The Detective's Daughter (15 page)

She resented meeting anyone in the mirrored lift with its motion-activated polycarbonate light fittings which, the brochure had extolled, ‘offered greater durability’, or crossing the pinkish forecourt of crumb-rubber, ‘designed to protect from injury and increase comfort’. She did not need neighbours. In her head she told Terry she had got a bargain.

Every night, when she closed her front door, which blocked draughts and extraneous noise, she derived satisfaction from the sensible proportion of the rooms, the sleek woodwork and steel fittings. She understood Mrs Ramsay’s need to peer behind pipes and beneath stairs, tighten window catches and to sterilize what no one would see. In so big a house, it was impossible to keep tabs. Had she lived there, Stella too would have had to cover all bases. Her flat in Thameside Heights – she never called it home – required little monitoring and no bother to keep clean.

She put the two Rokesmith case files on the table and flicked them with a damp cloth, which did not rid them of the odour of Terry’s loft. She’d have another go at shredding at the office; a bit each day would see it sorted.

It was time for supper. Stella had a strict schedule and supper was at seven, washing up by half past, emails or other work until ten, then bed. She began by going into the galley kitchen to prepare food. The kitchen had been designed for a busy person with little time and little appetite for entertaining. The shiny appliances snugly wall-mounted with none of the gaps and nooks that so exercised Mrs Ramsay suited Stella perfectly. Right angles abounded – no wavering lines or bulges in the plaster to frustrate the eye or darken the mood, all handles and dials clicked flush to surfaces. The washer-drier, slim-line dishwasher and the eye-level combination microwave above the fan-assisted oven were white squares on a chessboard of the ‘Absolute Black’ granite worktop and floor tiles. Stella had taken her pick of materials from a choice too generous to be profitable. If she found herself chopping, slicing and stirring, she calmed herself with the prospect of the scrubbing, brushing and wiping to follow. She keyed in defrosting, cooking times and extra drain and spin cycles and found to solace in the sheen of a newly mopped floor.

Since Terry’s death Stella had done no cleaning in her flat.

She pulled a toad in the hole from the freezer – noticing it was the same brand as Terry’s shepherd’s pies – and set the time for three minutes on high, and while it revolved on the plate, mused at the wasteland below intended as a child-free zone of contemplation. The centrepiece, a Yogic Om in coloured concrete, was to have included bronze plaques with meditative texts: Christian and Buddhist. Bindweed strangled the casing of a Sony Trinitron television and slabs of brickwork – the foundations of the old electroplating works – nestled amidst thistles and towering buddleia and nettles, fractured by their roots. Stella had no time for contemplation with or without children; what irked her was a job half complete.

She was startled by the door buzzer. No one but Jackie and Paul knew where she lived. She trod softly down the carpeted hall, an unnecessary precaution for no one could hear her four floors up, and pressed the intercom panel: a video screen flickered to life, the camera trained on the front doors. There was no one. Then she saw a shadow to the side of the screen: someone was outside the range of the lens. Rationally she was confident that with the lobby doors of reinforced glass, held fast with solid locks, she was safe. With few residents there was little chance anyone would let in a stranger who claimed to have a parcel or lost their key. Her own door had a five-lever lock and the frame was reinforced with a London Bar. Nevertheless she rolled her shoulders, quelling a mounting panic.

Whoever it was knew she was in. Stella checked the intercom to be sure the volume was muted and heard rapid breathing. It was her own.

The shadow had gone. She stepped up to the monitor to be certain – maybe she had imagined it. She squinted through the eyehole in the door: corridor and a strip of blue carpet tapered to the end window.

Had someone been let in? In the kitchen the microwave pinged; her supper was ready. Already it was past seven, she was running late; she turned off the entry camera and hurried back to the living room.

Her mobile phone was flashing with a text from Paul.

I am outside.

The same message as when she was at Terry’s house the night before. She grabbed her keys from the dining-room table and went into her study, with a desk on which was a laptop docking station, a dictionary and a lamp. On the walls were a calendar and a map of London. She plugged the phone into a socket by the desk and laid the keys next to it so she didn’t forget them in the morning. Stella had many such tricks and ruses to ensure she met deadlines and objectives.

She shut both the study and living-room doors so that she would not hear the phone or see it light up with a call or a text. Finally she switched off the ringer on her main line, congratulating herself for not yielding to Paul’s pleading and giving him a key to her flat. He could not get to her now.

She munched her way through the toad in the hole, many minutes behind schedule, and eyed the rusting barbed wire spiralling along the perimeter of the demolished works. Through the gloom, between the coils of wire, was the hulk of a low-slung barge moored beneath her window. Paul had wanted them to live on a barge on the Thames. Stella had said it would be impossible to keep clean, but that was not the real reason; she knew now it was because Kate Rokesmith was murdered by the river.

Through the air vent came the rhythmic slapping of water against the wall. Somewhere over the river a flock of geese honked, the noise eerily plaintive as they made their way upstream to Barnes.

‘You can tell they’re geese because they’re flying in that “V” pattern, see?’

Stella followed the line of his finger.

‘No one knows why they do it. Maybe it gives them better visibility. Every bird has a clear view with nothing in front. They keep together – it’s nicer than flying alone. Birds and animals are sociable creatures. Like you and me.’

Paul would presume she was watching him from the study; he would imagine she cared. Stella chewed, slicing the sausage, cutting the batter into squares, forking each mouthful precisely. She wished Paul could be more like her and understand it was over.

Terry had never been to her flat. She dismissed this thought.

After washing up her plate and speedily wiping down the tops she had caught up with herself, but instead of looking at her emails she pulled out the chair at the head of the dining table – bought because the room required one, she did not have guests – and tipped the papers from the first box on to the glass. Before shredding it would do no harm to check what Terry had taken trouble to keep. She set aside what she had read at her office. A couple of sheets floated to the floor: one was an interview with an ‘internationally acclaimed medium’ in the
Sydney Morning Herald
– the case had gained international coverage – who divined that ‘the murderer spends time dressed in white beneath the ground beside a bubbling fountain’. Stella could not understand why such crackpots were given attention.

She turned to a clean page in the note section of her Filofax and testing her new Clean-Slate ballpoint, out of habit, made notes as she read.

The other piece of paper on the floor was page two of a transcribed interview. She licked a finger and flicked through the pile, but could not find page one. She was about to put the sheet aside, thinking that she would come across the rest in another box, when the name ‘Ramsay’ caught her eye.

‘… you confirm that you saw Katherine Rokesmith leaving her house with her son at eleven forty-five on the twenty-seventh of July?’

‘I told you.’

‘How can you be sure of the time?’

‘The church clock struck the quarter as I was getting out of the car. I notice these things, ever since… My children say I have a good eye. Ear in this case.’ [Laughs.]

‘Did you engage in conversation with Mrs Rokesmith?’

‘She was in a hurry. I waved.’

‘How did you know she was in a hurry?’

‘I didn’t. I meant,
I
was in a hurry, I was late home so… anyway… we didn’t speak.’

‘So Mrs Rokesmith wasn’t in a hurry?’

‘I couldn’t say. Aren’t we all?’ [Laughs.]

‘How did Mrs Rokesmith seem to you?’

‘She looked lovely, such a stunning girl. Reminded me of me as a… anyway, I’d been at our place in Sussex. I was shattered. I had to open the new village hall – a silly shindig shoved in to make way for this wedding. Frankly, Sergeant Hall…’

‘Darnell. Detective Inspector Darnell.’

‘I’m muddling you up. Victoria sponges are all the same: one has to keep one’s wits about one at these frightful barneys so as not to offend. I was desperate to get up to town and have a small drink and put my feet up. So, yes, I
was
in a hurry. The whole thing is bloody and of course now I wish I had stopped to talk.’

‘Did you see the boy?’

‘Isn’t he a poppet! I think I did.’

‘You are not sure?’

‘Yes. I did see him.’

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘I waved. He waved. At least he may have. I’m hopeless at this, when you have to trawl back it’s so diff… It was just another day.’

[Interview with Isabel Ramsay ends 10.01 a.m. 29 July 1981.]

Mrs Ramsay had initialled each section of the transcribed speech with bold loops of the pen. Stella knew her handwriting; despite her apparent frailty she pressed hard, indenting the paper. Her voice came off the page: Mrs Ramsay in her sitting room clinking a gin and tonic, a pen substituting the cigarette held up by her shoulder.

Stella laid down the statement. It was extraordinary that Mrs Ramsay was the last person to see Kate Rokesmith alive. Terry had interviewed her client years before she had known of her existence. Mrs Ramsay was a key witness in the Rokesmith murder and had never told her. Stella could not ask what she had thought of Terry or how much she remembered of Katherine Rokesmith because, unbelievably, Mrs Ramsay too was dead.

Stella had lost the only client whose cleaning had been a challenge: she would never deep-clean for Mrs Ramsay again.

Busily, using the edge of a box lid, Stella ruled columns in her notes: one for a description of the event, one for the date and one for the file number. The night wore on; fortified with coffee, she filled the columns with neat script. At 3 a.m. she rested her head on the plastic-covered sofa intending to close her eyes for a moment, and fell into a dreamless sleep.

The river flowed sluggishly past the solitary block of flats, its opaque surface absorbing the ghostly squares of light from Stella’s living room and kitchen. At the front, sightless windows reflected a car in one of the visitors’ spaces. Had the estate lights been working it might have been possible to see if someone was sitting at the wheel.

Wednesday, 12 January 2011

Jack stepped on the crack in the paving. He blamed the man in the car waiting at the zebra. For a moment their eyes locked and Jack thought here was a man like himself, at home in the night-time streets. The darkness was his friend; like Jack he had nothing to fear.

Jack had stared at him – or where the man’s face should be because when the car trickled closer, its headlights dazzled Jack – and this was his first mistake. He should have paused to get his bearings, instead he took a step and that’s when he stepped on the crack.

He knew the walk to Earls Court off by heart and should not have been gulled into the stupid error. Every paving stone was part of his plan but the car made his concentration slip and with it his boot.

A crack was not a real line but his dictum covered gaps between paving slabs, edges and boundaries of objects and buildings, so had to include cracks. He stared down, teetering on a high wire; in the light of the lamp-post the paving slab was a map of London, the crack being the river and the fissures and runnels rat-runs. He was hot with shame: the driver would know the extent of his mistake. The car had gone.

Night, when most of London was asleep, was Jack’s best time of day. At the end of the rush hour, faces made way for lines: pipes and guttering, eaves and roof slopes, wavy lines of bunched cable and stubby lines of the sleepers beneath his cab. The line in the pavement straddled life and death and by trying to see the car driver he had tempted mortality.

If Jack’s colleagues liked him, and this was an overstatement, it was because he was prepared to do the ‘Dead Late’ shift that finished after midnight. Most drivers hated the endless tunnel hours, claiming the silence and continual darkness killed their social lives and their ability to be polite. Jack drew comfort from the overarching brickwork with its mutely held secrets of over a century and a half; he resented having to come above ground.

He had a social life.

The street was silent; once grand houses sunk to shabby hotels with plastic signage clamped to crumbling stucco. They highlighted the banality of his blunder. This awareness thrilled up his leg, making his heart flutter like a bat trapped in his chest. His instinct was to jump off, but he refused to side-step – literally – his responsibility. He remained on the line, taking in the significance. He must learn from his mistake; he made few, so such opportunities were rare.

The driver was out of sight so he would put him out of mind. Jack hugged into his coat and, walking, tried to retrieve his rhythm, relieved that at this late hour no one else had witnessed his transgression.

A young man slouched in the portico of a hotel, the firefly glow of his cigarette giving him away. There were no security cameras here; it was a blind spot. Jack wove between the parked cars, taking care to avoid splits in the camber and the lines of the drain grille. He flicked up a cigarette from the packet he carried for these eventualities; he preferred roll-ups.