‘What would you do if it was me?’ Simon hit on a method that would stay with him all his life: to punish people with their own demons.
‘I d-don’t…’ the boy stammered.
‘You’d have me court-martialled and shot.’ Simon smiled, raising his eyebrows for confirmation. ‘Remember?’ He saw from her face that Nicky did. He saw her like him a tiny bit more.
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘I think you did and it’s a good idea, don’t you think, to set an example?’
Simon strolled past them to the door and cast a look across the cemetery. Dusk was falling. At this time of evening, the shadows shifted and it seemed that the statues moved. Simon wasn’t afraid. Not any more.
He had brought the hut back into service as their HQ. The tower had been out of commission and now had police swarming all over it. The eyot had been occupied by the enemy. Simon knew he went there. He left him little signs: he moved the stones, he planted some bulbs, but had no idea if Justin had seen. Simon didn’t pretend that Justin was his friend. When he had seen him on the eyot, he had looked right through Simon as if he was no one. He had denied that he knew him. The final betrayal.
Mr Wilson had told Simon that the disciple Peter denied knowing Jesus. Three times, it said in the Bible. He had said that by doing so Peter hadn’t just betrayed Jesus, he had betrayed himself. Simon now understood what he meant. Justin was lost to him as a friend, but he was lost to himself too. Only Simon could save him.
‘I didn’t say I saw your mum going into the tower that day. I lied and said the people I saw were in Chiswick House grounds and were not a man and a lady. My brother even told them he had lost the glove. I did everything like you said.’ Richard hiccoughed.
‘You didn’t lie. You never saw my mother,’ Simon said. ‘Why did you go to the police at all? You thought you were cleverer than me. If you go there again, I will tell them the truth. That you are a murderer and that your brother lied for you.’
‘They told me off for wasting their time.’ The boy scuffed his boot with the soft earth at his feet.
‘You are not fit for this unit.’ Simon echoed the Captain’s own words.
‘Give him his glove back, Simon. It’s not even his, it’s his brother’s, so he’s already been punished by him for taking it and getting him involved with the police. We all know Richard is innocent. This is a silly game. Let’s stop.’
‘Please let me go.’ The boy made the mistake of nodding his thanks to Nicky.
‘Please what?’
‘Please, Captain.’ The boy rubbed his nose on the sleeve of his windcheater. Simon had forbidden him to wear his Captain’s jacket: he had seen that if he stripped him of the trappings of authority – uniform and rank – he could sap him of his strength, his identity. He could make him nothing.
Taking a bottle of Coca-Cola from the supplies cupboard, Simon put out a hand. Nicky tried to hand him the bottle opener, but Simon indicated the campaign table. Slowly she laid it down there as if giving up a gun. Simon snatched it up and, applying it to the bottle, prised off the cap. He didn’t toss the cap away, as the Captain had done at their first meeting, he placed it with the opener on the table like the spoils of war.
‘You see, the thing is, if either of you were to tell the police, or anyone about anything, you’d be put in prison. Your glove is evidence.’ Simon was perfecting an imitation of his father: reasonable, always careful to explain a situation. His father, a psychiatrist, would be able to see right into their heads. Simon had convinced the unit that he could too.
‘It’s his brother’s glove,’ Nicky reminded him. She looked very pale, as if she had begun to guess there was more to the boys’ exchange, that it was not a game.
‘Have you told him?’ Simon didn’t address the question to her.
‘No.’
‘No what?’
‘No, Captain.’
‘See, if you did, I’d have to tell them you called my mother bad names. You lied to them – I’d have to tell them that too. I’d have to tell them everything that happened.’
The boy started nodding and didn’t stop.
Simon had envisaged Nicky as official codebreaker, his right-hand man. ‘Did he tell you what he said about my mum?’ he asked her.
‘Ye-es.’ She reddened. ‘He shouldn’t have, Simon, he knows that. It was mean.’
‘Can I have my glove?’
The boy had no sense of timing or nuance. Of this, Simon, better able to read minds than his father, was openly scornful. ‘You can go now,’ he told Nicky.
‘What are you going to do?’ She was obviously frightened, but her sense of justice got the better of her. Perhaps the girl sensed that the time when Simon no longer valued her had not yet arrived.
‘We are going to have a chat. You can go. Be back here tomorrow and we’ll form a plan of action. We have much work to do. The police will be on the watch, so we have to resort to deep cover.’ Simon was cheered by this prospect.
Nicky hesitated, looking at the Private. Then, with obvious reluctance, she retreated out of the door. Once outside she darted between the graves to the path. Simon waited until she had become another shifting shape in the cemetery, a trick of the light.
‘What’s going to happen?’ The boy was quaking, his eyes – hazel flecked with green – never left Simon.
Simon let a silence fall before he answered, ‘One day I’ll come for you.’ He addressed the Coke bottle. ‘The thing is, you won’t know what day that is until it comes.’
Outside, Simon kicked at a pile of leaves by the door that hadn’t been there yesterday and, reaching in, shut the door. Zigzagging across the cemetery, he avoided uneven ground and toppled headstones, on the lookout for Nicky, whom he wanted to trust. Until it was shrouded in gloom, he saw with satisfaction that the door was still closed. The Captain had done as he had commanded.
At the gate, in a pool of lamplight, Simon consulted his Timex watch. He noted that it was teatime: toast with honey and a mug of hot milk. As she always did these days, his mummy sat in the sitting-room window, watching for him. Or so he told himself.
Simon had noticed that since the day when he had tracked his mother to Stamford Brook station, she had reverted to how she used to be with him.
From now on, he decided, he would stop being nice. Everyone would have to be nicer to him.
52
Sunday, 27 October 2013
Jack shut his flat door. His clock said half past five. He had been with Lucie May for an hour. Walking there and back didn’t count: he hadn’t broken his promise to Stella, he imagined telling her.
Moonlight slanting in through the north window etched in silver his few bits of furniture – the bed, the cupboard, his desk and chair – like a photographic negative. Outside, the beam of light everything was in deep shadow. Soon it would be dawn.
He flicked on the green lawyer’s lamp on his desk and everything shrank to prosaic normality. He went into the kitchenette.
The twine, pebbles, sticks worn by the tides and bleached by the sun, and the flattened ballast were bathed in moonlight. The steam engine and the two carriages had gone.
Jack tore around the circular space, shoving aside books, papers, jumpers, shirts; he shook the duvet until the futility of his search caught up with him, a wolf snapping at his heels. He came back to the window and sat at the table. The binoculars lay where he had left them before going out to see Lucie. He snatched them up as if they might vanish too and looked out through the window.
Two lorries were on Hammersmith Bridge, heading into town. A centimetre adjustment took him several metres north. There was something by one of the buttresses. He twiddled with the focus although it was already sharp. It was only the barrier for buses. He combed the towpath either side of the river and arrived at the eyot. An area of pitch dark. He became accustomed to the lack of light and distinguished the swell of the tide and the gradual emergence of the causeway. He couldn’t see anyone on Chiswick Mal
l, or beneath the stone porch of the church, but he sensed a shift in atmosphere. Someone was there. Someone was watching him.
The same someone who had found their way into his tower and stolen his train.
Simon knew where he lived.
He ran to the window in the bathroom. He had told Stella there was no need to have frosted glass so high up.
The narrow walkway outside was well below the level of the windows. Only a high-wire artist would consider launching a ladder from it.
Yet Simon had got inside.
Jack could write to the landlords, ask for extra locks. He could have Stella’s London bar and her many mortices. Jack stormed back to the main room. He pulled up the lid of his laptop and typed in his password. He changed his password every week. He chose set numbers from his timetable on random dates picked from his diary with his eyes shut to ensure they really were random.
If Simon could get into his mind, he could break the code.
Jack’s fingers raced over the keys. He told Palmyra Associates there had been an intruder but that nothing was stolen. Strictly speaking, this was true: the train wasn’t his. He said they must have been disturbed, but that he expected them to return. As he wrote this, he realized how upset he was. He had believed the tower to be impregnable, but it was not. He asked them to treat his request as urgent and pressed ‘Send’. The message remained in his Outbox. He tried again and saw the problem.
CBruno. The other router had kicked in again.
He clicked on the drop-down list, but CBruno was the only router offered. He dived under the desk. His router was off. He clasped it in both hands and, clumsy and impatient, he indiscriminately pressed every button. At last it flashed with a series of lights that steadied to the required blue. Getting up, he heard the sink glug.
‘No you don’t!’
Frantically Jack ran to the sink and turned on the tap. Water thundered around the sink, splashing his chest, his face and the draining board. He turned it off and reached for a towel to mop his face. He glanced at the floor beneath the window.
The train was on the floor. The engine must have tumbled off the ballast and pulled the carriages after it. The stones had given way under the equivalent of a weight of over a hundred long tons. Jack had put artistic interpretation above accurate engineering. His father would never have done that.
He was relieved that, thanks to C. Bruno’s router, he hadn’t managed to send the email. Simon had not after all got into his tower. He was crediting him with too much power. Stella and Lucie had agreed on one thing: after all these years, Simon would have forgotten him.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Before going to bed, Jack confirmed that the outer door was secure. He went up to the top of the spiral staircase and confirmed that the skylight to the roof was locked and that the bolts were secure.
Inside the flat, he turned the mortice key and left it at an angle so that it couldn’t be pushed out of the keyhole from the other side and then teased beneath the door, a trick he had used himself. The door fitted exactly within the aperture, so that not even gas could escape, but in the past Jack had achieved the impossible: he took no chances.
In bed, he was reluctant to turn out the light and lay looking at his books ranged on a shelf above the cupboard. His roving gaze halted at the purple-spined copy of Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith. He jumped out of bed and pulled it out from the others.
When Guy Haines meets Charles Bruno on a train he cannot know that his life will change forever. Charles Bruno proposes a sinister deal – each will murder for the other – Guy assumes he’s joking until Bruno calls and says he’s kept his part of the ‘bargain’. Now it’s Guy’s turn…
Charles Bruno. CBruno.
A search on Google Images netted at least five Charles Brunos: two black, three white; all but one were smiling. None looked mad. Or bad. Charles Bruno was just a name. Jack reconnected to his own router, deleted his email to Palmyra Associates and logged out. The C. Bruno who owned the router – Colin, Christopher perhaps – had doubtless never heard of Strangers on a Train. Stella would say he was over-complicating things. She would say none of it was to do with Jack’s past; they were investigating a murder and the murderer was out there somewhere, trying to stop them.
Jack returned to bed and turned out the light. He heard creaks and cracks as heat ebbed from the cladding and floorboards settled. The Smiths’ ‘How Soon Is Now’ began, increasing in volume, as his mind took over. Entering a dream, Jack told a sheeted figure that the words, the chords, the melody – such as it was – were embedded in the walls, in the body of the tower.
How Soon Is Now? was a message from the dead man.
53
Monday, 28 October 2013
‘It’s the letter I forwarded to Nicola earlier this month, it’s been returned, I guess by the owner of the house. It seems she’s moved.’ Liz regarded an envelope lying between Stella’s latte and her Americano with hot milk on the side. ‘I didn’t like to open it.’
They were seated in a coffee shop on Hammersmith Broadway. Liz had rung Stella when she was cleaning Terry’s old office at Hammersmith Police Station and asked to see her ‘as soon as possible’. Stella had opted for the only place she knew that was both close to the police station and allowed dogs. Stanley lay under the table, his head resting between his paws.
‘So what do you think?’ Liz asked.
‘About—’
‘Shall we open it?’
Two years after his death, a letter occasionally came for Terry. Stella disliked having to open them. But this letter might solve the case. Lucille May would have no compunction about ripping it open. Jack neither. Would Terry open it?
Nicola’s London address was printed in capitals, small and neat. Stella had seen the handwriting before; Lulu had scoffed that her husband wrote like a twelve-year-old. ‘This is from Rick Frost,’ she exclaimed.
‘I forwarded it last week, that doesn’t make sense—’
‘This is postmarked the sixteenth of September, the day he died.’ All they had to do was open it. She had tried to take Jack in hand for not opening his post as soon as it arrived. Between his work at London Underground and Clean Slate, she was sure he earned well, so it couldn’t be the worry of bills that put him off. As with so many things to do with Jack, Stella found she couldn’t ask him why. ‘If your friend Nicola is coming back, we can give it to her.’ Stella found a solution.
‘And if she doesn’t?’ Liz added milk to her coffee, holding the jug high so that it came out in a long thin stream. ‘Isn’t this the evidence your dad’s policeman friend wanted?’
‘Martin can’t open mail on our say so – we might have stolen it. It’s probably “interfering with the mail, intending to act to a person’s detriment without reasonable excuse”, or some such. And that neighbour down in Charbury saw Nicola, so she’s not “missing”.’
‘We don’t know where she is now,’ Liz pointed out.
‘We don’t know where she was planning to go, so we can’t say she didn’t arrive,’ Stella echoed Martin Cashman’s line. She took out her phone. ‘I’ll call Lulu and ask exactly what the neighbour said.’
The phone rang and rang; Stella mouthed an apology to Liz. She was about to give up when Lulu answered. Stella asked for a blow-by-blow account. She was annoyed with herself for not asking for it the first time they spoke. Terry would have done.
‘I was about to ring,’ Lulu yelled. ‘Nicky’s landlady called!’
‘What did she say?’ Stella was ready with her Filofax.
‘Her name’s Chris Howland – for Christine, I suppose. Honestly, the things people mind, she was quite tetchy that Nicky went without saying goodbye.’ A blast of air roared down the earpiece; Lulu bellowed over it, sounding as if she was at sea in a storm.
‘Can you talk now? You sound as if you’re outside,’ Stella asked. She wrote down the name ‘Christine’ and underlined it and nodded to Liz, but Liz was looking at her
phone and didn’t see.
‘Yes. Chiswick Cemetery. I’m weeding Mum’s grave. It’s her anniversary,’ Lulu shouted.
There must be some moral code about talking on a mobile phone in the presence of the dead, Stella thought, and looking up saw scraps of rubbish flying across the Broadway like crazed birds. A newspaper had caught against the railings outside the Underground, held there by the force of the gale. Commuters scurried past the plate-glass windows, pushed and buffeted by the wind. When the café door opened, a strong gust blew napkins off the tables and scattered sugar sachets. The storm that forecasters were warning of was building.
‘Christine was upset Nicky had typed the note!’ Lulu bellowed.
‘What’s wrong with typing it?’
‘She said it was too official. I told her: Nicky doesn’t do “friends”, if we don’t count trying to steal my husband. And no, I didn’t say that to her. I promised to call her if Nicky turns up – she wants to hand back some excess cash; Nicky had paid in advance – if she lets the house before the lease expires. I told her to think of it as compensation for the typing! The woman’s a forensic specialist!’ Lulu spoke as if this explained everything.
‘You have Christine Howland’s number?’ Detection wasn’t just about asking questions – it was asking the right questions. Lulu, scatty though she seemed, had been more thorough than Stella gave her credit for. Stella felt as if a fog had settled above her head, stopping her thinking straight. This came of having so little sleep over the last few days.
When she ended the call, Stella apologized again to Liz.
‘Don’t mind me. Justin’s just texted, suggesting I visit him at home, that’s a step forward!’ Liz looked radiant.
Stella rang the number Lulu had given her.
‘Chris Howland?’ A woman answered with the preoccupied tone of someone too busy to talk.
‘Stella Darnell here, I’m looking after Nicola Barwick’s house in London.’ Embarrassed by her fib, she flashed a look at Liz, but she was texting on her phone. ‘You returned Nicola’s letter.’ She paused. Nothing. ‘Nicola didn’t mention leaving Charbury so, like you, we’re surprised.’ She went for a point of commonality.
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