The Detective's Daughter

65

Monday, 24 January 2011

After he opened the back door, Jack pressed against the wall and let the minute hand go around his watch-face five times. Ivan Challoner had a mind like his own and would do everything he could to outwit him. He gave him time.

Jack glided along a flagged passage. Outside the fog was thinning and a moon appeared. Fact: a waning gibbous moon. It gave enough light to plot the room: a large kitchen. A carving knife lay on a long table but his experience with Sarah Glyde had told Jack he could not stomach blood and mess.

So far it had been too easy. He gauged the silence; it was too quiet.

He did not need to orientate himself. As in a dream, he knew the way. The doorway ahead led to the main part of the house and upstairs, as he expected, Jack found a corridor with five doors.

His boyish sing-song verse reverberated off the walls. He had been before.

Far off, a rook cawed three times. Rooks. He had heard them before too. A bar of light shone beneath the fourth door.

The last time he had turned the handle it had been higher up and difficult to grasp; he’d had to use two hands. Tonight the china knob turned with no effort.

A candle burned and, after the comparative darkness, the bright light hurt his eyes. His entrance caused a draught; the flame flickered and then flared up so the room seem to tip. The candle was in a silver holder with a snuffer attached. The wick was half submerged in molten wax. Jack estimated that the flame had another quarter of an hour.

A campaign of items advanced across the top of the dressing table: lipsticks, foundation, face powder, mascara, eye-liner, combs, hairbrushes, moisturizers, cleansers: the tools of magic. A used cleansing pad, pinched by fingers, stained by lips, lay next to lumps of cotton wool stained with red nail varnish. The black snood that she used to pull her hair back from her face when she did her make-up dangled from the mirror.

Minute fibres clung to an exposed lipstick, the surface of the open pot of face cream had crusted to a custard yellow. Balls of cotton wool were grey and dirty and a scent hung in the air, laced with the heavier tang of damp; it made his stomach clench. He could not touch the bottle of Eau Savage Extreme.

‘Boys don’t wear perfume. I bought it for your mother.’

‘It says it’s aftershave.’

‘And I said, put it down.’

The artistry created authenticity: the make-up, the potions and creams, nail scissors, nail varnish and nail-varnish remover had not been used for decades. This was the stage-set of an abandoned life; he was looking into the past to a time that had petrified; he could not obliterate the evidence with the click of a mouse or the turn of a street atlas page.

Downstairs, a clock struck the hour, followed by church bells, their volume varying as they were carried on the wind. He stopped counting after five and took the candle; cupping the dying flame, he walked egg-and-spoon-race style over to the bed.

He had made Stella count up the number of words she could see out of the car window while they sat in a traffic jam.

He lost count as words swam before his eyes: headlines which provided more context as time went by and the case became history. There had been other murders, other Kates.

Thames murder: Kate killer left no trace

Clueless detectives – Kate hunt stepped up

Kate: tragic boy speaks

Ten years: Kate TV appeal

Was Rokesmith Hammersmith Murder no. 7?

Murdered Kate’s boy is school bully

Rokesmith loses battle with cancer

Mystery flowers on murdered woman’s grave

Kate Rokesmith detective dies

Beneath each headline Jack read and reread the story of his mother’s murder. He could not change the ending: at the end of each article his mother was dead.

Mixed in amongst grainy images – newspaper orange-peeled with damp – were colour prints of Kate. Jack recognized the back of this house. Kate was in the kitchen filling a kettle, smiling brightly: the perfect housewife.

The kettle whistled like a train.

‘Give me that. It’s not for blowing through. You’ll fill it with germs.’

Kate lying fully clothed on the bed in this room, upon the same counterpane as the one on the bed now. She held a glass of red wine to the camera, smiling over the rim; her teeth were white and even. Three Kates reflected in the bedroom mirrors; Kate picking flowers in the garden; Kate outside the front door.

Jack lifted the candle close to the flaking plaster wall. Many photographs had been snipped; he examined one of Kate on the bed: the hand not raising the wineglass was holding a hand smaller than hers. Although he had been there, Jonathan Rokesmith had been excised from the picture.

Jack had lain on the bed beside his mother so that Uncle Tony could take their picture. He had picked flowers in the garden, carefully choosing her favourite ones. He had stood outside the front door and, while they waited to have their picture taken, asked when they were going home.

‘Sssh, darling, smile for Uncle Tony.’

‘After this, you’re to go and play in the sitting room, there’s a good boy. Your mother and I have much to talk about.’

A length of material was draped across the back of the bedstead. Jack directed the candle towards it and a heady scent filled his nostrils.

It was a silk scarf. Even in the guttering light Jack could see that it was a livid green.

Pantone 375.

He set the candle by the bed and with tremulous hands wound the scarf into a pool of slippery fabric around his hand. He put it to his face and breathed in; he shook with sobs.

The flame died.

Jack wrapped the scarf around his neck and blundered out of the room. Jack knew about the second staircase. All his life he had wondered if the house with two sets of stairs was his invention. There had been no one to ask. He stopped: suddenly he pictured seeing the man called Uncle Tony talking to the boy called Simon by the gate in his secret garden at school. He had kept very quiet so they did not see him; but then perhaps that was a dream.

He glided along the passage, the scarf – the last sign – caressing his skin. He did not feel sick.

The door beneath the main staircase opened and a man came out into the hall, his shadow enormous and then diminishing when he reached the front door. He paused at the foot of the stairs.

Ivan Challoner left his father’s surgery, satisfied that everything was in order for his patient. He trusted Stella would come and that his treatment would be effective. He put a kettle on for tea. Kate liked chamomile at this time of night. He unhooked two cups, deciding he would join her. There were drops of water on the floor and he presumed some had splashed when he filled the kettle. He stopped. They were not by the sink and were not splashes; they were footprints. They led to the cloakroom where the bulb was low wattage but enough for him to make out that the trail started by the back door.

Someone was here.

Kate. He must make sure she was unharmed. It was then that a nasty idea came to him: Kate had not expected him tonight and she had let someone into their house. He went swiftly along the passage to the hall – and froze.

Kate Rokesmith was standing on the landing, her hair framing her face. The scarf he had given her for her birthday was arranged around her neck in elegant folds, pale moonlight highlighting the fine green threads. Slowly, gracefully, she descended the staircase.

The kettle came to the boil, the whistle rose to an urgent hoot like a child hurtling through a subway tunnel, pretending to be a train.

The piercing sound hurt Ivan’s ears.