Authors: Barry Maitland
“I thought I’d better contact you,” the woman said. “It’s probably not relevant, but I read the report in the
Standard
last night about that crash on the M25, and your appeal for information about the man, and what with your officer calling on us a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d better follow it up.”
Kathy was lost, but didn’t say so. “Oh yes? You knew Stafford Nesbit?”
“I met him, yes. He came here to our office. I spoke to him.”
“When would that have been?”
“Well, that’s the point. I checked in my diary. It was last year, July. Which was the same month that Janice was killed, you see.”
“Janice?” Kathy felt at sea.
Who’s Janice
?
“Janice Pearce. She worked for us. You remember?”
“Oh, of course. I’m sorry, I was lost there for a minute. Janice Pearce.”
The legal secretary, the earliest murder, the one we decided had no connection with the others.
“Maybe I could come up and see you?” Kathy said.
“All right. This morning?”
“That would be terrific.”
Kathy put the phone down and realized that her heart was thumping.
She decided to take the train. It was almost five weeks now since she had first travelled on this line, following Angela’s route home. The weather was almost identical to how it had been then, even though it was now early October, and she had an acute sense of time suspended, of travel without destination. Discoveries had been made, facts uncovered, people implicated, and yet she felt no closer to understanding the reality of Angela’s death than when she had first settled back in a Southern Region compartment and watched Angela’s London unroll outside the window.
As advised by the solicitor, she got off at London Bridge and caught the tube up to Moorgate. A couple of minutes later she was sitting in a small, cluttered, modern office with a cup of coffee and a chocolate biscuit.
“I wouldn’t have contacted you,” the solicitor said, “except for the way the newspaper report was phrased, linking Nesbit to the four murders. Was he a suspect?”
“Let’s just say that, if he was alive, he’d be presently helping us with our inquiries.”
“I see. I’ve never actually come face to face with a serial killer before. Family law is my area. Something of an oddity in this practice, which is mainly commercial. A spin-off really, for when our commercial clients’ home lives run into trouble.” She fixed Kathy with a penetrating smile, as if inviting her to confess that she too might need these services. “I should have thought that he might have been a bit old for violence. Though he was very intense, as I remember.”
“He was a client, was he?”
“In a way, yes.”
“Was it on a family law matter that he saw you?”
“It was unusual, actually. That’s why I remembered his visit so clearly. Not at all the normal divorce business.” The solicitor paused to smooth the immaculate sleeve of her grey linen suit. Italian, Kathy guessed. “He wanted to talk about an adoption.”
“He wanted to adopt someone?”
“No. He wanted to trace someone. His own child, who had been put out to adoption at birth.”
“Ah, yes.”
“I rather gathered that his wife was not the mother. I had to establish that in order to advise him, you see. It affected the circumstances of the case. The reason why he came to us was that he had, over a number of years, had dealings with this firm concerning the child. I’d better explain this.”
The solicitor smiled and eased back in her chair, holding its arms firmly in her slender hands, speaking the way she did to her divorcing clients when she had to explain a point of law that would be central to the outcome they wanted, and, incidentally, to their continuing faith in her. “The law stipulates that it is not lawful to make or give a person any payment or reward for, or in consideration of, adoption. However, the court may permit a
scheme of allowances, balancing all the circumstances with the welfare of the child as first consideration against the degree of taint of the transaction.”
“A scheme of allowances?”
“Yes. Let us say that a person had a child in circumstances where he could not openly acknowledge the child, but nevertheless wished to contribute to its well-being even after it was adopted. He could apply to the court to allow him to provide an allowance to the child or its family by some scheme approved by the court. In this case, Mr. Nesbit paid a monthly allowance into a special account held by a neutral third party—this firm of solicitors—who paid this money each month, less a small fee for service, to the adoptive mother. Neither the natural father nor the adoptive mother knew who the other was, thus avoiding taint. Their only connection was through this firm. At one time we specialized in this sort of thing. Mr. Bailey, one of the founding partners, was himself adopted, and had a close relationship with a number of the adoption societies and agencies that used to flourish in London.
“Mr. Nesbit’s arrangement with us expired some years ago—presumably when the child reached its eighteenth or twenty-first birthday. He was coming to us again now because he wanted to establish contact with the child, and thought that we could provide a name from our records.”
The corners of her mouth turned down. “It was out of the question, of course. I began to discuss with him what other options he, and indeed the child, might have available, if they wished to re-establish contact, and that was when the matter of the legitimacy of the birth came up. You see, the birth documents of an illegitimate child might contain no information whatsoever about the father. Under the present English law, any adopted person may, having reached the age of eighteen and paid the stipulated fee, obtain a certified copy of their birth certificate. This will tell them the date and place of birth, the name under which they were
originally registered, the mother’s name and possibly her occupation, the name of the person who registered the birth, the date of registration, and the name of the Registrar. But if the parents weren’t married at the time of registration, it may well say nothing about the father. And if the mother withholds information about the birth from the father, we may have a situation where neither father nor child is able to establish contact with the other at a later date.”
“Except, in this case, through your records of the scheme of allowances,” Kathy said.
“Precisely.” The solicitor smiled brightly at her once again. Kathy was becoming a little bit irritated by that smile, and wondered how it went down with the divorce clients when things got really sticky.
“Well,” Kathy said, “those records may well be something that we would be interested in.”
“Oh, do you think so?” The smile abruptly vanished. “Of course, you could apply to the court, if you could show an overwhelming public interest. However, even if you were successful, it wouldn’t do you any good.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t appear to have them any more. It seems they no longer exist.”
“
YOU WERE SPOT ON
,” Brock said. “Absolutely spot on. He must have had a fit when you started asking him about the lost child during his interview. It’s like some Victorian melodrama. You think he killed Janice Pearce in order to get hold of the records of the child?”
Kathy had tracked Brock down to the Bride of Denmark, to which he had descended in order to escape the phone while he prepared the final version of his overdue budget forecasts.
“That’s what the solicitor was wondering. She said that Janice Pearce would have been the one person in the office most likely to track down old records. It’s possible that Nesbit tried to cultivate her, get her to help him on the side, when he realized he would never get hold of the information officially. Then, when she refused to help, he became enraged and strangled her.”
Brock stared up at the beamed ceiling and tugged thoughtfully at his beard. “A man in his sixties, no wife, no career, no family, going quietly potty in his big spooky house, developing a desperate, an overwhelming desire to see the child he fathered decades ago, and secretly helped to support for all those years. Without the co-operation of the child’s mother, who might be dead herself by this time, his only way is through the records at Baker Bailey Rock.”
He stopped. “Is that right? Surely there would have been some other way? Couldn’t he have applied to the adoption agency that was responsible for the original placing?”
“If he knew which one it was. But what status does he have? Some bloke who suddenly appears, thirty or more years later perhaps, claiming to be the unregistered father of a child about whom he knows nothing. What are they going to give him?”
Brock shrugged. “All right. So he murders the legal secretary in his madness to get hold of the name. Why does he then go on to murder the other women?”
“He now has no way of ever tracing his child. His rage turns on the woman who gave the kid away, the mother.”
She hesitated.
All my enemies.
Could Stafford really have been like that? “I suppose, when you think about it, he was the obvious person, because he was in control of the dramatic society. He specifically chose the plays to provide the death themes, each murder coming at the climax of one of his productions.”
“Ironic that the file that he first murdered for no longer existed,” Brock said. “What happened to it, I wonder?”
“They don’t know. After Nesbit’s visit, the solicitor asked one of
the juniors to dig out the file. It should have been in a storeroom of old files, but after an hour or two they couldn’t find it and gave up looking. They’ve moved office twice in the past ten years, and they went through a period of enthusiasm for microfilming old records that fizzled out half-way through, and another period of computerization. It’s even possible that the file is actually there somewhere, but wrongly labelled.”
“Couldn’t they get at the information some other way? The bank account, for instance.”
“The partner who set up the scheme is dead. The account was closed years ago, and they don’t know which bank it was with, or whose name it was under.”
“Well,” Brock grunted, “that’s all quite satisfyingly mysterious and theatrical. Somewhere out there is somebody who has absolutely no idea that his natural father has murdered five innocent women out of sheer frustration at not being able to find him.”
He frowned. “Just as well the mad old bastard’s dead, really.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, it’s all conjecture, isn’t it? I’d have hated to try to get a conviction against him on the strength of what we’ve turned up so far.”
AUNT MARY, EXHAUSTED BY
the drama of events, had decided to miss the performance that evening and have an early night at home. When the play was over, Kathy slipped away, driving back, as she had on the night of the technical dress rehearsal, by way of Stafford’s house. It was a cloudless night with a full moon, and the ravages of Bren’s excavations in the front lawn were clearly visible from the street. Kathy was reminded of another passage from the play:
“. . . we found ourselves sitting among ruins in bright moonlight.”
She left the car around the street corner and walked back to the house, down the front drive through the moon-shadow cast by
the enormous monkey-puzzle tree, and past the front door, draped by a police tape. When she reached the back garden she saw that it was in even worse shape than the front, with holes and mounds of earth everywhere. The back door swung open at her touch, the lock broken. She stepped inside.
She passed from the kitchen into the hall, dimly lit by moonlight rippled and tinted through the stained-glass panels above and to each side of the front door. The smells of disturbed dust closed around her as she climbed into the darkness of the upper floor, the massive banister cool to her touch. Along a dark corridor she saw that the door at the head of the attic stair must be open, for the rocking-horse was lit in a pool of moonlight from above. Its worn head was raised towards the light, and when Kathy went towards it and looked up, she saw that the roof space was filled with the glow of moonlight, bright in contrast to the darkness below. She climbed the narrow stairs and pushed her way through the dark ranks of hanging costumes towards the dormer windows.
She stood there for some time, looking out at the magical transformation of the suburban landscape in the moonlight, the foliage of the monkey-puzzle tree black against the silver of the drive. There was no traffic in the street, no sound but the clicks and creaks of old timber adjusting to the night air. At one point she thought she heard movement below, and went silently back to the head of the stairs to listen. Hearing nothing more, she returned to the dormer, looked down, and saw a car pull up at the kerb opposite. As its lights went off she saw that it was a Cavalier, dark in colour. The driver’s door opened and a bulky figure got out. For a moment, the gesture it made, stooping to close the door carefully, made her think of her father. Then it turned and walked slowly across to the end of the gravel drive. It stopped and stood, dark and motionless, staring up at the house.
She held her breath, trying to judge its height, its weight. After several minutes it moved forward, gliding on its pool of black
shadow, the moon being now directly overhead. Half-way down the drive it came, then stopped again. It seemed to be examining the signs of digging to left and right, and then the head turned and stared directly up at Kathy’s window. She drew back, making out a pale face framed in darkness. It seemed to hesitate, uncertain what to do.
Kathy jumped to life, running rapidly through the racks of clothes, dropping down the stairs in threes. She hesitated on the landing, straining for any sound, and when none came moved swiftly down the main stair and slid into the darkness of the kitchen doorway. The outside door was exactly as she had left it. Slipping through, she jumped across the gravel path and ran silently along the grass verge until she could see the front drive. It was deserted. She raced on, to the street, and found nothing, stopping finally among shadows on the far side, catching her breath, checking in all directions. In the distance the silent progress of a late train was marked by flashes in the sky, like lightning, from its contact with the electrical rail. She ran to her car and drove around the deserted streets for a while, looking without success for the dark figure of a man, or a blue Cavalier. Both had vanished, like ghosts.