The Detective's Daughter

by Lesley Thomson

  Identification was not an issue; the hospital had his driving licence. She refused the offer of ‘time alone with your dad’, thinking what was the point? At the nurses’ station, she caught sight of Terry’s name on a form: ‘Certification of Life Extinct’.

  Beneath these words she scanned his admission notes. Words floated free of their sentences as she read, her brain fighting to dismiss meaning: ‘Attempted to resuscitate. Police called. Date of death Monday 10 January 2011. Last seen alive, Broad Street, Seaford, 8.25 a.m. today. Means of identification: personal papers – driving licence, bank cards. No suspicious circumstances.’

  A doctor had signed his or her name and underneath the signature had printed more legibly: ‘May he rest in peace.’

  The chapel door banged and a wheezy man in a fluorescent jerkin that showed off his beer gut pattered in, sighing.

  Stella drew her jacket around her and tipped Terry’s Accurist watch into her palm. She put her hand through its heavy bracelet and snapped shut the clasp. Her wrist looked childlike and the watch slid up her arm, cold against her skin. It would need links taken out to fit. Terry kept it three minutes fast for punctuality, a tip Stella followed. In the same bag was his wedding ring. Her mother had thrown her own in the bin. Stella presumed Terry wore it to make women think he was married, just as Suzanne’s ringless finger signalled she was unattached. Stella had retrieved her mother’s ring from a wad of damp tea bags. She now had both rings.

  There was no spare underwear or toothbrush and this confirmed her growing suspicion that Terry had not expected to be away overnight. What was he doing in Sussex?

  The last bag was labelled ‘Contents of pockets’ and comprised a half-eaten packet of chewing gum, £7.80 in change, a scratch card with a winning prize of ten pounds and the head of a yellow rose. She took the flower out of the bag; it had no scent and was browning. She did not think Terry liked flowers. She found his keys.

  Stella knelt up on the chair, leaning over the kitchen table, and worked her way through each key.

  ‘Daddy has lots of doors.’ She began to chatter on and bang went his chance to have a read of the paper. Propped on her elbows, she questioned him about each one like a detective. When she behaved like a grown-up, going all serious, he had to try not to laugh.

  He started by answering promptly, as if it was a quiz, but after a while had to admit he got fed up; it had been a long night and he needed his bed.

  ‘Do you lock up murderers and throw away the key?’

  He snatched the bunch off her.

  ‘Where’d you get that from?’

  ‘You know where.’ In came her mother. Suzanne has to have a go.

  Game over.

  Stella dangled the keys from her forefinger. When she was twenty-one Terry handed her his door keys; in case of emergency, he had explained. He had cancelled her birthday dinner that year to attend a fatal stabbing on the White City estate. Her mother said giving her his keys was his idea of a rite of passage and that would be her lot. Once she was over eighteen, Stella had told herself she had no need of a father.

  Two months ago, suspecting an intruder, Terry had heightened the back garden wall with a trellis and changed the locks; he had not given Stella the new keys.

  Now she had them and had inherited the doors they unlocked: she had unrestricted entry to Terry’s abandoned life. She brushed the leather Triumph fob with her thumb.

  Where was his car?

  The stained-glass window had become opaque; it must be dark outside. The man had gone. She could not remember what car Terry drove: the Triumph Herald had long ago packed up on him. The police officer had relayed an offer of help from Terry’s colleagues at Hammersmith Police Station, which she had refused. She would not ask anything of the police.

  Terry’s wallet bulged with papers: receipts, loyalty cards, the driving licence and sixty-five pounds in twenties and a five. He was one coffee away from a free drink at Caffè Nero; she had presumed greasy spoon cafés were more him. She struck lucky: a receipt from a filling station in Seaford. She peered at the faint blue ink and worked out that Terry had bought petrol at sixteen minutes to eight that morning.

  Stella had never driven Terry; if they went anywhere together it was in his car. When she passed her test – first time – her mother had told her that Terry did not trust women drivers.

  At the bottom of the bag two glistening ham rolls nestled in a Co-op carrier; the doughy bread mummified in cling film had been flattened by a can of Coke. Her stomach heaved: Terry had bought them just before he died.

  At London Zoo, Terry had treated his little daughter to a bottle of Coke. Stella hated drinks with bubbles but at the giraffe house she had upset him by calling him ‘Terry’ as her mum did, instead of ‘Dad’, so she sucked dutifully on the pink straw, willing the level to creep down, the bubbles exploding in her throat. They waited on the westbound District line platform of Earls Court station to go the one stop to her new home in Barons Court and Stella got a feeling in her tummy. She swallowed a rush of saliva and stayed stock still.

  The train clattered in, doors swished, a voice boomed and when people pushed behind her Stella threw up over shoes and legs. Brown foaming liquid chased along the carriage floor. The train was taken out of service and it was her fault.

  She had retreated to the new bedroom, with no toys and a stain on the ceiling. Before being sick she had planned to say ‘Thank you for having me, Daddy’ to make it all better. In Stella’s memory her parents’ voices conflated with the policeman who had mutely reprimanded her lack of emotion: ‘What were you thinking of? You don’t know your own daughter. She hates fizzy drinks.’

  You don’t care about your father.

  The NHS bag bulged with bald indicators of a life. Stella did not think of Terry Darnell filed in a steel drawer in the hospital mortuary, but as following her out of the hospital warning her to mind her own business.

  Jackie had told Stella that Seaford was a seaside town twelve miles east of Brighton; she took the coast road recommended by her satnav. A notice announced Seaford was twinned with Bönningstedt in Germany. She swung past the station over a mini-roundabout, took a left then a right on to a street with Barclays Bank on one side and a Pound shop on the other. She was in a ghost town: no cars; no pedestrians on the shop-lit pavements. A crisp packet broke free from the shelter of a lamp-post to spin and skitter along the camber like tumbleweed. A church clock tolled nine as Stella stopped the van outside a disused Woolworths store and turning off the engine became aware of a creaking like a rocking chair. She got out: further along the street the metal sign for a men’s clothes shop swung back and forth; the place unsettled her.

  Jackie had said Terry died at a difficult time of the year: right after Christmas. Stella did not see what that had to do with anything; she had not spent a Christmas with Terry since she was seven.

  The Co-op had closed an hour ago. Stella guessed that it must have looked the same when Terry arrived early that morning; the shelves restocked with packets, jars, bottles, their labels stark in the low security lighting. Rows of shopping trolleys were corralled next to the fruit and vegetable section, ready for the next day. Terry would not have used a trolley for so few items; he had not touched them. Opposite, she read ‘Sweet Moments’ on the fascia of a handmade-chocolate shop; perhaps these were the last words that Terry had seen.

  If Stella expected to find a clue to the drama that had taken place in the doorway twelve hours earlier, she was disappointed. The two-storey shop buildings, block paving, tang of disinfectant and yellow plastic ‘wet floor’ hazard cone near the tills yielded nothing. It could have been any Co-op store in any town.

  She stepped back from the store to where the pavement extended into the road for a pedestrian crossing delineated by ridges. Terry had told her that gold studs on the stones marked the boundary between private land and the public walkway, or had he? An outlet next to the supermarket was to let; unopened mail piled up on the door mat.

>   Terry had arrived here early that morning; he must have stayed the night somewhere but, since he hadn’t even taken his toothbrush, Stella was sure he had not planned to. Where had he stayed?

  She was staring at a snatch of white. She bent down: a piece of paper had wedged between the bars of a drain cover. She extracted it and in the low security light of the Co-op doorway unpeeled it, careful not to tear along the fold. It was a newspaper photograph, photocopied on a skew, cutting off some of the image. A footprint had transferred the surface of the pavement like a brass rubbing so she struggled to read the caption: To th ma or Mr say launches Charb new vi all.

  The black and grey pixels comprised a group of people, their features bleached out in sunlight. There was a figure in the foreground who might be a woman, but a splodge of dirt blotted her face. Triangular shapes crossed the top of the frame. The only unmistakable element of the photograph was a church. The angle of the shot made it appear to be balanced on the woman’s head and the time on its clock was midday. Although there was nothing about the cutting to connect it with Terry, Stella slipped it into her pocket.

  She heard the beeping of a reversing vehicle and scanned the street; it was empty. She hurried back to the van and saw that a light was flashing on an automatic teller in the wall of a building society on the other side of the road. At the end of the street a stretch limousine rolled by, a gaggle of young women in orange afro wigs hanging out of the windows bawling Robbie Williams’ ‘Angels’; the raucous sound faded into the night. The beeps stopped and the light in the cash machine went out. She approached it: a twenty-pound note lay in the cash tray.

  Stella retrieved the note; brand new, it crackled when she folded it into her coat pocket with the cutting. She saw a ‘P’ for a car park and, jumping into the van, slung it left down a narrow road with a terrace of cottages on one side and a building with a castellated roof silhouetted against the sky on the other. Ahead of her was the car park. Four cars were dotted around the asphalted space and again Stella tried to recall the car Terry had owned.

  She felt about among Terry’s things and at the bottom of the bag found his keys. When she pressed the remote button on the fat plastic head there was no response. She extended her arc and hazard lights to her right flashed twice.

  The blue Toyota Yaris had a parking penalty clamped to its windscreen by a wiper; Stella ripped out the ticket in yet another plastic bag and, nerving herself, got in the driver’s seat. She caught a whiff of vanilla deodorizer and saw with approval that Terry had plugged an air purifier into the cigarette lighter socket. The car started first time. She cruised around the area until she found a residential street with no parking restrictions. Before getting out she gave the car a brief check, searching for a clue to why Terry had been in Seaford. She found nothing but a Kit Kat wrapper and a half-drunk flask of coffee that had rolled under the front seat and concluded that the vehicle would need valeting before she sold it.

  Only when she had locked the car did Stella notice that Terry had, after all, paid and displayed; a ticket face up on the dashboard was valid until eight fifteen that morning.

  Terry had died fifteen minutes after the expiry time.

  Half an hour later, Stella was speeding along the M23. Her rear-view mirror reflecting the empty motorway was a black rectangle. Earlier there had been tail-lights ahead, which were snuffed out when the driver rounded a bend and had not reappeared. She adjusted her phone in its cradle on the dashboard.

  Where was Terry’s mobile phone?

  She rumbled on to the hard shoulder and, releasing the seat belt, scrabbled through the NHS bag on the front seat. There was a shuffling in the back of the van. Stella froze. She had not adhered to her own rule of looking in the interior if she left the van. It was easy to hide amongst the buckets and spare overalls. She heard the shuffling again, then a thump, and she spun around.

  A bag of dishwasher salt granules lay on the carpeted floor. Many clients included appliance maintenance in their contract and someone had stacked the bags on the racks without securing them. Another was about to go; Stella clambered through the seats and caught it. She stowed the salt where it belonged, on the bottom shelf in a plastic container.

  She checked the central locking and remembered why she had stopped. One thing Stella did know about Terry was that he always kept his mobile phone with him. Yet it was not in the NHS bag nor in his car, although there was a phone charger in the glove box.

  The keyboard on her BlackBerry was fiddly in the feeble light but eventually she selected ‘Dad’. She clenched her teeth, waiting for it to connect: some part of her expecting Terry to answer.

  The ringing briefly fell in step with the click-click of her hazard lights. She was about to hang up when it stopped.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Stella almost said: Dad, is that you?

  Who’s that? a woman responded.

  ‘No, who are you?’ Stella demanded.

  No, who are you? It was her echo.

  The line deadened with an almost imperceptible change in quality; a cessation of sound as if someone had replaced a receiver.

  The screen said ‘Call duration twelve seconds’. Stella selected ‘Dialled numbers’. ‘Dad’ was top of the list with ‘Clean Slate’ underneath: her last two calls.

  She pressed ‘redial’.

  This time the answering service cut in and Terry’s voice invited the caller to leave as much information as they liked. Even in retirement he was encouraging witnesses to come forward with evidence, available any time of the day or night.

  Stella had always told herself that if she called, Terry would be too busy to talk.

  Her voice hesitant, she asked whoever had the phone to ring her to arrange collection.

  Maybe Terry had dropped his phone when he collapsed and it had been stolen by kids. Thinking that she had called the wrong number, she went into ‘Dialled numbers’ again: the word ‘Dad’ lost meaning the longer she stared at it.

  Stella caught her reflection in the side window, the dark rendering it high contrast: lumpy hair, her eyes lost in their sockets and her mouth a grim pencil line. She ran the window down to erase herself and was hit by cold wood-smoked air. Beyond the carriageway ragged trees were outlined against the sodium-pink sky of a town. A light blinked through the branches, moving, vanishing, then appearing closer and she heard a long low whistle.

  She looked in her wing mirror and saw that a car was parked on the hard shoulder twenty yards away with its lights off. It hadn’t been there when she had pulled off the road. She tilted the wing mirror, but it was too dark to tell if there was anyone inside. She did not want to wait to find out; she started the engine and gunned the van out into the middle lane. Fixing her seat belt, she accelerated to seventy. Careful of petrol consumption and after all a policeman’s daughter, Stella did not speed.

  By the time the lights of London twinkled ahead, she was clear: Terry’s death was a task to be ticked off and then she would move on.

  She easily negotiated the tight gap between bollards on Hammersmith Bridge, but instead of joining the Great West Road to go to her flat in Brentford, she crossed a deserted Hammersmith Broadway and headed for the office.

  Shattered from the day but exulted at the prospect of working, Stella paid little attention to headlights that stayed behind her all the way to Shepherd’s Bush Green.

  3

  Monday, 10 January 2011

  ‘Now the day is over,

  Night is drawing nigh,

  Shadows of the evening

  Steal across the sky.’

  Jack sang softly while he strolled through the subway and up the ramp. At the statue he paused under cover of the hedge and the bells pealed again, this time counting the hour. The church clock was a minute fast – not that when he was walking he cared about measuring time. On his journeys he noted only slipshod work, wanton neglect and deliberate damage; he counted dented cars, skirting scatterings of windscreen glass glittering on kerbstones and squashed smoulderi
ng cigarette butts tossed in gutters. Jack took trouble on behalf of those who did not bother.

  The sound of the bells reverberated in his ear. Sundays were the worst, Jack confided to the statue of the Leaning Woman; the chimes and changes upset him more than horns, or roadside drilling, which at least had purpose. Blood had trickled down his neck, warm at first, drying to a crust. He had been instructed not to tell and, good at keeping secrets, told no one. He cupped a hand over his ear – the cold made it worse – but the ache was too deep.

  In the lamplight breaking through the tree branches, the statue stretched her arms out to him.

  Today’s journey had been simple; the route on the page was like two circles attached by a straight line and Jack ended up where he had started: on Church Road in Northolt in the London Borough of Ealing. From there it was no distance across Western Avenue to the Underground station, a building dating from 1948. After clicking through the route on Google Street View he scribbled the year on page fifty-three in his street atlas. On Street View, he plotted anything of potential interest in the A–Z before embarking on the actual journey. The five and three of fifty-three added together equalled eight and the numbers 1948 added up to twenty-two which in turn equalled four. Four and eight made twelve which made three. If this was a sign, Jack did not know what it signified.

  He had chosen the middle carriage in the train. Northolt was on the Central line so he was unlikely to know anyone, and if he did, he was ready with a plausible excuse.

  He made the journeys in strict page order during the day. At night, his favoured time was reserved for walking the city without a map, when he was reliant on a future Host to lead the way. As he passed each house, he saw which blinds were drawn, which curtains pulled or shutters swung across. People were careless, and left gaps. He slowed down when a possible Host stopped at his gate, dawdling to get out his door key. Most did not have the forethought to have it ready as Jack always did; if they did this he would know they did not after all have a mind like his own. However, they might offer him a warm and friendly home while he looked for the True Host.