The Detective's Daughter

69

Tuesday, 25 January 2011

It was Stella who found the bolt at the top of the door, stopping Sarah’s clumsy struggle with the handle. She slid it across; the oiled mechanism gave at once.

Winding stone steps receded into darkness. Cool damp air laced with a clinical odour drifted up. Stella could smell Eau Savage Extreme; neither Ivan nor Jack wore it.

‘It’s hers.’ Sarah’s breath was hot in Stella’s ear. ‘The studio smelled of it after she had been for a sitting.’

They listened but heard nothing.

Logic came back to Stella: the door had been bolted on the outside so whoever was in the basement had been locked in.

‘We’re too late.’

She plunged down steep steps, catching herself with a rope slung through loops on the wall.

‘There he is!’ Sarah leapt the last three steps, jolting Stella, who lost her balance and dropped the torch, extinguishing the light.

‘Challoner’s dead.’

Stella thrashed about on all fours in the smothering darkness, flailing for the torch. The slate floor grazed her palms. She scrambled to her feet and at last found a switch. She knew it would not work, but habit made her flick it down.

The room was flooded with light.

Stella’s first thought was that there was no blood. Next she saw her van keys on a step beneath a gigantic contraption of red leather beneath a cone of light. A figure lay supine, feet right up, a surgical mask strapped to its face, wrap-around sunglasses shielding the eyes. Thin plastic straps clamped the calves, waist and wrists. Challoner lay motionless, skin waxy in the remorseless glare.

‘Antony!’ Sarah darted forward and grabbed a wrist. ‘I can feel a pulse.’

Stella ripped off the mask.

It was Jack.

‘Pass me a scalpel. Quick!’ Stella gesticulated at a jumble of surgical utensils on a worktop.

She eased the blade between Jack’s skin and the plastic thongs, willing her hand not to slip, and released Jack’s limbs. Only when she had finished did Stella think to remove the wrap-around sunglasses.

Jack stared through her with eyes like Terry’s in the hospital, glassy and unseeing, the pupils dilated. She leant on the lever making the chair descend abruptly to a sitting position. Jack’s head jerked to one side and a string of spittle swung from his mouth.

Sarah shut her eyes and, concentrating, tried his pulse again.

‘There’s a fluttering.’

‘Are you sure?’ Stella willed it to be true. She waved a hand over Jack’s face but he stared impassively at something far away. ‘Jack, wake up. What’s the bastard done to you?’ She gripped his shoulders, holding him to her, breathing in the familiar scent of detergent and damp wool.

‘I think this might explain it.’ Sarah held up an empty syringe. She pulled off the needle and sniffed the open end of the capsule. ‘Lidocaine combined with adrenaline, judging by the size of his pupils.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m a dentist’s sister, remember?’ Sarah raised her eyebrows. ‘It’s a ten-millilitre syringe. One of these would be fine, the maximum safe dose is five hundred milligrams, which is five of these syringes. It depends how many times he’s been injected.’ She lifted Jack’s arm and tugged up his sleeve. There were two red blotches on his arm.

‘Three is OK, isn’t it?’ Stella demanded. ‘That’s three hundred.’

‘Antony wouldn’t overuse a site.’ Sarah dragged Jack’s shirt out of his trousers. There were three more areas of red on his stomach above the line of dark hairs from his navel. She fumbled with his other sleeve. ‘Hmmm. Looks like he’s had six hundred, with three jabs away from his heart, which gives him a chance. I can’t say for sure – but too many, whatever. You can see he’s suffering from visual disturbance.’

Stella stared at Jack. His gaze was unfocused and his lips working silently.

‘He’s trying to tell me something. Jack, how much did Challoner give you?’ Jack blinked slowly and his tongue appeared between his teeth. ‘It’s no use. Call an ambulance!’

‘There’s no signal down here.’

‘Go upstairs, then.’

‘I don’t have a mobile and there isn’t a telephone. Antony got rid of it. Give me yours.’

‘It’s in the car!’ Stella grabbed her keys and ran up the stairs. At the top she slammed into wood and, grabbing hold of the rope, only just stopped herself toppling back. The door was shut and there was no handle on the inside.

Challoner had locked them in. She kicked at the wood but it did not give. She raced down and wheeled impotently around the room, rattling instruments and banging the counter.

Sarah had somehow got Jack on to the floor in the recovery position and folded her jacket under his head. Dimly Stella considered she would not have thought of that.

There were no windows. No other doors. No way out.

‘Help!’ Stella yelled, her voice cracking.

‘It’s soundproofed. No one will hear us. Not even Antony.’ Sarah swabbed Jack’s mouth with a moistened pad. ‘We won’t suffocate – I can tell the air is fresh, but I don’t know how long we can last without food. At least we have water.’

‘I don’t care about us. What about Jack? Is there something we can give him, to reverse it, neutralize the drug, anything?’

‘I think there’s an antidote but Antony won’t have it here. He doesn’t even keep oxygen down here. Jack needs supportive management – his airway protected and cardiac monitoring.’ Sarah Glyde’s haphazard manner had vanished: she had turned into a medic.

Neither of them said the obvious: if they could not get Jack to a hospital within the next few hours, he would die.

‘Did you tell your office where you were going?’

Stella shook her head. She had not told Jackie where she was going for days. ‘Wouldn’t Challoner’s receptionist think of finding you here?’

‘Mrs Willard wouldn’t care, but if she did ask, he will tell her I’m away.’

Stella went over to the dentist’s chair. Jack looked frightened. She stroked his fringe back from his face.

‘We will get you help, Jack. I promise,’ she whispered.

The counter took up one wall; apart from a sink and the instruments it was strewn with rubbish. And a mobile phone.

‘He’s left his phone!’ Stella grabbed it and pressed the ‘on’ button. The screen lit up, accompanied by Nokia’s tinkling signature tune, but then went blank. The battery was dead. Infuriated she slapped it against her palm and saw minute scratches on the casing. She tipped it towards the light.

‘TCD’. Terence Christopher Darnell. It was Terry’s phone. Final proof, had she needed it, that her dad had been here. Although she was convinced he had not seen Challoner’s secret surgery. Challoner had found his phone and answered it when she rang the night of her dad’s death.

The water fountain trickling into the ceramic bowl beside the leather dentist’s chair filled the silence. The murderer spends time dressed in white beneath the ground beside a bubbling fountain. Not all psychics were crackpots.

Her dad had cleaned dirt off the Ford Anglia’s registration plate. It would have been a strain in the tight space. He had not noticed his mobile fall out of his pocket.

Terry had told Martin Cashman he was going to ring his daughter and Stella had not believed it because he had not called. Terry could not ring because Ivan Challoner had his phone. Too tired to drive, he had slept in his car all night – in his clothes – and when he woke he’d parked near Broad Street and bought ham rolls in the Co-op. He was going to call her before he drove back to London and that was when he realized he did not have his phone. Upset by such a stupid mistake, his heart rate took off. Her dad had died in the street.

Sarah was talking: ‘When I was a child – I must have been terribly young – I would be sent to find Antony at mealtimes. I’d get a chair and bolt the basement from the outside and then search the house. Bonkers really, it showed how much I hated him, but this was always the last place I looked, although it was where he would be. Eventually I’d pluck up the courage and sneak down the first few steps. The surgery was always empty with the light on and the rinsing fountain going. My mother would tell me off for trespassing because only Antony was allowed here.’

‘This is hardly the time for a jaunt down memory lane,’ Stella barked. ‘We need to get Jack out of here.’

Jack groaned and, his eyes shut, moved his head towards the rubbish on the worktop and the images of Kate Rokesmith’s childhood mouth.

‘He doesn’t want the light – he’s probably getting tinnitus.’ Sarah placed the sunglasses back on his face. ‘My point is, having bolted him in, the only explanation for why Antony was not here when I came looking is that there is another way out.’

Fresh air. The door and window Stella had seen in the garden.

She put her dad’s phone in her anorak pocket and this time paced the room purposefully, opening cupboards, poking in the space under the stairs. She found boxes of cotton-wool pads, swabs, syringes, plaster moulds, replicas of upper and lower sets of teeth, X-ray film: the equipment of a dentist working fifty years ago.

The music was faint at first, then swelled as if a door somewhere had opened.

‘Beethoven’s “Pathétique”.’ Sarah could have been introducing a recital.

Ivan Challoner was still here.

‘Ivan told me this was his son’s favourite music, his wife played it on the piano at bedtime while he read him Narnia stories.’ Stella spotted the speakers, four tiny discs, inserted above overhead cupboards. ‘I believed him.’

‘It’s all right, don’t cry, we are going to solve this,’ Sarah murmured to Jack. She rinsed out a glass on the counter and filled it with water. She gently inserted a straw between Jack’s lips and held the glass. He sucked weakly on it but then gave up.

In a closet hung a row of dental coats, white faded to grey. The temperature was lower than in the room behind her. Stella dragged the coats off the rail and flung them on the floor. She felt the panel at the back, tracing the patina of the wood. A button was fitted into the panel. Stella pressed it, pulled it, pushed it, but it did not give. She twisted it and fell forward into the cupboard as the wall gave way. Threads of fog drifted into the room and cold air seared her cheeks. She was by the stone steps where Sarah had found her.

Ivan had used a secret exit.

Stella shouted back into the room: ‘I’ll get help.’

‘I told you he’d do this, but you wouldn’t believe me. You spoil that boy. Now look what he has made me do.’ Ivan Challoner unhooked the poker from the carousel of hanging fireplace tools and stirred the embers noisily. He could not drown out his stepfather:

‘Children have to learn the hard way, that’s how they get backbone, Antony’s like a girl. I’m keeping my study locked from now on. Antony doesn’t know what to do with that steam engine, he doesn’t play with it properly. I’ve confiscated it. He has his own room, I’ve told him to keep to it. We have to have rules. Children prefer them.’

If he fumbled over a sentence, Ivan Challoner repeated it, the next time getting the words right:

‘When we move to London you’ll have a bedroom all of your own at the top and must keep to it. There will be strict bedtimes and no answering back and crying. I’ve told you, your father is dead and now you answer to me. We have to have rules. You will never be my son, you have no backbone and I already have a daughter.’

Eventually Ivan had become word perfect, but by then Mr Glyde too was dead.

The fire had nearly died. Ivan held a sheet of newspaper over the aperture until it sucked inwards and glowed orange.

‘Now look what he’s done. When we move he stays in his room. We have to have rules…’

A flame popped up behind a log and he fed it kindling and blew hard. Another flame darted out and vanished. Then another, and soon the flames joined up. When the fire had taken hold he laid the picture of his Cathy just out of reach of the flames.

‘You spoilt our son because you are spoilt, sullied, corrupted,’ he told Cathy.

‘He’s not your son. He is nothing to do with you.’

He put the flat of his fingers to his lips, kissed them and tipped his hand away towards the fire. Cathy was smiling. Heathcliff smiled back.

‘Go well, my darling. It’s for the best. I told you I knew what was best for you.’

There was a sound. He knew all the sounds in this house. It was the kitchen door. Whoever it was imagined they were opening it quietly. He had planned properly and long before they arrived had cut the power and prepared everything.

‘Sweet dreams, little Jonny. Sleep tight, don’t let the bugs bite.’ He knew what to say to children. ‘Shut your eyes and count to ten. When a person dies they wake up. That is all dying is. We wake up somewhere else.

‘We’ll give them time, Cathy. Sarah will know where I am, but will put off looking. She is such a daddy’s girl, while Stella Darnell is used to nosing in lives that are not her own. Sarah is not a proper sister; she does not understand loyalty.’

He heard footsteps in the passage. They would go upstairs, then to the garage and then they would go to his father’s surgery. He hid in the passage and once they were on the basement stairs, he ran across the hall and drew the bolt across. He returned to the sitting room and, aware of the value of precise timing, waited a further five minutes.

He rested the needle on the record and when the music began gradually turned up the volume. Cathy played the ‘Pathétique’ beautifully; it always put the boy to sleep.

The cold air winded Ivan when he opened the back door.

The garden gate was still padlocked – he had expected to find the chain cut. He hurried along the gravel path, past the buttress, around the church and paused outside the porch to tie up his shoelace. The fog was clearing and the headstones were like carious teeth against the diminishing white. Ivan felt a stirring of dread. The snow was melting and the thaw was coming.

He pulled the knot tight and became aware of an infinitesimal creaking close to his ear. It was persistent; gathering force, it grew to a rushing climax with a thump. He whipped around. Behind him in the shadowy porch the great studded door was closed. It had not come from there. Then sounds were all around him. A slab of snow slid off the roof and exploded on the ground in chips of ice.

Ivan’s shoes tightly laced, he was ready to pay his respects, but was mesmerized by the dripping and plashing so that when he heard the splitting of an icicle high above his head, he paid no attention.

Ivan Challoner was conscious long enough to feel the infinitely sharp object drive deep into the base of his neck. The pain was over before it had begun.

Stella used the church tower to get her bearings and sprinted over the lawn to the gate she had seen when she and Jack came to his mother’s grave. The mist was clearing, the sliver of moon bright. The ground where the snow had melted was dark like craters in the strange light: one of these caught her eye.

Ivan Challoner lay face-down on the path, a stain spreading out from his head. Stella looked around. The churchyard was still, the wind had died down, and the quiet was broken only by branches shedding snow. Walls, graves, mausoleums were gradually exposed as snow melted.

Ivan’s blood was soaking into the gravel. Stella bent down: he had been stabbed in the back of the neck.

Jack had found Ivan after all.

She stepped back, her hands away from her; this was a crime scene.

She aimed the remote control at Terry’s car. Her phone was where she had left it between the seats. Stella dialled 999.

‘Which service would you like?’

‘Ambulance, two please.’ Stella took a breath and heard herself say: ‘We need the police.’ She gave the address and rang off.

She gathered herself; Jack had been unconscious when they found him. Sarah would have been able to tell if he was faking the symptoms. Someone had bolted the door from the outside. Jack had not killed Ivan. Who had?

Sarah Glyde.

Stella jumped when the church clock chimed four times. Although it was the dead of night, it was not entirely dark and she could see the silhouette of the weathervane on the top of the spire. She wished that it could be her dad who answered her call.

She took out his phone from her pocket and climbed into his car, locking the doors. She turned on the engine and, uncoiling the car charger in his glove box, plugged it in. This time when she switched it on, it stayed on. She chose Dialled Calls.

She did not scroll down far before she found ‘Stella mob’. The phone had been used to call her old number the afternoon before he died. Her dad did not have her new mobile number. She had not bothered to give it to him.

The headlights of the emergency services cut through the trees, making them seem to dance and swoop as if inhabited by Jack’s phantoms. Stella got out of Terry’s car and walked towards the lights.

Perhaps if she had given her dad her new number, he would have told her about the Rokesmith case. She would have agreed to work with him. She could have helped. Perhaps if she had answered his call, it would have changed the ending and they would be waiting by the church for the ambulance and the police together.

Perhaps.