The Detective's Daughter

by Lesley Thomson

  In the hall she skidded on a heap of mail-order catalogues in plastic wrappers silted up on the brush mat and had to kick them out of the way to shut the door.

  Upstairs a clock ticked and from the kitchen came the drip-drip of a tap. The air was cold but lacked the stale atmosphere she would have expected of a place shut up and unoccupied even for a couple of days. She identified Lavender and Vanilla from Glade’s Relaxing Moments Collection, which she reserved for middle-range clients prior to a sale or new letting to lend a positive impression to the most tired or drab of interiors and reinforce the conviction that Clean Slate did a thorough job. Terry fitted this ‘average’ profile; most of her clients in this district preferred a less synthetic scent.

  Unwilling to attract attention with lights, she twisted on the miniature Maglite attached to her key ring.

  Always carry a torch in case the lights fail.

  Phantoms shivered and re-formed when she levelled the beam around the hall. An old man flinching and jerking morphed into a coat stand draped with jackets, the telephone table was an arching cat that evaporated as the newel post, a slip of a cartoon character, rose to attention and then swooped up the stairs. Stella picked her way over the catalogues and along the passage to the kitchen.

  Something had triggered the security light; Stella leant over the sink but could see no one beneath the window sill and decided it was branches of a forsythia bush waving in the wind. She turned to the room; pale appliances and worktops were clinical in the vibrant light.

  There were none of the items that often take up kitchen surfaces: coffee-makers, toasters, cooking implements stuffed upright into ceramic pots, cutting boards harbouring germs; she guessed that little cooking or eating took place and recalled the Coke and two bacon rolls in the Co-op bag. Terry grabbed his food on the run; it was fuel only. She closed off the dripping tap, comforted by a whiff of bleach from the plughole.

  On recent visits to Terry, Stella had seldom gone beyond the front room but remained on the sofa, drinking tea. They both knew that the sooner she finished it the sooner she could leave.

  The American-style fridge with an ice dispenser dwarfed a reproduction country pine dresser that Stella remembered from her childhood. Ever the opportunist, Terry had snapped it up with a double bed, the kitchen table and her bedroom wardrobe from a man doing a house clearance next door to the scene of one of his crimes. Her mother told friends the cherry-stained pine was the tipping point to divorce, although much of the pine, darker with age, filled her small flat in Barons Court.

  The dresser was stacked with white crockery; plates propped up like blank faces in the unremitting light. In Stella’s day the cupboard had been a dumping ground for household odds and ends: a basket of pegs, her mother’s cookery books, chipped cups and plates that her mum got second-hand, not caring if they matched, light bulbs, candles, lengths of cables and trinkets from Christmas crackers.

  The fridge, its defrosting cycle complete, shuddered to meditative quiet. Stella was surprised to be greeted by beer and bottles of wine on racks and in the vegetable storage area. She had not thought of Terry as a drinker; whenever she saw him he was about to go on duty or was already working. In a pub he would nurse the same shandy all evening. Three eggs wobbled in a compartment along the top of the door; the only other food was jars of pickled onions, a lump of cheddar and a foil dish of half-eaten shop-bought shepherd’s pie. Terry would not have left food in the fridge if he’d been planning be go away. The drawers of the freezer were packed with more shepherd’s pies. Her mother was sure that Terry would disapprove of her recent decision to be a vegetarian; he disliked vegetarians, she said. Stella doubted Terry cared what her mother ate. Disliking waste, Stella would take his shepherd’s pies home. It felt like stealing; discouraged, she abandoned the idea.

  A subtle drop in temperature came not from the fridge but elsewhere in the house.

  Along the passage she made out the two panes of glass in the front door: oblongs suspended in darkness. The front door was shut. Above, a floorboard groaned; the house was adjusting to her presence.

  She returned to the kitchen. Lit by the halogen beacon the garden was a stage set awaiting performers. Terry must have recently swept because only a sprinkling of leaves were strewn in the flower beds. A plastic picnic table with rainwater collecting in a dip was in the middle on the patio. Matching chairs had been tipped against it in the way Stella would have put them, to keep birds from soiling the seats. Clean Slate offered pressure-washing of paths and garden furniture in a ‘Get Ready for Spring’ package. She would hose down the paving and turn over the soil; the furniture could go.

  She had never sat with Terry drinking a beer in the sunshine at the table, telling him about her latest contracts while he related his latest cases.

  The security lamp went out. Stella groped for her Maglite.

  He was watching.

  Spangles of light floated before her. The torch’s battery was failing; the beam wavered to a watery yellow.

  She was distracted by the acrid smell of kettle descaler from beneath the sink and bent to investigate. She had searched for a plunger in this cupboard, vast to a child, sent by Terry when the bathroom sink blocked. Stella dismissed the hazy memory.

  Stella Darnell judged a person by their cleaning cupboard. Those who stashed materials on shelves, penning stray bottles into plastic boxes, folding dusters, chamois, dishcloths, scourers in stacks and hung up the dustpan and brush, rarely paid invoices on time and picked holes in the service. If she opened a cupboard and the contents spilled on to the floor she could expect to make the place her own and never chase payment.

  Terry’s cleaning store was one of the tidiest Stella had seen.

  A bowl, a dessertspoon and a mug were placed in a line on the draining board: Terry’s last breakfast. He had eaten cereal and drunk coffee. His six-foot-one-inch frame had briskly crossed the kitchen, leather soles clicking on the tiles, and with swift economic motions he had scooped the inside of the bowl and the mug with the soapy scourer, sluicing each item under the hot tap, careless of scalding already roughened skin. With a fling he had shaken excess water off his hands, drying them with a flapping cloth poked into a rubber holder suctioned on the side of the fridge.

  Terry had left unaware that he was walking out of his house for the last time.

  The tea towel was dry. Terry had been gone two days. Why was he in Seaford?

  Take deep breaths. That’s it. In. Out. In. Out. Keep your eyes on the horizon. Once you get your sea legs, you’ll be right as rain.

  He could not loosen her grip on the handrail as a force-nine gale tossed the ferry like one of her bath toys. Passengers were being sick on the deck above and the wind spattered them with flecks of vomit. He would break her tiny fingers if he tried to prise them off the rail. Her bird shoulders rose and fell as she obeyed his instructions. The little thing was quaking; he hugged her close.

  Stella nudged the bowl, the spoon and then the mug an inch from their original positions so that Terry was not the last person to have touched them; she had wiped him away. She would crate the crockery for charity. She could not lose the impression that Terry was just out of her vision, monitoring her.

  She aimed the torch behind the living-room door, darkness folding in behind her. Nothing. Despite her fleece-lined anorak, Stella felt cold. She would not turn on the radiators; Terry was sparing with central heating, she was sure she had always been cold when she visited.

  She appreciated the clean lines and the metal sheen of the brushed chrome coal-effect fire flush with the chimney breast. When it was new, she had mistaken it for a television. She remembered Terry’s missing mobile phone and raked light under the sofa and armchair.

  She was on the floor when the lamp-post came to life projecting a silhouette of the swaying hedge on to the venetian blinds. Stella shivered. With forensic care she lifted cushions and then knelt on the sofa, shining the torch down the back. Her nose close to the fabric, she could sme
ll Terry’s aftershave; he sat here to watch television.

  The lamp-post went off and at the same time a bluff of wind shook the windows, its moan rising to a whine before dying away.

  The air freshener was in a double socket by the gas fire. She pulled it out. As she had guessed, the cartridge was empty. Terry was too meticulous to leave a used one plugged in: further proof that he had not planned to go away, that something had made him change his mind. Something was wrong.

  Stella hurried back to the hall and trod the stairs with a creeping disquiet, zigzagging the torchlight ahead. The draught was stronger here and she stopped on the landing and confirmed again that she had shut the front door.

  Terry’s toothbrush and razor poked out of a tumbler on the bathroom sink. She slid them to the other end of the glass shelf, but then admitting that Terry would hate to find them moved – she didn’t like Paul interfering with her things – restored them to their original positions. Every object was an emissary for Terry; he had her surrounded. Stella’s efforts to dispel her sense that any minute her father would appear and ask her what she was doing there were futile. She straightened the towel on the rail, although it was already straight.

  Terry’s bedroom was four steps up from the bathroom landing, facing the street. When she had come to Terry’s for his ‘access weekends’ this door was always shut. She stayed in her bedroom until he called her for breakfast. Her old bedroom was on the left; she would leave it until last. Stella feared her heart would crash out of her chest when she put out a hand to open his door.

  On her way to the bathroom the door had been ajar, now it was shut. Stella retreated to the lower landing and leant cautiously over the banister; stretching right over she could make out only a section of the front door. The failing beam did not reach the hall but she could distinguish the catalogues on the hall table and tried to remember placing them there. She must have put down the torch to gather them up and square them off or the pile would slither off. Her memory was getting worse.

  She returned to the bedroom door, the swish-swishing of her anorak loud in her ear, and this time the door was open although she had not turned the handle. Of course the draught had shifted the door ajar. Stella let herself breathe.

  The bedroom windows were locked and fitted with limiters; there was nothing Terry did not know about security. Stella swept the beam over bare walls, his bed with a melamine unit of shelves built around it and a pine wardrobe with matching chest of drawers on which sat Terry’s washbag, his father’s ivory-backed hairbrush with no handle and an almost empty bottle of Gillette aftershave. Stella gave him aftershave for birthdays and Christmas.

  The expanse of ironed grey duvet was broken by light blue pyjamas shop-folded on a pillow. Stella did not touch them; from feet away she could smell Terry’s hair product.

  The three wardrobe mirrors displayed her in crude triptych, a bulky figure in her anorak, her sharp features as granite in the unflattering light.

  She disconnected another used air freshener behind the bedside cabinet. A radio alarm with huge digits was next to a lamp, and a torch with a luminous casing. It worked, so she swapped it with her own.

  A ‘1’ was flashing on an LCD screen in the telephone base.

  Terry had a message.

  When she lifted the receiver its screen activated to blue. She pressed ‘play’. A female robotic voice with an American accent announced a voicemail had been left at three minutes past ten on Sunday, 9 January 2011, the day before Terry had died.

  After a signal there was silence. Stella presumed it was a predictive dialled sales call that automatically cut when the recipient did not answer but nevertheless hit ‘replay’. This time when she played the message she distinguished what sounded like a gurgling spring; listening to it again she learnt nothing more.

  She had forgotten 1471; she could find out the number of the caller.

  She punched in the digits and another recorded voice stated ‘You were called at 10.03 p.m. on the ninth of January…’ She patted her pockets for a pen while stilted tones enunciated each number; giving up she pressed ‘three’ to connect and a chirpy set of notes indicated the number dialling. She counted the rings: one, two, three, before a long beep and the line cut off.

  Air shifted in the room and Terry’s aftershave irritated her nostrils; stifling a sneeze, she saw that the bedroom door was shut. She dropped the torch and the light dipped crazily over the wall. It stopped, pointing at the mirror, the splash of light obliterating her reflection. She raked her hands through her hair; she must stay on it, she told herself. Her fingers numb with cold she tried again: ‘This is Terence Darnell, I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but if—’

  Stella hurled the receiver; it bounced on the duvet, making a dent in the cotton, the voice chippering through the earpiece. The last number to dial the house had been Terry’s mobile phone. He had rung to get his calls.

  When she was little, it had been the usher gliding up to their seats in the cinema with a slip of paper containing a message to attend a case, or a shambling man in a pub or a café, or a staccato voice on his radio relaying cryptic information that cut their time together short. As technology progressed this came via his pager, or the phone beside his cutlery, while they waited for food they would not stay to eat.

  Stella examined the telephone base. In the last year Terry’s breathing had grown worse, he sucked in as he inhaled; the few times he’d called she’d heard it down the phone; every sentence seeming an effort, as if talking to her was a chore. Yet there was no sound on the recording.

  The date was wrong.

  While the time was right, it read nearly midnight and was three minutes fast – the date stated it was the tenth of January; it was one day slow. This meant that what the machine called the ninth was actually the tenth. Terry could not have called his answer machine: by three minutes past ten he had been dead about twelve hours.

  The solution was obvious: whoever had used his mobile did not know Terry was dead and had tried to contact him to return the phone.

  A tiny siren was coming through the receiver; the line was still open. She retrieved the handset and in a measured voice left her name and Clean Slate’s number, hoping that Terry’s battery would live long enough for the person to get in touch.

  Stella remembered that this was the second message she had left and her relief dwindled. Someone had called but had not left a message; surely, had they wanted to return the phone they would have done so.

  It did not make sense.

  She went to the door.

  It would not open. She rattled the handle. The door was locked. She was going mad.

  The torch died. She flailed at the door; in the pitch black she lost her bearings and fell backwards catching the bed. Her bowel muscles contracted and she clenched her buttocks. She breathed deeply and after a bit the smell of washing detergent grounded her. She needed to pull herself together, she berated herself.

  At that moment a spear of orange light cut across the door. The lamp-post had come on and was shining through a crack in the curtains.

  She found the fluorescent torch – a yellow shimmering stick – at her feet, but it didn’t work. The lamplight went off. She grasped again at the doorknob, wrenching it, and this time the door opened. The cold air made her shiver and her teeth chatter. She clenched her jaw, furious at losing her nerve. It was obvious that the handle needed oiling; it was a knack, that was all. As for the door being shut, she had closed it herself when she came in to stop the draught. Terry was dead, she had seen his body, he was not here.

  She had to rely on her failing key-ring torch to get across the landing to her bedroom. This room overlooked back gardens in St Peter’s Square and below, in the garden adjoining Terry’s at the end of a winding slate path, she could make out a summerhouse. This was familiar, although she had not seen it from this angle before and not at night. She was looking into Mrs Ramsay’s garden.

  She had forgotten how close to Terr
y Mrs Ramsay lived. When she came to her house she approached from King Street and, intent on work, could forget his proximity. She had been round the corner from Terry many times in the last two years; never once had she thought about him. Her favourite client and her father occupied different worlds.

  There was a shriek: hollow and agonized. Stella clutched at the window sash, her heart pumping. A bark answered, rougher and less distinct than a dog’s, and a fox bounded along the path and leapt on to Mrs Ramsay’s garden table, snuffling to and fro, its eyes flashing, before it melted into the undergrowth by the wall. Stella tried to regain equilibrium; never had it seemed so easy to have a heart attack.

  The old lady fretted that children played hide and seek in her garden, concealing themselves under the table, in the bushes or the summerhouse. She accused Stella of not believing her but seemed mollified when Stella offered to scrub down the table, remove the bird shit and treat the wood. Stella had not invoiced her.

  Mrs Ramsay had been wrong: Stella had believed her. The daughter of a detective, she was aware that the improbable was probable and had scanned the garden for signs of intruders – scuff marks, sweet wrappers, footprints in the soil – but found nothing. She wished now she could reassure Mrs Ramsay that it was a fox.

  She found a silver pen on the window sill. Stella could not decipher the inscription in the poor light but could explain why it was there: Terry would have been scribbling notes at the desk and got up to check what had activated the security lamp. The patio not being visible from here, he would have gone downstairs to investigate and, fearless, crept along the passage to the kitchen and opened the back door.

  She trained the torch on the door as if Terry might be about to return from the kitchen – panting and irritable – to switch off the lamp and go to bed, leaving the chair by the window as it was now, with his pen on the sill.

  The torchlight flickered, grew brighter, then dimmed and died.

  Stella felt about for the desk lamp, her breath uneven. It was angled downwards but after the comparative dark, the light dazzled her. A stapler, a plastic clock, a Nescafé jar jammed with pens and pencils and a pile of magazines shrank to prosaic normality.