Authors: Barry Maitland
“No,” Kathy said. “You lead the way.”
When they walked out of the front door on to the driveway, the uniformed policeman stepped forward and grabbed Stafford’s arm. It was an unnecessary, clumsy gesture, which made Stafford suddenly appear awkward and humiliated. Kathy caught the expression on Ruth’s face, horrified.
KATHY WAITED UNTIL BROCK
arrived, reluctant to begin. She hoped, in fact, that he would take over the interrogation, but when he bustled in the first thing he said was, “I want you to question him, Kathy. Just you. I’ll stay outside and watch.”
“He respects you, Brock. Don’t you think . . .”
“You have some kind of rapport with him, Kathy. I’ve noticed.”
“You think it’s because I look like them, don’t you? Female, blonde.”
“That could be. Play on that. Pitch it on a personal level.”
Nesbit was clutching his temple in his long bony hands as if in intense prayer, and didn’t look up when she came into the room.
She opened the file she was carrying and spread the photographs of Angela Hannaford out on the table in front of him, then sat down.
“We showed you these pictures a few days ago, Stafford, and you said you didn’t recognize the woman. Do you want to change your mind?”
“No.” His head shook, still protected by its cage of fingers.
“Look at them, please.”
He pulled his hands away finally, and stared at the pictures for some time.
“I don’t remember ever seeing her before.” His voice seemed deeper, slightly hoarse, from a cold perhaps, or from shouting at the cast.
“Yet she was a pupil at Sundridge Grammar for eight years, and a student of yours from 1984 to ’87. Throughout the first term of ’87 she was sitting in front of you, in your classes, for five hours each week. Do you deny that?”
He frowned and lowered his eyes.
“You marked her essays, discussed the set books with her. She even took part in two school plays you were responsible for. It isn’t possible that you don’t know her, Stafford. Why are you lying to me about it? Why would you want to deny it now, now that we know?”
He kept his eyes lowered, avoiding hers.
“Where did you spot her, on September the eighth, that night you went to the National Theatre? Was it in the foyer? During the interval? Or afterwards, on Waterloo station? Where was it?”
He gave no reply.
“Stafford,” Kathy said quietly, “this is no good. You have to say something. We can’t let you go unless you explain yourself.”
He looked up suddenly in alarm. “I shall have to be at the Three Crowns tonight, Kathy. You know they can’t manage without me.”
“That depends on you.”
He shook his head slowly. “You may be right, about this girl. I don’t know.”
“How could you not know? You saw her almost every day for several years.”
“When my wife died, I became depressed. My doctor gave me pills. As I got worse, he tried different things. Finally”—he sighed deeply—“they put me in hospital for several months. I was heavily sedated for a time, and they tried new forms of treatment. Afterwards, I found I had forgotten things, people, from that period. Sometimes a man or a woman stops me in the street and says ‘You were my teacher’ and I can’t remember them.”
“Are you on medication now?”
“Yes.” He took a small packet out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her.
“How long have you been on this?”
“There have been various things over the years. I tried, a couple of years ago, to stop taking anything, but it upset the balance. We had to start all over again.”
“Her name is Angela Hannaford, and her home is in Petts Wood. You knew that, didn’t you, Stafford?”
He shook his head wearily. “No, Kathy, no. You’re wrong.”
Kathy glanced over at the mirror on the side wall, behind which she knew Brock was watching them. She sighed. “Just now, in your attic, you said you kept everything from the past, but now you’re saying that isn’t so. You’re saying that you’ve been erasing your memories too, like me, is that right?”
“It’s not the same. I had a breakdown, I was on drugs.”
“What about before that? You had a child, by a woman who wasn’t your wife. Is that right?”
He frowned angrily. “Ruth Sparkes’s gossip!”
“She thought it was a romantic story, Stafford. A sad story. I think she’s right. Tell me about it.”
“I shall do no such thing! It’s got nothing whatsoever to do with you, or your case.”
“Have you kept a picture of her?”
“Mind your own business, young woman!”
“Oh, come on.” Kathy smiled at him. “You were poking about in my business, weren’t you? Pumping my aunt? And you were right, I have tried to obliterate my memories of my father. And perhaps I do feel guilty. Perhaps I still hate him for that. Do you hate her?”
“No . . . no.”
“She gave away your child, didn’t she? The only child you ever had. You must feel angry, and guilty.”
Kathy was aware of a squeaking noise. He was rubbing his shoes together in agitation under the table. “I’m not going to discuss this.”
“She must have been quite pretty.”
“She wasn’t
quite pretty
,” he exploded suddenly. “She was very, very
beautiful.
”
“Yes. What did she play?”
“Ophelia. She was a wonderful Ophelia.”
“Ah yes. With long hair, I’ll bet. Longer than mine?”
“Yes.”
“But the same colour as mine. Fair.”
“Yes.”
“What was her name?”
“I am not going to discuss this further.”
“If you told us her name, we might be able to trace her. We might even be able to help you find your son. That would be something, wouldn’t it?”
“No! You have no right to talk about this. No right whatsoever.”
“To see your lost child again, Stafford!”
He stared at her with pain in his eyes.
“But to do that, we would have to know how Angela died. You must tell us that, first.”
“I . . . don’t want to see her again.”
“Did you kill her, Stafford? Did you kill Angela, and imagine that you were killing Ophelia?”
“NO!”
Kathy got abruptly to her feet and left the room. It was an uncalculated move which surprised her as much as Stafford. She simply felt an overpowering need to be out of his presence. She stood in the corridor outside, leaning back against the wall, feeling her heart racing unpleasantly out of control. Brock came around the corner.
“All right?”
“I’m not getting anywhere, Brock.”
“Nonsense. You got the colour of the hair. You’re doing fine. Bren’s gone to arrange the search of his house. Change the subject. Talk about the play or something. Just keep him talking.”
KATHY RETURNED CARRYING A
tray with mugs of tea. She sat down and offered one to him, but he made no move to accept it.
“That speech of the Captain’s, in the play,” she said. “What you called the ‘all my enemies’ speech. Do you know the one I mean?”
He nodded, eyes heavy, so that she wondered if he’d taken one of his pills while she was out.
“It seemed to me that it was an example of . . . is it hyperbole? Is that the word?”
“Hyperbole . . .” He nodded, sluggish. “Yes.”
“Completely over the top. Exaggeration to the point of caricature. I couldn’t understand anyone feeling like that. Not really. My colleague, on the other hand—a man—seemed to find it perfectly understandable. I wonder if Strindberg would only make sense to a man?”
He gave her a thin smile. “Strindberg had trouble with the feminists,” he said. “They disliked some short stories he wrote about
married life, and he believed they were plotting against him. Perhaps he was goading them with an absurd caricature of how men are supposed to think.”
“It’s a speech about men’s hatred of women, isn’t it? My colleague said that the man who murdered Angela probably feels like that. Do you think so?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Strindberg was quite disturbed himself, wasn’t he? He had periods when he was consumed by insane jealousy. You can see it in that scene at the end of act two—a husband throwing a lighted lamp at his wife!”
Stafford gave her a secretive smile. “It’s considered to be almost impossible to stage that scene convincingly, but we shall see. Strindberg got the idea from England. He understood that it was quite common for English husbands to throw lamps at their wives. In one of his letters he said that this wasn’t surprising, considering what English women were like.”
Kathy smiled, then said very quietly, “Whatever possessed you to put on this play, Stafford? What are you trying to tell us?”
“Do you find it disturbing, Kathy?” He leaned forward suddenly and hissed at her. “Perhaps the title is disturbing for you, if, as you say, you hate your father.”
“I didn’t say that . . .”
“Oh, but you did. And I know why.”
“Do you?” She couldn’t stop herself asking him, “Why?”
“Not because he left you and your mother bankrupt; not because you had to leave your comfortable big house in the home counties and go to live in that miserable little terrace in Sheffield with your aunt and uncle; and not because your mother died of shame within two years of his suicide.”
Kathy stared at him, shocked. Aunt Mary had told him everything.
“No, the reason you hate him is because he left without giving
you the slightest indication that he cared about you. He left without saying sorry.”
For a moment Kathy was speechless. “That is ridiculous,” she said finally.
He turned in his seat sideways to her, folded his arms, and said, “And now I should like to speak to my solicitor.”
BREN RETURNED IN MID-AFTERNOON
, looking flushed, sweat stains darkening his shirt around his armpits and down his back.
“That house is unbelievable. You could be in there for a week and still be discovering things. But we’ve had the dogs go through every room, from cellar to attic, and all through the garden, and we’ve come up with nothing. No Doc Martens, no bayonets, no condoms, and no Zoë Bagnall. Plenty of Leichner make-up materials, but you’d expect that.”
“Did you come across a diary?”
“No, nothing like that. Seems like just about everything else, though. He’s kept everything.
National Geographic
going back thirty years, scrapbooks of theatre programmes and reviews going back to the 1940s, his dead wife’s clothing, everything.”
“I spoke to some of our medical people about his claim of memory lapses,” Brock said. “The general consensus is that it’s possible he could be telling the truth. Depends on what they were giving him and whose opinion you asked.”
“He could just have forgotten teaching Angela?”
“Especially if she was associated with the most painful period, at the end, just before he was admitted to hospital. Which seems to be the case.”
Bren shook his head. “What do we do, then?”
Brock looked at Kathy. “You haven’t said much, Kathy. What do you think? You know him best.”
“I don’t know.” She was still burning from his words and from
the knowledge that the others had been outside the room, listening, recording. “I really don’t know if he would be capable of it,” she said abruptly, but she thought of his rages at the rehearsals, and the look on the headmistress’s face, and knew she wasn’t being entirely honest.
“If we let him go, you’ll be the one closest to him, Kathy,” Brock said.
AFTER FINISHING WORK THE
following day Kathy went alone to the Three Crowns, Aunt Mary having decided to stay at home and recover from her labours on the costumes. This was the final rehearsal before they moved to the theatre, and there was an atmosphere of suppressed last-minute panic, the cast wearing the preoccupied look of ill-prepared travellers about to set off on a desperate journey. They quarrelled over trivial details, and became impatient with each other’s mistakes. Stafford was worst of all, constantly breaking into the flow of the speeches to make minute corrections of intonation and expression. And all the time Ruth watched him, shaking her head with disapproval and alarm.
“This is all wrong,” she said. “He should let them run it through, and give them his comments at the end of each act. He knows that.”
“Never mind,” Kathy said, trying to calm her. “Soon be over.”
“Sooner than you think! Have you seen that girl?”
“What girl?”
“Bettina!” She glared across the room at Bettina sitting smirking beside Edward. “She’s wearing a ring in her
nose
! Stafford will go insane when he notices. I tried to warn her. Do you know what she said?”
“What?”
“She said he’s a bully and a pain, and she doesn’t give a stuff. Those were her precise words.”
“I’m amazed. I thought she was a bit of a mouse.”
“She’s a surly, insolent girl. I’ve taught enough of them in my time.”
It wasn’t until they had ground their way into the second half of act three that Stafford noticed Bettina’s gesture of defiance. It was after 11:00, and the landlord of the pub had just looked in to ask how much longer they would be. Stafford hurled a withering comment in his direction and turned back with a haunted look to the action in centre stage, between the Captain and his daughter.
“To eat or to be eaten,”
he snapped.
“To eat or to be eaten—that is the question,”
Edward said.
“Unless I eat you, you will eat me—you’ve already shown me your teeth. But don’t be afraid, my darling child, I shan’t do you any harm.”
He reached across and picked up a revolver, meant to be hanging on the wall.
“That gesture is too weak!” Stafford roared. “The gun is a symbol, Edward. It represents your manhood. The women have removed the bullets, do you see? They have emasculated you. You must use the gun to tell us this.”
Edward frowned, tired and tense.
Stafford rapped out the cue-line.
“Don’t be afraid.”
“But don’t be afraid, my darling child, I shan’t do you any harm.”
“Better.”
“Help! Mama, help!”
Bettina screamed, rather unconvincingly to Kathy’s mind. “
He’s going to murder me!”