The Detective's Daughter Read Online Free

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.
    Two electric candles dripping with fake wax were plugged into a socket on the altar. Stella recognized the scent as one of the flower fairy ranges of Asquith & Somerset and doubted it could be on the NHS preferred supplies list. A bunch of fresh freesias drooped out of a cream plastic vase beneath a stained-glass panel of the Madonna and Child. She made a mental note to order lavender spray for Mrs Ramsay in St Peter’s Square. On her last visit, there had been a stale odour; she suspected the old lady of smoking, although she claimed to have given up.
    This led her to think about her other clients and, getting out her phone, she scrolled through her messages. Jackie had signed up someone responding to the advert in the local paper