The Detective's Secret

by Thomson, Lesley

  It was ten past ten. Jack had returned from his driving shift that day restless and dissatisfied. Shocked by Stella coming to Tallulah Frost’s house that morning, he had failed – despite his determination to focus on it – to calculate the length of the West Hill tunnel. If he knew the mystery fact, it would unlock other hidden facts.

  He hadn’t yet faced examining the steam engine he had found on the monitor. It was a sign of something he had tried to forget.

  Stella had texted, saying she had seen him. He was scared to see her and was appalled with himself. He had been called a coward in the past – it was true.

  He was taking refuge with Lucie May. Unfettered by a moral code, Lucie pursued her stories with blind ambition. While this wasn’t an attitude he admired, being with Lucie, her diminutive frame lost in a jumper – a relic of a husband divorced along the way – curled on her sofa, substituting smoke for air and consuming gin as if life, not death, depended on it, Jack felt a braver and better person. He nestled in his corner of the sofa. The coffee table was lost beneath piles of back copies of the Chronicle, on which Lucie May had been chief reporter for nearly forty years.

  Lucie had just filed a story – ‘Hush hush, Jackanory, it’s embargoed until next week’ – so was ‘demob bloody jubilant!’ She had once told him she never drank on the job, but he could see that alcohol was taking its toll. Her skilfully applied foundation didn’t hide a pinkish complexion or the crazy bright of her eyes.

  ‘You’ve decorated.’ Stella would approve of the newly whitewashed walls. Although with Lucie’s nicotine habit it would not be white for long.

  Lucie had reinstated the numerous photos of herself with the great, the good and the royal (the Queen in 1970, Prince Edward in 1985).

  ‘I’ve scared away the ghosts.’ Lucie contemplated her glowing butt, fitted it between her lips and sucked on it before pinching it out in an ashtray shaped like a woman’s upturned hand. Jack’s own palms tingled.

  Long ago, a woman had killed herself feet from where they sat. Lucie had bought the house intending to write a book about the case – her pension plan – but the ghosts had got to her first, so there would be no book. Jack doubted a lick of emulsion would scare them away.

  ‘Certainly should,’ he said nevertheless. Perhaps, after all, it was a good sign.

  ‘So what can I do you for?’ Lucie rasped. Swirling her glass, she sent ice whizzing around it, faster and faster. ‘Or is this just a social call?’

  He got to the point. ‘What do you know about the Palmyra Tower?’

  ‘Zilch. Should I?’ Lucie drained her glass and mussed up her expensively dyed blonde hair. Her gestures and tics belonged to a long-ago younger self, but somehow she got away with it. She reached for her cigarette packet on the sofa arm, but then seemed to think better of it. ‘Where is it, Italy? Going on holiday, darling? Can I come?’ She gave a cackle and picked up the cigarette packet.

  ‘Chiswick Mall.’ Jack was disappointed; he had been relying on Lucie, a mine of information about West London, to shed light on his new home.

  ‘Oh, you mean Chiswick Tower!’ She flicked up a fresh cigarette, lit it, inhaled and puffed out a swirl of smoke. ‘Talking of ghosts!’ She shifted about happily. ‘Dead Man’s Tower! I knew it was finished. Luxury accommodation! They’ll make a mint from some poor sod happy to climb that scaffold and live in a water tank!’

  Jack’s head jerked and he sniffed to cover the tic that rarely surfaced. ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Say again?’ Lucie’s cigarette hand was above her shoulder, the smoke spiralling upwards.

  ‘I’m living there.’

  ‘Lordy-lou!’ Lucie funnelled smoke up to her brilliant white ceiling. ‘Even for you, that takes the biscuit!’ she said eventually.

  ‘Have you written something on it?’

  ‘Wind Drowns Out Terror Screams!’

  Like himself, Lucie had a photographic memory. She could recite from pieces she’d written decades ago, both the headlines and whole passages from the articles. She had facts at her fingertips that no amount of Tanqueray would blur or blot out. Jack felt a buzzing in his solar plexus: dread or excitement, he wasn’t sure.

  ‘Tell me.’ Jack tucked his own feet up, shoes clear of the sofa – Lucie was house-proud – and prepared for a cracking story.

  ‘Chiswick water tower was erected in 1940 to protect local industry, the brewery and a shipbuilder’s on the wharf where Pages Yard is now. It was meant to put out fires caused by German bombing, but I don’t think it ever did. Unlike the one on Ladbroke Grove – a bomb hit the cemetery nearby and sent a headstone smashing into the side of a gasometer. But for that tower, Shepherd’s Bush would be a memory!’

  Gone were Lucie’s corncrake tones and her brash flirty style. The reporter was cool and authoritative, her mind a fount of fact and folklore. Jack got a glimpse of the professional, brimful of hope and principle, that Lucie had once been.

  ‘It was decommissioned in the sixties and became a white elephant. One resident campaigned to have it demolished in the late seventies, but the whole community rose up and objected. It might be a concrete monstrosity, but it was their concrete – you get it!’

  She went to the cabinet on the other side of the room and, with Faustian precision, put together another nippet.

  ‘It was listed and in the eighties a company bought it to turn it into luxury apartments. But it was a bridge – or a tower – too far and they went bankrupt. It stayed empty for another couple of years, Chiswick’s own Centre Point. A consortium bought it about five years ago and began redeveloping it. They wouldn’t do interviews – the project was cloaked in secrecy. Even I couldn’t get a sniff. If you ask me, that was the point, talk it up – or not talk – so I gave up. I won’t play that game.’ She dropped a lemon slice into her drink and sucked on another. ‘I didn’t think the place would ever get a tenant. Trust it to be you!’

  ‘Why? It’s got amazingly detailed views.’ Jack accidentally echoed the leaflet. The sensation in his solar plexus clarified into dread.

  Wandering to her French doors, Lucie sniffed her drink with anticipatory delight. ‘Because a man had lain dead there for nearly a year. Sorry, darling.’ She turned around and grimaced at him.

  ‘There’s no sign of him now.’ Thinking of Stanley’s furious digging and sniffing, Jack wasn’t sure this was true.

  ‘The police couldn’t identify him. He had perfect teeth, no fillings, nothing, but no dentist had him on their books. Teeth was pretty much all that was left – the corpse was skeletal after all that time. He was discovered by a representative of the consortium. You sure about it? I sure as hell wouldn’t like to live in a place where a person had died.’

  Jack refrained from pointing out that Lucie was doing exactly this, or that most flats and houses over thirty years old had witnessed a death.

  ‘Who was the man?’

  ‘They never found out. I dubbed him “Glove Man” since that was pretty much all there was of him. The nationals ran with that, not that I got any credit.’ She opened the French windows and seemed to Jack to float on to the patio into the darkness beyond. He got up and followed her.

  ‘I’m sorting this too,’ she was muttering, glass in hand, as she leant down desultorily and wrenched up a weed, tossing it into next door’s garden.

  ‘Why did you call him Glove Man?’ In the slant of light from the sitting room, Jack noticed that at long last Lucie had got rid of the rusted swing that had stood for decades in the middle of the lawn. He felt a twinge of regret. He fancied flying up into the night, but on a swing he would have to come down.

  ‘They found a glove on the corpse’s back. There was some argy-bargy at the inquest about whether he could have placed it there himself. Terry demonstrated it was just about possible, but the question remained, why would he? If he was going to kill himself and make it look like murder, then he should have framed someone. Obvious candidate was the owner of the glove, but that was never established. His
fingernails showed signs that he had gone for the door and the walls, but being metal and concrete he had no purchase, nothing to grip, poor bloke. So he wasn’t in a “framing frame of mind”!’ Jack suspected she had made the pun more than once before.

  ‘What was the verdict?’ Was this another case of Terry’s that had got away? That was the reality of being a detective. If you wanted to truly restore order, you should be a cleaner. He might say that to Stella. Stella.

  ‘Open. The police thought he was homeless. He thinks: set up shop in the tower, but the door shuts. Effectively he’s trapped in a giant toilet cistern! In the old days he’d have got out through the roof, but the builders had stripped out the pipework by then.’

  ‘Why didn’t you think he was homeless?’

  ‘Apart from a sleeping bag, there was a champagne bottle in there, a high-class choice of tipple for a guy living on the street – or above the street. A used condom suggested he wasn’t alone. They found more than one set of fingerprints, but nothing that figured on police records. Over the years enough people had been up there. I suggested to Terry it might have been a paedophile and his family were keeping shtum. What better way to disown him than his being locked in a tower? They might even have locked him in there!’

  ‘Why did you think he was a paedophile?’

  ‘The glove was too small for an adult. It wasn’t his.’

  ‘Could have been dropped by kids afterwards.’

  ‘That was the official police line. But, as I said to Terry, even a kid knows better than to incriminate himself. Terry agreed, but without cogent evidence he couldn’t raise a budget to take it further. Another mystery that haunted the poor guy.’ She sipped at her drink. Despite her threadbare jumper, she didn’t seem to feel the cold.

  ‘Sounds like you had the answer. He drank too much, shut the door and was unable to escape.’

  ‘There was no reason for the door to shut, it was at the top of a spiral staircase, as you know, so could only shut if someone deliberately pushed it. Ergo, someone who intended to lock him in. After so long the pathologist couldn’t pinpoint time and date of death, but they narrowed it to late 1987. As I said, October was the month of the Great Storm, that hurricane that famously wasn’t forecast. The wind was like a tempest – the lead flashings on our house rolled up like foil and we lost a load of roof tiles. It was deafening. No one would have heard Glove Man yelling for help. Even on a quiet night, I doubt the sound would have carried.’

  She ground out her cigarette into the grass with the toe of her boot.

  Jack was about nine in 1987; he had a hazy recollection of streets blocked by fallen tree trunks, pavements strewn with branches and smashed glass, cars abandoned. It gave him a bad feeling, the same feeling he got when he thought about the steam engine.

  ‘Hundreds of feet up in a concrete vault, the man must have been stark staring petrified. It was likely he had heart disease, probably undiagnosed. Being a bag of bones they couldn’t verify that. But it’s likely the terror of being locked in a tank miles in the sky did it for him. Bam! His ticker packed up. Terry’s lot did call-outs to surgeries, but drew a blank; no doctor had a missing patient with a dicky ticker. Poor Terry. A literal skeleton in the cupboard!’ Lucie was gazing at the sky; she seemed to have forgotten Jack was there.

  ‘I swapped notes with Terry. I had a bulging file because of the demolition protests. We kept each other’s secrets.’ She pinched up the lemon from her drink and threw it into the bushes. ‘Stupid bugger, I said he needed exercise.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Terry.’ She produced her cigarettes from the waistband of her trousers and stuck one between her lips. ‘Stella see much of her mum?’

  ‘Yes.’ Jack knew the tactic. Lucie would appear to be asking after someone, but everything led somewhere. He wouldn’t let his guard down.

  ‘Mobile phones were a rarity then and they were the size of houses. So, end of Glove Man.’ Lucie was with the story again.

  The door in the tower was original. A man had battered on the galvanized metal before he collapsed with a coronary. The dog had tuned into the frequency of the man’s terror and anguish; Jack, usually so alive to the presence of the dead, had sensed nothing. He had abandoned one set of ghosts – of his parents, of the self he preferred to forget – for a more potent phantom.

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Between twenty and forty, which gives lots to play with. One clue, he had a receipt in his trousers from the Fullers wine shop, as it was in 1987. That one on the corner of Goldhawk Road and King Street – your old neck of the woods, darling. No CCTV then and no one in the shop recalled the purchase. In that area, getting a bottle of bubbly is probably not a rare occurrence!’ Lucie paused and contemplated the sky, where Jack could just make out faint stars.

  ‘Stella’s mum back from Oz yet?’ she asked airily.

  ‘Yes.’ She was homing in. He steeled himself and tried to deflect her. ‘I got a leaflet through the door about the tower.’ If he was honest, Jack was thrilled to be living on a murder site. Another of Terry’s unsolved cases: it was a sign. He would offer it to Stella as a recompense for his being in Tallulah Frost’s landing cupboard. Except if he said Lucie had told him, it would make things worse. Stella wouldn’t want to hear that Lucille May and her father had worked on a case together. It would be no recompense at all.

  Stella and Lucie, chalk and cheese. Chalk and chalk as they weren’t so different. Both of them had loved Terry Darnell. Jack wished they could get on.

  ‘What’s this Palmyra shit? What’s wrong with plain old Chiswick Tower? Is that your name for it?’

  ‘No, it was on the leaflet.’ Jack pictured the pink sheet. Apart from Palmyra being an ancient Syrian city and a suburb in Western Australia, he had no idea what connection it had with the tower. With little sleep, his mind was a fog. He wondered again at his luck in getting the flat – not luck in Lucie’s view. It had taken two mailshots, so maybe she was right, potential tenants had found Lucie’s articles about the dead man online and been put off.

  He and Lucie were mavericks. Few would relish knowing someone had died a horrible death a couple of metres from the bottom of their bed.

  ‘Palmyra rings a bell with me, but the older one gets, the more bells ring. Stay, young Jack, stay as you are!’ Lucie touched his cheek with the back of her hand and meandered back to the sitting room. ‘You should check out what your mystery guest looks like.’ She pulled shut the French windows.

  ‘Sorry?’ Jack sat in his corner.

  ‘Mispers!’

  ‘Bless you.’ It wasn’t a sneeze, he realized.

  ‘The Missing Persons’ website. It lists the lost and unclaimed of Britain. Bodies found on commons, in alleyways, drowned in the Thames or hit by trains on railway lines. Glove Man hasn’t got a photo, unfortunately, so nothing to see. They’ve done a sketch, so maybe one day someone might recognize him. I hope it’s me.’

  ‘I’ll take a look.’ Jack frowned to hide his excitement.

  ‘Course you will, Rapunzel!’ Lucie punched his arm. ‘As soon as you’re back in your tower!’

  Jack drew his coat around him to hide that she was right.

  Lucie May lit her cigarette and said in her Lucille Ball accent: ‘Has Mrs Darnell brought a present back for her “one and only” offspring?’ She smiled sweetly through a pall of smoke.

  Ground Zero.

  As if he hadn’t heard, Jack asked, ‘Does the name Rick Frost ring any of your bells?’

  38

  Friday, 25 October 2013

  Stella lived in a gated complex in Brentford, bought off-plan. She had opted for a corner flat on the fifth floor in the block – high enough for privacy (she was indifferent to the ‘stunning views of the River Thames and across London’), but accessible should the lift break down. Had Stella been given to mulling on such matters, she might have thought it not dissimilar to Jack’s tower. Silent and secure, with ‘detailed views’.

  For the
first couple of years the building had been 80 per cent unoccupied. This had suited Stella; she didn’t move to find a community in which to play an active part. She signed up to Neighbourhood Watch because keeping an eye out for intruders was what she did anyway. When the economy improved – for the income bracket that could afford Thames Heights – there had been an influx of new residents. Now only a handful of properties were empty. Despite this, Stella rarely met anyone going in or out.

  Taught by Terry to be security-conscious, Stella appreciated the automatic gates that juddered open on to a drive winding between undulating lawns to garages and numbered bays. CCTV monitored the door of a fully glazed marble-clad foyer more in keeping with a multinational corporation HQ than a block of flats in Greater London.

  With Stanley at her heels, Stella punched in the key code and slipped into the lobby. The door shut swiftly with a sigh, narrowly avoiding Stanley’s back legs. Stella was gratified: her complaint about how long it took to close had been heeded. Most of her complaints – sporadic cleaning of the common parts and security lights that worked in the day but not at night – were ignored.

  She was keen to get to bed: it had been a long and unsatisfactory day, culminating in the discovery that Lulu Carr was Tallulah Frost and her husband hadn’t left her for another woman, he was dead.

  At the end of the cavernous lobby – housing two lifts – a line of ceiling bulbs had blown, throwing it into gloom. Stella made for the lifts and was brought up short by the sudden hush of the lift doors opening in unison, a rare thing.

  Two paths of bright light flooded the marble. Stella hung back to make way for passengers in both lifts. No one came out. She might have taken it in her stride, but Stanley began to quake, his tail between his legs. Tired and troubled about Jack’s recent appearances in odd places – the roof of his tower, a cemetery and the pub – Stella was assailed by panic. To reach the staircase or the main door, she would have to cross the slants of light.