The Detective's Daughter

2

Monday, 10 January 2011

A woman sat in offices on Shepherd’s Bush Green integrating new clients into a cleaning schedule. It was an early morning task she enjoyed; it involved creating a list of staff, lining up availability to match time slots and applying a colour code to cells on a spreadsheet. Blue for mornings, yellow for afternoons, green for evenings and light green for late nights. She was methodical, switching between grids, extracting data from two files to populate a third. She chewed spearmint gum with her mouth shut, her jaw quietly working.

The starched white cotton shirt, sharp haircut and tailored suit trousers hinted at an authority confirmed when, having identified cleaners to cover the shifts, she tossed her gum into a waste bin and dialled the numbers on the list. She was pleasant but firm, overcoming objections or obstacles from the seventeen freelancers who worked exclusively for her. By five to nine the rota was complete and she had been at her desk three hours.

She strode through to the main office to fetch client details from signed contracts in her PA’s pending tray and was startled by knocking. A policeman was gesticulating through the wire-reinforced glass door panel.

‘I’m looking for Stella Darnell.’

‘You’ve found her.’

At six foot and in her mid-forties Stella was taller and older than the officer.

While he talked she grabbed a cleaning equipment catalogue from a shelf and, resting it on a filing cabinet, scribbled busily, squeezing words into the margins and around pictures of a soft banister brush with a wooden handle and a galvanized flat-top socket for a broom. ‘Superintendent Darnell… coming out… Co-op… Seaford… collapsed. Ambulance in 10 mins, paramedics worked… failed revive… dead on arrival.’

Stella circled ‘dead on arrival’ and laid down her pen. She contemplated the banister brush. It was not necessary, but would impress fussier clients; she would ask Jackie to order one and see how it went.

A mug of tea materialized by the catalogue and, as if she hovered far above, Stella gazed down uncomprehending: she had not heard Jackie arrive. The policeman’s voice, droning on like a radio announcer, was drowned out by the telephone. She counted the rings: it was answered on the seventh. Not good enough. She stipulated it should be picked up at three max.

‘Clean Slate for a fresh start. Good morning, Jackie speaking, how can we help?’

The tea was scalding and sweet. Stella’s own voice was reminding Jackie that she didn’t take sugar and Jackie was replying slowly and patiently, explaining in words of one syllable that it was for shock.

Your father is dead.

It was not until the late afternoon, in the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, that Stella entertained the notion that she should be upset. All day she had dealt with the police, medical staff, administrators and Jackie, who treated her with practical sympathy. Everyone’s response was out of proportion to Stella’s so she was grateful at last to be alone.

The NHS bag containing Terry’s belongings banged against a door as she emerged on to a goods road between the Cardiac Unit in a high-rise block and the shambling nineteenth-century building which housed the reception she had arrived at five hours earlier. Once a paean to Victorian endeavour, it was dwarfed by a maze of new-builds clad in steel and glass, its grandeur undermined by stuccoed pre-fabs and flaking render. She dodged a van and pushed through plastic flaps into a passage with a suspended ceiling and a flooring of epoxy quartz screed that emphasized a list to one side and gave her the impression of being on a ship.

Terence Christopher Darnell was pronounced dead at half past eight a.m. in the street where he had collapsed twenty minutes earlier. A female doctor told Stella that the probable cause was cardiac arrest but they could not be definite until they had performed a post-mortem. It was most unlikely, she had assured Stella, that ‘Terence’ had experienced pain.

His name is Terry.

She rarely called him Dad.

Stella frowned. She had not considered that he might have been in pain. She had also been informed, perhaps by the policeman, who was clearly both relieved and appalled by her lack of tears, that a lady coming out of the Co-op behind Detective Superintendent Darnell had said he’d toppled over like a toy soldier making no effort to save himself.

He was a toy policeman, Stella had nearly said.

She shouldered through another set of doors and found herself in a chapel; warm and dark, the quiet extreme after the bustle of the hospital.

Stella was about to leave, but arranged around an altar was a semi-circle of chairs and she slumped on to the nearest one, and dropped the NHS bag beside her.

Terence Christopher Darnell’s sudden death would mean extra work at a busy time, she mused. Stella’s parents had divorced when she was seven and her mother had not seen her ex-husband since Stella was old enough to visit him without being delivered or collected. Suzanne Darnell would lament that her marriage had been a wrong turning; she lived alone in West London, having made no further navigational errors. She would not help her daughter dispose of Terry and his belongings.

In Stella’s business, death was a prompt for a house clearance and thorough clean in readiness for sale; Terry’s death need be no different to any other, she told herself.

Although she was Terry’s only child, it had surprised Stella that he had a slip of paper in his wallet naming her as his next of kin because she saw him no more than three times a year. Sitting on the hard chair, surrounded by wall plaques commemorating patrons and patients of the hospital now at peace and in a higher place, Stella dwelt on the earthly fact of the death of a man she hardly knew. His body had not looked at peace.

Two electric candles dripping with fake wax were plugged into a socket on the altar. Stella recognized the scent as one of the flower fairy ranges of Asquith & Somerset and doubted it could be on the NHS preferred supplies list. A bunch of fresh freesias drooped out of a cream plastic vase beneath a stained-glass panel of the Madonna and Child. She made a mental note to order lavender spray for Mrs Ramsay in St Peter’s Square. On her last visit, there had been a stale odour; she suspected the old lady of smoking, although she claimed to have given up.

This led her to think about her other clients and, getting out her phone, she scrolled through her messages. Jackie had signed up someone responding to the advert in the local paper and had trialled a new cleaner in the office after Stella had left for Sussex. The woman had not passed, but Jackie wanted to know if she should hire her anyway. Stella tutted at this, the noise distinct in the silence; rapidly her fingers busied on the keypad as she instructed Jackie not to take on someone who had failed the cleaning test. As Stella dreaded, her business could not carry on without her being there.

Paul had texted, wanting to see her. She had not told him about Terry, nor did she want to. He would be hoping that over a bottle of wine he could persuade her to let him move in.

Jesus, pale and chipped upon the Cross, gazed down at her with blank eyes as she typed: Let’s call it a day. We know it’s not working. Stella.

She hesitated before adding an ‘x’, but then, just before she pressed ‘send’, she deleted the kiss. She did not love Paul – whatever love was – and it was better to be honest. She watched the envelope icon tumble into infinity to become a dot, and insisted to herself she was doing Paul a favour; he could find someone who loved him.

Having mustered up the wherewithal to release herself from a relationship about which she had been ambivalent for too long, Stella tackled the NHS bag. Each item was in a sealed packet, which did not stop a sour reek of sweat escaping, sickly and clinging. Her stomach coiled. She extracted the leather wallet with delicate fingers – the crackle of plastic was loud in the chapel; she had given it to Terry for his fiftieth birthday over fifteen years ago. She had asked the shop to have his initials embossed in silver: ‘TD’, forgetting about ‘Christopher’. The letters had rubbed away to the merest indentation. Terry had folded up the birthday wrapping paper, smoothing it flat on his coffee table, and let slip how his colleagues nicknamed him ‘Top Cat’. Stella had been infuriated, although she could not have said why. The policeman in her office had momentarily stepped out of role to exclaim that Terry was a ‘top man’ but if this was meant to console her, it had landed wide.

The clothes he was wearing had been folded and placed together. His dark grey suit was from Marks & Spencer’s Autograph range: the jacket had a tear under the shoulder; a blue cotton shirt striped with brown was also torn with loose threads trailing where the paramedics had ripped away the buttons. Applying the method of fixing the age of a tree, salt rings under the arms indicated to Stella that Terry had worn it for two days. Little though she saw him, she knew Terry ironed his shirts and kept his hair washed. On the few occasions that she kissed him – in greeting, or on departure – his chin was smooth and scented with Gillette Series Aftershave Splash Cool Wave, his hair smelling of Boots anti-dandruff men’s shampoo. He would not wear anything more than once. She looked up and caught Jesus looking at her balefully. She considered that the detective, whom her mother insisted was happier with tagged corpses and evidence bags than with his family, was now a collection of belongings sealed in plastic and backed up by a sheaf of paperwork. Terry would have hated such an end.

Stella passed over underpants, shoes, a T-shirt and balled-up socks and stuffed them all back in the bag, inhaling deep the chapel’s flower fairy scent.

The nurse who had taken her to see Terry’s body must have been on some training course about dealing with bereaved relatives. She was keen that Stella should banish timidity in the presence of her dead father.

Stella had noted his greasy hair was brushed the wrong way and the stubble on his chin was white. A stained tooth was visible between stiffened lips. She had not seen Terry lying down since she was a child. He was naked under the sheet, draped loosely over the gurney.

‘It’s OK to touch him,’ the nurse had whispered encouragingly.

Stella pretended not to hear. Keeping her hands in her pockets, she nodded in confirmation like an actor in a police procedural drama and muttered: ‘Yes, that’s him.’

Identification was not an issue; the hospital had his driving licence. She refused the offer of ‘time alone with your dad’, thinking what was the point? At the nurses’ station, she caught sight of Terry’s name on a form: ‘Certification of Life Extinct’.

Beneath these words she scanned his admission notes. Words floated free of their sentences as she read, her brain fighting to dismiss meaning: ‘Attempted to resuscitate. Police called. Date of death Monday 10 January 2011. Last seen alive, Broad Street, Seaford, 8.25 a.m. today. Means of identification: personal papers – driving licence, bank cards. No suspicious circumstances.’

A doctor had signed his or her name and underneath the signature had printed more legibly: ‘May he rest in peace.’

The chapel door banged and a wheezy man in a fluorescent jerkin that showed off his beer gut pattered in, sighing.

Stella drew her jacket around her and tipped Terry’s Accurist watch into her palm. She put her hand through its heavy bracelet and snapped shut the clasp. Her wrist looked childlike and the watch slid up her arm, cold against her skin. It would need links taken out to fit. Terry kept it three minutes fast for punctuality, a tip Stella followed. In the same bag was his wedding ring. Her mother had thrown her own in the bin. Stella presumed Terry wore it to make women think he was married, just as Suzanne’s ringless finger signalled she was unattached. Stella had retrieved her mother’s ring from a wad of damp tea bags. She now had both rings.

There was no spare underwear or toothbrush and this confirmed her growing suspicion that Terry had not expected to be away overnight. What was he doing in Sussex?

The last bag was labelled ‘Contents of pockets’ and comprised a half-eaten packet of chewing gum, £7.80 in change, a scratch card with a winning prize of ten pounds and the head of a yellow rose. She took the flower out of the bag; it had no scent and was browning. She did not think Terry liked flowers. She found his keys.

Stella knelt up on the chair, leaning over the kitchen table, and worked her way through each key.

‘Daddy has lots of doors.’ She began to chatter on and bang went his chance to have a read of the paper. Propped on her elbows, she questioned him about each one like a detective. When she behaved like a grown-up, going all serious, he had to try not to laugh.

He started by answering promptly, as if it was a quiz, but after a while had to admit he got fed up; it had been a long night and he needed his bed.

‘Do you lock up murderers and throw away the key?’

He snatched the bunch off her.

‘Where’d you get that from?’

‘You know where.’ In came her mother. Suzanne has to have a go.

Game over.

Stella dangled the keys from her forefinger. When she was twenty-one Terry handed her his door keys; in case of emergency, he had explained. He had cancelled her birthday dinner that year to attend a fatal stabbing on the White City estate. Her mother said giving her his keys was his idea of a rite of passage and that would be her lot. Once she was over eighteen, Stella had told herself she had no need of a father.

Two months ago, suspecting an intruder, Terry had heightened the back garden wall with a trellis and changed the locks; he had not given Stella the new keys.

Now she had them and had inherited the doors they unlocked: she had unrestricted entry to Terry’s abandoned life. She brushed the leather Triumph fob with her thumb.

Where was his car?

The stained-glass window had become opaque; it must be dark outside. The man had gone. She could not remember what car Terry drove: the Triumph Herald had long ago packed up on him. The police officer had relayed an offer of help from Terry’s colleagues at Hammersmith Police Station, which she had refused. She would not ask anything of the police.

Terry’s wallet bulged with papers: receipts, loyalty cards, the driving licence and sixty-five pounds in twenties and a five. He was one coffee away from a free drink at Caffè Nero; she had presumed greasy spoon cafés were more him. She struck lucky: a receipt from a filling station in Seaford. She peered at the faint blue ink and worked out that Terry had bought petrol at sixteen minutes to eight that morning.

Stella had never driven Terry; if they went anywhere together it was in his car. When she passed her test – first time – her mother had told her that Terry did not trust women drivers.

At the bottom of the bag two glistening ham rolls nestled in a Co-op carrier; the doughy bread mummified in cling film had been flattened by a can of Coke. Her stomach heaved: Terry had bought them just before he died.

At London Zoo, Terry had treated his little daughter to a bottle of Coke. Stella hated drinks with bubbles but at the giraffe house she had upset him by calling him ‘Terry’ as her mum did, instead of ‘Dad’, so she sucked dutifully on the pink straw, willing the level to creep down, the bubbles exploding in her throat. They waited on the westbound District line platform of Earls Court station to go the one stop to her new home in Barons Court and Stella got a feeling in her tummy. She swallowed a rush of saliva and stayed stock still.

The train clattered in, doors swished, a voice boomed and when people pushed behind her Stella threw up over shoes and legs. Brown foaming liquid chased along the carriage floor. The train was taken out of service and it was her fault.

She had retreated to the new bedroom, with no toys and a stain on the ceiling. Before being sick she had planned to say ‘Thank you for having me, Daddy’ to make it all better. In Stella’s memory her parents’ voices conflated with the policeman who had mutely reprimanded her lack of emotion: ‘What were you thinking of? You don’t know your own daughter. She hates fizzy drinks.’

You don’t care about your father.

The NHS bag bulged with bald indicators of a life. Stella did not think of Terry Darnell filed in a steel drawer in the hospital mortuary, but as following her out of the hospital warning her to mind her own business.

Jackie had told Stella that Seaford was a seaside town twelve miles east of Brighton; she took the coast road recommended by her satnav. A notice announced Seaford was twinned with Bönningstedt in Germany. She swung past the station over a mini-roundabout, took a left then a right on to a street with Barclays Bank on one side and a Pound shop on the other. She was in a ghost town: no cars; no pedestrians on the shop-lit pavements. A crisp packet broke free from the shelter of a lamp-post to spin and skitter along the camber like tumbleweed. A church clock tolled nine as Stella stopped the van outside a disused Woolworths store and turning off the engine became aware of a creaking like a rocking chair. She got out: further along the street the metal sign for a men’s clothes shop swung back and forth; the place unsettled her.

Jackie had said Terry died at a difficult time of the year: right after Christmas. Stella did not see what that had to do with anything; she had not spent a Christmas with Terry since she was seven.

The Co-op had closed an hour ago. Stella guessed that it must have looked the same when Terry arrived early that morning; the shelves restocked with packets, jars, bottles, their labels stark in the low security lighting. Rows of shopping trolleys were corralled next to the fruit and vegetable section, ready for the next day. Terry would not have used a trolley for so few items; he had not touched them. Opposite, she read ‘Sweet Moments’ on the fascia of a handmade-chocolate shop; perhaps these were the last words that Terry had seen.

If Stella expected to find a clue to the drama that had taken place in the doorway twelve hours earlier, she was disappointed. The two-storey shop buildings, block paving, tang of disinfectant and yellow plastic ‘wet floor’ hazard cone near the tills yielded nothing. It could have been any Co-op store in any town.

She stepped back from the store to where the pavement extended into the road for a pedestrian crossing delineated by ridges. Terry had told her that gold studs on the stones marked the boundary between private land and the public walkway, or had he? An outlet next to the supermarket was to let; unopened mail piled up on the door mat.

Terry had arrived here early that morning; he must have stayed the night somewhere but, since he hadn’t even taken his toothbrush, Stella was sure he had not planned to. Where had he stayed?

She was staring at a snatch of white. She bent down: a piece of paper had wedged between the bars of a drain cover. She extracted it and in the low security light of the Co-op doorway unpeeled it, careful not to tear along the fold. It was a newspaper photograph, photocopied on a skew, cutting off some of the image. A footprint had transferred the surface of the pavement like a brass rubbing so she struggled to read the caption: To th ma or Mr say launches Charb new vi all.

The black and grey pixels comprised a group of people, their features bleached out in sunlight. There was a figure in the foreground who might be a woman, but a splodge of dirt blotted her face. Triangular shapes crossed the top of the frame. The only unmistakable element of the photograph was a church. The angle of the shot made it appear to be balanced on the woman’s head and the time on its clock was midday. Although there was nothing about the cutting to connect it with Terry, Stella slipped it into her pocket.

She heard the beeping of a reversing vehicle and scanned the street; it was empty. She hurried back to the van and saw that a light was flashing on an automatic teller in the wall of a building society on the other side of the road. At the end of the street a stretch limousine rolled by, a gaggle of young women in orange afro wigs hanging out of the windows bawling Robbie Williams’ ‘Angels’; the raucous sound faded into the night. The beeps stopped and the light in the cash machine went out. She approached it: a twenty-pound note lay in the cash tray.

Stella retrieved the note; brand new, it crackled when she folded it into her coat pocket with the cutting. She saw a ‘P’ for a car park and, jumping into the van, slung it left down a narrow road with a terrace of cottages on one side and a building with a castellated roof silhouetted against the sky on the other. Ahead of her was the car park. Four cars were dotted around the asphalted space and again Stella tried to recall the car Terry had owned.

She felt about among Terry’s things and at the bottom of the bag found his keys. When she pressed the remote button on the fat plastic head there was no response. She extended her arc and hazard lights to her right flashed twice.

The blue Toyota Yaris had a parking penalty clamped to its windscreen by a wiper; Stella ripped out the ticket in yet another plastic bag and, nerving herself, got in the driver’s seat. She caught a whiff of vanilla deodorizer and saw with approval that Terry had plugged an air purifier into the cigarette lighter socket. The car started first time. She cruised around the area until she found a residential street with no parking restrictions. Before getting out she gave the car a brief check, searching for a clue to why Terry had been in Seaford. She found nothing but a Kit Kat wrapper and a half-drunk flask of coffee that had rolled under the front seat and concluded that the vehicle would need valeting before she sold it.

Only when she had locked the car did Stella notice that Terry had, after all, paid and displayed; a ticket face up on the dashboard was valid until eight fifteen that morning.

Terry had died fifteen minutes after the expiry time.

Half an hour later, Stella was speeding along the M23. Her rear-view mirror reflecting the empty motorway was a black rectangle. Earlier there had been tail-lights ahead, which were snuffed out when the driver rounded a bend and had not reappeared. She adjusted her phone in its cradle on the dashboard.

Where was Terry’s mobile phone?

She rumbled on to the hard shoulder and, releasing the seat belt, scrabbled through the NHS bag on the front seat. There was a shuffling in the back of the van. Stella froze. She had not adhered to her own rule of looking in the interior if she left the van. It was easy to hide amongst the buckets and spare overalls. She heard the shuffling again, then a thump, and she spun around.

A bag of dishwasher salt granules lay on the carpeted floor. Many clients included appliance maintenance in their contract and someone had stacked the bags on the racks without securing them. Another was about to go; Stella clambered through the seats and caught it. She stowed the salt where it belonged, on the bottom shelf in a plastic container.

She checked the central locking and remembered why she had stopped. One thing Stella did know about Terry was that he always kept his mobile phone with him. Yet it was not in the NHS bag nor in his car, although there was a phone charger in the glove box.

The keyboard on her BlackBerry was fiddly in the feeble light but eventually she selected ‘Dad’. She clenched her teeth, waiting for it to connect: some part of her expecting Terry to answer.

The ringing briefly fell in step with the click-click of her hazard lights. She was about to hang up when it stopped.

‘Who’s that?’ Stella almost said: Dad, is that you?

Who’s that? a woman responded.

‘No, who are you?’ Stella demanded.

No, who are you? It was her echo.

The line deadened with an almost imperceptible change in quality; a cessation of sound as if someone had replaced a receiver.

The screen said ‘Call duration twelve seconds’. Stella selected ‘Dialled numbers’. ‘Dad’ was top of the list with ‘Clean Slate’ underneath: her last two calls.

She pressed ‘redial’.

This time the answering service cut in and Terry’s voice invited the caller to leave as much information as they liked. Even in retirement he was encouraging witnesses to come forward with evidence, available any time of the day or night.

Stella had always told herself that if she called, Terry would be too busy to talk.

Her voice hesitant, she asked whoever had the phone to ring her to arrange collection.

Maybe Terry had dropped his phone when he collapsed and it had been stolen by kids. Thinking that she had called the wrong number, she went into ‘Dialled numbers’ again: the word ‘Dad’ lost meaning the longer she stared at it.

Stella caught her reflection in the side window, the dark rendering it high contrast: lumpy hair, her eyes lost in their sockets and her mouth a grim pencil line. She ran the window down to erase herself and was hit by cold wood-smoked air. Beyond the carriageway ragged trees were outlined against the sodium-pink sky of a town. A light blinked through the branches, moving, vanishing, then appearing closer and she heard a long low whistle.

She looked in her wing mirror and saw that a car was parked on the hard shoulder twenty yards away with its lights off. It hadn’t been there when she had pulled off the road. She tilted the wing mirror, but it was too dark to tell if there was anyone inside. She did not want to wait to find out; she started the engine and gunned the van out into the middle lane. Fixing her seat belt, she accelerated to seventy. Careful of petrol consumption and after all a policeman’s daughter, Stella did not speed.

By the time the lights of London twinkled ahead, she was clear: Terry’s death was a task to be ticked off and then she would move on.

She easily negotiated the tight gap between bollards on Hammersmith Bridge, but instead of joining the Great West Road to go to her flat in Brentford, she crossed a deserted Hammersmith Broadway and headed for the office.

Shattered from the day but exulted at the prospect of working, Stella paid little attention to headlights that stayed behind her all the way to Shepherd’s Bush Green.