Ghost Girl

by Thomson, Lesley

  Jack sat cross-legged on the mat, like a small boy engrossed in a game. The ‘game’ involved raking through the rubbish. Suzanne Darnell was leaning over the arm of her chair, chattering happily to him; neither was aware of Stella.

  ‘…he would have got away with it if it hadn’t been for me because no one had spotted the anomaly. Their filing system was a mountain of Xerox boxes stored in the basement. Call yourself a detective, I told him.’

  ‘Sometimes it takes another eye.’ Jack stirred a lump of soggy tea bags about with a forefinger. He delicately parted them, then pushed them to the far reaches of the newspaper.

  ‘Another eye? Terry never paid attention in the first place, he was always somewhere else,’ Suzie Darnell retorted. ‘Terry used to say my legs could win Miss World,’ she said apropos of nothing.

  ‘Ah ha!’ Jack exclaimed.

  Stella, still by the door, watched with distaste as he sweep aside the cellophane from a pork pie and the packaging of a ready meal of liver and onions.

  ‘Is this it?’ He balanced on his haunches, steadying himself on the armchair.

  Suzie made a darting motion like a bird; their heads came together like conspirators.

  ‘Yes!’ She clapped her hands and looking up saw Stella. ‘He’s found my ring! Your clever Jack has found my ring.’

  ‘Your engagement ring? The one you lost in 1980?’ Stella was disbelieving.

  ‘What? I didn’t get engaged. My view was if you’re going to do it then just do it. No, my eternity ring, I lost it… oh – when did I lose it?’ She appealed to Jack, her hands fluttering over the cushion on her lap, fingers tapping away.

  ‘Last night.’ Jack bundled up the rubbish.

  Jack had found the needle in the haystack. Stella ought to feel pleased. She looked about her. The room was transformed. When she tidied, she picked something up only to put it down again because there was no place for it. If she threw anything out, her mother might not miss it, but months later it would feature in the rubbish search. Suzie maintained she had lost a black glass necklace that Terry had given her when Stella was born. Stella found a similar necklace in an antique shop in Kensington and bought it, put it in the bin and then feigned its discovery. Her mum claimed never to have had such a necklace and didn’t want the one Stella had found because it had been in the rubbish. It sometimes occurred to Stella that her mum might be getting early onset dementia, but then she would refer to something insignificant that Stella herself had forgotten and she would dismiss the suspicion.

  Stella had become resigned to simply keeping her mother’s chaos at bay, but Jack had gone further. He had rearranged the furniture to give the electric fire focus. By placing the sofa under the window, he had forged a pathway to the serving hatch. She hoped the knick-knacks had been disposed of, but spotted her mother’s horrible china figurine of a maiden with a basket of blooms propped on her hip dancing towards the toy guardsman with the movable arms that Suzie had refused to give to Stella when she was little. Jack had put them together.

  ‘We need to get going.’ Stella jangled her keys. There had been no spare van. Jackie had dropped Jack at Barons Court and Stella had come to collect him in the van that had not yet been sprayed with the logo. She wanted to discuss the blue folder.

  ‘What a marvellous job.’ Suzie Darnell’s hands fell still on her cushion.

  ‘Until next time.’ Jack tied up the handles on the rubbish bag.

  ‘Jack will come next week at the same time, Mum.’ Stella was harsher than she had intended.

  ‘I want him before that.’ Her mum sounded sad.

  ‘He has other work. We’ll see.’ Stella moved the dancing maiden to the middle of the shelf. She had forgotten that she had decided Jack should come twice a week but would not admit her mistake.

  ‘She was perfect there.’ Her mother’s fingers were frantic on the cushion.

  Stella slid the figurine back. She walked over the newly exposed carpet and pecked Suzie on the cheek.

  Jack was leaning on the handle of the steam cleaner by the lift, surrounded by cleaning materials. Stella felt bad for her behaviour upstairs; her mum had the knack of bringing out the worst in her. Clumsy at small talk, she told Jack about finding the jacket under David Barlow’s bath to lighten the strained mood, but Jack said nothing. She couldn’t read his closed expression. They walked out of the flats in silence.

  A paper flapped behind the windscreen wipers on the van. Stella had a parking ticket.

  ‘I forgot to put money in the meter!’ Unbelieving, she folded the ticket into the map compartment. Was it she and not Suzie who was losing her memory?

  ‘What do you think?’ Jack asked when they were beating traffic in the outside lane of the Talgarth Road.

  ‘It looks good.’ Stella had worried that Suzie would find fault with Jack. A worry that was nothing in the face of her mother turning him into a god.

  ‘Not the flat, the pictures in this file. The streets.’ He had the folder on his lap.

  Stella signalled left and rounded the Broadway. She exited on to King Street and slowed down by Marks and Spencer’s.

  ‘A boy was killed here on Monday afternoon. He was called Joel Evans.’

  Jack craned around to see the witness appeal notice. ‘See how like piglets those sandbags—’

  ‘There’s one like that in one of the pictures. I think they’re scenes of an accident,’ Stella interrupted.

  ‘I can’t meet tonight.’ Jack was genial. ‘Actually, if you could pull over by the school here on the left. Oh… OK, too late.’ He patted the blue folder.

  ‘Be careful with that,’ Stella warned. ‘Why, what are you doing?’

  ‘Oh, nothing that can’t wait.’ Jack settled back and began leafing through the photographs.

  Stella accelerated towards Brentford.

  ‘You said it used to annoy you that Terry took pictures when he was with you. Suzie seems exercised by that too.’

  ‘It did, but I was a kid. Dad wasn’t a tourist, he was following a hunch or a lead. He’s numbered the pictures, but not said where they are.’

  ‘More than one accident. These are different streets. Do you think he suspected a crime?’

  ‘I’d say he’d spotted a pattern.’

  ‘Question is, what is it?’ Jack scratched his cheek ruminatively.

  It was a year since they had solved the Rokesmith murder – using the case files Stella had found in her father’s attic – and she missed the work. Jack said that detective work was like cleaning: it restored order to people’s lives. Stella had not thought of herself as a detective, but perhaps Terry had. Suddenly she knew this was true. Terry was a tidy man; he put things away. He had died of a heart attack, but must have felt ill for a while and had sorted out his affairs. Her dad had left the blue folder out for her. It was another case. Stella bit her lip to stop herself smiling.

  Twenty minutes later Jack and Stella were side by side on her plush white sofa, Jack in his coat despite the effective central heating. Stella clasped a mug of tea; Jack was neglecting his hot milk and honey on which a skin was forming. She trained the table lamp on to the folder.

  Jack examined the witness appeal board on the kerb in the labelled picture. ‘This is not the accident you pointed out just now in King Street.’

  ‘Of course not, that happened this week.’

  ‘Silly me. You might be on to something with the accidents.’ Jack leafed through the folder. ‘Was Terry ever in Traffic?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘Suzie will know.’

  ‘Don’t tell her.’ Stella spilt her tea on the file. She hastily wiped the plastic. ‘She’ll get in the way. I mean, she’ll confuse things.’

  ‘You underestimate her.’ Jack nibbled the arm of his reading specs. ‘Where did you find this file?’

  ‘In Dad’s darkroom. I think he wanted me to see it.’

  ‘Ah, you made it to the basement. Well done.’ Jack pinched the skin off his milk, draped
it on the edge of the mug and took a gulp.

  Stella ignored Jack’s remark. ‘On the other hand he was always taking pictures so maybe there’s no significance.’

  ‘Could be like an artist’s sketchbook: Terry’s collection of hunches.’ Jack lingered on the picture of a car on a forecourt with two legs sticking out from under it. ‘A man mending a car. It’s numbered one in the series which could be significant, or then again not.’ He turned the pages. ‘Your mum’s had quite a life, hasn’t she?’

  ‘Hardly. She did the same secretarial job for years and since retiring has done nothing.’ Stella sank back on the sofa. This was why she didn’t want Jack to clean there. Suzie was now a paragon of virtue.

  ‘She was telling me she used to type up your dad’s reports. She was a secretary for the police and once solved a murder case.’

  ‘She made that last bit up.’ Stella was peremptory.

  ‘I’m not so sure.’ Jack sipped his milk.

  ‘She was a secretary. It’s how she met Terry.’

  ‘She said he caught her speeding on Holland Park Avenue. He was off duty and she was doing forty miles an hour in a Mini Traveller. He promised to let her off if she went on a date with him.’

  ‘That’s not true!’ Stella struggled up from the sofa and took her mug into the kitchen. She called back, ‘Terry would never have broken the law.’

  ‘He told her it was love at first sight and got her the police job, which she loved. When she divorced him she went to work for the council. I get the feeling everything stopped for your mum after that.’

  Stella stowed the mugs in the dishwasher and rinsed out the milk carton and tossed it in the recycling bag. Jack had finished her milk, which meant black tea in the morning. One cleaning shift and he was the expert.

  When she returned, Jack was examining the blue folder. ‘We need to identify these roads, then find out what happened there. Shame Terry didn’t label them. I suppose he thought he had time.’ Jack got up. ‘Let’s look on the internet.’

  Stella used the third bedroom as an office. It overlooked the landscaped slopes at the front of the gated development. Night had fallen; the glass reflected only Jack and Stella sitting at the desk.

  Jack slipped the photograph with the witness appeal board out of the plastic sleeve and aligned it on the scanner. Stella pressed ‘Scan’ and the image appeared upside down on the screen. She rotated it 180 degrees.

  ‘Zoom in on the board,’ Jack murmured. Black print filled the screen. Although fuzzy and pixelated, Stella read:

  WITNESS APPEA

  FATAL ACCIDEN

  2002 at HOUR

  CAN YOU HEL

  Telephone 080 8246

  ‘We know the time.’ Stella jotted ‘20.02’ in her Filofax. ‘That’s not much help.’

  ‘From the position I think it’s the year: 2002, which actually limits it. Let’s assume it’s Terry’s borough.’ Jack typed ‘car fatalities Hammersmith 2002’ into the search bar. It returned eight possibilities between 2003 and the 2012 all linked to the Hammersmith & Fulham Chronicle website.

  ‘I think you mistyped,’ Stella said.

  Jack did it again and got the same result.

  ‘Not all answers are here.’ He sniffed steepled hands. ‘OK, let’s go with it.’ He clicked on the top link and brought up the newspaper’s web page. Amongst brightly coloured adverts was a postage-stamp-sized piece about a fifty-three-year-old man who had crashed his car into a telegraph pole on Marquis Way in March 2003. In the habit of capturing every scrap of information, Stella jotted down ‘Harvey Gray’ along with the details in her Filofax.

  Jack took the photograph out of the scanner. ‘We should check out back copies in Hammersmith Library.’ He contemplated the picture in his hand, frowning. ‘Could it be as simple as Terry was thinking of moving house and these streets are contenders?’

  ‘Nothing is simple, you’re always saying that.’ Stella did not want this to be the explanation. Surely Terry wasn’t planning to move from the house in Rose Gardens North? It had been her home for the first seven years of her life.

  Jack sat down again. ‘You know we could shortcut this by you asking that mate of your dad’s to buzz through their database.’

  ‘No.’ Stella took the picture off him and slipped it into its sleeve. ‘The police are clients.’

  ‘You’re working for the police?’ Jack’s voice fluted on the last word. He turned to look at her.

  ‘Not working for them. We’re cleaning the station.’ Stella was mild. She worked the mouse and panned the image until the entire street was visible.

  ‘How is you cleaning not working for them?’ Jack looked at the laptop. ‘Wait a mo. What’s that grey blob?’ He tapped the screen. ‘Go in a bit.’

  ‘Careful of the plasma,’ Stella barked. She enlarged a square shape beside the kerb until it took up the lower quartile of the screen.

  ‘A horse trough!’ Jack pronounced. ‘I love those. They were a wonderful idea. Practical and yet considerate.’ He folded his arms and tipped the chair back. ‘Bit like you, Stell!’

  The trough stood at an angle from the kerb. Faint lettering was carved in the stone. Stella scribbled down what she could read: ‘Be ind a d rci ul To Ou Ani a s’.

  It was like an anagram in one of her mother’s crosswords; despite having all the letters Stella could never get them. Her mum took seconds to find the sentence.

  ‘“‘Be Kind and Merciful to Our Animals”.’ Jack contemplated the trough. ‘The Metropolitan Drinking Foundation and Cattle Trough Association was a charitable venture set up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.’ He leant forward. ‘I’m sure I’ve been to that street.’

  ‘That narrows it down nicely.’ Stella preferred not to think about where Jack went at night. He had promised to stop his nocturnal jaunts, but this morning when she had knocked on his door he had not been there.

  Jack grabbed the mouse from her and brought up Google. With one finger he laboriously pecked out ‘horse troughs London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham’. Of the links listed, most referred to the borough, to horses or to troughs.

  Stella snatched at his cuff: ‘Go to that one.’

  Jack clicked the penultimate link on the page and brought up an Excel spreadsheet. ‘Voilà!’ He clapped his hands.

  The document listed the location of all horse troughs, drinking fountains and other ‘items of statuary’ in London. The last entry was numbered 1006.

  ‘This will take forever,’ Jack sighed. ‘This trough could be anywhere.’

  ‘We’re focusing on Hammersmith,’ Stella reminded him. ‘Let’s assume it’s there.’ Privately, Stella too was dismayed by the immensity of the task. She looked at Jack: ‘Might you recognize a street name? From your walking…’

  ‘I don’t bother with names unless they are a sign. I get a feel for the direction, the paving, the light, chewing-gum shapes on the pavements…’

  ‘OK, so what about the pavements and the light? Anything strike you?’ Stella went with Jack’s methods, off the wall though they were.

  Jack yawned and scrubbed at his hair. ‘No, can’t say it does. We need to find out what happened in Hammersmith in that year.’ He stood up. ‘Actually, I have to go.’

  Stella was taken aback. Jack’s use of ‘actually’ was a bad sign – speaking of signs; he was up to something.

  ‘If you did talk to your guy he might at least tell you—’

  ‘No.’ Stella addressed the grainy grey of the granite trough. ‘And he’s not “my guy”.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Jack did up his coat. ‘Shall I come at the same time tomorrow?’

  ‘What time was that?’ Stella scrolled the spreadsheet up to the first entry.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Come when you finish work.’

  Stella heard the front door shutting. She should be used to Jack Harmon going off without warning, not responding to messages or being home when she called. He was reliable when
he wasn’t going AWOL. Jack was not like other people and generally she liked this, but tonight she was uneasy. Jackie said knowledge was power, yet Stella suspected knowing more about Jack wouldn’t help at all.

  The spreadsheet belonged in her world. Jack lived by numbers, light and pavements. He saw signs and portents everywhere, which dictated his decisions. At work, Stella spent hours compiling or combing spreadsheets. She collected and cut data according to an objective, analysed it, drew a logical conclusion and made a rational decision.

  She put her worries about Jack to one side and applied herself to the task. She chose the ‘filter’ tab in the header, pressed ‘sort’ and keyed in ‘horse troughs’. Within minutes she had isolated six streets in Hammersmith with horse troughs. She printed off the list and opened Street View. Jack had told her that before he went on walks in London, he rehearsed the route on Street View. Stella was dubious about the motive for his ‘journeys’, as he called them, but saw sense in a reconnoitre of the task. She rather thought that Jack’s approach was why he was the best cleaner she had ever known.

  The hours passed. Stella worked on.

  Some troughs sported displays of blooms, others were unofficial litter bins. One of the locations – on King Street outside a prep school – turned out to be a drinking fountain with no horse trough to be seen.

  Stella sniffed success with a trough by the kerb as in Terry’s picture, but this was dashed when she saw it was on a corner. Terry’s trough was on a straight road with no side turnings.

  She reached the last entry on the list. The picture on Street View jerked into focus. There was a trough by the kerb on a long road. There were shops and traffic and the pavements were busy with pedestrians. The trough was outside a pub. Dead end. Either the horse trough had been removed since the Terry took the photograph so wasn’t on the list or the list was incomplete. Or both.

  Later in bed, Stella remembered Jack’s suggestion that she ask Martin Cashman. While it made sense, she would not cadge a favour. She had never told Jack that she had approached Cashman during the Rokesmith case and got her fingers burnt. Terry could have asked him but had not. The witness appeal board gave them a year: 2002. A big window but, like deep cleaning, laborious forensic work was Stella’s forte.