Ghost Girl (6 page)

She was unmoved by the inexorable gentrification around her. It was what she had been used to before she met Terry, she would archly inform her daughter, as if her marriage had caused her to slip down the social scale. Since Suzie was the daughter of a prison officer, Stella knew this was untrue. Her mother was gratified that the sooty brickwork had been brought back to salmon pink and the doors and window frames painted or replaced. But she did not visit the cafés selling fresh ground coffee and or applaud that the local shop now sold Earl Grey tea and Prosecco. She did care that the Tesco Express would not deliver ad hoc packets of cigarettes or sliced bread but she refused to shop online. If she wanted toast she called her daughter. Getting out of the van, Stella decided that the telephone calls for help had increased.

She skirted a bicycle chained to a lamp-post, droplets of dog’s pee jewelling its wheel, the saddle stolen or removed to prevent it being stolen. She toed aside a bag of rubbish slumped by the entrance. The musty foyer was lit by a chandelier blurry with dust and already brown walls were darkened with a film of grease. Stella’s soles clacked on the grimy tiles and, loath to touch, she dragged aside the grille to the lift with her fingertips. The hollow clang further dampened her spirits. She steeled herself against the ominous swaying whenever she got in the cramped lift. She punched a brass button for the top floor and regarded herself in the grainy mirror while the apparatus shuddered upwards. Tonight the dull light was flattering and showed off the glossy new haircut that did indeed accentuate the shape of her face. Her suit did do the trick, Stella decided; she looked quite the sharp businesswoman. Cheered, she stood straight. Jackie would urge: You’re lovely and tall, make the most of it. Almost immediately, Stella’s shoulders slumped: it was late, it had been a long day and it wasn’t over. She pictured being in her bedroom in her mum’s flat, sipping the Horlicks Suzie would insist upon and then falling into a deep sleep. The lift jerked to a stop and Stella dismissed the image.

On the landing she was greeted, as always, with the absolute hush that never failed to unnerve her; somehow, it was worse than the silence in Terry’s house. The carpet was thickened by a patina of grease and balls of fluff like miniature tumbleweed. A shadow of dirt lay on the windowsill, the glazing bars and along the wainscot. The infrequent cleaning was intended, Suzie Darnell insisted, to flush her and the other ‘low-rent’ tenants out to make way for ‘adolescent bankers and other such types’. Stella suspected these ‘types’ included herself. Stella had considered pitching for the cleaning contract, but was fairly sure that the weekly letter Suzie sent the landlords detailing the parlous state of the common parts would not stop if her daughter were responsible for the cleaning. Suzie was right, the landlords were trying to lever her out by letting the building deteriorate. It was the wrong approach. If something was wanted of her, Suzanne Darnell moved mountains to avoid giving it. She generally got her way; her disappointment was that she never liked what she got.

Tonight, as on other nights, outside her mother’s flat, thoughts of Horlicks vanished and Stella wanted only to take the stairs to the street, go to her office and do her emails in the out-of-hours quiet.

‘It’s me, Mum.’ She squeezed inside and, sweeping her hand over the wall until she found the switch, clicked on the light. It spread bleak illumination over a narrow hallway, made narrower by piles of newspapers and cartons, reaching higher than Stella’s six feet, that threatened to topple when, moving crabwise, her rucksack in her arms, Stella inched along.

She paused at her old bedroom. There were the boxes of carbon-copied reports from when her mother worked, magazine recipes, bank statements, postcards and letters awaiting Suzie’s attention; they must not be thrown out. A box in the doorway had ‘Mum’ scrawled on the side. Stella’s grandmother’s knitting patterns, needles and odd balls of wool spilled out. It being there gave Stella scant hope her mum was sorting it at last, but more likely she had, on a whim, been prodding about for the pattern she would knit when she ‘found the time’. She would not throw it out, it would be ‘killing her mother all over again’, she said. As if she had killed her the first time. Sometimes the way Suzie talked reminded Stella of Jack.

Stella’s bedroom had been Clean Slate’s office and like her room at Terry’s held no evidence of her childhood. The day Stella started at the ‘big’ school, Suzie had announced she was grown up. Stella had been pleased by this but when she had got home her toys, her wool rabbit, her puzzles, her Sindy doll and the glass tube of sand from the Isle of Wight holiday – the first without Terry – had gone to charity. Preoccupied with the complexities of new teachers, noisy children and so many classrooms, Stella had not thought she minded.

Despite her cleaning only yesterday, the air was cloying with cooking smells overlaid with cigarette smoke. Suzie insisted she had given up; Stella knew this was a lie. Her mother lied about many things, or maybe she could not distinguish the truth.

Stella paused outside the living-room door. Despite knowing Suzie was in there, Stella felt that she could be alone – so unlike her impression that Terry was present when she was in his house.

A semblance of domestic comfort signalled by a standard lamp with a fringed shade was cancelled out by clutter. More newspapers behind the door, a plastic laundry bin full of the umbrellas her mother insisted she had taken by accident. A gate-leg table took the weight of serving dishes, jars filled with buttons, paper clips, bus tickets and the other objects Suzie collected indiscriminately. There were two more tubs of mini chocolate biscuits, her mother’s latest food fad.

The serving hatch was of no practical use: it was partially obscured by piles of books and a sofa blocked access to it. A cracked plastic Adidas holdall lay on the path to the kitchen; Stella recognized her old games bag and wondered with a sinking heart why her mother had got it out. Beside it was a green glass fruit bowl spilling over with bars of staples, packets of screws, a bulb of garlic, a root of stale ginger and the used jiffy bags Suzie had asked her to bring from the office two days ago. Stella had cleaned the room only yesterday; none of what she had achieved was evident.

One item dominated the chaos: a threadbare wing-backed armchair upholstered in red velvet. Stella was uncomfortably reminded of Mrs Barlow’s recliner. She snatched up the fruit bowl and wedged it between two shoe boxes on the table and made her way across the room. A television Stella had fitted into an alcove by the gas fire was back on the kitchen chair with the broken strut that Stella was forbidden to take to the dump because it had been ‘Mum’s favourite’. Laying siege to this were more jars with coins, scraps of material and stamps. The flickering screen increased Stella’s impression of instability and she tripped over a mound of tea towels by the sofa.

Suzanne Darnell was small-boned and, in contrast to her tall daughter, barely over five foot. Disappointment and dissatisfaction had not eroded the beauty that had captured Terry Darnell years ago. Her shoulder-length blonde hair – one of her outings was to the colourist – was tied back with a succession of brightly coloured ribbons. Curled in her chair, a cushion hugged to her chest, legs tucked beneath her, she was lost in her ex-husband’s fisherman’s jumper, a favourite. Stella had noticed that, unlike herself, her mother achieved chic even when scruffily dressed. Her careless pose implied a girlishness that belied her sixty-six years. Her neediness, on the other hand, could add a further twenty years to her age.

Her mother was glaring at the television screen on which a man was being given cardiac shock treatment. Suzie kept the volume down in case of shouting or raucous background music; she hated surprises. She continued to gaze in the direction of the screen when Stella stepped into her line of vision.

‘Where have you been?’ Corncrake asperity broke the quiet. When she spoke, Suzie’s fingers tapped the patchwork cushion.

‘It takes a while to get here from—’ Stella stopped. Terry’s death had not stemmed her mum’s waspish remarks about his shortcomings. Meant, Stella used to suppose, for her to pass on to her father. Growing up, Stella had side-stepped this tacit intention; now she found odd comfort in her mother’s sniping: while Terry was found wanting, he had not gone entirely. She avoided mentioning Terry’s house. If Suzie demanded to visit Stella would not know how to prevent her.

‘Even at this time there’s traffic,’ Stella finished.

‘So you say.’ Suzie laid the cushion flat and tapped it. Her hand stilled and she rested her head against the back of the chair.

‘What’s the problem?’ Stella had not meant to sound harsh; she could see no sign of an emergency, which was a relief. Then she bit her lower lip: a scorch mark on the arm of the chair was new; her mum must have fallen asleep with a cigarette in her hand. She could see no sign of a stub or flecks of ash.

‘Lucky you turned up out of the blue.’ Nestling deeper into the chair her fingers busied themselves briefly again on the cushion.

‘You asked me to come.’

Suzie shook her head. ‘I didn’t.’

Stand-off. Both women turned their attention to the television where the heart monitor now showed a flat line.

It seemed to Stella that she could hear the continuous signal without the volume. She looked away. ‘You did.’ Instantly she regretted pursuing a battle she could not win.

‘I didn’t.’ The fingers tapped. ‘Watch closely, you’ll see a pulse. No one can play dead for long.’ Her mother waved a hand as a sheet was pulled over the man’s impassive features.

Stella went to the kitchen. When she had lived there, the hatchway meant she was not alone in the lounge when her mum was cooking and her mum would chatter on. Now, jammed with objects, there was no connection with the adjoining room.

The bin was empty only because Suzie persisted in dropping rubbish into a plastic bag hung from a cupboard knob. This was bulging, the plastic ripped by a foil tray. The sink and draining board were heaped with dirty dishes from which there came the acrid odour of stale tomato sauce and possibly nicotine.

Stella relaxed. She could clean.

She looked for the rubber gloves she had left by the tap. Her mother must have thrown them away; her hoarding instincts did not apply to what Stella brought to the flat. Suzie didn’t seem concerned that disposing of these things could ‘kill’ her daughter. The idea in this context seemed less absurd to Stella, because finding that the cleaning agents and equipment she had stowed in the under-sink cupboard had disappeared could well be the death of her.

She delved into her rucksack for her emergency kit: gloves, a sponge, a cloth and a vial of anti-bacterial cleaner. Within minutes she had restored order. She returned to the living room with the sealed bag of rubbish.

‘Let me see.’

‘It’s the rubbish, Mum.’ She should have hidden it behind her back.

‘Get newspaper and lay it out properly. If a job’s worth doing…’ The fingers pattered furiously over the cushion.

It was pointless to resist what was coming; Stella fetched a newspaper from the tower near the door.

‘Not from there. I want those!’ The drumming on the cushion was intense.

Stella went into the hall and snatched a newspaper from the top of the highest pile, steadying the rest in case the paper –
The Sun
– by some quirk of balance was keeping the whole thing upright. She spread it at Suzie’s feet. It was dated 12 June 2008. Suzie hopped out of her armchair and knelt beside Stella. The delicate scent of her mother’s perfume wafted around her: Suzie had asked for Givenchy’s ‘Very Irresistible’ for her last birthday, a change from the Elizabeth Arden Terry used to buy her which she had worn for all of Stella’s life.

Suzie grimaced at the picture of Myra Hindley on the front page. Hindley stared back. Beside the iconic 1960s mug shot was the headline: ‘Myra swamped by fan mail’.

‘He never caught her.’ Suzie’s fingers tapped the crinkled paper.

It took Stella a moment to understand. ‘Dad was in the Met, he didn’t work that case.’ Every unsolved case, every criminal injustice, every police error was Terry’s fault. Suzanne Darnell had no fear of logic.

Stella undid the knot she had tied in the neck of the bag and, cross with herself for not anticipating this regular sifting of the rubbish, tipped it out, moving it over the sheet to evenly distribute the contents. Myra Hindley vanished beneath sodden tea bags, used tissues, bread crusts and a congealed half-eaten lamb chop. Stella clambered on to the sofa and reaching through the hatchway unhooked a fork from the carousel. The tines caught the light of the lamp as she teased through the detritus, lifting, pushing and raking it. Suzie was rapt with attention.

‘It must be there somewhere,’ she said eventually.

‘Don’t think it is,’ Stella replied, not knowing yet what ‘it’ was. It didn’t do to jump the gun, as her mother called it.

‘It’s the only present Terry gave me.’ Her voice was tiny, her fingers relaxing when she subsided into silence. ‘They’re my favourite earrings. If one is lost both might as well be.’

‘When did you last see it?’ Stella knew the answer: 30 August 1978, they had looked for them many times before. Had they been looking for Suzie’s Parker pen, lost six months ago, there was a chance of uncovering it somewhere in the flat, but most of the objects Suzie had her hunt for had been mislaid long ago in Terry’s house. They would not discover them in the rubbish here. The pearl earring had come up in the searching after Terry died; Jackie said it was symbolic and was her mother’s way of handling grief. Stella was sceptical: Suzie had left Terry and had not seen him since Stella was old enough to travel to see him unaccompanied. Whatever the reason, the forensic unpickings of the bin were a waste of time; nothing was ever found.

‘I took them out after the parents’ evening when they said you were bossy to that boy, ridiculous to-do. The limp lettuce should have stood up for himself. I was on my own. Terry had been called out as per.’

Stella forked through the mush and Myra Hindley reappeared, blotched with stains. At last she convinced Suzie, and by now herself too (because once involved in the process she forgot its futility), that the earring was not there. She refilled the bag and put it in the hallway.