The Chalon Heads (27 page)

Dr Waverley became lost in admiration for a moment before McLarren spoke sharply. ‘Not readily detectable, then, Doctor?’

‘Well, quite. To be perfectly honest, if you presented me with one of these, I would have the greatest difficulty in identifying it as a forgery. What gave the game away was your laboratory analysis. With your mass spectrometers you were able to pick up faint traces of the modern solvent that had been used to remove the earlier inks. Having found that, it was possible, using your scanning electron microscope, to find traces of the earlier dye, which appeared to be a light yellow-green. My guess is that he used the one penny green of 1856 from the colony of Victoria, which is worth only a few pounds, as his base. It was very bad luck for your forger—without that kind of laboratory equipment and analysis his work really would have been undetectable.’

‘A master forger, then, Dr Waverley!’ McLarren cried.

‘Indeed, yes. Absolutely. Quite the best I’ve seen.’

‘And where there’s one, or three . . . ?’ McLarren continued to prompt.

‘Yes, well, as you know, Superintendent, after you spoke to Cabot’s about this, they agreed to us looking at the collection of stamps which Mr Starling has deposited with them, towards payment for the Canada Cover, which was used as the kidnap ransom.’

‘And what have you found?’

‘Well, we’ve only just made a start. We selected a dozen stamps at random, all Chalon Heads. Seven of the twelve showed spectroscopic traces of the solvent.’

Kathy wondered at how fast McLarren had moved. Cabot’s must be in a panic, she imagined.

‘So, Mr Starling’s collection is possibly riddled with forgeries, is that right?’

‘Well, we don’t know yet . . .’

‘You yourself advised Mr Starling on his stamp purchases in the past, did you not?’

Dr Waverley reddened. ‘I was recommended to Mr Starling by Cabot’s to authenticate a set of rare stamps he was thinking of buying a couple of years ago. After that he occasionally had me check a particularly expensive item for him.’

‘You’ll no doubt be keen to establish whether any of those were the work of our master forger, eh, Doctor?’ McLarren grinned at the other man’s discomfort. ‘At any rate, we know that Mr Starling was one collector who was the victim of this forger. And if there’s one, there’ll be others. Not much point going to all that trouble just to make one or two copies.’

‘I’m afraid so.’ Waverley agreed. ‘One thing I hope we’ll establish is whether the forger has stuck to Chalon Heads or whether other rare stamps have been copied.’

‘Aye. These Chalon Heads were a particular speciality of Mr Starling, I believe?’

‘That’s correct.’

‘Which brings us back to the kidnapping of Mrs Starling, and the unusual kidnap notes. Anyway, Dr Waverley, that’s our problem, not yours. If you’ve nothing further to tell us just now, we’ll let you get back to the laboratory. Eric here will take you down to the street and arrange some transport for you. Many thanks.’

They shook hands, and one of the detectives led him away.

‘Well, now,’ McLarren rubbed his hands and began pacing back and forward in front of the board, ‘what do we make of this?’

‘Sir.’ Inspector Hewitt spoke.

‘Tony! Have you any thoughts to enlighten us?’

‘If Starling was a victim of Raphael, why would Raphael kidnap his wife?’

It was a rhetorical question, and McLarren nodded encouragingly. ‘Aye, aye . . .’

‘Maybe Starling had twigged to Raphael’s racket, eh? Maybe he’d figured out what was going on. He realised that Raphael had ripped him off for thousands of quid for dud stamps, and he was threatening Raphael in some way. So Raphael’s partner started to get rough with Starling, to shut him up, teach him a lesson. Leaving his wife’s head at the garden gate was a tough lesson, yes? Right in line with what we know of The Beast.’

‘Ye-es . . .’ McLarren flapped his hand like a conductor, wanting more.

‘Well, the point is, Starling must know who Raphael is.’

‘Yes!’ McLarren clapped his hands delightedly. ‘Well done, Tony. That is indeed the point. And now we must persuade him to to tell us.’ A general murmur of enthusiasm broke out around the room. McLarren beamed, then noticed Kathy. ‘DS Kolla? You look troubled?’ The room went quiet again.

‘Have you had the forensic report on Eva Starling’s head, sir?’

‘No, not yet. Who’s the pathologist?’

‘Dr Mehta. I expect they’re waiting for the toxicology reports. But apparently she had a heavy cocaine habit.’

‘I see.’ He rubbed his jaw with a bony hand as he took this in. ‘And how does that help us, would you say?’

‘I . . . I don’t know, sir.’ Kathy felt dumb, a party-pooper.

McLarren let this hang on the air for a moment. ‘Well, we’ll await Dr Mehta’s report with interest,’ he said, with a faint sarcasm that provoked a chuckle from someone, and turned to the tasks awaiting his team. A list of active, large-scale stamp collectors was being compiled from Cabot’s and other major dealers; they were to be interviewed and arrangements made for their recent acquisitions to be sampled by the laboratory.

As the meeting broke up, the other woman in the room came up to Kathy and introduced herself as DC Colleen Murchison. ‘Don’t let the old man bother you,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It used to upset me until I watched one of those nature programmes on TV, about dominance rituals among gorillas, and I suddenly realised I was watching old Jock. Now whenever he puts on one of his performances I just imagine him eating bananas and thumping his chest.’

Kathy smiled, then Colleen glanced towards Desai. ‘What about him?’ she asked. ‘He looks tasty.’

‘Do you think so?’ Kathy said, as if she’d never considered the matter.

‘Oh, yes. I like the smouldering Eastern type. I wouldn’t mind sharing a banana with him.’

‘Well, give it a try. Why not?’

‘Can’t, unfortunately. My betrothed would play up. What about you?’

‘Hmm . . .’ Kathy looked thoughtful. ‘Is this the first time he’s worked with you lot?’

‘Yeah. This is the first time I’ve seen him around.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Absolutely. I’d have remembered him.’

On her way out, Kathy found a quiet corner to make a phone call to Queen Anne’s Gate. She got through to Dot.

‘What’s going on, Dot?’ she asked. ‘Can I talk to the boss?’

‘Oh . . .’ Dot, usually so brisk and businesslike, seemed lost for words. ‘Kathy, it’s just terrible.’ She was speaking in a whisper, as if she might be overheard, and Kathy thought she heard a catch in her voice, like tears.

‘Are you all right, Dot?’

‘I’m all right, but they’re taking the place apart.’

‘Who are?’

‘You know . . .’ she whispered. ‘The Internal Bureau.’

‘Is Brock there?’

‘He’s gone, Kathy. I don’t know where.’

‘Bren?’

‘I—I’ll have to go . . .’

‘Get him to phone me, will you? If you can—’ The line went dead.

Kathy was not assigned to the group seeking out stamp collectors. Instead she accompanied McLarren and Hewitt to their interview with Sammy Starling. She didn’t understand why she had been so favoured, until she saw Starling’s reaction to her presence, which was to ask immediately where Brock was.

‘DCI Brock has been taken off this case, Mr Starling,’ McLarren said carelessly, turning over the pages of the file in front of him.

‘Taken off? What do you mean, taken off?’ Starling insisted, in a tone of contained panic.

‘I mean exactly what I say, Mr Starling. You will not be seeing him again.’

‘What?’ Starling yelped. ‘But I—I insist on seeing—’

McLarren looked slowly up from his papers and fixed him with a withering look that killed his demand in mid-sentence.

‘You and DCI Brock go back a long way, I understand, Mr Starling,’ he said, in a soft, dangerous tone. ‘How would you describe your relationship?’

‘What?’ Starling bit his lip anxiously, his eyes disappeared into the narrowest of creases and his round face took on an aspect of doll-like innocence.

‘Friendship, would you say?’

‘Oh,’ Starling said cautiously, after a pause. ‘I wouldn’t presume to say that, Mr . . . Mr . . . ?’

‘Did money ever change hands between you, Mr Starling?’

Now it was Kathy who bit her lip, to stifle the objection that she almost shouted at McLarren.

‘Money?’

‘Money, yes.’

‘I think that’s a matter between Mr Brock and me.’

‘I take that to mean yes.’ McLarren’s voice became almost a purr. ‘What did you give him money for, Mr Starling?’

‘Eh?’ The folds of flesh around Starling’s eyes parted until his eyes appeared about to pop out of his head. ‘No, no. You’ve got it wrong! In the beginning, when I was starting out, I sometimes gave him a bit of information, like, in exchange for cash. He gave me cash.’

‘Yes? And the reciprocal, Mr Starling, the
reciprocal
?’

‘What? I don’t follow.’

‘
You
also gave
him
cash in exchange for information, am I not right?’

‘No! Absolutely not. No way!’

‘Stamps, then? You gave him valuable stamps?’

‘What? No, no! You’ve got this all wrong. What’s this all about?’

‘He’s interested in stamps, isn’t he?’

‘He never told me if he is. We never talked about stamps, until this thing with Eva happened.’

McLarren glared with deep displeasure. ‘You are not being helpful, Mr Starling. If you want our unstinting assistance you must give us yours.
Reciprocity
is what this is all about. A token of good faith.’

‘I want to help you, of course I do, but I can’t tell you what isn’t so, can I?’

‘I wonder if you would be so loyal to DCI Brock if you realised . . .’ McLarren left the sentence dangling, then shook his head and muttered, ‘No matter.’

‘What? If I realised what?’

McLarren sighed. ‘It’s hard to deal with you, Mr Starling, hard to help you, when you’re so uncooperative.’

‘Please,’ Starling said desperately. ‘What should I realise? Maybe this is all some terrible misunderstanding. If you’d just tell me—’

‘A misunderstanding!’ McLarren turned to Hewitt at his side with a look of incredulity. The other man snorted. ‘A very tragic misunderstanding, if that’s what it was, Mr Starling. Very tragic. Let me put it to you then, very simply.’

He watched Starling carefully as he continued. ‘The stamp which you gave to the kidnappers by way of the ransom was not the authentic stamp which you had bought and they had demanded. It was a copy, which they detected, and naturally were exceedingly unhappy about. So unhappy, in fact, that they killed your wife and cut off her head to teach you a lesson.’

Starling might himself have been dead, so immobile had he become as he listened to this. Finally, his lips parted enough to whisper, ‘No.’

‘Oh, yes. And it wasn’t just any copy that you gave them. Our laboratory has confirmed that it was the copy they had made the night before the auction, which
DCI
Brock
instructed them to make.’ He held up a sheaf of official order forms. ‘These are his requisition sheets . . . in order to substitute for the real stamp, but which in the end it was decided not to use. You remember?’

Another long, immobile pause before a whispered ‘Yes.’

‘Yes. And now the intriguing question. After your refusal, DCI Brock put the copy into his jacket pocket, do you remember that? Never mind—several witnesses confirm it, including DS Kolla here. So the question is, how? How was it possible that the copy in DCI Brock’s pocket, and the real stamp which came up from the auction, became, shall we say, confused? Have you got an answer to that?’

Starling gazed at McLarren for a long while, his eyes screwed up so tight that Kathy thought he might be about to cry. Then he said, ‘Who are you?’

‘I told you my name at the beginning, Mr Starling,’ McLarren said, with laboured patience. ‘Jock McLarren— Superintendent Jock McLarren.’

‘Yes, but
who
are you? I mean, who are you
with
?’

‘Fraud Squad, Mr Starling. You’ve had dealings with us before, I believe, ten years or so ago.’

Starling whispered some oath or prayer, and the last of the colour faded from his cheeks. ‘Why?’ he croaked. ‘This is a murder inquiry. My wife has been murdered.’

‘Yes, yes.’ McLarren said dismissively, as if that were the least of his concerns. ‘Now, in the light of what I’ve just told you, is there anything you would like to tell me about your relationship with DCI Brock, eh? Come along, man, we haven’t got all day.’

Starling’s pale moon face remained deadly still, eyes invisible. Then the three police officers saw a glistening drop of water form in the outer corner of each crease, and tumble simultaneously down each cheek, followed by another, and another, though Starling remained perfectly still and silent as he wept.

McLarren turned away with a look of disgust on his face. ‘I am interrupting this interview for a five-minute break for Mr Starling to compose himself,’ he said fiercely towards the tape-recorder, got to his feet and strode out of the room.

Hewitt followed him out, leaving Kathy to supervise Starling’s recovery. After a while he wiped his face with a handkerchief, and sipped at a plastic cup of water, but otherwise said and did nothing to give Kathy any clue as to what was going on inside his head. She had felt her stomach knot with alarm after listening to McLarren’s accusations against Brock, and wondered what had made him so convinced and confident that he could spell them out to Starling. She wanted to tell Starling that she was sure there was some other explanation for what had happened, but she was acutely aware of the video camera and the one-way mirror, on the other side of which McLarren and Hewitt were probably watching her.

After ten minutes of silence, the door opened and the other two detectives returned. McLarren was talking intently to his assistant, and Kathy picked up the last words of his sentence, ‘. . . by the balls, Tony.’

Hewitt nodded and took the central seat facing Starling, who showed no sign of having heard McLarren’s words.

‘Let’s talk about fraud, Mr Starling,’ Hewitt began coldly. ‘On Saturday you handed over a substantial collection of postage stamps to the dealers Cabot’s in exchange for credit towards the purchase price of an item bought that day at auction.’