Ghost Girl

by Thomson, Lesley

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  To Mel

  And for Sarah Baylis, an inspiring writer

  (1956–87)

  The power to concentrate exists in everyone; but few can concentrate sufficiently to drive a motor car with complete mastery in all circumstances.

  Roadcraft: The Police Drivers’ Manual, 1960

  Jack is alive and likely to live,

  If he dies in your hand you’ve a forfeit to give.

  The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes,

  edited by Iona and Peter Opie

  Prologue

  In the pale light the girl might be a ghost risen from one of the graves. Zipped up in a chequered anorak, insubstantial, she trips along the asphalt path, her hood drawn up, her face a pallid oval in the twilight. Apart from the anorak she is dressed as if for a party in black patent-leather pumps, white socks gartered to her knees and a swaying skirt. A duffel bag is strapped across her back. She slips with apparent confidence through the maze-like cemetery.

  She stops before an angel; the statue dwarfs her. The angel is sculpted to hold the gaze of a mourner and her considerable height means that from below only darkening sky frames her covered head. Fast-moving clouds make her appear to incline towards the child in solemn greeting. The girl returns the stare. Alone in a London cemetery, she does not seem afraid.

  She rummages in her bag and brings out a hammer. Managing the oversized tool with both hands, she clambers on to the low marble surround. Her pumps crunching on the decorative surface are the only sound in the votive quiet.

  She wields the hammer and with a precise arc smashes at the angel’s wrist, severing her hand. A clean break. The hand lands with a thump away on the grass. The girl positions herself on the other side of the angel and aims again. This time she swings too wildly. On the downward return the hammer head clips her knee, breaking the skin, but she appears not to feel it. She executes the perfect swing of her first attempt and shears off the other hand. She slips the hammer through the neck in her bag. She collects up the two marble hands and pokes them inside.

  She rushes away pell-mell, pretty pumps kicking out, flitting over graves and around mausoleums to the central avenue. She leaves the way she came.

  1

  Sunday, 15 March 2009

  Fog skimmed the bonnet and wreathed around wing mirrors which reflected only darkness. Lamp-posts and telegraph poles swooped out of the swirling mass when the headlights washed over them; phantoms bowing in obeisance, they melted into the night.

  Hunched over the wheel, Charlie Hampson, middle-aged, ruggedly tousled and used to commanding all he encountered, judged the intervals of light had become fewer, despite his even speed. Hardly bloody speed; more like a funeral cortège. Good call since the place was crawling with dead people. He nudged closer to the car in front – the only vehicle apart from his own that seemed to be out on this filthy night – and again unsuccessfully coaxed it to accelerate.

  Hampson, in his sparkly new BMW 318i, found scant comfort in the blue shadow Alcantara upholstery for which he had paid extra and from which a gentle heat now emanated. He was inclined to be impervious to mood or atmosphere but the bated stillness within the car was getting to him.

  ‘Get a move on, shithead!’

  Despite the closed windows and vents, tendrils of fog had found their way inside the car and he fretted that the damp reek of corpses and exhaust fumes would taint the pristine interior. The fog had seeped into his jacket and trousers and chilled him. This was what decades ago his ma would have called a pea-souper. Nowadays such weather in London was rare; tonight it had come out of nowhere. It was a fucking inconvenience and he took it personally.

  His digital display warned of black ice and the clock read 10.56 p.m. He had four minutes.

  ‘Child on Board’. He read the sticker in the car’s rear window. ‘Fuckwit on board, go!’ He got a flash image of the kid; the doctor said that was normal, and like that day, he touched the accelerator. The car responded instantly. Lovely. He blotted out the boy.

  The fog thinned briefly and revealed a tree. His four-cylinder engine with high-precision direct injection was soundless. It might be he who was stationary and the wall that was moving. This impression brought back the kid. He had not had the vision for ages; the fog was playing tricks. He turned on the radio and was instantly soothed. Andy Williams returned him to a bright and jaunty youth. Charlie lustily boomed out the chorus of ‘Music to Watch Girls By’.

  The effect was mesmeric and he nearly pranged the other car. He stamped his foot on the brake. He leant forward to see into the toy-like Renault but the silhouette of the headrests blocked a view of the driver or of any frigging child on board. The sticker was typical of that kind of holier-than-thou shitbag. What made kids more important than him? What did they add to the economy? He rode the clutch and revved the engine, relishing the rising purr. He would put the fear of God into the risk-averse parent in the Twingo. He twiddled his headlights to manual and flashed a Morse Code-like order in time to his words: ‘Shift. Your. Arse!’

  The music deteriorated to white sound. He pressed the station scanner but the crackling got louder and more intense. The car was deliberately going at walking pace to fuck with him. In a forty-mile-per-hour zone it was topping no more than ten. Had to be a joke. Hampson pulled out to overtake and was deafened by a blaring horn and dazzled by lights. He pulled on the wheel as the gigantic hubs of an articulated truck filled his side window, the forty-four-tonner making a wafer-thin corridor. It was gone. This wasn’t a route for artics; stupid bugger must have tried to find a short cut off the Great Chertsey Road. The geriatric box on wheels was doing eight miles per hour. Got to be a woman. Mother and child shouldn’t be out at this time of night. Hampson heard the pounding of his heart. He tried turning the radio on and off to locate Andy Williams. The impenetrable noise from his surround-sound speakers matched the thickening fog. He could not bear to switch it off and kill all hope of hearing the music. In the unnatural silence it was a lifeline.

  The clock said he had two and half minutes. He might do it if ‘Mummy’ put her sodding foot down. The kerb-hugger was stopping at the speed humps. He could ram her – she would never trace him – but he didn’t want to damage his car. Although now he could afford the repair. Hell, he could get another one.

  A thirty-mile-limit sign glided out of the gloom. The bitch wanted him to shunt her so she could cash in on the insurance. He pulled back.

  This made him remember why he was in this godforsaken place. Forgetting the fog and the late hour, Charlie cheered up; soon he would be a free man.

  ‘Move it!’ This set him coughing, which made his eyes water. ‘Whiplash, baby, yeah!’ he yelled above the white crackling to the imagined tune of ‘Love Shack’. He depressed the accelerator and surged forward.

  One minute. Certain there was nothing coming, Hampson swung out again. He preferred night driving: even in foggy conditions there was less room for error than on a sunny day in Hammersmith when the schools were out. He gnawed his bottom lip and powered the BMW through thirty-five to forty, readying himself to gesture at the careful lady-driver.

  Charlie Hampson saw a version of himself: a grey-haired, overweight bloke who no doubt liked a scotch, his Formula One and Andy Williams on the radio.

  He sliced in on the Renault, accelerated then braked, and looked in his rear mirror to see the car swerve. It had gone. The bastard had got away.
Now he was officially late.

  He could just make out the perimeter fence of the cemetery. ‘Keep your doors locked and don’t stop for any reason. A driver was ambushed there last month.’ Great meeting place. Still, no houses or speed cameras. No Big Brother. Those were the days.

  Too late Hampson saw that the form by the kerb was not another trick of the eye. He wrenched at the wheel, but, unused to the car’s sensitive response, over-compensated. The high-performance saloon mounted the pavement at fifty-eight miles an hour. In the fog, as in the hot sunshine on Brackenbury Road W6 months before, Charles Hampson had the impression of weightless stasis. Impassive he noted a tree zooming in on him as if it were a digital simulation. At the same moment Andy Williams returned full volume.

  Oliver Twist, with blue eyes curious and trusting, locked him in a staring contest as, like an angel, he flew past Charlie, up to the sky. Hampson shut his eyes.

  On impact the BMW bounced off the hundred-year-old oak tree and smashed a car-shaped hole in a Victorian wall feet away. The London Stone bricks needed repointing, which marginally lessened the secondary impact. In the convivial telling later Charlie Hampson would have rendered this as comic, what with the Andy Williams soundtrack. He would have boasted how he might be fifty-four with a heart murmur but his avoidance reflexes were spot on: he had avoided the speed bump.

  Except for Charlie Hampson there was no later.

  2

  Monday, 23 April 2012

  Stella pressed the doorbell, initiating a ‘Big Ben’ chime. The freshly painted window sashes told her all she needed to know about David Barlow. Bereaved men came in two kinds: those in denial who fled to an irresponsible past and those who spruced up and replaced the dead wife. The first group stopped shaving, drank and fed off takeaways until a tide of bottles and cartons spilling out of the kitchen prompted a relative to call in Clean Slate. The relative paid the invoices until a new partner came along and cancelled the contract.

  Barlow was in the second camp. His having contacted the office told her he disliked the break in routine; for him Clean Slate was a dating agency and he would resent stumping up for cleaners who proved unsuitable marriage material. He would pay late or not at all. Stella had learned to avoid his sort. Compassion had limits.

  Her assistant Jackie Makepeace had let Barlow in under the wire. He had read the article in the Chronicle. Supposing the piece to be about Terry Darnell’s funeral, Stella had agreed to the interview and then was dismayed to see it headed ‘The Detective’s Daughter’. It described how single-handedly (single generally, it was implied, as if she were open season) she had succeeded where her cop-dad had failed and solved the famous Rokesmith murder, a cold case from the eighties. Set into a shot of Terry’s flag-draped coffin on the blustery damp day at Mortlake Crematorium, watched by a solemn crowd of mourners from across the Met, was a photo of Stella at her desk. The caption beneath, ‘Sleuth at Work’, was a blatant misrepresentation of Clean Slate’s brochure picture of Stella drawing up a cleaning schedule that Jackie had sent through to the paper. Jackie had stopped her complaining. ‘All publicity is…’ The thrust of the piece – written by a woman with two first names like the characters in The Waltons – was how Stella had built up a cleaning empire in West London yet found time to clean up crime. Stella, so the article decided, had laid her dad’s ghost. He could rest in peace. What bloody ghost? Stella fumed to herself again on Barlow’s doorstep, noting with some approval the daisies ranked each side of the tiled path. She hadn’t worked on the case alone – but Jack did not want to be mentioned. Wise move. Although published a year ago, the piece still attracted a trickle of business. Barlow was the latest. Pleased by this PR success, Jackie made Stella promise to pop by on her way home and seal the deal. Stella promised herself that the meeting – crowning a hectic day – would be short with no deal.

  Her resolution wavered when David Barlow opened the door. Neat hair, aquiline nose, he was trim in a slick suit with a silk tie. But for it being a modest terraced house near Hammersmith Broadway and therefore unlikely, David Barlow might be David Bowie. The resemblance was striking.

  ‘Come in.’ He ushered her inside with a sweeping hand. He was her height – six foot – but Stella banished this as irrelevant.

  Aware of Barlow behind her, she made for a doorway on the left of the hall. She rehearsed her exit: the sitting room was too large, too small, impossible to clean – whichever was applicable.

  Barlow had put tea things out on a glass-topped table. With doilies. Stella set her shoulders. If he expected to win her over he would not.

  ‘Do sit down.’

  She sat down in a spacious armchair by the fireplace and found herself agreeing to a cup of tea. Barlow sat on a sofa, his back to the window.

  ‘She was in that recliner, sitting where you are. Towards the end she couldn’t concentrate and she’d doze off with the telly. I kissed her and whispered it was bedtime. She wasn’t breathing.’ He handed her a cup.

  Stella quelled an inclination to rush out to her van. She took a sip. It was exactly how she liked it, a dollop of milk and one sugar. She sank into the cushions.

  So it was that Stella Darnell – aged forty-five and indeed single – director of Clean Slate Cleaning Services (For a Fresh Start), came to be sitting in a dead woman’s riser-recliner, taking tea on a Monday evening in Hammersmith when she had planned to be clearing out her dead father’s house and compiling a quote for a car dealership in Chiswick.

  David Barlow chatted peaceably from the corner of an austere sofa with little padding, his legs crossed, one foot twitching in emphasis of certain words. ‘…it was a Friday, too late to ring the doctor or undertaker.’

  ‘Medics work through the night.’ Stella drained her cup and placed it on the little table. A furtive finger test confirmed the job would be unrewarding: no dust. Apart from random black lines on the walls, the room – spanning the length of the house, including a conservatory extension – was clean.

  ‘My wife had passed away, no one could help her and on a weekend they are run off their feet.’ Mr Barlow cleared his throat: ‘And to be honest, after so many years, I wanted her a little longer, you understand.’ He smoothed his tie. Jack said the gesture was a sign of dishonesty. What did he know? He never wore a tie. ‘You are too young to have known death.’ Barlow smiled, looking over the top of his rimless spectacles. Perhaps referring to the article he added, ‘Although that isn’t true.’

  Stella was trying to conjure her escape so did not correct him about her age or elaborate on her experience of death. Jack had worn a tie to her dad’s funeral, she remembered.

  David Barlow’s thick brown hair had no grey and his symmetrical good looks showed only a few lines. He was younger than Bowie, anywhere between forty-five and fifty-five. In over twenty years of running Clean Slate, Stella’s stringent appraisal of her clients had begun to include their dress sense. This, coupled with her assessment of their attitude to the cleaning, had contributed to a shrewd business acumen that brought Clean Slate considerable commercial success. Barlow had trodden silently over his spotless carpet in understated soft brown leather loafers. He had not smartened up for their appointment; he took this trouble for himself.

  Aside from David Bowie, he put her in mind of her dad. It was not his appearance, she decided; Terry was an off-the-peg man, in a hurry, his clothes lacking Barlow’s attention to detail. But Terry was a charmer; he always broke the ice and could elicit information and confessions from suspects or indeed anyone. Barlow’s mild manner had to be an act because, like Terry, no wool would surely ever be pulled over those gimlet eyes. He had already got her to have tea. Time to go.

  ‘Clean Slate would not suit you, you need—’

  ‘Of course.’ He laid his cup and saucer on the tray. ‘Your firm is too successful.’ He got up, apparently accepting Stella’s refusal before it was clear in her mind. ‘We were burgled a while back and Jennifer felt the place was violated. I should have had the house cle
aned while she was alive.’

  He shot her a brief smile. His eyes were a greenish blue. Absurdly, because there were more important things that she forgot, she recalled that Bowie had different coloured eyes. Stella struggled to her feet, snatched up her rucksack and glanced behind, half expecting Mrs Barlow to be there.

  ‘I chose Clean Slate because you list “deep cleaning” among your services.’

  Stella stopped, her hand on the door jamb. ‘It’s for industrial environments, hospitals, hospices…’ she managed.

  ‘Deep cleaning is what I want.’ Barlow addressed the recliner. ‘Your website lists the eradication of kitchen grease, offensive odour control, duct cleaning. This would be a sanitizing…’ He folded his arms. ‘I want cleaning that is as deep as can be. I want everything cleansed, all traces eradicated. To make this a home again.’

  He looked around the room as if surveying the devastation that the burglary must have caused. Stella brightened. David Barlow appreciated order and cleanliness. Her heart began to race and she strode back into the room.

  ‘I want the walls washed, all furniture pulled out and cleaned, vent panels, everything removed, taken apart. Retribution.’ He turned to her.

  Stella now saw that the marks on the wall were not random as she had assumed but were shapes outlined with dirt where objects had once hung. There were the outlines of three crucifixes between the oblongs and squares of pictures. Not a believer in God, Stella did not rule his existence out. She supposed that the theft of a crucifix – three – might incite retribution. Yet she wasn’t convinced that deep cleaning would do it. How would the thieves know?

  It was not her policy to dwell on her clients’ motives. However, inspired by David Barlow’s determination to get his house back, she found herself hoping it would help.

  ‘I’ll do it.’ She swung her rucksack down and ferreted in it for her estimates pad. ‘When were you thinking?’