‘None of the recruitment interviews was a “yes”. You do wonder if these people paid other people to write their applications. Nothing they said matched the quality of the forms.’
Stella rifled through the printout. What address?
‘…so my suggestion is we revisit our job description. It’s attracting weak candidates. This lot were slow typists, no one could add or subtract and we wouldn’t want them cold calling.’
‘Good idea.’ Stella scanned the lines of data.
‘…by the way, did Jack say? I was right about that woman. My friend from school – well, he’s not really a friend – said she was in our class. Said she was tough, took no prisoners. That sort. Didn’t see it myself—’
In the van Jack had highlighted Michael Thornton’s entry, Stella stared at it. ‘Jackie, really sorry, I have to go. I’ll be there in the morning.’
When he had read the entry out to her, Jack kept to the salient details, so had omitted the dead boy’s address.
It was 81 British Grove. The house where Lucille May lived.
Thursday, 3 May 2012
‘It has a curse on it. Some nights I don’t sleep.’ Lucille May poured herself a generous measure of vodka chased by a cursory splosh of tonic, cracked an ice tray into a bucket and, with a chef’s skill, swiftly reduced a lemon to a pile of thin slices.
Jack was back on the sofa in Lucille May’s sitting room, watching her fix herself the ‘first drink of the day’. He had refused one himself.
She returned to the sofa and, nestling against his arm as if they were old friends, tilted the glass at him in silent toast and drank. ‘A woman topped herself on that settee. Overdosed. Ten years ago this November. Not that settee, obviously.’ She slurped her drink. Jack suspected it was not her first.
‘Why?’ Jack had claimed he wanted advice about getting into journalism, a flimsy excuse that Lucille made no pretence of believing. He draped his arm along the back of the sofa behind her.
‘She didn’t leave a note. Looked like your typical husband playing away, bored housewife reliant on “Mother’s little helper”, swigged down with “Mother’s ruin”. Ha!’ She gestured at the ceiling with her glass. ‘Same day as Myra Hindley snuffed it. The fifteenth of November 2002. I should have had Hindley, but our fuck of an editor handed it to the new kid on the block. New kid’s the boss now.’
‘But it wasn’t typical?’ Jack brought her back.
‘Her son was Michael Thornton, a sweet little thing killed in a fatac in the sixties. Hit and run, driver never traced. My editor wanted it revived to spice up her suicide. Boy with the face of an angel who brought joy and laughter eeecetarah! Story had traction: sixties nostalgia, heartbroken mother, empty swing.’ She stopped and, uncurling from the sofa, returned to the dresser and sloshed vodka over the melting ice cubes. No tonic this time, Jack noticed. Everything in the woman’s behaviour added weight to Stella’s theory. Almost everything.
‘Did you know that when you moved here?’ He risked the question.
‘What are you, my psychiatrist? Listen Jackaranda, I’m not superstitious and I’m not easily freaked, but this house is toxic. It’s cold even with that fire lit. Look at you all wrapped up in that lovely coat.’ She had not answered his question.
Jack pulled his coat tighter. The room was chilly. It was evening now and a dreary grey light penetrated the faux lattice windows.
‘She never got over her baby boy dying. No one did.’ Lucie stopped still. ‘The sanctity of sons! Bet your mother loves you!’ She meandered back to the sofa and plonked down beside him, spilling her drink.
‘Not sure you ever get over the death of a loved one,’ Jack said.
‘I wouldn’t know, no one sticks around long enough to die on me. I’ve wanted to kill a few in my time.’ She patted her short blonde hair. ‘Michael Thornton haunts me day and night.’ She glared at Jack as if he too were a ghost.
‘When did Michael die?’ Jack wanted her to flesh out the facts. ‘You said he was a sweet boy. Did you know him?’ He held his breath.
‘Figuratively speaking. He was before my time! My predecessor covered it in his size-ten hobnailed boots. It was the year the Moors Murderers went down so there was a hue and cry about kiddies. Sixty-six. Clot angled it that the mother was at work when the boy came home from school, a “latchkey” boy fending for himself.’ She used Jack’s thigh to lever herself up and wove over to the French doors. ‘They got sackfuls of irate letters about the mum not being fit to have kids. Blah blah blah. Enough to drive her to top herself. It’s a wonder it wasn’t sooner.’
‘When you went to the police about Marquis Way, who did you speak to?’ Jack asked airily.
‘Questions! You don’t need my help to doorstep anyone! Most of them avoid me even when I help them. It was Terry Darnell, one of the sharper knives in the drawer, always up for a goss at the Ram, that place by the river? A charmer like you is all I shall say, me lud.’ She tapped the side of her nose.
She opened the French doors and stepped outside into the garden. Jack went too. Who was charming whom? Terry Darnell had known what he was doing.
‘This was Michael’s’. She raised her glass at the swing. ‘It’s bad luck to move it and bad luck to leave it. I’m stuck with the bloody thing. Stuck with this place too. Puts buyers off.’
‘Most people wouldn’t know the history.’ They would feel it. Jack was grateful to be in the sunshine.
‘We buy houses with our hearts not our heads. Never mind damp, dry rot or subsidence, we draw a line at the corpse in the lounge and the dead brother on the swing.’
‘Brother?’
‘Son, husband, brother. The place is tainted.’ She gave her raucous laugh. ‘Mother never left her home after he died. Not until it was feet first.’
‘How did he die?’ Jack trod carefully as an idea took shape.
She scowled. ‘Sneaked out for sweets.’
Jack looked at the house. The suburban Edwardian villa, apparently benign and homely, leaked profound pain from every brick. Had he come into the garden on one of his night walks he would have known a Host lived here.
‘They spent a whack on a fuck-off monument at Hammersmith Cemetery. St Michael, an angel like the boy. It creeps you out.’ She stomped over to the fence, close to the mosaic under the holly bush. ‘You go to Jamie’s grave?’
‘I prefer to look after the living.’ Keep up. He had forgotten his supposed link with the dead driver.
‘You saying a girl made this gave you away.’ Lucille May aimed a kick at the mosaic, dislodging a chip of glass. ‘Sure you won’t join me in a quick drink, darling?’
‘I should be going.’ Jack longed to restore the glass to the mosaic, but Lucille would interpret it as a criticism. He hadn’t said a girl had made it, he had used the word ‘child’. ‘Gave what away, Lucie?’
‘First law of journalism, don’t steal from others.’ She pouted her lips and ground the glass into the soil. ‘I’ve had it up to here with effing journos.’
‘How long did you say you’ve lived here?’ Jack held her gaze.
‘I didn’t, sweetheart.’ She shook her glass, making the remaining ice cubes spin around the bottom. ‘You could call it a lifetime.’
‘Where is Mr Thornton now? Were there any other children?’ No point in holding back now. She had his measure.
‘Dead. And he was an only child.’ Lucille May eyed her glass. ‘Like Robert Smith.’
‘I could sort through your material on the accidents? Put it in order? It’s the kind of thing I do.’
‘And steal my story?’ She looked her age, raddled and tired in the cold evening light. Her eyes were watery, as if she might cry.
‘I don’t have your narrative skills, Lucie. I’m just good at tidying up.’ Jack touched her elbow and then let his hand drop.
‘What a lovely man.’ She stumbled on a tussock and steadied herself on his arm. ‘I’m going to trust you. Just pull it together then I’ll be off and running.’
Jack closed the French doors. He looked back at the garden. The swing was moving.
Saturday, 5 May 2012
‘Your dad was the attending officer.’ Jack had Lucille May’s file open on his lap. ‘Michael Thornton must have been one of his first fatalities. Lucie gave Terry the lead on this case, be it unwittingly.’ Jack had told Stella what the journalist had said. He left out the hint that there had been more between them.
‘Why is she living there if she hates it?’ Stella parked along from a Mini outside the cemetery gates. Saturdays were shopping and chores; she supposed tomorrow would be busier. Jack had done an extra shift on the District line during the day on Friday. She had picked him up by the statue of the Leaning Woman on the Great West Road. Beyond his text assuring her he was fine, they had not discussed the case since Jack’s second visit to Lucille May’s on Thursday.
‘She’s a journalist stuck with a story that she can’t write and can’t abandon. I think it’s got to her. She doesn’t have the drive to operate a campaign of murder, pardon the pun.’ Jack thrust a faded photostat at Stella. She sniffed stale ink on the shiny paper, and read the paragraph of blurred type from Terry’s report.
I arrived at the location – Young’s Corner, south side of King Street, ten yards from traffic lights, at 15.47 hours. I confirmed that the victim, a male child (dressed in shorts, shirt, one sandal thrown off during incident), was fatally hurt. Checked for vital life signs. I covered him with my jacket. I radioed for an ambulance and police. The vehicle involved in the collision did not stop at the scene. No one present had witnessed the accident. A customer in the hardware shop ten yards east of the location reported a grey car travelling at speed. He could not give the make or the model. Stated was a grey saloon.
‘Lucille May knows more than she’s let on. Look at all this. Weird that she gave it to you. Did she say anything else about my— about Terry?’ Stella looked out of the window at Hammersmith Cemetery. Michael Thornton was buried there. Her dad would have gone to the funeral, probably in the black suit her mum said was past its best when it was new. He would have stood a distance from the graveside ceremony. He’d have made a silent promise to find Michael’s killer; he never had.
Someone else had made that promise too.
‘Come on.’ Stella got out of the van without waiting for Jack to reply.
Hammersmith Cemetery was a half-mile square and bounded by railings partially obscured within bushes. Although sprawling between the traffic-clogged South Circular and the Lower Richmond Road the graves and mausoleums were shrouded within a breath-held quiet. Despite the strong morning sunshine, Stella zipped up her anorak against an insidious chill.
‘Opened in 1926 as an overspill for Margravine Cemetery.’ Jack paced down the central path reading aloud from his phone. ‘The graves are on the lawn principle with a concrete strip at the head of the plot. That means you don’t need to wait for the soil to settle before installing the headstone.’ He sounded chirpy. Telling her about his visit to Lucille May’s he had been oddly upbeat and optimistic. This rather annoyed Stella; he was there to gather facts, not enjoy himself.
‘After a coffin’s in the hole and the soil replaced, there’s ten per cent of the earth left over. Think how much soil that is in a place this size.’
‘There are hundreds of graves. We need an index of burials.’ Stella headed for a brick chapel halfway along the path. A chain was looped through iron handles on the doors barring access and there was no sign of a warden. She went on a few metres to where an intersection offered three directions.
‘Look out for an angel.’ Jack scanned the acres stretching before them.
‘That narrows it nicely,’ Stella muttered. ‘I can already see four.’
Jack jogged along the left-hand path to an angel with outspread wings. ‘First World War casualty.’ He darted across the grass to the next one.
None of the angels marked the grave of Michael Thornton. Without conferring, they struck off along a track from the central avenue. The sun had gone behind a stratum of cloud, casting a flat light that left no shadow.
They were in a secluded section of the cemetery. The silence intensified. Letters on headstones were missing or worn away. What dates Stella could decipher were from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Coarse grass and creeping foliage disguised plots long untended. The path lost definition and petered away. Stella forgot to look for an angel. Unable to shake off a growing unease, she trudged mechanically behind Jack.
‘Oh!’ He stopped; Stella trod on his heel. He snatched at the sleeve of her anorak. A figure was framed against the lowering sky.
Stella was about to pull Jack back the way they had come when he set off at a run towards the person. He leapt over grave edgings and tussocks, his coat like black wings. She lost sight of him behind a clump of bushes.
Stella blundered after Jack, crashing through undergrowth, blood pulsing in her ears.
Jack was dwarfed by the tallest statue Stella had ever seen. It was at least fifteen feet high. Upon a tiered plinth, she read:
IN LOVING MEMORY OF
MICHAEL
AGED 7
15TH MARCH 1959 – 6TH MAY 1966
BELOVED CHILD OF
ROBERT AND JEAN THORNTON
‘WHO IS LIKE UNTO GOD’
‘BONNY AND BLITHE AND GOOD AND GAY’
‘Their grief is palpable,’ Jack breathed. The statue was enclosed by a marble ledge a foot high, wide enough to fit a car on. The enclosed space was filled with green chips of glass.
‘“And the child that is born on the Sabbath day is bonny and blithe and good and gay.”’ Jack stepped on to the base. He scooped up a handful of glass. ‘I have the same birthday as Michael.’
‘That would make you older than me.’ Stella didn’t need Jack and his signs now.
‘The date, not the day.’ He examined the glass. ‘This is the same grade aggregate as ours.’
‘How can you know?’ But Stella knew it was.
‘These markings like rainbows?’ He held up a piece between thumb and forefinger. ‘Glass grinding against glass. Our man comes here before his next murder and each time he takes seven pieces.’