All My Enemies (13 page)

“ ‘The man is believed to be the main suspect in the police hunt for Angela Hannaford’s killer, but so far police have been unable to gather sufficient evidence to lay charges against him.’ Then there’s the editorial, have you seen that? Pious drivel about the rights of ordinary people to privacy. That’s pretty rich coming from this rag. They’re outraged because Gentle’s been doing what they do every day of the week.”

He threw the paper down and glared at Bren and Kathy. “The point is, how did they get hold of it? If Hannaford fed it to them, how did
he
get hold of it?”

Kathy pulled the set of photocopies out of her bag and began to compare them to the picture in the paper.

“It’s this one, see?” she said after a moment. “They’ve used the central section of Gentle’s photograph. It’s quite a good reproduction too.”

“Meaning?”

“Well, it doesn’t look as if they’ve worked from a photocopy.”

“And the original set is at Orpington,” Brock growled. “Where the hell is Ted?”

He lifted a phone and snarled into it for a while, then slammed it down.

“Look,” he said, “we can’t wait. I’m going to have to stay here to fend off the wolves. I want you two to get down to Orpington and find out what the hell’s happened down there. And track down Hannaford. We’ve got to get him to understand that his playing the lone vigilante is going to screw up our investigation and maybe end up letting Gentle walk away scot free.”

AN HOUR LATER BREN
and Kathy were sitting in Orpington police station with the CID Sergeant with whom Ted Griffiths had been liaising.

“Yeah,” he said, “Ted got on to me last night about a possible leak to Hannaford, but I don’t see it, frankly. I’ve talked this morning to all the people involved, and nobody’s heard of anyone having contact with him. I mean, I suppose it’s possible that the Hannafords know someone in another department, who’s been talking to them, but what would they know? And as for this . . .” He stared at the paper and shook his head.

“Ted went to see the Hannafords on Monday, didn’t he?” Bren said.

“Yes, Monday. I went too. There was nothing said about Gentle. We didn’t mention his name and neither did Hannaford.”

“Did you take the photographs with you then?”

“No, course not. What would be the point?”

“And Hannaford hasn’t been in here since then? Or been in touch?”

The sergeant shook his head. “Nah. The only one’s been in was the boyfriend, Avery. He came in late Monday to pick up his clothes that Forensic had finished with. I saw him, over there, talking to Ted, at his desk.”

“Where are the photographs kept?” Kathy asked.

The sergeant hesitated, then nodded his head towards the desk. “Ted keeps the prints. The negatives were sent down to the evidence store.”

They got up and walked over to Ted Griffiths’ desk. Another, smaller, gallery of family portraits decorated its top. The rest of the material on it was more chaotically stacked—paper trays, printouts, notepads, and on one side, the buff manila files of Gentle’s photographs.

“Just like that?” Bren said. “Left out for anybody to pick up?”

Angela’s file was on top. Inside, the picture published in the newspaper was missing.

THERE WAS A GREEN
Escort parked outside the Avery house.

“Isn’t that Ted’s?” Kathy said.

“He’s probably worked it out for himself on the way here,” Bren replied.

Mrs. Avery answered the front door so quickly that she must have been standing directly on the other side of it. She looked worried. “Oh. More of you!”

“Where are they, Mrs. Avery?”

“Upstairs, in Adrian’s room. The other gentleman went straight up . . .”

They could hear the muffled sound of Ted yelling even as they reached the foot of the stairs. They followed the noise to a bedroom door. Inside Ted Griffiths had Angela’s boyfriend by the
hair, steadily banging his head against the far wall. The lad was stark naked.

Ted looked angrily back over his shoulder, glaring at Kathy and Bren. “Come in. I’m just about to tear this little bastard’s balls off.”

“Put him down, Ted,” Bren said calmly, as if he was always coming across this sort of thing. “What’s the story?”

“He admits he pinched the photograph from my desk when I turned away to use someone else’s bloody phone. He gave it to Hannaford. Go and wait for me downstairs, Bren.”

“No, Ted,” Bren said, in the same matter-of-fact voice. “You go downstairs with Kathy, while I have a quiet word with our friend here.”

Kathy didn’t think Ted would do it. He turned away from them, his grip on Adrian’s greasy hair tightening. Then, with an abrupt final bang of the man’s head against the wall, he let go and stormed out.

Bren joined them outside in the car five minutes later. His face was sombre, and he sat for a moment saying nothing, staring through the front windscreen.

“Well?” Ted demanded. “He didn’t try to deny it, did he?”

Bren shook his head. “No.” He twisted round to face the other detective in the back. “He says you started telling him about this bloke who’d been secretly taking photos of Angela and other women. He says you told him the man’s name was Gentle, and that we were dead certain he was responsible for Angela’s death, but we couldn’t prove it.”

“No! Look, it’s bloody obvious that we need more on how Gentle was harassing Angela, and the only place to look is among those people who were close to her. For Christ’s sake, if Gentle was giving her a hard time, she must have said something to her boyfriend. It stands to reason.”

Kathy shook her head. She didn’t think so.

“When that little creep came in for his clothes on Monday,”
Ted went on, “I grabbed him and started trying to prod his memory a bit. I mentioned Gentle’s name—I didn’t know you’d already done that, Kathy. It obviously meant nothing to him. Then I told him about the photographs—showed them to him.”

“Why, for God’s sake, Ted?”

“Because if Angela had realized that Gentle was snapping her, she might have threatened to tell on him, which would have been an extra motive for him to kill her. If she’d mentioned something to Avery, then we’d know that she knew about it. Look! The point was that Avery didn’t know who Gentle was. I never told him that he worked with Angela.”

“No, but Hannaford knew that,” Bren said. “It was Hannaford who put Avery up to coming to see you on Monday, Ted. Hannaford thinks we’ve been jerking him around, so he told Avery to try to find out what we’re doing. He told him to tell you that he would love to help if you could just prod his memory a bit—point him in the right direction. Is that right? Did he say that to you?”

“Christ.” Ted looked away, out of the window.

“Before he retired,” Bren went on, “Hannaford used to catch the same train up to town as Sir Charles Merritt. They got to know each other, and when Angela got her A-levels, Hannaford asked Merritt what she should do, and his advice was, forget about university, waste of time for women, do something useful like typing, and he’d fix her up with a job in his firm. Hannaford has met Gentle, for all we know he may have heard the office gossip about him, and when young Avery went round on Monday night with the photograph he’d pinched from you, and the information you’d given him about Gentle, Hannaford went berserk.”

Bren paused. “All this is what Avery just told me. Does it make sense, Ted?”

Ted Griffiths gave a little nod, his face pale. “Makes me look pretty stupid, doesn’t it? What do we do now? Find Hannaford, I suppose.”

“Bang his head against the wall?” Bren shook his head. “I think Brock’s going to have to do that.”

“Yeah.” Ted sat for a moment, then opened the car door.

“Where are you going?” Bren asked.

“To see Brock,” Ted replied.

They watched him drive off, then Bren started up the car and they returned to Orpington. Later that morning he took a call from Brock. It went on for some time, but at the end of it he didn’t have much to tell Kathy.

“They still can’t trace Basil Hannaford,” he said. “Oh, and just to make our day, the boffins have decided that the shoe print on Angela’s back was a ten for sure. Definitely not less than a nine.” He shook his head and walked away.

At 8:00 that evening he reappeared. “Brock’s been on the blower again, Kathy. Big conference down here tomorrow morning to review the case. He’d like to talk to us about it now.”

“OK, I’m coming.” She closed down the computer and stood up, suddenly aware of the tension across her shoulders again.
I need another swim
, she thought, and then immediately pictured Desai’s trim bum in his black briefs. She hoped this wasn’t going to become some kind of reflex.

DRIVING UP TO CENTRAL
London, Bren suddenly said, “So, what do you get up to on your time off, Kathy?”

The question took her by surprise. She replied, “Oh, it’s amazing how many things there are to do.”

“Yeah.” His voice held an unfamiliar tone of resentment. “Yeah, I’ll bet there are. I envy you, Kathy.”

“Really? I thought you had things pretty well sewn up. You’ve got little kids, haven’t you? Don’t tell me they’re beating you up already?”

“Don’t ask, Kathy,” he said quietly. “Just don’t ask.”

Kathy didn’t ask.

They passed Ted Griffiths’ desk on the way to Brock’s office, and Kathy noticed with a shock that the rampart of family portraits had gone: the desktop was completely clear. She pointed it out to Bren, who didn’t look surprised.

Brock was brusque in his acknowledgement of them, his own desk heaped with documents. He waved them to seats, then pulled a bottle of Scotch out of a desk drawer, and three small glasses, which he filled and passed to them without a word.

They sipped in silence, then Brock growled, “There are people, and sometimes I am one of them, who think that I’m getting too old for this. There are also people who, for reasons of their own, would like to see changes in the way we work. Their favourite phrases are
operational autonomy
, which is accountant-speak for giving less resources to operational units like us, and
operational accountability
, which means greater control from above. I find myself increasingly unable to be civil with these people, which probably proves that I am senile.

“Anyway,” he sighed, and topped up their glasses, “the point is that we can’t afford any more mistakes. Do you see? Ted has agreed that he’d be more comfortable in another place, and he’s now out of it. Which may put more on your shoulders. I’m sorry.”

Kathy saw that he was looking at Bren as he said this.

“I want you to go home, have a bath, a few drinks, and awake refreshed on the morrow, ready for a complete review of the case. Unfortunately we’ll have some observers. That’s operational accountability. Their time will be billed to our budget—that’s operational autonomy.”

KATHY WAS SURPRISED TO
find her aunt still up when she got back.

“I’ll make you a nice cup of tea,” the old lady said. “You look quite worn out.”

“Thanks, I am.” Kathy sank into a chair. “How did you get on today?”

“Oh, grand. I went out.”

“Did you? That’s good. Where did you go?”

She had been to the Imperial War Museum.

“The
what
? I thought . . . well, we talked about Madame Tussaud’s, or the Tower . . .” Kathy took a deep breath. “Well . . . what was it like, the Imperial War Museum?”

“Oh, grand. Very nice, love,” Aunt Mary replied vaguely, and wandered out to the kitchenette.

Grand? Very nice?
It was at this point that Kathy began to consider that her aunt might be suffering from dementia. She wondered how she could find out for sure.

THE ROOM AT ORPINGTON
was crowded, and for the first time Kathy was made aware of how many people were involved in the hunt for Angela’s killer. Among them, over to one side and unintroduced, were the two observers.

Brock sketched a summary of the case so far, of the frustrating absence of the murder weapon and the shortage of forensic or any other kind of leads. He discussed the possibility of Gentle’s guilt, especially in the light of a psychological profile of Angela Hannaford’s attacker which had now been prepared by a consultant psychologist. This profile was so much at variance with what they knew of Gentle that he was forced to conclude that, regrettably, it didn’t seem plausible to inflate him from sleaze to murderer. This was the first time that Kathy had heard Brock’s opinion of Gentle after he had interviewed him for himself, and his verdict, the opposite of her own advice to him, gave her a jolt of disappointment. She wanted to ask just how much reliance could be put on the psychologist’s report, but decided to keep her mouth shut.

Brock then returned to the savagery and apparent randomness of the crime. It was this that, for him, lay at the heart of the matter.
Was it conceivable that such an act could just burst upon the world without warning or precedent? He was convinced not. So where were the earlier steps which had led to 32 Birchgrove Avenue? He asked Bren to take over.

“There are no current serial sexual murder investigations that Angela’s death can be readily connected to,” he began. He didn’t look as if a night’s sleep had done him much good. “In other words, if this is part of a series, it’s one that hasn’t been identified previously. It’s possible that it is the first murder in what has previously been a series of rapes, but again, although there are quite a few of those on the books, the extreme violence in this case, and the absence of DNA evidence, makes it difficult to establish any connection to a known rape series.”

Bren cleared his throat. “That takes us to past unsolved murders that were assumed to be isolated, and the possibility that one or more may have been the work of our man. We’ve identified four within the past twelve months or so that we think are worth reopening. I’ll go through them backward . . . in time . . .”

Bren stopped fumbling with the words and took a drink from a glass of water on the lectern at the front. “. . . In reverse chronological order. The most recent, three months ago, and not much more than five miles away as the crow flies from either Petts Wood or Orpington stations, seems the most likely. You’ll remember it, I’m sure. On the evening of Saturday June 9 last, a seventeen-year-old, Carole Weeks from Croydon, was raped and strangled in Spring Park, West Wickham. At least that’s where she was found the next morning.”