The Detective's Secret

by Thomson, Lesley

  A diminutive boy, pale and thin, lingered at the corner of the building, gripping the drainpipe as if he would float away should he let go.

  Simon had expected to find Justin sitting on the steps surrounded by the cooks in their white caps. The fierce lady who had told Simon to eat his cabbage would be mussing Justin’s hair – they fussed over him like a prized pet. The kitchens were out of bounds. But Justin was not there. Simon had lost him again.

  In the last months, one event had cheered Simon. Justin had arrived at the school.

  Simon had been told to ‘show Justin the ropes’. Proud to initiate him into the routine, he was dismayed when the new boy refused to do what Simon told him to. Simon had understood that abiding by the rules and working hard would endear him to the teachers and the other boys. But whatever he did or did not do, Simon was disliked. In a culture where physical perfection and prowess were valued, the fact that the first two joints on the middle finger of his left hand were missing, that he was clumsy and that he was too clever for his teachers assured his unpopularity. When Miss Thoroughgood had told him to look after the new boy, Simon had been happy. At last he had a friend all of his own.

  A burst of laughter came from beyond the fogged glass. Illogically, because he couldn’t have been spotted, Simon believed they were ridiculing him. Keeping low, arms hanging loose like a monkey’s, he pattered past the building.

  The path came to a dead end by a group of tall bins. Simon skidded on a scattering of potato peelings and turned his ankle. Tears pricked his eyes. Justin was missing, and it was Simon’s fault.

  There was a door in the wall opposite. Simon read the notice: ‘Private’. Since the old man was found dead there on New Year’s Day, the kitchen gardens were even more out of bounds. Simon had overheard Mr Wilson, the RE teacher, saying the ‘gardener was lying dead as a doornail in the greenhouse’. He had written up this extraordinary piece of information in his notebook: ‘dead as a doornail’. When he told Justin, the new boy had nodded as if dead gardeners were usual.

  Simon should go back to the library and mug up on his Tutankhamun project for Mr Wilson, whom he liked, but then he thought: Enter enemy territory and retrieve missing personnel. Evade capture. It was his duty to rescue Justin.

  A cloud hid the sun. The wall, spiked with flints as sharp as stone-age knives, overshadowed the boy. He stood at the crossways of three gravelled paths. Left, right and ahead, they separated raised beds in which tall weeds and nettles flourished. The gravel was blotched with moss endive and rhubarb cloches made of clay peeped between cow parsley and thistle. Snails and slugs consumed bolted lettuces and once-prized dahlias. Fearsome fennel, gossamer foliage browning, towered over the herb bed, the geometric definition of which was lost to wooded branches of rosemary and clusters of sage. Garlic and thyme ran riot.

  Simon marshalled facts. Quarry last seen going to kitchens, doing his stupid hopscotch walk, like a girl. Simon tripped on a bramble meandering across the path. He should report Justin to Mr Wilson. He liked Mr Wilson. His first name was ‘Nat’, not spelled with a ‘G’, but still the boys called him the Stick Insect because of it and because he was thin. The air was cooling. Simon had left his jumper on his chair in the library to make it look as if he was there. Mr Wilson would be cross that Simon had let Justin out of his sight.

  He saw a greenhouse, beyond a rusting lawn roller. A crack. Simon dived behind the roller. Above his head a gull cried, derisive like the white capped cooks. The dead gardener groped at his leg. He shouted and scrabbled free. A cat, black with a white bib, was weaving about him. Simon liked the cat – although as Mice Monitor it had been his job to keep it away from the classroom. He put out his bad hand and stroked it; instantly it arched in appreciation, then it gave a start and darted away. Simon peeped around the roller.

  The door to the greenhouse was open. The metal frame had buckled; slats of glass were missing. Shelves were filled with flower pots and seed boxes. No one was there, dead or alive.

  He ventured further along the path, the weeds so high it was like a tunnel. Justin liked tunnels; he said he was going to be an engineer when he grew up. Simon had asked if an engineer drove engines and Justin had laughed and said he was stupid. Simon turned a corner and saw Justin sitting on the ground in the middle of a patch of sunlight.

  ‘You’re trespassing!’ Relieved to find him, Simon grabbed Justin by the shoulders. He was surprised by the feeling of sharp bones.

  ‘Let go!’ Justin wrenched free. He was pouring water into a hole in the side of a pile of earth. The pool shrank as water soaked into the ground.

  ‘I need to get more.’ Justin spoke as if to himself.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Simon expected that Justin would be sorry and accompany him to the library where they were meant to be.

  ‘This reservoir has to feed two towns. There’s no need for a pump or a water tower, it’s higher than the settlements, I’m using gravity.’ Justin waved a hand. The ground had been cleared of weeds, earth flattened and marked with stones like a railway track. A gutter had been cut into the raised earth through which a tunnel ran. Justin had constructed it with lolly sticks and mud. Simon poked at the mound with his bad hand.

  ‘Careful!’ Justin grabbed Simon’s wrist. ‘It could collapse. I had to measure the sides, make sure the rolling stock can pass through.’ Justin’s father was an engineer. Simon’s father worked with mad people and never smiled. Simon didn’t want to be mad when he was grown up.

  ‘Get off me, Stumpy!’ Justin glared at him. ‘Go away.’

  ‘Your mummy’s dead.’ Simon said and was immediately horrified. He hadn’t meant to say it.

  ‘She’s not. And anyway your mummy doesn’t love you. That’s worse. Mine loves me very much.’

  Simon felt his eyes sting. Dashing at his face with his sleeve, he pulled out of the tunnel a red locomotive attached to three carriages.

  ‘What’s in here?’

  The carriages uncoupled and crashed on to the tracks. He picked them up and peered in through the windows of one of them.

  ‘Gosh, it’s a dining car!’ he exclaimed. ‘Look, that’s you and me having our lunch. Let’s pretend we met there. I’ve got steak and French fries like the man in Strangers on a Train. Have you read it? It’s my mum’s favourite book. It’s really for grown-ups. What are you eating?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Justin replied as if he didn’t care either.

  ‘Two men meet and become friends.’ Simon chattered on happily, his mood recovering as he warmed to his idea. His mum had been impressed that he had read the book from beginning to end. ‘Do you like tomato ketchup?’ He imagined shooting it all over his chips like the man in the story.

  ‘I am about to drive my train through the tunnel,’ Justin said.

  ‘I’ll do it.’ Brought rudely back to the present, Simon was terribly sorry to have made a mess, but this was all against the rules. He reattached the carriages and, lifting the engine, ran the wheels over his palm, making them spin. He pushed it on the impacted soil, wheels whirring, and watched with satisfaction as it sped into the tunnel. It shot out of the other side, carriages twisted and buckled, and veering off the tracks smashed into the watering can.

  ‘You went too fast.’ Justin rubbed his hand on his shorts.

  Simon was horrified; he had wanted to help. He pulled on his bad finger and pretended he was a racing driver who didn’t care about going fast.

  ‘Can I have a turn?’ Perhaps Justin had forgotten it was his own train.

  ‘Unfortunately you cannot. I need to perform more test runs.’ Simon pressed too hard on the locomotive and it sank into the earth. ‘Stop doing that with your mouth,’ he ordered.

  Justin twitched his face on purpose to frighten him. ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘You were. I don’t want to have to get cross with you.’ The engine was stuck; soil clogged the axle and front wheels. ‘There’s nowhere for the passengers to get out.’ Simon’s palms
were damp. Who had killed the gardener? The enemy can smell fear.

  ‘I will kill you and bury your body so that no one will ever find you and then your flesh will be eaten and your bones will crumble.’ Simon stuck his bad hand inside Justin’s shorts and pinched him. ‘I’ll say you escaped again. Message understood?’

  Simon tore the pin from the hand grenade and hurled it into the tunnel. He dragged Justin away as a blast tore into the mountain, pelting the enemy with clods of earth.

  ‘You’re mean.’

  Simon pretended he hadn’t heard Justin. He imagined radioing back to base. Enemy camp destroyed. Mission accomplished. He imagined being an entirely different person, someone who could make people do what he wanted. This idea faded before it had taken shape. Flushed with shame, Simon stared at his bad hand as if it were his enemy.

  The boy hurried along the low vaulted passage, past the reception. Outside the cloakroom toilets he bumped into nice Mr Wilson.

  ‘Hey, kiddo!’ The teacher had a funny accent because he wasn’t English. ‘Have you seen your mate, Justin the Dreamer?’

  Simon stopped, clutching at his bad hand.

  Mr Wilson waited.

  ‘He’s in the library.’

  ‘OK, Simon, can you make it your job to get him into dinner on time? We don’t want him being late again.’ Mr Wilson was smiling down at him.

  ‘Yes I will, sir.’

  Simon had lied for Justin. That meant he would like him.

  Careful not to run – it was against the rules – Simon continued to the library.

  4

  Saturday, 19 October 2013

  Stella slotted the van behind a dented blue Toyota Yaris. It had been a long week, she could spend the evening on her own, catching up on emails. Jackie’s street, tree-lined and spacious, was quiet considering it was close to a busy main road. Beyond the railings was a cemetery and, not for the first time, Stella considered she wouldn’t like to live opposite dead people.

  Her dad had owned a blue Yaris. This one’s rear panel was a mismatch of replaced panels. Terry’s car had been ten years old, but he had kept it immaculate. She could remember his car, but she couldn’t conjure up his face.

  A bus went by; its back draught rocked the van and light from the windows raked the interior, breaking her thoughts. There was a bleat. It came from the dog strapped into the jump seat behind her on the passenger side. She had installed the seat especially, because if he travelled beside her in the front, he risked being killed by the airbag. In the dim light the little beige poodle, the size of a cat, could be a ghost dog, a blurred shape with dark brown eyes. Stella had forgotten about Stanley. She wasn’t cut out to own a dog. Just as well that she would be giving him back soon.

  ‘We’re here,’ she remarked as she unclipped him. He climbed on to her shoulder and she manoeuvred them both out of the van.

  On the way from her mother’s flat in Barons Court, unsettled by the silent empty rooms, Stella had wished she could go to Terry’s and empty her inbox over a microwaved shepherd’s pie. Nothing personal, Jackie was a friend and Stella liked her husband Graham and their two sons, but she didn’t fancy company. However, the Makepeace family wouldn’t require her to join in; they did the talking, leaving her free to eat, and then Jackie would let her wash up. Jackie was minding Stanley for the night while Stella went to fetch her mum from the airport.

  ‘You like it here,’ she said as the dog jerked the lead taut and snouted towards Jackie’s gate. Stanley was left over from a relationship of the sort her mum called a ‘wrong turning’. Stella had wanted to refuse, dogs were liable to cause mess, but months into minding the dog, she decided that relationships caused more mess.

  The house next door to Jackie’s was up for sale. Jackie was worried about this. The man living there now had been there since he was a boy and, Jackie said, he was a ‘sweetie’, kind and gentle; she hoped the new owners would be as nice. Stella thought again how living in a flat at the end of a corridor meant that, apart from the rare times she met anyone in the lift, she could avoid knowing her neighbours.

  Clutching white wine, plucked from the chiller cabinet in Dariusz Adomek’s mini-mart beneath her office, Stella took the dog over to a sycamore tree by the Jackie’s gate to lift his leg. The tree trunk was thinner than the others in the street. Jackie had told her the tree replaced one that came down in the 1987 hurricane and crushed their car.

  She rummaged in her pocket and gave Stanley a biscuit as reward for peeing outside, to reinforce his toilet training as she had been told at his obedience class. Something fluttered to the ground. It was the paper she had found under a cushion at her mum’s flat. Jack had cleaned the flat many times during her mum’s six-week absence, but the paper was caught under the back of the sofa. The dog had been whining and when she gave in and pulled away the cushions, he had truffled out a bone-shaped biscuit. The paper was next to it. The writing was her mum’s: ‘Dale Heffernan, 38 Fisher Ave, Vaucluse. Likes sailing and B. Springsteen. Dislikes having time on his hands!’

  During the first week her mum was away, Stella slept with her phone under her pillow expecting the call informing her Suzie was clinging to life. She had even looked up St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. There had been no call. No call at all. Passing up Skype or email, Suzie sent two postcards to the office which Beverly, the admin assistant, stuck on the pinboard reserved for staff holiday messages. The sun was hot and there was a possum in her friend’s attic. ‘Love to Stanley.’ In the second card she had wasted space with advice about the client database she had built, but had sent love to Stella.

  Stella had told Jackie she didn’t miss her mother. However, she found the comparative quiet at work uncomfortable; she missed the daily task list and the weekend calls informing her that Stanley wanted a walk in Richmond Park (as if her mum and the dog had conferred). Before Terry’s death Stella might have welcomed the break from her mum’s grumblings and demands. Now she wanted everything to be back to normal.

  She stuffed the paper back in her pocket. Dale Heffernan was probably an ex-client.

  Jackie and Graham Makepeace had lived in the 1920s semi for thirty years. Graham had made their gate; their initials, ‘J’ and ‘G’ intertwined, were carved into the beech struts. Jackie and Graham were still in love. Stella saw falling in love, like falling trees, to be fraught with the danger of crushed hopes and rearranged schedules.

  ‘Heel.’ She marched up to the front door, the dog trotting beside her.

  Had Stella not met Jackie, the immaculate front door, gleaming window sashes and weed-free shingle path bordered by box hedging would have assured her she would like her. Jackie’s mix of house-proud care and easy homeliness was apparent in the twisting branches of a laburnum, bracketed to protect brickwork, around the porch and the recycling bins corralled behind a trellis draped with honeysuckle.

  The door flew open. The wine bottle slipped from her grasp; trying to stop its fall she kicked it on to the hedge.

  ‘Hey, Stell!’ A young man in a boxy leather jacket and hipster jeans was squatting at her feet submitting to a busy washing from the dog. ‘Mum said you were coming. Sorry to miss you, I’m off out. They’re all waiting for you.’

  Gathering herself, Stella couldn’t think of his name. She retrieved the bottle from the hedge. ‘All?’ she echoed.

  Jackie’s older son lived up north. Steve. Leeds. Teacher. This was Nick the dancer.

  ‘Some guy Mum’s got round.’ Nick spun on his heel and leapt over the gate.

  Stella froze. ‘Is he staying to eat?’

  ‘Sure he is – and there’s candles!’ Nick Makepeace grinned. ‘He’s your type!’

  ‘On your way, Nicholas. Text if you’re not coming home, so I can lock up.’ Jackie pulled off an apron and popped a biscuit, magically produced, into the dog’s mouth. She shook her head. ‘Ignore him. In you come!’

  Stella’s last visits had met Jackie’s promise of freshly cooked vegetables. Stella had forgotten there w
as sometimes another motive. Six months after one of Stella’s ‘wrong turnings’, Jackie often launched a campaign to find Stella’s Mr Right. It was six months since Stella had finished with David.

  Always welcoming, the Makepeaces’ kitchen, rich with the smell of roasting lamb, wine glasses glinting in candlelight, was tonight no exception. Graham Makepeace, mindful that Stella disliked kissing – for fear of germs – fussed Stanley instead.

  A man stepped into the pool of candlelight and grasped Stella’s hand, shaking it vigorously. ‘William Frost, so pleased to meet you!’

  Stella didn’t need an introduction. An inch shorter than her six feet, in a dark suit and tie, this was Jackie’s latest Mr Right.

  5

  Saturday, 19 October 2013

  ‘There is no step-free access at Hammersmith station until late November. Customers requiring step-free access should change at Earl’s Court and use local bus services.’ Jack shut off the public address channel and, as he drove out of West Brompton station, he sang under his breath:

  ‘Little Jack Horner

  Sat in the corner…’

  Fulham Broadway, Parsons Green. At Putney Bridge station, about to close the doors, Jack consulted the driver’s monitor and saw something on top of it. Someone had left a toy for the owner to reclaim; it must have been a driver because passengers weren’t allowed beyond the gate. He leaned towards it.

  It was a red steam engine. He felt a prickling at the back of his neck. It looked identical to the engine he had lost when he was little. Jack rose from his seat; he would hand it in at Earl’s Court after stabling his train. Then he saw the time: he was running thirty seconds late. He sat down and checked the monitors again. A man was standing at the other end of the platform. Jack paused to give him time to board the train, but he didn’t move so Jack shut the doors. He pulled on the lever and eased the train forward. Heading for East Putney station, he forgot about the man.