The Detective's Daughter

29

Wednesday, 19 January 2011

Jack was breaking London Underground rules: he had left his phone switched on in the cab. He would not answer it, but he had to know if she called. It was fifteen minutes past midnight and his phone had remained silent. Stella was making him suffer.

He did not know if Stella had guessed it was him being Nick Jarvis. But calling the referees when her PA had already done so was proof enough that she did not yet trust him.

She might believe she did not need him. Yet again he combed through their conversation in the summerhouse for something that had caused her to verify his references just when he thought they were getting on. Perhaps she had always doubted him? No, something specific had prompted her. He suspected it was Isabel’s lilies.

Mike Thorpe and Nick Jarvis had been adequate Hosts: he had modelled their ruthless and dispassionate approach; even down to how they boiled water for tea or tied their shoe laces. Jarvis’s brutal disregard for space, pushing through crowds, taking up more room than necessary; Thorpe, unaware of anyone, never getting up for anyone on a bus or a train. Their utter lack of empathy had been gratifying and staying with each of them he had been sure he had found men with minds like his own. Until the facts belied this.

A good liar believes his own lies. By making the men his referees Jack had given them new life.

‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name…’ he muttered, the words comforting although Jack did not think of himself as religious.

Jack had stayed with Nick Jarvis in his Barbican flat for two months and could not pretend it had been pleasant. He did not have a cleaner because he did not want snoopers prying into his business. Jack had known Nick Jarvis as soon as he saw him on the platform at Sloane Square; there were too many Nick Jarvises, standing where the doors would open, pushing their way in, taking the last seat, they projected respectability and belonged to the Rotary Club and Neighbourhood Watch while behind the scenes they were getting away with murder.

This afternoon Nick had stepped out of character to give Jack a good reference, but Stella had seen through him; she had not called Mike Thorpe. Jack had been ready, knowing he would have to work to get Thorpe’s voice right. On the other hand, maybe it was a positive sign: Nick had convinced her.

Stella was taking her time.

Tonight’s set number – he had done a short shift so there had only been one – was 242. Jack tried to divine the answer from the rails and the cable bundles strapped to the walls and gantries but on this journey they too were impervious. All he could see was all there was: no signs, no messages; he had been abandoned.

Above ground, triangles of snow, bisected by silver lines hatching off across Chiswick to Ealing and over to Ruislip, were translucent in the London-dark. On a segment of land between the District and Piccadilly route track-side workers had built a snowman and dressed him in a ‘hi-viz’ jacket with a woolly bobble cap and sticks for arms, but no face.

Jack had not noticed Ealing Common. He must have stopped there, would have operated the doors and seen who boarded and who alighted; he was not concentrating.

Stella should not have let him leave without going through the rooms he had cleaned. To assert authority she should highlight any blemish: a forgotten corner, a wisp of cobweb. Not liking to praise, she needed to catch him out. She had not done so; she was avoiding him.

Stamford Brook was the next stop. He imagined himself as static while the world outside his cab passed by in rolling scene changes: a line of lights, a canopy, the London Underground roundels; the passengers.

The platforms were deserted; few travellers went up to town at this time. He was steering his train through a deserted city; cheered he began to sing:

‘Incy-wincy spider climbing up the spout. Down came the rain and washed the spider out…’

There was someone on his platform; involuntarily Jack jerked the handle, jolting the train like a novice. His fingers clammy with sweat, he gripped the lever. The man was close to the platform edge and Jack imagined him getting ready to execute a perfect dive – on your marks, get set – right in front of Jack’s cab. Instead the man turned away and went down the steps; Jack let himself breathe. He loved trains, the engine, the cab, the carriages for their stolid intent: so oblivious to the frailty of a single life. Flowers were laid beside roads where ‘loved ones’ had died, but none were put on tracks. Death was better glimpsed from cars than contemplated by waiting commuters who might get ideas of their own.

Waiting passengers took no notice of the driver, although they stared at the cab; it was the train they eyed impassively as it entered a station. He saw the same expression on hundreds of faces. When he was a boy Jack had not grasped what, if people had eyes, noses, mouths and chins, made them different from one another. It was not true that under the skin we are all the same because, as he had learnt, only some had minds like his own.

Pick a face, any face. He could enter a tunnel and wipe them out.

A person was looking straight into his cab.

Stella Darnell had no need to call his mobile. She knew where to find him.