The Dog Walker

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘We’ll never get Lofthouse to confess,’ Stella said.

  ‘She’ll carry that secret to the grave,’ Jack agreed. ‘Whenever she dies,’ he added.

  ‘At the least if Merry knew Lofthouse had seen Steven Lawson on the steps by the river she knew she was a bystander. Everyone was watching everyone, but nobody saw anything.’

  ‘Merry had luck on her side. Megan mistook Merry’s voice saying “Oh, it’s you!” for Helen and assumed she was talking to her dad. If she’d known it was Merry, she would have told the police and alerted them to another suspect. Thank God Suzie had that intuition about you being in trouble,’ Jack said.

  ‘Hardly intuition. Mum thinks I’m in trouble if I don’t answer her texts or call right away. And it was too late. By then I was in Latimer’s house trapped by Rowlands. You rescued me. You saved my life.’

  Jack pulled a face. ‘Anytime!’

  Stella flicked through the pages of their report. ‘It’s extra­ordinary Daphne Merry didn’t try to hide the body. Either of them. If Rowlands hadn’t buried Helen Honeysett for her it’s likely she’d have been caught.’

  ‘I doubt she’d have cared. The crowning event in Daphne’s life was the death of her little girl. She lacked empathy. It made her a good declutterer. She didn’t get attached to things or, apart from her daughter, people.’ She hadn’t brought him a cake to be nice. She was nobody’s mother. She’d wanted to see inside Latimer’s house, to check for clutter. He said, ‘Rowlands mistook her lying to the police as their tacit understanding he’d “decluttered” for her. He kept Judd’s house going, opened the post, paid bills and, after Latimer got him out, he stayed in there. He needed a reason to come to the towpath. He couldn’t keep a dog in his bedsit, so took Whisky’s lead and poo-bags.’ Jack couldn’t say that this was why he’d sensed evil in the house. Evil had gone now.

  ‘I assumed he had a dog because the lead strung across his chest made him looked like a dog walker.’ Stella gave a sigh. ‘Rowlands must have got a shock when he saw Stanley and realized he was Brian Judd’s dog.’

  ‘Stanley witnessed a murder,’ Jack breathed.

  They turned to look at the little poodle. He lay in his bed, all four paws in the air. He had known trauma. Would Stanley forget that he had been trapped in the ruins of Natasha Latimer’s basement for over twenty-four hours? They’d thought he was dead. Stanley had been found under the digger bucket; it had protected him from falling masonry and provided an air pocket. Suzie had given Stella a cutting from the Sun headlined JCB Saves Poodle.

  ‘Merry said she wanted clients to have light and air. Maybe she cared a bit,’ Stella mused as she watched her dog.

  ‘She wanted light and air for herself. If Suzie had been in the room with Daphne when she asked for her stuff back she could have been her third victim. I know that flash of fury when someone cuts you up driving or pushes in to a queue. I’ve imagined killing someone who lets their dog poo and doesn’t pick it up. Daphne did it.’ Stella would never want to kill someone and certainly not for a petty reason.

  ‘Me too.’ Stella was still looking at Stanley. ‘David was too scared to ask for his things back. He said she’d kill him.’

  Jack had a lot more to find out about Stella.

  ‘This case has been all about dogs,’ Stella said eventually. ‘Merry wouldn’t have killed Helen if Baxter hadn’t pooed on the path and she hadn’t left it there. Dad used to say a detective must “get to know” the murdered person. Mum said that was blaming the victim. He said the victim was ground zero. Someone who lived and loved, like you and me. It wasn’t just about getting them justice; he worked to restore the person they had been when they were alive so they didn’t become known only for how they had died. What we’ve learnt about Helen Honeysett is that she was tactless and thoughtless and careless.’

  ‘Fair enough. We all have flaws. She was also lovable, incor­rigible and full of energy. She wanted people to be happy. If she’d been alive today I’m betting she would have found Natasha Latimer the perfect house without upsetting anyone.’

  ‘The families can have closure.’ Stella echoed the words of the press release that Jackie had insisted she put out. ‘We always suspected Helen was dead within hours of going out to the towpath.’

  Like Helen Honeysett, Stella could say it how it was. ‘He’ll have to find another way to make peace with her for his affair,’ Jack said. ‘An affair isn’t a heinous crime, it took on enormity because she was murdered. She would have had an affair with Steven Lawson if he’d been up for it. Her death lent his infidelities an unmerited darkness.’ He got up and filled the kettle. ‘I still say you solved this case. You worked out it was Merry.’

  ‘If you’d been with me when I first bumped into Sybil Lofthouse, you’d have spotted the comment about her seeing Merry by Mortlake Crematorium and worked out she could have alibied Lawson. I wrote it down but didn’t grasp the significance. She had seen Merry. And if I’d taken you with me to interview Neville Rowlands you would have recognized the photo of Daphne Merry under his divan. And seen that he was the man in the black suit. I forgot to show you the sweatband Stanley found in Latimer’s basement. If I had you’d have known straight away that it belonged to Helen Honeysett: you would have recalled the pictures from the reconstruction.’

  ‘If I had recognized it, you’d have insisted we show it to Martin Cashman. He’d have taken the case over.’

  ‘Would that have mattered as long as the case was solved?’

  ‘Who says he would have solved it? You did fine, Stell. Just fine.’

  Stella and Jack had disagreed about how to express the dis­covery of the killer in their report. Stella had cut Jack’s bit about her deducing Daphne Merry murdered Helen Honeysett and rewrote it to include them both.

  ‘It’s the truth,’ he had argued.

  ‘“There is truth and truth.”’ Stella quoted words that Jack had once said to her back to him. ‘We’re a team. I still don’t get why Rowlands left the dog collar in the digger.’

  ‘It was Whisky’s collar. Perhaps it was a sign to us that Brian Judd was in his grave.’

  ‘He probably dropped it by mistake.’ Stella couldn’t do with everything being a sign.

  ‘Neville Rowlands’ only mistake was believing Daphne Merry loved him. Otherwise he was meticulous in everything he did.’

  ‘Fancy loving someone so much you literally let them get away with murder.’ Stella decanted the rest of the stew into a plastic freezer bag and sealed it. She washed the pan. ‘So much for Claudia and her haunting theory. Most of the time the squeaking wasn’t even Rowlands controlling the digger arm. It was the house straining on the compromised foundations. Graham said the signs would have been apparent long before it collapsed.’

  ‘Claudia wasn’t wrong. Helen Honeysett was buried in the garden at number one. She was haunting it. Now at least she can be at peace.’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Stella snapped off her marigolds. She opened the box containing all their notes and the papers on the Honeysett file. She pulled out the photocopy of the diary and ran her finger down the first page. ‘There!’ Stella slid the copy over the table to Jack.

  ‘“Saw Nev R. He greeted me like I didn’t know him.” What does that mean?’ Again Stella was ahead of him.

  ‘Do you know who I am and what I have done?’ Stella snagged the marigolds into a plastic holder on the side of the sink. ‘The line wasn’t Steven Lawson’s. He was quoting. What if that’s what Rowlands said to him on the towpath? Rowlands couldn’t tell Lawson the truth or Daphne Merry would be arrested for murder, but maybe couldn’t live with Lawson taking the rap for something he hadn’t done. He gave him a sign.’

  ‘A sign!’ Jack was jubilant, Stella was seeing signs. ‘Steven didn’t get the significance of Rowlands’ question. Rowlands’ love for Daphne destroyed him. He was consumed with evil. Like Suzie, he’d lost track of who he was. Who am I and what have I done?’

  ‘Why didn’t Steven Lawson
just write, “It’s Neville Rowlands”?’ Stella passed Jack the tea bags. ‘That’s what I’d do.’

  ‘You’ve never been suicidal or lived under a cloud of suspicion for murder. Lawson felt bankrupted in all ways. He walked into the freezing river, not as a cry for help, but to die. This question was all he could manage. He left it for others to decipher. He left it for us!’ Jack added milk to their mugs of tea. ‘And it wasn’t Neville Rowlands. Maybe Lawson was a fair-minded man unwilling to point the finger without proof.’

  ‘Bette has achieved her ambition to clear Steven’s name.’ Stella bundled the tea towel into the pan and rubbed it dry.

  ‘At a terrible cost,’ Jack whispered.

  He returned to the table with the tea. They drank in silence. The bells of St Peter’s Church struck eleven o’clock.

  74

  Monday, 18 January 2016

  The hearse pulled under the arch outside the crematorium chapel. The pall-bearers came forward. One, a woman in a modish hat with a fantail, unfolded a black-draped gurney and trundled it to the rear of the vehicle. Jack and Stella stood close together as the bearers transferred the coffin – dark oak with silver handles – on to it and, stepping away, bowed to the coffin. This triggered a storm of camera shutters and flashes from press photographers corralled behind a barrier.

  Instinctively Jack moved into the shadow of the arch. Stella kept close to him. Like him, she wouldn’t want her picture taken. If Lucie had had anything to do with it, Stella would have been all over the front page. Or maybe Lucie would have respected Stella’s wish for anonymity. She, like Stella, had never failed to surprise him.

  When he heard that the funeral would be at Mortlake, Jack doubted Stella would attend. She’d been reluctant to go to Terry Darnell’s funeral – he was cremated at Mortlake – although last year she did make it to the funeral of her friend Tina. Jack’s mother had been buried. He had no clear memory of the ceremony, but he’d visited her grave and sat in the empty country church imagining he could hear her singing.

  Nine, ten,

  A big, fat hen;

  Eleven, twelve,

  Dig and delve…

  The service passed in a blur. During the second verse of the hymn ‘Before the Ending of the Day’, Jack got a tickle in his nose and sneezed, drowning out the words:

  ‘…from nightly fears and fantasies;

  tread underfoot our ghostly foe,

  that no pollution we may know…’

  Stella handed him a tissue. She wasn’t even misty-eyed. Some might have mistaken her cool demeanour for lack of feeling; Jack knew better. Stella handled painful emotions with cleaning jobs. The tissue reminded him that he’d met Bella at a funeral; she too had given him a tissue, assuming he was mourning the deceased. He told her later he’d been crying for his mother. Meeting Bella at a sad occasion was a bad sign – perhaps it had doomed their relationship? He had met Stella during a murder case. Was their relationship doomed too?

  A loud sniff from along the pew. Stella drew out another tissue from her ‘handy’ pack and passed it to Bette Lawson. Mouthing silent thanks, Bette passed it on and, taking it, Lucie May blew her nose with a trumpeting snort. She grimaced at her niece Megan, seated on her other side. Her nephew Garry maintained a stolid disregard, a frown furrowing his brow. Lucie had started weeping as soon as the coffin was placed on the catafalque and hadn’t stopped throughout the service. Jack understood. Lucie had planted herself amid her family, but the reconciliation was shaky. She had much to cry about.

  As if Lucie blowing her nose were the ‘last post’, Helen Honeysett’s coffin jerked through the curtain-framed aperture to the crematorium oven. The chapel filled with the plodding chords of ‘Every Breath You Take’. The sinister song struck Jack as an unsuitable send-off for a woman who had been murdered. He supposed Adam Honeysett had chosen it.

  Helen’s body had been exhumed from the grave in which she had lain, under the guise of ‘Hercules’, since 1987. Brian Judd had been discovered beside Max. The police had dug up the other graves and a bone expert confirmed the skeletons interred were canine. Judd had been given what undertakers dubbed a ‘Direct Disposal’. No cars, no flowers, no mourners. What the recluse would have wanted, Jack guessed.

  He glanced at Stella to see what she was making of Sting’s haunting anthem and was stunned to see a tear rolling down her cheek. Perhaps Stella would always surprise him. Perhaps he would never know her.

  *

  ‘Nippet o’clock, darlings!’ Leaning on her sister’s arm, Lucie May waved her intricately decorated walking stick topped with a gold snake’s head – superior to Suzie’s stick – like a rallying flag. She huddled from the cold in a bright green wool coat, a replacement for what Jackie called her ‘fur monstrosity’, which had been ruined by the Thames.

  Bette Lawson put her hand on Lucie’s arm. ‘Come back to ours.’

  ‘Is that OK?’ Lucie May looked at Garry Lawson.

  ‘It will be,’ Bette mouthed.

  ‘It’s one hell of a tall ladder to climb to the top of your tree, Gaz.’ Lucie gave her nephew a timorous smile. Jack felt for her brave bluster.

  ‘I’m not bothered.’ Garry pawed at the ground, head down. He had forgiven Megan, but would he be able to forgive his aunt?

  ‘There’s only one person to blame for this and that’s Daphne Merry.’ Bette Lawson nodded at the crematorium where Adam Honeysett was surrounded by journalists. So they’d got to him in the end, Jack observed. Honeysett had got what he wanted. They had found his wife. How would he live now?

  Lucie had also seen Honeysett. She became animated. Jack saw her curb herself, perhaps recalling she was at Helen Honeysett’s funeral to support her family, not as a roving reporter.

  ‘Shame about that old lady,’ Lucie said chattily. ‘Police think she lost her footing.’

  ‘What old lady?’ Stella asked.

  ‘Sybil Lofthouse. She drowned in the Thames. They think she slipped. They fished her out by Hammersmith Bridge. That sod of an editor’s given the story to Frog of the Pond, Porter. I said I’d do it, but he said it’s too close to home after what I’ve been through. I said, I don’t live in the effing Thames, it’s not my home and getting mugged is par for the whatsit! I’m over it!’

  ‘Lofthouse is dead?’ Stella exclaimed. ‘How could she slip? She had no reason to go there, she didn’t have a dog.’

  ‘If she did slip.’ Lucie tapped her stick on the ground in satisfied punctuation.

  ‘I guess that’s that then.’ Stella looked at Jack. He held her gaze, keeping his face expressionless.

  Eventually Stella said to him, ‘We have to get going. We’re collecting Stanley from my mum’s and taking him for a walk.’

  This was the first Jack had heard about the plan. But as Stella said it, he saw that taking the little dog for a walk with Stella was exactly what he wanted to do.

  Epilogue

  Thursday, 12 May 2016

  It was a perfect spring afternoon. Fluffy clouds hung in a turquoise sky. Thames Cottages were picturesque, roses trailing around doors, the laburnum outside the Lawsons’ in flower. The park was washed in evening sunlight that coloured daffo­dils, violas and tulips in the beds vivid reds, purples and yellows.

  Jack and Stella sat on Steven Lawson’s bench. Stanley lay between them, head on paws, his lazy gaze fixed on a blackbird hopping along the branch of an oak tree by the entrance. The ‘No Dogs’ rule had been circumnavigated by Jack carrying Stanley. He’d maintained it didn’t count if Stanley’s paws didn’t touch the ground.

  ‘He’s still in the park.’ Stella, nervous of by-laws, had argued.

  ‘The only person likely to object is Daphne Merry and she’s dead.’ Jack lapsed into silence.

  Stella reread the plaque on the bench.

  STEVEN LAWSON, A SPECIAL HUSBAND AND DAD

  1952–1987

  It might be an idea to get a bench for Terry. She frowned. A bench would mean he was dead. Which of course he w
as… She blinked and looked over the hedge.

  It was now possible to see all the cottages from the bench. When it came out that Neville Rowlands had cut a hole in the privet to watch Daphne Merry’s house, residents and local parents petitioned for the height of the hedge to be lowered.

  Stanley was interested in the blackbird, now hopping about on the grass near them.

  Jack began rolling a cigarette. He didn’t smoke; Jackie said he found the procedure soothing. But if he didn’t smoke them, why was there room for more cigarettes in the case? Stella thought. A smoker couldn’t rid themselves of the smell of smoke. Jack smelled of soap and clean fabric.

  ‘Bella must be pleased. You know, now you’re back in your house and can have visitors.’ Stella had decided she should get to know Bella since Jack liked her. She slipped Stanley a liver treat to divert his attention from the blackbird.

  Jack crossed his ankles, his face hidden behind a flop of hair. ‘It’s over with Bella.’ He wheedled a bunch of tobacco along the Rizla paper.

  The blackbird swooped off the branch to a flower bed a few metres away. Stanley was still watching it. Stella said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be.’ Jack recrossed his legs at the ankles. He too was watching the blackbird. ‘She said she has to do the next bit on her own.’

  What next bit? Stella changed the subject: ‘I was thinking of changing Stanley’s name back to Whisky. He does answer to it.’

  ‘He answers to “Chicken” and “Biscuit”. Maybe leave it as it is? He knows Stanley is his name. My name’s Jonathan. Only my mum called me that and only when she was being strict.’ Jack sat up straight. Startled by the movement, the blackbird flew back to the oak tree. He enquired airily, ‘Did you take Thingummy-Thing’s stuff back to him yesterday?’

  ‘Yes.’ Jack still couldn’t say David’s name, real or not. Stella shifted on the bench and Stanley, assuming they were off, stood up, stretched and shook himself. Most of the contents of Daphne Merry’s lounge had belonged to David Barlow.