Authors: Barry Maitland
“Where is he now?”
“He’s at home. He’s been complaining of a summer cold since
the weekend. Muriel phoned in this morning to say she was going to keep him at home for a day or two.”
“Where is that?”
“I’ll get you the address. It’s in Chipstead, near Sevenoaks.”
“Sevenoaks is beyond Orpington, isn’t it? On the same commuter line that Angela used?”
“Yes.” Ferry nodded reluctantly. “I believe it is.”
“Please don’t contact him in advance of us getting there.”
On the way down in the lift, Bren said, “Don’t look so worried, Kathy. We might be getting somewhere.”
“Yes. But none of the women wanted to tell us about it. I asked Rhona straight out about whether Angela might have mentioned anything odd and she said nothing. It was only later she got her boyfriend to speak to me, and he made the point that she’d deny it if pressed. What worries me is that by the time we get the truth out of them, Gentle will have destroyed whatever hard evidence might still be remaining.”
“Any ideas?”
“Yes. I want to hit him hard, now, before he gets wind we’re onto him. Do you think Brock will go for a search warrant?”
“Hmm. Bit thin at this stage, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
THEY WAITED FOR THE
search warrant and another car of local CID officers at Orpington, then continued down the A21 to the Chipstead turn-off just beyond the M25. The Gentles’ home had once been two farm cottages, joined together and given a loft extension. It nestled comfortably between a stand of beeches and an orchard of ancient apple trees. A cottage garden spilled around the driveway in drifts of blue and pink and white, studded with columns of purple foxgloves and delphiniums. Muriel Gentle came round the side of the house, attracted by the sound of their
wheels on the gravel. She wore a gardening hat and gloves, and carried a basket full of cuttings. A basset-hound trotted along in her wake.
“Hello.” Her cautious smile to Kathy turned to disquiet as the second car turned into the drive. She had an attractive, intelligent face, and Kathy found herself staring at her, wondering how well she really knew her husband.
“Mrs. Gentle, we’re police officers, investigating the murder of Angela Hannaford. She worked in your husband’s office. Did you know her at all?”
“I believe I did once meet her there. I don’t recall her very clearly. Of course, I was very shocked to hear what had happened to her.”
“We think your husband may be able to give us some more help.”
“I see . . . He’s not very well at the moment. I’d better . . .” She watched the four men get out of the second car. “There are an awful lot of you, aren’t there?”
“We have a search warrant, Mrs. Gentle. I’m afraid we shall have to search your property. We shall be as quick and as careful as we can.”
Her mouth dropped open, colour draining from her face. “No! That’s not possible. There’s been some mistake!”
She turned to face the front door, from which the figure of her husband, in dressing-gown and slippers, had just emerged.
“What’s the matter, Muriel? What on earth is going on?”
She turned back to face Kathy. “I’m going to call our solicitor,” she said, and ran past her husband and into the house.
They followed her in, Kathy informing Tom Gentle of what they were doing as Bren and the others spread out through the house. He led them into a living-room with the look of a man who has just been mugged. His nose was red with his cold, and his eyes even more mournful than before.
The furniture in the room was, like the house, old, comfortable, and worn. A couple of pieces were unusual, a chest and a sideboard of blackened oak, Elizabethan or even earlier. After a moment Muriel followed them in. She looked fiercely at Kathy. “I don’t want you to ask him anything until Mr. Denholm gets here. Do you understand?”
“Very well, Mrs. Gentle. May I ask you one or two things while we wait?”
“Me? I told you, I hardly knew the girl.”
Kathy nodded and went to the door, where she called for one of the other detectives. “Mr. Gentle, would you go with this officer, please?”
She closed the door after him.
“Mrs. Gentle, can you tell me where your husband was on the evening of Saturday last?”
“Saturday . . . Oh, I see!” Relief began to spread across her face. “The theatre! You think . . .”
“He went to the theatre?”
“No! But that’s what you think, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here! I knew there must be a mistake!”
“Go on.”
“Oh . . .” She laughed, stroking her cheek with her hand. Kathy saw that the fingers were trembling. “Tom is such an ass. He told me on Saturday, about lunch time, that he’d bought a ticket at work for the theatre that night. He’d done it on impulse, because he thought I was having my bridge group round, and he thought he might as well be out of the way. Well, I told him that he’d got the night wrong, because my bridge isn’t till next Saturday. At first he said he wanted to go anyway—said it would let down the others in the party if he didn’t go. But I told him that he wasn’t going on his own, without me. He doesn’t even like the theatre, anyway!”
She smiled at Kathy. “You see? He didn’t go. Why? Was the poor girl part of the group?”
“She
was
the group, Mrs. Gentle. Only her.”
The woman’s face froze, startled, but not as shocked as it might have been. “I see. Well, obviously I misunderstood.”
“Did your husband ever speak about Angela to you?”
“No, why should he?”
“What about anyone else? Had anyone else mentioned her name to you?”
“Not that I can recall offhand. Why? What is the point of this?”
“So Mr. Gentle stayed at home with you all Saturday evening?”
“Yes . . . well, no. He went out to the local at around 9:30. He quite often does that on a Saturday night. He meets one or two friends for a pint.”
She looked defiantly at Kathy, who nodded. “I’m sorry about this, Mrs. Gentle, I really am.”
The solicitor’s Jaguar swung into the drive after ten strained minutes in which Muriel Gentle winced with every thump and scrape of her furniture being moved in the rooms around them. He strode in, a tall, thin, white-haired man of around sixty, and went straight to Muriel, who rose with relief.
“I told them, Victor. I told them that they mustn’t speak to Tom until you were present. But . . . I spoke to them.”
“That’s perfectly all right, my dear.” He looked at Kathy. “Are you the officer in charge?”
Kathy showed him her gleaming new warrant card and the search warrant.
“Are you laying charges against Mr. Gentle?” he asked.
“No, sir, not at this time. We have reason to believe he may be holding evidence relevant to our inquiry into the murder of Angela Hannaford at her home in Petts Wood on the night of September 8.”
“I find that very hard to believe, Sergeant,” the solicitor said dryly, “but no doubt we shall see.”
“Yes, sir. Shall we interview him now?”
He nodded. “Muriel, my dear, is there a neighbour you might have a cup of coffee with until this is over?”
“I couldn’t leave Tom. I shall go outside and wait in the garden. I take it”—she spun on her heel and glared at Kathy—“that you don’t intend to dig up my garden!”
“I sincerely hope not, Mrs. Gentle.”
Kathy and the solicitor found Tom Gentle sitting in the kitchen, squeezing his nose in a handful of tissues. The crumpled face of the basset-hound regarded them gravely from between its master’s legs. Gentle sniffed loudly and spoke. “Would you like something then, Sergeant, Victor? I’ll make a pot of tea if you like.”
Both shook their heads, surprised at how unconcerned he seemed. Kathy decided to get straight to the point. “Mr. Gentle, we’ve received reports that you made advances to Angela Hannaford, followed her in the train, and sexually harassed her.”
“Have you indeed?” Gentle stared at Kathy calmly.
“Is it true?”
“Where on earth did you get hold of rubbish like that?” He sat back in his Windsor chair and regarded her with an air of disappointment. Taking the cue, the dog gave a snuffle of contempt and rolled over.
“You deny it?”
“Of course I do.” He sneezed suddenly and loudly into the tissues. “I certainly travelled back and forward to town on the same train as Angela sometimes, and occasionally found myself in the same compartment, but I’d be very surprised if anyone who witnessed that would describe my conduct as improper in any way.”
“What about your arrangement to go out to the theatre with her last Saturday?”
“I already explained that to you, Sergeant.” He rolled his large eyes in exaggerated despair. “I arranged to buy a theatre ticket that was going spare; I did not arrange to go
out
with Angela.”
“But you seem to have hidden from your wife the fact that you were going to meet Angela alone.”
“Oh really! I can’t remember the precise words I used to Muriel, and I don’t suppose she can either. The fact is, I didn’t go!”
“Sergeant,” the solicitor broke in, “I take it that magistrates, even today, are not in the habit of serving search warrants on law-abiding citizens on the strength of office tittle-tattle and typists’ gossip. I must ask you if you have some substantial piece of evidence concerning my client’s conduct with the murdered woman. Something that can be corroborated?”
Kathy hesitated, and at that moment a detective put his head round the kitchen door and raised his eyebrow at her.
“Just a moment, please,” she said to the two men, trying not to sound relieved, and made for the door.
She followed the detective upstairs and into a room on one side of a small landing. There were no windows in the space, which appeared to be set up as a photographic dark room. The lack of outlook and the sloping ceilings of the room beneath the roof pitch gave it a claustrophobic atmosphere.
“This filing cabinet over here,” the detective pointed. “It was locked.”
It was a three-drawer grey steel office type of cabinet. The detective slid open the top drawer and began to pull out piles of magazines.
“A few photographic mags,” he said, “but mainly soft porn. Some not so soft.”
Kathy thumbed through the pile. “Anything violent, sadistic?”
“Didn’t spot anything. His tastes seem fairly straightforward.” He pulled out a magazine with the title
King-Sized Knockers.
“Mmm. Subtle.” Kathy nodded. “You’d better make a list of the titles and make a note of anything remotely nasty, OK? Is that all?”
The detective closed the top drawer and opened the second. He began to pull papers from the file-hangers at the front.
“What’s that?” Kathy asked. “Just looks like bills.”
“Yeah. Mainly telephone bills.”
“So what?”
“Have a look.”
Kathy thumbed through them for a while. “Sorry. Don’t see anything.”
“The 0891 numbers. See?”
“So? He kept up with the cricket scores or the weather or something.”
The CID man snorted derisively. “
Talk dirty to me.
You know. Listen to some bird telling you what she’d like you to do to her, for a quid a minute, or whatever it is. You know.”
“No, I don’t. I had no idea.”
“You’ve led a sheltered life,” he grinned.
“Obviously. Still, it’s nice to know that the world we live in is so wonderfully rich that there’re still things like this to discover. Would you classify it as a hobby, do you think?”
“A hobby?”
“Yes. He seems to have spent enough time and money on it. However”—she dropped the phone bills back in the cabinet with a sigh—“we’re going to need more than this to nail the creep.”
“Yes, Kathy.” She could tell from his voice that they were coming to the really interesting bit. Kathy was aware of the smell of his sweat filling the stuffy room.
“I’m not sure I can face this,” she said, her claustrophobic reactions to the room, the Sexual Assault Index, the Hannafords’ house, the suffocating leafy suburbs, all suddenly pressing in upon her.
“Oh, I think you’ll like what we’ve got here,” he said, and drew out a plain manilla folder from half-way back in the drawer. Kathy opened it, saw the pictures of Angela inside, and became very still. “Oh yes,” she whispered.
She was walking down the street, dressed for work, or sitting on
a park bench on a day warm enough to need only a light summer frock. In a couple she was sitting reading by a window, and Kathy realized, from the rounded corners of the window and the heavy sliding door-lock by her knee, that she was in the compartment of a Southern Region electric commuter train. In none of them did she seem aware that she was being photographed.
“The back half of this drawer and the whole of the bottom drawer are full of files like this,” the detective said. “Photographs of women, black and white 10 × 8s or 7 × 5s: he probably developed and printed them himself up here. Some have other things as well—restaurant bills, letters, hand-written notes about train times and addresses.”
“She doesn’t look as if she realized he was there,” Kathy said.
“No. Most of them are like that. A few have the girl smiling at the camera. I haven’t had time to take a thorough look. There’re hundreds of pictures here.”
Kathy returned downstairs to the kitchen, and saw Gentle’s expression change as he recognized the file in her hand. But still he wasn’t panicking. She sat down and placed the file, closed, on the table between them.
“We’ve found the filing cabinet in your darkroom, Mr. Gentle,” she said flatly.
“It was locked,” he said. “I hope you haven’t damaged it.”
“Sergeant, what . . .” The solicitor began to speak, then went silent as Kathy opened the file and he saw the pictures. He frowned. “Who is that?”
“The murdered woman, Angela Hannaford,” Kathy replied. “Your client has been photographing her, it seems.”
Mr. Denholm looked sharply at Gentle, who caught his look, shrugged, and sat back in his chair with a look of bland innocence. “So what? Yes, they’re my photographs. It’s my hobby.”
“What is your hobby, Mr. Gentle?” Kathy said, quietly.
“Photography. I like to photograph people, ordinary people, going about their daily lives. That’s my subject matter.”