The Detective's Daughter (53 page)

He held the fabric taut and pulled the lever on the chair, making it tip up until Challoner’s feet were as high as his head; he was helpless. His voice was thick as the scarf cut into his neck.

‘Did you stay to fight the dragon-slayer, like a brave little soldier? Did you rush to the aid of your beloved mummy?’

The fine green silk was a second skin that he could not shed.

‘No, you ran away. I’m no psychotherapist, but don’t they call it “projection”? You need to put your guilt on me. Go ahead. I am here for you, I always have been.’

He made no effort to loosen the makeshift ligature.

‘Kate was a trophy to your father; he didn’t want her but he didn’t want anyone else to have her. She was merely existing in his tomb. I saved her. Had you stayed, I might have saved you too.’

The sun was bright and made golden arrows on the water. Jonathan had wanted to drive his engine into the river and see if it could be a boat.

Jack let the scarf loosen.

His voice stronger, Challoner continued: ‘You and he leeched her life. If you didn’t get your way, you punched her and threw things at her. Is there a name for mothers abused by their children? I love her for who she is and I won’t let anyone spoil our life, not even you, who, despite everything, she longs to see.’

Challoner’s skin was white against the green silk. Jack moved his hands further up the scarf.

‘As I clasped her to me, a bird – a phoenix, I now believe – beat its way through my rib cage and I fought for breath. She entered my heart. I carried her home.’ Challoner reached behind and stroked Jack’s sleeve. ‘She is upstairs now, Jonny.’

Jack snatched his arm away and pulled on the scarf, making Challoner choke.

‘Cathy – that was my pet name for her – teased me and my sister will tell you that I do
not
like to be teased. Cathy promised to leave Rokesmith: we would have our life, the mornings waking up together, the rambles by the sea. I gave you my engine to make her think I would love you too. I brought her here to show her the house. You had to come. She adored our bedroom and was ecstatic when I said I was giving you the attic all to yourself. She said I was so generous. You rampaged along the passages, up and down the staircases, crashing through my house like a tornado. She said how happy you were. We toasted our little family with the last of my father’s Château Latour, laid down the year I was born. We did so because she had promised to leave him.’

It had been cold although the sun was out. Jonathan had made a bridge over the rivulet in the sand running into the sea. First he laid a stick along the mud and propped it up with stones, creating supports to make it solid. Then he dug into the mud to narrow the course so that the water flowed faster. When it was finished he called for Mummy to come and see. They were close to each other, walking amongst the ruins of the mill owner’s house. He had meant for his mummy to see it, but Uncle Tony came instead. He said it was very clever. Jonathan wanted him to go away.

He said so.

‘I have to preserve our peace. You are welcome here, but Stella Darnell doesn’t have your sensitivity and blunders in regardless of feelings. She’s like her father. You take after me.’

‘You are not my father. You are no one.’

‘We cannot host Ms Darnell. I have a mind like yours, but you know that, don’t you? We are one, you and I. I took better notice of you at that school than Hugh Rokesmith. I was a better father to you. For him, you were out of sight so out of his mind. I rang up every week to find out how you were.’

‘You’re lying; it would have been to check whether I had given your description to the police.’

‘You would never have done that. I was certain that your guilt had silenced you and I was right. Jonny, you misjudge me, my calls were proof of how I care for you.’ Challoner grimaced and put a hand to his neck, then let it drop. ‘I couldn’t get your house-mother off the phone. She said Simon was your special friend until the bullying. I was disappointed in you then, Jonathan. However, I understood: we all have our “Simons”, mine was Detective Darnell.’

‘Did you kill him?’

‘Jonathan, darling, please! I thought we understood each other. He killed himself: too many beefburgers and beers. Would you pass me my water?’

Jack loosened his grip and gave Challoner his glass.

‘I was with one of my late-night patients when Stella Darnell called her father’s phone. I shouldn’t have answered, a stupid mistake, but after the first call, when I found the phone, I couldn’t resist it. I forgot about background sounds of water rinsing into the sink; still no matter, she wouldn’t have noticed; she is a cleaner, not a detective, after all.’ He tilted the cup; this time he just moistened his lips. ‘She had to be better than her father. She had to poke about in our business.’

‘Stella loves her dad.’

‘She doesn’t understand love. The Stella Darnells of this world do great damage with their lack of insight. They hurt the likes of you and me.’

As the scarf closed on his larynx, Challoner spluttered: ‘If you kill me, you kill her.’

The little boy had collapsed, hot and panting, against the plinth. Unable to reach, Jonathan promised the Leaning Woman he would bring a knife and cut off the plastic box tied to her arm. He promised to set her free.

‘I will save you,’ he told his mummy.

The scent of Eau Savage was overwhelming, the silk of the scarf cool in Jonathan’s hands.

Tuesday, 25 January 2011

The light switch did not work. Stella switched on her key-torch: they were in a cloakroom. Signalling to Sarah, she trod lightly on the tiles but tripped over a wellington boot. Beside this was an industrial-sized top-loading washing machine and on a shelf above were packets of soap powder. Sarah gasped and jolted Stella’s elbow, making the torch dip wildly. Sarah Glyde was a liability; Stella should have sent her back to her car.

‘Those were my mother’s.’ Sarah indicated the soap powders.

‘Ssssssh. How can you tell?’ Stella lifted down a box. It was empty.

‘These boots are mine, that coat was my father’s. Antony has kept everything.’

They crept into a passage which went in either direction. When Sarah stumbled against her for the second time Stella clenched her teeth: for an artist the woman had little spatial awareness.

‘Left or right?’ Stella hissed.

‘Your choice.’

‘No, I mean what is the best way?’

‘Left takes us to the garage and back stairs and that way leads to the kitchen and through to the main stairs and the sitting room.’

‘Right then.’

Stella kept the torchlight down as they felt their way to the kitchen. She played the light along the wall until she found a light switch. When she flicked it on, nothing happened. She sighed: she had done this stuff too recently in Terry’s house. She was used to empty houses, but this was straining her nerves.

She manoeuvred around a long deal table and opened the fridge. It was an old Lec model, over forty years old. The lamp inside remained unlit, even with the door ajar. In such an old model the motor would have been noisy: ‘He’s turned the power off,’ Stella breathed.

‘Why would he do that?’ Sarah spoke in a normal voice.

‘Why do you think?’

‘Can you just tell me rather than talk in riddles. Antony doesn’t suffer from power cuts, his father had a generator installed.’

‘He’s expecting visitors. Your brother is prepared for us.’

‘You don’t seriously think he will harm us?’

Stella gave her a look. Not having siblings she could not be certain she would believe it if someone she hardly knew told her that her brother was a murderer. She might demand evidence. She suspected Sarah Glyde of long closing her eyes to clues.

Sarah gripped her arm, her terror palpable. Stella straightened. Only the fact that she would not admit to feeling afraid kept her from tearing out of the house. That and knowing that Terry would not have done so.

They tiptoed past a breakfast table laid for two; Sarah knocked a packet of Cornflakes off and in her effort to catch it batted it across the floor. The noise echoed in the cold silence.

There was no sound from above. Stella retrieved the box: it was light even for a packet of cereal. She looked inside. It, too, was empty. She caught sight of the sell-by date and squinted at the tiny figures.
December 1981.

That could not be right. She trained the light directly on to the flap of the packet. Even if the one was a seven, and she was sure it was not, the eight was definitely correct. The cardboard was worn and had been reinforced with clear tape. The cereal box was nearly thirty years old. She directed the beam on the table. The marmalade jar was empty; nor was there any ketchup in the old-style glass bottle. The breakfast table was a museum exhibit.

Stella pulled the kitchen door open quickly and thrust the quavering torch forward as if its beam might save them and turned left into a passage. At the end was the hall and the front door, its stained-glass lights casting watery triangles over the mosaics.

Out of the corner of her eye Stella caught a glint. Sarah Glyde had a carving knife, its sharpened blade tapering to a point. She was unblinking, her mouth grim. Stella was stunned: she would be prepared to kill her brother. This did not make Stella feel better.

The door led into a garage. Stella got a vague sense of comfort from the smell of petrol, paint, chemicals, garden implements, bags of compost. It reminded her of Terry’s shed. She got another feeling too: Terry had been here.

A dark shape draped with canvas filled the space; everything else – the lawn mower, flower pots, spades, a strimmer, canisters of calor gas – was ranged around the walls.

Challoner had another car.

Stella held the torch at shoulder height and scooted along to what, judging by the shape, must be the bonnet. She had little room to bend down and had to crane sideways. Sarah Glyde stayed by the door with the knife.

The strings holding the tarpaulin had been cut. Stella flung it back and a cloud of dust stung her eyes; she had to pinch her nose to stop a sneeze. The car’s windscreen was greyed with dust; cobwebs obscured the wing mirrors as if a massive spider had been at work wrapping the vehicle as it would a fly. The front tyres were flat, the rubber perished. Stella tried to see the registration number. She expected to find it obscured by grime.

It had been cleaned.

Terry had been here. She felt a rush of heat. In the quivering torchlight, she read a registration plate – black against white – she could have recited it with her eyes shut.

CPL 628B
.

She did not need to look above the radiator grille. Despite the dirt and the dark Stella knew what her dad had found:

A blue Ford, possibly an Anglia, was seen leaving Black Lion Lane at approximately eleven on Monday 27 July. Mrs Hammond, an elderly widow aged 74, noticed it because her husband had owned the same model in the 1960s and it brought back memories. The last letter of the number plate might have been a ‘B’, but she couldn’t swear. (Note: reliable witness, timing wrong.)

Mrs Hammond had seen the car an hour before Kate’s supposed time of death around midday, so they had discounted her statement; the only definite sighting that day. After Terry found the photograph of Isabel Ramsay opening the Charbury Village Hall, the Ford Anglia gained new significance, but by then Mrs Hammond was dead.

Challoner had not driven the Ford Anglia since that day.

Stella straightened up and squeezed back along the gap. Sarah led the way back to the hall.

‘That’s the sitting room.’ She jabbed the blade at a door beyond the foot of the stairs. To their left, brass stair rods were illuminated in the beam. At the top of the staircase was a portrait of a woman. The head seemed to turn when Stella shone her torch up. It was Katherine Rokesmith.

Sarah bumped into Stella; the blade sliced the air.

‘You nearly had my ear off!’

‘Sorry.’

Neither of them was whispering.

They heard a crack. It came from the sitting room. Keeping close, they flew to the doorway; Sarah swishing the blade like a sword. A fire was burning in the grate. It appeared to have just caught; flames flickered, whipping and licking around logs that hissed and crackled.

The room was empty.

A photograph of Kate Rokesmith lay upon the logs, just shy of the flames, warping and browning with the heat. Someone had stoked the fire: a poker lay on the hearth. Bright, white teeth between rosy parted lips, a pointed incisor to the left of the front teeth marring an otherwise even set, were crumpling amidst the smoke, the ink turning metallic blue.

‘Jack!’ Stella shouted. ‘Come on.’

She rushed up the stairs two at a time and flung wide doors in the passage to check inside each room. Sarah caught up with her in the bedroom where sheets were heaped on the floor and the mattress was sagging off the bed’s metal sprung frame. Make-up littered the floor and was scattered over the mattress. The mirrors on the dressing table were smashed, glass sparkling among lipsticks and foundation bottles in the torchlight.

The window frame blew to and fro, a rhythmic squeaking like stertorous breathing. The curtain twisted over the wood had half ripped from the hooks; it ballooned in and out with gusts of wind. Melted snow pooled on the sill and dripped to the floor with a steady put-put.

Stella raised the light; Sarah clutched her arm, staying her. Kate Rokesmith smiled at them from all corners.

For an instant, an absence pervaded the room – an absence stronger than the more temporal departure of the person who had ransacked it – and filled the cloying atmosphere with the irreversibility of death.

But after a moment Stella saw the bedroom was no more than bricks and mortar, mite-nibbled paper and moth-eaten bedclothes, damp walls pasted with photos and articles about a woman long dead.

She let herself breathe: there was no one there. Terry was dead. She would never talk to him again. Terry would never know she had followed in his footsteps. Her dad had gone.