The Dog Walker

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘I lied.’ Jane Drake sat on the edge of the plinth, the giant stone ball behind her.

  ‘I don’t understand.’ It was too extraordinary that Jane Drake had accosted her in a deathly quiet estate in the middle of the night. Drake must have followed her.

  ‘Adam asked me to give him an alibi. He said he was walking the streets, nerving himself up to tell that woman he was going to leave. He couldn’t prove he hadn’t killed her. He worked out that it was preferable to confess he had a lover – he called me that – to being done for her murder. Preferable for him – it destroyed me. Nineteen eighty-seven was the year the film Fatal Attraction came out. I was the bunny boiler who destroyed their marriage. Adam, the two-timing shit, got off scot-free.’

  ‘Are you saying he killed his wife?’ Jane Drake seemed to have forgotten that she’d assumed Stella was in a relationship with Adam Honeysett.

  Drake gave an exaggerated shiver. ‘I need a drink.’ She moved to one of the paths out of the grass circle. ‘Coming?’

  ‘I ought to... OK, thanks.’ Stella distantly noted that her good manners were again overriding personal safety. But this was too good a chance to miss. She followed Drake along the labyrinthine path. Glancing at Stanley, crisp bag still between his teeth, she stopped. ‘Do you have a poo-bag?’

  ‘I don’t have a dog,’ Jane Drake retorted.

  The sentence jolted a far-flung thought. But it was gone before Stella could get it.

  ‘Use this.’ Drake was holding out a tissue to Stella.

  Stella returned to the clearing. There was nothing beneath the stone ball. Stanley’s poo had gone.

  48

  Tuesday, 12 January 2016

  I know a busybody when I see one. What is a lady doing walking her dog so late? She let her dog do its business and left the mess for someone else to clear up. Unforgivable, you would say. It threw me; the dog is a spit of Whisky. Leave her to me.

  I am grateful that you are not here to witness her misdeed. She will never do it again. I dealt with it this time, but I won’t be so tolerant if it happens again. She is a meddlesome creature. We can’t have her – or her man-friend – sticking their noses in where they’re not wanted, can we? You and I are of a single mind. I know what you are thinking. I am with you every step of the way.

  By the way, a small thing, but I saw you with that young man. I have to say that wasn’t wise. A casual observer could get the wrong impression. I have forgiven you. It is because you hope for the best from the worst of mankind. You are sadly mistaken, as you will soon discover.

  You felt me watching over you last night. Never forget that I am there. Always.

  As I said, please leave me to deal with this.

  49

  Tuesday, 12 January 2016

  ‘Adam Honeysett used me and dumped me!’

  Jane Drake’s ‘pretend’ mews house was in a terrace that, but for the lack of flower pots, bins or cars, wasn’t unlike Thames Cottages. It was a different matter inside. Stella was stunned. Drake could do with a visit from Daphne Merry. Ornaments and knick-knacks dotted shelves jammed with books; sofas, armchairs and a fold-up table jostled cheek by jowl. Despite this, a surreptitious finger test told Stella that someone dusted and polished regularly.

  ‘I’m a husk!’ Jane Drake declared.

  Drake was red-cheeked and healthy and, given it was one in the morning, bright-eyed. The person Stella might compare to a husk was Megan Lawson.

  Stella took a mouthful of tea from what she’d supposed was a cereal bowl and observed that another thing that detecting and cleaning had in common was the consumption of tea. Stanley sprawled at her feet, the crisp packet crackling between his teeth.

  When she arrived, Stella’s shock had been reserved for the walls. They were papered with photographs. Printed on paper, curled and warped, most showed a figure walking away from the lens. The images reminded her of the covers of the crime novels her mum liked to read.

  Now Stella’s eye was drawn to a sequence of pictures of two people seen at a window. She nearly dropped the bowl of tea. Date- and time-stamped, they were taken over a duration of two minutes. Tuesday 5 January, just after midnight. That was the night Adam had asked her to investigate his wife’s disappearance. One of the people was Adam Honeysett. Stella went cold. The other was herself. Stanley had barked when she was there. He had detected a person. She should remember that he was never wrong. Jane Drake had been outside with her camera.

  She looked again at the walking figures. One was of herself; in another she recognized Jack. The date stamp for both was the same night. Stella’s was before she was accosted by Honeysett. Jack was while Stella was in his house. What was he doing there? Perhaps the time on the photo was wrong and it should have been for the night after. Except it was accurate for her pic­tures. Stella felt a wave of unease and moved on to the other pictures. There was one of Sybil Lofthouse. Why was she on the towpath at night if she didn’t have a dog? To the left of the frame was an elderly man with a stoop. It was the dog walker who’d passed her and Jack earlier. He was approaching the camera, which meant that Drake must have hidden on the riverbank to photograph him. In all the pictures was a shadow that Stella realized with a jolt was Adam Honeysett. He was out of sight of herself, Jack, all the other people in the photographs. Apart from the one time she’d met him on the towpath, Stella for one had not known he was there.

  ‘More tea?’ Jane Drake asked as if Stella had come for a cosy chat rather than stumbled into a stalker’s den.

  ‘I should be goi—’ This was the second ‘gallery’ she’d encountered within hours. Lucie May’s Murder Room focused on another man. Both concerned the Honeysett case. As Steven Lawson’s diary recorded the minutiae of his last days, so Drake had documented those connected to Adam Honeysett. She was mad.

  ‘I’m not mad.’ Jane Drake cut into Stella’s thoughts.

  ‘I never thought—’ Stella hid her face with the bowl and drank, hazily taking in that the tea was the nicest she’d ever had.

  ‘I loved him from the moment we met on the towpath. I was walking my parents’ dog and he had his dog. We instantly clicked. He’s older than me, nine years was a lifetime at nineteen, and I thought him a God.’ She gave a cheerless guffaw. ‘He said he would leave his wife.’

  ‘Did you believe him?’ Stella had cleaned for enough women having affairs with men who promised to leave their wives, but never did.

  ‘I planned to have his children. Tarquin for a boy and Miranda if it was a girl.’

  Tarquin sounded like a cleaning product to Stella. ‘Why did he want to leave?’

  ‘She didn’t love him. She teased him; nothing he did was right. He said that I was the best thing that had happened to him.’ She slurped her tea. ‘He wanted rid of her, not to be with me, but to be free. How stupid was I! His crime was banal.’

  ‘Hardly banal. A woman died,’ Stella remarked quietly. Terry had taught her to keep the victim top of mind in any investigation. Helen Honeysett might have been one of the figures walking off into the darkness.

  ‘She fancied herself a bloody agony aunt.’ Jane Drake, her fingers wrapped around her bowl, regarded Stella fiercely. ‘She made people’s problems worse.’

  ‘Did she have enemies?’ Despite her experience of the com­plexity of murder, Stella tended to regard the victim as nothing but blameless.

  ‘Hah, did she! She poked about in her neighbours’ lives, she took their pictures, watched their every move.’ She waved a hand at the walls. ‘This is nothing. She fancied herself as Queen of the Street. She told that man’ – Drake pointed at a stooped man with a brush moustache – ‘he mustn’t be trapped by his aged mother, he must find a wife. Adam said she assured that clutter-woman whose husband smashed up her family in a crash she wasn’t too old to start again!’ Drake unlaced her Dr Martens with a snapping flourish.

  ‘Who is that man?’

  ‘Neville Rowlands. He had an alibi.’ Jane Drake looked annoyed to be interrupted. />
  ‘Yes, I know.’ Rowlands might be trapped by his mother, but she’d saved him from being a murder suspect.

  ‘…can you imagine! As if that poor woman could just swap out one daughter for another and it would be all right. And as for the plumber: they were having an affair. She used to tease Adam with how he could do it more often than he could.’ She stopped. ‘Adam told me he didn’t have sex with her any more. He must have lied.’

  ‘She had sex with Steven Lawson?’ Stella felt disappointment. Despite her open mind she had hoped that Lawson would emerge unscathed from the case.

  ‘So she said. She lied all the time so who knows. He believed her. She was on at that woman who worked at the Stock Exchange – she called her the Duchess – to give up investment secrets. Enemies? Helen of Troy was spoilt for choice!’ She kicked off her boots and curled her feet under her. ‘She was all over me like a rash.’

  ‘You met Helen Honeysett?’ Stella put the empty bowl on a nearby table. Stanley, sensing a plot to steal his crisp packet, gnashed his teeth.

  ‘I had to suss out the opposition. I went to her work and asked her to find me a house. She treated me like a silly kid until I flashed my Coutts cheque book and talked of a cash buy. I said I was selling my flat too. She practically wet herself showering me with properties – water closets, en-suites, walk-in wardrobes, panoramic views – and insisted on driving me to see a house near Kew Station. You could see dollar signs springing out of her head as she totted up her commission.’

  Jane Drake was on their suspect list in tandem with Adam Honeysett, but she could have killed Helen alone. Adam must have worked their assignations around Helen’s movements. Drake would have known when to intercept her on the towpath. She could have pushed her in the river. ‘Oh, it’s you!’ Since Drake had met Helen, she would have known her.

  ‘…I pictured her telling Adam how a Jane Drake was buying the most expensive property on the books and she would exceed her target for that month. He would have died from terror that she’d guess who I was.’

  ‘If he was going to leave her, why would he mind?’

  ‘I see the contradiction now. He said she’d kill him if she found out about us. The next day that was academic, when she vanished!’ Jane Drake beat a tattoo on her front teeth with a finger. ‘Funny, that!’

  ‘If you suspected he’d murdered her, why give him an alibi?’ Stella tried to untangle the confusion of lies and high-octane jealousy. If the story of the false alibi was true, it made Adam Honeysett the key suspect. Perhaps it was as ‘banal’ a crime as Jane Drake said. Honeysett murdered his wife and had by accident of circumstances got away with it. ‘If he wasn’t with you, where was he?’

  ‘He said he was on the towpath.’ Jane Drake spat out the words.

  Stella glanced down at Stanley. He was snoozing; the crisp packet lay on the floor beside a paw. ‘How come no one saw him?’ She edged downwards, preparing to whip up the bag before Stanley realized.

  ‘He was with another woman.’ Drake looked briefly forlorn, but then resumed her expression of tight fury. ‘He’s a murderer,’ she fumed illogically.

  Stella tried to assemble the jumbled jigsaw of conflicting facts. On the walls the diminishing figures seemed to multiply. ‘If he murdered Helen that meant he was on the towpath as he said.’

  ‘He said he was going to tell her he was leaving. He lied!’

  ‘Perhaps he did tell her.’ Stella felt her way through the fog of possibility. ‘Perhaps they argued and in the heat of the moment he killed her.’ Had Helen encountered her husband by the river, she might have exclaimed, ‘Oh, it’s you!’

  Stella continued: ‘Where were you?’

  ‘What?’ Drake jumped up and came towards Stella. She tensed. Drake bent down and retrieved the crisp packet. Stanley continued sleeping. So much for being a guard dog – of the crisp wrapping or of her. ‘I was in my flat. Adam got there at four a.m. He cried and said we had to finish and he must give his marriage another go. Talked shite about being too old for me and letting me live my life. Of course I saw soon enough that this was a ploy to cover his arse. He’d bumped off the Queen of Sheba!’

  ‘And yet you gave him an alibi?’ Stella felt she was trapped in a maze in which she returned to the same point again and again no matter which route she took. Drake and Honeysett’s initial false alibi had put the focus of the investigation on to Steven Lawson. If the false alibi was false too and Honeysett was on the towpath at the same time as Helen, it altered everything. He was a prime suspect.

  ‘Why are you stalking him if you think he’s a murderer?’

  ‘I’m not stalking him!’ Jane Drake smoothed out the crisp packet over and over. Stella wanted to point out that it wasn’t hers, that it came from the ground. ‘I know how it looks. But I’m not a nutter who can’t let go.’ She scrunched up the bag and then flattened it again. ‘Actually I am a nutter who can’t let go. That’s what he’s made me.’

  ‘If Adam Honeysett did kill his wife, you might be in danger too.’ Stella spoke slowly as the idea dawned. ‘If he feared that you might tell the police he’d asked you to lie, he might want you dead too.’

  ‘I’m sure he wants me dead.’

  ‘Unless it wasn’t Adam that killed Helen. If he wasn’t with you all night you don’t have an alibi.’ Adam Honeysett had given her a pile of hastily assembled papers on his wife. He had clumsily kept back information Stella was bound to find out. Jane Drake had kept a meticulous record of various people’s movements in the street. She knew when there was likely to be no one about. It was against every rule in Terry’s book – she had no phone signal, no easy means of escape – but, scenting a lead, Stella said, ‘You had a motive, the means and the opportunity to kill Helen Honeysett.’

  Jane Drake got up. She tossed the crisp packet in an overflowing wastepaper bin. She was coldly matter of fact: ‘I didn’t kill her. But I sure as hell wanted her dead.’

  *

  Stella took a wrong turning out of Drake’s flat and found herself on the towpath. It was five to five in the morning; it wouldn’t get light until half seven. Considering she hadn’t slept she was alert, her mind clear. Stanley peed against the low retaining wall of the riverbank. Waiting for him to finish, Stella gazed off towards the towpath and saw a bright light. It floated off the ground. It was a man wearing a head torch. Avoiding the beam, she looked downwards and caught a glimpse of a lead clipped across his chest. A dog walker. Possibly he was the man she’d seen when she was with Jack on the towpath. He was familiar. She let herself breathe.

  ‘Morning,’ Stella greeted him. It was the man with the stoop.

  He passed her without replying.

  Stella felt a chill descend. His silence filled her with a strange dread. She whipped around. The towpath was empty. The light had gone out.

  She was metres from the old house that Stanley had broken in to. Her heart missed a beat. A man was in the porch. She shrank into the shadows of the riverbank. If she kept very still, he wouldn’t see her.

  Stanley mewed loudly. The man looked towards Stella’s hiding place. She shut her eyes as if it would make her invisible. When she dared open them, the man was coming towards her.

  50

  Tuesday, 12 January 2016

  Dappled light, melancholy and insidious, washed over the tow­path. Unable to sleep, Jack was walking. His ostensible reason for the nocturnal journey had been to walk until he had a signal and call Bella. He’d had the idea of asking her to reconsider breaking up with him, but when he tried to list reasons why she should change her mind – she would ask him to justify his request – he couldn’t think of one argument in his favour. His mind was full of the fact that a True Host lived minutes from where he was staying. A man who had likely murdered Helen Honeysett on the towpath where he was now.

  He was passing the dilapidated house. Pocketing his phone, Jack slipped down the path at the side of the house.

  The key was still on the inside of the bathroom door.
He unlocked the door and crept out into the hall. The post had gone from the mat. Avoiding dead leaves, Jack crossed the floor and climbed the stairs. This time he was not afraid. Although ostensibly he had come out to call Bella, he knew that all along it was to this house that he had intended to come. This time he was alone. He was ready and prepared.

  On the landing, the quiet was all-encompassing. Jack’s nerves were alive to the presence of Brian Judd.

  Come out, come out, wherever you are.

  The doors to the front-facing rooms were closed. He moved along the passage and trod on something; it let out a strangled squeak. Crouching, he felt something soft and fluffy. He found his Maglite and flicked it on. Pale and insipid as gaslight, the light revealed a toy hen with a padded orange crest that matched an orange beak. An incongruously cheerful creature to find in this cold, uncanny house. Jack turned off the light. He crammed the hen into his coat pocket and crept along the passage to the last room on the right.

  Last time he had been sure that Judd was just centimetres from him. He had felt the tingle of energy that passes between two human beings. Now he felt nothing. Was he alone?

  He opened the door and went in. He risked the light. A low-wattage lamp cast light on a room chock-full of paraphernalia. It took him some moments to understand that the frogs, bears, squirrels, a rabbit with an eye and an ear missing that lay scattered on a rag rug were dog toys. A divan was littered with rubber chews in the shape of rings and bones. From a hook on the wall hung a string bag bulging with tennis balls. Copies of Dogs Monthly: Fun Canine Stories to Fill Your Heart with Joy! – were on a table. The horse might already have bolted, but this time, Jack had taken the precaution of wearing gloves. The thick dust guaranteed fingerprints. One shelf was heaped with packets of nappy sacks that he knew did for poo-bags, packets of wet wipes and bottles of dog shampoo. Brian Judd shopped in bulk.

  A tartan dog bed was in one corner, a dog cage in another. Fur caught in the pins of a wire brush was cream-coloured like a sheep. A large bag of biscuits sagged beside this. Chicken and rice, for small-breed dogs. It depicted a cute portrait of a white-haired dog with a slip of a pink tongue, maybe a terrier – Jack only knew about poodles. Judd’s dog was small. This only faintly reassured him. If so minded dogs the size of Stanley could rip you apart.