The Detective's Daughter

68

Tuesday, 25 January 2011

The light switch did not work. Stella switched on her key-torch: they were in a cloakroom. Signalling to Sarah, she trod lightly on the tiles but tripped over a wellington boot. Beside this was an industrial-sized top-loading washing machine and on a shelf above were packets of soap powder. Sarah gasped and jolted Stella’s elbow, making the torch dip wildly. Sarah Glyde was a liability; Stella should have sent her back to her car.

‘Those were my mother’s.’ Sarah indicated the soap powders.

‘Ssssssh. How can you tell?’ Stella lifted down a box. It was empty.

‘These boots are mine, that coat was my father’s. Antony has kept everything.’

They crept into a passage which went in either direction. When Sarah stumbled against her for the second time Stella clenched her teeth: for an artist the woman had little spatial awareness.

‘Left or right?’ Stella hissed.

‘Your choice.’

‘No, I mean what is the best way?’

‘Left takes us to the garage and back stairs and that way leads to the kitchen and through to the main stairs and the sitting room.’

‘Right then.’

Stella kept the torchlight down as they felt their way to the kitchen. She played the light along the wall until she found a light switch. When she flicked it on, nothing happened. She sighed: she had done this stuff too recently in Terry’s house. She was used to empty houses, but this was straining her nerves.

She manoeuvred around a long deal table and opened the fridge. It was an old Lec model, over forty years old. The lamp inside remained unlit, even with the door ajar. In such an old model the motor would have been noisy: ‘He’s turned the power off,’ Stella breathed.

‘Why would he do that?’ Sarah spoke in a normal voice.

‘Why do you think?’

‘Can you just tell me rather than talk in riddles. Antony doesn’t suffer from power cuts, his father had a generator installed.’

‘He’s expecting visitors. Your brother is prepared for us.’

‘You don’t seriously think he will harm us?’

Stella gave her a look. Not having siblings she could not be certain she would believe it if someone she hardly knew told her that her brother was a murderer. She might demand evidence. She suspected Sarah Glyde of long closing her eyes to clues.

Sarah gripped her arm, her terror palpable. Stella straightened. Only the fact that she would not admit to feeling afraid kept her from tearing out of the house. That and knowing that Terry would not have done so.

They tiptoed past a breakfast table laid for two; Sarah knocked a packet of Cornflakes off and in her effort to catch it batted it across the floor. The noise echoed in the cold silence.

There was no sound from above. Stella retrieved the box: it was light even for a packet of cereal. She looked inside. It, too, was empty. She caught sight of the sell-by date and squinted at the tiny figures. December 1981.

That could not be right. She trained the light directly on to the flap of the packet. Even if the one was a seven, and she was sure it was not, the eight was definitely correct. The cardboard was worn and had been reinforced with clear tape. The cereal box was nearly thirty years old. She directed the beam on the table. The marmalade jar was empty; nor was there any ketchup in the old-style glass bottle. The breakfast table was a museum exhibit.

Stella pulled the kitchen door open quickly and thrust the quavering torch forward as if its beam might save them and turned left into a passage. At the end was the hall and the front door, its stained-glass lights casting watery triangles over the mosaics.

Out of the corner of her eye Stella caught a glint. Sarah Glyde had a carving knife, its sharpened blade tapering to a point. She was unblinking, her mouth grim. Stella was stunned: she would be prepared to kill her brother. This did not make Stella feel better.

The door led into a garage. Stella got a vague sense of comfort from the smell of petrol, paint, chemicals, garden implements, bags of compost. It reminded her of Terry’s shed. She got another feeling too: Terry had been here.

A dark shape draped with canvas filled the space; everything else – the lawn mower, flower pots, spades, a strimmer, canisters of calor gas – was ranged around the walls.

Challoner had another car.

Stella held the torch at shoulder height and scooted along to what, judging by the shape, must be the bonnet. She had little room to bend down and had to crane sideways. Sarah Glyde stayed by the door with the knife.

The strings holding the tarpaulin had been cut. Stella flung it back and a cloud of dust stung her eyes; she had to pinch her nose to stop a sneeze. The car’s windscreen was greyed with dust; cobwebs obscured the wing mirrors as if a massive spider had been at work wrapping the vehicle as it would a fly. The front tyres were flat, the rubber perished. Stella tried to see the registration number. She expected to find it obscured by grime.

It had been cleaned.

Terry had been here. She felt a rush of heat. In the quivering torchlight, she read a registration plate – black against white – she could have recited it with her eyes shut.

CPL 628B.

She did not need to look above the radiator grille. Despite the dirt and the dark Stella knew what her dad had found:

Mrs Hammond had seen the car an hour before Kate’s supposed time of death around midday, so they had discounted her statement; the only definite sighting that day. After Terry found the photograph of Isabel Ramsay opening the Charbury Village Hall, the Ford Anglia gained new significance, but by then Mrs Hammond was dead.

Challoner had not driven the Ford Anglia since that day.

Stella straightened up and squeezed back along the gap. Sarah led the way back to the hall.

‘That’s the sitting room.’ She jabbed the blade at a door beyond the foot of the stairs. To their left, brass stair rods were illuminated in the beam. At the top of the staircase was a portrait of a woman. The head seemed to turn when Stella shone her torch up. It was Katherine Rokesmith.

Sarah bumped into Stella; the blade sliced the air.

‘You nearly had my ear off!’

‘Sorry.’

Neither of them was whispering.

They heard a crack. It came from the sitting room. Keeping close, they flew to the doorway; Sarah swishing the blade like a sword. A fire was burning in the grate. It appeared to have just caught; flames flickered, whipping and licking around logs that hissed and crackled.

The room was empty.

A photograph of Kate Rokesmith lay upon the logs, just shy of the flames, warping and browning with the heat. Someone had stoked the fire: a poker lay on the hearth. Bright, white teeth between rosy parted lips, a pointed incisor to the left of the front teeth marring an otherwise even set, were crumpling amidst the smoke, the ink turning metallic blue.

‘Jack!’ Stella shouted. ‘Come on.’

She rushed up the stairs two at a time and flung wide doors in the passage to check inside each room. Sarah caught up with her in the bedroom where sheets were heaped on the floor and the mattress was sagging off the bed’s metal sprung frame. Make-up littered the floor and was scattered over the mattress. The mirrors on the dressing table were smashed, glass sparkling among lipsticks and foundation bottles in the torchlight.

The window frame blew to and fro, a rhythmic squeaking like stertorous breathing. The curtain twisted over the wood had half ripped from the hooks; it ballooned in and out with gusts of wind. Melted snow pooled on the sill and dripped to the floor with a steady put-put.

Stella raised the light; Sarah clutched her arm, staying her. Kate Rokesmith smiled at them from all corners.

For an instant, an absence pervaded the room – an absence stronger than the more temporal departure of the person who had ransacked it – and filled the cloying atmosphere with the irreversibility of death.

But after a moment Stella saw the bedroom was no more than bricks and mortar, mite-nibbled paper and moth-eaten bedclothes, damp walls pasted with photos and articles about a woman long dead.

She let herself breathe: there was no one there. Terry was dead. She would never talk to him again. Terry would never know she had followed in his footsteps. Her dad had gone.

‘What an adventure, we’ll have hot chocolate when we get home.’

‘I know where they are.’ Sarah ran out, finding her way easily along the corridor without the torch.