The Detective's Daughter

57

Monday, 24 January 2011

Sarah Glyde appeared in the kitchen doorway and collided with Jack as he carried out a half-filled bin liner.

‘I have to go out.’ She barged past. ‘You know where to find everything. Concentrate on the kitchen and bathroom, I want them done thoroughly.’

Jack tied up the bag and placed it on the steps to take to the basement area when he left. He considered the instructions issued with such brittle authority. When he had met Sarah Glyde last week she had seemed every inch the artist, floating about her sitting room, only vaguely listening to the earthly matters of limescale removal and grout-bleaching. However, like his Hosts, such as Nat, Nick Jarvis and Michael, it seemed Sarah could switch to peremptory and ruthless. In a short space of time she had reverted to type.

From the sitting-room window he watched her walk towards the subway and out of sight, and counted to ten in case she returned. When it was safe he put on his coat and went into the garden.

Like her brother’s locked bedroom, Sarah Glyde’s studio was not on Jack’s cleaning itinerary. On his first visit, she had called it ‘out of bounds’, instantly putting it in Jack’s mind very much ‘in bounds’. He resented anything marked ‘Private’. He had seen Sarah fishing about in a ceramic pot by the back door so knew where she kept the key.

The studio was a detached brick and wood structure that, Jack estimated, had been built in the 1940s; its guttering was loose, the felt on the flat roof buckling and the brickwork crumbling. The house was in a similar state: Sarah Glyde did not look after her property.

Climbing plants smothered with snow grew in a flower bed beside the path. Existing footprints were Sarah’s; there were no others so she would notice his tracks. He knocked into a board, lumpy with dried clay and paint, propped by the back door. Jack supposed it was a discarded surface for works in progress. He laid it over the snow and stepped on to it. From there he leapt into the flower bed; the plants shivered as he landed, a shower of snow falling on to his shoes. He balanced precariously and reached for the board, managing to lift it, leaving only a mild indentation. He repeated the procedure up to the door. The path around the side of studio was clear, which struck him as strange. Why would Sarah Glyde neglect the bit she walked on the most?

She had laid a trap to tell her if her brother had been there. On the other hand, Jack thought, finding signs of an intruder, she would assume it was the brother.

The area between the studio and the garden wall was laid to paving on which was the statue of an angel, her wings outstretched, between box bushes trimmed square.

A honking disturbed the quiet: a flock of geese in ‘V’ formation flew over the house, across the river towards Hammersmith Bridge.

Jack peeped over the wall. Wind stung his face. He slipped on compacted snow and grasped cold brick to steady himself; someone made a habit of standing here. So what? Deflated, he flopped to the ground, his back to the wall. He had a child’s-eye view of the French doors into the studio.

He had been here before.

He got up and peered through the glass and skipped backwards. Someone was looking at him.

He blundered up the path, leaving footprints, scratched the key in the lock, strode past the sink and a potter’s wheel to a table on which unglazed pots awaited their turn in the kiln.

The head was stuck on a metal tube that crudely resembling the cervical section of a vertebral column. The lower lip was chapped and cracked in the middle as Jack’s had been until Stella gave him a salve stick.

Jack was face to face with himself.

It was not a faithful rendition; the forehead was lumpy like Frankenstein’s monster and lacked his own deeply etched lines. Yet the skin was tight over the cheekbones and hair slicked close to the head and down the back of the neck like his own. Jack stroked the bridge of the clay nose. So exact was the copy he could have been stroking the rise of bone on his own nose, except he could not feel the touch of his finger.

A spiral of wire with a wooden handle at each end lay coiled beside the model. He yanked the wire taut and poised it behind the head. As it bit into the clay he caught sight of a photograph pinned to a cork board. He rolled up the cutter and slipped it in his coat pocket; it would be a nice touch, one up from a ligature.

He had climbed on to the lavatory to see out of the bathroom window, and left the vacuum going so that she would think he was cleaning. He had not fooled her; she had spied on him. Sarah Glyde had a mind like his own.

Jack had never once thought his Host might be a woman.

It was no coincidence that Sarah Glyde had rung Clean Slate asking for a quote. She wanted him. If he had not turned up with Stella last Thursday evening, she would have come for him.

Her desk was grainy with clay dust and lost under papers: orders, invoices; whatever else she might be, like him, when it came to her own papers Glyde was not organized. The invoices were for hundreds of pounds: dinner services, vases, busts; she was busy.

He stirred the papers around and found more photographs. All were identical and of the place where his mother had been found dead, taken from where he had just been, by the garden wall. The light was poor, dusk flattened the contrast and made reflections on the river as substantial as the bricks and rubbish on the shore.

A ghostly figure stood at the water’s edge. He held it up to the window. Printed on gloss paper, light made the image merge into the sky. Jack gathered up the pictures and put them in his pocket with the cutter.

On a table by the French doors was a glazed panel of clay the size of a tea tray. The horizontal layers of green and turquoise interspersed with maroon and mauve put Jack in mind of Exmoor. A motif – Glyde’s signature – had been scored into the corner: a child’s depiction of an aeroplane with wings crossing the body and upright tail.

It was not an aeroplane; it was a glider.

Jack rushed out of the studio.

Minutes later he was in his parents’ bedroom at St Peter’s Square. He pulled open his mother’s wardrobe door; Kate Rokesmith’s clothes – dresses, coats, skirts eaten by moths, stiff with dust mites – hung where she had left them. Jack would crawl beneath them to the back, not realizing it was her hiding place too until the day he discovered a surprise.

The cardboard box was there; a side tore when he pulled off the lid. Jack sneezed as he dusted the box off with his coat sleeve. He pushed aside the flaps, fitted his hands in and lifted out a clay head identical to the one in Sarah Glyde’s studio. He got to his feet and set it on his mother’s dressing table.

Glyde’s fingers must have been on familiar ground as they manipulated and shaped his eyes to life; the eyes on this head were like his own. He passed a hand before them, half expecting them to blink. Her mouth was perfect, her lips slightly parted, her hair snaked around her neck and over her shoulders. Unlike his sculpture, this piece did not stop at the head, but continued to the swell of her bosom.

It was Kate Rokesmith only days before she died.

‘I hid it in there as a surprise. Ssssh! It’s our secret.’

He had only been interested in the aeroplane on the back of her shoulder and insisted on inspecting his mummy’s real shoulder to see if one was there too. No one had drawn on her skin or marked her out for jointing.

‘I don’t like it when you kiss like that.’

‘Kiss who, darling? Daddy?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t be silly, Jonny.’

The temperature was bitter in the bedroom and Jack hugged into his coat. He picked up her blue plastic hairbrush from the dressing table and played it along the terracotta tendrils on the clay head. There was no hair in the bristles; he had clawed off what there was and kept it in his trophy tin. For the first time in thirty years, Jack risked turning to stone, and met his mother’s gaze.

Sarah Glyde had lied when she had claimed not to know Kate Rokesmith. She had known Kate and Jonathan. Kate had commissioned a bust of herself as a present and they had visited her regularly. She had been their Host.

He had been right to keep faith with the London A–Z: it had led him to the Host. She had visited his mother’s grave in a silver BMW; she had lured his mummy and him to the river to see the lovely colours and shapes.

Sarah Glyde would not be Jack’s Host because this time he would not be staying.