All My Enemies

by Barry Maitland

  “Mr. Nesbit’s arrangement with us expired some years ago—presumably when the child reached its eighteenth or twenty-first birthday. He was coming to us again now because he wanted to establish contact with the child, and thought that we could provide a name from our records.”

  The corners of her mouth turned down. “It was out of the question, of course. I began to discuss with him what other options he, and indeed the child, might have available, if they wished to re-establish contact, and that was when the matter of the legitimacy of the birth came up. You see, the birth documents of an illegitimate child might contain no information whatsoever about the father. Under the present English law, any adopted person may, having reached the age of eighteen and paid the stipulated fee, obtain a certified copy of their birth certificate. This will tell them the date and place of birth, the name under which they were originally registered, the mother’s name and possibly her occupation, the name of the person who registered the birth, the date of registration, and the name of the Registrar. But if the parents weren’t married at the time of registration, it may well say nothing about the father. And if the mother withholds information about the birth from the father, we may have a situation where neither father nor child is able to establish contact with the other at a later date.”

  “Except, in this case, through your records of the scheme of allowances,” Kathy said.

  “Precisely.” The solicitor smiled brightly at her once again. Kathy was becoming a little bit irritated by that smile, and wondered how it went down with the divorce clients when things got really sticky.

  “Well,” Kathy said, “those records may well be something that we would be interested in.”

  “Oh, do you think so?” The smile abruptly vanished. “Of course, you could apply to the court, if you could show an overwhelming public interest. However, even if you were successful, it wouldn’t do you any good.”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t appear to have them any more. It seems they no longer exist.”

  “YOU WERE SPOT ON,” Brock said. “Absolutely spot on. He must have had a fit when you started asking him about the lost child during his interview. It’s like some Victorian melodrama. You think he killed Janice Pearce in order to get hold of the records of the child?”

  Kathy had tracked Brock down to the Bride of Denmark, to which he had descended in order to escape the phone while he prepared the final version of his overdue budget forecasts.

  “That’s what the solicitor was wondering. She said that Janice Pearce would have been the one person in the office most likely to track down old records. It’s possible that Nesbit tried to cultivate her, get her to help him on the side, when he realized he would never get hold of the information officially. Then, when she refused to help, he became enraged and strangled her.”

  Brock stared up at the beamed ceiling and tugged thoughtfully at his beard. “A man in his sixties, no wife, no career, no family, going quietly potty in his big spooky house, developing a desperate, an overwhelming desire to see the child he fathered decades ago, and secretly helped to support for all those years. Without the co-operation of the child’s mother, who might be dead herself by this time, his only way is through the records at Baker Bailey Rock.”

  He stopped. “Is that right? Surely there would have been some other way? Couldn’t he have applied to the adoption agency that was responsible for the original placing?”

  “If he knew which one it was. But what status does he have? Some bloke who suddenly appears, thirty or more years later perhaps, claiming to be the unregistered father of a child about whom he knows nothing. What are they going to give him?”

  Brock shrugged. “All right. So he murders the legal secretary in his madness to get hold of the name. Why does he then go on to murder the other women?”

  “He now has no way of ever tracing his child. His rage turns on the woman who gave the kid away, the mother.”

  She hesitated. All my enemies. Could Stafford really have been like that? “I suppose, when you think about it, he was the obvious person, because he was in control of the dramatic society. He specifically chose the plays to provide the death themes, each murder coming at the climax of one of his productions.”

  “Ironic that the file that he first murdered for no longer existed,” Brock said. “What happened to it, I wonder?”

  “They don’t know. After Nesbit’s visit, the solicitor asked one of the juniors to dig out the file. It should have been in a storeroom of old files, but after an hour or two they couldn’t find it and gave up looking. They’ve moved office twice in the past ten years, and they went through a period of enthusiasm for microfilming old records that fizzled out half-way through, and another period of computerization. It’s even possible that the file is actually there somewhere, but wrongly labelled.”

  “Couldn’t they get at the information some other way? The bank account, for instance.”

  “The partner who set up the scheme is dead. The account was closed years ago, and they don’t know which bank it was with, or whose name it was under.”

  “Well,” Brock grunted, “that’s all quite satisfyingly mysterious and theatrical. Somewhere out there is somebody who has absolutely no idea that his natural father has murdered five innocent women out of sheer frustration at not being able to find him.”

  He frowned. “Just as well the mad old bastard’s dead, really.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s all conjecture, isn’t it? I’d have hated to try to get a conviction against him on the strength of what we’ve turned up so far.”

  AUNT MARY, EXHAUSTED BY the drama of events, had decided to miss the performance that evening and have an early night at home. When the play was over, Kathy slipped away, driving back, as she had on the night of the technical dress rehearsal, by way of Stafford’s house. It was a cloudless night with a full moon, and the ravages of Bren’s excavations in the front lawn were clearly visible from the street. Kathy was reminded of another passage from the play: “. . . we found ourselves sitting among ruins in bright moonlight.”

  She left the car around the street corner and walked back to the house, down the front drive through the moon-shadow cast by the enormous monkey-puzzle tree, and past the front door, draped by a police tape. When she reached the back garden she saw that it was in even worse shape than the front, with holes and mounds of earth everywhere. The back door swung open at her touch, the lock broken. She stepped inside.

  She passed from the kitchen into the hall, dimly lit by moonlight rippled and tinted through the stained-glass panels above and to each side of the front door. The smells of disturbed dust closed around her as she climbed into the darkness of the upper floor, the massive banister cool to her touch. Along a dark corridor she saw that the door at the head of the attic stair must be open, for the rocking-horse was lit in a pool of moonlight from above. Its worn head was raised towards the light, and when Kathy went towards it and looked up, she saw that the roof space was filled with the glow of moonlight, bright in contrast to the darkness below. She climbed the narrow stairs and pushed her way through the dark ranks of hanging costumes towards the dormer windows.

  She stood there for some time, looking out at the magical transformation of the suburban landscape in the moonlight, the foliage of the monkey-puzzle tree black against the silver of the drive. There was no traffic in the street, no sound but the clicks and creaks of old timber adjusting to the night air. At one point she thought she heard movement below, and went silently back to the head of the stairs to listen. Hearing nothing more, she returned to the dormer, looked down, and saw a car pull up at the kerb opposite. As its lights went off she saw that it was a Cavalier, dark in colour. The driver’s door opened and a bulky figure got out. For a moment, the gesture it made, stooping to close the door carefully, made her think of her father. Then it turned and walked slowly across to the end of the gravel drive. It stopped and stood, dark and motionless, staring up at th
e house.

  She held her breath, trying to judge its height, its weight. After several minutes it moved forward, gliding on its pool of black shadow, the moon being now directly overhead. Half-way down the drive it came, then stopped again. It seemed to be examining the signs of digging to left and right, and then the head turned and stared directly up at Kathy’s window. She drew back, making out a pale face framed in darkness. It seemed to hesitate, uncertain what to do.

  Kathy jumped to life, running rapidly through the racks of clothes, dropping down the stairs in threes. She hesitated on the landing, straining for any sound, and when none came moved swiftly down the main stair and slid into the darkness of the kitchen doorway. The outside door was exactly as she had left it. Slipping through, she jumped across the gravel path and ran silently along the grass verge until she could see the front drive. It was deserted. She raced on, to the street, and found nothing, stopping finally among shadows on the far side, catching her breath, checking in all directions. In the distance the silent progress of a late train was marked by flashes in the sky, like lightning, from its contact with the electrical rail. She ran to her car and drove around the deserted streets for a while, looking without success for the dark figure of a man, or a blue Cavalier. Both had vanished, like ghosts.

  SIXTEEN

  SHE WOKE UP WITH a start, and for a moment couldn’t think where she was because the pattern of pale light on the ceiling wasn’t like that in her own bedroom. Then she remembered the temporary bed. Her mind went back to her dream, a dreadful dream. Stafford. Directing them, angry, pointing with his long bony fingers, but silent because he was dead. He turned to her, and he was telling her something, his jaw working silently, beard silver in the moonlight.

  His beard. She sat up slowly. Why would a bearded man use Leichner spirit gum?

  And there was something else. Something that had worried her less than it should. Stafford Nesbit had spoken to the solicitor two weeks after Janice Pearce was murdered.

  “I SUPPOSE,” BROCK SAID, “that you could find a perfectly plausible explanation for both things.”

  “Yes.”

  He noticed how pale Kathy had become in the last few days and said, “If he failed to get the information he wanted from Janice Pearce before he killed her, he might well have gone to see the solicitor openly two weeks later, as the only other option he had.”

  “Reckless, though. Unbelievably reckless.”

  Brock shrugged. “He was obsessed. Seriously, what other explanation could there be, if it wasn’t Nesbit?”

  Kathy took her time before replying. “After I finished interviewing the solicitor at Baker Bailey Rock, she gave me a book on the rules of adoption to look at, and I sat and scanned through it for a while. There was a section that talked about the rights that adopted people have to get access to their own birth records. Apparently, in exceptional cases, the courts can deny this right. The book referred to a particular case”—she looked at her notebook—“R. v. Registrar-General, ex parte Smith (1990), in which it was established that this information can be withheld where there’s a fear that the person might use it to commit a serious crime. In that case the applicant was a thirty-one-year-old trying to trace his natural parents. At the time of his application he had already killed two people, the second being the prisoner with whom he shared a cell, and whom he strangled one night in the belief that the man was his mother. The court didn’t think it would be a good idea for him to find out who she really was.

  “I suppose what struck me about that was that Alex Nicholson had mentioned matricide briefly when she was talking to us about schizo phre nia, do you remember? But there was no particular reason to think any more of it. Now, though, I wonder.”

  “You wonder what, Kathy?”

  “I wonder if we could have been looking at the wrong side of the relationship. Suppose it was the child who approached and murdered Janice Pearce, trying to find out about his father. And suppose he was successful, and did get the file from her, and then contacted Stafford Nesbit.”

  She hesitated, and Brock said quietly, “Go on.”

  “He hates them both, but especially his mother, the blonde actress. So he kills her, again and again, littering his father’s path with corpses, macabre messages only he would understand.”

  “Taking his cues from his father’s plays.”

  “Yes. What would the father do, when he realized what was happening, when he received the picture of Zoë Bagnall with her throat cut? Would he tell the police, and betray his child a second time? Would the police be able to stop it anyway? The only other way would be to kill himself. He didn’t actually confess in the note he left me, Brock. He just said that he was responsible. And then there’s the play.”

  “The Father?”

  “Yes. All about uncertain fatherhood and the way men and women torture each other through their family relations. And it ends with the impending death of the father.”

  They said nothing for a while, and then Brock grunted, “I must say that the lack of any incriminating evidence whatsoever at Nesbit’s house is a bit of a worry.”

  “Yes. And if the murderer is still alive, he will have selected another victim for the last night of his father’s play, tonight. He must be wondering whether to go ahead with it, now that his father’s dead.”

  “Bren had been thinking about providing an escort for all the blonde women in the production for the next twenty-four hours at least.”

  “I think I may have solved that. The only one was Bettina Elliott, and I managed to persuade her to become a brunette.”

  “Ah. That just leaves you, then, Kathy.”

  Kathy nodded. “True.”

  “Seriously, I want you to pull out. They can get someone else to prompt.”

  “No!” Kathy startled herself by the force of her reply. “No, Brock. It’s all the more reason for me to stay in there.”

  “Kathy, I can’t afford to lose any more of my team. People will begin to say it’s my fault.”

  “Don’t worry. This is probably just a red herring.”

  “All the same . . . All right,” he said reluctantly, “but I’m going to give you a side-arms authorization. I want you to go over to Broadway right now and get yourself a gun.”

  IT WASN’T THAT THEY had forgotten Stafford, but for their fourth and final performance on the Saturday night the cast had developed sufficient confidence in their ability to do the play on their own that a certain flair, even flamboyance, had crept back into their performance. Vicky was more frighteningly implacable, Edward more pathetically doomed, than they had ever been before. By the time they came to the final scene, the whole company was aware of the atmosphere of tense attention which told them that their audience was gripped. Not one Green Line pensioner twitched or looked fretfully at their watch as the Captain, still bound in the strait-jacket and draped with the Nurse’s shawl and his own military tunic, made one final effort to rise, gave an agonizing cry, and fell back into the Nurse’s arms.

  “Help, Doctor,” Laura cried, “if it’s not too late. Look, he’s stopped breathing.”

  “It’s a stroke.”

  “. . . First death, and after that the Judgement . . .”

  The daughter Bertha ran on stage towards her mother. “Mama! Mama!”

  “My child—my own child!” Laura cried, taking her into her arms.

  The Pastor lowered his head. “Amen.”

  The theatre erupted in thunderous applause as the curtain came down on this tableau, something which Kathy, on her first reading of the script, had hardly believed possible.

  THE END-OF-PRODUCTION PARTY WAS held at the home of Vicky and her husband. He welcomed everyone hospitably but remained, as did all of the accompanying partners, in some indefinable way an outsider. The camaraderie generated from crisis transformed into triumph was, for the moment, too strong for more everyday relationships to compete. Edward, whose wife was preoccupied in the kitchen with the food she had provided, made a particul
ar point of cultivating Kathy, and she enjoyed his attention for a while, telling herself that it really was all over, that Stafford had confessed and was dead, that the figure in his moonlit garden was just another suburban prowler, made curious by the police tapes and earthworks, and that, even if that weren’t so, there were only a few more hours to go before the pattern of murders would have been broken, for good.

  And when midnight came, and there had been no phone message about some girl found trussed in a strait-jacket, or immolated by burning paraffin, she finally did relax, and told herself she could have an alcoholic drink at last. She went into the kitchen where the booze was set out, and saw Ruth in a state of advanced inebriation, describing with dramatic gestures Edward’s disastrous lamp-throwing rehearsal.

  “Kathy! Where have you been? I’ve mished you!” she called out.

  “Dancing, Ruth. Where’s Mary?”

  “Maryanne,” Ruth corrected slurredly. “Her name from henchforth shall be Maryanne.”

  “Yes.” Kathy smiled. “So where is she?”

  “That man came to take her away. Someone’s had a stroke . . .” She frowned. “Or was that in the play?”

  Kathy froze. “It was in the play, Ruth,” she said carefully. “Who came to take her away?”

  “This big man, with a beard. Oh, I was supposed to tell you! Oops. Sorry. It was about the stroke.”

  A chill swept through Kathy. “Ruth! The stroke was in the play! Where did Mary go with the bearded man?”

  “No, Mary had a stroke too—I mean someone did. Someone she knows . . .” Ruth was becoming confused. “He said he was taking her home. Yes, home, he said.”

  “Dear God.” Kathy took out her phone. She first tried the number of her flat but got no reply. Then she rang the Duty Sergeant at Orpington police station and explained what had happened. “I’m going to try my home in Finchley first. See if they’ve gone there. Would you notify the Yard?”