There was a faint drizzle and Jane was wearing her police-issue cape to keep herself dry. She laughed as she recalled the night shift on patrol when she and Kath had eaten fish and chips under their capes so no one could see.
She reached the terraced row of new, expensive-looking flats, and checked she had the correct address before pressing the buzzer for the Brennan flat. She waited a while and, when there was no answer, pressed again. A distorted female voice asked if she was delivering groceries. Jane gave her name and rank, then there was a crackle and whistling sound. Unsure if she had been heard she was about to repeat herself when the door clicked open.
Jane walked up the four flights of carpeted stairs and took a few moments to get her breath back before knocking on the door. She noticed there was a mezuzah screwed to the doorframe. The front door was opened by a small, overweight woman in her mid-forties wearing a floral blouse and grey pleated skirt with pink slippers.
‘Mrs Brennan?’ Jane asked, guessing she was Ashley’s mother.
The woman gave her a quizzical, confused look. ‘Thought you were our grocery boy. I was expecting an early delivery.’
‘Mrs Brennan?’ Jane asked again.
The woman pressed her finger to her right ear and Jane heard a high-pitched whistling sound.
‘I’m very deaf, what do you want?’
Realizing that she was wearing a hearing aid, Jane spoke loudly and slowly.
‘I am WPC Jane Tennison from Hackney Police Station and I’d like to speak to Ashley Brennan.’
Mrs Brennan called out Ashley’s name and said that a policewoman was here to see him, but there was no reply. She let Jane into the comfortable-looking flat. She knocked on a closed door.
‘Ashley, come out of your room — there’s a policewoman here who wants to talk to you.’
‘ABOUT TIME, LET HER IN.’
‘She is in, dear.’
‘I MEAN IN MY ROOM.’
Jane recognized the squeaky voice coming from the room as the one from the previous morning’s phone call. Mrs Brennan opened the door and gestured for Jane to go in.
‘Do you want me to come in with her?’
‘No,’ Ashley said.
Jane eased past Mrs Brennan, who was pressing her hearing aid and causing it to whistle again.
‘I’m expecting some groceries.’
‘Go away, Mother.’
‘He doesn’t have many visitors. Is it about my disabled parking?’
‘GO AWAY, MOTHER.’
Ashley Brennan was sitting at a large wooden desk on a specially adapted swivel chair, which had a head rest, thick padded arms and an extra wide-cushioned seat. He was obese — at least twenty stone — and had a huge protruding stomach and thick fat arms, but tiny feminine hands. His size made him look much older than Jane suspected he actually was. He wore a cotton T-shirt and baggy tracksuit trousers, and as he swivelled round to face Jane she noticed he had small feet encased in embroidered slippers.
On the desk there was a telephone, filing tray, jeweller’s-type magnifying glass, tweezers, soldering iron and bits and pieces of wire lying around next to an electrical circuit board of some sort. Behind him, on top of a long wooden cabinet, there were two reel-to-reel tape-recording machines and two large pieces of electrical equipment with numerous dials and yellow-coloured arrow meters. Jane suspected they were radios of some sort, but only because they were attached to a large aerial hanging out of the window.
‘She’s as deaf as a post,’ he said.
Ashley had a yarmulke perched on the back of his head and his hair was thick and dark, parted to one side and oiled flat, but rather strangely he had a handsome face with dark eyes and a small nose.
‘I’d like to see your identification, please.’
‘But I’m in uniform.’
‘You can never be too careful.’
Jane opened her shoulder bag and handed him her warrant card which he inspected and handed back. He invited her to pull over the chair that was next to his single bed and said she could use one of his pillows as a cushion.
She declined the offer of the pillow, picked up the chair, and sat opposite him.
‘I have to say it’s about time someone took me seriously. I have called so many times, and to all the local stations. I was thinking about calling Scotland Yard or writing an official complaint to the Commissioner about it.’
She sat poised with her notebook and pencil ready, assuring him that as a police officer and employee of the Commissioner she was there in an official capacity and would treat anything he told her seriously.
‘Before we start can I just have your full name, age and date of birth for the record, please, Ashley?’ Jane asked.
‘Ashley, no middle names, and my surname is Brennan. Aged twenty and born 20.6.52.’
‘You’re nearly twenty-one then,’ Jane remarked.
He opened his desk drawer and took out a large diary then swivelled round in his chair and pointed to the radio equipment.
‘The one on the left is an RCA AR88, renowned for its performance and reliability as a surveillance and intercept radio during the Second World War. Works on six bands and uses fourteen tubes in a double preselection superheterodyne circuit... which I have modified to listen to the radio channels as well. The one next to it I’m very proud of as I built it myself. It’s an SSB transceiver with silicon transistors and Plessey integrated circuits.’
The high-pitched voice she had recognized was even more obvious as Ashley needed to take short breaths between sentences.
Jane wished he’d get to the point of why he’d called the police, but she didn’t want to offend him further by showing a lack of interest.
‘And the bits on the desk, is that your latest creation?’ she asked, hoping he wouldn’t go into too much detail.
He looked at her as if she’d asked a silly question. ‘No, it’s the circuit board and bits for my mother’s bedside radio that went on the blink. It’s obvious I’m fixing it.’
Jane asked politely if he could move on to exactly why he wanted to speak with a police officer, and poised her pen ready to write in her notebook.
‘I inadvertently picked up the transmission using the RCA when I was trying to tune into a station. At first I thought it was radio hams messing about, but the other night I became really concerned about their conversation. One was using the call sign Eagle and referred to the other as Brushstroke. Eagle said, ”Stay quiet, it’s a rozzer,” which of course I knew was another name for one of you lot. Then there was a loud, metal-type banging sound and Eagle got quite panicky saying the rozzer was looking in the café window, but they seemed to relax when he’d gone. I’ve a list of dates and times for everything I recorded on my reel-to-reel.’
Jane stopped writing and looked up at him. ‘Sorry, did you say recorded?’
‘Yes, I like to record radio programmes and listen to the ones I enjoy again. This was different, very suspicious with no names used, and they were not trained in radio etiquette as sometimes after saying “over” they continued to speak instead of waiting for a reply.’ He gasped and coughed.
Jane asked if he was able to determine the area that the transmission came from and he snapped impatiently that it could be a one- to two-mile radius, which in terms of London covered a lot of possible locations. He then detailed all the times he had overheard the conversations and said he had joined all the recordings together so the police could listen to the complete tape without changing reels.