Ghost Girl

by Thomson, Lesley

  As Terry Darnell’s only child, Stella had inherited his house – the mortgage long paid off. She had resolved to sell it, but instead was preserving Terry’s routine and keeping it clean.

  If her dad’s presence could linger in rooms scrubbed with carpet cleaner, vacuumed with maximum suction and mopped and polished to a flawless shine, it would be manifest in the darkroom where he had spent most of his spare time.

  In light through panes in the door, she tried the handle. The latch slid through the strike plate but the door did not budge. It was locked and Stella did not have the key.

  Soon it would be dark. She could not leave, although it was cold for the start of spring: the contents of the freezer would not survive. The clocks on the DVD, the microwave and the boiler and the myriad timers triggering and extinguishing lights, her father’s ploy to fool burglars, would slip out of sync. His intricate system would break down.

  Terry’s stuff, his clothes, the few books and his computer were as he had left them the morning he drove to a seaside town in Sussex where he had died. Stella did admit privately that she saw herself as only the custodian of her father’s home against the day he would return.

  She retrieved Terry’s keys from her rucksack. Two for the front door, one for the back and the spare for his Toyota, which she had forgotten to give the new owner. No basement key.

  Terry Darnell said that burglars rely on ease of egress not entrance, so make it hard for them to get the goods out. In a house where everyone is sleeping, oblivious, a draught from an open front door might be the first sign anything is wrong. She wondered how David Barlow’s burglars had left. Her own fifth-floor flat was fortressed above a foyer protected by a code and a camera, her front door strengthened by a London bar, a mortise lock and a chain.

  Again she was struck by the conviction that had Terry wanted her in his house he would have left instructions about watering plants, the trick with the boiler or the optimum programme for the dishwasher. He had never shown her where he kept the key to the basement. Jack would say that the power cut was a sign that she should leave.

  Stella tried the kitchen drawers, the cupboards and unlikely places like the door lintels and the grille fronting the sitting-room heater.

  Outside it had grown dark and the landing was in shadow. A new stillness increased her unease. Mustering calm, she tried to second-guess Terry. Jack would suggest she ‘became’ him; he imagined they were alike. Stella tried to remember Terry and realized that she could not.

  One stair at a time. At the top it occurred to her that some burglars defecated in people’s homes, shitting on beds, pissing in wardrobes. A reason to deep clean. The bathroom, with less to steal, was where they were least likely to go. The key would be there.

  To her mum’s horror – although Suzie had left by then – Terry replaced the 1920s bathroom fittings with a sale-priced cream fibreglass suite. Now the shower curtain rail sagged and a fine crack ran across the lavatory lid. Stella opened the mirrored cabinet door above the sink. Terry’s toothbrush and toothpaste were in a beaker beside packets of aspirin, a bottle of Warfarin, deodorant and a canister of shaving foam. She had had no difficulty chucking out Terry’s condoms. Burglars would check the cabinet. He would not hide the key here.

  The cast-iron cistern, the only original feature, rested on brackets she found a fiddle to clean. A chain with a grip of perishing grey rubber defied cleaning but Stella did not think it hers to replace. She had missed a cluster of cobwebs between the tank and the wall. If a prospective recruit had cleaned the room, she would not have hired them. She shrugged off shame that for Terry her standards had slipped. The condoms had thrown her; she would deep clean the bathroom.

  The cistern. Stella climbed on to the toilet lid, steadied herself with one of the iron supports and peered over. No key. About to jump down, she paused. She would hide a key here. She looked closer. The cover was not flush to the tank. She nudged it and it shifted. Careful to avoid it sliding off, she inched it aside. Grit scattered down; she blinked and brushed it away with her sleeve, noting crossly that the cuff was flecked with dust.

  She strained on tiptoe and dabbled her hand into the tank. The water was tepid and, even though there had been a cover on, she was nervous about dead birds. She paddled her fingers out as far as she could reach and felt something soft. A sparrow. She snatched away her hand, but then, swallowing hard, nerved herself. She yanked up her sleeve, plunged her hand in and grasped the bird.

  Snap! She teetered on the toilet bowl. Her dad’s toilet lid had broken in two. Stella felt a flash of guilt; she’d have to replace it. She pulled her hand out; water streamed down her wrists, soaking the dirt into the linen.

  The ‘bird’ was a folded plastic pocket, the sort with holes for filing, and inside was a mortise key. Stella knew without trying that it would open the basement door.

  After a year Stella expected the lock to be stiff, but the key turned easily and the door swung silently on oiled hinges. She had been so fixed on the search she had not considered actually going into the basement. A memory of the first time she had come here after Terry’s death flooded back, as vivid as if it were yesterday. She had walked around the house, dark then too, convinced she was not alone. It was one of the few times she had been truly frightened. This time it was a simple power cut and she knew how to mend a fuse. She shone the torch down the steps and descended.

  The sharp tang of photographic solution swept her further back in time to when she used to help her dad develop pictures. Stella grasped the banister rail. It was new – perhaps Terry had felt less sure-footed in his last years. She stopped the thought.

  Matt-black brick walls absorbed the light. At this time of night the Great West Road, yards away, was busy, yet the quiet was absolute. The beam revealed the folds of a blackout curtain, the sink, the table and chair where Terry sorted his pictures. The room was uncannily familiar yet unfamiliar.

  Terry’s enlarger was floor to ceiling; he could blow up images to poster size making large the smallest details. Nowadays Stella did this with a mouse click. Terry had never got to grips with computers.

  She had stood on a box in her crackling plastic apron and swished the paper about the tray with tongs encouraging the picture to emerge. The enamel dishes were still by the sink. There was no paper there now. Terry had not processed prints for years. No purist, he had not clung to old-fangled methods for an authentic look; he snapped photographs for record, not for art’s sake.

  Two lever-arch files were on a shelf above the sink. One, in Terry’s laborious capitals, read: ‘Commodore Fire 1981’. That was the year of Terry’s major case: the Rokesmith murder, which the newspaper article had said Stella solved on her own. At the time she had felt proud, she had done something for him, but after the article she suspected she had betrayed him. Inside the file was a sleeve of negatives. She slipped out a strip and held it in the beam of light: the silvery figures of firefighters, some caught in movement as they dragged on hose reels and wielded ladders. They looked like phantoms. An arc of water sprayed into a hole in the Commodore wall, from which smoke billowed like steam; everything dark was light. The end frame showed the departing fire engine, a ghostly outline. She flipped the page and found the corresponding contact sheets. Terry had captured the entire incident.

  Stella knew the Commodore. It had been on Young’s Corner in King Street. School tennis champion in her teens, on visits to Terry she would perfect slamming returns against its vast wall. She had forgotten this. Opened as a concert hall by Hollywood actress Tallulah Bankhead in the 1920s, it became a cinema. In the late seventies, when people stopped going to films, it became a bingo hall, the crimson velvet and mahogany furnishings tawdry and tired. During its demolition a dropped cigarette butt ignited the detritus of half a century. Terry couldn’t have taken the pictures for the police; it was not his job. Stella would never know why.

  The other file was scribbled with the catch-all ‘Misc’ and had pictures of the Broadway, includin
g Butterwick bus station where she caught the 27 bus to Terry’s, gone now to make way for extra lanes on the Broadway. Terry had snapped the Hammersmith of his youth; some of it had been hers too before it vanished. Stella shoved the file back and, kneeling down, scanned beneath the counter. No fuse box.

  She found a row of yellow Kodak cartons for photographic paper. Terry had written on the nearest one. Stella took a breath. ‘Hammersmith Murders’. Another unsolved case. She grabbed the box and pulled off the lid. There were no case documents, just two eight-by-ten-inch prints. One was of a barge on the river with a building on the far bank, its dark shape reflected in the water. On its wall was a sign: ‘Watneys Brewery’. That dated it. The other picture was of a willow tree with the river visible through the fronds that made shadows on the grass around the tree. So Terry did take arty pictures. Nothing about a murder; Stella was disappointed.

  When engaged in a task do not to be distracted by the client and move to other tasks. Page ten in her staff handbook. Stella clambered to her feet. Terry was distracting her.

  The fuse box was tucked behind the enlarger. It needed fuse wire. About to despair she spotted a card reel of wire and a pair of pliers on top of the box. Terry was always prepared. She snipped off the precise amount, threaded it into the Bakelite housing and levered down the handle. It made a dull clunk. With no light she couldn’t tell if the electricity was on. Stella flashed her torch about for a light switch and found Terry’s black anglepoise lamp.

  Faces, some smiling, some gazing through her, others staring as if trying to recognize her. Stella staggered against Terry’s chair and sat down heavily. The panelled partition to the steps was lined with photographs, a crazy wallpaper. Some life-size, some eight by tens, others holiday-print dimensions. Most were black and white, but a few were printed in Technicolor, giving them a lurid quality.

  All the photographs were of Stella and, she calculated, documented her life from a baby in a Santa hat to the Christmas a couple of weeks before her dad died, when she had dropped off his present: a bottle of Gillette aftershave popped into a gift bag, since he knew what it was. She had no idea he had taken a photograph that day, but there she was, glancing up unsmiling from her phone, as unwilling to stay then as she had been tonight at David Barlow’s. She had drunk a cup of tea and left. She had never seen him again. At least not alive. The partition was entirely covered. There was no room for more pictures. Just as well. Stella wheeled the chair closer.

  Suzanne Darnell still grumbled that her husband had never taken ‘snaps’ of her or of his daughter. In the Wimpy on Hammersmith Broadway, aged eight, Stella worked her way through a banana split while her dad let his coffee cool. She did not remember his camera, yet there on the top row was Stella spooning ice cream from a tall sundae glass and grinning sheepishly at the lens.

  As he had monitored the phases of the Commodore fire, so Terry had recorded his daughter’s forty-five years. Stella had dreaded finding something unmentionable in the basement, something worse than condoms. Instead she had found herself.

  She swivelled around to the table and, leaning on her elbows, rested her chin on her fists. Terry sat here to crop and trim the prints with his metal rule and the scalpel Stella must not touch under any circumstances. They were not there now. Instead there was a blue plastic ring binder that made Stella vaguely think of a visitors’ book for comments. She was a visitor. She eyed the folder.

  Snapping into action, she angled the lamp and gingerly, wary of finding more pictures of herself, opened the folder. She need not have worried. Inside were more eight by tens slotted back to back in reinforced wallets like the one in the cistern. All were framed in landscape mode so Stella turned the folder around. Street after street, the sort of boring shots she had seen Terry take countless times on the access weekends. Tarmac receding from the foreground, lines of uninterrupted kerbstones, some parked cars, lamp-posts and railings. No people. Her mother often said Terry couldn’t relate to people; she would say these pictures proved it. Stella found one that she had missed because she had turned two pages at once. Two legs stuck out from under a VW beetle parked on a wide pavement. More cars were on a ramp leading out of a low white building running down to the kerb. Beyond the depth of field, and so out of focus, were a bus and cars waiting at lights.

  She supposed it was a grisly accident until she recognized the garage. It was on the corner of St Peter’s Square, five minutes’ walk from where she was now. The legs belonged to a mechanic mending a car. There was the Commodore, which put the shot before 1981. She skimmed through the folder: more streets.

  All the prints were black and white, some on eighty-gram photocopying paper using an inkjet printer of poor quality. Lines were blurred and lighter areas were faint. Apart from the garage, she didn’t recognize the locations. Terry had taken the pictures at different times of day and on different days. In some, the pavements glistened with rain and puddles had formed in gutters; in another, a horse trough made a stark shadow in bright sunshine.

  Terry had numbered each print; Stella counted fifteen. The garage was number ‘1’ while some digits like the picture numbered ‘7’ also had a ‘7a’ and a ‘7b’.

  After Terry died, Stella had found all his private papers and files categorized alphabetically, chronologically or numbered. This folder was an exception: nothing on the front or the spine. He had left no clue to what it was. Thinking of Terry’s efficiency reminded Stella that she hadn’t answered her emails. She glanced at her watch: twenty-five to ten. Unbelievably she had been in the basement for over an hour.

  Stella shut the folder, turned off the light and ran up the stairs. The house was dark, but for the street lamp which was now on and sending a wash of light through the glazed door panels. She locked the basement and pocketed the key.

  She did not heat up the shepherd’s pie; she had lost her appetite. Outside on the step, to the ‘meep-meep’ of the house alarm, she locked up. When it stopped she heard her phone ringing from deep in her anorak pocket.

  Mum.

  Stella hesitated and then pressed the green button. ‘Hi.’ She kept her voice low to avoid the neighbours hearing.

  The voice was indistinct, the words intermittent. Stella cocked her head for a better signal, although reception was not the problem. Suzie never spoke into the mouthpiece.

  ‘It’s Mu… I… can’t open… Come and… Stella!’

  Stella fired her key at a green and white van by bushes on the opposite kerb. The phone clamped to her ear, she tossed her rucksack on to the passenger seat and climbed in.

  ‘I can’t hear you, Mum.’ She was playing for time; she knew what her mother wanted. What she always wanted: for Stella to come immediately. Suzie called at all hours of the day and night with urgent requests that could always wait. One day there would be a true emergency; in the meantime she had to play along.

  ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes. Stay where you are, OK?’ she added unnecessarily, hoping that day was not now.

  5

  Monday, 23 April 2012

  ‘Sing a song of sixpence,

  A pocket full of rye;

  Four and twenty blackbirds,

  Baked in a pie.’

  Jack twittered the song under his breath and ducked down an alleyway between the gardens. The raggedy pathway was a topographical leftover from cramming in dwellings in the sixties and was probably the bane of residents’ lives since it offered intruders a convenient route to their houses. He hummed softly. The muddy ground was sticky after the rain and mulched with rubbish: packaging, plastic bottles, cans. He hopped aside to avoid shit: a fox or dog. Possibly human.

  The alley was lined with a hotchpotch of walls, fences and hedges. Privets and sturdy panelled fencing offered him nothing and threatened to dampen his spirits. Then he came upon a ramshackle barricade of patchworked corrugated iron and warped slabs of MDF with a gap through which he spied a lawn and a weed-strewn stretch of concrete. Plastic furniture was heaped higgledy-piggledy down the sid
e of the extension next to a rusting barbeque. The house had a terrible air of neglect. He mulled over the options. Not uncaring tenants: the lease would require minimal standards of care. More likely the house owner had been left behind in the dilapidated dwelling, and was waiting to die. Jack tugged at the corner of an MDF panel and a rotten chunk broke off into his hand. This would too easy and offered him nothing.

  The windows were dark. He did a quick reorientation: he had passed this house many times and seen a ‘For Sale’ sign nailed to the gatepost. He recalled that an old man lived here. He did not fit Jack’s profile; he didn’t offer him a home or look like a murderer. And now perhaps he had died or gone into a home. Jack was losing his touch.

  He continued down the passage.

  ‘When the pie was opened,

  The birds began to sing;

  Was not that a dainty dish,

  To set before the king?’

  Someone with a window open might catch his lilting tones on the night breeze.

  A break in a pyracantha hedge was the challenge he craved. The hedge was planted to curb the likes of him. Through spiky branches he saw an outbuilding.

  White light drenched the scene. A security lamp. He kept still and dropped his singing to a low whistle. After a while the light went out. When the yellow blob faded from his retina Jack made out the lamp fixed to guttering above French doors. He noted every detail: the outbuilding, the garden laid to lawn. The doors were ajar. It was a cold night and they were open? A sign; certainly an invitation. No gravel to give away his approach. Perfect.

  He pulled his coat over his head and, keeping low, pushed through the branches and stepped on to the lawn. The light came on. He crouched in a ball but, as he expected, no one came out. People got blasé and assumed an animal had triggered the light. He dressed in black to merge with the night.