The Detective's Daughter

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘This is hardly the time for a jaunt down memory lane,’ Stella barked. ‘We need to get Jack out of here.’

  Jack groaned and, his eyes shut, moved his head towards the rubbish on the worktop and the images of Kate Rokesmith’s childhood mouth.

  ‘He doesn’t want the light – he’s probably getting tinnitus.’ Sarah placed the sunglasses back on his face. ‘My point is, having bolted him in, the only explanation for why Antony was not here when I came looking is that there is another way out.’

  Fresh air. The door and window Stella had seen in the garden.

  She put her dad’s phone in her anorak pocket and this time paced the room purposefully, opening cupboards, poking in the space under the stairs. She found boxes of cotton-wool pads, swabs, syringes, plaster moulds, replicas of upper and lower sets of teeth, X-ray film: the equipment of a dentist working fifty years ago.

  The music was faint at first, then swelled as if a door somewhere had opened.

  ‘Beethoven’s “Pathétique”.’ Sarah could have been introducing a recital.

  Ivan Challoner was still here.

  ‘Ivan told me this was his son’s favourite music, his wife played it on the piano at bedtime while he read him Narnia stories.’ Stella spotted the speakers, four tiny discs, inserted above overhead cupboards. ‘I believed him.’

  ‘It’s all right, don’t cry, we are going to solve this,’ Sarah murmured to Jack. She rinsed out a glass on the counter and filled it with water. She gently inserted a straw between Jack’s lips and held the glass. He sucked weakly on it but then gave up.

  In a closet hung a row of dental coats, white faded to grey. The temperature was lower than in the room behind her. Stella dragged the coats off the rail and flung them on the floor. She felt the panel at the back, tracing the patina of the wood. A button was fitted into the panel. Stella pressed it, pulled it, pushed it, but it did not give. She twisted it and fell forward into the cupboard as the wall gave way. Threads of fog drifted into the room and cold air seared her cheeks. She was by the stone steps where Sarah had found her.

  Ivan had used a secret exit.

  Stella shouted back into the room: ‘I’ll get help.’

  ‘I told you he’d do this, but you wouldn’t believe me. You spoil that boy. Now look what he has made me do.’ Ivan Challoner unhooked the poker from the carousel of hanging fireplace tools and stirred the embers noisily. He could not drown out his stepfather:

  ‘Children have to learn the hard way, that’s how they get backbone, Antony’s like a girl. I’m keeping my study locked from now on. Antony doesn’t know what to do with that steam engine, he doesn’t play with it properly. I’ve confiscated it. He has his own room, I’ve told him to keep to it. We have to have rules. Children prefer them.’

  If he fumbled over a sentence, Ivan Challoner repeated it, the next time getting the words right:

  ‘When we move to London you’ll have a bedroom all of your own at the top and must keep to it. There will be strict bedtimes and no answering back and crying. I’ve told you, your father is dead and now you answer to me. We have to have rules. You will never be my son, you have no backbone and I already have a daughter.’

  Eventually Ivan had become word perfect, but by then Mr Glyde too was dead.

  The fire had nearly died. Ivan held a sheet of newspaper over the aperture until it sucked inwards and glowed orange.

  ‘Now look what he’s done. When we move he stays in his room. We have to have rules…’

  A flame popped up behind a log and he fed it kindling and blew hard. Another flame darted out and vanished. Then another, and soon the flames joined up. When the fire had taken hold he laid the picture of his Cathy just out of reach of the flames.

  ‘You spoilt our son because you are spoilt, sullied, corrupted,’ he told Cathy.

  ‘He’s not your son. He is nothing to do with you.’

  He put the flat of his fingers to his lips, kissed them and tipped his hand away towards the fire. Cathy was smiling. Heathcliff smiled back.

  ‘Go well, my darling. It’s for the best. I told you I knew what was best for you.’

  There was a sound. He knew all the sounds in this house. It was the kitchen door. Whoever it was imagined they were opening it quietly. He had planned properly and long before they arrived had cut the power and prepared everything.

  ‘Sweet dreams, little Jonny. Sleep tight, don’t let the bugs bite.’ He knew what to say to children. ‘Shut your eyes and count to ten. When a person dies they wake up. That is all dying is. We wake up somewhere else.

  ‘We’ll give them time, Cathy. Sarah will know where I am, but will put off looking. She is such a daddy’s girl, while Stella Darnell is used to nosing in lives that are not her own. Sarah is not a proper sister; she does not understand loyalty.’

  He heard footsteps in the passage. They would go upstairs, then to the garage and then they would go to his father’s surgery. He hid in the passage and once they were on the basement stairs, he ran across the hall and drew the bolt across. He returned to the sitting room and, aware of the value of precise timing, waited a further five minutes.

  He rested the needle on the record and when the music began gradually turned up the volume. Cathy played the ‘Pathétique’ beautifully; it always put the boy to sleep.

  The cold air winded Ivan when he opened the back door.

  The garden gate was still padlocked – he had expected to find the chain cut. He hurried along the gravel path, past the buttress, around the church and paused outside the porch to tie up his shoelace. The fog was clearing and the headstones were like carious teeth against the diminishing white. Ivan felt a stirring of dread. The snow was melting and the thaw was coming.

  He pulled the knot tight and became aware of an infinitesimal creaking close to his ear. It was persistent; gathering force, it grew to a rushing climax with a thump. He whipped around. Behind him in the shadowy porch the great studded door was closed. It had not come from there. Then sounds were all around him. A slab of snow slid off the roof and exploded on the ground in chips of ice.

  Ivan’s shoes tightly laced, he was ready to pay his respects, but was mesmerized by the dripping and plashing so that when he heard the splitting of an icicle high above his head, he paid no attention.

  Ivan Challoner was conscious long enough to feel the infinitely sharp object drive deep into the base of his neck. The pain was over before it had begun.

  Stella used the church tower to get her bearings and sprinted over the lawn to the gate she had seen when she and Jack came to his mother’s grave. The mist was clearing, the sliver of moon bright. The ground where the snow had melted was dark like craters in the strange light: one of these caught her eye.

  Ivan Challoner lay face-down on the path, a stain spreading out from his head. Stella looked around. The churchyard was still, the wind had died down, and the quiet was broken only by branches shedding snow. Walls, graves, mausoleums were gradually exposed as snow melted.

  Ivan’s blood was soaking into the gravel. Stella bent down: he had been stabbed in the back of the neck.

  Jack had found Ivan after all.

  She stepped back, her hands away from her; this was a crime scene.

  She aimed the remote control at Terry’s car. Her phone was where she had left it between the seats. Stella dialled 999.

  ‘Which service would you like?’

  ‘Ambulance, two please.’ Stella took a breath and heard herself say: ‘We need the police.’ She gave the address and rang off.

  She gathered herself; Jack had been unconscious when they found him. Sarah would have been able to tell if he was faking the symptoms. Someone had bolted the door from the outside. Jack had not killed Ivan. Who had?

  Sarah Glyde.

  Stella jumped when the church clock chimed four times. Although it was the dead of night, it was not entirely dark and she could see the silhouette of the weathervane on the top of the spire. She wished that it could be her dad who
answered her call.

  She took out his phone from her pocket and climbed into his car, locking the doors. She turned on the engine and, uncoiling the car charger in his glove box, plugged it in. This time when she switched it on, it stayed on. She chose Dialled Calls.

  She did not scroll down far before she found ‘Stella mob’. The phone had been used to call her old number the afternoon before he died. Her dad did not have her new mobile number. She had not bothered to give it to him.

  The headlights of the emergency services cut through the trees, making them seem to dance and swoop as if inhabited by Jack’s phantoms. Stella got out of Terry’s car and walked towards the lights.

  Perhaps if she had given her dad her new number, he would have told her about the Rokesmith case. She would have agreed to work with him. She could have helped. Perhaps if she had answered his call, it would have changed the ending and they would be waiting by the church for the ambulance and the police together.

  Perhaps.

  70

  Monday, 7 February 2011

  Stella parked her dad’s car facing the River Thames. The wind was blowing and the water was choppy as gusts ruffled the surface. The snow had gone. Equating Challoner with the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Jack was convinced the thaw had heralded his death. Like the reign of Queen Jadis, he had declared, Ivan’s time was over: Aslan was coming. The gravel sweep outside the crematorium was crowded. Stella had not expected so many. She sat in her dad’s old Toyota, the engine idling, and contemplated leaving. No one had seen her.

  There was a rap on the window.

  It was Jack.

  She let down the glass.

  ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘I never go to funerals.’

  ‘You do now.’

  Stella had fetched Jack from the hospital in Eastbourne a week ago. She had not seen him since. His near-death experience appeared to have done him good: he had colour in his cheeks.

  He opened the door for her. When she got out, he took her arm. Stella did not object.

  ‘Have you given up smoking?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thought so.’

  They walked around the hedge that screened the car park from the crematorium. This was a single-storey brick building with a drive-through porch around which were clustered at least four hundred people, mostly in police uniform. Stella faltered.

  ‘Keep moving.’ Jack had her arm. ‘It’s going to last an hour, then we go to the reception in a place called Imber Court and then you can go home. I will drive you.’

  ‘What’s Jackie doing here?’ Stella did not acknowledge him but as Jack had intended the schedule had reassured her. ‘Who’s minding the office?’

  ‘It’s closed. A tribute to Terry.’

  A man in a black suit standing apart from the crowd raised his eyebrows in slight acknowledgement. Stella nodded in response although she didn’t recognize him. She did know the woman a few feet from him.

  ‘There’s Sarah Glyde.’

  Sarah Glyde looked more wispy than ever, trailing ribbons and layers of silks and bright wools. She stood out like a blousy bloom amid the sea of blue. She tipped a tentative hand to Stella and Stella smiled in acknowledgement. Forensics had cleared Sarah Glyde; an icicle had severed Ivan Challoner’s spinal cord. Sarah had not stabbed her brother, although Stella was certain that had they found him alive Sarah would have done. The police had broken into Ivan’s bedroom on the top floor of the Hammersmith house and found the room entirely free of dust and completely empty.

  A few more steps and she saw that the man in the black suit was Dariusz Adomek from the mini mart below her office; she had only ever seen him in his shop uniform.

  A man crossed the turning circle to meet them. It was D. I. Martin Cashman.

  ‘All right, Stella?’ He wiped his hand down his face: ‘We’ve got a bit of a problem.’

  ‘What kind of problem?’ Cashman looked as trussed up and ill at ease in his suit as she did in hers. Perhaps Imber Court, the venue for major police events in West London, had become unavailable? That was not a problem.

  ‘One of the pall-bearers is ill.’

  ‘Surely there’s someone one else who can do it?’ Jack was stern.

  ‘Not that simple.’ Martin continued to look at Stella. ‘It’s about height. Everyone’s got to be the same height or it goes wrong. Believe it or not, there is not a single person here who is six foot.’

  ‘I thought you had to be six foot to get into the police?’ Jack had Stella’s arm tight. His mandatory outfit of black coat and trousers and black brogues suited the occasion perfectly.

  ‘Not any more. So far the guys that have volunteered are either around five-ten or a couple of inches over the six. No one is bang on. Should be a uniformed officer. Janet is trying to rustle someone up so it’s not a huge deal. It means we have a small delay. Nothing to worry about.’ Cashman seemed to notice Jack for the first time. ‘How tall are you, mate?’

  ‘Six foot and half an inch.’

  ‘Would you do it? That coat will blend in.’

  ‘Sure, OK.’

  ‘Here’s my dad.’ Stella moved forward and stopped.

  A hearse turned in at the gate and made its way slowly along the drive. The sleek black vehicle was magisterial against the drab greys and greens of the landscaped garden. It came to a halt just short of the car park, waiting its turn.

  Stella could see the light wood coffin through the glass panel. The chrome fender and radiator grille gleamed in the harsh winter light. The hearse looked different to any she had ever seen.

  No other hearse had contained her dad’s coffin.

  Her dad should have been milling around with the rest of his team on the pavement, underdressed for the weather, rubbing his hands to keep warm, new shoes hurting his feet, his hair in need of a cut, but washed and brushed. Six foot himself, he would have stepped up to carry the coffin. If it had been Stella’s coffin, her dad would have been one of the pall-bearers. The other five would have had to match him.

  ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘What?’ Martin Cashman was signalling to a member of the funeral staff.

  ‘I am the right height. Tell them I will do it.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that you had—’

  ‘I will carry my dad’s coffin.’ She was firm.

  Stella approached the porch, dimly aware of mourners falling silent, some looking at their feet, the crowd imperceptibly shuffling to make way. Martin Cashman had assembled the other bearers: police officers all the same height as herself, the same height as her dad. Like him, they were broad-shouldered, square-jowled, with an air of capability and spruced attention. Hands clasped before them, they had formed a huddle, but broke ranks to admit Terry Darnell’s daughter.

  There was more scraping of shoe leather, clearing of throats. Stella looked around for Jack but could not see him. The hearse rolled forward, led into the porch by a slow-stepping police officer, holding Terry’s police cap balanced on a cushion. It glided to a stop and the funeral staff came forward and drew out the flag-draped coffin on its runners.

  A man touched Stella’s elbow.

  ‘We will lower it on to your shoulder. Don’t make any sudden movements, keep in step with the man in front and the man to your left and you will be fine.’ He held her gaze, a slight smile lifting the corners of his mouth.

  ‘We’ll take it in turns. I’ll carry it until we get across the road, then you can have the conkers when we get to the other side, I promise. I know you’re a strong girl.’

  Stella would not have a tantrum if he kept hold of the conkers all the way, but she would mind. She needed to prove herself. The basket bumped against her legs and he could see it was too much for her, but no way was she giving up.

  It was getting light when they reached the house. She carried it all the way.

  ‘That’s my girl.’ He gave her a quick smile.

  The wood was unremitting; the pressure immense,
crushing her. Stella clasped the underside of the coffin with her left hand; her right gripped the handle to keep it steady. She had to summon all her strength; the coffin grew heavier with every step.

  The aisle was long. Pew after pew passed; she was in step with the other bearers, their feet in unison with slow and certain tread. The man who had helped her receive the coffin was again by her side; slipping into place in front of her he lowered the coffin on to the catafalque. With the others, Stella bowed her head to the coffin and then she stepped into the front pew where she sat alone.

  ‘The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want.

  He maketh me down to lie…’

  ‘You’re going to live in a brand new home with Mummy. You’ll come here at weekends. We will have adventures same as ever. You and me, we’ll be the best detectives ever.’

  He gave her a bit of a push to get her going down the path so she didn’t see his face. Stella was a clever little thing. She knew as well as he did that nothing would ever be the same.

  ‘…In pastures green; he leadeth me

  The quiet waters by…’

  Stella and her mother had gone to live in a flat by Barons Court station in West London. From that day, she had made herself forget her dad. He had lied to her about it making no difference and she told herself she would not forgive him.

  Stella laid two roses – one red and the other white – on his coffin. Jack had told her that the combination signified unity. Her lips moved silently: May you rest in peace.