The Detective's Daughter (8 page)

‘Stop doing that with your mouth.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘You were. I don’t want to have to get cross with you.’ Simon put on a girl’s voice. Justin did not talk like that, but did not point this out. Simon tried to shift the engine, but soil had clogged its wheels and it was mired.

Justin sifted soft earth; he must wash his nails before supper or Miss Thoroughgood would tell him off. She was leaving at the end of term so everyone was supposed to treat her nicely. Simon’s nails, all nine of them, were clean. Justin turned so that Simon would not see his mouth twitching.

He had developed a sniff accompanied by a flick of his fringe to distract attention from the tic that had begun after he started at boarding school. He also gnawed at the skin around his thumbnail. Simon called him ‘the Vampire’, which made no sense to Justin as he did not suck blood. Some of the younger boys called him this out of windows or from around corners.

‘There’s nowhere for the passengers to get out.’

Simon was right; he had not built a station. The tunnel had been complicated: he had worked out the strength of the roof, the width of the tunnel – half as much as its length – drawing and revising diagrams in his notebook after prep but had forgotten about alighting and disembarking.

Had there been other boys, he would have explained how he’d embedded struts made from ice-lolly sticks in the walls. He fixed them with roofing felt made from folded toilet paper layered with leaves and twigs and overlaid with a mortar of earth and some sand he had found by the shed.

I added water from the tap that I carried in this paint tin.

Mortar, he would inform them, dries as hard as concrete. He would run a road over the tunnel or perhaps lay a park with a statue, but Simon must be got rid of first.

Simon had warned that if he told on him Justin would be in trouble for messing up the vegetable patch and trespassing. He explained it was for this bad behaviour that Justin had been sent away.

‘I will kill you and bury your body so that no one will ever find you and then your flesh will be eaten and your bones will crumble.’ Simon stuck the hand with the half-finger inside Justin’s shorts. ‘I’ll say you escaped again.’ At first he was gentle, but then he squeezed and Justin felt sick. Simon’s fist struggled like an animal beneath the school regulation material.

‘Message understood?’ Simon pulled away.

Justin blinked back tears.

Simon never spoke of his random attacks and afterwards they both behaved as if nothing had happened. Justin had an oblique idea that Simon’s behaviour was sanctioned by a higher authority so did not believe he could stop it.

A storm roared about his ears, whipping soil and stones into the air that stung his cheeks. He dashed water from his face, ducking from the paint tin, and clasped his hands over his head. He opened his eyes. Simon had reduced his tunnel to clumps of earth, wads of discoloured paper stuck with splinters of wood and scattered with onions, carrots and wild garlic.

The small boy remained on the raised vegetable bed, a statue save for jerks of his head. He wore an expression of quiet despair.

At last he retrieved the engine from the far side of the bed and wiped sand and soil from the funnel and cylinder with toilet paper. He pushed a loose wheel into place and cleared slathers of wet earth from the carriage windows; the smiling people were gone. He peered in: passengers were sprawled on the floor, or wedged between seats.

Justin’s face was wet; Simon liked it when he cried. He looked around and saw he was alone, which made him uneasy.

He imagined writing to his mummy, putting the case for her to fetch him; she would not think he was a coward – except maybe she would. Perhaps he was.

The boy trailed up the path, past the greenhouse, to the gate to a bridle path that led to the road. He knew this because he had tried to escape. So much freedom just beyond his grasp.

To the little boy, the walled kitchen garden had a quiet of its own, its once richly planted beds now populated by rabbits, only one corner tended on occasional visits by an elderly gardener.

He heard an irregular clinking, persistent and distinct like a Morse code message. A dog lead hung from a washing-line post, the frayed strap weathered to a soft pink. In the breeze the clasp, oscillating like a pendulum, tapped out Jonathan Justin Rokesmith’s plot of revenge on the parched and knotted wood.

Tuesday, 11 January 2011

The light flickered and the lamp-post emitted an insistent buzz. At half past ten the Great West Road was still busy, headlights sweeping over the bollards stopping access to Rose Gardens North, their shadows in continual flux. Neither the buzzing nor the traffic penetrated a mantle of silence in the cul-de-sac.

In the 1950s the arterial road cut a swathe through West London, and all that was left of Rose Gardens was a row of six Victorian labourers’ cottages. The six new lanes extended to London Airport. The council, perhaps in bureaucratic penance for the demolition of the ivy-clad dwellings and burgeoning orchards bounded by hawthorn hedgerows, designated a patch of leftover land for recreational purposes. Bushes and infant cherry trees dotted newly sown grass (no dogs or balls allowed) in scant imitation of the orchards. Benches – each dedicated to a worthy councillor – were placed strategically in the shadow of the church. Each spring the trees offered a pink spray canopy, their colour offsetting the miles of tarmac. Soon the road claimed its first fatality: an eighty-one-year-old woman, her body memory obeying a vanished map, walked along Black Lion Lane as if the new road were not there and died instantly. Central railings were installed to discourage further deaths.

Time passed: the bushes grew into a forbidding shrubbery, tree trunks thickened, weeds ruptured the paths, frost forced the cracks apart to become potholes for rainwater and rubbish. In response to a residents’ petition, the benches – a magnet for drunks and suspicious-looking men – were removed. In the gleam of moonlight the plunging branches of the grand old sycamore provoked nameless dread in scurrying passers by; the paths were abandoned for a muddied track short-cutting over the grass to the subway. Set back from the Great West Road, shrouded from the pavement and St Peter’s Church by encroaching foliage, the little park was no longer a place to linger.

Stella could have come to Terry’s house at any time; assuming her to be grieving, Jackie did not expect her to be at work, but she was loath to meet Terry’s neighbours so she waited until it was dark. On her return from Mrs Ramsay’s she had found Jackie interrogating the revised rota. Michelle’s son had broken his arm, Felicia had resigned to work privately, Maxine’s brother had been in a car accident so she had gone to Manchester and Shelley was already doing the workload of two: they had a staffing crisis. Stella took all the shifts. A drawback of success was that she did less cleaning so, despite her high-calibre team, she relished any chance to do the work herself.

After two hours of vacuuming, polishing and mopping in the offices of a financial advice company by Hammersmith Underground station, she had stepped out on to the Broadway and, zipping up her windproof jacket against a bitter wind, driven to the house where she had spent the first seven years of her life. It was another job, she repeated to herself; Terry was another client.

She caught a movement in bushes across the road and peered through the windows of her van, ready to drive off. There was no one.

The lamp-post came to life and orange light dulled the colours of the parked cars to muddy brown and made gaunt shadows that quivered on the camber. Stella scanned the shrubbery again and wrongly assumed that a lumpish shape in the undergrowth was a bush.

She kept close to a privet that Terry had let grow tall – presumably to block a view into his living room – and unlatched the gate. Immediately she tripped on a hard object and her key-ring torch revealed a cast-iron shoe scraper: a painted squirrel nibbling on a nut in the middle of the crazy paving. She carried it to the front door, using the toe of her steel-capped boot to edge it into line with the tiled step. Stella fished in her jacket for his keys, too preoccupied by the enormity of her task – she had never been to Terry’s house uninvited – to consider why the scraper was on the path in the first place.

The lamp-post went on and light picked out recently repointed brickwork and newly painted sashes. Stella guessed that Terry had done the work; he would not trust others. It was probably such stubbornness that had killed him.

In 1981, the year Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government increased police pay, Terry worked more overtime than usual and was able to buy the corner house that he and Stella’s mother had rented after their marriage in 1966.

Many of Clean Slate’s clients lived in this part of Hammersmith: lawyers, judges, actors, journalists; ambitious professionals with no time or inclination to scrub or dust. The area was more openly opulent than it had been in the late sixties during Stella’s time there, when a mix of ramshackle upper-middle classes and working people like Terry had resided more comfortably side by side. Nowadays a policeman would be unusual; Stella guessed that Terry had not socialized with his neighbours so would not be missed.

Terry Darnell had cared little about social class; a detective, he could enter any home and poke about under baths, stairs and floorboards with impunity. He could delve into the recesses of all manner of lives and expose the unspeakable. Stella too, unimpressed by her clients’ status, applied astringents and detergents, wielded brushes and mops, listening without comment or judgement to dilemmas and dramas not dissimilar to those investigated by her father.

However, as Stella stared up at the drawn bedroom curtains and tightly slatted blinds, she found the notion of a shared experience with Terry untenable.

She ran the soles of her boots over the scraper and shook loose his mortice key, which turned easily in the lock. She was not so lucky with the Yale; it would not budge. Used to the idiosyncrasies of locks she inserted her gloved fingers into the letterbox, the flap mouse-trapping them, and eased the door back and forth while manipulating the torque with the key. She detected the correct position in the cylinder, the tumblers released, the plug rotated and the door opened.

Dry leaves were crushed underfoot behind her.

Stella left the door ajar, the key in the lock, and rushed to the gate. Wind tore through the hedge, smacking at her jacket, shaking chimes hung in next door’s porch that set off a tinkling discord of notes.

She put her staff through a drill for entering empty premises. The handbook instructed vigilance; keep the key at all times.
Do not leave the door open even to go out to the bins: a burglar needs only seconds to slip inside.

Besides her van, four cars were ranged along the nearside kerb; the bays by the bushes were empty. A gust sent leaves and a squashed milk carton racing along the gutter and somewhere a can clattered and bounced on tarmac. The lamp went out and the carton was subsumed into velvet blackness. Stella concluded that leaves and twigs scraping and sweeping on stone could sound like shuffling soles. She was uptight and letting her imagination run riot, she told herself.

In the hall she skidded on a heap of mail-order catalogues in plastic wrappers silted up on the brush mat and had to kick them out of the way to shut the door.

Upstairs a clock ticked and from the kitchen came the drip-drip of a tap. The air was cold but lacked the stale atmosphere she would have expected of a place shut up and unoccupied even for a couple of days. She identified Lavender and Vanilla from Glade’s Relaxing Moments Collection, which she reserved for middle-range clients prior to a sale or new letting to lend a positive impression to the most tired or drab of interiors and reinforce the conviction that Clean Slate did a thorough job. Terry fitted this ‘average’ profile; most of her clients in this district preferred a less synthetic scent.

Unwilling to attract attention with lights, she twisted on the miniature Maglite attached to her key ring.

Always carry a torch in case the lights fail.

Phantoms shivered and re-formed when she levelled the beam around the hall. An old man flinching and jerking morphed into a coat stand draped with jackets, the telephone table was an arching cat that evaporated as the newel post, a slip of a cartoon character, rose to attention and then swooped up the stairs. Stella picked her way over the catalogues and along the passage to the kitchen.

Something had triggered the security light; Stella leant over the sink but could see no one beneath the window sill and decided it was branches of a forsythia bush waving in the wind. She turned to the room; pale appliances and worktops were clinical in the vibrant light.

There were none of the items that often take up kitchen surfaces: coffee-makers, toasters, cooking implements stuffed upright into ceramic pots, cutting boards harbouring germs; she guessed that little cooking or eating took place and recalled the Coke and two bacon rolls in the Co-op bag. Terry grabbed his food on the run; it was fuel only. She closed off the dripping tap, comforted by a whiff of bleach from the plughole.

On recent visits to Terry, Stella had seldom gone beyond the front room but remained on the sofa, drinking tea. They both knew that the sooner she finished it the sooner she could leave.

The American-style fridge with an ice dispenser dwarfed a reproduction country pine dresser that Stella remembered from her childhood. Ever the opportunist, Terry had snapped it up with a double bed, the kitchen table and her bedroom wardrobe from a man doing a house clearance next door to the scene of one of his crimes. Her mother told friends the cherry-stained pine was the tipping point to divorce, although much of the pine, darker with age, filled her small flat in Barons Court.

The dresser was stacked with white crockery; plates propped up like blank faces in the unremitting light. In Stella’s day the cupboard had been a dumping ground for household odds and ends: a basket of pegs, her mother’s cookery books, chipped cups and plates that her mum got second-hand, not caring if they matched, light bulbs, candles, lengths of cables and trinkets from Christmas crackers.