No claims. Paul mumbled this as he fell against a signpost. He was free, single and not so young. He waited for the pavement to stop tipping like the deck of a boat, then set off for Stella’s.
At Young’s Corner he stopped. Even if Stella was in her flat he had no way of getting in because she turned off her buzzer and she would not hear him shouting through her double glazing. Like Stella, the flat was hermetically sealed from the world; perversely this idea prompted a wash of affection for her. They had got this far, that must mean something. She had dumped him because her dad had died; it was a reaction and he should cut her some slack. It was his birthday in two weeks. He wanted to spend it with Stella, not with a stranger. Or worse, alone.
Stella would have gone to her father’s house. She would not neglect her business to deal with his stuff so she would go at night. Although Paul Bramwell had provided himself with an excuse not to walk all the way to Brentford, he was right about where Stella was.
At the sight of her van, Paul was joyful. By now he had assured himself that Stella loved him as much as he loved her. He slouched against her van and planned his speech. The whisky had enabled him to forgive her for the poet with the spider legs and even for the tosser with the flash car he’d seen waiting for her by the river. As he had assured the policewoman, he was a family friend and he was there for her.
An hour went by. Initially the alcohol and the walk from the top of Goldhawk Road had made him hot; soon he cooled down and his feet went numb. He would not ring her. He imagined her checking her mobile and there being no call. Her secretary had dropped a hint that girls needed the chance to miss their partners. She had been right; he had laid low and Stella had come to his flat.
Maybe, he thought, Stella did not know where he was. He could pretend he was at home, which would mean she might think it safe to come out. But he ought to check she was all right – he had been drunk for a week when his father died. Yes, Paul Bramwell told himself, he should definitely call her.
He would tell her what he knew about the Rokesmith murder. He regretted now that he had not come forward; he might have met Stella’s dad – that would have impressed her.
He called Stella. It rang and rang and just as he was giving up he got through.
‘Hello?’ he whispered. She wouldn’t be happy if he woke the neighbours. He clamped the phone to his ear and picked up rustling and shoving. She was in bed with that man.
‘Stella. It’s me, Paul. I’m… I’m at home. I’ve been here all evening. Where are you? I know where you are.’ The line went dead. He dialled again.
‘Leave your name and number and a short message.’
Stella did not promise to return calls, nor did she ever call back. Paul tightened his fist as a red mist of fury descended.
He was brought back to the present by his phone ringing.
‘I’ve been trying to get you. Why were you ignoring me? I knew you were there all the time.’ He forgot to talk quietly.
‘I’m at the pub, the one by the river.’
‘I can’t hear anyone.’
‘I’m on my own.’
‘It’s open just for you, is it?’
‘No, I mean, I’m outside. That’s why I didn’t hear you ring. I came to check my messages and saw you had called.’
‘Nice of you to call back. Is he with you?’
‘No. Why don’t you go home?’
‘I’m coming. We need to talk; I need to explain.’
‘I won’t be there.’
She rang off. Paul could wait for her to return to the van or go and meet her. He was too cold to stay still, he told himself, so, fortified by her voice, he slithered and skidded to the subway. The tunnel was a break, without snow he could walk faster. The tiled walls and stone floor seemed to be merging: he was still drunk and must not let Stella see.
Halfway along, he checked each way and then peed into one of the gutters at the sides. His pee steamed as it hit the tiles and he swayed slightly. Stella hated him pissing outside. But these were special circumstances: he could not risk her leaving while he went to the lavatory.
Tucking himself in, Paul forgot to do up his zip because now he was concerned she might have left the pub. He careered up the ramp.
Demons chased him, leaping and grasping at him: another man’s hands had been on her; another man had been inside her. Whenever Paul thought of Stella when she was not with him, he supposed her the life and soul of the party, lively and spontaneous, surrounded by men wanting her. His jealousy was a kind of insanity.
The pub was shut.
He put a hand on the wall of a house to steady himself, and then stumbled up the three flood defence steps. He teetered at the top before dropping unsteadily down to the river.
He should have thought to bring a torch. He had his mobile. He nearly fell over as his feet sloshed through water. There was water everywhere.
‘…nor any drop to drink,’ he murmured, faintly pleased with himself. That bastard was not the only one who knew poetry. Paul inched along the shore.
Stella was not there. But it was all right: she loved him, she would be looking for him; she’d probably crossed the Great West Road, wouldn’t like the tunnel at night. Before his eyes danced black shapes of cut-out paper and when he tried to brush them away they got reinforcements and stung his cheeks. He thrust out his fists.
‘Oh, it’s you!’
The black shapes joined up to equal nothing.
42
Thursday, 20 January 2011
After leaving Stella, as she had anticipated, Jack did double back. He trod in other people’s footprints along Hammersmith Terrace. In Eyot Gardens the snow was thick, which made walking easier.
He noticed he was not the only one to have come this way since the last snowfall. A tall man, he guessed, looking at the distance between the prints; someone who stepped with the ball of his foot first.
He retraced his steps. Not literally, for he made no attempt to be precise, even kicking snow up to blur previous prints with the present ones; that would confuse. He stooped and made a snowball; compacting it to ice, he hurled it across Hammersmith Terrace. It splattered against the wall of the old laundry, making no sound. He ran to where it had landed, chips of snow on the flawless surface. Snow on snow. He scooped up more and, moulding it between his gloved palms, lobbed it at the spot where he had been standing. Bull’s eye. He went through this caper twice, shuffling back and forth across the road each time. If anyone noticed him they would think him drunk, or eccentric, but not suspicious. He hopped and jumped over his tracks until there was a muddle of footprints.
Once more he went down Eyot Gardens, further obscuring his tracks. The Great West Road had been salted. With offices on the south side and bushes and trees on the north, he would not be seen by a sleepless resident. A camera might catch him so he wore his woolly hat and affected a limp for the benefit of the lens. His disability was not pronounced; they would congratulate themselves on their observation skills if they spotted it. He pretended to struggle climbing the central barrier of the Great West Road and crossed the eastbound carriageway in a lop-sided stroll, hands in his pockets, head down, partly for the CCTV, partly because he felt like it.
It was two in the morning and with the city to himself Jack was in excellent spirits. He squatted down to make another snowball and hoped nothing would happen to spoil it.
43
Thursday, 20 January 2011
Jack was not alone. He had to move but his legs would not work. He sank to the floor.
It took temerity to slip in through a front door when the Host was only by the bins and he had nearly been discovered many times. He always stayed calm, remembering that his Hosts did exactly what he had planned. They were puppets in his private theatre. People saw only what they expected to see. They did not expect him to be there so they did not see him.
Now he had lost his nerve and was sure the man with the mind like his own had found him instead.
The change w
as imperceptible; most would have missed it. He could not say what had altered. The air may have been fresher; the temperature may have been colder. He believed in ghosts and there were plenty to choose from in these rooms.
It was not a ghost.
When he returned from the river he had confirmed that there were no marks on the steps, so they must have got in through the back. Yet the rear of the house was impregnable: a high wall by the Great West Road with holly bushes hard against it and a gravelled patio to warn off intruders. There were strong locks on the doors but this person knew those tricks.
The hands on the brass dial of the grandfather clock had stopped. He had not wound it.
He had wound it.
It was ticking.
He was making elementary mistakes. This simple error was one of the kind his benign Hosts made.
A shadow fell across the peeling William Morris paper on the landing wall.
He hid amongst the folds of the fur coat waiting for her.
She was coming down the stairs.
‘You took your time.’
‘How did you get in?’ he croaked.
‘Same route you used to scare Mrs Ramsay, through the attic.’ Stella Darnell was as cold as ice. ‘Now you know what it feels like. What I want to know is how you got in here? No, no.’ She reached the last step. ‘Don’t bother, I can’t bear to know. Get up. We’re going next door to Mrs Ramsay’s before we both end up at Hammersmith Police Station. At least we have a vaguely legitimate reason to be there – and a key.’
Jack hugged his knees, waiting for his heartbeat to return to normal. He wiped his clammy hands on his trousers and did not move.
‘So who lives here now?’ Stella persisted. ‘Don’t give me rubbish about a Host.’
The clock’s pendulum oscillated: back and forth, back and forth.
‘Jack!’
‘I do.’
‘Enough!’ She was brisk. ‘I mean who really lives here?’
‘This is my house. I live here.’
Stella stopped, her hand on the front-door handle and looked down at Jack, crouched in a ball at her feet.
A woman sprawled on a beach, her skin bleached by light and lack of life.
‘You are the little boy.’ She breathed at last. ‘You are Kate Rokesmith’s son.’
The steady tick-tock was louder in the silence.
‘I made a mistake.’
‘You could say that.’ Stella stood over him.
‘I have the mind of a murderer.’
‘Sure you do.’
‘I can imagine how a killer thinks and behaves. I recognize them: in streets, in cafés, libraries, on station platforms. They are not as rare as you’d think. They have little connection with the world; their attitude to those around them is clinical and derisive. They keep a tight rein on their lives and on other people’s.’ He got his cigarette case out of his pocket and shakily placed a cigarette between his lips.
‘But each of my Hosts had an alibi: their own crime was elsewhere, either geographically, or in the future, or kept at bay by some means. I haven’t found him but I won’t give up until I do.’
‘Found who?’
‘I got distracted by those not like me who gave me somewhere warm and brightly lit, with a piano sonata to send me to sleep or a radio playing that was like a bedtime story. On her way to bed, my mummy made sure the duvet was straight and tucked right up to my chin and shooed away ghosts and aliens.’
Jack slapped wetness from his cheek. The cigarette, stuck to his bottom lip, bobbed when he spoke.
‘I don’t understand.’ She did understand. Jonathan Rokesmith had gone mad.
‘The clue is in my name, but you didn’t guess.’
‘Jack Harmon?’
‘Jon Rokesmith.’
‘You’ve lost me.’ To distract herself, Stella pulled out her phone and confirmed that Paul had not called. This reminded her. ‘Did you see anyone on your way here?’
Jack ignored her. ‘You’ve not read Our Mutual Friend?’
‘I might have seen the film. I’ve only read Wuthering Heights. I don’t see the point in stuff that’s not true.’ She replied absently. How could Jack have missed Paul?
‘That’s not by Dickens.’ Jack put his head in his hands. He had misread the signs and was back at the beginning. He only had the street atlas filled with journeys that so far had taken him nowhere. He had wanted the killer to recognize him and had been sure they were moving around each other; closing in. All he could do was huddle on the floor in the last room his mother had been in before she was murdered and shiver like the coward he was. Everything: the visits with Hosts, the journeys – by Tube, through the streets, and virtually on Street View – were for nothing. The murderer was out there and he had no idea where.
‘You are the little boy,’ Stella repeated.
‘Yes.’ In a little boy’s voice.
‘Have you lived here ever since the… ever since?’ Stella could not say the word.
‘I told you that Katherine Rokesmith’s son went to boarding school and then abroad.’
‘Yes, you did tell me that.’ Jack had told her a lot of things. ‘What about Hugh Rokesmith? He was your father!’ No wonder Jack wouldn’t consider Rokesmith a suspect. She was in the doorway of the room that in Mrs Ramsay’s house was the dining room. Beside a table – the Rokesmiths had evidently not entertained on the scale of the Ramsays – was a piano. A book of music was propped open. She went over. It was a collection of Beethoven Sonatas, the page turned to the ‘Pathétique’. Mrs Ramsay had told her to listen to the piano music coming through the wall. Stella had heard nothing when she was cleaning. Jack had cared for Isabel; he had pretended to be her admirer and sent her lilies every week. He made her happy.
‘Do you play?’
‘It was my mother’s.’
‘That wasn’t my question.’
‘No.’
The tall windows were shuttered. Stella had noticed the windows of the house next door were always closed when she came to Mrs Ramsay’s and, scrupulous about not delving into what was not her business, had never asked who lived next door.
She was not a real detective. Until Terry’s death it had not been her business.
‘My father stayed here when he was in London but when he got less work he stopped coming. His aunt left him a cottage in Yorkshire, outside Whitby. He lived there until he died.’
‘Did you see him?’
Jack examined his hands. ‘I nursed him.’
‘It’s clean, considering,’ Stella remarked brightly.
‘I clean it.’
Stella nodded. People thought they knew what ‘clean’ looked like. This place would show them that they had no idea.
Sitting on the floor, Jack was the same height as his four-year-old self.
‘She banged her head.’ He crawled on all fours over to the table.
‘Who did?’ Stella came back into the hall.
‘My mother.’ He jumped up and ran up the stairs. Stopping where the staircase curved, he peeped down through the spindles. ‘I can see the table from here,’ he exclaimed excitedly.
‘Your point being?’ Stella asked in a level tone. His mother had been murdered; it perhaps made sense of the sneaking about, the thing about green and making up the life he had missed, the friends he had not made. Death did funny things; she knew that from her clients; from herself.
‘She had a cut on her forehead. The police came here looking for the blunt instrument that might have caused it and they found traces of blood on that table. If you remember, they concluded that she had argued with Hugh and he pushed her. A man who could do that might kill his wife, was their thinking.’
‘You do think he did it after all?’ The table had a marble top and the corners were sharp. It made sense: Jack had argued that Hugh Rokesmith was innocent because he could not bear his father to be a murderer. Terry had told her that life does not mean life. A man who murdered his partner could be released from
prison and, as next of kin, get custody of the children who were the only witnesses of his crime. It was a crazy world. Jack had polished the table beautifully; the marble was like a life-force.
‘I can still see you.’ Jack was prattling like a toddler. Stella tried to remain patient.
‘Pretend you’re looking in the mirror,’ he commanded from the stairs.
‘What mirror?’
‘It’s oval and dotted with silver blotches. Above the table.’ He pointed.
There was an oval shape on the peeling wallpaper, lighter than the surrounding area; in the dim light from the streetlight outside, the pattern swam. There was no mirror.
She peered in the oval mirror. It was spotted with silver, but she could examine the cut on her forehead, delicately dabbing at beads of blood, wincing when it stung.
‘She bent to straighten the rug – that rug – and banged her head. I was here, watching. I had been hiding in her wardrobe.’ Jack stomped down. ‘She didn’t come to find me.’
‘Was your father there?’
‘He left in the morning. I didn’t see him again until the police brought me to him.’
‘You remember now?’
‘It’s a fog.’
‘Do you have such a thing as a kettle?’ Stella rubbed her hands. ‘And any chance of putting on the heating?’
‘We’ll get tea and light a fire in my study.’
The kitchen was in the basement. A cave-like room lined with teak cupboards darkened with age, it was a time capsule for 1981. Shelves were piled with crockery, orange and steel pans hung from butcher’s hooks and dishes were stacked in an overhead draining rack. Stella had not imagined it was possible to make so many objects look ordered. When Jack filled the kettle the pipes clanked and whined. She knew the sound; she had heard it many times while she cleaned next door.
Mrs Ramsay had talked of letting a boy play quietly. Stella had assumed she meant Lucian. She had meant Jack.
‘Did you tell Mrs Ramsay who you were?’
‘Isabel knew who I was. She said I was a train driver because like my father I was looking for something.’ Jack splashed tea into two mugs out of a brown teapot with a chipped spout. There were no tannin stains in the mugs. Nothing had changed for decades; everything was clean, although Stella would not have kept a damaged teapot. Jack wiped the tea drops off the table and replaced the cloth on the draining rack. ‘I drive trains looking for her killer; that’s my reason for everything.’ He spoke more to himself. Isabel had actually said he was looking for his mummy, but he did not say this.
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