The Detective's Daughter

8

Tuesday, 11 January 2011

The light flickered and the lamp-post emitted an insistent buzz. At half past ten the Great West Road was still busy, headlights sweeping over the bollards stopping access to Rose Gardens North, their shadows in continual flux. Neither the buzzing nor the traffic penetrated a mantle of silence in the cul-de-sac.

In the 1950s the arterial road cut a swathe through West London, and all that was left of Rose Gardens was a row of six Victorian labourers’ cottages. The six new lanes extended to London Airport. The council, perhaps in bureaucratic penance for the demolition of the ivy-clad dwellings and burgeoning orchards bounded by hawthorn hedgerows, designated a patch of leftover land for recreational purposes. Bushes and infant cherry trees dotted newly sown grass (no dogs or balls allowed) in scant imitation of the orchards. Benches – each dedicated to a worthy councillor – were placed strategically in the shadow of the church. Each spring the trees offered a pink spray canopy, their colour offsetting the miles of tarmac. Soon the road claimed its first fatality: an eighty-one-year-old woman, her body memory obeying a vanished map, walked along Black Lion Lane as if the new road were not there and died instantly. Central railings were installed to discourage further deaths.

Time passed: the bushes grew into a forbidding shrubbery, tree trunks thickened, weeds ruptured the paths, frost forced the cracks apart to become potholes for rainwater and rubbish. In response to a residents’ petition, the benches – a magnet for drunks and suspicious-looking men – were removed. In the gleam of moonlight the plunging branches of the grand old sycamore provoked nameless dread in scurrying passers by; the paths were abandoned for a muddied track short-cutting over the grass to the subway. Set back from the Great West Road, shrouded from the pavement and St Peter’s Church by encroaching foliage, the little park was no longer a place to linger.

Stella could have come to Terry’s house at any time; assuming her to be grieving, Jackie did not expect her to be at work, but she was loath to meet Terry’s neighbours so she waited until it was dark. On her return from Mrs Ramsay’s she had found Jackie interrogating the revised rota. Michelle’s son had broken his arm, Felicia had resigned to work privately, Maxine’s brother had been in a car accident so she had gone to Manchester and Shelley was already doing the workload of two: they had a staffing crisis. Stella took all the shifts. A drawback of success was that she did less cleaning so, despite her high-calibre team, she relished any chance to do the work herself.

After two hours of vacuuming, polishing and mopping in the offices of a financial advice company by Hammersmith Underground station, she had stepped out on to the Broadway and, zipping up her windproof jacket against a bitter wind, driven to the house where she had spent the first seven years of her life. It was another job, she repeated to herself; Terry was another client.

She caught a movement in bushes across the road and peered through the windows of her van, ready to drive off. There was no one.

The lamp-post came to life and orange light dulled the colours of the parked cars to muddy brown and made gaunt shadows that quivered on the camber. Stella scanned the shrubbery again and wrongly assumed that a lumpish shape in the undergrowth was a bush.

She kept close to a privet that Terry had let grow tall – presumably to block a view into his living room – and unlatched the gate. Immediately she tripped on a hard object and her key-ring torch revealed a cast-iron shoe scraper: a painted squirrel nibbling on a nut in the middle of the crazy paving. She carried it to the front door, using the toe of her steel-capped boot to edge it into line with the tiled step. Stella fished in her jacket for his keys, too preoccupied by the enormity of her task – she had never been to Terry’s house uninvited – to consider why the scraper was on the path in the first place.

The lamp-post went on and light picked out recently repointed brickwork and newly painted sashes. Stella guessed that Terry had done the work; he would not trust others. It was probably such stubbornness that had killed him.

In 1981, the year Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government increased police pay, Terry worked more overtime than usual and was able to buy the corner house that he and Stella’s mother had rented after their marriage in 1966.

Many of Clean Slate’s clients lived in this part of Hammersmith: lawyers, judges, actors, journalists; ambitious professionals with no time or inclination to scrub or dust. The area was more openly opulent than it had been in the late sixties during Stella’s time there, when a mix of ramshackle upper-middle classes and working people like Terry had resided more comfortably side by side. Nowadays a policeman would be unusual; Stella guessed that Terry had not socialized with his neighbours so would not be missed.

Terry Darnell had cared little about social class; a detective, he could enter any home and poke about under baths, stairs and floorboards with impunity. He could delve into the recesses of all manner of lives and expose the unspeakable. Stella too, unimpressed by her clients’ status, applied astringents and detergents, wielded brushes and mops, listening without comment or judgement to dilemmas and dramas not dissimilar to those investigated by her father.

However, as Stella stared up at the drawn bedroom curtains and tightly slatted blinds, she found the notion of a shared experience with Terry untenable.

She ran the soles of her boots over the scraper and shook loose his mortice key, which turned easily in the lock. She was not so lucky with the Yale; it would not budge. Used to the idiosyncrasies of locks she inserted her gloved fingers into the letterbox, the flap mouse-trapping them, and eased the door back and forth while manipulating the torque with the key. She detected the correct position in the cylinder, the tumblers released, the plug rotated and the door opened.

Dry leaves were crushed underfoot behind her.

Stella left the door ajar, the key in the lock, and rushed to the gate. Wind tore through the hedge, smacking at her jacket, shaking chimes hung in next door’s porch that set off a tinkling discord of notes.

She put her staff through a drill for entering empty premises. The handbook instructed vigilance; keep the key at all times. Do not leave the door open even to go out to the bins: a burglar needs only seconds to slip inside.

Besides her van, four cars were ranged along the nearside kerb; the bays by the bushes were empty. A gust sent leaves and a squashed milk carton racing along the gutter and somewhere a can clattered and bounced on tarmac. The lamp went out and the carton was subsumed into velvet blackness. Stella concluded that leaves and twigs scraping and sweeping on stone could sound like shuffling soles. She was uptight and letting her imagination run riot, she told herself.

In the hall she skidded on a heap of mail-order catalogues in plastic wrappers silted up on the brush mat and had to kick them out of the way to shut the door.

Upstairs a clock ticked and from the kitchen came the drip-drip of a tap. The air was cold but lacked the stale atmosphere she would have expected of a place shut up and unoccupied even for a couple of days. She identified Lavender and Vanilla from Glade’s Relaxing Moments Collection, which she reserved for middle-range clients prior to a sale or new letting to lend a positive impression to the most tired or drab of interiors and reinforce the conviction that Clean Slate did a thorough job. Terry fitted this ‘average’ profile; most of her clients in this district preferred a less synthetic scent.

Unwilling to attract attention with lights, she twisted on the miniature Maglite attached to her key ring.

Always carry a torch in case the lights fail.

Phantoms shivered and re-formed when she levelled the beam around the hall. An old man flinching and jerking morphed into a coat stand draped with jackets, the telephone table was an arching cat that evaporated as the newel post, a slip of a cartoon character, rose to attention and then swooped up the stairs. Stella picked her way over the catalogues and along the passage to the kitchen.

Something had triggered the security light; Stella leant over the sink but could see no one beneath the window sill and decided it was branches of a forsythia bush waving in the wind. She turned to the room; pale appliances and worktops were clinical in the vibrant light.

There were none of the items that often take up kitchen surfaces: coffee-makers, toasters, cooking implements stuffed upright into ceramic pots, cutting boards harbouring germs; she guessed that little cooking or eating took place and recalled the Coke and two bacon rolls in the Co-op bag. Terry grabbed his food on the run; it was fuel only. She closed off the dripping tap, comforted by a whiff of bleach from the plughole.

On recent visits to Terry, Stella had seldom gone beyond the front room but remained on the sofa, drinking tea. They both knew that the sooner she finished it the sooner she could leave.

The American-style fridge with an ice dispenser dwarfed a reproduction country pine dresser that Stella remembered from her childhood. Ever the opportunist, Terry had snapped it up with a double bed, the kitchen table and her bedroom wardrobe from a man doing a house clearance next door to the scene of one of his crimes. Her mother told friends the cherry-stained pine was the tipping point to divorce, although much of the pine, darker with age, filled her small flat in Barons Court.

The dresser was stacked with white crockery; plates propped up like blank faces in the unremitting light. In Stella’s day the cupboard had been a dumping ground for household odds and ends: a basket of pegs, her mother’s cookery books, chipped cups and plates that her mum got second-hand, not caring if they matched, light bulbs, candles, lengths of cables and trinkets from Christmas crackers.

The fridge, its defrosting cycle complete, shuddered to meditative quiet. Stella was surprised to be greeted by beer and bottles of wine on racks and in the vegetable storage area. She had not thought of Terry as a drinker; whenever she saw him he was about to go on duty or was already working. In a pub he would nurse the same shandy all evening. Three eggs wobbled in a compartment along the top of the door; the only other food was jars of pickled onions, a lump of cheddar and a foil dish of half-eaten shop-bought shepherd’s pie. Terry would not have left food in the fridge if he’d been planning be go away. The drawers of the freezer were packed with more shepherd’s pies. Her mother was sure that Terry would disapprove of her recent decision to be a vegetarian; he disliked vegetarians, she said. Stella doubted Terry cared what her mother ate. Disliking waste, Stella would take his shepherd’s pies home. It felt like stealing; discouraged, she abandoned the idea.

A subtle drop in temperature came not from the fridge but elsewhere in the house.

Along the passage she made out the two panes of glass in the front door: oblongs suspended in darkness. The front door was shut. Above, a floorboard groaned; the house was adjusting to her presence.

She returned to the kitchen. Lit by the halogen beacon the garden was a stage set awaiting performers. Terry must have recently swept because only a sprinkling of leaves were strewn in the flower beds. A plastic picnic table with rainwater collecting in a dip was in the middle on the patio. Matching chairs had been tipped against it in the way Stella would have put them, to keep birds from soiling the seats. Clean Slate offered pressure-washing of paths and garden furniture in a ‘Get Ready for Spring’ package. She would hose down the paving and turn over the soil; the furniture could go.

She had never sat with Terry drinking a beer in the sunshine at the table, telling him about her latest contracts while he related his latest cases.

The security lamp went out. Stella groped for her Maglite.

He was watching.

Spangles of light floated before her. The torch’s battery was failing; the beam wavered to a watery yellow.

She was distracted by the acrid smell of kettle descaler from beneath the sink and bent to investigate. She had searched for a plunger in this cupboard, vast to a child, sent by Terry when the bathroom sink blocked. Stella dismissed the hazy memory.

Stella Darnell judged a person by their cleaning cupboard. Those who stashed materials on shelves, penning stray bottles into plastic boxes, folding dusters, chamois, dishcloths, scourers in stacks and hung up the dustpan and brush, rarely paid invoices on time and picked holes in the service. If she opened a cupboard and the contents spilled on to the floor she could expect to make the place her own and never chase payment.

Terry’s cleaning store was one of the tidiest Stella had seen.

A bowl, a dessertspoon and a mug were placed in a line on the draining board: Terry’s last breakfast. He had eaten cereal and drunk coffee. His six-foot-one-inch frame had briskly crossed the kitchen, leather soles clicking on the tiles, and with swift economic motions he had scooped the inside of the bowl and the mug with the soapy scourer, sluicing each item under the hot tap, careless of scalding already roughened skin. With a fling he had shaken excess water off his hands, drying them with a flapping cloth poked into a rubber holder suctioned on the side of the fridge.

Terry had left unaware that he was walking out of his house for the last time.

The tea towel was dry. Terry had been gone two days. Why was he in Seaford?

Take deep breaths. That’s it. In. Out. In. Out. Keep your eyes on the horizon. Once you get your sea legs, you’ll be right as rain.

He could not loosen her grip on the handrail as a force-nine gale tossed the ferry like one of her bath toys. Passengers were being sick on the deck above and the wind spattered them with flecks of vomit. He would break her tiny fingers if he tried to prise them off the rail. Her bird shoulders rose and fell as she obeyed his instructions. The little thing was quaking; he hugged her close.

Stella nudged the bowl, the spoon and then the mug an inch from their original positions so that Terry was not the last person to have touched them; she had wiped him away. She would crate the crockery for charity. She could not lose the impression that Terry was just out of her vision, monitoring her.

She aimed the torch behind the living-room door, darkness folding in behind her. Nothing. Despite her fleece-lined anorak, Stella felt cold. She would not turn on the radiators; Terry was sparing with central heating, she was sure she had always been cold when she visited.

She appreciated the clean lines and the metal sheen of the brushed chrome coal-effect fire flush with the chimney breast. When it was new, she had mistaken it for a television. She remembered Terry’s missing mobile phone and raked light under the sofa and armchair.

She was on the floor when the lamp-post came to life projecting a silhouette of the swaying hedge on to the venetian blinds. Stella shivered. With forensic care she lifted cushions and then knelt on the sofa, shining the torch down the back. Her nose close to the fabric, she could smell Terry’s aftershave; he sat here to watch television.

The lamp-post went off and at the same time a bluff of wind shook the windows, its moan rising to a whine before dying away.

The air freshener was in a double socket by the gas fire. She pulled it out. As she had guessed, the cartridge was empty. Terry was too meticulous to leave a used one plugged in: further proof that he had not planned to go away, that something had made him change his mind. Something was wrong.

Stella hurried back to the hall and trod the stairs with a creeping disquiet, zigzagging the torchlight ahead. The draught was stronger here and she stopped on the landing and confirmed again that she had shut the front door.

Terry’s toothbrush and razor poked out of a tumbler on the bathroom sink. She slid them to the other end of the glass shelf, but then admitting that Terry would hate to find them moved – she didn’t like Paul interfering with her things – restored them to their original positions. Every object was an emissary for Terry; he had her surrounded. Stella’s efforts to dispel her sense that any minute her father would appear and ask her what she was doing there were futile. She straightened the towel on the rail, although it was already straight.

Terry’s bedroom was four steps up from the bathroom landing, facing the street. When she had come to Terry’s for his ‘access weekends’ this door was always shut. She stayed in her bedroom until he called her for breakfast. Her old bedroom was on the left; she would leave it until last. Stella feared her heart would crash out of her chest when she put out a hand to open his door.

On her way to the bathroom the door had been ajar, now it was shut. Stella retreated to the lower landing and leant cautiously over the banister; stretching right over she could make out only a section of the front door. The failing beam did not reach the hall but she could distinguish the catalogues on the hall table and tried to remember placing them there. She must have put down the torch to gather them up and square them off or the pile would slither off. Her memory was getting worse.

She returned to the bedroom door, the swish-swishing of her anorak loud in her ear, and this time the door was open although she had not turned the handle. Of course the draught had shifted the door ajar. Stella let herself breathe.

The bedroom windows were locked and fitted with limiters; there was nothing Terry did not know about security. Stella swept the beam over bare walls, his bed with a melamine unit of shelves built around it and a pine wardrobe with matching chest of drawers on which sat Terry’s washbag, his father’s ivory-backed hairbrush with no handle and an almost empty bottle of Gillette aftershave. Stella gave him aftershave for birthdays and Christmas.

The expanse of ironed grey duvet was broken by light blue pyjamas shop-folded on a pillow. Stella did not touch them; from feet away she could smell Terry’s hair product.

The three wardrobe mirrors displayed her in crude triptych, a bulky figure in her anorak, her sharp features as granite in the unflattering light.

She disconnected another used air freshener behind the bedside cabinet. A radio alarm with huge digits was next to a lamp, and a torch with a luminous casing. It worked, so she swapped it with her own.

A ‘1’ was flashing on an LCD screen in the telephone base.

Terry had a message.

When she lifted the receiver its screen activated to blue. She pressed ‘play’. A female robotic voice with an American accent announced a voicemail had been left at three minutes past ten on Sunday, 9 January 2011, the day before Terry had died.

After a signal there was silence. Stella presumed it was a predictive dialled sales call that automatically cut when the recipient did not answer but nevertheless hit ‘replay’. This time when she played the message she distinguished what sounded like a gurgling spring; listening to it again she learnt nothing more.

She had forgotten 1471; she could find out the number of the caller.

She punched in the digits and another recorded voice stated ‘You were called at 10.03 p.m. on the ninth of January…’ She patted her pockets for a pen while stilted tones enunciated each number; giving up she pressed ‘three’ to connect and a chirpy set of notes indicated the number dialling. She counted the rings: one, two, three, before a long beep and the line cut off.

Air shifted in the room and Terry’s aftershave irritated her nostrils; stifling a sneeze, she saw that the bedroom door was shut. She dropped the torch and the light dipped crazily over the wall. It stopped, pointing at the mirror, the splash of light obliterating her reflection. She raked her hands through her hair; she must stay on it, she told herself. Her fingers numb with cold she tried again: ‘This is Terence Darnell, I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but if—’

Stella hurled the receiver; it bounced on the duvet, making a dent in the cotton, the voice chippering through the earpiece. The last number to dial the house had been Terry’s mobile phone. He had rung to get his calls.

When she was little, it had been the usher gliding up to their seats in the cinema with a slip of paper containing a message to attend a case, or a shambling man in a pub or a café, or a staccato voice on his radio relaying cryptic information that cut their time together short. As technology progressed this came via his pager, or the phone beside his cutlery, while they waited for food they would not stay to eat.

Stella examined the telephone base. In the last year Terry’s breathing had grown worse, he sucked in as he inhaled; the few times he’d called she’d heard it down the phone; every sentence seeming an effort, as if talking to her was a chore. Yet there was no sound on the recording.

The date was wrong.

While the time was right, it read nearly midnight and was three minutes fast – the date stated it was the tenth of January; it was one day slow. This meant that what the machine called the ninth was actually the tenth. Terry could not have called his answer machine: by three minutes past ten he had been dead about twelve hours.

The solution was obvious: whoever had used his mobile did not know Terry was dead and had tried to contact him to return the phone.

A tiny siren was coming through the receiver; the line was still open. She retrieved the handset and in a measured voice left her name and Clean Slate’s number, hoping that Terry’s battery would live long enough for the person to get in touch.

Stella remembered that this was the second message she had left and her relief dwindled. Someone had called but had not left a message; surely, had they wanted to return the phone they would have done so.

It did not make sense.

She went to the door.

It would not open. She rattled the handle. The door was locked. She was going mad.

The torch died. She flailed at the door; in the pitch black she lost her bearings and fell backwards catching the bed. Her bowel muscles contracted and she clenched her buttocks. She breathed deeply and after a bit the smell of washing detergent grounded her. She needed to pull herself together, she berated herself.

At that moment a spear of orange light cut across the door. The lamp-post had come on and was shining through a crack in the curtains.

She found the fluorescent torch – a yellow shimmering stick – at her feet, but it didn’t work. The lamplight went off. She grasped again at the doorknob, wrenching it, and this time the door opened. The cold air made her shiver and her teeth chatter. She clenched her jaw, furious at losing her nerve. It was obvious that the handle needed oiling; it was a knack, that was all. As for the door being shut, she had closed it herself when she came in to stop the draught. Terry was dead, she had seen his body, he was not here.

She had to rely on her failing key-ring torch to get across the landing to her bedroom. This room overlooked back gardens in St Peter’s Square and below, in the garden adjoining Terry’s at the end of a winding slate path, she could make out a summerhouse. This was familiar, although she had not seen it from this angle before and not at night. She was looking into Mrs Ramsay’s garden.

She had forgotten how close to Terry Mrs Ramsay lived. When she came to her house she approached from King Street and, intent on work, could forget his proximity. She had been round the corner from Terry many times in the last two years; never once had she thought about him. Her favourite client and her father occupied different worlds.

There was a shriek: hollow and agonized. Stella clutched at the window sash, her heart pumping. A bark answered, rougher and less distinct than a dog’s, and a fox bounded along the path and leapt on to Mrs Ramsay’s garden table, snuffling to and fro, its eyes flashing, before it melted into the undergrowth by the wall. Stella tried to regain equilibrium; never had it seemed so easy to have a heart attack.

The old lady fretted that children played hide and seek in her garden, concealing themselves under the table, in the bushes or the summerhouse. She accused Stella of not believing her but seemed mollified when Stella offered to scrub down the table, remove the bird shit and treat the wood. Stella had not invoiced her.

Mrs Ramsay had been wrong: Stella had believed her. The daughter of a detective, she was aware that the improbable was probable and had scanned the garden for signs of intruders – scuff marks, sweet wrappers, footprints in the soil – but found nothing. She wished now she could reassure Mrs Ramsay that it was a fox.

She found a silver pen on the window sill. Stella could not decipher the inscription in the poor light but could explain why it was there: Terry would have been scribbling notes at the desk and got up to check what had activated the security lamp. The patio not being visible from here, he would have gone downstairs to investigate and, fearless, crept along the passage to the kitchen and opened the back door.

She trained the torch on the door as if Terry might be about to return from the kitchen – panting and irritable – to switch off the lamp and go to bed, leaving the chair by the window as it was now, with his pen on the sill.

The torchlight flickered, grew brighter, then dimmed and died.

Stella felt about for the desk lamp, her breath uneven. It was angled downwards but after the comparative dark, the light dazzled her. A stapler, a plastic clock, a Nescafé jar jammed with pens and pencils and a pile of magazines shrank to prosaic normality.

On the shelves where Stella’s few books had been were books on forensics, biographies of police officers, true crime paperbacks: the Moors Murders, the Kray twins, Harold Shipman and a copy of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. A computer with a flat screen monitor sat on top of a blotter in a mock-leather holder. Terry would have used a computer at work, but Stella was surprised that he owned one, thinking him uncomfortable with new technology. The magazines were editions of The Job, the Metropolitan Police in-house publication. She sat down at the desk, which tilted as she leant upon it. By her elbow was a blank sheet of headed notepaper created on a computer unlike Clean Slate’s embossed letterhead on vellum. Colin Peterson offered ‘Quality rendering and screeding’. Scribbled at the bottom was: ‘17/6 – 21/7, spare room’. Stella fizzed with betrayal: Terry had not mentioned he was having her bedroom decorated. She folded the paper and wedged it under the leg of the desk to stop it wobbling.

The room did need a make-over: it was still the pink that Terry had chosen for the daughter he had wanted but not got. Red carpet tiles were shiny with ingrained dirt and scored with indentations from the chair wheels. She finger-tested the desk and found no dust. Methodically she repositioned the objects as if making last-minute adjustments for a party. It did not lessen the impression that Terry was in the house or that she should not be there handling his possessions.

On one wall, a laminated London street map replaced her poster of John Travolta in Grease. Stella knocked over the pen jar trying to see if there was anything written on the red and black wire-bound calendar above his desk. January was blank. She flicked through, searching for a clue as to why he was in Seaford. Nothing. January was blank. Terry had no life.

For the next hour she was busy: pulling out drawers, emptying files and collecting bank and pension statements, utility bills, the documents needed for probate. The shredder ground on as she fed it with out-of-date MOT certificates, insurance schedules for cars Terry had sold or part-exchanged, receipts, payslips for the last forty years. She stuffed instruction leaflets for cassette recorders, kettles, even a bread-maker, into a rubbish sack along with the police magazines. Despite her hurry, she was methodical about recycling and confidentiality. Soon the shredder bin overflowed, stalling the motor. She wasted time picking concertinaed strips from the teeth with the penknife blade on her key ring but it would not start.

In the last desk drawer, in a manila envelope, was a photocopy of Terry’s will, confirming Stella as sole beneficiary of his estate. This discovery should not have been a shock – her father had no other children and she was his next of kin – yet it was.

In the silence of the shredder she heard her mobile phone beeping and pulled it out of her pocket. A voicemail: the person who had Terry’s phone. She connected to the message service with clumsy fingers, tapping her feet while the automatic voice listed options, unable to circumvent the preamble. At last there was the beep signalling the message, followed by a jumble of white sound. She caught Paul’s voice: ‘I am outside.’

Stella rushed out on to the landing and, opening Terry’s bedroom door, she ran to the window and lifted a slat in the blinds. The wind had died and the road was quiet; there was no one there. The message had been left half an hour before. Paul had given up and gone home.

In Terry’s office she sat down, stretched out her legs and stared at the ceiling while her heartbeat returned to normal.

The ceiling wanted decorating, the plaster was cracked, the white paint had gone a nicotine yellow – although Terry had given up smoking when Stella was five – and on the loft hatch it was flaking off. She had forgotten the attic. Above her a square of yellow bled around the edges of the ill-fitting flap.

The attic light was on.

He took away her beaker of water. She would not drink it because of drowned birds in the tank even when he told her he had run it from the kitchen tap. She whispered that there was a murderer in the attic. He assured her it was his job to capture all bad people and there were none here. It was their game. ‘My daddy catches bad people.’ This time she would not play and was quiet. She did not believe him. He could not catch all bad people. In that instant he felt his world collapse.

Stella flicked off the light and stamped out on to the landing. Closing and opening the door loudly she inched back to the study out of the sightline of the trap door from which lines of light cast a glow on the paraphernalia spread over the carpet.

Whoever was up there was calling her bluff in return. Stella, fighting the urge to run, pulled on the attic doorknob releasing a ball-catch. Chill air drifted through the aperture, a scattering of grit smattered her face and she was smothered by soft fabric. Stifling a shout she crashed against the desk, knocking the lamp. The bulb smashed. She snatched at the material, her eyes smarting, and pulled it away: she choked on dust and coughed violently.

Stella made out a green fleece strung with cobwebs on the carpet tiles, spot-lit by the shaft of light. She picked it up and shook it. It had a logo for an alarm company embroidered on the breast, the ‘A’ of ‘Abacus’ forming the pitched roof of a house, the ‘S’ eliding with ‘Security’.

Through the hatch she could see roof beams, lagged with glass fibre felt and, at the apex, a light bulb hanging from a cord.

Against her better judgement she hauled down the ladder and, grabbing the hole punch, reached up and smashed the hole punch against the bedroom ceiling, intending to flush out whoever was there. Silence.

The next time she risked going all the way up, her body tensed for an attack; she ventured on to boarding which sprang but held her weight. Except for a few boxes the loft was empty, and there was nowhere to hide in the chimney recesses or under the eaves. Then she saw the source of the draught: the skylight was tilted open. She levered it down with a bang and shut out the low-level scrawl of the A40; only her breathing was audible. She pulled herself together: Terry had forgotten to close the window and turn off the light.

A dented Revelation suitcase lay on its side out of the path of the retracting ladder. Stella recognized it: she had bounced on its lid to help lock it for their last ever summer holiday. While her mum assembled clothes, a first-aid kit, washing things, Stella had furtively explored the pockets with elastic tops, played with the straps and stroked the silky lining within which she discovered grains of sand and broken shells; vestiges of other holidays. Terry strode ahead to the bus stop, holding the case lightly as if it were empty, while her mother let the gap widen, apparently to keep pace with Stella – except when Stella had tried to catch up with Terry, her mum had tugged her arm. Stella had invested all her hopes in the pinch of sand. Terry had promised that they would make a castle with a moat but she did not remember that they had. Home again, she had crawled inside the case and shut the lid but no one had come to find her.

Behind the suitcase was a carton which had held twenty boxes of Kellogg’s Coco Pops. Stella pulled open the flaps.

A row of three plump-cheeked faces framed with stiff nylon hairstyles and sightless eyes stared out. Terry had kept her dolls. One doll cried when the string in her back was tugged; the cord cut into Stella’s fingers and she hated the sound of crying. Another doll wet herself when water was poured into a hole in her head. As a bed-wetter herself, she hated this feature even more. Beneath the dolls was a skipping rope, a bundle of dolls’ clothes, a plastic stove and a matching washing machine. Tucked in too was a uniform for playing nurses, a plastic stethoscope, a pack of cards with the Tower of London on the back and an unopened bag of marbles with a price label of ten new pence from the post office in King Street.

Terry would bring the box into the living room after she had arrived, accompanied by a small suitcase all of her own. She would give up her coat and perch on the settee, unsure what was expected of her. The toys were never there already or they would have been easier to ignore. Instead she had to feign interest as the box was ceremoniously placed at her feet. She would listlessly stir the contents, keeping her back to Terry. He would be reading a newspaper but really watching to see if she liked her toys. So, paralysed with hopelessness and dogged by the dim conviction she would fail, but not sure how or at what, Stella had determinedly dressed and undressed the dolls, rolled marbles along the carpet and put them in the washing machine or the oven and taken them out. Later she would report to her mother that Terry had read to her, asked her about school and taken her along the towpath to collect nature. Her mother never believed her.

By the adjoining wall was a shelf unit packed with file boxes. Stella read the title printed on every box: Katherine Rokesmith 27 July 1981.

There were twenty-three file boxes each tied with a ribbon. As Stella hauled down the first in the series from the left-hand side of the top shelf she kicked something. It was a camp stool. It meant that Terry had spent time here. She unfolded it, and squatting with a box at her feet, eased off the lid. The inside was crammed with papers. Stella felt a wave of nausea.

Terry had stolen the paperwork of a murder case.

She flipped through the contents, the dank papery smell making her sneeze. Terry had not stolen the documentation, he had copied it: photographs, newspaper cuttings, index cards laid two to a page, the details of every person who had come forward with information, however trivial. One woman had found the wrapping for a packet of Polos in the gutter by the Ram public house; another reported her husband; two teenaged girls had seen the victim walking with her boy along Hammersmith Terrace three weeks before the day of the murder. Many pages were blotted with actual as well as photocopied mug rings and smears of grease. Every page had an MIR number in the right corner and was in strict order.

Stella did not need telling that MIR stood for Major Incident Room, the basis of an indexing system and where the police conducted every murder investigation. At Hammersmith Police Station this room was the Braybrook Suite. Terry had taken her there.

Cold penetrated her bones and her feet were numb but she lifted out a few sheets stapled together: the Interim Report by Detective Inspector Darnell. In that instant Stella understood why Terry had the boxes.

The Rokesmith case had never been solved.

While the suitcase and the toy-box on the other side of the attic were coated in grey dust, the boxes were clean. Stella saw what had made her sneeze: a canister of Mr Sheen furniture polish stood in the shadow of the shelves, a folded duster beside it. She frowned: a damp cloth would have done better. The bulb flickered and she looked up expecting Terry.

‘Go and make us a cup of tea, there’s a love. Leave that to me.’

She snapped into work mode, hauling down the next box in the sequence and lugging the two over to the hatchway; her boots thumped on the boards despite her efforts to take light steps. She did not want next-door to hear, nor did she want to fall through the floor.

Two flights down the front door closed.

She clasped the boxes, ice-cold sweat trickling out of her armpits, and backed behind the chimney. The hatch door was down, the ladder was out; she would be found. She patted her pockets for her phone. She had taken off her anorak and draped it over the desk chair and her phone was in the pocket.

The church clock struck four, the sound muffled. If she shouted for help she might not be heard through the thick fire wall. She crept to the skylight and eased it up. A spattering of freezing rain drenched her face. Wiping her eyes she saw that the creeping blue light of dawn gave definition to Mrs Ramsay’s summerhouse. A bird twittered, answered by another, then another; the dawn chorus had begun. She could not climb out on to the sloping roof.

Below her the house was quiet and Stella dared to peer down into the study. Shredded paper had sprung out of the bin and trailed over the carpet tiles.

Stella hurled herself down the ladder and reached back for the two file boxes. There was no one on the landing, and now there was enough light to see without a torch. Terry’s bedroom door was closed. Her mind was playing games with her.

She took the stairs two at a time and in the hall skidded on the catalogues on the mat, falling heavily on one knee; keeping hold of the boxes and ignoring pain shooting up her thigh, she grabbed at a coat hanging from hooks by the door and got to her feet.

She was staring at Terry. Tired, cheekbones gaunt, hair limp, his jacket crumpled; dead staring eyes that would not stay shut as he lay on the gurney. He held something under each arm and put a hand to his mouth, as if caught in the act. The fingers were cold against her lips. She pushed back her hair; he did the same. She gasped and his mouth opened. She had never seen him frightened before; then a sharp gleam of dawn sunlight penetrated the panes in the front door, highlighting dust on the mirror.

Stella wrenched open the door, slamming it behind her and blundered out to the gate.

A coach roared along the Great West Road, its sleeping occupants slumped against the glass. Only when she had clambered into the van and set the central locking did she register that she had the box files. She threw them on to the passenger seat and started the engine, flooring the accelerator and careering out of the street and down St Peter’s Square.

If Stella had checked the rear-view mirror when she turned out of Terry’s road she would have seen a figure under the cherry trees walking in the direction of the river where, thirty years before, Katherine Rokesmith had been found murdered. An hour later, when she was out of the shower, dressed and leaving for the office, Stella discovered she had left Terry’s keys in his house.