All My Enemies (12 page)

“Well . . . seems a bit far-fetched.”

“Does it?”

His irritation with Griffiths’ apparent complacency was palpable. After a moment he spoke again, quietly. “What about the Hannafords? How are they coping?”

“I suppose they’re all right. We haven’t heard from them.”

“I asked you to go and see them last Wednesday, Ted. I told you to keep in close touch with them.”

Griffiths coloured slightly. “Oh . . . I didn’t get time, Brock. I reckoned, let sleeping dogs lie.”

“You reckoned.”

Kathy hadn’t ever seen that look in Brock’s eye before, and she was very glad it wasn’t directed at her.

“I’ll do it this morning,” Griffiths said hurriedly.

“Yes.” Brock’s monosyllable hung in the air. “I think we have to bring Gentle in, Bren. You agree?”

Bren nodded.

“We’ll make it formal. Grill him on his movements that Saturday evening. Kathy, why don’t you go down to his home again? Check his shoe size and have another word with his wife. Also, these searches for precedents, have you circulated the county forces around the Met area?”

“Yes, Brock. Especially south of the river. I’ve followed up with phone calls too.”

“If we’re talking about commuters,” Leon Desai came in, “we
could look further afield. People commute into London from Brighton, Bristol, Barnsley, even. Boulogne too, pretty soon, I suppose.”

“True enough,” Brock grunted. “Better send out another request, Kathy; make it nationwide. Emphasize the peculiar features of the assault.”

He pushed his papers back into their file. “All right, let’s get on with it. Ted, I’d like a word in my office, in ten minutes. Kathy, hang on here, will you?”

The meeting broke up, Kathy and Brock remaining silent in their seats. When the others had gone, Brock said to her, “What was all that about, between you and Bren?”

Kathy frowned. “I . . . I don’t think there was anything, Brock.”

“You sure? You haven’t been having disagreements about the case?”

“No, no, not at all.”

He met her eyes for a moment, not doubting exactly, but searching for something. “It’s important that you two can work together, Kathy. You understand, don’t you? The importance of the team.”

“Of course I understand, Brock.” It wasn’t like Brock to be stating the obvious. She wondered what he was worried about.

He nodded and picked up his file as if to go. “Bren’s wife’s father died last week. After a fairly grim illness. It put a lot of strain on the family.”

“Ah. I’m sorry. He didn’t say anything—to me, anyway.”

Brock shrugged and got to his feet. “You sounded there as if you were having doubts about this Gentle character, Kathy.”

“No, I think he’s the one all right. I’ve just been trying not to jump too soon to conclusions. They kept telling us that at Bramshill.”

Brock smiled. “Very commendable.”

“But since we found his photographs, and after talking to the
women, I’ve begun to get a very bad feeling about him, to be honest. His whole behaviour seems to be like a mask, hiding what he wants, what he feels—what he really
is.
He hasn’t shown the least concern since we started paying attention to him. I’ve never seen a murder suspect so unconcerned.”

“I’ll look forward to meeting him, then,” Brock grunted, and led the way out of the room.

On her way up to the entrance, Kathy passed Ted Griffiths’ desk, its top carefully composed with framed photographs—the wife, the wife and the baby, the baby, Ted and the baby. She found it vaguely embarrassing.

MURIEL GENTLE’S INITIAL PANIC
had been replaced by a cold fury at the disaster which had burst into her tranquil life. She seethed at the injustice of the police treatment of her husband, the heedless obstinacy of their suspicions. Kathy’s second visit gave her the opportunity to express some of this. She harried Kathy with every step as she went through the house, checking Gentle’s shoes. They were all size seven: Hush Puppies, trainers, slippers, wellington boots—nothing remotely like Doc Martens.

“You have simply no
idea
, do you?” she stormed at Kathy’s back. “You demolish our whole existence on the flimsiest of pretexts, turning innocent people’s lives into a nightmare on the basis of some second-hand rumour, because you simply have no
idea
what you’re doing. You don’t know where to look for that girl’s murderer, so you go around kicking innocent bystanders to the ground. You’re stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”

After five minutes of this, Kathy led her back to the living-room and asked her to sit down. She did so, abruptly silent, chest heaving with the exertion of her invective. She stared at the mantelpiece and its framed photographs of herself and her husband, the two
of them together, and another with an elderly couple, parents presumably. No children. Then, in a low, furious voice, she began again.

“Do you
imagine
that I could be married for twenty years to a sex monster, a
thrill-killer
as the papers put it, and not have the faintest idea? Do you? Don’t you think I would know?”

“Did you know about the photographs, Mrs. Gentle?”

“Oh, that’s ridiculous! Tom is a photographer. That’s his hobby. He’s always done that. He has his darkroom upstairs. Of course I knew.”

“I mean, following women, and taking photographs of them secretly.”

“There you go, you see! Turning him into a monster. It wasn’t like that! He’s told me all about it. He likes his sitters to be natural, unposed.”

Her use of the word struck Kathy. She thought of Angela’s body on the bed, rigidly posed.

“Angela believed that your husband was following her and harassing her. Other women in his office have made the same complaint before.”

Mrs. Gentle heard the calm voice, the professional dealing with a case, not her life but a
case
, and she decided to make one more effort to break through the detective’s stubbornness, to make her understand. “Look, my husband has a hobby, he’s an enthusiastic photographer, a girl notices him looking at her and she misinterprets it. That’s all. The thing with the girl in the office happened years ago, when Tom was under a lot of stress at work. He snapped at her over something, and she took offence. Some spiteful gossips blew it up out of all proportion, and then people started saying ‘no smoke without fire.’ My God, that’s a long, long way from murdering Angela Hannaford, isn’t it?”

Kathy nodded. It was a good try. But she thought of the filing
cabinet, the bureaucratically neat files of photographs of unsuspecting women, and tried to imagine the efforts of a wife to rationalize that.

“The point is,” Muriel Gentle’s voice became low, pleading, “when you’ve finally eliminated Tom from your inquiries, and you’ve discovered who did actually do it, will we be able to put our life back together again? Will Tom be able to face the people at his work again? Will I be able to go to the shops? Or will we always hear people whispering behind our backs, because you once pointed a finger at an innocent man? Please, I beg you, please be careful!”

LATER THAT AFTERNOON KATHY
caught up with Bren, and asked him how their interrogation of Gentle had gone.

“Brock finally got him to admit that he drove to Petts Wood that night. He said he had felt awkward about not turning up at the theatre, and wanted to explain to Angela how it had happened, so there’d be no misunderstanding. He said he didn’t want her discovering at the office on Monday that he had bought the other ticket, and maybe jumping to the sort of conclusions that had started the misunderstandings at the office the last time.”

“Very considerate. So what happened?”

“He says he had a couple of beers at the Daylight Inn, then sat in his car in Station Square, waiting for her.”

“That’s great! We’ve got him then.”

Bren shrugged non-committally. “He claims she never appeared. He says he waited till after midnight, then gave up and drove home.”

“But he admits he was there! That’s the crucial thing. God, he’s surely not expecting us to believe that Angela had
two
stalkers on her trail that night!”

“Every step along the way, he’s only admitted as much as he
thinks we already know. But this time, I’d say he was scared, for the first time, probably. We’ve taken his car for forensics.”

“What about him?”

“He’s free, for the moment. How did you go with the wife?”

“She believes, like all the other women I’ve spoken to, that he’s incapable of violence.”

“Yeah, that’s what Dr. Crippen’s wife thought too.”

“And he takes size seven shoes.”

“Well, to be honest, Kathy, I wouldn’t place too much weight on all that crap Desai’s been feeding you.”

“How do you mean?”

“He gets a bit carried away with those lab blokes. The way he drools over the technical terms, like he’s got argon ions flowing where the rest of us have blood. Brock calls it ‘physics-envy.’ I call it ambition. He sees that as his way up—interpreting the boffins to all the dumb buggers like us.”

“Still, that doesn’t mean they can’t come up with a shoe size from Angela’s shirt. I thought it was pretty impressive, what they’d done.”

“The make I grant you, but not the size.” Bren regarded her, stony-faced. “How sure can they be? How safe? A couple of millimetres and you’ve got completely the wrong answer. Remember, they’re under pressure just like the rest of us. So far they’ve come up with sweet F.A., and they don’t like that, any more than we do.”

FOR A MOMENT, WHEN
she opened the front door of her flat, Kathy thought she’d been robbed, the lights all on, table and sideboard bare. Then, just as the small figure bustled out of the kitchen, she remembered her aunt. It looked as if she’d spent the whole day finishing the job of cleaning the flat that Kathy had begun over a week before.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Kathy said, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. It wasn’t just the fact that her aunt had taken over the place with her cleaning. The intrusion was of a deeper kind, the familiar face and voice and lily of the valley perfume inadvertently sparking intense traces of things which Kathy thought she had safely cordoned off in the past. “You’re supposed to be on holiday. Didn’t you go out?”

“I was quite happy,” the old lady said vaguely.

“I’m really sorry I couldn’t take the day off to take you up to town. We should sit down and work out things for you to see, and how to get there. At the weekend we can go somewhere together.”
If you’re still here, that is.

“I’m perfectly happy, Kathy.”

“Have you phoned home? Let Uncle Tom know you arrived safely?”

“Mmm.”

“Well . . .” Kathy said, “perhaps we could go out and see a film tonight.” She tried to imagine Aunt Mary grappling with Peter Greenaway.

“Thank you, dear, but I’ll just have an early night, if you don’t mind.”

“You are feeling all right, are you?”

“It’s all been more of a strain than I imagined.”

Later, when Aunt Mary had closed the bedroom door, Kathy noticed her battered old school atlas lying on the corner table. A sliver of paper marked the page for Canada.

TOWARDS THE END OF
the following afternoon, Brock suddenly called them together again in the small conference room they had the use of at Orpington police station. He looked puzzled.

“I’ve just had a call from the Gentles’ solicitor, Victor Denholm. He was complaining about his clients being harassed.”

“Oh, come on!” Bren groaned, disgusted. “Denholm was with him all the time we questioned him yesterday, and we haven’t been near him since.”

“Not harassed by us. By Angela Hannaford’s father, Basil Hannaford.”

“What?” They all sat up.

“Basil Hannaford phoned Tom Gentle at home last night—three times, threatening and abusing him, until he took the phone off the hook. This morning Hannaford was on to Mrs. Gentle’s father, Sir Charles Merritt, the chairman of Merritt Finance, asking if he was aware that his son-in-law was the pervert who had tortured and murdered his daughter.”

“Jesus!”

“But how?” Kathy said. “How could he know that?”

“Exactly. He told Merritt that he, Hannaford, knew that
we
know that Gentle did it, but we haven’t been able to prove it yet. He wants to force Gentle to confess.”

Muriel Gentle’s appeal for them to be careful suddenly flashed back into Kathy’s mind.

“So,” Brock went on, “who told him?” He looked at Kathy and saw the consternation on her face. “Kathy?”

“No . . . no, I was just thinking of Muriel Gentle. She was frightened that something like this was going to happen. I . . .” She was desperately trying to cast her mind back. “I’m sure I never mentioned Gentle’s name to the Hannafords. I did ask someone—the boyfriend, I think—if Gentle’s name meant anything to him. But I didn’t say who he was, and he obviously didn’t recognize it.”

“Bren? Ted?”

“No way.” Ted spoke first. “I saw Basil Hannaford yesterday like you said, Brock. But I never mentioned Gentle, I kept it all pretty vague.”

“Bren?”

“I’ve never even met Hannaford, Brock.”

“Well, someone’s been talking to him. Maybe he knows someone who works here, with Orpington police. Try to find out, will you, Ted?”

“Do we talk to Hannaford?” Bren said.

“If we can find him. I’ve been trying the number, but there’s no reply.”

NEXT MORNING KATHY WAS
roused from Mrs. P’s folding bed by a call from the duty office at New Scotland Yard, telling her to get in to Queen Anne’s Gate immediately. There was no explanation, but when she reached the news kiosk at the tube station she saw it for herself. The banner headline read STALKER ON THE 8:19. It framed a familiar photograph of Angela Hannaford sitting reading in the window seat of a commuter train.

“They don’t name him.” Brock was crouched over the paper on his desk, face dark with anger. “But they do everything but. ‘The Stalker is believed to be a work colleague of the murdered woman, who has made a habit of following and photographing hundreds of unsuspecting women on the commuter rail lines around London, using a hidden spy camera.’ Good grief!” Brock shook his head.