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.
2
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.
The starched white cotton shirt, sharp haircut and tailored suit trousers hinted at an authority confirmed when, having identified cleaners to cover the shifts, she tossed her gum into a waste bin and dialled the numbers on the list. She was pleasant but firm, overcoming objections or obstacles from the seventeen freelancers who worked exclusively for her. By five to nine the rota was complete and she had been at her desk three hours.
She strode through to the main office to fetch client details from signed contracts in her PA’s pending tray and was startled by knocking. A policeman was gesticulating through the wire-reinforced glass door panel.
‘I’m looking for Stella Darnell.’
‘You’ve found her.’
At six foot and in her mid-forties Stella was taller and older than the officer.
While he talked she grabbed a cleaning equipment catalogue from a shelf and, resting it on a filing cabinet, scribbled busily, squeezing words into the margins and around pictures of a soft banister brush with a wooden handle and a galvanized flat-top socket for a broom. ‘Superintendent Darnell… coming out… Co-op… Seaford… collapsed. Ambulance in 10 mins, paramedics worked… failed revive… dead on arrival.’
Stella circled ‘dead on arrival’ and laid down her pen. She contemplated the banister brush. It was not necessary, but would impress fussier clients; she would ask Jackie to order one and see how it went.
A mug of tea materialized by the catalogue and, as if she hovered far above, Stella gazed down uncomprehending: she had not heard Jackie arrive. The policeman’s voice, droning on like a radio announcer, was drowned out by the telephone. She counted the rings: it was answered on the seventh. Not good enough. She stipulated it should be picked up at three max.
‘Clean Slate for a fresh start. Good morning, Jackie speaking, how can we help?’
The tea was scalding and sweet. Stella’s own voice was reminding Jackie that she didn’t take sugar and Jackie was replying slowly and patiently, explaining in words of one syllable that it was for shock.
Your father is dead.
It was not until the late afternoon, in the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, that Stella entertained the notion that she should be upset. All day she had dealt with the police, medical staff, administrators and Jackie, who treated her with practical sympathy. Everyone’s response was out of proportion to Stella’s so she was grateful at last to be alone.
The NHS bag containing Terry’s belongings banged against a door as she emerged on to a goods road between the Cardiac Unit in a high-rise block and the shambling nineteenth-century building which housed the reception she had arrived at five hours earlier. Once a paean to Victorian endeavour, it was dwarfed by a maze of new-builds clad in steel and glass, its grandeur undermined by stuccoed pre-fabs and flaking render. She dodged a van and pushed through plastic flaps into a passage with a suspended ceiling and a flooring of epoxy quartz screed that emphasized a list to one side and gave her the impression of being on a ship.
Terence Christopher Darnell was pronounced dead at half past eight a.m. in the street where he had collapsed twenty minutes earlier. A female doctor told Stella that the probable cause was cardiac arrest but they could not be definite until they had performed a post-mortem. It was most unlikely, she had assured Stella, that ‘Terence’ had experienced pain.
His name is Terry.
She rarely called him Dad.
Stella frowned. She had not considered that he might have been in pain. She had also been informed, perhaps by the policeman, who was clearly both relieved and appalled by her lack of tears, that a lady coming out of the Co-op behind Detective Superintendent Darnell had said he’d toppled over like a toy soldier making no effort to save himself.
He was a toy policeman, Stella had nearly said.
She shouldered through another set of doors and found herself in a chapel; warm and dark, the quiet extreme after the bustle of the hospital.
Stella was about to leave, but arranged around an altar was a semi-circle of chairs and she slumped on to the nearest one, and dropped the NHS bag beside her.
Terence Christopher Darnell’s sudden death would mean extra work at a busy time, she mused. Stella’s parents had divorced when she was seven and her mother had not seen her ex-husband since Stella was old enough to visit him without being delivered or collected. Suzanne Darnell would lament that her marriage had been a wrong turning; she lived alone in West London, having made no further navigational errors. She would not help her daughter dispose of Terry and his belongings.
In Stella’s business, death was a prompt for a house clearance and thorough clean in readiness for sale; Terry’s death need be no different to any other, she told herself.
Although she was Terry’s only child, it had surprised Stella that he had a slip of paper in his wallet naming her as his next of kin because she saw him no more than three times a year. Sitting on the hard chair, surrounded by wall plaques commemorating patrons and patients of the hospital now at peace and in a higher place, Stella dwelt on the earthly fact of the death of a man she hardly knew. His body had not looked at peace.