Authors: Barry Maitland
“Your subject matter seems to be exclusively female.”
“Yes . . . well, Renoir spent his whole life painting pictures of nude women. I don’t think anyone has suggested he was a pervert.”
“They knew he was doing it, didn’t they? Agreed to be his models?”
“Oh, come on! Cartier-Bresson made his name wandering about the streets of Paris taking impromptu photos of people in cafés, on the streets. That’s all I’m doing.”
“How did you do it? What equipment did you use?” Kathy turned one of the pictures towards him, of Angela walking down a leafy street.
“From my car. I have a camera with a telephoto lens.”
“So you waited in your car for Angela? Where?”
“That one was in the suburb where she lives.”
“Taken when?”
He shrugged. “A month or two ago. She was on her way back from work.”
“So how did you take it? You must have known her route home from the station. You must have known where she lived. You must have got there ahead of her, knowing which train she’d come back on, then waited for her, in her street. In Birchgrove Avenue.”
Gentle shrugged off-handedly.
“That means yes? What about this one, in the railway carriage?”
“Ah yes, I’m rather proud of those. I have a miniature camera, a Minolta. I’ve developed this technique where I aim the camera from behind a newspaper. I can do it without anyone noticing, even in a quite crowded compartment.”
Kathy reached forward and closed the file. “I’d like you to get dressed, Mr. Gentle.”
“What for?”
“So that you can come back to Orpington police station with us and make a statement. We shall want you to identify the women in all of the files you have upstairs.”
“All?” the solicitor queried.
“Yes, there are dozens, just like this.”
“But that’s pointless,” Gentle protested. “I don’t know the names of half of them.”
“Maybe your wife does. We could show them to her.”
“Now look . . .” Gentle began to splutter until he was cut off by Mr. Denholm. “I am sure, Sergeant, that, despite his condition, Mr. Gentle will be happy to comply with your request to go to Orpington. I don’t think we need cause Mrs. Gentle any further unnecessary distress.”
Although he wasn’t looking at Gentle when he said this, Kathy sensed that it was aimed firmly at him.
Gentle’s bottom lip curled in a sulk. “There’s no law against taking photographs,” he said.
“That’s what you call it,” Kathy replied. “The word we use is stalking. Your hobby is stalking women, Mr. Gentle. Let’s go and find out how many of your
subjects
are no longer alive.”
It proved to be a bigger task than she expected. Of the seventy-three women photographed in Gentle’s files, he was able, or willing, to provide the full names of only eighteen, and first names of a further dozen. Of the more than five hundred photographs, he gave a location for the picture in about two-thirds of the cases, and an approximate date for rather more than that. Throughout he appeared genuinely to be trying to co-operate, sniffing and sucking throat pastilles. He spent most of Wednesday at Orpington, and returned voluntarily the next day. By Thursday afternoon he had become part of the background, chaffing with the typists at the coffee machine, sharing a sly joke with the lads from Traffic in the next office, and occasionally catching Kathy’s eye with a rueful, impish grin.
A scan of photographs of nationwide missing persons took until the end of the week, and yielded only one, doubtful, correspondence with a picture of an unnamed woman in Gentle’s collection. The Sexual Assault Index didn’t include photographs of victims, and none of Gentle’s eighteen names appeared on it.
“He’s not likely to name anyone he’s raped or bumped off, is he, Kathy?” Bren commented. “But the locations are interesting, aren’t they? Maybe there’s something in Brock’s theory after all. The more recent files, since 1987, are all women who live somewhere along the Orpington–Sevenoaks line. Before that they come from the south-western suburbs—Hinchley Wood, Surbiton, Berrylands—all places on the Esher line, which is where he and his missus used to live.”
“Even the ones we do track down don’t want to talk to us,” Kathy said. “I spoke to a couple of women this morning who claimed they knew nothing about him, and were obviously desperate for me not to call on them to talk about it. I finally got one to agree to meet me tomorrow morning while she’s doing the Saturday shopping.”
“Gently, gently, catchee monkey.” Bren grinned encouragingly, then changed tack. “Did I do something wrong the other evening, Kathy?”
“When?”
“Couple of nights ago, I offered you a lift back up to town and a drink. You seemed put out.”
“Did I? Sorry, I was probably preoccupied.”
“It wasn’t me, then?”
“No, no. You’re looking more cheerful these days, Bren. I thought you were a bit down early on in the week.”
Bren looked away. “Not me, Kathy. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s moody people. So”—still not looking at her—“it’s hot as buggery, isn’t it? And muggy too. How about a nice cool drink on the way back tonight?”
“Oh . . . well, fine, OK.”
At that point Brock put his head round the door. “Anyone seen Ted Griffiths?”
Kathy shook her head. “I think he left, Brock. More than an hour ago.”
He frowned, then shrugged. “Well, anyone fancy a cold drink? No doubt you’ll be anxious to return to the bosom of your family, Bren, but you might consider postponing that pleasure for the sake of your unmarried colleagues here. Help Kathy and me fill a few minutes of our empty lives between shifts.”
“God save us,” Bren muttered under his breath.
IT RAINED DURING THE
night, and when the Saturday shoppers left home the next morning they found that the world had changed. New smells filled the suburbs, of damp earth and vegetation. It was still warm, but the sky was dark with clouds that spasmodically soaked the world below with showers of heavy raindrops. The certainty of endless sunny days was shaken, replaced with a sense of the inevitability of autumn. Kathy found the coffee shop in Bromley High Street, and went inside, half-expecting the woman not to be there. But she was, wearing, as she had arranged, a straw summer hat, incongruous now with the change in the weather, and reading a copy of the
Guardian
, headlining the drought crisis.
“Mrs. Oakley? I’m Kathy Kolla.”
The woman shook her hand reluctantly, as if she still hadn’t quite made up her mind to go through with this.
“I don’t live here any more,” she said. “It’s funny coming back. I hope I don’t meet anyone I used to know.”
“Thanks for agreeing to speak to me.”
“I almost didn’t come. I don’t know anyone called Tom Gentle, you see, so you’re probably wasting your time.”
But you did come, because you didn’t want me showing up at your home
, Kathy thought, and smiled. “Well, I appreciate your help,
anyway. This is the man I was talking about.” She showed the woman a picture of Gentle they’d taken at Orpington.
“Ah.” It was clear that she recognized him. Kathy waited while she hesitated, and then finally nodded. “Yes. This is Bryan Jordan. That’s Bryan with a ‘Y.’ ”
“Tell me about him.”
Mrs. Oakley sighed, removed the straw hat from her head, and ran her fingers through her hair. She had the weary, embattled look of someone who has just fought their way out of a very crowded supermarket.
“Once both boys were at secondary school, I decided to go back to work. I managed to get a job with an insurance company in the City. Well, after I’d been going up and down to Blackfriars for a few months I began to recognize some of the regulars on the train, the way you do. Bryan was one of them. One day we were crammed together in the evening rush hour, and we got talking. I said I’d only recently returned to full-time working, and he said he’d only recently moved to Bromley, so we were both newcomers, in a way. He was nice to talk to, very quiet, considerate, a little bit sad. When we got to Elmstead Woods it was raining. He said he’d got his car at the station, and could he give me a lift. Well, the thing is, living in Bromley I was really on the Victoria line, but I worked in the City, so Elmstead Woods was the closest station, and it was always a pest getting home from there. So anyway, I said yes.”
She took a sip of the coffee the waitress had brought them and tugged at her hair again.
“We began to see each other quite often on the train after that, and Bryan would give me a lift home. He told me a bit about himself, about his invalid wife and everything. I began to look forward to seeing him. There was something about him not belonging to either home or work, but being something in between, a friend just for the journey. Then one evening, after the clocks changed and the evenings were getting dark, he
stopped on the way home and, well, he gave me a cuddle.” She shrugged, embarrassed. “It never got beyond that.”
She saw the look that passed briefly across Kathy’s face and she said, “No, really. We had the opportunity, but he never took it any further. I did wonder if it was me. Anyway, he told me, a month or two after, that he felt he must stop seeing me on account of how he could never leave his wife, who depends on him for everything, and in a way I was secretly relieved. I have seen him sometimes since then on the station at Blackfriars, but we never speak, and I’ve noticed he doesn’t get off at Elmstead Woods any more.”
Kathy hesitated.
“Is that any help to you?” Mrs. Oakley said. “Obviously, I don’t want my husband to know about it. You do understand that, don’t you?”
“Of course. Thank you for being so frank with me. The only thing I’m really interested in is if he was ever violent, or tried to make you do anything against your will.”
“Oh no!” Mrs. Oakley looked shocked. “He was never like that. That’s what I liked about him really. He was so gentle, and sort of sad. You couldn’t help wanting to cheer him up. It was on account of his wife, of course.”
Then a small doubt crossed her face. “His wife does have a handicap, doesn’t she?”
“Oh yes, Mrs. Oakley,” Kathy nodded, “she has a handicap all right.”
THAT EVENING KATHY WAS
surprised by a phone call from her cousin Di in Canada. Since their contact was usually restricted to Christmas and birthday cards, Kathy assumed there was a new crisis in her life.
“No, no. I just wanted to wish you luck with your new job,
Kathy. Have you started yet? I wasn’t sure if you were back in your flat.”
Kathy blinked in surprise. It was hard to imagine that Di would have known about her movements, let alone cared.
“Are you sure nothing’s wrong? Are Tom and Mary all right?”
Di gave her warm mid-Atlantic chuckle. “Can’t stop being a suspicious detective, can you, Kath? Mom and Pop are fine, I guess. You haven’t spoken to them recently?”
“Not for a month or so. How’s everything with you?”
Strangely, Di didn’t seem to have much to say about the things that usually filled her conversation, the boys, her new husband, their vacation. After a few more minutes they ran out of things to say. When she hung up Kathy still had no idea what the call had really been about.
IT WAS SUNNY AGAIN
the next morning, Sunday, just one week since Kathy had started working on the Hannaford case. She opened the Sunday paper over her coffee and toast, and discovered the twelve-letter-word answer to the previous weekend’s word quiz—
melodramatic
. Of course. She didn’t look at the new puzzle in case it became a habit. The thought of measuring her future Sundays in word-puzzles made her heart sink. Instead she dug out her swimming costume and a towel and took the tube into town.
She went first to the offices at Queen Anne’s Gate, for which she now had a key. As she made her way through the building she could hear the sounds of other people, but there was no one from Brock’s team in the basement, nor any messages to indicate new developments. She thought of Gentle’s puppy-dog smile and of all those unnamed women’s faces in his files, and she felt restless. She sat down at a computer and called up, once again, the Sexual Assault Index, this time concentrating on cases within the Metropolitan Police Number Five Area, covering south-west London and the Esher suburban rail line, and Number Three Area, for the Sevenoaks line. Eventually she fixed on seven cases which might, she thought, from the bare details given, conceivably correspond with pictures of women from the relevant areas. She
then faxed the photographs to the case officers cited for each assault, in the hope that someone might recognize them, using the photocopied set of Gentle’s pictures which she’d brought with her from Orpington.
She switched off the machine and headed back upstairs to the street. She’d been told of a pool nearby in Pimlico which people from Headquarters used, and she walked briskly south, trying to get Bren’s prediction out of her mind, that they were wasting their time.
After the first couple of lengths, the rhythm of the crawl took over, gradually easing the tension which the keyboard had built up across her shoulders and neck. Twenty minutes later, she pulled herself out and sat dripping on the edge of the pool. Despite the warm day, there were only a couple of other people there. One of them, a dark-haired man with goggles who had been trolling steadily up and down the pool since she arrived, completed a fast length to her end and got out. She took no notice until she became aware of his dark-skinned legs at her side, and then of him sitting down beside her.
“Hi.”
She was surprised to see Leon Desai.
“Oh, hello. I didn’t recognize you without your clothes on,” she said.
He looked coolly at her without smiling for a moment, and then, just as irritation began to tighten her mouth, the corners of his eyes creased, just a fraction. What really irritated her was the fact that she felt uncomfortably self-conscious in her swimming-costume.
“How are you finding Brock’s team?” His voice was quiet, measured.
“OK. How are you finding it?”
This time his smile almost reached his mouth.
“I’d say it’s going through a difficult patch. Brock’s under a lot of
pressure with the current reorganization of Specialist Operations, and I don’t think he’s getting much help from the rest of the team. He seems to have a lot of faith in you, though.”