The Detective's Daughter

47

Saturday, 22 January 2011

Mrs Ramsay’s house was finished. Her daughter had sent a consignment of bright yellow plastic crates from her company: Gina-Ware. They had packed them with crockery, vases, figurines, books; the paraphernalia of fifty years would go into storage. Stella had sprayed the rooms with a sandalwood and ginger spray from the Body Shop she had not used before. She wished Mrs Ramsay could offer an opinion, although feared she might consider the scent dreary. It was not usual for the family of the deceased to ask Clean Slate to sort the contents and Stella had disliked taking responsibility for deciding what to keep and what to take to charity or the rubbish tip. Lucian and Eleanor had not been in touch; Mrs Ramsay would have called them naughty. Stella had been wary of throwing out something valuable and knew Gina Cross would not welcome the number of crates.

She had not thrown out the spiral notebooks indented with Mrs Ramsay’s heavy script and stained with multiple mug rings: the weekly task lists. These were still on the shelf in her bedroom. Stella had read them, but found nothing to shed light on why Mrs Ramsay had not told the police the truth.

Each list – addressed to Lizzie, the Ramsay’s live-in help in the sixties – was dated with the completed item scrawled through. Many were carried over: ‘Clear Mark’s Study’ appeared frequently and was never crossed off. There was no study; Stella guessed it must be at their country house. A lot of the items – cleaning, general tidying – were delegated to children. Mrs Ramsay would cook special meals: Boeuf en Daube popped up the most. Later notebooks covered a greater span of time but the names assigned for the tasks stayed the same, with Mrs Ramsay seemingly unaware that they no longer figured in her daily life.

In the last notebook it had been Stella not ‘Lizzie’ who actioned: ‘Sort Broom Cupboard, Do basement and Tidy coal cellar.’ She had shovelled damp coal in the hole beneath the pavement, the cramped chamber enmeshed in spider webs as thick as rags. For no apparent purpose, she moved coal from one part of the cellar to the other. Mrs Ramsay did not light fires. Stella would tell Gina Cross about the coal, but did not think she would want it.

Stella did not feature in Mrs Ramsay’s notebooks.

She should arrange handing over the keys but was delaying the moment. She locked the front door and walked around the corner to Terry’s house.

Jack arrived at 11 a.m. on the dot as she was booting up the computer.

‘How did you get in?’

‘You left the back door open.’

‘Yes, but… OK. We need to crack this password.’

‘It’s possible to bypass the BIOS with a desktop computer, but newer laptops have a security chip on the motherboard. We need an engineer; Paul would know, you needn’t explain why we want it. Just a thought.’ Jack knelt down beside her chair, and picked up Terry’s silver ballpoint. Once more Stella breathed in a mixture of washing powder and fabric rather than stale tobacco smoke.

‘Can you really not guess it? Your dad wasn’t that complicated, was he?’

‘We’ve been through this. You carry your parents’ vital numbers and now I understand why. Plus you’re obsessed with numbers. All the same, did you know your father’s password?’

‘My mother’s birthday,’ Jack replied promptly, sucking on the ballpoint.

‘Terry wouldn’t be using my mum’s birthday. She still complains he never remembered it. She holds a grudge that Terry was on a job the day I was born.’

‘What was that?’

‘Twelfth of August 1966.’

‘No, the job.’

‘The Braybrook Street shooting.’

‘Do I know about that?’

‘You’re too young.’ Stella was dismissive. ‘So was I, come to that.’

‘When was it? What was it?’ He pulled forward a blank police notebook from the pile Stella had yet to clear.

‘Three policeman were shot dead in Braybrook Street, West London, when they approached a suspicious group of men in a car. It’s right by Wormwood Scrubs Prison, so at first it was assumed they had escaped. I had just been born and Terry was on his way to Hammersmith Hospital, and was diverted to join the search. They didn’t find the ringleader, Harry Roberts, for three months. He camped out in Epping Forest. Terry didn’t see me for two days.’

‘I vaguely remember reading about it.’

Jack was bluffing. He did not like it when she knew something that he did not.

Stella carried on: ‘The room, used as the incident room at Hammersmith Police Station in the eighties, is named in honour of the fallen officers: the Braybrook Suite. They ran Kate’s investigation from there.’ She trundled the mouse around the mat; the pointer did not show up on the screen. ‘It’s a meeting room now with pictures and a plaque to the officers. It was the worst loss of police life since 1911 and wasn’t matched until the IRA Harrods’ bomb in 1983 when another three officers died.’

‘Considering your view of the police, you’re well informed.’ Jack got up and went over to the window.

‘Terry showed me the room.’

‘So, when was your birthday?’

‘I said, twelfth of August 1966.’

‘That makes you…’

‘It makes me older than you. Can we get back to breaking into this thing?’

‘Try your birthday.’

‘That’s one date Terry will not have used.’

Jack came over and, leaning over her shoulder, pecked in: ‘12-08-1966’.

The screen returned an incorrect password.

‘Told you.’ Stella flung back in the chair, pushing it away from the desk, just missing Jack’s feet.

‘Three of his colleagues were killed on that day and his daughter was born. Terry cared all right.’ Jack frowned. ‘One, two, zero, eight, six, six.’

Password incorrect, press return for a retry.

He shook his head. ‘What time were you born?’

‘How would I know? You know that too, I suppose.’

‘Do you know what time you were born?’ Jack repeated.

‘No.’

Stella swivelled the chair back and forth. She could get crates like Gina’s to store Terry’s stuff until she had time to deal with it. Gina-Ware offered good rates.

‘Where’s your birth certificate?’

‘Certificates only have dates.’

‘Do you still have Terry’s files here?’

‘The case files? You know I don’t, they’re at the flat.’

‘His personal files, the stuff you’re meant to be giving to the lawyer.’

Stella tipped a languid hand at the buff concertina file on the floor where she had left it the night she had fled Terry’s house. That seemed a lifetime ago.

‘You’ve already been through that. This is a waste of time, Jack.’

‘We’ll see.’ He clapped his hands. ‘Eight six six!’

‘What?’

‘My set number on Tuesday was your birthday. See? It’s a sign!’

To humour him, Stella typed in the numbers.

‘No luck.’

Jack wasn’t listening. He spilled the papers on to the carpet tiles and, cross-legged, scrutinized each paper, giving a running commentary: ‘His dad’s death certificate, his leaving certificate – exemplary service – meant to show you this, not that bad a detective then. You should display this. His mum died four years after you were born, do you remember her?’

‘Four is too young to remember anything.’ Nana.

‘Quite possibly.’ Jack bit the side of his thumb.

Hunched over the papers, Jack Harmon – or Jonathan Rokesmith – could have been playing cards or arranging his toy cars. With a shock Stella saw why she had taken the risk of allowing this shabby man who looked in need of a meal and older than thirty-three into her flat and on to her cleaning schedule. She understood why she was prepared to be alone with him in a succession of empty houses late at night. She had a new reason for finding who killed Jonathan Rokesmith’s mother. Against her better judgement, she liked Jack.

Her mobile rang.

It was Ivan. She answered, pretending she did not know the caller so that he would not guess she had programmed his number into her handset.

‘I am so sorry but I will have to postpone dinner for a bit. I’m at a conference in Paris. Paediatric dentistry is not really my thing, but one has to show one’s face. I’ll be away until next week. May I call you when I’m back and see how you’re fixed? I feel rotten, I should have rung earlier.’

Stella assured Ivan that she did not mind. Privately she was rather relieved: eating in a restaurant twice in one week was a challenge she did not relish. She enjoyed the fact that the dentist’s receptionist had got it wrong; she had said he was in Rome.

‘Here we are!’ Jack waved a faded pink card. ‘Stella Victoria Darnell – Victoria was his mother’s name by the way. Born in Hammersmith Hospital, weighs ten pounds, one ounce – that’s heavy – on Friday the twelfth of August 1966 at two minutes past midday. Your adoring parents sent this to their friends and relations announcing you were here!’

He crawled over to the desk and kneeling up, tapped in the keys like a pianist picking out a melody.

‘One, two and a zero, then another two. A one, a two and zero-eight. I’ll bet he dropped the nineteen so lastly six and six. Voilà!’

Nothing happened. Then the hard drive light on the left of the keyboard flickered, the screen went blue and up came the Windows password request. Jack repeated the sequence of numbers. They were in.

‘Most important day of his life,’ Jack said under his breath.

‘Terry was good with people,’ Stella remarked after they had both read the document on the desktop. ‘So she did speak to the police.’

‘I didn’t know,’ Jack admitted.

Mrs Ramsay had not shared all her secrets with Jack, Stella noted.

‘Terry seems to have assessed her correctly: he wasn’t taken in by her charms,’ Jack said. ‘He didn’t speak to you.’ He jabbed a finger at the ‘SD’.

‘He had the wrong number,’ she admitted. She cleared her throat. ‘We need to look into Mark Ramsay. Something’s not right there.’

‘I don’t feel that was where Terry was going.’ Jack was gnawing at his thumb.

Nevertheless Stella underlined Mark Ramsay on their list of suspects, which numbered four: Hugh Rokesmith, Mark Ramsay, Paul (who surely did not count but she left him there anyway) and the wild card: the ‘nominal’ in police-speak.

They spent the next fifteen minutes exploring Terry’s computer but found nothing else. According to a receipt in his files, Terry had not had the machine long before he died. He had not created any other documents.

Jack clicked on the browser to find out the five-day weather forecast.

‘What do you care? You’re underground most of the time.’

‘Not when I’m walking.’

‘Walking! Where?’

‘It depends which page I’m on.’

‘What do you mean?’ Stella looked at her watch. It was only thirty-five minutes past eleven. She was sorry not to be meeting Ivan; she could do with a glass of wine at the end of the day.

‘I found a London street atlas on a Richmond train. It has pen marks on every page. I thought at first they were a child’s scribbles, but when I looked properly I found that the lines trace a journey. They are a sign.’

‘A sign of what?’ She had thought it was going too well.

‘Only if I complete all the journeys will I find out. I trace each one on Street View before I go in real life. It’s not cheating, it’s another way of seeing.’

‘Why would it be cheating? It’s not just a sign that someone forgot their A to Z?’

Jack groped in his coat and produced a filthy battered copy of the A–Z. Stella thought again about a therapist. She would not like Jack to go off the rails. Literally.

‘I’ll show you.’ He clicked on Google maps.

Stella grabbed his wrist: ‘Stop! It’s showing what was looked at last. Why didn’t I think of that? We can see the history of Terry’s searches.’

‘I’m walking this last page tomorrow.’ Jack was gazing at the book. He paused, then: ‘Isabel loved my tales.’

Stella found that hard to believe. Mrs Ramsay was not a good listener. She pulled the monitor towards her.

‘Pay attention, Jack. Where is Bishopstone?’

‘East Sussex. It’s where my mother grew up. She’s buried in the churchyard there. You know this; it’s in the notes. It’s near a town called… um what’s it called?’ Jack looked up and ran his finger down the screen. ‘There, Seaford. Anyway, when I’m not working I go on these expeditions following—’

‘Seaford. Are you sure?’

‘It says so there.’

‘Seaford is where Terry died.’

Jack jerked his head. He crammed the book back in his pocket and clutched at the desk to steady himself. He grabbed the mouse from Stella and enlarged the window.

‘You’re a star, Stell.’ He batted the arm of Stella’s chair.

No one but Terry or Jackie called her ‘Stell’.

Jack switched to Google Street View. ‘Your dad must have gone to see her grave or the house where she lived. Why did he do that?’

‘Like the jury going to see where Diana died?’ Stella ventured.

‘No, it was something else.’

‘His car is still in Seaford – I meant to go and get it!’ Stella exclaimed.

‘Let’s go.’ Jack leant on the desk to get to his feet, making it tip forward. He did up the few remaining buttons on his overcoat.

Stella typed ‘Broad Street’ into the Street View search. A picture of the high street where Terry had died came into focus out of a cluster of pixels. She manoeuvred the cursor along the road to the Co-op store on the left. Most pictures for Street View were taken in brilliant sunshine, giving the scenes an upbeat unreality, but the weather the day these images were taken had been overcast, cold and spitting with rain. Somehow she expected to see Terry going into the supermarket to buy his breakfast. The cursor swooped out of control and she was in the next street: a figure was heading towards the camera. Stella thought it familiar, but in the course of her job she met many people; they merged into types. Most people looked like other people.

‘Terry’s car might hold a valuable clue!’ Jack was on a treasure hunt. Ever since she had learnt his real identity Stella could not shake off the impression he was a small boy treating everything as a game. Despite bags under his eyes and lines around his mouth that made him look nearer forty than thirty-three, Jack could seem four years old.

Jack looked over at the screen and divined Stella’s motivations for looking at the Co-op better than she did herself. He spent as much time in Street View’s static landscape as he did walking the actual streets, searching the pixellated faces on sunlit pavements for the parent he had lost. Since 27 July 1981 his life had had only one purpose. He brushed Stella’s shoulder: ‘Terry had a massive coronary and wouldn’t have known about it. It’s the memory of pain or trauma that makes it bad. It’s worse for those left behind.’

Stella turned off the machine. ‘We’ll take the train so we can come back in Terry’s car together and debrief.’

Stella did not add that she wanted Jack’s company.