62
Saturday, 5 May 2012
Jack stood in Amanda Hampson’s sitting room and listened. Apart from the ticking of the quartz clock on her bureau, the sounds were external. Traffic on the South Circular, an aeroplane’s muffled roar and the chugging of a District line train leaving Kew Gardens station right on time.
His phone rang. Clean Slate.
‘Hello, love, Jackie here, is it all right to speak?’
‘Always to you, Jacqueline!’ He laughed happily.
‘Stop it! You’re at that woman’s house, aren’t you? I’m checking you’re not frightened.’
‘Yes and no.’
‘Say if it’s spooky. I can come out there.’
‘It’s fine. Stella offered too.’ Jack looked about the room. It was horribly empty. Amanda’s absence was as large as her presence. He was suddenly less confident. ‘What about you?’
‘Me? Oh same old… although did I tell you about that woman at the police station? Sent me back, I was a girl again.’ She cackled.
Keen now to keep her on the line, he encouraged Jackie to tell him the whole story.
The memory of the night Jack stood in the garden watching Amanda Hampson through the window made him sad. She was not a True Host, but he was wrong to dismiss her. Grubby though she had let her house become after Charlie Hampson died, she had created a home such as Jack had yearned for most of his life.
He regretted that while Amanda was alive he had written off her theory that her husband had been murdered as unresolved grief. He had let her down. The two cases had converged. A man was avenging children killed on roads by careless drivers. One of those drivers was Charlie Hampson. The obvious person was Michael Thornton’s father, but Lucie said he was dead. Who else cared that the boy had died?
The answer was obvious. Terry Darnell.
Jack needed air. He plunged outside and slammed the French doors behind him. He blundered on to the lawn. Vaguely he registered the grass was cut, the weeds gone. Stella had sent in her garden crew and made it better than when Amanda was alive. Stella made things better.
Frustrated by the lack of action, had Terry taken the law into his own hands? Gamekeeper turned poacher. Jack rubbed his face. No. It could not be. No.
His tiny bead of doubt was not, could not be, to do with Stella’s father. Terry had been a clean copper. Cashman had told Stella the man was his role model. A respected detective, he was not a vigilante. If Terry were the killer he would not have left the folder out for Stella to find. He was too clever for that. Jack let himself breathe.
He looked back into the sitting room. Something was different, even allowing for police and forensics and the urgency of the ambulance crew. The Turkish mat was wrinkled and the dining chairs had been shoved aside to make a gangway for the paramedics to bring Amanda’s body through. The curtain ties hung loose. A cushion lay on the carpet and the occasional table that Amanda kept folded was by the sofa. Jack avoided Charlie Hampson’s cold sardonic stare.
Papers lay on the open bureau, utility bills and junk mail. Nothing about Charlie Hampson’s death or the boy he had fatally injured. Amanda had tidied her file away. The door to the room was slightly open. Any minute she would sail in with coffee, expounding some newly gleaned fact.
‘Bring that table over for your drink, there’s a love.’
She only put the occasional table out for visitors. Neither he nor Stella had moved it. No one else had need to. The table was folded by the door when he last cleaned.
Amanda had had a visitor. She had not put the table away after her guest had gone because by then she was dead.
Jack put his hands to his face. His eyes were wet and he dashed at them with the cuffs of his coat. He paced the flags where they had found Amanda. The stones were uneven, lifted by tree roots and cracked by frost. His shoe caught the edge of a slab where the path dipped. That night it had rained, making the paving slippery. It would have been easy to fall in the dark. But Amanda wasn’t clumsy; she moved like a dancer.
Martin Cashman had told Stella that Amanda’s blood alcohol level was 0.29, which he said would have likely caused ‘severe motor impairment’. Lucille May dying that way would not surprise him, but he did not see Amanda as much of a drinker.
The meditation temple was unlocked. Jack went in. Amanda had asserted that, being circular, it didn’t need cleaning, but dried leaves had gathered on the door mat and scattered on the marble floor. An oval table inlaid with a tableau of a faun peeping out from between spindly tree trunks stood beside a maroon-covered divan grey with dust. White walls, sheer and sweeping, rose to a glass dome in the ceiling, interrupted by a stained-glass porthole, the only window.
Amanda believed her temple was unsullied by earthly cares and, despite her having died on its threshold, Jack did feel a profound calm. In a way Terry had taken the law into his own hands when he had left a file of photographs for his daughter to deal with.
A bloodstain on the divan where the ambulance crew had lain her down had darkened to brown. He could have reassured Amanda it would come out with a good scrub. Gingerly Jack sat down.
Amanda Hampson had been murdered by the man who had killed the car drivers, including her husband. The killer was not infirm or dead. Amanda had not knocked down a child; she had discovered something that made her a threat. From that moment her death warrant was sealed.
‘Lucille bloody Ball. I love Lucy, I don’t think. Making sheep’s eyes at Charlie even when he was dead. She’s got me to answer to now!’
Amanda’s whisper bounced around the curving walls. ‘She’s got me to answer to now!’
That last day Amanda had declared she had proof that her husband was murdered. She told the police administrator that Charlie had passed his advanced driving test. A minor fact that had convinced Jack Amanda was kidding herself.
‘I have the missing jigsaw piece. The murderer has underestimated me.’
Amanda had got short shrift at the station so she rang Lucille May. This was hitting rock bottom: Amanda disliked the woman, was annoyed she found her husband attractive, even in a painting and so beyond Lucie’s charms. Jack, bent on finishing his shift on time, dwelling on Stella’s blue folder and preoccupied with the streets in the attic, had paid Amanda scant attention.
Stella believed Lucie May was hiding something. Surely Lucie was not a killer. Amanda could have overcome her with a swipe. If anyone killed anyone it would be the other way around. Jack sat back and surveyed the domed space. He willed the walls to give up their secret and whisper the killer’s name to him. The leaves on the floor stirred in an imperceptible breeze.
A hardback book lay on the sill in the porthole window. He expected it to be on mediation or Yoga so was surprised to find a history of motor racing over the last half a century. Not very meditative.
He had seen it before. The book slipped from his grasp and landed on the tiles, pages splaying. It settled on a chapter about the death in Germany of a racing driver called Jim Clark in 1968. The name meant nothing to Jack. He put it back on the sill. The bookmark lay amongst the leaves. It was a ripped section of a letter from the Parkinson’s Disease Society requesting a donation. He was about to replace it, guessing the Jim Clark page was the place when he realized with a shock that there was no point. Amanda would not be reading on. Amanda wasn’t interested in motor racing. Jack turned the letter over. There was handwriting was on the back.
The door creaked. He jumped and looked out of the porthole. There was no one on the path.
‘15th March, 11 p.m., Marquis Way W6. Porphyrion. ￡￡￡!!’
The day Charlie Hampson was killed. The day that, had he lived, Michael Thornton would have been fifty.
Amanda had this book when she was leaving for the police station. Jack, busy with cream cleanser on the bath, hadn’t given it a thought.
‘I’ve won, Jack! Tomorrow we’ll celebrate. Now Inspector Whatsit will bloody listen.’
Inspector ‘Whatsit’ was Terry. Amanda didn’t know he was dead. If she had remembered his name, Jack could have told her. If she had shown him this note, scribbled, he guessed, by Charlie taking down a phone message, Jack would have believed her because he had seen Terry’s blue folder. He would have assured her that, although retired, Terry Darnell was building a case. He would have told her that he was working with Darnell’s daughter on the case. If he had told Amanda this, she might still be alive.
The night he died, Charlie Hampson was meeting someone at 11 p.m. on Marquis Way. The administrator had said the police already knew Charlie had the advanced driving licence. Not knowing about Terry’s photographs or the green glass, the administrator had tactfully dismissed her. Amanda had not shown her the Parkinson’s Disease letter, she would have wanted to wait to see Martin Cashman.
Jack thought back to his conversation with Jackie. The signs were beginning to make sense. He rang Stella. No signal penetrated the thick walls of the temple.