On the shelves where Stella’s few books had been were books on forensics, biographies of police officers, true crime paperbacks: the Moors Murders, the Kray twins, Harold Shipman and a copy of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. A computer with a flat screen monitor sat on top of a blotter in a mock-leather holder. Terry would have used a computer at work, but Stella was surprised that he owned one, thinking him uncomfortable with new technology. The magazines were editions of The Job, the Metropolitan Police in-house publication. She sat down at the desk, which tilted as she leant upon it. By her elbow was a blank sheet of headed notepaper created on a computer unlike Clean Slate’s embossed letterhead on vellum. Colin Peterson offered ‘Quality rendering and screeding’. Scribbled at the bottom was: ‘17/6 – 21/7, spare room’. Stella fizzed with betrayal: Terry had not mentioned he was having her bedroom decorated. She folded the paper and wedged it under the leg of the desk to stop it wobbling.
The room did need a make-over: it was still the pink that Terry had chosen for the daughter he had wanted but not got. Red carpet tiles were shiny with ingrained dirt and scored with indentations from the chair wheels. She finger-tested the desk and found no dust. Methodically she repositioned the objects as if making last-minute adjustments for a party. It did not lessen the impression that Terry was in the house or that she should not be there handling his possessions.
On one wall, a laminated London street map replaced her poster of John Travolta in Grease. Stella knocked over the pen jar trying to see if there was anything written on the red and black wire-bound calendar above his desk. January was blank. She flicked through, searching for a clue as to why he was in Seaford. Nothing. January was blank. Terry had no life.
For the next hour she was busy: pulling out drawers, emptying files and collecting bank and pension statements, utility bills, the documents needed for probate. The shredder ground on as she fed it with out-of-date MOT certificates, insurance schedules for cars Terry had sold or part-exchanged, receipts, payslips for the last forty years. She stuffed instruction leaflets for cassette recorders, kettles, even a bread-maker, into a rubbish sack along with the police magazines. Despite her hurry, she was methodical about recycling and confidentiality. Soon the shredder bin overflowed, stalling the motor. She wasted time picking concertinaed strips from the teeth with the penknife blade on her key ring but it would not start.
In the last desk drawer, in a manila envelope, was a photocopy of Terry’s will, confirming Stella as sole beneficiary of his estate. This discovery should not have been a shock – her father had no other children and she was his next of kin – yet it was.
In the silence of the shredder she heard her mobile phone beeping and pulled it out of her pocket. A voicemail: the person who had Terry’s phone. She connected to the message service with clumsy fingers, tapping her feet while the automatic voice listed options, unable to circumvent the preamble. At last there was the beep signalling the message, followed by a jumble of white sound. She caught Paul’s voice: ‘I am outside.’
Stella rushed out on to the landing and, opening Terry’s bedroom door, she ran to the window and lifted a slat in the blinds. The wind had died and the road was quiet; there was no one there. The message had been left half an hour before. Paul had given up and gone home.
In Terry’s office she sat down, stretched out her legs and stared at the ceiling while her heartbeat returned to normal.
The ceiling wanted decorating, the plaster was cracked, the white paint had gone a nicotine yellow – although Terry had given up smoking when Stella was five – and on the loft hatch it was flaking off. She had forgotten the attic. Above her a square of yellow bled around the edges of the ill-fitting flap.
The attic light was on.
He took away her beaker of water. She would not drink it because of drowned birds in the tank even when he told her he had run it from the kitchen tap. She whispered that there was a murderer in the attic. He assured her it was his job to capture all bad people and there were none here. It was their game. ‘My daddy catches bad people.’ This time she would not play and was quiet. She did not believe him. He could not catch all bad people. In that instant he felt his world collapse.
Stella flicked off the light and stamped out on to the landing. Closing and opening the door loudly she inched back to the study out of the sightline of the trap door from which lines of light cast a glow on the paraphernalia spread over the carpet.
Whoever was up there was calling her bluff in return. Stella, fighting the urge to run, pulled on the attic doorknob releasing a ball-catch. Chill air drifted through the aperture, a scattering of grit smattered her face and she was smothered by soft fabric. Stifling a shout she crashed against the desk, knocking the lamp. The bulb smashed. She snatched at the material, her eyes smarting, and pulled it away: she choked on dust and coughed violently.
Stella made out a green fleece strung with cobwebs on the carpet tiles, spot-lit by the shaft of light. She picked it up and shook it. It had a logo for an alarm company embroidered on the breast, the ‘A’ of ‘Abacus’ forming the pitched roof of a house, the ‘S’ eliding with ‘Security’.
Through the hatch she could see roof beams, lagged with glass fibre felt and, at the apex, a light bulb hanging from a cord.
Against her better judgement she hauled down the ladder and, grabbing the hole punch, reached up and smashed the hole punch against the bedroom ceiling, intending to flush out whoever was there. Silence.
The next time she risked going all the way up, her body tensed for an attack; she ventured on to boarding which sprang but held her weight. Except for a few boxes the loft was empty, and there was nowhere to hide in the chimney recesses or under the eaves. Then she saw the source of the draught: the skylight was tilted open. She levered it down with a bang and shut out the low-level scrawl of the A40; only her breathing was audible. She pulled herself together: Terry had forgotten to close the window and turn off the light.
A dented Revelation suitcase lay on its side out of the path of the retracting ladder. Stella recognized it: she had bounced on its lid to help lock it for their last ever summer holiday. While her mum assembled clothes, a first-aid kit, washing things, Stella had furtively explored the pockets with elastic tops, played with the straps and stroked the silky lining within which she discovered grains of sand and broken shells; vestiges of other holidays. Terry strode ahead to the bus stop, holding the case lightly as if it were empty, while her mother let the gap widen, apparently to keep pace with Stella – except when Stella had tried to catch up with Terry, her mum had tugged her arm. Stella had invested all her hopes in the pinch of sand. Terry had promised that they would make a castle with a moat but she did not remember that they had. Home again, she had crawled inside the case and shut the lid but no one had come to find her.
Behind the suitcase was a carton which had held twenty boxes of Kellogg’s Coco Pops. Stella pulled open the flaps.
A row of three plump-cheeked faces framed with stiff nylon hairstyles and sightless eyes stared out. Terry had kept her dolls. One doll cried when the string in her back was tugged; the cord cut into Stella’s fingers and she hated the sound of crying. Another doll wet herself when water was poured into a hole in her head. As a bed-wetter herself, she hated this feature even more. Beneath the dolls was a skipping rope, a bundle of dolls’ clothes, a plastic stove and a matching washing machine. Tucked in too was a uniform for playing nurses, a plastic stethoscope, a pack of cards with the Tower of London on the back and an unopened bag of marbles with a price label of ten new pence from the post office in King Street.
Terry would bring the box into the living room after she had arrived, accompanied by a small suitcase all of her own. She would give up her coat and perch on the settee, unsure what was expected of her. The toys were never there already or they would have been easier to ignore. Instead she had to feign interest as the box was ceremoniously placed at her feet. She would listlessly stir the contents, keeping her back to Terry.
He would be reading a newspaper but really watching to see if she liked her toys. So, paralysed with hopelessness and dogged by the dim conviction she would fail, but not sure how or at what, Stella had determinedly dressed and undressed the dolls, rolled marbles along the carpet and put them in the washing machine or the oven and taken them out. Later she would report to her mother that Terry had read to her, asked her about school and taken her along the towpath to collect nature. Her mother never believed her.
By the adjoining wall was a shelf unit packed with file boxes. Stella read the title printed on every box: Katherine Rokesmith 27 July 1981.
There were twenty-three file boxes each tied with a ribbon. As Stella hauled down the first in the series from the left-hand side of the top shelf she kicked something. It was a camp stool. It meant that Terry had spent time here. She unfolded it, and squatting with a box at her feet, eased off the lid. The inside was crammed with papers. Stella felt a wave of nausea.
Terry had stolen the paperwork of a murder case.
She flipped through the contents, the dank papery smell making her sneeze. Terry had not stolen the documentation, he had copied it: photographs, newspaper cuttings, index cards laid two to a page, the details of every person who had come forward with information, however trivial. One woman had found the wrapping for a packet of Polos in the gutter by the Ram public house; another reported her husband; two teenaged girls had seen the victim walking with her boy along Hammersmith Terrace three weeks before the day of the murder. Many pages were blotted with actual as well as photocopied mug rings and smears of grease. Every page had an MIR number in the right corner and was in strict order.
Stella did not need telling that MIR stood for Major Incident Room, the basis of an indexing system and where the police conducted every murder investigation. At Hammersmith Police Station this room was the Braybrook Suite. Terry had taken her there.
Cold penetrated her bones and her feet were numb but she lifted out a few sheets stapled together: the Interim Report by Detective Inspector Darnell. In that instant Stella understood why Terry had the boxes.
The Rokesmith case had never been solved.
While the suitcase and the toy-box on the other side of the attic were coated in grey dust, the boxes were clean. Stella saw what had made her sneeze: a canister of Mr Sheen furniture polish stood in the shadow of the shelves, a folded duster beside it. She frowned: a damp cloth would have done better. The bulb flickered and she looked up expecting Terry.
‘Go and make us a cup of tea, there’s a love. Leave that to me.’
She snapped into work mode, hauling down the next box in the sequence and lugging the two over to the hatchway; her boots thumped on the boards despite her efforts to take light steps. She did not want next-door to hear, nor did she want to fall through the floor.
Two flights down the front door closed.
She clasped the boxes, ice-cold sweat trickling out of her armpits, and backed behind the chimney. The hatch door was down, the ladder was out; she would be found. She patted her pockets for her phone. She had taken off her anorak and draped it over the desk chair and her phone was in the pocket.
The church clock struck four, the sound muffled. If she shouted for help she might not be heard through the thick fire wall. She crept to the skylight and eased it up. A spattering of freezing rain drenched her face. Wiping her eyes she saw that the creeping blue light of dawn gave definition to Mrs Ramsay’s summerhouse. A bird twittered, answered by another, then another; the dawn chorus had begun. She could not climb out on to the sloping roof.
Below her the house was quiet and Stella dared to peer down into the study. Shredded paper had sprung out of the bin and trailed over the carpet tiles.
Stella hurled herself down the ladder and reached back for the two file boxes. There was no one on the landing, and now there was enough light to see without a torch. Terry’s bedroom door was closed. Her mind was playing games with her.
She took the stairs two at a time and in the hall skidded on the catalogues on the mat, falling heavily on one knee; keeping hold of the boxes and ignoring pain shooting up her thigh, she grabbed at a coat hanging from hooks by the door and got to her feet.
She was staring at Terry. Tired, cheekbones gaunt, hair limp, his jacket crumpled; dead staring eyes that would not stay shut as he lay on the gurney. He held something under each arm and put a hand to his mouth, as if caught in the act. The fingers were cold against her lips. She pushed back her hair; he did the same. She gasped and his mouth opened. She had never seen him frightened before; then a sharp gleam of dawn sunlight penetrated the panes in the front door, highlighting dust on the mirror.
Stella wrenched open the door, slamming it behind her and blundered out to the gate.
A coach roared along the Great West Road, its sleeping occupants slumped against the glass. Only when she had clambered into the van and set the central locking did she register that she had the box files. She threw them on to the passenger seat and started the engine, flooring the accelerator and careering out of the street and down St Peter’s Square.
If Stella had checked the rear-view mirror when she turned out of Terry’s road she would have seen a figure under the cherry trees walking in the direction of the river where, thirty years before, Katherine Rokesmith had been found murdered. An hour later, when she was out of the shower, dressed and leaving for the office, Stella discovered she had left Terry’s keys in his house.
9
September 1985
Justin moved as swiftly as he dared in the deathly quiet library, slipped into the furthest aisle between the bookshelves and raced to the end where there was the door to the basement. Simon followed him into the library seconds later and, flanked by oak cabinets and creaky carousels of catalogue cards, scanned the wood-panelled room.
Simon was not as careful as his prey and allowed the door to slam behind him. The librarian, a placid woman with blurred, creamy features that had earned her the sobriquet of ‘the Oyster’ from the boys, paused from wiping a book with votive diligence to frown from her podium, signalling silence with her linen pad.
Justin tripped over a stool on casters, which spun along the aisle. He grimaced, sure he had given away his position, but Simon had wrongly anticipated him and was checking the Reading Corner by the inglenook fireplace which, with a semi-circle of high-backed leather winged armchairs, was an obvious hiding place.
When Margaret Lockett died in 1939, aged eighty-one, she left Marchant Manor to her trust to found and administrate a boarding school for the children of families connected with her father’s passion: the railway. Sir Stephen Lockett had died fifty years before his daughter, an early supplier of toilet systems; he had increased his fortune through shrewd investment in Britain’s developing rail network and his obsession with the likes of sanitary engineers J. G. Jennings and Thomas Twyford extended to structural pioneers such as Gustave Eiffel, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Thomas Bouch. This apparently innocuous interest was to prove fatal.
On the night of 28 December 1879, Sir Stephen boarded a train to cross the Firth of Forth by the new Tay Bridge: a lattice-grid construction, then the longest bridge in the world. Queen Victoria had made the inaugural journey six months before. He did not let the storm already buffeting his carriage dampen his spirits and treated with boyish excitement the flickering gas lamps and loose window catch that let rain spatter on to his pocket book and soak his coat. Even when the train lurched upwards, pressing him into his seat, he did not panic. Only when he heard a crack that his understanding of sewer construction told him was the sound of inflexible cast-iron fracturing did Sir Stephen appreciate the gravity of his situation. Tall pilings crumbled, girders buckled and in moments the bridge collapsed like one of Stephen Lockett’s wooden models, although this time he could not revise calculations and start again. The train plunged into the river A rush of water engulfing him, he thought of a toilet flushing but the thought had no time to develop. Over seventy passengers drowned; Loc
kett’s body was one of those never recovered, nourishing school lore that his waterlogged ghost roamed the night-time corridors of Marchant Manor. On stormy days he shook casements and caused power cuts. Boys claimed to have caught a whiff of his cigar in the library that had been his smoking room.
Six years after the Tay Bridge disaster Thomas Twyford invented the Unites, a one-piece, free-standing toilet set on a pedestal base and Margaret Lockett doubled the turnover of her father’s business living as a recluse amongst his railway relics with only his marble bust for company.
Sir Stephen Lockett’s book collection, typical of a rich man without literary interest, was housed in shelves lining the walls protected by grilles and glass doors. Classics of the day: The Dictionary of National Biography, the 1870 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the complete works of Scott, Dickens, Collins and Thackeray were bound in matching calfskin and embossed with Lockett’s off-the-peg crest. Boys could only borrow items with permission of the Oyster and read them in situ wearing a pair of silk white gloves. The only boy in Marchant Manor School’s present intake prepared to suffer this ignominy was now cowering in the Geography section.
When Justin poured over first-edition biographies on contemporary engineers and deciphered cumbersome treatises on new building materials or the effects of aerodynamic forces, he could convince himself that he was the son Sir Stephen had longed for. The musty tomes containing pictures and technical descriptions of masonry, key stones, deck spans, flying buttresses and stanchions impervious to collisions or waves were spellbinding. The eight-year-old guided his finger along dense print, traced diagrams of spans and suspensions, marvelling at sepia images, bold etchings and sentimental paintings of railway scenes, tunnels, bridges and viaducts, towers and lighthouses, and concocted stories to tell his mummy.
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