not read all her articles.

‘I wasn’t living in the UK,’ Jack said.

‘Fancy.’ Lucie May gave a shrug of mild disapproval.

In 1998, Jack, like Simon, had been twenty years old. Simon wasn’t dead. Jack was supposed to feel relief. He did not. He had told himself that the idea of his mind being invaded was absurd. It was a symptom of tiredness or, as Stella might have said, ‘his overworked imagination’. Simon wasn’t dead. He had never been dead.

Jack marshalled himself. ‘The attack was in Chiswick Cemetery, so why was Terry involved?’ Chiswick Cemetery was opposite Jackie’s house. Stella had been wandering around it a few hours ago. So had someone else.

‘The young man died in Charing Cross Hospital, and the two police divisions cooperated on the case with Terry in charge.’

‘Did ever they identify him or catch his attacker?’ The print swam. Jack put down the article.
Simon was alive.

‘A damp squib of a story! The police had the dead kid’s fingerprints on file. He was eighteen. They hadn’t checked because of the kid’s father identifying him as his son. Fancy not remembering your boy had lost a finger! None of the family spotted it. Sounds like my family. I could have sat down to supper with an arm missing and my dad wouldn’t have batted an eye.’ She nibbled the carrot down to the leaves and tossed the clumsy bouquet on to the table. She went on, ‘Shock, he said. His wife looked embarrassed. Unhappy pair. Anyone could see she wished it was him on the slab instead. The dead boy was Ryan Morrison, unemployed, no qualifications, an incompetent petty thief. His prints were all over two houses in Corney Road. The owner of the other house had caught up with Morrison and chased him into the cemetery. He reclaimed his transistor radio and a toaster and smashed Morrison to a pulp. Job done, didn’t think to let the police know!’