The Detective's Secret

by Thomson, Lesley

  Gingerly Simon went over to the back exit. The door opened when he stood too close to it. He looked out. The woman was his mother and she wasn’t alone.

  ‘Could you either go out or come away from the door? You’re letting in all the cold,’ an old man clutching a wire basket rasped at him.

  Taken by surprise, Simon went outside.

  His mother had parked their car by the entrance; there was no need for her to be by the pavement. Simon inched around the car, reassured by its solid familiarity, and crept along the gap between the cars and the wall. He got as close as he dared, but couldn’t hear what she was saying. Blindly he turned and ran back into the shop.

  He drifted mechanically along an aisle, supported by the trolley. He joined a queue, imagining he could pay, pack the shopping in the boot and drive away. He bottled sudden rage that being nine he could do none of these things. Simon felt as he had when Justin had left the school and Simon was no one.

  ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you!’ She wrapped her arms around him, cutting out the light. He inhaled her perfume and another smell – smoke. She didn’t smoke.

  ‘I was here,’ he replied numbly.

  ‘You were meant to stay by the trolley.’

  ‘Ten minutes is over.’ He was by the trolley, but he didn’t say that.

  ‘Not by my watch.’ She briskly rearranged cartons and tins, although she didn’t need to.

  ‘I got everything in twelve minutes and thirty-five seconds. That was without you helping.’

  ‘Did you get grapes?’ She was consulting the list.

  ‘No.’ He scrutinized the trolley. Grapes should be on top with the eggs. He looked at the list. Grapes were not there.

  ‘I’ll get them.’ He worried that if she went, she would vanish again. The store whizzed by, shoppers pushed him, trolleys dug into his legs, he was jabbed in the ribs with a wire basket. Red or white grapes? They never ate grapes. Red.

  ‘Come on.’ She was about to pay for the shopping. ‘Didn’t they have white?’

  ‘No.’ The cashier raised one eyebrow; he knew he was lying. Simon felt himself grow hot.

  She took the bags off him without saying, You’re my rock, I can’t do without you.

  ‘You’ll never guess who I met!’ They were driving into their street.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mr Wilson, your religious education teacher from Marchant Manor. He left soon after you did, he’s been living in London all this time!’

  Simon pulled on his half-finger, the habit formed when he was a much littler boy and had still harboured hope it would grow back.

  ‘Did he come to see me?’

  ‘Of course not!’ She laughed. ‘He said “Hello”.’

  ‘Is he coming to teach at my new school?’ Mr Wilson had said he was his friend.

  ‘Stop being silly, Simon.’ She never called him silly.

  Simon sank into the seat and decided not to ask why Mr Wilson had been holding his mummy’s hand.

  15

  Monday, 21 October 2013

  Jack knew the sounds in the house. The owl’s thud resonated up to the top floor and, regardless of who was knocking, she lightened his spirit. This sound was sharper. It was the letterbox flap. He glanced at his watch: ten to seven.

  He peered out of the sitting-room window. He was meeting Stella, he couldn’t be delayed. It would be a charity or Jehovah’s Witnesses. It wouldn’t be Stella, she always texted first.

  A man in a black coat, a baseball cap pulled low, was going down the path. He didn’t look up at the house as Jack would have done, certain that someone would be there. He was walking past Isabel Ramsay’s house without dropping in a leaflet. Stella had advised Jack to put up a ‘No Junk Mail’ notice, but he liked to know what people were up to. He couldn’t say this, nor could he point out that Clean Slate did leaflet drops. Stella wouldn’t consider them junk.

  When his father was alive – his mother too, he supposed – post was left on the hall table. Nothing there now. Nor was there post on the doormat. Downstairs Jack did up his coat, pleased to be seeing Stella and excited by a new case. He considered following the man, but it would contravene his promise to Stella and he’d be late. Something was under the marble table. There was a leaflet after all.

  To Let. A5 and pink: another leaflet about the tower. The owners obviously hadn’t found a tenant.

  Rereading it, Jack considered that the word ‘cosy’ wasn’t usual estate agent vocabulary. Stella would have no truck with ‘craving silence’.

  …crave silence and a bird’s eye view, then Palmyra Tower is your home. Guardian wanted for Grade 1 listed Water Tower. You will sign a year-long contract with no breaks and be available to take up residence as soon as your application is accepted.

  The phrase ‘detailed views’ was peculiar. From high up, the view couldn’t be detailed; it would be better to emphasize the breadth of the panorama. Whatever, by now the owners would have found a tenant.

  You will.

  His eye lit upon the pack of Tarot cards on the hall table. Since finding the card on the mat he hadn’t looked at them. At some point, though, he must have replaced the Tower card, it was face up on the top of the pile, tightly bound by the elastic band. A sign.

  Jack smoothed out the flier on the marble top and scanned the text. At the bottom of the flier he found an email address. Info@palmyra-tower.co.uk. He opened his phone and tapped out a message: To whom it concerns, if it’s vacant, please may I rent the flat in Palmyra Tower? Yours, J Harmon

  On the doorstep he stroked the owl’s tucked-in wing with a finger. ‘You don’t need a tower to see the world,’ he whispered to her.

  In the subway, Jack’s voice was insistent and sibilant.

  ‘Oh that I were where I would be,

  Then would I be where I am not;’

  He left the tunnel and hurried up the ramp on to Black Lion Lane.

  Another voice completed the verse in the bleakly tiled tunnel long after Jack had gone.

  ‘But where I am there I must be,

  And where I would be I can not.’

  16

  September 1987

  After dark, the gate to the cemetery on Corney Road was closed, so Simon used a hole beside a side entrance in the church passage. Inside, he scampered along between the mounds, alert for intruders. The good thing about living full-time in London was that he could go to his den more often. Another good thing was that no one at the Chiswick school called him ‘Stumpy’.

  It was two years since he had seen Justin, but he could picture him and hear his voice. Sometimes, in front of the bathroom mirror, Simon imitated his sniff and the jerk of his head. In two years, Simon’s sister had learnt to jump and could manage a few words. Time and wishful thinking had rendered Justin a loyal confidant; he was Simon’s best friend.

  The boy cut along the boundary wall, out of sight of the houses that had replaced wharfs and factories by the Thames. The stench of the river deadened the air. His belted mac was damp from the pall of mist that was suspended above the squat stone tombs and mausoleums. Flaking and worn, the headstones had been erected in the early nineteenth century and their graves were sunken and smothered with browning weeds.

  Simon looked across the cemetery and saw, far off, that the lit upstairs windows in his street were just a string of lights. He couldn’t see his house. His dad wouldn’t know he was out because Simon had pushed a pillow under his duvet. His mum said she was seeing a friend and Simon preferred to believe her.

  The ground was crisp with fallen leaves etched with frost; his footsteps crunched in the chill quiet. Once he missed his footing and stubbed his shoe on broken masonry.

  Simon reached a brick hut under spreading conifer branches. Originally used for storing tools which the maintenance crew had transferred to an aluminium shed by the Corney Road gate, one wall was lined with ancient plaques, scrolls and shields of blackened granite or slate, many stained the lurid green of carbonized brass. Traces of
inscription – ‘left us’, ‘dead’, ‘fell asleep’ – were ghost messages.

  Simon had noted all this on his first visit; they were signs to tell Justin about. That Justin lived so close to him in London was another sign.

  He had stumbled upon the building two weeks earlier when he had rushed out after his mother, who had gone shopping without him. He had cut across the cemetery, intending to catch her at the Hogarth roundabout lights, but he was too late. Giving up, he had found the hut on his way back and made it his den.

  A pile of leaves and branches was heaped by the side of the hut. He approached the door gingerly and, reaching up, tapped on the hut door. The rotting wood was spongy and crumbling and his knocking made little sound.

  All clear. Inside it was pitch black. Simon’s nostrils pricked with the smell of damp earth. He switched on his torch and found a broken flower pot by his granddad’s old deckchair. First the mound of leaves, now this. He had an intruder.

  He held the torch low to avoid light escaping out of the half-moon window. The table wasn’t where he had put it; the wooden crates and the deckchair were set around it. Simon shone the torch into the supplies cupboard and saw his bottles of Coca-Cola were still there. He was pleased with himself for remembering the opener, although now that he was here, he wasn’t thirsty.

  He put his torch on end on the table and lowered himself into the deckchair. Now it faced the door, which was better. Who had been here? Practised at surveillance, Simon made sure no one followed him.

  It was colder inside the hut than out and Simon wished he’d brought a jumper, but he was an explorer, so he mustn’t mind.

  The door burst open.

  ‘Get out!’ The command sliced the air. Hands pulled him out of the chair and pushed him across the table, pressing his face to the splintered wood.

  ‘We’ve got a fugitive,’ the voice shouted.

  ‘Stop it!’ Another voice – a girl, Simon thought. He couldn’t move.

  ‘I think you mean trespasser.’ He mumbled politely, and decided not to say he couldn’t leave because he was being pinned down.

  ‘Name and rank?’ The hand yanked his hair, forcing him up.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ the girl said.

  The hand let go. Simon fell to the ground and scooted over the damp earth to the wall. Peering up from behind a packing case, he saw a skeleton by the table. It had dark sockets for eyes. He melted with fear and the room dipped.

  ‘Who are you?’ The skeleton had a gun.

  The room was dipping because the skeleton had picked up his torch and was waving it at him.

  ‘Don’t do that, you’re blinding him.’ The girl directed her own torch at the skeleton and Simon saw he was actually a boy with short hair and jutting cheekbones. Perhaps hearing the girl, he lowered the torch.

  ‘I know him!’ the girl said suddenly. ‘He’s at our school.’

  ‘Shut up, Nicky, don’t give away our identity.’ As the spots of light cleared, Simon saw that the boy was dressed in army clothes, a jacket with epaulettes and lots of pockets that was too big for him.

  ‘What regiment are you?’ he rapped at Simon.

  Simon knew the boy. He had seen him in a corner of the playground where no one went. He had been crawling along the grass below a wall, so at first Simon hadn’t noticed him. He had stayed watching him; then, sensing danger, he had retreated before the boy realized he was there. No way out now: the boy was barring the exit and he had a gun.

  ‘Answer!’

  ‘Sorry, I—’

  ‘What regiment?’

  ‘I don’t— There isn’t a name.’ Simon had no idea what he was talking about, but did know his life depended on giving the right answer.

  ‘Who are you spying for?’

  ‘No one.’ If Justin were here he would kill the boy, Simon thought. ‘I’m by myself.’ He was lying, because in his mind Justin was with him.

  ‘How do we know that? What are you doing here?’

  ‘I was checking everything was in order. I was keeping watch.’ Simon got to his feet, his mind busy. The girl placed her torch on the table and took Simon’s torch off the boy in the army jacket. She laid it on its side. The beam bounced off the bricks and sent a dim glow around the hut. To Simon it looked like a cave.

  The girl wore a duffel coat and her hair was pushed back with an Alice band, which made her look fierce. Simon knew her too. She had sat with him at lunch on his first day and asked about his last school. She hadn’t been fierce then. She had got him seconds of sponge with hundreds and thousands and custard that he hadn’t wanted because he was homesick, but made himself eat to please her. Best of all, she hadn’t asked about his finger. He had since seen her in the playground and she had waved. Apart from his little sister, Simon didn’t know any girls personally.

  ‘You will follow my orders.’ The boy’s voice made him start.

  ‘Yes.’ Simon stood up straight and involuntarily clicked his heels together.

  ‘Yes what?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Simon admitted.

  ‘Yes, sir, I’m the Captain!’ the Captain said. ‘You are our prisoner. A trespasser.’ He added.

  Simon panicked. If they locked him in the hut, he would never be found. ‘I have to get back or my—’

  ‘He could join the unit. You keep saying we need to train up new recruits,’ Nicky said.

  There was silence while the Captain appeared to be giving this some thought.

  ‘This is my lieutenant. She’s our Official Codebreaker. Every undercover unit has one. If I were to let you in, you’d be a private and do as we say.’ The Captain went to Simon’s supplies cupboard. The torchlight glinted on Simon’s bottles of Coke. The Captain took one out.

  A flash of silver. Nicky raised her hand; she had a knife. Quaking, Simon flattened himself against the wall.

  ‘You do it,’ the Captain said to the girl and Simon saw it wasn’t a knife, it was a bottle opener. He felt no relief.

  The Captain sat down in the deckchair. This meant he had his back to Simon, but Simon knew there was no point in attacking him – he would get shot before he reached the door. Wrenching off the cap, the Captain stretched out long legs.

  ‘You may not be fit for this unit.’ He frowned at the bottle.

  ‘Give me a chance,’ Simon pleaded. If he were in a unit, Justin would be his friend. A unit changed everything. He could break codes too.

  ‘Before you can join, you must prove yourself worthy.’ The Captain tipped the bottle to his lips.

  ‘How?’ Simon felt despair. With his bad finger he would never be able to prove himself.

  ‘Nothing and no one comes before the unit.’ The Captain was rubbing at some mark on his trousered knee. ‘You are trespassing in our headquarters, that’s a capital crime.’

  ‘He was here first,’ Nicky said. From that moment Simon loved her. ‘He must be brave. It’s nearly eight o’clock now and he’s out here on his own in the dark.’ She added: ‘We never come here by ourselves.’

  ‘I do.’ The Captain took a swig of Simon’s Coke.

  The girl looked at him and shook her head the way Simon’s mum did at Simon’s dad. ‘I vote we set him free and recruit him. He could be useful,’ she said.

  Simon had never thought of having a friend who was a girl, although she had a boy’s name.

  ‘We have a Code of Honour. In this unit we look after each other. You have to swear allegiance and do your duty to me.’

  ‘To the God and to Queen,’ Nicky the Codebreaker said.

  ‘To me,’ the Captain repeated. ‘Standing orders, you have to address me and the Lieutenant correctly and wear your uniform unless instructed by your commanding officer. That’s me. You have to do as I say all the time or you will be court-martialled and shot.’

  ‘We look after each other.’ Simon had said that to Justin when he came to the school. He had found a unit that would look after him. Privately he swore allegiance there and then. Emboldened
he said, ‘I was thinking that your headquarters have been penetrated. It’s contaminated.’ He was pleased with ‘contaminated’.

  ‘What?’

  The boy got out of the deckchair and leant over the table, knocking over the other torch. The shadows of the three children leapt and vanished as the torch rolled to a stop.

  ‘There’s leaves and stuff outside. They weren’t there before.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘It means someone has been here. This flower pot wasn’t here either.’ Simon guessed that the Captain mustn’t be contradicted.

  The Captain snapped into action. ‘The enemy is on the move.’ He slammed the bottle on to the table.

  ‘You’re always saying that,’ Nicky remarked wearily.

  With a stab of perception that would get sharper as he grew older, Simon saw that the Captain was making it all up and that the girl had had enough of his stories. He saw a chink in the armour. Simon also saw that this didn’t make the boy less dangerous.

  Simon saw his chance. ‘I saw someone so I came to investigate.’ White lies were OK.

  ‘I said he was courageous,’ Nicky murmured, which seemed to anger the Captain. He chucked his empty bottle on to the ground, hitting soft earth. It didn’t break. He faced Simon.

  ‘Private, two tasks for you. In the next twenty-four hours you will find a new HQ and you will steal something valuable from your mother to prove your loyalty. If you fail, we will shoot you.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ Nicky protested. ‘We didn’t have to do anything to join.’

  ‘We knew we could trust each other! He might have put those leaves there himself. Come on!’ The Captain stomped out of the hut.

  The mist had lifted; the headstones were luminescent in the pallid moonlight. A keen breeze sent leaves and twigs through the open door into the hut. Simon started to clear them, but as they were decamping, there was no point.