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.