He clenched his fists. ‘What is this? I knew Amanda – she was a little darlin’ – and seeing that basket for a coffin, it … it didn’t seem right to me. Got me all upset to know that she was inside it.’
‘Can you tell me about the times you drove Amanda Delany?’
He sighed. ‘Not much to tell. It wasn’t that often, but if she had a première or a big do, she’d call one of us.’
‘Do you remember driving her to a lunch at Le Caprice restaurant?’
‘No. That said, I don’t remember all the jobs. How recent was it?’
‘Maybe four months ago?’
‘Nah, not me. I was in Turkey on a shoot.’
‘Did your brother also drive Miss Delany on a personal basis?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Do you retain a logbook for private events?’
‘Yeah, some of the time. All depends if it’s on account or cash.’
There was a flurry of activity outside the club and the flash bulbs were popping.
‘You gotta get out, here’s my ride.’
‘Do you have a card, Tony?’
He shoved one into Anna’s hand as he got out, signalling to Scott Myers and his wife. Anna was caught between Fiona and Scott as the photographers chased them down the road. The Myers were quick to get into the car, and by the time Anna was passing the club’s entrance, the Mercedes had driven away. Scott stared at her from the passenger window as the car went by.
Anna was in a fury; she got back to her parking spot to find that her Mini had been clamped. She couldn’t believe it as she was no more than ten minutes over the allocated parking time. When she called to get the clamp unlocked, she was told it would be at least an hour before they could be in her area. She paced up and down the pavement, waiting. She tried to put in a call to the station, but there was no signal. Whether or not her phone had been damaged when it fell onto the stone floor at the church, she couldn’t tell. She dared not leave the car to find a call box in case the clampers returned to release the car and she wasn’t there.
The team made their way back from the funeral in dribs, and drabs, and it was at least three hours before Mike Lewis held a briefing to discuss what, if anything, they had found out. Anna’s absence was noticed; Barolli suggested she might have taken the afternoon off to do some shopping in Covent Garden. No one had anything of real interest to report. The consensus was that attending the funeral had been a waste of time. Then Langton appeared.
‘Where is Travis?’
‘Not sure, Guv. We left her at the church, expected her back with everyone else.’
Langton pursed his lips and nodded to Mike; they left the incident room and went into his office.
It wasn’t until seven that evening, having hit the rush-hour traffic, that Anna made it back to the station. She was about to take off her coat when Mike Lewis walked in and slapped the Evening Standard down on her desk. A large photograph of Scott Myers and Colin O’Dell dominated the front page, alongside a picture of Amanda’s unusual coffin. The headline read: STARS BID GOODBYE TO AMANDA DELANY.
‘Heavens, they work fast, don’t they?’ Anna said, looking at it.
Mike gestured for her to open the paper.
On page three, under the headline CAT FIGHT AT MURDER VICTIM’S FUNERAL, was a picture of Anna caught between the doorman and Jeannie and Felicity. The way it had been photographed or doctored made it look as if she was about to punch the doorman. She gasped and sat back in her chair.
‘My God, I don’t believe it!’
‘You’d better. Langton is going apeshit. The only good thing is they don’t have you identified.’
‘Is he here?’
‘He was, and got pissed off waiting. We’ve called your home and your mobile. What in Christ’s name were you doing?’
Anna sighed.
‘I went to the drinks party after the funeral,’ she said.
‘Were you drunk or something?’
‘No, I wasn’t. I can’t speak for either of the other two girls, but I was sober and … Listen, let me try and explain everything.’
‘All I want to know is if you got something for us?’
‘Well, not exactly.’
‘Right. In that case, save the excuses for tomorrow morning. Goodnight.’
Lewis slammed her door, hard, leaving Anna staring at the newspaper. After a while, she went into the incident room and saw that someone had cut out the picture from the Standard and pinned it up. There was a red ring around her face. Angrily she tore it down.
Chapter Thirteen
The doorbell rang, making Anna jump. It was almost eleven. She had opened a bottle of wine and was sitting in her kitchen working on her laptop, reflecting on what she had witnessed that afternoon and listing everything she thought was relevant. Jeannie Bale and Felicity Turner must be questioned again and a warrant issued to search their premises. She wanted Tony James checked out to see if he had any criminal record, his brother Harry too, and … Anna stared at the screen. She had not come up with any fresh details, rather underlined the old. Yet she was still certain something was being covered up between Andrea Lesser and Andrew Smith-Barker.
Anna hurried to the front door and looked through the spy-hole. Langton was standing there, his face in profile. She unlocked the Yale and opened the door.
‘How did you get up to my floor?’ she asked.
‘Car-park doors were open so I walked in. You might have refused to let me come up.’
She gestured for him to go into the lounge, but instead he walked into her kitchen.
‘I’m starving. What have you got to eat?’
‘Bacon sandwich?’
‘Lovely, and a cup of tea.’ He picked up the bottle of wine and looked at the label.
‘Do you want a glass?’
‘Nope, tea’s fine.’ He sat down at her laptop, reading where she had left off.
Anna behaved as if she wasn’t in any way surprised by his visit, but her heart was thudding in her chest. She made the tea, put bacon under the grill while Langton remained seated, pressing her laptop commands and reading her notes.
‘Some of that is private,’ she said quietly.
He swivelled round to face her.
‘What am I going to do with you, Anna Travis?’
She said nothing as she carried on preparing his sandwich. He poured some wine into her glass and sipped. Then grimaced.
‘Not chilled enough,’ he muttered.
‘Are you here because of the Evening Standard?
‘Quite possibly. So far they haven’t put out your name or your connection to the Met, or the fact that you are investigating the murder of Amanda Delany, so no harm done. However, someone might recognise you if you do the TV interview so I’m pulling you out and putting Mike Lewis on it.’
‘Fine.’
‘No, it isn’t fine, Anna. I need to know what the fuck you are playing at! Do you want to get chucked out on your ear because, if so, you are going the right way about it!’
‘I can explain.’
‘I certainly hope you can because I’ve had that Miss Lesser onto me. She’s made a formal complaint to the Commissioner and he’s ferreting around and not liking the fact that we’ve got bugger-all so far. And it doesn’t help seeing one of his officers pissed and having a cat fight outside the Ivy Club.’
‘I was not pissed,’ she snapped.
‘Looked like it, and you were gone all afternoon.’
Anna banged the grill to turn the bacon over and filled the teapot.
‘Having asked you to make it a priority to keep the team informed of your movements, you totally disregard me. No one could contact you.’
‘I dropped my phone in the church. It must have got damaged because I couldn’t make any calls.’ She fetched a mug and jug of milk and put them on the counter.
‘So when was that? Directly after the service?’
‘Yes. I went back in to look for it.’ She poured him a cup of tea and took him through the event
s of the afternoon.
‘You already interviewed the unit drivers, didn’t you?’ Langton asked when she told him about her conversation with Tony James.
‘Simon did. They didn’t give us any reason to be suspicious, but I saw Tony James in the church passing what could have been drugs to Colin O’Dell.’
‘That’s making you suspicious now?’
She sighed. She was getting increasingly rattled by him.
‘It’s possible that the James brothers knew more about Amanda than we at first thought, if she also used them as private chauffeurs. They may have known about the book she was going to write, and if it was going to be a big exposé of her lovers, then—’
‘You think that Tony was having an affair with her?’
‘No, but it’s possible that if he had that information, he might have told someone or tipped them off’
‘I don’t buy it,’ Langton said, wiping the crusts of toast around his plate.
‘Don’t buy what?’
‘That some movie star who screwed her would go to such lengths – murder – so as not to be written about in her cheap little book.’
‘It wasn’t cheap. She was going to be paid over a million pounds for it.’
‘I was referring to the contents, sweetheart.’
Anna chewed her lips, feeling stressed out by his presence. She wasn’t going to let him know though, so she continued.
‘Another motive would be if her agent, Andrea Lesser, and this investment guy, Andrew Smith-Barker, had been embezzling her money. They could have hired someone to do it. I told you what Jeannie and her druggie friend said to them at the Ivy Club.’
‘Nah. Still don’t buy it.’ Langton stared into the mug, holding it cupped in his hands. ‘Why take her cuddly little rabbit?’
‘What?’
‘You brought it up, Anna. Why did whoever killed her take that old rag toy she slept with?’
‘Isn’t it more important to know who took her diary?’
‘Maybe it would make sense to take that, if you were concerned about her writing something that could be damaging to your career or your business, or even if she was going to accuse you of some kind of fraud. But why take the rabbit?’
He held out the mug for a refill.
‘I’ve been thinking about something you said,’ he went on, ‘that it could have been taken as a keepsake, sick as that might sound. In psycho-babble it often means that the murderer wants to keep something close to them, like a token or a trophy. But this isn’t a serial killer.’
Amanda kept her drugs hidden inside the toy, Anna reminded him.
Langton laughed softly. ‘You don’t stab someone, give them multiple wounds hard enough to leave bruises, the imprint of the shaft on the skin – you don’t do that for a few measly grams of coke.’
He suddenly slapped the table with the flat of his hand. ‘This was not a professional hit! This was someone with a lot of hate, a lot of anger – and I am damned sure it was done by someone she knew and knew well.’
‘I don’t think any of the actors we interviewed hated her that much. You know they’ve all had their prints taken to see if they match with those from her mews.’
‘You got some whisky?’
She opened a cupboard and handed him a half-bottle of Johnnie Walker. He reached for a glass.
‘I’ve never met anyone who bought a half-bottle of Scotch,’ he grumbled.
‘It takes all kinds,’ she said under her breath.
Langton sipped his drink. He didn’t seem inclined to leave or move from the kitchen to a more comfortable place to sit, but stayed perched on the stool.
‘OK, go back to what I said about the stab wounds, and think what you brought up about Amanda knowing the killer. It had to have been someone who cared, you said, to spread her hair out over the pillow, someone who didn’t want to touch her face, not an actor, no way an actor.’
Anna started to wash up the dishes, anything to keep her hands occupied as she had a real inclination to punch him.
‘Keys,’ he said softly.
She watched as he lifted the glass a fraction and then put it back onto the table, making a circle.
‘The front-door keys. We know the interior designer had one, we know Andrea Lesser had one and that the designer gave his back when he’d finished the job. Amanda had one obviously. According to Lewis, they checked with the locksmith and there were four keys cut, so that leaves us with one key unaccounted for. She could have easily had others cut, but I doubt it. It’s possible one of the people working on her place got one cut but again, I doubt it. This was her first home, her own place and I don’t think, the more I get to know of Amanda Delany, that she would have handed them out.’
‘She hated to sleep alone,’ Anna observed. ‘In fact, she was afraid to go to sleep. She used speed, coke and uppers to keep herself awake.’
She pulled up a stool to sit beside him. Langton wasn’t listening. She knew him too well; he could easily tune out when he was concentrating on something. After a moment of silence, she continued.
‘No sign of a breakin, the killer let himself in, but there’s nothing on CCTV. The driver brought her back from the film set, watched her go in before he drove away. He returned later that day, couldn’t rouse her, called her mobile, called her landline … are you listening to me?’
Langton nodded. By now Anna had fetched a glass and was pouring herself a Scotch. The bottle was just over half-full and he took it from her to top up his own drink, screwing the cap back on very slowly.
‘Then Andrea Lesser turns up with a key to open the front door and she finds the body. If tests prove that Amanda had been dead a much shorter time than we were told at first, it would mean she was actually killed later that morning,’ Anna said.
‘Keys …’ he repeated. Langton started to pace; even in the cramped, small kitchen he still managed two or three paces back and forth.
‘Keys – it’s the keys,’ he repeated. ‘Take a look in your handbag.’
Anna frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
Langton took a set of keys out of his pocket – car keys, house keys, office keys and another for his pedal-bike lock. He hooked them onto his forefinger, twirling it slightly, then dangled his keyring in front of Anna.
‘My keyring is an old medal from the First World War and belonged to my great-grandfather.’
He pulled the stool out to sit beside her again. The key discovered in Amanda’s handbag, he recalled, was on a single ring, nothing else attached. She might have needed keys for her laptop, desk drawer, jewellery case and quite possibly the door keys from her old flat that she was still paying rent on. He counted on his fingers the number of keys that she would have needed. Anna sipped her Scotch, listening.
‘New home … in my humble opinion, the girl would have had something special as a key ring. This was the first place that she owned.’
‘What exactly does this add to the enquiry, apart from there might be a set of keys missing?’ Anna asked.
Langton drained his glass and crossed to pour the rest of the bottle into it. He gave one of his rare smiles.
‘We never saw anyone entering, nobody saw anyone around the mews, you said yourself she hated to go to
sleep, she was scared of her nightmares. What if the killer was already inside the house?’
‘It’s possible,’ Anna conceded. ‘It would tie in with her knowing the killer, and that the previous night she had a nightmare and woke up screaming.’
Langton ruffled her hair. She had always hated it when he did that, as it made the red curls stand up on end. She flattened it down with her hand as he picked up his coat.
‘I talked to a nurse who’d cared for her at the Drury Clinic,’ she blurted out. ‘She said that Amanda often screamed herself awake. So I don’t think the scream she claimed she heard was connected to her murder.’
He stared at her. ‘You talked to a nurse?’
Anna explained Dilys Summers’s connecti
on with the previous case she had worked on, how the same woman had looked after Amanda Delany at the clinic.
He nodded, then took a match and bit it, using it as a toothpick. ‘Go on.’
‘As I said, apparently Amanda often screamed herself awake and would get very distraught. Dilys Summers also mentioned that Amanda had visitors at the Drury – Colin O’Dell and Scott Myers, and someone else who she didn’t know as she wasn’t on duty, but it could have been Rupert Mitchell.’
‘Really. And was this information passed on to the team?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Not exactly. Jesus Christ! I want to know precisely what our victim was doing weeks before the murder.’
‘She was filming, practically nonstop – very long hours. We know that as we have her schedule, we have her mobile phone and we’ve been checking all her contacts and calls made shortly before her murder.’
‘He was inside the mews waiting for her,’ Langton said softly.
‘What?’
‘I think her killer was already inside the mews cottage waiting for her to come home.’
Anna gave a wide-handed gesture. ‘Whoever it was, are you saying he had house keys?’
‘That is exactly what I am saying’. Langton shrugged into his coat. ‘He would have time to maybe find that five-year diary, read it and get into a rage, angry enough to kill her.’
Langton walked towards the door and then stopped.
‘No, no, that’s not right because whoever it was came ready to kill. He had the knife, the weapon, on him.’
He flicked his coat collar up. ‘Food for thought.’
Anna followed him as he headed into the hall.
‘Can I ask you something?’ she said.
He turned and cocked his head to one side. ‘Yes.’
‘Why did you come here tonight?’
‘As I said, food for thought and, well, I missed …’
She thought he was going to reach out to her, tell her he missed her, but he didn’t. He opened the front door.
‘I miss these kinds of nights – you know, thrashing ideas around. This case is starting to really get to me. We have to establish who the lady was seeing, if they weren’t connected to the film unit as we suspected. I’d wager it was someone she had been close to for some time.’
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