Ghost Girl

by Thomson, Lesley

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Sorry, can I what?’

  ‘Be forgiven for the death of a child.’

  Stella was born a few months after the Moors Murderers were sentenced, but she did remember Terry’s frustration when Hindley died, that she had escaped in the end. ‘No. Definitely not,’ she agreed.

  She lugged the equipment up to the spare room, a room that was spare because the Barlows had no children. Unlike her other relationships, she and David agreed about key things. He had risked his life to save a dog. He cared for his wife even when he no longer loved her. He was loyal and steadfast. And certainly there was no way back if you killed someone.

  Lost in her thoughts, Stella forgot to phone Jack.

  62

  Saturday, 5 May 2012

  Jack stood in Amanda Hampson’s sitting room and listened. Apart from the ticking of the quartz clock on her bureau, the sounds were external. Traffic on the South Circular, an aeroplane’s muffled roar and the chugging of a District line train leaving Kew Gardens station right on time.

  His phone rang. Clean Slate.

  ‘Hello, love, Jackie here, is it all right to speak?’

  ‘Always to you, Jacqueline!’ He laughed happily.

  ‘Stop it! You’re at that woman’s house, aren’t you? I’m checking you’re not frightened.’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘Say if it’s spooky. I can come out there.’

  ‘It’s fine. Stella offered too.’ Jack looked about the room. It was horribly empty. Amanda’s absence was as large as her presence. He was suddenly less confident. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Me? Oh same old… although did I tell you about that woman at the police station? Sent me back, I was a girl again.’ She cackled.

  Keen now to keep her on the line, he encouraged Jackie to tell him the whole story.

  The memory of the night Jack stood in the garden watching Amanda Hampson through the window made him sad. She was not a True Host, but he was wrong to dismiss her. Grubby though she had let her house become after Charlie Hampson died, she had created a home such as Jack had yearned for most of his life.

  He regretted that while Amanda was alive he had written off her theory that her husband had been murdered as unresolved grief. He had let her down. The two cases had converged. A man was avenging children killed on roads by careless drivers. One of those drivers was Charlie Hampson. The obvious person was Michael Thornton’s father, but Lucie said he was dead. Who else cared that the boy had died?

  The answer was obvious. Terry Darnell.

  Jack needed air. He plunged outside and slammed the French doors behind him. He blundered on to the lawn. Vaguely he registered the grass was cut, the weeds gone. Stella had sent in her garden crew and made it better than when Amanda was alive. Stella made things better.

  Frustrated by the lack of action, had Terry taken the law into his own hands? Gamekeeper turned poacher. Jack rubbed his face. No. It could not be. No.

  His tiny bead of doubt was not, could not be, to do with Stella’s father. Terry had been a clean copper. Cashman had told Stella the man was his role model. A respected detective, he was not a vigilante. If Terry were the killer he would not have left the folder out for Stella to find. He was too clever for that. Jack let himself breathe.

  He looked back into the sitting room. Something was different, even allowing for police and forensics and the urgency of the ambulance crew. The Turkish mat was wrinkled and the dining chairs had been shoved aside to make a gangway for the paramedics to bring Amanda’s body through. The curtain ties hung loose. A cushion lay on the carpet and the occasional table that Amanda kept folded was by the sofa. Jack avoided Charlie Hampson’s cold sardonic stare.

  Papers lay on the open bureau, utility bills and junk mail. Nothing about Charlie Hampson’s death or the boy he had fatally injured. Amanda had tidied her file away. The door to the room was slightly open. Any minute she would sail in with coffee, expounding some newly gleaned fact.

  ‘Bring that table over for your drink, there’s a love.’

  She only put the occasional table out for visitors. Neither he nor Stella had moved it. No one else had need to. The table was folded by the door when he last cleaned.

  Amanda had had a visitor. She had not put the table away after her guest had gone because by then she was dead.

  Jack put his hands to his face. His eyes were wet and he dashed at them with the cuffs of his coat. He paced the flags where they had found Amanda. The stones were uneven, lifted by tree roots and cracked by frost. His shoe caught the edge of a slab where the path dipped. That night it had rained, making the paving slippery. It would have been easy to fall in the dark. But Amanda wasn’t clumsy; she moved like a dancer.

  Martin Cashman had told Stella that Amanda’s blood alcohol level was 0.29, which he said would have likely caused ‘severe motor impairment’. Lucille May dying that way would not surprise him, but he did not see Amanda as much of a drinker.

  The meditation temple was unlocked. Jack went in. Amanda had asserted that, being circular, it didn’t need cleaning, but dried leaves had gathered on the door mat and scattered on the marble floor. An oval table inlaid with a tableau of a faun peeping out from between spindly tree trunks stood beside a maroon-covered divan grey with dust. White walls, sheer and sweeping, rose to a glass dome in the ceiling, interrupted by a stained-glass porthole, the only window.

  Amanda believed her temple was unsullied by earthly cares and, despite her having died on its threshold, Jack did feel a profound calm. In a way Terry had taken the law into his own hands when he had left a file of photographs for his daughter to deal with.

  A bloodstain on the divan where the ambulance crew had lain her down had darkened to brown. He could have reassured Amanda it would come out with a good scrub. Gingerly Jack sat down.

  Amanda Hampson had been murdered by the man who had killed the car drivers, including her husband. The killer was not infirm or dead. Amanda had not knocked down a child; she had discovered something that made her a threat. From that moment her death warrant was sealed.

  ‘Lucille bloody Ball. I love Lucy, I don’t think. Making sheep’s eyes at Charlie even when he was dead. She’s got me to answer to now!’

  Amanda’s whisper bounced around the curving walls. ‘She’s got me to answer to now!’

  That last day Amanda had declared she had proof that her husband was murdered. She told the police administrator that Charlie had passed his advanced driving test. A minor fact that had convinced Jack Amanda was kidding herself.

  ‘I have the missing jigsaw piece. The murderer has underestimated me.’

  Amanda had got short shrift at the station so she rang Lucille May. This was hitting rock bottom: Amanda disliked the woman, was annoyed she found her husband attractive, even in a painting and so beyond Lucie’s charms. Jack, bent on finishing his shift on time, dwelling on Stella’s blue folder and preoccupied with the streets in the attic, had paid Amanda scant attention.

  Stella believed Lucie May was hiding something. Surely Lucie was not a killer. Amanda could have overcome her with a swipe. If anyone killed anyone it would be the other way around. Jack sat back and surveyed the domed space. He willed the walls to give up their secret and whisper the killer’s name to him. The leaves on the floor stirred in an imperceptible breeze.

  A hardback book lay on the sill in the porthole window. He expected it to be on mediation or Yoga so was surprised to find a history of motor racing over the last half a century. Not very meditative.

  He had seen it before. The book slipped from his grasp and landed on the tiles, pages splaying. It settled on a chapter about the death in Germany of a racing driver called Jim Clark in 1968. The name meant nothing to Jack. He put it back on the sill. The bookmark lay amongst the leaves. It was a ripped section of a letter from the Parkinson’s Disease Society requesting a donation. He was about to replace it, guessing the Jim Clark page was the place when he realized with a shock that there
was no point. Amanda would not be reading on. Amanda wasn’t interested in motor racing. Jack turned the letter over. There was handwriting was on the back.

  The door creaked. He jumped and looked out of the porthole. There was no one on the path.

  ‘15th March, 11 p.m., Marquis Way W6. Porphyrion. £££!!’

  The day Charlie Hampson was killed. The day that, had he lived, Michael Thornton would have been fifty.

  Amanda had this book when she was leaving for the police station. Jack, busy with cream cleanser on the bath, hadn’t given it a thought.

  ‘I’ve won, Jack! Tomorrow we’ll celebrate. Now Inspector Whatsit will bloody listen.’

  Inspector ‘Whatsit’ was Terry. Amanda didn’t know he was dead. If she had remembered his name, Jack could have told her. If she had shown him this note, scribbled, he guessed, by Charlie taking down a phone message, Jack would have believed her because he had seen Terry’s blue folder. He would have assured her that, although retired, Terry Darnell was building a case. He would have told her that he was working with Darnell’s daughter on the case. If he had told Amanda this, she might still be alive.

  The night he died, Charlie Hampson was meeting someone at 11 p.m. on Marquis Way. The administrator had said the police already knew Charlie had the advanced driving licence. Not knowing about Terry’s photographs or the green glass, the administrator had tactfully dismissed her. Amanda had not shown her the Parkinson’s Disease letter, she would have wanted to wait to see Martin Cashman.

  Jack thought back to his conversation with Jackie. The signs were beginning to make sense. He rang Stella. No signal penetrated the thick walls of the temple.

  63

  Saturday, 5 May 2012

  It was five past six when Stella stowed everything into her van. She looked around to wave. David had gone and his door was closed. She stopped the van around the corner from Aldensley Road, reluctant to arrive at Dukes Meadows early.

  She must phone Jack. He had not called her, which probably meant all was well. It could also mean it was not. She was keying in his number when the phone rang.

  ‘Jack! Did you find anything?’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you, darling. It’s not the lovely Jack.’ A corncrake laugh. ‘It’s Lucie-Lou.’

  ‘Hello.’ Stella was about to ask how the journalist got her number but, of course, since the interview she had had it. May had worked out who she was, she probably matched the number when Stella had called to fix the appointment at the house. The woman had not lost her investigative touch after all.

  ‘Jack wanted to know about the people who lived here. That boy’s a sweety, makes you want to do anything for him, doesn’t he?’

  On principle Stella was about to disagree, but could not.

  ‘Between you and me, if any post came here for the Thorntons, I’d be a fool to tell you – grist to the mill – but nothing has. They’re dead and gone.’ Nevertheless she gave Stella the Thorntons’ forwarding address.

  Stella dashed it down in her diary in the space for today’s date. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she didn’t trust Lucille May. She hadn’t liked her when the woman rang to interview her and she had been right, the resulting piece had little in common with their conversation. There was something May wasn’t telling them.

  ‘If you find the Thorntons, don’t be forgetting it’s my story.’ The journalist rang off.

  Stella knew the address. The posh house name was misleading. The building was derelict and awaiting planning permission to become a free school. Since she couldn’t see David, she would pop along there after seeing Marian, even though it was a dead end; the Thorntons, it seemed, were lost in the mists of time. If the killer was still alive they were no nearer to finding out his identity.

  She read David’s directions to Dukes Meadows. His talking about the murder there had made her uneasy. Since Terry’s death she had entered a dark world populated with victims and villains and, with the business with the printout, had become one herself. With time to kill. Stella tapped the murdered prostitute’s name into Google.

  Elizabeth Figg’s was body found on 17 June 1959, two months after Michael Thornton’s birthday. The young woman was one of several murdered in West London in the fifties and sixties. The case was called the Hammersmith Murders. The killer, dubbed, as David had said, Jack the Stripper because he left the bodies half naked, was never caught. Stella sat up. One of the case files in Terry’s basement was labelled ‘Hammersmith Murders’. Was he investigating this too? The file was under the sink counter, out of sight. More likely, a collector of unsolved crimes, Terry could not let anything pass. Amazing that David remembered it. His first body, he said. Like Terry he had not forgotten. Thinking of David, she wondered where he would be going on a Saturday night. She stopped the thought.

  There was a picture of the murdered woman. Printed on the front page of the Star newspaper, thirty-six hours after the body was discovered, it had the caption ‘Murdered girl: Yard issue picture. Do you know this Miss X?’ Elizabeth Figg gazed impassively into the distance. It took Stella some moments to realise she was looking at a corpse. She closed her phone and dropped it in her rucksack.

  When Stella reached the last line of David’s directions and parked by the boathouse at Dukes Meadows, she called Jack.

  She had no signal.

  64

  Saturday, 5 May 2012

  At the door to the petrol station shop, Jack made way for a young man ripping a Mars wrapper open with his teeth before slipping inside. No customers: perfect. A tall stooping man with rheumy eyes stood behind the till. Lurked was more like it; if a human being could make himself invisible, this man got close.

  ‘Mr Ford?’ Jack was warm; Jackie had warned that her friend couldn’t say boo to a goose.

  ‘Yes.’ Ford blinked rapidly and straightened. He ran a hand over the till as if casting a protective spell.

  ‘I work with Jackie Makepeace, at Clean Slate.’ Ford showed no comprehension.

  ‘Yes,’ he complied. This was going badly.

  ‘Jackie says you’re a wizard when it comes to wood,’ Jack prattled as he drew out a Mars bar from the display. He placed it on the counter as if laying down arms. Coin by coin, he counted out change.

  ‘Did you purchase fuel?’ The man was expressionless.

  ‘Fuel for me!’ Jack grinned and nudged the chocolate. Treating the transaction as life-threatening, Mr Ford took the five-pound note he offered him.

  ‘How is Jacqueline?’ Ford quavered.

  ‘Good. She sends her best.’ Jack popped the bar into his pocket and rested his hands on the counter, fingers spread. ‘You’ve known her since school, she says. Wish I had a friend I’d known that long.’

  ‘I don’t see her often.’ Ford stacked Jack’s change on the counter by coin size, the five pence on top. ‘She was kind.’

  ‘She rates you. A practical kind of guy who can turn to any job. Thing is, I have a flat pack that needs assembling – would that be something you could do?’

  ‘I don’t drive, but…’

  ‘I would fetch you and take you home. Jackie said you live across the road from here.’

  ‘I guess, I…’

  ‘Sorted!’ Jack clapped his hands. ‘She has been kind to me too.’ He looked out at the forecourt. There was one car at the pumps. A Ford Fiesta. This man’s name was Ford. Had to be a sign. Jack felt positively happy. Yet the car was a nasty orange, surely not a good sign. ‘She said when you were little you saw a boy die.’

  The man went very still and stopped blinking. Jack faltered. You are dealing with other people’s pain. Be kind and merciful. It wasn’t in Stella’s manual.

  ‘Something happened to me when I was small, that’s how it came up.’ He frowned out of the window. The man at the pump could have been David Bowie. This was Hammersmith; perhaps it was. He thought about saying so to lighten the mood.

  ‘I wasn’t the only one who saw it.’ Mr Ford produced a box of Mars bars from
under the counter and, reaching over the display, stuffed one into the gap.

  ‘Sorry?’

  The man talked quietly; Jack had to move closer. ‘Mary wanted to swap. The cards took me ages to collect; my nan gave me ones from her tea, but she died.’ He rammed in another Mars bar. ‘I wanted Mary’s Yew and the Sycamore which was Number Thirteen. She didn’t need it.’ His face was red, his mouth grim. He spoke as if reading a script. ‘She was chasing her brother and, you see, she had my cards so I had to get them back. The boy ran into the road. Mary never saw me.’ He shut his eyes. ‘My nan said if a thing is wrong, it must be put right.’

  ‘Are you saying he had a sister?’ Jack pulled out the new Mars bar and handed Douglas Ford the right money. Lucie had said the family was dead. If Michael was fifty today, this sister must be a similar age. Stella said Lucie was hiding something. She was a journalist; she would know there was a sister.

  ‘I never told tales about the cards.’ Douglas Ford slammed the change into the till and screwed up the receipt.

  ‘What was her name? Did she see Michael die? You told the police you weren’t there.’ Jack had to stop himself yelling at the man.

  ‘I didn’t get Mary into trouble. I got there too late to see what actually happened.’

  ‘Mary? Was that her name?’

  ‘I didn’t say about Mary, but even so she punished me.’ Ford spoke as if in a dream, his voice toneless. ‘Nan watches over me, she knows what happened. Mary had me punished.’ He said again: ‘My Holly for her Yew. Nan said an eye for an eye.’

  Behind them the door slid aside. Jack made way for a woman carrying a can of oil. The woman paid for petrol and a bag of crisps and left.

  ‘I won’t keep you.’

  Ford looked startled, probably hoping Jack too had gone.

  ‘Did Michael’s death make you angry?’ Jack stroked the top of the Mars bars.

  ‘I will have to decline the job.’ The man tapped a key on the till and the drawer flew open. He shut it. ‘I get tired after work and hate to make errors. Please thank Jacqueline.’