24
Thursday, 26 April 2012
A fierce wind blew through the sixteen spans supporting Hammersmith flyover and the clouds massing were the grey of the obdurate structure. Traffic noise was amplified to a discordant roar that drowned out the reproachful call of pigeons sharing cavities with electricity cables and the heating pipes that were an innovation in their time. Birds finding tenuous perches on the spalling surface made the paving around the supports viscous with excreta.
Stella tried to put out of her mind the rumour, which she supposed she had got from Terry, that criminals of London’s underworld were entombed within the units of pre-stressed concrete.
The Hammersmith and Fulham Archives were housed in a nondescript building without signage in the shadow of the flyover at the west end of the Talgarth Road.
Stella had left the office after lunch, intimating to Jackie that she had an appointment with a new client, without actually saying so. She hadn’t told Jackie about the blue folder, and in particular hadn’t admitted she was going out with David Barlow this evening. Jackie was keen for Stella to meet ‘Mr Right’; she was always saying Stella must give people time, get to know them, dare to trust them. While she might approve of David Barlow’s looks and considerate manners, her judgement would be clouded by the deep cleaning and him being a client, a transgression of Stella’s rule.
Ten minutes later Stella was untying the string from a roll of film that held editions of the Fulham & Hammersmith Chronicle for 2002 and clumsily feeding the intractable end around a series of rollers on a microfiche reader. When she attempted to spool it forward, she twiddled the dial the wrong way and the strip of celluloid whipped from the casing and smacked against the glass plate. The librarian, whose help Stella had refused, glanced up from her desk with raised eyebrows, silently renewing her offer. Stella shot her a grim smile and began the process again. At last she mastered the sensitive controls and, as she tentatively turned the dial, the film jerked forward.
Optimistic of success, Stella drew a grid in her Filofax with columns headed ‘Date’, ‘Street’, ‘Accident’ and ‘Victim’. She put in seven rows, because, not counting the numbers with letters, there were seven streets. She squeezed in an extra column for the picture number.
She had forgotten how unsettling a local newspaper could be. The murders, muggings and accidents that befell people in the ordinary course of their lives – house fires, more than one murder in an abandoned church or a bedsit, robberies and accidents at work and in the street – were so frequent that, if they read the paper, residents of Hammersmith could be paralysed with fear.
After two hours she had only reached May 2002 and found two fatal traffic accidents. An elderly man – Harry Pickering – hit by a motorbike and a young man who, the article reported, had yet to be identified, crushed by the 272 bus on Shepherd’s Bush Road, not far from Stella’s office. He had died later of head injuries. This story intrigued her because a man arrested at the scene was not the bus driver, which inspired further questions. Who else could be responsible? Was he pushed in front of the bus? She trawled through the following weeks but found no answers. She was getting distracted. Terry would keep strictly within the limits of the case. There was no mention of a horse trough.
Her back ached from sitting on the hard chair and a headache from staring at the poor resolution screen was nagging at her temples. She went to the lavatory.
She was drying her hands – on a towel whose hygienic properties she mistrusted on principle – when she saw what had been under her nose. She hurried back and pulled out the blue folder from her rucksack; she flipped to the street with the witness board (number 5b) and there they were. Two horse chestnut trees – she had learnt about trees at primary school and could still identify most species in the British Isles – their bare branches black lines against a white-grey sky placed the season of the photograph as late autumn or winter. Stella was safe omitting the months between May and August from her search.
She opened the cabinets housing film dating back to the 1960s, eased out ‘September 2002’ and loaded it into the machine. By now she was operating the clunky apparatus with the breezy skill of an expert and arrived quickly at Thursday, 5 September, the day the paper came out. No accidents reported for that week. A woman was found dead in her bed of a paracetamol overdose. A nurse in the renal department of Charing Cross, she had stopped work to care for her father and after his death was diagnosed with depression. Stella believed that keeping busy was the best cure, not that she had looked after Terry. She whizzed the film on and accidentally skipped a week. Reversing it, she found no fatal accidents.
Another hour passed and she was at the end of October. Her headache was worse; she could do with a handful of paracetamols herself.
She was about to give up when she found it. Date: Thursday, 14 November 2002, above an advert for Woolworths in King Street.
Hit and Run Man in Fatal Collision
By Lucille May
A man who was given a suspended sentence of two years for causing death by dangerous driving and leaving the scene was killed when his Peugeot RCZ hit a tree on Britton Drive W6. James Markham was taken to Charing Cross Hospital on Sunday night where he was pronounced dead.
The smash is known to have occurred after 11.30 p.m. when DS Terence Darnell, an off-duty police officer, drove down the street and noticed nothing unusual.
James Markham, 36, of l Glenthorne Road, was married with a two-month-old son. On 2 January 2002 Markham caused the death of seven-year-old Christopher Mason, who ran out in front of his car on Shepherd’s Bush Road. Mr Markham failed to stop, but reported the accident at Hammersmith Police Station that evening. His widow Sasha Markham told us: ‘Jamie was thrilled to be a father and was rebuilding his life.’
Anyone who witnessed the incident or who has information should contact Hammersmith Police Station quoting reference P103/1900/12.
Incredibly Terry had given the accident a time frame. Trembling, Stella pressed ‘copy’ and the photocopier by the librarian’s desk sprang to life. She called up Street View on her iPhone and dabbed Britton Drive into the search box. She had expected a fiddly, careering perambulation along the streets as the controls on the phone were clumsier than on her laptop – but there, set back from the kerb and framed by two sweet chestnut trees in full leaf, was a horse trough. Street View takes pictures in the summer when it is meant to be sunny; these were taken in June two years ago. Like the trees in Terry’s photograph these were sweet chestnuts. Stella knew not to confuse them with horse chestnuts. More evidence, if she had needed it, that she had found one of Terry’s streets. Stella sat back in her seat, her arms folded to contain her excitement. If she needed proof that the pictures in the blue folder were clues to a case, this was it. Sometime later, years later even, her dad had returned to Britton Drive and taken his own record of the accident spot. Why?
Her phone rang. She fled back to the toilet because a notice at the reception instructed users of the library to turn off their phones and, reluctant to obey instructions other than her own, Stella had ignored it.
Suzie. She would be complaining about Jack’s cleaning. Stella did not answer.