Deadly Intent (Anna Travis Mysteries)

by Lynda La Plante

  Anna went to speak to Cunningham, but Phil was just coming out of her office. “She’s not in until twelve; personal problems.”

  “Shit!”

  “Yeah, well, we just plow on. We are bringing in Julia Brandon, as she requested.”

  “What about Honour and Damien Nolan? Are they being brought in?”

  Phil shrugged. “It’d be more convenient if we went and questioned them at their nearest station, as there’s still an ongoing search.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  Phil looked at her. “I’m waiting on the forensic team to give me a result on the bed linen we took from the farm. If it’s Fitzpatrick’s, we can arrest them. If it isn’t, we just question them.”

  “Phil, I really think you need to question the two drug dealers again—this time, with the photograph of Fitzpatrick.”

  “I’m off there now. Sam Power kicked up about the expense of taking them out of the cells—transport to here, security, and then wheeling them back again.”

  Anna nodded. “One thing we need to know is if Stanley Leymore was shot before Frank Brandon. It’s the gun—same weapon used.”

  “Yeah, I know, the Glock,” he said tetchily.

  “Maybe they just put Donny Petrozzo in the squat and lied about him being the shooter? We’ve still only got their word for it—and his prints.”

  “Right.” Phil looked at her. “Anything else?”

  “Nope. I am trying to get a through line on the dates and times of the deaths. We’re all over the place.”

  “Good—because that’s exactly what we are. You know, this case expands every bloody day. Shipping in more officers hasn’t helped much.” He indicated Cunningham’s office with his head. “And she’s fucking useless.”

  Anna wouldn’t be drawn. “Well, let’s get this show on the road. We work it between us, Phil.”

  He gave a half smile; she knew he didn’t like it that she used we, but he stomached it. “We should do just that, Travis.”

  Anna went into the incident room to talk to DC Pamela Meadows, who was running the investigation on the Stanley Leymore murder. The incident room was becoming cramped. With filing cabinets and trolleys overflowing with mounds of files, and the extra officers allocated to the case, space was short. Desks buttressed onto each other; it was a headache for the duty manager to control.

  Pamela pointed over to a desk in the far corner of the room, where two detectives were sitting beside a stack of grubby, dog-eared files. They had traced the original owner of the Mitsubishi; the files were Stanley Leymore’s sales ledgers, dating back years.

  “What I want from you,” Anna instructed, “is the exact date that Mitsubishi left Leymore’s garage. I want all the details on when Leymore was last seen alive, plus the time of death.”

  She joined the duty manager and gave him a list: Julius D’Anton’s wife was to be reinterviewed, to clarify the exact dates of his last sighting, and reconfirm the dates of the antiques fair he was known to visit, plus his visit to the antiques shop, and the date his van was towed into the repair garage in Shipston on Stour. Some of the dates she was able to provide, but she wanted all the dates up on the board. She also wanted Donny Petrozzo’s time of death and last sighting printed up, and the last sighting of Frank Brandon next to the date of the shooting in the Chalk Farm squat. As yet, no postmortem had been done on David Rushton, but she also wanted his name alongside the other four victims.

  Anna then instructed Gordon to make up a timetable of the yacht Dare Devil: when it had been chartered, and when it had been sold. As she went back to her office, she saw two plain whiteboards being set up, with Timetable in large letters. She felt that she had started to make progress, albeit as if she was using the incident room as a classroom; instead of the blackboard, they had the incident board, and felt-tipped pens instead of chalk.

  The body of David Rushton was at the morgue. Ewan Fielding would begin the autopsy sometime that morning. DC Pamela Meadows had been given the unpleasant task of informing his wife that her husband had been murdered. She was accompanied by another officer from the team. They would also have a warrant to remove any items from his home that they felt could be connected to the investigation.

  Langton had made sure that, to date, there had been little press coverage; they were hoping to keep the case under wraps. What Langton did not want was a leak that they were hunting Alexander Fitzpatrick. This could create pressure from the U.S., and Langton didn’t want their interference. None of the team were aware that DCI Langton was now going to be present full-time. As the case had mushroomed out of control, he had taken the decision that Cunningham needed help.

  Phil Markham was the first to have his collar felt, as Langton put a rocket under him. He would accompany Phil to interview the two drug dealers. As they now had the photograph of the man he was certain was Alexander Fitzpatrick, one or both of the dealers had to recognize him. It was crucial they work closely with the Drug Squad: Langton didn’t want their noses put out of joint. If there was a possible deal to be made, then they should, with Sam Power’s assistance, put the pressure on for the dealers to talk. They were being charged with possession and dealing in narcotics. If the charges were upped to murder, they would be looking at a very long stretch in prison.

  Phil had never worked alongside Langton before, and he found him unnerving. He sat beside him in the patrol car; at first Langton used his BlackBerry, firing off messages, his fingers moving over the tiny keys like lightning. He then opened a window and lit a cigarette. Phil watched as he drew three or four heavy drags, then tossed it out. He opened his briefcase and took out the copies of the two dealers’ statements. Then he replaced them, muttering to himself. “We go for Silas Roach first,” he said quietly.

  Phil nodded; he noticed that Langton kept rubbing his right knee as if it pained him badly.

  “So how do we work it?” Phil asked.

  Langton shook his head with a sarcastic smile as he repeated what Phil had just said, then turned to face him. “You watch, listen, and learn, son. You’ve had these two pieces of shit in and let them walk away.”

  Phil sat back, smarting. “You know, many of our problems have come from the long wait for the toxicology reports. I mean, in Donny Petrozzo’s case, we didn’t know what had killed him, then the same with D’Anton. This Fentanyl stuff—I’d never even heard of it.”

  Langton leaned back against the headrest. “Fentanyl is used mostly in hospitals for fast-acting pain relief. It’s an opiate, like morphine but nearly a hundred times more potent, faster-acting, and out of the system more quickly—a high of five or ten minutes. Mix it with OxyContin, or Acopolamine painkillers and maybe a dash of heroin, and you have a God Almighty high better than cocaine, and some poor suckers want this as a way of life.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah—oh. In case you don’t know, we’ve already got a few problems in our NHS hospitals. Instead of chucking out the residue not needed in operations, it’s being nicked, and there’s been a few doctors shooting themselves up with it.”

  “Wow.”

  Langton just shook his head, before returning to check his messages.

  “Where do you think Fitzpatrick is hiding out?” Phil asked.

  “No idea, but the murder of David Rushton last night makes it pretty obvious our man is still close at hand. Whatever happened between them would be about money. Whether or not our kingpin actually got it, we’ll hopefully find out. He must need a lot—it’s expensive staying on the run, and it costs to build a network of shippers and dealers you can trust.” Langton gave a rueful laugh. “I’d say that’s where it went pear-shaped; he chose the wrong ones, so he had to get rid of them!”

  “You think that he hid out at the farm?”

  “Maybe. We’ll know soon enough. What concerns me is that the Nolans didn’t seem too worried about the loft discovery.”

  “So we charge Honour and her husband with harboring a wanted felon?”

  “I think there�
�s a lot more to get out of that couple. They can just say they were forced to hide him out and were too scared not to.”

  “But if Damien Nolan wrote the directions for Fitzpatrick to the farm, then it’s not looking as if he was forced into doing it.”

  “Correct.”

  “So are we bringing them in?”

  Langton sighed. Phil’s constant questions were starting to annoy him. “Not yet. They may be the only people that Fitzpatrick trusts; if they are, he may contact them.”

  “Not when it’s swarming with us.”

  “The search should be over sometime today, and we can get everyone cleared out. Most important is the go-ahead to put a tap on their phones and retain covert surveillance. If they make a move, we will know about it.”

  Phil leaned back. He stared out of the window as they hit a nose-to-tail traffic jam. Langton tapped the driver to put the siren on and get them moving; he was impatient to interview the two dealers. As he turned back to say something to Phil, he suddenly winced in pain. He gritted his teeth, then hunched over to grip his knee; it felt as if it was on fire. No matter how much pressure he applied, it continued to be excruciating.

  By the time they drove into the Drug Squad’s car park, Langton was ashen, with a film of sweat that made his face look even more pallid. He needed Phil to help him out of the patrol car, and he closed his eyes with the pain as he slowly straightened up. It took a few moments before he was able to walk into the building, stopping at a water fountain to take some painkillers.

  Phil felt helpless, not knowing what to do, but eventually the color came back into Langton’s face, just as Sam Power approached. “You’re late,” he said. “We got the pair of them ready for you.”

  “Good. Sorry—we got into a god-awful traffic pile-up,” Langton said, shaking Sam’s hand.

  Phil was amazed at his recovery; it was as if nothing had happened. However, it had. Langton could still feel nightmare pain at every step. Thankfully, this time, his leg had not seized up. They had said he would suffer from housemaid’s knee when he had been in rehabilitation. He hadn’t really taken it seriously but, over the past months, he had upped his painkillers, as it had begun to hurt more frequently; the pain was very debilitating.

  The aftermath of the nightmare attack, two years previously, the horror of almost being sliced in two, had taken its toll. He continued to have spasmodic pains in his chest, sometimes feeling very short of breath, and he suffered violent headaches and depression. The notion that he should take it easy was anathema to him. Langton’s obsession about never allowing it to be known just how much he was physically affected by the attack was his way of dealing with it. The thought of retiring, and possibly ending up in a wheelchair, was unbearable. Without the pressure of work, keeping his adrenaline pumping, he knew he would not survive the black depression.

  Phil and Langton went into the interview room. Silas Roach was sitting with his solicitor, Margery Patterson. He seemed nervous: his head twitched as he sat threading and rethreading his fingers. He repeated what had taken place on the night of Frank Brandon’s murder. Langton let him talk, looking over his statement. Silas ended up swearing on his mother’s life that it was the truth.

  Langton spoke quietly. “So, let me just get this straight: you have admitted to dealing drugs from the squat on the Chalk Farm estate, but the gun—the Glock automatic—you say did not belong to you, but Delroy Planter.”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t use it—he just had it for show, you know what I mean?”

  “On this night,” Langton continued, in the same quiet voice, “you have stated that Donny Petrozzo was there and that he was very agitated. You said he was high.”

  “Yeah, well—he was actin’ crazy like.”

  Langton nodded, as if agreeing. He held the statement up in front of him. “Describe the door to me, would you, Silas?”

  “What door? The front door?”

  “No, the door to the room you say you were using inside the squat.”

  “Oh yeah, I understand. Well, it was a special door the lads fixed up. It had bolts across and we’d made a sort of grille in the middle of it; well, not the middle—up a bit.”

  “Like in the old speakeasies.”

  Silas was not sure what he meant but explained that sometimes when the dealers were passing gear over, the junkies could make a grab, or try to throw a punch, so the door was for the dealers’ protection, not just from them, but also from their rival dealers, or from the police.

  Langton smiled, nodding. “So there you are, working the deals, and you get a rap on the door. You say that Donny Petrozzo opened the grille, looked out, and then grabbed the Glock and opened fire.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because he had seen someone he knew? Someone he was scared of? And he picks up Delroy’s Glock, and fires at this person outside—he fires three rounds?”

  “Yeah, that is exactly what he done; I think he said the guy was a cop.”

  Langton nodded, placing the statement down in front of him, touching the sides as if to make the three pages neat and tidy. “You say that Donny Petrozzo next opens the door, steps out, and fires another three shots into the man who was lying on the ground.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, Donny Petrozzo has the Glock pistol in his hands. You say he then ran from the building—in fact, you say you all got out of there as fast as possible.”

  “Yeah, right, because I mean, what went down was crazy, understand me? Like, it was fucking bad, man.”

  Langton nodded. “You know Donny Petrozzo has been found murdered?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  “Donny? Well, he was a good buyer, you know? He used to score from us all the time; always paid up, no trouble. Not heavy stuff; he was mostly dealing a few grams of cocaine to the blokes he drove around, some spliff, but never the hard stuff, mostly coke and some Ecstasy tabs, I think. Delroy knew him better’n me. Del always trusted him.”

  Langton placed down the photograph of Alexander Fitzpatrick. “What about this man?”

  Silas shook his head.

  Langton put the photograph back in the file. “You escaped via the back window?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you never went out the main door; never saw the dead man’s face?”

  “No, I just got the hell out.”

  Langton sniffed, took out his handkerchief and blew his nose, then folded it to place it back in his pocket. He stared at Silas for at least fifteen seconds before he said, so quietly that Phil could hardly hear, “You are fucking lying, son. Let me tell you something: Donny Petrozzo wouldn’t worry about recognizing the man at the door, because he was working for him. He also knew he was an ex-cop, so he would have no reason to open fire.”

  Silas, having been gradually relaxed by Langton so that even his twitch had stopped, was now very tense and started to twist his neck.

  Langton still kept his voice very soft. “I think what happened is you recognized Frank Brandon. You had been busted by him: he was on the Drug Squad when you were arrested and now here he was again. You were the one to go crazy—you; you panicked and you opened fire.”

  “No, that’s not true, I didn’t, I never shot him!”

  “Silas, you are going to go down for murder. You’ll not get a few years for dealing this time. You shot a man in cold blood, fired into his face three times. An ex-cop, it’s eighteen years at the very least.”

  “No, I swear before God, it wasn’t me!”

  “Who was it, then, Silas? Give it up, because we have your pal’s statement that you, and you alone, used that Glock pistol; that you were high on crack cocaine. Donny Petrozzo wasn’t even fucking there, was he? Was he?”

  “It wasn’t me! Jesus Christ! It wasn’t me that done him!”

  Langton sipped from a beaker of water. “Next, I need to ask you about a secondhand car dealer: this man, his name is Stanley Leymore.” Langton put down a photo of him. “You see,
the reason I know you have been bullshitting me is because the same gun used to kill Frank Brandon”—Langton slapped down the photograph of Frank from his police ID—“also killed Stanley Leymore. Look at him.”

  “I never done that, I never done it.”

  Langton laughed. “Don’t be dumb, Silas, you had the fucking gun when you were arrested! In your statement, you said that Donny Petrozzo went out of the room, then fired three more shots into this man as he lay on the floor. So did Donny hand the gun back to you whilst you were escaping out of the window? ‘Here, Silas, you take the gun’? Or did he, as you say, run off with it? If he ran off with it, how did it get back to you? Unless you also killed Donny Petrozzo? You see how this is building, Silas? You understand what we are going to charge you with?”

  Silas kept on shaking his head. Langton placed down the photograph of Donny Petrozzo’s body, bound in the plastic bin liners. “Donny Petrozzo.” Next, he placed down the photograph of Stanley Leymore sitting on the toilet, dead, the bullet through his temple. “Stanley Leymore; same weapon, Silas.”

  Silas’s eyes were wide, almost popping out of his head.

  Lastly, Langton laid out the picture of Frank Brandon’s dead body, facedown in a pool of blood in the squat.

  Silas started to whimper, sniffing. As the snot trickled down his nostril, he wiped it away with the back of his hand. “Honest to God, I never done them.”

  “Honest to God, Silas, you are going to go down for all three. Your pal has given it up: you had the Glock. Out of your skull, you just went crazy and opened fire.”

  “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me!” Silas slumped forward, his head on his arms, as he started crying.

  Langton looked at the tape recorder and gathered up his papers.

  “You can have a five-minute break to talk to your solicitor, Mr. Roach, but when I come back, I suggest you start telling me the truth, because I’m losing patience.” Just as Langton pushed back his chair, Silas grabbed at the photograph in front of him.