The Detective's Daughter (48 page)

‘Will you do something for me?’

‘Of course.’ She had not heard Ivan return.

‘Come to Fullwood House.’

‘I’ve been, haven’t I?’ He surely had not forgotten.

‘Not my flat, that’s a billet for when I’m working. I feel nothing for it, as you probably gather. It’s sterile.’

Stella liked sterile but did not say so.

‘I want you to see the house where I was born. It’s a beautiful place. I seldom take guests there. Most would not understand, but you would. Come!’

‘If you’re sure … that would be nice.’ Stella felt her reply was inadequate to his enthusiasm. She had never seen Ivan so animated. He must have lived with his wife and son in the house. He was coming out of the shell of grief. She should not knock him back by refusing his invitation.

‘I could go next Saturday,’ Stella said, getting out her diary to show she was serious.

‘I mean now.’ Ivan put down his glass. Stella saw that he had hardly touched his wine.

‘Now?’ she echoed.

‘It’s only ten past eight. We can be there in no time. It will be dark, but it is a place that benefits from mystery.’

‘I need to be at work in the morning. I wasn’t there today. I have my father’s stuff to sort and there is that murder.’ Stella picked up her empty glass and put it down.

Ivan looked crestfallen. ‘I find that plans kill the spirit of an adventure because the experience has to measure up to the plan and is not of itself.’

‘I could do either day at the weekend. Actually Sunday would be better.’ Stella tried to mollify him. ‘Or shall we leave it open?’ She liked to plan and was disappointed he saw it differently. Paul had been big on spontaneity, but even he knew better than to give her no notice at all. To shore up her argument, she added: ‘The weather might have improved by then. Already it’s thawing.’

‘A smattering of snow is nothing. My car is designed for bad conditions. Once there I light a fire, I have towels and night things and a spare room. I’ll get the bill.’ He folded his napkin and rubbed his palm at the waiter. ‘Never mind. It can’t be.’

‘I’ve sorted it.’ Stella tucked the bill into her purse.

Unsmiling, Ivan bowed his head. Stella remembered when she had thrown up at Earls Court Underground station: one mistake with Terry had led to another, as was horribly confirmed by Paul’s death. Ivan would not offer her another chance to see his home. Already she could see he was regretting it; he would be thinking he had been wrong about her. Perhaps that was true.

Kew Station village looked like a Christmas card; branches of kerbside trees white with snow twinkled in the lamplight. Stella climbed up into Ivan’s big four-wheel drive. When he shut the door, it locked automatically. He walked around the back of the car to the other side.

Terry would have accepted the invitation. He was not a spur-of-the-moment man but he knew an opportunity when it presented itself. Ivan could have helped her with the case and she had let the possibility pass by. Stella did up her seat belt.

Terry’s dull brown case boxes were awaiting her, smelling of damp paper and failure. Her flat was no more of a home than Ivan’s clean and uncluttered living quarters; it was no more than a pit stop. She had turned off the heating. It would be cold.

Stella had a speech prepared to explain her refusal, but when they stopped outside the lobby Ivan was out of the car as soon as the ignition was off and opening her door.

‘Will you come up for a cup of tea?’ She used the same words as she had the day before, hoping they would elicit the same response and that Ivan would accept.

‘I want to get down to the country before it is too late.’

The evening was over.

Monday, 24 January 2011

The Ram Inn on Black Lion Lane had closed early, so few customers had ventured out. Although a thaw was setting in, by nightfall the pavements had frozen and an insidious grey fog hung over the Thames and crept up the Bell Steps. The clock in the St Peter’s Church tower struck ten.

Jack had not entertained the possibility that his mother’s killer was a woman. It had not felt right, nor did it still, but it did make sense. When people had said they had not seen anyone suspicious, or noticed a stranger in the area, they meant men. Sarah Glyde was not a stranger, nor would she inspire suspicion.

The police report said it had taken strength to apply the ligature to his mother’s neck. Sarah moulded clay, she lifted heavy pieces of sculpture and wielded tools that could kill. She was strong.

Despite his cleaning, the air in the hallway stank of decay, its contents absorbing moisture, gathering dust, the wallpaper yellowing and peeling and brittle. Framed photographs of eminent Victorian ancestors were obscured by silver in the prints rising to the surface. Sarah Glyde’s home was her studio. The house was impervious to life.

Jack’s ghost-self moved on soundless feet, the clay-cutter wire spiralling in his hands. He unlatched the basement door, the box containing his mother’s clay head digging into his armpit. The basement stairs strained and flexed as he descended. At the bottom step he let his eyes grow accustomed to the hovering shapes in the half-dark. The fridge trilled and then shuddered into silence. Ethereal light from the garden called forth ogres and spectres of his childhood and evoked the spirits of animals and trees turned to stone by the White Witch. He was in a gallery of statues that wanted only his touch to bring them back to life. He turned on the light and chose the longest kitchen knife from a row on a magnetic strip. The blade was sharp.

Jack may not have been a guest in this house, but he had cleaned every inch of it. The telephone wire was clipped beneath the barred window facing on to the back garden. Jack had wiped it free of cobwebs. His hand jerked as he fitted the blade between the wire and the wall and levered out a clip. He steadied it and then prised out another clip, loosening the wire, which he severed.

There was a light in her studio.

Snow had receded from the path; he left no tracks and his footsteps were silent. The studio door creaked when he stepped inside and he was enveloped in the fuggy warmth of a calor gas stove.

‘Who’s that?’ The voice came from behind the partition. She was scared. Jack was gratified to discover she could feel fear. He brandished the knife, flashing the long silver blade to disguise the tremor in his hand. The cutter dangled from his fist; he had a choice of weaponry.

Sarah Glyde, in a stained man’s shirt and torn jeans, was seated on the stool by her work-table.

‘Oh, it’s you.’ She gave a wan smile. ‘Did you want your money? I pay the agency, they should have explained.’

She saw the knife.

Jack was intrigued at how quickly colour can drain from a face.

‘No amount of cash will cover your debt to me.’

She shrank back, crashing against the heater, the jolt opening the stove door. Jack kicked it shut. His clay head was on the table. She was working on it.

‘A good likeness.’ The clay eyes followed him as he strolled to the patio doors and confirmed they were locked.

‘I’ll pay you for being a model. This is only a rough start.’

He wanted to say:
What’s the next stage – you strangle me and leave my body down there?
It would be crass, the pleasure momentary.

She was allowing herself relief, Jack could see. He wanted money; that was it, she could pay him off. She was used to disposing of problems with a cheque and was making rapid calculations: would a cleaner know the going rate for an artist’s model? Could she undercut it?

She was edging closer to the telephone beside his clay head. He smiled as, the knife slicing the air, he got there first. He pressed the green button and handed it to her, in a trance she put it to her ear.

Now she was
truly
frightened. That was more like it.

‘I don’t keep money here. We can go to a cashpoint. I can take out five hundred at a time. I don’t have a car, we’ll have to walk, unless you … The nearest one is in King Street.’

It was extraordinary how people fixed on the more prosaic facts of life at times like these. She still had the temerity to lie: oh yes, she had a car.

The blade rat-tat-tatted against the worktop as Jack’s grip on the handle lessened. Intent on finding the murderer, he had not considered the logistics of his revenge. Like Stella, he hated mess.

Glyde’s hands fluttered over the head as if by destroying it she might destroy him. Suddenly Jack understood that this was true. If she smashed the clay piece on the tiled floor he would be nothing.

‘I don’t want your money.’ He spoke in a weary voice.

He took the box from under his arm and placed it on the table. Gently taking out Kate’s head, he positioned it next to his and stood before the two faces. They were indistinguishable.

Sarah Glyde backed as far as she could go, stopping by the wall that abutted the Bell Steps.

The heads had identical bone structures: a straight nose with a lump below the bridge and square chins and wide mouths and full lips over which played the ghost of a smile. The gender difference was not apparent beyond a thickness of neck and an Adam’s apple on the newer sculpture.

The real difference was in the mastery of the clay: over the decades the artist had developed a deeper relationship with her material. The first head had the strained perfection of a younger and less confident sculptor: she had cut and smeared, pushed and pummelled to achieve verisimilitude and technically it was exceptional, but it lacked a soul. The clay for Jack’s head had been moulded at its maker’s behest: coaxed and massaged to her will. While Jack’s jawline was sharper than his mother’s, it was fashioned with a lighter feel.

Sarah dropped the handset. It hit the table, bounced to the floor and chips of plastic flew across the tiles. The casing lay at Jack’s feet, the light still glowing.

‘She was beautiful,’ she whispered. ‘She had seen my advert for pottery classes in the newspaper but didn’t want to join a group. She insisted she was musical, not artistic. She commissioned me to make her likeness as a surprise. We had several sessions: I sketched her first. Her son had to come with her so I gave him clay to keep him busy. He didn’t make soldiers or sausages like most kids; he created a half-naked woman with folded arms. I recognized the statue by Karel Vogel beside the Great West Road. He had paid attention to what he saw; it was an incredible likeness. We fired it.’ She was talking to Kate’s head. ‘I don’t think she realized how talented he was. She was astonished.’

Sarah bent over his mother, her palms tenderly cupping the face, not making contact, echoing its shape with butterfly movements. She went on: ‘I saw you in the street. I wanted you to model for me, but before I could get your attention, you had gone. When you appeared on my doorstep with your boss I thought you were a ghost. I worked from photographs and memory, but I was certain I had been here before. I knew the planes of your face, the way the light plays on your cheekbones. I
knew
you.’

‘Why did you kill her?’

Jack had asked his mother’s murderer this question as he watched Miss Thoroughgood chalk up sums on the blackboard, as he walked London according to the street atlas, as he drove his train beneath London. When he was with the Leaning Woman.

Sarah Glyde was as tall as Jack. He remembered his mother as tall, but in the case notes he read she was five foot six inches. He was six foot. If his mummy were here, he would tower over her. Sarah Glyde had easily overpowered her.

For years he had scoured the streets for the monster he would capture and slay. This wiry woman in her fifties with a grip of steel was that monster. Sarah Glyde’s head was cadaverous in the angled light; a bluish vein pulsated on her forehead, her hair escaped in coiling springs from a careless bun. Her bones would snap with a mild blow. The knife would slice into her with little resistance and she would feel a cold pain and look, uncomprehending, at the quiet pumping stream.

Jack swallowed hard.

For a moment he longed for her to hold him, to grip his throat, squeeze down on his neck and, as she had made a head identical to Katherine Rokesmith’s, by killing him she would reunite him with her.

You killed my mummy.

He had dreamed of uttering these words. He had spoken them into the night, whispered them in spare rooms, from rooftops, in tool cupboards in the homes of his Hosts. Yet faced with the mind like his own, Jack’s lips were as immobile as clay.

She came towards him and he lifted the knife.

‘You have made a mistake.’ She flinched from the blade. If he used the cutter he would not have to touch her, just draw the wire through her flesh, like butter.

‘You told the police you didn’t know Kate.’

‘It was her secret.’ With an unsteady hand she supported his clay cheek, refining the bone beneath the left eye. ‘They would have asked questions I could not answer. She had taken the piece away and wasn’t coming back. She never paid me and I did not want her husband to cover it, he was going through enough. Then when it was he who murdered her, there was no point.’

She began on his other cheek. Jack had not thought the head could look more like himself than it already did. His own strength seemed to ebb as, retreating from her fear, Sarah Glyde smoothed and stroked the clay.

‘I talk to her. I talk to all my pieces. I liked her. Why would I kill her?’

‘The police asked about your car?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Don’t lie.’ He would pierce her heart. Tuck the blade under the left side of her rib cage and give a firm push.

‘I couldn’t drive.’

‘A 1964 blue Ford Anglia?’

‘I don’t even know what one looks like.’

It was a while since Jack had seen someone so frightened, but any gratification he felt was dull, for she had not expressed remorse. He could not kill her until she said she was sorry.

‘What has that to do with me?’

‘It was registered in your name. After 1981 no more road tax payments made. I know a lot of facts about that year.’

‘How could that be?’ She clasped her hands under her armpits as if to warm them; the stove had gone out. Beads of perspiration glistened on her bone-pale forehead and her lower jaw quivered. She was lying.