All My Enemies (5 page)

“You found us all right, then,” he said as he led her off down a narrow corridor.

“Yes, eventually. I went to Broadway first.”

“Brock prefers it over here, tucked away out of sight. This place is leased as overspill space. I don’t know how long they’ll let us stay here.”

As they made their way through the building, Kathy realized that the original terrace of individual town houses had simply been knocked together, so that the old staircases, front doors, and corridors were now all linked internally into a confusing three-dimensional maze.

“We’re in the basement,” Bren said. “Brock had to fight hard to get it.”

“Why did he want it?”

“I’ll show you.”

They descended to the foot of one of the stairs, and made their way along a tight, low-ceilinged passageway until they reached an arch. Bren switched on a light and Kathy was surprised to find
herself in what appeared to be the tiny snug bar of an ancient pub. A huge stuffed salmon in a glass case dominated one wall, and a variety of other trophies and mementoes covered the others. The bar was jammed into one corner, barely large enough for three stools to cluster in front of it.

“The Bride of Denmark,” Bren announced proudly. “Until we took it, this building belonged to an architectural publisher, who’d had it since before the war. They made up this bar from bits and pieces they collected from old pubs that had been bombed or demolished. Not surprisingly, the Bride is the only pub in a Metropolitan Police building in London, and Property Services were stumped what to do with it. They thought they’d clear all this out, to make a file store, but Brock wouldn’t have it. He threatened to go to the National Trust.”

“What do you use it for?” Kathy smiled.

“It’s officially designated a conference room. We quite often have conferences, usually at the end of the day.”

“I can imagine. It’s wonderful.”

In the distance they heard Brock’s voice. Bren looked at his watch. “I think we’re having one now, as a matter of fact.”

Brock arrived with a greeting for Kathy, and squeezed round behind the bar, on which he began to lay out the pile of documents he’d brought under his arm. He was followed by a detective sergeant Kathy recognized from the Jerusalem Lane case.

“Did you ever meet Ted Griffiths, Kathy?”

“Yes, yes, I did. Hello, Ted.” They shook hands. He was a little older than Kathy, quite good-looking, and with enough attention spent on his hair and clothes to suggest he was aware of it.

“You’ll have to excuse Ted if he seems a bit preoccupied, Kathy.” Brock spoke as he peered through his half-lens glasses at the papers he was sorting. “His wife has just produced their first baby. Couple of weeks ago.”

Ted Griffiths nodded, his grin a little smug, Kathy thought.

“But since the same thing happens somewhere around the world about five hundred times every minute, we’re not going to let it distract us from our work, are we?”

Ted smiled some more and sat down below the salmon, on an oak bench as black and worn as an old church pew. As Kathy and Bren took their seats on the stall facing Ted, DS Desai arrived and, with a brief nod, sat on a spindle-backed chair at the far end of the small room from Brock’s bar counter.

“Right,” said Brock, apparently finally satisfied with the layout of his papers, “the murder of Angela Hannaford.” He began to pass photographs and pages of summary information across to Ted to circulate to the others.

“Aged twenty-two last month, single, lived with her parents at 32 Birchgrove Avenue, Petts Wood, and had done so since 1971. Kathy might tell us what else we know about her in a moment.”

He tilted his head and peered down through his glasses at another piece of paper which he drew out of the pile. “Last Saturday night, while her parents were abroad on holiday and her fiancé was out with friends at a stag night, Angela is believed to have come up to town to see a performance of
Macbeth
at the National Theatre on the South Bank. She had apparently bought two tickets for the play, the other being taken by a girlfriend from work called Rhona. Angela didn’t possess a car, and probably travelled up to town on the train, using her season ticket. The performance began at 7:30 and finished just before 10:30. That would have given her plenty of time to walk the 500 yards or so to Waterloo station to pick up the last reasonable train home that night, the 11:05 from Charing Cross to Sevenoaks, stopping at Waterloo at 11:08, and reaching Petts Wood at 11:40. From Petts Wood station it was a fifteen-minute walk to her home, so if she did come home that way she should have arrived at 11:55.”

He paused, took off his glasses, and looked around the room.
“Which happens to be precisely the time when the boy next door, one Warwick Ratcliffe, aged fifteen, says he arrived home, on foot, from a party. He doesn’t remember seeing a light on at number 32, and heard nothing, either then, when he arrived, or when he went to bed soon after.

“She could have returned some other way, of course. Maybe Rhona had a car and gave her a lift home, in which case they might have got to Birchgrove Avenue soon after 11:15, if they came directly there, or any time later if they stopped along the way. Again, she could have come back to Petts Wood by train, then accepted a lift home from the station, perhaps from someone she met on the train, who’d left their car near the station. But, again, Warwick didn’t notice any car parked outside Angela’s home, nor anywhere else in the street.

“At any rate, some time after arriving home, Angela was sexually assaulted and murdered in her bedroom on the rear first floor, by someone who apparently didn’t need to force an entry into the house. A preliminary schedule of injuries is given on one of the sheets I’ve copied for you there, although we’ll have to wait for the post-mortem this afternoon to confirm these. As you see, they are quite extensive, and there are peculiarities about the way the body was left. I particularly don’t want to publicize these features—the matchstick in the mouth and the way she was laid out. I don’t want these appearing in the newspaper accounts. Obviously they are things that only the murderer could know, and for the time being we’ll keep them to ourselves.”

“Or murderers,” a soft voice said from the other end of the room. They all turned to look at Desai. “It’s possible there was more than one, sir,” he added.

“Is there forensic evidence of that, Leon?”

Desai nodded. “Possibly. I can’t be sure at the moment, but there may have been at least two men involved.”

“I see. Is there anything else you can tell us at the moment?”

“It’s too early for any results from the scientific tests, of course. Only an impression, really, of the style, the way it was done.”

“Go on.”

“Well, you know more about this than I do, sir, the psychological side. But there’s something odd about it. It’s not like anything I’ve seen before. Usually the scene of a murder is just a mess—there’s been a fight, someone was drunk, in a rage, high, or just couldn’t put up with something any more, and they’ve exploded and killed someone. Much less often, there’s preparation, premeditation. What you see isn’t so much rage as a kind of blind panic to get the job done—usually fumbling, taking three or four attempts to get the carving knife in to the right spot, or getting bitten and scratched, desperately trying to keep the victim quiet until they finally choke or drown or whatever.”

Brock nodded. Kathy listened intently to Desai’s words, which were delivered, she thought, with a great deal of preparation and premeditation. She noticed that Bren’s foot was tapping impatiently. His shoes were in need of cleaning and repair, unlike Desai’s which looked brand new.

“Call me Brock, for God’s sake, Leon. You’re part of the team. So, what’s different about this one?”

“There was certainly a great deal of rage, or passion of some kind. But it was also very . . . calculated. He—or they—seem to have been in control, of the girl, of course, but also of the sequence of events, and of the traces that they left behind.”

“Yes.” Brock raised a hand to his face and clawed at the short grey beard he wore. “Murderers display two basic kinds of behaviour. The Americans call them organized and disorganized. You’re saying that this one was organized. He wasn’t acting impulsively. He wasn’t carried away by a sudden fit of uncontrollable emotion. He was carrying out a plan he had thought about very carefully before
he ever got to Angela’s house. He was in control, and he was enjoying himself.”

Kathy lowered her head, feeling sick.

“So,” Brock sighed, “Kathy, what can you tell us about the young woman?”

“She . . . she seems rather colourless, at this stage, Brock. Everyone says how nice she was. She was a very dutiful daughter, a faithful member of her church. She’d been going steady with the same bloke, Adrian Avery, since they were both sixteen. I don’t think she’d ever been out with anyone else, and my impression was that he’d pretty much come to take her for granted. She did reasonably well in her A-levels at school, and could have gone to university, but apparently decided not to. Instead she did a one-year secretarial course and then got a job in the City. She’s still in the same job, a clerk-typist with a finance company called Merritt Finance, near Blackfriars Station.

“Perhaps ‘colourless’ isn’t the right word. Maybe it just all sounds a bit old-fashioned, somehow. Rather tidy and static. I’m not sure that she even had a driving licence. She certainly didn’t own a car. The only corner of her life that seemed to arouse any passion, from what people told me, was the theatre. She belonged to a church theatre-goers’ club which regularly does the local shows and the West End. It was about the only thing she did without her boyfriend or her parents.”

Brock nodded. “We found a collection of old theatre programmes in one of the drawers in her bedroom. Any thoughts?” He looked at Bren, who shrugged and reeled off a number of suggestions. “Who saw her at the theatre? Who else was on that train? Who else got off the train at Petts Wood? Who else walked down Birchgrove Avenue that night?”

“Mm. Well, you and Kathy might begin up here in town, Bren, while Ted goes down to Orpington to set up an incident room
with the local CID there. That way your wife will know where to get ahold of you.”

“Thanks, Brock.” Ted smiled.

“You’ll be at the post-mortem, Leon?”

He nodded.

“Well, I’ll see you there, and then I’ll join you down in Orpington, Ted. I’ll hold a briefing for the local CID, and then I’d like to talk to the boyfriend. Do you know what he does, Kathy?”

“He’s unemployed.”

“Well, line him up for me, will you, Ted? We need to check up on the crew he was out with on Saturday night.”

“To confirm his alibi, Chief?” Ted said.

“And theirs. It’s possible they all knew that Angela would be returning to an empty house that night.”

“Was she in the church choir?” Bren turned to Kathy.

“I’m not sure. Nobody mentioned it. Why?”

“The way she was set out, with her mouth jammed open, arms by her side, like she was singing or something. If it was one of those blokes who knew her, if maybe they paid her a visit that night and she refused to co-operate, could that be some kind of sick joke? The choir girl singing her last hymn?”

Kathy frowned, but didn’t reply.

Brock shook his head, shoving his papers together, the meeting over as far as he was concerned. The others recognized the signs and began to get up. But Kathy said, “Brock, can I ask something?”

“Of course.” He stopped what he was doing and looked at her, while the others sank back down on to their seats.

Kathy suddenly felt that she should have kept quiet, but she ploughed on anyway. “Yesterday you said that there had to be some pattern linking Angela’s life and the killer’s. Fair enough if, as Bren suggests, it was someone she knew. But if it wasn’t. Where would we begin?”

He seemed disappointed by the question. “It’s far too early to
say, Kathy. We don’t want to start with preconceptions. We need a lot more information.”

She winced and muttered, “Yes, yes, of course,” and to herself thought
Great start, Kathy.

“But . . . one inevitable thought . . .”—Brock stared at the salmon as if its gawping mouth might tell him something—“is the railway.”

“The railway?” Kathy wondered if she’d misheard.

“Mmm. Angela lived in Metroland, Kathy, the great suburban territory sustained by the intricate web of its electric railway system. There are more passenger trips made each year on the Southern Region railways around London than in the whole of the United States. But, more to the point, Londoners understand London in terms of its railway system.”

Kathy still looked frankly puzzled.

“Remember John Duffy, a couple of years ago?”

“The serial killer?”

“Yes. The papers dubbed him ‘The Railway Rapist’ because he seemed to have a preference for committing his crimes near a railway line. And the reason for that was that his mental map of London, the way he could navigate within it, was built around the railways he travelled on. From that it was possible to identify the area he lived in.

“For Angela, London was what you see from the Petts Wood to Blackfriars line. She got on it at 8:19 each morning and again at 5:17 every evening. It was as familiar to her as her own bedroom, and maybe that’s true for her killer too. Maybe he caught sight of her on that line, and stalked her on it, and finally followed her home from it.”

He paused and frowned, as if he’d said more than he’d meant to. “Anyway, let’s keep an open mind for the moment.”

BREN DROPPED KATHY AT
the north end of Blackfriars Bridge and continued across the river to the National Theatre, while she walked east down Queen Victoria Street. It didn’t take her long to find the building in which Merritt Finance occupied floors five to eight. The Head Office Manager’s suite was on the fifth.

“Mr. Ferry should be in any time now, Detective Sergeant,” the secretary said. She seemed fascinated by Kathy, and kept glancing at her bag, as if it might contain some lethal arsenal. “Can I get you a cup of coffee? Or perhaps, if you told me what it was about, I might be able to help in some way.”