BARRY MAITLAND grew up in London and went on to work as an architect and urban designer in the UK. In 1984 he moved to Australia as Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle. The Marx Sisters, the first in his London-based Brock and Kolla crime novels, was published in 1994 and twelve more have followed. In addition he has published four crime novels set in Australia. Barry’s novels have been published throughout the English-speaking world and in translation in a number of other countries.

  PRAISE FOR BARRY MAITLAND’S BROCK AND KOLLA SERIES

  ‘Riveting, intelligent crime writing from one of Australia’s best.’ —The 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.’—The 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.’—The 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.’—The 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.’—The Courier-Mail

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First published in 2021

  Copyright © Barry Maitland 2021

  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:info@allenandunwin.com

  Web:www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76087 964 8

  eISBN 978 1 76106 343 5

  Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Cover design: Nada Backovic

  Cover photo: Elisabeth Ansley / Trevillion Images

  To Margaret

  With many thanks to all those who made this book possible, especially my wife and first reader, Margaret, my agent, Lyn Tranter, and the brilliant team at Allen & Unwin, in particular Annette Barlow, Angela Handley, Ali Lavau and Clara Finlay. Among the sources of inspiration I am particularly indebted to Gwendolen Webster of the Kurt Schwitters Society.

  Contents

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  1

  ‘It’s like finding yourself dropped on another planet.’

  Brock was out of sorts, uncharacteristically grumpy, Kathy thought. They were three old colleagues, all of them detective chief inspectors in the Met—David Brock, Bren Gurney and herself, Kathy Kolla—veterans of Brock’s former homicide squad. Though they now worked in different Scotland Yard departments, they tried to lunch together at least once a month, if their schedules allowed, which was why they were now sitting in the Two Chairmen pub in Westminster on a Monday in November eating pot pies.

  ‘They don’t interview suspects,’ Brock continued. ‘They never see them! They just sit at their screens all day, following money trails around the globe. I asked one of them, But where are they? Where are the crooks? And he just pointed out the window at the towers of the City and Canary Wharf, then turned back to his computer.’

  Bren laughed, but Kathy could see that Brock was genuinely disconcerted. His hair and beard, silvery white now and cropped short, looked a bit shaggy and neglected. A big steady figure in her life, it was unsettling to see him like this. After the debacle of his arrest during the Hampstead murders, the Met had reluctantly agreed to let him come back from retirement and take up his old rank, but not in Homicide. There were no vacancies in the twenty-four murder investigation teams, they told him, and posted him to Fraud, where he was clearly a fish out of water. It made Kathy feel sad, especially because the Hampstead murders had been the making of her in her new role as head of one of those teams. Since then she’d had a series of successes, all cleared up in rapid time. Her team was working well and she had been featured in an article in one of the Sunday supplements about the new breed of women detectives in the Metropolitan Police. Even her boss, Commander Torrens, head of Homicide and Serious Crime Command, had given her a rare pat on the back, expressing his satisfaction with her performance since she had ‘stepped out of the shadow of the old guard’. He’d meant Brock, of course, for whom she’d worked all those years, and her pleasure at the compliment was tinged with regret as she saw him struggling now.

  ‘What’s so embarrassing is that I’m about fifty years older and outrank them all,’ Brock was saying. ‘I’m sitting there like a useless appendage, a waste of space, with nothing to contribute.’

  Bren, trying to be supportive, said, ‘But they must be able to use your experience, Brock. Remember that bloke with the Ponzi scheme who started to murder his victims? What was his name? There must be villains like that in the City.’

  ‘No, Bren. Fraud is abstract, digital and bloodless. You’ve no idea. It’s another world.’ He sighed, then roused himself. ‘Anyway, enough of that. What about you, Kathy? What have you been up to?’

  ‘Well … I’ve got a locked-room mystery.’

  ‘Ah! That’s more like it. Go on.’

  So she told them the story of Ahmed Majeed.

  A month ago, Kathy had been called to a house in Titmus Street, Clapham. Her car pulled up outside a row of three identical brick houses, very plain and dull compared to the more elaborate Victorian terrace houses that made up the rest of the street. Maybe a bomb had dropped there during the war, Kathy thought, and these were a 1950s gap-filler. There were half-a-dozen emergency vehicles parked outside, and people were making their way between the plastic wheelie bins that cluttered the pavement. Kathy approached two men in white crime-scene overalls who were standing at the front door of number thirty-three, conferring over a clipboard. One of them was DI Peter Sidonis from her team, and he took her inside.

  ‘A bloody mess,’ he warned her, and when they reached the top of the narrow staircase she realised that he’d meant it literally. Looking through the open bathroom door to the scene inside she saw blood everywhere, sprayed over the walls and puddled and smeared across the tiled floor. Stretched out on the floor lay a naked male of around forty, jet-black hair, a gaping wound across his throat.

  ‘Ahmed Majeed,’ Sidonis said. ‘Resident here. He returned early this morning from his night shift at Clapham Junction and came upstairs to have a bath while his wife Haniya cooked him a meal in the kitchen below. She heard a shout and a crash and ran upstairs. She thought she heard someone moving about inside the bathroom, but her husband didn’t respond to her knocking on the locked door. She got it into her head that someone must have broken into the house through the bathroom window and attacked him, so she rang triple nine. A patrol car in the area responded. One officer went round to check the back garden while the other, PC Ashley Osborn, came in the front. She went up the stairs and broke open the bathroom door. As she burst in, she slipped on the blood and went down.’ Sidonis pointed to a smear on the tiles. ‘She’s in the dining room downstairs now, recovering. The ambos checked her out, say she’s twisted her ankle. She’s covered in blood and in a bit of a state. So’s the wife. She’s in the living room with another woman PC.

  ‘Ahmed’s throat was c
ut presumably with what looks like a kitchen knife lying on the floor beside the body. He’d have died very quickly. The bathroom window was locked from the inside and has no bloodstains or signs of tampering. The door was secured with a sliding bolt which couldn’t be opened from the outside. You can see the damage where Osborn forced her way in, ripping it out of the frame.’

  ‘Suicide,’ Bren said.

  ‘That’s what it looked like,’ Kathy agreed, ‘and that’s how it stands. But there were some strange anomalies. Ahmed gave no indication to anyone that he was depressed or contemplating suicide. In fact, he’d only just made arrangements to spend time with friends the following weekend. And he would have been dead seconds after he cut his throat and dropped the knife, so what were the sounds Haniya heard from inside the bathroom when she ran upstairs? Then the crime scene analyst insists that the blood spatter pattern is consistent with someone else being in the room. And, finally, the pathologist says the throat was cut from left to right, suggesting he held the knife in his right hand—but Ahmed was left-handed. Yet there’s no way anyone could have got out of that room without leaving either the window or the door unlocked.’

  ‘Good one, Kathy,’ Bren said. ‘Nothing like a good locked-room mystery. But it’s quite common for intending suicides to give no prior warning. Witnesses’ memories of the sequence of noises and events are often confused. Blood spatter is notoriously hard to interpret if the victim was moving at the time of injury. And a left-handed person can slit their own throat from left to right if they hold the knife like this …’ Bren demonstrated with his steak knife.

  ‘Very good, Bren. That’s what we reckon. How about you, Brock?’

  ‘PC Osborn did it,’ he growled, and Kathy and Bren’s laughter was interrupted by their phones ringing simultaneously, calling them back to duty. They went reluctantly, leaving Brock to poke forlornly at the remains of his pie.

  When he got back to his office, the senior DI, Matt Stone, was waiting for him.

  ‘Brock. Job for you.’

  ‘For me?’ Brock looked at him, astonished.

  ‘Yes, sir. From Assistant Commissioner Cameron, no less.’

  No one so elevated as an assistant commissioner would allocate jobs to floor ten, and Stone looked both perplexed and impressed.

  ‘Well, fire away.’

  ‘The wife of the assistant commissioner’s cousin received a disturbing email this morning, and they would like us to investigate it.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  Stone was keeping a straight face, but Brock sensed his hidden amusement. He rather liked Stone, and appreciated his deadpan approach with the more difficult members of his team. A couple were prima donnas and several seemed to find non-digital interpersonal communication impossible, but Matt Stone never lost patience with them. Brock suspected that he had a sense of humour, but he didn’t have much opportunity to reveal it in this place. Now he presented Brock with a printout of the email.

  From: Marylyn Smart marylsom239@inbox.ru

  Subject: Nadyababington86—887321

  Date: 12 November 2018 at 8:21:16 am GMT

  To: nadyababington86@btinternet.com

  Reply-To: Marylyn Smart

  Hey there

  I am the hacker who cracked your email address and device.

  Here’s your password from nadyababington86@btinternet.com upon time of compromise: 887321.

  Obviously you can will change it or perhaps already changed it.

  Still it won’t change anything, my own malware modified it each and every time.

  Do not really consider to contact me personally or even find me.

  Via your own email I uploaded malicious code to your Operation System.

  I saved all your emails, addresses of contacts and visits to the internet, even those now deleted.

  Additionally I installed a Trojan on your system.

  I am shocked to discover what you have been up to, and I am sure all your family and friends will be too.

  BUT I am certain you do not want that.

  Thus, I expect to have payment from you for my silence.

  I believe £10,000 is an satisfactory cost for this!

  Pay with bitcoin.

  My bitcoin wallet address is 6NahgenKtqTcKpmP6LSbVVSnn 5QAXly8paqrzfM

  If you do not know how to do this—enter in to Google ‘how to transfer money to a bitcoin wallet’. It is not difficult.

  Following payment of the given amount all your data will be destroyed automatically. My computer virus will additionally clear away itself out of your operating system.

  My computer virus possess auto alert, so I know when this email is read.

  I give you 2 days (48 hours) in order to make payment.

  If this does not happen you will be exposed.

  Do not end up being silly!

  Authorities or pals won’t aid you for certain …

  I expect for your wisdom.

  Hasta la vista.

  ‘I see,’ Brock said, although he didn’t really.

  ‘It’s rubbish, of course,’ Stone said. ‘These things fly around the internet all the time, but the Babingtons are alarmed. They rang the assistant commissioner, who promised a swift response from Fraud. Here are the Babingtons’ contact details. Best get on to it straight away.’

  ‘Well, I’ll need a bit more information about this scam. It is a scam, I take it?’

  Stone gave him what Brock’s mother would have called ‘an old-fashioned look’, then launched into a rapid briefing while Brock took notes.

  ‘Just sound confident,’ Stone concluded. ‘Absolutely no need for concern.’

  ‘But there’s nothing we can do?’

  ‘Nothing short of getting on to MI6.’ He laughed. ‘It’s a Russian email address. Take Charlie Wardle with you for the technical stuff.’

  Brock went and introduced himself to DS Wardle, a short, rumpled man who listened without comment to what Brock had to say, then groped around beneath his desk for a piece of equipment and stuffed it into a backpack. ‘Okay, boss, lead the way.’

  While Wardle drove, Brock did a quick search on his phone. Julian Babington was a corporate lawyer in the firm of Babington and Smythe with offices in the City and in New York. But the most remarkable thing about him seemed to be his collection of twentieth-century paintings, acquired by his father and grandfather, and considered to be one of the most important private art collections in the UK. His wife Nadya was described as ‘glamorous’.

  ‘Here we are, boss.’

  Brock looked up as the car slowed outside a neat Georgian brick terrace house on the east side of Montagu Square, a couple of blocks north of Marble Arch in London’s moneyed West End. Brock’s ring was answered by a man in a beautifully tailored black suit, gleaming white shirt and a collegiate tie that added a stripe of colour. The deep lines on his face confirmed the age of sixty-three that Brock had garnered from his web search, though the boyish quiff of blond hair that flopped across the forehead suggested someone who believed he was younger.

  Brock introduced himself and Wardle, and Julian Babington shook their hands and said, ‘I hope we’re not wasting your time with this, but my wife’s very concerned about it and I have to fly to the US tomorrow, so I’d like to reassure her before I leave.’

  He showed them into a sitting room, where Brock was immediately struck by the art on the wall facing him—two spectacular large abstract expressionist paintings on either side of a marble fireplace, with a portrait on the chimney breast between them which, despite its small size, held its own against their clamour.

  Babington murmured, ‘Let me introduce you to my wife, Nadya. Darling, these are experts from the Fraud Squad, Detective Chief Inspector Brock and Detective Sergeant Wardle.’

  She must have been at least twenty years younger than him, Brock thought as he turned to the woman standing against the light from the tall windows facing the square. Strikingly beautiful, with hair as black as her husband’s suit, her complexion was very pale, and the hand that Brock shook was cold.

  Babington indicated seats around a coffee table on which sat an open laptop computer. ‘This is Nadya’s laptop. She asked me to check it for messages this morning while she was getting dressed, and I found this. You’ve seen it? What do you make of it?’