The Detective's Daughter

34

Wednesday, 19 January 2011

Stella made her way from the garages to the lobby in the dark; the lights were still on the wrong timing. She had copied the boiler-room key in case Paul ambushed her but could see from the lack of footprints that there was no one about. For this, if in no other way, the snow was proving useful.

It was numbingly cold. The crunch of her boots carried across the silent compound. It took six journeys to transfer the Rokesmith boxes and Terry’s boxes to the lobby. Stella was relieved to get inside. For once she would have derived comfort from meeting another resident.

She loaded the boxes into the lift and pressed the button for her floor. She padded back and forth along the corridor until she had got everything into her flat.

The novel Ivan had given her lay on the hall table where she had left it and aimlessly she carried it through to the lounge where the DVD clock read two minutes past three. On the dining table the case papers she and Jack had been reading were scattered across the glass. This reminded her that Jack had confessed to knowing the boy.

Perhaps he was lying about that too, but somehow she believed him.

She left Wuthering Heights on top of the microwave while she brewed a cup of tea, and then, the scuffed volume in one hand, the mug in the other, she went to her bedroom.

Stella had lied to Jack. She did not want to solve the case to vindicate her father as Jack imagined, but to show Terry Darnell that she was a better detective, and to get Kate justice. Now a new impetus was creeping in, which Stella could not put into words. She shivered: the sense that Terry was present had followed her from his house.

She sat in bed drinking the tea, Wuthering Heights propped up on her knees, and turned the tissue-thin pages. Other than Jackie, Ivan Challoner was the only person she had met who was genuinely interested in Clean Slate, she mused.

He was wrong about Wuthering Heights – she had no time for fiction, real life was full enough – but she rather liked that he thought it was her favourite book. Something fell out of the pages, skimmed off the bed on to the floor. She bent to retrieve it and nearly toppled over. It was a postcard. She flipped it over. It was not stamped and in turquoise ink were the words: ‘T, Five. “Cathy” x’.

The writing was scrawled, as if written in a hurry. Described on the back as a ‘Winter Scene in Woodland’, the picture showed Queen Charlotte’s cottage in Kew Gardens, the roof laden with snow, surrounded by trees, not unlike the scene outside Stella’s bedroom window.

This presented Stella with a dilemma. The card must have been given to Ivan and if she returned it, he might feel bound to explain who it was from and risk their conversation straying to intimate subjects. Beyond discovering that each was an only child and Ivan referring to a son, neither had given anything away.

If she did not return the card it would be stealing. The scribbled words might be one of the few mementoes he had of his dead wife, whose name was Cathy – or perhaps not, given the inverted commas. It might seem insignificant, but he had kept it so Stella could not throw it out, nor did she want to hold on to it.

No, it was not Ivan’s; the novel was second-hand, it had been sent to a previous owner. There was no signature on the flyleaf to offer a clue; no name starting with ‘T’. The edition was eighty years old and the card had no date. Ivan had probably never even opened the book. She laid the postcard on the bed. The Rokesmith papers had made her question everything.

More questions: when had Ivan’s wife died? How long were they married?

Wide awake now, Stella turned to chapter one and began to read.