The Detective's Daughter (35 page)

‘He was fussy – not that I was as good then, mind. She said he blew hot and cold. I couldn’t be doing with that. Drive you mad.’ He flicked an invisible speck off the arm of his chair. Stella wondered how sensible it was to have white leather in the house of a plasterer. Her experience of plaster was that it did not respect dust sheets or closed doors; it got everywhere.

‘Why didn’t you say about Uncle Tony to the police at the time?’ she enquired carefully.

‘He was fibbing about Uncle Tony, like I said. Her bloke was an engineer; they’re the worst sort of customer. These days, I’d turn the job down. They’re so finicky. Small step to kill his wife, I’d say.’

‘What’s wrong with engineers?’ Jack was taking it personally. Stella tried to nudge his foot, but he was out of reach in the corner of the sofa. She would remind him, they would only spot clues if they paid proper attention.

‘They work to much finer tolerances. They’re dealing with machines; it’s all certain, no room for slippage, no approximations. I’m doing it by hand so it’s bound to be rougher. Like I said to Kate, any problems, there are British Standards. My dad could quote them for breakfast, so I was up on them. He wants an argument, I’m out of here, I told her. That’s when she said it was just his way and she could handle him.’

‘Do you think he killed her?’ Stella was struggling to sit straight amidst the squashy cushions.

‘He said he was with his mum. Like my first wife was fond of saying, my mum argued cats were dogs for me.’ Peterson assumed a wise expression. ‘He might have done it. Then again he might not.’

A wall clock struck four. The design was one of those that make a feature of the mechanism at the expense of telling the time. Stella thought it more of an engineer’s clock than a plasterer’s. She stood up.

‘I told your dad, I hope he gets the man this time. I’d be in the queue to have a pop at him. For the aggro he caused me and for that poor girl. People don’t trust you. I thought about changing my name, but what to and why should I? He should change his.’

‘Perhaps he has,’ Jack murmured.

On the doorstep they shook Colin Peterson’s hand and, perhaps because it was over and in a minute they would be gone, he confided: ‘He’s all right, your dad – some of them flash their badges soon as look at you. They get off on it.’ He seemed to appraise Stella for the first time. ‘Got you doing his leg work, has he!’

‘Something like that.’ She wanted to be gone, but forced herself to pay attention.

‘He hadn’t forgotten his roots.’ He leant on the gate, his appointment in Acton apparently forgotten. ‘We did have a laugh about the old days. Funny bloke isn’t he, cracked me up! He went to Old Oak Primary like me but was a couple of years above. My sister Joan remembers him – a “dish”, she said! She used to hang about outside his house – you can tell him that. He’s still a QPR man, ain’t he? Said he dragged you to the Cop once. My boys defected to Spurs.’

‘His house?’ Stella was casual.

‘Primula Street. Forgotten what number. Joan will know. He said he was taking you there.’

‘If you think of anything else.’ Stella saw Terry flipping open his wallet, removing his card. She would lie in bed and worry about the criminals who had his number and would come to find him. She offered her Clean Slate business card.

‘Your dad’s never let this go, got to admire him. Give him my best, yeah?’

On the street Jack skidded and grabbed her arm, causing Stella to lose her balance. They teetered like starfish.

‘Why didn’t you tell him Terry was dead?’ He let go.

‘It wasn’t important.’

For the first time since Terry’s death, Stella Darnell began to suspect that perhaps it was.

Thursday, 20 January 2011

Jackie rang to confirm the appointment with Sarah Glyde as they were passing Wormwood Scrubs Prison on Du Cane Road. She had liked Stella’s idea that her cleaners come to initial meetings to impress clients. Stella would have to come up with a reason why this only applied to Jack.

He suggested they leave the van outside Terry’s house and walk under the foot tunnel to Sarah Glyde’s. Stella soon saw why. At the Leaning Woman he cleared off a new layer of snow and scraped icy patches from around her face and along her thigh with a coin.

In the growing dark, the statue diminished in size and the ravages of the years was apparent. It was a lump of concrete which, over half a century, had fallen victim to decay and vandalism. Jack worked frenetically exposing the pock-marked surface demarcated into butcher’s joints, a tinge of colour in his cheeks. It struck Stella that, like a vampire, Jack drew life from the sculpture. His hands flitting over the Woman’s thigh, her face, brushing and sweeping, he was not the zombie of an hour earlier. As the statue had shrunk, so Jack had gained in stature.

Sunlight flashed on the hearse. Stella was beside him, a tiny thing on the wide seat. Already her tights were wrinkling. Her feet fidgeted in new patent-leather shoes. She had expected to visit her nana and although he’d explained what a funeral was, she had not taken it in. Her mother had dressed her up. Wearing a dress had, he could see, put a dampener on the day for her. Until Du Cane Road Stella chattered away; it was exciting, they had a whole huge car to themselves. Did prisoners go in it? He didn’t get this until she announced that the man driving them was a policeman like him. She became subdued when the traffic slowed and the hearse in front filled the windscreen.

Suzanne had said four was too young for a funeral and besides Stella hardly knew his mum. He said she had loved her nana. He had to be right so she came, no arguments. Stella was upset and he was sorry; he didn’t care if he was right, just that he didn’t make her cry.

Du Cane Road was solid; nothing could stop the world, not even his cranky old mum. He had gone mad with flowers despite her warning no fuss. She would have given Stella juice and biscuits afterwards. His family: his mum and his little girl. When he told his mum about his matrimonial problems she said at least you have ‘fin-fan’; her name for his Stella. The sun was hot and it was only morning. They passed the prison. He shouldn’t have brought her.

‘When I get there I’ll sort your father out.’ His mum’s dying words had got a laugh at the station but wouldn’t work on Stella.

‘Is Nana getting boiling hot?’ She jerked a wet thumb at the coffin.

‘She can’t feel anything, not pain or sun.’

Satisfied, she put her thumb back in her mouth; he wouldn’t stop her, not today.

His mum could not feel sunshine.

Stella might have been mulling it over the way she crinkled her forehead. She worked problems out step by step, taking after her nana. One day perhaps he would have his practical businesslike mother back by way of his daughter.

Stella slipped a damp hand into his and they squeezed fingers when the hearse entered the crematorium gates. She would not forget her nana, he told himself. He was right to bring her.

Look after the living, his mum would say.

‘I wanted to scream when he was waffling on,’ Stella said. ‘All that about Terry and primary school.’

‘I didn’t see anything about an Uncle Tony in the files, did you?’

‘Of course not. He made up him up,’ Stella snapped. Jack also knew about ‘made-up’. She rounded on him: ‘What was the matter with you back there? He obviously reckoned Hugh Rokesmith did it and you kept contradicting him. Peterson was there, he should know, that was why you suggested we went.’

Jack’s ear was against the plinth as if he were cracking open a safe and listening to the tumblers. Stella hoped he was not going to have another ‘Pantone 375’ attack.

‘He was biased, he hadn’t liked Hugh Rokesmith because he was a perfectionist. In an engineer’s world errors are not permissible. If a bridge is wrong it shows – at worst it falls down – so your mistakes are public.’

‘Did you meet him?’

‘What do you mean?’ Jack brushed off the last of the snow.

‘You were Jonathan Rokesmith’s friend. Did you meet his father?’

‘He brought the son into the class on the first day.’

They walked in silence through the subway.

In Black Lion Lane Stella trod gingerly; she could not afford to break an ankle. Even when Sarah Glyde’s house was in sight, Stella did not let herself increase her pace. Jack, his coat unbuttoned, flapped ahead of her, silhouetted against the lamplight like a great bat.

Stella gave the knocker two sharp raps. She craned up, certain that she would not like to live in such a large house on her own. Mrs Ramsay had managed it by filling her draughty home with dead people and making up others for company – except she had not made up everyone: Jack was real.

‘You made it! Come out of this perishing cold!’ Sarah Glyde ushered them in.

Jack stepped into the light and Sarah Glyde stopped smiling. The moment was brief and, shaking her hand, Stella decided her impression that the woman had for a moment been terrified was mistaken.

Thursday, 20 January 2011

They parted outside Sarah Glyde’s house and again Jack refused a lift. This time she did not argue; she knew where to find him. Neither of them suggested a debrief about the meeting; since the afternoon, despite a slight improvement in his mood at the statue, Jack had been heavy and sullen and Stella was as keen to part with him as he seemed to be with her. Jonathan Rokesmith might have been his friend, but if they stood a chance of solving the case he had to put his own feelings to one side and be professional.

They arranged that Jack would be at Stella’s flat the next afternoon; he was busy in the morning. Stella stopped herself pointing out that he had said he only did late shifts on the Underground. Jack was one of those people who liked to weave a mystery around themselves to appear interesting, so she would not indulge him by quizzing him.

Jack set off down the path to Hammersmith Bridge; he would have to double back, perhaps via the Great West Road. Grasping gateposts, walls, even hedge branches, Stella snailed her way along Black Lion Lane.

Every few paces she checked behind, as she had done on the way to Sarah Glyde’s, looking out for Paul. Jack would not be suspicious were he watching. Paul’s silence since her visit to his flat was making her nervous. Just before the ramp, she clambered over a mound of snow in the gutter and hid behind a four-wheel drive.

Jack would pass by on her right; she was ready to move around the large vehicle to avoid him. She arched her back to alleviate the stiffness. She had concentrated on the Rokesmith case over the past week so had not picked up cleaning shifts which she relied on for exercise; she was out of condition. She gave up and stepped into the road.

Jack was by the Bell Steps. He was staring at her. She had been stupid: he had reeled out his line, let her swim towards the bait, now he was winding her in.

He moved and she realized he was facing the other way and had not seen her. She took her chance and, careless of injury, scooted into the subway.

It took Stella ten minutes to stumble through the snow and ice to St Peter’s Square, by which time she had decided what to do about Jack.

Thursday, 20 January 2011

After the Clean Slate people had gone, Sarah Glyde went outside without sufficient warm clothes. She did not think Antony would visit now, yet she hesitated on the brick coping step, her lungs hit by cold air. A thick mist lowered the sky and shrouded the river. The country was complaining about productive hours lost, injuries, traffic jams, car accidents and cancelled trains. As she had told Antony, the white-out afforded an opportunity for meditation. She had cleared a path to the garden wall by smashing up one of the blocks of salt she kept for children’s sculpture classes and sprinkling it on the bricked surface but had left snow on the path to her studio so she would know if Antony had been there. With enough work she could sit tight and share in the joyful spirit of those adults who had taken to the hills on tea trays and – willing huskies – dragged their offspring on toboggans through streets to stock up on provisions. These people had souls; Sarah was not alone.

She had willed him to come to her and tonight he had; the strength of her powers scared her. He was called Jack Harmon and would come to her house every week. She would not tell Antony; he would spoil it.

She had planned to go out to the studio and continue with Jack Harmon’s head. She felt naughty; her mother would have disapproved and if he appeared Antony would tell her it was too cold, too late, she should take more care. The idea that she was flouting their authority should not have mattered to a woman in her fifties, but old habits die hard and the fact that her behaviour lacked parental sanction added spice to her decision.

She leant on the garden wall and damp crept through her father’s Aran jumper, making her bones ache; she pulled the cuffs over her hands, hugging herself, comforted by the ghost of his smell.

Her mother had been dead ten years, her father longer, but still Sarah’s sense of freedom was tenuous. She jealously guarded her slivers of independence: people came to the studio as models; when the piece was fired, their relationship, such as it was, ended. They paid for their time with her.

Jack was different. Sarah was prepared to pay a high price for him.

With no buildings there were few lights on this stretch of the Thames. The surface of the river was black as oil; slick and treacherous. On the horizon it reflected the kindling lights of Hammersmith Bridge like stars leaping, vanishing and reappearing when chill gusts whipped the water. The whoosh of traffic on the Great West Road was in counterpoint to an irregular tink-tink at the river’s edge of a bottle washing back and forth on the encroaching tide, tipped against a brick jutting out of the mud. The insidious sound was a warning to those who ate, drank and were merry in the cafés, pubs and clubs of London amidst the rigour and tumult of the city, that mortality awaited them as it had their forebears. The metronomic sound pointed up the hubris of human endeavour as mere flotsam and jetsam. The river had flowed when hansom cabs, broughams and horses dragging carts log-jammed the thoroughfares of London. The tide came in. The tide went out.