The Dog Walker

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘Good evening.’ The man wore a head torch. Jack was blinded. He caught the glint of a dog lead dangling from the dog walker’s hand.

  ‘Evening,’ Jack replied. A dot of light floated on his retina after the man had gone. Jack let himself breathe. It wasn’t only True Hosts who were out on lonely paths late at night. Dog walkers were not afraid of the dark. He moved on along the footpath towards the Kew Railway Bridge.

  10

  Sunday, 11 January 1987

  ‘I know her!’ Megan couldn’t hide her pride.

  ‘How can you know her? My dad was talking about her at breakfast. He says there’s a monster on the loose. She’s on the telly – you can’t know her.’

  ‘I do. She’s probably just lost.’ Megan was annoyed that Angela Parker didn’t believe her. Angela had broken friends with Becky Fox and had asked to go around with Megan. Although Megan liked Becky better, she had cautiously agreed. ‘She lives there, by our house.’ Megan waved a hand over the hedge and added for good measure, ‘Her husband is very handsome. He took a picture of me in secret.’

  ‘You’re a liar,’ Angela pronounced.

  ‘It’s true, in fact.’ Used to Garry contradicting her, Megan was equable. She murmured, ‘She takes pictures of people’s rooms and sells them.’

  The children were scrutinizing an A4-size poster tied with loops of string to railings in the park. Rain had soaked the string and loosened it, so that the poster, encased in plastic, hung askew. The face of Helen Honeysett looked through the clouded plastic at them, as if through dirty water. The word Missing was printed in bright red. Like blood, Angela had said.

  Missing. Missing who? Megan had missed her family when she went on Brownie camp. She had never thought of a person being missing, let along Mrs Honeysett, who was as beautiful as a queen and was going to have two of Garry’s budgies.

  ‘She looks scary,’ Angela pronounced. ‘The way she’s smiling like it’s fun to be missing. I think she’s hiding.’

  ‘She didn’t know she was missing when that was taken. My dad took it at their Ewell-Tide Party when they got here. She’s very nice. My dad likes her. He saved her dog from drowning.’ Megan remembered how happy her dad had been at the party, dancing and singing. Since the man’s washing machine had gone everywhere, he was always cross. He had said 1987 was cursed. ‘Helen Honeysett says he’s the best plumber in London.’ Megan sniffed to cover her confusion because she wasn’t sure Mrs Honeysett had said that.

  ‘I ’spect she’s drowned in the river. That’s what happens. Your dad should have saved her not her dog.’ Then in a burst of munificence Angela conceded, ‘Amazing you know a famous person. Have you got her autograph? I’ve got that man from Dad’s Army and Basil Brush.’

  ‘She wasn’t famous until she became missing.’ This fact struck Megan as peculiar. Surely a person had to be there to be famous?

  ‘I wish Becky was missing,’ Angela said as they wandered across the playground to the gate that opened on to the towpath. A blue-and-white plastic tape marked ‘Police Line Do Not Cross’ was tied from two tree trunks beyond. A metal sign propped on the path told them ‘Road Closed’.

  The girls craned over the tape. Uniformed officers were moving along the riverbank, poking sticks and shining torches into tangled scrub.

  ‘My dad says her husband killed her to get her money,’ Angela said.

  ‘You said a monster took her,’ Megan reminded her.

  ‘He is a monster. He murdered her.’ Angela giggled at the word ‘murdered’.

  ‘She’s missing. She’s not murdered,’ Megan insisted.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Her husband is handsome. He’s called Adam and he’s not a monster.’

  ‘Dad says the police are questioning him. They won’t care he’s handsome.’ Angela wavered. ‘I shouldn’t think so, anyway.’

  ‘I’m rearing a baby budgie.’ Megan had been saving up this nugget for her new friend. ‘My brother breeds them and I help him. I give her bits of grated carrot and apple. She’s beginning to feather up.’ She pronounced the ‘technical term’ with aplomb. ‘You can visit her, if you’d like.’

  Impressed, despite herself, by a missing famous person and a baby budgie, Angela agreed.

  Another poster was wrapped around the lamp-post by the towpath steps. With no protection, the photograph had bleached. It had a dated quality. Only missing a few days, Helen Honeysett already belonged to a distant past.

  11

  Tuesday, 5 January 2016

  A fire burned in the grate. Stella’s deep-cleaning eye roved over opened post on a table, letters and circulars stuffed back into envelopes, CDs out of their cases splayed around a tower of audio equipment; a ripped packet spilling Digestive biscuits lay on top of copies of the Metro and the Evening Standard piled on a chair. Stella had seen truly untidy rooms, with every available surface buried under mounds of clutter and nowhere to sit, but this was different. She might not be a great judge of character, but Stella could assess the habits of a client from just one room. This man was restless, flitting from one unfinished task to another like a butterfly.

  Stella reminded herself she wasn’t here to do a cleaning estimate. Only then did it strike her that she’d allowed a stranger to lure her into his home in the middle of the night. When she was little, her parents had forbidden her to answer the door or the telephone even if they were upstairs. Tired after hours in the hospital and preoccupied with Natasha Latimer’s commission, too late she heard her dad’s advice: ‘Always say where you are going. Don’t trust anyone, especially not the respectable ones: appearances deceive.’

  Stanley barked, sharp and shrill, his warning tone.

  ‘I have to go,’ Stella said.

  ‘You can’t!’ The man – he had told her his name, but she’d forgotten it and this somehow made her predicament worse – shovelled papers off an armchair and motioned to her to sit. He pulled the curtains. Despite the warmth of the fire, Stella was chill.

  As if watching a film, she saw herself shutting the van door and driving back to Hammersmith. Instead she had gone down an alley and now she was trapped. In electric light the man didn’t look respectable. Crumpled shirt. Trousers blotted with muddy paw marks. Scuffed shoes. His wired manner, bright eyes and twitchy movements didn’t reassure. Was he on something? Her mum would presume Stella had gone home after she left her. Jackie supposed she’d been to agility and was at home. Jack too. No one was wondering where she was.

  Natasha Latimer had said there was no ‘community’. No one had welcomed her. Stella could understand that digging out a basement might alienate the neighbours. But what if they weren’t friendly anyway? Helen Honeysett – ghost or not – had disappeared from this street. In such cases, it was often the husbands. If she shouted for help, who would come? After midnight there would be few passers-by. She should have waited and come with Jack. He would be with Bella asleep or... Stella closed down the thought.

  Stella could have no idea that Jack wasn’t with Bella but, at the moment she was taking in the enormity of her mistake, he was outside. Had she called for help Jack would have heard.

  Stella sat down in the armchair. The man – his name was Adam Honeysett – was pacing up and down the long room. This wasn’t easy as there was so much stuff: toys and books, a baby grand piano. When he had his back to the door, she could make a run for it. Yet her curiosity took over. She said, ‘You wanted to talk about your wife?’

  ‘Have you heard of Helen Honeysett?’ Adam Honeysett stopped and, interlocking his fingers, cracked his knuckles. An old trick designed to unsettle.

  ‘The missing estate agent?’ Guessing he expected her to know, Stella was fleetingly grateful to Natasha Latimer for refreshing her memory that morning. To hear about the woman twice in one day was extraordinary.

  ‘She was my wife.’ He puffed out his cheeks as if this was an inconvenience. ‘Early on the morning of the eighth of January 1987 Helen went jogging with the dog along th
e towpath by the river at the end of these houses. She never returned.’ Looking at Stella with strange intensity, he said again, ‘She’s dead. I want you to prove it.’

  ‘Why now, twenty-nine years later? Why not years ago?’ This might antagonize Honeysett. Her dad had asked awkward questions, but he could radio for help. She never antagonized cleaning clients.

  ‘With no new leads, there’s no active investigation. The police review it annually, but Helen is a “cold case”. There was nothing cold about my wife. I want you to find out what happened to her.’

  Stella had been about to protest that since the Met police hadn’t solved the case she doubted she and Jack could, but then she remembered how her mum grumbled that Stella and her father’s first response was always ‘no’ and also that she and Jack had solved four cold cases. She should at least listen. Not that she had a choice. Stanley stood by her chair, tail down. A bad sign. In the grate, a lump of wood had burned to grey ash; the flames died. She said nothing and huddled in her jacket.

  Adam Honeysett grabbed a silver frame placed next to the model of a dog with a long tail on the mantelpiece and gave it to Stella. ‘That’s my Helen. Please find her.’

  Stella knew the image. In 1987 it had been all over the press and TV and on missing posters stuck around West London. Stella had been starting out on her cleaning business then and – no van in those days – had seen ‘Missing’ posters on trees, fences and lamp-posts as she walked between jobs. A blonde woman, with hair piled on her head, strands curling around her face, laughing into the camera. Stella considered how a murdered person became known for one expression. Usually a smile that grew as familiar as the Mona Lisa’s. Stella stared at Helen Honeysett and Honeysett stared back. Stella blinked; she could imagine Honeysett coming out of the photograph and asking why Stella was in her house so late. Stella laid the frame on her lap. It seemed rude to give it back to Adam Honeysett or to return it to the mantelpiece.

  Honeysett took up a poker from beside the grate and pushed the log about on the embers. A lick of flame engulfed it. Still grasping the poker, he leant on the piano. ‘She never learnt to play this.’ He smacked the poker in his palm. Stella wished he would put it down. ‘In a few days it’ll be the anniversary of when Helen vanished. I read in the local paper that you found some killer from the seventies and that you solved your father’s case. You see clues that the police miss. I want a fresh, objective eye.’

  Lucie May had written an article after what Lucie called ‘The Kew Gardens Murders’. It had netted a couple of cleaning jobs, but no detection cases. Stella had been vaguely grateful; although she had decided to open a detective arm to her cleaning business, she remained ambivalent. A detective burrowed into people’s personal lives, something that as a cleaner, despite entering clients’ homes, Stella made a point of not doing. However, Helen Honeysett was the focus of two jobs within twenty-four hours. If not one of Jack’s signs, it was something that might be worth pursuing. She got out her Filofax. ‘So you think your wife is dead?’

  ‘Some days I feel it here.’ He thumped his chest. ‘In what’s left of my heart. Natasha in the end house accused me of starting an absurd story that Helen’s haunting the street. I told her, that’s not my wife’s style. If anyone, she’ll haunt me for putting her favourite silk shirt on spin.’ He spoke on a sigh: ‘If she was alive, I’d know. I want to move on.’

  Natasha Latimer had said something about Honeysett having a ‘new girl every week’. A missing wife must cramp things a bit. Stella wouldn’t probe that for now.

  Honeysett laid the poker on the hearth. He grabbed a lever-arch file from under a heap of magazines. ‘I’ve got together newspaper cuttings, stuff off the internet, photos and police letters. You probably do things your way, but...’

  ‘I’d like to hear it from you first.’ Terry used to say that how someone told a story provided clues. Stella noted that he’d only recently assembled the material; the file wasn’t the result of decades of obsessive research.

  A cloud passed over the man’s face. Perhaps he was used to doing things his way. Hugging the file he began to talk, without emotion, as if he’d said it many times before. In her head Terry’s ‘ghost’ voice advised, ‘Even a well-rehearsed lie reveals a grain of truth.’

  ‘I left Helen that morning. She was asleep. I had a pitch in Northampton. I kissed her on the cheek, careful not to wake her. Had I known it would be the last time, I’d have shaken her, told her I loved her, told her I’d never…’ He wiped a hand over his mouth and brooded at the dying fire.

  ‘Hold the silence. Into the void, a clue will fall.’

  After some moments Honeysett continued, ‘Helen started work at ten in Hammersmith. At eight, she went for a jog with the dog. Every day, same time, same route. If someone were stalking her, he would have got her routine in no time. It never varied. These days we’d call her OCD; then she was disciplined. It makes it so hard.’

  ‘Makes what hard?’ Stella hadn’t meant to speak and not to ask an absurd question. His wife being missing and presumed murdered was hard.

  Honeysett said, ‘Hard to remember that morning. It was the same as any other. I said to the police, days merged. They still do, but then it was because I was blissfully happy, now I don’t care what happens.’ He fell silent and scratched his stubbly chin.

  Stella brought him back. ‘Was it usual for you to go to Northampton?’

  ‘No. I was presenting worked-up concepts for an annual report to a firm that made plastic cogs. After Helen, that job – any job – seemed banal. I’m a graphic designer. Was. Not much going now. Few want to hire a murder suspect. Recently it’s picked up, younger guys think it’s edgy. And as long as the price is right.’ He pushed out his lower lip and gave a shrug in mock powerlessness.

  Stella had scribbled Honeysett’s initial words in her Filofax. ‘I want you to find my wife.’ She could be alone with a killer. She tried to hear Terry, but his voice was silent.

  Honeysett was still talking. ‘…nevertheless, I live under a cloud of suspicion. If you’d set up a pitch for graphic design companies, would you invite the one that killed his wife?’ he asked bitterly.

  ‘I choose the work I like best.’ Stella had sat through design pitches when Clean Slate rebranded. ‘If I liked your ideas, I’d choose you.’ Honeysett had said ‘killed his wife’, not ‘might have killed’. Was that a slip?

  ‘God! If I hadn’t gone to Northampton, Helen would be talk­ing to you now.’ He went to the window and tweaked the curtain aside, as if looking to see if his wife was outside. He returned to his chair.

  Stella didn’t say that she wouldn’t be there if Helen Honeysett were alive. She asked, ‘Were you the last person to see your wife alive?’ A family member or someone close to the victim was statistically likely to be the killer. More than once Stella had seen a weeping partner on Crimewatch pleading for his loved one to return, only to hear later he’d been charged with murder. That Honeysett had brought her the case didn’t rule him out as a suspect.

  ‘I got back at eight that evening. Helen wasn’t there. I didn’t worry as I guessed she’d gone with the dog for her run. She went twice a day. Eight in the morning and eight at night.’

  ‘Where did she used to go?’ Stella posed questions that prompted clear-cut replies. If Jack were here, he’d encourage Honeysett to ramble on. He said people gave themselves away when they went off the subject. She wanted a foundation of facts.

  ‘Along the towpath, to Chiswick Bridge and back.’

  ‘When did you realize Mrs Honeysett was missing?’ She wasn’t on first-name terms with the potential victim.

  ‘About ten that night. Helen was always out for an hour.’

  That meant that Helen Honeysett should have got back by nine. Despite her strict routine, her husband only started worrying an hour after that. Had the police decided he was innocent or did they lack the evidence to prove him guilty?

  ‘Sometimes she’d go as far as Hammersmith Bridge.
She was a friendly person. I guessed she’d met a neighbour on the towpath and gone in for a drink.’

  ‘Did she do that a lot?’ A spontaneous visit to neighbours didn’t fit the OCD profile. Nor did it fit the kind of neigh­-bours that Natasha Latimer had described. But it was about thirty years ago; perhaps there were nice ones then.

  ‘Never. She borrowed two baking potatoes off Daphne Merry. She liked the family at number 2. She flirted with Steve Lawson, the husband.’ He shrugged as if it was unimportant. Stella wrote, ‘Check Steve Lawson/Helen Honeysett.’

  ‘When you got worried, what did you do?’

  ‘I tried every house. Bette Lawson said Helen wasn’t there. I didn’t call on Sybil Whatsit next door at number 5; she did early shifts at the Stock Exchange so I knew she’d be asleep. Besides, she keeps herself to herself. She walked out of our party without saying goodbye. No way would Helen have gone there.’ He put a finger to his lip. It made him look like a small boy. Stella wondered if it was meant to. ‘That Merry woman didn’t answer. It turned out she’d been walking her dog and had found our dog down by the river. She’d tried me, but of course I was on the towpath looking for Helen. Old Neville Rowlands lived at number 1, the cottage closest to the river. Tash kicked him out when she bought the house, turned out he hadn’t told the people he rented from that his mother had died! The cottage was part of a portfolio of properties, the consortium who owned it hadn’t kept tabs on the tenants or they’d have realized she had to be about a hundred and thirty! Rowlands was lucky not to be done for fraud. Anyway, that night he behaved as if I’d accused him of kidnapping Helen. After that I told the police to try there first. Helen used to call him an “old grouch” but she was sweet with him. She was nice to everyone. He wasn’t old, he was only in his mid-thirties then. He was that classic type that looks middle-aged even as a kid, lives with his mother and does some boring old job. It’s the quiet ones who turn out to be murderers.’