The Detective's Daughter

by Lesley Thomson

  Jack pulled up the collar of his overcoat; forecasters were saying the wind came directly from Russia.

  It was extraordinary how trusting people were. It gave people like him freedom.

  16

  Thursday, 13 January 2011

  Stella was thirty minutes early, so, parking the van in the street along from the dental surgery, she hauled out the batch of papers she had shovelled into her bag before leaving for work. Twisting sideways she stacked them on the passenger seat.

  She wolfed down a sweaty cheese sandwich she had forgotten about at lunchtime and read that the pathologist said a fresh swelling with broken skin above the victim’s right eye was consistent with a glancing blow from a sharp instrument. Katherine Rokesmith may have sustained another wound at the base of her skull when she fell. Any bloodstains that might have spattered on ground were washed away by the tide.

  Terry must have carried this document about with him: the folds on the photocopy were deep, the paper spotted with grease, no doubt from one of the beef burgers he bolted on the run. This attitude to food had infuriated her mother, whose elaborate cooking made no more impression on him than a bag of chips. She complained that, like Stella, he put ketchup on everything. Stella balled up the sandwich cellophane and stuffed it in the carrier bag behind her seat. The handbook stipulated that staff must not eat in Clean Slate vehicles.

  Stella had Googled the murder and found over a thousand links to articles and books, newspaper investigations, a Wikipedia page and more than one documentary which pieced together what was known of that day. Each new exploration took a run at the story, galloping confidently towards the murder with new snippets of trivia and hearsay. Over the years minor players – a man in the Ram pub, a taxi driver dropping a fare in nearby British Grove – were added to the police’s General Register, dates meticulously recorded. The ‘red tops’ re-ran photos and inflated vague possibility to within an inch of fact. Inevitably any piece or programme ended with the inexorable fact of the unsolved murder; an intrinsic point of anti-climax. Katherine Rokesmith’s murder remained a mystery and her killer at large.

  During a search of the Rokesmiths’ house, Stella read, traces of blood were discovered on a hall table. Possible evidence of a fight: had Hugh Rokesmith argued with his wife before going to his mother’s? Cashman had said that Kate was seen later by Mrs Ramsay but nevertheless Hugh Rokesmith, who had left his mother’s to get champagne during the ‘murder window’, was questioned at Hammersmith Police Station. This fact provoked violence: a window in his house was broken and his car was keyed so the police moved him and his son to a safe house. As senior officer on the investigation, Terry would have known its whereabouts, Stella supposed.

  She wondered again why Mrs Ramsay had never mentioned giving evidence about her neighbour. She could not ask her and, thinking at a tangent, mused how already she missed her daily phone calls.

  Hugh Rokesmith had not fulfilled the public’s expectations of a man whose wife was murdered, nor had he cut a tragic figure. He had been pushy and arrogant, his behaviour that day open to more than one interpretation, although officially he was not a suspect.

  In a paragraph free of punctuation, Terry had noted: ‘…a woman would be capable of the strength required to apply a ligature to compress the neck for a period of approximately fifteen seconds so ensuring death ensues.’ Nowhere else had Stella found references to the theory of a female killer; she presumed it had been dropped. Her mother said Terry did not consider women capable of much; perhaps he made an exception for murder.

  It was another quarter of an hour before she was due for her filling. The van was cooling down; Stella zipped up her anorak.

  The police had interviewed several suspects, all released without charge. In the office that morning Stella had jotted down their names and bare details and scanning the contents list in Terry’s Closing Report had seen that the interview transcripts were in box number six. She would have to go back to Terry’s house. Detectives had suspected a rapist recently released from Wormwood Scrubs prison who had bought a sausage roll from a bakery on King Street at nine thirty, which put him in the vicinity. These days CCTV would have sealed his alibi.

  Twenty-eight-year-old Colin Peterson had completed decoration of the Rokesmiths’ spare room two weeks before the murder. Forensic tests were conducted on his tools and his clothes; his dustbins were sifted, the rubbish taken away for examination. The press camped outside his bedsit and, it seemed, interviewed everyone the sandy-haired man with the pock-marked face had ever known. An ex-partner confided to The Sun that Peterson had ‘a wacky sense of humour and a bit of a temper on him’. Then a winning betting slip was found wedged behind the windscreen in his very untidy van – there was a picture of the dashboard in the file – confirming that at the time of the murder he had, as he claimed, been at Doncaster racecourse.

  Ringing the bell at ten past twelve on the Monday, the grocer’s delivery boy had received no answer from the Rokesmith home, and a florist’s assistant bringing flowers next door to Number 48 St Peter’s Square at eleven thirty had also got no answer, nor returned to the shop straight away. Stella wondered if in those days Mrs Ramsay’s flowers had been from a genuine admirer and noted that the day of delivery was Monday not Friday. Maybe she received flowers from other admirers then too? Both young men’s alibis were established and were crossed off the shrinking list of suspects. As the last person to see Kate alive, Mrs Ramsay could be a suspect, but so far there was no mention of this in the files. Stella scribbled in her notes; everything should be explored, however unlikely.

  Katherine Rokesmith’s murder case had been overtaken by one of the major royal events of the century and with a dearth of information, languished and all but vanished into criminal history.

  In 1981 the house that overlooked the beach where Katherine Rokesmith’s body was found belonged to a widow: Mrs Clarissa Glyde, aged fifty-nine. Her daughter Sarah (twenty-one) lived in the basement flat working as a potter from a studio in the back garden. Mr Glyde had died of cancer six years earlier. Sarah Glyde had a dentist’s appointment at the time of the murder and had only returned to the house in the late afternoon after going to an address off Fulham Broadway where she met a woman to discuss a commission for tiles. On 27 July Mrs Glyde had been at the family’s cottage in Sussex, so had seen nothing. Detective Sergeant Janet Barton interviewed the women on the morning of 30 July. A handwritten account of her interview was stapled to signed statements.

  I was shown into a room on the second floor, with one window facing on to a 150-foot garden. A single-storey workroom approximately twenty yards long partially blocks a view of the river and the length of the plot makes it impossible to see the site where the body was found.

  Pots and plates were stacked on sills, shelves and around the settee along with books and magazines. The daughter said she played music while she works so would not have heard anything had she been there. Nor had she in the days before. [see SG statement – page 2 MIR 349.]

  Neither woman had known Katherine Rokesmith by sight, although when shown a picture of the boy the older woman said he looked familiar. Barton had asked to see the upper floors and established that from the bathroom it was not possible to see where the body was found. An adjacent room was locked and they could not produce a key.

  The studio doors opened on to a patio on the south side and only by leaning far over the garden wall was the beach was visible. The garden next door had a trellis and in 1981 the house had been up for sale and was unoccupied. Both women had alibis: the Sussex village vicar had had coffee with Mrs Glyde while Miss Glyde’s dentist confirmed her midday appointment. Not keen to read about dentists, Stella skipped over this bit. In five minutes she would be having a filling.

  Chaotic houses were only temporarily satisfying, in between sessions the mess would return. Stella insisted on direct debits as payment could be equally erratic. She might have refused the contract had the Glydes approached her or taken Jackie’s
advice and charged a premium. The house-to-house inquiries had provided nothing useful: of the few at home, no one had heard or seen a thing.

  At one of several sessions with a psychotherapist, Jonathan Rokesmith had ignored the cars and dolls with which it was hoped he would construct a narrative.

  [J. J. Rokesmith, 13 September 1981]

  Sunshine flooded the room making the wool rug a livid red. Dolls lay scattered there, some face down; others were on their sides, their limbs twisted. These positions were not significant; Jonathan tossed them there before going into the garden. The six adults did not move or speak; however, his absence allowed them relief in tension. The detective sat with his head in his hands, massaging his temples. In this, the last session, Jonathan had still not acknowledged that he had heard the detective speaking to him. Father was impatient; on arrival he announced he had to move an appointment to be there. He said these sessions are no help. The police do little to disguise that they consider Father a suspect although I have explained that Jonathan understands more than he lets us know.

  Every minute that Jonathan is in the garden frustrates the adults because nothing can be achieved while he remains absent.

  Today Jonathan came upon the pieces of green crayon that I had retrieved from the bin where he had thrown them during his previous session. He expended effort snapping these fragments into smaller bits and took them to the garden. When he goes there it is to a bed of tall white daisies where he sifts sand from the sandpit through his fingers becoming a sand clock measuring time. Today, before doing this, he buried the crayon in the sand and covered the ‘grave’ with twigs and leaves torn from daisy stems. He pushed a stone into the sand to mark the spot.

  Stella was reminded of her paralysis as, in the glare of adult expectation, she had confronted the dolls in Terry’s toy box.

  The little boy wet the bed. Stella shifted in her seat, remembering the warmth shot through with horror when she awoke in pressing darkness to cooling reality. Her mother had caught her trying to wash her sheets in the bathroom basin and still reminded Stella of this. Jonathan’s every move was recorded: he had wet the bed thirty-one times in the six weeks after Katherine Rokesmith was murdered. Stella did not do the maths but this was practically every night.

  A man was heading down the street on the other pavement. Stella shrank down in the seat and shielded her face with her hand. It was Paul. He would see the van. At the last minute she clambered into the back and crawled to the back windows, which were glazed with one-way glass.

  Paul’s steps were erratic; he appeared drunk. He was walking as a child might, leaping and teetering on the paving as if playing hopscotch. It was not Paul; it was Jack Harmon.

  Was he following her too? Surely Jackie would not have told him where she was; she was a stickler for confidentiality. It dawned on her: Harmon had been cleaning the dentist’s. She flung herself on to the front seat and pulled at the door handle, intending to ask him how it had gone but then changed her mind. In a minute she would get feedback from the client. She watched in her off-side wing mirror until his bobbing figure was out of sight.

  She had knocked the Rokesmith papers off the seat, so, gathering them up, she stacked them together, impatient with herself for getting flustered. Since Terry’s death she had been a bag of nerves and more than ever Stella wished she could see Mrs Ramsay; a list of exacting tasks in strict running order would settle her.

  Newspaper reports and witness statements from neighbours and her husband’s elderly mother described Katherine Rokesmith as fun-loving and a wonderful mother with no enemies. If someone had stalked her, he had lit on a moment when he was sure he would get away with it. Stella popped a pellet of extra-strong gum in her mouth and, although unwilling to agree with Terry, concluded that it was obvious; everyone had known it at the time: Hugh Rokesmith had murdered his wife and his mother had given him an alibi.

  She retraced Jack Harmon’s steps. Feeling more light-hearted, she resolved that tomorrow she really would shred the case papers and clear out Terry’s house.

  17

  Thursday, 13 January 2011

  It was two months since the Host forgot to take his keys from his front-door lock and Jack had withdrawn them and sneaked along the hall. Ideally he would have used them to get another set cut, but if his Host realized where he had left them, he would change the locks. The man had been in the kitchen preparing the evening meal, his back to him, the radio blaring. Jack had shut the front door before the man noticed a draught; if he saw Jack, the keys would be his alibi. The man had been chopping onions, which made his eyes water; he kept stopping to pat them with kitchen towel, unaware that he had a guest.

  The man with a mind like his own had been on the path through the graveyard. Although it was the quickest way to and from the high road, in the winter no ordinary mortal would risk the unlit secluded route. Jack’s elation was akin to love as he had kept pace with the man who trotted between headstones, past the church to the gate. There was little of the grown-up about him; he was like an earnest schoolboy who makes few friends and whose silence unnerves and annoys.

  He had since found out the man’s name was Michael Hamilton and he was the practice manager at a local doctor’s surgery. He quickly impressed Jack with his terse efficiency and ruthless disregard for the patients: the perfect Host. Jack had not imagined Michael in a relationship and was appalled to discover that he lived with a solicitor called Ellen. But by then he had adopted Michael as his Host; besides, as the weeks passed Jack found that to all intents and purposes Michael was on his own.

  Logically, if he had a mind like Jack’s Michael ought to have been aware of Jack in his house, but he was not. After several weeks of being an invisible guest, curled up in the cosy box room listening to birds squabbling in the gutter outside, faced with facts, Jack had to admit that Michael was not the True Host. By then he had ‘met’ Ellen and had another reason to stay; she made him feel at home.

  From downstairs came the Chopin Nocturne, the B-flat minor, Opus 9/1. He knew it well and whispered in time:

  ‘This is the safety-catch, which is always released

  With an easy flick of the thumb.’

  Jack’s fluid ten-key-stretch and steady hand-to-eye coordination would have handled any nocturne, but he was tone deaf. Under his touch piano keys remained cold ivory, their action stilted. Yet when he picked out ‘Three Blind Mice’ with one finger on Ellen’s Bechstein Baby Grand and sang haltingly to the laborious tune he could appreciate the lyrics. See. How they. Run. See. How they. Run.

  In the moonlight Jack examined his hands and fancied, not for the first time, that if he added a lick of nail varnish and with the fine gold band on his finger, his hands might belong to a woman. He could be anyone.

  Jack’s associations and memories hung like fine cobwebs in the corners of the room, enhancing the sense it was his home. He kept the light low so that they would not see it under the door if they came upstairs, although they rarely did until bedtime. In his room there was a single bed, a chest of drawers and a built-in wardrobe with louvred doors; all he needed when he visited. There were actual cobwebs which he had missed last week. The couple would never be customers of Clean Slate; they set aside Saturday mornings to clean: Ellen as a penance and Michael to punish Ellen. Jack cleaned his own room, which was on Ellen’s task list, because when she was in here, she texted her lover.

  Stella Darnell would applaud their cleaning cupboard packed with instruments for every activity – window-cleaning, shoe-shining, polishing – all in labelled compartments. Ellen did not know he covered for her because she was too overwrought to notice dust. As he had expected, Michael slipped in when she was playing the piano; he sniffed for polish and inspected the carpet. Thanks to Jack’s efforts, he found nothing. Ellen had no idea that Michael tracked everything she did, waiting to catch her out: she owed her life to Jack’s protection.

  It was half past eight and they were doing what they did on what they called ‘schoo
l nights’. Ellen was in the garden room playing Beethoven and Chopin from memory. Jack now had a key to the garden and the back gate; he came and went as he pleased when they were out.

  In the sitting room Michael Hamilton was slumped in his armchair by the fireplace, perfectly still except when he lifted a glass of wine to thin, pursed lips while a loud television programme competed successfully with the piano. Michael did not like Ellen and tried to blot her out.

  Jack pulled his London A–Z Street Atlas from underneath the mattress and sat up on the bed. The cleaning session was a perfect end to a perfect day. He had worked his way around the dentist’s flat feeling that finally events were going his way.

  Tonight, he was not driving a train and according to page sixty-six of the A–Z would be in Dagenham. This journey was out of sync. He was much further on in the A–Z. Months ago he had accidentally turned two pages at once. The pages had taken him to East London, Barking, Homerton and East Ham. This area was relatively unfamiliar, although of course he had been to East London countless times in his Upminster or Barking train. Jack would have preferred to take the main line to Rainham rather than use the District line to avoid Underground staff recognizing him. But he had no choice; the pen line on the page began at Dagenham East and he was obedient; he was alert for signs. The book, which he had found years ago on a train, was defaced with routes in ballpoint on every page; they were a sign.

  The page’s marked-out route formed a loop that took in Ballards Road, Rainham Road and New Road with a tail at one end trailing to down to Rainham station. He fished his laptop out of his satchel and fired up Google Street View. Jack ‘walked’ his journeys online before embarking on them in ‘real life’; his ghost self familiarizing himself with the journey.