Silent Scream

by Lynda La Plante

  Chapter Nineteen

  Anna was one of the last to join everyone in the incident room and she sat right at the back. While he was impressed that there had been some developments, Langton said, it was nowhere near what he had hoped they would accomplish. The murder of Amanda Delany might no longer be front-page news, but the press could easily get wind of the fact that two movie actors were being questioned that evening.

  ‘You never know, the press-hungry stars could even tip off the paparazzi themselves. We want this evening to be above board and get them in and out as soon as possible, so be prepared. They are just helping enquiries, there are no charges against them. We’ll use the time now to discuss any queries you want ironed out.’

  Anna was grateful that Langton was ignoring her; she hadn’t yet decided how she would deal with him knowing about her and Gordon. Not that it was any of his business, but she wanted to be prepared for how he might react. It was impossible to predict.

  Colin O’Dell looked as if he had slept in his clothes; his jeans and jacket were crumpled and his T-shirt stained. Even his boots looked scuffed and worn. Despite his appearance he was very self-assured, smiling at Anna and Barolli who were to conduct the interview. When he introduced his solicitor, he joked that he was there just for support and to make sure he didn’t make a complete ass of himself.

  In total contrast, Scott Myers was wearing a smart collarless suit with a silk scarf wrapped around his neck. He was quiet and rather nervous as he was led down the corridor to the interview room where Langton and Mike Lewis were waiting. They made it clear to him that he was not under arrest but there of his own free will, and they expressed their thanks for his cooperation. He accepted a bottle of water, snaking his scarf free, and sat down opposite Langton. He agreed to answer any questions put to him, but was wondering if he should have brought a solicitor.

  ‘We can provide you with one, but we are just hoping that you may be able to help us with a few enquiries.’ Langton gave a smile. ‘On the other hand, if you are concerned or if you lied when previously questioned and held back information that could have repercussions…’

  ‘No, I haven’t lied about anything.’

  ‘Then there shouldn’t be any problems. We just want to iron out the details regarding your relationship with Amanda Delany.’

  ‘I explained it all to the detective who interviewed me. We were no longer seeing each other, I wasn’t involved with her in any way.’

  ‘Yes, we know all that, Mr Myers, but we wondered if there was anything you might have forgotten to tell DI Travis.’

  ‘Believe you me, nothing about my relationship with Amanda escapes my memory – it was a nightmare,’ Scott said. ‘I left my wife and my children. I must have been out of my mind.’

  ‘I’m sure your marital situation at the time was very distressing.’

  ‘That’s putting it mildly. Right now we’re having a battle over money, and Fiona won’t let me see the kids. I have visitation rights, but when I get to the house, she’s taken them out!’

  Langton commiserated, letting Myers wind himself up. Mike joined in, saying he had young kids. He could only imagine what it must be like, not to be allowed to see them.

  ‘It’s the money too, but I really only want the best for us all. I’m not working right now, a movie I was scheduled to start has folded due to lack of finances and so I’m in a legal wrangle with those guys too.’ He gave a charming smile. ‘I’m sorry. You probably don’t want to hear all this.’

  ‘It’s really a question of clearing up some dates,’ Langton said, and looked at Mike as if to give him a cue to open the file.

  ‘OK, let’s have a look at this. You stated that you had not been to Miss Delany’s mews house. Is that correct?’

  ‘I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I was asked about a specific time, the night of Amanda’s death, and I was not there then.’

  ‘We have a match on your fingerprints, Mr Myers, so you may not have been there on that specific night, but you were at some time inside the house.’

  Myers nodded. Then he sighed and twisted the silk scarf around his hands.

  ‘All right. I said what I said because I didn’t want to get involved. The truth of it is, I was there but only once. When I was told she had been murdered, it made me even more wary of admitting that I’d been there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I’ve had a bad deal from the press about my relationship with Amanda and the break-up of my marriage, and I just didn’t want it all to start up again. If it got out that I’d been with her…’

  ‘What do you mean by being with her?’

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Yes, we’d broken up, yes, I wasn’t seeing her and didn’t want to see her, but she asked me to meet with her, she said it was important. When I told her I wasn’t interested, she said it was nothing to do with us getting back together.’

  ‘When exactly was this?’

  ‘A couple of nights before she was murdered. I’m not sure of the date.’

  ‘So you went to the house?’

  ‘Yeah, she was filming, said it was a night shoot and she’d see me there as she wasn’t sure what time she’d be finished.’

  Langton left a lengthy pause before asking how Scott would have entered the house if Amanda wasn’t there. Drawing the scarf more tightly round his hands, the actor looked away and swore under his breath before answering.

  ‘She gave me a key.’

  Langton showed no reaction, playing the waiting game again, and Myers continued.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. I lied, all right, but I don’t want you getting any ideas that I had anything to do with her murder. It’s freaking me out. She gave me her key when I met her.’

  ‘So she didn’t just call you for this one meeting?’

  ‘No, I met her in a café, the reason being I didn’t want to see her again, I didn’t want anything more to do with her, but she insisted. She said that if I didn’t meet her, she’d start calling Fiona and I didn’t want that either, so we met up.’

  ‘Why didn’t she tell you at this café why she wanted the other meeting?’

  ‘She wouldn’t tell me what it was all about, just that she needed to talk to me and that it would be …’ This time he gave it up. ‘She had cocaine, or said she was scoring some, and that’s why I agreed to go.’

  Scott Myers was sweating and fidgeting restlessly as he swore blind that he was now in a programme and wasn’t doing drugs any more. Since that night, he had not scored again as he was trying to get his life back on track.

  ‘Did you usually score for yourself?’

  ‘No, I got the gear through Amanda. It’s the truth – I mean, I couldn’t risk it.’

  ‘How come she was able to get it?’

  ‘She had a good source; she was always able to get whatever she wanted.’ He suddenly straightened out and folded the scarf on the table. ‘I wasn’t going to get him in on this, but now I think I need to, because whatever I’m telling you is putting me in deeper shit.’

  ‘Do you want a solicitor present?’

  ‘No, I don’t need one because, one, I can prove that when she was murdered I have witnesses and an alibi and, two, I admit I went to her mews house and I admit that I’ve lied about that.’

  ‘Do you still have her front-door key?’

  ‘No, I tossed it. This makes me sound like a right asshole. I know I should have come clean about it before, but I wasn’t there alone.’

  ‘At the mews?’

  ‘Yeah. I wasn’t alone with her, there was someone else there as well. I just haven’t told you because I didn’t want to get him involved.’

  They waited expectantly. Was this other person Lester James? When they saw Myers hesitate, Langton asked if the other person was Amanda’s driver. Myers looked confused.

  ‘No, it was Colin O’Dell. He was there that same night.’

  Anna and Barolli had put Colin O’Dell through the same questions and grilled him abou
t irregularities in his original statement. He was almost treating the interview as a joke, saying that he couldn’t remember what he had said as he was hungover that first time. Anna found him to be increasingly irritating; it was Barolli who sorted him out. Although he was there of his own free will to answer questions, it was clear, Barolli warned him, that hungover or not, he had lied.

  ‘You stated that you had never been to Miss Delany’s mews house, but we now have evidence that puts you right there – your fingerprints, Mr O’Dell – so I suggest you straighten out and don’t play any more games or we will be charging you with attempting to pervert the course of justice. When were you there, in the house?’

  As O’Dell turned to confer with his solicitor, there was a rap on the door. Mike Lewis signalled for Anna to join him.

  ‘I can help you with the date and night you were there,’ Anna said when she returned a minute later.

  ‘Scott Myers recalls that you were with him at the house two nights before Amanda Delany was murdered.’

  ‘Christ, listen to me. I had nothing to do with that, all right? So I was there, but I can’t remember much about the evening, just that Amanda had called me to say to come on over as she had something she wanted to talk about.’

  Anna glanced at Barolli.

  ‘I know what it was,’ O’Dell continued. ‘She was worried about her agent. She couldn’t remember if either Scott or I were represented by Andrea Lesser and she wanted to know if we’d been paid our fees for working on The Mansion. She was a bit out of it because it was me, not Scott, who’d been in the movie, and I had been paid. She was going on about not getting her money and what should she do? Apparently she knew someone else off the film who had been paid and she was starting to get really paranoid about it.’

  Barolli flipped over the file of notes. ‘So what time was this meeting?’

  ‘Be late. I got there after Scott and he let me in. She was on night shoots, so it was Christ knows what time when she got home, and …’ He laughed and pulled a face. ‘She’d left some goodies for us to while away the time.’ He touched his nose and snorted.

  ‘Take me through what happened when Amanda arrived home,’ Barolli asked.

  O’Dell shrugged. ‘She was all uptight about the missing money. I had to catch a flight back to Dublin and she said I could use her driver – she’d told him to wait, I think.’

  Anna felt tense. ‘This driver,’ she said. ‘Can you describe him?’

  ‘Big bloke, fair hair, don’t think I saw his face. Well, he was just the driver, know what I mean? We talk to the backs of their heads. I was well away, but he got me to the airport in time, very ragged I was.’

  ‘So you and Scott Myers just had a talk about money, and…’

  ‘Well, one thing led to another.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He whispered to his solicitor and eventually admitted that all three had gone into her bedroom.

  ‘I was totally knackered, but she was a right little nympho and fuelled up on crack cocaine and didn’t want us to leave – hung onto me, she did.’ He paused. Anna was fast, fitting the pieces together like a jigsaw.

  ‘You were in The Mansion, correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You also wore a gold crucifix, didn’t you?’

  He puffed out his cheeks and repeated that he’d forgotten about it, and only now remembered that Amanda had given it to him from the costume department.

  ‘What happened to the cross?’

  ‘She almost choked me with it that evening, snapped it, and said she wanted me to stay, but I had to get my flight back and so we left.’

  ‘You left with Scott Myers?’

  ‘Yeah, the driver dropped him off at a taxi rank and drove me to Heathrow.’

  Anna left the interview room and went next door to ask Scott Myers if he could identify the driver who had not only brought Amanda home, but had driven him to a taxi rank and taken O’Dell to the airport. Myers admitted to being very stoned and had been sick just after he’d been dropped off. He could not identify the driver as he had hardly spoken to him; all he recalled was that the driver was maybe fair-haired with broad shoulders. When Anna asked what the two of them had talked about in the back of the Mercedes, all he could remember was Colin O’Dell saying it was the best orgasm he’d ever had, even though Amanda had almost choked him to death, and then they had discussed the sexual high of part-strangulations before ejaculating.

  It was almost 9 p.m. when Scott Myers and Colin O’Dell were released without charge. Langton was insistent they track down Lester James. A press conference was arranged for the following morning. Concerns for Jeannie Bale and Felicity Turner were growing. They would ask the press to assist them and release photographs of the two of them. They had managed to track down an aunt of Jeannie Bale’s, but the girls seemed to have disappeared into thin air.

  Anna left the station and headed on foot to the nearest tube. She had not gone far when Langton drew up in his car and gestured to her to get in. With a sinking heart, she opened the door of the old brown Rover. She was quiet, waiting for him to bring up Gordon but he didn’t. Instead he talked about running over the security tapes from Amanda’s mews to try to get the numberplate or some identifying connection to their suspect.

  ‘Problem is, with the security cameras being on a timer and not turned on during the day, we didn’t even get the fact that Rupert Mitchell’s wife visited. So it’s doubtful whether or not we’ll get anything more.’

  Anna agreed. Everything hinged on Lester James.

  ‘I think he was supplementing his earnings,’ she observed, ‘if not a user himself, and was supplying Amanda with crack cocaine. We know for certain that she was a user, if not an addict. He was probably the man Helen Mitchell saw at the house and could also be the driver who picked up both the actors…’

  Langton interrupted her. ‘I’m not quite following you.’

  ‘How do you think Lester James would feel if he was in love with her? Maybe she’d even had sex with him. She didn’t restrict her liaisons to movie actors, she often picked up men from clubs, total strangers. And here is this driver having to collect two actors who’d been having sex games with her, discussing their prowess and boasting that she’d not wanted them to leave.’

  Langton said nothing. They still had no evidence against Lester James, and until it was confirmed that he had indeed driven the two actors that night, it was pure supposition.

  ‘Unless it was one or other of the brothers,’ Anna went on, ‘but I somehow doubt it was. Tony and Harry are older and wiser, more-than-my-job’s-worth types, but we can’t rule them out.’

  ‘Talk to them again and go over their itinerary for the film unit, who drove whom, and so on.’

  As Anna nodded, she felt her mobile vibrate in her pocket. There was a text message from Josh Lyons’s secretary apologising for not returning a call Anna had made to his office earlier, and two voice messages from Gordon. She put the phone back in her pocket as they approached her block of flats.

  ‘You going to ask me in for a drink?’ he asked nonchalantly.

  ‘I wasn’t going to. It’s been a long day and it’s almost ten.’

  ‘Never bothered you before.’

  ‘It doesn’t bother me, it’s just that I am tired. We’ll probably have another long day tomorrow.’

  ‘Well then, we’ll discuss it now.’

  She tensed up but made no reply.

  ‘What’s going on between you and Gordon?’

  She glanced at him and then looked away.

  ‘It’s fuckin’ unethical, unprofessional.’

  ‘I am not his patient any more,’ Anna pointed out. ‘I only needed one session and my neck is fine, so I can’t see that it’s either unethical or unprofessional, nor can I see that it’s any of your business.’

  ‘It is. I suggested you go to him.’

  ‘So I did, and I really appreciate it, but whether or not I am seeing him outside hours shouldn’t be a
ny concern of yours.’

  ‘What if it is?’

  She was starting to get angry. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just that I advised you to go and see him for treatment and he ends up fucking you and I feel in some way responsible.’

  ‘Are you joking? Responsible? I took your point about my last relationship with Damien Nolan as being unprofessional, and I agreed and I ended it, and I haven’t seen him since. But this has nothing to do with work and I can’t see that I am your responsibility in any way at all.’

  ‘Because I care about you.’

  ‘I appreciate that and I thank you, but you have a wife and children, and whatever I am doing with my life is none of your business whatsoever. I don’t ask you about your private life, so what gives you the right to judge mine?’

  She had her hand on the door handle about to get out.

  ‘Because I talked to him about you.’

  She froze, turning to face him.

  ‘You talked about me? When you called him to ask if he could see me for my neck injury?’

  ‘No, before.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What sort of things did you tell him about me?’

  Langton leaned across, opening the glove compartment, searching for a cigarette.

  ‘Personal stuff. Is there a pack of cigarettes in here?’

  She peered into the glove compartment, his face close to hers as she looked inside.

  ‘There you go, Marlboros. But you shouldn’t be smoking.’

  He ignored her and lit the cigarette, lowering the window on his side.

  ‘Like a therapist. Well, in some ways, I dunno, but under his influence … I just found it therapeutic to talk.’

  Anna sighed. ‘So you told him about us?’

  ‘Not so much about us, more the way I had felt.’

  ‘Pity you never tried talking to me.’ She regretted saying it as soon as the words were out of her mouth. ‘I have to go in.’

  ‘Fine. I just wanted you to know, that’s all.’

  She turned to face him. The cigarette was dangling out of the side of his mouth, and in the semi-darkness his face was even more handsome, but she realised that she wasn’t eager to be this close.