The Dog Walker

by Lesley Thomson

  David stared, perhaps taken aback by Stella’s asking about his wife or because the question was out of character. ‘Mrs Merry said she hated carelessness. She dislikes dog walkers who don’t pick up their dog’s mess. People who put out their rubbish bags the night before for the foxes to rip open. She had a neighbour who did that. People who chuck litter out of cars or on the street. One dog walker dumps their poo-bags in her bin when it’s out on the pavement for collection. She said the government should limit who owns dogs. I told her about Stanley.’

  Stella had been with David when he rescued Stanley from falling in the river. Having established he didn’t belong to anyone, David had kept him. When he’d had to go away for several months, he’d asked her to look after Stanley. On his return he relinquished ownership because Stanley had become attached to Stella. ‘Did Mrs Merry say which neighbour leaves the dog poo in her bin?’

  ‘No. I got the impression everyone did. She told me an old woman in her street saw a neighbour let his dog poo on the towpath and did nothing. That was another beef. She hates bystanders, people who let others take the rap. Not her words. She said they were as bad as a culprit. I agree.’ David contem­plated his empty wine glass. Stella didn’t respond. They both knew that David Barlow had been a bystander in his time.

  The only ‘old woman’ living at Thames Cottages apart from Merry herself was Sybil Lofthouse. She had made clear to Stella that she kept herself to herself. That would add up to being a ‘bystander’. Stella wanted to get out her Filofax and jot down what Merry had told David. Whoever had killed Helen Honeysett had the strength to dispose of her body and dig a grave in the winter. It would take strength to heave her down the bank into the river. Again, Stella considered that she herself might have that strength – cleaning and dog-walking kept her fit – but Sybil Lofthouse was small and slight and had done a desk job. Adam Honeysett, Steven Lawson, Neville Rowlands, Brian Judd could have done it. Daphne Merry disposed of clutter: bric-a-brac not bodies. Bette Lawson had motive and strength and, until her husband died, she had got him to herself after Helen vanished. Did Steven Lawson know what Bette had done and it drove him to suicide? Did Lucie think her sister guilty too and out of loyalty blamed Steven Lawson?

  ‘…be kind to walk him on familiar ground.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Stella hadn’t heard a word.

  ‘Mrs Merry said that since I’d found Stanley on the Kew towpath, I ought to take him there, it’s his territory. She cared more about Stanley than my mother’s teapot. It was worthless, but I can see Mum holding it, I can’t believe it’s gone.’ He leant towards Stella as if to take her hand. Stella was horrified by a sudden wish that he would. Her mum insisted that marrying Terry had been her wrong turning. David represented a definite loss of direction for Stella. She wouldn’t say Stanley had been to the towpath – David might ask to come. She gave a start. More than once, Stanley had rushed to the ramshackle house on the river. Terry taught her to follow hunches. ‘Stanley’s owner, where did she live?’

  ‘A flat on the South Circular. Police wouldn’t say where,’ he answered promptly.

  So much for hunches.

  ‘This place needs a clean.’ David fixed on her, eyebrows raised. ‘A deep clean. I could walk Stanley on the towpath while you’re here.’

  Jack said Stella wasn’t great at reading people – she trusted the untrustworthy – but she did recognize a chat-up line. David Barlow knew her well enough to use the bait of deep cleaning. She drank her tea to stop herself saying yes.

  60

  Tuesday, 12 January 2016

  Daphne let him in. I heard him use the paltry excuse of returning her cake tin. I know my Daphne, she is too nice to refuse. She puts herself out rather than be impolite. She offers so much, and gets nothing back. I will change that.

  I heard her say ‘Jack’ when she opened the door. He calls her Daphne as if she was his friend. I’ve seen him on the towing-path sneaking about asking questions. He broke into the house and sneaked about; he knew I was there, but he was brazen. Now he’s with Daphne. Drinking from her mug, as if he’s right at home.

  He is one of those self-styled saviours with a mission to cleanse the world of evil. They are dangerous because they don’t operate by normal values. Charming and vulnerable, women want to look after them. Give them a home. Once ensconced they strike. This man is a creature of the night. I have to save Daphne from him.

  Daphne smiled at me on the towing-path. A sign. Jack believes in signs: I’ve seen how he walks, avoiding cracks in pavements and so careful on the towing-path because he knows each step counts towards his fate. Or someone else’s. Daphne’s smile was like the sun. She appreciates all I have done. Mother would approve of Daphne. I will make her proud.

  I will have to bring forward my plan. I removed that young woman and I’ll remove you. Jack.

  Through the window, I see Daphne smile. She gives him a letter. I move closer to see but Daphne pulls the curtains. She shuts me out. I have said before that no one should do that. Jack.

  Jack, who are you and what have you done? I will shut you out.

  Jack in the box.

  61

  Tuesday, 12 January 2016

  Stella planted herself in full view of the camera outside Natasha Latimer’s cottage. If Jack was in the basement, he’d see her on what he called the River Wall. She rang the bell. When he didn’t come, she rang it again. He must be with Bella. He was never there when she needed him.

  Stanley growled, a curdling rumble. He strained on his lead towards the towpath steps. She looked. He was wrong; there was no one there.

  ‘Sssh!’ she told him. If Jack was with Bella, he should have a signal. She called Jack’s mobile, remembering as she held the handset to her ear that it was a dead zone. To her surprise Stella heard Jack’s voice on the other end. ‘Jack, it’s me—’

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

  Stella paused, unsure how to articulate the barely formed hunch. She needed him to read her notes. She didn’t leave a message. When she put her phone back into her pocket, her fingers brushed something.

  It was the rag that Stanley had dug up when they were with Natasha Latimer and her sister in the basement. A scrap of towelling. Stella lifted it to the lamplight. It was a sweatband. She looked around for a bin. There’d be one in the park, but it would be trespassing to climb over the gate.

  Another growl. Tail down, Stanley was still fixed on the steps. He’d be wanting to go to the ramshackle house. ‘Over!’ Stella said, still in agility mode. She corrected her command: ‘I mean heel.’ Gratifyingly obedient, Stanley by her side, she walked along the narrow pavement. Passing Adam Honeysett’s house she paused. She wanted Jack with her when she tackled Adam. They were meant to be a team. Plus she should make up to him for going solo on the Rowlands interview. But Jack was with Bella. He wasn’t being a team.

  So preoccupied was Stella that she forgot that Stanley was never wrong. As she walked up the path of number 4 Thames Cottages, if she had turned to her left she would have seen a shadow on the towpath steps and caught the glint of a dog-lead clasp.

  *

  This time Adam Honeysett took Stella through to the kitchen. He wore a faded denim shirt open to reveal a white tee shirt tucked into faded and ripped jeans. His stubble looked deliberate and his hair looked recently cut, short at the sides and messy and tousled on top. The tousle was held in place by product: Stella caught a whiff of L’Oréal gel. Adam Honeysett took care of his appearance.

  He invited her to sit on a bright blue stool in the shape of an H and he chose a E-shaped stool that was the same yellow as the digger.

  He didn’t take the same care with the kitchen. Cardboard packaging – Stella recognized a shepherd’s pie sleeve as the brand she liked – spilled across the floor to a cluster of at least thirty empty beer and wine bottles. She’d seen a similar mess in the homes of men whose wives had left them. Beards were grown, hair was unwashed and the recycling bin over
flowed with empties. But Adam Honeysett’s wife had left him in 1987, so this must be normal.

  The table was a Lego-type construction of giant plastic bricks, raised circles acting as place settings. It gave her the odd sensation of being in doll’s house. On a wall was a colour print of a food cupboard, the shelves chock-full of Marmite, honey, cereal, soup tins, spices and condiments. The contents weren’t dissimilar to those in her own cupboard, not that she had need of spices.

  Gingerly she sat on the stool. It was more comfortable than she’d expected. She cut to the chase. ‘You don’t have an alibi for the night your wife disappeared.’

  ‘We’ve been through this.’ His expression was thunderous. ‘I was having an affair and yes, I feel shit about it, OK! But look, Helen was no angel. Death was her trump card. Now she’s untouchable while I’m fair game.’

  ‘You asked Jane Drake to lie and say you were with her. But that wasn’t true.’

  Honeysett leapt up. He kicked the E stool. It skittered across the floor, knocking down the bottles and coming to rest on the cardboard. Stella’s nerves jangled; stupidly, she had not antici­pated violence.

  ‘Are you saying you were with her all night?’ Jane Drake could be lying. Withdrawal of her alibi would be powerful revenge on Honeysett for not marrying her. But somehow, despite Drake’s stalking her and her creepy shrine, Stella believed her.

  ‘I walked around London. I had to clear my head. Jane’s dad had found out about us; he was threatening to tell Helen if I didn’t end it. He was livid I had my hands on his special little girl. You ask me, he wanted to have her himself. I tried to end it, but Jane went ape and I couldn’t do it. Either way, it would wreck my marriage. I’d have nothing.’ He bit back a sob. But, Stella noticed, his eyes were dry.

  Jack walked the streets at night; if he were here he’d know what questions to ask. Something about atmosphere and feeling in touch with the past. She said, ‘Where did you go?’ She had told Lucie he was on the towpath believing that to be true.

  ‘Nowhere. Everywhere. I wasn’t following a route. I got a coffee in an all-night café at one point. No one could have noticed me or they’d have blown my alibi long before.’ He righted the stool and sat on it.

  Stella saw that the other stools were also letters. Another E, an L and an N. Belatedly she realized they spelled ‘Helen’. Had Adam bought them after Helen disappeared to show the police and the press he missed her? Had they been a present for Helen because he was guilty about Drake? Or, and Stella thought of Latimer’s Pow3r 1 number plate, Helen had bought the stools for herself. ‘You’ve lied before. How do I know you’re not still lying? You had motive and you had the means.’

  ‘All I can say is I didn’t murder Helen. I loved her and I want her back.’ He splayed his hands out.

  He was overdoing the emotion. ‘Did you walk to the towpath?’

  ‘I came back that way. I didn’t see anyone, but then I wasn’t looking. Don’t you think I’ve racked my brains since? Was Helen lying unconscious on the bank and I walked right past her? Could I have saved her? If I’d been at home earlier she might not have gone out.’ He leant on the Lego table and buried his face in his hands. ‘I went home, crept in, so as not to wake her.’ He sat back and smacked his forehead – careful, Stella noticed, to avoid his hair. ‘If only I’d gone upstairs, I’d have seen she wasn’t there. But even then I’d have thought she had gone jogging early. But all I was bothered about was making sure the fucking dog didn’t hear me and wake her up.’

  The semaphore might have been convincing had Stella not witnessed the same high-octane emotion when he’d described kissing his wife lightly on the lips before driving to Northampton.

  ‘If you weren’t with Jane Drake, she has no alibi. Could she have attacked your wife?’

  ‘She was seen buying wine that evening,’ Honeysett reminded her.

  ‘She wasn’t seen after that and now it seems you weren’t with her.’ Stella wanted to provoke a reaction. Jolt him out of his theatrics. She put out of her mind what Honeysett might do if he was cornered.

  ‘Whatever Jane is, she is not a murderer.’ He caught his reflection in the window and patted his hair. Suddenly he reached across the Lego table and grabbed her wrist. ‘You have to believe me! Jane Drake is stalking me. I can’t tell the police, because she’ll tell them I lied. I’m at her mercy! You can stop this. Please find my wife!’

  62

  Tuesday, 12 January 2016

  Jack checked his phone to see if Stella had called. He was dis­proportionally ecstatic to see that he had a signal. He would call her. He saw the time – ten to eight – Stella wouldn’t thank him for interrupting Stanley’s agility class. He pushed on the door and went in. With silent footsteps he climbed the stairs.

  Jack gave a knocker on the paint-flaked door three sharp taps. He put his ear to the door, but only heard blood pounding in his head. The door opened and he sprang back.

  ‘Oh, it’s you!’ Megan Lawson didn’t look pleased to see him.

  ‘Hello there, Megan!’ Jack rubbed his hands with an enthus­iasm that must look insane.

  If she was surprised, Megan gave no sign. She said flatly, ‘You can come in if you like.’

  This time it struck Jack that Megan Lawson was like her apartment, clean and tidy; nothing in the room captured the eye or gladdened the heart. In contrast Daphne’s sitting room, although packed with clutter, was warm and homely. Although, he reflected, the homely objects were not Daphne’s own and therefore didn’t accurately express her personality.

  ‘Do you want a drink.’ She made the question sound rhetorical.

  ‘No thanks, I had hot milk at Daphne Merry’s.’

  It was as if Megan Lawson had been hit with an electrical charge. ‘Why were you there?’ she demanded.

  ‘I was returning a cake tin.’ It sounded ludicrous. ‘She’d made me a cake.’ Instantly he saw he had said absolutely the wrong thing.

  ‘I never see her now.’ Megan slumped in a chair. If it was possible she looked even more lethargic.

  ‘She must work hard, uncluttering and what not.’ Hazily try­ing to save Megan Lawson’s feelings, Jack was gabbling. Beyond denuding Suzie Darnell’s flat, he had no idea of Daphne’s workload.

  ‘She was my friend. I was going to be a declutterer.’ Megan hugged her stomach as if in pain and started up her humming. ‘Then my mum said I couldn’t see her. I went anyway, but she sent me away. I might as well be dead.’

  ‘No! You are alive.’ Jack clawed at the air in a bid to reassure. However, he would feel the same. Daphne Merry had been drawn to Megan because it enabled her to be the mother of a little girl again. But when Megan grew up Daphne must have lost interest; she would have had no experience of mothering an older child. She hadn’t seen her own daughter become a teenager. Megan would remind her of what she had missed out on. In a different way to Steven Lawson, Daphne had abandoned Megan. Jack could see that for Megan, as it had been for him when his mother died, a powerful blow had been dealt the day her father died. She was at once a seven-year-old girl, vibrant and curious, and a woman in her mid-thirties, tired of the life she had not had. Jack couldn’t say that this was why he had come. He wanted to show Megan Lawson that she wasn’t alone. Except she was alone. She lived by herself in a cold, shabby flat and he could do nothing for her.

  ‘Has Mrs Merry got a dog still?’ Megan stopped humming to ask the question and then continued.

  ‘Yes. A spaniel, I think. I’m not good on dogs. Apart from poodles.’

  ‘Mrs Merry was lovely with animals. She let me walk with Woof after our Labrador called Smudge went away.’ Megan sat up straight as if someone had told her to.

  ‘Woof! That’s the name of her dog now,’ Jack exclaimed.

  ‘All her dogs are called Woof.’ Megan started humming again.

  ‘How confusing.’ Jack felt a chill. He’d gone to clean for a woman who called all her cleaners ‘Tracy’ because she couldn’t ‘get those foreign names
’. The client cancelled the contract when he invited her to call him Tracy.

  ‘Daphne’s little girl named the first spaniel. I suppose it kept the name alive.’

  ‘I expect you’re right.’ As he had before, Jack warmed to Megan. He’d been right to come. If not for her, then for himself.

  ‘Daphne found Helen Honeysett’s dog Baxter on the towpath by Mortlake Crematorium and handed him in to the police.’ Megan brightened as she remembered this.

  ‘Adam Honeysett said they didn’t take Helen’s disappearance seriously until the dog was found,’ Jack agreed.

  ‘Mr Honeysett was with his… mistress. Daphne looked after Baxter.’ Megan sat back, humming. ‘Dad rescued Baxter from drowning once.’ She screwed her hair behind her neck and twisted it tight. ‘Dad didn’t rescue Helen that night.’

  ‘Is that why you think he was guilty?’

  ‘If he’d brought back Helen’s dog, the police would have suspected him so he left him by the river.’ The light that had come into her eyes when talking about Daphne Merry went. ‘In the end, because of me, he was suspected anyway.’

  ‘A guilty man might have brought the dog back to throw off suspicion.’

  Megan shrugged as if the topic tired her and said abruptly, ‘It’s Dad’s birthday today. Mum and Garry went to his grave. I went yesterday to avoid meeting them.’

  ‘You couldn’t go with them?’ Jack didn’t say that he knew she’d been because Stella had followed her and got locked in.

  ‘No! If Garry knew I’d been near Dad’s grave he’d have gone mad. I think Mum is scared he’ll do what Dad did. I won’t risk him doing that.’

  That. She wouldn’t say ‘suicide’. ‘Did you tell your mum you go and tend his plot?’ Jack shut his eyes. She had said nothing about tending the grave. Stella had told him that. She also said the grave looked untended.