Ghost Girl

by Thomson, Lesley

  That day the fat waxy crayons had done her bidding and recreated the dog exactly. She had a good feeling in her tummy when her teacher pinned it on the classroom wall. The good feeling went when Stella explained to the children at her table that Trixy was best at sniffing for bodies underwater. She was sent to the headmistress. Her mum had been cross with Terry. Soon after – and so in the seven-year-old’s mind linked – her mum and dad divorced. Why was ‘trixy and tulip’ here?

  Stella was in her mother’s flat. It was clean last time she visited; this was a transformation. She paused by the open door to her bedroom. The tiger fleece bedspread from her adolescence was draped over the bed; the rabbit knitted by her nana was propped on the pillow. Bunny had gone to charity, how come he was back?

  Stella drifted into the room. No dust on the venetian blind. On the shelves above the bed were the boxes of stationery with the original Clean Slate branding and files bulging with Clean Slate’s first invoices and receipts. Her mother’s electric typewriter was next to them. Gone were the mounds of fabric and the heaps of suppliers’ catalogues that Suzie had collected.

  ‘Stella, is that you?’ her mum trilled from the living room.

  ‘Yes.’ The door swung wide when Stella pushed it and banged against the wall. This was because the carton of clothes Suzie refused to let her chuck had gone.

  ‘You’ll dent the plaster!’

  House-proud now.

  Suzie was perched in her armchair; she too seemed spruce and to have grown in stature. The plaster ceiling rose of carved blooms and cherubs was free of London grime.

  Stella did not need to inspect for vacuum marks on the carpet pile, she could see them from where she stood. The scent of carpet shampoo stung her nostrils. The curtains in the two windows were tied back with coloured lengths of material, presumably from the fabric collection. The panes were so spotless they were invisible. Free of its protective plastic cloth, sunlight brought up the finish on her mother’s pine dinner table. It was no longer laden with objects. Gone was the box of cleaning samples, along with the ‘Bag for Life’ bulging with bargains brokered in junk shops, regardless of need. There was no chipped crockery or postcards from forsaken seaside resorts. Surfaces gleamed.

  The room was restored to the room of Stella’s childhood. The rag mat on which she had played with her dad’s Meccano was spread in front of the gas fire.

  ‘I got your message, Mum.’

  ‘We’ve made you tea.’ Jack gestured to the familiar diamond of coconut matting on the coffee table. Stella might be seven; time could be turned back. She took the mug and went into the kitchen. Strategically positioned appliances on the deeply cleaned counter made it a showcase for what is possible in a tiny space.

  ‘What are you doing, love?’ Suzie called.

  ‘Sticking it in the microwave. I like it hot.’

  ‘It’s hot,’ Jack joined in.

  ‘It won’t be enough.’ She took a sip to prove it and fanned at her mouth. It was hot. She came back and sat on the edge of the sofa, now by the window.

  On the Saturdays her mum had her – which was most Saturdays – she let her have a bar of chocolate. Sitting here, Stella ate it too quickly, flicking through the Beano and later Jackie. She had sat here, washed and dressed, waiting for Terry to collect her. Sometimes he could not come.

  ‘See what a good job your Jack has done?’ Suzie tapped on the obligatory cushion; something had not changed. ‘Take your jacket off, you’re always in a rush.’

  Stella shook her head. She was in a rush.

  ‘We have a proposal.’ Jack lifted his glass of milk to take in Suzanne Darnell.

  Stella sniffed an ambush. Jack was inclined to be sentimental about families. ‘Suz, you tell.’ He looked at her mother.

  ‘I want a job.’ In her effort to get the words out, Suzie Darnell’s intonation was aggressive. Her fingers thwacked the cushion. This provided her daughter with the justification she needed to wrest control of the situation.

  ‘You’re retired, Mum, you don’t need a job. Your finances are healthy and will be even better if you move. The landlords are desperate, they’ll give you a lump sum and I’ll top it up. We could get a cottage in the country. With a garden. Or sheltered accommodation, maybe by the sea.’

  ‘I’m only sixty-six and I feel thirty-six. I don’t want to moulder in a henhouse.’

  ‘Anyone over fifty can live in those places if their partner or husband is older.’

  ‘My husband is dead.’

  Stella’s tea was exactly the right temperature. Although Jack only drank milk, he made perfect tea and coffee.

  ‘I want a job.’ Her mother was appealing to Jack.

  Stella jumped up.

  ‘Hang on.’ Jack put up a hand. ‘What your mum means is she has skills to offer.’ Without his coat, in his grey knitted sleeveless jumper frayed at the shoulders, crumpled shirt sleeves rolled halfway up his wrists and glasses perched on his nose, Jack had an old-fashioned authority. He was always looking for a home; it seemed he had found one.

  Ghost girl. Stella saw herself cross-legged under the table, beneath a tent of fabrics and blankets, dressed in the Red Indian Chief costume her dad had given her but never saw her wear. After she had constructed the wigwam and donned the costume, she hadn’t known what to do next. Nor did she now.

  ‘Stella, did you hear me?’ It was Jack.

  The wigwam vanished. The girl too.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I told you she wouldn’t listen.’ Suzie drummed her cushion.

  ‘Yes, yes, she will!’

  Stella had never seen Jack angry before. She sat down.

  ‘Your mum wants a job with Clean Slate. I thought this was possible. You are looking for another assistant for Jackie.’

  ‘Doing what?’ At the mention of her business Stella bristled.

  ‘You tell me. For a start, typing.’ Jack took a long draught of his milk. ‘Suzie’s speed is ninety-five words per minute with a nil error rate.’ He bit his lower lip. ‘That is fast.’

  ‘We don’t do “typing”, as you call it and Mum hasn’t had that speed for years.’

  ‘It’s like riding a bicycle.’ Suzie Darnell addressed the electric fire, her fingers skittering over the fabric. ‘The quick brown fox…’

  ‘Your mum types every day.’ Jack indicated Suzie’s cushion.

  Her mother had developed the tic of tapping a cushion when she spoke after Stella had left home. Now she saw what Jack meant. It was a keyboard. Each finger tap was a letter, each beat of her thumb put a space between words. Phantom stenography. Her mum was stressed. If she worked, this would increase.

  Stella’s mobile was ringing.

  ‘Jackie, hello there!’ Timing never better. ‘I’m so sorry about our meeting. An emergency with my mother, as you guessed.’

  She went through to the kitchen, the phone tucked between her cheek and her shoulder. She dropped a spot of washing-up liquid in her mug, sluiced it under the hot tap and dried her hands on a crisply ironed towel.

  ‘No problem. We need to meet to review the short list though.’

  ‘Yes.’ Stella opened the cupboards until she found where the mugs now went. What shortlist did Jackie mean?

  Jackie must have guessed her bewilderment. ‘Six candidates coming in. Three today and three tomorrow, for the post of my assistant.’

  ‘I’m on my way.’ Too late Stella discovered the phone was on hands free. Her mum and Jack had heard the conversation.

  ‘I have to go.’ She breezed back. ‘I’ll give you a lift.’ She tipped her head at Jack.

  ‘I’ve finished here.’ Jack reached for her mum’s mug.

  ‘Leave that, love.’ Suzie Darnell touched his arm and, looking at her daughter, said: ‘You don’t want to be late for Jackie.’ Her fingers remained still. Stella muttered a goodbye.

  Jack was quiet in the lift. He took out a tobacco pouch strapped with an elastic band and, opening it, pinched out a twist,
shut the packet and returned it to his coat pocket. Stella hesitated over the lift buttons as if there were any way but down.

  Downstairs she wrenched open the gate with a clang and followed Jack. He walked head-down, tweaking tobacco into a thin line, the cigarette paper butterfly-like in his palm.

  ‘Your mum said, before she had you she worked for the police, typing reports, cases lists, indexing.’ He rolled the paper into a cylinder.

  ‘We’re not talking yesterday.’ Stella hurried along Margravine Road.

  ‘She typed for Terry – he couldn’t read his own handwriting. I didn’t know she used to run Clean Slate with you.’ Jack cradled his silver cigarette case.

  ‘We’re going to see someone.’ The words were out before Stella had formed the idea.

  ‘Don’t you have interviews?’ Jack slotted his seat belt into the socket.

  ‘Jackie can do them.’

  ‘Jackie has a jolly good sense of people,’ Jack agreed, the roll-up bobbing between his lips.

  In anyone else the pallid complexion and dark stubble would have been a concern, but Stella guessed this was one of Jack’s good days. ‘Take this.’ She lifted down a street atlas from a compartment above the sun visor. ‘Look up British Grove.’ She executed a six-point turn, crushing a recycling bin against the wall.

  ‘What happened to the satnav? You don’t believe in maps.’

  ‘It’s broken.’

  ‘British Grove is off King Street, opposite the junction for Goldhawk Road.’ He raised the book. ‘Is this A to Z yours?’

  ‘Clean Slate’s, yes.’

  ‘I’ve lost mine.’

  ‘Yours is defaced by those letters on each page. Time you got another.’ Stella had to be firm with Jack. ‘That is not yours.’

  ‘I dropped it and now a stranger has it.’ Jack sounded mournful. He believed his possessions were lost without him. Stella scoffed inwardly, but then saw Bunny sitting on her pillow at her mother’s. She’d been worried sick about him when he went. However, a street atlas was hardly the same.

  Travelling towards the lights on Hammersmith Road, passing the site of the register office – long gone – where her parents had married in 1966, Stella remembered: ‘What was that about cracking the code?’

  ‘Ah yes.’ Jack tapped his cigarette case. ‘The digits for the dates when the men died all equal seven.’

  ‘Not all. Some have eight numbers.’

  ‘Not the number of numbers, the total of the numbers. Take Paul Vickery, our first death on Marquis Way. He died on the sixteenth of March. That’s a one, a six and a three. It equals ten. One and nought is one. Add the year, which was 1977. One plus nine is ten, make that a one again, two sevens are fourteen which is five. Add in our two ones and we have seven. The trick is to think of it like reducing gravy, keep boiling it down.’

  Concentrating on keeping to the speed limit, Stella had lost track. ‘I’ve nearly filled in the grid. Get my Filofax.’ She indicated her rucksack.

  Jack scrutinized the neatly drawn matrix. ‘Hey, well done on Denis Atkins. How did you find him?’

  ‘There was a plaque on Mafeking Avenue. I found an article about when it was unveiled, which gave me the year. It mentioned a man called Atkins…’ Stella was rather impressed with herself.

  ‘See! The seventh of September 1970. All of that comes to thirty-three. Add that and it comes to six.’ Jack’s cigarette fell on to his lap. ‘And Charlie Hampson’s date – the15th March comes to twenty which boils down to two. What a nuisance.’ He found the cigarette and snapped it into his case. ‘Something about threes maybe, thirty-three was Jesus’s age when —’

  ‘Two of them were killed on a Sunday and mostly in March, including Hampson.’ Stella felt excitement building, the answer was just out of reach. They were by Marks and Spencer’s. The witness appeal board about Joel Evans’s death was still there.

  ‘Very true.’ Jack shut the Filofax and popped it back in the rucksack.

  ‘There’s a seven in half of the dates, we keep finding seven bits of glass and the boys who died were aged seven. This man has a thing about seven.’ Stella was on it now.

  ‘What’s in British Grove?’

  ‘Lucille May.’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘A reporter on the Hammersmith and Fulham Chronicle. She covered most of the accidents. She did that piece about Terry. Don’t mention it. I won’t say who I am.’

  ‘Sounds like a Hollywood actress. Great name.’ Jack whistled. ‘Nice one, Stell. Are we telling her about Terry’s photos?’

  ‘Absolutely not. She’s a journalist.’

  ‘Have to be clever. They have the snouts of porcupines.’

  ‘You’ll think of something.’ Stella dipped down a road behind the garage where Terry got his car serviced. It had closed down. Hoardings blocked it from view; a sign warned of demolition. Stella saw why older people could resent change. It played havoc with memory. If you didn’t recognize a place, how could you remember where, or even who you had been? The garage going put Terry at another remove. The nice man who had given her polo mints while they waited for his tyres to be changed must be dead now. More bloody ghosts.

  ‘They’re putting up luxury flats.’ Jack dropped her rucksack on the floor. ‘Ooops.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Some man told me.’ He pushed everything back into the bag.

  The garage gave way to a terrace of redbrick villas. Stella drew up by the first house.

  ‘What’s this?’ Jack held up the printout from the police database.

  53

  Thursday, 3 May 2012

  ‘Jamie Markham was my schoolfriend.’ Jack contemplated his milk.

  Stella tapped sharply on the floor with the umbrella, but he ignored her. She should not have left the strategy to Jack; pretending to know the road traffic victim was a bad idea. Lucille May was a journalist. Like a detective, she would be programmed to smell a rat and root it out.

  ‘My dear, you don’t look old enough.’ Lucille May patted Jack’s knee. In a short dress topped with a baggy man’s jumper, her stockinged feet tucked under her, she faced him on a leather chesterfield set in a bay window. On a coffee table in front of the sofa lay a London street atlas and the latest copy of the Chronicle and a heap of files containing Lucille May’s articles. They sipped their drinks.

  ‘I’m older than I look,’ Jack demurred.

  ‘My condolences about Jamie.’

  Stella thought Lucille May might try to sound as though she meant it. She left her hand on Jack’s knee a little too long. Jamie Markham was twenty-nine in 2003 so would now be thirty-eight. This meant it was plausible they could be schoolfriends. Still Jack’s ruse was risky; she would have said so if he had told her what he planned to say.

  ‘We lost touch after school.’ Jack looked regretful.

  At least he was resisting embellishments: unlike her, Jack was a skilled liar. The coffee was lukewarm and sweet. Stella put it down.

  Lucille May’s flirty, rather skittish manner didn’t suit either her or her name. She was the woman who had interviewed Stella about her father’s death, the article that had prompted David to call. Their conversation had been on the phone, Stella having refused to let her come to the office, so she had not seen her until now. She had mumbled her name at the door, but May’s eyes were on Jack. Stella had to hope the journalist didn’t recognize her from the photograph used in the article. May had a careworn air that, like Jack, made it hard to guess her age, mid-fifties, Stella decided. She was tall. Stella was always surprised to meet women as tall as herself at six feet. May had invited them in before they could finish explaining why they were there. Stella thought back to the woman’s probing questions about Terry and shuddered. ‘Lucie, please!’ Ushered ahead of her into the kitchen, they waited while she made the drinks so had no chance to confer.

  The kitchen had not been decorated for decades. Stella had eyed with distaste chipped blue Formica surfaces, shrunk and fade
d floral curtains that hung limply. The living room was dingy, the furniture tired and outdated. Despite the rooms having been knocked through and French doors added, foliage around lattice windows let only a dim greenish light filter in.

  Jack’s ‘open sesame’ had been his dead friend, Jamie Markham. Fiddling with the cutting on Markham’s death, May needed no encouragement to talk.

  The room was that of a busy professional. Although worn, it looked unlived-in. A gigantic television divided the room by a green-tiled fireplace. The wall above and the mantelpiece were filled with cheaply framed photographs of May with various low-grade celebrities spanning at least thirty years. They put Stella in mind of Terry’s basement wall with pictures of herself. A warped laminate bookcase was packed with garish true crime paperbacks and back copies of the Chronicle. Trying to sit properly in a squashy oatmeal settee, Stella saw no sign of a partner or children, although Lucille May wore a ring on her wedding finger, implying there had been someone at some stage.

  ‘The Markhams were newly married and she was pregnant. Well, you’ll know that.’

  ‘Not until I read your article. I’d appreciate hearing anything you can tell me about Jamie.’ Jack looked sorrowful.

  Stella got up and fled to the other end of the room where doors opened on to a garden. So much for teamwork. Since Jack had found the printout, they had not made eye contact.

  The garden was a meadow. The grass was too long for a domestic machine; were she doing the job, she would bring in their new rotary field mower. Stella’s eye was drawn to a swing. The chains were hanging from a rusting metal frame, the seat green with mildew. Lucille May had at least one child.

  Stella got the picture: ‘empty nesters’ holding on to their kid’s stuff for hoped-for grandchildren. No child should use that swing; it belonged in a skip. Lucille May needed Clean Slate’s gold garden package. She would get Beverly to pop a leaflet through. She turned back to the room.

  ‘…Markham’s son had reared some creature… Let me see.’ May was rootling through her files. ‘Here we are. A sweet lad. Bit like my brother – how we change!’