Authors: Barry Maitland
Kathy looked at him in surprise. “What do you mean, he’s not getting much help?”
Desai shrugged and turned away to watch two boys climbing the high diving-board at the far end. “I think you should come and have a look at what we’ve got so far at Lambeth.”
“Oh?” She didn’t feel inclined to sound too enthusiastic. “Have you made progress?”
“We’ve been having our own difficulties—technical rather than personal.” This time there really was a smile, sardonic, which Kathy interpreted to mean that only lesser mortals had the personal kind.
“Come down tomorrow morning if you like—9:30. Know where it is?”
“Yes. But Brock’s called a conference at 10:00.”
“Oh yes—8:30, then? I’ll tell Morris.” And then he was on his feet.
She watched him stride off towards the male changing-rooms, trying not to stare unduly at his sexy bum.
TOWARDS FOUR O’CLOCK THAT
afternoon the doorbell of Kathy’s flat rang. She was startled to find her Aunt Mary standing on the threshold, her small round figure enveloped in a thick yellow winter coat, her silver hair capped by one of the many hats she owned, this one a furry brown helmet trimmed with a gold ribbon. The whole effect was like a plump teddy bear. As she came into the flat, Kathy saw that she had a small suitcase in tow, strapped to a folding aluminium frame with little wheels.
It had been some years since Kathy had spent much time with her aunt, the uncertainty of that gap making their embrace more awkward than either intended.
“Are you on your own?” Kathy beamed, trying to sound as if it was the most natural thing to have her aunt call on a Sunday afternoon, when in reality the sight of the familiar figure here in her flat, outside of her native Sheffield, seemed as bizarre and exotic as if an Amazonian Indian in full ceremonial dress had dropped in.
“Yes, dear.” Aunt Mary seemed abnormally short of conversation, just as her daughter Di had been on the phone. There was something odd about the way she looked too—dazed, not quite registering her surroundings, avoiding eye contact with her niece.
“No Uncle Tom?”
“No, dear.” Then, after a long pause, “I thought I’d get away on my own. To London.”
“That’s a good idea.” Kathy tried not to sound alarmed.
“Do you mind, Kathy?” Aunt Mary said heavily, looking hard at Kathy for the first time. “Do you mind if I stay here for a day or two?”
“Of course not. Mrs. P next door has got a folding bed I can borrow. Here, take your coat off. You must be sweltering. What train did you catch?”
“Mid morning, it was.”
“Really? And what did you do when you got to London?”
“I got the underground, dear. To find you.”
Kathy stared at her. She must have been down in the tube for two or three hours, trying to find Finchley Central. It was a miracle she’d made it.
“You could probably do with a cup of tea.”
DESAI COLLECTED KATHY AT
the reception desk of the Forensic Science Laboratory the following morning, and took her with barely a word to a room on the third floor. A balding man with
thick glasses straightened up from a cluttered laboratory bench in the centre of the room and came over to shake her hand.
“Morris Munns is our best scene photographer.” The man beamed at Desai’s compliment. “He’s with our Serious Crimes Unit. Up with all the latest laser stuff.”
“Even so”—Morris shook his head—“we’ve been ’aving an ’ell of a time with this one, Kathy. It’s been a real challenge.”
She thought them an odd couple, the young Desai tall, long-skulled, and cool, the elderly Munns short, broad cockney, bustling around enthusiastically. Yet they obviously got on well together: Desai’s admiration for the older man’s work was clearly genuine, and seemed to be reciprocated.
“How come, Morris?”
“Plenty of latent marks, but very few legible ones. No fingerprints we could visualize, so we concentrated on the possibility of footprints. I think we were ’aving a go at that with the portable laser when you looked in, Kathy. Masses of marks on the carpet, but not one clear enough to visualize on that thick pile, see? The only decent marks we found were on the ’earth.”
Desai selected a photograph from a pile on the bench and showed it to Kathy. “They sealed up the fireplace when they put in central heating, but they left the tiled hearth in front of it. That’s the only part of the floor of the room that isn’t carpeted.”
“There were two small partial shoe prints on the corner tile, Kathy,” Morris went on, showing her another photograph. To Kathy’s eye the traces were indecipherable.
“Yes, not a lot,” Morris agreed. “But clearly two different patterns, the lower one in blood, probably a partial ’eel mark, then partly obscured by the larger upper one.”
“That’s what made us think for a while that there could have been two men involved,” Desai added.
“But you don’t think so now?”
Desai gave his sardonic smile. “The second one belongs to one
of the police officers who was first on the scene. That’s why I’m paranoid, you see.”
Kathy nodded. “But . . . there’s almost nothing of the lower shoe print.”
“We photographed it
in situ
under different lights, then tried to get more detail with gelatine lifting and treatment with tetraaminobiphenyl,” Morris said sadly.
“No good?”
He shook his head.
“Well . . .” Kathy looked at him doubtfully, then saw the gleam in his eye as he turned to Desai.
“OK.” Desai became businesslike, taking charge. “The post-mortem examination revealed a large bruise on Hannaford’s back, about the size of a foot, as if she’d been stamped on.”
You cold bastard. Everyone else calls her “Angela.”
“The section of her blouse corresponding to that position showed no significant marks on the outside surface. But we know that, when a body is run over by a vehicle, for example, the tyre marks are sometimes printed on the
inside
surface of their clothing, by absorbing material from the skin. So we tested the inside surface of Hannaford’s blouse.”
Morris Munns pulled a sheaf of photographs from an envelope and selected one for Kathy. Like the previous one of the shoe prints on the hearth tiles, it had a scale rule across the bottom. Apart from that it was an undifferentiated grey.
“That’s it under ordinary white light. Nothing much.”
He pulled a second print from the sheaf. “Under an argon-ion laser. Getting better.”
The ghostly, distorted outline of a foot was emerging from the gloom.
“Then we treated it with DFO, which reacts with amino acids to fluoresce under laser light.”
A third photo, brighter still. There was something unsettling
about seeing this image of a grossly violent act teased into visibility from the fabric of a dead girl’s blouse.
“Then ninhydrin, which reacts with both amino acids and proteins. The marks are visible under white light.”
Kathy stared at the fourth and final photograph, quite clear now. “Why is it so distorted?”
Desai replied. “The material of the blouse is loose, crumpled. He brings his foot down and the material is pressed against her flesh, soft, contoured, resilient. In some places the material stretches, in others it bunches up. You end with an image distorted in all sorts of unpredictable ways. That’s why the print on the tile is important. It gives us a basic fragment of true scale to work from.”
“To undo the distortions.”
“Right. We’re not there yet, but we’ve got a pretty good idea.”
Desai reached over for a fat A4 folder and turned the pages to one marked with a slip of paper. Kathy realized that they had probably laid out all their exhibits here specially for her to see this morning. She felt rather gratified. She also wondered what was in the carrier bag sitting on the end of the bench.
“Do you know the Footwear Index?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“It has over ten thousand sole patterns. We reckon this is the one.”
Kathy looked at a pair of shoe prints reproduced on a file sheet. The information boxes at the top identified them as Doc Martens.
“Several manufacturers have copied the classic Doc sole pattern, but we think this is a genuine one.”
“Size?”
“That’s the tricky bit. We’re still working on that. At the moment our best guess is a ten.”
Now Morris reached for the carrier bag and produced from
inside it, with something of a flourish, a pair of black, shiny Doc Martens, size ten.
“Used to be only bovver boys and coppers wore ’em. Now everyone does, from pre-teen girls to grandpas. It’s the best we can do.”
“Thank you, Morris,” Kathy said. “I’m impressed. And if you can be any more certain about the size, we’d be really grateful.”
She was thinking about Tom Gentle’s dapper frame and neat little feet.
DESAI WAS MORE RELAXED
with her now, driving back across the river, as if she’d passed some kind of initiation test. He even cracked a joke of sorts, about using one photographer to catch another, and Kathy, trying to encourage this faint thaw, asked what Morris did for a hobby, arrange car loans? He actually laughed, a short bark, head tipped briefly back, and she admitted to herself, reluctantly, that he had a certain style.
The mood in the Bride of Denmark was more troubled. Bren looked tense and short of sleep, Brock preoccupied. Only Ted Griffiths seemed relaxed, giving them a little wave as they sat down.
“Bren,” Brock started abruptly.
Bren cleared his throat and straightened in his seat. “We held the re-enactment on Saturday night. A WPC dressed much like Angela joined the crowds leaving the National Theatre at 10:30 and made her way to Waterloo suburban station, where she caught the 11:08 to Petts Wood, then walked to Birchgrove Avenue. It hasn’t produced anything new so far. We have managed to find a couple of people who were in the audience for
Macbeth
on the eighth near Angela, and can remember seeing her, sitting alone, the seat beside her empty. We’ve also had people come forward
who were on the train that night, but nobody who recalls Angela on the journey, or at Petts Wood.”
He paused and took a deep breath. “We do have a taxi driver who recalls seeing a pale grey BMW parked near the taxi rank at the foot of the station steps at Petts Wood one night about a week ago, but he can’t swear it was the Saturday. Tom Gentle has a pale grey BMW. One of the barmaids in the Daylight Inn thinks she recognizes Gentle’s picture, but can’t be any more precise than that. No one at Gentle’s local can vouch for him being there that evening.”
There was another pause. “I can tell you all the other things we’ve done, Brock, but so far, these are the only results.”
Brock nodded. “So, the hypothesis is that Gentle went out at about 9:30, telling his wife he was going to the local. Instead he drove to Petts Wood, where he waited for Angela to return from the play, maybe had a drink in the pub there while he waited. Probably he knew that her parents were away, and saw this as a chance he couldn’t let slip. She was surprised to see him, but accepted a lift. When they got to her home he asked to use her loo, or the phone or whatever, she let him in, then resisted when he made advances. He lost control, killed her, and went home.”
Bren nodded. “That’s about it.”
“Kathy?”
“I haven’t got much that’s solid, Brock. I’ve been unable to get any positive matches between the faces in Gentle’s files and either Missing Persons or the Sexual Assault Index. We’ve got addresses for eight women so far. I’ve spoken to five on the phone, and one in person. They all knew Gentle, but not necessarily under that name, and none realized he’d been photographing them. The most damning was the typist who made the complaint against him at Merritt Finance, and whose picture was in his collection. The words she used were creepy, sleazy, and devious. The others were more generous; they saw him as charming, persuasive, a bit sad.
They would make very reluctant, embarrassed witnesses, and they never saw a violent side to his nature.”
“That’s because they all went along with him,” Bren retorted. “We’ve got to find the ones who slapped his face and told him to fuck off, like Angela did.”
“Yes, but why show your face in the local pub, or park your car in front of the taxi rank, if you were up to something?”
“Because he planned to poke her, not murder her!” Bren was irritated, his voice tight.
“He doesn’t seem to have . . . to have had sex with any of the women I contacted, actually, although I gathered that at least two of them would have agreed to it. But he must have anticipated enough to be carrying the knife, and whatever he tied her thumbs with. And what about the mess his clothes would have been in?” Kathy hesitated. She hadn’t meant to get into an argument over this. “Anyway, Leon’s got something that has a bearing.” She was aware of Bren turning and staring at her as she said this.
“Ah,” Brock said. “Something at last, Leon?”
Desai gave a summary of what he and Morris had told Kathy at the Laboratory, his voice sounding calm and reasonable after Bren’s. Kathy, eyes lowered, noticed Bren’s large, grubby shoe tapping with impatience whenever the other man used the technical names of chemicals and processes.
When he had finished, Desai produced the pair of shoes from his bag, and passed them round.
“So what’s the difficulty, Kathy?” Brock said.
“I think Gentle has small feet.”
“How sure are you about the size, Leon?”
“We’re working on that. It’s only a probability at present.”
Brock nodded and turned to Ted Griffiths. “How are things going in Orpington?”
“Steady, Chief. No great developments. I think we’ve pretty well eliminated the boyfriend and his buddies at the stag do.”
“How did you manage that?” There was a note of scepticism in Brock’s voice.
“Well, they all support each other’s accounts. It would have been next to impossible for any one of them to have spent time alone at Angela’s house before 2:00 a.m., and the post-mortem seems to rule out a later time.”
“We don’t know it was one man alone. What if it was a group of them?” Brock’s voice was hard now.