Read Online The Malcontenta by Barry Maitland - Free Book Online

The visitors got up from their seats round the fire and stretched their legs. When Brock returned, Dowling was casting his eye over the titles of the books piled on the worktop, keeping well clear of the live computer, and Kathy was having another look at the enigmatic little artwork on the wall.
    ‘Mr Schwitters did me a big favour,’ Brock said, setting down the pot. ‘I’d never be able to get anything as good again, and I’ve never had the nerve to put anything second-rate beside it. If it hadn’t been for that, these walls would have been a mass of flying ducks and faded Gauguin prints.’
    Kathy laughed, but he saw the expression on her face and added, ‘Really, it may just look like a mess of old tram tickets, but it is in fact a milestone of twentieth-century art. How I came by it is another story.’
    It seemed to Kathy that it was very like Brock to own a treasure that you wouldn’t recognize inside a house you couldn’t find.
    ‘Well, it’s a great house,’ she said. ‘I love it.’
    ‘I rented a room here many years ago, when my life was going through a change. Then later, when my landlady died, I bought the place from her estate. They were glad to get rid of it. It was a tiny, crooked little terrace house, and buyers couldn’t find it. A few years later the one next door came on the market and I bought that too and knocked them together, and gradually it’s just sort of grown. What about you, Kathy? Have you kept on your flat in North Finchley? I remember you had a very protective next-door neighbour and a splendid view.’
    ‘Yes, I kept it on.’ She smiled at the memory of his visit, when she had almost pushed the bunch of flowers he had brought, his peace offering, down the sink disposal unit. ‘While I’m away, a friend is staying there. He’ll move on when I return to London - if they’re prepared to have me back at the Met.’
    ‘Perhaps your friend will have grown attached to the place, like I did here. Not want to leave.’
    She thought that remark was a little sly, and didn’t respond.
    ‘Well, you’re welcome to use this place as a base any time you need to come up to town - both of you, I mean. There’s plenty of room. Are you married, Gordon?’ Brock asked.
    ‘No, no.’ He shook his head.
    ‘Well, why don’t you both stay over tonight? Return to the wild south tomorrow.’
    ‘Oh,’ Gordon said nervously, ‘I think, if you wouldn’t mind, sir, I really ought to get back today.’
    ‘Of course, whatever. I just thought your tale may need plenty of time to do it justice. I must say I’m intrigued by the body in the Temple of Apollo. Whips and carrot juice. And the brass swastika, Kathy, you haven’t explained that yet.’
    Intrigued, and also a little worried. Kathy had become more confident, swifter in her decisions, than when he remembered her last. But he was concerned at her obvious antagonism towards Tanner, Beamish-Newell and Long -all of the main male characters in her account so far, apart from Dowling, whom she seemed to be mothering. He worried whether she was being objective enough in her assessments.
    The building was brand new, the sharp smell of fresh paint and new carpets still strong in the air. They showed her through a door into a narrow viewing area separated from the examination room by a glass screen. She hardly noticed the three or four people present, as the sudden vision of Petrou’s naked body on the stainless-steel tray just a couple of metres away leaped up at her. In the rush to get here, she hadn’t consciously prepared herself for this. It was true that she had seen any number of corpses before, and with much more horrific injuries than this - her three years in Traffic Division had ensured that. But the immaculate objectivity of the setting gave the body a startling presence. Naked, blotched, its head thrust dramatically back by the block beneath its neck, eyes closed in the total self-absorption of the dead, it formed the focus of