‘We should secure the house. She’s gone out and forgotten to lock up.’ Jack did not say that he too was keen to leave. He was used to occupying Hosts’ houses in their absence, but this felt different.
Droplets of water clung to plates and dishes in the draining rack. Jack felt the kettle: it was warm. The oven emitted a gentle heat when he opened the door. Amanda Hampson had cooked, eaten and washed up her supper things. She had started taking care of her newly cleaned home, but then had gone out, leaving the door open. It didn’t add up.
‘Maybe’s she’s in bed,’ Stella whispered.
‘She says she never sleeps.’
‘She must sleep some time.’
The sitting room was the hub of Amanda’s quest for the truth about her husband’s death. Here too it was tidier than Jack usually found it. Amanda had stacked her papers into piles and placed them on her desk and on the dining table. Cushions plumped in their corners on the sofa were as he had left them.
Charlie Hampson smiled down, sardonic within his gilded frame.
Jack trod heavily up the ladder-style staircase to warn Amanda, but she was not in any of the rooms.
He stopped. ‘Look in the bathroom.’
‘Why me?’
‘If she’s fallen asleep in the bath, it’s better you wake her than me.’
‘Hardly.’ Nevertheless Stella pushed the door open with a finger. She stepped back on to Jack’s foot.
‘Ouch!’
‘She’s not there.’
They retreated to the sitting room.
‘She might be at the station.’ Jack was hopeful. ‘Maybe she got an appointment with Martin Cashman after all.’
Stella shook her head. ‘At this time of night? Besides he’s on holiday.’
‘Wait a minute.’ Jack flicked one of the piles with his gloved hand. ‘She’s taken her file.’
‘What file?’
‘The pink one she took to the police.’
‘I saw her with that.’ Stella looked around.
Jack glanced behind him and Charlie Hampson’s eyes met his. Amanda Hampson would never leave her house unattended. On his first visit she had not trusted him to be alone there.
‘We’re being dense. Call her. You have her number.’ He nudged Stella.
‘I don’t. Jackie does, but obviously she’s at home now.’
‘Ring her.’
‘At home asleep. Most people are at this time, Jack. Besides, she won’t have the number there.’
Jack stirred the papers on the desk and unearthed a fat leather wallet. ‘She hasn’t taken her Filofax.’ He felt a creeping unease. In the event of loss, please return to… Amanda had filled in her name, address and home telephone and at the bottom in different ink was her mobile number. ‘Got it!’
‘She will be cross that we’re here.’ Stella peered out of the French doors at the garden.
‘Let’s ring her and see.’ Laboriously Jack keyed in the number on his phone. He counted the rings. ‘Come on, Amanda.’
‘Ssssh. I can hear a ringtone.’ Stella put her finger to her lips.
Jack shook his head. ‘She’s on voicemail.’
‘Try again.’ Stella was fumbling with the door handle.
Jack pressed ‘redial’. ‘That’s weird. I can hear ringing.’ He joined Stella.
‘It’s out here.’ Stella heaved on the doors.
Jack stamped his foot. ‘The meditation temple!’
‘The what?’
‘She’s doing Yoga Nidra!’
Cool air wafted in from the garden. Jack plunged on to the path. He hissed at Stella. ‘You stay here. She hates being disturbed, but she knows me.’
‘She’s not expecting you in the middle of the night. You could scare her witless.’
Jack trod on something. He looked down. The light on the crazy paving was Amanda Hampson’s phone, its screen glowing with a missed call.
‘Jack.’ Stella grabbed his coat sleeve.
Amanda Hampson lay face down on the threshold of her temple. Jack took some moments to comprehend that the dark spreading pool around her head was blood.
‘She’s dead.’ Stella dabbed at her phone and rapped out. ‘Police. And ambulance, although it’s too late.’
The springs on Colin’s bed were painful, but Jack didn’t care. He stared at his hands. Long and slender, his mother said they were the hands of a pianist. His fingers tingled as if they still rested on Amanda Hampson’s neck – her skin had been warm – feeling for a pulse. He buried his face in the pillow. The bed was meant for a child so he had to bring his knees to his chest. Tonight the position suited him: he felt small and lost. When he was at school he had lain alone in the dark, missing his home and his mummy. Time had telescoped.
Until he had found the glass on Phoenix Way, Jack had rather assumed that Amanda Hampson herself had been driven off kilter by her husband’s death. In the grip of an obsession, she wheedled at every bit of evidence to make it corroborate her conviction that someone had killed him. Tonight Jack had planned to apologize and say he believed her. But Amanda was dead and the police were treating it as suspicious.
He swung his legs over the bed. He would go back to the house and examine it properly. He slumped forward; of course he could not. The bona fide detectives were there; he had no right. Amanda was not a relative: he had no rights at all.
The front door clicked shut below. His Host was back. He should hide, but he was tired and tempted to let matters take their course. He could share these thoughts with her, two minds were better than one and her mind might serve him well. He went into the corridor and took up position in the shadow of the fire door.
She paused for breath on the staircase. Again Jack experienced the certainty that she was aware of him. This time he crouched low; most people expect intruders to be the height of an adult so rarely look down. His Host was not ‘most people’.
She went on up the stairs without looking right or left.
She was as much a stranger to him as on the day he had encountered her. He loved working on the streets in the attic – the work was a secret he shared with the old man about which his Host clearly knew nothing – but he could not afford the indulgence. Tomorrow he would get his book back and leave. He and Stella had a murderer to catch.
Jack Harmon climbed back into bed and burrowed beneath the blankets. In the woolly darkness he pictured Amanda Hampson, alive and executing flighty dance moves on her landing. Softly, the way his mother did, Jack sang himself to sleep.
‘I had a little pony,
His name was Dapple Gray;
I lent him to a lady
To ride a mile away.
She whipped him, she slashed him,
She rode him through the mire;
I would not lend my pony now,
For all the lady’s hire.’
Tuesday, 1 May 2012
Early the next morning Stella pushed her cart along the corridor of the second floor of Hammersmith Police Station, the wheels spinning on the varnished wood. She parked it by the ladies’ toilets, unhooked the mop and bucket wringer, grabbed the floor cleaner and, complete with latex gloves, shouldered inside.
Four cubicles took up the left side of the tiled room; doors ajar, they faced a matching number of sinks with mirrors. The sinks, dating from the thirties, were generous in proportion with flat rims on which lay blocks of soap. The porcelain was riven with cracks, darkened with time and impossible to clean properly. Stella eyed them like enemies while she massed her equipment in the echoing chamber.
She had not slept. Unlike Jack, who had remained cool at the sight of Amanda Hampson dead and bleeding, her eyes blankly staring, it had been all Stella could do not to pass out on the floor of what Jack kept calling a temple. Perhaps he had been affected, because on King Street, as they were passing the drinking fountain where, in what seemed another life, she had picked him up earlier, he had bundled out of the van without saying goodbye.
Even after a shower and a hairwash the metallic odour of blood clung to her. She had lain all night stiff and inert as a corpse until the dark sky resolved to grey, when she gave up on sleep and took another shower. It was then she had remembered Terry’s trick of dabbing eucalyptus oil under his nostrils. She found a bottle in the bathroom cabinet and smeared it liberally around her nose. It stung and had not eradicated the metallic odour. It was in her mind.
With Jack gone, the milky eyes staring up unseeing were only more vivid, even when, stopped at traffic lights, she could shut her eyes, she could not obliterate the image. Stella had doubled back to invite him to sleep in her spare room, but he was not on Weltje Road or King Street or walking along the Great West Road. He had not had time to go into the subway to the river. She drew up alongside the drinking fountain, her eye drawn to the wrought-iron gates of the prep school. Jack had vanished. She worried that he was up to his old tricks. She had hoped solving the Rokesmith murder would have sorted it. On top of finding Mrs Hampson, this worry had contributed to Stella’s lack of sleep.
Now, alone in the police toilets, she scowled at her reflection in one of the mirrors. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ears and grimaced to relax her facial muscles, a trick of Jackie’s. She glanced past her reflection and froze. One of the cubicles was shut. She whipped around.
There was someone inside.
She heard a groan.
‘Hello?’ she faltered. The doors were fitted from the ceiling to the floor; the only way in was by smashing the lock.
‘Can you hear me?’ Stupid. Only a dead person would fail to hear her. Stella shook her head at this idea. ‘I’ll get help,’ she quavered.
The bolt slid slowly. The door jerked open. Marian Williams staggered out and toppled into Stella’s arms. Shorter by many inches than Stella’s six feet, and well built, Stella had to rest against a basin to keep her balance.
Eventually Williams let go and tottered to a sink. Stella steeled herself against the possibility that the administrator was going to vomit. This she could tolerate less than a corpse.
The woman twisted on the tap and ran water over her hands and mopped her brow. ‘Thank you.’ She didn’t look at Stella, she returned to the lavatory and came out patting her face dry with a wad of toilet paper.
‘What happened?’ Stella leant on the handle of her bucket wringer set.
‘Everything went black. I fainted. Next thing I heard you.’
Stella snapped into action. ‘I’ll get help. Someone must do first aid here.’
‘That’s me.’ Marian Williams pushed the sodden paper into a swing bin by the door. As she did so, her cardigan sleeve rode up.
‘You’re hurt!’ Stella jerked the mop handle at a dark bruise that merged into a graze on the administrator’s forearm.
‘It doesn’t hurt.’ Williams regarded the wound as if it was not her own.
‘It’s shock.’ Stella was brisk. ‘Come back to your office, I’ll get you a cup of tea with sugar.’
They sat either side of Marian Williams’s desk with hot drinks that Stella had fetched from the canteen. Marian Williams rested her injured arm on her lap and drank unsteadily with her left. The bruise was livid crimson, overlaid with darker marks in a row that made Stella think of fingers.
‘That was some knock. You were lucky not to break it.’ Despite herself Stella was relieved she had not cleaned the toilets before the accident, it cleared her of responsibility. Core to Clean Slate’s induction was a warning to staff not to over-polish floors or leave them damp without a warning cone.
‘Lucky not to break what?’ Detective Chief Superintendent Cashman breezed in.
‘Mrs Williams fell in the ladies’ toilets.’ Too late Stella realized the woman did not want Cashman to know. Tugging at her sleeve, she was concentrating on her computer screen.
‘It’s nothing, sir. I’m fine, thanks to Ms Darnell.’
‘Let me be the judge of that.’ Cashman towered over the desk. When Marian Williams rolled up her sleeve he gave a whistle. ‘You are going home, no argument.’
‘It looks worse than it is.’
‘I insist.’ He rocked on his heels. ‘It is as bad as it looks. What happened?’
‘I thought you were on holiday.’
‘I was hauled in last night. A fatality – as Stella knows: she called it in. Did you do that here?’
Stella wondered if he was thinking about compensation, but Cashman was old school like Terry, he didn’t work that way. What you saw was what you got.
‘It was my fault.’ Marian Williams shook her head. ‘What fatality?’ She frowned at Stella as if she were responsible for his curtailed holiday, which, in a way, she was. Marian Williams had not heard about Amanda Hampson’s death. Stella was suddenly sure that the woman did not like to be a step behind. Especially if the one in front was the cleaner.
‘It’s on Surrey’s patch,’ Cashman said. ‘Near Kew station. They got me in because we know the victim. It’s that Mrs Hampson who, I’ve just heard, you handled like the pro you are last week. Stella and a colleague had the nasty experience of finding her.’ He sniffed and glanced at Stella. ‘Actually Stell, I never asked what you and your friend were doing there, better tick that one off!’
Stella felt her brain empty of words. She should have anticipated this, but despite her misgivings about the police she did rely on Cashman treating her as one of their own and so had not prepared an answer. Her rescue came from the least expected place.
‘Were you passing, perhaps?’ Marian Williams wheeled herself to the printer where a paper lay in the output tray. She did not look at Stella.
‘I was, yes.’ Marian Williams had inadvertently saved her. ‘My colleague does – did her cleaning and he noticed lights on and the door was open. I didn’t know her myself.’ Marian would wonder why Stella hadn’t mentioned this after Mrs Hampson’s visit to the office.
‘It’ll need processing.’ Marian Williams snatched up her mouse.
‘Go home, Marian!’ Cashman clapped his hands. ‘We’re on it.’
Stella broke another cardinal Clean Slate rule and questioned a client – and it was the police – about their business: ‘Any idea what happened?’