The Detective's Secret

by Thomson, Lesley

On Google Street View, Jack could travel with the roll and click of a mouse. As if operating it now, he zoomed in on Stamford Brook station and focused on the strip of platform hundred metres away. Yet again he was reminded of the toy station he had bought as a boy. Grey and brown plastic with a detachable ticket office and a couple of sweet-vending machines, added for free because the toyshop man had felt sorry for him.

  Jack’s train slowed as it entered Stamford Brook station. There was one man on the westbound platform: he would have a wait: the information board was blank. Trains would be diverted to Richmond because of his dead train at Ealing Broadway. He felt a flash of poignancy that he had abandoned it to be shunted without him to the Acton depot. His concern for inanimate things frustrated Stella.

  Jack’s attention was taken by the headlights of a Heathrow-bound Piccadilly train lighting up the rails ahead. After Hammersmith, it wouldn’t stop until Turnham Green.

  Nervous of overshooting the platform, his driver was applying the brake too soon. The last time Jack’s train had broken down at Ealing Broadway, he had been sitting in the cab of a novice driver. Everything about this man was the same as the other; both moved their lips as if silently talking. The Piccadilly train was nearly on them – its headlights flooded the cab. He braced himself for the slipstream after it passed his train.

  Jack glanced again at the platform for Richmond: still no train on the board. No need to hurry, but the man on the platform was hurrying. The wheels of the oncoming Piccadilly line train clackety-clacked closer. A tinny announcement came through the platform speakers: ‘Stand well away from the edge of platform two. The next train is not scheduled to stop at this station.’

  Five metres to go until the end of their platform. Jack’s sense of déjà vu was oppressive, as if the last time had been a rehearsal for tonight.

  ‘Take it right up,’ he said softly, using the same phrase as last time. ‘Get your passengers off. We don’t want them pitching on to the line.’ The man shoved the handle forward. Jack smelled his fear. ‘Keep connection with the lever, coax it. The engine is you and you are the engine.’ Something was wrong.

  All stories are the same.

  Jack banished the unwanted voice and saw the man on the platform lit by the headlamps of the Piccadilly train. The man gave a backward glance and abruptly broke into a run along the platform. Did he think the Piccadilly line train would stop? He was looking at Jack – not a glance, a proper look as if trying to express something. Jack had seen the expression before. Then the man was in mid-air above the tracks, caught in the glare of light as the Piccadilly line thundered into the station. The man’s body hit the windscreen and rolled under the cab. All was over in a second. Carriages jolted along and blocked Jack’s view. Both trains halted. Jack looked at his watch. Six minutes past twelve: 126.

  A haunting wail carried across the station. The Piccadilly driver was sounding the whistle for staff to assist trackside. The bleak marking of a life extinguished.

  Jack’s driver was a waxwork, his hand frozen over the controls. He had berthed their train perfectly, seemingly unaware of what was happening metres to his right.

  Later, at the inquest, Jack found that his driver had indeed seen nothing. Only Jack and the Piccadilly Line driver, a man called Darryl Clark, had witnessed the incident. The few District line passengers had been asleep or plugged into headphones in a private world and although the other train was packed, it was impossible for anyone to have seen the man go under the front of the cab.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Jack touched the man’s arm, intending to ground him.

  ‘Alfred Peter Butler,’ he replied as if reporting for duty.

  ‘You did well, Alfred. We’ll stop here, you need a break and I think they might need some help here.’ Accompanying Alfred Peter Butler through the carriages, for the second time in an hour, Jack informed passengers that a train was out of service.

  Like Stella, Jack was comfortable with emergencies, everyone acting according to their role. While the tannoy announced delays, he and his driver checked seats and gangways for abandoned possessions. In the past he had found wallets, handbags, a tatty London street atlas that he had been allowed to keep, even a Springer spaniel lashed to a pole by its lead.

  Alfred Peter Butler escorted their little troop down the stairs and across the station concourse, Jack bringing up the rear. To their right, Piccadilly line passengers were streaming down the westbound staircase, there was the buzz of muted exchange, word had got around.

  It was a ‘One Under’.

  Jack Harmon dubbed himself a flâneur; he walked the night-time streets of London, observing others unobserved. Unlike a flâneur, he cared about those he watched. Courting mortality, feeling the imminence of death, he hunted out those with darkness in their souls and minds like his own. Jack entered the homes of what he dubbed his ‘True Hosts’, those who had killed or would kill if he didn’t stop them.

  Jack was quite aware that he sought a re-enactment of the day his mother had died, a day that for him, as for many, was when his world stopped. As when a film is watched again and again in the vain hope that the next time the victim won’t die. He drove in the tunnels of the London Underground to find his way back to before.

  Affecting nonchalance, Jack strolled across the station, singing softly:

  ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

  Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.’

  His hair blown back from his face by a cold night breeze, Jack guided passengers through the gap in the concertinaed gate to the street. Even though it was after midnight, traffic on Goldhawk Road was nose to tail, slowing for those filing over the zebra crossing. Someone was watching Jack from the top deck of a 237 bus; he supposed it was a man – a baseball cap was pulled low over the eyes. The bus moved towards King Street and the reflection of the blue station fascia wiped the figure out.

  In ten years of driving a train, Jack hadn’t had a suicide. Some drivers had it twice, while others went their whole working lives without a person jumping in front of their cab. Jack could not shake the conviction that tonight’s incident was the culmination of many signs.

  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.’

  2

  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 could
n’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.

  3

  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.