The Detective's Daughter (16 page)

Jack wore a pleasant smile. His polished brogue mounting the bottom step, he asked for a light.

Thursday, 13 January 2011

The WPC on ‘scene guard’ behind the ‘Do Not Cross’ police tape impassively eyed a woman in trousers that showed off a flat stomach stepping out of a cleaners’ van. Her loafers were polished to within an inch of their life and she was, the officer reckoned, too smartly dressed for a cleaner. She was the boss come to collect her winnings, or in this case, cut her losses. She obviously knew the wisdom of running a spotless Peugeot Partner slapped with company details rather than a Lexus or Merc that advertised to customers that she knew how to spend their money. The officer allowed a sliver of respect for the woman, who like herself looked to be early forties. She raised her eyebrows in enquiry, ready to state it was ‘no entry’ whatever Ms Clean Slate said.

A car glided to a stop at the kerb and the passenger door swung out, clipping the woman’s natty leather rucksack, but she did not break her stride. The WPC recognized the detective inspector’s Volvo. Doing up his jacket, he bounded out of the passenger seat like Action Man and, just a fraction too late, she raised the tape to let him pass.

‘All right, sir?’ Of course he did not reply.

‘Are you in charge here?’ the woman called after him.

‘Contact our communications people. You know the score, no press.’ D. I. Cashman rapped on the front door, studying his shoes while he waited for it to open. The police officer did not move, underlining his authority.

‘Do I look like a journalist?’ The front door remaining closed, Cashman had to acknowledge her. ‘I cleaned for Mrs Ramsay.’ The woman fidgeted with branches on the straggling hedge, ripping off leaves. ‘Stella Darnell. Clean Slate.’ She gestured a thumb at her van. ‘Maybe you knew Detective Superintendent Darnell?’

There was a beat.

‘Terry? Terry bloody Darnell?’

Stella took in the female police constable with a slight nod and played a never-used card: ‘He was my father.’

‘You know what?’ The detective was coming down the steps. ‘Your dad taught me more than I’ve forgotten.’ He jumped the last two. ‘It’s a hellish thing. I was
totally
gutted.’ Panting, he gave her a clumsy handshake across the hedge. ‘Martin Cashman, Detective Inspector.’ He hesitated. Maybe like Terry he was happier with the evidence-bag aspect of death than with cups of sugary tea and a few well-chosen words.

Stella saw that he was the Terry look-alike of the day before, dressed in a serviceable Marks & Spencer’s suit, like the one she had put into the dry cleaner’s below her office in readiness for charity. He had Terry’s mousy hair combed in a side parting, tipping over his collar; it was, Stella knew, due a cut that he would not make time for. In his pudgy vein-flecked features were the beginnings of Terry’s double chin and his slight paunch had loosened his shirt from his waistband. He hastened to tuck it in, emitting a tang of Gillette aftershave. In no time at all, Stella reflected coolly, the doppelgänger effect would be complete.

With a look to the WPC, Detective Inspector Cashman beckoned Stella through.

Fixing the tape back into place, the officer observed Stella Darnell stalk up the steps as if she owned the place, and grudgingly envied how she had the boss eating out of her hand.

‘He rang me last week… he was on form, cracking jokes. Still on the job!’ The front door had been opened and upstairs Stella could hear voices, heavy footsteps and guffaws of laughter. Instinctively she was annoyed; Mrs Ramsay did not encourage visitors.

‘I was sure retirement would get to him. Some can’t hack having no reason to stress. Mad, isn’t it? We’ve had blokes doing the conga on the Friday and a couple of months later I’m listening to a eulogy at their…’ With scene-changing swiftness he wiped his hand over his face and made a show of shuffling his shoes on Mrs Ramsay’s doormat. Stella did the same.

Mrs Ramsay would have been distressed to see her dilapidated but pristine hall a mess. Gone was the ratty rug that skidded and chalk marks outlined the stains it had hidden. The acrid smell of ninhydrin, used to lift latent prints, extinguished the lavender fragrance Stella encouraged Mrs Ramsay to spray throughout the house and a dusting of fingerprint powder greyed the coiled end of the balustrade polished so recently.

‘Those were there already.’ Stella indicated the stains.

‘Our guys said that.’ He loosened the knot on his tie as if she was depriving him of breath, as Terry did when she challenged him.

Sensing advantage Stella pressed the point home: ‘I couldn’t get rid of them. Mrs Ramsay didn’t know what they were.’ She cast around. The rug slumped drunkenly in plastic wrapping beside the antler hat stand, which was also in the wrong place.

‘Blood, SOCO think. Forensics’ll confirm.’ He rubbed his hands together vigorously and stepped over the marks to the stairs. ‘You didn’t do the cleaning yourself? Big shot these days, your old man says – said.’

Stella detected sarcasm.

His shirt – blue cotton with pencil-thin brown stripes – was identical to the one Terry was wearing when he died.

‘Sky’s the limit,’ he told her and kissed her forehead. In his best shirt, he waved her off through the gates, tracing a big rainbow arc with a sweep of his arm to egg her on but she did not look back, already Miss Independent. He stayed until she had gone. It would be three whole hours until dinnertime. He had promised to be in exactly the same place when she came out. They were going to have sandwiches in the park as her reward for being such a brave girl.

The detective’s brogues could do with a buff, but like Terry he would blend into a crowd. Terry’s death was a detail; there were more detectives where he came from. One day D. I. Cashman too would be substituted; maybe by the woman at the gate. Stella roused herself.

‘No actually, I did handle this. Mrs Ramsay was particular and I knew her ways.’

Sunlight slanted in through the landing window at the turn in the staircase, highlighting nineteenth-century
Punch
cartoons framed in gold wood hung in step formation. Glittering particles of dust flittering in the light reminded Stella of how Mrs Ramsay would snatch at them, opening her fist like a child to examine her empty palms. She had once found Mrs Ramsay vacuuming the air, she waved the nozzle like a fire fighter putting out a blaze. Mrs Ramsay kept her curtains shut to avoid seeing what she could not remove or wipe away and was fond of saying that what was out of sight was not out of mind.

‘When did you come here last?’

The hall was as chill as a church. Mrs Ramsay did not heat rooms she only passed through. Her skeletal frame clad in fraying layers of fluttering silk, cotton and cashmere, she claimed not to feel the cold.

‘Last Friday for three hours. I finish at one. Sometimes I have a cup of tea, but I had a meeting in Chelsea at one thirty so had to rush.’ Mrs Ramsay had been hovering by the hat stand, flapping an overcoat, smoothing the fabric. She was annoyed Stella could not stay and Stella had half expected her to bar the way. A mad notion in retrospect, but lately her behaviour had been more erratic. Busying herself rummaging in the pockets of the coat, she did not say goodbye.

The coat was not there now. At the time Stella had supposed it belonged to Mr Ramsay; his wife seemed unable to accept he was dead and like she did the rest of her family behaved as if he had just left the room.

‘Did the old lady seem anxious or unwell?’

‘She was always anxious; no worse than usual.’ Stella reacted to the term ‘old lady’; it did not describe Mrs Ramsay.

‘OK.’ He pulled out a notebook that was bagging his jacket and drew a pen from his breast pocket. ‘Why was she anxious?’

Decades after she had left Terry, Suzanne Darnell still complained about how he never dressed for an occasion and the careless way he treated his clothes, although her own were neglected, with several blouses on one hanger and trousers, or slacks as she called them, bundled up with no regard for the crease.

‘Oh, no reason.’ Stella did not need the police asking awkward questions. ‘Older people get anxious, and depressed, it goes with the territory.’ She tossed generalizations at him like birdseed. ‘She had to know when I was coming so she could be ready, her routine kept her going. Nothing odd about that.’ Except Mrs Ramsay was not like the other pensioners Stella worked for. Stella pictured the last list dashed down in the bold and rounded script, her handwriting was not shaky or tiny; Mrs Ramsay had never seemed old.

She sniffed tobacco smoke, someone had smoked a cigarette; she wanted to order them all to leave.

Despite being an ex-smoker, Terry too hated the smell of cigarettes.

She returned to the open doorway and looked out at a splaying tree in the Square. The trunk was so thick that two people could not hold hands around its circumference. Wind in the night had stripped the last of the leaves, leaving branches stark and uncompromising against the sky. She could not remember what time of year the lawns would be dotted with conkers, shining as if soaked in oil; unless kids had got in before the park opened and taken them all.

‘Put your jeans on over your pyjamas. Here, wear my jumper, that’s it. Do up your shoelaces good and tight. We won’t talk until we’re clear of the house, keep close by me.’ She cocked her head so he could whisper into her ear. It felt soft against his lips.

If she was afraid she did not let on, clutching his hand she scurried beside him to the Square. It was bitter; he was glad he had made her wrap up. He climbed the gate first then made her fit her boot on to the foothold between the bars. He had forgotten her mittens and worried about the icy metal. He nearly shouted with joy when she hauled herself up like a boy, rolling over the top and scrabbling with her boots for the horizontal bar. She peered into the pitch black beyond the torchlight. She was so excited. He knew then that his plan would work.

Until now it had not occurred to Stella that Isabel Ramsay’s disconnected remarks, her fanciful stories, were more than eccentricity. What she had told the detective about her being anxious was true: she had been on edge. When Stella left, the bolts were shot home and she would hear the security chain while she was still on the path. When the water pipes had banged and hooted Mrs Ramsay had said it was the little boy again. Stella remembered that it was the youngest child, Eleanor, whose antics had annoyed her mother, but did not correct her. By the time she was in her van and ready to drive off, Mrs Ramsay would be peeping through a gap in the dining room curtains and Stella would wave. Mrs Ramsay did not move, her face, like a ghost’s in the reflection, indistinguishable from the sky. Stella could not say any of this to the detective.

‘Did the old lady get on with her family?’ D.I. Cashman gave a business-like sniff, his pen poised. ‘I’ve got here: husband was a doctor, dead over ten years, three kids…’

‘I never met her children. We try not to come when there are visitors. Clients prefer their guests to see the effects of our work, not trip over a brush or slip on a wet floor. You’re better off asking them.’

It was not lost on Stella that having access to the house and the trust of the frail owner, she was technically a suspect. She would not be charmed or intimidated: never would she compromise client confidentiality, especially for the police. Cashman had so far treated her as ‘one of our own’ and was putting up with her unhelpful responses because she was his ex-boss’s daughter.

She had not made the connection that Mrs Ramsay had not seen her family for nearly as long as Professor Ramsay had been dead. She did not say that each time she came, she tidied up two water glasses by the bed both emptied: CID were not interested in ghosts.

Nor did she mention Mrs Ramsay’s obsession with finding her children’s dolls’ house and how she had led Stella through the rooms, warning her to a avoid a creaky stair, getting over-excited as she described an ‘incy-wincy’ bedspread she had embroidered for the main bedroom in the dolls’ house. Although she gave the impression that it was Eleanor who was keen to have the house found, Stella guessed from the way she chattered on about the dolls and the ‘exquisite little furniture’ that the house had belonged to Mrs Ramsay herself. Stella’s parents could not have talked so intricately about her toys.

They had searched the children’s bedrooms. Mrs Ramsay had shaken a fist at Eleanor’s gloss-black ceiling and blood-red skirtings, like the rooms of some teenage offspring of Stella’s clients. Stella ignored her fretful hints to extend Clean Slate’s services to painting and decorating; their core business was to clean.

The rooms in the Ramsay’s basement were a holding bay for discarded objects. A cylinder and an upright vacuum, its bag stiff and cracking with age, telephone directories and newspapers from the sixties were heaped on a single-sized bed. There was no dolls’ house.

Like her own bedroom in Barons Court, no room had any toys; perhaps like Stella’s mother, Mrs Ramsay had given them to charity without asking her children’s permission.

Mrs Ramsay had stipulated that Stella must not touch any of this or her daughter would never learn. It did not need a detective to work out that the bedrooms had been abandoned long ago.

Mrs Ramsay’s behaviour had worsened in the last month, she had lost all sense of time. Stella kept this to herself while D.I. Cashman scribbled a concluding point in his notebook with a stab of his pen and went into the dining room.

They were hit by a cloying odour: dead flowers, their stalks limp, were scattered over the tablecloth, a stain spread into the midnight blue material was not unlike diluted blood.

The detective’s mobile phone rang and raising his hand he stepped out to the hall to answer it.

Oxi-clean was the only agent that removed lily stains from fabrics; supermarket stain-devils never worked as well. Isabel Ramsay frequently got stamen stains on her clothes and when Stella told her she had a means of eradicating them she had been rewarded with one of Mrs Ramsay’s rare smiles.