‘My golf clubs. They were still in the hallway where I’d left them earlier. I can’t even really remember exactly how it happened – I was so angry with her. She tried to open the front door so I just grabbed a club from the bag and hit her.’
As he began to sob and shake profusely Jane was shocked that even in anger he could do this to his pregnant daughter. Bradfield waited for him to calm down and asked how many times he struck Julie Ann.
He wiped his nose. ‘I don’t know, two or three times maybe . . . She fell to the floor and was rolling around moaning. I suddenly realized what I’d done and begged her to forgive me . . . but she screamed that she’d report me to the police and have me arrested. Some of the money had scattered on the floor so I picked it up, and I was so disgusted with what I’d done that I told her she could have it. But she said nothing, went limp and just lay there curled up in a ball.’ He paused, then shaking his head he said repeatedly, ‘I thought I’d killed her.’ Jane watched as the man broke down, sobbing wretchedly.
Bradfield waited for him to regain some composure, feeling little sympathy for George Collins; he should have controlled himself and never have hit Julie Ann, but it never ceased to amaze him how people could turn on those they loved the most. To make matters worse Collins had never even considered trying to call an ambulance, instead going into the living room and pouring himself a brandy to calm his nerves.
‘Julie Ann was clearly not dead, so what did you do?’ Bradfield asked, masking his revulsion for the man in front of him.
Mr Collins continued in a pained low voice, ‘I suddenly heard the front door slam and ran back into the hall. I couldn’t believe it. She’d gone, leaving the few notes that had fallen out of the envelope on the floor. She’d taken the rest of the money and her rucksack was gone. When I realized I rushed outside, but she was already running off down the road.’
‘Did you chase after her?’
‘No, I had nothing left in me to go after her, but I wish to God that I had. I had never raised a hand to her before that day and I am totally ashamed of what I did.’
‘Did you hear from her again?’
‘No, but I now know for certain she only came here looking for money that day. She faked being unconscious and I felt betrayed as everything she said was lies, even the fact she was pregnant. It wasn’t until you told me at the station that the pathologist discovered she really was pregnant that I knew she’s told me the truth about that. I wish to God I’d never played golf that day, then I would have taken the money back to the office safe and there would have been nothing for her to steal except the housekeeping.’ Collins’ grief had turned to anger.
Bradfield tapped his notebook. ‘So you say she took her rucksack. Was there anything she left in the box room that might help us?’
‘I don’t know, I just removed the padlock so my wife wouldn’t know Julie had been here and threw the hypodermic needle and some dirty clothes into the bin, then shut the door.’
‘She definitely never tried to contact you again?’
‘No, I swear to you. And my wife was away and has no knowledge of Julie being here. I am too ashamed of what I did to tell her. The first time I knew any more about what happened to her was when you came here to tell us she was dead. I have been consumed with guilt and worst of all I never got the chance to tell her how sorry I was and that I still loved her, no matter what.’ Jane watched as Collins started sobbing again, his head in his hands.
‘On the day and evening before her body was discovered, where were you?’ Bradfield asked quietly and calmly.
‘Where was I? Surely you don’t still think that I could have had anything to do with her murder?’ Collins looked up, surprised. ‘I was at work and afterwards I was here with my wife all night. We actually had our neighbours over for dinner, so you can ask them to verify it.’
‘I will do that, Mr Collins. Exactly how much money did she take?’
Collins stuffed his handkerchief back into his pocket.
‘It was about £2,000, well, minus the notes she left behind, which I think were maybe about a hundred.’
Bradfield let out a slow whistle. ‘New notes?’
‘They were sequentially numbered £5, £10 and £1 notes. Whenever possible I always use the same teller and ask for the cash like that as it makes it easier to count off and check the individual pay packets are correct. I had to go back to the bank on Friday morning to withdraw more cash. The teller was surprised to see me and she asked if there was a problem. I didn’t tell her what had happened, but said that I’d had an unfortunate situation and she jumped to the conclusion I’d been robbed. She gave me a list of the serial numbers for the notes I had withdrawn.’
‘Do you still have it?’
Collins looked confused.
‘I think so. I came home with it in my pocket.’
‘I would like a copy of the serial numbers, Mr Collins.’
‘Will it help your investigation?’
‘The fact that your daughter had so much money makes her vulnerable and may be another motive for her murder. There wasn’t a penny on her when we found her body and she obviously didn’t have an abortion. I doubt she blew two grand on heroin in just over a week, but the serial numbers may help us to trace Julie Ann’s movements after she left here, and hopefully trace the person who killed her.’
Mr Collins nodded. Bradfield tipped his head at Jane to indicate that she should accompany Mr Collins. She followed him to the kitchen; the dog was asleep in a scruffy old basket. Mr Collins pulled out a drawer that was crammed full of receipts.
‘It’s the odds-and-ends drawer so I may have put it in here.’ He tipped the contents out onto the kitchen table, seeming much calmer now that he’d confessed.
Bradfield walked slowly up the stairs and could see that DS Lawrence had unscrewed the box-room door from its hinges to take back to the lab for further examination. He asked Lawrence if he or the detectives searching Julie Ann’s room had found a rucksack or anything else of interest.
Lawrence held up a small quilted shoulder bag with worn cotton and velvet patchwork squares, on which some of the stitching had come loose.
‘This is a typical hippie-style bag and was hidden under the mattress in the box room. There’s a sort of concealed side bit in it, a bag within a bag, containing some drugs paraphernalia and other stuff. I’ll log everything back at the station and take anything useful for examination at the lab.’
He handed it to Bradfield who glanced inside and saw an unopened clean syringe, matches, used spoon with burn marks and a rubber tourniquet for tying round the arm when injecting. There was also a small empty plastic bag with tiny traces of white powder left in it.
‘Looks like she forgot this in her hurry to get out of the house,’ Bradfield said, and nodded towards the master bedroom. ‘Mrs Collins stirred yet?’
‘No, and we still need to look in there,’ Lawrence replied.
‘I’ll get her downstairs and then you can have a discreet look round without her knowing,’ Bradfield said, and checked his watch. He told his two detectives they could go back to the Regent’s Canal to search for any witnesses to the Eddie Phillips incident.
‘Are you arresting Mr Collins?’ Lawrence asked, but Bradfield didn’t answer as he walked towards the master bedroom.
He tapped on the bedroom door and waited. He tapped again and slowly opened the door to peer into the room. The curtains were closed and Mrs Collins was wearing a sleeping mask with the plum-coloured eiderdown pulled up to her chin. He moved quietly across the room towards her and noticed the photographs of Julie Ann on the bedside table. There were more photographs of her at various ages along the dressing table and on the chest of drawers. One photograph showed her in a tutu and ballet shoes, her tiny hands holding the edge of the net skirt. It was almost incomprehensible that this sweet angelic child, with beautiful eyes and a small Cupid’s bow mouth, had become the ravished junkie they’d found strangled on the playground nudging one of the roughest esta
tes in Hackney.
He went over to the curtains, swishing them back. Mrs Collins remained asleep so he nudged the bed with his knee, but there was still no response. He turned as Jane walked in and handed him the list of serial numbers which Mr Collins had found.
Bradfield looked at Mrs Collins and whispered, ‘It’s like she’s in a coma. I’ve opened the curtains and nudged the bed. You’d better wake her as I don’t want to give her a heart attack. Just verify exactly when she went to her sister’s and when the neighbours came for dinner.’
‘She’s probably exhausted after the memorial service. Should I tell her about her husband’s confession?’
‘No, that’s up to him. Besides, it will come out in the long run.’
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
He paused at the bedroom door.
‘About what?’
‘Mr Collins – are you arresting him?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t condone what he did to his daughter, but he’s suffered enough with her death and he and his wife need each other right now.’
Jane was touched by Bradfield’s compassion. She looked round the room and wondered if the many pictures of Julie Ann had in some small way influenced his decision not to arrest George Collins.
Jane leant over the bed. ‘Mrs Collins . . . MRS COLLINS.’ She gently nudged Mrs Collins’ shoulder.
When she’d finally awoken, Mrs Collins confirmed everything her husband had said about her being in Weybridge on the Thursday and the neighbours coming for dinner. She was understandably concerned as to why the police were at the house so soon after the memorial service and Jane said they were just following up on some information and that her husband would tell her all about it. The reality was that Jane didn’t have a clue what George Collins would say to his wife or how he’d explain the missing box-room door, but that wasn’t her problem.
As she left the bedroom she saw DS Lawrence in the hallway.
‘I hear you impressed Dr Harker with your knowledge on fibre transfers – he said you were the only one in the class who thought of it. Now, I wonder where you got that from?’ he said with a cheeky grin.
Jane blushed; it hadn’t crossed her mind that Harker and Lawrence might actually work together.
‘Don’t worry, I didn’t tell him you were at Julie Ann Collins’ post-mortem, or that you got it from me. Harker was very impressed, though, and not just with your knowledge,’ he said with a wink, making her blush again.
‘Take a bit of advice from an old sweat like me. You’re a sharp cookie, Tennison, and the stuff with the Bristol and the screw marks on the door was a good spot. But never try to run before you can walk, not in this job. As a probationer it’s always best to keep your eyes and ears open and mouth shut, or you’ll fall into a heap of shit before you know it.’
During the journey back to the station in the uniform patrol car Bradfield sat in the front passenger seat flicking the pages of his notebook back and forth and going over everything George Collins had said.
‘That’s a shedload of money his daughter nicked. It meant she was flush with cash for the two weeks before her body was found.’
‘Do you think the serial numbers can help trace where she was over that period?’ Jane asked.
‘Be a bloody lucky stroke if they did. The money could be anywhere by now, especially if she was buying smack with it. That cash will have been moved around faster than a ferret. Two grand is a lot of bloody money, and scumbag drug dealers like Big Daddy and Dwayne “Shoes” Clark are probably the sort of people who’d kill to get their hands on it.’
‘Interesting that she told her father she’d been raped – do you think that was true?’
He sighed. ‘I dunno. She lied about most things and slept with punters for a living, so even if she was alive nobody would believe her, or would just think that rape goes with the risky territory, so to speak.’
‘If we find who strangled her he’s guilty of a double murder because he killed her child as well.’
He slowly turned in his seat to look at her.
‘Sadly, no. If an unborn child dies because of injury to the mother rather than injury to the foetus it’s neither murder nor manslaughter. You could never prove the intention to kill, or transfer of malice. Even child destruction under the Infant Life Act wouldn’t stick as the foetus was too young.’
‘How do you know all that?’
‘CID course when I was first made detective. We had to learn all the different acts and offences off by heart. Fail an exam and you were out – back to uniform.’
‘Sounds pretty intensive.’
‘It was, and still is,’ he said, and paused.
‘It’s not easy to become a detective then . . . ’
‘We need to find the bastard, or bastards, who killed Julie Ann. So far we seem to keep moving one step forward and then end up back at square one. Now, I’d really appreciate it if you kept quiet and let me concentrate.’
‘Yes, sir, I’m sorry,’ she said, surprised, as he’d done most of the talking.
At the station they joined DS Lawrence, who’d returned before them and was now checking over and listing the items taken from the Collinses’ house. The contents of the patchwork shoulder bag were laid out on a table, the drugs paraphernalia to one side and the rest to the other. Lawrence stood beside Bradfield as they looked over some thin, cheap-looking silver bracelets, elasticated beaded necklaces, some plastic toy animals and an unused Tampax. DS Lawrence made a joke about it being effing useless considering her condition. There was also a cheap bright pink lipstick, and an empty purse made of Moroccan leather with a broken clasp. A medical card in the name of Julie Ann Maynard was for the Homerton Hospital Drug Dependency Unit, and then there were scraps of paper with names and contact numbers. Bradfield told Jane to copy all the names and numbers down and start making criminal-records enquiries on them, and DS Lawrence could then take the paper for fingerprinting, along with the empty plastic bag of what had most probably been heroin.
Jane looked down at the items on the table – the bracelets reminded her of Janis Joplin who had worn so many bangles on her wrists. Some words from Joplin’s ‘Piece Of My Heart’ began to sing out in Jane’s mind:
You’re out on the streets looking good,
And baby, deep down in your heart I guess you know that it ain’t right,
Never, never, never, never, never, never hear me when I cry at night,
Babe, and I cry all the time!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The café’s front window was filled with cheap Greek travel brochures and photographs, as well as a planning order and notice to customers that the café was to undergo refurbishment. The door had a broken blind with a ‘Closed’ sign on it. As John knocked on the door he was encouraged by the fact that it was difficult to see into the café from the street. At first there was no answer so he knocked again and a few seconds later the door was unlocked and inched open. The man who answered was a fifty-year-old muscular Greek with iron-grey hair. He had a hard, lined face with a jutting chin and bad teeth, along with bulging thickset hairy arms and a barrel-shaped chest. The top four buttons of his white shirt were open revealing a gold chain and coin pendant engraved with an owl with oversized piercing eyes, not dissimilar to the man’s own.
‘You Silas?’
‘Who wanna know?’
‘You do souvki takeaway?’ John asked, using the prearranged introduction his father had given him. The scribbled notes had been hard to read as they were written in pencil on Izal toilet paper and were badly creased, due to being refolded so many times in order to fit into the small matchbox.
‘You mean souvlaki?’ Silas spoke with a strange accent, a mixture of Greek and Cockney.
‘Yeah, I’m John Bent—’
‘No last name, first only, you come in,’ he said in a staccato manner.
John stepped inside as Silas looked outside, quickly glancing up and down the road before relocking the door. They
shook hands and Silas jerked his head for John to follow him. The interior of the café was small and shoddy, with six tables covered in plastic red-and-white-checked sheets. A refrigerated display counter contained a number of plastic bowls with different sandwich fillings and olives, while cakes and Greek pastries were arranged to one side next to baskets of sliced bread and rolls. There was a large espresso machine, and an array of bottles and sauces on dusty shelves behind the counter.
Silas led John to a back room; the doorway had a greasy multicoloured plastic strip curtain hanging across it. Inside there were boxes and boxes of what appeared to be tins of tuna, vine leaves and assorted vegetables stacked on unsteady-looking shelves.
‘You wanna a coffee or sometink, or shall we just get on wiv it?’
‘I’d like to see where we start, and do you have a back yard so we can bring in the equipment or does it all have to come in via the front?’
‘I have yard, but maybe good if decorating stuff come in front way during first day to make it look real. I still open café in day and you work at night so look like I still keep business going. Anyone ask I say basement being converted for more seating as I expanding, so there should be no problem.’
Silas flicked on a light switch and John followed him down stone stairs into a large dank basement.
‘You got a power source down here?’
‘I got big set of cables with long leads, plenty power for down here.’
They stood side by side facing an old whitewashed brick wall. Silas slapped his palm against it. ‘This also bank’s wall. You smash through here, dig tunnel and vault is on other side, but you gotta thick concrete floor base that is gonna take hours of drilling – they say it supposed to be impenetrable.’
‘Bloody hell, it’s a lot of work,’ John said quietly.
‘Yeah and we only work through night and stop 5 a.m. before light and people about on streets. I open café at seven but only during week. I close weekends cos no local business open.’
‘I’m going to have to get some wooden RSJs and Acro props for that wall if we want to knock through it.’
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