‘Stella rang.’ Beverly was banging metal cabinet drawers like sporadic gunfire as she filed.
‘When?’
‘Ages ago, she said to say she’s working from home and not to disturb. I was going to tell you.’
‘In your own time, I’m guessing?’
‘She’s not here, so it’s obvious she’s not coming. Time for tea?’ Beverly slammed another drawer.
Jackie watched the young woman leave the room to fill the kettle in the toilets. She did at least make a good cup of tea.
The phone rang. A pub on King Street liked Stella’s quote and wanted a cleaner tomorrow. Jackie spent the next hour arranging a contract and reorganizing the rota because Stella never said no to new business.
She was in bed when she remembered she had not recorded the plasterer’s call in the day book or rung Stella. It was five to ten but Stella worked late. Or once upon a time she had; nowadays Jackie had no idea what Stella did.
There was no reply on the landline so she rang Stella’s mobile and, apologizing, left a voicemail consisting of: Colin, plaster, uncle and childhood. It was the epitome of the incomplete message she was training out of Beverly, but Stella might understand.
Jackie Makepeace could have no idea of the importance of these words or that by the time Stella heard the message, it would be too late.
57
Monday, 24 January 2011
Sarah Glyde appeared in the kitchen doorway and collided with Jack as he carried out a half-filled bin liner.
‘I have to go out.’ She barged past. ‘You know where to find everything. Concentrate on the kitchen and bathroom, I want them done thoroughly.’
Jack tied up the bag and placed it on the steps to take to the basement area when he left. He considered the instructions issued with such brittle authority. When he had met Sarah Glyde last week she had seemed every inch the artist, floating about her sitting room, only vaguely listening to the earthly matters of limescale removal and grout-bleaching. However, like his Hosts, such as Nat, Nick Jarvis and Michael, it seemed Sarah could switch to peremptory and ruthless. In a short space of time she had reverted to type.
From the sitting-room window he watched her walk towards the subway and out of sight, and counted to ten in case she returned. When it was safe he put on his coat and went into the garden.
Like her brother’s locked bedroom, Sarah Glyde’s studio was not on Jack’s cleaning itinerary. On his first visit, she had called it ‘out of bounds’, instantly putting it in Jack’s mind very much ‘in bounds’. He resented anything marked ‘Private’. He had seen Sarah fishing about in a ceramic pot by the back door so knew where she kept the key.
The studio was a detached brick and wood structure that, Jack estimated, had been built in the 1940s; its guttering was loose, the felt on the flat roof buckling and the brickwork crumbling. The house was in a similar state: Sarah Glyde did not look after her property.
Climbing plants smothered with snow grew in a flower bed beside the path. Existing footprints were Sarah’s; there were no others so she would notice his tracks. He knocked into a board, lumpy with dried clay and paint, propped by the back door. Jack supposed it was a discarded surface for works in progress. He laid it over the snow and stepped on to it. From there he leapt into the flower bed; the plants shivered as he landed, a shower of snow falling on to his shoes. He balanced precariously and reached for the board, managing to lift it, leaving only a mild indentation. He repeated the procedure up to the door. The path around the side of studio was clear, which struck him as strange. Why would Sarah Glyde neglect the bit she walked on the most?
She had laid a trap to tell her if her brother had been there. On the other hand, Jack thought, finding signs of an intruder, she would assume it was the brother.
The area between the studio and the garden wall was laid to paving on which was the statue of an angel, her wings outstretched, between box bushes trimmed square.
A honking disturbed the quiet: a flock of geese in ‘V’ formation flew over the house, across the river towards Hammersmith Bridge.
Jack peeped over the wall. Wind stung his face. He slipped on compacted snow and grasped cold brick to steady himself; someone made a habit of standing here. So what? Deflated, he flopped to the ground, his back to the wall. He had a child’s-eye view of the French doors into the studio.
He had been here before.
He got up and peered through the glass and skipped backwards. Someone was looking at him.
He blundered up the path, leaving footprints, scratched the key in the lock, strode past the sink and a potter’s wheel to a table on which unglazed pots awaited their turn in the kiln.
The head was stuck on a metal tube that crudely resembling the cervical section of a vertebral column. The lower lip was chapped and cracked in the middle as Jack’s had been until Stella gave him a salve stick.
Jack was face to face with himself.
It was not a faithful rendition; the forehead was lumpy like Frankenstein’s monster and lacked his own deeply etched lines. Yet the skin was tight over the cheekbones and hair slicked close to the head and down the back of the neck like his own. Jack stroked the bridge of the clay nose. So exact was the copy he could have been stroking the rise of bone on his own nose, except he could not feel the touch of his finger.
A spiral of wire with a wooden handle at each end lay coiled beside the model. He yanked the wire taut and poised it behind the head. As it bit into the clay he caught sight of a photograph pinned to a cork board. He rolled up the cutter and slipped it in his coat pocket; it would be a nice touch, one up from a ligature.
He had climbed on to the lavatory to see out of the bathroom window, and left the vacuum going so that she would think he was cleaning. He had not fooled her; she had spied on him. Sarah Glyde had a mind like his own.
Jack had never once thought his Host might be a woman.
It was no coincidence that Sarah Glyde had rung Clean Slate asking for a quote. She wanted him. If he had not turned up with Stella last Thursday evening, she would have come for him.
Her desk was grainy with clay dust and lost under papers: orders, invoices; whatever else she might be, like him, when it came to her own papers Glyde was not organized. The invoices were for hundreds of pounds: dinner services, vases, busts; she was busy.
He stirred the papers around and found more photographs. All were identical and of the place where his mother had been found dead, taken from where he had just been, by the garden wall. The light was poor, dusk flattened the contrast and made reflections on the river as substantial as the bricks and rubbish on the shore.
A ghostly figure stood at the water’s edge. He held it up to the window. Printed on gloss paper, light made the image merge into the sky. Jack gathered up the pictures and put them in his pocket with the cutter.
On a table by the French doors was a glazed panel of clay the size of a tea tray. The horizontal layers of green and turquoise interspersed with maroon and mauve put Jack in mind of Exmoor. A motif – Glyde’s signature – had been scored into the corner: a child’s depiction of an aeroplane with wings crossing the body and upright tail.
It was not an aeroplane; it was a glider.
Jack rushed out of the studio.
Minutes later he was in his parents’ bedroom at St Peter’s Square. He pulled open his mother’s wardrobe door; Kate Rokesmith’s clothes – dresses, coats, skirts eaten by moths, stiff with dust mites – hung where she had left them. Jack would crawl beneath them to the back, not realizing it was her hiding place too until the day he discovered a surprise.
The cardboard box was there; a side tore when he pulled off the lid. Jack sneezed as he dusted the box off with his coat sleeve. He pushed aside the flaps, fitted his hands in and lifted out a clay head identical to the one in Sarah Glyde’s studio. He got to his feet and set it on his mother’s dressing table.
Glyde’s fingers must have been on familiar ground as they manipulated and shaped his
eyes to life; the eyes on this head were like his own. He passed a hand before them, half expecting them to blink. Her mouth was perfect, her lips slightly parted, her hair snaked around her neck and over her shoulders. Unlike his sculpture, this piece did not stop at the head, but continued to the swell of her bosom.
It was Kate Rokesmith only days before she died.
‘I hid it in there as a surprise. Ssssh! It’s our secret.’
He had only been interested in the aeroplane on the back of her shoulder and insisted on inspecting his mummy’s real shoulder to see if one was there too. No one had drawn on her skin or marked her out for jointing.
‘I don’t like it when you kiss like that.’
‘Kiss who, darling? Daddy?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t be silly, Jonny.’
The temperature was bitter in the bedroom and Jack hugged into his coat. He picked up her blue plastic hairbrush from the dressing table and played it along the terracotta tendrils on the clay head. There was no hair in the bristles; he had clawed off what there was and kept it in his trophy tin. For the first time in thirty years, Jack risked turning to stone, and met his mother’s gaze.
Sarah Glyde had lied when she had claimed not to know Kate Rokesmith. She had known Kate and Jonathan. Kate had commissioned a bust of herself as a present and they had visited her regularly. She had been their Host.
He had been right to keep faith with the London A–Z: it had led him to the Host. She had visited his mother’s grave in a silver BMW; she had lured his mummy and him to the river to see the lovely colours and shapes.
Sarah Glyde would not be Jack’s Host because this time he would not be staying.
58
Monday, 24 January 2011
Jack let himself in through Stella’s basement. The scrap of thread he had wedged in the jamb drifted down; no one had been here since he’d used the exit to avoid Paul Bramwell.
He was unlikely to meet anyone in the lift, but just in case he used the stairs, the box clasped to his chest.
He put his ear to Stella’s door. It was a ridiculously thick security door and he did not expect to hear anything, but a particular stillness confirmed she was out. Stella was becoming as unavailable to him as she had been for the drowned Paul. He rang the bell, pressing the button and holding it. Stella did not come.
Jack had taken Stella’s key off her ring when he handed back her car key the day they escaped from Paul. He had had a copy cut and it was back before she could notice it had gone.
‘Stella?’
No answer.
Jack’s footsteps and the click of the front door were deadened by the carpet, the fire doors and the triple glazing. It gave him the irrational sense that he was a ghost, and entering the living room he coughed to dispel this impression. He half expected to find Stella among the files, trying to solve the case by herself, but the room was empty.
He tried Stella’s mobile number and left another message: ‘I’m in your flat.’
The sun had almost set and streaks of orange across grey sky tinged the river a dusty pink. Jack Harmon watched the yellow disc sink below a bank of smog on the horizon. The light faded incrementally until his own reflection – holding the bust of his mother in his arms – stared back at him.
He was startled when the answer machine snapped into action; Stella had turned off the telephone bell.
‘I’m not able to take your call. Leave a message. Thanks.’
Jack shifted his mother’s head and sat in his corner on the sofa.
‘Hi, Stella. Martin here. Martin Cashman from Hammersmith? I ran a check on that item we discussed? Like I said, it’s an early plate, the second year into that scheme which started in 1963. It’s 1964. The present owner bought it new, so now it’s a classic, although must be on private property as no tax paid since, oh wait a sec.’ Jack heard a shuffling and breathing. ‘Here it is: 1981 and the owner is S. A. I. Glyde, address at the time was Fullwood House, Church Lane, Bishopstone, Sussex. If I can do anything else any time at all, please just ask, I insist… It’s Martin speaking, by the way.’
The machine went quiet. Stella had not told him she was going to trace the number plate; in fact she had behaved as if it was not important. He had believed her.
In the dimming light his mother’s head was more lifelike than ever: her features fluid, her mouth on the brink of a smile. Katherine Rokesmith’s clay facsimile was moulded by the woman who murdered her. Some murderers collected trophies as mementoes of their crimes. Sarah Glyde had crafted a clay bust of her victim.
He had given Stella a chance to stop him. He had come to the flat, trusting they were a team, to tell her about Sarah Glyde. But like Terry Darnell, Stella worked alone – or no: it seemed, despite her avowed dislike of them, she worked with the police.
Jack was on his own.
He sprang up and roamed the flat, still holding Kate’s head, convincing himself Stella had forfeited her right to privacy. In the spare room was a desk, as basically furnished as Terry Darnell’s, lit by a lamp shaped like a spider’s leg, the bulb the size of a bullet.
Jack was surprised to find a novel by Stella’s bed: Wuthering Heights. A postcard three chapters in marked her place. He held open the place with his thumb and took out the card. It was of Queen Charlotte’s cottage in Kew Gardens; he had been there during page seventy-one of his street atlas expeditions. He turned it over: ‘T, Five. “Cathy” x’.
It was his mummy’s writing but her name was spelt wrong. He had other cards like this in his biscuit tin of trophies.
Twenty minutes later the Clean Slate van was outside Sarah Glyde’s house where a solitary light shone in an upstairs window. At last Jonathan Rokesmith was doing what for most of his life he had planned he would do.
This time he did not ring the bell first. He opened the door with his key.
59
Monday, 24 January 2011
Stella paid the bill when Ivan was in the toilet; he had insisted on covering it the last time. She was enjoying herself: Ivan had unwittingly offered her a refuge from Terry, from the office and from the Rokesmith murder. Jack had called her, but typically not left a message. Paul used to do that; she had no time for games. Her mobile was in her rucksack; if it rang she would not hear it. She sipped her frosted glass of Sancerre and silently toasted her respite. She might have been mistaken about the memory card in Terry’s camera; she was tired.
‘Will you do something for me?’
‘Of course.’ She had not heard Ivan return.
‘Come to Fullwood House.’
‘I’ve been, haven’t I?’ He surely had not forgotten.
‘Not my flat, that’s a billet for when I’m working. I feel nothing for it, as you probably gather. It’s sterile.’
Stella liked sterile but did not say so.
‘I want you to see the house where I was born. It’s a beautiful place. I seldom take guests there. Most would not understand, but you would. Come!’
‘If you’re sure… that would be nice.’ Stella felt her reply was inadequate to his enthusiasm. She had never seen Ivan so animated. He must have lived with his wife and son in the house. He was coming out of the shell of grief. She should not knock him back by refusing his invitation.
‘I could go next Saturday,’ Stella said, getting out her diary to show she was serious.
‘I mean now.’ Ivan put down his glass. Stella saw that he had hardly touched his wine.
‘Now?’ she echoed.
‘It’s only ten past eight. We can be there in no time. It will be dark, but it is a place that benefits from mystery.’
‘I need to be at work in the morning. I wasn’t there today. I have my father’s stuff to sort and there is that murder.’ Stella picked up her empty glass and put it down.
Ivan looked crestfallen. ‘I find that plans kill the spirit of an adventure because the experience has to measure up to the plan and is not of itself.’
‘I could do either day at the
weekend. Actually Sunday would be better.’ Stella tried to mollify him. ‘Or shall we leave it open?’ She liked to plan and was disappointed he saw it differently. Paul had been big on spontaneity, but even he knew better than to give her no notice at all. To shore up her argument, she added: ‘The weather might have improved by then. Already it’s thawing.’
‘A smattering of snow is nothing. My car is designed for bad conditions. Once there I light a fire, I have towels and night things and a spare room. I’ll get the bill.’ He folded his napkin and rubbed his palm at the waiter. ‘Never mind. It can’t be.’
‘I’ve sorted it.’ Stella tucked the bill into her purse.
Unsmiling, Ivan bowed his head. Stella remembered when she had thrown up at Earls Court Underground station: one mistake with Terry had led to another, as was horribly confirmed by Paul’s death. Ivan would not offer her another chance to see his home. Already she could see he was regretting it; he would be thinking he had been wrong about her. Perhaps that was true.
Kew Station village looked like a Christmas card; branches of kerbside trees white with snow twinkled in the lamplight. Stella climbed up into Ivan’s big four-wheel drive. When he shut the door, it locked automatically. He walked around the back of the car to the other side.
Terry would have accepted the invitation. He was not a spur-of-the-moment man but he knew an opportunity when it presented itself. Ivan could have helped her with the case and she had let the possibility pass by. Stella did up her seat belt.
Terry’s dull brown case boxes were awaiting her, smelling of damp paper and failure. Her flat was no more of a home than Ivan’s clean and uncluttered living quarters; it was no more than a pit stop. She had turned off the heating. It would be cold.
Stella had a speech prepared to explain her refusal, but when they stopped outside the lobby Ivan was out of the car as soon as the ignition was off and opening her door.
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