‘Darling, we needn’t concern ourselves with Mr Bramwell or the detective any more. There’s just the daughter now.’
She toasted him, toasted them both.
‘Luckily Stella is keen to confide in me because my hard work listening to stories about commercial floor care have paid off. What she has told me is good and bad so I want you to pay attention.’ She was still smiling. He did not trust the smile. Did she already know what he was about to say?
‘I invited Stella Darnell here tonight. No, don’t look like that; I know what I’m doing. We would have dealt with her but she refused to come. However, it’s a matter of time. Her new man cleans for me. I haven’t met him but I heard her talking to him by that statue; the night you told me off for taking a risk. Aren’t you glad I did go out on a limb? Who else loves you like I do? They are weaving a web, my darling; one that you and I will not be caught in. I will have to get another cleaner – a shame – this Mr Harmon is terribly good.’
An owl hooted from the direction of the church. The lattice windows were opaque with fog. Ivan was lighter for unburdening himself; she had put the problem in proportion. He could deal with Stella Darnell and Jack Harmon. He would not allow them to ruin a life that had taken thirty years to build: Fullwood House was sacrosanct. Bramwell had been easy; the detective’s daughter would be too. They would soon be safe.
He ran nimbly down to the basement, which he called the surgery, for that was what it had been in his father’s day. He had the only key so he knew it was unsullied by the detective’s intrusion.
The surgery was soundproofed and for this reason once he closed the door he did not hear a floorboard creak in the utility room, nor did he hear someone going up the stairs to the bedroom.
65
Monday, 24 January 2011
After he opened the back door, Jack pressed against the wall and let the minute hand go around his watch-face five times. Ivan Challoner had a mind like his own and would do everything he could to outwit him. He gave him time.
Jack glided along a flagged passage. Outside the fog was thinning and a moon appeared. Fact: a waning gibbous moon. It gave enough light to plot the room: a large kitchen. A carving knife lay on a long table but his experience with Sarah Glyde had told Jack he could not stomach blood and mess.
So far it had been too easy. He gauged the silence; it was too quiet.
He did not need to orientate himself. As in a dream, he knew the way. The doorway ahead led to the main part of the house and upstairs, as he expected, Jack found a corridor with five doors.
His boyish sing-song verse reverberated off the walls. He had been before.
Far off, a rook cawed three times. Rooks. He had heard them before too. A bar of light shone beneath the fourth door.
The last time he had turned the handle it had been higher up and difficult to grasp; he’d had to use two hands. Tonight the china knob turned with no effort.
A candle burned and, after the comparative darkness, the bright light hurt his eyes. His entrance caused a draught; the flame flickered and then flared up so the room seem to tip. The candle was in a silver holder with a snuffer attached. The wick was half submerged in molten wax. Jack estimated that the flame had another quarter of an hour.
A campaign of items advanced across the top of the dressing table: lipsticks, foundation, face powder, mascara, eye-liner, combs, hairbrushes, moisturizers, cleansers: the tools of magic. A used cleansing pad, pinched by fingers, stained by lips, lay next to lumps of cotton wool stained with red nail varnish. The black snood that she used to pull her hair back from her face when she did her make-up dangled from the mirror.
Minute fibres clung to an exposed lipstick, the surface of the open pot of face cream had crusted to a custard yellow. Balls of cotton wool were grey and dirty and a scent hung in the air, laced with the heavier tang of damp; it made his stomach clench. He could not touch the bottle of Eau Savage Extreme.
‘Boys don’t wear perfume. I bought it for your mother.’
‘It says it’s aftershave.’
‘And I said, put it down.’
The artistry created authenticity: the make-up, the potions and creams, nail scissors, nail varnish and nail-varnish remover had not been used for decades. This was the stage-set of an abandoned life; he was looking into the past to a time that had petrified; he could not obliterate the evidence with the click of a mouse or the turn of a street atlas page.
Downstairs, a clock struck the hour, followed by church bells, their volume varying as they were carried on the wind. He stopped counting after five and took the candle; cupping the dying flame, he walked egg-and-spoon-race style over to the bed.
He had made Stella count up the number of words she could see out of the car window while they sat in a traffic jam.
He lost count as words swam before his eyes: headlines which provided more context as time went by and the case became history. There had been other murders, other Kates.
Thames murder: Kate killer left no trace
Clueless detectives – Kate hunt stepped up
Kate: tragic boy speaks
Ten years: Kate TV appeal
Was Rokesmith Hammersmith Murder no. 7?
Murdered Kate’s boy is school bully
Rokesmith loses battle with cancer
Mystery flowers on murdered woman’s grave
Kate Rokesmith detective dies
Beneath each headline Jack read and reread the story of his mother’s murder. He could not change the ending: at the end of each article his mother was dead.
Mixed in amongst grainy images – newspaper orange-peeled with damp – were colour prints of Kate. Jack recognized the back of this house. Kate was in the kitchen filling a kettle, smiling brightly: the perfect housewife.
The kettle whistled like a train.
‘Give me that. It’s not for blowing through. You’ll fill it with germs.’
Kate lying fully clothed on the bed in this room, upon the same counterpane as the one on the bed now. She held a glass of red wine to the camera, smiling over the rim; her teeth were white and even. Three Kates reflected in the bedroom mirrors; Kate picking flowers in the garden; Kate outside the front door.
Jack lifted the candle close to the flaking plaster wall. Many photographs had been snipped; he examined one of Kate on the bed: the hand not raising the wineglass was holding a hand smaller than hers. Although he had been there, Jonathan Rokesmith had been excised from the picture.
Jack had lain on the bed beside his mother so that Uncle Tony could take their picture. He had picked flowers in the garden, carefully choosing her favourite ones. He had stood outside the front door and, while they waited to have their picture taken, asked when they were going home.
‘Sssh, darling, smile for Uncle Tony.’
‘After this, you’re to go and play in the sitting room, there’s a good boy. Your mother and I have much to talk about.’
A length of material was draped across the back of the bedstead. Jack directed the candle towards it and a heady scent filled his nostrils.