The Malcontenta (28 page)

She wished she knew what had happened to Dowling. She had tried a number of times to ring him at work and at his home, but without success. By the time the cabbie pulled in to the kerb outside the building, her heart was pounding badly. She fumbled the money and looked closely at the man’s face while he searched for change, as if he was the last normal human being she was ever likely to see.

Tanner kept her waiting another hour, sitting alone in the windowless interview room with her back to the door, facing an empty chair across the table. At least it gave her a chance to bring down her heart rate and stabilize the adrenalin in her bloodstream, although when the door eventually did fly open she nearly leaped to her feet.

A woman detective came in after him, closed the door and took a seat behind Kathy’s right shoulder. Tanner took the chair facing her. He laid down a plain manila file, lit a cigarette and considered her for a moment through the blue smoke. Imagining what she would do in his position, she had decided he would begin with that last interview he had had with them, and his words of warning. Then, having established the
threat
with that recollection, he would begin the
questions.

She was wrong. He had no questions. Instead he opened the file and withdrew a single typed sheet of paper and laid it in front of her. Beside it he placed a ball-point pen.

‘Read and sign,’ he said simply, his tone distant, indifferent.

She blinked with surprise, then leaned forward, not wanting to touch the piece of paper, and read what it had to say.

STATEMENT BY DETECTIVE SERGEANT K. KOLLA

On 16 March last, 1, together with DC G. Dowling, visited the private home of DC! D. Brock in London. The latter was known to me from professional contact during my previous attachment to the Metropolitan Police. My intention was to persuade Detective Chief Inspector Brock to use his influence as a senior officer with the Metropolitan Police to reopen the case of the death of Alex Petrou at the Stanhope Clinic during the night of 27/28 October last. I was fully aware that the police and coroner’s investigations had been completed on the circumstances surrounding the death of Mr Petrou, that the case was closed, and that my superiors had explicitly instructed me to make no further inquiries into the matter. I made these facts known to DCI Brock.

After discussion, DCI Brock agreed to undertake a private investigation of his own into the affair, and to this end registered himself as a patient at Stanhope Clinic, without disclosing his intentions or his identity as a police officer to the owners of the clinic. He entered the clinic on
18
March last.

On 21 March I met DCI Brock in Edenham to review his progress. During this meeting we discussed the possibility of illegally gaining access to the private computer files of the clinic. Subsequently DCI Brock did in fact do this, during the night of 23 March, by forcibly breaking into the clinic offices.

This statement is freely made and witnessed.

Kathy felt a cold, nauseous lump rise from her stomach towards her throat as she reread the document. She forced herself to concentrate, think clearly.

Some of this must have come from Brock …All of it? … No mention of Belle … And not a word about Rose.

‘No’ - she sat up and met Tanner’s eyes - ‘I can’t sign that.’

‘You’ll notice that there’s no mention of Rose Duggan’s name.’ Tanner spoke casually but slowly, letting her think it through. ‘No mention of your and Brock’s role or share in the responsibility for her death.’ He leaned back in his chair and studied her face as he might a television screen, waiting for some information to come up, impersonally.

Kathy stared back at him, then lowered her eyes and read the page a third time.

‘Take out the last paragraph,’ she said finally, ‘about the files.’

Tanner gave a little smile and shook his head. ‘There is another version of that paragraph,’ he said. ‘I’m still not sure which to go for.’

He reached forward and drew out a second sheet of paper from the file in front of him. At first it seemed identical to the other. Kathy ran her eye quickly down it until she spotted the difference. A further sentence had been added to the last paragraph, after ‘forcibly breaking into the clinic offices’.

He did this after an unauthorized attempt by STO B. Mansfield to gain access to the clinic computer, using a private phone line, was unsuccessful.

Kathy swallowed, forcing the lump back down. Then she reached forward, picked up the pen and signed her name to the first version of the statement, without the reference to Belle.

Tanner kept her waiting in the interview room for a further forty minutes. Then he reappeared. ‘How did you get here?’ he asked.

‘Taxi,’ she said.

He nodded and left. Ten minutes later a uniformed WPC put her head round the door. ‘Chief Inspector Tanner says you can go now. There’s a taxi waiting downstairs.’

Kathy made her way down to the front entrance. The taxi was standing at the kerb, engine running. She opened the rear door to get in, then hesitated, seeing another passenger on the far side of the back seat. She didn’t recognize him for a moment.

‘Brock!’

She was shocked by his face, haggard, with dark circles under his eyes.

‘Where to?’ the taxi driver asked, looking at her in his mirror.

‘Do you want to get something to eat?’ she asked Brock gently.

He shook his head. ‘Wouldn’t mind ten minutes’ kip,’ he said, his voice sounding husky.

She hesitated, then gave the man the address of her bedsit. When they got there she paid off the taxi and led Brock up to her room on the first floor. He seemed not to notice his surroundings as she opened the door and showed him the single bed over by the far corner.

‘The bathroom’s first on the right outside.’ She pulled the curtains closed, found him a towel and left him to it.

She went out to the small supermarket two streets away and bought some groceries, then lingered at a newsagent’s on the way back, flicking through magazines, to give Brock time to get himself organized. When she finally put her head round the door, the room was dark and silent. She tiptoed across to check the motionless form under her duvet, collected a sweater from the wardrobe and went back downstairs to the kitchen.

Around eight she cooked a couple of steaks with onions and baked potatoes, and went upstairs to wake him, but he was so unresponsive to her touch that she decided to leave him be. She knocked on Patrick’s door to see if he was interested in a steak, but he wasn’t there.

By eleven she was flagging. She returned to her room and attempted to make a nest for herself in the armchair. For a couple of hours she shifted uncomfortably from one position to another, overtired and sleepless. Throughout this time there was neither sound nor movement from the figure on her bed. Around one o’clock she got out of the chair and went back down to the kitchen with a paperback, a blanket wrapped round her shoulders. Patrick was there, making a cup of instant.

‘Hello again!’ he beamed.

‘Hi. Just back from work?’

‘Sort of. How about you? Did you get your call?’

‘Yes, it came finally. Now I’ve had to put someone up in my room for the night and I can’t get to sleep myself.’

Patrick thought. ‘You could use Mervyn’s room. Up in the attic. He’s gone to stay with his parents for a couple of days.’

‘Mervyn - he’s “Sylvester”, isn’t he? He seemed a bit odd.’

‘Oh, not really. He has some personal problems - well, BO actually, as you must have noticed. He’s very sensitive. But we’re working our way round to helping him sort it out.’

Kathy wondered what their strategy was. ‘That’s the social welfare committee of number twenty-three, is it?’ she asked.

Patrick smiled.

‘Well, I couldn’t just use his bed without asking him.’

‘Oh, it would be all right. I have his key. Everybody leaves a spare key to their room with one of the others. Everybody except you, that is.’

Kathy began to see the extent of the social web of the house, of which she had been totally oblivious.

‘We couldn’t rely on Dominic, you see.’

‘Who’s Dominic?’

‘The landlord, of course.’ Patrick was shocked at her ignorance.

‘Oh, right. I did meet him once.’ Kathy sighed with tiredness.

‘Look, I’m absolutely sure that Mervyn would be very upset if you didn’t make use of his room.’

Kathy nodded. She no longer had much confidence in her own judgement as to what was proper. She followed Patrick up to the top of the house and fell exhausted into Mervyn’s bed.

Brock finally awoke next morning at eleven, his ‘ten-minute kip’ having lasted twenty hours. Kathy made them both bacon and eggs while he had a bath and shaved, and they sat and ate it on their laps in her room in front of the electric fire. Brock was certainly more like his old self, complimenting her on the food and trying to work out where they were from the view out of the window. But she found his sporadic conversation aggravating. It seemed as if he was refusing to think about what had happened. Finally, the thought she had been resisting refused any longer to be suppressed.

He’s given up. He just doesn’t want to know any more.

She had intended to let him begin, but now she decided to broach the subject herself. ‘Do you want to see the papers? I’ve kept them all from Tuesday morning when they first carried the story.’

‘What do they tell us?’

‘Not a lot. No arrests. No clues mentioned. Inquiries continuing. A lot of patients leaving the clinic. Regurgitation of the Petrou case. An interview with Rose’s parents.’

Brock’s frown deepened at the mention of Rose’s name, but he said nothing. Kathy broke into his silence with what was uppermost in her mind. ‘I signed a statement, Brock.’

He wiped his plate clean with a piece of bread and chewed it thoroughly before replying. ‘Yes, he showed it to me. You had no choice, I’d say.’ He reached for the mug of tea.

‘Do you think so? I didn’t tell him any of those things. He didn’t ask me anything.’

‘No. He didn’t get them from me either, if that’s what’s worrying you.’

‘But…?’ She stared at him perplexed.

He took a sip of tea and placed the mug carefully back down on the tray. ‘He knew it all already.’ Brock straightened his spine against the back of the chair and flexed his shoulders. ‘I’m afraid I seriously underestimated our problem, Kathy. I shan’t do it again. The only thing to say on the positive side’ - he turned his neck slowly - ‘is that they do seem to have cured my bad shoulder.’

‘The other good thing,’ Brock said later, when they were washing their plates in the kitchen, ‘is this conference. They feel inhibited about disgracing me while I’m supposed to be representing the cream of my profession at an international conference. They feel bound to wait until I get back.’

‘You’re still going to Rome?’

‘Have to. I’m booked to fly out on Saturday. What day is it today? I’ve lost count.’

‘Thursday.’

‘That means it’s Good Friday tomorrow. Is that right?’

‘I suppose so,’ Kathy said. ‘I’d forgotten it was Easter. When will you get back?’

‘Well, it might be advisable for that date to become a little uncertain. The formal business of the conference finishes on Friday, but I suppose, if my paper was brilliant enough, my Italian colleagues might feel it necessary to ask me to extend my stay. I don’t actually use up all of my back leave until the middle of April.’

Kathy stared at the soapy water in the bowl, again wondering if he was telling her he was bowing out.

‘I don’t think,’ he said, wiping the last plate with the tea-towel, ‘that they’ll go for you until they’ve made up their mind what to do with me. I may be wrong, but that was the feeling I got. There were one or two interruptions, phone calls, in the course of their inquiries, concerning relations between forces. You are still formally on secondment from the Met, which makes it a little more awkward for them. And, of course, it now looks as if you were right about Petrou being murdered. Embarrassingly so. They won’t forgive you for that.’

Brock took the dishes over to the cupboard. ‘Let’s see, you’re “Eric”, aren’t you?’

‘How on earth did you know that?’ Kathy looked at him, astonished.

‘Jill told me. Nice girl. Patrick’s a pleasant fellow too. You’re lucky to have such good neighbours.’

‘And when did you meet them?’

‘About four in the morning. I woke up with a foul headache and went searching for an aspirin. Jill and Patrick were down here. They fixed me up.’

‘They were down here then?’

‘Mmm. Jill had just got in from some disco. She offered to take me next week, but I had to tell her I’d be in Rome. They did say they were a bit concerned about you.’

Kathy shook her head in disbelief. ‘You think … you think Division will just leave me in suspense for a while?’

‘Yes. They don’t need to rush. I think you should keep very quiet. Not do anything to attract anyone’s attention. Trust no one.’ It reminded her of Tanner’s earlier advice. ‘On the other hand, if you knew of ways to stay in touch -indirect, inconspicuous ways - it would be very useful to know what was going on.’

‘You haven’t told me what happened to Rose,’ she said.

Brock frowned and lowered his head. ‘I feel like some fresh air. Is there anywhere around here we can walk?’

They put on their coats, crossed the main road at the front of the house and followed a lane opposite that led down to the banks of the stream which flowed through the centre of Crowbridge. There was a path along the bank, wide enough for them to walk side by side, and they followed it slowly, watching the heavy current swirl past between clumps of willow and hawthorn.

‘Poor Rose,’ Brock said at last.

‘Tanner said we shared the responsibility for her death.’

‘Perhaps he’s right. It makes it worse that I was there and couldn’t prevent it. Hell, I don’t even know what happened! One moment I was feeling the first needle going in, and the next thing I remember was trying to get my legs out from underneath her body - twenty minutes later. I can’t blame them for being sceptical. I wouldn’t have believed it myself if a witness had told me that.’