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.