The Red Dahlia

by Lynda La Plante

  Sharon stood behind him as he appeared in the doorway. “Not a lot of room,” she said.

  Langton gave Anna a brief nod.

  “You do your own laundry?” he asked Sharon.

  “We’ve got a washing machine but it doesn’t work that well, so we use the local launderette.”

  “You still have Louise’s dirty washing, then?”

  “Yes, it’s in the corner in that basket.” She pointed. “I don’t know what’s in there; I haven’t looked.”

  Langton’s eyes roamed slowly around the room and then back to Anna as she gestured to the wardrobe.

  “Sharon thinks Louise’s coat is missing.”

  Langton nodded. His gaze swept the room once more before he turned to Sharon. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  “The kitchen?”

  He said quietly to Anna that he would leave her to it, and followed Sharon out of the room.

  Anna did a thorough search, noting the hairbrush with dark red strands of hair still caught in it. They would take that. She did not find any personal notes or letters; there were very few knickknacks and no photographs. Louise’s cosmetics and toiletries were a mishmash of cheap products. There were a few bottles of perfume, some expensive, two of which were unopened. Anna took the stopper off the cheap-looking Tudor Rose, which was half empty, and sniffed: it was sharp and synthetic. In a rather grubby old floral silk makeup bag, she discovered several used lipsticks in various shades of pink and orange.

  Anna found nothing under the bed apart from dustballs. She looked into the laundry basket: it was full of white shirts, knickers, and bras. She shut the lid and then went back to the chest of drawers. She found two empty handbags: one quite good leather but old-fashioned, the other a small, cheap-looking clutch bag. No handbag had been found. Anna made a note to ask Sharon what kind Louise was likely to have been last seen with. Anna found no checkbooks, no diary, and no address book. Leaving the room, she frowned as she heard a sound from the kitchen. She could not hear what was being said, but it sounded as if Sharon was crying. Langton’s low, soft voice talked on.

  Anna went into the narrow bathroom; there was just room for a bath and toilet. A glass cabinet held aspirin and some prescription drugs, but the tablets were in Sharon’s name and were only for migraines. Anna moved into the hallway and opened the cupboard by the front door to find raincoats and old shoes. Looking up, she saw two stacked suitcases on a shelf. Standing on tiptoe, she read a label: Louise Pennel, and the address of the flat. Anna quietly eased the case down and carried it to the bedroom.

  The old suitcase was cheap and plastic, with a mock silk lining. Inside, there were two photo albums and a worn address book with various names and addresses listed in no particular order. Sifting through the photo albums, Anna was able to get a better idea of who Louise was. There were some black-and-white snaphots of a couple; the woman looked very like Louise and, in a number of pictures, even had a flower in her hair. The man was very good-looking but with a laconic, almost bored air about him: he rarely smiled. There were a lot of baby pictures, then Louise in school uniform and as a camera-shy teenager. The more recent photographs were in the second album. There were some of Louise at parties and others of her standing by the Regent’s Park zoo’s chimp enclosure, shading her eyes and laughing into the camera. A few innocent-looking snapshots pictured her with various young men, always smiling and hanging on to their arm. Anna jumped as Langton appeared in the doorway.

  “I need to get back. You want a lift?”

  “Yes, please. I’d like to take these with me.”

  He glanced at the albums and then walked out.

  They sat in silence in the patrol car, Langton up front, Anna in the back. As they drove away, the white forensic van was just parking up outside Sharon’s flat.

  “Louise was not a whore, but close,” he said, as if to himself.

  “I wondered about that. She had some very expensive clothes; lot of cheap ones as well, but a few designer labels and some very exclusive perfume.”

  “Sharon, I’d say, is on the game; not that she would admit it. Total denial, but she started to blubber when I asked her if Louise was. They would pick up men from clubs, sometimes together, sometimes not; on the night Louise went missing, Sharon scored herself a rock singer and spent the night at the Dorchester. Louise was often out every night. Sharon said Louise wouldn’t cook or eat anything if she didn’t have a date, so I guess the one-nighters were literally meal tickets! She described Louise as being very secretive, sometimes annoyingly so. She would be very coy about where she had been.”

  Anna chewed her lip. Sharon hadn’t told her any of this.

  “This tall, dark older guy is the one we need to trace.”

  “Sharon said she thought he might be married, which was why Louise was so secretive about him,” Anna said quietly.

  Langton nodded. “There was also something a bit kinky going on. Couple of times, she’d come back from being with him with bruises on her face and arms, very withdrawn, often crying in her room. She never said what was bothering her, just that she didn’t like doing certain things, whatever that means.”

  Anna stared out of the window. Langton had got so much detail and quickly.

  “The autopsy said there were no drugs.”

  “Yes,” Anna said lamely.

  “But she did take cocaine. Sharon said they had an argument about it. After one of the dates with this older man, Louise brought some back and offered it to Sharon. She was pretty sure that Louise was into some serious sex games with this guy. It’d sometimes be a couple of days before she’d return home, looking really knackered.”

  “She had some very expensive underwear.”

  Langton swiveled around in his seat to face her. “I think they went a bit further than sexy knickers!”

  “Oh.” Anna tried not to blush.

  He gave her one of his lopsided smiles. “ ‘Oh’? We’ll know more when they complete the autopsy; certainly taking their time. What we know already is pretty sickening.” He turned to face forward again. There was a long pause. “So, how’s life been?” he asked without looking at her.

  “Fine, thank you.”

  “Found yourself a nice chap, have you?”

  “I’ve been working too hard.”

  He snorted. “I wish the case looked as if you had; bloody nothing. To lose that amount of time before you got her identified was not good, not good at all, but then old Morgan was never what I’d call a fast thinker.”

  Before Anna could reply, they pulled into the station car park. Langton was out and heading directly into the station ahead of her as if she didn’t exist. She hurried after him and almost caught a clip from the door as he banged through. It was a repeat performance of the last time they had worked together.

  “I’m right behind you,” she said curtly, but he just ran up the stairs two at a time before slamming into the incident room.

  Langton stood in front of the team, looking at his watch, impatiently waiting for silence. It was just after six thirty. He held up the two photo albums brought from Sharon’s flat.

  “I want these gone over with a fine-tooth comb: the boyfriends, the friends, anyone that can give us more clues to our victim’s lifestyle. Also, important, hit the clubs she used. Talk to anyone that knew her or might have seen her on the last night her flatmate saw her alive. We know she was missing for three days before her body was found. Where did she go? Who with? What we do know is that she was sexually permissive and took cocaine and ecstasy; that we found no trace of drugs is down to the fact her body had been drained of blood. Big clue, because any young lad screwing her isn’t likely to be able to not only drain her blood, but also chop her in two. The toxicology results might give us more details, but they’re going to need at least three to four weeks. The initial autopsy report gave us a lot of unpleasant details and I suspect there are more to come. Whoever carved this young girl up has to have a house or apartment that could facilitate such
carnage. The suspect also has to have a car, as he transported the body to the murder site.”

  Lewis interjected. “Maybe the killer could have borrowed a vehicle, even hired one.”

  Langton suggested that he immediately check out hire cars for the relevant time and location.

  Lewis grimaced; it would be a very long and boring job, and he muttered to Barolli that he should have kept his mouth shut.

  “We have found no clothes or other personal items belonging to the victim, so I am sorry if I am going over old ground, but we need to check out skips, bins, the local tip, household waste collections, and someone will have to ascertain when the bins in that area were emptied.”

  He turned to the board and pointed. “Take a look: the saw used to dissect her body did a very professional job, so it was more than likely used by someone who has medical or surgical experience. This narrows the suspects down, so eliminate eliminate until we get some perspective on the killer. We need to track down a tall, dark-haired man, driving a…” He gestured in exasperation. “Black car, expensive-looking. This man was known to be dating our victim. This man was very secretive; this man used drugs; this man also lured Louise into perverted sexual games. Our suspect is possibly married. To start with, concentrate in this area. Any doctor or surgeon struck off for medical malpractice, any doctor or surgeon with a police record. When we have exhausted that area, we widen the net, but I want this man traced!”

  Langton dug his hands into his pockets. “I want a very closed shop on this one: keep your mouths shut about what was done to her. The press get hold of this horror and we’ll have a Fred West scenario, which we do not want. As it is, I will have the big boys breathing down my neck for a result, never mind some of the heavy-duty females skiing up the ranks.”

  Anna felt this jibe was directed at her own promotion, though Langton never even glanced in her direction.

  “I have asked for more officers to be drafted in to help us out.”

  Langton continued his briefing for over an hour. Hardly anyone interrupted, even when he said some very derogatory things about the way they had been handling the case to date. He was determined that no more time would be wasted; they had to get results, and fast. When he finished, Lewis and Barolli handed the lists of duties that Langton had ordered to the operations manager. There would be no overtime; if need be, they would have to work around the clock. Langton returned to his office. It was like a whirlwind had passed through.

  Anna went over to find out what Lewis had discovered at Louise’s place of work: not much. She was always late, bit of a shoddy worker; a very likable girl, just lazy. The dentist confirmed that he had given her notice to quit. He also confirmed that she was paid a low wage, as he had been doing a lot of free dental work on her. The other girls working at the clinic got on quite well with her, but she kept very much to herself and rarely, if ever, mixed with any of them socially. The dentist was married with four children, and on the night Louise was at Stringfellow’s, he was at a family dinner. He did not socialize with Louise and knew little or nothing about her private life; however, one of the dental nurses recalled that Louise had wanted to leave early one day, about a month before she disappeared. She had said she had an important date. The nurse had seen a black car, possibly a Rover, parked opposite the surgery, but she could not describe the man sitting inside. She said that the following day, Louise was very late for work and had showed them a bottle of perfume and a cashmere sweater she had been given by her “friend.”

  It had stuck in the nurse’s mind because, midafternoon, Louise became very sick and had to leave the surgery, so she had to cover for her. She said that Louise often came to work very hungover. A couple of times, she had also looked as if she had been in some kind of fight: her face was bruised, and once she had deep scratches on her arms. Louise had claimed she had been tipsy and fallen down the stairs of her flat.

  Langton rocked back in his chair, flipping a pen up and down as he listened to Barolli going over the wording of the press statements. Langton was being cagey about what they should release: too much information would result in a slew of sickos calling in. The most important thing to get across was that the police wished to contact the tall, dark middle-aged man in order to eliminate him from their inquiries. They also needed to know if anyone had seen Louise during those three days she was missing. Langton okayed the use of that same photograph with the red rose in her hair. He then called it quits for himself and went home.

  Anna did not get home until late either. She felt too tired to cook, so had bought a pizza on her way home. She had a bottle of wine already open and poured herself a glass. The pizza was cold now, but she ate it anyway as she opened the copy of tomorrow’s Sun she’d picked up from the tube station. She knew the press release would be coming out the following morning, so it was a surprise when the now-familiar photograph of Louise stared back at her from page two.

  The accompanying headline read POLICE HUNT KILLER OF RED DAHLIA. Anna frowned; it was not a dahlia but a rose in Louise’s hair. The article likened the case to a very brutal murder that had made history in Los Angeles in the mid-forties, that of Elizabeth Short: a beautiful girl who was nicknamed the Black Dahlia because of the flower she wore in her raven hair.

  The journalist on the Sun crime desk had cobbled the story together, but his editor liked it; the catchphrase of the Black and Red Dahlias looked good in print, as did the two color photographs of the dead girls. Though they lacked any real detail about the Louise Pennel case, they could hang the article on the fact that the killer of the Black Dahlia was never traced, just as the killer of Louise Pennel, the Red Dahlia, remained at large after ten days.

  The journalist kept quiet about the fact that he had received an anonymous letter pointing this out. The second contact from the killer lay crumpled in a ball in his office bin.

  3

  Langton chucked the newspaper into the bin in his kitchen.

  He snapped angrily into the phone. “Yeah, I just read it. No! Do nothing about it. I’ve never heard of this Black Dahlia woman, have you?”

  Lewis said that he hadn’t either.

  “Doesn’t really have anything to do with us, seeing as it was in the forties and in the bloody USA!”

  Lewis wished he had never made the call. “Right, just thought if you hadn’t seen it.”

  “Yeah, yeah; look, I’m tired out, sorry if I bit your head off. See you in the morning.” Langton was about to replace the receiver when he remembered. “How’s your son?”

  “He’s terrific; got over that bug, and he’s got rows of teeth now,” Lewis said affably.

  “Great; good night, then.”

  “ ’Night.”

  It was after eleven. Langton retrieved the paper from the bin and pressed it out flat on his kitchen counter.

  Elizabeth Short, though aged only twenty-two, had been a jaded beauty with raven-black hair, white face, and dark-painted lips. The flower in her hair might have been a dahlia, but it wasn’t black. In comparison, Louise Pennel looked younger and fresher, even though they were about the same age. Louise’s eyes were dark brown and Elizabeth’s green, but eerily, the dead girls had a similar expression. The half-smile on their pretty lips was sexual, teasing, yet the eyes had a solemnity and a sadness, as if they knew what fate had in store.

  DAY EIGHT

  The next morning, Anna stopped off at a bookshop to buy her daily Guardian. Next to the till, there was a bookstand of half-price paperbacks, one of which was The Black Dahlia. Blazoned across the cover were the words TRUE LIFE CRIME. She bought it. By the time she got to the incident room, the phones were jangling; the press release was in all the papers, as was the photograph of Louise with the red rose. Numerous other tabloids had picked up on the Sun’s article and were also now calling Louise the Red Dahlia. A couple of articles referred to the original case in LA but most of them concentrated, as Langton had hoped they would, on the fact that the police were trying to trace the tall, dark-haired
stranger.

  Eight days into the inquiry, for all Langton’s snide remarks about Morgan, he had got no further in tracing Louise’s killer himself, though at least he did now have more facts to give the press. Although they had not been given all the details, the brutality of the murder, even tempered down, made shocking reading.

  All the calls to the incident room regarding the Red Dahlia inquiry had to be monitored and checked out, so extra clerical staff had been shipped in. Of the many calls, seventy percent were from either jokers or perverts; thirty percent still needed investigating. It was a long day, with half the team interviewing Louise’s friends, such as they were, or trying to trace the male companions pictured in her photograph albums. Meanwhile, forensics had removed all the dirty laundry and bed linen from Louise’s flat to test for DNA. Langton was covering all areas but still felt like a headless chicken. He decided to go to Stringfellow’s with Lewis to make inquiries. Barolli was checking out the other two clubs that Sharon had said Louise often went to, hoping that someone would be able to identify their tall, dark stranger, or that someone would have witnessed Louise leaving the club. Taxis also had to be checked out; it was an endless, tedious slog, but it had to be done.

  The officers who had been scouring the coffee bars local to Louise’s workplace had various sightings of her confirmed; she was often alone, though she would sometimes pick someone up and go to the cinema in Baker Street. No one questioned could give a name or recall ever seeing her with the same person twice, let alone a tall, dark stranger. She was always friendly and chatty; no one thought she was on the game, more that she needed company—preferably the sort who would pick up the bill.

  Anna had not been asked to join the lads on their club crawl, but she didn’t mind. Her head ached from monitoring call after call, still with nothing tangible at the end of the day. During her lunch break, she had begun reading the book about Elizabeth Short’s murder. It had been written by a former Los Angeles Police Department officer, who had been attached for many years to the homicide division of LA County. He made some startling deductions and even put forward his own father as the killer. Anna continued reading once she was home. She didn’t expect to be up still at two o’clock in the morning, but she had been unable to put the book down. Even when she finished it, sleep didn’t come: all she could do was think about its nightmarish contents. Although Elizabeth Short had been murdered in the forties, there was nevertheless a sickening link beyond the similarities between her photograph and Louise’s. The murders were virtually identical.