Jack swung between them. ‘In fact ants aren’t power—’
‘Didn’t Gray have the outlet factory on Britton Drive?’ Stella intervened. It would be woodlice next.
May whipped around. ‘Someone’s done their homework.’ She regarded Stella for a moment and then said, ‘Shoes had crap soles.’
Although it was early spring, the air was cold. A wind had got up. Stella should have put on her anorak. Woodlice made her think of Mafeking Avenue where Denis Atkins had died. May had covered that too. She wouldn’t be happy about the blue folder: it was treading on her toes. They should leave.
‘Don’t say you knew Harvey Gray too.’ May brushed an invisible speck from Jack’s coat. ‘Darling, that’s ghastly luck.’
‘No, I didn’t.’ Jack’s feet momentarily pointed at the sky. ‘Both Gray and Jamie died on a street at night. Both were involved in fatal accidents with children.’
Stella wanted to grab the swing. Beneath the flirty persona Lucille May was as sharp as a pin.
‘You should be doing my job!’ May gave a corncrake laugh. ‘Gray killed a boy called Robert Smith. Gray died on the seventeenth of March 2003, my ex-husband’s birthday. Bastard.’ She narrowed her eyes and drew on her cigarette. ‘Gray, that is. Although the husband was a close second. People say you marry your father. My old dad was OK, despite favouring my butter-wouldn’t-melt brother.’
‘So you don’t think the deaths were coincidence?’ Stella waved away smoke when Lucille May wasn’t looking. Assuming she would be ignored, she was surprised when May replied.
‘In my game you get to see that apparent coincidence is exactly that: coincidence. Take my advice and let your friend go and move on. No good comes of raking the coals.’ She flashed Stella an on-off smile, put her cigarette in her mouth and, going behind Jack, gave him a push. ‘The day Mr Slip-Shod killed Rob Smith was Guy Fawkes. Poor bloody parents were going to have a party. Rob had made the Guy. Just before your lovely Jamie died.’ She pushed Jack harder, amidst a plume of cigarette smoke.
Jack flew up and then down like a great black bird.
‘Now I’m free to do what I bloody well want,’ she said apropos of nothing and gave another clattering laugh.
‘There was a witness for Gray’s death. Did he ever come forward?’ Stella stole a look at Jack, who was swinging back and forth in a world of his own.
‘What did you say you did?’ May blew smoke towards Stella.
Stella did her best ‘Jackie’ voice: warm, open. ‘I’m a cleaner. I read your articles regularly. They’re more interesting than homework.’ This was rubbish. They needed to back off fast.
‘Stella suggested I talk to you.’ Jack landed between them. ‘She said it would help me move on, as you say.’ Welcome back, Jack! Stella’s mind buzzed with how to end this and get out.
‘A woman called in the accident, a lady of the night, shall we say. Carol Jones saw a man on Marquis Way before she came upon the crash.’
‘Your article said it was an elderly person. It doesn’t say it was a man.’ Stella couldn’t help herself.
‘If he existed at all, he was a man.’ Smoke clouded out of May’s nose and mouth. ‘Jones said he was tall, possibly drunk because he wasn’t steady on his feet. He was coming from the crash site. Timing-wise he would at least have heard the collision. Suspected suicide. No one will ever know.’ She lit another cigarette with the tip of the glowing stub. ‘Nine years on and the trail is cold. Jones is dead. Found out when I chased her up. Too slow. My best hunting days are nearly over.’
‘This swing is brilliant,’ Jack piped up. Feet thrust out, toes to the clouds, he gathered momentum.
‘Careful,’ Stella cautioned. She brandished the umbrella. She affected a stroll and made for the bike.
‘Nice to see it being used.’ Lucille May spoke as if Jack was a visiting seven-year-old. ‘This place needs life.’ She stabbed at the air with her cigarette. ‘Oozes misery some days.’
It was a girl’s bicycle, its blue paint chipped. On the metal chain guard Stella read ‘Trusty Pavemaster’. It was an exact replica of the bike Stella had had when she was a child. Her mum still complained that Terry was prepared to foist stolen property off on his daughter. Stella didn’t care who had owned the bike before her. She loved the fat tyres, the vibrant blue frame and the bell on the handlebars. She hadn’t been allowed to take it to Barons Court. It was a treat for when she visited her dad on his weekends. The bike wasn’t in the house now. Stella had the whirling idea for a second that this was it. She exhaled deeply. Of course it was not. If May had lost a daughter she ought to feel sorry for her.
Beyond the fence she recognized the back of England House: a detached mansion at the end of St Peter’s Square that abutted Terry’s old garage. She knew most streets here; over the years she had cleaned in houses and flats all over Hammersmith.
Something glinted beneath a holly bush. Stella lifted a branch, avoiding the spikes. A mosaic in the coiling pattern of a snail shell had been pressed into the soil. In the centre was a marble decorated with a twisting of orange snakes.
‘Did you make this?’ she called.
Lucille May came over with Jack behind her. He stared down as if he had seen a ghost.
‘Like I have time for garden design!’ Lucille May dropped her cigarette on to the soil by the mosaic and ground it out.
Jack was on his haunches. He traced the shell with a forefinger. ‘A child did this, it’s too naïve for an adult.’ He stood up.
‘Hate to hurry you, but I have to get on.’ Lucille May waded through the long grass to the house.
‘But…’ Stella began.
‘Leave it.’ Jack went after May, giving Stella no choice but to follow.
Stella knew why he had gone pale. What had attracted her attention was not the mosaic, but that it was made with chips of green glass.
Thursday, 3 May 2012
‘She’s waving.’ Jack tilted his hand at Lucille May on her doorstep.
Stella accelerated down British Grove. ‘You might have warned me you planned to seduce her. I was a pumpkin.’
‘A gooseberry.’ Jack unfurled the printout from his coat. ‘By the way, how come you have an umbrella? You don’t approve of them – you say they take people’s eyes out in crowds.’
‘I accidentally took it from a café.’
Jack beamed at her. ‘You stole it?’
‘No. Well, not exactly.’
Jack settled into his seat. ‘That’s what happened in
Howards End
. A woman went off with Leonard Bast’s umbrella at a concert. It led to his death. Did you accidentally take this too?’ He flourished the printout.
‘You suggested it,’ Stella muttered. ‘Did you have to go on the swing?’ A cheap retaliation.
‘Lucie found it charming and a charmed person chatters like a canary. That stuff about Gray the villainous shoemaker was cool.’ He fished out the blue folder from under his seat. ‘Incidentally, she’d be a star at Clean Slate; her house hasn’t seen a lick of paint for years but it was sterile.’
‘She would turn up late or not at all,’ Stella huffed. ‘She was strange about that mosaic. Did you notice how bitter and twisted she is about the dead drivers? We’ve been assuming this murderer is a man. Lucille May covered most of those cases about the dead boys. She’s got the jade aggregate and she didn’t like me knowing about Britton Way. I think she had a child that died, possibly on a bicycle.’
‘She’s the wrong personality. That mosaic got me, though. Made me feel sad. Did you get that?’
‘No.’ Jack could be subjective once he liked someone, Stella thought. He had dismissed her theory. ‘I think she fits perfectly. The person at the Gray crash was tall. So is May. She was keen to get hold of Carol Jones – why? Lucky for Jones she was dead.’ Stella slapped the wheel. Jack’s lack of logic was infectious.
‘This killer is clever. He, and I think it is a he, has murdered for decades without arousing suspicion. You’ve met her once and you think it’s her. May is an disappointed woman whose prime was way back when and who never made it to Fleet Street.’ Jack balanced the folder on his lap. ‘This photo is different.’ He jabbed at the garage picture. ‘We thought it was here by mistake, but Terry didn’t make mistakes.’ He flattened out the printout.
‘That’s not true.’
‘OK, he missed stuff, but he was methodical. He numbered this “1”.
Stella drew in at the junction of St Peter’s Square by the defunct garage. She parked outside England House, a grand imposing building unlike the others in the square. Clean Slate had two clients there. She took the blue folder off him.
‘It’s a mechanic mending a car.’
‘I know that, but why is it familiar?’ Jack scratched his chin. Stella noted he needed a shave, although the look suited him.
‘It’s here! How stupid to miss it. Terry stood where we are parked now. This was his garage. He would have hung around while they mended his car; he had to keep busy so he took pictures.’
The picture was a mid-shot with little background. Now she saw a triangle of the Commodore’s wall and on the left a sliver of shop frontage. ‘W. R. Pha’. It came back to her. The dental surgery named W. R. Phang had featured on a Pink Floyd album until the dentist made them remove it. Now the surgery had made way for a coffee shop and the garage, once a thriving concern with vehicles every which way on its forecourt, would soon be gone too.
In the picture, the car with the legs sticking out partially obscured an old-style telephone box. The low wall in the photograph was still there, but the phone box had gone.
‘Why did he take this?’ Jack was leafing through the printout.
He might as well apply water torture to her; Stella felt physical pain as he perused the documents she had effectively stolen.
‘Gotcha! Good work for including the 1960s in your search, Detective Darnell.’ He snatched a pen from under the dashboard and circled a line of print. ‘The sixth of May 1966. A Friday. Listen to this: “Michael Thornton, aged seven, fatally injured. King Street, Hammersmith. Vehicle – poss. grey saloon – failed to stop and left the scene. Victim died on impact. No witnesses. First officer on scene: PC T. C. Darnell. Brackets number 130253 unbrackets.”’ He described the air with the pen. ‘Stella, you are a Wonderhorse! I bet Terry never forgot that day.’
‘The date adds up to six.’ Stella had broken the law; she did not deserve praise.
‘No, and nor was it one or three or a Sunday or in March.’ Jack dropped the pen back on the dashboard shelf. ‘Trail’s cold as ice.’
‘I see why it’s different to the rest!’ Stella snatched up the pen as if it were a baton. ‘It was a fatal accident, not a murder.’
‘Hang on.’ Jack got out of the van and ran alongside the hoarding to the low wall where the telephone box had stood. Suddenly weary, Stella noticed it was past midday. She had missed the recruitment interviews. She checked her phone. Nothing from Jackie. This did not make her feel better. Michael Thornton had been killed just round the corner from Lucille May’s house. She tried to corral the fact.
Jack was back in the van. ‘Here!’ He sprinkled a cluster of green chips of glass on to her palm. ‘They were buried by that wall. Your papers say that Michael Thornton was seven when he died.’
‘They’re not my papers.’
‘Other children died, all boys; there are no pictures. This death merited a picture in the blue folder.’ Jack held her hand open and stirred the glass in her palm with his finger.
‘Terry didn’t handle the other deaths, that’s the difference.’ Stella had resented that Terry would not talk about his work. She saw why. It was too painful. His world was obsessive and ultimately lonely. She shivered. ‘Let’s go to my dad’s and take stock.’ She gave the glass back to Jack and started the van.
‘The difference is staring us in the face.’
‘Hunger is staring at me. I need breakfast, or lunch…’ The lights at Chiswick High Road went to amber. ‘We’ll get sandwiches. I’ve bought milk.’ She took refuge in the banal.
Jack slapped the dashboard with the rolled-up printout. Stella hit the brake. Behind them a horn blared; she steered to the kerb and stopped.
‘Michael Thornton was the first boy to die.’ Jack’s eyes were bright. ‘He is the reason for the rest.’
Thursday, 3 May 2012
Matthew Benson was having a bad week. It had started with the woman in Brentford. She had been as happy as Larry about her shower at the time, even hinting he hop in and give her a demo. Then, at the crack of dawn on Monday, she was on the phone shouting that water was dripping through her lounge ceiling. He knew it would be her hair clogging the trap or a break in the mastic, but when he got there he isolated the problem to the shower valve; he had forgotten to tighten it. Not that he told her; he made out that it was a manufacturing malfunction and got another valve from the van and went through the charade of swapping them. Still, she made it clear she would not want him for her downstairs cloakroom. Back in the day he had avoided her sort like the plague, but now he took any job, however small. Not that Maureen was bothered, since the business of the dead boy she wasn’t talking to him. Except to say she didn’t know how he lived with himself.
When he had finished with the valve, he found a parking ticket on his windscreen. Madam hadn’t offered to pay. Probably let the tosser issue it. She made a wisecrack about the name. ‘Perfect Plumbing’. ‘Not so perfect, Mr Benson!’ Waving the
Chronicle
. She wasn’t talking about the valve; she meant Joel Evans.
Today he had parked in the corner bay of the plumbing merchants to eat his bacon sandwich and snatch a kip. At eight in the morning the store was buzzing. Where did these blokes find the work? His diary was on the dash; no jobs today or tomorrow and his credit in the store had run out. The couple wanting new radiators had put him off and he was undercut on a shower and WC in Fulham – even for cash. Or maybe because – the lady turned out to be a copper. Probably knew about the hit and run. His petrol tank was reading empty and so was his bank account. Shit week and it wasn’t over yet.
If he went home, Maureen would have a go. Bitch. He should chase up old clients but couldn’t face it. He screwed his sandwich wrapper into a ball.