The Detective's Secret (45 page)

‘They won’t think that. There’s no body.’

‘By the time they ask themselves that question, it will be too late. They’ll find your body soon enough.’

Jack had never been alone in his tower. Simon had been there. Simon was the man on the bus outside Stamford Brook station; he was the man on Hammersmith Bridge. Simon had delivered the fliers about the tower through his door. He was the man in the crowd.

Jack had been Simon’s Host. He hadn’t read the signs.

‘More disappointment, I thought you’d read them sooner.’ Simon spoke soothingly, as if he could follow his thoughts.

Into Jack’s mind came the thought that if his own mother had lived, he might have wanted Simon as his friend. But had she lived, he wouldn’t have been sent away to school and he wouldn’t have met Simon.

‘You betrayed me.’ Simon spoke in a kindly tone. ‘More than three times, you denied you knew me. What did Mr Wilson teach us? There was a man who didn’t practise what he preached. By now the Cleaner and the Reporter will have worked it out, but I hoped you’d get there before them. You recognized his Timex watch. I supposed it would be plain sailing for you after that.’

‘Mr Wilson was the man trapped in the tower.’ Jack nodded as he got it. He had recognized the Timex watch. Stanley tensed; he stroked him. ‘You were the one who shut the door on him.’

‘At last!’ Simon tossed Jack’s phone back and forth between his hands. ‘Mr Wilson was the only person who bothered with me. He found me in the basement after you locked me in that last time at school.’

‘So why kill him?

‘He betrayed me, like everyone else. Like you did, Justin.’

‘You killed him because he betrayed you?’

‘Do you consider betrayal a minor transgression? Your cleaner puts a high price on loyalty. That was one thing in her favour. You and she are haphazard detectives, but you get there in the end! Shame for you it is the end.’

‘So why Mr Wilson?’ Jack asked again.

‘My mother, the lovely Madeleine, met Wilson when she was on a business trip to Australia. She left me for a month to go to a banking conference in Sydney. She was at the conference all right but, as my dad in one of his rather cruder moods once shouted at her, she did less banking than bonking!’ Simon raised his eyebrows. ‘She met Wilson in a bar. He did his disappearing act and followed her over here. That man took my mother away from me.’ He smiled brightly. ‘Mr Wilson had to pay for his sins.’

‘So you killed him?’ Jack repeated.

‘Call it the wrath of God. A week after the hurricane, I went back to the tower to warn him to stay away from her, intending that he’d have learnt his lesson. He was on the floor by the door, stiff and cold and dead.’

‘The post-mortem thought it likely that Wilson had a heart attack.’ Jack had thought the sketch of Glove Man on the Missing Persons’ site was familiar. He had assumed it was because he saw so many faces, some of which were on the wall before him. The main reason he had dismissed it was because he had blotted out that time at school. He had blotted out Simon.

‘Your mother may be dead, Justin, but it’s no excuse for cruelty. Simon tried to care for you. He only wanted to be your friend. Now you have no friends.’ The man tapped the Bible. ‘One day you’ll understand what you have done. God watches over us all.’

‘I shut the door on him.’ Simon tapped his lips with Jack’s phone. ‘I killed him just as that train driver you bought coffee for the other day killed the Captain. It should have been me standing him a cup of coffee. I have much to thank him for. He was my amanuensis. The Captain knew his day had come.’

Jack had sensed a presence on the balcony overlooking Earl’s Court station. He should have trusted his instinct that he was being watched. Simon had been there.

‘Mr Wilson thought my mother was joking. When he realized he was trapped in the tower, he called her names, he shouted unforgivable things about her and about me. When I got outside, the hurricane was raging. I had to go – it was dangerous to be out.’

‘Where is Nicola Barwick?’ Jack interrupted him.

‘In good time, Justin.’ Simon ran a coin over his fingers, tumbling it over the top of his hand, his half-finger bobbing. At school, Simon had done it to impress him; Jack knew he was doing it now to mark time.

‘Tell me my nickname at school?’ Simon said.

‘Stumpy.’ Jack had made it up.

Simon flicked the pen into the air, caught it and continued his trick. His hand resembled a giant insect. The boys had called the teacher a stick insect. Jack’s past was flooding back.

Stanley struggled to be let down. Jack lowered him to the ground and he ran across to the bed, leapt upon it and settled down. So much for dogs sensing danger. Perhaps that was exactly what Stanley had done: he had gone to Simon, the little boy who had only tried to help and was lonely.

‘You have known what it’s like to be shunned. To see people’s eyes glaze over, that flash of disappointment, even panic, when they hear you’re on their football team. They tell you a chair is taken when you try to sit down – all the empty chairs in the class are taken. You were my blood brother, but you did nothing. You told me my mother didn’t love me.’

‘I was unhappy. No one wanted to talk to a boy touched by death.’ Jack had had blackness in his soul. Mr Wilson had intoned:

‘
And then if anyone says to you, “Look, here is the Christ!” or, “Look there he is!” do not believe it. False Christs and false prophets will arise and show signs and wonders, to lead astray, if possible, the elect.’

‘I don’t have friends,’ Jack said. Stella and Jackie invited him to their houses. Clean Slate’s cleaning team and Beverly in the office had bought a cake in the shape of an engine on his birthday. Dariusz in the mini-mart beneath the office and Cheryl in the dry cleaner’s checked he had eaten recently. There was Lucie May and, before Dale turned up, there had been Suzie. Isabel Ramsay was commemorated in his Garden of the Dead. He did have friends.

Then Jesus said to the chief priests and captains of the temple and elders, who had come out against him, ‘Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs? When I was with you day after day in the temple, you did not lay hands on me. But this is your hour, and the power of darkness.’

Jack rubbed at his forehead to stop the voice.

‘Quite a contact list for a man with no friends!’ Simon was looking at Jack’s phone. ‘Hmm, I don’t see myself here.’

‘I didn’t want a friend. I wanted my mum and my toys. I wanted my bedroom and the tree in our garden. I wanted to make tunnels and bridges like my dad. I wanted to go home. I didn’t want a friend!’ Jack’s voice reverberated off the concrete.

‘You told the Captain you didn’t know me. The cooks called me greedy when I asked for seconds, but you got thirds because your mummy was dead.’

Abruptly the music stopped.

‘I am the engineer, not you.’ Simon raised his voice. ‘It’s me that builds bridges and tunnels. You only drive in them and wonder about how long they are. This is my tower, not yours. As you know, the best way to vanquish your enemy is to become him. Look for the person with a mind like your own. All those True Hosts – and for what? Time and time again the Cleaner has to save you from yourself, but not this time.’

‘How do you know about the Hosts?’

‘Oh, Justin! You can do better than that. You and me, we know how to make ourselves invisible, how to garner facts about those we shadow. You taught me surveillance tactics. You told me that, unless they’ve done wrong, most people don’t think they’re being watched. I wanted you to see me, but even when you did, you looked through me and failed to read the signs. You promised the Cleaner to stay in at nights. She’s made you soft!’

He tapped at the screen on Jack’s phone with his stubby finger. ‘Look, the Cleaner’s sent you a text.
Stella mob
! Stella mop, perhaps!’

Beware the jokes of those with no sense of humour.

Simon is alive. Stay where you are, I’m coming.
She’s ahead of you, Justin! So you’re happy to be her friend, or would you like to be more than friends? Is that why you hate Dale, the Brand-new Brother? What shall we reply to her?
Too late, he’s dead?
or
Leave or the dog dies!
Shall we tell her you have betrayed her? That you were hiding in the house when she was there? They say anger helps assuage grief. My sister should know, although it’s guilt at her own betrayal she has to assuage, not grief. She’s in with the Captain’s brother. She lied to me. She is Wilson’s daughter – betrayal’s in the blood.

‘Wilson wasn’t in a relationship. He was in love with your mother. Who did he betray?’

‘Me.’ Simon might have been a small boy, his face untouched by the years. ‘Really, Justin, did Jesus really die for the likes of all of you?’

‘I can’t turn the clock back.’ But Jack had tried to.

‘I have looked for myself inside your head, but I’m not there, am I? I was dead to you.’

‘I told you your mother was having an affair with Mr Wilson. I saw them in the car park at school.’

‘You weren’t being kind, if I remember. You laughed.’

‘Yes, I did.’ Jack had wanted someone else to have a reason to cry. He had felt a thrill of cruelty as he told the boy that his mummy had kissed the RE teacher.

‘Knowledge is power,’ Simon said. ‘It did at least mean I was no longer in the dark.’

‘I was jealous your mother was alive. I wanted you to think she loved Mr Wilson more than you so that you’d be alone like me.’ Jack had blotted out this self of his.

‘I overheard him asking my mother to come away with him. She went to meet him at Stamford Brook station. I followed her. When he didn’t come, she would have assumed he had betrayed her. Until I found him dead in the tower, I did too. When they found him, she must have guessed that it was Wilson’s body in the tower, but she kept it to herself. She let his family wonder where he was for all those years. His mother died not knowing what happened to him. My mother knew. Perhaps she kidded herself it wasn’t his body up there because she never stopped looking out for him. She kept the living-room curtains open at night. She would follow men in the street and then see they were strangers. She knew I didn’t believe her lies about where she was. She knew why I was at Stamford Brook that day. She may have suspected I shut that door. We became strangers. I waited for the right time and then I killed her. Just a little push. You see, betrayal is unforgivable.’

‘She didn’t betray you.’ Jack spoke mechanically.

‘Only because he didn’t come to the station. It’s intention that counts. She was going to take my sister because she was his child. She was going to leave me.’

‘Did she take bags with her to the station?’ Jack asked.

‘No, that would have given her away.’

‘So she didn’t plan to leave you.’ Jack snatched at a sliver of hope, but Simon wasn’t listening. ‘Simon—’ Jack saw what he had done to Simon. Not just him – he recognized he was not solely to blame – but he had played his part in changing Simon. It was no excuse that he had been unhappy; he had destroyed Simon’s faith in people. Jack wanted to plead, not for his life, but for forgiveness, but it had been too late a long time ago.

‘The day I found Mr Wilson lying dead on the floor of the tower, I learnt that if you dislike someone, they don’t have to live.’ Simon jumped up. ‘Did you get all my signs? I’m Charles Bruno and you’re Guy Haines. Like Bruno in
Strangers on a Train
, remember I told you? I see loyalty in reciprocity. I do your murder, you do mine.’

‘They aren’t real. It’s a story.’ Jack heard his mistake. He could neither placate nor argue with Simon.

‘Fiction is a way of being alive. Or dead.’ Simon looked about him. ‘I wonder if my treacherous mother let her mind drift to those walls in your flat while she had sex with Mr Wilson. Is the concrete stained with her passion?’ He faltered briefly.

‘Where is Nicola Barwick?’ Jack dreaded the answer.

‘Nicky tried to be clever, but lucky for me, my sister, thinking only of her own feelings, told me what Nicky had done with her passport. That she had betrayed me. Up until then, I had still hoped she was my friend.’

‘Where is she?’ Jack pushed past Simon into a kitchen the same as the one in his own flat. A train was on the window sill, set on top of stones and strands of twine. A pair of binoculars sat on the table by the ‘Hammersmith Bridge’ window. Simon had replicated everything. He had known what Jack was thinking because he had a mind like his own. He could follow him in all senses of the word.

Simon slid back the partition panel to the shower room and went inside. Gingerly, sensing a trap, Jack stayed in the doorway.

‘Nicola Barwick, this is John Justin Harmon.’

A woman was seated on a chair by the partition. Long hair straggling down her shoulders, she was dressed in a loose-fitting fleece jacket and jeans. She had the dull-eyed look of the passengers’ faces in the other room. Jack could see no gag, no ropes restricting her, but she seemed unable to move.

‘Are you alright?’ He heard how lame his question was. He recognized her. ‘You were on my train, the one that broke down at Ealing Broadway last month,’ he said. ‘You got off before I cleared it.’ Her face was one of the pictures.

‘I thought you were
him
.’ She was matter of fact.

Jack stepped towards her.

‘Don’t come closer or he will kill us all.’ She didn’t move.

Jack saw that Nicola wasn’t alone. A woman sat on a stool in the shower cubicle, as if entombed in a huge glass case. Unlike Barwick, she was dressed smartly in black bootleg trousers tucked into knee-high leather boots, with a wool jacket over an ironed shirt. She too wore no gag and wasn’t visibly restricted. Simon entered people’s minds; he had no need of physical fetters.

‘She’s right.’ Simon paced about Nicola as he might an exhibit. ‘Nicky only pretended to be my friend. She left her house without telling me where she was going. Friends don’t do that.’

‘My mother will call the police. I’m due there to cook her supper. My brothers will come looking.’ The woman in the shower cubicle spoke with authority. Jack felt a frisson of reassurance that vanished as quickly as it had come. Her threats were impotent: Simon didn’t care.