Ghost Girl

by Thomson, Lesley

  ‘Clean Slate must be too busy to bother with me.’

  He crossed to the recliner and depressed a foot pedal. The chair tilted slowly forward like a person getting to their feet. Stella found the sight unsettling. Was he not serious after all? She knew that type.

  ‘I used to run a sales team for an internet company. I wasn’t meant to fuss with customers only making small purchases like dial-ups or modems. Time is money.’ He let the chair down. ‘You have to be pragmatic.’

  Barlow would have been a soft touch: too nice. Her dad would have made a crack salesperson; he got what he needed from any situation. Now that Barlow was prevaricating, Stella was determined to close the sale. She flipped to a fresh page in her pad and, clicking on her Clean Slate branded pen, jotted down what she could see. Thankfully the wife had not been one for ornaments – unless the burglars had taken them. ‘I’ll send you a quotation.’ She was particularly formal to hide a rising excitement; it was a year since she had deep cleaned.

  ‘Invoice me after each visit. I will pay by return.’

  He didn’t ask for a cash deal; exacting a discount was another trait of one species of widower. The less they paid for their new wife the better. Barlow was what he seemed: a decent bloke wanting a job done.

  ‘It will be expensive,’ she warned, rat-a-tatting the page with her ballpoint. Were Jackie here she would suggest Stella talk up the benefits of Clean Slate so when she priced the work the client was primed to think it worth every penny. She had killed the job.

  Barlow nodded. ‘I want it sorted.’ He repeated, more to himself, ‘I will pay.’

  Reprieve. Stella flipped open her Filofax. They decided on two sessions a week. She scratched out a recruitment meeting with Jackie that clashed with one day.

  Standing in a shaft of sunlight from the conservatory, Barlow enquired: ‘Who will be coming?’

  Stella looked out at a green lawn so neat it looked synthetic.

  ‘Me.’

  Halfway up Aldensley Road, braking to avoid boys kicking a football across the kerbs, Stella reappraised David Barlow. He wasn’t sizing her up as a bride. He wanted his house cleansed of bad memories so he could move on. Maybe this was why she hadn’t sold Terry’s house, she would tell Jack next time he asked. David Barlow was her kind of person. He valued order, free of dust or grime. Just as she did, and she had been quoted on it in the article. The piece had appeared in the paper before his wife died; Barlow had not rung earlier because she was too ill. Stella exhaled with relief as she turned on to King Street and headed for Young’s Corner. Deep cleaning. Perfect start to her week. The last domestic client to commission cleaning at a forensic level had died; she missed the work.

  David Barlow was exactly whom she needed.

  3

  Tuesday, 19 April 1966

  The noise made her ears hurt. She clapped her hands over them but it got louder. Around her sandals dots of light sparkled, white and blue and pink.

  ‘I told you not to touch them!’ her mum cried. ‘That’s all our crockery!’

  Mary Thornton stayed perfectly still in the hallway while her mother scrabbled about on the parquet floor, shuffling broken china and bits of glass on to newspaper which she wrapped up into a parcel.

  ‘Don’t stand there. Get the dustpan and brush!’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘Where it usually is, under the sink.’ She shook her head at Mary.

  ‘Will it be there already?’ They had only moved to the house that day.

  ‘No it won’t.’ Her mother sighed. ‘Look in the box labelled “Under Sink”. Don’t try to carry the whole thing this time. Lord knows what we’ll drink out of.’

  Mary pushed open the door to the new kitchen and found her brother Michael sitting at the table. He was eating yoghurt out of a glass jar. She walked over to him and saw that somehow amongst all the boxes, wooden cases and newspapers he had got his special spoon. He eyed her, the spoon suspended; then, evidently considering it safe to do so, he resumed eating.

  ‘Who said you could have that?’

  ‘Mummy did. Are you in trouble again?’

  ‘No,’ she asserted, although Michael, three years her junior and never in trouble, must have heard her drop the box and listened to everything that happened afterwards.

  ‘Give me some,’ she demanded, even though she wasn’t hungry.

  ‘You hate yoghurt.’ The small boy snatched away the jar and cupped it on his lap when his sister lunged for it. He opened his mouth to shout and she halted her hand in the air.

  ‘If you say anything I’ll get you later,’ she hissed. ‘Give. It. Here.’

  Mary pulled Michael’s wrist. Her brother wriggled free and, kneeling up on his chair, crouched over the table shielding the jar. Both children were engaged in the struggle for its own sake. After tugging and shoving, Mary detached herself and wandered over to a box by the back door. She had written the words ‘Under Sink’ on its side herself. She knelt on the lino and, lifting the flaps, rummaged inside.

  ‘You’re bad,’ Michael uttered, apparently arbitrarily, now that he had a clear route to the door.

  ‘I’m not.’ She was bad. This had not occurred properly to her before. Dimly she pondered that ever since the buried children had been dug up on the Moor she had been bad. That was why she had a new name.

  Despite her labelling, the box was full of pans, the rolling pin, her nan’s cheese grater and the metal measuring jug for making Michael’s favourite cakes. Mary could not see the dustpan and brush. She wrapped her arms around the cardboard and, disobeying her mum, hauled it up and staggered to the sink. She dumped it on to the draining board with a terrible clang and whipped around. Michael was smearing out the last of the yoghurt from the jar with his finger. Her mum did not appear.

  ‘Will our milkman come here?’ he asked conversationally.

  ‘How do I know?’ Mary barked at him. ‘No, of course not, we’ve moved miles and miles away. Go and wash your hands.’ With private triumph she fished out the dustpan and brush from another box also called ‘Under Sink’. She examined the galvanized dustpan, mildly perplexed that it looked the same in the new house where otherwise so much was different.

  ‘Where shall I wash them?’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot. In the bathroom.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Stop asking me things. Go and see.’ Mary brandished the brush at her brother; he scampered out of the room. ‘Stop!’ Michael’s head bobbed back.

  ‘Wash them in the sink here.’ Mary did not want to be alone in the new kitchen.

  Michael pattered to the tap and by going on tiptoe he could just reach it. Mary vaguely registered that in their proper house he stood on a chair. He must have grown. Wistfully she pictured that kitchen with the sunbeam that on some school mornings warmed her cheeks while she ate her Cornflakes and made her feel special. She did not feel special any more and the idea of the new school made her tummy ache.

  Mary Thornton clasped the dustpan and brush and trotted back to the hall. Her mum had gone. She crouched down and played at housework. She took today’s paper from her father’s coat pocket and spread it out on the floor.

  The little girl was momentarily unnerved by the photograph of a woman looking right at her. She read the headline above the image: ‘MOORS MURDER TRIAL OPENS’. She dabbed a thumb over the lady’s name, blotting it out.

  She snatched up the brush, scooted the remaining tiny fragments into the dustpan and tipped them out on to the paper until the face of the glary lady had nearly disappeared and the floor was clean. She bundled the paper up the way her mother had and carried it like baby Jesus into the kitchen.

  Michael had gone. The empty jar was on the table. Mary rinsed it in the sink and plonked it upside down on the draining board. There were round circles from cups on the silver top, which was strange because they had not had a drink in the new house. Michael had whispered there were ghosts. Stupid. She rubbed at one of the rings until it was gone.
Daddy had been cross that her mum had packed the tea leaves in the wrong box and so there had been no tea. She looked in both ‘Under Sink’ boxes for a dishcloth but it must also be in the wrong box. It was not her fault, she said to herself. None of it was.

  When Mrs Thornton breezed in twenty minutes later, straining with the weight of a bulging string bag, her daughter had filled the cupboard under the sink so that it looked the same as in their last house.

  ‘That’s nice, love.’ She pushed aside two empty boxes and laid down her shopping. ‘Fish fingers, lamb chops, baked beans, tea, bread and cornflakes. And some veg. Please start the tea for you and little Mikey. Daddy’s driving back for the last load and I’m doing the beds.’

  ‘Can I go in the van with Daddy?’

  ‘What did I just say?’

  ‘Is Michael going?’

  ‘No, My— Mary! For goodness’ sake, do I have to ask a thing twice?’ Mrs Thornton clapped her hands to shoo Mary along and whisked out of the room. From the hall, she called: ‘Use the fish fingers and beans, they’re your baby brother’s favourite and he must have a treat to get used to the house.’

  ‘I’m off.’ Her dad was in the doorway.

  Mary grasped the chance. ‘Can I come?’ she pleaded.

  ‘You heard your mother. Don’t play games. No means no. Look after your brother.’

  Mary stood alone in the room. She heard a bang and then silence. In their old home she knew all the noises, but this house was foreign to her; its corners were sharp and the floors cold and hard. She was not bad and would show them by doing what she was told or she might be buried on the moor too. Mary wished Michael would come back. He would come soon enough if she made his tea.

  She counted out four fish fingers from the box. The cardboard was damp from where the food had thawed and she accidentally tore the flap; another fish finger fell out. She deserved an extra one. She lined up the tin of Heinz beans, the loaf of bread and a box of Brooke Bond tea beside three brown paper bags with twists for ears. She peered in each bag: carrots, potatoes and onions. Mary played being the greengrocer and announced each item out loud while tapping out the prices on the table with stubby fingers as if working the giant till. They would not see the nice greengrocer with the funny eyes who gave her penny snakes any more.

  As Mary had anticipated, attracted by the cooking smells Michael slunk in while his sister was at the stove and slid on to a chair. He lolled over the table between his rabbit knife and fork, which she had found for him, and enquired chirpily: ‘Are you meant to use the frying pan?’

  ‘How else can I make fish fingers?’ she retorted, forking them out on to two plates. She scraped splodges of congealing beans out of the saucepan and ladled them next to the fish fingers, spilling some on the tabletop. Michael snapped them up.

  ‘You’re not allowed,’ she added with some triumph.

  ‘We’ve got a bedroom each.’ Michael tucked his hands between his knees happily. His hair stuck up at the back and his wrists poked out like white sticks from the jumper knitted for him by their nan, who liked boys best.

  ‘Take your elbows off the table.’ Mary was now their mother. She banged down a plastic beaker of milk. ‘Sit up.’

  ‘Yours is bigger, but I can see my new swing from mine.’

  ‘What new swing?’

  ‘The one Daddy’s going to make in the garden by the willow tree.’ As he chattered he lined up the fish fingers with his fork making a train with two carriages. ‘It’ll be very, very high so I can kick the sky.’ He chanted the phrase, obviously pleased with it. ‘It’ll be very, very—’

  ‘Be quiet, Michael!’

  ‘You don’t have a willow tree in your tree album.’ He kicked his legs against the chair as he chomped his food.

  ‘I do,’ Mary said without thinking, although she did not remember a page with a willow and certainly didn’t have the card.

  ‘It’s not a “Trees of Britain” tree.’ Michael smiled good-naturedly at his sister.

  ‘It is.’ Too late Mary sniffed a trap of her own making.

  ‘The weeping willow comes from China. It’s in my en-cyc-lop-paedia. You won’t get it from this tea.’ Michael lined up the last three beans on his fork and nudged the packet of Brooke Bond with his other hand.

  ‘Who says?’ Mary pulled at his hand. ‘Don’t play with your food.’

  Michael shrugged and squirmed on his chair while he chewed. ‘I’ve never had my own bedroom. You’re always there.’ He looked suddenly less pleased.

  ‘Nor have I,’ Mary conceded. She sat down and gathering up a dainty forkful of beans popped it between her lips.

  ‘Yes you have.’ He slurped his milk. ‘Mare-ree.’

  ‘No, I have not and do not call me that. Close your mouth when you’re eating, I can see mashed-up food.’ She swallowed a bean without chewing and coughed.

  ‘You have, you had a bedroom by yourself before I was even born. For three years you had a bedroom.’

  ‘That doesn’t count.’

  ‘It does. It’s a very lo-ong time. In three years I’ll be ten like you. Except then you won’t be ten, you’ll—’

  ‘Shut up!’

  Her brother reddened and pronging a bean on his fork nibbled it off ruminatively. ‘I want to go home,’ he muttered after a bit, so quietly Mary only just caught it.

  ‘This is home.’ Impatient with trying to eat politely in the strange kitchen, she heaped beans and fish fingers on to the convex side of her fork and shovelled them into her mouth. When she had finished she rinsed their plates without washing-up liquid because it was not in the ‘Under Sink’ boxes.

  Neither child voiced what each had decided must be true, that although they had been told their father had a new job, the move to Hammersmith from Holloway, away from everything they knew, was in some way Mary’s fault.

  ‘I don’t like it here.’ Michael spoke to the lino with brimming eyes.

  ‘Nor do I,’ his sister replied without turning round.

  4

  Monday, 23 April 2012

  Terry had painted an outline of each tool in white on the wall in the understairs cupboard. It had put Stella in mind of the police marker for a corpse at a crime scene. She positioned the vacuum cleaner on a shelf and hooked up the hose according to its outline. She cleared the house, only the white shapes would remain. She thought of the black outlines at David Barlow’s. In this house she was the intruder.

  Each evening Stella Darnell came to her father’s end of terrace in what had once been a modest cul-de-sac off the Great West Road but was now quietly chic. She cleaned already clean rooms, consumed a microwaved shepherd’s pie from the freezer before catching up with emails on his computer in what had been her bedroom forty years earlier. She never stayed the night nor, although Terry Darnell had been dead a year, had she begun getting rid of his belongings.

  Fresh from meeting David Barlow, and still in her dark blue business suit and the sturdy black boots she used for cleaning, Stella decanted tonight’s ready meal – the potato topping pleased her, furrowed with straight fork lines – on to a white china plate and placed it off centre in the microwave, which Terry said captured the hot spots. When Stella had let slip to Jackie what she ate for supper, Jackie had suggested Stella liven it with veg from the mini-mart below the office. Or better still have supper with her and her family, a suggestion Jackie made about once a month. Stella had ignored her advice but sometimes accepted the invitation. She did not say she preferred to eat alone. Although in Terry’s house, she was not alone. The fancy-named journalist had been wrong. Terry, a retired detective chief superintendent, was dead, but Stella was conscious of his ghostly presence – like a chalky outline – in every room.

  She keyed in the timing and at the same moment heard a distant clunk. The liquid-crystal screen went black and displayed only her frown. The fridge had stopped humming. A power cut.

  At eight o’clock it would be light for another hour, but Stella could do no more witho
ut electricity. She had tidied and vacuumed; there was no point in staying. She wrapped the plate of food in clingfilm and fitted it in the fridge beside a tub of margarine. The half-litre of milk should last; she had bought it yesterday. She would leave the other shepherd’s pies in the freezer; the outage must be temporary.

  On the path outside she clutched her keys to stop them jangling. So far she had avoided meeting Terry’s neighbours. The lamp-post on the other side of the street had been flickering on and off for months. Stella intended to tell the council. It should not be on now: it was not lighting-up time.

  In a power cut it should not be on at all.

  She glanced in through the window of next door and saw the green of a football pitch on a television screen. She jogged back to Terry’s and tried the hall light. Nothing. The sound when the power failed must have been the lever tripping on the fuse box.

  During her cleaning Stella had not seen a fuse box beneath the stairs or the sink and from the few times she had ventured into the attic after her dad’s death she knew it wasn’t there.

  She contemplated the panelled door to the basement set beside the tool cupboard with stirring dread. She had avoided Terry’s particular lair. The fuse box would be in the basement.

  Terry Darnell had moved into the Victorian house in the London Borough of Hammersmith when he married Stella’s mother in 1966, six months before Stella was born. Suzanne Darnell left him seven years later and took their daughter to live in an austere mansion apartment in Barons Court. Terry lived on in the house until his death in January last year. At first the Darnells had rented the property, but Terry’s journey up the police ranks had been smooth, swift and steep, so by 1981 he was already a detective inspector and could afford a mortgage on the property. Suzie complained that he was ambitious, too busy for a wife and daughter. Eventually Stella had grown to consider her father a stranger about whom she knew little.

  She did know that Terry always carried a camera; it had frustrated her that he would interrupt a conversation to snap a photograph: of a suspect, a bicycle chained illegally to railings or a passing car. He developed the negatives in the darkroom in his basement.