Authors: Barry Maitland
“That sounds like your idea again, Tom,” Brock said. “I mean she wasn’t all that bright, was she? She needed a bit of help with the creative side, didn’t she? Not much point being bashful now.”
Gentle rocked his head in a self-deprecating little show of humility, his mouth squirming with guilty pleasure.
“So you decided on Zoë Bagnall.”
Gentle nodded. “Bettina decided to move down to the Shortlands area, and join SADOS. It gave her a buzz to see her father at close hand, and know that he had no idea who she was. She helped backstage with
The Lady Vanishes
, and we decided that Zoë should be it, her being blonde and in the play.”
“You started following her, did you?”
“I began travelling up and down to Victoria, the line she used, and getting the tube across to the office. I took photographs of her, and from time to time I met with Bettina and we discussed them.”
“Were you lovers, you and Bettina?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. Our relationship was different.”
“More like father and daughter, you mean? Or brother and sister?”
Gentle gave a little frown, as if to warn Brock against making jokes about this.
“Sorry, Tom, I’m getting tired,” Brock said. “Why don’t you tell us what happened with Zoë, and then we might take a break and finish off your statement later.”
Gentle shrugged. “The factual things, do you mean?”
“The factual things, yes.”
“I approached her in December sometime, coming home on the train. I let it out that I was a wealthy man, bored, looking for a new direction in life. After a while I asked her if she’d like to spend a weekend with me, and she was quite agreeable. I nominated
January the twentieth, and she told me she had the last performance of her play that night. She’d have to put in an appearance at a party afterwards, and we agreed I’d go to her flat and pick her up at the appointed time, and take her somewhere nice. I took her to Bettina’s place. She said, what’s this? because it wasn’t exactly a luxury hotel, and I said I had a surprise for her inside. And when we went in, Bettina was waiting for us. She killed Zoë there.”
“How, exactly?”
Kathy felt numbed by Gentle’s matter-of-fact description of scenes of horror, of him calmly taking pictures while Bettina cut the woman’s throat and mutilated her. She wanted Brock to hurry it up, to finish, although she knew he would have to go through every detail of it.
“What about your role, Tom?”
“Oh no, she did everything. I told you, I’d never have the nerve. I just recorded the event. I was always only an observer, not a participant. I’m not a murderer, Chief Inspector! Good lord, look at me! I only watch, take photographs. It seemed, well, obscene to me that such things might go unrecorded, unwitnessed. I felt I had to be there.”
“The audience for her starring roles, Tom. The official photographer. But you were more than that, surely. Actors need producers too. You were her producer, weren’t you? Preparing and planning, selecting the cast. Angela, for example. That was entirely your choice, wasn’t it?”
Gentle conceded the point. “Bettina was getting very agitated at that stage. Nesbit seemed to be oblivious to her little messages. When he didn’t react to the murder of the Weeks girl, in the park, Bettina insisted that we send him a picture of Zoë, with her throat cut. She attached a note with the message, ‘from your only son.’ But nothing happened. She expected him to go to pieces, but instead he just announced that he was going to do
The Father
instead of
Blithe Spirit
as his next play, which we thought was a bit
rich. We didn’t know, of course, what he was planning. So Bettina insisted we do another one, to wake him up. She was getting very twitchy. She wanted to grab someone after a rehearsal, Vicky probably, and I thought that was getting too dangerous. But then they arranged the trip to
Macbeth
, and I thought we might do something less obvious.”
“Was it a coincidence, then, that Angela was going to the same performance?”
Gentle looked quizzically at Brock, wondering how someone so slow could be in this line of work. “Hardly. I arranged for her to go. I was the one who got her the ticket in the first place. I had been pestering her a little, and she’d taken offence. It was my way of saying sorry.” He pursed his lips: what a naughty boy am I.
“Actually, it was more than that,” he went on. “She had been threatening to make a complaint to Clive Ferry, the Head Office Manager, about me following her home. So I peeked in her office file, just to see if there was anything there I could use to persuade her to keep quiet. And I noticed that she’d gone to the same school as the one that Bettina had discovered her father had been a teacher at—Bettina had a whole file on her old man by this time. I thought what a wonderful twist that would be, when he recognized Angela’s face in the paper. Bettina thought it was brilliant.”
“Yes,” Brock said, looking at him thoughtfully. “That was a very clever bit of stage management, Tom. But then why the hell did you end up buying her spare ticket, drawing attention to yourself?”
“Well”—Gentle looked up at the ceiling, shook his head, the great artist tripped up by the trivia of everyday life—“because unknown to me she’d gone back to the theatre and exchanged her ticket for two cheaper ones so her friend Rhona could go with her, and when that fell through Rhona was on the point of selling it to the young lad in Marketing who’s had his eye on Angela for some time. He’d have wanted to see her home. He might have stayed the
night—he might have spoiled everything. So I had to step in and buy the ticket myself. I thought, as long as I didn’t actually go that night, I’d be in the clear. I knew Muriel would never let me go.”
He shook his head sadly. “I really messed that up, didn’t I?”
“So you were the producer and casting director,” Brock said. “And stage-manager too, I shouldn’t wonder. The disguises, for instance.”
“Bettina had already started that in Edinburgh. She told me she’d bought a pair of size nine shoes up there so if she left any footprints the police would think it was a man. I just helped her develop it, with the beard and everything. We were creating a character.”
“And the trick with the condom, was that your idea?”
Gentle nodded. “I did quite a bit of reading about police forensic methods. There was an account of a rapist who was using a condom so that the police couldn’t get a DNA profile from his sperm. But the police were able to identify the make of condom he used from traces of the lubricant in the woman’s vagina. It appealed to Bettina, to make it look like a man was doing it—her father’s
son.
She enjoyed playing the part. You should have seen her performances! She was really scary. She tried the condom thing first with Zoë, even though the idea was that she would vanish without trace. She put the condom on the end of a broomstick, to cause bruising.”
“And where is Zoë now?”
“When Bettina was finished, we cleaned up as best we could, and wrapped Zoë in plastic. We lifted her into the boot of my car, and next day I took her to the dump, along with a pile of junk we wanted rid of. She’s in the Sevenoaks municipal refuse tip, I’m afraid.” He gave a little apologetic shrug of his shoulders. “I was due to change my car soon after, anyway.”
Brock glanced at Kathy, pale and drawn, over Gentle’s shoulder, and said, “I think we might take a break at this point, Tom. Give us a chance to check up on one or two things, and I dare say you might want to contact your solicitor.”
“One thing,” Kathy spoke for the first time. They looked at her in surprise. “You didn’t know that Stafford was planning to kill himself. So presumably you had another killing planned for last night.”
A crafty look came over Gentle.
“Who was the victim going to be?”
“You’ve got me there, Sergeant.” He gave a sly little smile. “Bettina had a key to your flat. She made a copy from the ones she pinched from your aunt. We were going to pay you a visit when you returned from the cast party.”
“What about my aunt?”
He shrugged; a matter of no concern. “When Nesbit killed himself, Bettina was completely thrown. In an odd sort of way I think she grieved for him. We decided to abandon our plans for Saturday. I really think she might not have done it any more.”
“What was she doing at Stafford’s house?”
“She thought he might have a picture of her mother. Maybe information about her. Where she lives . . .”
Kathy thought of a line she’d read from the closing passages of
Equus
, the voice of the horse asking why.
“Why did you pick me, Mr. Gentle?”
He smiled at her. “Bettina didn’t like you. She said she didn’t like the way you got on with Nesbit, the way he looked at you as if you were his daughter instead of her. She was jealous. And then, of course, you had the right coloured hair.”
THE MOTORWAY PATROL SPOTTED
the car parked on the hard shoulder just short of the bridge, and pulled to a stop behind it.
“Go on,” the driver said to his mate, “your turn.” Neither wanted to get out, with the rain sluicing down and great waves of spray buffeting the car with every truck that passed.
Reluctantly the other man put his cap on his head and turned up his collar. “Maybe it’ll ease off in a minute.”
“No chance,” the driver grinned. “And it’ll be dark soon.”
The officer got out and ran forward to the window of the parked car. He had to peer through the streaming glass to make out that the car was empty. He straightened and looked along the hard shoulder, trying to see if he could catch sight of the driver. It took him a moment to spot her, standing motionless in the darkness under the bridge. He called out, but she had her back to him, and with the roar of the traffic and the rain he wasn’t sure she would have heard, so he began running towards her. At least it would be dry under the bridge.
She turned at the sound of his footsteps and he saw that she was soaking wet, fair hair plastered to her head, face glistening with water.
“You all right, madam?”
She nodded. Her face seemed unnaturally pale in the evening light, catching the glow from the headlights rushing past.
“Trouble with your vehicle?”
She didn’t react at first, and he repeated the question, louder. Then she shook her head and muttered some reply which he didn’t catch. The underside of the bridge was magnifying the traffic noise. He made to move towards her, but she backed away, like a nervous pony, he thought. Then she turned and started walking back to her car. He followed after her, and stood watching as she got in, started it up, and drove off into the traffic stream.
“What was all that about?” the driver asked as he got back, dripping, into the patrol car.
“Who knows?” he said wearily. “Some melodrama.”