Ghost Girl (3 page)

‘You heard your mother. Don’t play games. No means no. Look after your brother.’

Mary stood alone in the room. She heard a bang and then silence. In their old home she knew all the noises, but this house was foreign to her; its corners were sharp and the floors cold and hard. She was not bad and would show them by doing what she was told or she might be buried on the moor too. Mary wished Michael would come back. He would come soon enough if she made his tea.

She counted out four fish fingers from the box. The cardboard was damp from where the food had thawed and she accidentally tore the flap; another fish finger fell out. She deserved an extra one. She lined up the tin of Heinz beans, the loaf of bread and a box of Brooke Bond tea beside three brown paper bags with twists for ears. She peered in each bag: carrots, potatoes and onions. Mary played being the greengrocer and announced each item out loud while tapping out the prices on the table with stubby fingers as if working the giant till. They would not see the nice greengrocer with the funny eyes who gave her penny snakes any more.

As Mary had anticipated, attracted by the cooking smells Michael slunk in while his sister was at the stove and slid on to a chair. He lolled over the table between his rabbit knife and fork, which she had found for him, and enquired chirpily: ‘Are you meant to use the frying pan?’

‘How else can I make fish fingers?’ she retorted, forking them out on to two plates. She scraped splodges of congealing beans out of the saucepan and ladled them next to the fish fingers, spilling some on the tabletop. Michael snapped them up.

‘You’re not allowed,’ she added with some triumph.

‘We’ve got a bedroom each.’ Michael tucked his hands between his knees happily. His hair stuck up at the back and his wrists poked out like white sticks from the jumper knitted for him by their nan, who liked boys best.

‘Take your elbows off the table.’ Mary was now their mother. She banged down a plastic beaker of milk. ‘Sit up.’

‘Yours is bigger, but I can see my new swing from mine.’

‘What new swing?’

‘The one Daddy’s going to make in the garden by the willow tree.’ As he chattered he lined up the fish fingers with his fork making a train with two carriages. ‘It’ll be very, very high so I can kick the sky.’ He chanted the phrase, obviously pleased with it. ‘It’ll be very, very—’

‘Be quiet, Michael!’

‘You don’t have a willow tree in your tree album.’ He kicked his legs against the chair as he chomped his food.

‘I do,’ Mary said without thinking, although she did not remember a page with a willow and certainly didn’t have the card.

‘It’s not a “Trees of Britain” tree.’ Michael smiled good-naturedly at his sister.

‘It is.’ Too late Mary sniffed a trap of her own making.

‘The weeping willow comes from China. It’s in my en-cyc-lop-paedia. You won’t get it from this tea.’ Michael lined up the last three beans on his fork and nudged the packet of Brooke Bond with his other hand.

‘Who says?’ Mary pulled at his hand. ‘Don’t play with your food.’

Michael shrugged and squirmed on his chair while he chewed. ‘I’ve never had my own bedroom. You’re always there.’ He looked suddenly less pleased.

‘Nor have I,’ Mary conceded. She sat down and gathering up a dainty forkful of beans popped it between her lips.

‘Yes you have.’ He slurped his milk. ‘Mare-ree.’

‘No, I have not and do not call me that. Close your mouth when you’re eating, I can see mashed-up food.’ She swallowed a bean without chewing and coughed.

‘You have, you had a bedroom by yourself before I was even born. For three years you had a bedroom.’

‘That doesn’t count.’

‘It does. It’s a very lo-ong time. In three years I’ll be ten like you. Except then you won’t be ten, you’ll—’

‘Shut up!’

Her brother reddened and pronging a bean on his fork nibbled it off ruminatively. ‘I want to go home,’ he muttered after a bit, so quietly Mary only just caught it.

‘This is home.’ Impatient with trying to eat politely in the strange kitchen, she heaped beans and fish fingers on to the convex side of her fork and shovelled them into her mouth. When she had finished she rinsed their plates without washing-up liquid because it was not in the ‘Under Sink’ boxes.

Neither child voiced what each had decided must be true, that although they had been told their father had a new job, the move to Hammersmith from Holloway, away from everything they knew, was in some way Mary’s fault.

‘I don’t like it here.’ Michael spoke to the lino with brimming eyes.

‘Nor do I,’ his sister replied without turning round.

4

Monday, 23 April 2012

Terry had painted an outline of each tool in white on the wall in the understairs cupboard. It had put Stella in mind of the police marker for a corpse at a crime scene. She positioned the vacuum cleaner on a shelf and hooked up the hose according to its outline. She cleared the house, only the white shapes would remain. She thought of the black outlines at David Barlow’s. In this house she was the intruder.

Each evening Stella Darnell came to her father’s end of terrace in what had once been a modest cul-de-sac off the Great West Road but was now quietly chic. She cleaned already clean rooms, consumed a microwaved shepherd’s pie from the freezer before catching up with emails on his computer in what had been her bedroom forty years earlier. She never stayed the night nor, although Terry Darnell had been dead a year, had she begun getting rid of his belongings.

Fresh from meeting David Barlow, and still in her dark blue business suit and the sturdy black boots she used for cleaning, Stella decanted tonight’s ready meal – the potato topping pleased her, furrowed with straight fork lines – on to a white china plate and placed it off centre in the microwave, which Terry said captured the hot spots. When Stella had let slip to Jackie what she ate for supper, Jackie had suggested Stella liven it with veg from the mini-mart below the office. Or better still have supper with her and her family, a suggestion Jackie made about once a month. Stella had ignored her advice but sometimes accepted the invitation. She did not say she preferred to eat alone. Although in Terry’s house, she was not alone. The fancy-named journalist had been wrong. Terry, a retired detective chief superintendent, was dead, but Stella was conscious of his ghostly presence – like a chalky outline – in every room.

She keyed in the timing and at the same moment heard a distant clunk. The liquid-crystal screen went black and displayed only her frown. The fridge had stopped humming. A power cut.

At eight o’clock it would be light for another hour, but Stella could do no more without electricity. She had tidied and vacuumed; there was no point in staying. She wrapped the plate of food in clingfilm and fitted it in the fridge beside a tub of margarine. The half-litre of milk should last; she had bought it yesterday. She would leave the other shepherd’s pies in the freezer; the outage must be temporary.

On the path outside she clutched her keys to stop them jangling. So far she had avoided meeting Terry’s neighbours. The lamp-post on the other side of the street had been flickering on and off for months. Stella intended to tell the council. It should not be on now: it was not lighting-up time.

In a power cut it should not be on at all.

She glanced in through the window of next door and saw the green of a football pitch on a television screen. She jogged back to Terry’s and tried the hall light. Nothing. The sound when the power failed must have been the lever tripping on the fuse box.

During her cleaning Stella had not seen a fuse box beneath the stairs or the sink and from the few times she had ventured into the attic after her dad’s death she knew it wasn’t there.

She contemplated the panelled door to the basement set beside the tool cupboard with stirring dread. She had avoided Terry’s particular lair. The fuse box would be in the basement.

Terry Darnell had moved into the Victorian house in the London Borough of Hammersmith when he married Stella’s mother in 1966, six months before Stella was born. Suzanne Darnell left him seven years later and took their daughter to live in an austere mansion apartment in Barons Court. Terry lived on in the house until his death in January last year. At first the Darnells had rented the property, but Terry’s journey up the police ranks had been smooth, swift and steep, so by 1981 he was already a detective inspector and could afford a mortgage on the property. Suzie complained that he was ambitious, too busy for a wife and daughter. Eventually Stella had grown to consider her father a stranger about whom she knew little.

She did know that Terry always carried a camera; it had frustrated her that he would interrupt a conversation to snap a photograph: of a suspect, a bicycle chained illegally to railings or a passing car. He developed the negatives in the darkroom in his basement.

As Terry Darnell’s only child, Stella had inherited his house – the mortgage long paid off. She had resolved to sell it, but instead was preserving Terry’s routine and keeping it clean.

If her dad’s presence could linger in rooms scrubbed with carpet cleaner, vacuumed with maximum suction and mopped and polished to a flawless shine, it would be manifest in the darkroom where he had spent most of his spare time.

In light through panes in the door, she tried the handle. The latch slid through the strike plate but the door did not budge. It was locked and Stella did not have the key.

Soon it would be dark. She could not leave, although it was cold for the start of spring: the contents of the freezer would not survive. The clocks on the DVD, the microwave and the boiler and the myriad timers triggering and extinguishing lights, her father’s ploy to fool burglars, would slip out of sync. His intricate system would break down.

Terry’s stuff, his clothes, the few books and his computer were as he had left them the morning he drove to a seaside town in Sussex where he had died. Stella did admit privately that she saw herself as only the custodian of her father’s home against the day he would return.

She retrieved Terry’s keys from her rucksack. Two for the front door, one for the back and the spare for his Toyota, which she had forgotten to give the new owner. No basement key.

Terry Darnell said that burglars rely on ease of egress not entrance, so make it hard for them to get the goods out. In a house where everyone is sleeping, oblivious, a draught from an open front door might be the first sign anything is wrong. She wondered how David Barlow’s burglars had left. Her own fifth-floor flat was fortressed above a foyer protected by a code and a camera, her front door strengthened by a London bar, a mortise lock and a chain.

Again she was struck by the conviction that had Terry wanted her in his house he would have left instructions about watering plants, the trick with the boiler or the optimum programme for the dishwasher. He had never shown her where he kept the key to the basement. Jack would say that the power cut was a sign that she should leave.

Stella tried the kitchen drawers, the cupboards and unlikely places like the door lintels and the grille fronting the sitting-room heater.

Outside it had grown dark and the landing was in shadow. A new stillness increased her unease. Mustering calm, she tried to second-guess Terry. Jack would suggest she ‘became’ him; he imagined they were alike. Stella tried to remember Terry and realized that she could not.

One stair at a time. At the top it occurred to her that some burglars defecated in people’s homes, shitting on beds, pissing in wardrobes. A reason to deep clean. The bathroom, with less to steal, was where they were least likely to go. The key would be there.

To her mum’s horror – although Suzie had left by then – Terry replaced the 1920s bathroom fittings with a sale-priced cream fibreglass suite. Now the shower curtain rail sagged and a fine crack ran across the lavatory lid. Stella opened the mirrored cabinet door above the sink. Terry’s toothbrush and toothpaste were in a beaker beside packets of aspirin, a bottle of Warfarin, deodorant and a canister of shaving foam. She had had no difficulty chucking out Terry’s condoms. Burglars would check the cabinet. He would not hide the key here.

The cast-iron cistern, the only original feature, rested on brackets she found a fiddle to clean. A chain with a grip of perishing grey rubber defied cleaning but Stella did not think it hers to replace. She had missed a cluster of cobwebs between the tank and the wall. If a prospective recruit had cleaned the room, she would not have hired them. She shrugged off shame that for Terry her standards had slipped. The condoms had thrown her; she would deep clean the bathroom.

The cistern. Stella climbed on to the toilet lid, steadied herself with one of the iron supports and peered over. No key. About to jump down, she paused. She would hide a key here. She looked closer. The cover was not flush to the tank. She nudged it and it shifted. Careful to avoid it sliding off, she inched it aside. Grit scattered down; she blinked and brushed it away with her sleeve, noting crossly that the cuff was flecked with dust.

She strained on tiptoe and dabbled her hand into the tank. The water was tepid and, even though there had been a cover on, she was nervous about dead birds. She paddled her fingers out as far as she could reach and felt something soft. A sparrow. She snatched away her hand, but then, swallowing hard, nerved herself. She yanked up her sleeve, plunged her hand in and grasped the bird.

Snap! She teetered on the toilet bowl. Her dad’s toilet lid had broken in two. Stella felt a flash of guilt; she’d have to replace it. She pulled her hand out; water streamed down her wrists, soaking the dirt into the linen.

The ‘bird’ was a folded plastic pocket, the sort with holes for filing, and inside was a mortise key. Stella knew without trying that it would open the basement door.

After a year Stella expected the lock to be stiff, but the key turned easily and the door swung silently on oiled hinges. She had been so fixed on the search she had not considered actually going into the basement. A memory of the first time she had come here after Terry’s death flooded back, as vivid as if it were yesterday. She had walked around the house, dark then too, convinced she was not alone. It was one of the few times she had been truly frightened. This time it was a simple power cut and she knew how to mend a fuse. She shone the torch down the steps and descended.