38
Tuesday, 1 May 2012
Early the next morning Stella pushed her cart along the corridor of the second floor of Hammersmith Police Station, the wheels spinning on the varnished wood. She parked it by the ladies’ toilets, unhooked the mop and bucket wringer, grabbed the floor cleaner and, complete with latex gloves, shouldered inside.
Four cubicles took up the left side of the tiled room; doors ajar, they faced a matching number of sinks with mirrors. The sinks, dating from the thirties, were generous in proportion with flat rims on which lay blocks of soap. The porcelain was riven with cracks, darkened with time and impossible to clean properly. Stella eyed them like enemies while she massed her equipment in the echoing chamber.
She had not slept. Unlike Jack, who had remained cool at the sight of Amanda Hampson dead and bleeding, her eyes blankly staring, it had been all Stella could do not to pass out on the floor of what Jack kept calling a temple. Perhaps he had been affected, because on King Street, as they were passing the drinking fountain where, in what seemed another life, she had picked him up earlier, he had bundled out of the van without saying goodbye.
Even after a shower and a hairwash the metallic odour of blood clung to her. She had lain all night stiff and inert as a corpse until the dark sky resolved to grey, when she gave up on sleep and took another shower. It was then she had remembered Terry’s trick of dabbing eucalyptus oil under his nostrils. She found a bottle in the bathroom cabinet and smeared it liberally around her nose. It stung and had not eradicated the metallic odour. It was in her mind.
With Jack gone, the milky eyes staring up unseeing were only more vivid, even when, stopped at traffic lights, she could shut her eyes, she could not obliterate the image. Stella had doubled back to invite him to sleep in her spare room, but he was not on Weltje Road or King Street or walking along the Great West Road. He had not had time to go into the subway to the river. She drew up alongside the drinking fountain, her eye drawn to the wrought-iron gates of the prep school. Jack had vanished. She worried that he was up to his old tricks. She had hoped solving the Rokesmith murder would have sorted it. On top of finding Mrs Hampson, this worry had contributed to Stella’s lack of sleep.
Now, alone in the police toilets, she scowled at her reflection in one of the mirrors. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ears and grimaced to relax her facial muscles, a trick of Jackie’s. She glanced past her reflection and froze. One of the cubicles was shut. She whipped around.
There was someone inside.
She heard a groan.
‘Hello?’ she faltered. The doors were fitted from the ceiling to the floor; the only way in was by smashing the lock.
‘Can you hear me?’ Stupid. Only a dead person would fail to hear her. Stella shook her head at this idea. ‘I’ll get help,’ she quavered.
The bolt slid slowly. The door jerked open. Marian Williams staggered out and toppled into Stella’s arms. Shorter by many inches than Stella’s six feet, and well built, Stella had to rest against a basin to keep her balance.
Eventually Williams let go and tottered to a sink. Stella steeled herself against the possibility that the administrator was going to vomit. This she could tolerate less than a corpse.
The woman twisted on the tap and ran water over her hands and mopped her brow. ‘Thank you.’ She didn’t look at Stella, she returned to the lavatory and came out patting her face dry with a wad of toilet paper.
‘What happened?’ Stella leant on the handle of her bucket wringer set.
‘Everything went black. I fainted. Next thing I heard you.’
Stella snapped into action. ‘I’ll get help. Someone must do first aid here.’
‘That’s me.’ Marian Williams pushed the sodden paper into a swing bin by the door. As she did so, her cardigan sleeve rode up.
‘You’re hurt!’ Stella jerked the mop handle at a dark bruise that merged into a graze on the administrator’s forearm.
‘It doesn’t hurt.’ Williams regarded the wound as if it was not her own.
‘It’s shock.’ Stella was brisk. ‘Come back to your office, I’ll get you a cup of tea with sugar.’
They sat either side of Marian Williams’s desk with hot drinks that Stella had fetched from the canteen. Marian Williams rested her injured arm on her lap and drank unsteadily with her left. The bruise was livid crimson, overlaid with darker marks in a row that made Stella think of fingers.
‘That was some knock. You were lucky not to break it.’ Despite herself Stella was relieved she had not cleaned the toilets before the accident, it cleared her of responsibility. Core to Clean Slate’s induction was a warning to staff not to over-polish floors or leave them damp without a warning cone.
‘Lucky not to break what?’ Detective Chief Superintendent Cashman breezed in.
‘Mrs Williams fell in the ladies’ toilets.’ Too late Stella realized the woman did not want Cashman to know. Tugging at her sleeve, she was concentrating on her computer screen.
‘It’s nothing, sir. I’m fine, thanks to Ms Darnell.’
‘Let me be the judge of that.’ Cashman towered over the desk. When Marian Williams rolled up her sleeve he gave a whistle. ‘You are going home, no argument.’
‘It looks worse than it is.’
‘I insist.’ He rocked on his heels. ‘It is as bad as it looks. What happened?’
‘I thought you were on holiday.’
‘I was hauled in last night. A fatality – as Stella knows: she called it in. Did you do that here?’
Stella wondered if he was thinking about compensation, but Cashman was old school like Terry, he didn’t work that way. What you saw was what you got.
‘It was my fault.’ Marian Williams shook her head. ‘What fatality?’ She frowned at Stella as if she were responsible for his curtailed holiday, which, in a way, she was. Marian Williams had not heard about Amanda Hampson’s death. Stella was suddenly sure that the woman did not like to be a step behind. Especially if the one in front was the cleaner.
‘It’s on Surrey’s patch,’ Cashman said. ‘Near Kew station. They got me in because we know the victim. It’s that Mrs Hampson who, I’ve just heard, you handled like the pro you are last week. Stella and a colleague had the nasty experience of finding her.’ He sniffed and glanced at Stella. ‘Actually Stell, I never asked what you and your friend were doing there, better tick that one off!’
Stella felt her brain empty of words. She should have anticipated this, but despite her misgivings about the police she did rely on Cashman treating her as one of their own and so had not prepared an answer. Her rescue came from the least expected place.
‘Were you passing, perhaps?’ Marian Williams wheeled herself to the printer where a paper lay in the output tray. She did not look at Stella.
‘I was, yes.’ Marian Williams had inadvertently saved her. ‘My colleague does – did her cleaning and he noticed lights on and the door was open. I didn’t know her myself.’ Marian would wonder why Stella hadn’t mentioned this after Mrs Hampson’s visit to the office.
‘It’ll need processing.’ Marian Williams snatched up her mouse.
‘Go home, Marian!’ Cashman clapped his hands. ‘We’re on it.’
Stella broke another cardinal Clean Slate rule and questioned a client – and it was the police – about their business: ‘Any idea what happened?’
‘No suspicious circs. It’s looking like she tripped on the path. Money on the tox report says high blood-alcohol levels. There was an empty whisky bottle in the bin and a tumbler with whisky dregs that had lipstick on the rim. No sign of an intruder. As you know, Stella, the door was open. Neighbours heard nothing. One said it wasn’t the first time she’d forgotten to lock up. Another implied she wasn’t the full shilling, but that was based on that temple thingy in her garden.’ He was pacing the room; he stopped by the door. ‘Marian, before you shoot off, can you give me the heads up on what Mrs Hampson wanted when she came?’
The administrator was staring at her screen, showing no signs of shooting off. If Stella were she, she would disapprove of Cashman involving the cleaner. Cashman behaved as if she were an extension of Terry. Stella found herself liking this notion.
‘She had found out Hampson had his advanced driving licence. I said we knew.’
Cashman puffed out his cheeks. ‘Got to feel sorry for her. She was scraping that barrel.’ He rocked on his heels. ‘Suicide’s not ruled out, though there’s no note.’
‘What about Joel Evans’s killer?’ Marian Williams got up from her desk. ‘Matthew Benson has to be expedited. I’m fine now.’
Stella had sympathy. Jackie had once packed her off to the dentist in the middle of a crisis. Work was the best cure.
Cashman strolled to the filing cabinets and leant on one. ‘Benson’s going nowhere: we’ve got his passport. You are! Watch rubbish daytime telly and return fresh as a daisy.’ Cashman thrust his hands in his pockets.
Marian Williams turned to Stella and said formally, ‘Thank you for your help.’
‘It was nothing.’ Stella squeezed her empty tea beaker until it cracked. ‘I hope you feel better soon.’ Marian had gone.
‘She’s a diamond.’ Cashman pushed away from the cabinet. ‘Here week in, week out. Marian’s missed one day in the last twenty-five years.’
Stella whisked her cloth at the vacated desk. ‘I suppose you need Marian to keep up with processing traffic-accident figures.’ This was the nearest she would go to asking Cashman outright about Terry’s streets. And then, conscious of the non sequitur: ‘Like that boy Marian mentioned.’
‘I wish! We don’t analyse traffic incidents. They’re a second cousin to crime. Even if we did, we don’t have the resources to follow up. That was one of Terry’s beefs.’ Suddenly he was efficient; rubbing his hands together, he crossed to the door. ‘Stella, you manage people. Did she look OK to you?’
Stella didn’t think of herself as managing people. ‘Yes. Well, apart from the fall.’ So Terry had been bothered about traffic incidents.
‘Lucky it was you that found her. Terry’s daughter can do no wrong! Your dad was a god to her. I’m a poor substitute!’
Alone in the office, Stella could not wipe away the sight of Mrs Hampson bleeding on the stones. She should call Jack. Terry would have checked on his team after a trauma. Martin Cashman had sent a key staff member home because of a bruise. Stella had no idea about managing people.
When she returned to the toilets it was after eight and the station was busy. She wouldn’t clean with women coming in and out; clients resented their privacy being disturbed.
She did not know what made her go into the cubicle where Marian had fallen, lock the door and sit on the closed toilet lid. Her knees were an inch from the door, the tiled walls close to her shoulders. There was little room to move, what with a plastic bin for sanitary towels, another Gina-Ware product. The porcelain toilet-paper dispenser was inset flush into the tiles. It had not caused the injury.
Marian Williams was not a small woman so it was freakish that she had hurt herself in the tight space. Bad luck that she got such a drastic bruise; she must bruise easily.
Someone entered the adjacent toilet. Stella hurried out, wheeling the bucket-wringer ahead of her like a child’s toy.
At the lights on Shepherd’s Bush Green, Stella recalled Cashman’s prediction that Mrs Hampson’s death was an accident fuelled by alcohol. It was as unlikely as Marian’s injury. Terry said there was no such thing as an accident. For once he was wrong. Odd things did happen.
The lights went to green. Mulling on Jack, Stella concluded that if she rang to offer him support, he would be embarrassed. She would be.
Some things were best unsaid.