The Detective's Daughter

10

Wednesday, 12 January 2011

Stella emerged out of Shepherd’s Bush Tube station rush hour into sunshine. Dew sparkled on the green. Red buses, blue cars, white vans and yellow salt bins cheered the soulless roundabout and the wipe-clean walls of the new nation-size shopping centre. At this time of the morning – just before seven – the rhythm of the neighbourhood was apparent. In the dry cleaner’s the owner, a woman in her fifties, dressed as if going somewhere special in pressed trouser suits with razor-sharp lapels, waved to Stella, a ticket between her teeth as she heaved clothes on hangers along racks. Stella stepped aside for a gangly young man arranging goods on the pavement outside the Pound and Penny shop. Already towers of storage boxes, swing bins and washing baskets dwarfed stacking stools and brushes stuffed handle-first into a tub. A list of wares was stuck crookedly on to the window, a crease in the laminate obliterating letters: ‘Garde ware ,gift, partywar, pet upplies snaks statnery swets, toilries’, which every morning irritated Stella.

The Polish mini-mart below Clean Slate’s office had been open an hour already; two men were erecting the sloping display using crates draped with fake grass, while another unloaded fruit and vegetables from a ten-year-old van. Stella noted the number plate. As a rule she did not trust the owner of a commercial vehicle over five years old. She threaded past the men into the shop and from the back of the chiller cabinet extracted a litre of semi-skimmed milk with the most recent sell-by date. Dariusz Adomek was on the till behind a high counter further shielded from muggers by chewing gum display stands and a Lotto machine. Stella handed up a five-pound note.

‘How’s business. Good?’ He ran the sensor over the barcode and passed back the milk.

‘Good, yes. You?’

‘Mustn’t grumble.’ In a Polish accent the cliché gained new life.

Dariusz Adomek had taken on a lease with the same landlord, and this slender commonality was grounds enough for mutual co-operation. He swiped change out of the drawer and poured the coins into Stella’s palm.

They had the same interchange every morning, developing on it only when Stella was looking for cleaners or Adomek had heard of a new client. No one he recommended – a relative or contact recently arrived from Poland – had let Stella down, the staff turning up for work and the clients paying invoices on time. In return Clean Slate cleaned the mini-market at a discount and Stella helped Adomek with Inland Revenue forms and had Jackie compose and type letters.

Clean Slate occupied two clumsily converted rooms over the mini-mart and a mobile phone shop. Facing south across the green, the late Victorian building was prone to damp, with cracks in ceilings and mould behind filing cabinets. It was hard to heat in the winter, keep cool in the summer and keep clean all the year round.

Stella tucked the milk carton under an arm to fit the mortice in the ground-floor door before seeing that the door was on the latch. It was well before nine. The insurance brokerage on the top floor – which employed a rival cleaning company – had ignored her latest memo.

She headed up the dingy stairs, trying, as she did every day, to ignore the brown linoleum that sent a discouraging message to prospective clients. The landlord refused to decorate the common parts. The tawdry sixties-meets-seventies décor accounted for the low rent for premises in what had become a prime location. Clean Slate had the turnover to afford plush offices with straight walls and air conditioning but an office move would interrupt the hectic routine. Each year, ignoring her accountant’s advice, Stella, nervous of over-stretching her business, put it off. Each day, as she avoided the dirt-engrained banister, she worked her way through the same train of thought and by the time she was at her desk other issues had taken priority, which today was how she could retrieve his keys from her dead father’s house without breaking a window, smashing a lock or Jackie finding out.

A man was outside peering around the sign on her office door.

‘What are you doing?’

He came towards her, a looming bulk in the cramped passage. Stella grasped the milk, fleetingly aware that dashing a Tetra Pak in his face would not save her.

She had forgotten Paul.

‘Come on, Stella. We can work this out and make a go of it.’ He backed off when Stella, head down, whipped both her hands up to avoid his touch. ‘I’ve been calling and texting you,’ he added plaintively.

‘How did you get in here?’

‘The door was unlocked. You want to watch that, anyone could wander in.’

Anyone had.

‘You’re seeing someone.’ Paul was blocking the doorway. ‘Who is it? That fuckwit Pole you were talking to?’

‘No, it isn’t.’ Stella regretted taking the bait and giving him a toehold. ‘It’s none of your business who I see. Are you spying on me? You left that message last night when I was at Terry’s.’

‘It is my business if you’re messing me about.’ He rubbed under his chin with the back of his hand, a gesture that had once attracted Stella. ‘I have the right to come to your flat. Terry who? Was that the bloke with the flash Beemer? Don’t lie.’

‘So you weren’t outside when… Oh never mind. Look, I said it’s over, end of.’ Stella tried to step around Paul but he remained in the way.

‘This place is all you care about.’ He thumped the wire-reinforced glass.

‘My father is dead.’ Stella unwittingly jettisoned the standard splitting-up script for a different kind of drama.

‘What do you mean? Your dad’s died?’ Paul put out a hand and tentatively brushed her sleeve and when she did not react, read it as a good sign and slid his fingers down to her hand.

‘Yes he has. Not that you asked,’ Stella retorted, aware of the flagrant illogicality. She shoved past Paul and scratched her key in the lock. ‘I don’t want a scene, please, Paul?’ She tripped the alarm and had ten seconds to deactivate it. Once inside, her tone softened: ‘This is hard enough without you making it worse.’

‘I’ll call later, yeah?’ Paul drifted along the landing, obviously cowed by the immensity of Stella’s loss. ‘You’ll get through this. I’m there for you. My dad died too. I am beside you on this.’ He retreated downstairs.

Stella punched in the alarm code, relieved that Jackie had not been there because she would feel sorry for him. Jackie believed that what Stella needed was the love of a good man; Paul, with his pleasant if unremarkable looks and kind nature drenched in Boss aftershave, was her latest vision of Stella’s Mr Right.

Forcing Paul from her mind, Stella thought how a locksmith would be expensive and attract attention but the probate papers were in her old bedroom; she should tackle them soon.

She had an hour and a half before Jackie would prop the door back and flip the ‘Open’ sign around, and the administrative assistant, an eager woman of twenty-two, would set to making coffee for the three of them. This was Stella’s favourite part of the day; the world was clean and tidy and there was all to play for. But this morning, despite the sunshine, she was in an unfamiliar landscape stalked by the demons of Terry and Paul.

If a potential customer faltered on the lino-covered staircase, their mood would lift on entering the bright, immaculate office, with shelves of storage boxes and catalogues. A bank of filing cabinets with primary colour-coded drawers would reassure them that this was a place where promises were kept, contracts adhered to and even the most complex of tasks expedited. The laminated pages of the Staff Handbook – beside the water cooler for continual reference – counselled: Avoid clutter: nothing without legs, apart from waste bins and filing cabinets, must touch the floor. Keep equipment on shelves and cupboards and box in cables and wiring.

Computers in black casings were in standby mode, the Clean Slate logo floating about the screens like a fish in a tank, the ‘L’s in each word expressed by two sweeping brushes. Against the wall was a trestle table on which was a drinks fridge with a see-through door and a tray of white cups, saucers and plates. Three plastic storage jars from the Pound and Penny shop displayed tea bags, instant coffee and sugar. A silver jug kettle reflected the room in concave.

There was a stain on the carpet. Stella bent down and it disappeared: it was the shadow of a hole-punch by the photocopier.

While she was at ground level, she could not resist checking the floor: no bits, no fluff. She spied two paper clips and an elastic band beneath the radiator, and with her nose inches from the pile she could see no grooves made by the vacuum brush. She sniffed and was mollified by an uplifting aroma of lemon. Six out of ten. New cleaners did the ‘home shift’ before she let them loose on clients. This one had answered a perpetual advert on the website, had not come recommended by Adomek and offered only lukewarm references.

She was about to turn on the photocopier – it took ten minutes to warm up – but this was the assistant’s task and Jackie was insistent she would forget her routine if Stella kept doing her job. Stella switched it on.

Two wood-veneer-topped desks, striped with bars of winter sunlight through Venetian blinds, were pushed together by the window. Creating symmetry were three-decker filing trays on each desk, marked ‘in’, ‘out’ and ‘pending’. Stella’s door was propped open with a foot-high cement lion Jackie had presented to Stella on her forty-fourth birthday last August. If she had minded that Stella had not taken it home, she had not said. Perhaps she understood that Stella’s home was the office. She only closed her door for client meetings, which were rare; decisions were made by telephone or at what Jackie persisted in calling the ‘scene of grime’.

Stella’s room was a third of the main office, partitioned by a clumsy stud wall that abutted the window frame and vibrated whenever a Tube train rumbled below, causing framed certificates and awards for best cleaning company to slide askew on their strings. Stella straightened them before placing her rucksack on the visitor’s chair and pulling her laptop and Filofax from it.

She had painted the walls white herself. The only colour was Clean Slate’s new green and light blue logo emblazoned on blocks of sticky notes, box files, company literature and the printers’ complimentary mouse mat. A spray of Clean Slate branded roller-ball pens were arranged in a papier maché pen pot, the blue and red William Morris design a gift from a client who did occasionally visit the office. Stella judged the pattern fussy, should the contract end, the pen pot would go.

She consulted her calendar – a replica of the one in Terry’s study – and was relieved that she had only one appointment: a cinema in Richmond. She switched on her computer and angled the slats in the blinds to allow in a soft light.

The calendar reminded Stella about the door keys. She toyed with the notion of abandoning the house; so what if everything was stolen? If only when people died everything to do with them vanished too. If only when relationships ended the other person just went away.

A bus with Marble Arch on its destination panel inched past the window, giving the room a temporary rosy glow.

Whatever he said, Paul must have trailed her last night and, not realising that the house belonged to Terry, assumed as he always did that she was having an affair. She wished she had thought of this while he was there; it would have calmed him down. Briskly she returned to the main office where the answer machine signalled messages with subdued pips. About to press ‘play’, she decided to get a coffee first. There was no kitchen so she ran up to the toilets on the next floor to fill the kettle.

She could deal with Paul.

The toilets were shared with the insurance broker and with both genders which meant that the seat was generally up. The landlord cleaned the room to keep overheads down and this meant that paper dispensers were rarely filled and the roller towel, grey with overuse, spooled on to the vinyl flooring of pallid lemon-coloured flowers. There were gaps under the doors so Stella only used the toilet if she was alone. She left the kettle on the sink and went into the nearest cubicle and, loath to touch it, tipped the seat with one finger. It fell on to the porcelain with a crash. This action was unnecessary for she never sat on a public lavatory, but hovered inches above.

She sipped her coffee as the answer machine clicked into gear. Transcribing calls was the assistant’s job, but Stella prepared to scribble details in the daybook in writing that no one could read.

‘I would like to speak with Miss Stella Darnell.’ Stella knew the type; a client who would find fault before the cleaning had begun. The woman paused after each sentence as if she intended Stella to respond. ‘This is Gina Cross, Isabel Ramsay’s daughter. You were her cleaner.’ Stella jabbed at the page with her pen. Ye-es, so? She drew a box around the name, and made it three-dimensional.

‘I want you to clear out my mother’s house once we have removed valuables. My number is…’ Stella was not good with numerals and had to replay the voicemail to note them in the right order.

The next three callers were a supplier and Wendy, the first cleaner to join Clean Slate, calling in sick for the first time, compounding the staffing issue. The final message was a client wanting an extra session. She left the machine off; she would answer any calls: people never tried again if they got a voice message. Clean Slate was open for business.

She copied Gina Cross’s details on a sticky note and, armed with her coffee, went to her room. Mrs Ramsay always gave the impression that Gina, Lucian and Eleanor lived with her.

Unlike many of Stella’s clients, Mrs Ramsay never boasted about her children’s careers. She tssk-tssked while she stirred clutter on her kitchen table in search of her paper knife with which she opened her junk mail as if it were eagerly awaited correspondence. If she couldn’t find the knife, she complained that one of her kids had it. Perusing each catalogue or leaflet, concocting her first drink at a few minutes past eleven each morning, splashing gin into her glass, tossing in ice cubes and dribbling in tonic, Mrs Ramsay would rail that it was her three monsters who wrecked the house, causing her to mislay things and then accusing her of absent-mindedness or senility. Her children and their friends played hide and seek all over the house day and night, creeping up and down the stairs. Stirring the liquid with the handle of a spoon, Mrs Ramsay would make Stella promise not to tell Gina, of whose disapproval she appeared afraid. Hearing Gina Cross demand that she call her ‘ASAP’, Stella understood why.

After several sessions of cleaning for Mrs Ramsay, Stella noticed she repeated the same stories, and some incidents involved Stella, as when the freezer thawed because ‘Eleanor’ had unplugged it. Another version had Gina as the culprit and Mrs Ramsay would, she informed Stella, make her daughter clean up her own mess and pay for the damage from her pocket money. Children must be taught a lesson or they got away with murder.

One day Stella was collared in the street by a distressed woman who accused Mrs Ramsay of taking her cat and calling it Crawford. Stella went inside and removed the cat, which was moulting, from the top of the boiler in the kitchen. She said nothing when she handed over the pliant orange and white animal. She remained non-committal, while the woman, now addressing her pet, divulged that the Ramsay children had not visited their mother since the year 2000.

Later that day Mrs Ramsay confided to Stella that she had found Crawford the cat dead in Elly’s room. He was curled up on her bed and she had assumed him asleep, but when she touched him he was ‘as cold and hard as a hat. Cats and dogs are harbingers of evil.’ She had decided they should stop for a coffee to get over the unpleasantness.

It did not surprise Stella that with their mother dead, her offspring were fronting up to claim their inheritance. Such behaviour, about which she made no judgements, was not unusual.

She punched in the telephone number.

‘Gina-Ware, for fantastic plastic, yes?’

Stella sat up. She had called one of her suppliers. The catalogue was in front of her on the desk because yesterday she had been weighing up their sale offer on 36-litre mop buckets with heavy-duty wringers.

‘I’m sorry, wrong number.’

She rang the number on the sticky note and the same voice answered.

Gina-Ware. Mrs Ramsay had said her son-in-law, whom she dubbed Jon-the-footrest, owned a business specializing in durable plastic products, including footrests. Gina-ware was everywhere: Jackie had the deluxe footrest for her back.

‘Hello, Stella Darnell speaking. Clean Slate. You called us about a house clearance?’

‘I’m driving. I answered because our call centre has gone down. Meet me at the house to agree a price so you can get going.’

Stella was about to offer condolences and explain that she did not give instant estimates and would quote only after scoping the job when the line went dead.

For the next hour she worked through emails, signed her way through letters Jackie had left and calculated two outstanding quotes. With half an hour before the others would arrive, she got her rucksack from the chair and dragged out the Rokesmith box files she had fled with the night before. She set them on the desk, keeping the label away from the door, and went to fetch the shredder.

Stella remembered the murder of Katherine Rokesmith. There had been a storm of publicity, but now only a few aged under forty would know details without prompting. Many other shocking events had occurred since to occupy the public’s imagination.

Terry Darnell had the afternoon off so invited his fourteen-year-old daughter to central London to see the rehearsal of the wedding of Charles and Diana. Colleagues detailed on special duty would assure them a prime position and afterwards he would take her to a restaurant – pizza or a hamburger, whatever she liked. Stella was nonchalant, saying she didn’t believe in royalty. She had never been out for a meal with Terry and the idea made her nervous about waiters waiting and lots of cutlery. Up until then they’d had fish and chips, or Terry had microwaved shepherd’s pie with tinned peas. Even this was an ordeal for the teenager who did not like chewing and swallowing in front of others. In preparation, Stella had ironed new jeans, chosen a skimpy top and planned to wear lipstick, which would ‘show him’.

Early that morning he had rung the flat to outline the tight schedule: she must be in the foyer of Hammersmith Police Station at eight in the morning. They would travel up to town with officers going on duty, which meant, he promised, that she got a ride in a panda. Her mother warned that if she was late, Terry would go without her. She would describe any arrangement with Terry in terms of the threat of what would happen if Stella fell short. An hour before she was to leave, Stella was touching up her make-up when her mother barged into her bedroom:

‘He’s not coming. He’s got a murder. You look like a tart.’

Katherine Rokesmith 27th July 1981.

Stella tipped papers out of the first box on to her desk. The photocopies were crinkled as if they had got wet; others were creased; all had been well thumbed. She flicked through and saw that Terry had underlined text and scrawled illegible notes in the margins.

Terry had told Stella that in the 1980s, every item in an inquiry was listed in an Action File containing a grid of numbers ticked off as they were assigned to a document. Each ‘event’: a witness statement, a sighting, any minor observation, got an MIR reference. In 1981 the initial recording of data was done by hand; Stella had adapted part of the process for her business.

She intended to destroy the files before Jackie and the assistant arrived so did not have long. Shredding was another of the admin assistant’s duties and Stella did not want to explain what she was doing; she positioned the shredder between the desk and her chair and slid the switch to ‘on’. The motor made a terrible churning sound, but closing the door was out of the question. She straightened the first pages and glanced at the top sheet.

It was a long shot of a scene bathed in summer sunshine. A trellis ran along a retaining wall; to the right of the image was a flight of steps. A mooring chain was slung along the brickwork from iron hoops. Stella recognized the location: the Bell Steps led from Hammersmith Terrace to the River Thames. One day in the summer holidays when she was about ten, she had ridden her bike there. She had struggled along the shoreline all the way to an island called the Chiswick Eyot. The wheels stuck in the soft mud and, dismounting, she’d had to drag the bike and had bent the mudguard so that it caught on the back tyre, slowing her down. She had barely made it to the road before the tide came in.

At Chiswick Mall a man shouted that ‘another five minutes and she would have drowned’. He ran towards her and she threw herself on to her bike, pedalling furiously away, slowed by the mudguard. She dared not confess to Terry that she had gone to the island without checking the tide. She hid the bike behind the dustbins where his recycling bins now offered better cover. He must have found it for on another visit Stella discovered it in the back garden under a tarpaulin, cleaned and with the mudguard straightened. Terry said nothing: a more effective punishment than a telling off.

Years after the murder, Stella had speculated that the man who had chased her was Kate Rokesmith’s killer.

The sunshine made mirrors of pools stranded in the mud. Were it not for the police tape, the Scene of Crime team – spacemen in their forensic garb – standing, crouching and kneeling on the shore, the body would have been easy to miss; from this angle it blended with the ground.

He plucked Stella out of the mud. Her wellingtons sank deeper into the sludge so it looked as if she had combusted, leaving her boots behind. He laughed at this and hoisted her on to his shoulders, tipping her forward to see them. He meant to make her laugh but she started crying.

‘Don’t they look silly, Stell!’ he coaxed. ‘What an adventure, we’ll have hot chocolate when we get in.’

She gripped his neck between her legs and snatched at his hair. This hurt, but he did not say. He balanced her precariously and bent down for her boots. They made a sucking sound when he pulled them out. She cried all the way back.

There were eight pictures, according to Terry’s numbering. She spread them on the desk, oblivious of the deafening shredder.

The original images had been black and white and the copies were high contrast making the images stark. At one remove from reality they straddled a line between fact and art. The rest of the photographs were close-ups of a woman in her twenties wearing a patterned shirt and the calf-length, side-zip slacks popular in the eighties; her feet were bare. Her hair, wet from the incoming tide, trailed in rat’s tails over her face. Heightened contrast had bleached her features to a mask. One eye was slightly open and her parted lips showed perfect teeth. Puffiness in her face did not disguise that when she was alive Katherine Rokesmith had been beautiful. The final picture, a close-up of the victim’s throat, showed a line around it like a necklace; a chain or a thong. Stella knew enough about forensics to recognize the mark left by a ligature.

It was not public knowledge that Katherine Rokesmith had been strangled: the police had kept the means of her death back from the media. Until now Stella, like everyone else, had not known the cause of death.

Terry had known all along.

Thirty years had passed since Katherine Rokesmith, known to her friends, family and the tabloids as ‘Kate’, was found floating in shallow water of the Thames one Monday afternoon in July 1981. Until now Stella had never considered Kate a real person whose life was brutally terminated. During the investigation, she, like the public, had seen the photograph that would come to define Kate Rokesmith: a woman in a black and white chequered wool coat, standing on a kerbstone at the Notting Hill Carnival, a baby boy in her arms, both looking in the same direction. They were laughing, their faces two-thirds turned towards the camera revealed them as mother and son. The picture told the story.

The media would use this iconic image over the ensuing decades when anniversaries of the murder rolled around, or more rarely if a new lead emerged. Terry had not taken his daughter to Buckingham Palace that Monday and over the following months, if she saw him it was on the television behind a clutch of microphones appealing for witnesses or giving an update on the case.

‘The public can be assured that myself and my team will leave no stone unturned in our search for whoever murdered Katherine. We will bring them to justice.’

For a few weeks her father’s fame had been compensation: impressing her school friends was more satisfying than stilted visits to Wimpy bars and the cinema with him. As detective inspector, Terry had been in charge of the day-to-day running of the case. Kids at school brought in cuttings from newspapers for Stella to get him to sign and instead of doing her homework she sat late into the night faking his signature and composing elaborate answers to questions about the case that she gleaned from the press. The only time she did see Terry, he refused to talk about the murder.

One day Stella overstretched herself and told girls in the year above her that the police had a suspect: a serial killer who had killed loads of times. He was a local man, divorced with children at the school. One of the girls refused to leave the house and told her parents who told the Head who told Stella’s mother who grounded Stella. After this, interest in her detective father waned and life returned to normal.

When she saw him on television, her mother would say that Detective Inspector Darnell was more interested in Kate Rokesmith than in his own daughter. Stella grew to hate the dead woman: her dad had never left any stones unturned for her.

After some weeks, her curfew over, daubed with red lipstick Stella embarked on what became a regular pilgrimage. She journeyed on the Tube from Barons Court one stop to the Wimpy on Hammersmith Broadway and sat with a view of the door, making a milkshake last an hour, watching passers-by. Later she patrolled Shepherd’s Bush Road past the police station. She played games with herself: she was not hoping to see Terry, she was just out and about. Once she saw him run out of the main entrance and get into a plain police car that sped off, the siren diminishing. He had not seen her. After that Stella gave up her beat.

That September she lost her virginity at a party in a Kennington tower block, shoplifted perfume from Selfridges and spent evenings, when her mother was out at her latest evening class, smoking out of her bedroom window and listening to Spandau Ballet all night long. She was not a policeman’s daughter; Terry Darnell and Kate Rokesmith were welcome to each other.

Beneath the photograph, Stella found an article from the Daily Mirror dated Tuesday, 28 July 1981.

Under a photograph of Terry at a table reading from a statement, grey suit bunched at the biceps, were the words: Det. Insp. Terry Darnell assured the public that police are meticulously following up numerous lines of inquiry.

Stella absently turned off the shredder, the abrupt quiet highlighting a developing headache, and continued to read. Another newspaper article, this time in the Daily Mail, described how police decided that Jonathan Rokesmith had left the river after his mother was attacked or she would have noticed him missing and run after him. Perhaps he tried to get help, but then the article speculated he might have feared he too would be hurt because he had not gone to the Ram, an obvious place to raise the alarm even for a four-year-old. No one had seen a boy and if he had stopped at the pub, the woman reporter stated, he might have saved his mother’s life. Instead he had crossed the Great West Road, possibly, the reporter Lucy May speculated, going home. Whatever the truth, Jonathan Rokesmith had got no further than the statue, where he was found sitting an hour after the discovery of his mother’s body. Masters also put forward a theory she claimed the police were considering: that the killer himself (no one supposed a woman would commit such a murder) had taken the boy but, worried he would attract attention, abandoned him. Terry had underlined the last sentence in shaky biro. Stella wondered if he gave this theory mileage.

After the murder, despite lengthy psychiatric examinations, Jonathan Rokesmith had not uttered a word; whatever had happened, the experience was locked inside him. Hugh Rokesmith moved abroad. Stella leant over her desk and, firing up her laptop, brought up Google. She found only one reference to Hugh Rokesmith: he had died nearly four years ago of cancer of the oesophagus and his son, like Kate Rokesmith’s murderer, had vanished without trace.

Stella read that exhaustive inquiries had failed to unearth a firm sighting of anyone acting suspiciously that day. There were only two witnesses who had seen Kate in the last moments of her life: a neighbour and of course the boy.

A reconstruction a week after the murder yielded no fresh information apart from the usual bunch of cranks who, in a bid for attention, claimed responsibility or that they were material witnesses.

Stella knew the sort; alive to any attention, they were often scrupulously clean and tidy. Occasionally such types asked Clean Slate for a quote, which they deconstructed item by item, pointing out the advantages of their own methods of maintaining the ‘hygienic imperative’ as one man had put it.

The dog owner had been interviewed. The spaniel – one reporter irrelevantly included that his name was Homer – had alerted his owner to the body which in another few minutes would have been submerged and drifted downstream or sunk, the article stated. Three decades on, with the murder unsolved, it might as well have, Stella reckoned.

Stella recognized Terry’s handwriting on papers headed General Registry Docket: ‘I respectfully submit that this file is put away. 27th March 1983.’ The case had been filed twenty months to the day of the murder.

The dog owner, a Charles Jenkins, aged fifty-six, had gone to the Ram to ring the police. This baffled Stella until she recalled that in 1981 the mobile phone was not in general use. Partial footprints had been discovered on the shore, their ‘chaotic positioning’ initially attributed to a struggle with the assailant, until it was established that Jenkins had returned with an excited retinue of drinkers who splashed up and down the shrinking beach, their detective skills boosted by alcohol, in search of a weapon before being ‘removed’ by a constable, who sealed the already contaminated scene. The incoming tide had washed away any hard evidence.

Kate Rokesmith had been strangled with a length of material, perhaps twine found in rubbish on the beach. The murder had been only months before DNA was discovered, but later tests on Katherine Rokesmith’s clothing had revealed nothing. Stella found a submission from Terry three years after the file had been put away, suggesting an exhumation of the body to perform a DNA examination of any matter behind her fingernails, but a medical expert had stated that nothing about the state of the victim’s hands suggested she had put up a struggle so the expense had been spared.

It seemed to Stella that use of a readily available weapon pointed to an impulse crime, making it unlikely that the victim knew her killer. The man may have seen Katherine Rokesmith and followed her, or maybe he had stalked her for days and plucked up the courage to chat her up. When she rejected his advances, he had attacked her. This idea was confirmed by Terry a few pages on: ‘… he had perhaps only intended to molest Mrs Rokesmith, considering her easy prey, but with a toddler in tow she could not escape.’ The sentence implied the boy hampered her and Stella imagined this was Terry’s opinion. There was no sign of sexual assault and a psychiatrist’s report stated: ‘Something about Mrs Rokesmith could have reminded the perpetrator of a mother figure and evoked in him a long-held rejection that sent him into a childlike rage. The boy remained unharmed because he was a bystander with no role in the culprit’s inner drama.’ Stella could guess Terry’s reaction to this idea and agreed with him that the reason for not killing the boy was simple: Jonathan Rokesmith had run away.

Her theory that the killer had been watching Kate’s house was demoted to ‘unlikely’ a few pages later; there had been no sightings of strangers in the vicinity in the days before the murder.

The pathologist’s report said that the gravitational effects on blood would have helped determine the time frame within which death had occurred. The body had lain in baking sun for some time so had a high temperature. It had shifted and turned on the pull of the tide, all of this meaning that the pathologist could only give the time of death a two-hour window.

In the end everything hinged on the testimony of the neighbour who had seen Kate just before midday.

The office door opened. It was ten to nine. Stella hastily stuffed the papers into the box and gulped the cooling coffee, cursing that she could not put the shredder back without Jackie seeing.

‘You’re early,’ she called out gaily, shoving the boxes into her rucksack and kicking it under her desk.

She smelled stale tobacco smoke. Neither Jackie nor the assistant smoked.

A man stood in the main office, his hand raised to the door panel as if he was about to knock upon it. Later it would occur to Stella that the gesture came after she appeared; but by then it did not matter.

‘I’m looking for Stella Darnell.’

‘You’ve found her.’ It was the policeman all over again. Fleetingly Stella thought that this time her mother had died. She was polite; a shabbily dressed man could be a premier client. ‘Can I help?’

‘I saw your ad.’

Stella thought fast. She could hit him with the cement lion but by the time she got a grip on it he would have reached her. A pair of scissors lay in the box beside the photocopier, but he might suspect if she pretended to use them for an innocuous task; he would know the tricks. Would she lose her life because she was concerned to be polite to a killer? She could not placate him; perhaps that was Katherine Rokesmith’s mistake, she tried to humour her killer instead of running and screaming as loud as she could. But then she had a ‘toddler in tow’.

The man was speaking; patiently he repeated: ‘The advert on your website?’ He pushed his hair off his forehead. ‘For the cleaner? Your door was open.’ His pleasant, assured manner was at odds with his dishevelled appearance.

This man, with bags under his eyes and lank hair, looked as exhausted as she felt and Stella doubted he could wield a pressure washer or a vacuum and was about to explain that the position had been filled, when he crouched down. Stella sidled towards the scissors, stealing a glance at the clock: six and a half minutes to nine. She had to keep him talking until Jackie arrived.

He crawled under Jackie’s desk and reappeared cupping a five-pence piece and string of shredded paper as if they were live creatures. Stella had not spotted them; she did notice that his fingernails were clean and filed. He dropped the paper into the bin and placed the coin in Jackie’s desk tidy.

‘I have time in the day.’ He was businesslike. ‘I can give you references.’

Stella pushed an application form towards him, hiding her trembling hands. After last night she was easily rattled and anxious that he should not see he had scared her. He gripped the pen in his left hand, bunched into a fist, like a boy for whom writing was a new activity, and filled it in. She told him she would be in touch if they needed him, resolving, as she shut the door behind him, that ‘they’ never would be in touch.

She was stowing the shredder on the shelf in the main office when there was a rap on the glass. She stayed where she was, her legs too weak to move. He was back. She had latched the door when she let him out so he could only mouth at her through the glass, holding up something that glinted in the sunlight now filling the room.

Two minutes to nine; Jackie was never late. Stella risked opening the door, too alarmed to speak.

‘I found these on the stairs. Weird that I didn’t see them on the way up. I wondered if they were yours? I guess not, as you must have keys or how would… anyway… as there’s no one else here but you…’

The man handed her Terry’s keys.

Stella remained by the desk, his completed form in one hand, the keys in the other, listening to his footsteps receding on the stairs. At the thud of the street door she sank into the admin assistant’s chair.

If she had dropped the keys on the stairs she would have heard them fall and Paul would have seen them; he always found things she had lost or mislaid. Had they been in her pocket all along? If Paul had seen the man enter the building his suspicions that she was having an affair would be confirmed. Had Paul somehow stolen the keys? Her forehead pulsed with the conflict of possibilities, all of which were surely impossible. She must have dropped them.

She read the man’s application, grimacing at the block capitals slanting backwards and crammed together as he had run out of space.

Jack Harmon.

The name rang a bell but, while Stella was trying to think why it did, there was another knock on the door and she leapt out of the chair and scooted out of sight.

‘Stella!’

It was Jackie. The snib was down so her key would not work. Shakily crossing the room, Stella released the catch and her PA flew past her and grabbed the nearest telephone. Stella had not heard it ringing. She had got up too quickly and leant against the table by the tea things, letting the dizziness subside.

‘Clean Slate for a fresh start. Good morning, Jackie speaking, how can we help?’ Jackie cocked her head to hold the receiver and, snapping on a ballpoint, swept a pad of sticky notes towards her over the desk.

‘Sorry, who is this?’ She steadied the pad. ‘Gina? How are you spelling that, please?’

Stella signalled and Jackie passed her the phone: the voice was speaking when she put it to her ear: ‘… no point in coming. The police in their wisdom think my mother was murdered.’