65
Saturday, 5 May 2012
Jack was practised at entering his Host’s home. He removed the window glass, insinuated himself inside, unlocked the back door, went out and replaced the glass.
He half expected she would be there to greet him.
He ran swiftly up the staircase to his dormitory. The bed covers were as he had left them and, poking in the back of the wardrobe, his biscuit tin of trophies was untouched, the contents intact. He did an audit: the lock of hair, his Host collection – photographs held with an elastic band. A wooden clothes peg from a house he had wanted to call home. No time to go down memory lane. Jack shivered and drew his coat around him. Time to find the street atlas and go. For the second time he tried Lucie May’s number and got no answer.
In a Host’s house he was far away from Stella’s clean bright world. Until now he had thought he could move between both worlds, but this school was like an exile from which he feared there was no return.
They had six bags of glass chips; each group of seven represented a life.
He laid the glass from Michael Thornton’s grave on the candlewick counterpane. There were seven pieces. He had scooped them up. What were the chances of there being seven? It was a sign. He wrote the location on the bag and fitted them into the tin. A temporary measure, for the glass was not strictly speaking a trophy. He put the tin in the wardrobe and sat on Colin’s bed.
He checked his phone. No voicemail from Stella. He called her.
‘I am sorry I can’t take your call…’ He was about to close the line when a thought occurred: ‘Hey, Stell. If you see her, ask your friend exactly what Amanda Hampson said when she came to the police station. Tell her why if you have to. We need to meet, there’ve been developments.’
Diffused light filtered into the room through the grimy panes. He would like to clean them, but without permission it was rude.
The old man would be expecting him. Jack had come to value his evenings working companionably on the streets of Hammersmith. He would tell him about the garage hoarding already being in place on King Street and that Wilson’s Warehouse had been converted into flats. The man would not be pleased.
He would be sad to go. He wouldn’t say he was going. Cowardly, but he couldn’t do goodbyes. Jack wandered across to the next bed.
Steve.
The sky darkened; a gust of wind buffeted the window sashes. He shrugged deeper into his coat. The second bed belonged to Bill, the third to Jimmy. The names were familiar. They were common names; he worked with a Jimmy and a Bill. He had never met a Colin.
Steve. Stevie. Stephen. Jack grabbed the iron bedhead. Stephen Parsons!
The name on the headstone in St Peter’s graveyard. The grave his Host had visited. She was a True Host! She had killed the boy. He took deep breaths. Stella would tell him to think logically.
When he had told Stella about the article he had found at Amanda’s he’d asked her if the name rang a bell. It had not. Jack could not think why he knew it. Stephen Parsons was the name of the boy killed by Charlie Hampson.
Steve.
He walked to the foot of the bed as if approaching the foot of a grave. The blankets were tucked in nice and tight. Jack did not need Stella’s spreadsheet to confirm that seven-year-old James Harrison was hit by Paul Vickery’s car on Marquis Way.
Careless of discovery, he went into the other dormitories on his corridor. ‘Chris’. And ‘Rob’ whose mother couldn’t live without him.
There was a new label on the ‘spare’ bed. ‘Joel’. Jack got it. These were not the names of boys away for vacation. The term dates on the notice downstairs were wrong, he should have realized. His Host was playing with him. The windows were dirty, the water glasses empty, beds untouched, the blankets stiff and unslept in. The school was closed. These beds belonged to boys killed in road accidents dating from Friday, 6 May 1966, when Michael Thornton died. Jack fumbled for his phone. He punched out Stella’s number, his hands were shaking. Voicemail. He left a message.
‘Ring the administrator as soon as you get this, tell her to warn that man, Matthew Benson. Ring me when you get this!’
‘“O Lord, I love the habitation of thy house, and the place where thy glory dwells. Sweep me not away with the sinners…”’ The old man’s voice was like the buzzing of a wasp.
‘“…nor my life with bloodthirsty men, men in whose hands are evil devices, and whose right hands are full of bribes…”’ Jack continued.
The man was pummelling at an apron of concrete with the tip of a long bladed knife. Jack recognized the hard standing outside Harvey Gray’s shoe factory.
In a street close to Jack’s elbow a grit bin was upended; sand spilled on to the kerb. Jack righted it and saw a chip of green glass, half the size of the bin, wedged against a wall. He was on Phoenix Way. The glass marked the spot where Charlie Hampson had smashed first into the oak tree and then through the wall. The tree was a perfect replica; Jack could vouch for that. The oak leaves must have taken months to cut out and attach to wire branches. These were green and lush because it was May. The man would replace them with russet leaves for autumn and when winter came the branches would be bare.
He heard a noise. A strangled cry. The man was coming towards him with the knife outstretched. The blade flashed. Jack was baffled. He didn’t move. When the tip was just feet from him he snapped into action and dived into the crawl space at his feet. Wrong. There was no way out. He kept going. He had no choice. Light leaked in from the room above; he could just see his way and by now he knew the layout. On the turn towards the centre of the model something glinted. A ring handle set into the wood. The eaves. He lifted the ring and tugged it. The door swung open, blocking the space. Beyond was complete darkness. Ignoring the tang of urine, hearing shuffling close by, Jack threw himself inside and pulled the door shut after him.
Blindly he scrabbled away from the door and then stopped. Desperate to get away, he had plunged on regardless of direction. He put out his left hand. Almost immediately he felt cold brick. That must be good. He was heading into the house, not towards the external wall at the side. A dead end in every sense. The bricks to his left were at the front of the house. Jack made himself take stock, as Stella would do. On his right was the partition, meaning he was inches from the attic of streets. He shuffled forward, mindful to make no sound, his progress tortuous. With each move he expected a firewall or a break in the eaves that would make this effort futile. He was attuned to the merest sound, pricking fear weighting his limbs in the suffocating darkness, his blood beating in his ears. His Host was tracking him, keeping pace as he passed by her bedroom, the old man’s room, squeezed around the pipes for the kitchen sink. The tunnel went on, his luck thin but holding.
He encountered brick, rough and implacable. Dank and cold. He smacked at the unyielding surface. He had been crawling for a lifetime. Please let this be the wall at the other end of the mansion.
The fusty air was colder here. He must be beyond the boundary of the flat. Jack shut his eyes, the better to picture the house from the outside, framed through the iron gates. It wasn’t symmetrical. A wing had been added on the Weltje Road side. A fire escape was attached to the back.
A fire escape required easy access. It made no sense to have a hatch into the tunnel at only one end, there must be other ways in. At any point she could open a door and find him. Jack swept his palms over the partition. He felt an indentation – no, a groove. He stopped. He might have imagined it. He willed it to be so. Again he forced himself to be logical, methodical like Stella. He took his time and listened to what the wood was telling him. There was a groove. He followed it up, a right angle, then along. Down again. He had traced a square. A hatch.
No handle on the inside, Jack flung himself against the aperture. The thump was like a depth charge on the seabed. Surely they had heard it? The wood had given slightly. He launched himself shoulder first and tumbled through.
He was on a rough wooden floor. He clambered to his feet, distantly registering pain in his hip bone from the fall. He was in a long low room, a mirror image of the attic of streets. Although it was completely bare. No streets. Nor were there beds or coffin wardrobes. A thin light drifted through the glazed panels of an external door. Jack wrenched on the handle. It was stuck fast. Push not pull. A typical mistake. He kicked at the bottom of the door and pushed.
The door swung out on shrieking hinges. Jack staggered forward and just prevented himself pitching over a balustrade. The fire escape shook perilously. The rivets had rusted; two had corroded completely away, freeing the ironwork from the wall. Jack gripped the railing as if it would save him. Despite himself, he appreciated the Victorian ironwork stairs spiralling down, each step decorated with a different pattern, diamonds, circles, crosses. Through the ornately fashioned metal he contemplated a breathtaking drop.
He placed a foot on the first step. The frame trembled. The metal was blistered with rusting sores and every so often spindles had sheared off, leaving a gap. As he risked each step, it seemed to Jack that the ground got no nearer.
Far below, the siren of an emergency vehicle whooped and swooped along King Street towards Hammersmith Broadway. Above the grey brooding clouds came the rumble of a plane descending to Heathrow.
Five steps from the bottom he came upon a barricade of looped barbed wire. Jack gathered up his coat and vaulted over the side railing. Smacking his palms he looked up. The door was open, darkness within. No one had followed him. She didn’t need to. She could use the stairs and meet him outside.
Jack tore across the yard, out of the gate, stifling a scream that welled in his chest. He did not stop until he reached Furnivall Gardens. He hung over the river wall close to the slick water rushing below. His reflection was fractured by the current. It might not be his reflection, but writhing black creatures struggling beneath the surface.
A thick pall of mist hung over the river, shrouding Hammersmith Bridge. His watch said a quarter past seven but it felt later. The enclosing fog and dark grey clouds massing at Barnes created a premature dusk.
The old man had attacked him. Why? What had he done wrong? Jack didn’t need to ask. The answer was cold and stark. He had been late one too many times, the old man had lost his mind.
He narrowed his eyes at the bushes behind him. Cars passing on the Great West Road lit the branches and ivy tendrils; they pointed and writhed towards the sky. He detected no human movement. He had shaken off his Host. He went along the path a few paces, towards Chiswick Mall. He could never work with the old man again.
Jack checked his phone. Still no message from Stella. He pressed ‘redial’. ‘I am sorry I can’t take your call.’ Stella had promised to answer whenever he rang. She had broken this promise when she was out with Barlow. Jack told himself that because of the deep cleaning Stella would treat Barlow as a special client, but he could not kid himself, she liked the man. This was a mistake, but he couldn’t say why.
Jackie had told him it was great that the article about Terry’s funeral had netted Barlow. Deep cleaning was good for Stella; she had taken Terry’s death badly. Jack had reread the piece in Jackie’s press cuttings file and found nothing about deep cleaning. Yet, absorbed by the streets in the attic, Jack had let her reassure him; she was the marketing expert.
Stella was cleaning for Barlow now. That did not stop her answering the phone. He felt the stirring dread that he knew to trust. Stella had recognized the green glass because Barlow had used it on his wife’s grave. Or so he had told her.