37
Monday, 30 April 2012
It was nearly midnight when they reached Kew. All the lights in the two-storey house were blazing. Jack was right: Mrs Hampson was still up. A lamp over the porch lit a gravel path to the door.
‘It’s open.’ Jack made to step inside.
‘We can’t just walk in.’ Stella reached around him and rang the bell. The sound pealed like a fire alarm. She preferred David’s Big Ben bell. She was meeting David tomorrow.
No one answered.
‘She must have forgotten to close it. People are always doing that,’ Jack said.
‘How do you…? Oh, never mind.’ Stella pushed the button again. The sound was difficult to miss, she thought.
‘Come on.’ Jack pushed the door wide and they were greeted by a bluff of warm air. ‘Mrs Hamp-son?’ he called cheerily and when he got no reply, ‘Amanda?’
‘She must be here, the heating’s on full blast.’ Stella undid her anorak and followed Jack into a brightly lit hallway.
The kitchen was large. In the centre was a hexagonal island inset with a six-ring hob.
‘We shouldn’t be here. Clean Slate has upset her already. Using bleach will be nothing to wandering about her home uninvited,’ Stella said.
‘We should secure the house. She’s gone out and forgotten to lock up.’ Jack did not say that he too was keen to leave. He was used to occupying Hosts’ houses in their absence, but this felt different.
Droplets of water clung to plates and dishes in the draining rack. Jack felt the kettle: it was warm. The oven emitted a gentle heat when he opened the door. Amanda Hampson had cooked, eaten and washed up her supper things. She had started taking care of her newly cleaned home, but then had gone out, leaving the door open. It didn’t add up.
‘Maybe’s she’s in bed,’ Stella whispered.
‘She says she never sleeps.’
‘She must sleep some time.’
The sitting room was the hub of Amanda’s quest for the truth about her husband’s death. Here too it was tidier than Jack usually found it. Amanda had stacked her papers into piles and placed them on her desk and on the dining table. Cushions plumped in their corners on the sofa were as he had left them.
Charlie Hampson smiled down, sardonic within his gilded frame.
Jack trod heavily up the ladder-style staircase to warn Amanda, but she was not in any of the rooms.
He stopped. ‘Look in the bathroom.’
‘Why me?’
‘If she’s fallen asleep in the bath, it’s better you wake her than me.’
‘Hardly.’ Nevertheless Stella pushed the door open with a finger. She stepped back on to Jack’s foot.
‘Ouch!’
‘She’s not there.’
They retreated to the sitting room.
‘She might be at the station.’ Jack was hopeful. ‘Maybe she got an appointment with Martin Cashman after all.’
Stella shook her head. ‘At this time of night? Besides he’s on holiday.’
‘Wait a minute.’ Jack flicked one of the piles with his gloved hand. ‘She’s taken her file.’
‘What file?’
‘The pink one she took to the police.’
‘I saw her with that.’ Stella looked around.
Jack glanced behind him and Charlie Hampson’s eyes met his. Amanda Hampson would never leave her house unattended. On his first visit she had not trusted him to be alone there.
‘We’re being dense. Call her. You have her number.’ He nudged Stella.
‘I don’t. Jackie does, but obviously she’s at home now.’
‘Ring her.’
‘At home asleep. Most people are at this time, Jack. Besides, she won’t have the number there.’
Jack stirred the papers on the desk and unearthed a fat leather wallet. ‘She hasn’t taken her Filofax.’ He felt a creeping unease. In the event of loss, please return to… Amanda had filled in her name, address and home telephone and at the bottom in different ink was her mobile number. ‘Got it!’
‘She will be cross that we’re here.’ Stella peered out of the French doors at the garden.
‘Let’s ring her and see.’ Laboriously Jack keyed in the number on his phone. He counted the rings. ‘Come on, Amanda.’
‘Ssssh. I can hear a ringtone.’ Stella put her finger to her lips.
Jack shook his head. ‘She’s on voicemail.’
‘Try again.’ Stella was fumbling with the door handle.
Jack pressed ‘redial’. ‘That’s weird. I can hear ringing.’ He joined Stella.
‘It’s out here.’ Stella heaved on the doors.
Jack stamped his foot. ‘The meditation temple!’
‘The what?’
‘She’s doing Yoga Nidra!’
Cool air wafted in from the garden. Jack plunged on to the path. He hissed at Stella. ‘You stay here. She hates being disturbed, but she knows me.’
‘She’s not expecting you in the middle of the night. You could scare her witless.’
Jack trod on something. He looked down. The light on the crazy paving was Amanda Hampson’s phone, its screen glowing with a missed call.
‘Jack.’ Stella grabbed his coat sleeve.
Amanda Hampson lay face down on the threshold of her temple. Jack took some moments to comprehend that the dark spreading pool around her head was blood.
‘She’s dead.’ Stella dabbed at her phone and rapped out. ‘Police. And ambulance, although it’s too late.’
The springs on Colin’s bed were painful, but Jack didn’t care. He stared at his hands. Long and slender, his mother said they were the hands of a pianist. His fingers tingled as if they still rested on Amanda Hampson’s neck – her skin had been warm – feeling for a pulse. He buried his face in the pillow. The bed was meant for a child so he had to bring his knees to his chest. Tonight the position suited him: he felt small and lost. When he was at school he had lain alone in the dark, missing his home and his mummy. Time had telescoped.
Until he had found the glass on Phoenix Way, Jack had rather assumed that Amanda Hampson herself had been driven off kilter by her husband’s death. In the grip of an obsession, she wheedled at every bit of evidence to make it corroborate her conviction that someone had killed him. Tonight Jack had planned to apologize and say he believed her. But Amanda was dead and the police were treating it as suspicious.
He swung his legs over the bed. He would go back to the house and examine it properly. He slumped forward; of course he could not. The bona fide detectives were there; he had no right. Amanda was not a relative: he had no rights at all.
The front door clicked shut below. His Host was back. He should hide, but he was tired and tempted to let matters take their course. He could share these thoughts with her, two minds were better than one and her mind might serve him well. He went into the corridor and took up position in the shadow of the fire door.
She paused for breath on the staircase. Again Jack experienced the certainty that she was aware of him. This time he crouched low; most people expect intruders to be the height of an adult so rarely look down. His Host was not ‘most people’.
She went on up the stairs without looking right or left.
She was as much a stranger to him as on the day he had encountered her. He loved working on the streets in the attic – the work was a secret he shared with the old man about which his Host clearly knew nothing – but he could not afford the indulgence. Tomorrow he would get his book back and leave. He and Stella had a murderer to catch.
Jack Harmon climbed back into bed and burrowed beneath the blankets. In the woolly darkness he pictured Amanda Hampson, alive and executing flighty dance moves on her landing. Softly, the way his mother did, Jack sang himself to sleep.
‘I had a little pony,
His name was Dapple Gray;
I lent him to a lady
To ride a mile away.
She whipped him, she slashed him,
She rode him through the mire;
I would not lend my pony now,
For all the lady’s hire.’