The Detective's Secret

by Thomson, Lesley

  A cosy home with detailed views.

  It was the flier for the tower. He thought he had filed it with the scant paperwork involved for his moving. It must be the first one he had received. Through the curtain of willow fronds Jack saw the water was rising. He stuffed the leaflet back in his pocket and wended his way beneath a canopy of brambles and briar to the western end of the island. His direction was counter-intuitive: the shortest route to Chiswick Mall was the other way, but the river had already submerged the end of the causeway by the eyot. Jack knew it was easy to slip off the causeway and be pulled under by the Thames’s unforgiving currents.

  The scene altered with every turn of the tide, but blocks of stone and brick remained embedded in the mud. He knew which would sink under his weight and to side-step slicks of slime that hid mud as deep as quicksand.

  Two people were on the beach by Chiswick Mall, a woman and a boy of about three. The child ran about, his legs kicking. Arms flailing, he lacked economy of movement. At the edge of the spreading pool, he hurled a stone into the water, which plopped into the shallows. Jack would throw like that, letting go too late, curtailing momentum. When Stella threw a ball for Stanley, it could pierce the sky.

  Jack paused when he reached the steps below Chiswick Mall. In the diminishing light the tower was menacing. According to the flier, it was no longer called Chiswick Tower, but had been renamed Palmyra Tower. He recalled that his father had been commissioned to build a bridge in Palmyra, a suburb of Perth in Western Australia. Seemingly insensitive to the fact that the boy had lost his mother, he had sent him a postcard of Fremantle Cemetery and told him about an unmarked grave for Martha Rendell who was hanged in 1909 for murdering her stepchildren. Jack kept it in his box of treasures. Substituting the name of the tower for one of a foreign city ‘dis-located’ it from its history and surroundings. It was, Jack felt, a betrayal.

  None of the windows in the tower were lit, but still Jack had the crazy notion someone was up there watching him.

  ‘Let’s get home, have tea and then bath and bed.’ The woman’s voice carried across the beach. ‘Leave those stones, you’ve got enough.’

  The boy had gathered a bundle of rope, stones and wood. ‘Can I have it like soldiers?’ he piped.

  ‘They’re not soldiers, they’re fingers. Yes, if we go now.’

  Jack caught a reflection in the water of wings outspread. The gull he had seen earlier was floating on a thermal. Jack had once had a ‘cosy home’.

  ‘They’re not soldiers, they’re fingers.’

  He leant on the railing overlooking the river. The road would flood in twenty-three minutes. The woman and her little boy hadn’t passed him; he would have seen them. They must have seen the tide coming in, but even so he should have warned them. There was no one on the pavements; no car was driving away. Even the gull had flown away.

  The boy and his mummy were the streaks of grey in the darkening sky, the snatches of light on the water. Jack understood why they left no footprints in the mud.

  A glow lit up the wool weave of his coat.

  ‘Hey!’ He was hearty: Stella didn’t believe in ghosts.

  ‘My mum has faxed Jackie, she’ll be back tomorrow evening. I’m to clean the spare bedroom and change the sheets. We know what that means.’

  ‘Do we?’

  ‘She’s met a man!’ Stella’s cry was like the gull’s.

  ‘What did the fax say?’

  ‘What I said about the sheets.’

  ‘So she mightn’t have met a man. If she has, is that such a—’

  ‘My mum is a bad judge of men,’ Stella huffed down the line.

  ‘Not so bad. She chose Terry.’

  ‘She walked out on him!’

  ‘It could be the friend she’s been staying with.’ He wouldn’t mention Stella’s own shaky judgement of men. She didn’t rush headlong into relationships, she made her mistakes after much consideration.

  ‘It’s not.’ Stella was trenchant.

  ‘She’s asked you to make up the bed in your room, not her own bed. That sounds like a friend.’

  ‘Mum would never share her bedroom.’ Stella was arch. ‘I’m to collect her – them – from the airport. I can’t meet you, I have to get over to her flat now.’

  ‘That’s a good sign.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘She wants you to meet this person, instead of springing him or her on you.’

  ‘She is springing him on me.’

  Above the brewery, the tower was a palpable presence.

  ‘Shall I go with you?’ Stella kept his ghosts at bay.

  ‘Thanks, but no need. I’ve started putting together a plan of action. We need to know Frost’s friends, his likes and dislikes, his routines. I’ll send it. I’ve tried to describe the man I saw at the station. Meanwhile Frost’s wife is our prime suspect and no, I haven’t changed my mind, we’ll find another way to talk to her.’ She rang off.

  Jack knew that Stella’s objection to the man – if the mystery guest was a man – would be out of concern for Suzie. He suspected that were he in Stella’s shoes, he would be concerned at having a stranger taking over his bedroom. He would mind his mother calling his bedroom ‘spare’; it would make him feel as though he didn’t exist. He hoped that if Suzie Darnell had met a man, he would like him.

  Ghosts. Spare bedrooms. Hot toast and honey. The falling away of old structures. The revelation of the true self. A cosy home. His home. Jack recognized the signs. In the light of the lamp-post saw he had an email. It was from– and headed without apparent irony: –

  Your tower awaits you.

  22

  October 1987

  The carriage clock in the sitting room struck two.

  ‘I have to go out.’ His mother was rinsing a mug under the tap.

  ‘Where?’ He had begun to hope she was staying in the house with him. He could tell her what she planned to do, but that would make it true and it wasn’t true.

  ‘Shopping.’ She put the mug on the draining rack. It fell on to its side, but she didn’t notice. ‘For apple crumble, your favourite!’

  He wanted to say he hated apples, but he couldn’t lie to her. Her wedding ring – her real ring – was on the shelf behind the taps.

  ‘You’ll lose your ring if you leave it there,’ he said instead.

  ‘If I leave it there, it won’t get lost.’ She tipped water out of the washing-up bowl.

  ‘I’ll “forage” for apples.’ He was suddenly happy. She really was going shopping.

  ‘You’ve got homework.’

  ‘I haven’t got homework, I just have to write what I did at the weekend.’

  ‘That’s homework.’ She still had her back to him. ‘Simon, if you want to be helpful, go and get your sister.’ She snapped off her rubber gloves.

  ‘Is she going too?’ That made no sense: his sister was too little. ‘She can’t “hunt and gather”.’ He had a thought. ‘The weekend hasn’t happened yet.’ Justin would like that argument.

  ‘Now!’

  His sister was sitting on the sitting-room floor, walled in by big coloured bricks.

  ‘You’re going shopping, Beeswax!’ His name for her because with her blonde pigtails and stripy jumper she resembled a bumblebee. It didn’t occur to Simon to take out on her his resentment that she was going when he wasn’t allowed. He made the expedition to Marks and Spencer’s sound as exciting as he actually thought it was.

  One by one he lifted away the bricks, sorry to dismantle her construction, then reached down and hauled her up. Staggering, he nearly dropped her. This highly entertained her and she let out a raucous chortle.

  In the hall he cajoled into her anorak and then fixed her into her buggy. He fetched plastic bags from the cupboard with the vacuum cleaner and jammed them into the buggy’s carrier. When she craned around to watch him, he did a monster face and made a scary noise. She chortled again.

  ‘Sah. Sah!’ Her attempt at his name. She could say words like Ma
ma, mat, bottle.

  Heartened by her delight in him, Simon kissed her on the forehead. She smelled of talc and shampoo.

  ‘Bees, your job is to spy and report back to me, OK?’ he whispered.

  If his mother thought she could keep secrets, she was wrong. When his sister said ‘mat’, she didn’t mean the thing you wipe your feet on. She hadn’t got to grips with ‘n’, she was trying to pronounce ‘Nat’. Mr Wilson’s name was Nat. The boys at Marchant Manor spelled it ‘Gnat’ and called him a stick insect behind his back. Simon didn’t call him this because he had thought Mr Wilson was his friend. His mother wasn’t going shopping, she was meeting Mr Wilson.

  ‘I’m off, Simmy.’ She used her name for him and fluffed his hair and, pleased, he considered he might be wrong about Mr Wilson and it was shopping after all. She took her coat from the hooks and opened the front door.

  He scrunched up his nose. ‘You smell funny.’

  ‘Don’t be horrid, darling, it’s perfume as you well know. Start your diary. We’ve had most of today, haven’t we, and when you’ve written it, read it to Dad.’

  Today my mummy went away with Mr Gnat Wilson the Stick Insect. The Captain said she was a prosit… a pros—

  His sister was tootling like a train, their sign; he shot her a smile and choo-choo sounds of an engine.

  ‘I could write about the shopping.’ Simon looked down. Her shoes were pointy and shiny with spiky heels. He had never seen them before.

  ‘Sah. Sah!’

  The buggy clunked over the brass threshold and the front door shut. His mother had left the scarf he had bought her with his pocket money on the hook. Pocket money.

  Simon rushed upstairs and into his bedroom. He wrenched off the lid of his money tin. Inside were seven fifty-pence pieces. He dropped them into a pocket in his trousers.

  He pulled on his mac and ran out of the house. Outside he saw her green Citroën 2CV. His mother had abandoned her pretence of shopping at the gate.

  The water tower blocked out the sun. Simon waited until his mother appeared on the other side of the subway and then ran down the ramp, through the tunnel and up the other side. Chiswick Lane was a problem, a straight road with the park on one side and houses on the other so that there was nowhere to hide. Luckily she never looked behind.

  By the time he got to the radio repair shop at the top of Chiswick Lane, she was metres from him on Chiswick High Road, walking fast.

  He fell into pace with a woman holding hands with two girls, younger than him. If she glanced back, she would assume he belonged in their family.

  The family peeled away, leaving him exposed. His surveillance skills were unnecessary: she didn’t look anywhere but where she was going. He could have walked alongside her and she wouldn’t have seen him.

  They were nearing Marks and Spencer’s – she might after all be shopping; she didn’t need much so that was why she didn’t want him to come. It was why she had left the car.

  He dashed across the zebra crossing without waiting for the traffic to stop. A blaring horn, a slant of red as a bus missed him by centimetres. Someone shouted.

  He hurried after her under the bridge, now so close he could hear the rattle of the buggy wheels. Outside Turnham Green station, he used a newspaper vendor as a shield. She was at the gateway to the platform when he entered the station. He asked for a return to Upminster, the end of the line; he could go either way with it if she was going to Richmond or Ealing Broadway. He had no idea of the cost of a train fare, so he pushed all of his fifty pences under the glass.

  He shovelled up change into his bad hand and went up the stairs. There was a train in the station; he got on as the doors were closing.

  Simon grabbed a central pole and looked up the carriage. She might not be on the train. He tried to see if she was on the platform, but the train was already out on the open tracks. She might have gone the other way. He was sick with himself for his stupidity.

  He made his way up the aisle to the end, grabbing at poles, and peered through the glass doors. She was standing up, wheeling the buggy back and forth as if to lull his sister to sleep, but she was carrying her – the buggy was empty. As Simon noticed this, his sister looked at him and put out a hand, fingers splayed as if to catch him. He retreated and trod on something.

  ‘Watch it!’ A man in jeans, his woolly jumper tucked in, legs sticking out in the gangway, glared at him.

  ‘Sorry.’

  The jumper was striped, but red and gold, not yellow and black like his sister’s.

  ‘What you staring at?’ the man said.

  ‘Sorry.’ Simon hugged a pole and risked another look through the carriages. His sister was chattering to his mother, she would be telling her she had seen him. ‘Sah, Sah!’ He hoped his mum wouldn’t believe her.

  At Stamford Brook station, his mother turned the buggy around and backed off the train. A man helped her lift the buggy out on to the platform. Simon jumped down and saw instantly that his sister was looking for him. His mother glanced in Simon’s direction. He didn’t have time to move, but she was looking right through him as if he was invisible.

  He waited until she disappeared down the staircase, then chased after her, holding his trouser pocket to stop the change jangling. Outside the entrance on Goldhawk Road, she pushed the buggy over to one side and stopped. It was precisely three o’clock. All of sudden he understood what was happening. He had caught only a fragment of their conversation at the tower, but he knew his mother did things by the clock – in that she was like his father. She was leaving home with Mr Wilson. Properly leaving, not going shopping or going to the tower. She lived in a coffin and now she was escaping. Why hadn’t she asked him to come with her? Simon pulled on his half-finger. Why was she taking his sister? She was meeting Mr Wilson on the dot of three. She was on time.

  His head filled with questions, the boy drifted out of the ticket hall into plain sight of his mother. She had her back to him and was looking up and down Goldhawk Road, her handbag hanging from her shoulder, the flap open.

  Simon realized he was exposed and shrank back behind a closed newspaper stand. The headline on the vendor’s box read Lester Piggott Jailed. He didn’t know what to do. Justin would know. He saw that one of his sister’s arms had flopped over the side of the buggy. She had fallen asleep. He wanted to lift it up and lay it on her lap. There, there, Beeswax, sleep tight and make lots of honey. Their private joke.

  The minute hand on his watch went around five times. He risked leaving his post and wandered back into the station. One strategy was to tell his dad everything and let him deal with it. He dealt with disturbed people all the time. He could ‘section’ Gnat Wilson, a thing his father did that Simon assumed meant cutting people up into pieces.

  Simon looked at station clock. It was a quarter past three. Mr Wilson was fifteen minutes late.

  The man with the jeans and the stripy jumper from his train was running towards him from the road. Fleetingly Simon supposed he had got off at the wrong station. He tried to move out of the man’s way, but was stopped by the photo booth. Stepping away from it, he lost his balance and his leg slid out from under him; he tried to get his balance and felt a boot catch his calf. There was a thump. Mr Wilson! He grabbed at the man and kicked at his leg.

  It wasn’t Mr Wilson. It was the man from the train. Simon was shoved aside by a man in station uniform who grabbed the man and pushed one of his arms behind his back.

  Something flew across the ground. Instinctively Simon caught it. Black leather with a flap that was open. It was his mum’s handbag.

  ‘Police!’

  ‘Thief!’

  ‘Get him.’

  Stamford Brook station teemed with people: passers-by, station staff, passengers from an Upminster train pulling out of the station. There was the whoop-whoop of a siren and a Ford Focus with chequered strips and flashing lights tore up to the zebra crossing. Two police officers pushed through the gathering crowd. It took a few moments for someone to
see a small boy in grey school trousers and a jumper with a tear in the sleeve, sitting slumped against the photo booth clutching a woman’s handbag. A few more moments for the people who dragged him to his feet to understand that he wasn’t the accomplice of the culprit but the son of the woman whose bag had been snatched.

  Simon was taken outside to where his mother was talking to a woman police officer. His sister reached up a hand and he squeezed it.

  ‘You and me against the world, Beewax,’ he whispered to her. ‘I’ll protect you. Always.’

  ‘Bzzzzz!’ she replied confidentially.

  ‘Kid’s a hero,’ a man in London Transport uniform told the police officer. ‘Tackled the guy – piled in there. Fearless. That boy loves his mum!’

  Simon didn’t take his eyes off his mother. Unblinking he stared, and when she looked away he spoke quietly so that no one else would hear: ‘Since he’s not come, we can go hunting and gathering.’

  23

  Wednesday, 23 October 2013

  Stella waited while Stanley sniffed at a lamp-post. She swapped hands on the lead as he pottered around the post to prevent him becoming wrapped around it. They were outside the house on Primula Street in Hammersmith where her dad had been born and lived until he moved with Suzie to Rose Gardens North. Terry had swapped the hum of the A40 for the Great West Road. Stella had a photograph, presumably taken by Suzie, of Terry leaning in the doorway, with her nana and herself, aged four, on the doorstep of the house she was outside now.

  Terry’s father had died of a heart attack when he was fifteen.

  ‘I was at school, I rushed out of the biology lab, dodged across roads, I didn’t care. I stood on the path outside our house and yelled, “Not my dad! Not my dad!”’

  When Terry himself had died of a heart attack, Stella had resented the disruption to her work.

  Not my dad!

  The semi-detached red-brick house looked smaller than she remembered. A wheelchair ramp had replaced the step. Her nana would disapprove of the double mattress slumped against the wall and the television dumped on balding turf. Gone were the marigold borders and window boxes in the photograph. A plastic urn, faded and cracked, flourished with dandelions by the ramp.