The Detective's Secret

by Thomson, Lesley

  ‘It’s not failing.’ Stella saw the time; she had to leave. ‘What do you think happened?’ Terry would have asked this first.

  ‘Something – or someone – had frightened him. He sounded strange in the message. I hardly recognized him. I think he was murdered.’

  Jack teased convoluted meaning from obscure signs; it frustrated her, but he did get results. Terry had followed hunches. Stella preferred the tangible.

  ‘Can I hear his message please?’

  ‘No. I deleted it after I heard it. Stupid, I know. The police clearly thought so.’

  Stella’s cleaning process was methodical. Stain by stain. She used the same process for detection. Clue by clue. However, this only worked if there was a stain – a clue – to start with. The only clue was the evidence. The man had jumped off a platform: end of, in all senses.

  ‘I’m sorry Mr Righ um, I don’t see that we can help.’ She turned on the engine. ‘I have to get to the airport.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’ He clipped in his seat belt.

  9

  May 1985

  He executed the plan perfectly. Every strut, every load-bearing beam, every cross fitted. He picked up the last girder – iron slats from a bench he had found behind the greenhouse – and, holding his breath, slotted it in. It held. Balanced on his haunches, he patted down the soil at the base of the stanchions.

  Simon was in the kitchen garden. He had found a book on Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the library and he had made copious notes from engineering textbooks: a legacy of the owner of the house before it was a school. At first Simon borrowed books he’d seen Justin read, but soon he was on a path of his own. This afternoon he was constructing a box girder bridge. A present for Justin.

  ‘It’s the longest bridge in the country,’ he would tell him. ‘I made the arches and the central spans off-site, and erected the segments with a gantry crane.’ He particularly liked the word ‘gantry’. ‘A gantry is a framework of bars, usually steel. It rests on two supports and is used for holding up road signs over motorways or for carrying electrical cables,’ he told the garden. The bit about using a gantry crane wasn’t true, but Justin wouldn’t mind.

  Mr Wilson had been thrilled to get a post at a boy’s boarding school in the UK. It would go down well on his CV back home. Full of ambition and passion, he was determined to be the teacher the boys remembered when they were men playing their part in the world. He would be cited in articles, eulogized in biographies; through teaching he would be immortal.

  It hadn’t worked out that way. The boys mocked his accent. He had come into the classroom one morning to find ‘Convict’ daubed on the blackboard. It seemed that the English assumed every Australian had been deported from the UK. The fact that his great-great-grandfather had set off a spark of fury. Intent on flushing out the little tyke that had written it, he chose Simon as the ‘fall guy’ and accused him of the crime. He’d been sure that this would prompt the actual culprit to confess. He had been wrong. It seemed the boys were happy that Simon take the rap. He couldn’t withdraw the accusation or he would look weak. The thing was a bloody mess.

  Simon was the one boy who did what he was told. Out of all of them, in later life, he was most likely to cite Wilson as a key influence. The kid pored over leather-bound tomes; he wanted to be an engineer, not a boring banker or a Board Director or, buoyed by a trust fund, nothing at all.

  While most of the boys mindlessly parroted answers learnt by rote or, like the kid whose mother had died, daydreamed, Simon was his star pupil. He read around subjects, told Wilson stuff he didn’t know and made oblique connections. But soon the boy’s adherence to rules got under Wilson’s skin and bit by bit the man’s objective shifted. A mild-mannered man, Wilson had become infuriated by Simon. He saw himself in the seven-year-old, a meek snap of a thing with no friends. Instead of encouraging Simon to find joy in new knowledge, he started to try to catch him out. He vented his annoyance at Simon’s obsequious manner by gratuitously punishing him. He found justification in making an example of an innocent boy: it would bring the others into line.

  The afternoon Wilson saw Simon leave the playground and sneak around the back of the kitchens was a gift. He went after him.

  Simon walked his fingers over the boarding – he had taken the balsa wood from the workshop – and pressed hard. It creaked, but didn’t break; the pressure was the equivalent of a ton. The spans had give and would withstand strong winds. Justin had explained that to him; he would remind him of that.

  The boy was astonished at his achievement. Now he knew how to do it, they could build another bridge, or a tunnel – whatever Justin liked. Ideas raced fast and furious; hands together as if praying, Simon contemplated the breadth of possibility. It would be their secret.

  He smiled at the distant thud of the garden door closing. Justin hadn’t learnt his skill of stealthy tracking. Simon would teach him this. He scrambled to his feet, imagining Justin’s face when he saw the bridge. Justin never smiled. Simon supposed it was because his mother was dead. He wanted to make him smile.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here.’ Justin did a high singing voice. ‘It’s out of bounds.’

  ‘I made it.’ Simon realized Justin was imitating him. Unaccountably he felt afraid and fluffed his speech. ‘I did the spans like Hammersmith Bridge.’

  Hands on hips, Justin surveyed the bridge. ‘The stresses are in the wrong places, it won’t take a significant load.’

  ‘I tested it,’ Simon protested, his eyes swimming with sudden tears. ‘It does.’ Mentally he scanned his drawing for possible error. An engineer’s mistake couldn’t be hidden. Sir Stephen Lockett, the sanitary-ware millionaire who had wanted to be an engineer, whose house they lived in, had trusted the Tay bridge. It had collapsed. Sir Stephen’s body was never recovered from the river Tay beneath. Forever restless, his ghost was said to roam the library at night.

  Simon had imagined Hammersmith Bridge, the looping spans mirrored in the Thames. All he had achieved was a cluster of wood, stuck with glue. He saw it as Justin saw it and pulled on his bad finger. ‘I did it for you.’

  Justin’s shoe caught a strip of wood. It broke off and fell into the ‘river’.

  ‘That’s OK.’ Simon said as if Justin had apologized.

  Justin stepped on the bridge and crushed it.

  ‘See? It can’t take a decent load.’ Justin kicked up a shower of gravel and, turning on his heel, strolled away up the path between the tall weeds.

  Simon couldn’t comprehend the devastation. He rubbed his palms on the back of his trousers.

  ‘What are you playing at?’

  Simon wheeled around. Mr Wilson was standing with his hands on his hips as Justin had.

  ‘I built him a bridge,’ Simon said and then corrected himself. ‘I built a bridge.’

  ‘You did, did you?!’ Wilson folded his arms, wondering if the boy had whacked his head. He couldn’t see a bridge in the mess of sticks and mud at his feet. ‘Look at the state of you.’

  ‘I tested it. My sums were right.’

  He was dishevelled and pathetic. Wilson’s triumph ebbed; he felt sorry for him and sick with himself.

  ‘Simon, mate, you shouldn’t be here,’ he said gently. The kid was doing the thing with his finger, twisting and tugging it as if the injury was recent. No one knew how he came to lose his finger. Wilson would have a chat with Madeleine next time she visited the school. It would do him no harm for her to see him showing concern for her son. So many of the teachers here actually disliked children. If the boys knew why, they might stop teasing him. He’d even had it in mind to come up with a hero story in which the kid had saved lives and lost his finger in the process, but couldn’t see how that would work, so had given it up.

  ‘Come with me.’ He ushered him up the path.

  Intent on getting Simon away before another master saw him and insisted he get detention, Nathan Wilson didn’t see the other boy crouched in the greenhouse.

  10
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  Christmas Eve 1986

  At the junction of Goldhawk Road and Chiswick High Road, traffic was nose to tail. Christmas Eve shoppers, weighed down with bags and packages, wove between the stationary vehicles. When the door of the off-licence on the corner opened, a burst of John Lennon’s ‘Happy Xmas (War is Over)’ swelled above the idling engines.

  None of this last-minute bustle reached St Peter’s Square where tall Georgian houses, stucco dappled with lamplight, formed a stately contrast to the seasonal mayhem. The square, its park in darkness, was of the past more than the present. Frost sparkling between shadows of branches might be the footprints of ghosts.

  Anyone watching from a window of a house on the west side, indulging in this fancy, might decide that the boy hopscotch jumping between the cracks in between the flags by the park railings was one such phantom. Nothing betrayed him as a child of the 1980s, when loads of money didn’t so much talk as shout. He had stepped out of a Narnian wardrobe in polished brogues, his gabardine mac collar down despite the biting wind, hair in a precise side parting.

  Many downstairs windows were a showcase for Christmas. Splendid trees were festooned with lights and quaint decorations in reds, gold and silver. Lanterns burned on sills; candles flickered on mantelpieces; darts of light bounced off glasses of red wine and port. Indeed, quintessentially Dickensian, the boy, suitably diminutive and pale, observed the tableaux through misted glass, quaking in the icy cold.

  He arrived at a house on the south side. The curtains were closed. Perhaps the residents were away or perhaps they eschewed the festivities; the unruly box hedge and fractured plaster on Doric columns supporting the porch hinted at indifference.

  An eagle was poised on the porch, wings spread. Timidly, his shoulders hunched, Simon regarded it as if it might devour him as easy prey. He scurried up the steps to the front door.

  Simon had had no doubt that Justin would be pleased to see him. He would tell him he had left his boarding school too, that he lived near to him. They could see each other every day. He bent down and raised the letterbox flap. Inside was a fusty smell like the room under the school library. A black cloth had been pinned to the door, blocking his view.

  ‘It’s me,’ he whispered. ‘Your friend.’

  11

  Saturday, 19 October 2013

  ‘Thank you.’ Stella took the ticket from the machine and stuck it between her teeth. Talking to machines was more Jack’s thing. Luckily William Frost – as she had finally remembered he was called – hadn’t heard.

  She found a space on the car park’s third level. In the lift to the Arrivals hall, she questioned her wisdom in letting Frost come with her. Suzie wouldn’t approve; she was unhappy about Stella ‘playing detective’, like her father. Nothing William had said on the journey to the airport – or his long brooding silences – gave her confidence that he would win Suzie over with charm as Jack had.

  ‘What do you think we could find that the police haven’t?’ They were alone in the lift.

  ‘The truth. You finding the killer will be worth the money.’

  Stella hadn’t considered charging a fee. Their last two investigations – the Rokesmith and Blue Folder cases (not counting a missing cat Jack found in an empty house he was cleaning) – had been Terry’s cold cases. No money had changed hands.

  Frost was expecting to pay for a service Stella probably couldn’t fulfil. She had built a successful business by avoiding risks, expanding only when there was the capital and demand. She had not taken on bigger offices or rewarded herself with a higher wage. She paid her operatives properly and invested in the best equipment. She had stuck to what she knew. She was not a detective.

  ‘If the police couldn’t find proof that your brother was murdered, I can’t see how we can.’

  ‘You clean for Hammersmith Police Station, don’t you?’

  Jackie would not have told him.

  ‘I saw you in the compound.’ He stopped beneath the Arrivals board. ‘You wouldn’t have that job if your firm wasn’t thorough. Jackie assured me you leave no corner unclean. My brother was murdered. I know you will prove it and solve the case.’

  ‘Perhaps it was a cry for help that went wrong,’ Stella persisted, feeling every inch the pretend detective.

  ‘A cry for help is taking tablets then texting someone. It’s not jumping off a platform in front of a fast train.’

  ‘He did call you.’ She had to say it.

  ‘He asked to see me, if he meant to kill himself, why do that?’ Frost was adamant. Jackie had given him airtime, Stella reminded herself. She refrained from saying it was possible to survive a fall on to the rails: a client of hers had slipped off a platform when he was drunk and got away with a gash in his arm. Still, she supposed living to tell the tale – he told it whenever she cleaned for him – was unusual.

  ‘You didn’t get the call. Maybe that tipped him —’ Stella stopped herself crashing into the unfortunate pun and, turning away, scanned the Arrival’s indicator. The question surely is, did your brother have a reason to kill himself.

  ‘Baggage hall’ was listed beside her mother’s plane. She took up position at the mouth of the gate.

  The first passengers – identifiable by suntans and summer clothes – straggled out, battling with trolleys bulky with cases, bags, surf boards, giant stuffed kangaroos. Many were hailed – cries and whoops – by people waiting by the ribbon. Stella edged around a man with a square of cardboard against his chest for a clear view of the exit.

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Who did what?’ She kept her eyes on the passengers.

  ‘About a month before he died, Rick remarked that long ago he made a mistake that had come back to haunt him.’

  ‘Doesn’t that make suicide more likely?’

  ‘He isn’t the type.’ Frost was a stuck record. ‘He said it in passing, I ignored him, felt like saying his whole life was a mistake, now I see he was trying to tell me something.’

  Stella risked a glance at the man. In the stark airport light, his complexion was grey, eyes red-rimmed. She felt rather sorry for him.

  Passengers were streaming by, jostling with trolleys, heaving bags, rolling cases into each other’s paths. Jack wouldn’t need proof: he would follow instinct, pay attention to his precious signs; he got results. She should have called him when she saw him in the cemetery. What was he doing there?

  ‘Could someone have pushed him? Did they see anyone on the CCTV?’ Her mum would be last off the plane; unused to travel, she would have mislaid her passport or got stuck in her seat belt.

  ‘They saw no one on the film, but not all the station is covered. Whoever did this would know that.’ Frost was animated. ‘He has a car. I found it parked a couple of streets from his house. Why didn’t he drive to see me? Obvious, because he didn’t want to be seen leaving.’

  ‘Who might have been watching?’ Stella wondered why taking the Underground made it less likely he would be seen leaving, but felt it rude to pick Frost up on every point. She would never question a client’s cleaning requirements.

  ‘Is that your mother waving?’

  A woman in a wide-brimmed straw hat that hid her face was sailing along wearing one of those billowing coats with bat-wing shoulders Stella associated with Australia. Suzie. Her trolley was heaped with makeshift bags. She was going so quickly other passengers had to veer out of her path. Stella couldn’t see the suitcase Suzie had taken with her, and she had three times the luggage she’d set out with. She was waving, not just at Stella, but at everyone waiting. Stella leant out to get her attention. Her mother snatched off her hat and flung it on to her tower of bags.

  The woman’s face was scored by lines; her tan suggested she never saw the inside of a house. She wasn’t her mother. Stella’s relief was brief, for behind the woman was an expanse of floor. There were no more passengers. Her phone buzzed. Distracted by Frost, she had missed Suzie. Stella read the text.

  Staying in Sydney for two weeks. Feed plan
ts. Mum x.

  ‘She’s not coming.’ When she finally spoke, Stella’s voice was gruff. ‘I should have seen this coming.’ She turned on her heel. ‘She’s had an accident – or worse.’ What was worse? Her thoughts were racing.

  ‘People often act out of character and surprise us,’ William Frost said.

  ‘Like killing themselves.’ She stopped. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘Fair point. Rick took the train when he had a car and he shouldn’t have been at Stamford Brook. I live on the Goldhawk Road, near Shepherd’s Bush Green – he was out of his way. He asked to see me, then he went in front of a train. It doesn’t add up.’

  ‘Went out of his way?’ Illogical behaviour generally had an explanation. They took the lift back to the car park. Stella forced herself to concentrate. Despite her text, she was on the lookout for her mother.

  ‘His nearest Tube was Hammersmith, he should have got a train to Goldhawk Road station. I’m three minutes from there.’

  ‘We need to pay. Stella nodded at a bank of ticket machines.

  ‘Let me.’ Frost began feeding coins into the slot in the nearest machine.

  ‘You needn’t.’ Everything was slipping away from her.

  ‘I’ve taken your time, let me recompense you.’

  Jackie had ‘sent’ William Frost to her. Stella trusted her judgement; Jackie wouldn’t set Stella up for a fall. Watching him pick out the right change from a pile of coins in his palm, she deemed the man calm and practical, perhaps not the sort to get stuff out of proportion.

  ‘I’ll talk to my Jack, my partner, and let you know our decision,’ Stella said.

  ‘Do you want a deposit now, and an advance on expenses?’