Authors: Barry Maitland
“Don’t you see? Those were the most incredibly compulsive pictures I’d ever taken. I couldn’t stop looking at them. I couldn’t just put them away in a drawer and forget about them! I had to see her again, speak to her, the person who’d performed that act.
“I called on her, after work one day, but she wasn’t there. I left it for a week or so, then tried again. This time she was at home. I said I had some information for her, about Janice Pearce, and could I talk to her about it? She was surprised, as you’d expect, and she let me in. I’d decided to hit her with it, so to speak, straight away, before she had a chance to prepare herself. She said, what sort of information? and I gave her two photos, the first of Janice trying to cuddle her while she was reading the file, and the second of her strangling Janice.”
He suppressed a snigger. “You should have seen her face! I explained to her that I was a keen amateur photographer, an observer of life, and I thought she would be interested in some of my work. I told her these were only a few of the pictures I’d taken of her and Janice. She asked what I wanted, what I was going to do, and I said, nothing; for me it was enough to watch and record. But I said I would be interested to know what it had all been about. Well, she thought about that, and then she started telling me this story about her being a poor orphan, trying to trace her long-lost parents, and I thought she was trying to have me on with some kind of sob story. But when I said as much, she got this look in her eye, the same as she’d had when Janice was trying to grope her, and it was pretty scary close up, I can tell you. So I apologized, and said I was really interested to hear her story, if she would tell it to me.
“Whoa”—he puffed his cheeks—“any chance of a cup of tea?”
“Of course. How do you take it? We’ll organize some breakfast shortly.”
“That’d be nice. White, two sugars, please.” He gave an apologetic little smile to the WPC, who made for the door. “Sweet tooth.”
Kathy hated the way Brock was humouring him, playing the rather dim but sympathetic interviewer. In his place she would have ripped the bastard apart, wiped the stupid smirks from his face,
made
him see what a grotesque little pervert he was. Which was why Brock was doing this interview and not her.
“So,” Brock said, “Bettina’s life story.”
“Yes. She was adopted at birth, apparently, by a couple from Walthamstow. Sounded like a reasonable home to me—he was the manager of a hardware shop and she did cleaning—and Bettina didn’t suggest that she was abused or anything like that. But she said she hated them anyway. She must have been a very difficult child. They told her, when she was five, that she’d been adopted, the way they’d been advised to do, and from then on she had these fantasies about her real parents, which would be natural, I should think, for anyone in her position. Sometimes they were poor but good people who had had some terrible misfortune which forced them to give up their daughter, and sometimes they were monsters who’d rejected her, and she’d dream of having revenge on them one day.
“Ah!” He beamed appreciatively at the WPC, who had returned with plastic cups of tea. “Just what the doctor ordered.”
He stirred and sipped and sighed and relaxed back in his chair. “Her adoptive parents didn’t really know anything about her real mother or father, so when Bettina reached eighteen, the first thing she did was to apply for her birth certificate. She said she was offered counselling about it—apparently they do that to everyone—but she told them to get stuffed. By this stage she’d already been in trouble, at school, and with the police. That’s why she was so particular about cleaning up after Janice, she explained—she reckoned you had her fingerprints on your computer.
“Well, the birth certificate told her the name of her mother, and described her as an actress. But it said nothing at all about her father, meaning they weren’t married, and possibly the mother didn’t even know who the father was. Bettina tried to find the mother, but all she had was a name, and an address which turned out to be a rented flat where nobody had heard of her. She didn’t have a date of birth, or any kind of description apart from the one word, “actress,” and the fact that her adoptive mother had once said that she’d been told that the natural mother had been blonde, like her. She tried for a while, contacting people with that name in the telephone directory, and acting agencies, but got nowhere. So she gave up, and got into worse trouble. I understand she got involved with a married man who wasn’t very nice to her. She attacked him with a breadknife, apparently, and put him in hospital. He hushed it up.
“Her adoptive parents, who had no other children, both died last year, and it was when she was clearing their house that Bettina came across an old envelope marked with her name. Inside was a record of regular monthly payments to her mother from a firm of solicitors, together with a copy of the original court order setting out arrangements for her natural father to contribute to her financial upkeep, and a letter from the solicitors explaining that under no circumstances could the names of the parties be divulged to one another. So she went to those solicitors, ostensibly for help with her current troubles with the law, but hoping to find someone who would help her trace the name of her father. She found Janice Pearce.”
Gentle yawned suddenly and stretched. “Do you know,” he said, “confession makes you terribly hungry. Any chance of that breakfast now, Chief Inspector?”
“Fair enough. We’ll suspend the interview.” Brock looked affably at the clock. “Reconvene in forty-five minutes. OK, Kathy?”
Gentle turned and smiled at her as if they were making arrangements for an agreeable day out together.
BREN WAS WAITING OUTSIDE
for Kathy. “How’s it going?”
“He’s just getting into his stride,” she said wearily.
“Yeah, well, we’ve solved the mystery of your aunt, anyway.” He said it warily, the messenger of bad news, and she felt a jolt of alarm.
“What’s happened?”
“No, she’s just fine. It’s your uncle. He had a stroke yesterday lunchtime. He’s in the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield. She’s there now, with him. The relatives sent a nephew down to fetch your aunt last night. You can ring her on this number at the hospital.”
Kathy nodded, smiling her relief. “Thanks, Bren. God . . . ” Fatigue and a sudden resentment at all the shocks and anxieties of the past twenty-four hours swept over her. “You’d have thought she’d have left me a message or something! I’ll wring her bloody neck . . . ”
Kathy dialled the number Bren had given her and waited while they put her through, too tired now to feel impatient.
“Mary! How are you? How’s Tom?”
“Hello, pet. He’s not at all well, I’m afraid. He’s on the life support. They’re not . . . They don’t think . . . ”
“Oh . . . I’m so sorry, Mary.”
“There’s nothing can be done, love. We’ll just have to wait and see.” Her voice sounded faint, exhausted. “And I was sorry to rush off like that without saying goodbye. They sent Tom’s nephew Colin down to fetch me, and he had a terrible time finding me. Your nice neighbour, Mrs. P, heard him ringing your front doorbell and told him we were at the Shortland theatre. He got there after
we’d all gone on to the party, but someone locking up thought they knew where we were, and then he got lost, and anyway he found it eventually. Did you get my note?”
“Note? No. Where is it?”
“In your flat. We called in there to get my things on our way back up north. I am sorry to leave like that, love. Have you been busy?”
“Sort of.” Kathy almost mentioned Bettina, but immediately thought better of it.
“Did you see Bettina?” Mary said. “I asked her to tell you what had happened. She said she had been planning to see you later last night, but the arrangements had been cancelled. I didn’t understand. She was a bit drunk, I think.”
GENTLE HAD BEEN TO
the bathroom after his breakfast; his soft brown hair was neatly combed back, his face fresh and pink.
“We’d got to the point where Bettina had got Janice to help her trace her father,” Brock said mildly. “I don’t really understand why she killed Janice, though. Had she planned to do that?”
“I asked her about that. I’m not sure that she’d planned it exactly, but she said she got very uptight where her real father was concerned. Janice had read the file, and knew the name. Bettina didn’t like that. She didn’t want anyone else to know it but her. She said it made her very angry. That and the way Janice was trying to get on to her.”
“I see. So, now she had his name. What then?”
“His name and his address—he was still living in the same place. But suddenly she wasn’t sure what to do. I mean, she’d had this big quest, she’d murdered for that name, but what was going to happen now? What if he didn’t want to know her? Suppose he rejected her for a second time? So she was cautious. She went to see his house, like something out of the Addams Family, she said, and spied on him, seeing what he looked like, this weird old cove.
Then she phoned him up, several times, before she said anything—at first she just dialled the number and listened to him saying hello.
“Eventually she worked out what she would do. She pretended to be from some kind of agency, and said she could arrange reunions between adopted children and their natural parents, was he interested?”
“What did he say to that?”
“He said, yes, he would do anything, anything at all to meet his son.”
“His son?”
“That’s right, his
son.
She didn’t understand. She said, was he talking about the child mothered by whatever the actress’s name was, and was there more than one? and he said no, that was the one, his son, the only child he’d ever had. Well, apparently she was devastated. She rang off. She’d been prepared for him to say he wasn’t interested in finding his child and then she’d have just got mad, but this threw her. Oh, she was really thrown by that, I can tell you. She went on and on about it. Her theory was that he must have wanted a son, not a daughter, and he’d somehow convinced himself that that’s what he had. As if he’d rejected her twice, you might say, as a person and as a woman.”
Gentle paused and drew a deep breath, shaking his head.
“You had another idea, Tom?” Brock asked.
He raised his eyebrows. “Seemed obvious to me. He hadn’t dreamed up something like that. It was the mother who’d told him she’d had a boy, so he’d never, ever, be able to find his daughter.”
“Ah. And how did Bettina react when you told her that, Tom?”
“She hit the bloody roof!” He cackled. “God, you should have seen her! Her mother hadn’t just abandoned her, she’d obliterated her, wiped her off the face of the earth so she’d never have a real father!”
“And you helped her to see that, Tom,” Brock said, nodding. “Iago. Motiveless evil.”
“What?” Gentle looked at him in surprise.
“The part you played. Don’t worry, a theatrical reference. Carry on.”
“Well, anyway, she didn’t like it. And she wanted to get back at them, especially her mother. She started following Nesbit around, finding out about him. She found out about that theatre group of his, and about this play they were doing at that time, in Shortlands.”
“Which one was that?”
“It was called
Equus.
I was interested to see her father, so I said, why didn’t we go along and see a performance, which we did. This would have been late in July last year.”
“Yes.”
“Afterwards, we talked about it. I thought it was pretty amateurish, myself, but she said it was really good, very moving. She particularly identified with one of the characters, a boy who stabs out the eyes of these horses. She said she came out of the theatre feeling that she could do that to her mother. She understood why the boy had done it, and she knew she could do it too. Then we saw that in the programme it mentioned that they were going to take the play up to the Edinburgh Festival, and she got the idea of following them there.”
“Did you plant that thought in her head too, Tom?”
“Maybe. Anyway, she went. Muriel and I were away on holiday at the time, in France, and when I got back Bettina told me what had happened. She’d gone to see the play again, and afterwards she went into the alleyways behind the theatre, and when a blonde woman came by on her own, Bettina grabbed her, and stabbed out her eyes with a screwdriver, like the boy had done.”
Gentle paused for a drink of water and Kathy noticed that his hand was shaking, although his voice had shown no emotion as he had described this.
“Well now, what was your reaction to that, Tom?” Brock asked neutrally.
“Oh, hey . . .” Gentle grinned. “Pretty damn surprised!”
“Surprised, were you? . . . But what else?”
“Well, impressed. Yes, impressed. That she had the nerve to do something like that. Christ, I never could! Could you?”
“Did you find it scary?”
“Yes, yes, it was scary. She was a scary sort of person, when you knew what she had done. Hell, I’d seen her in action!”
“But you were impressed, fascinated.”
Gentle nodded vigorously.
“I’ll bet you wished you’d been up there with your camera, eh?”
Gentle hung his head coyly, conceding the point without agreeing to it.
“Did you understand that she’d deliberately killed the woman in Edinburgh in that particular way in order to send a message to her father?”
“No, that came later I think, with Zoë. In Edinburgh it had been the play itself that had inspired her. Afterwards she wondered if her father would have seen the connection, and she said she hoped he would, and that’s what gave us . . . gave her the idea for making Zoë Bagnall disappear.”
“How was that?”
“Oh well, we were talking about her father, and she was saying about his acting thing, and how her mother had been an actress, and how she hated them both for it, pretending to be characters in a play when they hadn’t been able to play their own lives properly, abandoning her, and how she felt they should be punished for it. And she mentioned that according to the programme of the theatre company, her father was planning on doing another play in the new year, called
The Lady Vanishes.
And we were kind of joking, you know, about the title, and then the idea just came up
that she could make one of the women in the play vanish, and that would spook her father for sure.”