The children munched ruminatively. They looked out at the rooftops beyond their new back garden. A light was on in one of the windows. A woman was sitting there. Every now and then she put up a hand and then lowered it. The square of light could be hanging in space.
‘She’s reading,’ Mary murmured.
‘How do you know?’ Michael breathed in her ear as he strained to see.
‘She does it every night.’
‘I think she might be painting a picture.’ Michael spoke seriously.
Mary handed him more chocolate, but did not take any herself. She had not liked to tell Michael she did not want it, that she had no appetite and the beans were still there, lurking like enemies. She tucked the rest into the foil and slipped it within the paper sleeve. She placed it beneath her pillow.
‘That’s for tomorrow night.’ She wiped her mouth with her hand.
‘Shall I come at the same time?’
‘What is the time?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Come when you hear the television go on.’
Michael clambered off the bed and, scuttling over the rug, sneaked out of the door with exaggerated determination. As he was about to shut it he stopped and regarded his sister, still sitting on top of the bedclothes.
‘Mary?’
‘What?’
‘I’m glad you didn’t run away after all.’ In the dark room, the moonlight made Michael pale, less substantial.
‘Come back tomorrow for the rest.’ Mary hopped under the blankets. The chocolate paper rustled when she repositioned her pillow. ‘Thanks for sharing.’
The door closed.
The following night, mechanically eating her way through the rest of the bar, Mary decided that the woman in the window was painting a picture.
Wednesday, 25 April 2012
David Barlow was on the doorstep when Stella arrived at Aldensley Road. She preferred clients to be out while she cleaned but, maybe because she was deep cleaning, today she did not mind. She would put off telling him she would not meet him until she had finished; she wanted to enjoy the shift. When David Barlow offered to carry in her brand-new room sanitizer, she let him.
‘Here are details of the pub I suggest, I’ve put in the post code so your navigation system can find it and my number should you have to cancel. I am crossing my fingers that you won’t have to.’
Stella took the note, in fact a sheet of Basildon Bond writing paper, the sort on which Suzie had made her write ‘thank you’ letters when she was little. This memory and the trouble that David Barlow had taken confounded her and she could not think how to reply.
‘I’m going out. I need to go to the cemetery, tend her grave.’ He lifted up a bunch of flowers from the hall table. ‘The place is yours.’ He looked about him, seemingly impressed by Stella’s equipment lined up in the hallway: the floor scrubber-drier, carpet cleaner and the Planet vacuum cleaner. He added, ‘Please clean absolutely everywhere. No stone unturned!’
‘Of course.’ Stella felt a stirring of excitement.
‘A fresh beginning.’ Barlow brandished his bouquet and, stooping down, hauled up a plastic tub from beneath the table. ‘No more delaying. I must do Jennifer proud.’
‘Creating Life from Glass’: the tub contained twenty kilos of ‘Festive Green Aggregate (Jade)’. Stella started to lift it, but it was too heavy.
‘Let me.’ David Barlow swung it up. ‘For the grave. Saves the time spent weeding.’
A great one for saving time. Stella vaguely thought weeding was good for grief. She was starting in the bathroom. She gathered up her equipment bag, which bulged with boxes of disposable gloves and aprons, antibiotic wipes and disinfectant scented with woodland pine to dissolve all grease and banish germs.
On the half-landing she noticed that the layout was the same as her dad’s house. Typical Victorian terrace with one door on the first landing, two on the second landing, the far one was probably Barlow’s bedroom, as at her dad’s house it had been his. Again she remembered the time she had gone to her dad’s house after his death. Stella shivered and gripped the disinfectant. She had no time for ghosts.
She knew from scoping the job that this bathroom, unlike Terry’s clinical white, was a mix of sickly colours like the orange Ford. No doubt it was the dead wife’s taste. Stella recoiled again at the scalloped suite, the shell shape echoed in the ‘sea-bed’ pattered shower curtain. Pink tiles offset custard yellow walls. Only the ceiling was white. Stella suspected Jennifer Barlow had ruled the roost. She did so from beyond the grave soon to be decorated with jade aggregate. He might regret his invitation to supper; it was too soon. Stella would leave a note letting him off the hook.
She wheeled in the floor scrubber and stopped. On her last visit she had not noticed the coved flooring. A mandatory feature in hospitals and other hygienic environments, she had never seen it in a house. She considered David’s pristine appearance, his specific efficiency; the coving would have been his idea. He was serious about hygiene.
So was Stella. She set to work.
The next two hours passed blissfully. She tackled the tiles, bleached grouting and scrubbed in corners, crevices and grooves. She washed the walls and the ceiling and ran alcohol wipes down cords for shower, the light and the roller blind. This she dismantled to clean at sluice temperature on her own machine along with the shower curtain. She boiled kettle upon kettle of water, suspecting the tank of dead birds. There was little dirt. Stella began to suppose she was not the first to deep clean here. This was disquieting; if she was liable to jealousy it focused on those who had cleaned before her.
Had she been one to reflect, Stella would have agreed with Jack Harmon that the measurement of time was necessary only for punctuality and invoicing. Otherwise it got in the way. The afternoon shift was drawing to a close, but she didn’t want to stop.
Stella’s previous deep-cleaning client, Mrs Ramsay, had made her clean under the bath and in other places no one saw. David Barlow hadn’t specifically requested she include this in the itinerary. Yet she would. Stella unscrewed the bath panel and slid it out. Here at last was dirt. The panel was streaked with cobwebs and furred with muck. She washed it over the bath. Soon water in the bath was grey; she let it out, pinched out strings of cobwebs clogging the plughole and tossed them into her rubbish bag. She switched on her torch and turned her attention to the cavity under the bath. Usually rational, Stella had been affected by Mrs Ramsay’s fervid imagination and had dreaded discovering an animal, putrid and rotting, or worse, a human corpse. Now she banished the possibility from her mind.
She saw something. Her heart pounded.
Her fingers grappled with a stiff mound and she was grateful for the latex protection. She found purchase and hauled it out. It was a man’s jacket. She laid it on top of the bath panel. The garment had been folded as if for sale in a shop, the sleeves crossed over the chest. Stella shivered; the jacket’s pose and its rictus-like state did make her think of a dead person.
The fust of years pervaded the room. She gave several dog-like sniffs – her sense of smell was acute – and detected a faint suggestion of hair oil. Gingerly she unfolded the jacket. It had narrow lapels and the material could be seersucker. Engrained with grime, it was the grey of the bath water, but beneath the lapel the material was a pale blue. Stella didn’t know anything about the history of fashion, but Suzie had grumbled that when she met in him in 1965, Terry was a Mod, trim in his suit and two-tone winkle-pickers down the Hammersmith Palais on a Saturday night. In natty outfits and free with his wages, Terry had hoodwinked her because after they married the dancing stopped. Stella resisted reminding her mother that weeks after they married she was born. Nights at the Hammersmith Palais would have been a rare treat.
The jacket had been under the bath a long time. It wasn’t David Barlow’s; he would be careful with his clothes. It would belong to a plumber or someone. She slipped it into a bin bag and replaced the panel, leaving slack in the screws should he ask her to clean there again. She trundled in the ultra-violet sanitizer and programmed it to run for half an hour.
David Barlow had not returned by the time she had finished. Stella was irritated; how much work did a grave need? Mrs Barlow had only been dead a few months. Stella had opted to have Terry cremated. She had no grave to tend. Or to visit.
She hesitated over whether to pop the jacket into the dry cleaner’s by her office, but doubtless Barlow would throw it out. She left it out for him to decide.
She loaded up the van. No sign of his orange car. She would have liked him to see her work, to confirm it was what he wanted. She drove out of Aldensley Road. Driving down Shepherd’s Bush Road, Stella realized she hadn’t left a note cancelling dinner. Perhaps after all she would meet David Barlow.
Wednesday, 25 April 2012
‘Mrs Hampson.’
‘Clean Slate?’ A sharply dressed woman in her forties held the door of a 1960s house in Kew half open.
Jack Harmon lifted the plastic card around his neck on which ‘Clean Slate’ was written in blue. The woman looked familiar. But he had noticed that this happened more and more. He saw a lot of people.
‘I was expecting a woman.’ She was stern.
‘People often do.’ Jack let the card drop. He was happy to leave it; his new Host had left the school early that morning and, delayed by Jackie’s call, he had lost track of her. She had taken the
A–Z
; it wasn’t in her bedroom.
‘You’d better come in.’ Mrs Hampson let go of the door and went inside, saying over her shoulder, ‘Don’t do my meditation temple, it’s circular so doesn’t attract dirt.’
Jack collected up the Henry vacuum and heaved in the cumbersome green and blue bag of materials. There was no sign of Mrs Hampson. His job sheet stipulated he begin in the kitchen so he snapped on his blue rubber gloves and got started.
The room had a modern Scandinavian feel: light wood and a bright open aspect, helped by a large window that framed an overgrown lawn. He pictured walking across the springy turf and felt a tingling. Mrs Hampson must be in the house, yet there was a profound quiet not unlike that in the school. A quiet he had learnt not to trust.
At first glance he couldn’t see what needed doing, surfaces gleamed in the afternoon sunshine. But when he got to work on the sink, he found scum around the plughole and the taps, streaks of grime on the stainless-steel splashback and a greasy residue on the hob. A veil of dirt shrouded the room. This was the years of accumulation that Stella relished. No wonder Jackie had circumvented her in favour of him. Stella would never run the business if she did jobs like this. This reminded him that Stella had talked about a case. Odd she hadn’t been around to his house first thing. He wrung out his cloth and groaned. Stella would have knocked and got no answer. She would ask where he had been and he could not tell her.
It was half past four; he was on schedule with just the sitting room to clean and the house to vacuum. He would stay longer than an hour if necessary. Jack felt vaguely that this would make amends to Stella for his night-time activities. With the vacuum in his arms he padded along the hallway and opened the sitting-room door.
‘Oh!’ he exclaimed.
Mrs Hampson was seated at a desk by the French doors, staring at papers strewn over the surface.
‘Did I frighten you?’ She did not look up, a pen poised.
‘I didn’t expect you to be here.’ Jack lowered the vacuum cleaner. ‘I thought you had gone out. This room’s on my list, but if you’d rather…’
‘I would hardly leave you alone.’ Mrs Hampson flung down her pen and swung around to face him.
‘I can do the vacuuming first.’ Jack understood his unease in the kitchen and what was wrong now.
He had been here before. He had stood on that patio outside two nights ago. This was the room he had seen through the glass. Mrs Hampson had been where she sat now.
On the wall above the fireplace was the man in grey. Jack saw that while a smile played over full sensuous lips, the eyes were cold. The painting, or rather the photograph scanned on to canvas, was no less life-life up close.
Jack did not choose True Hosts at random. He could come across them by chance. That he knew them on sight was due to intuition. He spent time following them before he accepted a tacit invitation to stay. Those who risked cutting along a secluded towpath or dark alley must have a mind like his own. He divined that they had either done a dreadful deed or were planning one. True Hosts spread unease at best and misery at worst. Jack styled himself a saviour. Detectives finds murderers because only by the flip of a coin are they not a murderer themselves. Jack believed himself of the same cast as his Hosts and dreaded that one day the coin would flip again and he would become a Host. Until last night he had kept his promise to Stella to stop looking for Hosts, he had assured her it was over. That he found himself back here was a sign.
‘That’s an imposing picture.’ Jack broke Stella’s cardinal rule about commenting on clients’ possessions or their homes. If she knew what other rules he had broken this would seem paltry.
‘It’s my husband.’
Mr Hampson was a Host. ‘He must be pleased with it.’ Jack gave the frame a flick with his duster. It came away thick with dust.
‘He’s dead. Didn’t they tell you?’
‘I’m only told what I need to know for each job.’ Jackie had told him and of course he had guessed the other night. Jack got more out of people by feigning innocence.
‘You need to know Charlie has been dead three years.’ Mrs Hampson stood up. ‘Did you use bleach?’
‘Tea-tree concentrate.’ Jack was prompt.
‘He was killed at some time after eleven on the evening of Sunday the fifteenth of March, 2009.’ She came over and, putting out a hand, stroked the frame, seeming not to notice that her finger came away blackened.
‘I’m sorry.’ Jack set down the vacuum cleaner. He resisted telling her that he had been thirty-two on that day and could remember what he had been doing.