Authors: Barry Maitland
Bren paused and pinned a photograph of a young woman, blonde hair, happy smile, on the board behind him. “There were some odd features of the case. Carole was found with her tights removed, rolled up in a ball and stuffed into her mouth. Her handbag was by her side, but her shoes were missing. That same Saturday night another girl was attacked near another park,
Langley Park, a mile to the north. She managed to get away from her attacker, and a search was made of the area, without result. She gave a description of a bearded man with an odd smell, which was never identified. Carole’s attacker used a condom, and left insufficient material for either a blood group or a DNA profile to be established, although the make of condom was established from the lubricant traces. Quite a lot was made of that in the press, if you remember. We’ve now established that it was the same make used in the Angela Hannaford murder. The cord used to strangle Carole Weeks wasn’t recovered.”
Bren took a deep breath. “So, that’s Carole from Croydon. A sexual murder, like Angela. Same type of condom. Something odd about the way her mouth was left stuffed open. Not far from here, and very recent.”
“A Saturday night too,” someone called out. Someone else followed with, “And she was a blonde.”
“Yes, right, a fair-haired woman on a Saturday night. On the other hand, a very different weapon and setting, and nothing like the mutilation of the body. Still, much the most likely connection, we think.
“Now, working backward, the next is a missing person, Zoë Bagnall, who disappeared last January.” A second photograph went up, brunette, older than the first.
“She was a divorced lady, forty-two, living alone in a flat near Shortlands station in Bromley, again very close to here. The reason for our interest in her is that we initially thought she was one of the women in Gentle’s portrait gallery. However, when we showed the picture to her old mum, who lives in Barnet, she said it definitely wasn’t Zoë, and I suppose she should know. The other reason for doubting that it is the same woman is that, although she lived close to Gentle’s route, she worked in Pimlico and commuted on the Victoria line, not the Charing Cross–Blackfriars line that he uses, so it’s unlikely he would have come across her.
“Zoë from Shortlands, then. A longer shot, especially since we don’t know she’s dead.”
“What day of the week did she disappear?” the voice called out.
Bren consulted his notes. “Not sure. Last seen at a party on Saturday the twentieth, but not reported until Wednesday, January 24.
“Next is also a long shot. Kirstie McFadden, last August, murdered in Edinburgh.”
There was a murmur of surprise at the geographical leap four hundred miles to the north. The photograph showed a peroxide blonde with heavy eye make-up.
“The connection here is a footprint at the murder scene, a size nine Doc Martens, and the only correlation we’ve been able to make from DS Desai’s discovery. We haven’t been able to establish that it’s the same shoe, only that it’s the same pattern and a similar size to what Angela’s attacker is thought to have worn. The other interesting feature is the brutality of the attack. Kirstie was killed by repeated stabbing blows to her eyes, probably with a screwdriver, which has never been found.”
Bren studied his notes again and added, looking in the direction of the voice from his audience, “This one was a Friday, August 25.”
He paused and pinned up a fourth portrait. “The previous month, but back in South London again, we have the unsolved murder of Janice Pearce at her flat near Blackheath, some time between the evening of Tuesday July 4 and Wednesday July 5. This is the only unsolved murder of a woman commuter on Gentle’s line, in her case from St. John’s station up to London Bridge. On the other hand, she doesn’t figure among Gentle’s photos, there was no sexual assault involved, and no mutilation. She was strangled, probably with a pair of her own tights.”
Bren looked across at Brock, who nodded and got back on his feet.
“We’ll concentrate on the murder of Carole Weeks. Assume that both she and Angela Hannaford were killed by the same man. We’re looking for connections between the two cases, things that contrast, things that seem the same. We’re working on the basis that the pattern of a series can tell us things that each individual case cannot. Unfortunately, a series of two is not a very strong one, but still, we must be alert for connections.
“It would be nice to find connections also with the other three cases, but they seem much less likely. Nevertheless, we’ll reopen them all, have a fresh look.”
In the following discussion, most people seemed interested in pursuing the case of Kirstie McFadden in Edinburgh, for reasons which didn’t seem to have much to do with detection, but had more, Kathy guessed, to do with the chance of getting away from home. She herself was disappointed to be allotted the missing Zoë Bagnall, which seemed to Kathy the least likely of the lot.
THE REST OF THE
morning didn’t make her feel any happier. She had phoned the number they had for Zoë Bagnall’s mother in Barnet, and spoken to a woman who sounded as elderly and vague as Aunt Mary. Of course, the woman had said, come over whenever you like, I’ll stay in and wait for you.
Only she hadn’t. When Kathy found the house, soon after 11:30, there was no reply to her knock. After several minutes of knocking, a woman’s face appeared over the hedge which formed the boundary with the garden of the other half of the semi-detached house.
“She’s out, ducks. Can I help?”
“Are you sure? I phoned her an hour ago and she said she’d wait in for me.”
“Well, I saw her leave ten minutes back with the little boy.”
Kathy swore under her breath. “I don’t suppose she said where she was going, did she?”
“I didn’t speak to her. But she was pushing her shopping-basket.”
“Are they far away, the shops?”
“Depends which ones she went to, ducks.”
“Oh, well . . . She’ll probably not be long. I’ll wait in the car. Thanks.”
An hour later, Kathy was wondering what to do. Barnet was on the far side of London from Orpington, and she was reluctant to write off the time it had taken to get there. At 1:00 she decided to have a drive around the local shopping areas. Towards 2:00 she bought herself a sandwich, having seen no sign of an elderly lady with a shopping-basket and a small boy. She returned to the house, and again got no response to her knock. At 2:30 she was drumming the steering-wheel with impatience, about to leave, when she spotted them in the wing mirror, ambling towards her at a snail’s pace. The contraption the woman was pushing—a walking-stick handle on a wicker basket mounted on a pair of wheels—reminded Kathy of her aunt, as did the vague look in the woman’s eyes when she turned at the garden gate in response to Kathy’s call.
“Oh!” Confusion filled the old lady’s face. “I’m so sorry. It quite escaped my mind. We had to go to the shops, you see, to meet Big Dog.”
“Big Dog,” said the little boy, kicking the wheel of the shopping-basket in disgust, “was just a man dressed up. Anybody could see that.”
They went inside, put on the kettle, sat the boy in front of the TV and retired to the front lounge, where Zoë’s mother kept her collection of photographs. Then they had to get up again and go back through the other rooms, searching for her glasses. When
they were finally settled, Kathy gave her the photograph she had brought with her, from Gentle’s collection.
“Yes, this is the picture the other officer showed me. It’s definitely not our Zoë. See, this one’s fair.”
“We got a better copy made,” Kathy said. “Just to be sure.”
“Well, it’s not her. Look, here she is on her wedding day, June 6, 1979. Isn’t she just lovely?”
A plump brunette beamed at the camera. Kathy nodded. There was little similarity to the blonde in Gentle’s picture. It was only the eyes that had deceived someone, making the comparison. The same almost feline character to the eyes. But Zoë’s nose was too big, everything about her was too big.
“Do you have anything more recent?”
Her mother’s collection of pictures came to an end with the birth of the little boy. After that, it seemed, there had been no one around with a camera.
“That was six years ago,” she said. It was the same bride, a little plumper if anything, clutching the baby, his pink eyes lurid from the flash.
“Well, thank you very much. I can see we’ve made a mistake. We’ll let you know if anything else comes up.”
Kathy decided to head out to the M25 and take the orbital motorway clockwise. It was a mistake. It was almost 5:00 when she crossed the river into Kent, having inched her way through one huge jam on the M11 approaches, and another at the Dartford Tunnel. Her skin crawled with irritation at the wasted time. In a kind of desperation to justify the day, she turned off at the A20 and headed, not to Orpington, but to Shortlands, where Zoë Bagnall had been living when she disappeared.
The flats were three-storey walk-ups, developed fifteen years before in what had been an old orchard, conveniently located near the station. Kathy started knocking on doors, and at the
fourth attempt found a woman in her thirties who had known Zoë.
“You still looking for her, are you?” she said.
“We try to follow up missing-person cases to check they haven’t turned up without us being told.”
“Not Zoë. Not as far as I know. They took all her stuff back to her mother’s. She lives in Barnet. I’ve got the address somewhere.”
“That’s all right,” Kathy said. “We’re checking photographs at the moment, getting our records up to date. This isn’t Zoë, is it?”
Kathy showed her Gentle’s picture, ready for the negative answer.
“Yes,” the woman said brightly, “that’s her.”
“It is? Are you sure?”
“Oh yes. No doubt about it. Look, there’s the corner of our flats in the background. She must have been walking home from the station. Who took it?”
“Er, look, can I come in and talk to you about Zoë?”
The woman shrugged. “All right.”
The front door opened straight into a compact sitting-room with a view out to the rear yard, largely taken up with car parking for the residents of the flats. In the far corner of the garden a solitary gnarled apple tree had somehow survived from the original orchard.
“The thing is, I showed this picture to Zoë’s mother this afternoon, and she said it wasn’t her. She showed me pictures of her that didn’t look at all like this.”
The woman laughed, a throaty, smoker’s laugh. “Oh, Zoë changed a lot after her divorce. She turned blonde, had her hair cut short, and lost at least two stone, maybe three. And she had her nose done. She said that was the best thing she ever screwed out of her ex. I don’t think her mum liked the new Zoë. I think she preferred to think it wasn’t happening. Leastwise, that was my impression.”
“I see. Do you know how Zoë came to be living here in the first place?” Kathy said.
“It was when she and her husband split up. She knew someone who was living down here, and when a flat came free she took it. That would have been about three years ago, I reckon.”
“What did she do with her little boy, when she was at work?”
“Yeah, well, he went to live with his gran, didn’t he? I mean, tenants here aren’t supposed to have kiddies, and she was out at work all day, so she asked her mum to look after him. It was meant to be temporary, but you know . . .” The woman shrugged.
Like other cities that have grown suburbs in all directions, the development of London resembles a series of concentric rings, the age of buildings within each ring being roughly the same, right around the circle. It occurred to Kathy that Zoë had chosen to live in the same ring as her mother, but on the opposite side, as far distant as she could be.
“She just got caught up in things here. She didn’t have much time to look after the little one.”
“Is there much to do around here, then?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. She had a great social life. She was completely caught up in the theatre.”
“The theatre? That’s interesting. I don’t remember it being in her file.”
“Yeah. Amateur theatre. She was mad about it. She was an actress. That’s all she cared about, really. The next play—and the next leading man.” She smirked.
“Did she go up to town to see plays, do you know?”
The woman thought. “Yeah, I think so.”
“About the time she disappeared? The National Theatre, say, something like that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought so, ’cos she was in the middle of one of her productions, and she never had time for anything else when they were on. That’s why I didn’t realize she
was missing at the time, ’cos when she was in a play you wouldn’t see her from one week to the next. I can’t remember the dates now, but it would be in my original statements to the detectives.”
Kathy nodded. “Right. Do you remember her ever mentioning a trip to the National Theatre?”
“Sorry, not that I can recall.”
“That’s OK.”
“I suppose her acting friends would know. She was in at least two different amateur groups, I think, but I wouldn’t know their names or anything. I remember the play she was doing at the time was supposed to be on board a train, ’cos I went to see her in it.” She wrinkled her nose, thinking. “Only I can’t think what it was called. They put it on at the Shortland Rep, just round the corner. Her boyfriend would know more about it. He was in the same play—they were starring together.”
“I don’t remember a boyfriend being mentioned on the file, either,” Kathy said, puzzled. Zoë had been last seen at a party in Bromley.
“Probably not. He’s married, see. Probably wanted to keep his head down.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“Sorry, we were never introduced. Zoë kept her love life pretty private.”
Kathy showed her the photograph of Gentle. “Ever seen him before?”
“No, sorry. Don’t recognize him at all.”
KATHY FOLLOWED THE WOMAN’S
directions to the Shortland Repertory Theatre, tucked a couple of blocks away on a side street. The 1950s red-brick façade looked too utilitarian for a place dedicated to illusion and fantasy, but the curling posters crowded inside the notice cases on each side of the heavy timber doors all
advertised theatrical productions. She went up the steps and tried the doors, which proved to be locked.