The Detective's Daughter

by Lesley Thomson

  After several sessions of cleaning for Mrs Ramsay, Stella noticed she repeated the same stories, and some incidents involved Stella, as when the freezer thawed because ‘Eleanor’ had unplugged it. Another version had Gina as the culprit and Mrs Ramsay would, she informed Stella, make her daughter clean up her own mess and pay for the damage from her pocket money. Children must be taught a lesson or they got away with murder.

  One day Stella was collared in the street by a distressed woman who accused Mrs Ramsay of taking her cat and calling it Crawford. Stella went inside and removed the cat, which was moulting, from the top of the boiler in the kitchen. She said nothing when she handed over the pliant orange and white animal. She remained non-committal, while the woman, now addressing her pet, divulged that the Ramsay children had not visited their mother since the year 2000.

  Later that day Mrs Ramsay confided to Stella that she had found Crawford the cat dead in Elly’s room. He was curled up on her bed and she had assumed him asleep, but when she touched him he was ‘as cold and hard as a hat. Cats and dogs are harbingers of evil.’ She had decided they should stop for a coffee to get over the unpleasantness.

  It did not surprise Stella that with their mother dead, her offspring were fronting up to claim their inheritance. Such behaviour, about which she made no judgements, was not unusual.

  She punched in the telephone number.

  ‘Gina-Ware, for fantastic plastic, yes?’

  Stella sat up. She had called one of her suppliers. The catalogue was in front of her on the desk because yesterday she had been weighing up their sale offer on 36-litre mop buckets with heavy-duty wringers.

  ‘I’m sorry, wrong number.’

  She rang the number on the sticky note and the same voice answered.

  Gina-Ware. Mrs Ramsay had said her son-in-law, whom she dubbed Jon-the-footrest, owned a business specializing in durable plastic products, including footrests. Gina-ware was everywhere: Jackie had the deluxe footrest for her back.

  ‘Hello, Stella Darnell speaking. Clean Slate. You called us about a house clearance?’

  ‘I’m driving. I answered because our call centre has gone down. Meet me at the house to agree a price so you can get going.’

  Stella was about to offer condolences and explain that she did not give instant estimates and would quote only after scoping the job when the line went dead.

  For the next hour she worked through emails, signed her way through letters Jackie had left and calculated two outstanding quotes. With half an hour before the others would arrive, she got her rucksack from the chair and dragged out the Rokesmith box files she had fled with the night before. She set them on the desk, keeping the label away from the door, and went to fetch the shredder.

  Stella remembered the murder of Katherine Rokesmith. There had been a storm of publicity, but now only a few aged under forty would know details without prompting. Many other shocking events had occurred since to occupy the public’s imagination.

  Terry Darnell had the afternoon off so invited his fourteen-year-old daughter to central London to see the rehearsal of the wedding of Charles and Diana. Colleagues detailed on special duty would assure them a prime position and afterwards he would take her to a restaurant – pizza or a hamburger, whatever she liked. Stella was nonchalant, saying she didn’t believe in royalty. She had never been out for a meal with Terry and the idea made her nervous about waiters waiting and lots of cutlery. Up until then they’d had fish and chips, or Terry had microwaved shepherd’s pie with tinned peas. Even this was an ordeal for the teenager who did not like chewing and swallowing in front of others. In preparation, Stella had ironed new jeans, chosen a skimpy top and planned to wear lipstick, which would ‘show him’.

  Early that morning he had rung the flat to outline the tight schedule: she must be in the foyer of Hammersmith Police Station at eight in the morning. They would travel up to town with officers going on duty, which meant, he promised, that she got a ride in a panda. Her mother warned that if she was late, Terry would go without her. She would describe any arrangement with Terry in terms of the threat of what would happen if Stella fell short. An hour before she was to leave, Stella was touching up her make-up when her mother barged into her bedroom:

  ‘He’s not coming. He’s got a murder. You look like a tart.’

  Katherine Rokesmith 27th July 1981.

  Stella tipped papers out of the first box on to her desk. The photocopies were crinkled as if they had got wet; others were creased; all had been well thumbed. She flicked through and saw that Terry had underlined text and scrawled illegible notes in the margins.

  Terry had told Stella that in the 1980s, every item in an inquiry was listed in an Action File containing a grid of numbers ticked off as they were assigned to a document. Each ‘event’: a witness statement, a sighting, any minor observation, got an MIR reference. In 1981 the initial recording of data was done by hand; Stella had adapted part of the process for her business.

  She intended to destroy the files before Jackie and the assistant arrived so did not have long. Shredding was another of the admin assistant’s duties and Stella did not want to explain what she was doing; she positioned the shredder between the desk and her chair and slid the switch to ‘on’. The motor made a terrible churning sound, but closing the door was out of the question. She straightened the first pages and glanced at the top sheet.

  It was a long shot of a scene bathed in summer sunshine. A trellis ran along a retaining wall; to the right of the image was a flight of steps. A mooring chain was slung along the brickwork from iron hoops. Stella recognized the location: the Bell Steps led from Hammersmith Terrace to the River Thames. One day in the summer holidays when she was about ten, she had ridden her bike there. She had struggled along the shoreline all the way to an island called the Chiswick Eyot. The wheels stuck in the soft mud and, dismounting, she’d had to drag the bike and had bent the mudguard so that it caught on the back tyre, slowing her down. She had barely made it to the road before the tide came in.

  At Chiswick Mall a man shouted that ‘another five minutes and she would have drowned’. He ran towards her and she threw herself on to her bike, pedalling furiously away, slowed by the mudguard. She dared not confess to Terry that she had gone to the island without checking the tide. She hid the bike behind the dustbins where his recycling bins now offered better cover. He must have found it for on another visit Stella discovered it in the back garden under a tarpaulin, cleaned and with the mudguard straightened. Terry said nothing: a more effective punishment than a telling off.

  Years after the murder, Stella had speculated that the man who had chased her was Kate Rokesmith’s killer.

  The sunshine made mirrors of pools stranded in the mud. Were it not for the police tape, the Scene of Crime team – spacemen in their forensic garb – standing, crouching and kneeling on the shore, the body would have been easy to miss; from this angle it blended with the ground.

  He plucked Stella out of the mud. Her wellingtons sank deeper into the sludge so it looked as if she had combusted, leaving her boots behind. He laughed at this and hoisted her on to his shoulders, tipping her forward to see them. He meant to make her laugh but she started crying.

  ‘Don’t they look silly, Stell!’ he coaxed. ‘What an adventure, we’ll have hot chocolate when we get in.’

  She gripped his neck between her legs and snatched at his hair. This hurt, but he did not say. He balanced her precariously and bent down for her boots. They made a sucking sound when he pulled them out. She cried all the way back.

  There were eight pictures, according to Terry’s numbering. She spread them on the desk, oblivious of the deafening shredder.

  The original images had been black and white and the copies were high contrast making the images stark. At one remove from reality they straddled a line between fact and art. The rest of the photographs were close-ups of a woman in her twenties wearing a patterned shirt and the calf-length, side-zip slacks popular in the eighti
es; her feet were bare. Her hair, wet from the incoming tide, trailed in rat’s tails over her face. Heightened contrast had bleached her features to a mask. One eye was slightly open and her parted lips showed perfect teeth. Puffiness in her face did not disguise that when she was alive Katherine Rokesmith had been beautiful. The final picture, a close-up of the victim’s throat, showed a line around it like a necklace; a chain or a thong. Stella knew enough about forensics to recognize the mark left by a ligature.

  It was not public knowledge that Katherine Rokesmith had been strangled: the police had kept the means of her death back from the media. Until now Stella, like everyone else, had not known the cause of death.

  Terry had known all along.

  Thirty years had passed since Katherine Rokesmith, known to her friends, family and the tabloids as ‘Kate’, was found floating in shallow water of the Thames one Monday afternoon in July 1981. Until now Stella had never considered Kate a real person whose life was brutally terminated. During the investigation, she, like the public, had seen the photograph that would come to define Kate Rokesmith: a woman in a black and white chequered wool coat, standing on a kerbstone at the Notting Hill Carnival, a baby boy in her arms, both looking in the same direction. They were laughing, their faces two-thirds turned towards the camera revealed them as mother and son. The picture told the story.

  The media would use this iconic image over the ensuing decades when anniversaries of the murder rolled around, or more rarely if a new lead emerged. Terry had not taken his daughter to Buckingham Palace that Monday and over the following months, if she saw him it was on the television behind a clutch of microphones appealing for witnesses or giving an update on the case.

  ‘The public can be assured that myself and my team will leave no stone unturned in our search for whoever murdered Katherine. We will bring them to justice.’

  For a few weeks her father’s fame had been compensation: impressing her school friends was more satisfying than stilted visits to Wimpy bars and the cinema with him. As detective inspector, Terry had been in charge of the day-to-day running of the case. Kids at school brought in cuttings from newspapers for Stella to get him to sign and instead of doing her homework she sat late into the night faking his signature and composing elaborate answers to questions about the case that she gleaned from the press. The only time she did see Terry, he refused to talk about the murder.

  One day Stella overstretched herself and told girls in the year above her that the police had a suspect: a serial killer who had killed loads of times. He was a local man, divorced with children at the school. One of the girls refused to leave the house and told her parents who told the Head who told Stella’s mother who grounded Stella. After this, interest in her detective father waned and life returned to normal.

  When she saw him on television, her mother would say that Detective Inspector Darnell was more interested in Kate Rokesmith than in his own daughter. Stella grew to hate the dead woman: her dad had never left any stones unturned for her.

  After some weeks, her curfew over, daubed with red lipstick Stella embarked on what became a regular pilgrimage. She journeyed on the Tube from Barons Court one stop to the Wimpy on Hammersmith Broadway and sat with a view of the door, making a milkshake last an hour, watching passers-by. Later she patrolled Shepherd’s Bush Road past the police station. She played games with herself: she was not hoping to see Terry, she was just out and about. Once she saw him run out of the main entrance and get into a plain police car that sped off, the siren diminishing. He had not seen her. After that Stella gave up her beat.

  That September she lost her virginity at a party in a Kennington tower block, shoplifted perfume from Selfridges and spent evenings, when her mother was out at her latest evening class, smoking out of her bedroom window and listening to Spandau Ballet all night long. She was not a policeman’s daughter; Terry Darnell and Kate Rokesmith were welcome to each other.

  Beneath the photograph, Stella found an article from the Daily Mirror dated Tuesday, 28 July 1981.

  The body of a 24-year-old mum was found by the Thames near Hammersmith Bridge yesterday by a man walking his dog. Police suspect that her four-year-old son was with tragic Kate Rokesmith when she was attacked in broad daylight. It is not known if the brutal murder of the brunette beauty, her future as full of promise as Lady Di, took place yards from the pub or if her body was brought there. Police hope that little Jonathan Rokesmith will identify his mother’s killer. Detective Inspector Darnell refused to confirm if a weapon had been found. Kate, married to engineer Hugh Rokesmith, 35, who has built bridges in countries as far apart as China, the Middle East and Germany, lived in nearby fashionable St Peter’s Square. Mr Rokesmith told police he was at his mother’s in Twickenham at the time of the murder. His son had complained of feeling unwell so his wife had decided to keep him at home. D. I. Darnell said that the ‘hot weather that day had considerable impact on the success of forensic analysis to determine timings’.

  Under a photograph of Terry at a table reading from a statement, grey suit bunched at the biceps, were the words: Det. Insp. Terry Darnell assured the public that police are meticulously following up numerous lines of inquiry.

  Stella absently turned off the shredder, the abrupt quiet highlighting a developing headache, and continued to read. Another newspaper article, this time in the Daily Mail, described how police decided that Jonathan Rokesmith had left the river after his mother was attacked or she would have noticed him missing and run after him. Perhaps he tried to get help, but then the article speculated he might have feared he too would be hurt because he had not gone to the Ram, an obvious place to raise the alarm even for a four-year-old. No one had seen a boy and if he had stopped at the pub, the woman reporter stated, he might have saved his mother’s life. Instead he had crossed the Great West Road, possibly, the reporter Lucy May speculated, going home. Whatever the truth, Jonathan Rokesmith had got no further than the statue, where he was found sitting an hour after the discovery of his mother’s body. Masters also put forward a theory she claimed the police were considering: that the killer himself (no one supposed a woman would commit such a murder) had taken the boy but, worried he would attract attention, abandoned him. Terry had underlined the last sentence in shaky biro. Stella wondered if he gave this theory mileage.

  After the murder, despite lengthy psychiatric examinations, Jonathan Rokesmith had not uttered a word; whatever had happened, the experience was locked inside him. Hugh Rokesmith moved abroad. Stella leant over her desk and, firing up her laptop, brought up Google. She found only one reference to Hugh Rokesmith: he had died nearly four years ago of cancer of the oesophagus and his son, like Kate Rokesmith’s murderer, had vanished without trace.

  Stella read that exhaustive inquiries had failed to unearth a firm sighting of anyone acting suspiciously that day. There were only two witnesses who had seen Kate in the last moments of her life: a neighbour and of course the boy.

  A reconstruction a week after the murder yielded no fresh information apart from the usual bunch of cranks who, in a bid for attention, claimed responsibility or that they were material witnesses.

  Stella knew the sort; alive to any attention, they were often scrupulously clean and tidy. Occasionally such types asked Clean Slate for a quote, which they deconstructed item by item, pointing out the advantages of their own methods of maintaining the ‘hygienic imperative’ as one man had put it.

  The dog owner had been interviewed. The spaniel – one reporter irrelevantly included that his name was Homer – had alerted his owner to the body which in another few minutes would have been submerged and drifted downstream or sunk, the article stated. Three decades on, with the murder unsolved, it might as well have, Stella reckoned.

  Stella recognized Terry’s handwriting on papers headed General Registry Docket: ‘I respectfully submit that this file is put away. 27th March 1983.’ The case had been filed twenty months to the day of the murder.

  The dog owner, a Charl
es Jenkins, aged fifty-six, had gone to the Ram to ring the police. This baffled Stella until she recalled that in 1981 the mobile phone was not in general use. Partial footprints had been discovered on the shore, their ‘chaotic positioning’ initially attributed to a struggle with the assailant, until it was established that Jenkins had returned with an excited retinue of drinkers who splashed up and down the shrinking beach, their detective skills boosted by alcohol, in search of a weapon before being ‘removed’ by a constable, who sealed the already contaminated scene. The incoming tide had washed away any hard evidence.

  Kate Rokesmith had been strangled with a length of material, perhaps twine found in rubbish on the beach. The murder had been only months before DNA was discovered, but later tests on Katherine Rokesmith’s clothing had revealed nothing. Stella found a submission from Terry three years after the file had been put away, suggesting an exhumation of the body to perform a DNA examination of any matter behind her fingernails, but a medical expert had stated that nothing about the state of the victim’s hands suggested she had put up a struggle so the expense had been spared.

  It seemed to Stella that use of a readily available weapon pointed to an impulse crime, making it unlikely that the victim knew her killer. The man may have seen Katherine Rokesmith and followed her, or maybe he had stalked her for days and plucked up the courage to chat her up. When she rejected his advances, he had attacked her. This idea was confirmed by Terry a few pages on: ‘… he had perhaps only intended to molest Mrs Rokesmith, considering her easy prey, but with a toddler in tow she could not escape.’ The sentence implied the boy hampered her and Stella imagined this was Terry’s opinion. There was no sign of sexual assault and a psychiatrist’s report stated: ‘Something about Mrs Rokesmith could have reminded the perpetrator of a mother figure and evoked in him a long-held rejection that sent him into a childlike rage. The boy remained unharmed because he was a bystander with no role in the culprit’s inner drama.’ Stella could guess Terry’s reaction to this idea and agreed with him that the reason for not killing the boy was simple: Jonathan Rokesmith had run away.