The Detective's Secret

by Thomson, Lesley

  ‘Stanley!’ David had told her that if Stanley was fixated with getting under a sofa or nosing behind a bookcase, there would be a good reason. Last week, giving in to his barking at a filing cabinet, Beverly and Jackie had eventually shifted it, a half-hour effort, to find his stuffed rat wedged behind it. There could be no toy in this cupboard.

  ‘What are you doing up here?’ She reached for a liver treat, but the pouch around her waist contained cleaning gear. She went closer and stopped.

  Lulu’s bedroom door was open. She never left it open.

  There was one room in the house that Lulu didn’t want her to clean: her bedroom. Stella had dreaded to think what state it was in, so, looking in, was surprised to find it immaculate. Dominating the room, beneath a swathes of fabric suspended from the ceiling, was the biggest four-poster bed she had ever seen. More suited to a stately home than a modest house in Hammersmith. Soft linen and lace billowed from the ceiling, suspended there like clouds. Great dust collectors, she fleetingly thought.

  Mirrors placed at strategic points reflected the bed into infinity. The bedspread twinkled with gold and silver threads; intertwining blossoms in blues, green and reds were lit by a sun motif in the centre. The sun was not as bright as the flowers. Floating on top of the silk was a pool of water, golden like the sun. The awful truth dawned.

  Stanley had peed on the bed.

  ‘No, no. No!’ Stella scrubbed at her hair. She bundled up the counterpane. No point in reprimanding Stanley, the moment he had laid claim to Lulu Carr’s territory would be lost in his past.

  Something dropped to the floor. Stella reached down for it. It was Lulu’s driving licence. There were bite marks in the plastic cover. Flushing with horror, Stella flipped it open, praying that Stanley hadn’t rendered it invalid. The photograph wasn’t Lulu; the face that stared out at her was the same as the one turned up in her internet research. It was Rick Frost.

  ‘Stanley!’ Stella closed the bedroom door. Holding the counterpane high to avoid tripping, she hurried down the stairs. She piled it into a large IKEA bag she kept in her equipment bag for emergencies such as this, got her phone from her anorak and called Jack.

  Pick up!

  Stanley cantered back up the stairs barking frantically. The phone clamped to her ear, Stella raced after him, worried she had forgotten to shut the bedroom door. He was back at the cupboard. She swished his lead from around her neck and clipped it on, but he wouldn’t move.

  She heard a buzzing. It sounded like a trapped insect. It must be what he could hear.

  At that moment Jack’s phone cut to answer machine.

  Closing her phone, Stella went over to the cupboard. The buzzing had stopped. Holding on to Stanley’s lead, she flung open one of the doors. A fragrant smell drifted out, aftershave mingled with fresh cotton. No trace of her beeswax polish, and there shouldn’t be aftershave: she’d washed down the wood after removing the husband’s clothes. Jilted clients hired her to eradicate all trace of their partners. She would have to clean the cupboard again.

  ‘Nothing, see?’

  Stanley backed away, tail down. There were smells he disliked: lavender oil, Jack’s washing detergent. This reminded Stella that she needed to find Jack. She shut the cupboard door and carried the dog downstairs. Picking up the IKEA bag, she opened the front door, and formed the proper question: Why was Rick Frost’s driving licence on Lulu Carr’s bed?

  Driving to her flat to wash the counterpane, more questions winged in. Was Lulu having an affair with Rick Frost? Had his wife found out and killed him? Was that why she wouldn’t agree to meet? If Lulu was having an affair with Rick Frost, that might be why her husband had left, although it was blatantly unfair to blame him. Conversely, it made it likely that, torn in half by two women, Rick Frost had killed himself. Or had Frost refused to leave his wife? That gave Lulu Carr herself a motive for murder. Perhaps she had hired Stella to wipe away the evidence. But then, why leave her bedroom, where the most evidence might be, untouched?

  Waiting at lights on the Hogarth roundabout, hunched over the wheel, Stella’s head jangled with the chaos of possibilities and incongruities. She needed Jack to restore the order, even if it did involve signs and ghosts.

  Checking on the dog, she saw something by his feet. She leant back to see properly. It was a glove. He must have taken it from Lulu Carr’s bedroom. She started to reach behind to pick it up, but saw his eyes. He had taken possession of it. They would have to trade. She hoped he would resist destroying it before she got to the flat.

  Stella saw Jack’s tower. Yet again there was someone on the roof. She leant on the wheel and narrowed her eyes. Jack was holding something. Binoculars. He was looking at her.

  She was brought to by a cacophony of sound. Furious faces in her rear mirror, fists and fingers raised, horns blaring: she had missed the lights. Stanley joined in, emitting short sharp barks. Miming apology, but unable to drive forward, Stella pressed ‘dial’ on her steering wheel.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Jack Mob.’ Stella was as monotone as the computer. The lights changed to green.

  ‘This is Jack, who are you? Tell me after the beep.’ She pulled away.

  She wouldn’t leave a message. Her ‘Missed call’ would be enough. On second thoughts: ‘I just saw you. Please call!’

  35

  Friday, 25 October 2013

  ‘I just saw you. Please call!’

  Jack took his train out of Southfields station. As if to emphasize Stella’s voicemail, there had been two little eyes at the top of the screen on his phone as if she were watching him. The flat light of a dull grey day filling the cab matched his low mood and reminded him why he liked the darkness of the Dead Late shift. Again, he had forgotten to measure the time it took to pass through the West Hill tunnel. He had been distracted. Last time it had been the red Triang engine on the monitor at Putney Bridge station, a sign he had yet to understand. Today, he had been shocked by how close he had been to Stella – or her dog – finding him in Tallulah Frost’s cupboard.

  He fretted about Stella’s text. She had seen him. He went over the words in her text, analysing them like a political correspondent for meta-meaning. ‘Just’ – presently, in a minute, a minute ago, recently, how recently?

  Stella had broken her code. She had gone into Tallulah Frost’s house disguised a cleaner. Jack felt cold fear at the prospect of seeing her; he dreading her telling him she had done it. Or far worse, that she didn’t tell him at all. She said she had seen him – maybe she would divert her guilt to him for trespassing? Jack toyed with pre-empting any of this by telling her himself. She might forgive him.

  He acknowledged the driver of a train coming out of Wimbledon Park. The woman looked like Stella, shortish dark hair. He had Stella on his mind.

  Stella didn’t end relationships with grand announcements. There would be no special treatment for him as her friend. She would stop giving him cleaning shifts or inviting him to Terry’s for shepherd’s pie. No more detective cases. They would drift apart. From his tower, Jack would watch Stella leading her life and have no part in it.

  Jack couldn’t explain to Stella that what she liked in him – his knowledge of human nature, his interpretation of actions, above all his cleaning – depended on walking night-time streets and keeping vigil in the homes of True Hosts until they let their guard down. Telling Stella was not an option. She would never forgive him.

  ‘I just saw you. Please call!’

  At Wimbledon Park, he watched passengers get off and on. The red steam engine was there on the driver’s monitor, exactly where it was last time. He stared at the number on the boiler: ‘26666’. It was the same number as the engine he had lost in the river when he was a child. Did they all have that number or was it the same engine?

  Even as he reached for the engine, he expected it to disappear, a ghost engine, so was surprised by cold metal. Instantly he was taken back to being a tiny boy, crouched by the river’s edge, pushing his engine down
the slipway.

  Jack got back into the cab and put the engine in his bag. He pressed a button and, with a collective swish, the carriage doors closed. He pulled the lever and eased the train forward.

  As the monitor slid out of sight at the top right of its screen, Jack saw a figure at the far end of the station. The shape, the bearing, was familiar. He had seen the same figure in another monitor screen at another station. That man, like this one, Jack guessed, had made no attempt to get on the train.

  On the return journey to Upminster, leaving Wimbledon, Jack made himself think of nothing but the West Hill tunnel. Leaving Southfields, he could see the mouth of the West Hill tunnel ahead. Jack checked his watch: thirteen thirty-three. He forced himself to concentrate.

  The second hand hit the fourteenth minute past the twelve. He fixed on the tracks, his mind blank, and maintained forty miles per hour. The darkness enveloped him.

  ‘I just saw you. Please call!’

  36

  Friday, 25 October 2013

  A strong gust of wind buffeted her. A tower might sound exciting on paper, but in reality it was dangerous and scary. Especially in the middle of the night.

  She should have rung before coming. Jack hadn’t replied to her text and, unwilling to text him again, she decided to surprise him. He did it to her all the time.

  There seemed more stairs than last time and they were steeper. She had left her gloves in the van, and her hands burned on the frozen metal rail. The wind was like in a horror film, a moan rising and subsiding. Stella told herself it was the sound of it blowing through the holes in the metal stairways, but couldn’t shake the impression of a baby crying in the dead of night. It was late, past ten o’clock. She was letting her imagination get the better of her.

  There was a click. Jack had come down to let her in. Stella called out, ‘It’s me.’ Stanley tensed. Probably because he wasn’t keen on Jack.

  She stepped on to the walkway, which was narrower than she remembered. No sign of Jack. A flurry of wind slapped her against the tower wall. She held the dog tight, mindful of breaking his ribs. They would both break everything if they fell off the walkway.

  There was no bell. Stella huddled in the door recess and, sheltering Stanley in the folds of her anorak, rang Jack again.

  ‘This is Jack, who are you? Tell me after the beep.’

  Jack was always advocating spontaneity, yet here was proof it didn’t pay off. Stella dared not look down. She might be on the ledge of a cliff face, darkness all around. She had never felt more alone. There was one place she could go.

  Stella parked up opposite the mansion block in Barons Court. Ahead was the station, its lit fascia like a beacon. She thought of the fish Suzie had said Dale was cooking for supper and wondered if there was any left over. Too late to visit: Suzie liked an early night and Dale, who her mum said had jet lag, would be asleep. Stella had never had jet lag. She wasn’t sure how it worked. It didn’t seem to affect her mum.

  When Jack was driving, he turned off his mobile. That was it. The living-room lights were on in her mum’s flat. She was still up. A shadow slanted across the ceiling – two shadows. Dale and Suzie came to the window and, like subjects in a framed photograph, looked out. Stella fumbled with her key and pulled away from the kerb.

  She got through the lights at the Talgarth Road junction and was soon back on the flyover. What could Suzie and Dale find to talk about? Stella talked about work when she visited her mum. They couldn’t be swapping recipes; Suzie would soon run out.

  Stella slowed at the Hogarth roundabout lights, where that morning she had seen Jack on the roof of his tower. He wasn’t there now.

  Since Jack was doing day shifts for a driver friend, it must mean his nights were free.

  A man was striding briskly along the pavement. He passed the pub, head down, walking with a bounce on the balls of his feet, like a teenager. He wore a long black coat and his hair hung in locks to his shoulders. He merged with the shadows, vanished and then reappeared. There was only one person it could be. Stella slowed as he reached the subway. She couldn’t stop or turn around. She lowered the passenger window button to shout, willing the lights to go red. They stayed green. She looked in her driver’s mirror in time to see Jack go down into the subway. If she went around the roundabout she could catch him on the other side. No, there were too many cars, even at this time of night; she couldn’t swap lanes.

  Jack had been coming from the direction of the tower. He had been there all along. He had broken his promise to her – he was walking at night. Stella minded less that Jack had lied; she was worried for him. One day he would get himself killed.

  On Kew Bridge her phone rang.

  ‘Number unknown’. Not Jack.

  ‘I’ve found her!’

  ‘Found who?’ Stella tried to place the voice.

  ‘My husband’s mistress.’

  Lulu Carr. Stella pictured the bedspread airing in her study. The stain had come out. She had forgotten about the glove.

  ‘I’m on my way there!’ Lulu’s voice boomed in surround sound and Stella adjusted the volume.

  ‘Stay where you are.’

  Lulu opened the door before she could knock. She was waving a piece of paper like a flag of victory.

  ‘I was right, I was bloody right!’ she exclaimed in a hoarse whisper guaranteed to wake the street. Stella hurried her through the house to the kitchen.

  ‘I found this in the cupboard on the landing.’ She slapped the paper down on the table.

  ‘What is it?’ The paper was covered with pencil shading like a child’s scribbled-out drawing.

  ‘Secret writing. It’s a number, look!’

  Hardly secret then. Stella could see some random marks. She tilted the note to the light. The marks did look like numbers.

  ‘I know where he is.’ Lulu was looking out into the garden as if that was where her husband was. Stella had to end the charade.

  ‘Lulu, when I was here earlier—’

  ‘Nicola Barwick’s been dying to get her hands on my husband.’ Lulu slumped down on a chair. She spoke as if reciting from a script.

  ‘Who is Nicola Barwick?’ Stella remembered what Dale had said about the man in his restaurant with an imaginary friend.

  ‘The spectre at our wedding. She was the bad fairy. My brother made me invite her – he has a soft spot for her. So did my husband. She twists men around her little finger. She’s been waiting to twist the knife.’

  ‘Lulu, I found—’

  ‘They mucked around as kids, skulking in the cemetery over the road from us. My mother worried about my brother, he took it so seriously. I heard her suggesting to my dad they take him to a doctor, but my dad was a psychiatrist and it wouldn’t have done to have a bonkers son, so he did nothing.’ She spoke in a whisper and kept glancing at the back door as if afraid of being overheard, reminding Stella of William Frost’s behaviour in the pub. She looked too, but saw only their reflections in the glass.

  ‘What are you saying?’ She closed her fingers around the driving licence in her pocket. Where was Jack?

  Suddenly it struck Stella that Lulu might not know Rick Frost was dead. Years ago, one of her clients had been having an affair with a man who fell off a ladder at his home and died. He didn’t turn up at the arranged place. Her client had seen a memorial notice in a newspaper six months later; by then she’d destroyed everything he had ever given her, assuming he had dumped her. Exactly as Lulu had been doing.

  Lulu was still talking.

  ‘This is written in invisible ink. He could never do anything normally. If we arranged to meet in a station or a café, he got there early to watch me waiting for him. Sometimes he wasn’t there, but I felt I was being watched all the same.’

  ‘Are you talking about your husband?’ Stella might point out the marks weren’t written with invisible ink since they could see them and she had a distant memory that invisible ink was made with lemon juice.

  ‘What?’ Lulu looked
oddly guilty.

  ‘I cleaned that cupboard, I didn’t see this.’ Why had Stanley been so interested in the cupboard?

  ‘Exactly! Don’t you see, someone’s been here. No prizes for guessing who. I’m going to wipe away her crocodile tears!’

  ‘Maybe wait until the morning.’ Stella saw the time on her watch: ten past eleven; it nearly was the morning. ‘Lulu, how do you know Rick Frost?’ Gentle and friendly, she imitated Jack asking contentious questions.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Lulu stiffened and shut her eyes tight like a little kid hiding.

  ‘I found this.’ Stella laid the driving licence on the table beside the note. There would be time later to explain about her dog. The paper and the licence looked like exhibits from a crime scene. Perhaps they were. ‘Were you having an affair with Rick Frost?’

  Lulu opened her eyes. ‘No, I bloody well was not!’

  ‘Why have you got this?’ Stella was morphing from cleaner to detective in one job.

  ‘Why have I got any of his things?’

  ‘You tell me.’ Stella coaxed. Take your time, she nearly said.

  Stella felt the sensation that Jack often claimed to feel, like an autocue: she saw Lulu’s answer before she spoke.

  ‘Rick Frost was my husband.’

  37

  Friday, 25 October 2013

  ‘How’s Stella Darnell? Still cleaning for England or cleaning up England?’ Cigarette smoke puffed from between Lucille May’s lipsticked lips.

  ‘She works hard,’ Jack said levelly. At best Lucie and Stella were openly hostile towards each other.

  ‘Sure I can’t tempt you with a nippet? No milk, but a whole damn bottle of Tanqueray is cooling its heels!’ Waving her glass of gin and tonic at him, Lucie shut an eye against the smoke and eyed him beadily with the other.

  Jack shook his head. ‘No, you’re all right.’ Lucie held a scary amount of drink without obvious impairment to her thinking or her memory. A ‘nippet’ – a triple gin with a splash of tonic – would fell him.