The Detective's Daughter (3 page)

The starched white cotton shirt, sharp haircut and tailored suit trousers hinted at an authority confirmed when, having identified cleaners to cover the shifts, she tossed her gum into a waste bin and dialled the numbers on the list. She was pleasant but firm, overcoming objections or obstacles from the seventeen freelancers who worked exclusively for her. By five to nine the rota was complete and she had been at her desk three hours.

She strode through to the main office to fetch client details from signed contracts in her PA’s pending tray and was startled by knocking. A policeman was gesticulating through the wire-reinforced glass door panel.

‘I’m looking for Stella Darnell.’

‘You’ve found her.’

At six foot and in her mid-forties Stella was taller and older than the officer.

While he talked she grabbed a cleaning equipment catalogue from a shelf and, resting it on a filing cabinet, scribbled busily, squeezing words into the margins and around pictures of a soft banister brush with a wooden handle and a galvanized flat-top socket for a broom. ‘Superintendent Darnell … coming out … Co-op … Seaford … collapsed. Ambulance in 10 mins, paramedics worked … failed revive … dead on arrival.’

Stella circled ‘dead on arrival’ and laid down her pen. She contemplated the banister brush. It was not necessary, but would impress fussier clients; she would ask Jackie to order one and see how it went.

A mug of tea materialized by the catalogue and, as if she hovered far above, Stella gazed down uncomprehending: she had not heard Jackie arrive. The policeman’s voice, droning on like a radio announcer, was drowned out by the telephone. She counted the rings: it was answered on the seventh. Not good enough. She stipulated it should be picked up at three max.

‘Clean Slate for a fresh start. Good morning, Jackie speaking, how can we help?’

The tea was scalding and sweet. Stella’s own voice was reminding Jackie that she didn’t take sugar and Jackie was replying slowly and patiently, explaining in words of one syllable that it was for shock.

Your father is dead.

It was not until the late afternoon, in the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, that Stella entertained the notion that she should be upset. All day she had dealt with the police, medical staff, administrators and Jackie, who treated her with practical sympathy. Everyone’s response was out of proportion to Stella’s so she was grateful at last to be alone.

The NHS bag containing Terry’s belongings banged against a door as she emerged on to a goods road between the Cardiac Unit in a high-rise block and the shambling nineteenth-century building which housed the reception she had arrived at five hours earlier. Once a paean to Victorian endeavour, it was dwarfed by a maze of new-builds clad in steel and glass, its grandeur undermined by stuccoed pre-fabs and flaking render. She dodged a van and pushed through plastic flaps into a passage with a suspended ceiling and a flooring of epoxy quartz screed that emphasized a list to one side and gave her the impression of being on a ship.

Terence Christopher Darnell was pronounced dead at half past eight a.m. in the street where he had collapsed twenty minutes earlier. A female doctor told Stella that the probable cause was cardiac arrest but they could not be definite until they had performed a post-mortem. It was most unlikely, she had assured Stella, that ‘Terence’ had experienced pain.

His name is Terry.

She rarely called him Dad.

Stella frowned. She had not considered that he might have been in pain. She had also been informed, perhaps by the policeman, who was clearly both relieved and appalled by her lack of tears, that a lady coming out of the Co-op behind Detective Superintendent Darnell had said he’d toppled over like a toy soldier making no effort to save himself.

He was a toy policeman, Stella had nearly said.

She shouldered through another set of doors and found herself in a chapel; warm and dark, the quiet extreme after the bustle of the hospital.

Stella was about to leave, but arranged around an altar was a semi-circle of chairs and she slumped on to the nearest one, and dropped the NHS bag beside her.

Terence Christopher Darnell’s sudden death would mean extra work at a busy time, she mused. Stella’s parents had divorced when she was seven and her mother had not seen her ex-husband since Stella was old enough to visit him without being delivered or collected. Suzanne Darnell would lament that her marriage had been a wrong turning; she lived alone in West London, having made no further navigational errors. She would not help her daughter dispose of Terry and his belongings.

In Stella’s business, death was a prompt for a house clearance and thorough clean in readiness for sale; Terry’s death need be no different to any other, she told herself.

Although she was Terry’s only child, it had surprised Stella that he had a slip of paper in his wallet naming her as his next of kin because she saw him no more than three times a year. Sitting on the hard chair, surrounded by wall plaques commemorating patrons and patients of the hospital now at peace and in a higher place, Stella dwelt on the earthly fact of the death of a man she hardly knew. His body had not looked at peace.

Two electric candles dripping with fake wax were plugged into a socket on the altar. Stella recognized the scent as one of the flower fairy ranges of Asquith & Somerset and doubted it could be on the NHS preferred supplies list. A bunch of fresh freesias drooped out of a cream plastic vase beneath a stained-glass panel of the Madonna and Child. She made a mental note to order lavender spray for Mrs Ramsay in St Peter’s Square. On her last visit, there had been a stale odour; she suspected the old lady of smoking, although she claimed to have given up.

This led her to think about her other clients and, getting out her phone, she scrolled through her messages. Jackie had signed up someone responding to the advert in the local paper and had trialled a new cleaner in the office after Stella had left for Sussex. The woman had not passed, but Jackie wanted to know if she should hire her anyway. Stella tutted at this, the noise distinct in the silence; rapidly her fingers busied on the keypad as she instructed Jackie
not
to take on someone who had failed the cleaning test. As Stella dreaded, her business could not carry on without her being there.

Paul had texted, wanting to see her. She had not told him about Terry, nor did she want to. He would be hoping that over a bottle of wine he could persuade her to let him move in.

Jesus, pale and chipped upon the Cross, gazed down at her with blank eyes as she typed:
Let’s call it a day. We know it’s not working. Stella.

She hesitated before adding an ‘x’, but then, just before she pressed ‘send’, she deleted the kiss. She did not love Paul – whatever love was – and it was better to be honest. She watched the envelope icon tumble into infinity to become a dot, and insisted to herself she was doing Paul a favour; he could find someone who loved him.

Having mustered up the wherewithal to release herself from a relationship about which she had been ambivalent for too long, Stella tackled the NHS bag. Each item was in a sealed packet, which did not stop a sour reek of sweat escaping, sickly and clinging. Her stomach coiled. She extracted the leather wallet with delicate fingers – the crackle of plastic was loud in the chapel; she had given it to Terry for his fiftieth birthday over fifteen years ago. She had asked the shop to have his initials embossed in silver: ‘TD’, forgetting about ‘Christopher’. The letters had rubbed away to the merest indentation. Terry had folded up the birthday wrapping paper, smoothing it flat on his coffee table, and let slip how his colleagues nicknamed him ‘Top Cat’. Stella had been infuriated, although she could not have said why. The policeman in her office had momentarily stepped out of role to exclaim that Terry was a ‘top man’ but if this was meant to console her, it had landed wide.

The clothes he was wearing had been folded and placed together. His dark grey suit was from Marks & Spencer’s Autograph range: the jacket had a tear under the shoulder; a blue cotton shirt striped with brown was also torn with loose threads trailing where the paramedics had ripped away the buttons. Applying the method of fixing the age of a tree, salt rings under the arms indicated to Stella that Terry had worn it for two days. Little though she saw him, she knew Terry ironed his shirts and kept his hair washed. On the few occasions that she kissed him – in greeting, or on departure – his chin was smooth and scented with Gillette Series Aftershave Splash Cool Wave, his hair smelling of Boots anti-dandruff men’s shampoo. He would not wear anything more than once. She looked up and caught Jesus looking at her balefully. She considered that the detective, whom her mother insisted was happier with tagged corpses and evidence bags than with his family, was now a collection of belongings sealed in plastic and backed up by a sheaf of paperwork. Terry would have hated such an end.

Stella passed over underpants, shoes, a T-shirt and balled-up socks and stuffed them all back in the bag, inhaling deep the chapel’s flower fairy scent.

The nurse who had taken her to see Terry’s body must have been on some training course about dealing with bereaved relatives. She was keen that Stella should banish timidity in the presence of her dead father.

Stella had noted his greasy hair was brushed the wrong way and the stubble on his chin was white. A stained tooth was visible between stiffened lips. She had not seen Terry lying down since she was a child. He was naked under the sheet, draped loosely over the gurney.

‘It’s OK to touch him,’ the nurse had whispered encouragingly.

Stella pretended not to hear. Keeping her hands in her pockets, she nodded in confirmation like an actor in a police procedural drama and muttered: ‘Yes, that’s him.’

Identification was not an issue; the hospital had his driving licence. She refused the offer of ‘time alone with your dad’, thinking what was the point? At the nurses’ station, she caught sight of Terry’s name on a form: ‘Certification of Life Extinct’
.

Beneath these words she scanned his admission notes. Words floated free of their sentences as she read, her brain fighting to dismiss meaning: ‘Attempted to resuscitate. Police called. Date of death Monday 10 January 2011. Last seen alive, Broad Street, Seaford, 8.25 a.m. today. Means of identification: personal papers – driving licence, bank cards. No suspicious circumstances
.
’

A
doctor had signed his or her name and underneath the signature had printed more legibly: ‘May he rest in peace
.
’

The chapel door banged and a wheezy man in a fluorescent jerkin that showed off his beer gut pattered in, sighing.

Stella drew her jacket around her and tipped Terry’s Accurist watch into her palm. She put her hand through its heavy bracelet and snapped shut the clasp. Her wrist looked childlike and the watch slid up her arm, cold against her skin. It would need links taken out to fit. Terry kept it three minutes fast for punctuality, a tip Stella followed. In the same bag was his wedding ring. Her mother had thrown her own in the bin. Stella presumed Terry wore it to make women think he was married, just as Suzanne’s ringless finger signalled she was unattached. Stella had retrieved her mother’s ring from a wad of damp tea bags. She now had both rings.

There was no spare underwear or toothbrush and this confirmed her growing suspicion that Terry had not expected to be away overnight. What was he doing in Sussex?

The last bag was labelled ‘Contents of pockets’ and comprised a half-eaten packet of chewing gum, £7.80 in change, a scratch card with a winning prize of ten pounds and the head of a yellow rose. She took the flower out of the bag; it had no scent and was browning. She did not think Terry liked flowers. She found his keys.

Stella knelt up on the chair, leaning over the kitchen table, and worked her way through each key.

‘Daddy has lots of doors.’ She began to chatter on and bang went his chance to have a read of the paper. Propped on her elbows, she questioned him about each one like a detective. When she behaved like a grown-up, going all serious, he had to try not to laugh.

He started by answering promptly, as if it was a quiz, but after a while had to admit he got fed up; it had been a long night and he needed his bed.

‘Do you lock up murderers and throw away the key?’

He snatched the bunch off her.

‘Where’d you get that from?’

‘You know where.’ In came her mother. Suzanne has to have a go.

Game over.

Stella dangled the keys from her forefinger. When she was twenty-one Terry handed her his door keys; in case of emergency, he had explained. He had cancelled her birthday dinner that year to attend a fatal stabbing on the White City estate. Her mother said giving her his keys was his idea of a rite of passage and that would be her lot. Once she was over eighteen, Stella had told herself she had no need of a father.

Two months ago, suspecting an intruder, Terry had heightened the back garden wall with a trellis and changed the locks; he had not given Stella the new keys.

Now she had them and had inherited the doors they unlocked: she had unrestricted entry to Terry’s abandoned life. She brushed the leather Triumph fob with her thumb.

Where was his car?

The stained-glass window had become opaque; it must be dark outside. The man had gone. She could not remember what car Terry drove: the Triumph Herald had long ago packed up on him. The police officer had relayed an offer of help from Terry’s colleagues at Hammersmith Police Station, which she had refused. She would not ask anything of the police.

Terry’s wallet bulged with papers: receipts, loyalty cards, the driving licence and sixty-five pounds in twenties and a five. He was one coffee away from a free drink at Caffè Nero; she had presumed greasy spoon cafés were more him. She struck lucky: a receipt from a filling station in Seaford. She peered at the faint blue ink and worked out that Terry had bought petrol at sixteen minutes to eight that morning.