Barry Maitland - The Chalon Heads

Praise for Barry Maitlands Brock and Kolla series

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

Weekend Australian

Barry Maitland is one of Australias 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: info@allenandunwin.com
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 McPhersons Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgements

Im 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

D C 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 didnt 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 colleagues 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 McLarrens 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 McLarrens 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, praying for release. And because the thought made her penitent she didnt walk away, as she might have done, but braced herself and turned back towards the wicket gate. Soon she was inside the stairwell, and didnt 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.