The Malcontenta

27

‘It just feels like an anticlimax,’ Kathy said. ‘I would really have liked to march into the canteen and arrest the bastard there, eating his bacon and eggs in front of his mates.’

Brock smiled, manoeuvring the car along the winding road back towards London. ‘Better that McGregor should pick him up, Kathy. In the long run you’ll feel better about it all if you distance yourself and don’t make it personal.’

‘But it is personal.’ She could see the glow of the orange street-lights of the built-up area in the night sky ahead, although here in the country the darkness was impenetrable. Soon the dawn would come, people would rise, taking up where they had left off. And Tanner, wherever he was, would rise too, and discover that his whole world had come to pieces while he slept.

‘It was a beautiful example of what that American was talking about at the conference, come to think of it,’ Brock said. ‘Chaos theory. A malcontented butterfly flutters her wings somewhere in the north of Italy, and in the south of England all hell breaks loose.’

‘Yes,’ Kathy yawned. ‘Bit ironic that the killer was the one person who wasn’t personally threatened by Petrou.’

‘The worst part of the whole thing,’ Brock said, ‘is that I’ve put my shoulder out again, breaking into Long’s bathroom.’ He glanced at Kathy’s face, her eyelids beginning to droop. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I took you straight back to your flat?’

‘Oh …’ Kathy felt too tired to think. ‘No, I might as well pick up my car from your place and get it home. Once my head hits the pillow I’m going to crash.’

Brock turned on the radio and a voice cheerfully predicted rain. It was followed by an old recording of ‘Volare’.

A pale dawn was silhouetting the backs of the houses behind Warren Lane and picking out the young leaves on the horse-chestnut tree as Brock turned through the archway from Matcham High Street and swung to a stop in the courtyard behind Kathy’s Renault.

‘I’ll ring you when you’ve had some sleep,’ he said. ‘Drive carefully.’

She nodded and trudged over to her car, feeling for her keys in her shoulder bag. She pulled them out, dropped them, groped around in the half-light on the cobble-stones, picked them up, opened the door and threw herself in behind the wheel. Thankful that the engine turned over first time, she strapped herself in, giving a little smile of pleasure at being alone again on her own territory. She put the car into gear, glanced up at the back of Brock’s house as she rolled forward, and saw a light in his kitchen window snap off.

She pulled to a halt. There was no way that he could have got further than his front door in the time since he had left her. Whoever had turned off the kitchen light must have heard his key in the lock, the door pushed shut, his footsteps begin the weary climb up the stairs.

‘Oh no.’

She switched off the engine and thought fast. She had no phone in the car. The nearest public phone would be in the High Street, but that would mean driving away. Which was what she should do. Except she still had the front door key Brock had given her.

She snatched it from her bag and hurled herself across the courtyard and round the corner to his front door. She bent down and opened the letter flap. A light was on in the stairway. She was just about to call out and warn him, when she heard the crash of breaking glass and splintering timber. Then total silence.

She thought again about leaving and getting help, or at least finding something to use as a weapon. What? The tyre lever? She slid the key into the lock as quietly as she could and carefully eased the door open. Still no sound. She closed the door and began to climb the stairs, the way she had learned as a teenager coming home late and not wanting to wake her aunt and uncle, by clinging to the wall, where the timber treads were less likely to creak. Half-way up, the light went off.

She froze.

In the silence she put her hand into her coat pocket and took hold of her bunch of keys, gripping a key between each of her knuckles. Not a lot of use, but still … She carefully slipped the long coat off her shoulders, laid it on the stairs and started to move forward again.

The darkness inside the house was relieved only by the faint glimmer of dawn which spread from the study across the landing and drew her into the room. It was light enough to see that there was no one standing waiting for her. Light enough, too, to see the chaos in the centre of the room, where Brock’s body was a dark mound in the middle of a shattered coffee-table.

Kathy looked carefully around the room, then a second time, then over her shoulder at the landing. No sign of anyone else. Was there a back door the intruder could have left by? A window, perhaps?

She stepped forward cautiously and knelt beside Brock, reaching to feel the pulse in his throat, still making no sound, as if the slightest noise might start the furies. The smell of whisky was overpowering, and she guessed that the broken bottle that lay beside his head must have been close to full. There was a pulse, but no signs of consciousness. His laptop computer was lying beside him like a faithful dog, waiting for its master to wake up and give it instructions.

She picked it up and straightened, trying to remember where the phone was, turned round and nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw Tanner’s dark figure standing a few paces away in the doorway.

‘Hello, Kathy.’

His voice was low and hoarse and probably the most frightening thing she’d ever heard.

‘Hello, Rie,’ she heard herself say, calm as anything. ‘You didn’t need to do that to Brock. You’ve hurt him. I think we should get an ambulance.’

He looked her over slowly before replying. ‘Too late for that, Kathy. Thieves are getting more and more violent these days. I don’t think he’s going to make it, to be perfectly honest.’

‘No, Ric. No one will buy that.’

‘Oh, really? Why’s that, now?’

She hesitated. ‘Too much of a coincidence, don’t you think?’

He was looking keenly at her. ‘Come on, Kathy, what have you got up your sleeve?’

He took a step towards her.

‘They know, Ric. Long has told them everything.’

‘Ah.’ He halted, a little smile frozen on his lips while his mind worked. ‘Well, it was always on the cards. I’ve had time to make other arrangements. I do have some family business to attend to overseas, as it happens. It makes it easier to deal with you two, anyway. No need to pretend. In fact, I can positively show off. Enjoy myself. It would be poetic having you and Brock end up exactly the same way as the other two, wouldn’t you say? Brock on the end of a rope like Petrou, and you with your throat sliced open like Rose. Couldn’t have a plainer way of telling them all to get fucked than that, now, could you?’

He slipped his hand into his trouser pocket. When he withdrew it he was holding something, and Kathy watched as it clicked and sprung a long silver blade.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said, her voice sounding implausibly relaxed to her own ears, ‘why you killed Petrou at all. What did he say to you that made you so angry?’

Tanner stared at her balefully for a long, silent moment. ‘It wasn’t what he said, it’s what he wouldn’t say.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I wanted the stuff he had on Long, didn’t I. Photographs and a letter. Very indiscreet stuff. Stuff you’d spend a lifetime to keep hidden. Especially if you were Assistant Comissioner of the Metropolitan Police.’

Kathy was chilled by Tanner’s voice, so detached, so quiet and unemphatic, as if he had already set aside all the feelings that modulate the way we speak.

‘But eventually he told you where it was?’

‘Eventually. I persuaded him.’

‘How did you do that?’

‘I sat on his chest and stuck a needle in his eyeball.’ Tanner sniffed and rubbed the back of his hand across his nose, as if he was developing a cold. ‘Then he told me. He kept them in a plastic wallet taped under the seat of his motor bike, together with his passport and a stack of money. His insurance — always ready for a fast getaway. That’s probably the way you think if you’ve lived in Beirut. Well, then I had to kill him, didn’t I?’

‘What sort of needle was it?’

‘What does it matter? It was on a trolley I passed on my way in. I was looking for something else to use — a scalpel or something. There were lots of needles sticking in a sponge and I reckoned that might do. My first thought was to stick it in his balls, but the eye was better. I could watch his face while I did it.’

He began to move towards her again, the blade poised. Instead of backing away she came at him, swinging the laptop towards his head. But it was just a little too heavy, the case a little too smooth to hold properly, and he raised his left hand and stopped her in mid-flight without any apparent effort. Then he brought up the blade in a graceful arc and sliced her right arm.

She recoiled, stumbling backwards over Brock’s body, arterial blood spurting from her arm, and fell in a clatter against the gas fireplace, scattering the elements and almost knocking herself out with the impact of her head against the tiled surround. She could hear herself making some kind of noise, snuffling in panic, then her scalp was seized with pain. She opened her eyes and realized he was gripping her hair and forcing her head back She stared at his eyes, wide, excited, only inches away, studying her fear and then, as his head drew back, fixing on her throat.

‘Goodbye, Kathy,’ he whispered.

She had no way of calculating the blow, left-handed, as she tried to thrust the toasting fork up and into him somewhere, anywhere, before he could bring the knife down. Afterwards she would tell her friends — especially the men, who seemed very troubled by it — that she hadn’t aimed there particularly: it just happened to be the spot that the long steel prongs met as she stabbed upwards. And at first she didn’t think she’d done him any damage, for he just froze, kneeling over her, open-mouthed and wide-eyed. While he seemed to hesitate, she frantically pulled the fork away and tried to target his upper body in case he struck at her. And then his whole frame suddenly convulsed, and she thought in panic of that glittering razor-edged blade. She cried out and turned her head. She gripped the fork that Gordon Dowling had toasted crumpets with just a month before, and jammed it into his throat.

The ambulance men found her by the open front door, shaking like a motor on broken mountings, trying to control the bleeding in her arm with an improvised pressure pad.

‘There’s two upstairs,’ she said through clenched teeth. ‘Please be careful. There’s a lot of blood and broken glass.’

One went upstairs, then reappeared in a hurry, calling down for help.

‘One of them’s alive,’ he shouted. ‘Which one?’ Kathy called to him.

‘Well, it’s not the geezer with the fork in his bleedin’ throat! Get the coppers here quick, Jimmy.’

‘I’ve called them,’ Kathy said, ‘I can’t understand why they’re taking so long.’

Like her on that first visit, they had missed the archway into Warren Lane and had to circle the block before they spotted the blue ambulance lights in the courtyard. She didn’t recognize the two young men. One came running and spoke to the ambulance man binding her arm.

‘Domestic?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Kathy replied, ‘nothing like that. I’ve just killed someone.’

In the odd, jangled state of her mind, she thought it must sound as if she was boasting about it instead of asking for forgiveness, which in an absurd sort of way she was. He looked closely at her, then called his mate over. After a few words he went upstairs and returned a couple of minutes later, ashen-faced.

‘Can you identify the man you killed, madam?’

‘He’s a police officer,’ Kathy sighed. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Richard Tanner.’

‘I see …’ They were both staring at her as if she was a freak. ‘And you are …?’

‘Kolla, Kathy Kolla. And I think you should step aside.’

‘And why is that, madam?’

‘Because I’m going to throw up.’

They waited till she had finished communing with the bushes on the other side of Brock’s lane before they formally cautioned and arrested her for murder. She nodded, her eyelids heavy with fatigue and shock, and muttered. ‘This is my first time.’ It wasn’t until they were sitting in Casualty, the bright morning sun dazzling through the tall windows, that it occurred to her to tell them to ring Penny Elliot at Crowbridge.

Three weeks later, on the evening of 3 May, Jerry and Errol threw a party to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Organized by two women friends, one with pink, cropped hair and the other dressed entirely in black leather, it was held at the home of another friend outside Edenham, whose private lawn ran down to the river. Kathy and Patrick stood by the water’s edge drinking champagne, watching the current swirl around the roots of the willow trees. On the far bank, hidden under the overhanging grasses, they could make out the dark hole of a river creature.

‘Interesting friends you have,’ Patrick said, looking back with fascination at the crowd. They formed every possible combination, it seemed, of age, gender, smoking habit and personal adornment.

‘I think I’m only here as the token law-enforcement officer,’ she smiled. ‘But it was nice of them to ask me.’

‘Jill tells me you’re soon going to be doing your law-enforcing in the big smoke.’

‘Yes. I’m going to work with someone I know in the Met.’

‘Brock? Yes, I met him, remember? I thought you might have brought him here tonight.’

‘He’s in traction at the moment. Should be back on his feet in a week or two. But I wanted to ask you — you didn’t mind coming, did you?’

‘Of course not. I thought I got around a fair bit in this area, but I don’t recognize a single face here. Want another drink?’

Kathy nodded. Her right arm was still bandaged under the sleeve of her blouse, but by now she was used to drinking with her left.

As they strolled up the slope of the lawn, Kathy caught Patrick giving her an odd look. It was the second time she’d noticed it.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘Did I mess up my make-up?’

‘Sorry,’ he smiled, and shook his head, i just can’t really believe that you …’

She stopped walking. ‘That I what?’

‘Well, that you actually … killed someone. Do you mind me saying that?’ She shrugged.

‘It’s not the sort of thing that happens in the real world, is it? I mean, I’ve never actually seen a dead body, let alone…’

‘It seemed very real at the time, Patrick. Now … no, it isn’t real. At least, not in daylight. What is real, anyway?’

There was an explosion of whistling and cheering from the house, and they turned to see the tight black trousers, red silk shirt and carefully groomed head of Jerry emerge triumphant through the french windows on to the terrace. Behind him Errol followed, a pair of cowboy boots conspicuous from his second honeymoon in the States, complete with spurs. He raised a glass to acknowledge a further burst of applause from the group standing around the drinks table.

Later, when the party had splintered into small groups chattering and dancing, Kathy and Patrick got the chance to talk to their hosts.

‘Well,’ Errol looked approvingly at Patrick, ‘and how is your relationship working out?’

Patrick looked surprised, and Kathy replied, ‘Oh fine. He does the cooking and I do the washing-up.’

‘Lucky you!’ Jerry said, ‘I have to do both.’

‘Never mind.’ Errol put an arm around his shoulder and led him off towards a photographer, his cowboy boots jingling. ‘There are worse things in life.’