LATER THAT AFTERNOON KATHY caught up with Bren, and asked him how their interrogation of Gentle had gone.
“Brock finally got him to admit that he drove to Petts Wood that night. He said he had felt awkward about not turning up at the theatre, and wanted to explain to Angela how it had happened, so there’d be no misunderstanding. He said he didn’t want her discovering at the office on Monday that he had bought the other ticket, and maybe jumping to the sort of conclusions that had started the misunderstandings at the office the last time.”
“Very considerate. So what happened?”
“He says he had a couple of beers at the Daylight Inn, then sat in his car in Station Square, waiting for her.”
“That’s great! We’ve got him then.”
Bren shrugged non-committally. “He claims she never appeared. He says he waited till after midnight, then gave up and drove home.”
“But he admits he was there! That’s the crucial thing. God, he’s surely not expecting us to believe that Angela had two stalkers on her trail that night!”
“Every step along the way, he’s only admitted as much as he thinks we already know. But this time, I’d say he was scared, for the first time, probably. We’ve taken his car for forensics.”
“What about him?”
“He’s free, for the moment. How did you go with the wife?”
“She believes, like all the other women I’ve spoken to, that he’s incapable of violence.”
“Yeah, that’s what Dr. Crippen’s wife thought too.”
“And he takes size seven shoes.”
“Well, to be honest, Kathy, I wouldn’t place too much weight on all that crap Desai’s been feeding you.”
“How do you mean?”
“He gets a bit carried away with those lab blokes. The way he drools over the technical terms, like he’s got argon ions flowing where the rest of us have blood. Brock calls it ‘physics-envy.’ I call it ambition. He sees that as his way up—interpreting the boffins to all the dumb buggers like us.”
“Still, that doesn’t mean they can’t come up with a shoe size from Angela’s shirt. I thought it was pretty impressive, what they’d done.”
“The make I grant you, but not the size.” Bren regarded her, stony-faced. “How sure can they be? How safe? A couple of millimetres and you’ve got completely the wrong answer. Remember, they’re under pressure just like the rest of us. So far they’ve come up with sweet F.A., and they don’t like that, any more than we do.”
FOR A MOMENT, WHEN she opened the front door of her flat, Kathy thought she’d been robbed, the lights all on, table and sideboard bare. Then, just as the small figure bustled out of the kitchen, she remembered her aunt. It looked as if she’d spent the whole day finishing the job of cleaning the flat that Kathy had begun over a week before.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Kathy said, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. It wasn’t just the fact that her aunt had taken over the place with her cleaning. The intrusion was of a deeper kind, the familiar face and voice and lily of the valley perfume inadvertently sparking intense traces of things which Kathy thought she had safely cordoned off in the past. “You’re supposed to be on holiday. Didn’t you go out?”
“I was quite happy,” the old lady said vaguely.
“I’m really sorry I couldn’t take the day off to take you up to town. We should sit down and work out things for you to see, and how to get there. At the weekend we can go somewhere together.” If you’re still here, that is.
“I’m perfectly happy, Kathy.”
“Have you phoned home? Let Uncle Tom know you arrived safely?”
“Mmm.”
“Well . . .” Kathy said, “perhaps we could go out and see a film tonight.” She tried to imagine Aunt Mary grappling with Peter Greenaway.
“Thank you, dear, but I’ll just have an early night, if you don’t mind.”
“You are feeling all right, are you?”
“It’s all been more of a strain than I imagined.”
Later, when Aunt Mary had closed the bedroom door, Kathy noticed her battered old school atlas lying on the corner table. A sliver of paper marked the page for Canada.
TOWARDS THE END OF the following afternoon, Brock suddenly called them together again in the small conference room they had the use of at Orpington police station. He looked puzzled.
“I’ve just had a call from the Gentles’ solicitor, Victor Denholm. He was complaining about his clients being harassed.”
“Oh, come on!” Bren groaned, disgusted. “Denholm was with him all the time we questioned him yesterday, and we haven’t been near him since.”
“Not harassed by us. By Angela Hannaford’s father, Basil Hannaford.”
“What?” They all sat up.
“Basil Hannaford phoned Tom Gentle at home last night—three times, threatening and abusing him, until he took the phone off the hook. This morning Hannaford was on to Mrs. Gentle’s father, Sir Charles Merritt, the chairman of Merritt Finance, asking if he was aware that his son-in-law was the pervert who had tortured and murdered his daughter.”
“Jesus!”
“But how?” Kathy said. “How could he know that?”
“Exactly. He told Merritt that he, Hannaford, knew that we know that Gentle did it, but we haven’t been able to prove it yet. He wants to force Gentle to confess.”
Muriel Gentle’s appeal for them to be careful suddenly flashed back into Kathy’s mind.
“So,” Brock went on, “who told him?” He looked at Kathy and saw the consternation on her face. “Kathy?”
“No . . . no, I was just thinking of Muriel Gentle. She was frightened that something like this was going to happen. I . . .” She was desperately trying to cast her mind back. “I’m sure I never mentioned Gentle’s name to the Hannafords. I did ask someone—the boyfriend, I think—if Gentle’s name meant anything to him. But I didn’t say who he was, and he obviously didn’t recognize it.”
“Bren? Ted?”
“No way.” Ted spoke first. “I saw Basil Hannaford yesterday like you said, Brock. But I never mentioned Gentle, I kept it all pretty vague.”
“Bren?”
“I’ve never even met Hannaford, Brock.”
“Well, someone’s been talking to him. Maybe he knows someone who works here, with Orpington police. Try to find out, will you, Ted?”
“Do we talk to Hannaford?” Bren said.
“If we can find him. I’ve been trying the number, but there’s no reply.”
NEXT MORNING KATHY WAS roused from Mrs. P’s folding bed by a call from the duty office at New Scotland Yard, telling her to get in to Queen Anne’s Gate immediately. There was no explanation, but when she reached the news kiosk at the tube station she saw it for herself. The banner headline read STALKER ON THE 8:19. It framed a familiar photograph of Angela Hannaford sitting reading in the window seat of a commuter train.
“They don’t name him.” Brock was crouched over the paper on his desk, face dark with anger. “But they do everything but. ‘The Stalker is believed to be a work colleague of the murdered woman, who has made a habit of following and photographing hundreds of unsuspecting women on the commuter rail lines around London, using a hidden spy camera.’ Good grief!” Brock shook his head.
“ ‘The man is believed to be the main suspect in the police hunt for Angela Hannaford’s killer, but so far police have been unable to gather sufficient evidence to lay charges against him.’ Then there’s the editorial, have you seen that? Pious drivel about the rights of ordinary people to privacy. That’s pretty rich coming from this rag. They’re outraged because Gentle’s been doing what they do every day of the week.”
He threw the paper down and glared at Bren and Kathy. “The point is, how did they get hold of it? If Hannaford fed it to them, how did he get hold of it?”
Kathy pulled the set of photocopies out of her bag and began to compare them to the picture in the paper.
“It’
s this one, see?” she said after a moment. “They’ve used the central section of Gentle’s photograph. It’s quite a good reproduction too.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, it doesn’t look as if they’ve worked from a photocopy.”
“And the original set is at Orpington,” Brock growled. “Where the hell is Ted?”
He lifted a phone and snarled into it for a while, then slammed it down.
“Look,” he said, “we can’t wait. I’m going to have to stay here to fend off the wolves. I want you two to get down to Orpington and find out what the hell’s happened down there. And track down Hannaford. We’ve got to get him to understand that his playing the lone vigilante is going to screw up our investigation and maybe end up letting Gentle walk away scot free.”
AN HOUR LATER BREN and Kathy were sitting in Orpington police station with the CID Sergeant with whom Ted Griffiths had been liaising.
“Yeah,” he said, “Ted got on to me last night about a possible leak to Hannaford, but I don’t see it, frankly. I’ve talked this morning to all the people involved, and nobody’s heard of anyone having contact with him. I mean, I suppose it’s possible that the Hannafords know someone in another department, who’s been talking to them, but what would they know? And as for this . . .” He stared at the paper and shook his head.
“Ted went to see the Hannafords on Monday, didn’t he?” Bren said.
“Yes, Monday. I went too. There was nothing said about Gentle. We didn’t mention his name and neither did Hannaford.”
“Did you take the photographs with you then?”
“No, course not. What would be the point?”
“And Hannaford hasn’t been in here since then? Or been in touch?”
The sergeant shook his head. “Nah. The only one’s been in was the boyfriend, Avery. He came in late Monday to pick up his clothes that Forensic had finished with. I saw him, over there, talking to Ted, at his desk.”
“Where are the photographs kept?” Kathy asked.
The sergeant hesitated, then nodded his head towards the desk. “Ted keeps the prints. The negatives were sent down to the evidence store.”
They got up and walked over to Ted Griffiths’ desk. Another, smaller, gallery of family portraits decorated its top. The rest of the material on it was more chaotically stacked—paper trays, printouts, notepads, and on one side, the buff manila files of Gentle’s photographs.
“Just like that?” Bren said. “Left out for anybody to pick up?”
Angela’s file was on top. Inside, the picture published in the newspaper was missing.
THERE WAS A GREEN Escort parked outside the Avery house.
“Isn’t that Ted’s?” Kathy said.
“He’s probably worked it out for himself on the way here,” Bren replied.
Mrs. Avery answered the front door so quickly that she must have been standing directly on the other side of it. She looked worried. “Oh. More of you!”
“Where are they, Mrs. Avery?”
“Upstairs, in Adrian’s room. The other gentleman went straight up . . .”
They could hear the muffled sound of Ted yelling even as they reached the foot of the stairs. They followed the noise to a bedroom door. Inside Ted Griffiths had Angela’s boyfriend by the hair, steadily banging his head against the far wall. The lad was stark naked.
Ted looked angrily back over his shoulder, glaring at Kathy and Bren. “Come in. I’m just about to tear this little bastard’s balls off.”
“Put him down, Ted,” Bren said calmly, as if he was always coming across this sort of thing. “What’s the story?”
“He admits he pinched the photograph from my desk when I turned away to use someone else’s bloody phone. He gave it to Hannaford. Go and wait for me downstairs, Bren.”
“No, Ted,” Bren said, in the same matter-of-fact voice. “You go downstairs with Kathy, while I have a quiet word with our friend here.”
Kathy didn’t think Ted would do it. He turned away from them, his grip on Adrian’s greasy hair tightening. Then, with an abrupt final bang of the man’s head against the wall, he let go and stormed out.
Bren joined them outside in the car five minutes later. His face was sombre, and he sat for a moment saying nothing, staring through the front windscreen.
“Well?” Ted demanded. “He didn’t try to deny it, did he?”
Bren shook his head. “No.” He twisted round to face the other detective in the back. “He says you started telling him about this bloke who’d been secretly taking photos of Angela and other women. He says you told him the man’s name was Gentle, and that we were dead certain he was responsible for Angela’s death, but we couldn’t prove it.”
“No! Look, it’s bloody obvious that we need more on how Gentle was harassing Angela, and the only place to look is among those people who were close to her. For Christ’s sake, if Gentle was giving her a hard time, she must have said something to her boyfriend. It stands to reason.”
Kathy shook her head. She didn’t think so.
“When that little creep came in for his clothes on Monday,” Ted went on, “I grabbed him and started trying to prod his memory a bit. I mentioned Gentle’s name—I didn’t know you’d already done that, Kathy. It obviously meant nothing to him. Then I told him about the photographs—showed them to him.”
“Why, for God’s sake, Ted?”
“Because if Angela had realized that Gentle was snapping her, she might have threatened to tell on him, which would have been an extra motive for him to kill her. If she’d mentioned something to Avery, then we’d know that she knew about it. Look! The point was that Avery didn’t know who Gentle was. I never told him that he worked with Angela.”
“No, but Hannaford knew that,” Bren said. “It was Hannaford who put Avery up to coming to see you on Monday, Ted. Hannaford thinks we’ve been jerking him around, so he told Avery to try to find out what we’re doing. He told him to tell you that he would love to help if you could just prod his memory a bit—point him in the right direction. Is that right? Did he say that to you?”
“Christ.” Ted looked away, out of the window.
“Before he retired,” Bren went on, “Hannaford used to catch the same train up to town as Sir Charles Merritt. They got to know each other, and when Angela got her A-levels, Hannaford asked Merritt what she should do, and his advice was, forget about university, waste of time for women, do something useful like typing, and he’d fix her up with a job in his firm. Hannaford has met Gentle, for all we know he may have heard the office gossip about him, and when young Avery went round on Monday night with the photograph he’d pinched from you, and the information you’d given him about Gentle, Hannaford went berserk.”
Bren paused. “All this is what Avery just told me. Does it make sense, Ted?”
Ted Griffiths gave a little nod, his face pale. “Makes me look pretty stupid, doesn’t it? What do we do now? Find Hannaford, I suppose.”
“Bang his head against the wall?” Bren shook his head. “I think Brock’s going to have to do that.”
“Yeah.” Ted sat for a moment, then opened the car door.
“Where are you going?” Bren asked.
“To see Brock,” Ted replied.
They watched him drive off, then Bren started up the car and they returned to Orpington. Later that morning he took a call from Brock. It went on for some time, but at the end of it he didn’t have much to tell Kathy.
“They still can’t trace Basil Hannaford,” he said. “Oh, and just to make our day, the boffins have decided that the shoe print on Angela’s back was a ten for sure. Definitely not less than a nine.” He shook his head and walked away.
At 8:00 that evening he reappeared. “Brock’s been on the blower again, Kathy. Big conference down here tomorrow morning to review the case. He’d like to talk to us about it now.”
“OK, I’m coming.” She closed down the computer and stood up, suddenly aware of the tension across her shoulders again.
I need another swim, she thought, and then immediately pictured Desai’s trim bum in his black briefs. She hoped this wasn’t going to become some kind of reflex.
DRIVING UP TO CENTRAL London, Bren suddenly said, “So, what do you get up to on your time off, Kathy?”
The question took her by surprise. She replied, “Oh, it’s amazing how many things there are to do.”
“Yeah.” His voice held an unfamiliar tone of resentment. “Yeah, I’ll bet there are. I envy you, Kathy.”
“Really? I thought you had things pretty well sewn up. You’ve got little kids, haven’t you? Don’t tell me they’re beating you up already?”
“Don’t ask, Kathy,” he said quietly. “Just don’t ask.”
Kathy didn’t ask.
They passed Ted Griffiths’ desk on the way to Brock’s office, and Kathy noticed with a shock that the rampart of family portraits had gone: the desktop was completely clear. She pointed it out to Bren, who didn’t look surprised.
Brock was brusque in his acknowledgement of them, his own desk heaped with documents. He waved them to seats, then pulled a bottle of Scotch out of a desk drawer, and three small glasses, which he filled and passed to them without a word.
They sipped in silence, then Brock growled, “There are people, and sometimes I am one of them, who think that I’m getting too old for this. There are also people who, for reasons of their own, would like to see changes in the way we work. Their favourite phrases are operational autonomy, which is accountant-speak for giving less resources to operational units like us, and operational accountability, which means greater control from above. I find myself increasingly unable to be civil with these people, which probably proves that I am senile.
“Anyway,” he sighed, and topped up their glasses, “the point is that we can’t afford any more mistakes. Do you see? Ted has agreed that he’d be more comfortable in another place, and he’s now out of it. Which may put more on your shoulders. I’m sorry.”
All My Enemies Page 10