The Detective's Secret Read Online Free PDF Page B

Stella had wanted to refuse, dogs were liable to cause mess, but months into minding the dog, she decided that relationships caused more mess.
    The house next door to Jackie’s was up for sale. Jackie was worried about this. The man living there now had been there since he was a boy and, Jackie said, he was a ‘sweetie’, kind and gentle; she hoped the new owners would be as nice. Stella thought again how living in a flat at the end of a corridor meant that, apart from the rare times she met anyone in the lift, she could avoid knowing her neighbours.
    Clutching white wine, plucked from the chiller cabinet in Dariusz Adomek’s mini-mart beneath her office, Stella took the dog over to a sycamore tree by the Jackie’s gate to lift his leg. The tree trunk was thinner than the others in the street. Jackie had told her the tree replaced one that came down in the 1987 hurricane and crushed their car.
    She rummaged in her pocket and gave Stanley a biscuit as reward for peeing outside, to reinforce his toilet training as she had been told at his obedience class. Something fluttered to the ground. It was the paper she had found under a cushion at her mum’s flat. Jack had cleaned the flat many times during her mum’s six-week absence, but the paper was caught under the back of the sofa. The dog had been whining and when she gave in and pulled away the cushions, he had truffled out a bone-shaped biscuit. The paper was next to it. The writing was her mum’s: ‘Dale Heffernan, 38 Fisher Ave, Vaucluse. Likes sailing and B. Springsteen. Dislikes having time on his hands!’
    During the first week her mum was away, Stella slept with her phone under her pillow expecting the call informing her Suzie was clinging to life. She had even looked up St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. There had been no call. No call at all. Passing up Skype or email, Suzie sent two postcards to the office which Beverly, the admin assistant, stuck on the pinboard reserved for staff holiday messages. The sun was hot and there was a possum in her friend’s attic. ‘Love to Stanley.’ In the second card she had wasted space with advice about the client database she had built, but had sent love to Stella.
    Stella had told Jackie she didn’t miss her mother. However, she found the comparative quiet at work uncomfortable; she missed the daily task list and the weekend calls informing her that Stanley wanted a walk in Richmond Park (as if her mum and the dog had conferred). Before Terry’s death Stella might have welcomed the break from her mum’s grumblings and demands. Now she wanted everything to be back to normal.
    She stuffed the paper back in her pocket. Dale Heffernan was probably an ex-client.
    Jackie and Graham Makepeace had lived in the 1920s semi for thirty years. Graham had made their gate; their initials, ‘J’ and ‘G’ intertwined, were carved into the beech struts. Jackie and Graham were still in love. Stella saw falling in love, like falling trees, to be fraught with the danger of crushed hopes and rearranged schedules.
    ‘Heel.’ She marched up to the front door, the dog trotting beside her.
    Had Stella not met Jackie, the immaculate front door, gleaming window sashes and weed-free shingle path bordered by box hedging would have assured her she would like her. Jackie’s mix of house-proud care and easy homeliness was apparent in the twisting branches of a laburnum, bracketed to protect brickwork, around the porch and the recycling bins corralled behind a trellis draped with honeysuckle.
    The door flew open. The wine bottle slipped from her grasp; trying to stop its fall she kicked it on to the hedge.
    ‘Hey, Stell!’ A young man in a boxy leather jacket and hipster jeans was squatting at her feet submitting to a busy washing from the dog. ‘Mum said you were coming. Sorry to miss you, I’m off out. They’re all waiting for you.’
    Gathering herself, Stella couldn’t think of his name. She retrieved the bottle from the hedge.