The Dog Walker

by Lesley Thomson

  Daphne spoke as if in a trance, unaware that there was anyone else there. She was unaware of Rowlands or of anyone. She was back at the accident on the A23, as if reliving it. Jack knew that for her, that day was when life had stopped.

  ‘It was clever getting the little girl to implicate her father. He was guilty. Living on the never-never, thinking he was a cut above. You and I kept our secret for nearly thirty years. It was a precious pact.’

  This seemed to bring Daphne Merry to life. She twisted on the seat. ‘I made no pact with you, you unmitigated fool. You are a petty little creature trailing after me like some foolish mongrel. Helen Honeysett was careless and frivolous. Like Gerald. Untie me now!’ Daphne Merry jerked her bound hands, forcing one of the levers up. The bucket lifted up with a hideous squeal and then crashed down. Jack felt the building vibrate. He heard creaks. Yet the digger wasn’t moving.

  ‘I dragged that girl along the towpath into my garden. I spent the entire night digging her grave – the ground was like concrete. Mother kept calling for me. If the police had come, they would have seen the freshly turned soil. But they suspected the husband and it was his garden they dug up. They knew you and I are law-abiding citizens upholding standards against a permissive tide.’ Neville Rowlands brandished the knife.

  The police would be on the towpath. They would be looking for the man who’d made the 999 call. Even with his mobile phone off, they could track his GPS. A woman had been attacked: they would be doing house-to-house calls. It was only a matter of time, Jack assured himself.

  There was a thud. The vault door had shut. The single low-wattage bulb hanging from the ceiling made ghosts of them all.

  ‘I removed your clutter. It was as if those murders never happened.’ White-faced, Rowlands seemed to have shrunk. ‘You owe me your life.’

  ‘You are a fantasist. A menace who walks the towpath without a dog. I took pity on you for pretending your dog was alive. I know what it is to lose a loved one. But you are pathetic!’

  Daphne Merry truly believed that she had not killed Helen Honeysett or Brian Judd. She had walked away. She had twisted truth to suit herself. Neville Rowlands had cleared up her mess.

  More creaks. And groaning. Stanley made a sound Jack had never heard before. A strange call, high and long. Sifts of dust trickled from the walls. Suddenly Jack understood the creaking. He yelled to Stella, ‘Get out!’ Dust filled his windpipe. He lunged at her.

  There was an ear-splitting roar. Caterpillar tracks trundled towards Jack; the giant claw blotted out the light. Neville Rowlands stepped into its path, the Sabatier blade thrust at the figure tied to the seat of the JCB. Jack glimpsed the kindly woman who had brought him home-made Jamaican ginger cake.

  He tried to wrench Rowlands out of the way of the digger, but snatched at dusty air. The two men tumbled in front of the machine. The walls of the vault shook. Jack was aware only of Stanley licking his face.

  71

  Wednesday, 13 January 2016

  An ambulance was outside the Greyhound Pub on Kew Green, blue lights strobing. Jackie pulled in a few metres behind it.

  ‘Stella!’ Suzie flung herself out of the car with the nimble agility of Stanley’s handler. Jackie caught up with Suzie outside Thames Cottages. A huddle of people were coming from the towpath end.

  Jackie saw the paramedics. ‘Suzie, get out of the way!’ Please let it not be Stella or Jack.

  ‘That’s my daughter you’ve got there!’ Suzie bellowed as if apprehending kidnappers.

  The paramedic at the head of the stretcher was terse. ‘Madam, I need you to stand back.’

  ‘Her name’s Stella Darnell, she was born on the twelfth of August 1966 in Hammersmith Hospital, she has no allergies—’

  ‘Suzie…’ Jackie took her arm.

  ‘No it is not!’ Bette Lawson’s voice cracked. ‘This is Lucille Florence May. My… my sister.’ She was clutching the hand of an inert shape under a blanket on the stretcher.

  ‘Lucie!’ Suzie was immediately concerned. ‘Oh my God! What happened?’

  ‘Suzie.’ Jackie was firm. ‘Let’s find Stella and Jack.’

  Despite her distress, Bette Lawson must have heard. She said, ‘A tall man rang for the ambulance. He never came back.’

  ‘He never came back!’ Suzie shouted. ‘There’s someone out there attacking my little girl and you never thought to—’

  ‘Suzie!’ Jackie grabbed Suzie Darnell by the shoulders. This was a risk; their relationship was fragile. ‘She might be at the cottage.’ With a sick sensation, Jackie registered that number 1 Thames Cottages was unlit. Why had she listened to Suzie Darnell? What the hell was ‘mother’s intuition’? When Nick broke his leg on stage in Mamma Mia, she’d had no idea until he phoned from hospital the next day.

  Suzie was leaning on the doorbell, her ear to the door. She thumped the wood. The door held fast.

  ‘Why did you think Stella was here?’

  ‘Where else would she be!’ Suzie retorted. ‘She has killed them.’

  Jackie felt a shock of fear. ‘Who has?’

  ‘Daphne decluttering fucking Merry. That woman ripped out my soul. She destroys lives.’

  ‘She made Jack a cake!’ Jackie heard how bonkers that sounded. From somewhere within she heard a squeaking and creaks. She looked about her, but the narrow pavement was empty. ‘Did you hear that?’

  Suzie aimed a kick at the door, scuffing the wood.

  There were footsteps on the towpath. Jackie braced herself. A shadow slanted down the steps.

  ‘Mum, what are you doing here? Jackie?’ Stella paused in the cone of light from the lamp-post. She was panting as if she’d been running. ‘Call the police!’

  ‘Stella! You’re all right!’ Jackie saw that Stella was not all right. Her face was white as a sheet and she was trembling as if she was freezing cold. Jackie delved into her bag and fished out a foil thermal blanket. She shook it out and draped it around Stella’s shoulders.

  ‘This is a dead zone.’ Stella started off along the pavement. ‘I’ll ask Adam to use his phone.’

  ‘I’ve got a signal.’ Suzie was waving her handset as if flagging down a speeding train.

  ‘Dial 999. Now!’ Stella came back.

  Suzie spoke into her handset. ‘Hello, there. Police please.’ She seemed to have regained her composure.

  Stella seized the phone from her. ‘And an ambulance. Hurry or Jack will die!’

  The creaking Jackie had heard was louder. It was like the approach of a juggernaut. She wheeled around. ‘Where is that coming from?’

  ‘The bloody house is caving in!’ Suzie shouted.

  Stella was running up the steps to the river, the blanket flying out behind her like Batman’s cape. ‘Jack!’

  *

  Jackie would later have only a patchy memory of that night. She had flashbacks of plumes of dust and grit. Of slabs of brick wall crashing down and of the constant smashing of glass. Stella had fought with them to go into a tunnel that was concealed deep in thick bushes and was all that remained of Natasha Latimer’s cottage. As she and Suzie struggled to keep hold of Stella, Jackie had had only one thought. They must not let go of her or she would die. Later she would tell Graham she wondered if she’d imagined that Stella cried, ‘Jack’s inside, I must get to him, I love him!’

  72

  Wednesday, 13 January 2016

  Stella pictured the vault. In the dusty circle of light Daphne Merry, a ghastly exhibit in a museum of horrors, was strapped to the bright yellow excavator. Stella had let Jack push her on into the tunnel thinking – stupid – he was right behind her. That wasn’t Jack. He’d never leave anyone in trouble. He’d saved her from Neville Rowlands and tried to save Daphne Merry. He had risked his life for a murderer. The booms were as thunder­ous as cannon fire. Stella launched herself at the tunnel entrance. Strong hands held her. She yelled, but thick dust choked her. Jack would not hear her.

  The upper floors collapsed down into the basement. Stella he
ard Terry’s bedtime-story voice: ‘If you’re captured, play dead. Only try to escape if you’re certain of success or things are desperate.’

  Things were desperate. She went limp and dropped her head. When the grip on her arms loosened she made a dash for it. But where it should be was a pile of rubble.

  She was recaptured and this time held fast.

  A figure drifted out of the fog. Ghostly white, it floated along the towpath. Stella’s legs gave way.

  ‘Jack!’ She shut her eyes. Her mind was playing the meanest of tricks.

  ‘It’s OK, Stell.’

  *

  She dared to look. The ‘ghost’ was smothered with brick dust and plaster. She rushed to Jack. He caught her. She felt wet against her cheek. He was crying. Hazily she thought she’d never seen him cry.

  ‘It’s OK, Jack. It’s all right. It’s OK, Jack. It’s…’ A mantra.

  ‘Stell, it’s not OK…’ He was shaking. ‘I couldn’t… Stanley…’

  Stella held Jack’s head between her hands and he sobbed.

  73

  Saturday, 16 January 2016

  CRAZED PENSIONER KILLED HELEN HONEYSETT

  By Alan Porter

  A mystery nearly thirty years old has been solved. Daphne Merry masqueraded as a declutterer, entered people’s houses and stole their ornaments and treasured keepsakes. We all get irritated if our neighbours drop litter, accidentally open our post or leave dog’s mess on the pavement. But for the regular church-goer these were terrible crimes. In 1986 Gerald Merry fell asleep at the wheel and drove the family car off the road, killing himself and their seven-year-old daughter. His widow couldn’t punish him for careless driving; instead she wreaked carnage on the innocent.

  One winter’s night in 1987 Merry was walking her dog along the Thames towpath. She greeted her neighbour, 27-year-old Helen Honeysett. The promising young estate agent, wired to her Sony Walkman, jogging with her dog, didn’t hear. Merry considered herself snubbed. When Helen returned along the lonely riverside track, the declutterer strangled her in cold blood and took her dog.

  In 2012 another neighbour, retired finance officer at Hammersmith and Fulham Council Brian Judd, paid the ultimate price for failing to pick up his dog’s waste. Judd’s poodle was found by a courting couple. Whisky was unclaimed. Judd was an elderly recluse who walked his dog after dark: no one missed him.

  In the early hours of Wednesday morning Merry met her nemesis. Neville Rowlands (65) an ex-tenant of Thames Cottages, the little terrace known locally as ‘Death’s Pavement’, lured her into the newly dug basement of property developer Natasha Latimer. Obsessed by Merry, Rowlands had stalked her for decades. He witnessed both her murders and removed the bodies. With no body, police had no clues to the killer or, in Judd’s case, no evidence of a murder.

  Certain his lust was mutual Rowlands told the murderess he’d ‘decluttered’ for her. She laughed in his face and, in frenzied dismay, he tied her to a JCB digger and tried to stab her with a kitchen knife. Fate intervened. The foundations of Latimer’s deep basement crumbled and the evil couple were crushed to death under a ton of rubble.

  Police forensics officers excavated a pet cemetery in the property’s back garden and unearthed gruesome remains. Helen and Brian Judd were buried in the graves marked with dogs’ headstones, Hercules and Max. Merry claimed to have no memory of the murders. Experts confirm it’s possible for a person to erase a trauma from their mind as if it never happened. But Daphne Merry did retain one memory. As she stole their precious knick-knacks, she told clients how she’d found her child’s lifeless body by the side of the A23.

  The case was solved by Stella Darnell, cleaner turned detective. In a statement, she said she hoped the families of Helen Honeysett and Brian Judd would find closure.

  Jack laid down that week’s edition of the Chronicle and resumed cleaning out the grate in what had been his mother’s den. He heard creaking and paused, the shovel of ash in his hand. Since the collapse of Latimer’s cottage, he was alive to the slightest sound in his own house. He reminded himself that although the house in St Peter’s Square was old, the foundations were firm. He tipped the ash into a bin bag and gave the grate a final sweep.

  Alan Porter was no stranger to sensational prose or inacc­uracy. He liked to think that Lucie wouldn’t have written so unsympathetically about Daphne Merry. Daphne had been a genuine declutterer, he wanted to protest. He wanted to argue that, poisoned by tragedy, she’d struggled to bring light and air to others’ lives. Nor had she stolen the ‘clutter’. Stella confirmed Daphne used to give unwanted things to the hospice shop. The headline was probably the work of the editor for whom Lucie reserved her most pernicious insults, but Jack had to admit it could have been Lucie’s. No, she would not have spared Daphne.

  Jack was engulfed by a wash of sadness. Lucie was another of Merry’s victims. Her rapier mind poisoned by the case, she’d lost objectivity and deeply wounded her sister and her family. Daphne had destroyed not just those she killed, but those caught in the backwash.

  Jack regarded the pan of ashes. He too was guilty. A True Host had been right there and, wooed by Jamaican ginger cake and soothing tones, he’d failed to recognize her. Daphne Merry hadn’t erased the trauma of murder from her mind: she had not been traumatized. She had murdered and moved on.

  Earlier that day, Jack had returned to the river. It was early evening and already dark. The lamp-post at the top of the steps to the towpath was lit. He had walked along to the dilapidated house where Brian Judd had lived with his dog Whisky. After a few minutes, Jack walked back along the path to the streetlamp. There was no one on the narrow pavement beside the cottages. The park was dark and silent. He knocked on the door of the end cottage.

  Sybil Lofthouse opened the door immediately. She showed no surprise. It was as if she had been expecting the tall man in the dark coat, half hidden in shadow. ‘You’d better come in.’ She shut the door after him.

  *

  Jack was jolted into the present. He was due at Stella’s to debrief. He slotted the newspaper into the case file and carried it downstairs.

  In the hall the polished newel post gleamed in thin light seep­ing through the fanlight. There was no shadow on the newly painted wall – white, nothing controversial, people’s tastes varied. Jack held his breath.

  One, two,

  Buckle my shoe;

  Three, four,

  Open the door…

  The voice in his head was his own. He put the file on the marble-topped table. There was a grey outline where the mirror had hung. His mother always checked her reflection when leaving or arriving home. That July morning, before they walked to the river, she had examined the cut on her forehead. She never came home.

  Five, six,

  Pick up sticks;

  Seven, eight,

  Lay them straight…

  Stella and Jack had eaten two bowlfuls of Stella’s lamb stew. Since looking after Suzie, Stella had started doing some cooking. Her brother Dale had emailed her the recipe.

  ‘Hot milk with honey?’ Stella held up a carton of milk.

  ‘Could I have a cup of tea?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure.’ Stella betrayed no surprise. She popped a tea bag into the London Transport mug she reserved for him and added hot water.

  On the table beside the case file was a copy of the report they’d given Adam Honeysett on their investigation into his wife’s murder. The report had been true teamwork. Jack wrote the first draft. Stella trimmed his screeds of description (…on dark winter mornings, the towpath is deserted. Lights on the north bank of the Thames accentuate the darkness...); she extracted facts and bullet-pointed them under headings. Beverly did the formatting and Jackie the proofreading. Beverly bound the document with the fearsome wire-binder machine at which she was expert. Jackie had calculated Honeysett’s invoice because left to Stella – and Jack – the job would have been pro bono.

  ‘I still reckon you solved the case.’ Sitting sideways at the
table, Jack stretched out his long legs towards the fridge. ‘I was sure Brian Judd was the True… the murderer. I thought he was the man in the Honeysetts’ party photo because he wore a suit.’

  ‘Why did that make you think it was him?’ Stella joined him at the table.

  ‘Brian Judd had a black suit in his wardrobe.’ He took a mouthful of tea; it was too hot to swallow. His eyes watered. ‘I went into the house by myself. Before you and I went there.’

  ‘I know,’ Stella said quietly. ‘Graham said that Judd always wore black at work. He’s sick with himself for giving him an alibi. I said anyone could have done it. When I see Jackie’s bag in the office, I assume she’s around. Not that she’d murder anyone.’

  ‘I went into Judd’s house without asking him.’ Jack tried again. Stella wasn’t getting the point. He had broken the law.

  ‘Brian Judd was dead. He didn’t know you were there. If you want to kill someone a good trick is to leave your coat and bag where people expect you to be.’ Stella sipped her tea and recalled his earlier comment. ‘Sybil Lofthouse gave me a clue it was Daphne Merry at our first meeting, only I didn’t get the significance of her remark. She said she’d seen Merry on the towpath with Helen Honeysett’s dog. How had she? Lofthouse said she went out before Helen and was by Kew Stairs. Daphne Merry claimed to have found Helen’s dog by Mortlake Crematorium. I believe her. She never lied. She left Helen and Judd’s bodies on the towpath where they could have been found. I think Sybil Lofthouse saw Steven on the Kew Stairs and then saw Daphne Merry murder Helen Honeysett.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Neville Rowlands have seen her?’ Jack suddenly knew that Stella’s hunch was right.

  ‘Rowlands was watching Merry. But Merry could have seen Lofthouse,’ Stella said. ‘Although if she had she’d have killed her to stop her telling the police.’

  ‘She wasn’t bothered about being caught. Daphne Merry was the perfect murderer. She had absolutely no sense of other. She killed and she moved on. Absurd though it sounds she might still have despised Lofthouse for being a bystander. She knew Lofthouse had watched her kill Helen and done nothing.’