Authors: Barry Maitland
Kathy looked at her watch and decided to leave it for that evening. Her encounter with Zoë’s mother had made her uneasy about the long periods that she was leaving Aunt Mary on her own.
She was relieved to find the old lady safely busy in the kitchen when she got home, making macaroni cheese for their dinner.
“You said you liked Italian food, dear,” Aunt Mary said.
“Oh . . . right. It smells lovely. Did you get out at all today?” Kathy crossed her fingers behind her back.
“No dear, not today. Maybe tomorrow.”
Kathy sighed. She wondered if she’d ever get used to Mrs. P’s folding bed, and the sound of Aunt Mary’s dry cough coming softly through the bedroom door all through the night.
THE NEXT MORNING KATHY
returned to the theatre in Shortlands. The solid timber doors had been folded back to expose an inner pair of glass doors, locked, but revealing the glow of a light over to one side of the dim interior. Kathy tapped her keys on the glass.
After a moment a woman’s face appeared on the other side. There was a clicking of metal, and then one door swung open.
“We are closed.” She raised her eyebrows at the warrant card that Kathy showed her. “What’s it about?”
“I need some information from you. It shouldn’t take long. I’m wanting to contact an amateur acting group that put on a production here in this theatre last January.”
The woman nodded. “Come in then.” She locked the door again behind Kathy and led the way across a dim foyer to the ticket office window from which the light was glowing. “Wait here,” she said, and disappeared through a side door. The whole place was deathly quiet, with the air of suspended life that civic buildings have when the public has gone. There was a distinctive smell too, of polish and old musty fabric. After a moment the woman reappeared on the other side of the ticket-office window carrying a large ledger.
“What date was it?”
“Around January the twentieth.”
“That was the last night of a production by SADOS. Would that be it?”
“Could be. What was the name again?”
“Shortland Amateur Dramatic and Operatic Society—SADOS. I’ve got a telephone contact number here if you want it.”
“Thanks, that would be great. Do you know them yourself?”
“Not really. I haven’t been doing this long. The number is for the club’s secretary, Ruth Sparkes.”
Kathy wrote down the details. “Thanks.”
“
The Lady Vanishes
,” the woman said.
“What did you say?” Kathy looked at her in surprise.
“That was the play they put on,
The Lady Vanishes
. That’s what it says here, anyway.” She saw the expression on Kathy’s face. “What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”
KATHY DROVE BACK TO
Orpington and walked into the incident room. She was surprised to find it crowded with people.
“What’s going on?” she asked one of the local detectives.
“Something on the Carole Weeks case. Bren’s called a briefing.”
Bren had been assigned the case of the girl murdered in Spring Park, and given the biggest team. The door to one of the side offices opened, and he came out, followed by Desai, Munns, and finally Brock, who hung back and perched on the corner of a table. He gazed around the room, his expression benign.
“Right.” Bren looked as if he’d been given an energy boost. “We seem to be getting somewhere. Most of you know that we spent quite a bit of time yesterday with the girl who was attacked in Langley Park on the same night that Carole Weeks was murdered in Spring Park, a mile to the south. We made progress with her over the computer enhancement of the picture of her attacker’s face.”
Bren pointed to a colour print taped to the wall behind him, of a black-haired, bearded man, glaring at his audience beneath bushy eyebrows.
“There are copies here, and details of a revised physical description.” Bren nodded, as if to himself. This all seemed to be merely a preliminary, the big story held back.
“After interviewing her here, we took her up to Lambeth, to MPFSL, for a detailed physical examination. You’ll remember in her statement that she described a man jumping out of the bushes on the edge of the park and rushing her, knocking her to the ground and stamping on her left upper arm when she tried to push herself upright. He then started dragging her back towards the bushes, when a car came round the corner from Ravenswood Chase towards them, and slowed down. That’s when the girl managed to break free and run out into the street.
“At the time of her physical examination after the attack, the doctor noted a large bruise covering her left upper arm as a result of the man stamping on her, as you might expect. That was about as much as anybody could say at that stage. However, Morris Munns has performed his usual miracle, and he has something very interesting for us. Morris.”
Bren turned and waved to the photographer, who blushed, bobbed his head, and shuffled forward. His obvious shyness at having to address the group was engaging in someone who was probably the most senior man in the room, apart from Brock, and it provoked a number of remarks, generally intended to be encouraging.
“Well, what ’appens,” he began, adjusting his thick glasses and scratching his nose, “when a body ’eals itself after an injury, there are a number of biochemical compounds introduced into the flesh as part of the natural ’ealing process, see.”
“Oooh.” Mock amazement registered around the room. Morris flushed, adjusted his specs, and waded gamely on. “These
compounds affect the amount of ultraviolet light that’s absorbed or reflected, like, by the flesh at that point. And if you photograph the injury site under UV light, you can record these variations.”
“But Morris,” someone objected, “this happened three months ago.”
“The effect can last for six months,” Morris replied. “There might be no sign of any bruising left on the skin at all, but underneath there’s this invisible chemical record of the thing that caused the injury.”
They were impressed, and silent now.
“It’s important, like, to photograph the victim in exactly the same position as she was in when the injury ’appened, if at all possible.”
“Show them, Morris,” Bren prompted, and the photographer gave his shy smile and produced an enlarged photograph from his file. It was a perfect image of a large red heel print on a pink background.
“Doc Martens,” Morris said. “Size nine.”
A cheer broke out from the gathering as he shuffled back to the rear of the group, head bowed in bashful pleasure.
Kathy was interested to notice that Bren, grinning, now nodded to Desai to step forward, without any sign of his previous animosity. It seemed that team spirit was breaking out all over.
“Just to add,” Desai said, “that the image is so good that we can definitely identify it as belonging to the same right heel that kicked Angela Hannaford in the back. There are at least three distinguishing detailed features of damage and wear common to both, the most distinctive being this nick in the second of the parallel strips that run across the centre part of the heel print. There is also the strong possibility that this new image can be matched to the Edinburgh footprints, at least from what we can make out on the copies they’ve sent down.”
“Exactly,” Bren said. “So Leon and Morris are going to fly up there today to check on that. This means we now know what our
man looks like, what he wears on his feet, and we have three—possibly four—sites where he has operated. All that remains is to pick him up.”
“What about the smell the girl noticed?” someone asked.
“Yes. Who was following that up?”
“Me, Sarge.” A young detective got to his feet. “I spoke to Bromley CID about it. They set up tests to cover everything they could think of at the time. They tried every kind of soap and perfume and deodorant. They tried washpowders, hair oils, industrial solvents. They had the lady sniffing at assortments of sweaty T-shirts and jock straps from the gym.”
A ripple of appreciative laughter went round the room.
“But it was no good. The best she could say was that it seemed a bit like some kind of cough linctus, mixed up with something else.”
Bren nodded. “Well, let’s concentrate on what we do know.” He began to outline tasks relating to the search for the source of the shoes and for publicizing the killer’s appearance, concentrating on an area within a five-mile radius of Hayes station, which lay roughly at the centre of the triangle of the three South London sites. “There’s going to be a lot of publicity with this now. A serial killer active in the suburbs. DCI Brock will be holding a press conference later this morning. Do you want to add anything, sir?”
Brock shook his head.
“Questions? All right, let’s go.”
As the meeting broke up, Kathy struggled across the crowded room towards Brock, who, head bowed, was listening to something from Bren.
“Sir!” she called as he turned to leave.
He looked back. “Kathy, we wondered where you were. Come through, will you?”
She followed him, Desai, and Bren into a small, cluttered office.
“Well done.” Kathy beamed at Desai. “That was brilliant.”
He shrugged off her praise. “Morris’s work entirely.”
“Kathy,” Brock said, as they sat round the small table. “We’ve decided that we can drop the Bagnall and Pearce inquiries now. They seem to be dead-ends. We need to put everything into this link with the Carole Weeks murder and, if Morris and Leon confirm it, the Edinburgh case. I’d like you to do as you did with Angela Hannaford, get to know all about Carole’s background, her personality, and so on.”
“Brock . . .” Kathy hesitated. The solidity of the evidence that Morris Munns had produced made her own discovery seem painfully tenuous by comparison. “I think I may have found a link between Zoë Bagnall and Angela Hannaford.”
“Have you now? What kind of link?”
“Well, first, she
is
the girl in Gentle’s photograph. That’s been confirmed by a friend of hers in the flats where she lived, in Shortlands. She’d changed her appearance since she divorced and moved to South London, and her mother seems to have been confused.”
“Two possible murdered women among Gentle’s collection of seventy-three,” Bren muttered. “I wonder what the odds are on that? It would be a lot stronger, of course, if we knew for sure that Zoë Bagnall is actually dead, and isn’t just living on a Greek island with some guy who owns a bar.”
“Yes,” Kathy had to agree.
“Go on,” Brock said. “You’ve got more for us, Kathy?”
“Well, Zoë was a blonde at the time of her disappearance, which means that all five of the women we’ve considered were fair—if that’s significant. Also, it seems that Zoë was interested in the theatre. In fact, like Angela, she probably had been at the theatre on the night she disappeared.”
Brock looked up sharply. “Really? That is interesting. The National Theatre?”
“Well, no. I haven’t been able to get all the information yet,
but she was probably acting in an amateur show at a theatre in Shortlands that night, just near where she lived.”
“Mmm . . .” Brock looked up at the ceiling, tugging his beard as he tended to do when he was thinking, rather as if he was absent-mindedly stroking a pet dog. “So, you’re wondering if our killer is a theatre buff, and went to a local show that night, rather than up to town. Saw Zoë on stage and decided to have her.”
Kathy nodded.
“Anything else?”
Kathy wondered whether to mention the name of the play that Zoë had been in. She was aware of Leon Desai and Morris Munns glancing at their watches, working out their timing to the airport, and Bren wanting to get on with his team.
“Not really.”
“No chance that Carole Weeks or the Edinburgh victim might be among Gentle’s photographs?”
“No,” Bren answered. “We’ve been through them all again. I don’t think there’s any possibility of a second mistaken identity.”
“Well, it’s intriguing,” Brock said. “But I think you’re wrong, Kathy.”
“Why?”
“What bothers me is that the primary link between Angela and Zoë—the thing that led you to this theatre connection—is Gentle and his photographs. But, as I said just now, the more we learn about the killer, the less likely does Gentle seem as a suspect. He doesn’t remotely fit the profile—wrong age, wrong interests, wrong socioeconomic group, wrong family history. Frankly, I simply can’t see him as the murderer of either of those two women. Then there’s the shoe size, and the physical description—even granted the unreliability of eyewitness descriptions. But for me the clincher is the brutality in each case, the sheer violent indulgence, stamping on them, raping them, hacking Angela’s face off . . . I simply can’t see Gentle doing that. He’s a creep, not a savage.
“Now, if he isn’t the killer, then his photograph collection, and all the leads that flow from it, are just so many red herrings. Isn’t that right?”
“I . . . I suppose so,” Kathy conceded.
“I have to go.” Brock got to his feet. “I’ll leave it to you, Kathy. If you feel strongly enough about it, stick with it for a day or two more. It’s not as if Bren’s going to be short of manpower. But I honestly think you’d be better sticking to the main game.”
Kathy nodded, and he left the room. When he was gone, Bren said quietly, “He’s right, Kathy. Come in with us. We’re going to nail the bastard, soon. I’d like you to be a part of it.”
“Thanks, Bren.” She hesitated. “It just seemed too good to ignore, that coincidence with the theatre. But I suppose he’s right.”
“Look, tell you what. I’d really appreciate your assessment of the character of the girl in the park, Carole Weeks,” Bren urged her. “Why don’t you have a look at the file, maybe go out and talk to her mum in Croydon, friends at school. You never know—she might have been a theatre-goer too.”
Kathy nodded. “Yes, OK, I’ll do that.”
“Good. Now, we’ve all got to get going.”
For a while Kathy stayed in her seat reading the file on Carole Weeks, aware of the sounds diminishing around her, until the whole building was silent. There was no hint from the reports that the girl had had any interest in the theatre. Kathy rang and made an appointment to see her mother, then dialled the number she’d been given for the secretary of SADOS, Mrs. Ruth Sparkes.