‘Embarking on an expedition?’ Lifting a garden spade and doctor’s bag from his car, Professor Ramsay addressed the boy, who knelt on the kerb coaxing a beetle into a porthole in the back of the engine’s cab.
‘We’re going to the Bell Steps, aren’t we, Jonny?’ Kate, with the mother’s anxiety that her son would ignore the question, replied in a cheery tone.
However, the boy announced: ‘He is going to fight at a war.’ Jon gravely eyed the spade.
‘Splendid. We need good soldiers.’ Mark Ramsay tucked the spade under his arm.
Jon snatched up his engine and struggled to his feet, causing the beetle to tumble out of the cab. It was crushed by his heel when he set off in a straight line, keeping to the kerb.
‘I’ve a headache so cried off my ma-in-law’s. A stroll should clear it,’ Kate ventured, taking her eye off Jonathan.
‘This is headache weather,’ Mark Ramsay agreed, swinging the medicine bag as, smiling, he watched Kate set off in pursuit of her son.
She straggled along the baking street towards the church, dazzled by darts of light from flecks of quartz in the paving and oppressed by the dome of white-blue sky. At Rose Gardens North, the asphalt had softened and swollen in the intense heat. Kate felt her limbs grow leaden. She glanced back; Professor Ramsay was still by the kerb.
Too late she made an effort to steer Jonathan away from the statue of the Leaning Woman. Naked from the waist up, as the name implied, the statue leant towards the Great West Road with arms folded; her sublime pose, describing the curve in the carriageway, contrasted with the clamour of speeding traffic.
Jonathan had become attached to her. He painted sloppy powder-paint pictures of her and fashioned lumpy clay models with misshapen breasts.
‘Boo!’ He sprang out from behind the plinth. Kate pretended shock.
On their last visit he had been dismayed to find her actual breasts slathered with green paint and a plastic strawberry punnet dangling like a handbag from her arm and demanded Kate climb up and take it off. She had been unable to snap the nylon cord or undo the knot, but had promised that next time they would bring a knife. She had presumed he would forget and had brought no kind of cutting implement.
Jon rampaged around the statue, deaf to his mother’s assurances that she would remember the knife on another walk. He slid to the ground with a despairing sob, lips pouting, grizzling: ‘You said you would be-fore and you did-ent.’
Kate snatched the steam engine off him and stalked away. His yells escalated to choking screams. She made for the subway ramp and did not stop when the noise subsided into intermittent wails. Later, this scene – a little boy huddled at the foot of a statue, hugging his knees – would shock the police officer who was unable to persuade him to leave.
Kate plodded on, her sandals slapping the ground; glare bounced off the concrete slope, the tiled walls, the metal railings, all conspiring to bewilder and enervate.
She did not hear the footsteps or notice that the crying had stopped.
The engine was wrenched from her, the metal ripping a nail on her forefinger. Jonathan barrelled past, jolting her hip, and belted on into the tunnel.
‘You hurt me. You idiot!’
She turned on to the lower ramp. Through the subway railings she caught a flicker by the statue, but dismissed it as a trick of the light. The turquoise tiles were closing in. A ring pull in the gutter flashed in the sun as she passed.
‘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.
1
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.