The Detective's Secret (25 page)

‘Stella’s mum back from Oz yet?’ she asked airily.

‘Yes.’ She was homing in. He steeled himself and tried to deflect her. ‘I got a leaflet through the door about the tower.’ If he was honest, Jack was thrilled to be living on a murder site. Another of Terry’s unsolved cases: it was a sign. He would offer it to Stella as a recompense for his being in Tallulah Frost’s landing cupboard. Except if he said Lucie had told him, it would make things worse. Stella wouldn’t want to hear that Lucille May and her father had worked on a case together. It would be no recompense at all.

Stella and Lucie, chalk and cheese. Chalk and chalk as they weren’t so different. Both of them had loved Terry Darnell. Jack wished they could get on.

‘What’s this Palmyra shit? What’s wrong with plain old Chiswick Tower? Is that your name for it?’

‘No, it was on the leaflet.’ Jack pictured the pink sheet. Apart from Palmyra being an ancient Syrian city and a suburb in Western Australia, he had no idea what connection it had with the tower. With little sleep, his mind was a fog. He wondered again at his luck in getting the flat – not luck in Lucie’s view. It had taken two mailshots, so maybe she was right, potential tenants had found Lucie’s articles about the dead man online and been put off.

He and Lucie were mavericks. Few would relish knowing someone had died a horrible death a couple of metres from the bottom of their bed.

‘Palmyra rings a bell with me, but the older one gets, the more bells ring. Stay, young Jack, stay as you are!’ Lucie touched his cheek with the back of her hand and meandered back to the sitting room. ‘You should check out what your mystery guest looks like.’ She pulled shut the French windows.

‘Sorry?’ Jack sat in his corner.

‘Mispers!’

‘Bless you.’ It wasn’t a sneeze, he realized.

‘The Missing Persons’ website. It lists the lost and unclaimed of Britain. Bodies found on commons, in alleyways, drowned in the Thames or hit by trains on railway lines. Glove Man hasn’t got a photo, unfortunately, so nothing to see. They’ve done a sketch, so maybe one day someone might recognize him. I hope it’s me.’

‘I’ll take a look.’ Jack frowned to hide his excitement.

‘Course you will, Rapunzel!’ Lucie punched his arm. ‘As soon as you’re back in your tower!’

Jack drew his coat around him to hide that she was right.

Lucie May lit her cigarette and said in her Lucille Ball accent: ‘Has Mrs Darnell brought a present back for her “one and only” offspring?’ She smiled sweetly through a pall of smoke.

Ground Zero.

As if he hadn’t heard, Jack asked, ‘Does the name Rick Frost ring any of your bells?’

Friday, 25 October 2013

Stella lived in a gated complex in Brentford, bought off-plan. She had opted for a corner flat on the fifth floor in the block – high enough for privacy (she was indifferent to the ‘stunning views of the River Thames and across London’), but accessible should the lift break down. Had Stella been given to mulling on such matters, she might have thought it not dissimilar to Jack’s tower. Silent and secure, with ‘detailed views’.

For the first couple of years the building had been 80 per cent unoccupied. This had suited Stella; she didn’t move to find a community in which to play an active part. She signed up to Neighbourhood Watch because keeping an eye out for intruders was what she did anyway. When the economy improved – for the income bracket that could afford Thames Heights – there had been an influx of new residents. Now only a handful of properties were empty. Despite this, Stella rarely met anyone going in or out.

Taught by Terry to be security-conscious, Stella appreciated the automatic gates that juddered open on to a drive winding between undulating lawns to garages and numbered bays. CCTV monitored the door of a fully glazed marble-clad foyer more in keeping with a multinational corporation HQ than a block of flats in Greater London.

With Stanley at her heels, Stella punched in the key code and slipped into the lobby. The door shut swiftly with a sigh, narrowly avoiding Stanley’s back legs. Stella was gratified: her complaint about how long it took to close had been heeded. Most of her complaints – sporadic cleaning of the common parts and security lights that worked in the day but not at night – were ignored.

She was keen to get to bed: it had been a long and unsatisfactory day, culminating in the discovery that Lulu Carr was Tallulah Frost and her husband hadn’t left her for another woman, he was dead.

At the end of the cavernous lobby – housing two lifts – a line of ceiling bulbs had blown, throwing it into gloom. Stella made for the lifts and was brought up short by the sudden hush of the lift doors opening in unison, a rare thing.

Two paths of bright light flooded the marble. Stella hung back to make way for passengers in both lifts. No one came out. She might have taken it in her stride, but Stanley began to quake, his tail between his legs. Tired and troubled about Jack’s recent appearances in odd places – the roof of his tower, a cemetery and the pub – Stella was assailed by panic. To reach the staircase or the main door, she would have to cross the slants of light.

It was inconceivable that both lifts had descended empty at the same time. Someone had to have activated them. Stanley began to growl, giving her away. She snatched him up and, rushing across the marble floor, shouldered her way through to the stairwell. Behind her she heard the same hush. The lift doors were closing.

Up or down? Stella made a snap decision and ran up the stairs to her flat rather than down to the basement. Fifty steps versus ten. After twenty, her legs became leaden as if she were wading through water. Stanley had gone quiet, but with every step he got heavier. Her rucksack, weighed down with her laptop, bumped against her spine and her boots scraped on the concrete stairs, giving her away. All the time the lift must be travelling upwards, faster than she could run. Or it had gone down. She had no way of knowing.

Each floor was numbered, which was lucky because Stella soon lost count. She couldn’t keep up her pace. Her lungs bursting, she had to stop. She stood for a moment, trying to get her breath, her chest heaving with hot pain. Hearing nothing, she edged to the banister. She looked up and then down, scared of seeing someone patiently waiting, looking out for her.

No one need do that. They would know exactly where she was.

Stella powered up the last flight and flung herself through the door at level five. She raced along the carpeted corridor, feeling for her key with her free hand. She hit the lock, missing it. She inserted it at the same moment as the lift doors were opening.

Stella tumbled into her hall and kicked shut the door behind her. Terry hadn’t trusted CCTV or electronic locking devices; all you need is a power cut, he had said. As she turned the keys in the two extra five-lever mortice locks, she silently thanked him for advising she fit them, along with the London bar that made jemmying the door impossible.

Stanley leapt down and trundled off down the hall and into the living-dining room, tail twirling like a flag. Slumped against the front door, her heart still pounding, Stella heard sloshing from the kitchen as he guzzled from his water bowl. Business as usual. She stumbled into her study, the ‘second bedroom’ opposite the living room, and took out her laptop. The lifts must both be faulty, she assured herself.

She began to close the blind and stopped, her hand on the cord.

A man stood on the path leading up from the gates. Only because she hadn’t yet switched on the study light could she see him, because with no security lights it was dark outside. Tall in a long black coat, hands in his pockets. Jack. Full of relief, Stella reached for the window lock; she wouldn’t bang on the glass and disturb the neighbours. The key was in the living room.

She waved. Jack didn’t respond, although she was sure he could see her. He hadn’t been there when she arrived – she would have seen him and he would have called to her. He had a key to the basement, so he could get inside. She got out her phone and texted him. Her fingers trembled and she made several mistakes before managing:
Are you ok?

Nothing in his body language intimated he had received the text. No light glowing in his pocket. She dialled his number.

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

She would have to go down to get him.

Stella was about to open the front door when her phone lit up.

Fine. You?
Jack didn’t waste words.

Why are you here?

She froze. There were two watching eyes at the top of the phone screen. It must be William – he
was
stalking her. She was startled by the ping of a text.

Why are any of us here? Jx

Stella went back to the study and, neighbours or not, raised her hand to bang on the glass.

Jack had gone.

Saturday, 26 October 2013

On a trawl of the Missing Persons’ Bureau website, Jack examined pictures of dead faces – reachable by surmounting several warnings to stop the unwitting stumbling upon one. ‘Glove Man’ had been submitted by the Metropolitan Police on 30 September 1988. No picture, as Lucie had said. Jack thought the pencil sketch familiar, it could have been any one of his male passengers – that parade of faces on platforms when he pulled into stations.

After a year in the empty water tank, the man was beyond recognition. Jack could imagine the skeleton, wrist bones poking from the ‘casual Millets anorak’, the fabric fusty and faded, nibbled by mites. Grey bones mapped with scraps of brown leathery skin, a skull tufted with ‘medium-length brown hair’ the consistency of dried grasses. A skull’s bared-teeth grin, which always struck Jack as gleeful rather than sinister. The empty eye sockets would have gazed back sightless. The man had died alone and unheard, perhaps unloved. After decades it was unlikely he would be matched with a missing person. Missing, but not missed. Once upon a time, over fifty years ago, Jack hoped there had been a celebration of Glove Man’s birth. His individuality, the man he had been in life, was distilled on a website database to his taste in champagne.

Jack leafed through Lucie’s file. ‘If you find out who he is, he’s mine, darling.’ Side-stepping credit suited Jack. Stella had been uncomfortable when he’d asked her take the kudos for their work on the Rokesmith and Blue Folder cases.
The Detective’s Daughter Does Dad Proud
had been one of Lucie’s headlines. Stella had only agreed when he pointed out the merits of anonymity: he could work incognito.

An hour ago Stella had texted enquiring if he was
OK
. She might be feeling guilty at going behind his back and – a classic tactic – projecting her guilt on to him. Jack had hoped she would suggest he came over to see her; although it was the middle of the night he could do with one of her shepherd’s pies. They had much to debrief. But she must be avoiding him.

The first article Lucie had written on the case was printed in the
Chronicle
the week after the corpse was found and was headed ‘Who Is the Man in the Tower?’ Jack sang under his breath:

‘The man in the moon

Came down too soon…’

The man in the tower hadn’t come down sooner or later. The file included torn leaves from Lucie’s notebook. He read that ‘the corpse’s jumper was knotted around his neck, although anorak zipped up’. This wasn’t on the website, probably because it wasn’t relevant to identification. Lucie had got it from Terry. She had said that the knotted jumper suggested a jaunty, laconic mood far removed from screaming in a concrete chamber until the heart gave out. Jack agreed that it belonged with quaffing champagne, if it had been drunk and had not evaporated over the months. The man had put on his anorak without unknotting his jumper and putting it on first. Lucie said this showed he must have died soon after he knew he was imprisoned. The night of the hurricane would have been cold; crazy to have a sweater, she had said, and not wear it.