The Detective's Secret

by Thomson, Lesley

  Jack snatched up a roll and ate it. Suzie, like her daughter, could deal out surprises. Stella would have expected her to argue, to have sound reasons why the idea was a bad one, but she had supported her.

  ‘So, Terry knew he had a son.’ Stella nodded to her mother.

  The mood in the room dropped.

  Terry and Suzie had kept their secret from their daughter. Simon would call it betrayal. Jack smeared the last of the crumbs off his plate. Simon would be right.

  Terry had compounded the betrayal by confiding in Lucie May. Apart from Terry, Suzie at least had told no one.

  ‘Terry could have used his position in the police to find you, but he respected the law, so he didn’t,’ Stella said to Dale.

  Dale rolled his shoulders. ‘I never came looking for you guys.’ Jack could see that his confidence had ebbed.

  ‘Stella, he thought of you as his only child, that’s why he left you everything,’ said Suzie.

  ‘No, Mum, he didn’t think that.’ Stella squeezed out detergent into the bowl and snapped on rubber gloves. ‘Terry didn’t make a will, so as his only surviving heir, in the eyes of the law, I inherited everything. This place has never felt mine. I didn’t work to get it.’ Stella rinsed the plates under the tap.

  ‘Terry worked so you could have it,’ Suzie said. Jack had never heard her speak in such a conciliatory way about Terry before. It must be the ‘Dale effect’.

  ‘Terry would have been there at the airport to meet you. I gather he considered a trip to Australia, but couldn’t get insurance because of his heart,’ Stella added. Jack guessed Lucie May had told her. It seemed she had told Stella a lot of things. He thought he was pleased.

  Suzie threw down her napkin. ‘Are you saying Terry knew about his heart?’

  ‘Terry knew a lot of things he kept to himself.’ Stella turned to Dale. ‘Terry liked good plain food and after Mum left he lived on ready meals. He would have liked your lamb stew, providing you ditched the garlic.’ She gave a quick smile and stacked the plates on the dish rack. Jack saw that Terry’s bowl and spoon and cup had gone. ‘If Terry had met you, he would have put you in his will,’ she added.

  ‘You don’t know that, Stella.’ Suzie was fierce.

  ‘I do.’ Stella repacked the hamper. Everyone sat back as she wiped the table. She turned to Dale. ‘Half of this house is yours.’

  For Jack, what happened next was a blur. There was a knock at the door. No one moved to answer it. Stanley started barking and ran down the passage. Jack went with him. There was a taxi at the gate and a man was on the path, already walking away. He turned around and Jack saw him like an identikit: pronounced cheekbones, glittering eyes, an elegant green serge suit. He was a double of David Bowie.

  He was Stella’s ex and he had come to get his dog. Jack guessed this wouldn’t have been the arrangement or Stella would have told them. The man must have broken their agreement. With these thoughts whizzing through his mind, Jack forgot about Stanley until the dog whisked through his legs and leapt at David Bowie.

  ‘Good boy!’ David – that was his actual name – crouched down and buried his face in the dog’s coat. Jack conceded that the man had a right to the dog’s enthusiastic greeting. Stanley was his dog.

  He was distracted by another black cab pulling up behind the one that had brought ‘David Bowie’.

  ‘Fare for Heathrow?’ the driver called through the cab’s open window.

  Jack spread his hands in apology. ‘We don’t need a taxi.’ Who had called him?

  ‘Please give Stella this letter.’ The ‘David Bowie’ ex thrust Stanley into Jack’s arms. ‘Tell her she can keep him. He’s hers now.’

  ‘It’s for me.’ Dale was on the doorstep.

  The man called David was in the first taxi and being driven away before Jack found he was holding an envelope as well as Stanley. He stuffed the envelope in his pocket and held on to Stanley tightly.

  ‘Stella’s taking you to the airport,’ he reminded Dale. ‘We all are.’

  ‘Change of plan. I hate goodbyes, I get choked. Do me a favour, Jack, help me with this stuff.’ Dale heaved two suitcases and a carrier bag out on to the path. He left the carrier bag on the path and struggled down to the taxi with the cases. The driver came to meet him.

  Jack grabbed the bag and, still holding Stanley, went after him. Vaguely he noticed it was the bag Suzie had arrived with.

  Dale climbed into the taxi. ‘The girls think I’m in the bathroom.’

  ‘I don’t like goodbyes either,’ Jack heard himself say.

  ‘I thought you’d get it. I kept trying to catch your eye to let you in on it, but you were eating for all of us!’

  ‘They’ll be upset that you’ve gone.’

  ‘Listen, Jack, I have a sister in Sydney and if some joker rocked up claiming to be her brother, I’d give him the evil eye. You are right to be wary of me.’ He was seated in the back of the cab. ‘I wanted to meet Stella, my biological sister, and see where I might have grown up. It’s not great to know you were given away, even if you get the reason, but this way, I might get closure.’ He clipped on his safety belt. ‘My adoptive parents were happy and I had a great childhood, even though there was no spare cash and the Parramatta Road’s not quite as salubrious as this bit of Hammersmith. If I’d stayed here, then I too would have been trundled between two homes like Stella – but at least there would have been two of us. I could have been there for Stella. I mind that.’ He shuffled along the seat closer to the window. ‘At least Stella’s got you.’

  ‘I’m not her brother.’ Jack had got it wrong. While he had been thinking of himself, Dale had been thinking of Stella.

  ‘No, mate, you are not!’ Dale reached through the open window and grasped Jack’s hand in his. ‘Tell the world’s best cleaner that Old Man Darnell’s will must stand as it is. For obvious reasons, she’ll listen to you.’ He let go of Jack’s hand.

  ‘I’ll support Stella with whatever she decides.’ Jack stepped away from the car, holding tight to Stanley.

  ‘Course you will, Jacko!’ He grinned at him. ‘Oh, and Jack?’

  ‘What?’ Jack heard himself sounding gruff and tried to smile.

  ‘How come you knew exactly where in Sydney I grew up? You said Crows Nest when you met me. You were right on the mark. How could you know that? Did you check me out? Wouldn’t blame you if you did.’

  ‘I lived in Sydney once.’ Jack looked up at the sky. Clear blue, the storm had gone. ‘I moved there in 1988 and lived there for some years until my father got work back in the UK.’ His father had worked on a bridge over the Hawksbury River outside Sydney that was never built – typical of most of his projects.

  ‘Fair dinkum!’ Dale ramped up his accent. ‘What suburb?’

  ‘Crows Nest, then Manly.’

  ‘Good on you, you’re an Aussie after all! Get yourself there again and I’ll shout you more than a drink! Bring Stella.’

  As Jack stepped away from the taxi, he heard the echo of Dale’s earlier words. ‘What did you mean, “for obvious reasons”?’ he asked.

  ‘Jack, for a smart guy, you are one dillbrain around women!’ Dale leant forward and tapped on the glass partition. ‘We’re good,’ he called to the driver. The car drew away from the kerb.

  St Peter’s church clock struck eight.

  Jack watched it round the corner into St Peter’s Square. Bring Stella. He thought again how close Simon had come to making Stella his fourth victim. She had shown him the picture of Simon under the trees at Wormwood Scrubs common. If William hadn’t come when he did, Simon would have lured her further in. He had planned to hurt the woman who mattered to Jack more than anyone in the world. Or worse.

  ‘For obvious reasons, she’ll listen to you.’

  The clock finished striking.

  Dale was mistaken. There was no obvious reason why Stella would listen to him.

  The first thing he saw when he went back into the house was Dale’s album on the stairs. He mu
st have put it by his suitcases and forgotten to pick it up. Jack grabbed it and flung open the front door, but the taxi had long gone.

  ‘Did he get off all right?’ Suzie asked. She and Stella were sitting at the table sipping freshly made coffee.

  ‘You knew?’ Jack exclaimed.

  ‘I heard him booking it.’ Suzie tore a scrap off Dale’s last croissant. ‘I think he wanted to spare me. I’d said I hated goodbyes.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’ Stella pushed a mug of hot milk towards Jack.

  ‘Because it’s not true. I love them, but when Dale confessed he needed diazepam to make it to his dad’s funeral, I guessed that he wouldn’t handle us waving him off to his plane! Me, I’m all for waving goodbye, doing a good tidy, then getting back to the old routine!’

  ‘I’ll have to go to airport. He’s left this.’ Jack laid the album on the table.

  ‘I asked him to hide it in the hall.’ Suzie picked it up and, shifting her chair to make room for Stella, she asked her, ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’

  ‘I should get to the office.’ Stella shot Jack a look; he could guess her thoughts. Dale Heffernan had not entirely gone; he had left them with episode two of his life story.

  ‘Stella Darnell, this is your life!’ Suzie handed the album to her daughter.

  Stanley on his lap, Jack read the heading over her shoulder. ‘Clean Slate: the Story so Far’.

  Suzie had pasted the pages with testimonies from clients, before and after photographs of carpets and worktops, the changing logo over the decades. There was Stella in the late nineties, modelling the first uniform. A section headed ‘Staff’ featured group photos of cleaners, starting with Stella as the only one. Cuttings from trade magazines of Stella at gala ceremonies collecting awards: one for excellence in disaster restoration; several for excellent customer service and low staff turnover. An article by Lucie May described how Stella had built up a cleaning empire single-handed.

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’ Stella’s voice was thick. ‘How did you find all this?’

  ‘I’ve been collecting it since the beginning. I never thought of making an album!’ Suzie shut Dale’s breakfast hamper and did up the straps. ‘Shows you all that you’ve done. That’s my daughter!’ She ate the last bit of croissant.

  Stella hefted the hamper out to the hall. Jack caught up with her by the front door.

  ‘I forgot to say, that guy you went out with, who Stanley belongs to?’ He heard himself imitating Dale’s upward inflection.

  ‘I’m handing him over at two p.m. this afternoon. Actually, Jack, I was going to—’

  ‘He said you could keep him,’ Jack finished.

  ‘Until when?’

  ‘Um, well, until he die— Forever. He said he doesn’t want him back.’

  Stella started to smile. Still smiling she returned to the kitchen. He heard her saying, ‘Mum, I’m taking Stanley for a walk, do you fancy coming?’

  It wasn’t until Jack got out the key to unlock the tower that he found he still had the envelope ‘David Bowie’ had handed him. He was about to text Stella, but she would be walking Stanley. He was seeing her that evening. He would give it to her then.

  Epilogue

  Monday, 4 November 2013

  Mist hung over the eyot. The tide had ebbed, exposing the causeway. The river flowed fast, the water murky and unforgiving. The beach was dotted with smashed glass, plastic and wood. Last Tuesday morning St Jude’s storm had left in its wake a trail of devastation across southern Britain. Four people were dead.

  On the eyot a snapped reed, a crushed leaf and one footprint were signs of the route he’d taken with Simon. He paused by the gap in the reeds where Simon had tried to make Jack kill him.

  ‘Why did you save me that time if you wouldn’t be my friend?’

  ‘I would save anyone.’

  ‘I’m not anyone.’

  ‘No, you are not.’

  ‘You won’t save me this time, Jack. Justin. It’s your turn to murder.’

  He stared through the gap in the reeds at the rushing water below, thinking that the spangles of sunlight would join up and become Simon’s face rising out of the blue-grey water. Right until the end, Jack had refused to do what Simon had wanted. It was his turn to murder and he had refused.

  The white stones in his Garden of the Dead glowed in stippled sunlight. Jack took four more stones from his coat and, one by one, added them to the circle.

  ‘Nathan Wilson. Madeleine Carrington. Rick Frost.’

  He held the last stone in his palm.

  ‘Simon Carrington,’ he whispered as he laid the stone within the circle.

  ‘As I walked by myself,

  And I talked to myself,

  Myself said unto me:

  “Look to thyself,

  Take care of thyself,

  For nobody cares for thee.”’

  ‘What do you call a group of crows?’

  ‘A murder.’

  Stella seemed satisfied by his answer, although he doubted she believed him. She held up the front page of the Chronicle.

  ‘Detective’s Daughter Does It Again!’

  ‘We didn’t actually solve the case.’ She was squatting on the floor in the main room of the tower, where his desk had been. The removers had taken everything back to his parents’ house, leaving the space as bare as it was when Mr Wilson had come here with Simon’s mother.

  Stella spread the Chronicle on the floor. She had popped in on her way back from the office.

  ‘We worked it out, but more by luck than ingenuity. We didn’t realize it was Simon until he had captured you. We’ll have to get better at this business if we’re going to offer it as a service. We missed all sorts of clues. Dale saw that Lulu Frost wasn’t what she said she was, but I ignored him. He texted Mum and me to say he’d landed safely.’

  Jack saw a cloud briefly pass across her face. He suspected Stella of missing her brother.

  ‘We did solve it. We discovered it was murder by suicide. We gave the police new evidence.’ Jack was at the north window. He picked up the binoculars from the sill.

  ‘I still don’t see why Rick Frost ran when he saw Simon. It can’t have been the first time – he was married to his sister after all,’ Stella said.

  ‘Remember what Nicola Barwick told us? She hid behind the hut one night when they were kids and overheard Simon telling Richard Frost that one day he’d punish him. Richard would know when that day came. The boy was in Simon’s grip: Simon had his glove and over time his threat gained potency. Rick knew Simon was closing in. Something impelled him to text William and go to see him. He saw Simon in the dark at the end of the platform and panicked. Simon didn’t have to do anything. He simply had to be there. Over time he had become a potent threat to Rick, the embodiment of his darker side, the boy who had bullied and humiliated Simon.

  ‘Martin Cashman said we should have called him in earlier,’ Stella said.

  ‘You tried and he said he needed evidence.’

  ‘He said Nicola putting her passport in the bin was evidence.’

  ‘Maybe he should have listened to William Frost when he came to him in the first place. The main thing is we fulfilled William’s brief and he’s paid us. By hook and by crook we’ve done our first job. Your staff manual says do what the client wants and no more. We’ve closed Terry’s “Glove Man” case too,’ Jack reminded her.

  ‘Clients don’t ask us to clean and expect us to guess where.’

  ‘Like we do with cleaning, we’ll improve the more crimes we solve.’ Jack trained the binoculars on one of the plane trees in St Peter’s Square. The St Jude storm had denuded it of leaves. He added, ‘Lucie’s happy. She might never write that book, but she’s done a spread for the Observer magazine and been read all over the world. She’s back in the mainstream!’

  ‘Lulu still loves Simon, even though he killed her real father and her mother. Simon never appreciated his sister’s loyalty,’ Stella said.

  ‘Actually I think
he did. His mother betrayed him, as did his teacher, and by refusing to be his friend, so did I. It poisoned his soul.’ Jack couldn’t bring himself to tell Stella the things he had said to Simon when they were boys.

  ‘His mother having an affair wasn’t betrayal, she was still his mother,’ Stella said.

  ‘She lied to her son. If you can’t trust your parents to tell you the truth, whom can you trust?’ Too late Jack thought of Terry and Suzie. They hadn’t lied to Stella; they had avoided telling her truth.

  ‘Parents don’t have to tell their kids everything,’ Stella replied.

  Jack didn’t say that having a brother was Stella’s business. She had her own way of squaring things.

  ‘Rick Frost looked at me before he jumped off the platform because he recognized me. We had met only once, when we were boys. I never forgot his eyes, hazel flecked with green, without a glimmer of warmth or life in them. That night on the station, they were full of fear. I did forget where I’d seen them before.’ You are trespassing. He had erased the memory.

  ‘He wasn’t a nice man, but he didn’t deserve to die,’ Stella said. ‘What was that about you denying him three times? Lucie said it’s in the Bible. I didn’t have you down as religious.’

  ‘I learnt early that if you deny something or someone, you can wipe them away. I didn’t want things to be the way they were. I didn’t want to go away to school and I didn’t want Simon to be my friend. By denying he was, I meant him to go away.’

  ‘No reason you should have been Simon’s friend. We choose who we like.’ Stella was looking at the photographs in the Chronicle. Lucie’s editor had printed the passport-booth pictures of Simon facing the wrong way. Jack had refused to look at them properly when she had tried to show him. Another sign he had passed up.

  ‘Simon was an engineer. He calculated every stress point, every weakness; he covered every eventuality. When Nicola Barwick slipped through his net, he befriended Liz Hunter. He hadn’t reckoned on William bringing us the case, but his plan was like water: regardless of obstacles, it found a path. He had watched me for decades, biding his time.’ At walking pace, Jack shifted the binoculars out of the square and up to the church on the corner of Black Lion Lane.