The Chalon Heads Read online

  Praise for Barry Maitland’s Brock and Kolla series

  ‘There is no doubt about it, if you are a serious lover of crime fiction, ensure Maitland’s Brock and Kolla series takes pride of place in your collection.’

  —Weekend Australian

  ‘Barry Maitland is one of Australia’s finest crime writers.’

  —The Sunday Tasmanian

  ‘Comparable to the psychological crime novelists, such as Ruth Rendell . . . tight plots, great dialogue, very atmospheric.’ —Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Maitland is a consummate plotter, steadily complicating an already complex narrative while artfully managing the relationships of his characters.’ —The Age

  ‘Perfect for a night at home severing red herrings from clues, sorting outright lies from half-truths and separating suspicious felons from felonious suspects.’ —Herald Sun

  ‘A leading practitioner of the detective writers’ craft.’

  —Canberra Times

  ‘Maitland does a masterly job keeping so many balls in the air while sustaining an atmosphere of genuine intrigue, suspense and, ultimately, dread. He is right up there with Ruth Rendell.’ —Australian Book Review

  ‘Forget the stamps, start collecting Maitlands now.’

  —Morning Star

  Also by Barry Maitland

  The Marx Sisters

  The Malcontenta

  All My Enemies

  Silvermeadow

  Babel

  The Verge Practice

  No Trace

  Spider Trap

  BARRY

  MAITLAND

  the chalon heads

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  This edition published in 2007

  First published in Australia in 1999

  Copyright © Barry Maitland 1999

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Maitland, Barry.

  The Chalon Heads.

  ISBN 9781741751765.

  1. Brock, David (Fictitious character) – Fiction. 2. Kolla, Kathy (Fictitious character) – Fiction. 3. Police corruption – Fiction. 4. Police – England – Fiction. 5. Stamp collectors – Fiction. 6. Missing persons – Fiction. 7. Policewomen – Fiction. I. Title.

  823.914

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Prologue: Raphael and The Beast

  1 Cabot’s

  2 Queen Anne’s Gate

  3 A Life of Starling

  4 The Canada Cover

  5 An Auction

  6 A Feminist Theory of Stamp Collecting

  7 A Female Head of the Greatest Beauty

  8 Severed Heads and Penny Reds

  9 Approaching Thunder

  10 Sew Sally

  11 A Parting of Ways

  12 Cobalt Square

  13 The Yellow Bikini

  14 Acting Badly

  15 An Orphan on Our Doorstep

  16 The Moving Finger Writes

  17 Raphael

  18 The Source

  19 A Chalon Head

  Acknowledgements

  I’m grateful to many people for inspiration and help in writing this book, including Detective Chief Superintendent Brian Ridley, Fred Broughton, Tony Judge, Scott and Anna Farrow, Mike and Lily Cloughley, Mic Cheetham, Neil Rees, John Boersig and, above all, Margaret Maitland.

  Philately

  The term was coined in 1864 by a Frenchman, Georges Herpin, who invented it from the Greek philos, ‘love’, and ateleia, ‘that which is tax-free’.

  Britannica Online, 1997

  Prologue

  Raphael and The Beast

  DC Martin was released from her prison on the dawn of the fifth day. She stepped through the wicket gate in the steel roller door, emptied her lungs of the stale, dead reek of the desolate building, and filled them again with crisp morning air laced with the tang of diesel fumes. Freedom. She stretched her legs, rolled her shoulders and took in the inconsequential sounds of the city stirring all around her. It had been her first real experience of solitary confinement, and she didn’t ever want to try it again. Her ears were ringing, her eyes bleary with sleeplessness, her limbs aching. She felt exhausted, grimy and disoriented.

  And pissed off. For four days and nights she had squatted in a cupboard in the dark, alone, waiting for a rendezvous that had never happened. It had been a salutary lesson in the effects of sensory deprivation. Her only conversation had been infrequent whispered monosyllabic reports into a radio, her view a dim panorama of cardboard boxes seen through a spyhole. The Hitachi crate had sat prominently in the middle of them, untouched, unapproached. Towards the end, unable to sleep or stay truly awake, she had begun to fixate on that Hitachi sign as an old lag might fixate on a blade of grass or a crack in the wall.

  There had been another detective with her inside the building, but they had never met once their positions had been allocated. She knew of his presence only from the toilet, for which from time to time she was grudgingly allowed to leave her hiding place. They had been forbidden to flush that toilet for fear of alerting an intruder, an absurd directive since the evidence of her colleague’s presence had become more and more palpable as the days had passed. By the third day the extent of his intestinal problem was becoming overpowering.

  The thing had been prolonged far beyond any reasonable use of resources or expectation of a result, becoming in the end simply a monument to McLarren’s stubbornness. Mary Martin looked up and down the service lane to see if he might still be lingering, unable to accept defeat, but there was no one, the outside teams called off an hour before. Now that she was in the open air, in the daylight, she could feel ashamed of the resentment she had developed for the outside teams, able to talk freely to each other in their unmarked cars, rotating home to a warm bed and a hot meal. And a bath, and a clean toilet. She had been placed inside because McLarren had developed a particular attachment to the idea that Raphael might be a woman. Mary had had plenty of time to mull over McLarren’s attachment to bizarre ideas.

  She looked back up at the windows of the second floor, where she had been incarcerated. The dawn sunlight, which was now raking across the rooftops, catching the chimneys and gables in a golden blaze, was visible through the third window from the end, glittering on the interior of the warehouse. Except that the sun was on the other side of the building, and there was no way it could penetrate through the interior to this side.

  DC Martin frowned. Perhaps her unseen companion of the toilet had switched on a light on his way out. A buzz of anger went through her. Unreasonably, she told herself. The poor bloke must have been suffering for days, p
raying for release. And because the thought made her penitent she didn’t walk away, as she might have done, but braced herself and turned back towards the wicket gate. Soon she was inside the stairwell, and didn’t see the glow in the upper-floor window go off.

  At the top of the dark stairs she eased open the door to the second floor and, in the grey light that was filtering through the warehouse, she was astonished to see that the Hitachi box had moved half a dozen yards to the left. The other boxes around it had been disturbed too. She froze, listening for any sound from the cavernous space. But when she finally picked it up it came not from in front of her but from behind, a soft scuffling. She wheeled round and saw a huge dim form bearing down on her across the dark landing. She backed rapidly into the warehouse and it followed her through the doors, materialising into a giant of a man.

  They both stopped, examining each other. He was breathing heavily, long black hair tied behind in a pigtail, a thick black beard, tattoos on his bare forearms, a ferocious-looking crowbar dangling from one enormous fist. Behind him was a second man, pale and scrawny, peering round the giant’s bulging biceps, eyes widening at the sight of a woman wearing body armour and a police cap.

  After a moment’s silence, Mary said calmly, ‘Police. Don’t move. You’re under arrest.’

  The giant regarded her thoughtfully. The crowbar twitched in his mitt. ‘How much you weigh?’ he asked ponderously.

  ‘120 pounds,’ Mary replied, amazed at her own composure.

  ‘Well, I’m 290. What do they tell you to do, then, in your training, like, when a 120-pound plonk faces up to a 290-pound villain?’

  ‘Get help,’ Mary replied.

  ‘That makes sense.’

  DC Martin reached a hand to her hip and brought up the Glock, pointing it at the centre of his huge chest. ‘Armed police,’ she said. ‘Did I say that before?’

  ‘No,’ he said sadly. ‘I don’t fink you mentioned that.’

  She fumbled with her other hand for the radio, keeping the gun trained on the big man. The other seemed like his frail shadow, moving only when he moved.

  ‘Let me guess,’ she said, pointing the muzzle at the skinny anaemic one for a moment. ‘You’re Raphael, right? The artist?’ She returned her aim to the giant. ‘And you’re The Beast . . . Or is that too obvious? Could it be the other way around?’

  The big man shook his head. ‘I’m Titch. And this is Marlon.’

  ‘Well,’ Mary said. ‘And I’ll bet you’ve got the loveliest birth certificates to prove it.’

  She had the radio to her mouth when the first blow sent it flying from her hand. Before she could turn, the second hit her, and she crumpled to the floor, all lights extinguished now.

  1

  Cabot’s

  It began innocently enough, in the days before Kathy knew a cottonreel from a woodblock.

  The long corridor of the Strand was booming with traffic, dust and petrol fumes hanging in the hot July afternoon air. Halfway along on the shady south side, not far from the setback entrance of the Savoy Hotel, Brock and Kathy found the shop-front surmounted by the name Cabot’s, in ornate raised gold letters on a black background. Beneath, two small boys had their noses pressed to the glass, mesmerised by a display of old postage stamps.

  Inside, in air-conditioned calm, they were confronted by a pyramid of devices, which looked to Kathy as if they belonged in the forensic lab—magnifying glasses both simple and illuminated, watermark detectors, colour indicators, packets of mounts, tweezers, tiny guillotines, short and long wave and ultraviolet lamps for identifying phosphor inks and coatings.

  ‘Nothing stays simple, does it?’ Brock said, pointing at the shelves of reference books and albums filling one wall. ‘When I was a boy, the complete listing of all the stamps in the world was contained in one small fat volume. Now you need a library.’

  He took a pair of half-lens glasses from his jacket pocket and leaned forward to examine a pocket microscope in the display, unconsciously imitating the posture of the small boys at the front window. He might have been their uncle, Kathy thought, or their schoolmaster, a big benign bear of a man in a slightly rumpled suit, grey beard and hair in need of a trim, as unlike the hard young men of Serious Crime as he could be, and therefore dangerous in a different way.

  Kathy looked around at the other people in the room. A glass counter circled the space, stools in front, glass shelves and cabinets behind with concealed lighting. A number of customers, office workers in shirt-sleeves by the look of them, were browsing or crouching over the counter, some deep in conversation with studious looking sales assistants. They were all male, Kathy noticed, and indeed, despite the array of technology at the door, the place had something about it that made her think of an old-fashioned gentlemen’s club—an air of ordered calm, of discreetly murmured conversations, of clocks ticking but time standing still.

  ‘Is all this just about postage stamps?’ she whispered.

  ‘Mmm . . .’ Brock’s attention had shifted now to a cabinet of tiny paper fragments. ‘Fascinating, isn’t it? Another world. Did you ever collect stamps, Kathy?’

  ‘No. I seem to remember collecting things from cornflakes packets, but I can’t remember what they were.’

  Brock’s raised eyebrow told her that that was entirely different, but for the life of her she couldn’t see why.

  Brock tore himself away from the cabinet and they made their way through a pair of glass doors into a lobby in which another kind of display was mounted, advertising a forthcoming auction. Expensive-looking catalogues were on sale, and posters featured some of the more important sale items. Again Brock delayed, studying a couple of the layouts. ‘There’s money in it,’ he murmured.

  Kathy wondered, looking at an old envelope in a glass case. The stamp was crude and scruffy, almost obliterated by a heavy postmark. How much would people pay for such things? Ten pounds? Fifty? A hundred? Surely not the price of a decent camera, or a washing-machine.

  They went on past the display to a reception desk standing in front of lift doors.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Brock and Detective Sergeant Kolla to see Mr James Melville,’ Brock said. The receptionist considered his identification with interest and made a phone call, then indicated the lift.

  A big cheerful man was waiting for them when the doors opened on the second floor, dressed like a banker but with an unruly mop of hair that refused to lie down. He introduced himself, shook their hands warmly and led them into his cramped office, offering them seats. His desk overflowed with papers, a tray of incoming mail threatening a pile of magazines and catalogues, a computer terminal jostling for space in the corner.

  ‘Thank you so much for coming here, Chief Inspector. I do appreciate it. Can I offer you anything? Tea? Coffee?’

  They declined. Brock said, ‘I was glad to get the opportunity to visit, Mr Melville. I used to be an enthusiast, many years ago, but I never knew where you were.’

  ‘Ah, yes. We and our rivals just along the street.’ He indicated the name on the Stanley Gibbons catalogue lying on the desk. Kathy picked it up and began thumbing through it.

  ‘What was your area, Chief Inspector?’

  Brock smiled, remembering. ‘I had an aunt in Canada so I had plenty of Canadian stamps, as I recall. She used to make a point of sending me first-day covers.’

  ‘Ah, well, they may be worth something now, you never know. We have a particularly outstanding Canadian cover in our coming auction that you’d be interested in. Let me give you both a catalogue . . .’ He stooped into the narrow space behind his desk with some difficulty and emerged with copies, which he handed across to them. As he did this he took the opportunity to examine Kathy’s hands. No rings, no nail polish, and traces of something—photocopy toner? He nodded approvingly.

  ‘What about you, Sergeant?’ Melville asked. ‘Were you ever a collector?’ He didn’t imagine for one moment that she had been, but he wanted to hear her voice. He approved of young women like this, c
ompetent and unpretentious, with low heels and little makeup.

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir. I know absolutely nothing about it.’

  An intelligent voice, class-neutral, and cautious, like her eyes. He did like her eyes, and the way her fair hair, cut short, was tucked behind her ears.

  ‘Well, perhaps we’ll have the opportunity to show you something of it . . . if you have time.’

  What it was that resonated with him about young women like this, James Melville couldn’t precisely say, except perhaps that they didn’t frighten him the way the others, all legs and lipstick, did. On the other hand, his last attempt to help just such a sensible young woman advance her career in Cabot’s had ended in near disaster. He took a deep breath to calm himself and turned to Brock. ‘I do hope you won’t feel I’ve wasted your time, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Brock replied. ‘You knew my name, Mr Melville. Have we met?’

  ‘No, I don’t believe so, but I know you by reputation from the newspapers.’

  ‘You said you had a problem. Is it to do with the auction? We saw the display downstairs. Looks fascinating.’

  ‘Ah, yes, a major event. But no, that wasn’t the reason for my call, Chief Inspector. Rather, it was to do with one of our clients, someone we’ve known for a number of years, who appears to be in some dreadful trouble. He told me about it only this morning, and I suggested—no, I insisted—that he contact the police.’

  ‘I see,’ said Brock slowly. ‘But how did you get my name, Mr Melville?’

  ‘It was our client who suggested that if I was to call anyone it should be you. He holds you in very high regard, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Look,’ Melville said hurriedly, ‘why don’t I get him in here and have him explain it all to you himself? He’s in the other office at the moment.’

  ‘Sounds like a good idea.’

  Kathy watched Melville’s departure with interest. He seemed quite anxious, and she wondered who would have chosen to approach Brock in such an indirect way, and have him meet him on ground like this. Royalty, perhaps? The Queen collected stamps, didn’t she? Or someone in government, a pop star . . .