The Promised Land Read online

  PRAISE FOR BARRY MAITLAND’S BROCK AND KOLLA SERIES

  ‘Riveting, intelligent crime writing from one of Australia’s best.’—Weekend West

  ‘No one drops so many wonderful threads to a story or ties them so satisfyingly together at the end.’—The Australian

  ‘Maitland crafts a suspenseful whodunit with enough twists and turns to keep even the sharpest readers on their toes.’ —Publishers Weekly, USA

  ‘This Australian crime writer’s popular Brock and Kolla series continues to do what it does best—intrigue and entertain. Verdict: tight suspense.’ —Herald Sun

  ‘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.’—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 is right up there with Ruth Rendell in my book.’—Australian Book Review

  ‘Forget the stamps, start collecting Maitlands now.’—Morning Star

  ‘Maitland gets better and better, and Brock and Kolla are an impressive team who deserve to become household names.’—Publishing News

  ‘Maitland stacks his characters in interesting piles, and lets his mystery burn busily and bright.’—Courier-Mail

  BARRY MAITLAND is the author of the acclaimed Brock and Kolla series of crime mystery novels set in London, where Barry grew up after his family moved there from Paisley in Scotland, where he was born. He studied architecture at Cambridge University and worked as an architect in the UK before taking a PhD in urban design at the University of Sheffield, where he also taught and wrote a number of books on architecture and urban design. In 1984 he moved to Australia to head the architecture school at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, and he held that position until 2000.

  The first Brock and Kolla novel, The Marx Sisters, was published in 1994, and was shortlisted for the UK Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Award for best new fiction. It featured the central two characters of the series, Detective Chief Inspector David Brock, and his younger colleague, Detective Sergeant Kathy Kolla. The sequel, The Malcontenta, was first published in 1995 and was joint winner of the inaugural Ned Kelly Award for best crime fiction by an Australian author. The books have been described as whydunnits as much as whodunnits, concerned with the devious histories and motivations of their characters. Barry’s background in architecture drew him to the structured character of the mystery novel, and his books are notable for their ingenious plots as well as for their atmospheric settings, each in a different intriguing corner of London. In 2008 he published Bright Air, his first novel set in Australia, and later his Belltree Trilogy—Crucifixion Creek, Ash Island and Slaughter Park.

  Barry Maitland now writes fiction full-time, and lives in the Hunter Valley. The full list of his Brock and Kolla novels follows: The Marx Sisters, The Malcontenta, All My Enemies, The Chalon Heads, Silvermeadow, Babel, The Verge Practice, No Trace, Spider Trap, Bright Air, Dark Mirror, Chelsea Mansions and The Raven’s Eye.

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

  First published in 2019

  Copyright © Barry Maitland 2019

  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 the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76063 267 0

  eISBN 978 1 76087 033 1

  Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Cover design: Nada Backovic

  Cover photo: Karina Vegas / Arcangel

  To Margaret

  With grateful thanks to all those who have helped me in the writing of this novel, especially my wife, Margaret, Dr Tim Lyons, Lyn and Kirsten Tranter, Annette Barlow, Angela Handley, Christa Munns and Ali Lavau. Also to Mike and Sue Wright who showed me a thing or two about Hampstead, and Mike and Lily Cloughley who did the same for Godalming.

  ‘… the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it you want to read about?

  ‘Naturally, about a murder.’

  George Orwell, ‘Decline of the English Murder’, 1946

  CONTENTS

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  1

  Charles Pettigrew shut down the computer on his desk and went out into the main office. It was deserted, both the women having left for the weekend. Angela, his senior (and only) editor, had taken the uncorrected Burdekin proofs home with her. He switched off the lights, locked the office and made his way down to the street door, where he glanced, as he always did, at the polished brass plate that declared Golden Press.

  Autumn had come in earnest this week; dead leaves slippery underfoot, plucked by the swirling wind from the trees in Golden Square. He passed by the statue of George II or Charles II—he was uncertain which—and made his way to Leicester Square, where he caught the tube out to Hampstead and followed the same walk he took most evenings, down the high street. He’d lived here almost all his life, loved Hampstead and hated it. It was full of ghosts, of his parents and of the authors whom they had venerated—Keats, Lawrence, Wells, Fowles, Huxley, Milne, Waugh—now commemorated on the blue plaques that peppered the streets.

  He walked on to Garden Gate, stopped for a whisky at the White Horse, bought a baguette at Le Pain Quotidien on the corner of South End Road, formerly a bookshop, Booklovers’ Corner, where George Orwell once worked. Ghosts everywhere.

  He reached home, 14 Parliament Hill Close, a late Victorian red-brick house his grandfather and father had both owned before him. A few letters waited in the wire basket behind the front door, and he carried them through to his study and poured himself a Scotch, sighed, loosened his tie, settled himself in the old leather armchair. In this room his grandfather and father had drunk whisky with the great authors of their day, many of whom they had published. Golden Press was truly golden then,
a byword for contemporary British fiction of the highest order. No longer.

  He flicked through the mail—bills, entreaties, flyers, and a large buff envelope addressed to him in printed felt-pen letters. Inside were a single photocopied page and a short covering note, handwritten:

  Dear Mr Pettigrew, I believe this may be of interest to you. If so, you may contact me. Shari Mitra.

  There was a mobile phone number.

  He frowned, turning to what appeared to be a photocopy of the first page of a manuscript written on an old mechanical typewriter with a threadbare ribbon, a handwritten message scrawled across the top.

  The manuscript read as follows:

  THE PROMISED LAND

  A novel by Eric Blair

  The Strand Hotel, Rangoon, six in the evening. I was staying there for a few days in the course of business from the Viceroy’s Office in Delhi. That evening I was sitting in the bar before going through to the restaurant. It was busy with traders, talking about their dealings in Burma and the latest news from home, and every table was taken. I noticed a tall, fair-haired man enter and look around in vain for a seat. He was different from the others, bearded, clothes rumpled, his skin weathered and discoloured by the sun, and on impulse I indicated the free seat at my table. He joined me and introduced himself as Ralph Halliday, an agent for one of the big timber exporters. He explained that he had just returned from an extended trip in eastern Burma, looking for new teak stands in the high country along the frontier with China. We went on to spend the evening together, during which he told me a remarkable story about a man he had encountered in the remote jungle, who had founded a unique community based upon radical utopian principles.

  Pettigrew looked back to the note at the top of the page. The handwriting was shaky, and it took him a moment to decipher the words:

  I hereby give this manuscript and all rights to its publication to my dear friend Amar Dasgupta. The novel ‘The Promised Land’ is not to form part of the GOP portfolio.

  E. Blair, Cranham, 12 August 1949

  Charles Pettigrew sat motionless, pondering, his forehead creased in a frown. It was a scam, of course. It had to be. And yet … In 1935 Eric Blair was living in a flat in Parliament Hill, not a hundred yards away. In June of that year he published a novel, Burmese Days, under the pseudonym George Orwell, and one warm evening in July, according to Pettigrew family legend, Charles’s grandfather Mortimer had drunk whisky with the thirty-two-year-old budding author in this very room, quizzing him about his future plans, before they sat down to dinner.

  Orwell sat in this chair that I’m sitting in now, Charles thought. It’s like a message from the past, a lifeline from old Grandpa Mortimer. For, God knows, Golden Press needed a lifeline now. ‘In business’, Grandpa Mortimer had told him, ‘you must be ruthless, boy. I let young Orwell slip through my fingers. He went with Victor Gollancz. Don’t make that mistake. In business, you must go for the jugular.’

  The more Pettigrew thought about it, the more he felt a strange and unfamiliar elation growing inside him. For so many years he had resigned himself to impotence and frustration as Golden Press slid downhill towards oblivion. Perhaps this, at last, was the coup that had always eluded him. You must be ruthless, he told himself. Go for the jugular.

  2

  A wedding. Detective Chief Inspector Kathy Kolla feeling uncomfortable—too much make-up, heels too high, music too loud, room too hot, too much else on her mind.

  Her friend Nicole appeared at her elbow. ‘She looks so happy, doesn’t she?’ Nicole took a big gulp from her champagne glass. ‘Radiant. This is the only time we ever use that word, isn’t it? “The bride looked radiant.” Like plutonium or something. That’s what liposuction does for you.’

  She was fairly pissed, Kathy saw, and was envious. Things being as they were, she was staying off the booze.

  ‘Still,’ Nicole went on, ‘goes to show.’ Another slurp.

  Kathy, who wished she was somewhere else, said, ‘What does it show, Nic?’

  ‘That there’s hope for us yet. She’s our age, Kath! And this is her first marriage.’

  ‘What’s her secret?’

  ‘She got him on the web of course. Partners Perfect. We should try it. We should.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘I will if you will. We could work as a team.’

  Kathy’s phone vibrated against her hip. ‘Peter?’

  ‘Guv. The Heath. We got another one.’

  Kathy became very still. This was what she’d been fearing. The roar in the room died away. ‘The same?’

  ‘Exactly the same.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Highgate side this time, Number One Pond.’

  ‘See if you can get Tony Fenwick.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’m on my way.’

  ‘I’ll have someone waiting for you on Millfield Lane.’

  She rang off, told Nicole to apologise to the bride and groom for her, and hurried as fast as her heels would let her to the car.

  When she reached the place, lights flashing, she found emergency vehicles cramming Millfield Lane to left and right along the wooded boundary of Hampstead Heath. No media yet. She changed her shoes for boots, pulled on a raincoat and ran to the police barrier, where a uniformed officer was waiting for her. She followed his flashlight into the dark shroud of the park around the glimmer of the large pond and stopped at the edge of a patch of thick shrubs where equipment was being prepared. Here she put on forensic overalls. As she was drawing on the gloves a man came stumbling towards her from the bushes and was sick. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Sorry.’

  She continued towards the circle of bright light where figures were clustered. They made room for her and she recognised Tony Fenwick, the pathologist who had attended the first case. She looked at the figure lying at his feet and saw that it was exactly like the other one. ‘The hammer,’ she said.

  ‘Just so.’ Fenwick nodded agreement. ‘The hammer.’

  Four days before, on the morning of Tuesday, 20 October, the body of Andrea Giannopoulos, twenty-eight-year-old wife of Valentin Giannopoulos, sixty-four, a Greek businessman, had been found by a dog-walker on the edge of Vale of Health Pond, a mile away across the Heath to the west and a few hundred yards from their home in Hampstead. She was fully dressed in her running gear, and her clothing and possessions had not been disturbed. Cause of death was multiple blows to the head by what was believed to be a heavy ballpein hammer, so severe that her face was obliterated.

  ‘How long ago?’

  DI Peter Sidonis, barely recognisable in his crime-scene overalls, spoke up. ‘Her husband found her around six thirty this evening. She’d gone for a walk on the Heath and he became alarmed when she didn’t come home by dusk. Came in with a torch, calling her mobile, and eventually heard it ringing over here.’

  Fenwick added, ‘Yes, I’d say she hasn’t been dead long. Rigor has hardly begun.’

  ‘So who is she?’

  Sidonis said, ‘Mrs Caroline Jarvis, guv. Home in Highgate. Husband Selwyn Jarvis.’

  ‘The judge?’

  ‘The judge.’

  Silence for a moment. Then Sidonis added, ‘And her brother-in-law is Oliver Gowe, the Defence Secretary.’

  Kathy drew a breath. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Over here, boss.’ Sidonis led Kathy to a patch of grass on which lay a woman’s shoulder bag, its contents spread out around it. ‘Looks like he may have had a look this time.’

  This was encouraging, Kathy thought, since he must surely have left traces. The lack of prints or DNA at Vale of Health Pond had been particularly frustrating, not helped by heavy rain that had fallen between the time of the murder and the discovery of the body. ‘What’s the weather forecast?’ she asked.

  ‘Periodic showers. They’re working as fast as they can to process and protect this scene.’

  ‘And no CCTV, I suppose?’

  ‘Right.’

  That was another thing that had hampered the
Giannopoulos investigation—within the whole eight hundred acres of Hampstead Heath there were only three CCTV cameras, clearly marked. It was like investigating a murder from fifty years ago, with no technology. Kathy had almost been tempted to call Brock to see if they were doing it right.

  Sidonis’s phone rang. He listened. ‘The dog’s found something.’

  The handler and her black labrador were waiting further along the main path, the dog almost invisible in the dark. The woman pointed her torch beam at stains in the dirt. ‘Blood, we think.’

  ‘Yes.’ Kathy looked around her. ‘He was probably waiting in those bushes for the right victim to come along, incapacitated her with a blow, then dragged or carried her to the pond.’

  ‘That’s what we reckon.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Bonnie and me.’ The handler nodded at the dog. ‘She followed the trail back out here from the body.’

  ‘Didn’t find the weapon, did she?’

  ‘No, but she was working the woman’s scent, not the man’s.’

  Standing well back, Kathy peered at the trampled ground, several broken branches. ‘Looks like there was a struggle.’

  A police helicopter passed overhead, followed shortly by another chopper that slowed and hovered directly above them, searchlight beaming down.

  ‘TV,’ Sidonis muttered. His phone rang again. He turned to Kathy. ‘They’re outside on Highgate Road too, boss. Big media contingent just arrived.’

  ‘Where’s the husband now?’

  ‘Ambulance took him home. Very shaken up. An officer’s with him.’ He gave Kathy the address in Highgate village.

  She said, ‘I’ll go and talk to him. You know what to do here, Peter. Call me if you need anything.’

  ‘Right, guv. This is going to be big, isn’t it?’

  When she reached the entrance to the Heath, she found the area solid with vehicles and media. She slipped through the clamouring reporters, hurried to her car and waited inside for uniforms to clear a way through for her. While she waited she made a couple of calls, then sat, tapping the steering wheel, thinking how right Peter was. This was her first big case as a chief inspector, the first as head of one of the Met’s twenty-four Murder Investigation Teams, and the pressure was going to be huge.