All My Enemies (19 page)

“Perhaps he wasn’t sure, when he left the house . . .”

“He knew exactly what he was going to do,” Kathy said bitterly. “I remember a letter that Mum got from someone he worked
with, saying what a wonderful communicator he had been. I remember I looked the word up in the dictionary to be sure I’d got it right—I was twelve, wasn’t I, or thirteen? The thing was that I couldn’t remember him ever communicating with me at all. Not once. And as it turned out, he hadn’t communicated with his wife either, not about anything that counted.”

“You have to remember, dear, that he was quite old when Christine had you. He must have been almost forty. He’d been away in the war all those years, then came back and took your mother to London, and then it was another ten years or more before you came along. By that stage he was so involved in his work . . . He wasn’t really interested, I suppose.”

Terrific
. Kathy sighed, letting the bile in her throat die away. They stared morosely at the berberis for a while, and then she said, “Crap,” and repeated, “crap, crap, crap.” She turned to her aunt. “You’ll have to learn to say that to yourself, Mary, to stop yourself making excuses.”

Aunt Mary shook her head. “I don’t think I could, dear. But we’ll both have to learn to forgive them, eventually.”

THAT EVENING MARY ASKED
Kathy if she had a needle and thread, so that she might mend the tear which the tenant had made in the bedroom curtain. As the old lady worked, Kathy remembered Ruth Sparkes’s plea. She watched the nimble fingers, unaffected by arthritis, and remembered the sewing-machine in the Attercliffe house, rattling away furiously whenever things got tense. She said, “Do you want something to do while you’re down here, Mary? How would you fancy an unpaid job, dressmaking?”

MARY WAS SURPRISINGLY RECEPTIVE
to the idea, and when they phoned Ruth Sparkes she was so overjoyed, and established such an immediate rapport with the old lady, that Kathy found herself being persuaded to take her down to Bromley to make a start the next morning, even though it was Sunday.

It was clear, when they set out, that Aunt Mary had gone to some trouble over her appearance, her blouse crisply ironed and a touch of lipstick and powder on her face, just as if she was presenting herself for a new job. Kathy took a route straight through the deserted City and across Tower Bridge for her benefit, and throughout the journey she was as bright and chirpy as the sparrows flitting through the sunlit gardens they passed. They found Ruth Sparkes’s flat in Bromley South without difficulty, and were immediately welcomed inside.

“And you’re Mary,” Ruth said.

“My real name is Maryanne,” Aunt Mary said diffidently, “but everyone calls me Mary.”

“What a shame! I prefer Maryanne. Would you mind if I called you that?”

Ruth was brisk, businesslike, and decisive. A retired schoolteacher, she had said.
Perhaps she’ll clap her hands if our attention strays.

Aunt Mary beamed. “I wouldn’t mind that at all, Ruth. Not at all.”

“Well, now, are you stopping, Kathy?” Ruth went on. “There’s plenty to do.”

“No, I’m going on down to Orpington police station to do a bit of work there. Mary’s got my number in case you need me. I’ll come back and pick her up at lunchtime, shall I?”

“Oh, but it’s already 10:30. Couldn’t you leave it a little longer? Say till 3:00, or 4:00? If Maryanne doesn’t mind, that is. I’ll give her lunch.”

“Oh yes, I think that would be best, Kathy. Give me a chance to see what’s what,” the old lady interjected. Kathy knew when she was beaten, and left them to it.

She found Bren in the incident centre at Orpington, working through a pile of reports.

“Not having a day off?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Got to keep pushing at this one, Kath.”

He looked pasty and tired.

“Anything new?”

“Forensic have a theory about the knife used in Angela’s murder. They think it may have been a military weapon, a bayonet, a stabbing rather than a cutting weapon. We’re out checking army surplus shops, getting the owners in to go through their books.”

“That’s interesting.”

Bren nodded, looking more weary than interested. “Could be. How about you? What are you doing here? Couldn’t keep away?”

“Something like that.”

“How’s your theatre connection coming along? I saw your note about Carole Weeks. Nothing there, eh?”

“No. I did track down a boyfriend of Zoë Bagnall, and spoke to some of the theatre people she acted with, but they couldn’t tell me anything more.”

“But?”

“What?”

“Come on, Kathy. You’re holding something back. It’s written all over your face.” Bren gave a sigh and rubbed his own face with both hands, as if trying to wipe away any hidden messages it might contain.

“Is it? Yes, there are things that bother me . . . bother me a lot. But I can’t see at the moment where they’re leading.”

“Come on, Kathy! If you’ve got some ideas, you owe it to all of us to share them, put them out on the table, discuss them, let us help develop them. This isn’t some kind of competition, a private game . . .”

“No, of course not!” Kathy shot back, angry at being pressured this way.

“Well then, let’s have it. If you’re in the team, you’ve got to be in it a hundred per cent. We share our ideas openly.”

“I don’t mind sharing ideas, Bren, but this isn’t ready yet. It’s half-baked. I haven’t worked it through.”

“You’re being precious, Kathy.”

“Precious!” She glared at him, and he glared right back. She noticed the red veins in the whites of his eyes, and the dark circles beneath, and felt ashamed. She’d had eight hours’ sleep last night.

“All right,” she sighed. “The problem I have is what Brock said about Gentle. I can see the sense in what he says, but I think he’s wrong, and I need to have something solid before I can come back on it.

“I think Gentle is the one, because if he isn’t, his stalking of Angela Hannaford and Zoë Bagnall are just the most amazing coincidences of all time. What’s more, I discovered another woman last night, in the same theatre group as Zoë, whom Gentle had photographed. Now, Angela and Zoë and this other woman were linked by their interest in the theatre, and that must be part of Gentle’s thing. Maybe the circumstances of Kirstie McFadden’s death had a theatrical connection, one that we haven’t established
yet. At any rate, there’s the common footprint and the similarly violent MO. I thought I’d try to find out where Tom Gentle was on the night of August 25 last year—the night Kirstie McFadden was killed. He may be able to fudge an alibi with his wife for an hour or two on a Saturday night, but a trip to Scotland would be more difficult. If there’s no possibility he was in Scotland that night, well, I’ll accept that Brock was right. That’s what I thought I’d check on today.”

“So, what is Gentle’s
thing
, Kathy? What makes him tick?”

“He has a need to prove himself continually with women. He is also a secret photographer, a voyeur. Maybe the theatre is a part of that—sitting in the darkness watching some unattainable woman on the stage, and afterwards, hunting them down, or someone who looks like them, or was there in the audience too, and possessing them, absolutely, finally, without pity.”

Kathy frowned, picking fiercely at the laminate of the table top as she tried to organize her thoughts coherently. “Brock says he isn’t the type, and of anyone, he has the experience to be able to say that. But I just wonder whether you
can
say that. I don’t think any of us can see into the mind of someone who would do what that man did to Angela. And I don’t think, if we met him in the street, that we would have the faintest idea that those things were going on inside his head. When they catch people like this, they don’t turn out to be deformed monsters at all. You read the reports of their trials—John Duffy, Michael Ryan, all the rest—and everybody is saying how surprised they were that it was him, because he’s so ordinary, so insignificant, just a quiet sort of bloke working away at the next desk. Bit of a wimp, really. Just like Gentle.

“I think Gentle is devious, secretive, and driven by all kinds of dangerous fantasies about women. I think he’s had lots of practice at disguising his real self, at being the charmer, the little boy who never grew up, the basset-hound. And I think he could do that
equally well with his physical characteristics too. I think it would be perfectly within his nature to put on a pair of shoes two sizes too big for him, and bulk up his clothing, and put on a false beard, and wash the body carefully afterwards, if he wanted to do something
really
naughty, and didn’t want to get caught.”

“A false beard?” Bren raised his eyebrows dubiously.

“Yes,” Kathy sighed, “that was another of my half-baked theories. That the smell that girl told us about was the smell of the glue they use in the theatre to stick beards on with. All right, I know that sounds like I’m getting obsessed with the theatre thing.”

Bren stared down at the papers on the table in front of him for so long that Kathy thought he was dozing off from exhaustion. But then he looked up at her and said, “Leon Desai faxed down a report from Edinburgh last night. I’ve just been reading it. They’re certain that the footprints at the scene of McFadden’s murder match ours. He also said that he’d picked up something from the files on her murder that he wanted me to pass on to you.”

“What’s that?”
The name of a good swimsuit shop
?

“The week she was murdered, the Edinburgh Festival was on. There were probably more actors and theatre buffs within a mile of Kirstie McFadden that night than anywhere else on earth. Every theatre, hall, and club room in the city would have been bulging with them. They would have come from every corner of the globe.”

“My God!” Kathy sank on to a chair.

“Yeah. Give me ten minutes, then I’ll come with you to see Gentle. If that’s all right?”

SHE DROVE, BREN BESIDE
her, jacket off, shirt sleeves rolled up, and arm resting on the open window sill. “Great day,” he said. “Needed to get out.”

“You look all in, Bren.”

“No, no,” he said, “coping fine,” and promptly fell asleep.

Kathy had spoken to Muriel Gentle on the phone, and been told that they would be shortly going out for lunch with friends. They were appropriately dressed for a summer picnic on the lawn, making Bren in his dark, crumpled suit look sweaty and out of place.

“We won’t take more than ten minutes,” Kathy said. “It’s just a matter of cross-referencing, eliminating names from lists.” She found it hard to meet Gentle’s eyes, her mind unable to suppress the picture of him taking a blunt bayonet to Angela Hannaford’s face, a screwdriver to the eyes of Kirstie McFadden. His presence seemed like an obscenity, and no matter how hard she told herself that this wasn’t going to help, she felt such an intense animosity every time he did anything with his hands, blowing his nose or stroking the dog’s neck, that she felt physically sick. He said nothing, letting his wife arrange things and speak for him. He appeared entirely untroubled.

“You keep a diary, I recall, Mrs. Gentle. Would you have last year’s handy?”

“Yes. It’s in my bureau. Shall I fetch it?”

“Please.”

They waited in silence while she did this, Gentle clucking to the dog as it rolled on to its back to have its stomach tickled.

“Here it is.” Muriel Gentle hung on firmly to the book in her hand.

“Would you have a look at last August, please? Friday the twenty-fifth. I just wanted to establish that you were both in the London area that night.”

The frown which gathered between Mrs. Gentle’s eyebrows as she turned the pages abruptly cleared as she came to the place. “No!” She smiled in triumph at Kathy. “We weren’t! We weren’t anywhere near London, as it happens. All right, Sergeant?”

“Ah,” Kathy held her breath, keeping her voice neutral. “You’re absolutely certain?”

“Absolutely! We were hundreds of miles away.”

“Where were you?”

“We were on holiday, all that week, and all the following week as well. We were together all that time. A touring holiday. In the Dordogne.”

“Where?”

“The Dordogne, in France. On that Friday we visited Rocamadour and the Padirac Chasm, then drove down to Cahors, where we spent the night. I have the name of the hotel here, the Hotel Roaldès.”

She passed the diary over to Kathy, who took it and stared at the tiny, neat handwriting without taking it in.

“Does that satisfy you? Sergeant?”

“Yes, that’s fine, Mrs. Gentle.” Bren had spoken. “Couple of other dates, while we’re at it. The previous month, July, Tuesday the fourth. Were you at home then?”

“Let me see . . .” Mrs. Gentle took the book back from Kathy and turned to the entry. “Well, yes, we were at home. I have nothing special marked for that day.”

“Do you remember it at all? What you did that evening, for a meal, or afterwards?”

“No . . . no, of course not. How could I, over a year ago? What are you asking this for?”

“Bear with us, please. I know this must be tiresome. Just one more, this year, January 20.”

Muriel Gentle pursed her lips, then relented and went back to her antique desk in the corner of the room and returned with her current diary.

“A Saturday,” she said when she’d found the place. “No, nothing special. It was an ordinary Saturday.”

“How about you, Mr. Gentle?”

Tom Gentle made a face, rolled his eyes, and shook his head.

“Well . . . anything else, Kathy?” Bren looked at her.

Kathy looked at Gentle and suddenly said, “Tell us about Bettina, Mr. Gentle, Bettina Elliott.”

Gentle looked at her in surprise.

“Who is she?” his wife demanded.

“One of the women your husband photographed, Mrs. Gentle. Only he didn’t identify her for us. She knew Zoë Bagnall, who disappeared.”

“Sergeant, I don’t like your threatening manner. I am going to call Mr. Denholm.” Mrs. Gentle turned to the phone.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Gentle,” Bren broke in quickly. “We’re finished now. What about Mr. Hannaford, by the way? Has he been causing you any more difficulties?”