The Runaway

by Lesley Thomson

Above her the cross on St Peter’s Church spire was silhouetted against a blue November sky with not a cloud in sight. The shadows of the bare boughs flitted across the pavement. On the Great West Road, cars, lorries and coaches streamed into London, banking up at the approach to Hammersmith Broadway. A driver in the near lane glancing to her left noticed a little girl with flyaway hair and a dog. This prompted a fond memory of her daughter when she was little and she gave the ghost of a smile. A lorry driver in a British Leyland truck laden with iron girders spotted a man near a church doing up his shoelace some metres away from the little girl. While David Cassidy sang about being a daydreamer in the rain on his cab radio, the man fell into a daydream of his own. The man must be the girl’s dad, because he kept glancing up to check she was in sight. She was waiting for him to catch her up. Letting out the clutch, the driver revved past the church and fell to thinking about his own daughter and how whatever happened he would never let her down.

  However, most drivers on the Great West Road at eight-thirty on that November morning didn’t see Stella Darnell lingering with her dog by the subway railings. And those who had, quickly forgot.

  Stella had no recollection of how she found herself shivering in the crisp cold beside the Great West Road. She tugged the dog away from the railings, intending to lead him back to the house. This brought the animal to life and with huge force he dragged her away from Rose Gardens North where she lived and down the ramp to the subway.

  ‘Heel!’ She deepened her tone in imitation of Terry Darnell, but the dog wasn’t fooled and propelled her onwards. Stella careered towards the mouth of the tunnel.

  The rumble of engines bounced off blue-tiled walls either side of the ramp. Confused by the cacophony of sound that seemed to come from all around her, and intent on keeping hold of the lead, Stella forgot the safety drill.

  On their walks Terry would teach his daughter to be a detective. Together they spotted clues and he encouraged her to draw conclusions. He taught her to truly observe: to note minor changes in the street, the colours of cars; to pick up the slightest nuance in behaviour. When they were going into the subway it was Stella’s job to check the mirror above the tunnel. Not a proper mirror, it was a circular sheet of metal tarnished with starbursts of oxidation like lichen, angled to reflect the inside of the subway. Relishing her task, Stella would crane up to make out the pools of bleak light drifting from lamps in the tunnel ceiling between the tiny encrustations on the metal. She would then ‘report in’ on what she could see to her dad. Never did it occur to her that he could see perfectly well for himself.

  If Stella didn’t see the square of light at the end of the tunnel, it meant someone was there blocking it out. She must hold tightly to Terry’s hand and keep close to him all the way through. There was no question of danger, because Terry Darnell was a policeman and he caught criminals. If the person was a criminal, then Stella believed her dad would catch him and take him to Hammersmith Police Station. So far – to her disappointment – this had not happened.

  If the mirror reflected the lamps in the tunnel and she could see the square of light, Stella could run in all by herself.

  Now, chasing along with the dog, Stella didn’t do the check. Mindful only of the leather lead cutting into her palms, she plunged into the gloom of the underground passage, her footsteps drowned by the engines above.

  *

  In the glare of the low autumn sunlight, the figure close by the embankment wall might have appeared, to a casual observer, insubstantial – perhaps a blackened post or a stain on the high brick wall discoloured by two centuries of mud and slime. The ‘stain’ moved; it was a person. A tall woman in a long black coat, dressed inappropriately for the muddy shoreline in black boots with platform heels. Her glossy dark hair was twisted up into a bun and this, together with a somewhat obdurate expression, gave her a look of overarching authority, as if she might stop the receding tide should she wish to.

  Sparks of light flickered on the Thames as a breeze chased ripples over its surface. Trees on the far bank, a display of reds, golds, ambers and yellows, reflected a kaleidoscope of colours in the water. The woman stood in the lee of a moored barge in a suntrap. The bright winter light showed a fine-boned beauty that the years would only refine.

  Isabel Ramsay shut her eyes and, feeling the warmth of the sun on her cheeks, let herself believe it was summer, her favourite season and the only time she felt alive.

  A bird crossed her sightline, the whirring of its wings loud in the immediate quiet. She traced its flight towards Barnes Bridge, leaning slightly in the direction it had taken as if she might fly after it. The bird was larger than a seagull; a bird of prey, she hazarded. Mark would know. She furrowed her brow at the memory of Mark’s quizzes on the interminable car journeys to their house in Sussex and his insistence that the children stay awake and spot a Doric column or a Gothic arch, or correctly identify flora and fauna or the make of some car. He had been as ruthlessly intent as the Hanging Judge, his father.

  Lucian had made up for lack of intelligence with diligence and sensibly mugged up in advance. Elly, always off in some dream, was lucky to scrape a point and never won. Gina only knew about horses, which Mark, who didn’t ride, discounted. If he was in a good mood he might toss her a point or two for a gelding, a hunter or some bloated piebald nag. Mark would know what the bird was.

  Isabel Ramsay reminded herself that, with Elly at boarding school, they had all as good as left the nest, like the bird now vanished in the sky. There was just her and Mark.

  Isabel had longed for the time when she would be free to go for a walk by the river without Lucian splashing in the muddy shallows or Elly poking about the beach like a mudlark. She’d be able to bask in the sun and in the full attention of the Poet or the Playwright or the Artist or whoever. No chance of that now. The Poet was dead, the Playwright had found some young thing to leave his wife for and the Artist had stopped pleading for her to leave her husband in 1968.

  She found herself wishing that one of her children were here. Not as the intractable young adults that in their different ways they had become, but the cherub-cheeked creatures she had adored.

  Today Isabel Ramsay was thirty-nine, one year off forty, and to escape this deadening fact – her son and eldest daughter had called her on the telephone that morning and Mark had sent lilies – she had fled to the river. It was no escape. Wherever she looked, there were shadows of lost people: ghosts of the living, as well as of the dead. The older you got the more there were. Pushing forty, she was too old to be anyone’s muse. Elly had once asked whether you could be a parent if your children were dead. She had laughed with Mark about that at the time – now she wondered. Her children had left her. What was she?

  She trudged down to the shoreline and dabbled the toes of her platform boots in the shallow water, regarding her reflection in the murky Thames. The image fractured to colours and shapes and Isabel put a hand to her face as if to confirm she was still intact.

  She shuddered and huddled deeper into her astrakhan coat. Long ago, someone – the Artist maybe – had said she was psychic because she always knew when he was going to call and she was sensitive to atmosphere. Maybe he was right; certain places did give her a bad feeling. This place did.

  The amorphous dread grew. She looked behind her and confirmed that she was alone. As quickly as it had come, her sense of doom evaporated. She made her way back over mud-slicked stones, broken glass and bricks, telling herself that the beach, a stone’s throw from the Great West Road, was the harbinger of happy times.

  *

  Despite the rumble of traffic above, in the deadened air of the tunnel there was a strange stillness. Stella pulled the dog away from brownish-coloured water welling in the gutter at the base of the tiled wall. She had an acute sense of smell and could detect a person was in a room before she entered it. Her dad said it was a gift and would help when she was a detective. It also made her detect horrible smells she would rather not know about. The ste
nch filling her nostrils now was, Stella decided, a mix of toilets before the chain was pulled, exhaust fumes and a dead bird.

  A chill pricked her skin and with a shock Stella took in that she had left the house without telling her mum and dad. She was not allowed to take Hector out on her own. She set off back along the tunnel, but the dog, who moments earlier had led her on a frantic dash into the subway, sat down and wouldn’t move. She tugged on his lead and pleaded with him to ‘heel’ but he stayed where he was.

  A scraping. Stella whipped round; the sound glanced off the tiled walls and, although slight, it filled her ears and could have come from either direction. The end of the tunnel was a long way away; she didn’t remember coming so far along it.

  Another scrape. Then another and another. Stella stiffened, her face a mask. She could identify the scrapes. They were footsteps.

  Someone was coming.

  The dog gave a low growl, his ears flattened back on his head.

  The footsteps stopped and started. The daughter of a detective, Stella had eagerly absorbed her dad’s stories – stories her mum didn’t know that he had told her – featuring bodies and sniffer dogs, aggravated burglaries and stolen cars. Stella slept soundly at night.

  ‘The thing is, Stella, you must ask yourself questions. What can you hear? Why can you hear it? Don’t be afraid to trust your instincts.’

  A detective now, Stella asked herself questions. Why would a person walk slowly? Because they were old or they had hurt themselves. But her instincts told her that the footsteps were slow because the person didn’t want her to know they were coming. How did the person know that she was there? Perhaps they didn’t know.

  The square of light at the end of the tunnel had gone.

  One thing Terry and Suzanne Darnell did agree on was that their daughter was sensible. She knew not to talk to or accept sweets from strangers. While Suzanne railed that living with a policeman had instilled in Stella a skewed view of the world, she also conceded that it had made Stella mindful of dangers and therefore circumspect. She would never suffer fools, Suzanne would say.

  Stella was mindful of danger now. There was a person at the end of the tunnel who didn’t want her to know they were there. It must be one of her dad’s criminals, she decided.

  Until now, despite her parents’ problems, Stella had been certain of the world. There were good people and bad people. Her dad locked up the bad people.

  On that Wednesday Terry Darnell wasn’t there to save his daughter. He would never walk through the tunnel with her again.

  She smelled something. Not the sickening smell of toilets, but something much nicer. Clean clothes mixed with rose petals. There was a tangy smell that she thought might be aftershave. Stella matched smells with colours; now she thought of brown and orange. In this way she calmed herself and could think straight.

  ‘Did I frighten you?’ The man stood at the end of the tunnel. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No,’ Stella said.

  ‘I expect you’ve been told not to talk to strangers.’ He was blocking her way home.

  ‘Yes.’ Stella’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.

  ‘Quite right, it could be dangerous here. What if you fell and hurt yourself? Who would be there to help? With all that noise from the road, no one would hear you calling.’

  The man was coming towards her.

  Stella let go of the dog’s lead and ran for her life.

  *

  Isabel Ramsay was unwilling to return to the house and face the birthday cards, all of them bright and garish with threes and nines in silver or gold and all too big. Gina had rallied her brother and sister – they usually forgot to do them. The four cards, far from cheering her, told her that her best days were behind her.

  She leant against the wall, her hands flat against the dank brick, and let the sun seep into her pores. Since the day in 1968 when Robert Kennedy was assassinated on the kitchen floor and Nixon got in, cards and invitations had dropped off. Since then it was as if no one had the heart for parties. She hadn’t realized that at first.

  Princess Anne was marrying a Mark too. Mark Phillips wasn’t as sexy as Mark Ramsay, nor, Isabel was sure, was he as clever. Her own wedding in 1953, a week after Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, was not on a cold November day like this, but in the summer. The Hanging Judge had taken off his black napkin and even ran to a jazz band with a marquee on the lawn near to old Uncle Whatsit’s hallowed bloody tree. He had dusted off his Daimler for the trips between his house and the church. In those days the villagers treated the Ramsays as if they had descended from Mount Olympus. The village had groaned under the bunting and there was some trumpet playing outside the lychgate on the way out. That didn’t happen any more.

  There was a thump and, looking round, Isabel saw a girl on her knees at the bottom of the steps. Mud had splashed up her dress, a red corduroy; her hair hid her face as she got up from the ground, with more mud on her hands and streaked on her tights. The extraordinary is always so banal, Isabel said to herself; her hands fluttering uselessly by her sides, she exclaimed, ‘We’ve been looking everywhere for you!’

  *

  A graze on Stella’s right knee was stinging and a stitch under her ribs hurt when she breathed. She had to breathe.

  She panted: ‘How did you know I went out?’

  ‘What? Oh, you’re not—’

  The woman moved out of the sun and Stella saw her properly. She had on huge sunglasses that made her look like a fly.

  The lady reached into her coat, which gave Stella the crazy notion that she had a gun, and Stella put her own hand to her hip where a gun would be if she had one.

  ‘There was a—’ Stella stopped. Why had she run? The man had sounded kind; he had warned her about the tunnel. Her mum said that not everyone was a criminal.

  It was not a gun, but a packet of cigarettes. The tall lady flipped it open; flicking up a cigarette, she dipped her head and took it out with her mouth. She wore bright red lipstick. She fumbled in her coat pocket and produced a silver lighter. She clicked up a flame and, cupping it, lit the cigarette. A row of bangles on the woman’s wrist jangled like handcuffs. Stella shrank back towards the steps. The man had been trying to help and she had made things worse.

  ‘You’ve come quite a cropper!’ The tall lady nodded at Stella’s torn tights through a cloud of smoke. She turned towards the river and examined her fingernails, fingers flat against her palm, the cigarette in her other hand poised above her shoulder, the way Stella’s mum used to do before she gave up smoking. This shared mannerism with her mum made Stella feel more confident. She came back from the steps.

  ‘I tripped.’ Perhaps he had gone the other way. He hadn’t been chasing her after all. Emboldened, she went on, ‘I was walking Hector. He’s our dog.’ She was relieved to have an explanation she could give to her mum and dad.

  ‘Hector? Is he an imaginary dog?’ Each word was punctuated by a puff of smoke.

  ‘No.’ Not having ever imagined animals or friends or anything else, Stella didn’t know what the lady meant.

  ‘Where is Hector then?’

  Hector! She had left him behind. He was still in the tunnel. Or the man had taken him. She ran to the steps.

  ‘He’s gone! He’s been stolen!’

  ‘Stay calm. No use getting aerated. How do you know he’s been stolen?’

  ‘There was a man in the tunnel. He’s taken him.’ Stella tried to keep calm. Daddy said that detectives had always to be calm.

  ‘Did he hurt you, this man?’ The lady threw her cigarette down on to the mud.

  ‘No.’ Again Stella heard the kindness in the man’s voice. He would not have stolen Hector. He had been trying to help her and she had been rude. She wasn’t meant to talk to strangers, but if she did then she was also not supposed to be rude. A conflicting pair of instructions that had always baffled her.

  ‘He was kind to me.’

  ‘What do you mean, kind? You’re saying he took your do
g?’

  Stella’s dad had told her a story about a man who had been charged with robbing a sweet shop. He had been seen nearby by some children, who said he had spoken to them. Her dad said he had an alibi. He was put in a cell at the police station. While he was there another sweet shop was robbed and the police had found on the till the same fingerprints as in the first shop. The man was innocent. He had not done anything wrong. Nor had the man in the tunnel. Stella’s dad had told her in secret that he suspected the children, but he had not followed it up because, he had said, it could ‘blight their lives if they were guilty’. Stella didn’t ask what it meant to have your life blighted.

  ‘It wasn’t him. Hector has run away because I dropped his lead,’ she said firmly.

  ‘That’s all right then.’ The lady was lighting another cigarette. At her feet a wisp of smoke coiled upwards from the half-smoked one in the mud. ‘Hector? After the warrior at Troy who gets dragged round the city walls without his clothes? Dead already, poor man.’ The lady put her cigarette lighter back in her pocket. ‘Does he often run off? Your dog?’

  Stella was surprised that, unlike all the grown-ups she knew – her teacher, her mum and dad, the neighbours – the lady wasn’t cross that she had lost her dog.

  ‘No. Hector is a horse at the police station. Our dog is called after him,’ she said.

  ‘A villainous horse!’ The lady drew on her cigarette and to Stella’s astonishment, blew a smoke ring up to the sky. She pouted her lips and added: ‘We have a cat.’

  ‘Not all criminals are nasty. Keep an open mind and don’t be fooled.’

  ‘Cats get their fur on the settee and the carpet.’ Stella hadn’t meant to say this. It might be rude.

  The lady agreed. ‘They have fleas too.’

  ‘What make is your cat? I mean what species.’ Stella reddened at her mistake. She had read about cats in her encyclopaedia.

  Stella knew that she shouldn’t be talking to a stranger, but she couldn’t leave. She had never before met an adult who treated her like a grown-up. She couldn’t know that Isabel Ramsay, lacking in empathy, treated everyone as versions of herself, with cares and considerations identical to her own. This could annoy anyone wanting to be seen for themselves; and Isabel’s eldest daughter, sharing none of her attributes, was invisible to her. But for Stella she offered a breathtaking new world.