The Malcontenta

Part Three
19

It was strange how different the place was in daylight in the middle of a weekday afternoon. In theory it should have been the same as at the weekend, but somehow it wasn’t at all. The sounds were different: the cries of small children coming home from the primary school round the corner; heavy traffic on the main road at the front; complete silence indoors. The house seemed more squalid for being empty. She sat at the small table in the middle of the kitchen and saw all the things she’d never had time to notice before. She wondered whether she should try to do something about the deposits of black grease which had formed around the feet of the old gas cooker, but then saw the state of the lino, curling and cracking wherever furniture wasn’t pinning it to the floorboards. Without people rushing through it on their way to work or out for a date, the room was forlorn.

Especially forlorn was the cupboard on the opposite wall, with grubby stickers on all the doors identifying whose was which. Someone had done that several generations ago, someone with a tidy mind, or upset at having their stuff pinched. The names had remained the same, although the tenants had all changed. She was ‘Eric’, the girl on the ground floor who worked at the building society was ‘Monty’, and ‘Sylvester’ was a creepy little man in the attic. She didn’t know the other two tenants.

‘We never meet for the best part of a year, and suddenly we keep bumping into each other.’

Kathy jumped at the unexpected sound. ‘Oh yes. Hello again. So you’re “Mary”.’ She nodded at the name on the door he was reaching across to open. ‘Mary’ was a six-foot-two, fair-haired man with a boxer’s face whom she’d passed as he was talking on the pay-phone in the hall that morning.

‘My other name is Patrick. And you are “Eric”, I believe.’

‘Aka … Kathy.’

‘How do you do, Kathy,’ he shook hands formally. ‘You’re the detective, aren’t you? We never meet because we both work odd hours. I’m a rep with Whitbread’s.’

‘I was just realizing how little I know about this place, even though I’ve been living here all this time. I’m probably one of the longest-serving tenants by now.’

He smiled, a pleasant, battered, gentle smile, she thought, the asymmetry of the nose and the larger left ear potentially engaging, if that sort of thing appealed to you. ‘Not quite. You’re a figure of considerable mystery and speculation, though.’

‘Why’s that?’ Kathy asked.

‘Because of what you do, I suppose. And the fact that hardly anybody has spoken to you or seen you, except occasionally being picked up by bulky men in unmarked cars.’

‘I haven’t participated much in the community of number twenty-three, you mean? I honestly didn’t think there was one.’

‘Oh, you might be surprised. It’s helped me out from time to time.’

‘Well, maybe I’ll get the chance to find out. This place is pretty grimy. Maybe I should do something about it.’

‘That would be wonderful. None of us likes cleaning. Want some?’ He offered her some of the instant coffee he was making.

‘Thanks, I’m OK.’

‘Taking some time off?’

‘You could put it like that.’

‘You make it sound pretty bad.’

Kathy got to her feet. ‘Yes.’ She turned and made for the door. When she reached it she stopped to think. ‘Look. If you hear the phone any time over the next few days and it’s for me, would you make sure and bang on my door, no matter what time it is? It’s just that I don’t always hear it, being at the back of the house. My room is — ’

‘I know where it is.’ He smiled again. ‘Yes, I’ll do that, of course.’

‘Thanks.’ She strode off down the threadbare hall carpet, avoiding the pedal and oily chain of the padlocked bike parked at the foot of the stairs.

A couple of hours later Kathy was lying on her bed, hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling, when there was a soft tap at her door. She jumped to her feet and yanked it open.

‘Hi.’ Patrick grinned shyly at her in the gloom of the landing.

‘Is it the phone for me?’

‘No, no. I was just thinking, I have to go out to pay a call on someone. It’s a nice quiet place, not far away. I wondered if a drink might brighten your day.’

‘Thanks, it probably would. But I’d better stay here, just in case.’

‘Jill just got back from work. Her room’s right next to the phone, you know. She says she’s going to be here till her friend picks her up at eight, and she’ll ring the number I give her if any calls come in for you.’

Kathy hesitated. ‘I suppose it would look pretty bad if I refused, in view of my non-participation in the social life of the household so far.’

Patrick shrugged and nodded agreement. ‘Pretty bad.’

The ‘place’ was a drinking club called PDQ, for some reason that Kathy never learned. It was so dark that its actual extent was indeterminate. The darkness also had the welcome effect of suspending real time, so that it became difficult after a while to recall what hour of the day or night it was outside. They sat on stools at the bar and Patrick introduced her to Carl, the blond Swede who owned the place, whose forearms were as massive as the joint of cold beef he proceeded to carve for them for sandwiches with their drinks. After an initial altercation when Kathy tried to order mineral water, they both settled on lager. While Patrick took Carl’s order for the brewery and tried to interest him in a new strong beer, Kathy sipped her lager, munched on her sandwich and stared at the tiny silver stars glued to the midnight-blue ceiling. She thought of Brock, now more than twenty-four hours in Tanner’s hands. She thought of his grey face and the stoop of his shoulders. And she rehearsed once more the responses she would give to their questions, although the longer they took to call her in, the more difficult it was becoming to believe in her replies.

‘Looks to me like a case for a rusty nail, Carl,’ she heard Patrick say.

‘What?’ she said, bringing her attention back to the two of them. Patrick was looking at her with concern. ‘What’s a rusty nail?’

‘A liqueur folded into the spirit that forms its base. I suggest Lochan Ora and Scotch.’

‘Nah.’ Carl was shaking his head. ‘She needs a walkie-talkie, that’s what she needs.’

‘And what’s a walkie-talkie?’

‘You don’t need to know, but after I give you two of them, you can’t walkie and you can’t talkie.’ He roared with laughter.

‘Yes,’ Kathy said, imagining herself attending her interrogation in a state of alcoholic paralysis, ‘that’s all I need.’

The call came the following morning just after eleven. A secretary from administration told her to report to Interview Room 247 immediately. In the taxi, Kathy recalled Tanner’s earlier instructions to Dowling and herself. You will do what you’re told; you will go to counselling; you will keep very, very low; you will be very, very quiet and humble. Because if I see or hear one cheep from either of you again, I am personally going to insert all the paperwork from this case into your private orifices and set fire to it.

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.’