Free The Detective's Daughter by Lesley Thomson Page A

emitted an insistent buzz. At half past ten the Great West Road was still busy, headlights sweeping over the bollards stopping access to Rose Gardens North, their shadows in continual flux. Neither the buzzing nor the traffic penetrated a mantle of silence in the cul-de-sac.
    In the 1950s the arterial road cut a swathe through West London, and all that was left of Rose Gardens was a row of six Victorian labourers’ cottages. The six new lanes extended to London Airport. The council, perhaps in bureaucratic penance for the demolition of the ivy-clad dwellings and burgeoning orchards bounded by hawthorn hedgerows, designated a patch of leftover land for recreational purposes. Bushes and infant cherry trees dotted newly sown grass (no dogs or balls allowed) in scant imitation of the orchards. Benches – each dedicated to a worthy councillor – were placed strategically in the shadow of the church. Each spring the trees offered a pink spray canopy, their colour offsetting the miles of tarmac. Soon the road claimed its first fatality: an eighty-one-year-old woman, her body memory obeying a vanished map, walked along Black Lion Lane as if the new road were not there and died instantly. Central railings were installed to discourage further deaths.
    Time passed: the bushes grew into a forbidding shrubbery, tree trunks thickened, weeds ruptured the paths, frost forced the cracks apart to become potholes for rainwater and rubbish. In response to a residents’ petition, the benches – a magnet for drunks and suspicious-looking men – were removed. In the gleam of moonlight the plunging branches of the grand old sycamore provoked nameless dread in scurrying passers by; the paths were abandoned for a muddied track short-cutting over the grass to the subway. Set back from the Great West Road, shrouded from the pavement and St Peter’s Church by encroaching foliage, the little park was no longer a place to linger.
    Stella could have come to Terry’s house at any time; assuming her to be grieving, Jackie did not expect her to be at work, but she was loath to meet Terry’s neighbours so she waited until it was dark. On her return from Mrs Ramsay’s she had found Jackie interrogating the revised rota. Michelle’s son had broken his arm, Felicia had resigned to work privately, Maxine’s brother had been in a car accident so she had gone to Manchester and Shelley was already doing the workload of two: they had a staffing crisis. Stella took all the shifts. A drawback of success was that she did less cleaning so, despite her high-calibre team, she relished any chance to do the work herself.
    After two hours of vacuuming, polishing and mopping in the offices of a financial advice company by Hammersmith Underground station, she had stepped out on to the Broadway and, zipping up her windproof jacket against a bitter wind, driven to the house where she had spent the first seven years of her life. It was another job, she repeated to herself; Terry was another client.
    She caught a movement in bushes across the road and peered through the windows of her van, ready to drive off. There was no one.
    The lamp-post came to life and orange light dulled the colours of the parked cars to muddy brown and made gaunt shadows that quivered on the camber. Stella scanned the shrubbery again and wrongly assumed that a lumpish shape in the undergrowth was a bush.
    She kept close to a privet that Terry had let grow tall – presumably to block a view into his living room – and unlatched the gate. Immediately she tripped on a hard object and her key-ring torch revealed a cast-iron shoe scraper: a painted squirrel nibbling on a nut in the middle of the crazy paving. She carried it to the front door, using the toe of her steel-capped boot to edge it into line with the tiled step. Stella fished in her jacket for his keys, too preoccupied by the enormity of her task – she had never been to Terry’s house uninvited – to consider why the scraper was on the