The Detective's Daughter

by Lesley Thomson

  Her theory that the killer had been watching Kate’s house was demoted to ‘unlikely’ a few pages later; there had been no sightings of strangers in the vicinity in the days before the murder.

  The pathologist’s report said that the gravitational effects on blood would have helped determine the time frame within which death had occurred. The body had lain in baking sun for some time so had a high temperature. It had shifted and turned on the pull of the tide, all of this meaning that the pathologist could only give the time of death a two-hour window.

  In the end everything hinged on the testimony of the neighbour who had seen Kate just before midday.

  The office door opened. It was ten to nine. Stella hastily stuffed the papers into the box and gulped the cooling coffee, cursing that she could not put the shredder back without Jackie seeing.

  ‘You’re early,’ she called out gaily, shoving the boxes into her rucksack and kicking it under her desk.

  She smelled stale tobacco smoke. Neither Jackie nor the assistant smoked.

  A man stood in the main office, his hand raised to the door panel as if he was about to knock upon it. Later it would occur to Stella that the gesture came after she appeared; but by then it did not matter.

  ‘I’m looking for Stella Darnell.’

  ‘You’ve found her.’ It was the policeman all over again. Fleetingly Stella thought that this time her mother had died. She was polite; a shabbily dressed man could be a premier client. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘I saw your ad.’

  Stella thought fast. She could hit him with the cement lion but by the time she got a grip on it he would have reached her. A pair of scissors lay in the box beside the photocopier, but he might suspect if she pretended to use them for an innocuous task; he would know the tricks. Would she lose her life because she was concerned to be polite to a killer? She could not placate him; perhaps that was Katherine Rokesmith’s mistake, she tried to humour her killer instead of running and screaming as loud as she could. But then she had a ‘toddler in tow’.

  The man was speaking; patiently he repeated: ‘The advert on your website?’ He pushed his hair off his forehead. ‘For the cleaner? Your door was open.’ His pleasant, assured manner was at odds with his dishevelled appearance.

  This man, with bags under his eyes and lank hair, looked as exhausted as she felt and Stella doubted he could wield a pressure washer or a vacuum and was about to explain that the position had been filled, when he crouched down. Stella sidled towards the scissors, stealing a glance at the clock: six and a half minutes to nine. She had to keep him talking until Jackie arrived.

  He crawled under Jackie’s desk and reappeared cupping a five-pence piece and string of shredded paper as if they were live creatures. Stella had not spotted them; she did notice that his fingernails were clean and filed. He dropped the paper into the bin and placed the coin in Jackie’s desk tidy.

  ‘I have time in the day.’ He was businesslike. ‘I can give you references.’

  Stella pushed an application form towards him, hiding her trembling hands. After last night she was easily rattled and anxious that he should not see he had scared her. He gripped the pen in his left hand, bunched into a fist, like a boy for whom writing was a new activity, and filled it in. She told him she would be in touch if they needed him, resolving, as she shut the door behind him, that ‘they’ never would be in touch.

  She was stowing the shredder on the shelf in the main office when there was a rap on the glass. She stayed where she was, her legs too weak to move. He was back. She had latched the door when she let him out so he could only mouth at her through the glass, holding up something that glinted in the sunlight now filling the room.

  Two minutes to nine; Jackie was never late. Stella risked opening the door, too alarmed to speak.

  ‘I found these on the stairs. Weird that I didn’t see them on the way up. I wondered if they were yours? I guess not, as you must have keys or how would… anyway… as there’s no one else here but you…’

  The man handed her Terry’s keys.

  Stella remained by the desk, his completed form in one hand, the keys in the other, listening to his footsteps receding on the stairs. At the thud of the street door she sank into the admin assistant’s chair.

  If she had dropped the keys on the stairs she would have heard them fall and Paul would have seen them; he always found things she had lost or mislaid. Had they been in her pocket all along? If Paul had seen the man enter the building his suspicions that she was having an affair would be confirmed. Had Paul somehow stolen the keys? Her forehead pulsed with the conflict of possibilities, all of which were surely impossible. She must have dropped them.

  She read the man’s application, grimacing at the block capitals slanting backwards and crammed together as he had run out of space.

  Jack Harmon.

  The name rang a bell but, while Stella was trying to think why it did, there was another knock on the door and she leapt out of the chair and scooted out of sight.

  ‘Stella!’

  It was Jackie. The snib was down so her key would not work. Shakily crossing the room, Stella released the catch and her PA flew past her and grabbed the nearest telephone. Stella had not heard it ringing. She had got up too quickly and leant against the table by the tea things, letting the dizziness subside.

  ‘Clean Slate for a fresh start. Good morning, Jackie speaking, how can we help?’ Jackie cocked her head to hold the receiver and, snapping on a ballpoint, swept a pad of sticky notes towards her over the desk.

  ‘Sorry, who is this?’ She steadied the pad. ‘Gina? How are you spelling that, please?’

  Stella signalled and Jackie passed her the phone: the voice was speaking when she put it to her ear: ‘… no point in coming. The police in their wisdom think my mother was murdered.’

  11

  The bed was unmade. He sniffed the sheet: fresh laundered Egyptian cotton. He wished she would keep the bedroom in order. But as soon as she smiled he could not be cross any more. Wet from the shower, he towelled himself dry, covering himself as best he could for he was modest about his body. Drawing a comb through his hair he assured her that he belonged entirely to her, whatever she did or had done.

  She liked that. ‘I don’t even belong to myself!’

  When he examined her features, he saw their son in her generous mouth, full lips parted over faultless teeth. The scarf suited her elegant neck. On his way out he smoothed the sheets, tucking them in tight, hotel-style.

  He was consumed by her and in this he was lucky; not many men felt this way about their loved ones. Most people lived half-lives servicing long-dead relationships, paying mortgages, mowing lawns, marking anniversaries; lives of drudgery that were merely endured. He was sure of her. She would never leave. He kept her secrets; he kept her safe.

  He stopped in the doorway of the boy’s room. He wandered in and flicked through the heavy pages of his own stamp collection, which was laid out on the table like an exhibit. He tipped a model Spitfire suspended from the ceiling: it revolved until the momentum died. On the bookshelf he blew dust off the line of intricately painted medieval knights and the Sherman and Panther tanks, strategically positioned between the Hardy Boys books and the encyclopaedias.

  He had been about to get in the shower when there was a knock at the door. They were not expecting anyone; he pulled the curtains when he got home to discourage visitors. He refused to answer, but she had made him. He agreed that the caller would have seen the landing light – why draw attention to themselves? He donned a bathrobe, cool and slinky, that reached to his calves, which she had said made him look like a transvestite. He did not like it when she teased him. She teased more when he told her this.

  A potato-faced woman out of a Grimms’ fairy tale with black braids and a ghastly lipstick, in an embroidered gingham apron, had been about to give up. He pulled himself together. She was not a figment of some childhood fable. Her skin appeared golden in the setting sun. Beside her w
as a gruff daughter, an overweight teenager with a missing incisor. The mother thrust a bouquet of heather wrapped in foil at him. Superstitious, he had bought the heather before she could finish her sales spiel.

  The kitchen was chilly after the hot shower. He had stopped her taking sugar; she liked lemon in Earl Grey now. He had taught her so much.

  He lingered by the sink, waiting for the kettle to boil, contemplating the rooks roosting in the chestnut trees. The birds had been there for at least sixty years; his father remembered them when he was a boy. One day his own son would stand here and observe the same scene.

  When he had stepped out of the shower she had knelt before him; she knew exactly what to do.

  She could make him feel like a king.

  The winter sun dipped behind the trees while he sipped Earl Grey and watched the rooks.

  12

  Wednesday, 12 January 2011

  Stella was unlocking her front door when she heard her mobile phone. No other flat on her floor was occupied, so, faint though the ringing was, it broke the hermetically sealed quiet.

  ‘Private call’.

  It had switched to voicemail. In the living room she switched on the light and sank on to the sofa, the protective plastic squelching while she waited for the message to come through.

  The only client with this number was Mrs Ramsay and she was dead.

  Mrs Ramsay rang at least twice a day: to amend her task list, or request that Stella bring a particular cleaning agent. Stella had not returned Mrs Ramsay’s last call, made on Monday when Stella was at the hospital. In the scrambled message she had caught the words ‘want a talk’ and was sure what the ‘talk’ would involve – Mrs Ramsay would be gearing up for her annual clean. In the three years that she had employed Clean Slate, Mrs Ramsay had commissioned two days of cleaning in addition to her bi-weekly sessions. The fuss for these days was, Stella suspected, on a par with the parties Mrs Ramsay had hosted in her youth. She would fill spiral pads with prioritized lists and with the vigorous precision of a house-search insist Stella unscrew the cover on the water tank and clean behind the bath panel. Stella lifted floorboards in Eleanor’s room and vacuumed between joists and under the eaves; she tidied the garden shed and the summerhouse and disinfected the drains. Clean Slate did not offer deep cleaning as a standard package but, to Jackie’s dismay, Stella never charged Mrs Ramsay more than the basic rate.

  Leaning on the sofa’s plasticized arm, Stella yawned. She had not told Jackie how much she relished the forensic operation: covering every inch of the property, routing out hidden horrors like bloated frogs in watering cans, the dead mouse with its head protruding from a hole in a crate as if in the stocks. Now Mrs Ramsay’s overhaul would never take place.

  Her phone beeped: Stella listened to the voice message.

  Mr Challoner’s receptionist had reserved his last appointment the next evening. Stella quelled disappointment that Ivan Challoner had not called himself and selected ‘ring back’. In case he, like she, listened to his answer machine, she injected warmth into her confirmation that she would be at the surgery for five thirty tomorrow.

  She jotted the time in her Filofax, which she’d received from Terry on her eighteenth birthday, along with a police application form which her mother had torn up. Twenty-seven years later, shiny with use, its corners curling, the address pages and dividers dark with thumbing, Stella was lost without it. This was not sentimentality: if an object continued to be functional, why replace it? She took care of her possessions, wiping her dining-room table with tea-tree oil, buffing it with a glass cleaning cloth, flicking a duster over her hi-fi equipment. Everything in Stella’s flat was new or looked new.

  Stella was the first resident to put down a deposit, choosing the corner apartment in the riverside development in Brentford, aptly named Thamesbank Heights, after a hasty viewing of a model in the site’s marketing suite. She justified her speedy purchase to Terry in her head, countering objections that her mother said he would make, the main one being that Stella would get her fingers burned when what was obviously a scam fell through. By the time the venture did collapse, building was almost complete so only the developer’s fingers felt heat as the bank foreclosed on the loan. Stella moved in on her forty-fourth birthday, refusing help from Terry, who, being retired, said he had time on his hands.

  The flat was on the fourth of five floors, so there was not a great climb if the lift broke. It offered a view over the Thames and south-west London, but Stella had not bought it for the scenery. With triple glazing, toughened security doors and CCTV, it was secure with minimal heat loss. Situated on the south side of the block, facing the river, it provided her with total privacy.

  Even as the paint in the lobby was drying, the recession was in full swing and six months on only 35 per cent of the dwellings had been sold. The under-populated estate had an air of futuristic unreality, residents moving like avatars in an online game over the manicured landscape bounded by a ha-ha and dotted with benches on which no one sat. Scraps of paper, crisp packets and cartons marred the perfection promised in the marketing literature and wind harassed infant acacia trees that would not, the saleswoman had assured Stella, block out light or compromise foundations.

  Stella negotiated the shallow pit in front of the main door; filled with hard core and rubbish, it awaited marble to make it a step. Few footsteps other than Stella’s echoed in the quartz-tiled lobby or crunched the gravel paths winding discreetly to housed bins and garages with automatic doors. Seldom was the stillness interrupted by the ping of the lift and the swish of its door. Stella monitored the dirt on the chrome fittings and bluish-tinted glass of row upon row of desolate balconies in front of curtainless windows, their panes stuck with ‘For Sale’ tape. Only the show flat balcony was furnished: sporting a faded consortium-branded umbrella spiked into a patio table that smacked in the breeze like a flag of surrender. The timer for the exterior lighting was awry; lights embedded in path borders and perched on poles in the car park came on at seven in the morning and went off seven at night. The managing agent had not returned Stella’s call about this or the erratic cleaning service. Stella did not want the contract; she would not be paid.

  She resented meeting anyone in the mirrored lift with its motion-activated polycarbonate light fittings which, the brochure had extolled, ‘offered greater durability’, or crossing the pinkish forecourt of crumb-rubber, ‘designed to protect from injury and increase comfort’. She did not need neighbours. In her head she told Terry she had got a bargain.

  Every night, when she closed her front door, which blocked draughts and extraneous noise, she derived satisfaction from the sensible proportion of the rooms, the sleek woodwork and steel fittings. She understood Mrs Ramsay’s need to peer behind pipes and beneath stairs, tighten window catches and to sterilize what no one would see. In so big a house, it was impossible to keep tabs. Had she lived there, Stella too would have had to cover all bases. Her flat in Thameside Heights – she never called it home – required little monitoring and no bother to keep clean.

  She put the two Rokesmith case files on the table and flicked them with a damp cloth, which did not rid them of the odour of Terry’s loft. She’d have another go at shredding at the office; a bit each day would see it sorted.

  It was time for supper. Stella had a strict schedule and supper was at seven, washing up by half past, emails or other work until ten, then bed. She began by going into the galley kitchen to prepare food. The kitchen had been designed for a busy person with little time and little appetite for entertaining. The shiny appliances snugly wall-mounted with none of the gaps and nooks that so exercised Mrs Ramsay suited Stella perfectly. Right angles abounded – no wavering lines or bulges in the plaster to frustrate the eye or darken the mood, all handles and dials clicked flush to surfaces. The washer-drier, slim-line dishwasher and the eye-level combination microwave above the fan-assisted oven were white squares on a chessboard of the ‘Absolute Black’ granite worktop and floor t
iles. Stella had taken her pick of materials from a choice too generous to be profitable. If she found herself chopping, slicing and stirring, she calmed herself with the prospect of the scrubbing, brushing and wiping to follow. She keyed in defrosting, cooking times and extra drain and spin cycles and found to solace in the sheen of a newly mopped floor.

  Since Terry’s death Stella had done no cleaning in her flat.

  She pulled a toad in the hole from the freezer – noticing it was the same brand as Terry’s shepherd’s pies – and set the time for three minutes on high, and while it revolved on the plate, mused at the wasteland below intended as a child-free zone of contemplation. The centrepiece, a Yogic Om in coloured concrete, was to have included bronze plaques with meditative texts: Christian and Buddhist. Bindweed strangled the casing of a Sony Trinitron television and slabs of brickwork – the foundations of the old electroplating works – nestled amidst thistles and towering buddleia and nettles, fractured by their roots. Stella had no time for contemplation with or without children; what irked her was a job half complete.