The Chalon Heads

by Barry Maitland

  Kathy was saved from making a reply by a large plate of sandwiches which appeared in front of her in the centre of the table.

  ‘Do you want mustard, dear?’ the woman asked. She had a rich, hoarse, smoker’s voice. An actress’s voice.

  ‘Er . . .’ Desai looked at Kathy, who shook her head.

  ‘Well, yes.’ He sat back with one of the sandwiches in his hand and regarded Kathy gravely. ‘It’s been a sod of a day. I’m just the messenger, so I suppose it’s understandable him giving me a hard time. But that doesn’t explain his dropping you, does it?’

  Kathy was grateful for his change of subject. ‘No.’ She reached for a sandwich.

  ‘You were working closely with him. Didn’t you notice a change in his manner at some point?’

  She thought about that. ‘After the autopsy, I think. He seemed quite preoccupied after that . . . didn’t seem to want to talk about it. I thought he was upset by seeing her like that.’

  She met his eyes again. ‘It was upsetting, Leon. Even when you’ve seen it all a hundred times before. I felt we almost knew her. And the beheading. It’s so . . .’ She searched for the word. ‘Abrupt?’ That wasn’t quite it. Not strong enough. ‘Brutal.’

  ‘But the autopsy was only this afternoon, wasn’t it? And yet when you got back to the office your transfer had already been arranged.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. Before that we watched Bren interviewing Keller, and I thought then that Brock seemed off-colour.’

  ‘You mean because of what had happened to Eva? Wasn’t he concentrating on the interview?’

  ‘No, no, he seemed completely focused on Keller. I think that was what seemed to disturb him. He seemed shocked at how much Keller had changed.’

  ‘And he was the one who put Keller away in the first place.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, what do you think it was? Guilt?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Kathy said slowly. ‘Why should he feel guilty about putting Keller away?’

  ‘Do you think Brock believes Keller killed Eva?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What about Sammy?’

  ‘I don’t think Sammy killed her.’

  ‘I’m not asking what you think,’ Desai said quietly. ‘I’m asking what Brock thinks.’

  ‘I said I don’t know,’ Kathy said, beginning to feel exasperated with his persistence. She really didn’t want to go on talking and thinking about this. ‘He interviewed Sammy this morning. I watched part of it. Sammy seemed very calm, I thought, considering what he’d just seen. He admitted to stopping on the way back from the airport, to look for Eva at the Cinema Hollywood.’

  ‘Is that plausible?’

  ‘I don’t know. Brock seemed to accept it.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  Kathy frowned as she tried to remember. ‘Sammy said an odd thing at the end, as he was leaving. Something about how this sort of thing could strike anyone, at any time, even Brock.’

  ‘Was it a threat?’

  ‘It didn’t seem like that.’

  ‘But that could be it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well . . . suppose Sammy said something—that, or something else—something that jarred with Brock. He had relied on Sammy’s evidence to nail Keller, hadn’t he? Suppose he heard something that made him doubt Sammy. And then he watched Keller being interviewed and realised how much he’d damaged Keller, putting him away.’

  Kathy looked sharply at him. ‘That’s a bit fanciful, Leon. Totally fanciful.’

  ‘He’s already been through one traumatic case with Sammy, and now it’s happening again. If he begins to think that Sammy is unreliable in this one, then what does that say about the earlier one?’

  Kathy remembered Brock’s words in the taxi right at the beginning, after they’d first met Sammy: ‘This is not a case for us.’

  She sighed, ‘I don’t know, and right now I don’t really want to think about it.’

  ‘I think you must,’ he persisted.

  She glared at him over her sandwich. ‘Leon, having a quiet conversation with you sometimes feels pretty much like being dissected.’

  He considered her, calmly and sympathetically. ‘Interesting choice of words. Do you identify very much with Eva?’

  ‘What? No! Of course not.’ The sudden juxtaposition of Eva’s severed head with her ham sandwich made Kathy choke. ‘Anyway, where does this take us?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m just trying to see it from Brock’s point of view. Maybe he’s trying to protect you. That’s what you’d like to think, isn’t it?’

  Kathy turned away, trying to summon up something really scathing to silence him with, and was struck by a figure standing at the bar, a girl in a tight black leather skirt and long matching boots, with a spectacular shock of red hair. ‘Is she on the game?’ she said.

  He turned and looked. ‘No. She’s a bloke, actually. They like to come here.’ He jerked his head towards the adjoining bar, at a group in stiletto heels and extravagant hairstyles.

  ‘They’re all blokes, are they?’ she said, a smile spreading over her face. ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Kathy looked at him nonchalantly, lifting her glass to her lips. ‘I suppose that’s what you meant earlier, about us not knowing much about each other.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Well, come on, Leon. You’re very knowledgeable about women’s underwear, you hang out in transvestite bars, and you live with your mum. I mean, that’s interesting.’

  She admired his composure. ‘Circumstantial evidence,’ he murmured, smiling at her as if what she’d said was rather endearing.

  When they’d finished the sandwiches, he offered to drive her home on his way back to Barnet. The rain was coming down hard now, and they ran to the car. Along the way he told her about his family, forced out of Uganda during Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians in 1972. ‘We got out with two suitcases and a kind of woven bag,’ he said. ‘Everything else was left behind. I have this very clear picture in my mind of my parents sitting on the bags on a dusty street in the blazing sun, waiting for a taxi to the airport. They are small people, you see, and they were sitting on these bulging bags to try to make sure that nobody stole them. Despite the humiliation of their situation, they were very calm and dignified, and somehow managed to look as if they weren’t in the least troubled.’

  ‘That’s where you get it from, then,’ Kathy said. ‘You’re very calm.’

  ‘I didn’t feel it this afternoon. You’ve lost both your parents, haven’t you?’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘It came up during the Angela Hannaford case.’

  For a second the name took Kathy back to the place where she had first met Desai, in Angela Hannaford’s bedroom, the girl’s blood sprayed across the walls, and him ordering her to clear out before she contaminated his crime scene.

  ‘How did it come up?’ she said.

  ‘I think it was Alex Nicholson who mentioned it. You remember her?’

  ‘The forensic psychologist, yes. How come I find out from you that everyone’s talking about my private life behind my back?’ She heard herself sounding snappy, and realised it was because she’d imagined at the time that Desai was interested in Dr Nicholson. She took a deep breath and tried to clear her head, feeling stupid.

  ‘Because you’re interesting,’ she heard him say, above the noise of the wipers and tyres in the heavy rain.

  He pulled in as close as he could to the front door of her block in Finchley. The evening was prematurely dark and sodden and miserable, and Kathy paused before getting out of the car. Then she felt his hand on her arm. She turned to face him.

  ‘You OK?’ he asked softly.

  She had a sudden overwhelming urge to ask him to come in with her, and keep her company. And for the second time that evening her mouth said the opposite of what she wanted. �
��I’m just fine, Leon,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Take care.’ She reached across quickly and brushed a kiss across his cheek, then turned and ran.

  Later, lying alone in her bed, she worked out why she had done this. The image of Helen Fitzpatrick in her cottage had returned to her, and she decided that she had wanted Leon Desai as a comfort, like Helen’s dogs or Sammy’s stamps, something absorbing and sympathetic and, above all, distracting from the bleak, dark night on the other side of the window-pane. But Eva had gone out into that dark night and never returned, and she depended on Kathy to find out what had happened to her.

  That made no sense, of course, for Brock had forestalled that possibility.

  Soon after dusk, around 10.30 p.m., a car drove along Matcham High Street in South London and came to a stop fifty yards short of an archway leading into a cobbled service courtyard behind the shops. Two men got out and walked into this courtyard. A horse-chestnut tree loomed dark and heavy with foliage on the far side, and they made their way past it to a small lane, on one side of which stood a terrace of two- and three-storey houses. They stopped at the first front door and knocked. The house was in darkness, and the sound of the brass door knocker echoed inside without response. They tried again, then returned across the courtyard to the archway and back to their car, where they waited for a further hour, watching. No one went through the archway during this period. Finally one of the watchers made a call on the car radio. The driver restarted the engine and they drove away. When their tail lights had disappeared, a bulky shadow emerged from the bus shelter, which stood twenty yards beyond where they had parked, walked to the archway and through into the courtyard.

  Brock waited for some minutes in the darkness beneath the horse-chestnut, watching for other visitors, before going to his front door and letting himself in. He didn’t put on any lights when he got inside, but went upstairs and ran a bath, poured a large glass of whisky, and took the remains of a gourmet steak and kidney pie from the fridge. When he had finished all three in the darkness, he went to bed and fell asleep. Later he started awake, sweating, with a dream vivid in his mind of being smothered by someone else’s scalp and hair, pulled forward over his face.

  12

  Cobalt Square

  Cobalt Square had been intended as the doom of Queen Anne’s Gate and all the other scruffy little outposts in the bureaucratic diaspora of Scotland Yard. When it was completed in 1995, it had brought a thousand civilian and police staff together within the one block, emptying Drummond Gate, Bessborough Street, Jubilee House, Mandela Way and a dozen smaller headquarters buildings and annexes in the force’s biggest move since New Scotland Yard vacated Norman Shaw’s buildings in Westminster. Located not far from the south end of Vauxhall Bridge, where the MI6 building stands, it is naturally seen as part of some sort of nexus of the forces of law and order. Less flashy in its post-modernism than the MI6 building, more sober in its brick-framed glass curtain walling, Sally Malone would have pointed out that this was the two-bob side of the block, as against the half-crown riverbank site of the other building. Taken with its size, this more sombre expression of the Met complex makes the security services building seem almost frivolous. Approaching the front door of Cobalt Square, Kathy wondered what bureaucratic amnesia had allowed Brock’s team to remain free at Queen Anne’s Gate for so long.

  Superintendent McLarren was not available when Kathy arrived at level five. After half an hour, she was told to get herself a cup of coffee and return at ten. This was repeated several times. Towards noon, just as she was wondering if she was doomed to spend the rest of her life like this, wandering the corridors of Cobalt Square, she was told that Superintendent McLarren had returned and would see her immediately.

  A tall, wiry Scotsman with a sharp beak of a nose and unexpectedly luxuriant eyebrows, McLarren was in good spirits. ‘Come in, lassie, come in!’ He waved her into his office and told her to sit.

  ‘We’ll go through and join the others in a minute, but I wanted a wee word with you first, Kathy. Welcome aboard!’ He thrust his hand at her. It was bony and the grip hard.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ She knew that he liked to be referred to as Old Jock in his absence, and sir to his face.

  ‘You only just made it, you know.’ He gave her a grim smile and perched himself on the edge of his desk.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, yes. So . . .’ He stared at her with a gleam in his eye, as if he were expecting her to say something heartfelt.

  ‘Thank you for having me, sir,’ she said, dutifully.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ He continued fixing her with the enigmatic gleam. He wanted more. ‘Do you know what I’m thinking, Kathy?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I’m thinking, Kathy, that I’m looking at a shipwrecked sailor who’s been pulled into the lifeboat from the stormy seas, but who doesn’t yet understand what a near thing it was.’

  Kathy tried not to look surprised. ‘Really, sir?’

  ‘Aye, really. Is there anything you regret, tell me, about coming aboard?’

  Kathy found it hard to find something appropriate to say. ‘Er . . . Well, I suppose I regret coming off the Starling case, sir. It was . . . interesting.’

  ‘Oh, fascinating indeed! Kidnapping, decapitation and philately! What could be more fascinating!’ He chuckled. ‘Well, then, if that’s all, then you regret nothing.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t follow.’

  He leaned forward. ‘I am now the investigating officer in the Starling case, lass. That is what we shall be working on together.’ He peered closely at her reaction from under his lush eyebrows, and when her face showed none, he added, ‘Brock is off the case, and his team likewise. That’s what I meant about you being only just in time. Twenty-four hours later and you wouldn’t have been allowed within missile range of the Starling case.’

  ‘Brock is off the case, sir?’

  ‘DCI Brock is suspended from duty, Kathy, as of midnight, last night. The rest of his team is to have nothing further to do with the case. But, by good fortune, you have scrambled on board to provide us with some measure of continuity. Now do you understand my metaphor, Kathy, of the shipwrecked sailor?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, sir. I do understand.’

  He mistook her smile as a sign of her gratitude at having been saved, rather than relief that Brock’s actions might, after all, have been explicable.

  ‘But why is DCI Brock suspended, sir? Surely no one believes . . . Is it the missing stamp?’

  ‘It’s not really for me to comment, lassie, except to say that it was more than one thing.’

  ‘More than one?’

  McLarren tapped his fingers on the edge of the desk. ‘I’m talking about the whole bungled kidnapping and ransom operation. Our friends in Crime Operations Group are taking a very dim view of it all.’

  ‘SO10 are going to be working with you now, sir?’

  McLarren looked particularly pleased with himself at this question. ‘Indeed not. Crime Operations Group have gracefully conceded that this one is entirely ours.’

  ‘But surely, extortion, kidnapping, that’s their field, isn’t it?’

  ‘I was able to convince them that the Starling case is not, essentially, about extortion, kidnapping, decapitation or murder. It is about postage stamps.’

  ‘Postage stamps?’

  ‘More particularly about the forgery of rare postage stamps, which is fraud, our bailiwick.’

  Kathy looked astounded.

  ‘You doubt it, Kathy?’

  ‘Well, I had no idea . . .’

  ‘Really?’ He looked carefully at her. ‘Brock didn’t mention the forged Chalon Heads to you?’

  ‘No.’ Once again Kathy felt the ground giving way under her, just when she thought she had found some basis for understanding Brock’s actions.

  ‘The ransom notes, three Tasmanian Chalon Heads, you remember? Van Diemen’s Land?’

  ‘Yes, they were valuable stamps . . . forgeries?’

&
nbsp; ‘Aye, forgeries, lassie! The forensic laboratory discovered this towards the end of last week, and I was informed straight away, as was DCI Brock.’ He saw the question forming in her eyes, and laughed. ‘Why was I informed? I’ll be talking about that in our briefing.’ He checked his watch. ‘Aye, best be getting on with it. I just wanted to give you that introduction before we started, Kathy. Establish where we stand.’

  Establish my indebtedness, Kathy thought.

  As McLarren turned to gather up documents from his desk, he said casually, ‘That young Indian laddie Desai, forensic liaison, seemed pretty bright to me. What’s your opinion?’

  ‘He’s good,’ Kathy said cautiously. ‘Very thorough.’

  ‘You’d recommend him, would you? Only we need a good liaison man on the team now, and he isn’t really part of Brock’s immediate team, as I see it. I thought I’d bring him on board.’

  There was something about the disingenuous way McLarren said this that alerted Kathy. ‘Yes, I’d recommend him, sir,’ she said.

  ‘Good, excellent! Now, let’s go and meet the others.’

  She followed him out of his room and along a short corridor to an open-plan office area, which served as the main base for his team. A dozen men and one woman were there, some drinking coffee, talking in undertones, clearly waiting for his arrival. Kathy was startled to see Leon Desai among them. She had thought, from McLarren’s comments, that he hadn’t made up his mind about bringing Desai in, but there he was, looking quite at home among the others. She stared at him for a moment, and a horrible thought came into her head. Surely to God he hasn’t been working for McLarren all along? At that moment Desai noticed her at the door and gave her a smile. She grinned back and banished the nasty idea. Next to him Kathy recognised Dr Waverley, the forgery expert. He looked like a tourist, politely interested in what was going on around him, and gave Kathy a small smile of recognition.

  McLarren introduced Waverley, Desai and Kathy before beginning his briefing. She recognised a couple of faces in the room, and paid particular attention to McLarren’s deputy, a detective inspector called Tony Hewitt. He was a younger model of McLarren, tall, fair-haired and lean, and he reminded Kathy of the saying that owners choose dogs that look like themselves. Being rawer and less established, Hewitt was not yet able to afford the air of benign patronage which his boss liked to affect. He looked mean and sceptical, the way Kathy imagined McLarren must once have looked, and he regarded her carefully, without enthusiasm.