The Chalon Heads (20 page)

‘You’re sure you’re up to this, Sammy?’ Brock said, with what sounded like genuine concern.

Starling gave a little nod. ‘I’m all right, Mr Brock, really.’

‘You look very calm, Sammy, all things considered,’ Brock said quietly. ‘If I may say so.’

Starling took a little time to reply. Eventually he tilted the sphere of his head back and said, ‘That is the way we are, Mr Brock. We hide our feelings. We remain inscrutable.’

‘We?’

‘We English.’ If he meant it as a joke, there was no indication from the set of his face.

Looking at the two of them, it struck Kathy that their appearances were reversed, Starling calm and distant, Brock slightly dishevelled, as if he’d left home in a hurry when he’d heard the news. But more than that, Brock seemed the more troubled of the two, the more uneasy.

‘Why don’t we clear up the business of the time you took to return from Heathrow?’ he suggested.

‘Yes, of course. That was stupid of me. I see that now,’ Starling conceded calmly. ‘I caught a taxi outside the terminal. I told him to take me to Canonbury. At about the Hammersmith flyover I changed my mind. I told him to go instead to Camden Town, which he did. He dropped me at Camden Town tube station.’

‘Why did you change your mind?’

‘I decided to go to the Cinema Hollywood, where Eva often used to go.’

Brock stared at Starling, making no comment on this.

‘I went to the Cinema Hollywood,’ Starling finally said, ‘to see—to see if Eva was there.’

‘Explain that for me, Sammy,’ Brock said softly.

‘I thought, if Eva was behind this, if she was hiding out somewhere, it might be there, in the dark, watching those films.’ Starling looked at him sadly. ‘It was a stupid idea. She wasn’t there, of course. And then I felt ashamed of myself, doubting her like that. So I didn’t tell you.’

‘But of all the places you thought she might be, that was the most likely?’

‘I thought so.’

‘Do you think she met somebody there?’

The brief crease in Starling’s eyes might have been a wince. ‘If anywhere, I thought there. But I might be quite wrong.’

‘We’ll take a closer look at that place. Anything else?’

‘
Anything else?
’ Starling tilted his face back and let out a deep sigh. ‘Oh, Mr Brock, why? Why did they have to do that? To Eva? To the cover? Did they just have to destroy beautiful things?’

Brock lowered his head and didn’t reply. Again Kathy thought how uneasy he looked, as if he knew more than Starling and could see no good in it.

There was a knock at the door and a man in shirt-sleeves came in with a message for Brock, who read it, and got slowly to his feet. ‘That’s enough for now, Sammy,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I’m terminating this interview at . . .’ he looked up at the clock above the table ‘. . . one eight. Time for lunch, Sammy. Sunday lunch. Where are you going?’

Starling looked at him in surprise. He began to say, ‘Home,’ then hesitated.

‘I wouldn’t advise you going home. The place is crawling with press reporters and cameras.’ Starling’s body sagged slightly as he took this in.

‘What about Mr and Mrs Cooper?’ Brock suggested.

Starling thought. ‘Yes, I suppose . . .’

‘Want to phone? We can take you there, and someone can collect some things for you from your home. What about Marianna? She’s with your neighbours, but the press will soon sniff her out. Shall we get her to the Coopers too?’

‘I—I don’t think so. No, no. There’s some Portuguese people, attached to the embassy, friends of Eva’s family. They might . . .’

Brock led Starling towards the door. He towered over the other man, whose shoulders had now slumped. When they reached the door, Brock stood aside to let him through. Starling looked at him and said, ‘It can happen to anyone at any time, Mr Brock. Don’t forget that.’

‘What can, Sammy?’

‘That you lose everything. We’re just sacks of potatoes brought to life for a short while. We have no hold on anything.’

Brock stared at him but didn’t reply.

‘It could happen to you, Mr Brock. This afternoon, maybe. Or tomorrow. Or next week.’

He turned and walked through the door.

On the other monitor, Bren was making little headway with an uncommunicative Marty Keller. There was no overt aggression or even resistance in the former police inspector’s responses. In his body posture, his facial expressions and tone of voice, he maintained that air of withdrawal and passivity that Bren had described from his earlier observations of him. But his eyes had a surreptitious life of their own. They darted around the room, exploring the little differences from when he himself would have conducted such an interview as this, over ten years before. The one place they didn’t look was at Bren.

‘Have you got a problem, Mr Keller?’ Bren said, provoked into irritation.

‘Sorry?’

‘You won’t look at me. Is there a problem?’

‘A problem? No.’ But he kept his eyes on the table in front of him.

Bren took a deep breath. ‘Have you had any form of contact with Mr Samuel Starling or any member of his family in the past six months?’

Keller shook his head.

‘Please give an answer.’

‘No. None whatsoever.’

‘You haven’t seen him, or written to him, or visited his properties, or seen his wife during that period?’

‘No.’

‘Has any person known to you had contact with Mr and Mrs Starling during that period?’

Keller thought about that for a moment. ‘No.’ He seemed to have no curiosity about the reason for these questions.

‘Are you sure about that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you ever asked anybody, at any time during the past nine years, since June of 1988, when you were found guilty of certain criminal charges, to report to you on the whereabouts, activities or affairs of Mr or Mrs Starling?’

Keller’s eyes rose to the ceiling. ‘That’s a broad question.’ The break in the monosyllabic responses was a relief to Bren, Kathy saw.

‘Yes, it is a broad question. Answer it, please.’

‘I may well have asked my brother what Starling was up to, especially in the early stages. Before I lost interest.’

‘How long ago would that have been, that you lost interest?’

‘Four years . . . five.’

‘Why did that happen?’

‘You realise, after a while, what’s important, that’s all. Sammy Starling isn’t important. Not to me.’

‘What is important to you, Mr Keller?’

The eyes drifted down from the ceiling, avoiding Bren, and considered the floor. ‘Getting through today.’

‘You went through a bad patch about a year ago.’

‘Did I?’

‘It’s on your prison record.’

‘Is it?’

‘Answer my question, please.’

‘What was your question?’

‘Did you undergo a period of mental depression in July to September of last year?’

Keller said nothing for a while, then, ‘Yes.’

‘What was the cause of that?’

Keller shook his head in mid irritation, his eyes turning up to the camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling, so that he seemed to be looking directly at Kathy. ‘It can happen like that, when you get towards the end of a long stretch. It sometimes gets harder instead of easier. Because you know the end is within reach, every day becomes longer, more difficult to take. You begin to wonder if you can hang on that long. You wonder if you might just give up, with the finish almost in sight.’ He spoke clinically, without self-pity.

‘Was your brother concerned about you?’

‘You’d have to ask him.’

‘Did he try to think of some way to give you strength again? Something to look forward to, perhaps?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Perhaps he thought that it would be good for you if you could get angry with Sammy Starling again? Give you something to live for?’

Keller lowered his eyes from the camera and considered the table once more, then gave a soft laugh. ‘Been on a course, have you? Well, go on then, tell me.’

‘Tell you what?’

‘What you’re dying for me to ask. Starling, Starling, Starling. What’s happened to him, then? Why am I here?’

‘Mrs Starling has been kidnapped, Mr Keller. And murdered.’

Keller stared unblinkingly at the table for a long time before speaking again, in a quiet, neutral voice. ‘Oh . . . Well, I don’t know anything about that.’ He turned his head away towards a corner of the room and seemed to address some invisible person there. ‘Who’s leading the inquiry, may I ask? Not you, I take it?’

‘DCI Brock is in charge of the investigation.’

‘Is he still around, then? And still a DCI? Well, well.’ Keller looked abruptly up at the camera again, a faint smile on his mouth, and with a start Kathy realised that Brock was now standing silently by her shoulder. She hadn’t heard him enter the room.

‘I’m surprised he isn’t here in person, conducting this interview,’ Keller went on, peering up at the lens. ‘But, then, I suppose, under the circumstances, it would have been difficult for him.’

‘What circumstances are those?’ Bren asked.

‘Oh . . . it’s a long story. And an old one. Too old.’ Keller gave a wan smile, returning his attention to the far corner of the room. ‘Sammy’s wife, eh? Blimey, Sammy’s wives do have it tough. That’s a high-risk occupation, that is, being married to Sammy Starling.’

‘Wives?’ Bren said, frowning.

‘Well, you’ll know more about that than me.’ Keller gave a humourless laugh. ‘You’re the copper, after all.’

‘Kathy.’

Kathy turned to the sound of Brock’s voice, low and intent.

‘I’ve got Dr Mehta lined up to do an autopsy on the head. I’m going back up to town now. Will you let Bren know?’

Kathy nodded. ‘I’ll help make arrangements for Marianna,’ she said. ‘Then I want to talk to Sally Malone, if we can find her.’

‘Malone?’

‘She was Starling’s housekeeper for ages, until a couple of years ago. He asked me, just before the auction, to contact her if anything went wrong. Maybe she knows something about Eva.’

‘Yes . . .’ Brock frowned in thought. ‘I remember her.

I think that’s a good idea. Tell you what, sort out Marianna, then pick me up in two hours at the morgue. If you’ve found Sally we’ll go to see her together.’

‘Shall I bring her in?’

‘No.’ Brock rubbed his face, weary. ‘Let’s see her in her natural habitat, without prior warning.’

The dark thunderclouds were filling half the the sky by the time Brock reached central London. The forensic pathology unit was attached to the coroner’s office and court, and he was stopped at the security desk in the front hall and made to wait for Mehta to come up and collect him. Sundeep Mehta was Brock’s first choice for the difficult autopsies, and he’d had no qualms about bringing the little Indian in on a Sunday. A dapper man with large eager eyes and a professionally perverse sense of humour, he had discovered his talent for interpreting the remains of the dead early in his medical training in Bombay. He now proclaimed loudly at dinner parties that medicine would be a wonderful occupation if it were not for the live patients, and that it was the absence of these which made pathology his inevitable career path, but this was merely his way of putting people at ease when they discovered, somewhere during the main course, what it was that he did. The truth was that, just as the subject of a biography remains alive to its biographer, so his subjects were alive to him, their whole life stories compressed into the final moment of their existence.

He led Brock through the barrier, protesting at the hopelessness of reaching a proper conclusion on the basis of just one major organ.

‘You really must find me more, Brock! Otherwise I shall very probably disappoint you. Mind you,’ he went on, as they waited for the lift, ‘this is becoming very fashionable, so I suppose I must forgive you.’

‘What is?’

The lift doors opened on a startled clerk as Dr Mehta cried, ‘Decapitation!’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, yes! Don’t you go to the movies? Or read the newspapers? Everyone is doing it, it seems, although this is the first I’ve had on my table so I should thank you for that. I have a theory about it, you know.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me, Sundeep,’ Brock said drily.

‘Now, now. My theory is that it is symptomatic and expressive of a widespread perception of the breakdown of social order. Think of the French Revolution! Heads rolling around absolutely everywhere!’

‘I see.’

‘In my study at home I have an etching which I found years ago in an antique shop in Inverness. It shows a rather corpulent, jolly man sitting in a frock coat and wig and knee breeches, explaining something to the artist. It is a portrait of Simon, Lord Lovat, as the inscription at the foot says, “Drawn from the Life and Etched in Aquafortis by William Hogarth, Published According to Act of Parliament, August 25th, 1746”.’

‘You’ve lost me, Sundeep.’ They stepped out of the lift and began the walk down the long, bare, underground corridor.

‘Lovat was a Highland chieftain, captured by the English during the Scottish rebellion of 1745. He was taken to the Tower of London, where he was drawn by Hogarth before they took him out and chopped his head off. He was the last person in the UK to be executed by the Crown by beheading.’

‘I still don’t see . . .’

‘Well, look, the last official beheading coincides exactly with the Act of Union and the formation of the UK! And this current taste for decapitation is thus a reflection of the fact that everyone knows that your precious United Kingdom is falling apart at the seams!’ Dr Mehta gave a great hoot of triumph and swept through the door into the anteroom of the large dissecting room.

‘Very convincing, Sundeep,’ Brock muttered, suspecting that he’d got his history confused and taking the overalls, gloves and other protective clothing he was offered. ‘I’ll bear it in mind as a possible motive. No doubt the defence will find that useful.’

‘You have a suspect, then?’

‘Not really. A lover, the husband . . .’

‘Oh dear.’ Mehta rolled his eyes with disappointment. ‘Always the lover or the husband.’

Brock followed him through the plastic swing doors into the large, brightly lit chamber.