The Detective's Daughter

by Lesley Thomson

  Ivan Challoner reappeared bearing a tray clinking with an array of glasses, bowls of pretzels and olives and a dusty bottle of Sancerre in a silver ice-bucket. He twisted out the cork, flourishing the bottle-opener like a practised barman. He held the bottle by its base and poured equal measures into sparkling glasses; then he proffered crackers that smelled of fresh baked bread and tasted deliciously of herbs and garlic. Stella was hungry but, anxious not to reek of garlic, had only one.

  Ivan Challoner folded his long frame into an armchair facing the fire and crossed his legs at the ankles, displaying a glimpse of white skin beneath creased trousers. His shoes were polished like a police officer’s. Stella drank the cool wine and deliberated whether a conversation opener would be to ask if he cleaned them himself.

  Their conversation was in fact easy and flowing, any silences comfortable, as they swapped views on running a business, acknowledging the truth of the cliché that it was hard to find reliable staff. Nevertheless Stella was scrupulous in letting Challoner know that she succeeded. She snapped up the chance to assure him that circumstances allowing, he would have the same cleaner each session. He had remarked that he would be with patients when Mr Harmon called so would not meet him. Stella faltered: naturally he would not concern himself with cleaning. Perhaps Challoner sensed her discomfort for he added: ‘However, it is reassuring to hear this. My receptionist was terribly taken with how your people bring their own vacuum cleaner. It saves battling with the temperament of our equipment.’

  Placated, Stella remained vigilant; clients who kept a distance from the process tended to be disappointed and were not worth the nuisance they would become.

  She gathered his children had grown up in this house when he mentioned a son’s friend had been hit by a car outside the gate. There were no wedding or graduation photographs, which Stella guessed he would consider vulgar.

  Challoner wore a thin gold ring better suited to a woman. She concluded he was a widower and that the ring must have been his wife’s, which explained his reserved manner; it was grief. She had seen it in other male clients who had lost their partners. There were two kinds of grieving man. The first sort grew beards and lived in squalor and Clean Slate only encountered them when a busybody friend or relation hired them to restore order. She liked these jobs. The difference made was stark: month-old dishes were washed, carpets shampooed, sheets laundered and put back on beds in rooms light with air freshener within which the clean-shaven client could begin again. Stella used a rota of staff for these types because they were liable to propose marriage to anyone who ranged into their orbit. The other sort were more businesslike, demanding a seamless existence in which the hole made by the absent partner was filled by a continuation of the cleaning routine. They must step on shiny vinyl or varnished floorboards without disruption or distraction, barely aware of their loss. Armed with an anti-static cloth or a stringent stain remover, Stella believed that with her team she nullified death’s impact.

  Ivan Challoner was in the second group. Jack Harmon had maintained the order to the standards of his wife. Stella could not bear to think how he had managed until Jack’s visit.

  Set in a recess was a nightlight that had been burning when she came into the room. She had not seen Ivan Challoner light the candle. Jack Harmon must have done it. She felt a flicker of unease.

  Ivan Challoner proposed a toast to Clean Slate and clinked glasses. He made a remark about Harmon being as ‘elusive as the original’ which Stella did not understand. Flames flared in the grate, sending sparks up the chimney; the room smelled of burning chestnut. In the pause as they drank, pockets of gas hissed and popped.

  Stella was reluctant to return to the freezing streets.

  Thick flakes were quickly settling by the time she gingerly made her way down the path. She struggled to her van, feathery shapes floating and spinning around her.

  Fortified by the wine – she had kept to one glass – and once more lulled by Ivan Challoner’s unruffled presence, Stella felt courage enough to attempt Terry’s house. If she stuck at it, she reckoned she could complete it in a week. From Kew, she could be there in twenty minutes.

  When she pulled into Rose Gardens North, the streetlight was out and the weather had deteriorated further. Butterfly flakes swirling against the windscreen disorientated her and she shielded her eyes from flurries that stung her cheeks, balking at going inside even for shelter. She could not face Terry’s grey suits and starched shirts, the toe-to-toe shoes worn with the uneven tread that had given him back trouble.

  There were footprints on the path.

  Stella jumped back in the van and, skidding at the corner, parked it in a space out of view on the north side of Black Lion Lane. She would go to the Ram; it was Terry’s local and in her mind was the illogical notion that her father would be there and she could give him back his keys.

  Snow overlaid every horizontal surface casting a translucent light. Like death it was a leveller; time telescoped, changes and distinctions were lost under a white shroud. The footprints outside Terry’s house must be the postman’s, the one person who after death continued to visit. She hurried on, keeping away from the graveyard where black headstones trimmed with white recalled the gloomy rectangles in Ivan Challoner’s painting.

  A tangle of boxwood and holly etched with snow might have been picturesque, but Stella could not shake off the sense of being stalked. She had been off her guard and had not looked out for Paul when she left the dentist’s. Suppose he had followed her from the office and waited while she was having the filling? He would have seen her go upstairs. Dancing flakes darted from the corner of her vision, she increased her pace and hastened over the grass, impacted snow squeaking beneath her feet. A hulking shape stood in the shadow of the church.

  The statue was screened from the subway and the street by thick privet. When Stella was small, it had been in plain sight but bushes had already begun to obscure it in the case-file photographs and nowadays no one would see a little boy crouched beneath it. The Leaning Woman had become a secret known only to locals.

  That afternoon, when she should have been sourcing a new window-cleaner, Stella had researched the history of the Leaning Woman. On the Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham’s website, she discovered that the sculpture was erected in 1959, seven years before she was born, to commemorate the new Great West Road. She had printed up a grainy black and white image of the unveiling ceremony; elderly men from the council in overcoats and trilbies on chairs by the roadside where she was now.

  She checked there was no one behind her and slipped in through the gap in the hedge. Jonathan Rokesmith had sat as still as the statue until a policeman had carried him away.

  A gust of wind whipped powdery snow against the brick plinth. In the lagged quiet, Stella’s impression that she was not alone was stronger.

  He swung Stella off his shoulders and lowered her on to the statue’s knee. She was light as a feather, her skinny legs dangling. She wasn’t scared of being up high. He worried the concrete would graze her, but she was calm as you like. Afterwards he wiped the river mud off with his hankie and put her boots back on. Her face was blotchy from crying.

  ‘You’re my Snow White,’ he told her and pulled a funny face. That made her laugh.

  Katherine Rokesmith had walked down the subway slope that last day. Stella skidded on the subway ramp and held the rail to steady herself, imagining the young woman walking hand in hand with her son. The chrome on the safety mirror was tarnished and already flecked with snowflakes so she couldn’t see into the tunnel. She turned the corner; the passage was deserted. Welcoming the respite from the snow, keeping her breath shallow to ward off the smell of piss, Stella slowed down. With a ‘toddler in tow’, Kate might have ambled; the day had been scorching, she too had welcomed the shelter of the tunnel. The child might have shouted as kids did in tunnels, but with the traffic above as it was now, it was likely Kate had not heard him.

  Stella coasted the slope, her legs tra
iling. There was chain oil on her dress. He had removed the stabilizers an hour ago and she was proficient in a jiffy. As a boy he had taken longer to get his balance. Hunched over the handlebars, she only braked at the turn, her back wheel lifting. She just missed the wall. Unafraid, she pedalled into the tunnel, getting up speed for the slope at the end. He couldn’t keep up with her.

  Someone was behind her. Stella spun around, her hands out in self-defence, but the passage stretched away, empty. At the end snowflakes floated, some creeping into the opening. Each time she reached the midway point between the ceiling lamps, her shadow disappeared and reappeared like a person pouncing. She risked injury and ran up the ramp on to Black Lion Lane.

  She called Jack Harmon as she neared the Ram; St Peter’s Church was striking nine when he answered. He sounded offhand and did not thank her for offering him a job. Stella intended her recruitment process – a lengthy form and an hour-long interview plus the trial in the office – to expose the value of the role and sift out the best. She had allowed Harmon to skip this but did not intend him to be lackadaisical about his success. If she had not seen the quality of his work, if Ivan Challoner had been less enthusiastic and if she did not have a staffing crisis, Stella would have withdrawn her offer.

  If she did not want to be Ivan Challoner’s cleaner, she needed Jack Harmon.

  The Ram, once a modest hostelry for those working in the surrounding streets and on the river, was now the pub of choice of stockbrokers and lawyers. Little was genuine in the nineteenth-century building: sepia-toned photographs adorned oak-panelled walls that might be original, but coated in dark varnish appeared false. Stella was surprised Terry had been comfortable here; he disliked pretension and her mother said he had no time for tradition.

  Three men, with the shiny complexions of the cut and thrusting, hair aggressively gelled, trim suits tailored close to the leg, perched on bar stools. They fell silent while Stella ordered an orange juice and a bag of salt and vinegar crisps. Three Pauls in a row: they were mute jackdaws angling for attention. Stella ignored them. When the barman tipped change into her hand she tensed against an impulse to fling the coins into their faces and inflict short sharp pain. They would have been babies when Kate Rokesmith was murdered, if they were alive at all; they had nothing to tell her.

  The coin glanced off Stella’s forehead. It must have hurt but when he asked her she shook her head. A mark appeared that would be a bruise. Like him she never fussed. He looked for the culprit, but the pool was crowded, kids bombing into the shallow end around them, splashing and shouting. If he spotted who had thrown it he wouldn’t trust himself. Stella rubbed her head when she thought he wasn’t looking. He plunged underwater and found the coin and, water splashing up, his eyes smarting with chlorine, presented her with a newly minted two-pence piece. She shook her head, this time vigorously. He dropped it into the ceramic gutter under the edge of the pool, meaning to get it to add to her pocket money when they got out. He forgot.

  Stella sipped her orange juice and surveyed the room. She did not know where Terry liked to sit. Perhaps he would stay at the bar with the men, insinuating himself into their conversation, getting in a round as he teased out gossip and established facts. Wherever he went Terry sized up the regulars, took note of newspaper vendors, street-sweepers, postal workers; no humdrum daily activity escaped him. On his way to the toilet he would have found an excuse to engage the man doing a crossword in conversation. He would, as he put it, have neutralized him. When Stella was with Terry these ambushes had crippled her with shame and fury. Her mother said he was not naturally friendly; if he spoke to a stranger he was working. Stella wanted nothing to do with the men and women Terry enlisted; she shrank from the strawberry noses, leering eyes and greasy hair. While she sucked on the orangeade for which she was too old – he would not let her have a vodka – as Terry completed his business, Stella fumed at the caked foundation and cheap perfume and resolved never to descend into the unfathomable darkness of Terry’s underworld, a place where livings were scrabbled for and the law was there to be wheedled, circumvented or broken. On sunlit pavements, defined by chalked hopscotch numbers, Stella’s ambition to run a cleaning company was hatched. Leaping precisely from square to square, the teenager-still-a-girl determined how she would literally get rid of scum.

  There were five customers in the bar, including Stella. The crossword-man had a bottle of wine and several glasses on his table; he was expecting company. Perhaps sensing Stella’s gaze their eyes met and she made a show of scanning for somewhere to sit but he was looking past her to the door.

  She chose a table beyond a chimney breast. Two buttoned wing-backed armchairs positioned either side of a gas-jet fire represented an attempt at intimacy. Stella slid along a pew bench. With her back to the wall she had the room covered.

  Post was delivered in the morning. Stella put down her glass. It had not started snowing until the evening so the footprint on Terry’s path was recent. She could not kid herself: it must have been Paul; large and clumsy, stomping and angry, he had been to Terry’s house. She quelled the sudden knowledge that a good detective would have known this straight away.

  She stared at the door; in her corner she was not immediately visible and could slip out the back way, but surely Paul would not come here. He knew she hated pubs.

  She took a gulp of the orange juice and told herself that Terry was not a successful detective. He had not been able to prove that Hugh Rokesmith murdered his wife.

  The door opened and an elderly man in a tweed car coat, heralded by a gust of snowflakes, stood aside to let his wife pass. They made for the table with the wine bottle, where the man, presumably their son, was already on his feet pouring the wine without Ivan Challoner’s laconic flair. His languor had vanished; he looked twitchy and anxious to please. He was to spend the evening drinking with his parents: an experience Stella would never have.

  The envelope icon appeared on her phone, followed by six more. Seven texts.

  Call me.

  Where are you?

  We need to talk.

  Call me now.

  The other three texts were notifications of voicemails all received while she was at Ivan’s, when she had turned off her phone, and all from Paul. He had seen the paint he had advised for her bedroom on offer; they had not agreed he would decorate her bedroom. She had quite liked his choice – another sort of white – but that was all water under the bridge now. In the other calls, each lasting seconds, Paul did not speak, although she could make out his breathing. She set the phone to silent and, as if the handset were Paul himself, shuffled it behind the salt and pepper pots.

  In the days since Terry’s death her mobile phone had transformed from an imperative requirement to a dreaded enemy.Stella was frustrated at having to resort to avoidance tactics when she had left at four fifteen for the dentist. Jackie, generally discreet about how Stella arranged her life – she arranged the majority of it for her – had reminded her that she was not due at the surgery until five thirty. She fixed tight schedules so that Stella did not waste a minute. Stella’s fumbled pretence that she had got the time wrong had not convinced Jackie: she never got the time wrong. After two months – Stella’s longest relationship – Paul was wrecking her routine. She was right to finish with him.

  This hastily constructed conclusion lessened Stella’s lurking guilt at hurting Paul. She supposed she should eat; and consulted the ‘specials’ chalkboard on the side of the chimney. Yellow sticky-notes spelling ‘Sold Out’ curled next to ‘Fish Soup with Rouille and Gruyère Crouton’s’ and the ‘Rack of Lamb with Apricots’. Both were too fussy, she doubted Terry had gone for them, he would have opted for the gammon, eggs and chips. The sandwich gobbled before her dentist appointment lay like a sodden sponge in her stomach; Stella had no appetite, but as the barman neared her table at that moment, she ordered the gammon.

  Ivan Challoner had said that red wine stained ivory if held in the mouth two seconds before swallowing. He
allowed himself a couple of glasses of Sancerre a day; one had to have vices. Stella had feared this was a hint so said she rarely drank. He had told her she had marvellous teeth, no crowding, no gum disease. His own teeth were a flawless white.

  She made room on the table for the case papers.

  One article – from a folder of press cuttings Terry had printed from websites weeks before he died – described Jonathan Rokesmith as ‘sitting with his chubby legs crossed, perfectly still like a little Buddha beneath the poignantly maternal statue of a half-naked woman’. A gift for journalists. The boy had shown no emotion and Stella was not surprised: at four he was too young to grasp the meaning of death, but might have cried at his mother’s continued absence. If a parent was no longer there day to day it was upsetting but so far, from her reading, he had seemed unconcerned. Jonathan Rokesmith had flown at the constable who tried to carry him off, kicking and punching him, but never making a sound. He fought off his ‘rescuers’ in silence.

  The boy’s loss of speech went on for six months, broken briefly when one day with his father he had spied a red Triang steam engine in a shop and demanded to have it. When his father had refused, telling him he had enough toys at home, the boy did not protest and went quiet again. This episode, mentioned in the psychotherapist’s report and somehow leaked to the media, earned the child the sobriquet of a spoilt only child. Despite liquid dark eyes and cutesy blond hair, ‘Jonny’ – as his mother had apparently called him – had, like his father, not won the public’s affection.

  Although her mother complained she had bought all her toys, Stella admitted to herself that had she wanted a toy in a window Terry would have given it to her; but then buying presents was easy.

  According to the psychotherapist’s account, Jonathan Rokesmith had not responded to hugs or attempts to kiss him and arched his back when touched, preventing people getting close. In a brown envelope Stella found psychiatric facts lifted from the web in Terry’s handwriting. At the end of the page he had scribbled the inadequate reference: ‘Google, Sept 2010’ followed by: ‘Kids are resilient. If they re-enact a traumatic event, firing guns, mimicking witnessed behaviour of criminals, don’t discourage. Does not mean without feeling. Not necessarily reliving or repeating damage.’