The Dog Walker

by Lesley Thomson

  Sybil Lofthouse’s lips tightened a fraction. Had Stella not been forensically aware, she would’ve missed it. ‘I was.’

  ‘It must have been a shock.’ A dead-end statement. Jack would ask an open question.

  ‘I went the other way, I didn’t see her. I didn’t look down at Kew Stairs; my dog stayed on his lead. Then back, cocoa and bed.’ Sybil Lofthouse retreated into her house. ‘Goodbye, Whisky.’ Tipping a hand at Stanley, she shut the door. Stella had been ticked off about dropping Stanley’s lead. She had pushed it too far.

  She trotted Stanley into the little park beyond the hedge and felt Steven Lawson’s bench for damp before sitting down on it. Before going to see Jack, while it was fresh, she would record her meeting with Lofthouse in her Filofax.

  ‘I never made an error in thirty years.’

  Sybil Lofthouse had meant her work at the Stock Exchange, but was it true of everything she did? So far Honeysett’s killer had committed the perfect murder. It was a stretch to number the thin, reclusive woman as a suspect. Still, Stella was keeping an open mind.

  32

  Monday, 29 February 1988

  ‘Happy birthday to you,

  Happy birthday to you,

  Happy birthday, dear Mrs Hon— Helen,

  Happy birth-day to you!

  ‘It’s me, Megan, by the way…’ the little girl sang under her breath.

  Megan let Smudge’s lead dangle, and imagined the dog bound­ing off, paws splashing on the muddy track. Smudge darted back to her – her dad said he did it to report ‘on progress’ – and then with a toss of the head was off delving into bushes on the riverbank.

  At four in the afternoon, the grey of the sky met the grey of the river and the houses on Strand on the Green on the far bank dissolved into an indistinct mass.

  The bitter cold forced reality upon her. Mrs Honeysett wasn’t having a real birthday – today was the day she’d been born – because she was dead. Daddy had been dead for over a year. He’d missed his birthday last year. Smudge had gone to live in a proper home with a mummy, a daddy and two girls who, her mum said, would ‘love him as much as we do’. No one else could love Smudge like she did. She hoped he was somewhere nice.

  Megan wrestled with the dilemma that had weighed on her since Steven Lawson’s death the year before. Traipsing along the empty towpath, she feared that, because her father had murdered Helen Honeysett, he was in Hell. She didn’t want him to be alone, so she put Smudge in there with him. Except Smudge was innocent and she knew from school that the innocent went up to Heaven in white dresses. And Smudge wasn’t dead, but living in a proper home.

  Outside Mortlake Crematorium was a long black car. It was like the car they had used for her dad. ‘Say goodbye to Daddy.’ Garry hadn’t watched the huge box go behind a curtain, but Megan had promised her dad that when she was frightened she would never blink and look away so she hadn’t missed a thing. ‘Murderer. Kill. Kill. Kill!’

  Megan heard footsteps. Smudge. She whisked around. There was a person coming along the towpath. As they got closer, she realized it was Mr Rowlands again. She hesitated, hopeful that Mrs Merry was with him because he had said they were friends now. He was on his own. Something dangled from his hand. It was a dog lead. Megan looked for his dog but couldn’t see it. He was watching her, his eyes boring into her. Megan was engulfed in prickling fear.

  Quickly, she ran to the gate into the crematorium grounds and slipped through. She passed the sign that dogs weren’t allowed, but luckily Smudge was invisible. She ran for her life, full pelt across the damp grass.

  She heard music, sonorous and haunting, and she imagined she was running towards her dad.

  ‘Love you, Megsy.’

  She ran faster. As she reached the gravel drive in front of the building, the chapel doors were closed and the music – Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings – faded.

  Behind her damp fog drifted up from the river. She stared unbelieving. The long black car was rolling towards her. Silent and smooth, the fender gleaming. Megan shouted, but her throat felt squeezed tight and nothing came out.

  33

  Saturday, 9 January 2016

  Grey clouds over the Thames hastened the impending night. A murky flat light cast no shadow, all was one-dimensional and monochrome. Dank air would penetrate the warmest clothing. The water had receded exposing the Kew Stairs and the foreshore littered with plastic bottles, rags, fragments of broken metal, iron and glass. Oozing mud, like quicksand, would suck the unwitting into its depths, a fathomless grave of bones and lost treasures.

  Jack and Stella paused at the top of the granite steps. Stanley lifted a leg against a rotting post. This being the reason they were out, they could now go back to Natasha Latimer’s cottage and debrief on the Honeysett case.

  ‘You were going to ask me to come with you to talk to Adam Honeysett.’ Jack was aggrieved that Stella had again seen the man he had dubbed the Grieving Widower without him. He went down the steps and stopped. In the mephitic gloom, a bouquet of chrysanthemums had been tied to the trunk of an oak sapling. The stems, wrapped in cellophane, were soaked by many tides, the heads bleached whitish-brown.

  ‘I bumped into him here.’ Stella had already told him this.

  ‘In the dark? By yourself?’ Jack was ashamed for being peevish.

  ‘Stanley was here. I thought you were with Bella.’

  ‘I wasn’t… Stella, he’s a suspect, the main suspect. You shouldn’t be alone with him.’ He hadn’t meant to sound reproving.

  ‘I asked him why he didn’t mention he was having an affair. He said he didn’t want to prejudice us against him. He threat­ened to sack us if we didn’t trust him.’

  ‘I am prejudiced now! Fishy, don’t you think?’ There was a card on the bouquet.

  ‘For S. Loving you. Bx’.

  ‘Everyone’s fishy. Daphne Merry made no secret to you of disliking Helen Honeysett. Sybil Lofthouse shut the door when I brought up the subject. However, in 1987 she did have a dog – called Dartie – and did go to the towpath. If Helen Honeysett was pushed into the river, either of them could have done it. Or both. There’s Neville Rowlands who, if Natasha Latimer’s to be believed, may be dead. But even so he could have done it.’

  ‘Montague Dartie married Winifred Forsyte.’ Jack reread the dedication card; evening dew had blurred the biro ink. Had someo­ne died here? How? Murder? Heart attack?

  ‘Is she a client?’ Stella asked.

  ‘Winifred Forsyte? No, she’s in The Forsyte Saga.’

  ‘Is that related to this case?

  ‘No! It’s cos you mentioned the dog called Dartie… Oh, never mind. It’s amazing you got Sybil Lofthouse to talk.’ Jack was seriously impressed.

  ‘Stanley helped. People talk to you if you have a dog.’

  Having a dog had got Stella talking to people too.

  A lavender bush, leaves muted grey in the dusk, flourished on the bank. Jack pinched a sprig between his fingers. The fragrance propelled him back to his mother’s garden – his garden. Some­times he fancied he saw her ghost wandering between the beds, trailing fingers caressing a swathe of Michaelmas daisies. His reverie was broken by a shout from the beach below.

  ‘Having a good gawp, are you?’ A woman came up the steps. ‘You lot don’t give up, do you! No respect for folk trying to live their lives. We’re a story to sell your dirty rags!’ Her voice carried across the water.

  She clasped a fresh bunch of chrysanthemums. Jack saw a flash of silver and instinctively flinched. But it wasn’t a knife; the woman snipped the twine around the bouquet with a pair of scissors. ‘Bx’. Jack knew who she was and why she was there. Bette Lawson had come to the steps down which, in 1987, her husband Steven had walked to the river and drowned.

  ‘I’m sorry. We were waiting for Stanley to…’ Jack shut himself up and climbed back to the bank.

  ‘Don’t fob me off with your shit!’

  Stella was waiting in the pool of light by the steps to Thame
s Cottages.

  Looking back down the Kew Stairs, Jack saw Bette Lawson tying a fresh bunch of flowers to the oak sapling. Oak, the harbinger of wisdom. Jack carried an acorn as a talisman against mortality and illness. It was too late for Steven Lawson.

  *

  ‘I met her last night when I was with Adam. She was reasonably friendly; I want to keep it that way.’ Stella opened the microwave and placed two shepherd’s pies inside the oven. Hoping for a nice bone, Stanley was regarding Stella with a baleful glare.

  She gave a slight nod; he knew she’d seen how sparkling clean he’d made it. Jack felt faint pleasure. Although she’d never told him, Jack knew from Jackie that Stella considered him her best cleaner.

  He had spent the day cleaning the cottage. He was methodical, doing one type of task at a time. He washed skirting boards, walls, wainscots and window sills from the attic to the ground floor. He vacuumed and dusted and polished. He left the basement until last.

  Like Claudia, Jack had expected to encounter phantoms in Latimer’s newly dug basement. As in the home of a True Host, he was alive to the faintest presence.

  He dismissed typical symptoms reported in haunted houses. Apparitions flitting out of the corner of an eye; mist in the room not explained by a shaft of sunlight or a boiling kettle. Strands of floating gossamer; ornaments that vanished and reappeared elsewhere or were found smashed to bits. Ghosts were outsiders; they eschewed stereotypical means of making their presence – or absence – felt. A fused light bulb, a drop in temperature or the creaking reported by Latimer were expressions of people’s fears and terrors rather than proof of phantoms. A thorough cleanse wouldn’t relieve Latimer of her demons, but would give him an intimate connection to the building. If Helen Honeysett had chosen to haunt the cavernous basement, he would find her.

  Jack had relocated a glass figurine from the coffee table in the sitting room to the mantelpiece, rearranged cubes of coloured plastic and adjusted a battalion of toy grenadiers in the play­room. He took photographs that captured the position of each soldier. He moved the coffee table centimetres to the right. Inspecting at the end of the day, he was satisfied that nothing had moved. He was alone.

  At intervals as he cleaned, although there was no signal, he had checked for a text from Bella. Pointless: she’d told him once that if she thought someone wanted to leave her, she wiped them from her life as she erased a pencil sketch of a plant if it was inaccurate or she wanted to move it to another part of her drawing. Bella would rub him out and start again. Like one of her specimens, he was extinct.

  After he had finished cleaning Jack had flopped on the lips sofa and mulled disconsolately on what to have for supper. He had forgotten to shop and only had the milk Daphne Merry and Stella had brought him. He’d gone off milk. It was for babies. He reflected again on how soulless was the space Latimer had carved out from deep in the foundations. The sparse industrial aspect suggested that the objective of achieving a yawning sub­terranean extension took precedence over creating a cosy room.

  He had been happy when the lights dimmed and Stella’s face appeared on the River Wall. She was holding the shepherd’s pies and a tin of ‘fresh’ petits pois. He had taken them off her and gone with her to the towpath to get Stanley to pee.

  ‘Show me that thing on the computer,’ Stella said. Supper finished, they were side by side on the sofa.

  Who am I and what have I done? Jack had forgotten he’d told Stella about Latimer’s question. He got off the sofa and went to the steel Magic Box. He pulled open the steel office and jiggled the mouse. Nothing happened. He banged the mouse on the desk.

  ‘Careful, you’ll break it.’ Stella stayed his hand. He hadn’t noticed her get up. Her skin felt warm and soft. ‘You’ve turned off the machine.’

  ‘I didn’t!’ he snapped. Stanley was watching him, tail down. Jack spoke in an unnaturally bright voice to reassure him. ‘I cleaned around it today. It was off then too.’ He didn’t know why he was tense.

  ‘Has there been a power cut?’ Stella was reasonable.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘The microwave clock was showing the correct time, but it’s probably some smart sort that knows the time whatever.’ Stella wandered back to the sofa. ‘The question is probably to do with this basement. After all the fuss from neighbours, maybe Latimer regrets what she did.’

  ‘She didn’t sound regretful the other night,’ Jack said. ‘This sounds like a threat.’ He shivered. ‘Natasha Latimer mightn’t have written it.’

  ‘Who else could have? Surely not Claudia, she’s all about peace and love.’ Stella was losing interest. The Honeysett case had taken over.

  Jack pulled a face. ‘The ghost?’ He looked for his coat to put on, but it wasn’t on the back of the sofa where he was sure he’d left it.

  ‘Do ghosts use computers?’ Jack silently applauded Stella for trying. ‘Latimer only said about squeaking and creaking in the house. It could be an intruder. It’s a matter for the police.’

  Jack felt his skin crawl. It wouldn’t be the first time a True Host had turned the tables on him. ‘Did you see my coat when we came in?’

  ‘It’s over there, by that sandpit.’ She waved an arm and the glass panel slid back.

  Jack went through to the fake playroom. His coat was slung over the back of a chair he’d put by the sandpit. He remembered placing it there now. He put it on.

  ‘Going by this evening, it’s going to be hard to get Bette Lawson to talk to us.’ Stella had opened her bag and was sorting through the bundle of Honeysett papers the Grieving Widower had given her. ‘She wants to be left alone.’

  ‘Especially if she thinks we suspect her husband.’

  ‘It’s telling his own daughter told the police she’d seen him with Honeysett.’

  ‘Daughters can be wrong about their dads.’

  ‘Yes, they can.’ Stella went quiet.

  Jack hadn’t meant to remind Stella of her own unsatisfactory relationship with her father. She had really only got to know him after his death. He pulled his cigarette case from his coat, assembled tobacco and papers on his lap and began to roll a cigarette.

  There was a noise. Jack jumped up, knocking over Stella’s mug and spilling dregs of tea on to the liquid-resistant flooring. In the distance, through the glass panels, Jack saw Stanley. He was scrabbling at the white brick wall. He must have gone there when Jack fetched his coat.

  ‘Enough!’ Stella commanded. Stanley ignored her. Sighing, she got up and went to him, the glass panels swishing open for her.

  Jack slipped the completed cigarette into his case and closed it. He followed Stella to the end of the basement.

  ‘He might have found something,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe he wants another pee.’

  ‘The garden’s up there.’ Jack pointed up at the green skylights. He put his hand to his mouth, he wasn’t meant to know about the garden. No, it was okay, he could have been there. Besides it was obvious that the garden was above them.

  ‘He forgets about stairs.’ Then Stella exclaimed: ‘There’s a door!’ Her surprise made Stanley stop scrabbling. He watched her eagerly. She pushed on the wall. ‘It’s moving!’ she gasped. A slab of brick of about a metre square opened inwards and a stale smell drifted in from the darkness. Jack didn’t need Stella or Stanley’s preternatural olfactory sense to identify the stink of river mud. The temperature dropped.

  Before Jack could stop her, Stella ducked through the opening. He went in after her. In light from the basement he made out a crude concrete ceiling.

  The light went out. A negative impression of the ceiling flashed across Jack’s retina and then dissolved to black.

  ‘What happened?’ He tottered and fell against cold brick.

  ‘The basement lights respond to heat and movement. We’re not there so they’ve gone off,’ Stella reminded him. ‘This must be the emergency exit.’

  ‘Hardly a quick getaway.’

  ‘Odd Latimer didn’t show t
his to us.’ Stanley started growling. ‘Hang on, I’ve found a switch.’

  A dirty bulb illuminated the ceiling. Instinctively Jack and Stella gravitated to each other. On a platform, gleaming bright yellow, was a mechanical digger.

  34

  Monday, 29 February 1988

  Megan felt warmth between her legs and then cold, a sensation from early childhood. She had wet herself. If she was dead, she didn’t care.

  ‘Megsy!’

  ‘What?’ Daddy!

  ‘Get up. It’s filthy. Get up!’ Hands grabbed her, snatching ineffectually at her school blouse. She sat up. The long black car had gone. A flock of geese flew overhead honking and dipped behind the roof of the crematorium. If she could hear, she couldn’t be dead.

  She clambered up. Her skirt was streaked with mud and had a damp patch. She bashed at it, but made it worse. Her knickers hung loose and sopping and her socks were round her ankles. Helen Honeysett had run along the towpath, she was running away from Daddy. When he caught up with her, he would have been kind.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here by yourself. Not at all! What if you’d been murdered like the lady? It’s dangerous!’ Garry stormed at her. ‘The murderer is out here somewhere.’ To Megan’s astonishment her brother looked afraid. She tried to reassure him.

  ‘He’s not, Garry. The danger is gone.’ The murderer went into the river and drowned.

  Garry Lawson knew what his sister was thinking. ‘You’ve got to stop this. What would Mum do if you was murdered?’ His voice was hollow over the darkening crematorium lawns.

  ‘I was taking Smu—’ The newspaper her mum had thrown at Aunty El said her dad liked Helen Honeysett more than his family. With no money of his own, he wanted to have hers. Megan faltered. Last night in bed, she’d tried to think what her dad looked like and only knew in the end because she found his picture in the paper.

  ‘Come home. Ugh, you stink!’ He took her hand like her dad used to. Like Garry used to. ‘Mum will run a bath and stick your clothes in the wash.’