The Detective's Secret (40 page)

‘Is this the password?’

‘No, his password isn’t that long!’

‘I wonder if it’s the serial number for his phone.’ She rummaged in her anorak pocket and pulled out the plastic bag with Rick Frost’s phone that Jack had given her on Stamford Brook station, the night they visited it together. She pulled off the silver cover and squinted at the tiny lettering on the back. There wasn’t a serial number.

‘Whose phone is that?’ Lulu Carr asked impatiently.

‘Your husband’s.’ Too late Stella realized that the police would have given the phone to Rick Frost’s next of kin, his wife, not his brother. William must have taken it from Lulu without her knowing.

She shook her head. ‘No, it’s not.’

‘What do you mean?’ Lulu never said what Stella expected her to. In that respect she was rather like Jack.

‘He scratched his initials on the back of his phone. So worried about people stealing it. That doesn’t have any scratches on it.’

‘Are you sure?’ Stella looked at the smooth shiny black surface. Not a scratch in sight. The phone in fact looked brand new.

‘Of course I’m sure. The man was obsessed with holding on to his stuff. That’s not his phone.’

‘So who has his phone then?’ Stella asked. And, she thought to herself, who left a brand new phone with no data on it where the police would find it?

‘Good question. I suggest we start with the man in this film. What’s he looking at?’

Stella crouched down and examined the numbers on the surface of the desk. Jack had left the paper with the numbers on in his flat and it had disappeared. She drew open the desk and found the bullet belt that was on the film. She also found a block of sticky notes and a bundle of Bic ballpoints bound with an elastic band. Typical of Jack to take a pencil rubbing when he could have written them down. Then Stella remembered Jack’s dictum about leaving no trace and inwardly apologized. Except Jack had left a trace: he had left a film of himself.

She began scribbling down the numbers on a sticky note and then stopped. Jack did nothing for effect or as part of some fantasy. He honed his skills. He had taken a rubbing because he wanted not only to reproduce the numbers, but to see how they were written. She looked again at the laminated surface of the desk. Jack had noticed that the distance between the numbers varied. He had guessed Frost – it was safe to assume the numbers were carved there by Rick Frost – had been in a hurry.

‘19 9 13 15 14  19 8 21 20  20 15 23 5 18  4 15 15 18’.

When she had looked at the numbers on the paper with Jack, before he said he lost the rubbing, he had suggested it was a serial number of a computer. She had thought it was the IP address of a computer, although the latter didn’t fit. Now she saw that the gaps between the numbers were irregular. Some greater than others. They were regularly irregular.

‘Lulu, I wonder if Rick left this as a message for you,’ she said slowly.

‘He was always leaving me messages. Stuck them all over the house. Cryptic notes letting me know he knew I’d seen my brother, or where I’d been. The man was mad.’ Lulu began to cry.

Stella ripped open a handy pack of tissues from her rucksack and passed Lulu one.

‘I think it might be a warning.’ Stella was feeling her way; the thought had come from nowhere. ‘If these gaps are to distinguish the numbers, then the first five are nineteen, nine, thirteen, fifteen and fourteen. Do they mean anything to you?’

‘No, they do not!’ Lulu flapped at the air with her tissue.

‘If it’s not a serial number, it might be a code.’ Stella heard herself sounding like Jack. ‘Did you have a code, you know, a secret thing between you both?’ A question she had never asked a client. Thinking of Jack, she must tell him about Rick’s phone. She dialled him again and got his answer machine. When they were looking at the pencilled rubbing, Jack had commented that Rick Frost only had one computer in his study. She had supposed he had special detective powers so she hadn’t asked how he knew. He knew because he had been here. Jack had lied to her. Stella made herself concentrate on Lulu.

‘We had nothing between us. Unless you count a wall when he slept in here.’ Lulu gave a hooting snort into the tissue.

‘If it was a code, it’d have to be something you’d easily get.’ Stella found a tactful way to say that Rick Frost would allow for Lulu not being used to codes and computer languages.

‘Rick lived in a fantasy world. I should have listened to Simon, he warned me that “the Captain will betray you”,’ Lulu wailed.

‘The Captain? Do you mean William?’ Stella folded the sticky note into her anorak pocket. No point in pushing Lulu once she was upset.

‘Rick. Simon called him the Captain because of their idiotic army games. It was bad enough when they were kids, but Rick never grew up.’ Lulu’s eyes swam with tears. ‘My brother says Rick only married me to spite him; he used to bully my brother when they were boys. I wonder sometimes if Simon has ever forgiven me for marrying Rick.’

‘Why would Rick have wanted to hurt your brother?’ Stella didn’t like the sound of the brother. At least Dale wasn’t like that.

‘Rick hated my brother and I think Simon was right, he hated me too. Rick watched me from this computer. There are cameras all over the house, haven’t you noticed?’

Stella had noticed. She had thought they were burglar alarms.

‘Rick wrote “Activity Reports” detailing where I had been, what I had been doing and who with. I found them all on the computer. Whom, I mean,’ Lulu added.

‘Whom.’

‘Sorry?’ Stella roused herself.

‘Grammar. My brother’s always correcting me, a horrid habit that I’ve caught off him.’

Stella wasn’t listening. She ran her finger over the marks on the desk. Perhaps they hadn’t been scratched directly on to the laminate, but were indentations from pressing too hard on paper with a ballpoint. Frost hadn’t written them for Lulu; if he had, he would have taken a less subtle approach and left her notes all over the house. He had written the numbers down and sent them somewhere, but whom had he sent them to?

‘If he watched you constantly, then Rick must have known about William.’ Stella didn’t know whom to believe, Lulu or William. Neither. She got a feeling in her solar plexus. It was one of Terry’s hunches. ‘Lulu, don’t take this the wrong way, but do you think your brother could have had anything to do with Rick’s death?’

‘You’ve been talking to William! No I do
not
. My brother looks out for me. When I told him about the Captain and Nicky, he reminded me that he’d promised to protect me. William’s only jealous; he says I don’t need protecting. All those boys think Nicky is Miss Perfect.’ She dabbed at her nose with the tissue. ‘This code-thingy was probably for her, she was Enigma Woman!’

‘She was what?’ Stella fought to keep bafflement at bay.

‘In their unit, Nicky-Perfect was the Official Codebreaker. I can’t imagine there were many codes to break for a bunch of kids sneaking about a graveyard wearing flower pots and shooting insects!’ She balled up her tissue and tossed it at the scratches on the desk.

‘Who was Nicola Barwick with when you saw her in Chiswick Mall that time? It can’t have been Rick, as you told me then – he was dead.’ Stella tried to keep on track.

‘My brother,’ Lulu muttered. ‘He said he’d stopped seeing her, that I was right not to trust her. He had her by her arm, holding her tight, all over her like a rash. He lied to me!’

Stella examined the numbers she had copied on to the sticky note. The most obvious code was to swap out numbers for letters, but that was too easy. Then again, while Rick Frost had been hot on surveillance, it seemed he was a kid at heart. He mightn’t have been a genius with codes. The one and the nine were together – so nineteen – then a gap followed by a nine and another gap, then thirteen, fifteen and fourteen and a bigger gap. She calculated out loud, ‘The nineteenth letter in the alphabet is “S” and the ninth is “I”. The thirteen is “M” and—’

‘Simon,’ Lulu whispered.

‘Simon what?’

‘Carrington.’

‘Isn’t your maiden name Carr?’ Stella quelled frustration.

‘My father wasn’t my real dad. Mum had an affair and I’m the result. I don’t know my real father’s name so I shortened Carrington to Carr. Like I said, I wanted a “fresh start”.’

Stella doubted that lopping off a bit of your surname amounted to a fresh start. ‘If we assume the numbers closer together are one word, then this could be a message. Four words starting with Simon.’ Stella put a line between each word. ‘This next one has four letters. Another “S” and eight is—’

‘I told William that I guessed Rick had found out about us and he killed himself. It proved he loved me after all.’ Lulu’s words were blurred with sobs. She snatched up her tissue from the desk.

‘It’s an “H”,’ Stella exclaimed. ‘The two and the one are close together so “twenty-one”, which is “U”, and then twenty. That’s a “T”. “Shut”! “Simon shut”. What did he “shut”?’

‘How should I know?’ Lulu huffed. ‘A case, his mouth, my mouth, a door—’

‘A door! Yes, this last grouping has four numbers. The first is “four”. A, B, C, D. “Simon shut something door”. To make sense it should be “the”, but there are five letters. We know twenty is a “T”, then we’ve got fifteen and a twenty-three.’ Stella counted out the letters on her fingers. She got lost and started again.

‘Tower,’ Lulu offered dully.

‘“Simon shut tower door”.’ Stella folded her arms. ‘What kind of sentence is that? Is it another code?

Lulu had stopped crying.

‘Lulu, where is your brother now?’ Stella demanded.

‘Simon was so sweet to me when I was small. When Dad was cross with me, he would say I wasn’t his daughter. Simon would take me out for walks by the river and tell me not to listen to him. We went to his HQ in the cemetery where he was the Captain. He once gave me a bottle of Coca-Cola. It tasted of blood, but he told me it was a magic potion to keep me safe. He’d say, “It’s you and me, Lulu, against the world.” When we were first married, Rick hated me seeing Simon and told me not to trust him. William once said he loved me. No one had said that to me before, but after Rick died, William became like him and Simon. They were always checking up on me.’ She tossed her hair back. ‘My brother’s got this thing on his phone; he can find me wherever I go. To protect me, he says.’ She slumped back in the chair. ‘So has William. Rick gave it to him.’

Stalker Boy
. Stella said nothing.

‘Does your brother protect you?’ Lulu suddenly asked.

‘I don’t need protecting.’ As she spoke, Stell wasn’t so sure.

‘Who’s that man?’ Lulu nodded at the picture frozen on the computer screen.

Stella had hoped Lulu had forgotten about Jack. ‘My colleague, he works undercover,’ she said. ‘So, exactly when did you tell Simon Carrington – your brother – about your affair with William?’ Was this how Terry felt when all the disparate bits of information, subtle nuances and apparently random events started making sense?

‘I can’t remember. I told you they hated each other,’ Lulu muttered.

Stella’s eye fell on two framed pictures beside the monitor. They weren’t in the paused film; Lulu must have put them there very recently. The photograph of Lulu’s parents had been on the sitting-room mantelpiece downstairs.

The other one showed two people in their late twenties. Stella recognized Lulu and guessed that the man was her brother, he looked like the man in the picture with Lulu’s mother, who it seemed was not her actual father

Cleaners shouldn’t have opinions about their clients’ homes, while detectives should. Simon Carrington had delicate features framed by locks of dark hair. In black and white, she couldn’t tell the colour of his eyes; they were light, almost ghostly. He was looking at the camera with such intensity that she felt he could see into her head. His gaze was empty, his face without expression. Stella considered again that Lulu didn’t take after her mother. However, were it not for the stubble on his chin and lack of make-up, Simon Carrington might be his mother’s double.

He looked like Jack.

Stella opened her phone and, fingers clumsy, swiped through her camera roll to the picture she had taken of Stanley dancing with his stick on the common. She tweaked it and enlarged the screen until it filled with the trees in the background. She manipulated the image until she found the man under the trees. He was out of focus, but his face was just about distinguishable.

Simon shut tower door.

‘Is this your brother Simon?’ Stella held up her phone to Lulu. Jack lived in a tower. She had to stop herself shouting at Lulu. ‘Take a look.’

‘How can I… Ye-es, I think so.’ Lulu sniffed into the tissue. ‘That doesn’t mean anything. He goes for walks.’

But it did. Stella had seen the man before. He was the man standing on the lawn outside her flat. It wasn’t Jack. He was the inspector at Stamford Brook station.
Stalker Boy.

‘Lulu, where is your brother now? Where is Simon?’

There was a creak on the stair. Both women shrank from the door. There was nowhere to hide. A faint buzz. Stella caught the camera lens tracking them. A red light was blinking.

‘You left the front door open.’ Warm and friendly.

Lulu pushed past Stella.

Stella stared at the man in the doorway.

‘I was trying to tell you all this when you rushed off.’ Holding Lulu close to his coat, he stroked her hair. William Frost looked over her head to Stella.

‘Tell me what?’ Thoughts, pictures, impressions. Stella tried to arrange them.
Stain by stain
. All the stains had joined up.

‘When you asked me about the glove. I remembered that Rick had said it was to do with the glove. I ignored him. He was always coming out with stuff like that – the guy was paranoid, I know that. He had to control everything. But it got me thinking. After I told the police I had lost the glove in the park, Rick was nice to me, far nicer than necessary. Made me wonder, had I covered for him without intending to?’

‘This isn’t Rick’s phone.’ Stella waved the phone at William. ‘Someone took his phone, swapped the case and left it for the police to find. You said Rick had the stalking app on his phone, didn’t you?’