Ghost Girl (30 page)
She liked David Barlow. They could have tea and then she could clean. No demands, no promises. Suzie said that Stella’s trouble was she didn’t know what she wanted even when it was under her nose. She might have a point. Jackie kept saying Stella needed to trust people more. She trusted David.
Tuesday, 1 May 2012
‘Ring when you get this. Tell me how you are. No, come round and we can catch up. Take stock,’ she added. Jack would not come if it was only to tell her how he was. She rang off and finger-dabbed up the last of the shepherd’s pie, a habit her mother had disliked when Stella lived with her, but now did herself. Jack had not been in touch all day; she would rather he was sulking than was upset about Amanda Hampson. She couldn’t shake the idea, either, that he somehow knew about her tea with David. So what if he did?
Jack was not the only man who hadn’t called. Nor had David. She checked her messages again although she hadn’t missed any. It was five and a half hours since she had opened the bath panel and, squatting on her haunches, stared unbelieving into the dark space.
A treasure trove. Three crucifixes and five pictures. One of a golden sunset; another of an electric blue sky, the sun obscured by dark clouds with bright edges. Something about Faith being the Light of the Soul was printed along the bottom. One showed a long-haired Jesus holding a child on his lap, a dove fluttering top right and red roses in the foreground. Blood red. Sickened, Stella had sat back on the floor, her back to the toilet. Unlike the jacket, she had no doubt these belonged to the Barlows. The objects, stacked beneath the bath – the panel was screwed tighter than the one upstairs – were what David Barlow had claimed was stolen in the burglary. Had literally claimed.
She started to put back the panel, when she considered that David Barlow expected her to remove vents, panels, move furniture to get everywhere. He wanted a deep clean. He would know she had seen behind the panel and what she had found there. He would know she had said nothing. She was implicated; her silence complicity. He was right about the silver: the crosses were plated and worth little. The pictures were crude depictions of spiritual and religious moments; ‘creepy’, he had called them. Stella came across them in some clients’ homes; they were not her taste but she didn’t judge. She was not one for pictures at all. They gathered dust.
She thought back to what Barlow had said about not being religious. He had wanted rid of them but couldn’t bring himself to throw them out. When his wife made him go to the police station to report the theft, he must have feared they would find them and charge him with wasting their time. He had talked about prison. When his wife died he had claimed for goods that were not stolen. This afternoon she had seen how annoyed he was that the company wouldn’t pay out.
The pictures were arranged against the back wall and propped on the pipes. The crosses lay in order of size on the cement floor. The bath cavity was a shrine.
Yet it didn’t add up. Barlow had been obliged to claim because the police had given him a crime number. When he asked her to deep clean he knew she would do under the bath. If he hadn’t known, he would have been alerted when she found the jacket. Stella got it. The burglars were interrupted. They had hidden the loot under here, intending to return. She must warn David.
Stella had arranged the crosses and pictures on David’s kitchen table. She was tempted to restore everything to their hooks in the lounge, but she had wiped away the dusty outlines so would have to guess their positions. David hadn’t liked them; he would probably only take them down again. She had tried to call him, but like Jack his phone went to voicemail. She had waited beyond the time of her shift – she would rather tell him in person, but by six he had not returned or responded to her messages. Stella needed to get to Terry’s, she was late. She wrote David a note and placed it next to a picture, her eye catching the words:
…while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us…
David would call when he read her message. ‘Call any time, I’m here.’ She had not said where ‘here’ was.
In the harsh electric light of Terry’s immaculate kitchen, his white china gleamed. Stella washed his plate, knife and fork and slotted them on his draining rack. She had trusted David. Jackie would approve of her for taking a risk. Still no call. It was half past nine. Surely not too late for David to call. Odd type of burglars who in a rush made time to stow everything away neatly. She would be that kind of burglar herself, but that was not the point.
Now distinctly uneasy – David couldn’t still be walking Stanley – she set the kettle to boil, popped a tea bag in a mug from the box of Brooke Bond Choicest Blend, noting there were five tea bags left. She would buy more. She had resolved to sell Terry’s house after she had exhausted his cupboards. Jackie had warned this wouldn’t happen if Stella kept renewing the contents.
She had not told Jack about David because he would work out that she had been with him when he rang on Friday evening and had cut his call. She could explain that she couldn’t interrupt another date with David, but then Jack would realize it was the second date. So what? Not that it was a date. Stella gave up; most problems disappeared if you ignored them.
The kettle boiled. She dunked the tea bag and stirred in the milk. The pint should last a week and then she would think about selling the house.
Perhaps David had gone to tend to his wife’s grave. She felt a stirring in her gut. He had not told her. She pulled out the bag before the tea got too strong. If she was the jealous sort, she would mind. After finding Mrs Hampson’s body by her temple, coming across Marian Williams in the police station toilet that morning and, this afternoon, discovering the stuff under David Barlow’s bath, she could do with his company. She wouldn’t even mind the dog.
In the brooding silence of Terry’s kitchen, Stella got the blue folder out of her rucksack, unclipped the spring binders and extracted the photographs. She laid them on the table in number order and sat sipping tea contemplating the fifteen images. The mug was hot so she rubbed her fingers on her trousers. The bruises on Marian Williams’s arm were fingermarks. Four fingers gripping so hard they bruised.
Marian had not fallen. Her husband or partner was violent. She worked in a police station; she could easily have him charged. She must be afraid her colleagues would find out. Ashamed even. Stella had seen enough of Marian Williams to guess that she would keep her troubles to herself. She must have been mortified that Stella had found her. Stella decided that when she saw Marian next, she would act as though it had not happened.
She heard a tapping. An irregular drip. The kitchen tap hadn’t dripped since she replaced the washer. Stella ignored it and rummaged in her rucksack for her Clean Slate sticky notes. She flicked through her Filofax to the grid. Jack had found a second collection of glass in Marquis Way, but had no idea who, if anyone, had died there. She filled in the line for the photograph indexed six and wrote ‘Marquis Way’ in the ‘Street’ column, then scribbled ‘Hit a telegraph pole’ in the same line. She printed each street name – on sticky slips and fixed them to the photographs. She was a detective.
All the men had died in crashes, most of them into trees. At each crash site they had found seven green pieces of glass.
No such thing as an accident.
The dripping was insistent. Two clicks then two close together in a steady beat. No leaking tap did that. Stella got up and crept down the passage. Her heart tumbled in her chest. A shape filled the frosted glass door panels. The letterbox flap lifted slightly and dropped. Her back to the wall, Stella edged along the passage. A neighbour would press the bell. Someone was trying to frighten her. They had succeeded. Her body was liquid with fear. Call the police!
Stella flung open the front door.
Tuesday, 1 May 2012
Jack was dog-tired, but he couldn’t stop dwelling on Amanda. Her death had astonished him. She was misguided and obsessed, but sure of herself and so determined. To die in such a prosaic, even ridiculous way was more than he could bear.
He was in his dormitory when he heard the door to the flat upstairs open and close. He ran down the stairs and hid in an alcove behind the staircase by the basement steps. Opposite was a door with a sign saying ‘Dining Hall’. He had to assume that at this time of night his Host had no reason to go in there.
Her shoes made no sound on the linoleum. Up until now Jack had relied on intuition to detect her proximity. He was alert to minute changes in temperature, a stale odour of food from the kitchens when she opened a door or the car fumes she brought in from the street. His luck must have run out. His Host was preparing to act and he must save her and her victim. After a week as a guest in her house, Jack had not got his book and did not know where she went at night. Tonight he would forgo working on the streets in the attic and concentrate on the Task.
By the time his Host reached the hall, Jack was racing along the warren of concrete passages in the basement. He was rewarded for familiarizing himself with the topography because the luminous fire-exit signs guided him now.
He was about to run up the area steps into the yard when he saw her. She could move faster than he expected from her bulky frame. She was by the back gate. He heard the clink of the chain when she locked it behind her.
Jack ran to the end of the alley between the house and the street to where an ancient twisting apple tree grew up the wall, the branches gnarled and bunched. He pulled himself up and, flailing an arm, hoisted himself on to the wall, avoiding the shards of glass sunk in the mortar. His Host was nowhere to be seen. She had not had time to disappear so effectively, so she must be hiding. It was a trap.
He belted up Weltje Road and looked up and down King Street. Nothing. He doubled back down to the Great West Road. Something brought him up short. He wheeled around. At a topmost window of the dark mansion was the silhouette of a figure.
The old man was watching him. Despite the distance and the dark, the man – he had not learnt his name – knew it was he. Jack had missed their appointment. This was not how it should be. He should follow his Host as if attached by a thread, invisible and at home in the night streets. But it was the old man who had him in his thrall. Jack retreated along the Great West Road and stopped. She was by St Peter’s Church. She was willing him to follow. He did as she wanted.
Jack considered the statue of a reclining woman a friend. Draped in loose cloth, she was sculpted from concrete by Karel Vogel in the late 1950s as a commemoration of the extension of the Great West Road. ‘The Leaning Woman’, her arms folded, body tipping forward, reflected the curve of the six-lane road. Nowadays daubed with graffiti, her surface pitted by the weather, she was screened from the road by thick foliage. She no longer signed a warning to motorists speeding into London from the West and was a secret known only to locals. Jack touched her gown. His Host was not there.
There was no one on Black Lion Lane or walking towards St Peter’s Square. The simple portico of the church was in shadow. The time on the clockface above was twenty past nine. The gate was ajar. Jack eased through and mounted the wide steps. She was not behind either of the Palladian columns. He felt an icicle chill; he had ventured into the open with nowhere to hide.
He edged around the church to the graveyard. Wedges of lamplight broke through the branches. Shadows flitted and shifted, giving him the crazy impression of figures dancing.
She was by a grave in the far-most corner holding something in her arms. It looked like a baby, but could not be. Jack hurried back to the street and took up position by the subway entrance to watch for when she left the church.
She did not come.
He broke cover and, keeping in the shadow of the trees, dodged across grass planted with cherry trees, their blossom ethereal in the lamplight, to the church. She wasn’t in the graveyard. That was impossible, there was only one way out. He stumbled over to where she had stood.
STEPHEN PARSONS
20TH JANUARY 2001 – 8TH JANUARY 2009
‘A LIFE TOO SHORT, OUR LOVE ENDURES’
The name was familiar. But Jack collected many snippets of information, so many facts. There was a Derek Parsons at work; he had a son, possibly called Stephen. When Jack drove the Wimbledon route he passed through Parsons Green.
He felt a sick lurch. Murderers returned to the graves of their victims. This death was relatively recent, there were fresh flowers beside the headstone, and the grave was well maintained.
He felt a prickling at the back of his head. His Host had not left. She was here somewhere.
Jack flung himself on to the ground. Damp seeped through his coat. He crawled forward on his tummy. There was a crackling. He had squashed a bouquet of flowers placed on a grave. He fluffed them up and gingerly snaked around to the rear of the church. Here the darkness was absolute. There was an alley between the church and the next-door house; halfway along he realized that he was doing what she expected him to do. He stopped. Stopping was what she anticipated too. Whatever he did he could not surprise her. He had met his match. He had two choices: she would expect him to go part-way and double back, then think again and go forward. He returned to the cemetery.
He zigzagged between graves to the street. The gate was as he had left it, but he felt sure she had passed this way and was ahead of him, not behind him.
He skirted the bushes, shielding the Leaning Woman and darted through the cherry trees to the tangled bushes that formed a boundary to the scrap of leftover land. He pushed through the branches, his coat protecting him from thorns. He vaulted over the railings and found himself in Rose Gardens North. He was opposite the house where Stella’s father had lived. It was in darkness and although he could not see Stella’s van, Jack was positive she was inside. He crept up the path to the house. Dustbins at the right of the bay window were an inadequate hiding place; he was taking a risk. His Host didn’t take such risks; this was his advantage.