Marquis Way lay on the outskirts of Hammersmith and Fulham, bordering Acton. Like Britton Drive it was long and bleak and penetrated deep into a dilapidated industrial estate. Opposite the wasteland was a row of four prefab units, with tar roofs peeling and fascias askew, that Stella dated to the eighties. They looked abandoned but for a sack of rubbish placed by a door and a dull blue light glowing from behind the wired glass in a window. Only one building proclaimed its business, ‘Luxury Imports’ spelled in vinyl letters stuck on the window. The last prefab had blinds drawn down, two slats were bent, leaving gaps through which someone could be watching. Stella’s body flooded with adrenalin; if they were attacked no one could help. She checked her phone. There was no signal.
‘This is a feeder road. It’s not a short cut so there will be little traffic.’ Not for the first time Jack seemed to read her mind. ‘You’d only be here on purpose.’ He leaned against the fence; it gave slightly with his weight. ‘It’s not on Street View. We are off the map!’ He seemed pleased by this.
‘We are off our heads. Let’s go.’ Stella turned to the van. Jack spent as much time on Street View as on real streets.
‘Not now we’re here,’ Jack replied illogically.
‘How do these places exist in a wealthy capital city with land at a premium?’ Bringing Jack back to reality, Stella indicated the prefab with the blue light.
‘Probably zombies.’
‘What?’
‘Companies earning enough to meet interest payments, but the bank won’t lend more so they can’t develop. They are in stasis, unable to live or to die. The walking dead of capitalism.’
So much for reality. Stella took a few steps along the road. She shone the torch up a driveway and picked out what looked like an old chapel. The drive continued down the side to what must have been the door for collection and deliveries. The paint on a sign was gone, leaving a ghostly outline: ‘Wilkins Laundry’. The words ‘Established 1868’ were carved at the apex of a tiled roof. Buddleia and bindweed grew around the door and sprouted through cracked window panes. This business was properly dead. It belonged in a horror film. She retreated.
‘This is brilliant. Come on.’ Jack hurried up the track. Stella kept pace in case he did something stupid. Something else stupid. Jack tried the door handle at the back of the laundry. It was locked. Stella brushed her hand on a clump of tall nettles and stung her knuckles.
Jack was checking the fastenings on windows either side of the door. These too were shut fast.
‘This is trespassing, we should go.’ As soon as she spoke, Stella heard a noise. The low drone of a car engine. Someone else had a reason for being here and it was unlikely to be legitimate. She switched off her torch. Silence. Either the car had passed by or had stopped. The road was a dead end. It was out there. Alive to every sound, Stella heard a creak, a door opening. Her knuckles tingled as if her fear had located itself there.
Treading carefully, as if over a minefield, Jack took her hand and led her around to the other side of the laundry. This was an alley with no way out. Halfway down was a wheelie bin from which came a smell that Stella didn’t want to trace to its source.
This was no hiding place if the driver of the car looked properly. Jack stood in front of Stella, shielding her. She stopped breathing, willing herself to disappear.
She heard a sound: the measured tread of a person intent on hiding their presence, keeping to the nettles where the ground was soft. Had she not heard the car she would not have known someone was there. Stone grinding on stone: they had reached the rubble at the back of the laundry. Jack’s shoulders were rigid. Two more metres and that was that.
Stella could not bear it. She would rather confront the man. The only thing stopping her was that he might be armed.
Then she heard an engine and a throaty acceleration receded to nothing.
‘He’s gone.’ Jack pushed aside the bin.
‘Let’s go.’ Stella was overwhelmed by another rush of adrenalin. Her tongue was rubbery; the nettle sting was vengeful. If only nettles were all she had to worry about.
‘We haven’t found what we came for. Shine your torch here.’ Jack’s voice sounded loud in the intense quiet. He was by a tall spreading tree, the one live thing in the area. Stella’s hand shook; the beam wavered. He took the torch from her and trained it on to the trunk.
Stella made her way over the remains of a low wall, stepping over a slab of bricks that had fallen away from it and lay, almost concealed, by grass and thistles.
‘This is where Paul Vickery died.’ Jack indicated a faint mark in the rough patina.
Stella let out a breath. ‘He must have rammed straight into it.’ Suddenly anxious, she scanned the road for the car they had heard. Far off a lamp-post spread a dull cone of light too weak to be effective. All was long shadows and patches of dark. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Two minutes.’ Jack spread out the article on the pavement and pulled the blue folder from his capacious coat pocket. He opened it at the photographs prefixed with a three. Like the Hampson pictures there were three: 3, 3a and 3b. In the newspaper picture the tree was possibly smaller, the wall outside the laundry was intact as it was in Terry’s black and white photograph.
‘Terry took his picture before this collapsed,’ Jack shone his torch on the remains of the wall, ‘which judging by the bricks was some time ago.’
‘This is an ash tree.’ Stella peered into the dark of the leaves above her. ‘What’s the connection between these deaths?’ Her voice rang across the deserted space. She turned round, but Jack was heading off along the street and soon merged into blackness.
She got up, fear coiling, and ventured forward, keeping within the van’s headlights. From the wasteland beyond the fence she fancied she heard breathing; perhaps dogs actually were patrolling.
Jack was squatting by a telegraph pole. He had set the torch on its end and the uplight gave him dark eye sockets and gaunt cheekbones. Stella would not have liked to encounter him unexpectedly on a bleak and desolate street after dark. He wasn’t reassuring her now.
‘Recognize this?’
‘No.’ She fought off panic; ridiculous, she wasn’t easily frightened.
Jack flipped through the photographs. ‘We’ve established that Marquis Way covers the photos numbered with a three, but look.’
Judging by the angle of the sun, Terry had taken the two pictures early in the morning. A metal fence gleamed in piercing light blurring a spindle that Stella recognized as the telegraph pole. It was the same street as the pictures of Vickery’s street with the ash tree, but these – only two this time – were numbered with a six.
‘You know what this means?’
‘Jack, it’s too late for a quiz.’
‘Someone else died here, see these grooves in the wood. The pole withstood the impact or they would have replaced it.’ He scrabbled in the earth at the bottom of the pole.
Terry’s gloves were smeared with soil. Stella resisted grousing that he should look after them; she had given them to Jack, so he could do what he liked with them.
He held out his hand. For a moment Stella hoped he was asking her to clean his glove. She looked into Jack’s open palm. ‘More stones.’ She quelled a sigh.
‘Yes! Like the ones where James Markham was killed on Britton Drive. They’re not stones, they’re chips of broken glass. Money on we find more at Vickery’s tree next to the laundry and on Phoenix Way where Charlie Hampson was killed.’
Stella went cold. ‘I do think we should leave.’ This time she turned on her heel and hurried towards the van.
‘Jack.’ She stared at the van, its headlamps cutting into the dark of the long avenue. ‘That man must have seen the van. He knew we were there.’
‘That’s why he went.’ Jack was unruffled. ‘Scared him off.’ He walked back to the laundry and ferreted around the base of the tree. Stella believed that Jack’s tenacity, a quality she relied upon, might tonight be their undoing. ‘Maybe we’ve prevented a crime,’ he called cheerily.
Stella wiped her hand down her face. If she wanted to prevent crime she would have joined the police. She climbed into the driving seat. At any minute the man might come back, and with a gang. She tapped a tattoo on the steering wheel until she began to remind herself of her mother and stopped.
At last Jack joined her. ‘Just as I guessed.’ He was triumphant. ‘I found more under the tree.’ He began decanting the glass chips into two plastic bags.
‘Oh no!’ Stella bashed the wheel. ‘They’ll find me. Clean Slate’s details are all over this bloody thing!’
‘Not this one. You swapped it after that chap in the garage clocked you, remember?’ Jack stuffed the bags into his coat pocket. ‘Every cloud, Stell, every cloud. I do believe we are getting somewhere, just not sure where.’ He leant forward and reprogrammed the satnav to the street where in 2009 Charlie Hampson’s life had abruptly ended.
*
Just inside the Hammersmith boundary, Phoenix Way was bounded by Hammersmith Cemetery on one side and Mortlake Crematorium on the other. Long and bleak like the other roads, here too street lighting was sparse – not helped, Stella noticed, by two of the lamps being out. She rolled the van on to a verge of grass between the pavement and the road. The tree that had killed Charles Hampson was an oak, tall and flourishing; thick roots had lifted the flags around its base. Stella reckoned it was over a century old. The odd car smashing into it now and again would be small fry. Again Stella reckoned that this was a reason why she liked trees. They weren’t affected by petty concerns.
Like James Markham’s tree, the trunk had sustained a deep gash. Hampson’s fatal incident had only happened three years ago so the wound was still raw, the exposed wood a blurred shape in the darkness.
This time it was Stella who spotted the glass pieces, they were embedded in the soil between the roots. Jack tipped them into a bag.
‘OK,’ she conceded. ‘They could be significant.’ She took the bag from him and pointed her torch at it. ‘Perhaps relatives leave them instead of flowers?’ She peered through the plastic. ‘There are seven. How many in the others?’
Jack produced the bags from his coat pocket.
In a lull on the main road, the faint sound of the bells of St Nicholas Church by the river striking quarter past eleven carried on the night breeze.
‘Seven,’ Jack said at last. ‘A sign. It can’t be family or why are there always seven and always green?’
‘Maybe it’s someone who knows all the victims?’
‘Seven’s a special number,’ Jack mused. ‘There’re seven notes in the major scale, seven Roman emperors; if you divide any amount under seven by seven you get the same six digits always in the same sequence—’
‘That’s too clever.’ Stella cut in. ‘It must be simpler – days of the week or a lucky number.’ Terry said start from the simple and work up. Start in the corners and clean outwards. It was important to keep to the process.
No car had passed. Although it was late, Stella doubted that Phoenix Way ever got many pedestrians. The reason would be to attend a funeral and few would walk. Why was Charles Hampson here? She contemplated the glass bits. ‘These are familiar.’
Something moved. She whisked around. The road was empty. In the cemetery she heard an owl hoot, or a pigeon. Whatever, it decided her. ‘We’re leaving!’
Perhaps at last Jack shared her anxiety because he immediately came back to the van with her and when they were inside pressed the central-locking switch. Stella turned the ignition key; the engine fired and stalled.
‘I shouldn’t have left the lights on,’ she groaned, flooring the accelerator. The starter motor whined; the engine coughed then died.
‘The engine’s flooding. Let it rest.’ Jack examined the latest bag of green chips.
Stella heaved a sigh. It was not completely dark and through the railings pale headstones looked unattached, ghostly. One moved. Stella shuddered. It wasn’t a headstone. There was someone in the cemetery. Dressed in white, they drifted beyond the line of yew trees.
She fumbled with the key, the motor caught and she bunny-hopped the van off the kerb without checking her mirror. She looked over at the cemetery. The white figure had gone. She was tired. So much for evoking atmosphere; they had evoked phantoms and in her case a headache.
Jack rattled the bags of glass. ‘Four dead men.’
‘Four?’ Stella tried to summon up her grid.
‘Paul Vickery, James Markham, poor old Charlie Hampson and a mystery driver who tangled with a telegraph pole. Someone or some people wanted them dead,’ Jack murmured.
‘You think they were murdered?’ She was very grateful to join the South Circular where the lights worked and there was still plenty of traffic.
‘I don’t think they were accidents.’ Jack weighed the bags in each hand, tossing them back and forth. ‘And nor did Terry.’ He stamped on an imaginary brake, ‘Turn right here.’
‘It’s not the way to my flat.’
‘You said you wanted to meet Amanda Hampson.’
Monday, 30 April 2012
It was nearly midnight when they reached Kew. All the lights in the two-storey house were blazing. Jack was right: Mrs Hampson was still up. A lamp over the porch lit a gravel path to the door.
‘It’s open.’ Jack made to step inside.
‘We can’t just walk in.’ Stella reached around him and rang the bell. The sound pealed like a fire alarm. She preferred David’s Big Ben bell. She was meeting David tomorrow.
No one answered.
‘She must have forgotten to close it. People are always doing that,’ Jack said.
‘How do you…? Oh, never mind.’ Stella pushed the button again. The sound was difficult to miss, she thought.
‘Come on.’ Jack pushed the door wide and they were greeted by a bluff of warm air. ‘Mrs Hampson?’ he called cheerily and when he got no reply, ‘Amanda?’
‘She must be here, the heating’s on full blast.’ Stella undid her anorak and followed Jack into a brightly lit hallway.
The kitchen was large. In the centre was a hexagonal island inset with a six-ring hob.
‘We shouldn’t be here. Clean Slate has upset her already. Using bleach will be nothing to wandering about her home uninvited,’ Stella said.