The Runaway

by Lesley Thomson

  So far she hadn’t asked Stella the usual questions adults asked. What was she going to be when she was grown up? Which was her favourite doll? What was her favourite subject? Stella’s answers were always wrong. She didn’t like dolls; her favourite subject was taking fingerprints, which she did at home with the kit her dad had given her because one day she was going to be a detective.

  ‘Species? Who knows? Paws, sharp claws, fur and wicked green eyes, that sort. My husband Mark would know. Strictly speaking, he’s his cat. A present from a grateful patient, one Mrs Crawford.’ She frowned at her cigarette and then glanced sharply at Stella. ‘You want him? Crawford, that is.’

  ‘We’re not allowed pets in Barons Court.’ Stella was incredulous. Her mum complained about Hector, but she wouldn’t give him away. Then, with leaden clarity, she thought that when they went to Barons Court they were leaving Hector behind, so this wasn’t true.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Mum says, who’s going to feed it? Not my dad because he’s not going to be there with us.’

  ‘Would you feed it? I’m always forgetting Crawford’s supper. Mark does the breakfast shift.’

  ‘I would.’ Stella was faintly excited that the lady could forget.

  ‘Your dog – Hector – he’s probably gone home.’ The lady’s head was surrounded by smoke. ‘Leonard Woolf’s dog crossed Ceylon and found him. Or go to the police, if all else fails.’

  Stella knew from her dad that the police didn’t start searching for someone until they had been missing for twenty-four hours, except for girls and boys. Then they looked straight away. She didn’t know how long they waited if it was a cat. Or a dog. Her dad would look for Hector right away. Stella felt a rush of relief. Her dad could find anything. When she was in Barons Court, he would come and find her.

  ‘It will be an adventure!’ Terry Darnell had reached out and, lifting a strand of his daughter’s hair away from her eye, tucked it behind her ear. He did this even if her hair wasn’t in her eyes.

  ‘I wish you were coming with us, Daddy,’ she had mumbled.

  ‘So do I, Stell.’ He had stroked her cheek with the back of his hand.

  ‘I’m not allowed pets, unless they’re fish,’ Stella announced now. ‘Mum says fish can be fun.’

  ‘Fish – fun?’ The woman fanned away smoke. Her bangles flashed in the sunlight, clattering loudly. ‘With a dash of butter and lemon and a scattering of pepper.’

  Stella considered what a dash of butter would look like; did it move very fast?

  Then: ‘Is this one of your hiding places?’ The lady broke into Stella’s thoughts. ‘My youngest was always hiding with her friends. When you arrived I thought? Oh well. Stupid thought.’ The lady gave a harsh laugh and sucked so hard on her cigarette that Stella could see what she would look like if she was a skeleton.

  ‘I don’t have hiding places.’ Stella was horrified. People who did bad things had to run and hide. Her dad was searching for a criminal called Harry Roberts on the day she was born. Stella often asked to hear the story again on the nights her dad tucked her up in bed. She looked about her. ‘The only place to hide here is under the river.’

  ‘Yes. It is.’ The lady blew out another smoke ring. Stella watched it break up into nothing. ‘Spying, my daughter called it. She could drive my husband mad, tucked behind a chair or a sofa with her notebook.’

  Stella nodded. Detectives had to be spies; they had to watch and then collect Vital Information.

  ‘You watching the nuptials?’ the lady enquired, looking out at the river as if Stella was there.

  ‘I, er…’ Stella didn’t know about ‘nup-shells’. Nothing on the mud around her offered a hint.

  ‘The royal wedding. All eight hours of it. Two more than they gave to Churchill’s funeral. Riveting. Are you and your family going to gather round the goggle box along with the rest of the nation?’

  ‘Me and my dad are watching it at a party.’ Until that moment, Stella had forgotten about the party. ‘My mum is finishing off the last few bits and pieces.’ Stella echoed her mother’s words of that morning over the cooling breakfast.

  ‘You horse-mad? My other daughter is; Gina likes them better than humans. Perhaps she has a point.’ The lady wasn’t smiling. Stella was used to her mum and dad making jokes that they didn’t think were funny.

  Stella’s dad had taken her to see the horses at the police station. Walking down the aisle of the stables, she had kept close to him. The horses’ heads poked out of the stalls on either side, their faces looming. Stella had shrunk from the stamp of their hooves and their snorting nostrils, their teeth bared like ice lollies.

  ‘I don’t like horses,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Trample you at the drop of a hat.’ The lady blew out a cloud of smoke.

  A trail of cigarette smoke made Stella’s eyes smart; she dashed at them with the back of her hand.

  ‘I’m going to the police party to see the wedding on a massive television.’ Stella gave a sigh. Then she surprised herself: ‘I don’t want to go.’

  ‘Don’t then.’ This time the lady crushed out her cigarette on the wall behind them. It made a smudge on the brick, dark against green slime. She wiped it off with the tip of her finger as Stella would have done. Then she threw it on to the mud at her feet, which Stella would never do. It lay a few centimetres from the first cigarette.

  ‘My advice: don’t do anything you don’t want to,’ the lady said.

  This was the opposite of any advice Stella had ever been given.

  ‘Although fancy dress sounds good.’ The lady walked round in a circle. ‘Bloody funny, you all going as police. I’d enjoy seeing that!’

  ‘It’s not fancy dress.’ Stella was puzzled.

  ‘You said it was a police party.’

  ‘It’s real police. My daddy is a detective.’ Stella winced; she didn’t say ‘daddy’ any more; it was babyish. She added, ‘He solves things, which is why my mum says he’s never at home.’

  The lady stepped into the middle of her circle of footprints. ‘A detective? What’s his name?’

  ‘Detective Inspector Terry Darnell. He’s just been promoted,’ Stella said without thinking. She was not supposed to tell a stranger her name.

  ‘Is that your name too?’

  ‘Terry?’

  ‘Darnell.’ The lady was looking at her.

  ‘Yes, I’m called Stella.’

  ‘Never think that all the bad people are men; women can be bad too.’

  ‘Isabel Ramsay is my name.’ She shrugged inside her coat as if Stella had asked her and she didn’t want to say. ‘I do hope your dad doesn’t ask you questions that make you feel guilty when you’re not?’

  ‘No, he doesn’t.’ Stella was prompt.

  ‘Most people have secrets, Stell. Secrets mean they lie even if they haven’t done the crime. Your job is to root out those secrets – like weeds – and get to the root of the matter.’

  ‘He says to ask the right questions,’ Stella maintained stoutly. ‘So you get to the root of the matter. Like a weed.’

  ‘What if you don’t want to get to the damned root? Sometimes it’s best to leave roots underground where they belong.’ Mrs Ramsay’s silver cigarette lighter flashed in the sunlight as she turned it over in her palm.

  ‘My mum says Dad treats everyone as a suspect.’ Stella’s memory was jolted. ‘He brought a little girl back who had run away. I wasn’t born then,’ she added, for that was critical. The story of the Runaway Girl – another bedtime tale she frequently demanded – was unusual in that Suzanne Darnell also told it to her daughter. Intended as cautionary, the story of a girl lost in Hammersmith, far from those who cared about her, intrigued and unnerved Stella. The girl had told her dad that she had moved house and wanted to go back to the bedroom she had shared with her brother. Unlike the girl, Stella had lost Hector. She couldn’t go home.

  ‘Did he treat her as a suspect?’ Mrs Ramsay – Stella considered her too grand to be ‘Is
abel’ – was asking.

  ‘No, he was kind to her.’

  ‘My children’s father is a doctor. People say he’s kind.’ Isabel Ramsay pouted her lips. ‘He sees us all as his patients.’ She tilted her face to the sun and blew out another circle of smoke. ‘He’s a better bet than Mark Phillips.’

  ‘My mum says he’s a “ladies’ man”,’ Stella remembered.

  ‘Your mum is right. Horsey Anne had better canter close if she wants to keep him.’

  Stella looked at her boots. ‘I have run away.’

  In the silence that followed it was possible to pick out the distant drone of traffic on the main road, a horn, an aeroplane. The sounds of London.

  ‘Have you?’ Mrs Ramsay was busy lighting another cigarette. Clicking away on her lighter, she at last got a flame. ‘Why?’ She blew out smoke and pocketed the lighter.

  ‘I don’t want to go to the police party.’ Stella felt as if she was floating above her body; her boots, smeared with mud, were far below. She stamped her feet to anchor herself.

  ‘I love parties.’ Mrs Ramsay addressed the glowing tip of her cigarette. ‘I’ve been organizing one for my birthday. Caterers, and my artist friend is doing the invitations.’

  ‘When is your birthday?’

  ‘Today. Cards, flowers, fuss!’

  Mrs Ramsay looked out at the river for so long that Stella decided she had forgotten Stella was there. Partly to remind her and partly because she liked her, she said, ‘Happy birthday.’

  The lady chucked her cigarette on to the mud although she had hardly smoked it. ‘Nearly forty is too old to celebrate!’ She did another walk round her circle.

  A nursery rhyme popped into Stella’s mind.

  Ring-a-ring o’ roses,

  A pocket full of posies…

  ‘But you’re having a party!’ Stella dismissed the stupid song. ‘Mum says twenty-seven is old and she must snatch the chance of a fresh start before it’s too late.’ Stella was impressed by Mrs Ramsay’s age and privately agreed that ‘nearly forty’ was old.

  ‘What? I’m not having a party.’ Mrs Ramsay appeared to have forgotten that it was she who had said about having a party. Did she think Stella had made it up?

  Stella was used to facts being tumbled on to their heads. Her mum complained that she never saw Stella’s dad and was getting a divorce, which meant she would never see him ever. Her dad had bought Stella a pink suitcase when he knew she hated pink. Stella dwelt on the ring of footprints.

  A-tishoo! A-tishoo!

  We all fall down.

  She didn’t like girls who cried. She wanted to tell Mrs Ramsay that she never made anything up, that it was important to stick to the facts.

  ‘Since her royal horsiness is tying the knot today, no one will come to my party, they’ll be watching the wedding in glorious Technicolor!’ She sucked on her cigarette and glanced at Stella. ‘So you’ve run away because you don’t want to go to a party?’

  ‘I am going to Barons Court because my mum and dad are Filing for Divorce. They have Matrimonial Troubles.’ Stella pronounced the phrases learnt from her parents.

  ‘Why? Is one of them having an affair?’

  A noise on the river caused them both to turn. A speedboat roared past and headed off towards Hammersmith Bridge. The engine sound died away followed seconds later by the wash in its wake.

  ‘I – I don’t know what that is,’ Stella confessed at last. ‘Mum told him he would be more use if he kept the bed warm.’ Stella had never comprehended this much-repeated complaint. Why was keeping the bed warm just her dad’s job? It could be hers if she was allowed to fill hot-water bottles.

  Isabel Ramsay frowned. ‘Ah well.’

  ‘My dad doesn’t want us to go. And I’m not sure he can manage his Fresh Start by himself.’ Stella had never articulated these concerns before.

  Mrs Ramsay didn’t reply.

  The sun had gone behind a thin layer of cloud. The river was grey. Without the sun the scene was drained of colour.

  Stella said, ‘I’ll have to go and find my dog.’

  Mrs Ramsay had her back to her.

  ‘The thing is, Stella Darnell, running away takes planning. Food, water, change of clothes. And somewhere to run to.’

  Stella nodded, although Mrs Ramsay wasn’t looking at her.

  ‘If you’re not at home, how will Hector find you?’

  ‘Bye then.’

  Without waiting for a reply, Stella raced up the river steps. She didn’t stop running until she reached the top of the ramp to the subway; then she stopped.

  The traffic on the Great West Road roared and clattered about her ears. The clock on the church struck a quarter past nine.

  Stella checked the mirror on the wall of the subway. There was a square of light at the end of the tunnel.

  *

  Terry and Suzanne Darnell were still in their bedroom. The door was shut. Stella stood outside her bedroom and looked along the landing. Methodically she pieced together the facts and arrived at a conclusion. They had been in there all the time. Her mum and dad didn’t know she had run away. An extraordinary possibility presented itself. She need not say she had been out.

  Striding into her bedroom, she pulled off her parka and hung it on the Bo Peep hanger in the wardrobe and shut the doors.

  There was dust on her desk that she had missed when she cleaned. She swept her sleeve over the veneer until it shone.

  Hector was lost. She sat on the chair, her elbows on the desk, her chin on her fists. She would have to confess she had lost him. Her dad would be upset. When she went to Barons Court he would be all by himself. There would be no Hector and it was all her fault.

  Stella shut her eyes to blink back tears. Mrs Ramsay was wrong; you couldn’t do what you liked, not if it was a bad thing, or the police would arrest you and put you in a cell. Her dad would detect that she had lost Hector and that she had talked to a Perfect Stranger and a man in the tunnel. He would ask her the right questions and he would get the right answers. He would discover her secret. She was a criminal.

  The door burst open. Stella quelled a shout of surprise and jumped up from the chair, her back to the table.

  ‘Hey there, Stell. Time we were going, your carriage awaits!’ Her dad clapped his hands as if to set Stella into flight. The carriage awaiting was his joke when they were going out. He stopped in the doorway. ‘Blimey, that’s a mess! How did that happen?’

  Stella looked down. A track of muddy footprints led across the carpet to where she stood.

  Terry Darnell stepped out on to the landing. ‘There’s more here.’

  Stella followed him and, standing with him at the top of the stairs, saw a trail of mud starting at the front door. Clues to a crime.

  ‘I’ll brush it up when you’ve gone.’ He rested a hand on her shoulder for a moment. ‘We need to hop it now, or we’ll miss the highlight when they say “I do”! Or, more to the point, we’ll miss the cake!’

  ‘Dad, I?’

  There was a knock on the door. A shadow darkened the glass. Stella grabbed the banister and clung to it as the staircase dipped below her. Another knock. It was the police.

  ‘Blimey, hold your horses!’ Her dad, smoothing a hand over his hair, went down the stairs.

  Stella watched him as if she was at the rail of a ship leaving land. They would lock her in a cell. She followed him down, one step at a time.

  Her dad opened the door. Something bowled past and flew at Stella, shoving her backward on to the stairs. Winded, her head dizzy, she sat down. Something wet and warm slathered her face.

  Hector had found his way home. Like Mrs Ramsay said he would.

  ‘…no idea how he got out,’ her dad was saying.

  ‘Found him wandering in the square. Happily truffling up some plant or other.’

  Stella smelled smoke.

  ‘Can’t thank you enough for bringing him back. My girl would have been heartbroken. Close shave too – he could have run into the road
, caused a crash. All the time we didn’t even know he was out. It’s my fault.’

  ‘Your gate was open.’

  ‘Yes, but how did he get out of the house? We need to keep a closer eye on him. Or I do. How did you know where he lived?’

  Terry moved aside to look at Hector and Mrs Ramsay saw Stella. The little girl froze, her thoughts racing. Never in her life had she told her parents a lie.

  It’s not the dog you need to keep an eye on, it’s your very naughty little girl.

  ‘It says it on his collar thingy.’ Mrs Ramsay tilted her face from the door and blew a smoke ring up into the air. She looked back and flashed Terry Darnell a smile that was mostly in her eyes.

  ‘We’re about to head off to a party – we’d have had to go looking for him and missed it. It’s a treat for my daughter. We’re over the moon, aren’t we, Stell? Say “thank you” to the lady. She’s saved our day! Thank you again, Mrs??’

  ‘Isabel. You’re going to the party?’ Mrs Ramsay was talking to Stella.

  ‘Yes,’ Stella admitted, her face hot.

  ‘Poor you! I hate parties.’ Mrs Ramsay raised her eyebrows. ‘Do you like them?’

  Stella was trained by her detective father to pick up the slightest nuance. Although only seven, she took the cue. She took a deep breath. ‘No, I don’t like them.’

  ‘What don’t you like?’

  ‘The noise and there’s loud music with games that I don’t understand and people get cross if I don’t try.’ The words were out; she ploughed on: ‘I don’t really much like cake and I feel sick if I drink fizzy drinks.’

  ‘Don’t go then. Why don’t you spend the day with your dad?’ She turned to Terry Darnell. ‘How would that be, Inspector?’ She took another drag of her cigarette. ‘My kids were marched on nature walks with my husband. I thought they adored them or I would have intervened. Now they’re pretty much grown up, so it’s too late.’ She looked down the path as if she had seen something.