B&K02 - The Malcontenta

by Barry Maitland

  ‘Alternatively,’ Tanner broke in, as if he hadn’t heard her speak, ‘I might just have heard that one of my sergeants had taken to frequenting gay bars. That sort of thing tends to get around, especially if the sergeant is a she.’

  Kathy didn’t reply. For several minutes they sat in silence. Eventually Tanner said, as if making idle conversation to a stranger, ‘What’s this Stanhope Clinic like, then?’

  Kathy didn’t really know how to reply. What was it like} It wasn’t really like anything. It had its own peculiar personality, hard to describe. In fact, coming away from it, Kathy realized how strongly that personality had begun to form itself in her mind. She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. It’s not a con. I think everyone there believes in it, the naturopathic thing, quite genuinely. You should ask the Deputy Chief Constable. He’s on the Board of Trustees.’

  ‘I did. He said I should take my next leave there. Do me the world of good, he said.’ He drained his whisky. ‘Get the poisons out of my system.’

  Kathy smiled. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said I didn’t think it would be that easy.’ He got to his feet, buttoning up his raincoat. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Show me.’

  ‘Show you?’

  ‘Yeah. I’d like to take a look.’ ‘But it’s dark.’

  ‘All the better. It was dark when it happened, wasn’t it? Whatever it was.’

  Kathy followed him out to the street. He had opened the passenger door of his Granada for her and was getting in behind the wheel on the other side. Reluctantly she got in beside him.

  She directed him back through the dark lanes towards Stanhope. When they arrived at the house he pulled into a space in the front car park.

  ‘They’re probably still at their evening meal in the dining room,’ she said. ‘We can have a look round the rest of the house.’

  ‘I don’t want to go inside,’ he said. ‘Show me this temple.’

  ‘There won’t be much to see …’ But he was already getting out of the car.

  ‘What about a torch?’ she asked. ‘Do you have one?’

  He ignored her, moving off between the trees towards the west wing. She followed. As they came to the building she pointed out features that were barely visible in the dark. There was the flight of stone steps leading down to the access door to the basement, from which Petrou might have come if he had walked from the gym directly to the temple. Here was the gravel path, one branch leading round the end of the west wing and up the rise towards the temple.

  Tanner barely spoke, occasionally giving a grunt. His feet crunched on the gravel as he led the way. It was so dark that, even though their eyes had partially adjusted, they were almost at the foot of the temple steps before they could make out the dark mass of the building in its dense grove of foliage.

  This is how it would have been. It was a night as dark as this, no rain till dawn, but heavy cloud cover, mist forming in the hollows.

  Kathy watched the black outline of Tanner mount the steps. He was almost invisible between the columns. He muttered something.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Come here.’

  She went up the steps and found that he had parted the tape that the SOCO team had left across the front of the building to keep people out. She couldn’t see what he had used to cut it.

  ‘You got the key?’

  ‘Yes.’ She felt in her pocket and brought it out. ‘Open it up.’

  She did as he said, easing the door open. It scraped on the threshold, and the sound echoed in the cavernous interior. ‘Go on.’

  The darkness was so intense that moving forward felt like diving into black water. She took short steps, conscious of the sound of Tanner’s breathing close behind. He had a smoker’s wheeze, which she hadn’t noticed before.

  It seemed to take an age shuffling down the nave towards the rail over the organ. All the time Kathy was thinking how stupid this was. Why hadn’t he brought a torch if he intended coming here? The darkness was so heavy, so pervasive, that it was hard not to become disoriented, to feel panic. When they reached the end she seized the rail with relief, feeling her heart pounding, and said, ‘There’s a rail in front of you. Wait here and I’ll go downstairs and turn on the light.’ She sensed him just inches away, unseen.

  She groped her way to the top of the spiral stairs, banging her shin once on a chair, then descended quickly and found the switch. After the darkness, the feeble organ light seemed remarkably bright.

  ‘So,’ Tanner said when he joined her, ‘describe it for me.’

  While she did so he strolled around, hands in pockets.

  ‘Where were the things you found on the ground? The whip and mask?’

  She showed him and he crouched over the spot.

  ‘What did Pugh make of them?’

  ‘Nothing yet. He said they looked clean, unused. But he won’t know till they get the tests done.’ He stood up, thinking, silent.

  Marooned together in that dimly lit pit in the darkness, Kathy had a sudden impulse to confide in him, to ask his opinion about the possibilities that had begun to form in her mind. But just as she was about to speak he turned his face towards her, and the chill of his expression choked the words in her throat. Then without speaking he strode away to the foot of the stairs and disappeared. She waited for a few moments to let him reach the top and then switched off the light. The darkness struck her blind and she hesitated before following him up the stairs. But waiting didn’t bring any relief, and she began to climb.

  She didn’t know what had happened to him. She could hear no sound when she reached the top, no footsteps, no breathing. She shuddered and strode out, risking the chairs, judging the paces to the centre of the nave, then turning and making out the faint grey blur of the doorway at the far end. She moved towards it as fast as she dared, reaching it with a sigh of relief. Still no sign of him.

  ‘Sir?’ she called into the darkness.

  Nothing. She closed the door behind her, stepped out into the night and hurried down the steps. Her eyes were fixed on the lights of the house across the lawn, when she suddenly became aware of a dark shape coming at her from the bushes to her right. She half turned as a hand came out of the darkness and grabbed her right upper arm hard. She was swinging round, about to scream, when she heard Tanner’s voice.

  ‘You didn’t lock the door.’

  She froze, knowing he had intended to frighten her. His face was close, and she could smell his smoker’s breath.

  ‘You should lighten up, Kathy,’ his voice different, a hoarse whisper. ‘You take things too seriously. Just relax.’

  For a moment she was convinced he was going to do something - hit her or kiss her, she wasn’t sure which - then his hand released her and his shadow slid silently away across the lawn. All her muscles were rigid and she began to shiver. What the hell does he want? She turned and paced back towards the temple, restraining the impulse to run. At the steps she stumbled, banging her head against one of the stone columns. She swore and forced herself to calm down, take her time. After locking the door she thought, / can’t face driving back to the pub with him. But when she returned to the car park she saw that his car was no longer there.

  The receptionist looked up in surprise.

  ‘Oh! I thought you’d gone.’

  ‘So did I,’ Kathy said. ‘I had some trouble with my car. Could you get me a taxi, do you think?’

  ‘Certainly.’ She peered at Kathy’s forehead. ‘You’ve had a scrape.’

  ‘I bumped into something nasty.’

  ‘Would you like Dr Beamish-Newell to look at it for you?’

  ‘No,’ Kathy said, too quickly. ‘No. Thanks for the thought. Just order a taxi, please.’

  7

  Gordon was looking sickly pale, his brow crumpled with anxiety.

  Brock cleared his throat. ‘How about a break?’

  Kathy nodded. She looked over at the window and was surprised to see sunlight reflecting off the snow on the br
anches of the trees outside. Brock was on his feet, stretching, rubbing his hand through his beard. ‘It’s lunchtime,’ he announced. ‘I’ll get something organized.’

  ‘Can we help?’ Kathy offered, and they followed him out of the room, by a series of twists and bends in the passageway, to a small kitchen at the back of the house. Kathy heated tinned tomato soup on the stove while Brock gathered some things on a tray - cold meats, cheese, a pork pie, pickles and mustard, oatcakes and bread.

  “What to drink?’ Brock asked, and outlined some alternatives. Gordon opted for a can of Foster’s, Brock a bottle of Guinness, and Kathy a cup of tea.

  They returned to the sitting room, pulled a circular table into the projecting balcony and set places for themselves, Kathy and Gordon sitting on cushions on the window-seat, Brock pulling a chair over to face them. Golden sunlight was now streaming in from the south-west, enhanced by a dazzling white light reflected upwards from the snow-covered ground outside. The light caught Kathy’s face, and for an instant Brock felt an involuntary sensation of immense regret that he wasn’t twenty years younger.

  ‘What are you working on at the moment, sir?’ Gordon ventured, as they started on the soup.

  ‘Oh … I’ve got myself side-tracked a bit, a dead end I think.’ He sucked a steaming mouthful from his spoon. ‘I made the mistake of writing an article for Contact a while ago - that magazine the Met Forensic Science Lab brings out from time to time.’

  ‘I read it,’ Gordon said. “‘New Directions for Offender Profiling”.’

  ‘Really? Well … unfortunately, so did one or two other people, with the result I got dobbed in to represent the Met at this international conference that’s coming up on-the subject.’

  ‘Somewhere nice?’ Kathy asked.

  ‘Rome.’

  ‘Well, that sounds wonderful. I’ve never been to Italy.’

  ‘Haven’t you?’ Brock poked gloomily with his spoon at the soup. ‘I had accumulated a lot of leave, and Personnel and Training were insisting I take some of it, so the deal was that I would go into hibernation for a month or two and do some research in preparation for this conference, where I have to present a paper. In my paranoid moments I wonder if they aren’t trying to ease me out gently - you know, all that stuff about early retirement that’s been going around the Met recently.’

  Kathy didn’t remind him that they weren’t in a position to know what was going round the Met.

  ‘More to the point,’ he continued, ‘the conference is at the end of this month, and I still don’t know what I’m going to say. To tell the truth, I’m finding the whole thing a bit of a pain.’

  Brock returned to his soup for a while before speaking again. ‘The Americans from Quantico will have masses of data of course, much more than I can lay my hands on. The Germans will be proposing some kind of European standard for systematic evaluation. I’m told the French will be contributing a philosophical/cultural/historical perspective, would you believe. No doubt they’ll prove that Fourier or some other Frenchman invented the whole thing centuries ago.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve read him,’ Gordon said.

  ‘He had a theory that human nature was formed by twelve passions,’ Brock explained, ‘the particular mixtures and variations of which determine each individual character. From the twelve passions he derived 810 basic human personality types - profiles if you like. He designed ideal communities around the idea of getting together precisely the right mixture of these personalities. Quite mad, of course.’

  He peered at Dowling, as if reassessing him. ‘You read, Gordon. I’m delighted. You’re not one of these new breed who seem to get everything they need from videos.’

  Gordon smiled shyly, pleased with the compliment, and got on with his soup.

  ‘So what line are you taking, Brock?’ Kathy asked.

  ‘As you probably saw’ - Brock nodded his head back towards the computer on the bench - ‘I’m supposed to be taking apart all my old cases and as many others as I can claim some familiarity with.’

  Gordon choked on a piece of bread: the old man had spotted the screen after all.

  ‘I’m interested in the way the serial offender’s behaviour is changed by his experience of the previous crime, learning and developing the pattern in the light of what happened last time, you see. In other words, not seeing his profile as something fixed, so much as an evolving thing, becoming more violent perhaps, more formalized, more ritualistic, or whatever. The unfolding of his internal obsession against the experience of the reality of the act. At least, that was the idea. The people at the University of Surrey have been trying to help me, but, I don’t know … it’s much harder than I thought it would be. God knows what I’m going to say in Rome. There’s no chance that your murder could have been one of a series, I suppose?’

  Kathy smiled. ‘I hope not. One was trouble enough.’

  ‘So,’ Brock said, picking up some cheese and pickle with an oatcake, ‘we move on to the Wednesday, then. Is that right?’ Brock said. ‘The post-mortem had been on the Monday. Weren’t you getting some lab test results back by this time? That seems to be the crucial area.’

  Hang on. Let me tell it. ‘We did get something later that day.’

  ‘Pugh - I’ve heard the name before. I just can’t remember the connection.’

  ‘Wednesday was the sort of day when things suddenly go flat. You’ve gone through the first panic, done all the obvious things, and then suddenly you’re on hold, just waiting. I had people trying to check Petrou’s activities outside the clinic, but I didn’t really believe it would lead anywhere. Then Belle came up with something.’

  ‘Aha!’ Brock settled back in his chair. The light caught his hair and beard in a kind of halo, and Kathy smiled. What a luxury to have a good listener, she thought, like a hot bath at the end of a long, cold day.

  ‘ This is the schedule of discrepancies, Kath.’ Belle had handed her two pages with about forty numbered items.

  ‘That’s great. I didn’t expect them so soon,’ Kathy said.

  ‘I thought you’d be in a hurry, so I worked through the night and all morning on it. I’m going home now for some sleep.’

  ‘Thanks, Belle, I really appreciate it. There seem to be an awful lot of discrepancies.’

  ‘Well, most of them are trivial, I’d say, just lapses of memory - A says she left the sauna at quarter past three when B says she was already in the dressing room at five past - that kind of thing. But there’s one that’s kinda interesting.’

  She pointed to number twenty-three on the list. ‘Late in the afternoon a patient went to get something out of his car in the car park and noticed the utility van that belongs to the clinic come out of the stable courtyard where it’s kept, and drive away. It was soon after four-thirty, he reckons. It was light enough to identify the vehicle clearly, but dark enough for it to have its side lights on.’

  Kathy nodded. ‘Dusk was at four-forty and it became overcast towards evening.’

  ‘Yes. The thing is, no one claims to have been driving it that afternoon, and everyone is accounted for at that time.’

  ‘Except Petrou! Did the patient see anything of the driver?’

  ‘The statement says not, but I guess you could ask again.’

  ‘That’s great, Belle. We should have picked that up ourselves.’

  ‘There are just too many things to cross-check. I hope it helps.’

  ‘Oh yes. It’s exactly what we needed.’

  While Gordon organized a new search in Edenham and Crowbridge, this time looking for sightings of the van rather than of Petrou’s motor bike, Kathy returned to the clinic. She spoke to the patient who had seen the vehicle leave on the Sunday evening, but he was unable to add anything useful to his earlier statement. He had a clear picture of the van driving past, but absolutely no recollection of the driver.

  Kathy then spoke again to Geoffrey Parsons, who was responsible for the security and maintenance of the vehicle. He said he hadn’t
been aware that it had been taken out on Sunday. When he opened up the stable block on Monday morning, it had been parked in the courtyard as normal. He held a set of keys in his office in the stable block, but another set was kept in the office in the main house.

  When Kathy said that she wanted to take the van away for forensic examination, Parsons became agitated. ‘We need it to collect groceries and things from town. We use it all the time. I don’t think we can do without it.’ He wiped his thin sandy hair back from his brow. ‘I’m sure the Director won’t agree to it.’

  He was right. Dr Beamish-Newell evidently considered Kathy’s request the final straw. He slammed his diary down on the desk and stood up, turning away from Kathy and glaring out of the window. She watched him clasping and unclasping his hands behind his back. When he finally turned round to face her, he made no attempt to hide his anger. ‘What possible reason could you have for wanting the van?’

  ‘It was seen leaving the clinic on Sunday afternoon, soon after Mr Petrou was last seen here. It’s possible he was the driver. We are trying to trace his movements, and the van may be able to help us.’

  ‘Was he identified as the driver?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This is getting way, way beyond a joke, Sergeant Kolla. You have done everything possible to disrupt the workings of this clinic, and I have had enough.’ His eyes held her with an almost physical force. She could imagine the effect on patients.

  ‘We will return it as soon as we possibly can. But if you don’t agree to surrender the vehicle voluntarily, I shall apply for a warrant, sir.’

  It was clear he wasn’t used to having people talk back to him. He weighed her up for a moment before shaking his head.

  ‘You’d better know what you’re doing,’ he said. ‘Have it back here by tonight.’

  At four o’clock that afternoon Kathy kept an appointment with Professor Pugh, made in response to her phone call earlier in the day. She was shown into his office and accepted the offer of a cup of tea. The pathologist left his desk and came and sat with her on the low chairs arranged round a coffee table in the centre of the room. He seemed preoccupied as he thumbed through a sheaf of papers.