Authors: Barry Maitland
SHE WOKE UP WITH
a start, and for a moment couldn’t think where she was because the pattern of pale light on the ceiling wasn’t like that in her own bedroom. Then she remembered the temporary bed. Her mind went back to her dream, a dreadful dream. Stafford. Directing them, angry, pointing with his long bony fingers, but silent because he was dead. He turned to her, and he was telling her something, his jaw working silently, beard silver in the moonlight.
His beard. She sat up slowly. Why would a bearded man use Leichner spirit gum?
And there was something else. Something that had worried her less than it should. Stafford Nesbit had spoken to the solicitor two weeks
after
Janice Pearce was murdered.
“
I SUPPOSE,” BROCK SAID
, “that you could find a perfectly plausible explanation for both things.”
“Yes.”
He noticed how pale Kathy had become in the last few days and said, “If he failed to get the information he wanted from Janice Pearce before he killed her, he might well have gone to see the solicitor openly two weeks later, as the only other option he had.”
“Reckless, though. Unbelievably reckless.”
Brock shrugged. “He was obsessed. Seriously, what other explanation could there be, if it wasn’t Nesbit?”
Kathy took her time before replying. “After I finished interviewing the solicitor at Baker Bailey Rock, she gave me a book on the rules of adoption to look at, and I sat and scanned through it for a while. There was a section that talked about the rights that adopted people have to get access to their own birth records. Apparently, in exceptional cases, the courts can deny this right. The book referred to a particular case”—she looked at her notebook—“
R. v. Registrar-General, ex parte Smith
(1990), in which it was established that this information can be withheld where there’s a fear that the person might use it to commit a serious crime. In that case the applicant was a thirty-one-year-old trying to trace his natural parents. At the time of his application he had already killed two people, the second being the prisoner with whom he shared a cell, and whom he strangled one night in the belief that the man was his mother. The court didn’t think it would be a good idea for him to find out who she really was.
“I suppose what struck me about that was that Alex Nicholson had mentioned matricide briefly when she was talking to us about schizo phre nia, do you remember? But there was no particular reason to think any more of it. Now, though, I wonder.”
“You wonder what, Kathy?”
“I wonder if we could have been looking at the wrong side of the relationship. Suppose it was the child who approached and murdered Janice Pearce, trying to find out about his father. And suppose he was successful, and did get the file from her, and then contacted Stafford Nesbit.”
She hesitated, and Brock said quietly, “Go on.”
“He hates them both, but especially his mother, the blonde actress. So he kills her, again and again, littering his father’s path with corpses, macabre messages only he would understand.”
“Taking his cues from his father’s plays.”
“Yes. What would the father do, when he realized what was happening, when he received the picture of Zoë Bagnall with her throat cut? Would he tell the police, and betray his child a second time? Would the police be able to stop it anyway? The only other way would be to kill himself. He didn’t actually confess in the note he left me, Brock. He just said that he was responsible. And then there’s the play.”
“The Father?”
“Yes. All about uncertain fatherhood and the way men and women torture each other through their family relations. And it ends with the impending death of the father.”
They said nothing for a while, and then Brock grunted, “I must say that the lack of any incriminating evidence whatsoever at Nesbit’s house is a bit of a worry.”
“Yes. And if the murderer is still alive, he will have selected another victim for the last night of his father’s play, tonight. He must be wondering whether to go ahead with it, now that his father’s dead.”
“Bren had been thinking about providing an escort for all the blonde women in the production for the next twenty-four hours at least.”
“I think I may have solved that. The only one was Bettina Elliott, and I managed to persuade her to become a brunette.”
“Ah. That just leaves you, then, Kathy.”
Kathy nodded. “True.”
“Seriously, I want you to pull out. They can get someone else to prompt.”
“No!” Kathy startled herself by the force of her reply. “No, Brock. It’s all the more reason for me to stay in there.”
“Kathy, I can’t afford to lose any more of my team. People will begin to say it’s my fault.”
“Don’t worry. This is probably just a red herring.”
“All the same . . . All right,” he said reluctantly, “but I’m going to give you a side-arms authorization. I want you to go over to Broadway right now and get yourself a gun.”
IT WASN’T THAT THEY
had forgotten Stafford, but for their fourth and final performance on the Saturday night the cast had developed sufficient confidence in their ability to do the play on their own that a certain flair, even flamboyance, had crept back into their performance. Vicky was more frighteningly implacable, Edward more pathetically doomed, than they had ever been before. By the time they came to the final scene, the whole company was aware of the atmosphere of tense attention which told them that their audience was gripped. Not one Green Line pensioner twitched or looked fretfully at their watch as the Captain, still bound in the strait-jacket and draped with the Nurse’s shawl and his own military tunic, made one final effort to rise, gave an agonizing cry, and fell back into the Nurse’s arms.
“Help, Doctor,”
Laura cried,
“if it’s not too late. Look, he’s stopped breathing.”
“It’s a stroke
.”
“. . .
First death, and after that the Judgement . . .”
The daughter Bertha ran on stage towards her mother.
“Mama! Mama!”
“My child—my own child!”
Laura cried, taking her into her arms.
The Pastor lowered his head. “
Amen.
”
The theatre erupted in thunderous applause as the curtain came down on this tableau, something which Kathy, on her first reading of the script, had hardly believed possible.
THE END-OF-PRODUCTION PARTY WAS
held at the home of Vicky and her husband. He welcomed everyone hospitably but
remained, as did all of the accompanying partners, in some indefinable way an outsider. The camaraderie generated from crisis transformed into triumph was, for the moment, too strong for more everyday relationships to compete. Edward, whose wife was preoccupied in the kitchen with the food she had provided, made a particular point of cultivating Kathy, and she enjoyed his attention for a while, telling herself that it really was all over, that Stafford had confessed and was dead, that the figure in his moonlit garden was just another suburban prowler, made curious by the police tapes and earthworks, and that, even if that weren’t so, there were only a few more hours to go before the pattern of murders would have been broken, for good.
And when midnight came, and there had been no phone message about some girl found trussed in a strait-jacket, or immolated by burning paraffin, she finally did relax, and told herself she could have an alcoholic drink at last. She went into the kitchen where the booze was set out, and saw Ruth in a state of advanced inebriation, describing with dramatic gestures Edward’s disastrous lamp-throwing rehearsal.
“Kathy! Where have you been? I’ve mished you!” she called out.
“Dancing, Ruth. Where’s Mary?”
“Maryanne,” Ruth corrected slurredly. “Her name from henchforth shall be Maryanne.”
“Yes.” Kathy smiled. “So where is she?”
“That man came to take her away. Someone’s had a stroke . . .” She frowned. “Or was that in the play?”
Kathy froze. “It was in the play, Ruth,” she said carefully. “Who came to take her away?”
“This big man, with a beard. Oh, I was supposed to tell you! Oops. Sorry. It was about the stroke.”
A chill swept through Kathy. “Ruth! The stroke was in the play! Where did Mary go with the bearded man?”
“No, Mary had a stroke too—I mean someone did. Someone she knows . . .” Ruth was becoming confused. “He said he was taking her home. Yes,
home
, he said.”
“Dear God.” Kathy took out her phone. She first tried the number of her flat but got no reply. Then she rang the Duty Sergeant at Orpington police station and explained what had happened. “I’m going to try my home in Finchley first. See if they’ve gone there. Would you notify the Yard?”
It was only when she was in her car and driving that the significance of the message about a stroke hit her. The stroke was the connection to the play. Stafford’s play. They had gone to Stafford’s house, not hers. The message was for her to follow.
She stopped the car in the street next to Stafford’s and ran the last fifty yards, seeing the top of the monkey-puzzle tree loom closer above the neighbouring roofs. There were no lights visible in the house from the front, but when she reached the back garden she could see a faint glow around the edge of one of the upstairs windows. The kitchen door was half open. She slipped her right hand round the grip of the Smith and Wesson in the small holster on her hip, eased it out, and stepped silently into the house, heart pounding wildly.
She crept as swiftly as she could up the long flight of the main stairs, crouching towards the top so that she could see over the edge of the landing. The door to what she remembered as the overcrowded bedroom was slightly ajar, a dim amber light seeping round the jamb. She flattened against the wall beside the door and tried to look in, but could see nothing. Taking a deep breath, she pushed the door open and entered the room.
The bed was a mess, bedding ripped, pillows shredded, mattress pulled half off the base. Someone in a black hooded jogging top was kneeling beside the corner of the bed, back to the door. The figure was engrossed in something on the floor and seemed unaware of Kathy’s entry. She noticed the Doc Martens on the feet, blinked,
and looked round quickly, checking the rest of the room, lit by one miserable bulb whose light barely made it through a heavy yellowed parchment shade. She took three paces into the room and aimed the gun at the centre of the back.
“Raise your hands,” she said. “I’m a police officer and I’m armed.”
The figure froze. Then the head very slowly began to turn. It was hard at first to make it out, the hood shrouding it in shadow. Then Kathy saw a pair of dark eyes, a ring in the nose.
The figure remained crouching and the face smiled up at her.
“Bettina?” she said, stunned. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s all right,” Bettina said. “I’ve found it.” Her left hand came up, holding a photograph. “Look, I’ve found it.”
Kathy, mystified, lowered her gun and started to walk towards the kneeling woman, whose face was glistening with tears. Only at the last minute did she see the right hand coming round, and the bayonet.
There was an explosion so loud, so devastating, that Kathy could hear nothing but a ringing in her head. Bettina could hear nothing in her head, for her head was gone. In its place was a red cloud, and scarlet rain spraying everywhere. The girl’s dark body tumbled to the floor, leaving the red mist suspended in the air above it. Kathy gaped at the gun in her hand, wondering how the hell it had gone off, how a .38 could have taken off Bettina’s head and shredded it across the wall there, beside the bed. She turned away, looking for an explanation, and saw the silhouette of her father standing at the door, solid, commanding, horn-rim glasses, a shotgun in his hands, and the thought came into her head,
No, no, I didn’t need
your
help.
She forced herself to look at him, to meet his eyes, and she saw Basil Hannaford, standing there, stunned by what he had done.
“
IT SEEMS HE’S BEEN
trailing you for a couple of weeks,” Bren said cheerfully. “He’d been following Gentle without success, and
reckoned he might do better shadowing you instead. Didn’t you ever notice? Dark blue Cavalier.”
Kathy was at the kitchen table, towelling her hair. The shotgun blast had taken the fragments of Bettina’s head away from her, but she’d been drenched by the following spray of arterial blood from the torso. They had found her a change of clothes in the attic.
“He thought—he still thinks—that the person he shot was Gentle.”
“I don’t understand, Bren. I don’t bloody understand.”
“Yeah. Well, when you’re ready, we’ve got the girl’s home address. Not far away. Brock’ll meet us there.”
“What about Mary? Haven’t they found her yet?”
“No sign. She’s certainly not here, nor at your place. It couldn’t be that someone up north really has had a stroke, could it? Could have sent someone down for her, urgently?”
“No . . .” She thought for a moment. “No, that’s too . . . Her Sheffield number’s in the address book in my bag. God, Bren, I don’t know what’s the matter with me, my arms feel like lead.”
“Too much drama. Don’t worry, I’ll try the number.”
“What was she holding in her hand, Bren? It looked like a photograph. She said she’d found it, as if she’d been searching.”
“Yes, a photograph. Blonde woman, stunner, taken some years ago, from the hairstyle. The sixties.”
He returned a few minutes later. “You’re shaking now. I’m going to get the doc down here for you.”
“I’m all right. I just need a minute.”
“Are your shots up to date? Hep B?”
She nodded. “Nothing on the phone?”
“No reply, but I’ll get Orpington to get on to Sheffield police. They’ll be able to check properly for us. God, you are shaking. Hang on.”
He left again, and came back holding a small glass brimming with golden liquid. “Get this inside you.”
She sniffed the brandy fumes, nodded, and gulped it down. “Thanks, Bren.”