Above Suspicion

by Lynda La Plante

  Anna had ridden horses since she was a toddler. She had won so many rosettes that she could cover herself from top to toe in red and blue ribbons. Once her dad had pinned them all over her and taken a photograph; she had only been eleven years old.

  Anna’s thoughts turned toward Melissa. What had her young life been like, before she was reduced to her present state? She thought of herself at that age, then younger. She realized Langton was talking to her and she leaned forward. “Sorry, sir, I missed that.”

  “The reason I force myself to go through the postmortem, to see that little soul cut to shreds, disemboweled, dehumanized, is because, somehow, it makes it easier. It steadies the anger. That prick Hedges couldn’t take it, of course. Wimp!”

  He closed his eyes; conversation seemed at an end for now.

  Anna followed Langton to the incident room, where he threw off his coat, took a marker and headed toward the board. He began listing the information he’d received from Henson. Without turning, he called out, “Jean, can you get me a chicken and bacon sandwich, no tomatoes, and a coffee.”

  Jean, a thin-faced constable in uniform, was working at one of the computers. She stood up as soon as he called her name: “You want a Kit-Kat, or anything else?” She didn’t look as if she suffered fools gladly.

  “No, thank you. Bacon and chicken sandwich, no tomatoes.”

  Mike Lewis walked in as Langton continued to mark the board: “Mike, it looks like our tip-off was right.”

  “OK! We got a time of death?”

  “Not yet, but she’s been dead four weeks at least. Strangled and sexually abused. Get onto the super, tell him we have a critical incident. We’ll need a Gold Group set up; we’re in danger of losing the public’s confidence. Contact the murder review team, let them know that we are now handling the inquiry. Is Barolli back yet?”

  “Nope, but he shouldn’t be long. He went over to forensics.”

  “Gather the team together, we’ll have an update at…” Langton glanced at his watch, then checked on the wall clock. “It’s already three o’clock. Fuck. Say half four?”

  Everyone in the incident room, apart from Anna herself, was getting ready for the meeting. None of her training had prepared her to join an up-and-running team like this one.

  “Excuse me, sir. Is there anything you want me to concentrate on?”

  Langton sighed. “Familiarize yourself with the case histories. Find a desk, Travis, and get started.”

  He pointed to the notice boards, then waved his hand toward a section of filing cabinets that lined one wall.

  “Right, sir.”

  She tried her best to look as if she knew what she was doing, but she was at a loss as to where to start and she could not figure out the filing system. Many of the cabinets had stacks of loose files balanced on top of them.

  A uniformed PC passed, carrying a tray of teacups.

  “Excuse me, which is the first case file?”

  “One nearest the wall,” answered the PC, without looking back.

  When Anna opened the top drawer, she found it fully stacked with rows of files. Removing an armful, she turned to survey the room. The same PC passed by with the empty tray.

  “Erm…is there a desk I could use?”

  The desk in the rear of the room was cluttered with cartons of takeaway food. The wastepaper bin beside it was overflowing with empty hamburger cartons and cold chips. Anna tidied a space for herself.

  Suddenly there was a bellow. Langton was holding up his sandwich, waving it around.

  “I said it not once but twice: no fucking tomatoes, Jean!”

  “I asked them for no tomatoes.” Jean was red-faced.

  “Well, it’s full of them! You know I hate tomatoes!”

  “Would you like me to take them out?” Jean retorted, but Langton was already chucking them into the bin.

  Anna lowered her head; she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. No one here had offered her so much as a cup of tea or coffee. Her presence seemed to go unnoticed. She located her briefcase and had just taken out new pencils and a notebook when she realized it was almost four o’clock.

  Teresa Booth was forty-four when her body was found on wasteground near the Kingston bypass. She had been a prostitute, though not from that area. Teresa worked the red-light district of Leeds for many years.

  With the busy road so close, not many pedestrians used the area and the victim had been found by a boy whose scooter had broken down. Wheeling it off the busy road onto the narrow pavement, he had glimpsed a foot through the undergrowth. After scrambling up the ridge, the boy found the body. The corpse’s hands had been tied behind her back with a bra; she had been strangled with a pair of black tights. The body had remained undetected behind bushes for three to four weeks. It had taken longer—four months—to identify her. This discovery was in1992.

  The mortuary photographs were attached, with pictures of the murder site. Teresa’s face in death had a terrible, haunting ugliness. Her skin was pockmarked and she had a deep scar on one cheek. Her bleached blonde hair had black roots showing. The initials “TB” on her arm appeared to have been scratched or cut and she had a faded pink heart tattooed on her right thigh. She had severe bruises to her genital area.

  “TB” had been traced to Terence Booth, her first husband. Teresa had subsequently been married three times. Though she had three children, none of them appeared to be by any of her husbands. Two were sent to foster care at a very early age, while the youngest, a boy, had been living with her mother.

  Teresa looked a lot older than her forty-four years. Hers was a sad, murky history. She was an alcoholic who had spent time in prison for persistent prostitution offenses and for “kiting,” which meant she was caught with using stolen credit cards and passing dud checks. She was identified by her fingerprints and from her photographs.

  “Travis!” Anna looked up. Mike Lewis was gesturing at the door for her to get a move on. She had been so engrossed, she hadn’t noticed the gradual emptying of the incident room. “Briefing room,” Lewis explained before disappearing.

  Anna was hurrying after him when Jean called out: “Don’t leave the files out, please; return them to the cabinet.”

  Anna zigzagged back to the desk, where she collected the half-read file and replaced it. When she asked where the briefing room was, Jean said sharply, “Second door on the left, one flight down.” As Anna exited rapidly, she could hear Jean moaning to another woman. “I’m sick to death of him having a go at me. It’s not my job, anyway, to go schlepping out for his lunch. They’re all bloody foreign in there, don’t understand a word you say to them; ‘no tomatoes’ and he gets layers of them!”

  Anna flew down the narrow stone steps and along a murky corridor. The hubbub of noise drew her easily to the briefing room. Rows of chairs had been placed in haphazard lines and a desk and two chairs faced them. The large dingy room smelled of stale tobacco, even though there were stained yellow notices demanding “No Smoking.”

  Anna skirted her way along to a vacant chair at the back, where she sat clutching her notebook. Up front, Lewis and Barolli were joined by eight detectives and six uniformed officers. The two female detectives were a large blonde woman who looked to be of retirement age and a tall thin-faced woman in her mid-thirties with badly capped teeth.

  The superintendent who had overall charge of the inquiry, DCS Eric Thompson, entered, closely followed by Langton. Thompson had an athletic look about him: his face fresh, his shoulders upright; he stood as if poised on the balls of his feet. His thinning hair was combed back from a high forehead. Langton by comparison looked tired and crumpled and in need of a shave. Barolli was loosening his tie in a seat nearby.

  “Quiet down!” Langton barked. He perched on the edge of a desk and leaned forward to address the room.

  “The victim was formally identified today by her father. She is, or was, Melissa Stephens, aged seventeen. We suspect she is a ‘possible.’ Her boyfriend’s statement on the night she went mi
ssing is all we have to go on so far, but it is my belief that Melissa strayed into our killer’s target area. To date all his victims have been hardened prostitutes, all in their late thirties or early forties. Melissa may be our biggest breakthrough yet. It’s imperative we move like the clappers.”

  Anna made copious notes, but not being privy to any of the previous case files, she had no idea what Langton was talking about most of the time. What she picked up was the following: on the night Melissa disappeared, she had an argument with her boyfriend. This had occurred at a late-night café close to Covent Garden. She was last seen walking in the direction of Soho. The boyfriend assumed she was heading toward Oxford Circus tube station. He finished his drink and headed after her. But Melissa, it seemed, had found a shortcut, perhaps down Greek Street. Inadvertently, she went through the red-light district.

  Though Melissa’s boyfriend, Mark Rawlins, called her mobile phone incessantly from the tube station, it was useless. The phone had been turned off. Frightened for her, he retraced his footsteps, hoping he’d bump into her. After returning to The Bistro, around 2.30 a.m., he went back to Oxford Circus tube station, then on to Melissa’s flat, but she had not arrived home. Neither Mark nor her three flatmates ever saw Melissa again.

  The following day, after calling her parents in Guildford and everyone else he could think of, Mark finally contacted the police. Forty-eight hours later, a missing person’s file was lodged and circulated, along with photographs and requests for information.

  No one came forward, even after a television reconstruction shown four weeks after her disappearance. They had not one eyewitness who could give a clue to her disappearance, with the possible exception of a waiter who had been smoking a cigarette outside a renowned gay club and who saw a blonde girl talking to the driver of a pale-colored, or maybe white, car. At the time, he assumed she was a prostitute, he said. Though he didn’t get a good look at her face, he did notice her black T-shirt, which had diamanté studs that sparkled in the neon lights outside the massage parlor opposite.

  Langton suggested that their killer, who haunted red-light districts, could have mistaken Melissa for a call girl: outside a strip joint very late at night, a blonde in a sexy outfit, short skirt and strappy sandals—could their killer have been the one to pick her up?

  Though the briefing continued for another hour, the super finally insisted they did not yet have enough information for him to take to the commander and request this murder inquiry be handed over to Langton’s team. Hearing this, Langton jumped to his feet, holding the photos of the six dead women like a pack of cards.

  “Their hands tied with their bra, strangled with their own tights. If forensic can verify that the knots around the neck and wrists were tied in a similar way, then Melissa Stephens becomes the latest victim of a serial killing. If we get this case then we’ve some hope of catching the bastard, but we’ve got to move! Any time lost in farting around begging for the inquiry is a fucking waste of time!”

  With that, the team broke up; they would simply have to wait until the following morning.

  After the team had left the briefing room, Langton sat moodily in a hard-backed chair. He looked up when he heard Anna crossing the floor toward him. He held in his hand the photos of the dead women.

  “They were all alive, once. Albeit in one wretched condition or another, but nevertheless they were alive, with families, husbands, sometimes kids. Now they’re dead and whether or not they were junkies, whores, drunks, or just fucked-up human beings, they have a right to have us hunt down who killed them with as much press as Melissa Stephens.”

  He sighed, pinching his nose. “’Course, on the other hand, I could be wrong. We won’t know one hundred percent until we get the forensic evidence back.”

  “But you really do think it’s the same man.” Anna felt more at ease with him now.

  “Thinking isn’t good enough, Travis. It’s evidence that counts. If they tell me that Melissa’s bra or the tights that throttled the life out of her weren’t tied in the same way as these poor bitches, then no, it’s not the same killer.”

  “Was there any DNA?”

  Now he turned that laser stare on her. “Read the case files; don’t waste my time.”

  “Would it be possible to take a couple home to read? Or I can stay late and do it here, so I’m up to speed with everyone else?”

  “Sign for anything you take out.” Langton banged through the doors.

  Anna shook her head; these guys certainly liked to make an exit. She collected her notebook and pencils. As she walked toward the open door she gave a backward glance to the still-smoky room. The chairs were now even more jumbled, the cups and saucers used as ashtrays overflowed and screwed-up paper and old newspapers littered the floor.

  She closed the door behind her quietly. She felt a strange sense of elation to be part of her father’s world.

  Chapter Two

  It was past midnight when Anna finished compiling her shorthand notes on the Teresa Booth case, and by the time she had finished the file on the next victim, it was after two o’clock in the morning.

  Sandra Donaldson, aged forty-one, had a similar background to the first victim: a life of abuse, drugs, alcohol, four children all fostered out and a junkie boyfriend. She was first arrested for prostitution when she was twenty and then numerous times after that for theft and handling stolen property as well as further arrests for prostitution.

  According to postmortem reports, she had been more severely beaten than the first victim. Her bruises looked horrific: some old and yellowing, some fresh. Her black bra had been used to tie her hands behind her back and she had been strangled with her tights. When Anna matched the two large blown-up photographs depicting the way the items had been knotted, she was hardly surprised to find they were identical.

  Sandra had been raped brutally, with damage to her vagina and anus. Like Teresa’s, her body was dumped and left rotting like rubbish. Anna reflected on this sad end to a sad life. It had taken weeks before anyone claimed her body for burial. The only reason she had been identified in the first place was because her fingerprints had been on file. Anna wrote a memo, reminding herself to check if all the other victims had police records too. It was the last thing she did before she collapsed exhausted into bed.

  However, none of this weariness was evident in her face or demeanor the next morning when, just before nine o’clock, she arrived at work in her brand-new Mini Cooper. A uniformed officer directed her to a car park round the back of the station, which was completely full with patrol cars. Obviously there had been no space allocated for her, so it took a few tours around the car park before she wedged her car in beside a battered old Volvo. As she locked her car, she prayed that whoever drove the Volvo wouldn’t scratch her baby on their way out.

  The incident room was quiet that morning and, with some relief, she noted that the used food cartons had been removed from the desks.

  “Good morning, Jean,” she said brightly. “Nobody here yet?”

  Jean, the only other occupant, returned her greeting with a lukewarm smile.

  “You must be joking. They’ve been in the briefing room for an hour. There’s a big strategy meeting.”

  “Nobody mentioned it last night,” Anna protested, taking off her coat. She quickly returned the files to the filing cabinet before heading to the door.

  “Did you get permission to take those away? They are supposed to stay here, you know.”

  “I am aware of that, Jean,” Anna replied, trying to curb her irritation, “but I asked DCI Langton if I could take them, to catch up. I signed them out in the logbook and desk diary. Who’s down there at the meeting?”

  “The commander. If DCI Langton can prove our murders are linked to the Melissa Stephens case and we have in-depth knowledge of all the linked offenses, we’ll have all the help we need.”

  Anna waited for her to explain.

  Jean did so carefully, as if dealing with a half-wit: “The Departmen
t of Public Affairs will liaise with the D/SIO and the SIO and will provide press statements and organize briefings. It’s all political now. Drives me nuts. There’s more and more paperwork required on every investigation.”

  “Has any conclusive evidence come up since last night that links Melissa Stephens to this inquiry?”

  “I don’t know, but the gov was in before the cleaners this morning, so I’d say he’s found something.”

  Jean looked smug as she resumed typing on her computer. Anna walked out of the room.

  There wasn’t a soul in the corridor or on the stairs; in fact, it seemed almost ominously quiet as Anna made her way to the briefing room on the lower floor. Since this was the headquarters of the day-to-day operations of the station, on a typical morning phones could be expected to be ringing constantly, with the sound of voices wafting up the stone steps to the next level.

  Not today, however. The double doors to the briefing room were closed and, unlike the interview rooms, there were no glass panels in them. Anna leaned against the doors, hoping she could hear something, anything. Apart from a low murmur of voices, she heard nothing. She couldn’t bear to barge into the room, so she turned round, planning to head back to the incident room, and almost collided with DC Barolli as he came out of the gents, wiping his hands on a paper towel.

  “How’s it going?” she said, in a low voice.

  “I couldn’t tell you. The commander’s not one to give anything away.” He lobbed the paper at a bin, missing it.

  “Did we get anything from forensic?”

  “You must be joking. They take their time.”

  “So, no other details came in?”

  “Not that I know. Those pricks over at Clapham wouldn’t give you a pot to piss in.”

  He continued down the corridor, so Anna returned to the incident room, where she read the third case history. This victim’s name was Kathleen Keegan. She was aged fifty, of below-average intelligence and illiterate. She had been beaten down by depression and ill health. There had been numerous arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct and, as with the others, arrests for prostitution and streetwalking. She had once been a redhead, but the hair in the photographs was badly dyed blonde and in texture resembled frizzy door matting. The mortuary pictures of her sagging, overweight body and her flattened breasts were depressing. Six babies had gone to care homes, or been fostered, due to her inability to care for them.