The Detective's Daughter

12

Wednesday, 12 January 2011

Stella was unlocking her front door when she heard her mobile phone. No other flat on her floor was occupied, so, faint though the ringing was, it broke the hermetically sealed quiet.

‘Private call’.

It had switched to voicemail. In the living room she switched on the light and sank on to the sofa, the protective plastic squelching while she waited for the message to come through.

The only client with this number was Mrs Ramsay and she was dead.

Mrs Ramsay rang at least twice a day: to amend her task list, or request that Stella bring a particular cleaning agent. Stella had not returned Mrs Ramsay’s last call, made on Monday when Stella was at the hospital. In the scrambled message she had caught the words ‘want a talk’ and was sure what the ‘talk’ would involve – Mrs Ramsay would be gearing up for her annual clean. In the three years that she had employed Clean Slate, Mrs Ramsay had commissioned two days of cleaning in addition to her bi-weekly sessions. The fuss for these days was, Stella suspected, on a par with the parties Mrs Ramsay had hosted in her youth. She would fill spiral pads with prioritized lists and with the vigorous precision of a house-search insist Stella unscrew the cover on the water tank and clean behind the bath panel. Stella lifted floorboards in Eleanor’s room and vacuumed between joists and under the eaves; she tidied the garden shed and the summerhouse and disinfected the drains. Clean Slate did not offer deep cleaning as a standard package but, to Jackie’s dismay, Stella never charged Mrs Ramsay more than the basic rate.

Leaning on the sofa’s plasticized arm, Stella yawned. She had not told Jackie how much she relished the forensic operation: covering every inch of the property, routing out hidden horrors like bloated frogs in watering cans, the dead mouse with its head protruding from a hole in a crate as if in the stocks. Now Mrs Ramsay’s overhaul would never take place.

Her phone beeped: Stella listened to the voice message.

Mr Challoner’s receptionist had reserved his last appointment the next evening. Stella quelled disappointment that Ivan Challoner had not called himself and selected ‘ring back’. In case he, like she, listened to his answer machine, she injected warmth into her confirmation that she would be at the surgery for five thirty tomorrow.

She jotted the time in her Filofax, which she’d received from Terry on her eighteenth birthday, along with a police application form which her mother had torn up. Twenty-seven years later, shiny with use, its corners curling, the address pages and dividers dark with thumbing, Stella was lost without it. This was not sentimentality: if an object continued to be functional, why replace it? She took care of her possessions, wiping her dining-room table with tea-tree oil, buffing it with a glass cleaning cloth, flicking a duster over her hi-fi equipment. Everything in Stella’s flat was new or looked new.

Stella was the first resident to put down a deposit, choosing the corner apartment in the riverside development in Brentford, aptly named Thamesbank Heights, after a hasty viewing of a model in the site’s marketing suite. She justified her speedy purchase to Terry in her head, countering objections that her mother said he would make, the main one being that Stella would get her fingers burned when what was obviously a scam fell through. By the time the venture did collapse, building was almost complete so only the developer’s fingers felt heat as the bank foreclosed on the loan. Stella moved in on her forty-fourth birthday, refusing help from Terry, who, being retired, said he had time on his hands.

The flat was on the fourth of five floors, so there was not a great climb if the lift broke. It offered a view over the Thames and south-west London, but Stella had not bought it for the scenery. With triple glazing, toughened security doors and CCTV, it was secure with minimal heat loss. Situated on the south side of the block, facing the river, it provided her with total privacy.

Even as the paint in the lobby was drying, the recession was in full swing and six months on only 35 per cent of the dwellings had been sold. The under-populated estate had an air of futuristic unreality, residents moving like avatars in an online game over the manicured landscape bounded by a ha-ha and dotted with benches on which no one sat. Scraps of paper, crisp packets and cartons marred the perfection promised in the marketing literature and wind harassed infant acacia trees that would not, the saleswoman had assured Stella, block out light or compromise foundations.

Stella negotiated the shallow pit in front of the main door; filled with hard core and rubbish, it awaited marble to make it a step. Few footsteps other than Stella’s echoed in the quartz-tiled lobby or crunched the gravel paths winding discreetly to housed bins and garages with automatic doors. Seldom was the stillness interrupted by the ping of the lift and the swish of its door. Stella monitored the dirt on the chrome fittings and bluish-tinted glass of row upon row of desolate balconies in front of curtainless windows, their panes stuck with ‘For Sale’ tape. Only the show flat balcony was furnished: sporting a faded consortium-branded umbrella spiked into a patio table that smacked in the breeze like a flag of surrender. The timer for the exterior lighting was awry; lights embedded in path borders and perched on poles in the car park came on at seven in the morning and went off seven at night. The managing agent had not returned Stella’s call about this or the erratic cleaning service. Stella did not want the contract; she would not be paid.

She resented meeting anyone in the mirrored lift with its motion-activated polycarbonate light fittings which, the brochure had extolled, ‘offered greater durability’, or crossing the pinkish forecourt of crumb-rubber, ‘designed to protect from injury and increase comfort’. She did not need neighbours. In her head she told Terry she had got a bargain.

Every night, when she closed her front door, which blocked draughts and extraneous noise, she derived satisfaction from the sensible proportion of the rooms, the sleek woodwork and steel fittings. She understood Mrs Ramsay’s need to peer behind pipes and beneath stairs, tighten window catches and to sterilize what no one would see. In so big a house, it was impossible to keep tabs. Had she lived there, Stella too would have had to cover all bases. Her flat in Thameside Heights – she never called it home – required little monitoring and no bother to keep clean.

She put the two Rokesmith case files on the table and flicked them with a damp cloth, which did not rid them of the odour of Terry’s loft. She’d have another go at shredding at the office; a bit each day would see it sorted.

It was time for supper. Stella had a strict schedule and supper was at seven, washing up by half past, emails or other work until ten, then bed. She began by going into the galley kitchen to prepare food. The kitchen had been designed for a busy person with little time and little appetite for entertaining. The shiny appliances snugly wall-mounted with none of the gaps and nooks that so exercised Mrs Ramsay suited Stella perfectly. Right angles abounded – no wavering lines or bulges in the plaster to frustrate the eye or darken the mood, all handles and dials clicked flush to surfaces. The washer-drier, slim-line dishwasher and the eye-level combination microwave above the fan-assisted oven were white squares on a chessboard of the ‘Absolute Black’ granite worktop and floor tiles. Stella had taken her pick of materials from a choice too generous to be profitable. If she found herself chopping, slicing and stirring, she calmed herself with the prospect of the scrubbing, brushing and wiping to follow. She keyed in defrosting, cooking times and extra drain and spin cycles and found to solace in the sheen of a newly mopped floor.

Since Terry’s death Stella had done no cleaning in her flat.

She pulled a toad in the hole from the freezer – noticing it was the same brand as Terry’s shepherd’s pies – and set the time for three minutes on high, and while it revolved on the plate, mused at the wasteland below intended as a child-free zone of contemplation. The centrepiece, a Yogic Om in coloured concrete, was to have included bronze plaques with meditative texts: Christian and Buddhist. Bindweed strangled the casing of a Sony Trinitron television and slabs of brickwork – the foundations of the old electroplating works – nestled amidst thistles and towering buddleia and nettles, fractured by their roots. Stella had no time for contemplation with or without children; what irked her was a job half complete.

She was startled by the door buzzer. No one but Jackie and Paul knew where she lived. She trod softly down the carpeted hall, an unnecessary precaution for no one could hear her four floors up, and pressed the intercom panel: a video screen flickered to life, the camera trained on the front doors. There was no one. Then she saw a shadow to the side of the screen: someone was outside the range of the lens. Rationally she was confident that with the lobby doors of reinforced glass, held fast with solid locks, she was safe. With few residents there was little chance anyone would let in a stranger who claimed to have a parcel or lost their key. Her own door had a five-lever lock and the frame was reinforced with a London Bar. Nevertheless she rolled her shoulders, quelling a mounting panic.

Whoever it was knew she was in. Stella checked the intercom to be sure the volume was muted and heard rapid breathing. It was her own.

The shadow had gone. She stepped up to the monitor to be certain – maybe she had imagined it. She squinted through the eyehole in the door: corridor and a strip of blue carpet tapered to the end window.

Had someone been let in? In the kitchen the microwave pinged; her supper was ready. Already it was past seven, she was running late; she turned off the entry camera and hurried back to the living room.

Her mobile phone was flashing with a text from Paul.

I am outside.

The same message as when she was at Terry’s house the night before. She grabbed her keys from the dining-room table and went into her study, with a desk on which was a laptop docking station, a dictionary and a lamp. On the walls were a calendar and a map of London. She plugged the phone into a socket by the desk and laid the keys next to it so she didn’t forget them in the morning. Stella had many such tricks and ruses to ensure she met deadlines and objectives.

She shut both the study and living-room doors so that she would not hear the phone or see it light up with a call or a text. Finally she switched off the ringer on her main line, congratulating herself for not yielding to Paul’s pleading and giving him a key to her flat. He could not get to her now.

She munched her way through the toad in the hole, many minutes behind schedule, and eyed the rusting barbed wire spiralling along the perimeter of the demolished works. Through the gloom, between the coils of wire, was the hulk of a low-slung barge moored beneath her window. Paul had wanted them to live on a barge on the Thames. Stella had said it would be impossible to keep clean, but that was not the real reason; she knew now it was because Kate Rokesmith was murdered by the river.

Through the air vent came the rhythmic slapping of water against the wall. Somewhere over the river a flock of geese honked, the noise eerily plaintive as they made their way upstream to Barnes.

‘You can tell they’re geese because they’re flying in that “V” pattern, see?’

Stella followed the line of his finger.

‘No one knows why they do it. Maybe it gives them better visibility. Every bird has a clear view with nothing in front. They keep together – it’s nicer than flying alone. Birds and animals are sociable creatures. Like you and me.’

Paul would presume she was watching him from the study; he would imagine she cared. Stella chewed, slicing the sausage, cutting the batter into squares, forking each mouthful precisely. She wished Paul could be more like her and understand it was over.

Terry had never been to her flat. She dismissed this thought.

After washing up her plate and speedily wiping down the tops she had caught up with herself, but instead of looking at her emails she pulled out the chair at the head of the dining table – bought because the room required one, she did not have guests – and tipped the papers from the first box on to the glass. Before shredding it would do no harm to check what Terry had taken trouble to keep. She set aside what she had read at her office. A couple of sheets floated to the floor: one was an interview with an ‘internationally acclaimed medium’ in the Sydney Morning Herald – the case had gained international coverage – who divined that ‘the murderer spends time dressed in white beneath the ground beside a bubbling fountain’. Stella could not understand why such crackpots were given attention.

She turned to a clean page in the note section of her Filofax and testing her new Clean-Slate ballpoint, out of habit, made notes as she read.

The other piece of paper on the floor was page two of a transcribed interview. She licked a finger and flicked through the pile, but could not find page one. She was about to put the sheet aside, thinking that she would come across the rest in another box, when the name ‘Ramsay’ caught her eye.

Mrs Ramsay had initialled each section of the transcribed speech with bold loops of the pen. Stella knew her handwriting; despite her apparent frailty she pressed hard, indenting the paper. Her voice came off the page: Mrs Ramsay in her sitting room clinking a gin and tonic, a pen substituting the cigarette held up by her shoulder.

Stella laid down the statement. It was extraordinary that Mrs Ramsay was the last person to see Kate Rokesmith alive. Terry had interviewed her client years before she had known of her existence. Mrs Ramsay was a key witness in the Rokesmith murder and had never told her. Stella could not ask what she had thought of Terry or how much she remembered of Katherine Rokesmith because, unbelievably, Mrs Ramsay too was dead.

Stella had lost the only client whose cleaning had been a challenge: she would never deep-clean for Mrs Ramsay again.

Busily, using the edge of a box lid, Stella ruled columns in her notes: one for a description of the event, one for the date and one for the file number. The night wore on; fortified with coffee, she filled the columns with neat script. At 3 a.m. she rested her head on the plastic-covered sofa intending to close her eyes for a moment, and fell into a dreamless sleep.

The river flowed sluggishly past the solitary block of flats, its opaque surface absorbing the ghostly squares of light from Stella’s living room and kitchen. At the front, sightless windows reflected a car in one of the visitors’ spaces. Had the estate lights been working it might have been possible to see if someone was sitting at the wheel.