63
Saturday, 5 May 2012
It was five past six when Stella stowed everything into her van. She looked around to wave. David had gone and his door was closed. She stopped the van around the corner from Aldensley Road, reluctant to arrive at Dukes Meadows early.
She must phone Jack. He had not called her, which probably meant all was well. It could also mean it was not. She was keying in his number when the phone rang.
‘Jack! Did you find anything?’
‘Sorry to disappoint you, darling. It’s not the lovely Jack.’ A corncrake laugh. ‘It’s Lucie-Lou.’
‘Hello.’ Stella was about to ask how the journalist got her number but, of course, since the interview she had had it. May had worked out who she was, she probably matched the number when Stella had called to fix the appointment at the house. The woman had not lost her investigative touch after all.
‘Jack wanted to know about the people who lived here. That boy’s a sweety, makes you want to do anything for him, doesn’t he?’
On principle Stella was about to disagree, but could not.
‘Between you and me, if any post came here for the Thorntons, I’d be a fool to tell you – grist to the mill – but nothing has. They’re dead and gone.’ Nevertheless she gave Stella the Thorntons’ forwarding address.
Stella dashed it down in her diary in the space for today’s date. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she didn’t trust Lucille May. She hadn’t liked her when the woman rang to interview her and she had been right, the resulting piece had little in common with their conversation. There was something May wasn’t telling them.
‘If you find the Thorntons, don’t be forgetting it’s my story.’ The journalist rang off.
Stella knew the address. The posh house name was misleading. The building was derelict and awaiting planning permission to become a free school. Since she couldn’t see David, she would pop along there after seeing Marian, even though it was a dead end; the Thorntons, it seemed, were lost in the mists of time. If the killer was still alive they were no nearer to finding out his identity.
She read David’s directions to Dukes Meadows. His talking about the murder there had made her uneasy. Since Terry’s death she had entered a dark world populated with victims and villains and, with the business with the printout, had become one herself. With time to kill. Stella tapped the murdered prostitute’s name into Google.
Elizabeth Figg’s was body found on 17 June 1959, two months after Michael Thornton’s birthday. The young woman was one of several murdered in West London in the fifties and sixties. The case was called the Hammersmith Murders. The killer, dubbed, as David had said, Jack the Stripper because he left the bodies half naked, was never caught. Stella sat up. One of the case files in Terry’s basement was labelled ‘Hammersmith Murders’. Was he investigating this too? The file was under the sink counter, out of sight. More likely, a collector of unsolved crimes, Terry could not let anything pass. Amazing that David remembered it. His first body, he said. Like Terry he had not forgotten. Thinking of David, she wondered where he would be going on a Saturday night. She stopped the thought.
There was a picture of the murdered woman. Printed on the front page of the Star newspaper, thirty-six hours after the body was discovered, it had the caption ‘Murdered girl: Yard issue picture. Do you know this Miss X?’ Elizabeth Figg gazed impassively into the distance. It took Stella some moments to realise she was looking at a corpse. She closed her phone and dropped it in her rucksack.
When Stella reached the last line of David’s directions and parked by the boathouse at Dukes Meadows, she called Jack.
She had no signal.