Ghost Girl (22 page)

‘I’ll never know.’ He got up. ‘Another?’

Stella’s eye caught the blackboard chalked with the evening’s menu and remembered the shepherd’s pie. She had planned to return to Terry’s after the drink to eat it, but she was hungry now.

‘Do you have time to eat? I thought perhaps…’ She hated eating with other people. ‘Although if you’ve eaten…’

‘Great! We’ll keep off death, is that a deal?’ He beamed, his blue eye bright. ‘What’ll we have?’ He turned to the board. Stella went for the ham and eggs; it was what she had eaten the previous time here. She was vaguely gratified when David chose the same.

While he ordered, Stella cast about for conversation topics. Men had limits on hearing about new cleaning methods however technical she could be.

The pub was busier than it had been on the snowy night last year. While he queued, David was chatting with three young men perched on stools, coordinated in light suits, brown hair cut short and gelled back. They laughed uproariously at something he had said. Stella recognized them from last time and this made her wonder again if Terry too might have chatted with David while waiting at the bar. Her phone was ringing.

‘Please could I speak to Stella?’

‘Obviously you are. Hello, Jack.’

‘I called your home and got no answer. Aren’t we meant to be meeting?’

Another appointment that Stella had completely forgotten.

Jack didn’t wait for her to reply. ‘Where are you?’

‘I’ll meet you at Terry’s in half an hour.’ Stella hadn’t told Jack that she spent every evening at her dad’s because he would ask why and she didn’t know. Or worse he would know and tell her.

‘I’m at Terry’s now. I can see your van.’

‘OK, I’m on my way.’

‘Guess what?’

‘What.’

‘Go on, guess!’ Jack sounded cheery.

‘I can’t.’ David was shaking hands with one of the men at the bar.

‘I know the name of the street!’

‘What street?’ David was making his way towards her, holding the drinks carefully to avoid spilling them. Her evening had slipped away.

‘Marquis Way.’ Jack seemed astonished that she could ask.

Jack often continued conversations broken off days before and expected her to keep up, but this time Stella had started the conversation. Ever since her visit to the library she had been impatient to tell Jack about identifying Britton Drive, but after she had sorted Terry’s house and remembered her drink with David, she had forgotten. ‘Yes. So have…’ she tailed off. Jackie would advise she didn’t trump others’ success with her own. David was handing a glass of ginger beer to her. She took it and mouthed a thank you.

‘I had a hunch about Marquis Way, I’m sure it’s near the front of the file. Like I said, I’ve walked there.’

‘That’s great.’ Stella spoke in a monotone. David tilted his glass against hers in a silent toast. Their fingers brushed. She pressed the phone to her ear to cut out the background chatter.

‘Where are you? Sounds like a pub. It’s past eight. I need to get to… I need an early night.’ Jack’s voice was jerky; he was walking, his breath across the microphone was like the roar of the wind. With sudden clarity Stella knew that she couldn’t tell him about David. There was nothing to tell.

‘Where are we going?’ She reached around the back of the chair for her anorak trying to think of an explanation for David.

‘Marquis Way, of course!’

27

Saturday, 18 June 1966

She urged the bike forward and went faster until the bushes and leaves were a whizz of green and brown. She stood up on the pedals and, her feet working furiously, she leant into the bend.

Michael and her dad were timing her from the other end of the park, but she didn’t need the stopwatch to know she would break the land speed record.

There was a dreadful grinding and the bike shook. Even though she pedalled harder she did not go any faster. She pressed on the other pedal and the scraping got worse. The bike tipped and Mary somersaulted on to the path. Hot pain rushed up her leg and she knew that, like the man in the Bluebird, she was going to die.

A whirring as if she was winding down. She opened her eyes. A pedal was spinning; it slowed and stopped. Silence. Above Mary was a blue sky with no clouds.

She sat up and stretched out her leg. Beads of blood dotted it like the dash of a red crayon. She twisted around. Michael and Daddy had gone.

Mary got out of bed and in her nightdress pattered across the matting and squeezed through the door, keeping quiet as a mouse. Michael’s bedroom door was shut. If he came out she would send him back to bed. She scurried along the landing and down the first three stairs from where she could see the hall.

Her dad had on the black suit he’d worn for Michael’s funeral. He was combing his hair at the mirror; it was shiny and Mary imagined stroking it. He lifted up his briefcase and gave her mum a quick kiss. Mary hadn’t seen her because she kept still, just as she did when Mary kissed her. Daddy opened the front door and went out.

Her mum stayed where she was. Mary knew she was not waiting for her dad to come back, but for Michael. She waited in the hall a lot now and only moved when Mary’s dad returned from his insurance visits – since Michael had died he even went out on Saturdays. Mary had tried to get her upstairs once and her mum had looked at her as if she were a ghost.

Mary wouldn’t try now. She ran back up the stairs. Outside Michael’s bedroom she listened. She couldn’t hear him. She glared at the door, doing the magic spell that worked with corn flakes in the kitchen, but instead of wishing herself back in their old house, Mary wished that her brother were fast asleep in his bed.

28

Thursday, 26 April 2012

‘Be Kind and Merciful to Our Animals.’ Balanced on the edge of the drinking trough on the ill-lit road, Jack was caught in the glare of the van’s headlights.

Britton Drive was long and straight and desolate, its bleak aspect unmitigated by the tall sweet chestnut trees. The wind whipped their faces and pushed at budding leaves on the branches. Stella had told Jack about Britton Drive and since it was closer than Marquis Way, they had come here first. She had not told him about her abortive date with David Barlow. David had encouraged her to leave – for a member of staff in crisis – and invited her to go for a walk with him by the river the next evening and have a meal to make up for the one they had missed.

‘Not much here.’ Jack patted the trough. ‘According to your list, this is granite and was erected in 1935.’

Putting David to the back of her mind, Stella fished out her torch from her anorak and focused it on the blue folder. She turned to the picture with the witness appeal notice. Jack leant forward.

‘Is that a tree behind the trough?’ He directed Stella’s gloved hand to light the lower part of the picture.

‘I think so.’ Stella looked up. Although she had left the headlights on and there was a solitary lamp-post some metres away, Britton Drive was dark and unsettling. A horrible place to die.

Industrial units were set back from the road, many with broken windows or boarded up and smothered with jagged graffiti. Even when occupied the buildings must have been shoestring-shabby, their occupants one step ahead of the receivers. Stella knew the sort: fly-by-night outfits that paid only the bills that kept them trading. She read a nearby fascia that proclaimed in blistering letters: ‘Gray Shoes Fa ory Outle at Amaz g Pr ces.’ It gave her a dull sensation in her solar plexus. She had not experienced commercial failure, the trick was keeping overheads low. They would not move to a bigger office, they would stay put until the economy picked up.

Jack lifted a Coke can out of the trough and stuffed it in his pocket.

‘What are you doing with that?’ Stella was appalled.

‘I’ll put it in your recycling bin. This isn’t a rubbish bin, it’s for horses.’

‘Don’t expect many horses pass this way.’ As she said this, Stella hoped she was right. The area had an air of despair, of hopes shattered and of life long gone. No place for a horse. She shivered. Or for them either.

The warped ‘To Let’ sign on an imposing stone building with arched windows that had been an electricity substation suggested it had been available for a long time.

‘That’s in the photograph, behind the appeal sign,’ she pointed at a plastic salt bin near one of the trees. As she reached it she saw the indented logo: ‘Gina-Ware’. Since discovering the company was owned by the daughter of her late client Mrs Ramsay, Stella came upon their products everywhere. Jack would say it was a sign.

Jack jabbed at the photo. ‘There’s a crack in the paving here. I missed that.’

Stella had not noticed the meandering crack under the witness appeal board. If she had she would have dismissed it as insignificant.

‘This is a working crack,’ Jack announced.

‘Meaning?’ Stella asked.

‘Meaning it’s more than three millimetres, so is moving and is open to intrusion from water which freezes then expands, so widening the crack.’ On his knees Jack traced a finger along the crack. ‘A priority for street maintenance, but no doubt this has fallen off the council’s list. Who’s going to trip here?’

‘This is private land. Businesses have to pay.’ Stella looked around her at the abandoned buildings. ‘Or not. Let’s get on with it. This place is like a dead zone.’

‘It is a dead zone.’ Jack gave her a look. ‘See how the crack’s lengthened since Terry’s picture? We could have used it to guess the year if we didn’t already know.’ He sounded disappointed.

‘You think it caused Markham to crash?’

Jack jumped up and ran to the middle of the road. ‘These appeal boards are placed to alert motorists coming either way. Where did it happen?’ He darted over to the salt bin and, holding the file out like an offering, he tightroped along the pavement, one foot in front of the other. Every so often he gave a hop, avoiding the breaks in the kerbstones. Stella had hoped Jack was improving.

Far off a siren whoo-whooped, dipping and soaring and then fading away.

‘James Markham smashed into a tree.’ Stella flapped the photocopy of the newspaper article. ‘Since these are the only trees we can assume…’ She marched over to the nearest tree and, kneeling, shone her torch at the trunk.

Jack joined her. He ran his hand over the bark carefully, as if the tree were a person.

Stella allowed her mind to wander briefly. David Barlow had said he would stay at the pub to eat his supper; wistfully she supposed he had left by now.

‘There!’ Jack nudged her. ‘This is where he died.’

A gash cut into the tree two feet up from the ground. Over the decade since the accident, the exposed wood had spotted with grime and moss. They wouldn’t have seen it had they had not been looking. The bark was closing over the scar.

‘Trees are two-thirds below ground, a substantial tree like this would have held fast when Markham hit it, even at speed. A wall might give way. Wait a minute, what’s this?’ Jack scrabbled in the earth around the roots. One by one he placed little chips of stone on the pavement.

‘Stones.’ Stella got up and stamped about to stop the pins and needles in her right foot. ‘Not everything’s a sign.’ She swung the torch out along the road; it fell short of a shape fifty metres away. A rubbish skip, although in the dim light it was hard to tell. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

Stella had forgotten to lock the van and had left her phone in view on the seat. It was glowing. Jackie had left a voicemail. Sitting at the wheel, Stella listened. ‘Can Jack go to Amanda Hampson’s at eight o’ clock tomorrow morning as well as Tuesdays? Of course she’s taken to him!’ Jackie enjoyed telling Stella they had more business. Stella wished they had spoken; she wanted to make up for leaving at lunchtime. While she hadn’t actually lied to Jackie, she hadn’t told her the truth. This didn’t sit comfortably with her.

Jack was still by the tree. ‘Jack, come on!’ She gesticulated through the windscreen. Jack waved, but didn’t move. Without asking him, Stella texted Jackie that he would be there. Jackie would see she was working. More deceit. Stella huffed in her seat. It was no good. She would return the blue folder to Terry’s basement and attend to her business.

‘This is a wild-goose chase,’ she declared when Jack finally joined her. ‘So what if there was an accident here? Terry took the picture because he was there that night.’ She started the engine. ‘It’s a souvenir.’

‘You don’t believe that.’ Jack was businesslike. He was jingling something in his palm. ‘Was Terry in all the streets? Life is rife with coincidence, but this seems implausible.’

‘He was a police officer.’

‘Not on Traffic. I asked Suzie.’

Stella pulled out into the road.

‘Your lights are off.’ Jack examined his cupped hand.

Stella flicked to full beam. ‘What was that?’ She rubbed a porthole in the fogging windscreen.

‘What was what?’ Jack dropped whatever was in his hand into his pocket and clipped on his seat belt.

‘I saw something.’

‘A fox probably.’

‘This place gives me the creeps.’ There, she had said it.

‘A man died here, that’s why,’ Jack replied amiably. He tilted his head back against the cushioned rest. ‘His ghost is here.’ He was matter of fact.

Further along the road, Stella remembered the dark shape. They must have driven past it. She looked in her rear mirror and saw the sweet chestnut trees silhouetted against the sky. Ghosts indeed. She had imagined the car and the fox. Nevertheless she confirmed the central-locking switch was activated.

Jack pulled on the gloves that Stella had found in Terry’s jacket pocket after he died and had given him. The brown leather accentuated his long slender fingers. The folder, still open at Britton Drive, lay on his lap. ‘I should imagine Terry was puzzled how it was that Markham came off the road. It’s as quiet as a grave here.’

‘It would have been thriving ten years ago.’

‘Not in the middle of the night.’

‘Maybe he suspected suicide, unless the guy fell asleep.’