‘But his daughter was murdered, for God’s sake!’ Anna said angrily.
‘Right. You’d think he’d want everything done to nail her killer, but he’s just kicking up about incompetent policework and poor investigation techniques. This is all we need, with the Deputy Assistant Commissioner putting pressure on us through Langton.’
‘So are you going ahead with the crime special?’
‘I need permission from Langton.’
Anna asked whether, in the meantime, she could requestion both Felicity Turner and Jeannie Bale.
‘Let’s push this fraud thing forward first,’ was Mike’s response, ‘and hold back on them because the last thing we need is for those two press-crazy girls to start acting up.’
‘But Mike, I think they know a lot more. If you won’t allow me a search warrant, at least let me talk to them. You’re going to have your hands full with the other searches going ahead this morning.’
Before Mike could answer, Joan appeared. Mr Delany, she announced, was in reception with a lawyer.
‘Shit! Thanks, Joan, put them into an interview room. I’ll talk to him.’
‘I’ll do it if you like,’ Anna offered.
Mike rubbed his head, making his hair stand up on end. Then Barbara put her head round the door. The producer of their TV slot was on the phone and Langton on hold waiting.
‘Christ! OK, OK, Anna. You and Barolli take Mr Delany, and as soon as I’ve sorted these calls I’ll join you.’
Anna and Barolli headed down the corridor towards the interview rooms.
‘I thought you were going to do the TV interview,’ Barolli said.
‘I was, then Langton put Mike onto it.’
They paused outside the interview room and looked through the glass window to see a stony-faced Mr Delany sitting alongside a small dapper man.
‘Let’s do it,’ Barolli said as they entered.
Mr Delany’s manner was even more aloof than when Anna had first met with him.
‘I do not want any further publicity surrounding the death of my daughter,’ he insisted. ‘I am fully aware that the television company wants to interview some of her … for want of a better word boyfriends … and I refuse to have her private life broadcast yet again. It was bad enough for my wife and me when she was alive. If you are dependent on trash media television shows to assist in your enquiries, that is tantamount to admitting your total failure in this case.’
Anna kept her voice low and persuasive as she said, ‘Mr Delany, we have found in the past that these programmes, contrary to what you are suggesting, have proved invaluable.’
‘When, tell me, did you have a victim as well-known as my daughter?’
‘Not recently, but by asking the public for their assistance, we have in the past gained vital information.’
‘What do you need exactly?’
Barolli leaned forward.
‘Missing from your daughter’s mews house is a soft rabbit toy and a diary. We also found a gold cross and chain caught in her mattress, which might have been worn by the killer.’
‘Then why haven’t you discovered who took the missing things?’
‘We are endeavouring to do so, but to show these items on a live television broadcast might well bring us the evidence we need.’
‘Apparently you believe that my daughter knew her killer, is that correct?’
‘We are considering that possibility.’
‘Well, if that is true, why do you need the public to be made aware of these missing items?’
‘The killer may have taken them with him and someone might have seen them,’ Barolli continued. He was having difficulty controlling his temper.
‘Rubbish. I refuse to allow my daughter to be vilified and for a publicity-crazed public to gloat over her murder. Instead of wasting time you should, in my opinion, be investigating all her known associates without delay.’
‘That is exactly what we are doing,’ Barolli snapped.
‘Without result! Then may I suggest you continue to do so. To date, the press have been reissuing ghastly material concerning my daughter’s promiscuity. It is abhorrent to me and to my wife. If you believe that one or other of these liaisons resulted in her death, then do something about it rather than continuing to …’ He turned to Anna and pointed a bony finger towards her. ‘I recognise you, madam, as having the audacity to infiltrate a private gathering and then putting on a disgusting show for the press with two other, equally unsavoury women.’
‘I resent your rudeness, Mr Delany,’ Anna said icily.
‘You may well, but it is nevertheless the truth. Even in death my daughter was made out to be nothing better than a whore and I am now, with legal advice, refusing to allow—’
At that moment, Mike Lewis walked in. They had withdrawn the television interview, he stated.
‘Thank you,’ Mr Delany said.
Mike turned and walked out. Barolli followed, while Anna waited for Mr Delany and his lawyer to leave.
‘Did you care for your daughter, Mr Delany?’ she asked suddenly.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I have interviewed many grieving parents whose loved ones have been murdered, and I have never come across anyone as lacking in any emotion as you, and I include your wife.’
Mr Delany’s mouth dropped open, shocked.
‘We are doing everything possible to track down her killer, and to be honest, our officers show genuine care for Amanda and want nothing more than to succeed in arresting the perpetrator.’
He lifted his hand.
‘Don’t point at me, Mr Delany! If your daughter’s personal life disgusts you, then perhaps when she was alive you should have done more to protect her and tried to understand why she seemed hellbent on destroying herself. We appear to be the only people who do care enough.’
‘You …’ he spat out, and although he didn’t point his finger at her this time, it felt to Anna as if he was pushing her in the chest.
‘You have no knowledge about what we have been forced to endure. And you have no right whatsoever to insinuate that as parents, my wife and I were lacking in affection for our daughter!’
‘Then why have you refused to assist us?’
‘Refused to assist! You are professional detectives, that is what you are paid to do – investigate – not harass and give grieving parents more heartbreak than they are already suffering.’
Mr Delany turned and walked out, followed hard on his heels by his lawyer, who paused in the doorway and glared at Anna.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Detective Travis.’
Mike and Barolli had already set the wheels in motion for the searches. By the time Anna had gained control and calmed down, they had left the station. She sat in her office, knowing she had overstepped her position with Mr Delany. The comparison between her own father, and this cold, vicious man, were like chalk and cheese. She had been adored and encouraged and admired; rightly or wrongly, it seemed to Anna that their victim had been cut off from any such loving support. She wondered if there was a different reason for Mr Delany’s stance, something stronger than Amanda’s promiscuity and her desire to feature on the front pages of the newspapers.
Fetching a coffee, Anna shut her office door and cleared the surface of her desk to lay out all the press clippings that had been accrued. Many of them were not in chronological order, so she began to sift and mix and match …
Andrea Lesser burst into tears when Mike Lewis showed her the search warrant. They required only the files and recent contracts relating to her client, Amanda Delany, he said. When she claimed that she had sent over files days ago to the station via Ronnie Hodgson, he thanked her and pointed out that they now required the updated ones.
Barolli was standing by a shredding machine in Andrew Smith-Barker’s office. It had, he noticed, been recently in use as there were bags of shredded material beside it. It was also obvious that the company was closing; the offices were nearly empty and pictures w
ere being taken down from the walls in the reception area. When Mr Smith-Barker was shown the search warrant, he claimed he had very little documentation regarding the investments made by his company for Amanda Delany. He may have spent hours shredding hard copies, but it would all still be on his computer files. Even if he had attempted to delete them, they would still be able to find them, Barolli knew. The man stared, white with anger, as his computers were seized.
Chapter Fourteen
At last Anna had all the cuttings in order and placed in long lines along her desk. Ten months, she calculated, had elapsed between Amanda’s stint at the Drury Clinic and beginning filming again. She must have been pregnant and had an abortion at some point during this time. Both Colin O’Dell and Scott Myers denied they were responsible for her pregnancy, but they both admitted visiting her at the clinic. Then she became a patient of Dr Eamon Suchet, by which time she was anorexic, self-harming and, according to him, very fragile. Yet, shortly afterwards, Amanda returned to a highly lucrative film career.
Next, Anna checked through Amanda’s passport, working backwards. There were stamps for two trips to Los Angeles, another to New York in the past two years. She came across a receipt from a jeweller in the South of France and a boarding-pass stub for a flight there three months earlier, tucked in the back of the passport. One of those trips coincided with the time Anna reckoned Amanda had been pregnant. Mr Delany had admitted that he knew about it; it was his wife who had booked his daughter into the Drury. Had Amanda gone to her parents for help? She did have considerable earnings by then, but nowhere near what she was bringing in more recently. Around this time, someone had arranged an abortion for her, and from what Anna knew it had been a terrible, botched job that had left the girl very ill and unable to have children. It was vital, Anna knew now, that she requestion Jeannie and Felicity who shared her flat throughout those years.
Neither Mike Lewis nor Barolli had returned to the station, so Anna decided to visit Jeannie and Felicity without a search warrant. She asked Barbara to put on her duty status that she had come up with some important queries she needed ironing out. She also asked if they had the address of the hotel in London where Mr and Mrs Delany were staying. Barbara had a contact number; it was a small hotel in Dover Court.
‘Hadn’t I told her to back off those two girls? Call her and get her back here immediately! We need her help to sort through these boxes.’ Mike Lewis, who had returned laden with documents taken from Andrea Lesser’s office, was furious when told what Anna was up to.
Barolli made the call. Anna’s phone was switched off so he left a curt message telling her to get back to the station as quickly as she could.
Anna was sitting with Mrs Delany in their hotel suite when Barolli tried to call. She was thankful that Mark Delany was not there too; in fact, Mrs Delany herself seemed relieved.
‘We’re returning to France in the morning so he’s just finishing up some business here.’
Anna went straight to the point, asking if Mrs Delany could confirm the dates of her daughter’s abortion. The woman immediately became very agitated.
‘Mrs Delany, I’m trying to piece together who Amanda knew and who could be a possible suspect. I need to find out who arranged for the abortion.’
‘I can’t see what this has to do with finding out who killed her. It was so long ago and we’ve tried hard to forget it all, put it behind us, my husband especially.’
‘We seriously believe that your daughter knew her assailant and may have even passed him her house keys to let himself into her house. It would have been someone she trusted, someone who may perhaps have been . .
‘We never met any of them.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The men she was seeing. We read about them, of course, but we never met them. I doubt if her father would have wanted to, he was so distraught with her behaviour. She was using drugs and drinking and courting the awful publicity that made our lives miserable. They kept on calling us, you know, the press, asking if she was getting married and … He had paid so much money for her to go into the Drury Clinic, but when she left there, sometimes we had no idea where she was. And that dreadful place she lived in with those girls, she was such a thankless …’ Her voice petered out as if she was ashamed of describing her dead daughter as ‘thankless’.
‘She was very young,’ Anna said quietly.
Mrs Delany patted her hair and folded her hands in her lap.
‘You know, she was such a beautiful child. I mean, people would come up to us in the street. She was like a little angel and I think we spoiled her dreadfully, especially my husband, which made it all the more difficult for him to come to terms with what Amanda became. She could have had anyone, anyone, she was that gorgeous; instead, she threw herself at the wrong men and disgusted him.’
‘Who was the father of her unborn child?’
Mrs Delany turned away, murmuring, ‘One of God knows how many.’
‘So you have no idea?’
‘No, and she said she didn’t know either.’
Anna opened her notebook. ‘She came to the South of France twice in the same year, about the time she was pregnant …’
Mrs Delany stood up and went across the room.
‘Would you like some water?’ she asked.
‘No, thank you.’ Anna waited, watching as Mrs Delany poured herself a glass then moved back to sit further away from Anna.
‘Did she discuss her pregnancy with you?’
‘No. It wasn’t showing.’
‘So when did you find out?’
‘I can’t really remember.’
‘What about the second time she came to see you? Did she mention the pregnancy to you?’
‘No. We didn’t know anything until we got a call from one of the girls in her flat to say she was very ill. My husband went to see her and she was rushed into hospital with internal bleeding.’
‘Did you accompany him?’
‘No, I didn’t. I have two dogs and I couldn’t leave them.’
‘So your husband found out about the abortion, got her to hospital and then booked her into the Drury?’
‘Yes, well, I made the call. I suggested she go there so I called from France.’
‘Did you go to see her whilst she was there?’
‘No, I had my dogs.’
Anna stared at Mrs Delany, with her manicured nails, her perfect hair and make-up. She was a very beautiful woman and it was obvious where Amanda got her looks from.
‘After that, did you visit Amanda at all?’
‘No, we travel a lot. As I have said, she was out of control and seemed set on embarrassing us.’
‘There was never any leak to the press about an abortion, was there?’
‘No, at least not to our knowledge. We only heard from her when she needed money.’
‘But she was earning a lot from her acting.’
‘It didn’t take off straight away, and I think she wasted a lot of her money. For all the pain she had caused us, my husband still made sure she was financially taken care of – that was, until she didn’t need it.’
‘I think she caused herself a lot of pain, Mrs Delany.’
This prompted an odd reaction. Smoothing her pencil-slim skirt with the flat of her hand, Mrs Delany then touched her hair and looked away from Anna to the window.
‘The pain was all mine,’ she whispered. She tilted her head with a strange smile, murmuring, ‘I am the secret you daren’t whisper, I am the green grass.’
Anna remembered it was a line from the poem read by Jeannie Bale at Amanda’s funeral. She was certain that Mrs Delany was a consummate actress; again, perhaps her daughter had inherited this talent from her as well as her beauty. She might not gain anything further from Mrs Delany, yet she was certain there was a lot more. When she had first met her, she sensed that the woman was afraid of her husband. Now she was alone with her, she didn’t think that was true – but then who was manipulating whom? And why? Anna could
feel it there like a buried seam, but she doubted she would be able to crack the outward veneer and she decided to leave.
‘Thank you so much for giving me your time.’
‘My pleasure. If there is anything else, you know where we are, but not for too long.’
‘Of course, you have the dogs.’
Mrs Delany’s eyes welled up. ‘No, sadly I don’t. They both died a couple of years ago.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Anna picked up her briefcase and was surprised when Mrs Delany rested her hand on her arm. She wore a large emerald and diamond ring and a diamond-encrusted wedding ring.
‘Tell me, how long will it go on for? If you don’t find who killed Amanda, how long will you continue the investigation?’
‘As long as it takes.’
‘But you don’t have any results, do you?’
‘No, sadly we don’t as yet.’
‘It’s just that the sooner it is over, the sooner we don’t have to be constantly pressured … Cold cases? Don’t unsolved cases become cold cases?’
Anna wanted the soft hand moved away from her. It made her skin crawl.
‘We won’t give up on your daughter, Mrs Delany.’ She would have liked to have added, ‘unlike her parents’, but held her tongue. Just as she reached the door to leave, she posed one final question.
‘Amanda’s toy rabbit – where did it come from?’
‘She had a pet one when she was tiny and it died. She found it all stiff in its hutch and was inconsolable.’ Mrs Delany’s unlined brow managed a slight frown. ‘She went away to school and I think my husband bought it for her, you know – one that would always be with her and couldn’t die.’
‘Unlike Amanda,’ Anna said under her breath as she walked out.
Mike Lewis had done a considerable amount of work before Ronnie Hodgson arrived to help him go through the documents he had taken from Andrea Lesser’s office. Using a calculator, he showed her how much money had been contracted for films and promotion, and the dates when it had been received by Andrea Lesser; clearly it had not been forwarded to Amanda’s bank account.
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