Barry Maitland - The Malcontenta

Kathy could feel the tension in Gordon Dowling at her side, and it irritated her unreasonably. They were only going to London, for God’s sake. He had developed this frown as the landscape had changed from the rolling countryside of the green belt into the constipated clutter of the outer suburbs, and the frown had deepened and his nose developed a nervous twitch as they had worked their way further into south London. ‘Do you get up to London much?’ she had asked at one point, and he had answered in a tight monosyllable, ‘Once.’ It was unbelievable. He had spent his whole life in the southern counties, and he had only been to London once.

What really irritated her was that she was getting edgy too. She had probably made a mistake picking the B road across country to Westerham. She had done so because of the gleeful warnings on Radio I of jams on the M20, A21 and M25. Snow had begun falling during the night, just when everyone was beginning to feel that spring couldn’t be that far away. At first it had seemed charming, turning the brown countryside pristine white and the villages into winter postcards. But then the fall had become heavier, the sky blacker. By the time they reached the outskirts of London a dark gloom had settled, and the Saturday morning traffic, headlights blazing, had become paralysed in a morass of slush and minor accidents. When they reached the south circular and found it locked solid, they had come less than forty miles in one and a half hours and felt as if they had entered an alien country.

In an attempt to get free of the jams, Kathy had then turned north off the main road in what had seemed to be the right general direction. It had been a terrible mistake. They had quickly become entangled in a confusing system of residential culs-de-sac and streets cut in two by arrangements of tree-planting and bollards designed to block through-traffic, in what the planners like to call ‘traffic-calming’. Brought to a stop for the fifth time, Kathy thumped the wheel in exasperation and admitted defeat.

‘We’d better check the A-Z,’ she sighed, then noticed that Dowling was staring over her shoulder towards the rear of the car. Half a dozen figures, the hoods of their parkas zipped against the snow, were closing in on them. Kathy heard the tightness in the young man’s voice as he muttered, ‘Do we look like coppers?’

She lowered the window and called to them. ‘Any idea how we can get to Herne Hill station? Or North Dulwich?’

One of the figures approached and tugged open the fur around the opening of the hood to expose a few inches of black face. ‘Yeah, you passed the turning into Croxted Road back there, didn’t yer.’ He pointed back the way they had come.

‘Thanks.’ She pushed the gear-stick into reverse and carefully did a three-point turn through the group, which parted and moved on.

Somewhere north of Dulwich they stopped by a small park. They had described a large circle and were lost again. Although it was now mid-morning, the pale-grey light penetrating the dark clouds above was no brighter than at dawn, and the snow had settled into a steady fall which was building up on the deserted footpaths and gradually overwhelming the slush on the roads. A sign was visible in the gloom saying ‘Wildwood Common’, but no such place existed in the A-Z. Kathy was thoroughly regretting the whole thing. What had seemed the previous week to be a brainwave now appeared pointless. Worse, it seemed dangerous. Their isolation suddenly brought home to her what she was risking, for both of them, if their superiors came to hear of it. The Deputy Chief Constable would go spare. And Tanner would love it, of course. Her stomach turned at the thought.

‘That says Matcham High Street over there,’ Dowling said suddenly, his nose still twitching fretfully. Kathy peered through the misted windscreen and finally spotted the sign pointing towards a gap in a row of terraces.

She nodded. ‘One last try, then. At least we might find a coffee shop before we give up.’

After the stillness of the deserted common, the high street was chaotic with traffic and pedestrians fighting through the snow. They missed the turning into Warren Lane the first time and had to turn on the far side of the railway bridge and crawl slowly back. They saw why they had missed it when they almost did the same thing again, for the entrance to the lane was no more than an archway in a block of shops, and when they turned into it they found themselves in an empty yard dominated by a large and gloomy brick warehouse.

Kathy stopped the car in the middle of the space and stepped out, shivering suddenly as the cold hit her. The noise of the high street was muffled by the snow and by the wall of old brick buildings around her, all of which seemed to be deserted. A faded sign above the door to the tall warehouse baldly gave the information ‘SMITH’S’. Nearby, the skeleton of a large horse-chestnut tree in the far corner of the courtyard showed black through the snow.

‘This can’t be right,’ she sighed. ‘Trust Brock to be difficult.’

She took a deep breath and walked towards the chestnut tree, feeling the irregular surface of cobble-stones under the snow beneath her feet. Beyond the tree she made out a narrow lane running out of the far corner of the courtyard. One side of it was lined by a hedge, and the other by an irregular terrace of brick cottages, two and three storeys in height. She walked to the first house, her feet crunching through the undisturbed snow which had drifted into mounds around the base of the buildings. Searching for a number, she cursed silently as her foot struck some obstruction under the snow, and when she kicked it away she saw an old iron boot-scraper set into the cobbles. She lifted her head and saw directly in front of her on the wall a brass plate, filmed with snow dust, upon which was inscribed the single word ‘Brock’.

Dowling was glumly listening to a medley of Italian pop tunes which a sadistic Capital Radio disc jockey had put on to remind drivers stuck on the motorways of the hot Mediterranean summers they were not currently enjoying. He jumped as the car door was yanked open and Kathy put her head in. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ve found him.’

Brock’s large frame filled the small front door when he opened it, making him look even bigger than he was. He beamed as he ushered them in, and Kathy was immediately reassured, recognizing that his pleasure at seeing them was genuine.

They squeezed into the small hallway while Brock hung their coats on pegs on the wall, then followed him up the stairs, which rose steeply ahead. At the top they came to a landing, the walls of which were lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, so that the doors leading off appeared to be cut into the packed books. A short corridor, also book-lined, twisted away to the left, and by the time they reached another small hallway with the foot of another staircase visible ahead, Kathy and Dowling were becoming disoriented. Brock opened a panelled door and led them into a bright room, warm, with some music playing quietly as a background to whatever they had interrupted. Kathy was surprised to hear the voice of kd lang. She glanced quickly at a long bench down one wall, cluttered with papers, books and two PCs, one with its screen alive with a rotating pattern as it waited for further instructions, the other a laptop.

‘Come in, come in,’ Brock growled, waving them in. ‘You’ll be freezing. A terrible day to be out and about. I heard the reports of the pile-ups on the motorway and thought you might not make it.’

‘We almost didn’t,’ she laughed, already feeling at home as he led them over towards the gas fire. ‘This is DC Gordon Dowling, Brock, who I mentioned on the phone, the one I’ve been working with. Gordon, this is Detective Chief Inspector Brock.’