46
Wednesday, 2 May 2012
‘Where are you going?’ The question resounded in the tiled tunnel.
Above on the Great West Road, traffic rumbled despite it being the first hours of the morning. If Jack shouted for help, no one would hear. There was no one to hear. His tongue like leather, he managed, ‘Where are you going?’ Stupid to be smart with strangers, he really was losing his touch.
The figure moved into one of the watery pools of light and yanked back the hood.
‘I saw you coming out of the school on King Street, near that fountain where I picked you up on Monday night. You promised to stop this, whatever it is.’
Stella. Jack slumped against tiles. Water ran down his face; he rubbed it with a palm. ‘It’s not what you think,’ he protested weakly.
‘It’s exactly what I think. More to the point it’s against the law!’ Stella, bulky in her anorak, glared at him. The words tumbled out.
‘That person following me is a True Host. I—’
‘What exactly is a “True Host”?’
‘A murderer. There’s another sort: I call them Hosts. They might kill but haven’t yet. I have to stop them. You’d do the same.’
This was true. Stella always tried to do what she called the right thing.
‘I don’t break into houses. That’s illegal!’
Water splattered from an overflow pipe. Then came the rumble of a stream of traffic that had cleared the lights at the Hogarth roundabout. The familiar sounds calmed him. Perhaps Stella too, for in a softer tone she said, ‘I’ll take you back to my flat to dry off. Hot milk and honey?’
She must think he had gone mad. Perhaps he had.
‘I can’t.’ He was beyond the world where curling up on Stella’s sofa with a hot drink could happen.
‘There must be lots of killers walking free. It’s a horrible thought but it’s not up to you to stop them. Nor can you.’ Stella was her practical self. ‘Jack, it’s over. You must let it go. Move on.’
‘Like you have with Terry?’ The words had slipped out. She was off, heading out of the tunnel on the south side. He felt scared at what he had started but couldn’t stop. ‘Isn’t playing detective just a way of refusing to see the truth?’
‘It’s clearing up. It’s what I do.’ Stella quickened her pace.
Jack chased after her. ‘You could forget the blue folder. You worry at it like a terrier. You go on about Terry never being off the clock.’ He jumped the cracks in the paving without Stella seeing, although she would know. ‘Terry’s life was refracted through a dark glass of crimes and potential crimes. He saw crime everywhere. But you don’t. What if they’re just snaps he took for the hell of it?’
‘They are not “just snaps”,’ Stella growled. ‘And me trying to understand what they are is very different from you stalking people and spying on them in their homes. That’s sick!’ She stopped suddenly and Jack banged into her.
‘It’s not stalking. I never follow women. Hosts are men!’ He had never lied to Stella before. They were standing on the edge of the kerb to the Great West Road. It might have been an abyss.
Jack should never have told Stella anything about this side of himself. What he dreaded had come true. She didn’t like him. Yet he was in too deep. ‘My Host has killed. I can’t leave it. It’s a calling.’
‘The only calling you should do is to the police,’ Stella quipped. She stepped away from the kerb.
‘Stella…’ Jack stopped, looked at her.
‘What?’ She met his gaze.
‘This Host is a woman and, yes, I did follow her. It’s the first time. I never follow women. My Hosts are usually men. It was my Host at Terry’s door.’ He felt himself redden. He had brought trouble to Stella, trouble she didn’t need.
‘I meant to say. It was Marian, the administrator who works for Martin Cashman. She came to bring me flowers.’
‘Flowers?’ Jack echoed. ‘Why would she do that?’
‘Why not?’ Stella bristled. ‘Actually, they were probably really for Terry. She’s in love with— Oh, never mind, it’s a long story. Main thing is, you weren’t being stalked.’
‘You have to listen. My Host is dangerous. I was following her, but all the time she’s been following me. It’s too late to get out.’ He mumbled the last words.
‘Marian comes to check on the house.’
‘You were in danger. So was she. Warn her if she’s coming again.’
‘She would think I was off my head.’ Stella started walking, head down against the insistent rain.
Furnivall Gardens, dark with dense foliage, was on the right. The rain, a clinging mist, blurred the headlights coming off Hammersmith flyover; the passing lights made phantoms of lamp standards and their shadows rotated around the bases like hands of a clock.
Stella was keeping her distance. He was losing her in all senses. Furtively he glanced back. The pavement glistened treacle-black; there was no one there. Stella increased her pace and he had to jog to catch up.
‘Where were you going?’ She had never questioned him so closely before.
‘I identified more streets.’ It was true, once he had shaken off his Host it was why he was out, he reminded himself.
‘Without asking me to come.’ Stella had no side to her. If she was hurt she couldn’t help but show it.
‘I supposed you’d be in bed.’
‘I got up.’
‘You’re out without telling me.’ The old trick of turning tables was beneath him but Jack blundered on, ‘I’ve called you several times over the last days, you haven’t answered.’ There was no satisfaction in hitting home.
‘I just texted you,’ Stella said.
He had turned his phone off at the school. He took it out of his pocket and switched it on. It throbbed with an incoming text.
Where are you?
‘You haven’t got the folder. How were you going to tell if the streets were right without me?’ Stella put up her hood. He couldn’t see her face.
Jack couldn’t tell her about the streets in the attic. Hosts were bad enough.
‘What have you found?’ Her voice was muffled by her hood. She hadn’t asked how he had found them. If she did, he would tell her.
‘Three more streets. Like our other ones, all in run-down areas. Two are dead ends and the third doesn’t lead anywhere useful. Two have CCTV now, but may not have had when whatever happened happened.’
‘You went there?’ Stella didn’t miss a thing. He had the sudden urge to hug her. His secret life lay between them; he couldn’t cross the divide.
‘It’s possible to go on Street View.’ He slalomed the truth.
‘Three more streets than the ones we know about? Jack, let’s not make things more complicated. Stick to the blue folder.’
‘I might be wrong,’ he conceded. Sure he was not.
‘You’re probably right.’
Truce. Jack let himself breathe. He could count on Stella to play fair. It was himself he was less sure of.
Ahead the flyover rose higher and higher; when they reached the leafy cul de sac where Stella had parked the van, it cut out the sky. Jack scanned the stanchions for his Host. Surely this time she had been able to overtake? Perhaps it was better that Stella believed the person at the door was her new friend. He had not told her that Hosts never let themselves be seen. The administrator was not the only woman passing Terry’s house.
Stella unlocked the van and Jack hopped into the passenger side. Once she was in, he locked the doors.
‘Be careful, Jack.’ Stella started the motor and the fan blasted out faintly warm air laced with lemon air freshener.
He wiped his eyes with his sleeve and, pushing back his fringe, scrubbed at his hair with the tail of his coat. ‘Always,’ he said brightly. Stella missed nothing.
‘Where first?’
Their altercation had upset him and he couldn’t remember the names. He shut his eyes and concentrated on the streets in the attic, his torch searching out the miniature signs on buildings and walls, and from far away came the tune that soothed his four-year-old self. In a lilting voice, to the melody of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, he crooned:
‘Mafeking Av-en-ue
Tolworth Street, Spelling Way
Mafeking Av-en-ue,
That’s where we’re sure to go.’
‘Tell me normally.’ Stella reversed the van up and executed a three-point turn.
‘Mafeking Avenue, Tolworth Street…’ Jack sang.
‘David Lauren!’
‘Tolworth Street, Spelling Way… Who?’
‘The man Marian Williams said crashed his car on Tolworth Street. In 1989.’
‘The photographs are private.’ It was their secret.
‘Keep your coat on, I didn’t tell her. Although you suggested that I should. She saw a photograph when she was at Terry’s.’
‘’Spelling Way is closer than Mafeking Avenue or Tolworth Street.’
‘What’s the reference number?’
‘It’s not in the file. I suspect Terry’s collection wasn’t definitive and he knew it wasn’t. Spelling Way is long and straight. And Mafeking Avenue is number two.’
‘Tolworth Street is number four: there’s one photograph. Marian said the man who died there had knocked down a child. A pattern is forming here. Let’s go to What’s-it Avenue. We should do the ones we have evidence for first.’
Jack typed the name into the van’s satnav. ‘Twenty-five minutes away.’
At Hammersmith Broadway Stella beat the junction lights and enquired in a ‘by the way’ tone that did not fool Jack, ‘Where are Terry’s gloves?’
‘They’re together.’ They were in Colin’s wardrobe, but he couldn’t tell her this. ‘They’re safe.’ A mistake. Stella didn’t believe that objects had feelings. She wasn’t worried his hands were cold; she was fretting he had lost her dad’s gloves. No present came without strings. He could not mollify her by reassuring her the gloves had each other and were safe from his Host.
‘Your hands must be cold,’ Stella said. ‘Here, take mine.’
‘’S OK.’ She could always surprise him.
‘I was with David Barlow.’
‘Say again?
‘Last Friday, when you called. I’ve been out with him twice.’
‘The client with the peculiar job?’
‘It’s deep cleaning, it’s not peculiar.’
Jack contemplated his bare hands, palms uppermost as if in supplication. They seemed not to be his own. He stopped himself thinking.
They drove on in silence.
Curving Juliet balconies of blue-painted metal were a clumsy attempt to soften the implacable square building. Stella counted lights in tall windows, many uncurtained, in some the shadows of some occupants passing over walls and ceilings. If an accident took place here tonight, there would be no shortage of witnesses. Unlike the other streets, Mafeking Avenue wasn’t an ideal place to choose if, like David Lauren had supposedly done, you wanted to kill yourself – help was at hand if you botched the job. More evidence, if they needed it, that the fatal collisions were neither suicides or accidents. On the other side of the road, tingeing the wet pavement orange, was the garish neon of a Sainsbury’s Local. Despite what Jack said, Mafeking Avenue was not like the other streets.
‘This is hardly derelict,’ she said.
Jack nodded assent. ‘Maybe the satnav’s faulty.’
Stella stretched back into the van and got out the London street map from the door pocket. ‘We cut through Melrose Street and went left.’ She indicated the page. ‘This is the right place.’
The steady rain made the lamplight a fuzzy ball that sent a ghostly glow over the frontage of a graphic design company; giant black and white letters in different fonts appeared to float free of the glass. Through the mizzle sinister shapes resolved against the sky and Stella recognized the twin turrets of Wormwood Scrubs Prison. Terry had grown up near here in Primula Street where one of the dead drivers, Paul Vickery, had lived. This disparate fact might have first sharpened her dad’s curiosity. Several men had smashed into trees – counting a telegraph pole as a tree – on lonely streets. Terry had taken his hunch to the grave, but he had left her some vital clues. She would not let him down.
‘This place is bristling with CCTV and there’s a speed bump.’ She clamped the blue folder inside her anorak to protect it from the wet.
Jack didn’t reply. It hadn’t escaped her that he’d been subdued since she’d mentioned David Barlow. Heedless of the weather or of possible traffic, he strode out to the middle of the road and, muttering, looked about him. She caught the words:
‘He’s got this wrong, it’s still a warehouse. No shop either… won’t like it, but I’ll have to say…’
‘Who are you talking about?’ Jack was being deliberately obtuse. Not waiting for an answer Stella went over to the flats. A plaque was set into the wall. She was about to read it when Jack called out.
‘Look!’ He was pointing up the road.
That was more his old self. Relieved, Stella followed the line of his finger. A tall plane tree stood about twenty yards away.
‘This beauty is at least a hundred years old.’ Jack circled the base of the trunk. ‘Here we are.’ He swept his hands over the bark. ‘It was some impact. This is at least twenty years old, but the scar is still there – see the faint alteration in the patina?’
A scar made by a vehicle travelling at speed, Terry would say. Stella bent down. Roots pushed up terracotta blocks fanning out from the base. They were new: in Terry’s picture chunky cobbles made it look like a Dickensian industrial street. She examined the bricks.
‘One is out of line.’
‘Imagine this is a chasm leading to the centre of the earth.’ Jack poked his finger into a gap between the bricks. ‘If you were a beetle.’
‘Not now, Jack.’ Although Jack being a beetle was better than stalking murderers or saying nothing about David Barlow.
Jack shoved his coat cuffs up. ‘Hold one side. When I say, pull as hard as you can.’
Stella clasped the brick, digging her nails into the crumbling mortar between the bricks. Their hands touched.
‘One, two, three,’ Jack gasped.
Stella felt a grating as it shifted.
‘We mustn’t let go!’ Jack let go. The brick slipped back. ‘I can’t get a purchase,’ he panted. ‘I give up.’
‘Don’t do that. Go again.’ Stella gripped the brick, her hands like a vice. Clenching her teeth, she tugged. The stone lifted enough for Jack to shove his fingers into the gap. Together they wrenched the brick out and clear of the hole. Jack placed it against a tree root.
He whistled. ‘You are tenacious.’
Stella was gratified by his comment; he was thawing. They were in this together.
She directed her torch into the hole and revealed a boiling mass of woodlice.
‘Yes… there we are. Sorry, everyone.’ Jack scrabbled amongst them and piecemeal took out what looked like dirty stones. He arranged them on the bricks. One glinted green in the torchlight.
‘We must put this back for the woodlice.’ Jack picked up the brick. ‘No one’s disturbed their habitat for decades. Not since the fatal…’
‘What do they mean?’ Stella felt the same unease as when they were on the other streets, despite there being people nearby. In the time they had been there no cars had passed.
‘It’s the opposite of taking an artefact from a murder scene for a trophy.’
‘He’s taunting the police.’
‘I don’t think the police were meant to know. He was staking a claim. Another for his collection. The glass quantifies his achievement. Like you with your spreadsheets: you collect and file facts towards an objective.’
‘Hardly the same,’ Stella snapped. She had not thought Jack noticed what she did. ‘Dead people. Some collection.’ She got to her feet.
‘Woodlice have fourteen joints. They curl themselves into a ball as a defence mechanism.’ Jack funnelled the stones into a plastic bag ‘We’ve panicked them – if a crustacean can be panicked – but they’ll be OK if no one disturbs them again.’
‘Shame woodlice can’t talk. They could tell us what happened here,’ Stella remarked more to herself than Jack. Sheltering under the spreading branches she shone her torch on to the folder and prised apart the damp pages. Water had penetrated the plastic files. She couldn’t risk damage. She hurried back to the van and laid the folder on the passenger seat.
As Jack had supposed, the photographs referenced ‘2’ and ‘2a’ matched Mafeking Avenue. The tree was in the second of two shots. Terry had shot it in the winter when the branches were bare and stark; now it was lush with green leaves. The apartment block was in the picture; despite what Jack had said earlier, Terry had known it was there. She looked again. It was a shell. A defunct warehouse with gaping holes for delivery of goods. These were picture windows done up with fancy balconies. The slogan ‘George Davis Is Innocent’ was sprayed across the bricks.
‘I assumed that Terry compiled this collection over a short period of time.’ Jack opened the passenger door. ‘But I’d say his suspicions were aroused years ago. No one was living in here when our fatal accident took place.’
Stella got out her grid. Meticulously she wrote in Mafeking Avenue and Terry’s photo references. Maybe Jack was right. She did like to collect and quantify.
‘They live about two years, although some have made it to four,’ Jack got in. ‘The woodlice witnesses to the crash were ancestors of these ones. Judging by the age of the scar, it’s like the ice age for us.’
‘The killer might return to the scene of the crime. He could be here now.’ Stella checked her mirrors. Although the street was quiet, he could be out there. She could see a salt bin a few metres away: a good hiding place.
‘I doubt it. He takes no chances. He’s a collector. He’s concerned with increasing his collection, not with playing cat and mouse with the police.’
‘He went back to Marquis Way. That was a risk. He wouldn’t know the police don’t analyse traffic collisions and that someone had not spotted a pattern.’
‘Terry did.’ Jack scrutinized the stones in the bag. ‘Maybe you should talk to your new friend.’
‘Meaning?’ Stella started the engine. She knew what he meant.
‘She’ll know her way around their systems. Not much she can’t find out. Bet she eats and sleeps her job. You said she instantly recalled the facts about Tolworth Street. She gave you flowers; she might want to help.’
‘It’s Terry she wanted to help.’ Marian would not have bothered with her if she were not Terry Darnell’s daughter. ‘A moment ago you wanted this to be our secret.’
‘Don’t say why you’re asking.’
‘Marian’s not stupid.’ Marian was law-abiding and hard-working and Stella respected that. She would not ask her to bend the rules. Jack’s concept of right and wrong was hazy. Although recently her own morality had been up for grabs. She had not yet found a way to return the green form. She did not say that unwittingly Marian had already helped them. Stella put ‘Tolworth Street’ into the satnav.
‘After three hundred yards turn left.’
‘So far we know at least three men died on desolate streets at night and the green glass leads us to be sure they were murdered. The killer marked the sites with seven green chips of glass.’ She tilted her head; a car behind them had its headlights on full beam, the light bright in the wing and rear mirrors. ‘We don’t know why and we don’t know how.’ Stella accelerated.
‘Slow down or we’ll have a crash.’ Jack was gripping the handle fixed above the door frame.
‘There’s nothing coming.’ A train driver, he must be used to being in control.
‘If someone stepped off the kerb, you’d have nowhere to go.’
Stella braked. Jack screamed.
‘That’s it!’ She cut the engine. ‘He stepped out and they swerved and smashed into the trunks. No cameras, no pedestrians; no witnesses. He walked away. The events put down as tragic accidents. No one noticed that the dead drivers had all run over children. No one saw the bigger picture.’
Jack grabbed her arm. ‘Brilliant, Stella!’
‘Although how could he be certain they’d take avoidance action? Some people are slow to react.’
‘A potential flaw. I suspect he courts the risk. Like Russian roulette. Later he returns and buries the glass. Job done.’
‘Or he buries the pieces before the event. A marker, a promise to himself.’
‘Nice one. That’s thinking like me!’ Jack rattled the glass. ‘Although the forensics crawling all over the scene might have found them. A risk too far.’
‘Must have been afterwards. No one would draw any significance from the stones. Even though they are at every crash site.’ Stella started the van and pulled out. ‘No one analyses the data. Besides, as we know, they were not found.’
‘He executed the perfect murder over and over again.’ Jack put the stones in his coat pocket with the others.
‘He’s pure evil.’ Stella checked her mirror. No cars now. The street was dark.
‘No such thing as evil. It’s the deed, not the person who is evil.’
‘If you commit evil you are evil. Wait a moment.’ Stella slowed the van, but didn’t brake this time. ‘I know what it is.’
‘What what is?’
‘The glass. It’s aggregate, the jade variety. David used it to decorate his wife’s grave. It saves weeding.’
‘You have reached your destination.’