The Runaway (5 page)

Terry moved aside to look at Hector and Mrs Ramsay saw Stella. The little girl froze, her thoughts racing. Never in her life had she told her parents a lie.

It's not the dog you need to keep an eye on, it's your very naughty little girl.

‘It says it on his collar thingy.' Mrs Ramsay tilted her face from the door and blew a smoke ring up into the air. She looked back and flashed Terry Darnell a smile that was mostly in her eyes.

‘We're about to head off to a party – we'd have had to go looking for him and missed it. It's a treat for my daughter. We're over the moon, aren't we, Stell? Say “thank you” to the lady. She's saved our day! Thank you again, Mrs??'

‘Isabel. You're going to the party?' Mrs Ramsay was talking to Stella.

‘Yes,' Stella admitted, her face hot.

‘Poor you! I
hate
parties.' Mrs Ramsay raised her eyebrows. ‘Do
you
like them?'

Stella was trained by her detective father to pick up the slightest nuance. Although only seven, she took the cue. She took a deep breath. ‘No, I don't like them.'

‘What don't you like?'

‘The noise and there's loud music with games that I don't understand and people get cross if I don't try.' The words were out; she ploughed on: ‘I don't really much like cake and I feel sick if I drink fizzy drinks.'

‘Don't go then. Why don't you spend the day with your dad?' She turned to Terry Darnell. ‘How would that be, Inspector?' She took another drag of her cigarette. ‘My kids were marched on nature walks with my husband. I thought they adored them or I would have intervened. Now they're pretty much grown up, so it's too late.' She looked down the path as if she had seen something.

‘Stell, I didn't know this. Do you want to do something else with me?'

‘Yes, because it's all my fault?'

Mrs Ramsay cut across her. ‘No more to say on that score then!'

Terry and Stella Darnell watched from the doorstep until Isabel Ramsay reached the gate. She shut it without turning back. Terry ushered Stella inside.

‘I'm sure Hector's learnt his lesson. He won't go out by himself again, will he? Not without asking us,' he said to Stella.

‘Dad, I?'

‘Odd, though,' he remarked, shutting the front door.

‘What was?' Suzanne was coming down the stairs. ‘Where's all this mud come from?'

‘That was Hector. He escaped. A nice woman has just brought him back.'

‘He escaped? How?'

‘I'll check the back garden. He'll have found a hole somewhere.'

‘How did this woman know where he lives?' Suzanne Darnell scruffled the dog's head, mussing his fur. Stella noticed with growing unease that, like a detective, her mum was asking all the right questions.

‘That's odd,' Terry agreed. ‘She said our address was on his collar.'

‘I only had the phone number engraved on the tag – you said not to give too many private details.'

‘Exactly! So how did she know?'

‘Mum, I?' Stella's mouth was dry.

‘She's probably seen us walking him.' Suzanne was rooting around the coats. ‘You two need to get going or you'll be late. Bring Stella to the flat later, like we said. Come before it gets dark. I want to get her settled.' She said to Stella: ‘Where's your anorak?'

‘It's a parka, not an anorak,' Terry glanced at Stella. ‘We're not going to the party.'

‘What?'

‘Everything is a clue: criminals often give themselves away with the smallest change in what they do. Keep an eye on the things you don't think matter.'

She always hung her parka in the hall. Stella ducked round her mum and ran upstairs. In her bedroom she grabbed her coat. The hanger clattered to the floor of the wardrobe; she snatched it and hooked it back over the rail. Pulling on her parka, she headed out of the room. She paused at the top of the stairs.

Terry and Suzanne Darnell were standing by the front door. Her mum was holding her dad's hand. When she saw Stella, she let go of it.

‘Ah, there you are, Stella. Listen, your dad and me, we've got a suggestion.' Suzanne looked at Terry.

Stepping away from her mum, towards the staircase, he rubbed his hands together as if washing them. He had done this when he told her about Barons Court. She braced herself.

‘We could all go out together. As a family. To Richmond Park and give Hector a run? See the deer. It's your day, Stella, you choose. We'll do whatever you like.'

‘But not if you don't want to,' Suzanne said.

‘Would you be coming too?' Stella asked her.

‘Yes, we'll all be going. Like Dad said.' Suzanne gave a tight smile.

Stella felt a whoosh of relief. Her plan had worked.

Suzanne's eyes were bright; she cleared her throat and in a thick voice said, ‘We'll make it a day to remember.'

*

The car passed the gate into the little park in the middle of St Peter's Square and, glancing in, Stella saw someone under the big tree. It was Mrs Ramsay. She was talking to another person. Stella strained to see who it was, but the car turned the corner and Terry Darnell accelerated up towards King Street and Mrs Ramsay disappeared from her view.

‘That woman knew I was in the police,' Terry said suddenly. Perhaps he too had glimpsed Isabel Ramsay. Or perhaps she was simply still on his mind. He braked at the junction with King Street and watched for a break in the traffic.

‘That's easy. I knew you were a copper the moment I met you!' Suzanne had put nail varnish on before they left the house. She held her fingers stiffly splayed on her lap.

Terry grinned at her. ‘I was at the wheel of a police car when I met you, Suzie!'

‘You look every inch a police officer, even in civvies.' Suzanne blew on her fingers to hasten the drying process.

‘She called me “Inspector”. How could she know my rank?'

‘You're the detective, you work it out.' Suzanne reached out and gave Terry's shoulder a biff with the side of her hand. She brushed at his jacket. ‘You always do.'

‘All right in the back there, Stell?' Terry winked at her in the rear-view mirror.

‘Yes.' Stella was battling with how to tell her mum and dad what had really happened. She couldn't see how she could tell them the truth without getting Mrs Ramsay into trouble. She would not do that.

The day passed without argument or incident. Stella walked ahead with Hector over the grass in Richmond Park. She threw a ball for him; he sat at her feet in the café. She tried to let her mum and dad be alone as much as was possible. They seemed to like each other again and if she could keep out of the way, there would be no need for Barons Court and the Matrimonial Troubles would be over.

Terry and Suzanne remarked to each other that Stella was growing up; they marvelled at how self-sufficient and independent she was. How well behaved. Again they wondered how that could be a problem.

Stella's plan faltered. Her dad missed the turning off the Hogarth Roundabout to Chiswick High Road. He picked up speed as the car passed Black Lion Lane and St Peter's Church and went up on to the Hammersmith Flyover.

Minutes later he pulled up outside a block of mansion flats near the Underground station and turned off the engine. He opened Stella's door, but when she got out he was already by the boot. He put her pink suitcase down on the pavement while he took the other bags out.

Terry didn't offer to carry anything. Suzanne and he had agreed it was best if he didn't come in. Stella, if she had heard this, had not remembered it. All she knew was that, with barely a wave, he drove away.

She carried her pink suitcase up stone steps into a cold tiled hallway that was like the subway tunnel. It smelled of stale roast dinners.

*

That Wednesday in November 1973 was special. The royal wedding went off without a hitch. The couple waved to crowds from the balcony of Buckingham Palace and later left for a honeymoon on the
Britannia
, the Queen's yacht. Their marriage was destined to be no more successful than Terry and Suzanne Darnell's: it would end less than two decades later after confirmation that Mark Phillips had fathered a child with another woman.

For Stella it was not a day to remember; everything that happened then and that had happened before it became a blank. Stella remembered nothing of the life she had led in the house in Hammersmith before her parents separated. She forgot that she had wanted to be a detective or that she had once owned a dog. Hector died of a brain tumour when she was nine. She forgot the expeditions with her dad, when they had hunted for clues by the river in Richmond Park or in Dukes Meadows. Her Access Weekends were few and on her visits she knew to be on her best behaviour and dutifully played with the toys he had bought for her, keeping faith with her strategy that it was up to her to make her mum and dad be nice to each other.

Stella Darnell and Isabel Ramsay would one day meet again. By that time Isabel was an old woman with secrets that no detective would root out and Stella, now several years past forty, was running a cleaning company. They didn't recognize each other when Stella came to do an estimate for deep cleaning; nor did either of them remember the other's name. Stella thought it familiar, but she met so many people in the course of her job. She was more likely to remember what they asked to have done, not what they were called.

But perhaps on that sunny morning in November thirty-eight years ago they had established a tenuous rapport. Isabel Ramsay would in the end put up with no other cleaner but Stella in her house and Stella, rather than be put off by the older woman's obduracy and insistence on stringent cleaning that went deeper than deep, came to consider Mrs Ramsay her favourite client. For her she made many exceptions.

Mrs Ramsay and Terry Darnell had been dead some years when one morning, while Stella was cleaning the stair carpet in what she sometimes still thought of as Terry's house, her memory was jolted. She sat down heavily on the top step. The vacuum beside her on the landing and the motor still whining, she gazed down to the hall below. Light spilled through the frosted-glass panes in the front door. Her anorak hung on one of the hooks by the door. Hector's dog lead was long gone from the end peg. The pink suitcase was not by the door. She felt a tingling on her cheek, a gentle feeling like the brush of the back of a hand. She rubbed her cheek, and becoming aware of the noise of the vacuum, she switched it off.

Sitting on the top stair, Stella relived every moment of that special Wednesday. From the moment when, bewildered, she had watched her dad stuff her Noddy duvet into a box with the rest of her bedding, to the evening after the sun had set and it was dark when, disorientated, she had found the duvet spread out on her new bed in the flat in Barons Court.

In the thin light in the hall Stella saw the ghosts of the living, as well as of the dead. A little girl with a suitcase. A man with a dog. A tall lady on the doorstep blowing smoke rings up to the sky.

‘I wish you were coming with us, Daddy.'

‘So do I, Stell.'

Jumping up, Stella switched on the vacuum. Grabbing the brush, she set to work cleaning the already clean landing.

~

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TO
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Apartment in Water Tower.

A cosy home with detailed views.

Jack Harmon craves silence and a bird's eye view. From his new home in Palmyra Tower, he can raise binoculars to watch over west London. He can see pictures in people's houses, read epitaphs in the cemetery. If he watches for long enough, he will learn who has secrets. He will learn who plans to kill.