28
Thursday, 26 April 2012
‘Be Kind and Merciful to Our Animals.’ Balanced on the edge of the drinking trough on the ill-lit road, Jack was caught in the glare of the van’s headlights.
Britton Drive was long and straight and desolate, its bleak aspect unmitigated by the tall sweet chestnut trees. The wind whipped their faces and pushed at budding leaves on the branches. Stella had told Jack about Britton Drive and since it was closer than Marquis Way, they had come here first. She had not told him about her abortive date with David Barlow. David had encouraged her to leave – for a member of staff in crisis – and invited her to go for a walk with him by the river the next evening and have a meal to make up for the one they had missed.
‘Not much here.’ Jack patted the trough. ‘According to your list, this is granite and was erected in 1935.’
Putting David to the back of her mind, Stella fished out her torch from her anorak and focused it on the blue folder. She turned to the picture with the witness appeal notice. Jack leant forward.
‘Is that a tree behind the trough?’ He directed Stella’s gloved hand to light the lower part of the picture.
‘I think so.’ Stella looked up. Although she had left the headlights on and there was a solitary lamp-post some metres away, Britton Drive was dark and unsettling. A horrible place to die.
Industrial units were set back from the road, many with broken windows or boarded up and smothered with jagged graffiti. Even when occupied the buildings must have been shoestring-shabby, their occupants one step ahead of the receivers. Stella knew the sort: fly-by-night outfits that paid only the bills that kept them trading. She read a nearby fascia that proclaimed in blistering letters: ‘Gray Shoes Fa ory Outle at Amaz g Pr ces.’ It gave her a dull sensation in her solar plexus. She had not experienced commercial failure, the trick was keeping overheads low. They would not move to a bigger office, they would stay put until the economy picked up.
Jack lifted a Coke can out of the trough and stuffed it in his pocket.
‘What are you doing with that?’ Stella was appalled.
‘I’ll put it in your recycling bin. This isn’t a rubbish bin, it’s for horses.’
‘Don’t expect many horses pass this way.’ As she said this, Stella hoped she was right. The area had an air of despair, of hopes shattered and of life long gone. No place for a horse. She shivered. Or for them either.
The warped ‘To Let’ sign on an imposing stone building with arched windows that had been an electricity substation suggested it had been available for a long time.
‘That’s in the photograph, behind the appeal sign,’ she pointed at a plastic salt bin near one of the trees. As she reached it she saw the indented logo: ‘Gina-Ware’. Since discovering the company was owned by the daughter of her late client Mrs Ramsay, Stella came upon their products everywhere. Jack would say it was a sign.
Jack jabbed at the photo. ‘There’s a crack in the paving here. I missed that.’
Stella had not noticed the meandering crack under the witness appeal board. If she had she would have dismissed it as insignificant.
‘This is a working crack,’ Jack announced.
‘Meaning?’ Stella asked.
‘Meaning it’s more than three millimetres, so is moving and is open to intrusion from water which freezes then expands, so widening the crack.’ On his knees Jack traced a finger along the crack. ‘A priority for street maintenance, but no doubt this has fallen off the council’s list. Who’s going to trip here?’
‘This is private land. Businesses have to pay.’ Stella looked around her at the abandoned buildings. ‘Or not. Let’s get on with it. This place is like a dead zone.’
‘It is a dead zone.’ Jack gave her a look. ‘See how the crack’s lengthened since Terry’s picture? We could have used it to guess the year if we didn’t already know.’ He sounded disappointed.
‘You think it caused Markham to crash?’
Jack jumped up and ran to the middle of the road. ‘These appeal boards are placed to alert motorists coming either way. Where did it happen?’ He darted over to the salt bin and, holding the file out like an offering, he tightroped along the pavement, one foot in front of the other. Every so often he gave a hop, avoiding the breaks in the kerbstones. Stella had hoped Jack was improving.
Far off a siren whoo-whooped, dipping and soaring and then fading away.
‘James Markham smashed into a tree.’ Stella flapped the photocopy of the newspaper article. ‘Since these are the only trees we can assume…’ She marched over to the nearest tree and, kneeling, shone her torch at the trunk.
Jack joined her. He ran his hand over the bark carefully, as if the tree were a person.
Stella allowed her mind to wander briefly. David Barlow had said he would stay at the pub to eat his supper; wistfully she supposed he had left by now.
‘There!’ Jack nudged her. ‘This is where he died.’
A gash cut into the tree two feet up from the ground. Over the decade since the accident, the exposed wood had spotted with grime and moss. They wouldn’t have seen it had they had not been looking. The bark was closing over the scar.
‘Trees are two-thirds below ground, a substantial tree like this would have held fast when Markham hit it, even at speed. A wall might give way. Wait a minute, what’s this?’ Jack scrabbled in the earth around the roots. One by one he placed little chips of stone on the pavement.
‘Stones.’ Stella got up and stamped about to stop the pins and needles in her right foot. ‘Not everything’s a sign.’ She swung the torch out along the road; it fell short of a shape fifty metres away. A rubbish skip, although in the dim light it was hard to tell. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Stella had forgotten to lock the van and had left her phone in view on the seat. It was glowing. Jackie had left a voicemail. Sitting at the wheel, Stella listened. ‘Can Jack go to Amanda Hampson’s at eight o’ clock tomorrow morning as well as Tuesdays? Of course she’s taken to him!’ Jackie enjoyed telling Stella they had more business. Stella wished they had spoken; she wanted to make up for leaving at lunchtime. While she hadn’t actually lied to Jackie, she hadn’t told her the truth. This didn’t sit comfortably with her.
Jack was still by the tree. ‘Jack, come on!’ She gesticulated through the windscreen. Jack waved, but didn’t move. Without asking him, Stella texted Jackie that he would be there. Jackie would see she was working. More deceit. Stella huffed in her seat. It was no good. She would return the blue folder to Terry’s basement and attend to her business.
‘This is a wild-goose chase,’ she declared when Jack finally joined her. ‘So what if there was an accident here? Terry took the picture because he was there that night.’ She started the engine. ‘It’s a souvenir.’
‘You don’t believe that.’ Jack was businesslike. He was jingling something in his palm. ‘Was Terry in all the streets? Life is rife with coincidence, but this seems implausible.’
‘He was a police officer.’
‘Not on Traffic. I asked Suzie.’
Stella pulled out into the road.
‘Your lights are off.’ Jack examined his cupped hand.
Stella flicked to full beam. ‘What was that?’ She rubbed a porthole in the fogging windscreen.
‘What was what?’ Jack dropped whatever was in his hand into his pocket and clipped on his seat belt.
‘I saw something.’
‘A fox probably.’
‘This place gives me the creeps.’ There, she had said it.
‘A man died here, that’s why,’ Jack replied amiably. He tilted his head back against the cushioned rest. ‘His ghost is here.’ He was matter of fact.
Further along the road, Stella remembered the dark shape. They must have driven past it. She looked in her rear mirror and saw the sweet chestnut trees silhouetted against the sky. Ghosts indeed. She had imagined the car and the fox. Nevertheless she confirmed the central-locking switch was activated.
Jack pulled on the gloves that Stella had found in Terry’s jacket pocket after he died and had given him. The brown leather accentuated his long slender fingers. The folder, still open at Britton Drive, lay on his lap. ‘I should imagine Terry was puzzled how it was that Markham came off the road. It’s as quiet as a grave here.’
‘It would have been thriving ten years ago.’
‘Not in the middle of the night.’
‘Maybe he suspected suicide, unless the guy fell asleep.’
‘Or murder.’
On Britton Drive it had seemed the dead of night. But Uxbridge Road was bright and noisy with cars and late buses. Teenagers and returning commuters bunched outside late-night groceries and off licences; knots of tardy smokers sat at pub picnic tables nursing last orders as if for warmth. Glad of the bustle, Stella didn’t resent braking when a man wove his way in front of the van. She wasn’t a detective, she ran a cleaning company and should be in bed now. She jumped when Jack batted the dashboard.
‘That was Marquis Way.’
‘Not tonight. It’s late.’