The Detective's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

of disinfectant and yellow plastic ‘wet floor’ hazard cone near the tills yielded nothing. It could have been any Co-op store in any town.
    She stepped back from the store to where the pavement extended into the road for a pedestrian crossing delineated by ridges. Terry had told her that gold studs on the stones marked the boundary between private land and the public walkway, or had he? An outlet next to the supermarket was to let; unopened mail piled up on the door mat.
    Terry had arrived here early that morning; he must have stayed the night somewhere but, since he hadn’t even taken his toothbrush, Stella was sure he had not planned to. Where had he stayed?
    She was staring at a snatch of white. She bent down: a piece of paper had wedged between the bars of a drain cover. She extracted it and in the low security light of the Co-op doorway unpeeled it, careful not to tear along the fold. It was a newspaper photograph, photocopied on a skew, cutting off some of the image. A footprint had transferred the surface of the pavement like a brass rubbing so she struggled to read the caption: To th   ma      or   Mr      say launches Charb          new vi          all.
    The black and grey pixels comprised a group of people, their features bleached out in sunlight. There was a figure in the foreground who might be a woman, but a splodge of dirt blotted her face. Triangular shapes crossed the top of the frame. The only unmistakable element of the photograph was a church. The angle of the shot made it appear to be balanced on the woman’s head and the time on its clock was midday. Although there was nothing about the cutting to connect it with Terry, Stella slipped it into her pocket.
    She heard the beeping of a reversing vehicle and scanned the street; it was empty. She hurried back to the van and saw that a light was flashing on an automatic teller in the wall of a building society on the other side of the road. At the end of the street a stretch limousine rolled by, a gaggle of young women in orange afro wigs hanging out of the windows bawling Robbie Williams’ ‘Angels’ ; the raucous sound faded into the night. The beeps stopped and the light in the cash machine went out. She approached it: a twenty-pound note lay in the cash tray.
    Stella retrieved the note; brand new, it crackled when she folded it into her coat pocket with the cutting. She saw a ‘P’ for a car park and, jumping into the van, slung it left down a narrow road with a terrace of cottages on one side and a building with a castellated roof silhouetted against the sky on the other. Ahead of her was the car park. Four cars were dotted around the asphalted space and again Stella tried to recall the car Terry had owned.
    She felt about among Terry’s things and at the bottom of the bag found his keys. When she pressed the remote button on the fat plastic head there was no response. She extended her arc and hazard lights to her right flashed twice.
    The blue Toyota Yaris had a parking penalty clamped to its windscreen by a wiper; Stella ripped out the ticket in yet another plastic bag and, nerving herself, got in the driver’s seat. She caught a whiff of vanilla deodorizer and saw with approval that Terry had plugged an air purifier into the cigarette lighter socket. The car started first time. She cruised around the area until she found a residential street with no parking restrictions. Before getting out she gave the car a brief check, searching for a clue to why Terry had been in Seaford. She found nothing but a Kit Kat wrapper and a half-drunk flask of coffee that had rolled under the front seat and concluded that the vehicle would need valeting before she sold it.
    Only when she had locked the car did Stella notice that Terry had, after all, paid and displayed; a ticket face up on the dashboard was valid until eight fifteen that morning.
    Terry had died fifteen minutes after the expiry time.
    Half an hour later, Stella was