Ghost Girl
To read this book as the author intended – and for a fuller reading experience – turn on ‘publisher’s font’ in your text display options.
To Mel
And for Sarah Baylis, an inspiring writer
(1956–87)
The power to concentrate exists in everyone; but few can concentrate sufficiently to drive a motor car with complete mastery in all circumstances.
Roadcraft: The Police Drivers’ Manual
, 1960
Jack is alive and likely to live,
If he dies in your hand you’ve a forfeit to give.
The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
,
edited by Iona and Peter Opie
In the pale light the girl might be a ghost risen from one of the graves. Zipped up in a chequered anorak, insubstantial, she trips along the asphalt path, her hood drawn up, her face a pallid oval in the twilight. Apart from the anorak she is dressed as if for a party in black patent-leather pumps, white socks gartered to her knees and a swaying skirt. A duffel bag is strapped across her back. She slips with apparent confidence through the maze-like cemetery.
She stops before an angel; the statue dwarfs her. The angel is sculpted to hold the gaze of a mourner and her considerable height means that from below only darkening sky frames her covered head. Fast-moving clouds make her appear to incline towards the child in solemn greeting. The girl returns the stare. Alone in a London cemetery, she does not seem afraid.
She rummages in her bag and brings out a hammer. Managing the oversized tool with both hands, she clambers on to the low marble surround. Her pumps crunching on the decorative surface are the only sound in the votive quiet.
She wields the hammer and with a precise arc smashes at the angel’s wrist, severing her hand. A clean break. The hand lands with a thump away on the grass. The girl positions herself on the other side of the angel and aims again. This time she swings too wildly. On the downward return the hammer head clips her knee, breaking the skin, but she appears not to feel it. She executes the perfect swing of her first attempt and shears off the other hand. She slips the hammer through the neck in her bag. She collects up the two marble hands and pokes them inside.
She rushes away pell-mell, pretty pumps kicking out, flitting over graves and around mausoleums to the central avenue. She leaves the way she came.
Sunday, 15 March 2009
Fog skimmed the bonnet and wreathed around wing mirrors which reflected only darkness. Lamp-posts and telegraph poles swooped out of the swirling mass when the headlights washed over them; phantoms bowing in obeisance, they melted into the night.
Hunched over the wheel, Charlie Hampson, middle-aged, ruggedly tousled and used to commanding all he encountered, judged the intervals of light had become fewer, despite his even speed. Hardly bloody speed; more like a funeral cortège. Good call since the place was crawling with dead people. He nudged closer to the car in front – the only vehicle apart from his own that seemed to be out on this filthy night – and again unsuccessfully coaxed it to accelerate.
Hampson, in his sparkly new BMW 318i, found scant comfort in the blue shadow Alcantara upholstery for which he had paid extra and from which a gentle heat now emanated. He was inclined to be impervious to mood or atmosphere but the bated stillness within the car was getting to him.
‘Get a move on, shithead!’
Despite the closed windows and vents, tendrils of fog had found their way inside the car and he fretted that the damp reek of corpses and exhaust fumes would taint the pristine interior. The fog had seeped into his jacket and trousers and chilled him. This was what decades ago his ma would have called a pea-souper. Nowadays such weather in London was rare; tonight it had come out of nowhere. It was a fucking inconvenience and he took it personally.
His digital display warned of black ice and the clock read 10.56 p.m. He had four minutes.
‘Child on Board’. He read the sticker in the car’s rear window. ‘Fuckwit on board, go!’ He got a flash image of the kid; the doctor said that was normal, and like that day, he touched the accelerator. The car responded instantly. Lovely. He blotted out the boy.
The fog thinned briefly and revealed a tree. His four-cylinder engine with high-precision direct injection was soundless. It might be he who was stationary and the wall that was moving. This impression brought back the kid. He had not had the vision for ages; the fog was playing tricks. He turned on the radio and was instantly soothed. Andy Williams returned him to a bright and jaunty youth. Charlie lustily boomed out the chorus of ‘Music to Watch Girls By’.
The effect was mesmeric and he nearly pranged the other car. He stamped his foot on the brake. He leant forward to see into the toy-like Renault but the silhouette of the headrests blocked a view of the driver or of any frigging child on board. The sticker was typical of that kind of holier-than-thou shitbag. What made kids more important than him? What did they add to the economy? He rode the clutch and revved the engine, relishing the rising purr. He would put the fear of God into the risk-averse parent in the Twingo. He twiddled his headlights to manual and flashed a Morse Code-like order in time to his words: ‘Shift. Your. Arse!’
The music deteriorated to white sound. He pressed the station scanner but the crackling got louder and more intense. The car was deliberately going at walking pace to fuck with him. In a forty-mile-per-hour zone it was topping no more than ten. Had to be a joke. Hampson pulled out to overtake and was deafened by a blaring horn and dazzled by lights. He pulled on the wheel as the gigantic hubs of an articulated truck filled his side window, the forty-four-tonner making a wafer-thin corridor. It was gone. This wasn’t a route for artics; stupid bugger must have tried to find a short cut off the Great Chertsey Road. The geriatric box on wheels was doing eight miles per hour. Got to be a woman. Mother and child shouldn’t be out at this time of night. Hampson heard the pounding of his heart. He tried turning the radio on and off to locate Andy Williams. The impenetrable noise from his surround-sound speakers matched the thickening fog. He could not bear to switch it off and kill all hope of hearing the music. In the unnatural silence it was a lifeline.
The clock said he had two and half minutes. He might do it if ‘Mummy’ put her sodding foot down. The kerb-hugger was stopping at the speed humps. He could ram her – she would never trace him – but he didn’t want to damage his car. Although now he could afford the repair. Hell, he could get another one.
A thirty-mile-limit sign glided out of the gloom. The bitch wanted him to shunt her so she could cash in on the insurance. He pulled back.
This made him remember why he was in this godforsaken place. Forgetting the fog and the late hour, Charlie cheered up; soon he would be a free man.
‘Move it!’ This set him coughing, which made his eyes water. ‘Whiplash, baby, yeah!’ he yelled above the white crackling to the imagined tune of ‘Love Shack’. He depressed the accelerator and surged forward.
One minute. Certain there was nothing coming, Hampson swung out again. He preferred night driving: even in foggy conditions there was less room for error than on a sunny day in Hammersmith when the schools were out. He gnawed his bottom lip and powered the BMW through thirty-five to forty, readying himself to gesture at the careful lady-driver.
Charlie Hampson saw a version of himself: a grey-haired, overweight bloke who no doubt liked a scotch, his Formula One and Andy Williams on the radio.
He sliced in on the Renault, accelerated then braked, and looked in his rear mirror to see the car swerve. It had gone. The bastard had got away. Now he was officially late.
He could just make out the perimeter fence of the cemetery. ‘Keep your doors locked and don’t stop for any reason. A driver was ambushed there last month.’ Great meeting place. Still, no houses or speed cameras. No Big Brother. Those were the days.
Too late Hampson saw that the form by the kerb was not another trick of the eye. He wrenched at the wheel, but, unused to the car’s sensitive response, over-compensated. The high-performance saloon mounted the pavement at fifty-eight miles an hour. In the fog, as in the hot sunshine on Brackenbury Road W6 months before, Charles Hampson had the impression of weightless stasis. Impassive he noted a tree zooming in on him as if it were a digital simulation. At the same moment Andy Williams returned full volume.
Oliver Twist, with blue eyes curious and trusting, locked him in a staring contest as, like an angel, he flew past Charlie, up to the sky. Hampson shut his eyes.
On impact the BMW bounced off the hundred-year-old oak tree and smashed a car-shaped hole in a Victorian wall feet away. The London Stone bricks needed repointing, which marginally lessened the secondary impact. In the convivial telling later Charlie Hampson would have rendered this as comic, what with the Andy Williams soundtrack. He would have boasted how he might be fifty-four with a heart murmur but his avoidance reflexes were spot on: he had avoided the speed bump.
Except for Charlie Hampson there was no later.
Monday, 23 April 2012
Stella pressed the doorbell, initiating a ‘Big Ben’ chime. The freshly painted window sashes told her all she needed to know about David Barlow. Bereaved men came in two kinds: those in denial who fled to an irresponsible past and those who spruced up and replaced the dead wife. The first group stopped shaving, drank and fed off takeaways until a tide of bottles and cartons spilling out of the kitchen prompted a relative to call in Clean Slate. The relative paid the invoices until a new partner came along and cancelled the contract.
Barlow was in the second camp. His having contacted the office told her he disliked the break in routine; for him Clean Slate was a dating agency and he would resent stumping up for cleaners who proved unsuitable marriage material. He would pay late or not at all. Stella had learned to avoid his sort. Compassion had limits.
Her assistant Jackie Makepeace had let Barlow in under the wire. He had read the article in the
Chronicle
. Supposing the piece to be about Terry Darnell’s funeral, Stella had agreed to the interview and then was dismayed to see it headed ‘The Detective’s Daughter’. It described how singlehandedly (single generally, it was implied, as if she were open season) she had succeeded where her cop-dad had failed and solved the famous Rokesmith murder, a cold case from the eighties. Set into a shot of Terry’s flag-draped coffin on the blustery damp day at Mortlake Crematorium, watched by a solemn crowd of mourners from across the Met, was a photo of Stella at her desk. The caption beneath, ‘Sleuth at Work’, was a blatant misrepresentation of Clean Slate’s brochure picture of Stella drawing up a cleaning schedule that Jackie had sent through to the paper. Jackie had stopped her complaining. ‘All publicity is…’ The thrust of the piece – written by a woman with two first names like the characters in
The Waltons
– was how Stella had built up a cleaning empire in West London yet found time to clean up crime. Stella, so the article decided, had laid her dad’s ghost. He could rest in peace. What bloody ghost? Stella fumed to herself again on Barlow’s doorstep, noting with some approval the daisies ranked each side of the tiled path. She hadn’t worked on the case alone – but Jack did not want to be mentioned. Wise move. Although published a year ago, the piece still attracted a trickle of business. Barlow was the latest. Pleased by this PR success, Jackie made Stella promise to pop by on her way home and seal the deal. Stella promised herself that the meeting – crowning a hectic day – would be short with no deal.
Her resolution wavered when David Barlow opened the door. Neat hair, aquiline nose, he was trim in a slick suit with a silk tie. But for it being a modest terraced house near Hammersmith Broadway and therefore unlikely, David Barlow might be David Bowie. The resemblance was striking.
‘Come in.’ He ushered her inside with a sweeping hand. He was her height – six foot – but Stella banished this as irrelevant.
Aware of Barlow behind her, she made for a doorway on the left of the hall. She rehearsed her exit: the sitting room was too large, too small, impossible to clean – whichever was applicable.
Barlow had put tea things out on a glass-topped table. With doilies. Stella set her shoulders. If he expected to win her over he would not.
‘Do sit down.’
She sat down in a spacious armchair by the fireplace and found herself agreeing to a cup of tea. Barlow sat on a sofa, his back to the window.
‘She was in that recliner, sitting where you are. Towards the end she couldn’t concentrate and she’d doze off with the telly. I kissed her and whispered it was bedtime. She wasn’t breathing.’ He handed her a cup.