The Detective's Daughter (2 page)

‘Calm down, darling.’ Kate tried to sound calm herself in case anyone could overhear. Jonathan had gone and she really did have a headache.

In the convex mirror at the mouth of the tunnel a figure merged into the darkness.

St Peter’s church bell struck ‘quarter to’ as the boy galloped along the subway, toot-tooting his way, his voice hollow. The fading sound had a melancholy quality, dying away in the ceramic-lined chamber. Although it was cooler here, the air was raw with exhaust fumes and the smell of piss.

Kate emerged on to Black Lion Lane South. The jumbled sounds of a television drifted from open windows in the Ram public house where baskets of vibrantly red geraniums, leaves frazzled, hung along the frontage, the red of their petals finding echo in the red umbrellas casting shade over empty tables. A solitary pint glass stood on a window sill; it was too early for lunchtime drinkers.

Kate steered Jonathan across Hammersmith Terrace. He shook her hand off his shoulder when she prevented him running his engine over the bonnet of the Ford Anglia outside the end house. She checked her hair in its wing mirror and caught Jonathan being Worzel Gummidge, lurching crabwise down the Bell Steps.

With no boats to churn up the river, the flickering surface mirrored spindly trees lining St Paul’s School playing fields on the far bank. The turrets of Hammersmith Bridge tottered as light obliterated the looping spans between the portals. If he were here, Hugh would inform them that the bridge had been designed by the man who created the London sewers and was opened by the Prince of Wales in June 1887.

She stepped gingerly over to where the wall of the gardens on Hammersmith Terrace cast a strip of shadow along the top of the beach; the shade did not afford a drop in temperature. A line of moss in the brick marked the level of high tide. Slung from iron hoops was a chain stained a lurid green by slime and weeds. Kate grasped this to steady herself on the rough ground.

On the shoreline, Jonathan Rokesmith filled the funnel of his engine with specifically chosen stones and fragments of glass. These, he explained to his invisible audience, were ‘je-wels’. He liked the sound of the word and repeated it when he reached the critical part of his operation. He guided the engine into the water. This was naughty. He looked to see if his mummy was watching.

The river filled and the current increased; the engine stirred lazily in the shallow water and for a while, made of metal and weighted by stones, remained anchored in the mud amongst rubble and the debris of centuries. It dislodged itself and, lifted by the current, was swept away to catch against a stanchion at Putney Bridge and sink. Buried in the silt of the Thames it would not be found for eighty-three years.

Kate Rokesmith was dead, her body sprawled on its back in the shrinking shade. Her neck twisted, she gazed sightlessly at the river, tangled tresses of her hair fanning out over the sun-baked mud. The swelling above her eye was stark as gravity drained the blood downwards and that side of her face gradually paled.

The tide encroached, narrowing the shore below the Bell Steps, which apart from the body was deserted.

Over the following weeks people would pick over the events of this day. In the Ram, drinkers sifted the few facts, retracing the likely route of the young mother’s walk from St Peter’s Square to the banks of the River Thames.

Kate Rokesmith’s decision to go to the river changed the lives of many. Jonathan’s memories of his mother would fade to a procession of shadows and murmuring embraces less substantial than his dreams.

In Britain, the Wednesday of that week was a public holiday. For decades, inhabitants of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham could describe where they were when Prince Charles married Lady Diana. The wedding overshadowed the murder two days earlier; few could recall that otherwise ordinary Monday in July 1981.

Even the smallest observation might have helped the police solve the murder of Katherine Rokesmith. In the end, it did not.

Sunday, 9 January 2011

The Toyota took three attempts to fire and the car was out of sight by the time Terry got moving. A skilled driver, he wove through the lunchtime traffic, snatching space, overtaking to slip in two vehicles behind the car at lights on Chalker’s Corner. It was indicating right. There was no right turn. Terry felt heat rise as the police officer in him wanted to pull alongside and flash his badge. The car crossed the junction but the indicator had warned him there would soon be a right turn. At Lower Richmond Road the car did indeed go right, then right again to rejoin the A316. Terry slid in behind and when it took the slip road on to the M3 congratulated himself on keeping his petrol tank full.

Terry Darnell knew he was dealing with a meticulous and observant personality, likely to notice a vehicle keeping pace, so he hung back until the M25; then he risked overtaking and keeping the vehicle in his rear-view mirror. He knew better than to underestimate his quarry: people surprise you.

Later he dropped back and tucked into the left lane with the car ahead. Luckily this was a cautious driver who would not speed; just like a woman. Just as well because Terry’s ten-year-old 1.4 engine would not be tortoise to this fuel-injected hare. He increased his distance when the other car crossed into his lane.

When it took the exit, Terry didn’t need to keep the car within his sights. He knew where they were going.

The hamlet had no through road and, although close to a town with a station, felt to Terry as remote as the depths of Dartmoor. It was remote in time too; iron lamp-posts had yet to shed light on a Victorian pillar box and the one street sign. Spreading oaks and forbidding acers and flint walls partially concealed substantial detached houses.

Terry watched the car go off left and continued on the bypass before he took a road to the sea and doubled back.

He let the Yaris bump along a lane treacherous with potholes and, steering it on to a secluded verge, killed the engine. If anyone came he would ask for directions to the church; that always went down well.

Terry registered his full bladder. He had not touched the flask of coffee he had made for staking out the premises; these days he wanted to piss all the time. He relieved himself behind the boot of the car. He tested his camera with shots of the tyres; feeling the tightening in his chest, he dismissed it.

The air was freezing; snow was forecast. He buttoned up his jacket. Snow would obliterate clues and hamper the simplest action. He did not find it as joyful as when Stella was little.

A weather-beaten sign pointed him towards the church and, picking his way along a rutted footpath crunchy with fallen leaves, he reached a lych gate. The intense quiet was broken by bells chiming three o’clock. Already the sky was darkening. He patted his pocket; his torch was there.

As he unlatched the gate and walked under the tiled canopy, another bout of dizziness overwhelmed him; despite what the doctor said, Terry knew it was blood sugar dropping. He had not eaten since his cornflakes that morning and these days he could not get away with it. There was no quaint village shop and he was reluctant to go into the town. It was when the perpetrator was cornered that less experienced detectives grew careless. Later he would eat the Kit Kat in the glove box with his coffee.

Terry lowered himself on to a bench within the lych gate and, resting his head back, read the laminated notices pinned opposite: flower rotas, times of services; a Wednesday coffee morning. His attention was aroused by a sign on red paper: ‘If you have lost a child, or know of a child that has died, however long ago, please come and join us in remembering them.’

He wondered if anyone could come or if it was for locals only. Did it matter if your child was alive and lost only to you?

He mulled over how many parents in this backwater could have suffered such a particular bereavement. It could not amount to a large congregation. A child had gone missing in the sixties near here; the girl had never been found but, as was becoming frequent, Terry could not conjure up detail. Some poor sod was tortured by that case; worrying over minor specifics, rifling through files he knew off by heart. Terry wiped his face – his memory really was on the blink – the poor sod was called Hall and was dead. He had read that the girl’s parents had also died; they would not be attending the service.

Kate Rokesmith’s murderer would be brought to justice. His own torture was at an end.

Terry took the path to the church. The tower was square and tapered; each point where it slimmed was marked by a line of jutting bricks giving the impression the structure could be telescoped upon itself. On its spire a golden cockerel weathervane facing towards the sea glinted in sunshine escaping from a break in the clouds. He remembered it from the funeral; it had put him in mind of his little girl. By then fifteen and doubtless into make-up and boys, she had no time for him. It was like one of Stella’s drawings which he had mounted in a scrapbook. Stella’s primary school pictures were bright with colour; if only life was how she had drawn it. When he asked if he could keep the ones she did on her visits, modest about her talent, she would shrug OK. The scrapbook still gave him happiness.

He had attended the service with a colleague, a woman whom he had quite fancied. Afterwards they dropped off for a drink at a pub on the A3 where she had called her boyfriend from a phone booth by the toilets; no mobile phones in those days. So that was that. Terry told himself it was not wise to mix business with pleasure. Instead, he had not mixed it with anything. Neither of them had seen anyone suspicious at the funeral. The case was as cold as ice and Kate had only been dead six weeks.

The murderer had been there, coiffured and respectable, in the left of the photograph by a headstone, watching the coffin carried out from the church. Three decades on, Terry, knowing whom to look for, had quickly spotted the killer in the crowd.

Any hope the Rokesmith family had of privacy had been dashed by the photographers, journalists, television crews and the obligatory straggle of onlookers who packed the churchyard. They had made Terry’s job harder but now he was grateful; he had the picture. It only proved the culprit’s presence at the funeral, but it was a start.

It would have been easy to chat with mourners without them batting an eyelid. There was no talk of a stranger acting oddly from the would-be detectives on the ground that day. Truth be told, Terry had been more interested in his sergeant – Janet, that was her name; after all, they believed they had solved the case, so in reality were only crossing Ts.

Hugh Rokesmith, Terry had observed to Janet over a pint of Fuller’s London Pride, had given a sterling performance, with the boy in his arms the perfect prop for the grieving widower. Terry had gone into the telephone booth after Janet and, with Stella’s weathervane drawing on his mind, called the Barons Court flat to see if she fancied meeting when he got into London. Stella informed him she was busy.

The dizziness ebbed. Trying to recall the whereabouts of the grave, Terry stumbled over uneven ground, going anti-clockwise around the building. The word ‘widdershins’ popped up: he had an idea his mum had warned it was bad luck to go widdershins around a church.

For the first time since Stella was born, Terry felt that luck was on his side. He threaded between the grassy mounds, the grass was damp with winter dew, and soon the bottoms of his trousers were sodden. He was long-sighted and could see the words engraved on headstones yards away. He ignored a row of nineteenth-century vaults for the moneyed dead, the mausoleums creating gaps like the canyon-like avenues in Manhattan. Or so he imagined, he had never been there.

In this section, headstones were older: Terry made out 1814, but most inscriptions were illegible beneath greenish-yellow lichen that crept over the eroding stone. Some were broken, their pieces lost in foliage or laid on top of the grave. Those who had tended the plots were themselves long dead.

An impenetrable hedgerow of beech bounded one side of the graveyard, woven through with tendrils of ivy and clumps of holly.

Terry came upon a gate and peered through the curling metal; another hedge within meant he had to crane sideways to see a house on a lawn. It was from one of the stories he had read to Stella: a witch’s house in a forest clearing, with lattice windows on the upper floor beneath gables carved with cut-out birds in flight, their shapes echoed by silhouettes of actual birds circling the stout chimneys.

Terry shrank back. Although the windows were dark, someone might be watching. On a weekday winter afternoon, a visitor to the church was rare; he would not blend in.

He stuck to a flagged path, grateful for firm ground and hastened between bushes clipped to form columns into an overgrown area with a wall, beyond which stretched away fields, brown and grey in the fading light. He crossed the grass in the gathering twilight and there it was; shaded by a larch and hidden from most sightseers: ‘Katherine Rokesmith. 27th July 1981’.

Terry doubted that these days the name would mean much to anyone.

A bunch of flowers leant against the headstone. Terry’s heart beat faster as he bent to examine them. Five yellow roses, their heads browning, the wrapping wrinkled from rain; he estimated they were about a week old. There was no shop label or price. He tore off a flower and dropped it in his pocket to show Stella. The grave was in good order, the grass clipped with no weeds; someone was tending it. Terry circled the plot snapping pictures: of the stone, a close-up of the roses and of the epitaph. He used flash: the merciless light highlighting the deteriorating writing. It could have been centuries old, yet some letters had no moss or lichen on them, as if whoever had begun restoration had given up or planned to return.

Suddenly the stillness was broken. The sound was slight, but Terry identified it instantly: the scrape of a shoe on gravel.

Someone was coming.

Monday, 10 January 2011

A woman sat in offices on Shepherd’s Bush Green integrating new clients into a cleaning schedule. It was an early morning task she enjoyed; it involved creating a list of staff, lining up availability to match time slots and applying a colour code to cells on a spreadsheet. Blue for mornings, yellow for afternoons, green for evenings and light green for late nights. She was methodical, switching between grids, extracting data from two files to populate a third. She chewed spearmint gum with her mouth shut, her jaw quietly working.