The station office reeked of sour sweat. Alfred Peter Butler was huddled in a corner nursing a mug of tea, staring at his feet. The other driver was texting on a BlackBerry, thumbs skimming the tiny keys. Someone on the phone confirmed that the ‘customer’ was dead. Jack refused tea. He kept to himself that he felt nothing. He told himself that since his mum died, he had nothing left to feel. Jack fastened the grille and ran up the stairs.
There was no one on the platform where the man had been. Lights from the train cast bleak stripes of light across the tarmac. Jack could feel the dead man’s presence in the deserted station.
Staff had rigged up lighting gear for the paramedics, due any minute. Confident that the train driver had dropped circuit breakers to cut the electricity, Jack vaulted on to the rails and crunched over the ballast. Sharp stones jabbing him, he peered beneath the train’s underbelly.
A splash of red. A hand curled over the live rail. The man wore a wedding ring; the thick gold band spoke of status, hopefully of love.
‘
Wake up,’
Jack had said to his mummy.
He leant in and touched the man’s ring finger. It was warmer than his own and still pliant.
‘I will save you,’
he had told his mummy.
Blood was soaking the front of the man’s shirt. Globules of blood seeped into the ballast. Jack trembled; his teeth began to chatter. The man’s eyes – hazel flecked with green, the pupils dilated – fixed Jack with the impassive gaze of the dead.
Eyes are like fingerprints, they don’t alter with age.
‘
I knew that!’ Jack found himself retorting out loud. He clambered out from under the train and hauled himself on to the platform. A woman in paramedic green was fumbling with a body bag. He stayed to see the man zipped into the bag and laid on to the stretcher. He accompanied the crew back down to the ambulance.
‘Go well.’ Jack formed the words silently, touching his cheek to stay a tic that happened at certain times. He watched the ambulance turn on to King Street, heading for Charing Cross Hospital’s mortuary. No blue light required.
In his statement about the incident, Jack didn’t put that, before he died, the man with the ring had looked at him. It wasn’t pertinent.
His shift declared over, he strolled down to King Street and into St Peter’s Square as the church clock struck a quarter to one.
The set number was 126. The man died at six minutes past twelve. From the moment he had stopped at Ealing Broadway, his every action and interchange was a sign. For Jack, death was a beginning, it was a sign that something else would happen.
Eyes are like fingerprints, they don’t alter with age.
The voice got there first. Jack had seen the man before.
With no True Host to watch, tonight Jack went back to his own house. The building was dark; he never left a light on. A wind had got up – forecasters warned of a hurricane-force storm coming – it battered the panes and shook casements swollen from the rain.
His door knocker was a short-eared owl fashioned from brass tarnished with age. Her burnished feathers flickered when she puffed up in greeting. Jack sang:
‘All the king’s horses,
And all the king’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.’
Saturday, 19 October 2013
‘He left me!’
Stella was rubbing at an oily stain on a hearth tile with a dash of detergent on a damp cloth. The stain was lifting. The voice startled her; she thought her client had gone out.
‘No warning.’ Mrs Carr put her palms to her cheeks in a pose of desperation.
Jackie had briefed Stella that Mr Carr had walked out on his wife in September, but from how she was behaving now, Stella thought that it was as if he had abandoned her that day.
‘I’m sorry.’ Stella avoided commenting on clients’ lives. Many would lay out their problems as if she could wipe them away as she could any stain. Jackie counselled that listening was integral to the job, but Stella was unwilling to put this in the staff manual: it invariably led to leaving a job not completed, which triggered a complaint. Jack had the right balance; he provided emotional support and did the cleaning within the allotted time. But Jack wasn’t like other people.
‘You don’t expect someone you love to lie. You miss tiny signs. Hesitation when you suggest meeting, and when you arrive they end a call without saying “goodbye” and pass it off as a sales call or wrong number.’ She did a smoothing motion with her hands as if rubbing in moisturizer. ‘Blood is thicker than water, he said, then he tells lies about my family.’
‘Ah.’ Stella wanted to get on with scrubbing the tiles and washing the skirting. Jack was always seeing signs, tiny or not. The best advice she had about relationships was to avoid them. Blood was thicker than water and she was tempted to suggest it was best to start on a stain with water rather than use hydrogen peroxide, which could bleach the colour out of a carpet.
When she gave Stella the job sheet, Jackie had warned, ‘It’s a complete tip, dirty and neglected.’ Often such scenarios were prompted by a friend or relative calling Clean Slate to halt the slide into chaos. But Mrs Carr herself had rung, which, Jackie and Stella agreed, hinted she would be co-operative, likely to pay promptly and let them get on with the job. Wrong, it seemed. However, she had been keen to get the job done, which included working on Saturday mornings.
Stella liked ‘cleaning sites’ where she could make a radical difference, but because of the estranged husband, she had judged this was one for Jack.
‘He’ll need to use the Planet vacuum. He’ll like that, he thinks it’s like a steam engine.’ Jack was like a magpie around the polished chrome casing of the cleaner.
‘He got himself one for Christmas – isn’t that typical of our Jack!’ Jackie had laughed.
As it turned out, Jack was doing day shifts for the Underground, so it was Stella who, fifteen minutes earlier, had parked her van in Perrers Road, a modest street of flat-fronted terraced houses close to Hammersmith Broadway. The little house was less dirty than Mrs Carr had described. It smelled of long-ago-cooked meals and fusty upholstery, but the Planet vacuum wouldn’t be needed. Stella applied their basic cleaning package. The biggest issue was mess.
‘I trusted him!’ Mrs Carr sagged on to a sofa arm, the only clear surface. Piles of clothes, CDs and DVDs, shoes and electrical gadgets, an iPod, a couple of phone chargers, portable disc drives and a tangle of cables were scattered on the furniture, on the floor.
‘It might help to move?’
‘Why should I? There’s no such thing as love. Water under the bridge now. I can’t turn the clock back.’
Mrs Carr spoke as if she had physically tried to. Stella’s gaze wandered to a clock on the wall, a replica of an old-fashioned train-station clock. When she left here she had to walk Stanley before going to her mum’s flat and watering her plants. Over the last weeks she had got into the habit of dropping in on her way to Terry’s. This would be the last time; her mum was due back tonight.
‘He said we need “space” and bolted.’
Jackie said Stella did the leaving to avoid finding out what it was like to be left. Stella resisted pointing out that David being detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, where pet dogs were not allowed, was hardly her leaving him. It was difficult to miss that Mrs Carr, pale with aquiline features and dark brown eyes, was beautiful. Stella had liked David because he wanted deep cleaning and looked like David Bowie.
‘Please take all this away.’ Mrs Carr wagged a finger at Stella. ‘Your company promises a fresh start. I want one of those.’ She did a grand sweep with her hand and left the room. Stella heard the front door shut.
She went to the window. Mrs Carr was heading off down the street, shrugging into a padded jacket.
Happy to be finally alone, Stella filled six bin bags with all the stuff in the sitting room. This took longer than she expected because she opted to separate heaps of junk mail, newspapers and sweet wrappers from the clothes and electrical equipment which it seemed a shame to throw out. She wouldn’t take her at her word. Jilted clients were apt to change their minds later and accuse Clean Slate staff of stealing.
Stella didn’t consider it her business to tidy, unless restoring objects to places and positions designated by the client. She did arrange gilt silver candlesticks symmetrically on the mantelpiece and position a framed photograph of a man and a woman she guessed were Mrs Carr’s parents – the woman looked like Mrs Carr – at one end, which, she hoped, would form a point of tidiness for Mrs Carr to model elsewhere in the room.
Mr Carr must have an extensive wardrobe because the clothes he had left would constitute many a man’s entire wardrobe. He had favoured military-style clothes: camouflage jackets and trousers – for the desert as well as dense woodland. Sturdy walking boots, Dr Martens shoes. She rolled up a canvas belt with compartments for bullets. Into another bag went a pair of chinos, a selection of lambswool sweaters branded with the Stromberg logo and some polo shirts. Stella counselled against judging clients but, folding Ben Sherman shirts and Calvin Klein jeans into the bag, could not help constructing an identikit of the unfaithful husband. He was chisel-cheeked, cleft-chinned, with an army-style short back and sides, his looks less remarkable than Mrs Carr’s. Several of Stella’s clients were former soldiers; she worked contentedly alongside them, keeping their ‘billets’ tidy. No, none of them would leave their kit behind.
Not her business.
She hefted the bags of newspapers out to the van and lined up the bags of clothes in the hall to await Mrs Carr’s final decision.
Someone was watching her. After Terry Darnell’s death Stella had got the impression that her father was there when she was in his house. This had faded after she and Jack solved the Blue Folder case. Jack said they had laid his ghost. Stella said that it was because probate was completed. Terry couldn’t be haunting her here.
She turned to the front door and stifled a yell. Mrs Carr stood perfectly still, staring not at Stella, but through her. She was so white that had Stella believed in ghosts she would have thought she was seeing one.
‘I didn’t hear you come back,’ Stella said pointlessly.
‘I asked you to take all that away.’
‘I wondered, as it’s all in good condition, whether you meant to give it back to your husband, if he could collect it, or perhaps a charity, a hospice or…’ She trailed off.
Do what the client asks. Don’t question anything.
This was why she allocated these jobs to Jack.
‘I asked you to take it away,’ Mrs Carr repeated.
Stella stowed everything in the van, pushing on the back door to close it. She returned to the house to confirm that the next shift was wanted as arranged, guessing it unlikely. Mrs Carr wasn’t downstairs. Stella called up: ‘See you on Monday, Mrs Carr.’ The use of ‘Mrs’ seemed tactless, but she didn’t know her first name and, besides, they weren’t on those terms.
No reply. Stella ventured up three stairs and called again. Nothing. She gave up and banged the front door shut to signal her exit. She would warn Jackie to expect an email cancelling the contract.
In the van, she lingered over the job sheet to give the woman a chance to sack her in person. The upstairs blinds were down. The house gave no sign of life.
Passing Hammersmith’s Metropolitan station, Stella pressed the button on her steering wheel. An electronic voice boomed through the car:
‘
Name please.
’
‘Jack Mob.’
‘
Dialling
.’
‘This is Jack, who are you? Tell me after the beep.’
Stella cut the line. The day could only get better.
May 1985
The high garden wall cast a shadow over the single-storey prefab, a crude addition to the Victorian estate. The kitchens were built to cater for increased demand when pupil numbers reached their optimum in the 1950s. Tresses of ivy disguised much of the shingle cladding and were an aesthetic link to the mansion featured on the school brochure. Steam drifted from open window flaps and misted panes; the cooks inside might have been phantoms but for clattering dishes and pans and raucous chat. The afternoon air hung heavy with the smell of institutional meals, past and present: boiled vegetables, suet and sallow meat.
A diminutive boy, pale and thin, lingered at the corner of the building, gripping the drainpipe as if he would float away should he let go.
Simon had expected to find Justin sitting on the steps surrounded by the cooks in their white caps. The fierce lady who had told Simon to eat his cabbage would be mussing Justin’s hair – they fussed over him like a prized pet. The kitchens were out of bounds. But Justin was not there. Simon had lost him again.
In the last months, one event had cheered Simon. Justin had arrived at the school.
Simon had been told to ‘show Justin the ropes’. Proud to initiate him into the routine, he was dismayed when the new boy refused to do what Simon told him to. Simon had understood that abiding by the rules and working hard would endear him to the teachers and the other boys. But whatever he did or did not do, Simon was disliked. In a culture where physical perfection and prowess were valued, the fact that the first two joints on the middle finger of his left hand were missing, that he was clumsy and that he was too clever for his teachers assured his unpopularity. When Miss Thoroughgood had told him to look after the new boy, Simon had been happy. At last he had a friend all of his own.
A burst of laughter came from beyond the fogged glass. Illogically, because he couldn’t have been spotted, Simon believed they were ridiculing him. Keeping low, arms hanging loose like a monkey’s, he pattered past the building.
The path came to a dead end by a group of tall bins. Simon skidded on a scattering of potato peelings and turned his ankle. Tears pricked his eyes. Justin was missing, and it was Simon’s fault.
There was a door in the wall opposite. Simon read the notice: ‘Private’. Since the old man was found dead there on New Year’s Day, the kitchen gardens were even more out of bounds. Simon had overheard Mr Wilson, the RE teacher, saying the ‘gardener was lying dead as a doornail in the greenhouse’. He had written up this extraordinary piece of information in his notebook: ‘dead as a doornail’. When he told Justin, the new boy had nodded as if dead gardeners were usual.