Ghost Girl (36 page)

She put off searching for clues to the telegraph-pole incident on Marquis Way. David Lauren held more promise. She paced the line of grey metal cabinets. The years were typed in wonky Courier font on browned and crinkled labels. She found the drawer marked ‘1986 to 1990’: 1989 was missing. She checked it hadn’t been misfiled. All the years were in order. She slammed shut the drawer and tried the one above and then the one below. It was not there. She balked at combing the entire collection; that was taking legwork too far.

‘You’re making rather a noise.’ The librarian was beside her. ‘Can I help?’

‘I’m looking for 1989,’ Stella barked loudly. She lowered her voice. ‘It’s been stolen.’

‘That can’t be.’ Stella watched her follow the same process, pausing at the gap in chronology, and was torn between wanting the woman to locate the reel and not wanting to look stupid if it was there all along. It was not there.

‘We get few thefts. It’s probably being repaired. The films get worn or the boxes collapse, although it’s not a popular year. Had it had been 1968 or the Silver Jubilee in 1977…’

While she waited for the librarian to confirm this Stella reread her notes and the size of the task pressed in again. It would be easier with two, but since Amanda Hampson’s death Jack had been distracted. The business last night confirmed he was up to something that could land him in trouble or worse. She was disconsolate.

She stared. Something was written on the opposite page to her grid.

‘Harvey Gray, aged 53, Marquis Way, Monday, 17 March 2003.’

Stella had jotted down the details of their first search on the newspaper’s website in case it was important. This was the other death on Marquis Way. Stella nearly called out to the librarian. She had another street! She retrieved the film for 2003 from the cabinets and, her hands trembling with anticipation, fed it into the microfiche. Soon she was looking at the edition for Thursday, 20 March.

SHOE MAN DIES IN CRASH

By Lucille May

Harvey Gray, owner of Gray Shoes, was killed outright when his luxury Lexus SUV left the road and hit a telegraph pole on Marquis Way W6 late on Monday. Gray was rushed to Charing Cross Hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Miss Carol Jones of Arkwright Buildings, Shepherd’s Bush, was on Marquis Way at half past ten and raised the alarm on her mobile phone.

Mr Gray’s factory on Britton Drive went into receivership last year. Police are asking an elderly person who passed Ms Jones before she arrived at the scene of the accident to come forward; he or she may possess vital information. Anyone who witnessed the incident or who has information should contact Hammersmith Police Station…

Stella recognised May’s name. This was the pushy woman who had written the article about Terry’s funeral.

The shots of Marquis Way on Street View were dated June 2009; darts of light bounced off quartz in the paving, shadows were stark in blinding sunshine. Terry went in the winter when the camber glistened with recent rain and a drain was clogged with leaves.

Stella pictured the dilapidated factory outlet in the first street they had visited. Signs and coincidences. Jack’s world. The wording was similar to the other articles about accidents also reported by Lucille May. Stella guessed May had got into the habit of trotting out the same phrases for fatalities that over the years must have become routine. Scarcely able to contain her triumph, she slotted Gray into her grid. She noted the figure seen near the crash could have been a man or a woman. A man surely.

Step by step. Stain by stain.

‘No luck, I’m afraid. Nineteen eighty-nine has vanished.’ The librarian was back. ‘Leave me your details and if it turns up I’ll call.’

Stella thanked her and studied her grid so far. Marian said that David Lauren had run over a boy called Billy. Charlie Hampson knocked over a child a few months before he died. Paul Vickery killed James Harrison in 1976. Stella looked at her watch. She was standing in for Wendy at a bridal shop in Ealing and didn’t have time to check if Harvey Gray killed a child. A hunch told her that he had.

Marian Williams had called David Lauren’s victim ‘Little Billy’ in the sugary manner of Lucille May. Impatient with ‘Tiny Tim’ sentimentality, Stella had forgotten to put it in her grid. She did so now. ‘Little Billy’ would have to do until she had his full name.

‘Here you are!’ The librarian placed a cardboard box in front of her. ‘Nineteen eighty-nine! Some of our visitors get numbers wrong or find our cataloguing system tricky. My mentioning 1968 got me thinking and hey presto! This was in the nineties drawer next to 1998.’

David Lauren had died when his car had slammed into a tree on Tolworth Street – the ubiquitous Lucille May didn’t give the species of tree – late on Friday, 31 March 1989. The paper splashed a half-page photograph of the flourishing beech deep in floral tributes. The crashed car had been removed. Stella gave Lucille May credit, the journalist had done her homework and linked the crash to the death of William Carter on Boxing Day 1988 in another article with the convoluted headline: ‘Christmas Boy-Death Crash Man Dies’.

May described how ‘Little Billy’ had been riding his Christmas scooter on the pavement outside Kings Court in Hammersmith when Lauren’s Vauxhall Carlton had mounted the kerb and ‘mown him down’. Stella wrote this next to his full name for good measure. May’s tone went as far as she legally dared to portray Lauren as cold-blooded and careless. ‘At the inquest, Lauren showed no emotion, apart from a kiss blown to his wife in the gallery. Dressed in a tailored suit…’ Maybe this wasn’t so routine after all. It was as if the woman took it personally.

Stella found her own emotions stirred. She altered the ‘Victim’ column to ‘Driver’; the children were the real victims. Unable to bear the crossings out, she rewrote the grid on a clean page. She sent the article for printing and, flinging herself back in her chair, reviewed her newly populated grid.

Four drivers had each killed a child; she would assume they all had. Her head was pounding. She had twenty-three minutes to get to ‘Happiest Day’ in Ealing. Gray and Atkins would have to wait. She thanked the librarian, paid for her printing and left.

A keen breeze whipped beneath Hammersmith flyover and blew away Stella’s frail sense of victory. Six men had died in five streets. Seven chips were buried at each of the crash sites. A man had stepped out in front of their cars, making them swerve and slam into a tree or a pole. Jack was right, it was a risky modus operandi: if one driver had survived, he could have said what happened. None of them had. The murderer had got away with it.

As she passed the police station on Shepherd’s Bush Road, Stella glanced up at Marian’s office. In the morning she would return the green form.

Overtaking a number 72 bus, Stella admitted to herself that, at the end of the day, she and Jack were no nearer to knowing who had killed these men and why.

49

Thursday, 3 May 2012

Stella had been at the police station for half an hour when her phone rang. She was guiding her trolley towards Marian’s office, the wheels rattling on the parquet, and stopped, appalled. She did not want Marian to hear the phone.

‘Your mother’s just rung. She couldn’t get hold of you.’

Stella guessed, although nothing in Jackie’s tone implied it, that this applied to Jackie too.

‘This early? And what are you doing at the office?’

‘I’m not at the office. Beverly put the phone on divert instead of answer machine again. Lucky really.’

‘What did Mum want?’ Her mother had left a message last night. Stella had forgotten.

‘Jack’s number.’

‘Did you give it to her?’

‘No. I’m afraid that made her cross.’

Stella nodded approval although Jackie couldn’t see her. ‘I’ll call when I’ve finished here.’

‘Have you remembered our recruitment meeting at nine-thirty?’

Stella had forgotten. ‘I’ll be there by eight-thirty,’ she declared. She slipped her phone into her trouser pocket. This was the best part of the day and Suzie had put a dent in it. Her fear about Jack cleaning there had come true; he had displeased her in some way and Stella would have to sort it out.

*

Jackie Makepeace arrived at Clean Slate at seven-thirty. Since Stella’s father had died, Stella no longer arrived at six o’clock every morning and worked a twelve-hour day. Recently there were days when she didn’t come to the office at all. This had been noticed. Dariusz Adomek, the owner of the mini-mart below, had asked after her, and this morning Sue in the dry cleaner’s had wanted to know if Stella was all right. Jackie gave nothing away. Stella would hate to think her movements had been observed, albeit because people cared. Jackie herself had noticed that, since Terry Darnell’s death, Stella had changed. Two months ago she had got a speeding ticket for doing three miles per hour over the speed limit on King Street. She had attended a speed awareness course, which had made her evangelistic about speeding and resulted in a section on speeding in the staff manual. Jackie was perturbed. As a policeman’s daughter, it was unlike Stella to break the Highway Code. Or any sort of code.

One advantage of the new Stella was that at this time of the morning Jackie had the office to herself, a pleasure she had not had since managing the employment agency.

She made a coffee and began to process the week’s employee hours. She tsk-tsked at the three job sheets from Stella; she was doing too much cleaning again. This was not grief; it was Stella doing what she liked best. She had allocated herself two floors of the police station with Donette and Wendy sharing the ground floor. Typical. Jackie saw why. Stella’s floors included Terry Darnell’s old office and the Braybrook Suite, once the ‘Major Incident Room’, where Stella’s dad had conducted his most famous case. Maybe it was grief after all.

Jackie was certain she would not see Stella today so she did something she had never done before and countermanded Stella’s rules. She called Jack Harmon and gave him Suzanne Darnell’s number.

Stella left the trolley in the corridor and went into Marian Williams’s office.

A dark shape was slumped over the empty desk by the window. ‘Please don’t worry. I made a promise. It will all be all right; that’s what I’m here for.’

Marian Williams was one of those whose home is their workplace. She would believe that Hammersmith Police Station could not function without her. She might be right.

‘Don’t worry. It will all be all right.’

Stella was surprised by the soothing tone and hoped Marian was not buttering up the violent husband.

Marian Williams was less friendly than she had been at Terry’s. She stuffed her phone into her handbag, wheeled herself up to her own desk and fired up her computer. Like Stella, she would not want to be caught on a personal phone call.

Negotiating the doorway, Stella pushed her cleaning cart in and parked it by the window. She turned around and knocked a pot of pens off the unoccupied desk on to the floor. Marian frowned briefly, but her fingers did not stop their canter over the keyboard.

Stella could not equate the taciturn overweight woman squeezed into her chair with the friendly Marian who had thrust a bouquet of flowers into her arms. It was this kind of erratic behaviour that had prompted Stella to write the section in her manual on avoiding being overfriendly with clients. She scrabbled on the floor for the pens, a stapler remover and some paper clips that had scattered across the carpet tiles and poked them back into the pot.

‘They have no idea of the damage they cause.’ Williams wheeled backwards. ‘They think only of themselves.’

Stella gave the briefest of nods. Clients may engage you in conversation and later complain you are slow. Marian would shake her head to Cashman: Not a patch on her dad. She wadded her duster, squirted spray on it and gave the desk a vigorous polish.

‘Take this.’ Marian indicated her screen to Stella, pecking at the keys with an index finger. ‘This chappie cut his hand escaping from the garden of a house he had burgled. He told my colleagues that broken glass on the top of the wall was a “disproportionate response”!’

She hit ‘return’ and dense columns of words and dates filled the screen. Stella feigning interest, read Marquis Way. ‘What’s this?’ she demanded. Then, to cover up the urgency of her question: ‘It looks complicated.’

‘He’s what I was talking about the other night. He is no longer with us, I am not sad to say. Harvey Gray died on Marquis Way. We put the date there, see?’

Marquis Way was the street with two crashes. The screen swam before her eyes. In 2003, 17 March had been a Monday. Stella forced herself to memorize it in case that was important. ‘Did he crash into a tree?’ She kept her voice level.

‘What makes you say that?’ Marian Williams angled the monitor so Stella could no longer see it.

‘A joke really. Well, not a joke obviously…’ Stella swished her cloth over the desk. She knew it wasn’t a tree.

‘No. A telegraph pole, which is as good as a tree. Despite the negative tox report, he was drunk. Had to be. Don’t shed a tear, Stella. Hanging was too good for him. Robert Smith – his dad called him Rob; I make sure to find out, using a formal name underlines the family’s loss – would have been eight two days after he was run over. His parents split up a year later. Mr Smith was drinking and his wife was found dead in bed from an overdose of paracetamol.’ Marian clasped her hands either side of her face. ‘Not her own bed. She was curled up in Rob’s bed clasping his teddy-bear pyjama case.’