The Red Dahlia (Anna Travis Mysteries Book 2)

by Lynda La Plante

  Barolli was looking through Sharon’s checkbooks and paying-in slips, which he’d found in the cutlery drawer.

  “This is interesting: a week ago, she paid two thousand pounds in cash into her account.”

  Anna looked up, frowning. The headache that had persisted throughout the day was still lurking.

  “Is it rent?”

  “I dunno; she has regular payments of two hundred going in that looks like rent.”

  “Her tenants paid her, then she paid the landlady. What’s the outgoing?”

  “Shit!” He crossed to Anna. “She’s got twelve grand in her bank account!”

  Anna flicked through the statements. As she had thought, at the end of each month, there was a regular payment out to the landlady. Two five-thousand-pound lump sums had also been paid in.

  “We need to talk to her bank manager, and the landlady.”

  Barolli nodded, slipping the checkbook and bank statements into plastic containers. He went back to searching through the kitchen drawer. As he pulled it further out, cutlery clattered out all over the floor. He swore and bent down to pick up the knives and forks, tossing them back into the drawer.

  “I really need this on a Saturday afternoon,” he muttered.

  Anna closed her eyes: forced to sit it out in the small kitchen, she felt as if the walls were closing in on her. She rubbed her temples to try to ease the pain, but nothing helped.

  “I don’t feel so good,” she said quietly.

  “What?”

  “I said I don’t feel good. I think I’ve got a migraine.”

  “You want to go home?” he said, banging the drawer shut. It stuck firmly, so he shook it out again. The clattering noise felt like needles going through her brain. Barolli was on his hands and knees, feeling around inside the unit.

  “I’m going to be sick,” she said, and walked unsteadily to the kitchen sink.

  “Christ, go into the bathroom; don’t chuck up in here!” Barolli squinted into the drawer cavity. “Something’s caught between the drawers.” He reached further inside and then pulled out a brown manila envelope containing a bundle of fifty-pound notes.

  “Don’t handle the envelope too much,” Anna said, and then hurried into the bathroom.

  Anna filled a tumbler of water from the kitchen tap and sipped. She had not brought anything up, but her head was throbbing and she felt dizzy. Barolli had counted two and a half thousand pounds in cash into a plastic bag and he was keen to get back to the station to see if they could put a trace on the banknotes. When he suggested Anna go home, she didn’t argue; she hadn’t had such a bad migraine since she was a teenager.

  Back in her bedroom, Anna drew the curtains and went straight to bed, an ice pack on her forehead. She lay with her eyes closed, wondering where Sharon had got all that money, but just thinking about it made her feel worse. She started taking slow, deep breaths, trying to empty her mind, but she couldn’t ignore the fact that they might have got something that would help their inquiry, perhaps even trace the killer. Eventually she got up and took a shower. She still felt very dizzy, so went to lie down again. This time she slept, a deep, dreamless sleep, until early morning.

  DAY TWENTY

  Anna made some mint tea and had a dry piece of toast. She was feeling a lot better, but the shrill ring of her phone at seven thirty made her wince.

  “Travis,” he snapped.

  “Yes?”

  “You feeling better?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Well, soon you won’t be.”

  “I’m sorry?” She tensed: Langton sounded furious. “I’m sorry about yesterday; it was a migraine. If you need me to come in today, I can make it.”

  “I’m coming to see you.”

  “What?”

  “Now!” And he slammed the receiver down.

  She was left holding the phone in confusion, and feeling almost as angry as he had sounded. She wasn’t expecting sympathy, but he could have been a bit more understanding: she hadn’t had a day off sick since she had got her promotion.

  Fifteen minutes later, Anna buzzed the intercom and opened her front door, waiting for Langton to appear on the stairs. If he had sounded angry on the phone, it was nothing compared to the obvious fury with which he approached her, carrying an armful of newspapers.

  “You are in deep shit,” he said coldly.

  “For Chrissakes, I had a fucking migraine,” she said angrily, slamming the front door shut after him.

  “You’ll probably have another. Have you read it?”

  “Read what?”

  Langton slapped down a rolled-up edition of the Sun onto her kitchen counter.

  “Your boyfriend’s article, yesterday’s late edition.” He pointed to the paper. “And if that isn’t bad enough, everyone else has run with it!” He threw down the other papers he was holding. “Look at the bloody News of the World, Mail on Sunday, Sunday Times, Observer, Express…Exactly what I didn’t want, Travis: a media frenzy.”

  Anna could feel her body shaking as she picked up the Sun. Opening it, she read the headline on page seven—RED DAHLIA KILLER SUSPECT HELD.

  Richard Reynolds’s exclusive detailed virtually their entire conversation. The article stated that the suspect was a soldier with medical training and that he had admitted to the murder of Louise Pennel. It also gave details of the mutilations she had suffered and the autopsy results.

  “He hasn’t missed a fucking thing, even down to the fact she was forced to eat her own shit!” Langton was like a caged animal; fists clenched, he paced up and down the small kitchen. “What in Christ’s name were you thinking?”

  Anna wanted to burst into tears.

  “I warned you! Talk about sleeping with the bloody enemy! Have you any idea what repercussions this is going to create for me—for the entire team?”

  Anna sat on one of her kitchen stools. She was shaking.

  “It’s beyond belief that you could be so unprofessional, even after I warned you. Jesus Christ, Anna, how could you have been so stupid? Why did you do it?”

  She closed her eyes, squeezing them shut tight.

  “Well? What have you got to say for yourself?”

  She took a deep breath. “I told him that whatever we discussed was…”

  “Was what?” he snapped. “Headline news?”

  “I asked him—no, I told him—that whatever was said between us was private.”

  Langton shook his head in despair. “Private. Private? You are investigating a brutal murder; what do you mean, whatever you said to him had to be private? You are a detective, you know the law—you’ve broken the law, for Chrissakes, don’t you understand? You have given highly confidential information to a journalist. What happened? You have a few too many drinks and couldn’t hold your tongue? Is that why you had to leave the inquiry yesterday? Because you were so hungover?”

  “That’s ripe, coming from you.”

  She regretted saying it instantly, but it was too late. His eyes bored into her with such hostility that she had to look away.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  He rolled up the newspaper and tapped it on the edge of the counter. “I don’t know what I am going to do about this, Anna.”

  She licked her lips; her mouth was bone dry. “Do you want me off the team?”

  “That’s a possibility. I think, under the circumstances, at the very least you’ll have to come off the case. I need a few days to think about it. This could have severe repercussions for me. As it is, I am hanging on to this investigation by my fingernails. This load of shit that’s gone down today won’t stop with just the one article: every paper has picked up on it and I am going to have to deal with it.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He nodded, then said very quietly, “You should be.”

  Anna heard the front door close behind him. She sat staring at the kitchen wall and began to sob. Every time she dried her eyes and told herself to get it together, she
broke down again. She sat on the toilet and cried. She lay on her bed and wept. It was almost an hour later when she managed to close the floodgates, her eyes puffy and red-rimmed. Now she really thought about the consequences, and she knew her error could end her career. As always, the photograph of Jack Travis, her beloved father, was on her bedside table. She stared at his strong face and his deep-set eyes. She hugged the frame.

  “Well, Pop, I screwed up and I got screwed. This is what it comes down to: the bastard used me.”

  She sat up and put the photo back in its usual place. All the years of training, all her ambitions could be swiped aside if Langton so chose. She made her bed for something to do and then wandered into the kitchen. She brewed some coffee and sat feeling wretched, though at least the tears had dried up. She wondered what her father would have advised her to do. She was certain he would never have found himself in the same boat. Langton was right: she had been stupid.

  As if on automatic pilot, she finished her coffee, washed up, cleaned the kitchen, then tidied the lounge, until everything in the flat was in order; she even vacuumed the hall. She emptied the kitchen bin, the clank of empty bottles a reminder of her night with Reynolds. They had drunk two bottles of red wine between them; usually, Anna’s quota was no more than a couple of glasses, so it was no wonder she’d felt unwell the next morning. She flung the bag into the bin outside the flats. By the time she returned to slam her front door closed, she was angry. Hands on her hips, she stood in the hall and muttered to herself.

  “The bastard, he must have done it on purpose!” She reread Reynolds’s article and pursed her lips. She had been drinking, but she knew there was stuff in there that she had not discussed with Reynolds. She felt physically sick when she remembered opening her briefcase, but not getting around to looking through her notebook, the night that Reynolds had stayed. Now every crime desk was buzzing with its contents.

  Anna went into her bathroom and washed her face with cold water. Her eyes were still red-rimmed; she patted her face dry and put on some makeup. She donned her best coat and shoes and headed for the front door. She drove to the newspaper’s main gates. When she was asked if she had a security pass, she showed her ID and said that Mr. Reynolds was expecting her. She was waved through and told to park in the visitor bay by the side of the building. She was surprised by how calm she felt as she headed toward the reception area. As it was Sunday, there was only one receptionist on duty; fortunately, it was the one she had met previously.

  “DI Anna Travis.” She showed her ID. “Dick Reynolds is expecting me: can I go straight through?”

  She watched as the girl wrote down her name, time of arrival, and who she was visiting on an identification label that Anna then pinned to her lapel. The receptionist was just about to pick up the phone and call through to the crime desk when two more visitors appeared, requiring her attention.

  “It’s okay, I know where I’m going,” Anna said. As she pressed for the lift, she was pleased to hear the receptionist attending to the visitors rather than speaking to Reynolds.

  The lift stopped at the newsroom floor and Anna made her way along the corridor, pausing a moment to make sure she was going in the right direction, then turning into another corridor that led into the main newsroom. No one paid her any attention as she walked briskly between the rows of desks.

  Wearing jeans and a blue sweatshirt, Reynolds was sitting with his back to her. He was perched on the edge of his desk with a coffee, regaling his colleagues with some joke. He threw back his head, chortling with laughter. “I couldn’t bloody believe it! He had his trousers round his ankles—” Reynolds broke off as the others clocked Anna walking purposefully toward them. He did a half-turn and almost slid off the desk. “Anna!” he said, smiling, his arms wide.

  She walked right up to him, so that their bodies were almost touching, and he blushed.

  “This is a surprise,” he said. He edged away from her a fraction.

  She took the newspaper from under her arm and slapped it against his chest. “Not as much as I had when I read this.”

  He gave a shrug. “Look, I’m a journalist.”

  “Don’t give me your bullshit; this was highly confidential!”

  “Now, wait a minute; a lot of it’s public domain.”

  “Some of this isn’t and you know it. How could you do this to me?”

  “Anna, like I said, I’m a journalist. This is a big story.”

  “You knew what I told you was confidential! And what I didn’t tell you, you got out of my notebook. What did you do? Wait until you’d got me drunk? Until I had fallen asleep, so you could creep out of my bed to filch it?”

  “Anna.” He took hold of her arm; their confrontation was exciting a lot of interest among the other journalists at their desks.

  She swiped his hand away. “I have been kicked off the case. I probably have no career left, but that wouldn’t interest you, would it? You got your story and to hell with any consequences or trouble you might have got me into—and I am in big trouble. I think you are despicable!”

  Reynolds pursed his lips, then reached over his desk and picked up the Black Dahlia book. “There was an LA journalist who broke the news about the Black Dahlia suspect. All I was doing was following what happened in the original murder inquiry.”

  “None of what I told you was ever connected to that.”

  “Yes, it was. What you had not told me was what your victim had been subjected to, and it is the same as the Black Dahlia, so even though you are trying to disconnect the two…”

  “I’d like you to eat shit!” she snapped. Reynolds knew she was referring to what Louise Pennel had been forced into doing and it angered him.

  “Don’t be so crass. What you might not realize is that I work for the Sun, and although we are part of the same group that publish the News of the World, it’s a different bloody newspaper.”

  “So what did you do? Sell the information? It had to come from you, so don’t try and say you had nothing to do with it!”

  “Don’t you understand? The News of the World filched their article from mine!”

  Anna continued, her voice rising. “We had not allowed that information to be leaked, because if we did bring in a suspect—”

  “You have one. You told me.”

  “I also told you that it was highly unlikely he was the killer. Now you’ve blasted it out.”

  Reynolds looked around at the people listening and again tried to draw her away, but she wouldn’t budge.

  “Let’s go and have a coffee, talk in private about it,” he said.

  “I don’t want to be in your company longer than it takes to say what I have come to tell you. I want nothing more to do with you. If this has hampered the inquiry, then you will have DCI Langton to deal with. This is just for my personal satisfaction. You are a creep and a two-faced bastard.” She picked up the coffee he had left on his desk and threw it in his face. It was a good hit: his hair was soaked and his face dripping.

  “That’s very childish.”

  “Maybe, but it’s made me feel better.” She turned and walked away as he tried to mop up the coffee from his face and his sop-ping shirt.

  By the time she got back to her car, she was shaking with nerves. She drove home, hardly able to think straight, and her anger was unabated as she parked and let herself into the flat. She almost broke down in tears again, but refused to allow herself to. She tipped out her briefcase and searched through The Black Dahlia for the section that Reynolds had mentioned. She carried it into the kitchen and sat reading it over and over.

  The original article had been written by a screenwriter and sent to the LA Herald Express. As Reynolds had said, it covered much the same ground as his article, describing the gruesome injuries of the victim and revealing that a suspect was being held in custody. Its publication had prompted the real killer to admit the murder, wanting recognition for his hideous crime and to claim the publicity he had earned.

  Anna’s mou
th was dry as she drove to the station. She walked slowly up the stone steps and approached the incident room. She stood for a few moments outside the double doors, listening to jangling phones and muted voices, before mustering the guts to push them open.

  The room fell silent as everyone turned to stare at her. She walked to her desk and took off her coat, folding it over the back of her chair. She could see the glances passing back and forth and knew her cheeks would be pink with embarrassment, but she kept going. Taking from her briefcase her notebook and pencil, she proceeded to the front of the room to stand by the white crime board. There were a lot of copies of the newspaper article lying around. It was Lewis who spoke to her first.

  “You’ve got a lot of bottle, Travis.”

  “Not really, but I need to say something to everyone.”

  “Floor’s yours.” He gestured to the room; everyone was listening.

  Anna coughed and then lifted her head to stare at a small spot on the wall directly in front and across from where she was standing.

  “I really fouled up, and I am here to apologize to everyone. I had too much to drink and I foolishly trusted Richard Reynolds, the journalist. When I told him that what I was saying was highly confidential and not for publication, he promised me that it would go no further. I have no excuse, barring the fact I had that afternoon been through the hideous autopsy report on Louise Pennel and then seeing Sharon Bilkin’s body. I can only apologize, and if what has happened as a result of my stupidity creates problems for this inquiry, I am ashamed and deeply sorry. That’s all; again, please accept my apologies for my unprofessional and very naive conduct.”

  Anna returned to her desk, leaving everyone unsure how to deal with what she had said. It was almost as if they wanted to give her a round of applause for standing up to them. Anna had been so nervous that she had not seen Langton appear, listen, and walk back into his office. She packed up her desk and was reaching for her raincoat when Barolli came over and handed her a coffee.