The Detective's Secret

by Thomson, Lesley

  ‘We are in the dark,’ Mangen said. ‘It’s as if Nathan stepped off the planet.’ He appealed to anyone with information or who recognizes the woman to contact Harbourside LAC.

  In the photo, the woman was resting her head on Wilson’s shoulder. Some friend, Stella observed. Wilson was ducking to ensure he was in the frame.

  ‘Don’t mind me.’ Lucille May regarded her nails.

  ‘Read this.’ Stella handed her the phone.

  Amid a plume of steam, Lucie May languorously scrolled down the screen.

  After what seemed to Stella a frustratingly long time, Lucille waved the phone, ‘Jack said you knew, so why come to me?’

  ‘Sorry?’ Jack wasn’t there when she was looking at Dale’s album.

  ‘The Prodigal Son! Doesn’t Darnell Junior look like Simon Le Bon. What a dish!’ She fanned herself with a hand. ‘Get you, Miss Marple. First you solve Terry’s biggest unsolved case and now you’ve found his long-lost son.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Stella’s windpipe constricted.

  ‘Terry went to his grave without finding his boy. I pulled strings like a crazed puppeteer, but nothing – and Mr By-the-Book wouldn’t bend police rules. He dies and the Cleaner flies in on her magic broomstick and conjures up the lovely Dale!’

  ‘Dad knew about Dale?’ The words battered Stella’s skull like brick bats.

  ‘Mrs Darnell says to Terry, “Here’s your new daughter, oh and by the way I gave away our son!”’ She swigged some water. ‘Sorry, I know it’s your ma!’

  ‘I meant the article next to it.’ Stick to the basics. ‘The one about the missing teacher.’ Her dad didn’t come to see his newborn baby daughter in the hospital for three days. He had always said it was because he was called up to hunt for the killer of the three police officers in Braybrook Street. Was it because Suzie had told him he already had a son?

  Lucille May scrabbled under a cushion, retrieved a pair of black-framed glasses and jammed them on her face with one hand. Gone was the flaky manner; she studied the article with a frown, e-cigarette held aloft.

  Terry had known about Dale. Stella looked about the room and made herself do a cleaning estimate, although there would be nothing to do. Lucille cleaned like a pro. Was that why Terry liked coming here? Was it in this room that he told her he had a son and swore her to secrecy because his daughter didn’t know?

  ‘She killed him.’ Lucille May whipped off her glasses. ‘Country as big as Australia, she could bury him in the outback and get on with her life.’ She puffed on an arm of her spectacles, scowled and swapped it for the cigarette. ‘So, you and Jackanory ride again!’

  ‘He didn’t die in Australia.’ She gave May Lulu’s photograph. ‘This is Madeleine Carrington. Her daughter was married to Rick Frost, the man who died under that train in September. You covered the inquest.’ She had to trust the journalist, even if it wasn’t two-way.

  Lucille May narrowed one eye and exhaled a plume of steam. She regarded the picture as if weighing up whether or not to believe Stella.

  ‘It’s the same photo as in the Australian article.’ Stella pointed at the phone. ‘You can see that the man cut out from the picture is the missing teacher, Nathan Wilson.’

  ‘You’re saying he did a John Stonehouse and faked his death?’

  ‘Who?’ Stella asked.

  ‘Before your time, kiddo.’

  ‘He covered his tracks. He wanted to start again. A fresh start.’ Stella thought of the Clean Slate strapline.

  ‘Some fresh start, he rotted in a tower!’ May spoke with some relish. ‘Let me get this straight, Madeleine Carrington killed her son-in-law, is that your theory?’ Lucille asked.

  ‘The framer’s details are on the back; it’s dated this September. Madeleine Carrington died a year ago. The date on the back is a week or so after Frost died under the train. Looks like someone else other than Madeleine cut Wilson from the picture.’

  ‘Madeleine Carrington also went under a train at Stamford Brook. I wanted the headline “Station of Death” when Rick Frost died there too. My wimp of an editor vetoed it. She did it in front of her son. Riddled with cancer, she’d obviously had enough, but selfish all the same.’ Lucille replaced the cartridge in her cigarette. ‘I should have spotted the connection!’

  ‘What if her son murdered her?’ It was falling into place. Stella outlined the points to Lucille May. Simon Carrington had promised his sister it was her and him against the world. He hadn’t forgiven her for countermanding his advice and marrying his sworn enemy; it was the last straw when he found out she was having an affair with the Captain’s brother. To deflect him while not really understanding the level of threat she was deflecting, Lulu had suggested her husband was also having an affair with Nicola, the woman Simon had loved since he was a boy.

  And then there was Jack.

  ‘That’s a hell of a leap!’ Lucille pulled a face at her pun.

  ‘Simon and Lulu’s mother had an affair with Nathan Wilson. The date on that Australian article is in the eighties. Carrington was married with a son by then.’

  ‘So when shy “boy next door” Nathan Wilson was crowing to his neighbour in Sydney about his fiancée, she was leading a double life.’

  Lucille May finished her bottle of mineral water, rammed the bottle down until the neck met the base and screwed the top on. She tossed the crushed plastic at a waste bin on the other side of the room. It glanced against the rim and rolled away. Scrunched paper and wrappers around the bin testified to earlier misses.

  ‘Time to take stock.’ Lucille clambered over the top of the sofa. ‘Grab an end.’ She dragged a whiteboard out from the back of the sofa. ‘Lean it against the fireplace.’ She produced a pen from a packet under a sofa cushion, yanked the lid off with her teeth and knelt by the board.

  ‘We’ll start with Madeleine Carrington.’ She wrote the name on the board. ‘At some point she went to Australia either to see Wilson or she met him out there. Easy to verify and it doesn’t matter for now. She is connected to Rick Frost, how?’

  ‘He married her daughter Tallulah, now called Lulu.’

  Lucille wrote ‘Lulu’ and drew a line between the names.

  ‘Madeleine has a son.’ Stella liked whiteboards and was at her best with flow charts.

  ‘Name?’ Lucille tapped the board.

  ‘Simon. He is now our prime suspect.’ Stella felt mildly silly using the phrase, but Lucille dashed down ‘Prime Suspect’ and underlined it.

  ‘Does he know you suspect him?’

  ‘Not as such…’ Stella began.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I spoke to a man I assumed was surveying on Stamford Brook station last week. I think now he was Simon Carrington.’

  ‘What makes you think he wasn’t a surveyor?’

  ‘It was dark and he had no equipment.’

  ‘Now you’re talking like a ’tec!’ Lucille drew a box around Simon’s name.

  ‘Jack went to school with a boy called Simon—’

  ‘I thought I knew the name!’ Lucille May flung down the pen and began to rifle through a heap of files on the coffee table. She detached a fat manila folder. ‘Here we are. I found this after Jack had gone. Simon Carrington’s the name of the CEO of the company that redeveloped the water tower. He’s an engineer. I tried to interview him, but he never replied to my emails.’

  ‘Simon is the only person who knows Jack liked trains when he was a boy. Jack thought he was dead.’

  ‘So did his family. Another missed connection: I should have seen that. Carrington was the boy who didn’t die at Charing Cross Hospital. I need a database.’ She underlined ‘Prime Suspect’.

  Stella reached down to stroke Stanley; her hand swept the air. She had forgotten he was with Beverly. By now she would have taken him to Jackie’s as arranged. When he was away from her, she had no means of communicating with him, rather like Jack. At the end of the week Stanley would be gone and she would never see him again. Jackie hadn’t tex
ted to say he was there. Stella forced herself to concentrate. Her head ached as if there were cogs turning slowly. ‘As you told Jack, Rick Frost was the name of the boy who reported the couple near the tower. It must have been Madeleine Carrington and Nathan Wilson. My guess is he recognized Simon’s mother and went to the police, and then Simon forced him to withdraw his statement.’

  ‘There’s a motive.’ Lucille scribbled. ‘Motive: tell police about Mum’ next to ‘Prime Suspect’. She tossed down the pen and clambered back on to the sofa, thumping a cushion for Stella to join her. Unearthing a Windows tablet from under the files, she opened it and, swiping at the screen, brought up Google.

  ‘Teacher’s name?’ she barked.

  ‘Nathan Wilson.’

  ‘Nath-an Wil-son.’ Lucille May typed with two fingers as Stella had imagined Jack doing for his report.

  There were many Nathan Wilsons. Lucille skipped the offers to link in with Nat Wilson or be Facebook friends with Nathan of Idaho or of Bermondsey. She put in ‘missing’, ‘teacher’ and ‘Australia’. Up came the Australian Federal Police website for missing people.

  ‘Here we go.’ She switched off her e-cigarette and handed it to Stella. She read out the wording on the masthead. ‘One person goes missing every fifteen minutes. That’s two since you arrived here.’ She shot a look at Stella as if she was responsible, angling the screen so Stella could read it.

  According to the profile for Wilson, Nathan Bertram, he was last seen on Saturday, 22 November 1986, the year of his birth was 1947, his gender male. His complexion was described as pale, his hair and eyes were brown and build slim. Under Circumstances she read that Nathan Wilson was last seen at Vaucluse High School, Vaucluse, Sydney, NSW. He had told colleagues he was flying to Auckland the next day. It said: The above photograph was taken in 1986. Police reported his passport missing from his Cremorne apartment. He never flew to Auckland. Grave fears are held for his safety and welfare.

  The man in the picture looked like Lulu Carr.

  Lucille May scrolled through a gallery of photographs of missing people. Some were grainy or out of focus, others cropped from a group pose like in Wilson’s picture, with disembodied hands on shoulders; the missing ranged from teenagers to older people. Jack believed there was a finite number of faces. If you lived long enough, you saw them all. Vaucluse was where Dale lived. Sometimes there had to be coincidences.

  The types of photographs differed too. Some, Stella guessed, were scrambled out of a shoebox by a distraught relative. Passport-booth portraits, one black-and-white shot of a man not seen since 1966, the year Stella was born. Holiday snaps, a man in strong sunlight with a background of blue sea who had gone out to buy breakfast and never returned. Stella vaguely expected the pictures to betray some sign that the person was about to slip through the net of life. A faraway look in their eyes, a troubled expression, but none gave a hint of what lay ahead. They might have been her clients.

  A banner on the website announced that 96 per cent of people are found within a week. Cashman had expected Nicola Barwick to return. She roused herself: ‘Go to the UK Missing Persons’ site.’

  ‘Shut your eyes if you’re squeamish,’ Lucille warned. ‘This is a gallery of dead people.’ Deftly she resized the two missing person websites, the UK and Australian, on to a split screen.

  ‘Bingo!’ Lucille said under her breath. On the screen was Wilson’s Australian profile, with the UK entry that Stella recognized as the one Jack had shown her.

  Stella reread the list of clothes and items found with the body. The bottle of champagne and the child’s glove. When she had looked at it with Jack, she had dismissed the sketch of the dead man. With only brown hair and a bone structure to go on, it couldn’t be realistic. Comparing it to the photograph of missing teacher Nathan Bertram Wilson, she saw it was a good likeness. In the picture, Wilson was wearing a light blue jumper. A turquoise crew-neck jumper was listed among the clothes found on the body in the tower.

  ‘Stella, you have matched a name to a face, or a skull!’ Lucille was enveloped in a peachy fug. ‘Nathan Wilson is Glove Man!’ She handed Stella the tablet and returned to the whiteboard. ‘So, when Simon was a boy, he locked Wilson in Chiswick Tower. The guy died. Carrington went back and planted Rick Frost’s glove on the corpse, presumably to frame him. Is it possible he still held it over Frost when he was an adult? Surely Frost could have gone to the police and explained? Wait a minute.’

  Lucille May scooted over to the coffee table on her knees and shuffled the files around until she found a file labelled ‘One Unders’. Stella was grateful Jack wasn’t there to see.

  ‘Yes! I checked out the clients Rick Frost’s company had. Only one by the end. Guess what they were called. Palmyra Associates!’

  ‘So?’ Stella was losing it. Again she tried to stroke Stanley. Jackie had promised to text when Beverly brought him. That was hours ago.

  ‘Palmyra Associates are civil engineers. They do most of their work abroad. No website, but I looked at their listing at Companies House and, wait for it! The most recent UK project is Palmyra Tower and, winding back, who is the CEO?’

  ‘Simon Carrington.’ Stella could not hide her own triumph.

  ‘Right! Looks like Simon C. had Frost by the short and whatsits!’

  ‘Rick Frost bullied Carrington when they were boys, his sister told me.’ She didn’t say that Jack had said he had been unkind to Carrington.

  ‘This is one cool story!’ Lucille May waved her e-cigarette like a conductor’s baton. ‘One less missing person for the Australian police and one identified Misper for our guys. Shame Terry isn’t here to celebrate.’ She took a long vape and, it seemed to Stella, a shadow passed over her face. ‘I owe you, Officer Darnell.’

  A true reporter, Lucille was interested only in her story. Stella didn’t share her excitement. Stella remembered Jack’s expression when he told her about Simon. He had been afraid.

  ‘Here we are.’ Lucille pulled out another manila folder from the stack on the coffee table. She sat down next to Stella on the sofa and spread a huge sheet of paper across their laps.

  Stella’s phone rang. Jackie.

  ‘Don’t want to alarm you, Stella.’

  Stella became alarmed.

  ‘Beverly gave Stanley to a man who came to the office. He said he was Jack’s brother and that I’d sent him. Foolish, and she knows it, but apparently he was the spitting image of Jack, so she had no doubts. She did take up his suggestion she call Jack to confirm it, but he didn’t answer his phone. If only she’d called me.’

  ‘Jack doesn’t have a brother.’ Stella was numb.

  ‘I know that. Beverly does too, now. She’s distraught. I said it wasn’t her fault. I did wonder if it was David?’

  When Stella rang off, she couldn’t think or speak.

  ‘Read this.’ Lucille May tapped the sheet with her e-cigarette.

  Stella tried to make sense of tiny printed text within a vast diagram.

  Discrete entrances ensure that tenants in either residence rarely meet. Each has the experience of being a sole occupant. An internal staircase utilizes the pre-existing pipe cavity in the central shaft, giving both dwellings access to the roof. There was a signature at the bottom next to a printed name. It was Jack’s father’s name.

  ‘What is this?’ she demanded.

  ‘It’s a plan of Palmyra Tower.’

  ‘Jack never said his father was the architect!’ Stella couldn’t hide a sense of betrayal. She stared at the technical rendition of spiralling staircases, steel supports and intricate pipework.

  ‘Hold your horses! He doesn’t know.’ Lucille rattled the sheet. ‘The first developers were faithful to the original use of the building as a water tower. They hired an engineer – Jack’s dad – rather than an architect. He incorporated the pipe cavities into the new design, but when they went bust, he wasn’t paid. The poor guy was shafted, he should have known better, but after his wife died I suspect he took what he could g
et.’

  ‘My dog has been stolen—’ Stella stopped, a stolen dog was not a ‘cool’ story. David hadn’t trusted her to hand Stanley back on Friday, he had gone to the office and taken him. Stella let herself breathe. David wouldn’t hurt Stanley. ‘But Jack’s flat is the only one in the tower,’ she said instead.

  ‘Oh no, it isn’t! No guesses as to who lives downstairs. Call Jack!’ Lucille May leapt to her feet, sending the engineering drawing flying up.

  ‘Jack’s lost it.’ The fluttering in Stella’s stomach became a frantic beating of wings.

  ‘He can still talk on the phone.’

  ‘He’s lost his phone. I thought he’d found it, but I think—’ What did she think? David looked like David Bowie; he was nothing like Jack. Jackie had left the office because she had got a text from Jack saying the window was open. He had not got the wrong house – he hadn’t sent the text.

  ‘Simon Carrington’s got Jack’s phone,’ Stella shouted.

  ‘Come on!’ Lucille was already in the hall.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To find your dog and to save Jack!’

  60

  Tuesday, 29 October 2013

  ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are,’ Jack whispered with false bravado.

  On the eyot something was moving amongst the bushes and stunted trees. The tide was out, the beach between the eyot and the shore was discernible only by an absence of light. It was like a great chasm.

  Jack trained the lens on the brushwood and reed clumps and saw he hadn’t been mistaken. Nosing along what, at high tide, was the perimeter of the eyot, he saw a creature. A fox.

  Jack slumped back in his chair, his face slick with perspiration. It was past midnight and the wind was strong. It didn’t only disrupt humans, it blew birds off course and, stunning them, caused them to ‘crash’. Guillemots who lived by the sea would tomorrow be found dead on the streets of London. He raised his binoculars and scoured the beach with them. The creature lacked the prowling fluidity of a fox, it was trotting about with no awareness of a predator. It was Stanley.