The Detective's Daughter

by Lesley Thomson

  This time Terry risked jumping down from the gate into the churchyard. He executed a perfect landing on the tiled path and wished Stella had been there to see it.

  Terry was woken by a pain in his cheek where the armrest had been digging into him. The papers had dropped from his hand and were scattered in the well beneath the front passenger seat. He gathered them up and, trying to stretch, hit his shin on the window. Terry was in the habit of taking documents from the case files when he left the house, hoping to spot something new. He smoothed out on his lap the psychiatrist’s reports on the boy in the weeks after the murder. He had attended all the meetings, desperate that Jonathan would speak and describe his mother’s killer.

  He climbed out of the car, his damp shirt sticking to his skin. Seven forty-five and it was barely light. He had slept over eight hours, yet he did not feel better for it.

  His bladder was full. He looked up and down the road; his was the only car parked in the seaside bays. Opposite was a recreation ground and in the distance there were already lorries on the A259. Out of sight, below a bank of pebbles, came the wash and hush of the tide. He clambered over a wall separating the beach from the road, crossed a concreted walkway and took jumping strides, his feet sinking into the shingle, down to the shoreline. Dark-grey sky merged with iron-grey sea. He laid the papers down, weighing them with a chunk of bleached wood, and peed. He swayed as he did up his zip. His head was a mush as if he had been drinking. Last night had been the first night for weeks when he had not had a drink and nor had he eaten.

  Far off he made out a yellow dot. The Newhaven–Dieppe Ferry returning to Britain. Tucking in his shirt and doing up his cuffs, this sight cheered Terry. He would invite Stella to France, they would go for the day because she wouldn’t be able to spare much time. Like him, her work came first.

  Stella scampered over the beach when the water receded and waited, hands on hips. She bellowed at the sea: her words got lost in the rush of shingle dragged by the water, but he knew what they were.

  ‘I’m not scared of you!’

  The water rushed at her; Stella belted off pell-mell, squealing when froth lapped at her heels catching her sandals.

  Terry swept her up into his arms high above the sea.

  ‘Come on, Stell, let’s get an ice cream,’ he shouted. She scrubbed at his hair, her legs encrusted with sand. Maybe he’d buy himself one too.

  A burst of wind buffeted him and shifted the wood. The pages flew into the air. Terry snatched at them, but they whirled towards the surf, fluttering like birds in the dawn sky. Helpless, he gazed out to sea; he did not need the reports, he could practically recite them word for word.

  It was a steep climb up the shingle and twice, his balance poor, he stumbled on to his knees.

  He fell into the front seat, shivering, his neck stiff from sleeping awkwardly. His jacket pulled at his shoulders, somehow making his chest ache. These days he had pain somewhere all the time. He was too old to camp out in a car. Yet this morning nothing could dampen his spirits.

  He unscrewed the lid from his flask. He could have done with coffee last night but had forgotten it. Too exhausted to drive to London, he had told himself he had no deadline to meet, no press conference to attend. Ivan Challoner had no idea; he could take his time.

  Terry had solved the case that had haunted him for decades.

  Instead of going home he had found his way to the sea and, scrunched up on the back seat, covered with a skimpy picnic rug tainted with de-icer fluid, his jacket a pillow, had fallen into a thick sleep, dreaming of Jonathan Rokesmith and his bear named Walker.

  Ivan Challoner would provide a plausible reason for the flowers; he would claim they were a tribute to Kate’s years in Bishopstone where his family had lived for over a century. He would not be able to explain the stuff in the house. He would finally pay for his crime.

  It was tempting to call the station, but Stella must be the first to know. He would show her police work in action. She was like him, she was thorough and methodical: together they would bring Ivan Challoner to justice.

  He poured coffee and balanced the cup on the dashboard while he did up the flask. Steam clouded the windscreen. The liquid tasted of plastic.

  He would buy breakfast in Seaford and call Stella. They would make a plan.

  Terry spelled out his daughter’s name in the steam on the glass with a forefinger. He flopped back in the seat, catching a whiff of himself: sweat and greasy hair. He puckered his nose and scratched his unshaven cheek with distaste. A clean and fastidious man, he disliked being unkempt. He would shower and shave before he saw Stella. He wanted to look good. He undid another button on his shirt – torn now – to ease the pressure on his chest. He checked to see if absently he had clicked on the safety belt and found that he had not. He shifted to release his jacket, which had rucked up behind and pain came like a stitch. He had drunk the coffee too fast. Terry felt every day of his sixty-eight years.

  The sky was lightening towards the west. The steam had evaporated, and where he had written ‘Stella’ were vague finger dabs. He took out his handkerchief to blow his nose and the slip of newspaper with the registration plate fell out. He slotted it above the sun visor while he rubbed his chest to mitigate the cramps.

  Terry followed signs in Broad Street and found a car park behind the Co-op. He paid for half an hour – the shortest period; at the outside he would be fifteen minutes – and displayed the ticket.

  Seaford was a retirement town. This early on a parky January morning there were few locals about. It was too quiet. Terry could not imagine growing old here. This thought was contradicted by a derisive cry of seagulls above him. He retreated into the heated supermarket where he snatched up a ham roll from the chiller cabinet, hesitated, then made it two; he had missed supper. He grabbed a can of Coke. He broke into another sweat and, swaying, put out a staying hand. He needed to eat, that was all.

  He waited in the queue, pressing the cool can to his cheek; only one checkout was open and the cashier was slow, examining each item as if it was foreign to her. Jonathan had thrown away the green crayon because he had not wanted the colour in the box. He had drawn Challoner’s house in black and white. Terry cast around for another cashier. He ached; the food in his arms was heavy; the can was like lead.

  He was being watched.

  A small girl was by the counter, leaning back on it, a teddy bear clamped to her nose.

  Stella.

  He would not wait until he was in the car, he would ring Stella outside the shop before her day got under way. Terry winked at the little girl and quick as a flash she vanished behind the wire baskets and peered at him through the holes.

  [J. J. Rokesmith, 13 September 1981]

  When Jonathan returned, Walker the teddy bear was on the detective’s knee. He saw this immediately because Walker is his benign witness. Before he begins an activity he turns the bear to face where he has decided to be so that he is observed by him.

  In this final session I began by giving Jonathan a task, one I have broached before. The adults: the detective and female sergeant, the female social worker and father were silent while I reiterated how Jonathan might help catch the bad person. If he had not seen anything, he could not help. He must not make up stories to please the police or me. He did not speak.

  There was five minutes left when Jonathan came in from the garden. He hesitated on the threshold, apparently considering removing Walker from the detective, who remained neutral. He did not smile in case Jonathan interpreted this as triumph and decided he had ‘captured’ the toy. Nor was he stern, which might imply he had removed the bear as punishment. The impression given was that Walker had chosen his lap. Jonathan would see that if Walker was ‘in the detective’s corner’ then D. I. Darnell must be a good man. He returned to his table and sat still. The questions resumed in a light voice – Walker was doing the talking:

  Did you see a man talking to your mummy?

  No answer.

  Were
you there when the man hurt your mummy?

  No answer.

  What colour hair did the man have?

  No answer.

  At the end of the session the boy trotted over to the detective and put his face close to Walker’s face, glaring at him, implying betrayal. Then he collected him and left.

  This time he did not shoot the detective.

  Terry patted his jacket. He had left his wallet in the car. He felt himself redden; his breathing hurt – there was no air in the shop. The little girl had gone. Behind him the queue had backed up to the drinks aisle. Terry was about to abandon his breakfast when he found his wallet. He had forgotten his new jacket had inside pockets but was too tired to explain and handed over a ten-pound note. Always prepared, he had been to the cashpoint before staking out Challoner’s surgery.

  Terry lifted the carrier bag and nodded to the cashier. He wanted in some oblique way to share his buoyant mood, to say his daughter had bought his wallet and that he was this far from catching a murderer. A woman jolted him; he was in the way, so he left.

  Janet, his colleague, had gone to the car but Terry had been finishing his notes, grabbing some peace. It was a sweltering afternoon; the air in the consulting room deadened even with the garden door open. He was exhausted then too. Terry had been invisible to the boy, being either a detective or in this session a bear, and Jonathan had stayed mute, so that was that: dead end. The case was cold.

  The boy appeared, holding his bear by the ear.

  ‘All right, Jonny?’ Without thinking, he spoke to the boy as he would his daughter.

  Terry had never heard the voice before.

  ‘You have to know a very important thing.’ The boy was confidential.

  ‘Yes?’ Terry kept still; he did not call for a witness. Walker the bear stared at him with button eyes.

  ‘It’s important that you know.’

  ‘What should I know?’

  ‘My mummy is dead.’

  Terry Darnell faltered by the trolleys in the supermarket entrance. Until then he had been too preoccupied with catching Kate Rokesmith’s killer to remember this bald fact.

  In the search for his wallet he had not come across his phone. It was in the car. No, it was not in the car. It had been in his pocket when he was in Challoner’s garage. He had mistaken it for his torch. He still had the torch but not the phone. Where was it?

  He had dropped it in the garage. Challoner would know the police were on to him.

  He could not call Stella.

  The street was busier: sunlight suffused the mist, cars had parked along the kerb and pedestrians jostled on the pavements, wheelie shopping baskets rumbling, motorized buggies clearing a path.

  Darkness squeezed him from the sides. The carrier bag was too heavy.

  ‘My mummy is dead.’

  Darkness pushed from above.

  Stella!

  And then from below.

  A woman coming out of the Co-op knocked into the elderly man who had dawdled in the queue. She tutted and then exclaimed when he fell down in front of her.

  Later she would tell police how the gentleman had toppled over like a toy soldier. She had shouted into the shop for someone to call an ambulance. She was a nurse and had tried to resuscitate him, but had established before the paramedics arrived that he was dead.

  Epilogue

  Monday, 21 February 2011

  Mrs Ramsay’s house had been empty for weeks. Stella caught a whiff of lavender in the air. Her feet clattered in the hall, the rug and hat stand had gone, dust had settled on the glazing bars and fine cobwebs occupied cornices. It needed another clean, but she would not say or Gina Cross would think she was touting for more work.

  Gina Cross had not visited the house, nor had her brother and sister. Stella was used to the vagaries of families: she not been able to deal with her dad’s house. Nonetheless, it saddened her: when she wasn’t railing against their carelessness, Mrs Ramsay had spoken fondly of her children; for some reason they did not feel the same way about her.

  In the kitchen the gathering dust had made less impression. The sink still gleamed, the draining board was immaculate. The 1960s décor was too shabby to have retro value, though; new owners would strip it out. She wandered through to the dining room and, resting a foot on the radiator beneath the window sill, gazed out beyond the yew hedge to St Peter’s Square and read the postcard again: ‘11 a.m.’

  The address side of the card was blank, the italicized message in turquoise ink confident and bold. The card depicted Hammersmith Bridge from the Barnes end and, going by the cars, the image might be 1970s; a red Routemaster bus – number 33 – gave nothing away. Kate Rokesmith wrote cards to Ivan Challoner, summoning his presence. She had not sent this one. Stella had received it that morning with nothing else in the envelope. There did not need to be.

  She looked at her wrist: Terry’s watch was three minutes fast, meaning it was ten forty-seven. Unlike the hot Monday in 1981, on this colder sunny day St Peter’s Square was not deserted. Children played on the lawns and two mothers perambulated babies in buggies around the perimeter paths.

  Stella was there to give Mrs Ramsay’s house one last check. She would never come again. She returned to the hall and looked out of the back door at the garden. The lawn, a lush green, had survived the snow. She slapped her cheek, feeling a tickle; her fingers were wet. That morning she had put the box of toys that Terry got ready for her visits back in her old bedroom.

  Stella heaved on her rucksack and went out on to the porch. She shut the front door and as per Gina Cross’s instructions dropped the keys through the letterbox. She went down the steps, turned right and passed the house where Detective Superintendent Terence Christopher Darnell had lived for over forty years, walking on past the church. Jack said when a person was walking they were in no place at all, it was like death. No one had seen Kate walking. The clock in the tower showed ten fifty-six. Stella continued past the statue of the Leaning Woman and into the subway.

  From the Bell Steps there did not appear to be anyone on the beach. Then she saw Jack Harmon coming up from the shoreline. His name was really Jonathan Justin Rokesmith. Stella would always call him Jack.

  ‘You came.’ Jack leant against the wall beneath Sarah Glyde’s garden. The beach was a suntrap; out of the breeze it was warm. The tide had ebbed; the mud was viscous, the air heavy with its stench.

  ‘Of course.’ Stella rested the rucksack on a slab of concrete jutting out of the ground. She pulled out a maroon carrier of fake canvas and placed it next to it. Inside was a large tin.

  Jack held out his hands to take the tin. She shook her head.

  ‘It’s OK.’ She clasped it to her and stumbled over scatterings of bricks and glass, stepping from stone to stone, heedless of the rim of green slime around her loafers. A plank of wood, slippery and glistening in the sunshine, lay across the shingle, half in the shallows the red painted letters flaking:

  ‘KE P TO TH RI HT’.

  When Stella shuffled to the middle, it see-sawed with her weight. She prised the lid off the tin and handed it to Jack. Coarse grey-white grit sent a puff of dust into the air. The smell was not of ordinary ash, it was the smell of a body burned at an intense temperature for just over an hour in the Mortlake Crematorium: a smell unfamiliar to Stella. In a tin lined with plastic lay all that was left of her dad.

  ‘Do you want to say something? Make a speech?’

  Stella shook her head and crouched down; the plank tipped and steadied.

  The ash made a brushing sound as first it trickled, then poured out on to the mud. Water lapped around it, drawing it out to a pale blurred shape. Stella replenished it with more ash and again the tide swelled around it until all the ash floated on its surface like the glitter she had used at Terry’s for making Christmas cards.

  ‘Make a wish and blow out the candle. Keep it secret. No, don’t say what it is, not even to me. Blow really hard. That’s all right. Have another go. One, two, three. Blow!
Good girl! Your wish will come true. I promise.’

  Stella stretched out as far over the water as she could, and tipped the tin upside down, shaking out the last of the grit. Jack held her shoulder. She dipped the tin in the river, sluiced it around and rinsed it out. The current was dispersing Terry’s ashes and sending them downstream to the sea.

  She handed Jack the postcard.

  The message was meant for Ivan and Jack had neutralized it by sending it to Stella; they had met at the time Kate always specified.

  With a flick of his wrist Jack sent the card sailing into the air. It twisted and fluttered in the mild breeze and, alighting on the river, caught an eddy. It swirled around before vanishing and reappearing; it was lost in the bright morning light.

  ‘You hold the stone like this. Keep your wrist flat, hold steady. Flick it and keep your eye on the water. Imagine what will happen when you let it go. Like this.’

  Her dad sent the stone out on to the water. It skimmed the surface and bounced five times. He never did less than five. Sometimes he made six but she knew his record was seven. She had a go, but the stone sank. Dad made her stand properly and she did it again. It sank. She knew he thought she would give up, but she hunted about and found the right shapes and soon had a massive pile. She took her time, ‘gauging the throw’ as he told her: the stone whipped the top of the water over and over and over. Four! After that she never got more than three. Dad said he wished he could bottle that moment. He said he wished her mum had come. She knew that was because he hoped her mum would change her mind about leaving and Stella could stay with him.