The Detective's Daughter

9

September 1985

Justin moved as swiftly as he dared in the deathly quiet library, slipped into the furthest aisle between the bookshelves and raced to the end where there was the door to the basement. Simon followed him into the library seconds later and, flanked by oak cabinets and creaky carousels of catalogue cards, scanned the wood-panelled room.

Simon was not as careful as his prey and allowed the door to slam behind him. The librarian, a placid woman with blurred, creamy features that had earned her the sobriquet of ‘the Oyster’ from the boys, paused from wiping a book with votive diligence to frown from her podium, signalling silence with her linen pad.

Justin tripped over a stool on casters, which spun along the aisle. He grimaced, sure he had given away his position, but Simon had wrongly anticipated him and was checking the Reading Corner by the inglenook fireplace which, with a semi-circle of high-backed leather winged armchairs, was an obvious hiding place.

When Margaret Lockett died in 1939, aged eighty-one, she left Marchant Manor to her trust to found and administrate a boarding school for the children of families connected with her father’s passion: the railway. Sir Stephen Lockett had died fifty years before his daughter, an early supplier of toilet systems; he had increased his fortune through shrewd investment in Britain’s developing rail network and his obsession with the likes of sanitary engineers J. G. Jennings and Thomas Twyford extended to structural pioneers such as Gustave Eiffel, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Thomas Bouch. This apparently innocuous interest was to prove fatal.

On the night of 28 December 1879, Sir Stephen boarded a train to cross the Firth of Forth by the new Tay Bridge: a lattice-grid construction, then the longest bridge in the world. Queen Victoria had made the inaugural journey six months before. He did not let the storm already buffeting his carriage dampen his spirits and treated with boyish excitement the flickering gas lamps and loose window catch that let rain spatter on to his pocket book and soak his coat. Even when the train lurched upwards, pressing him into his seat, he did not panic. Only when he heard a crack that his understanding of sewer construction told him was the sound of inflexible cast-iron fracturing did Sir Stephen appreciate the gravity of his situation. Tall pilings crumbled, girders buckled and in moments the bridge collapsed like one of Stephen Lockett’s wooden models, although this time he could not revise calculations and start again. The train plunged into the river A rush of water engulfing him, he thought of a toilet flushing but the thought had no time to develop. Over seventy passengers drowned; Lockett’s body was one of those never recovered, nourishing school lore that his waterlogged ghost roamed the night-time corridors of Marchant Manor. On stormy days he shook casements and caused power cuts. Boys claimed to have caught a whiff of his cigar in the library that had been his smoking room.

Six years after the Tay Bridge disaster Thomas Twyford invented the Unites, a one-piece, free-standing toilet set on a pedestal base and Margaret Lockett doubled the turnover of her father’s business living as a recluse amongst his railway relics with only his marble bust for company.

Sir Stephen Lockett’s book collection, typical of a rich man without literary interest, was housed in shelves lining the walls protected by grilles and glass doors. Classics of the day: The Dictionary of National Biography, the 1870 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the complete works of Scott, Dickens, Collins and Thackeray were bound in matching calfskin and embossed with Lockett’s off-the-peg crest. Boys could only borrow items with permission of the Oyster and read them in situ wearing a pair of silk white gloves. The only boy in Marchant Manor School’s present intake prepared to suffer this ignominy was now cowering in the Geography section.

When Justin poured over first-edition biographies on contemporary engineers and deciphered cumbersome treatises on new building materials or the effects of aerodynamic forces, he could convince himself that he was the son Sir Stephen had longed for. The musty tomes containing pictures and technical descriptions of masonry, key stones, deck spans, flying buttresses and stanchions impervious to collisions or waves were spellbinding. The eight-year-old guided his finger along dense print, traced diagrams of spans and suspensions, marvelling at sepia images, bold etchings and sentimental paintings of railway scenes, tunnels, bridges and viaducts, towers and lighthouses, and concocted stories to tell his mummy.

Most boys preferred the light airy refectory in the new wing. Justin would sit alone at one of the slate-grey Formica-topped tables, out of sight of the door, to write his letters, watched over by Sir Stephen Lockett.

He kept still in the Geography aisle, knowing he could no longer seek refuge here now that his tormentor had found it.

Daylight was fading. Only the insidious groan of the wind off the sea broke the enforced silence. Any minute Simon would discover him. The copy of The Boyhood of Raleigh by John Everett Millais glinted in its gesso-gilt frame. A barefoot man seen from behind sat on a log dressed in crimson pantaloons pointing to the sea across a stone wall. The gypsy – Justin supposed this because of the earring – had the rapt attention of two boys. Justin believed the boy hugging his stockinged legs was Simon and the other sprawling on his tummy was himself; good friends, the boys listened to stories of the old man’s adventures on the high seas. The picture gave him hope that Simon would one day like him.

Even before the house became a school it had rivalled the Brighton Pavilion’s thirty lavatories with twenty-five: a high number of flush lavatories for a dwelling of its size. Sir Stephen Lockett had installed three in the library alone.

Simon was waiting for him outside one of these. Justin shrank back against a door marked ‘Private’ set at the end of the bookcases. When the librarian fetched him books from the Lockett catalogue stored in the cellars he had noted that she did not need a key. He leaned on the door; it opened.

Luckily someone was in the toilet; of course Simon supposed it was him and he would wait patiently outside, like a spider before sucking the life out of the fly. He was twirling a pencil, his stub finger as nimble as the rest, the pencil danced along his knuckles. Fact: Simon knew nothing about spiders.

Justin heard whoever was inside the toilet pull the chain and under cover of the lavatory’s thunderous flush, he stepped through the door by the bookcase and closed it behind him.

A bulb in a bracket cast tremulous light on uneven stone steps. Gingerly Justin descended and at the bottom found a switch and extinguished the bulb on the stairs in favour of a brighter light in the room. He listened for footsteps above but heard only the hissing of the cistern filling and wastewater sluicing along the soil pipe.

The cellar room used to be a scullery; it was now the librarian’s lair, full of broken-spined books and dusty stationery. Cobwebs furred with dust hung from the joists like miniature hammocks and in front of a mean grate were a chair and table. Sheets of paper backed with cellophane, scissors, a scalpel and a pot of rubber solution glue were arranged on the Formica surface.

Justin would enjoy helping the librarian cover and mend books, he imagined. Across the table was a metal yardstick. He looked at the book being repaired: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. Most people liked Lucy best. Justin preferred Edmund and given the chance would betray Simon to the White Witch for a lump of Turkish Delight.

He was being observed by a man with a flowing mane of hair and a thick beard. Stephen Lockett’s marble bust had been banished to the cellars to make room for a colour photocopier. Justin stroked his cheek, disappointed to find it chill and unyielding.

Justin had gambled on there being another exit and behind a wooden screen of Chinese silk much nibbled by moths he found an archway to a tiled passage. Piling three hefty volumes on the table he climbed up, teetering, to unscrew the ceiling bulb and everything went dark. He managed to jump off the table and land on the floor without hurting himself. Simon had triggered events early.

After some minutes he began to fear he had overestimated him: Simon had not found the cellar door and had left the library, presuming Justin had given him the slip. Justin was disappointed because he was ready for Simon.

A slant of light lit the steps. Justin ducked behind the screen. The elongated shadow of an old man projected on to the bricks, shoulders bowed, head bent, his feet faltering at each step. It was the ghost of Sir Stephen. Justin was not frightened; he longed to meet him.

The figure turned and became Simon.

Justin drew out the blind cord and pulled it taut in readiness, letting it slacken and then tightening it. It was the ideal weapon and he handled it expertly.