All My Enemies

A L L   M Y   E N E M I E S

BY BARRY MAITLAND

THE BROCK AND KOLLA NOVELS

The Marx Sisters

The Malcontenta

All My Enemies*

The Chalon Heads

Silvermeadow

Babel

The Verge Practice

No Trace*

Spider Trap*

Dark Mirror*

*Available from Minotaur Books

A  BROCK  AND  KOLLA  MYSTERY

BARRY  MAITLAND

MINOTAUR BOOKS
NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ALL MY ENEMIES
. Copyright © 1996 by Barry Maitland. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Grateful acknowledgement is made to Peter Watts and Penguin Books Ltd for permission to quote from Peter Watts’s translation of August Strindberg’s play
The Father
, published in
Three Plays
by August Strindberg, Penguin Books, 1958.

Design by Rich Arnold

ISBN 978-0-312-38400-5

First published in the United Kingdom by Hamish Hamilton LTD, a division of the Penguin Group

First U.S. Edition: September 2009

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

For Spats and Margaret

BY LUNCHTIME KATHY WAS
reduced to the word-puzzle in the Sunday paper.
Form words of three or more letters from the title of The Grubs’ latest hit single, “Claim to Dream.” No proper names; target 130; include at least one 12-letter word.

She had begun the day with good intentions. There were plenty of things that could be done before she started her new job: letters that could be written, bills that could be paid, housework that could be done.

Mad, ram, mat, tic, model, modal, rot.

She felt like a stranger in her own flat, hardly having been in the place in the past fifteen months. For a year, while she had been on secondment to the County force at Edenham, she had let the place to a tenant. Then, when she returned to London, she had had to leave again almost immediately for the staff college at Bramshill, in preparation for her new posting at the Yard. The result was that all of the little changes that her tenant’s occupation had brought about were still there. The dining-table was in the wrong place, the curtain in the bedroom needed repairing, and his cigarette burn in the worktop of the small kitchen still glared like a fresh wound. Just to wash the whole place down would have been an act of reclamation, establishing that she was in charge again, and for an hour after
breakfast she had plunged into the task, doing the easier bits—bathroom, kitchen, and windows—before running out of cleaners and sponges. She had turned to sorting an envelope of old papers, and come across things she was amazed that she still possessed: postcards, letters, fragments of the past. One piece in particular had stopped her dead, a forgotten scrawl, terse, imperious, on a scrap of pale blue notepaper. She’d given up at that point and made a cup of tea, overwhelmed by the feeling that she didn’t belong here.

Tea, lair, meat, rice, tame, idle.

The weather was partly to blame, a hot late-summer spell that everyone had felt obliged to take advantage of, so that when Kathy had walked down to the corner shop to buy the paper it had felt as if she was almost the last person left in London. The city seemed evacuated, the few people who remained were suspended, waiting for life to resume. On such a Sunday morning, even the music coming distantly from the Meat Loaf freak’s flat two floors below seemed to lack conviction.

Climate, micro, clear, air, clam, coma, melodic, time.

But mostly it was the unfamiliar sensation of having nothing to do. It had caught her off-guard and made her feel weak. Now she came to look at it, the paper seemed full of things designed to protect people from just this feeling, page after page of distractions and diversions to fill the awkward gaps between sleep and work. There were whole sections devoted to the problem—travel, sport, home improvements, the arts, gardening, food, entertainment, bridge, chess, crosswords. There was so much of it that you could occupy the day just reading about ways to occupy the day.

Everyone should have a hobby, the paper seemed to insist. Perhaps she should join something when she had settled in at the Yard. They were bound to have sports teams, social clubs. She turned the page and came to the personal columns. Better still, she could find a man, make a hobby of that.

Male, dream, date, admire, matador, idol, erotic, care, moral, laid, marital.

The words spun from her pen.

Lie, liar, immoral, malice, drama, rat, toad.

She shook herself and stood up. Clearly it was time to get out of the flat. Peter Greenaway’s latest was churning stomachs at the cinema down the road. If she bought a sandwich first and took a walk in the park, she could catch the second performance, so that it would almost be dark when she came out and could avoid feeling guilty about having wasted such a wonderful summer day, her last free day before she finally joined Brock’s team.

As she reached the door the phone rang and her heart gave a thump as she recognized the voice.

“Kathy! You’re back from Bramshill.”

“Yes. Hello, Brock. It’s good to hear you. How’s your shoulder?”

“Absolutely fine now.” It sounded as if he was on a car phone, his voice fading and strengthening. “I expect you’re busy, are you, just having got back?”

“Not really. I’m pretty much on top of everything.” Kathy tried to sound convincing.

“Only, I know you don’t officially join us until tomorrow, Kathy, but I’ve just got word of something that looks like a job for us. A killing. A rather nasty one by the sound of it. I’m on my way there now. If you were interested . . .”

“Yes! What’s the address?”

“Petts Wood, South London—Kent.”

“I know.” She scribbled down the address he gave her, and as he went on, suggesting the best route for her to get there from North London, she wrote:
Mortal, crime, team, armed?

When she put the phone down she took a deep breath and smiled to herself, feeling as if she’d just woken up from a deep sleep, although the twelve-letter word still eluded her.

THE DENSITY OF BUILDINGS
cramming the sides of the road began to ease, and she came to dark woods, heavy with summer foliage swaying and billowing suddenly like green-black sails in the light afternoon breeze. She drove with the window down, catching glimpses of solitary figures weeding in flower beds, ponies on a shady bridle-path. Then across a railway cutting, and ranks of houses reappeared on both sides of the road.

She stopped to check the A–Z, then turned off the main road into a maze of quiet crescents and winding streets lined with identical houses submerged in gardens of endless variety. Another railway bridge, and semi-detached gave way to detached, the gardens growing larger and the trees more mature.

It was so quiet when she stopped again to check the map, with only the faintest drone of a lawn-mower somewhere in the distance, and the whiff of roses and Sunday roasts. And so familiar, although she had never been here before. For a moment she was a child again, knowing every paving-slab and lamp-post, every rockery and pillar-box, just as she once had been in another, identical suburb, miles away, years ago. It was so reassuringly ordinary, so nurtured, so secure. And in one of these cosy boxes,
not far away now, something awful had happened, life had been thrown out of control, just as, in a different way, it once had in hers.

When she turned into Birchgrove Avenue it was clear which was the one, from the number of vehicles jamming the kerb. She stopped at the end of the line and walked back to number 32. As she passed the driveway of the house next door, a woman in a straw hat appeared suddenly from behind a hydrangea bush and waved a pair of secateurs at Kathy.

“Excuse me! Are you with the police?” she called.

Kathy paused. “Yes.”

“Only, I just wondered if I could do something to help. Is it a burglary?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Well, perhaps you could ask the Hannafords if there’s anything I can do. I’m Pamela Ratcliffe.”

“All right, Mrs. Ratcliffe. I’ll tell them.”

“Thank you. There’s an awful lot of you, isn’t there? For a burglary?”

Kathy turned down the brick drive of 32. The door was opened for her by a uniformed policewoman. Brock was standing in the middle of the panelled hallway, talking intently to a man dressed in a dark suit and dog-collar. Brock acknowledged Kathy with a nod and continued his conversation with the clergyman. “I’m only suggesting that, at this stage, it would be better to avoid speculation about motive, when you’re talking to Mr. and Mrs. Hannaford.”

The vicar appeared somewhat exasperated. Her eyes adjusting to the dark interior of the house, Kathy saw that he was a young man, rosy-cheeked, with rather stylish wire-framed glasses on his nose. He stabbed at them impatiently with his middle finger and said, “The fact remains, Chief Inspector, that we all have to share
the responsibility when something like this happens. And the sooner they can accept that, the sooner they will be able to forgive, and the sooner the process of healing can begin.”

“
We
have to share the responsibility?” Brock looked at him in disbelief.

“Of course. We have created a society based on selfishness and greed. People like the Hannafords have benefited materially from it. And now that the good times are over, it is others who are paying the price—the young who can’t get jobs and who may, in their desperation, turn to theft. And when they are disturbed, a tragedy like this inevitably happens. Of course the act is theirs, but we are all responsible for the circumstances which brought it about.”

Brock took a deep breath, then said, very quietly, “You haven’t been upstairs, have you, Mr. Bannister?”

The vicar frowned and shook his head.

“Well, maybe it would be helpful if you could make a formal identification for us. I didn’t like to press the point with her parents, the way they are at present.”

“I see . . . well, of course.”

Kathy followed them up the stairs, their footsteps silent in the thick carpet, air fragrant with Mansion House polish and Pine-o-Cleen. At the landing, Brock stopped them and went himself to an open doorway. He stuck his head in and exchanged a few murmured words with someone inside the room, then waved the Reverend Bannister forward. The vicar went to the door and stopped, adjusting his glasses again. There was a sudden dazzle of light from a photo flashgun within the room, and the clergyman recoiled abruptly from the doorway, as if someone had punched his chest. As Kathy went towards him she saw that his eyes were staring wide, the colour gone from his face. He looked at her for a moment without seeing, then brought a hand up to his mouth, looked around distractedly, and rushed across the landing to another doorway.