“Thanks. I’ll be ten minutes or so. How about a cup of tea for Miss Clement?”
The woman nodded and left.
“Rhona, I’m so sorry about this. Do you think you could go on with telling me what happened? Are you saying that you didn’t go to the theatre with Angela?”
“I’m sorry . . . Yes, that’s right. It was all such a rush on Friday afternoon. I realized we probably wouldn’t be back from Manchester in time to go out with her on the Saturday night. I can’t afford to throw money away, and I tried to find someone else who would buy my ticket from me, only none of the other girls up here are into that sort of thing. It was almost the end of the day before I eventually managed to get rid of it.”
“Who took it?”
“Mr. Gentle, the boss of our section—Sales and Marketing. He overheard me telling his secretary about it. I was really desperate and he suddenly said that he’d take it.”
“I see. Is he a single man?”
“Oh no!” Rhona coloured slightly. “He said . . . he said that he was a great admirer of the play, and that he’d been wanting to get to see this production.”
“Was Angela happy about it, when you told her who she was going with?”
“I never had the chance to tell her. She’d been working down here on the fifth floor all afternoon. I never saw her again!” The tears poured once more down Rhona’s plump cheeks.
“I’m sorry.” Kathy paused to let her recover. “Now, did Angela ever mention to you that she was being pestered by anyone? Followed home, perhaps, or getting phone calls?”
“No!” Rhona looked horrified. “Who told you that?”
Kathy shook her head. “No, I’m only considering the possibility. It’s something we have to consider.”
Rhona shook her head miserably.
“All right. Here’s your tea, Rhona. I’ll leave it at that for now. I’ll give you my phone number in case you think of anything later.”
Kathy followed the secretary out to her boss’s office, where Clive Ferry rose cautiously to his feet to shake Kathy’s hand. He was dressed stiffly in pinstripe suit, starched white shirt, and club tie, all as immaculate as the small, perfectly sculpted moustache on his lip, and this careful personal grooming seemed designed to imply total propriety. He hadn’t seen the newspaper reports either, and he slipped quickly into expressions of regret, almost thankfully, Kathy thought, as if he’d been expecting something more immediately threatening from her visit.
“We’ll co-operate in any way we can, Sergeant. A dreadful thing. I’ll check later about Angela’s entitlements from our staff insurance fund, and inform her parents, of course.”
“At this stage we’re trying to build up a picture of Angela’s movements and the people she knew.”
“Of course. You’ve been speaking to Rhona Clement, I believe.”
“Yes. We thought that she went to the theatre with Angela on Saturday night, but it seems she sold her ticket to someone else. I’d like to speak to that person now if I can.”
“Ah yes. And who was that?”
“A Mr. Gentle.”
Ferry looked startled for a second, the moustache giving a little leap, as if it might be about to run for cover, and then his face went completely blank. “Really?”
“You’re surprised?”
“Ah . . . a little. I wasn’t aware that Mr. Gentle was interested in the theatre.”
“But apart from that, was there anything else surprising to you about the arrangement?”
“I really don’t know the circumstances. You’d better ask him.”
Ferry hurriedly picked up his phone. He murmured into it, then looked at Kathy. “He’s not in yet. His secretary is expecting him.”
Kathy looked at her watch: 10:15.
“Well, perhaps in the meantime I could speak to some of the other people Angela worked with.”
“Yes, of course. In the boardroom?”
“What about the seventh floor? I’d like to see her desk, make sure she didn’t have a diary or anything like that. Is there a room where I could speak to people there?”
Kathy took the lift, and as she stepped out into an open-plan office area she was immediately aware that the news had preceded her, as a dozen pairs of eyes, bright with troubled curiosity, focused on her. She was shown to Angela’s desk, where she found nothing of interest, and then to a small room separated from the main office by a smoked-glass partition. As she moved through the office, whispered conversations died in front of her and started up again behind. Alone in the small room, she spoke to each of the women who worked in the immediate vicinity of Angela’s desk, getting little hard information from them, but gaining a distinct impression of wariness when she brought up Mr. Gentle’s name. It might have been nervousness about discussing their immediate boss, she thought, but the reaction of one girl in particular bothered her. She wore more make-up than the others, and had a mischievous, knowing look about her. When Kathy mentioned that her boss appeared to have gone to the theatre with Angela, she sucked in her cheeks and rolled her eyes.
“What does that mean?” Kathy asked her.
The girl shrugged exaggeratedly. “What does what mean?”
“Did Angela have a problem with Mr. Gentle?”
The girl looked affronted. “Not as far as I know. I never suggested that.”
“Well, what are you suggesting then?”
“Not a fing. I’m not suggesting anyfing, and you’d better not say I am.”
Kathy followed her gaze out through the smoked-glass wall to the main office, where a man had appeared and was deep in conversation with one of the older women.
Tom Gentle gave the impression of being appropriately named. He was slight of build, medium height, neat, and middle-aged. He came into the interview room, followed by the stares of the women who worked for him, with a look of immense distress. He sat opposite Kathy and spoke to her with a warm, soft voice, filled with concern. His most distinctive features, apart from his voice, were his large brown eyes, and Kathy suspected that he would be the sort of man that women might instinctively feel was in need of mothering.
“Now, I understand that you were at the National Theatre on Saturday night, Mr. Gentle, with Angela.”
“No.” He shook his head sadly. “No, I’m afraid I wasn’t.”
“Oh . . . Rhona Clement has just told me that she sold you her ticket late on Friday afternoon.”
“Yes, that’s quite right. Poor Rhona, she’s had a terrible time of it. She was very agitated when I overheard her talking to my secretary about the ticket. She was on the point of leaving for Manchester, and hadn’t been able to interest anyone. Well, on the spur of the moment I said that I’d take it. I thought at the time that my wife had arranged to have her bridge group round on Saturday night, and I was glad of an excuse to get out of the house. And of course I’d read a lot about how wonderful this production was. I didn’t have time to check with my wife, though, and when I got home I discovered that her bridge night is actually next Saturday. Well, that made it difficult. Muriel—my wife—did say that I shouldn’t waste the ticket and that I should go anyway, but I really didn’t feel comfortable about going out without her.”
“So, what did you do?”
“I stayed at home.”
“What about the ticket?”
“Well, I’m afraid that was just wasted.”
“You didn’t phone the theatre to see if they could sell it for you?”
“No—I wouldn’t have had time on Saturday to take it up to the theatre anyway.”
Kathy stared at him, and he stared back, a mournful smile on his face. But there was something else in his smile, a suggestion of sly impishness which, even in the present circumstances, he couldn’t quite suppress.
When she returned to the fifth floor, Kathy rang Bren at the National Theatre. The operator tracked him down eventually to the booking manager’s office, where he was copying information on bookings for the Saturday night performanc
e.
“The story is that the seat beside her was never taken up, Bren. The girl who was going to go with her, Rhona, had to back out, and sold her ticket to a man in their office, who says he decided not to go after all. It would be useful to know if that was true.”
“Yes. Trouble is that the system here isn’t set up to trace people in particular seats after the event. It’s going to take time to put a name and address to the seats in that part of the theatre, but I’ll concentrate on the ones close by. What about you?”
“I think I might as well get down to Orpington. I thought I’d follow Brock’s suggestion and take the train.”
“Yes, well, sometimes he starts off with some funny ideas, Kathy. Best to let him play with them for a while.”
“Yes, I had the feeling I spoke too soon this morning.”
“Don’t worry, he doesn’t talk unless he wants to.”
Kathy caught the 11:50 from Blackfriars, and settled back to discover Angela’s London. More familiar with the underground railway system north of the Thames, she studied the surface commuter train with a fresh eye. The carriage was open down its length, and anyone standing up could see over the tops of the seats from end to end. It would be difficult to harass someone unobserved unless there were very few passengers, as now. She wondered how full the 11:05 from Charing Cross had been last Saturday night.
From her window she watched the city roll past as they crossed the river and swung east through the congested South Bank, past Southwark Cathedral and into London Bridge station. Soon after there was a view of Tower Bridge, an improbable confection in the bright noon sunlight, and then the train picked up speed through the inner boroughs of Southwark and Lewisham as it headed down towards New Cross. The line had long since been absorbed and accepted into the fabric of the city. It offered a voyeur’s view of London, at first from the vantage point of the brick viaducts on which it crossed the older districts near the Thames, and later from the embankments and bridges on which it slipped through the dormitory suburbs beyond St. John’s and Hither Green. Thousands of homes lined the route, at first the blackened Victorian terraces and post-war tower blocks of the inner city, and then the endless sea of semis beyond. All turned their public faces away from the railway and towards the streets on their other side, addressing themselves to the hundred people who might see them from that direction each day and stubbornly ignoring the hundred thousand who stared down into their back yards from the railway, following the daily progress of their washing, the bungled construction of the rabbit pen and the never-ending paint job on the Cortina.
Kathy stepped blinking into the hot sunlight at Orpington station and found a taxi to take her to the Divisional police station. There she was shown to a room where Ted Griffiths was interviewing Angela’s boyfriend, Adrian. He was freshly scrubbed and neatly dressed for the occasion, helping Ted compile a list of all the people who had been at the stag party.
“They’re not going to be able to tell you anything,” he added morosely, as if he resented having his friends bothered, “but that’s up to you, innit?”
“Adrian,” Kathy asked, “did Angela ever mention being annoyed or pestered by a man—at work perhaps, or on her train journey?”
He shook his head. “She never mentioned anything like that to me.”
“Did she ever mention the name ‘Gentle’ to you?”
“ ‘Gentle?’ Nah. Who’s he, then?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Bren arrived in mid-afternoon, followed soon after by Brock, who was not happy. The preliminary results from the post-mortem were inconclusive, and added little to what they already knew. All would depend on the forensic evidence, which would take days. Bren too was frustrated. After hours on the phone, working through the lists he had compiled at the National Theatre, he had been able to speak to only two people who were seated within a few rows of Angela’s place. Neither could recollect whether the seat beside her had been occupied.
The prospect of days of futile phone calls and interviews, the sense of being miles away from the truth, grew as the hot afternoon wore on, and was heightened by Ted, who would stop in mid-sentence whenever a phone rang, and glance surreptitiously at his watch every few minutes. Brock sent him home at 6:00. At 9:00 Bren and Kathy were still at the desks they’d been allocated in the Orpington station.
“I’d best get going,” Bren said to her. “Want a lift back to town?”
They stopped for a hamburger on the road back, and Bren put his exasperation into words. “This is busy-work, Kathy. Filling in time.” He stretched his back and yawned.
“You think so?”
He nodded. “The theatre is irrelevant. So is the boyfriend. He and his mates didn’t do this, and neither did anyone within a mile of the National Theatre that night.”
“Who did, then?”
“A madman. Some evil, crazy bastard, out cruising the suburbs in the night, looking for a woman on her own.”
“The monster theory,” Kathy said.
Bren looked sharply at her to see if she was being sarcastic, then saw she was serious. “Yes, a monster, if you like. Some lunatic who’s sat watching a few too many sick videos at home on his own, and decides to go out and play Freddy Kruger for real. God knows, there’s enough sick bastards out there.”
“Why did he come to her street?”
“Why not? Any one would do. He has no connection with Angela Hannaford, or Petts Wood, or anything else that we’re likely to come across. It was random. He just kept driving till he spotted someone who would do.”
“How would he have known that her house was empty?”
“He didn’t know that, not at first. That was a bonus, gave him more time. He could just as easily have done it in his car, or taken her to the woods.”
“How will we catch him, then?”
“We won’t. Not unless he’s got a record and left some prints, which seems unlikely, or got stopped for speeding on the way home and the copper noticed something odd, which is even less likely, or someone reports some bugger washing bloodstained clothes down at the local laundrette . . .” He shook his head. “We won’t catch him. Not until he does it again, if he makes a mistake, or the time after that . . .”
Bren’s pessimism worried Kathy. She remembered him as a big, cheerful bear of a man, quietly infecting the others with his confidence, and remembered Brock’s comment about him having too much on his plate.
“Why are we doing this, then?” she asked.
“Because we have to do something. Because the girl’s parents have to believe we can do something.”
“Yes. I thought I’d go and see them tomorrow. It was difficult to get much out of them yesterday. Maybe they’ll feel more like talking now.”
“I’m sure they will, Kathy. I’m sure they will. Good luck.”
Bren took another bite out of his burger, then tossed it down in disgust.
“This is shit,” he said, his jaw tight with anger.
FOUR
THE FOLLOWING MORNING KATHY decided to retrace Angela’s journey home on the night she died. She took the tube to Charing Cross as she had the previous morning, but this time walked across the Thames on the footway on the Hungerford railway bridge, alongside the heavy rumble of the commuter trains bringing their loads up from the south. Once again it was a brilliant, sunny morning, promising a continuation of the heatwave, and the skyline of the City beyond the river to the east, of St. Paul’s and the NatWest Tower and its lesser clones, was enveloped by haze. She took the steps at the far end of the bridge down to the quiet expanse of terrace in front of the Festival Hall, and walked along the river through the precinct of cultural concrete which separated it from the National Theatre beyond Waterloo Bridge.
It was difficult, on such a morning, to picture the crowd spilling out of the theatre on that warm Saturday night, to see the boardmarked concrete made magic by floodlighting and mysterious shadows, and to visualize one single woman among the milling, chattering crowd,
carefully folding her programme into her bag, and then walking away to catch the last train home.
Kathy followed the route she thought Angela would have taken southward to Waterloo station, bought a single ticket for Petts Wood, and then, as she turned to make for the barriers, found herself confronted by Angela’s smiling face.
The picture had been enlarged from a snap her father had taken of her that spring, in the garden at number 32. Her fair hair was held back from her forehead by a simple band, and her smile was playfully scolding, as if she’d just looked up and realized her picture was being taken. She was wearing no make-up or jewellery. The wording on the poster read, “This woman caught the 11:08 p.m. train from Waterloo to Petts Wood on the evening of Saturday, 8 September. Did you catch that train? Did you see her? Contact the Metropolitan Police on these numbers.”
On this second journey along the corridor of Angela’s London, Kathy began to recognize features and landmarks from the previous day. The difference was that, although her own train was again almost deserted, the rest of the system was in convulsive action, the city-bound trains packed with rush-hour crowds crammed behind the windows of the carriages, and the station platforms dense with rushing figures. The suppressed violence of commuting struck her, of squeezing into a metal tube in one part of the city, of being crushed against sweaty strangers for a while and then abruptly ejected into a charging mob in another part.
She recognized the names of the stations—Hither Green, Grove Park, Elmstead Woods, and then through dark woodland and out on to the long straight to Petts Wood and Orpington.
There were more posters of Angela on the metal bridge across the station at Petts Wood. Kathy took the steps down the east side and walked around the Tudorbethan loop of Station Square, with the half-timbered bulk of the Daylight Inn at its centre, named in honour of the district’s most famous citizen, William Willett, the inventor of daylight saving time, appropriately enough for a community regulated by the clockwork discipline of the railway timetable.
All My Enemies Page 5
