Lesley Thomson - The Detective's Daughter

Sarah was talking: ‘When I was a child – I must have been terribly young – I would be sent to find Antony at mealtimes. I’d get a chair and bolt the basement from the outside and then search the house. Bonkers really, it showed how much I hated him, but this was always the last place I looked, although it was where he would be. Eventually I’d pluck up the courage and sneak down the first few steps. The surgery was always empty with the light on and the rinsing fountain going. My mother would tell me off for trespassing because only Antony was allowed here.’

‘This is hardly the time for a jaunt down memory lane,’ Stella barked. ‘We need to get Jack out of here.’

Jack groaned and, his eyes shut, moved his head towards the rubbish on the worktop and the images of Kate Rokesmith’s childhood mouth.

‘He doesn’t want the light – he’s probably getting tinnitus.’ Sarah placed the sunglasses back on his face. ‘My point is, having bolted him in, the only explanation for why Antony was not here when I came looking is that there is another way out.’

Fresh air . The door and window Stella had seen in the garden.

She put her dad’s phone in her anorak pocket and this time paced the room purposefully, opening cupboards, poking in the space under the stairs. She found boxes of cotton-wool pads, swabs, syringes, plaster moulds, replicas of upper and lower sets of teeth, X-ray film: the equipment of a dentist working fifty years ago.

The music was faint at first, then swelled as if a door somewhere had opened.

‘Beethoven’s “Pathétique”.’ Sarah could have been introducing a recital.

Ivan Challoner was still here.

‘Ivan told me this was his son’s favourite music, his wife played it on the piano at bedtime while he read him Narnia stories.’ Stella spotted the speakers, four tiny discs, inserted above overhead cupboards. ‘I believed him.’

‘It’s all right, don’t cry, we are going to solve this,’ Sarah murmured to Jack. She rinsed out a glass on the counter and filled it with water. She gently inserted a straw between Jack’s lips and held the glass. He sucked weakly on it but then gave up.

In a closet hung a row of dental coats, white faded to grey. The temperature was lower than in the room behind her. Stella dragged the coats off the rail and flung them on the floor. She felt the panel at the back, tracing the patina of the wood. A button was fitted into the panel. Stella pressed it, pulled it, pushed it, but it did not give. She twisted it and fell forward into the cupboard as the wall gave way. Threads of fog drifted into the room and cold air seared her cheeks. She was by the stone steps where Sarah had found her.

Ivan had used a secret exit.

Stella shouted back into the room: ‘I’ll get help.’

‘I told you he’d do this, but you wouldn’t believe me. You spoil that boy. Now look what he has made me do.’ Ivan Challoner unhooked the poker from the carousel of hanging fireplace tools and stirred the embers noisily. He could not drown out his stepfather:

‘Children have to learn the hard way, that’s how they get backbone, Antony’s like a girl. I’m keeping my study locked from now on. Antony doesn’t know what to do with that steam engine, he doesn’t play with it properly. I’ve confiscated it. He has his own room, I’ve told him to keep to it. We have to have rules. Children prefer them.’

If he fumbled over a sentence, Ivan Challoner repeated it, the next time getting the words right:

‘When we move to London you’ll have a bedroom all of your own at the top and must keep to it. There will be strict bedtimes and no answering back and crying. I’ve told you, your father is dead and now you answer to me. We have to have rules. You will never be my son, you have no backbone and I already have a daughter.’

Eventually Ivan had become word perfect, but by then Mr Glyde too was dead.

The fire had nearly died. Ivan held a sheet of newspaper over the aperture until it sucked inwards and glowed orange.

‘Now look what he’s done. When we move he stays in his room. We have to have rules…’

A flame popped up behind a log and he fed it kindling and blew hard. Another flame darted out and vanished. Then another, and soon the flames joined up. When the fire had taken hold he laid the picture of his Cathy just out of reach of the flames.

‘You spoilt our son because you are spoilt, sullied, corrupted,’ he told Cathy.

‘He’s not your son. He is nothing to do with you.’

He put the flat of his fingers to his lips, kissed them and tipped his hand away towards the fire. Cathy was smiling. Heathcliff smiled back.

‘Go well, my darling. It’s for the best. I told you I knew what was best for you.’

There was a sound. He knew all the sounds in this house. It was the kitchen door. Whoever it was imagined they were opening it quietly. He had planned properly and long before they arrived had cut the power and prepared everything.

‘Sweet dreams, little Jonny. Sleep tight, don’t let the bugs bite.’ He knew what to say to children. ‘Shut your eyes and count to ten. When a person dies they wake up. That is all dying is. We wake up somewhere else.

‘We’ll give them time, Cathy. Sarah will know where I am, but will put off looking. She is such a daddy’s girl, while Stella Darnell is used to nosing in lives that are not her own. Sarah is not a proper sister; she does not understand loyalty.’

He heard footsteps in the passage. They would go upstairs, then to the garage and then they would go to his father’s surgery. He hid in the passage and once they were on the basement stairs, he ran across the hall and drew the bolt across. He returned to the sitting room and, aware of the value of precise timing, waited a further five minutes.

He rested the needle on the record and when the music began gradually turned up the volume. Cathy played the ‘Pathétique’ beautifully; it always put the boy to sleep.

The cold air winded Ivan when he opened the back door.

The garden gate was still padlocked – he had expected to find the chain cut. He hurried along the gravel path, past the buttress, around the church and paused outside the porch to tie up his shoelace. The fog was clearing and the headstones were like carious teeth against the diminishing white. Ivan felt a stirring of dread. The snow was melting and the thaw was coming.

He pulled the knot tight and became aware of an infinitesimal creaking close to his ear. It was persistent; gathering force, it grew to a rushing climax with a thump. He whipped around. Behind him in the shadowy porch the great studded door was closed. It had not come from there. Then sounds were all around him. A slab of snow slid off the roof and exploded on the ground in chips of ice.

Ivan’s shoes tightly laced, he was ready to pay his respects, but was mesmerized by the dripping and plashing so that when he heard the splitting of an icicle high above his head, he paid no attention.

Ivan Challoner was conscious long enough to feel the infinitely sharp object drive deep into the base of his neck. The pain was over before it had begun.

Stella used the church tower to get her bearings and sprinted over the lawn to the gate she had seen when she and Jack came to his mother’s grave. The mist was clearing, the sliver of moon bright. The ground where the snow had melted was dark like craters in the strange light: one of these caught her eye.

Ivan Challoner lay face-down on the path, a stain spreading out from his head. Stella looked around. The churchyard was still, the wind had died down, and the quiet was broken only by branches shedding snow. Walls, graves, mausoleums were gradually exposed as snow melted.