Lesley Thomson - The Detective's Daughter

The boy appeared, holding his bear by the ear.

‘All right, Jonny?’ Without thinking, he spoke to the boy as he would his daughter.

Terry had never heard the voice before.

‘You have to know a very important thing.’ The boy was confidential.

‘Yes?’ Terry kept still; he did not call for a witness. Walker the bear stared at him with button eyes.

‘It’s important that you know.’

‘What should I know?’

‘My mummy is dead.’

Terry Darnell faltered by the trolleys in the supermarket entrance. Until then he had been too preoccupied with catching Kate Rokesmith’s killer to remember this bald fact.

In the search for his wallet he had not come across his phone. It was in the car. No, it was not in the car. It had been in his pocket when he was in Challoner’s garage. He had mistaken it for his torch. He still had the torch but not the phone. Where was it?

He had dropped it in the garage. Challoner would know the police were on to him.

He could not call Stella.

The street was busier: sunlight suffused the mist, cars had parked along the kerb and pedestrians jostled on the pavements, wheelie shopping baskets rumbling, motorized buggies clearing a path.

Darkness squeezed him from the sides. The carrier bag was too heavy.

‘My mummy is dead.’

Darkness pushed from above.

Stella!

And then from below.

A woman coming out of the Co-op knocked into the elderly man who had dawdled in the queue. She tutted and then exclaimed when he fell down in front of her.

Later she would tell police how the gentleman had toppled over like a toy soldier. She had shouted into the shop for someone to call an ambulance. She was a nurse and had tried to resuscitate him, but had established before the paramedics arrived that he was dead.

Monday, 21 February 2011

Mrs Ramsay’s house had been empty for weeks. Stella caught a whiff of lavender in the air. Her feet clattered in the hall, the rug and hat stand had gone, dust had settled on the glazing bars and fine cobwebs occupied cornices. It needed another clean, but she would not say or Gina Cross would think she was touting for more work.

Gina Cross had not visited the house, nor had her brother and sister. Stella was used to the vagaries of families: she not been able to deal with her dad’s house. Nonetheless, it saddened her: when she wasn’t railing against their carelessness, Mrs Ramsay had spoken fondly of her children; for some reason they did not feel the same way about her.

In the kitchen the gathering dust had made less impression. The sink still gleamed, the draining board was immaculate. The 1960s décor was too shabby to have retro value, though; new owners would strip it out. She wandered through to the dining room and, resting a foot on the radiator beneath the window sill, gazed out beyond the yew hedge to St Peter’s Square and read the postcard again: ‘11 a.m.’

The address side of the card was blank, the italicized message in turquoise ink confident and bold. The card depicted Hammersmith Bridge from the Barnes end and, going by the cars, the image might be 1970s; a red Routemaster bus – number 33 – gave nothing away. Kate Rokesmith wrote cards to Ivan Challoner, summoning his presence. She had not sent this one. Stella had received it that morning with nothing else in the envelope. There did not need to be.

She looked at her wrist: Terry’s watch was three minutes fast, meaning it was ten forty-seven. Unlike the hot Monday in 1981, on this colder sunny day St Peter’s Square was not deserted. Children played on the lawns and two mothers perambulated babies in buggies around the perimeter paths.

Stella was there to give Mrs Ramsay’s house one last check. She would never come again. She returned to the hall and looked out of the back door at the garden. The lawn, a lush green, had survived the snow. She slapped her cheek, feeling a tickle; her fingers were wet. That morning she had put the box of toys that Terry got ready for her visits back in her old bedroom.

Stella heaved on her rucksack and went out on to the porch. She shut the front door and as per Gina Cross’s instructions dropped the keys through the letterbox. She went down the steps, turned right and passed the house where Detective Superintendent Terence Christopher Darnell had lived for over forty years, walking on past the church. Jack said when a person was walking they were in no place at all, it was like death. No one had seen Kate walking. The clock in the tower showed ten fifty-six. Stella continued past the statue of the Leaning Woman and into the subway.

From the Bell Steps there did not appear to be anyone on the beach. Then she saw Jack Harmon coming up from the shoreline. His name was really Jonathan Justin Rokesmith. Stella would always call him Jack.

‘You came.’ Jack leant against the wall beneath Sarah Glyde’s garden. The beach was a suntrap; out of the breeze it was warm. The tide had ebbed; the mud was viscous, the air heavy with its stench.

‘Of course.’ Stella rested the rucksack on a slab of concrete jutting out of the ground. She pulled out a maroon carrier of fake canvas and placed it next to it. Inside was a large tin.

Jack held out his hands to take the tin. She shook her head.

‘It’s OK.’ She clasped it to her and stumbled over scatterings of bricks and glass, stepping from stone to stone, heedless of the rim of green slime around her loafers. A plank of wood, slippery and glistening in the sunshine, lay across the shingle, half in the shallows the red painted letters flaking:

‘KE P TO TH RI HT’.

When Stella shuffled to the middle, it see-sawed with her weight. She prised the lid off the tin and handed it to Jack. Coarse grey-white grit sent a puff of dust into the air. The smell was not of ordinary ash, it was the smell of a body burned at an intense temperature for just over an hour in the Mortlake Crematorium: a smell unfamiliar to Stella. In a tin lined with plastic lay all that was left of her dad.

‘Do you want to say something? Make a speech?’

Stella shook her head and crouched down; the plank tipped and steadied.

The ash made a brushing sound as first it trickled, then poured out on to the mud. Water lapped around it, drawing it out to a pale blurred shape. Stella replenished it with more ash and again the tide swelled around it until all the ash floated on its surface like the glitter she had used at Terry’s for making Christmas cards.

‘Make a wish and blow out the candle. Keep it secret. No, don’t say what it is, not even to me. Blow really hard. That’s all right. Have another go. One, two, three. Blow! Good girl! Your wish will come true. I promise.’

Stella stretched out as far over the water as she could, and tipped the tin upside down, shaking out the last of the grit. Jack held her shoulder. She dipped the tin in the river, sluiced it around and rinsed it out. The current was dispersing Terry’s ashes and sending them downstream to the sea.

She handed Jack the postcard.

The message was meant for Ivan and Jack had neutralized it by sending it to Stella; they had met at the time Kate always specified.

With a flick of his wrist Jack sent the card sailing into the air. It twisted and fluttered in the mild breeze and, alighting on the river, caught an eddy. It swirled around before vanishing and reappearing; it was lost in the bright morning light.

‘You hold the stone like this. Keep your wrist flat, hold steady. Flick it and keep your eye on the water. Imagine what will happen when you let it go. Like this.’

Her dad sent the stone out on to the water. It skimmed the surface and bounced five times. He never did less than five. Sometimes he made six but she knew his record was seven. She had a go, but the stone sank. Dad made her stand properly and she did it again. It sank. She knew he thought she would give up, but she hunted about and found the right shapes and soon had a massive pile. She took her time, ‘gauging the throw’ as he told her: the stone whipped the top of the water over and over and over. Four! After that she never got more than three. Dad said he wished he could bottle that moment. He said he wished her mum had come. She knew that was because he hoped her mum would change her mind about leaving and Stella could stay with him.