The Detective's Daughter

by Lesley Thomson

  It was over.

  Mr Challoner was keying details of his treatment into a computer. Stella tottered against the chair as she tidied her hair and tugged at her clothes. The bib lay on the counter.

  She had a gum infection under her lower left second bicuspid for which he scribbled a prescription for antibiotics, reassuring her that, apart from a spot of plaque and decay behind her top left incisor revealed by the X-ray, her teeth were good. With his hygienist on holiday he had performed a clean and polish. He would see her again for the filling which he made sound like a treat in store.

  He delivered Stella to his receptionist and with a slight bow bade her goodbye.

  Outside it occurred to Stella coming out of the reception, that the wall where the surgery had been was blank. She put this crazy impression down to the lidocaine numbing one side of her face; it turned the visit into a not unpleasant dream.

  She stuck to the speed limit on Chiswick Bridge thinking about the little boy tucked in by his father. Terry could not have named her favourite music. Her phone’s ringtone was amplified through the speakers and propelled her into the present.

  Jackie had left a voicemail about Mrs Ramsay, although crackling made the message unintelligible, Stella guessed Mrs Ramsay wanted her. When doing costing analyses Stella never built in the extra attentions she gave some clients regardless of their business worth. Such efforts, she had explained to Terry, were key to her success.

  Stella did not reflect that the extra touches were because she cared about Mrs Ramsay. Page two of her staff handbook warned cleaners of the dangers of mixing emotion with business: You are one side of the dustpan and brush; the client is on the other.

  Stella resolved to start on Terry’s house that afternoon. The pain in her mouth had gone and as her van rumbled over the rickety Hogarth flyover the cloud lifted. She angled the visor to cut out low sunlight and estimated, based on years of experience, that clearing his possessions need take no time at all.

  A police car and a van marked ‘Scientific Support Branch’ were parked outside Mrs Ramsay’s house. The back doors of the van were open and inside Stella could see the same blue plastic slide-out containers that she used for storing cleaning equipment in her vehicles. She drew in behind, wrenching up the handbrake to the furthest notch.

  Blue police boundary tape, rattling in the breeze, had been tied across the gateway of Mrs Ramsay’s house and a policeman blocked the path.

  ‘Sorry, madam, you can’t pass this point.’

  Stella looked over the officer’s shoulder to the shadowy hall. A lookalike Terry in a crumpled grey suit, balanced on his haunches, was inspecting her shampooed rug. A woman in scene-of-crime overalls sprinkled powder along the dining-room window sash bars which Stella had treated only last week and now would have to do again. The detective came out on to the porch, speaking into his phone.

  It was not Terry.

  As he kicked his heels, stamping on the mat and smacking dirt off his trousers, she caught the words ‘… place is a tip…’

  ‘I’m going to have to ask you to move on, madam.’

  ‘I’m here to see Mrs Ramsay. We handle her cleaning.’

  The constable folded his arms. ‘Not any more. Mrs Ramsay died in the night.’

  7

  May 1985

  The engine hurtled too fast into the tunnel; he should have applied the brakes sooner. Everything went into slow motion. His tummy churned, his tongue was a dead thing and when he tried to shout the sounds were lost in yawning blackness. Beakers of tea and coffee, books and bags slid gracefully off tables. Suitcases tumbled out of netted racks and blocked gangways as ceilings and floors changed places. He was alive to noises only experts would identify: cogs loosening, axles shearing off, metal grinding and snarling. The engine was swallowed up by the hole in the hillside.

  The urgency in the air was intoxicating, yet the engineer in him worried that the collision and consequent vibration would weaken the tunnel roof and expose mistakes. The driver’s cab should survive, he calculated as the engine roared out the other side dragging carnage in its wake like tins tied to a wedding car. The second carriage had telescoped into the first. Too late he blew his whistle: this was the best part and he had looked forward to it but his ribs hurt as if splinters of glass had lacerated his organs and his nostrils filled with the stench of rotting roots and claggy soil. The train careered off the track and came to rest beside a watering can.

  Jonathan had been proud of his tunnel, excavated into a mound of topsoil; it was high and wide enough for the rolling stock. He surveyed the damage: there were cracks around the opening which would develop into critical fissures and fatally undermine the structure if not repaired.

  ‘You went too fast.’ Jonathan dared to be cross with Simon. He rubbed his hand on his shorts leaving a bloody stain; he had been biting his thumb. Someone would be displeased with him; at this moment, dazed by the incident, Jonathan could not remember who that would be.

  ‘You’re a scaredy-cat, Justin.’ Simon was matter of fact.

  Justin, for that had been his name for four months now, shuffled his feet to alleviate pins and needles. Simon sat with his legs apart; there was a graze on his knee from football. Justin’s legs were skinny and pale; his football shorts flapped around his thighs, like a skirt, Simon said.

  Simon says: Justin’s a girl.

  Simon says: Justin’s a weirdo.

  Simon’s willy lolled in the depths of his shorts; everything about him was bigger. Justin concentrated on the tunnel in case Simon caught him staring and called him names. He was fretting about the incident, and wanted to be alone to inspect his train.

  The kitchen garden had been a secret but, falling into a routine of going there instead of the playground, Justin grew careless and Simon had seen him. He sneaked up when Justin was doing the opening ceremony for his new cut and cover railway tunnel behind the greenhouse.

  ‘Can I have a turn?’ Justin should not have to ask for a go with his own train.

  ‘Unfortunately you cannot. I need to perform more test runs.’ Simon was imitating him. He knew nothing about engineering or trains, Justin fumed.

  Simon shoved the engine along flattened soil that Justin had weeded and designated a ‘sand drag’ – intended to prevent a catastrophe such as this. He had not taken human error into account because he did not make mistakes. He would have liked to have installed a Moorgate control but lacked the tools. There were no actual rails; he had constructed the track along a section of earth he had punched flat with a brick. Justin dreamed of real tracks raised on ballast. Simon was pressing down on the engine’s tank until it sank into the mulch at the foothills of the compost heap.

  ‘Stop doing that with your mouth.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘You were. I don’t want to have to get cross with you.’ Simon put on a girl’s voice. Justin did not talk like that, but did not point this out. Simon tried to shift the engine, but soil had clogged its wheels and it was mired.

  Justin sifted soft earth; he must wash his nails before supper or Miss Thoroughgood would tell him off. She was leaving at the end of term so everyone was supposed to treat her nicely. Simon’s nails, all nine of them, were clean. Justin turned so that Simon would not see his mouth twitching.

  He had developed a sniff accompanied by a flick of his fringe to distract attention from the tic that had begun after he started at boarding school. He also gnawed at the skin around his thumbnail. Simon called him ‘the Vampire’, which made no sense to Justin as he did not suck blood. Some of the younger boys called him this out of windows or from around corners.

  ‘There’s nowhere for the passengers to get out.’

  Simon was right; he had not built a station. The tunnel had been complicated: he had worked out the strength of the roof, the width of the tunnel – half as much as its length – drawing and revising diagrams in his notebook after prep but had forgotten about alighting and disembarking.

  Had ther
e been other boys, he would have explained how he’d embedded struts made from ice-lolly sticks in the walls. He fixed them with roofing felt made from folded toilet paper layered with leaves and twigs and overlaid with a mortar of earth and some sand he had found by the shed.

  I added water from the tap that I carried in this paint tin.

  Mortar, he would inform them, dries as hard as concrete. He would run a road over the tunnel or perhaps lay a park with a statue, but Simon must be got rid of first.

  Simon had warned that if he told on him Justin would be in trouble for messing up the vegetable patch and trespassing. He explained it was for this bad behaviour that Justin had been sent away.

  ‘I will kill you and bury your body so that no one will ever find you and then your flesh will be eaten and your bones will crumble.’ Simon stuck the hand with the half-finger inside Justin’s shorts. ‘I’ll say you escaped again.’ At first he was gentle, but then he squeezed and Justin felt sick. Simon’s fist struggled like an animal beneath the school regulation material.

  ‘Message understood?’ Simon pulled away.

  Justin blinked back tears.

  Simon never spoke of his random attacks and afterwards they both behaved as if nothing had happened. Justin had an oblique idea that Simon’s behaviour was sanctioned by a higher authority so did not believe he could stop it.

  A storm roared about his ears, whipping soil and stones into the air that stung his cheeks. He dashed water from his face, ducking from the paint tin, and clasped his hands over his head. He opened his eyes. Simon had reduced his tunnel to clumps of earth, wads of discoloured paper stuck with splinters of wood and scattered with onions, carrots and wild garlic.

  The small boy remained on the raised vegetable bed, a statue save for jerks of his head. He wore an expression of quiet despair.

  At last he retrieved the engine from the far side of the bed and wiped sand and soil from the funnel and cylinder with toilet paper. He pushed a loose wheel into place and cleared slathers of wet earth from the carriage windows; the smiling people were gone. He peered in: passengers were sprawled on the floor, or wedged between seats.

  Justin’s face was wet; Simon liked it when he cried. He looked around and saw he was alone, which made him uneasy.

  He imagined writing to his mummy, putting the case for her to fetch him; she would not think he was a coward – except maybe she would. Perhaps he was.

  The boy trailed up the path, past the greenhouse, to the gate to a bridle path that led to the road. He knew this because he had tried to escape. So much freedom just beyond his grasp.

  To the little boy, the walled kitchen garden had a quiet of its own, its once richly planted beds now populated by rabbits, only one corner tended on occasional visits by an elderly gardener.

  He heard an irregular clinking, persistent and distinct like a Morse code message. A dog lead hung from a washing-line post, the frayed strap weathered to a soft pink. In the breeze the clasp, oscillating like a pendulum, tapped out Jonathan Justin Rokesmith’s plot of revenge on the parched and knotted wood.

  8

  Tuesday, 11 January 2011

  The light flickered and the lamp-post emitted an insistent buzz. At half past ten the Great West Road was still busy, headlights sweeping over the bollards stopping access to Rose Gardens North, their shadows in continual flux. Neither the buzzing nor the traffic penetrated a mantle of silence in the cul-de-sac.

  In the 1950s the arterial road cut a swathe through West London, and all that was left of Rose Gardens was a row of six Victorian labourers’ cottages. The six new lanes extended to London Airport. The council, perhaps in bureaucratic penance for the demolition of the ivy-clad dwellings and burgeoning orchards bounded by hawthorn hedgerows, designated a patch of leftover land for recreational purposes. Bushes and infant cherry trees dotted newly sown grass (no dogs or balls allowed) in scant imitation of the orchards. Benches – each dedicated to a worthy councillor – were placed strategically in the shadow of the church. Each spring the trees offered a pink spray canopy, their colour offsetting the miles of tarmac. Soon the road claimed its first fatality: an eighty-one-year-old woman, her body memory obeying a vanished map, walked along Black Lion Lane as if the new road were not there and died instantly. Central railings were installed to discourage further deaths.

  Time passed: the bushes grew into a forbidding shrubbery, tree trunks thickened, weeds ruptured the paths, frost forced the cracks apart to become potholes for rainwater and rubbish. In response to a residents’ petition, the benches – a magnet for drunks and suspicious-looking men – were removed. In the gleam of moonlight the plunging branches of the grand old sycamore provoked nameless dread in scurrying passers by; the paths were abandoned for a muddied track short-cutting over the grass to the subway. Set back from the Great West Road, shrouded from the pavement and St Peter’s Church by encroaching foliage, the little park was no longer a place to linger.

  Stella could have come to Terry’s house at any time; assuming her to be grieving, Jackie did not expect her to be at work, but she was loath to meet Terry’s neighbours so she waited until it was dark. On her return from Mrs Ramsay’s she had found Jackie interrogating the revised rota. Michelle’s son had broken his arm, Felicia had resigned to work privately, Maxine’s brother had been in a car accident so she had gone to Manchester and Shelley was already doing the workload of two: they had a staffing crisis. Stella took all the shifts. A drawback of success was that she did less cleaning so, despite her high-calibre team, she relished any chance to do the work herself.

  After two hours of vacuuming, polishing and mopping in the offices of a financial advice company by Hammersmith Underground station, she had stepped out on to the Broadway and, zipping up her windproof jacket against a bitter wind, driven to the house where she had spent the first seven years of her life. It was another job, she repeated to herself; Terry was another client.

  She caught a movement in bushes across the road and peered through the windows of her van, ready to drive off. There was no one.

  The lamp-post came to life and orange light dulled the colours of the parked cars to muddy brown and made gaunt shadows that quivered on the camber. Stella scanned the shrubbery again and wrongly assumed that a lumpish shape in the undergrowth was a bush.

  She kept close to a privet that Terry had let grow tall – presumably to block a view into his living room – and unlatched the gate. Immediately she tripped on a hard object and her key-ring torch revealed a cast-iron shoe scraper: a painted squirrel nibbling on a nut in the middle of the crazy paving. She carried it to the front door, using the toe of her steel-capped boot to edge it into line with the tiled step. Stella fished in her jacket for his keys, too preoccupied by the enormity of her task – she had never been to Terry’s house uninvited – to consider why the scraper was on the path in the first place.

  The lamp-post went on and light picked out recently repointed brickwork and newly painted sashes. Stella guessed that Terry had done the work; he would not trust others. It was probably such stubbornness that had killed him.

  In 1981, the year Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government increased police pay, Terry worked more overtime than usual and was able to buy the corner house that he and Stella’s mother had rented after their marriage in 1966.

  Many of Clean Slate’s clients lived in this part of Hammersmith: lawyers, judges, actors, journalists; ambitious professionals with no time or inclination to scrub or dust. The area was more openly opulent than it had been in the late sixties during Stella’s time there, when a mix of ramshackle upper-middle classes and working people like Terry had resided more comfortably side by side. Nowadays a policeman would be unusual; Stella guessed that Terry had not socialized with his neighbours so would not be missed.

  Terry Darnell had cared little about social class; a detective, he could enter any home and poke about under baths, stairs and floorboards with impunity. He could delve into the recesses of all manner of lives a
nd expose the unspeakable. Stella too, unimpressed by her clients’ status, applied astringents and detergents, wielded brushes and mops, listening without comment or judgement to dilemmas and dramas not dissimilar to those investigated by her father.

  However, as Stella stared up at the drawn bedroom curtains and tightly slatted blinds, she found the notion of a shared experience with Terry untenable.

  She ran the soles of her boots over the scraper and shook loose his mortice key, which turned easily in the lock. She was not so lucky with the Yale; it would not budge. Used to the idiosyncrasies of locks she inserted her gloved fingers into the letterbox, the flap mouse-trapping them, and eased the door back and forth while manipulating the torque with the key. She detected the correct position in the cylinder, the tumblers released, the plug rotated and the door opened.

  Dry leaves were crushed underfoot behind her.

  Stella left the door ajar, the key in the lock, and rushed to the gate. Wind tore through the hedge, smacking at her jacket, shaking chimes hung in next door’s porch that set off a tinkling discord of notes.

  She put her staff through a drill for entering empty premises. The handbook instructed vigilance; keep the key at all times. Do not leave the door open even to go out to the bins: a burglar needs only seconds to slip inside.

  Besides her van, four cars were ranged along the nearside kerb; the bays by the bushes were empty. A gust sent leaves and a squashed milk carton racing along the gutter and somewhere a can clattered and bounced on tarmac. The lamp went out and the carton was subsumed into velvet blackness. Stella concluded that leaves and twigs scraping and sweeping on stone could sound like shuffling soles. She was uptight and letting her imagination run riot, she told herself.