The Dog Walker

by Lesley Thomson

  Megan Lawson wrestled with a double bind that would haunt her for years. She had loved her dad, but he was bad because, like her Aunty El and Angela and everyone said, he was a murderer. Her mum and Garry said he wasn’t a murderer and he was good. If she thought that a murderer was good, then she must be bad. If she was bad she would go to Hell. If her dad and Smudge were there that would be all right.

  Megan glanced over her shoulder. Mr Rowlands was there. Except Mr Rowlands didn’t have a walking stick. ‘Gal.’ She tried to free her hand.

  Garry hurried her along. When they reached Thames Cottages, she started to tell him that Smudge was with their dad, but suddenly she doubted it was true.

  35

  Sunday, 10 January 2016

  ‘Call me when you get this message, please.’ Keys in hand, Stella was outside her mum’s front door. Since the night before when she and Jack had found a small JCB digger in Natasha Latimer’s basement, Stella had been trying to reach her to ask why it was there. Latimer hadn’t rung back.

  ‘It’s me-ee,’ Stella called as she stepped into the hall.

  Who is me? She waited to hear the ritual response. Nothing. The doors – her old bedroom, her mum’s room, bathroom and toilet – were closed. Suzie kept them open to light the passage. This had been a point of contention for the teenaged Stella who, as she still did, prized privacy. Stella switched on the light and saw that the carpet and skirting boards remained spotless. Jackie said that incredibly Suzie approved of Stephanie Benson, the new cleaner.

  She and her mum were going to take Stanley to Richmond Park: a regular outing dating from when Suzie had been depressed and had refused to go out at all. Since Stella had given her a job at Clean Slate, Suzie’s spirits had lifted and she thought nothing of flying to see her son in Australia. Maybe Richmond Park was now run of the mill and the plan had slipped her mum’s mind. From feeling mildly frustrated at losing an afternoon on the Honeysett case, Stella was also disappointed Suzie had gone out. When her mum wasn’t complaining about Terry, she was good company.

  Her mum had probably popped downstairs for a paper or milk. As she thought this, Stella was struck by the seemingly most unlikely notion that Suzie had gone to see her brother Dale in Sydney. She had long ago stopped being certain of her mother’s movements, her likes and dislikes. It was quite possible that having conquered some kind of agoraphobia, her mum had gone off to Australia on a whim with a bandaged ankle.

  ‘It’s me,’ she repeated as she opened the living-room door. Stanley bolted past her and came to a standstill on the carpet.

  At first Stella thought the living room was empty – of her mum – but alarmingly of everything. Stanley shouldn’t be able to sit where he was sitting. Her mum’s armchair should be there.

  Suzie’s collection of playing cards – going back fifty years – was gone from the shelf above the TV. The dancing porcelain man and women in eighteenth-century costume were no longer on the mantelpiece. Her mum’s armchair was actually still there, it had moved to where the little table should be. Where was the ashtray from Kent’s Cavern, bought in Devon on one of the last family holidays they’d taken before they moved to Barons Court? Of the four dining chairs her mum had bought ‘for a snip’ after the divorce, there were two left. The sofa had been shifted from the wall by the window to opposite the television. Not a fan of art or objects that gathered dust and got in the way of a swift polish, Stella was nevertheless relieved that the print of Constable’s Hay Wain, her dad’s favourite painting that her mum had laid claim to, remained above the fire. Through the hatch to the kitchen she saw that her wish that her mum would keep less stuff on the counters had come true. But for the kettle and toaster, the worktops were clear, and gleaming. Stephanie Benson was indeed good. Dread stirred in her stomach. It wasn’t just that the flat was clean. It had been stripped of practically all of Suzie’s personal possessions. Stella’s unexpressed fear took hold. Bored and frustrated at being marooned with a sprained ankle, her mum had decided to up sticks (literally) to Sydney and sublet her flat. She had left Stella behind.

  Her thoughts racing, she didn’t hear the front door and jumped when a voice exclaimed, ‘There you are!’

  Pulling off leather gloves and unwinding a Burberry check cashmere scarf bought duty-free at Heathrow, Suzie Darnell asked as if it were Stella who was late.

  ‘I thought you’d gone…’ Now that her mum was in front of her, holding a half-pint of milk, Stella’s idea of emigration appeared ridiculous.

  ‘What do you think?’ Suzie flapped her scarf at the room and crowed, ‘I’m a new woman!’

  ‘It wasn’t on the job sheet,’ Stella muttered huskily.

  ‘What job sheet?’ Suzie was lurching and limping around the room, swooping and dipping as if doing some outlandish dance. Reliant now on one crutch, she flourished it. ‘Relish the space that’s been liberated, breathe the air, bathe in the light!’ Suzie did a twirl where the armchair had been. Excited by the ‘liberated space’, Stanley cavorted joyously around Suzie. ‘Come and see the rest! Not that there is anything to see, that’s the point.’

  Suzie took Stella to what had been – and still was if she had a reason to stay – Stella’s bedroom. It was where her brother stayed when he visited. As Clean Slate’s first office it had once housed files, a printer, shredder and computer. Now it was as bare as a nun’s cell.

  ‘Where are the photo albums and my dolls?’ At any other time, Stella would have been pleased to see her dolls – never played with – had gone. ‘And that little Sydney Opera House Dale gave you?’ Stella went along to her mum’s bedroom. There was nothing on the shelves. The model she had done of the family dog when she was six – a lump of clay with no likeness to any animal that Stella never understood why her mum kept – was missing.

  ‘The cleaner was meant to do what Jack did.’ In her confusion, Stella couldn’t think of the woman’s name. She returned to the living room and was strangely disorientated by the space. She sat disconsolately on the edge of the sofa. She had seen the flat go through a drastic change before. When Jack had first cleaned, he had persuaded Suzie to get rid of the towers of newspapers her mum had hoarded from when they moved there in 1973. Somehow he’d made it feel like the home she had shared with her parents. Jackie said Jack had the knack of transforming the starkest place into a home. Now her mum’s flat was as bare and unfriendly as it had been on the day they moved there. Stella was reminded of Natasha Latimer’s basement. Although a fan of straight lines and clean empty surfaces, she felt a stranger in a place she knew well. Stella dimly understood that her irrational fear that her mum had emigrated had come from the fact that it did look as if she no longer lived here. There was no trace of her.

  ‘Where is everything?’

  ‘Banished!’ Her mother spun about on her good ankle. ‘Look at me, light as a feather.’ She windmilled her arms.

  ‘She shouldn’t have done this without permission.’ Stephanie Benson, that was her name.

  ‘She had my permission!’ Suzie cast herself on to the sofa beside Stella.

  ‘Stephanie Benson’s remit doesn’t cover carrying heavy fur­niture. If she had injured herself, she could sue for breach of contract. It wasn’t fair to ask her.’ Stella made herself breathe as Jackie would advise. The last time she had felt like this was when she found a body while she was cleaning. In fact she felt worse.

  ‘Stephanie. Sweet thing although she’s a bit doleful. Shifty too. Good cleaner, I grant you. But then all this freed space makes cleaning a doddle.’ Suzie fiddled with a lock of hair, girlishly. ‘Zigzagging increases tension. She’s cleared a straight path. Not that it’s why I hired her.’ Suzie stretched out her bandaged ankle while her other foot rested on one of four dents in the pile where the legs of her other armchair had been. Stella spotted tracks from Stephanie Benson’s vacuuming.

  ‘It’s not why you hired who?’ Stella felt foreboding.

  ‘Daphne Merry,’ Suzie crowed happily.

  �
�Who’s Daphne Merry?’ Oh God. Stella pictured her spread­sheet: Daphne Merry (Declutterer) Dog (Name?). Merry lived at number 3 Thames Cottages and had brought Jack cake. It was Daphne Merry who had found out that Steven Lawson’s daughter had seen him following Helen Honeysett to the river. Merry had brought back the Honeysetts’ dog Baxter the night Helen Honeysett vanished.

  Suzie beamed at Stella. ‘She lives next door to your victim!’

  ‘She’s not my vic— Mum, you asked Daphne Merry to declutter?’ Stella felt as if her worlds were colliding.

  ‘It’s not only Lucille May-Every-Time who can play detective. I don’t “play” – I was married to one. I know how to get the canary singing. You gain the suspect’s trust and once they’re putty in your hands apply the palette knife.’ She clapped her hands in the uncluttered air. ‘I went undercover!’

  Suzie had told Jack that she had been happiest in the early days of her marriage when Terry shared his cases with her. Before he left her. As it was her mum who left her dad, Stella had assumed this wasn’t true.

  ‘Daphne Merry isn’t a suspect,’ Stella retorted, although she and Jack had agreed to keep an open mind. Terry said everyone was a suspect unless they were dead at the time of the murder.

  ‘Everyone’s a suspect unless they’re dead at the time of the murder,’ Suzie announced. ‘The subject came up naturally, or so Daphne thought!’

  ‘How could the subject of a dead estate agent come up naturally when Merry was here to declutter?’ They might hate each other, but Lucie May and her mum were similar: they scattered obstacles in their wake as they chased a goal.

  ‘I said I’d seen her mentioned in one of those dreadfully penned articles by Citizen Kane on the Honeysett girl. I left it there and burbled about being fascinated that Merry entered people’s homes and expunged their rubbish. She didn’t take long to spill!’ Suzie snatched up a cushion and hugged it to her chest. ‘She called Honeysett “feckless”. Lives and dies by the sword does our Daphne. No prisoners cluttering her jail. Adroit. She never suggested I throw something away, she guided me towards the decision. It means, should I wish to, I can’t blame her.’ She tapped the cushion rapidly. ‘I liked her.’ An express touch-typist, her mum often tapped out words as she talked. Jack said it was a sign of intelligence: Suzie needed stimulation or she got bored. The last bit Stella agreed with.

  Regardless of Suzie’s mood or dubious method, Stella had to admit Suzie had found a way to interrogate a suspect. To date Stella hadn’t intentionally interviewed any of the residents of Thames Cottages. Stanley had led her to Sybil Lofthouse. Jack – and now Suzie – had befriended Daphne Merry and Stella had twice been ambushed by Adam Honeysett. Nevertheless, between her and Jack, they had met nearly everyone living in the street when Honeysett vanished. They had yet to find Neville Rowlands – dead or alive – and Megan Lawson and to interview Bette and Garry Lawson. Stella didn’t count Natasha Latimer, being born the same year as a crime was a watertight alibi.

  Meanwhile, her mum had only had the file for the time it had taken Stella to cook an omelette, eat it and clear up, but she’d gained a grasp on the case and grilled a suspect. Stella relented. ‘Did you learn anything else from Daphne Merry?’

  ‘She carries a sadness. In that way she’s similar to Stephanie Whatsit. Their burdens dictate their demeanour,’ her mum intoned like a fortune teller. ‘It goes beyond Honeysett’s dis­appearance, far back into the mists of time.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Suzie and Lucie May both let fanciful theories get in the way of fact.

  ‘When I said I had a daughter – that’s you – Merry nodded as if she had one, yet there was no mention in your file of family. In 1987 she was living alone. Where is this daughter, I thought?’

  ‘Actually I can tell you—’

  ‘She said it was cruel to leave a baby to cry. We never let you cry.’ Her mum pursed her lips. ‘Or I didn’t, your dad wasn’t there. That’s what made you cry.’ She patted the cushion complacently. ‘I teased it out of her.’

  Stella resisted saying what Jackie had told her about Daphne Merry’s daughter dying. It would spoil her mum’s triumph.

  ‘Daphne was coming back from a holiday in France with her husband and their seven-year-old girl. It was early in the morning, Charles Merry had been driving all night, he refused to let her take a turn at the wheel although she said she was a better driver than he was. She begged him, but he refused even to take a break; he was determined to get the early ferry. Which they did. Daphne and her little girl – she never told me her name and I was far too sensitive to pry – were asleep in the back. The next thing Daphne knew, she was hanging upside down by her seat belt on the A23 at some place called Pyecombe. Her husband was crushed by the steering column, he died of internal bleeding at the Royal Sussex County – where Terry was taken – and her little girl was thrown out of the car. She died instantly.’ Suzie’s hands lay still on the cushion. ‘She looked asleep. It wasn’t until the police arrived that Daphne realized she was dead.’

  ‘Was he driving on the wrong side of the road?’ Stella asked at last.

  ‘Police think he fell asleep. They swerved off the road at seventy-five miles an hour and hit a tree.’

  ‘What did she say about Helen Honeysett?’

  ‘You know that Daphne found their dog on the towpath. She brought it to Adam Honeysett, but of course he was out with his mistress.’

  ‘How do you know about the mistr—’ But Stella didn’t need to ask. Daphne Merry had indeed been putty in her mother’s hands.

  ‘…she put a note through his door saying she had the dog. It was called Baxter, would you believe! Daft name for a dog.’

  ‘Didn’t she think it odd when Adam Honeysett didn’t come asking for the dog?’ Stella didn’t think Baxter was any dafter as a name than Stanley. His name hadn’t been her choice.

  ‘She said they were a young couple and often out. She would hear the dog barking when it was left alone in the house. She said she wasn’t one to judge. I should coco! She bristled with disapproval. I gathered she hates carelessness. It’s an obsession.’

  ‘I suppose if you’re a declutterer, you would hate carelessness,’ Stella pondered.

  ‘More likely the one led to the other. Like you and cleaning. After you had that flu when you were fourteen you became a Finickety Fanny with a duster.’ Suzie fussed Stanley’s ears. ‘Then you started Clean Slate.’

  ‘Sybil Lofthouse had a dog.’ Stella felt an obscure need to demonstrate that she too had been interviewing suspects. ‘The killer might not have had an accomplice who disposed of the body. Helen Honeysett would have trusted Merry and Lofthouse.’

  Her mum shook her head. ‘I read that Lofthouse was in bed when Honeysett vanished. She had to be up early.’

  Stella tried to remember what Sybil Lofthouse had said. She would check the notes she had made after meeting her. Something about that meeting nagged her.

  Suzie banged the cushion. ‘According to your file, Lofthouse was fifty in 1987.’

  ‘That’s not old.’ Stella would be fifty in about seven months. It was just another birthday.

  ‘Fifty then was today’s seventy. Seventy is the new forty-five.’

  Stella hadn’t heard this. Suzie would be seventy this year (No fuss, no party!) and was as defiant about ageing as Lucie May, whose age was a movable feast. Stella viewed her mum as twenty-seven, the age she had been when Stella’s parents separated.

  Stella said, ‘Sybil Lofthouse kept calling Stanley Whisky.’

  ‘It would have been her dog’s name. Old people get confused.’ Suzie implied that ageing was outside her own experience. ‘You want me ’umble opinion, me learned lud, your killer is the plumber’s wife!’

  *

  Stella got in the lift outside her mum’s flat. She’d been dis­appointed that Suzie had changed her mind about going out. Having the flat decluttered seemed to have tired her out.

  As the mechanism creaked and jangled its way
downwards, Stella wondered again why Natasha Latimer had a JCB digger walled into a vault in her basement. Latimer was the second client who’d omitted information from a brief. The digger wasn’t critical, but it was odd she’d not shown them. When the lift reached the lobby, Stella recalled a comment her mum had made when she came back with the milk. Stella took the lift back up to the top floor and opened the flat door. Stella felt her heart flip. Her mum was hunched on the sofa, clasping the cushion; she seemed to have shrunk. In the bright and airy room she looked lost.

  ‘Mum.’ Stanley sniffed his way along the skirting. Without the sofa, he had an uninterrupted path. ‘You called Stephanie Benson shifty. What did you mean?’ Of course the cleaner wouldn’t be good enough.

  ‘Terry died five years ago today.’

  Stella stopped in the middle of the carpet. ‘I didn’t remember.’ She did remember the moment when she was told. She had jotted the words the policeman said in the margins of a cleaning equipment catalogue as if they’d make more sense that way.

  ‘…failed revive… dead on arrival…’

  Outside the sun had gone in. The sky was grey, the glass flecked with darts of rain. As well that they hadn’t gone to Richmond Park.

  ‘I had a look at her application.’

  Your father is dead.

  ‘Sorry?’ Stella stared at her mother.

  ‘Stephanie Benson. I checked the details in the database.’

  ‘That’s confidential!’ Stella groaned. ‘Normally a client wouldn’t see the database.’

  ‘Pish posh. I input her details myself!’ Suzie swatted the air with her crutch. ‘Stephanie put that she’d spent twenty years in Sydney. I told her I loved Sydney, the Harbour Bridge, opera house, Abbey’s bookshop and best of all Dale’s restaurant. She said she loved them too.’ Suzie bashed the cushion. ‘Dale has never heard of her.’

  ‘Australia’s a big country, why should he know her?’ Suzie’s injured ankle was forcing her to spend too much time thinking. Perhaps a trip to see Dale was the answer.