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 betrayaclass="underline" 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 voicemaiclass="underline" 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.