A Passion So Deadly

Seventeen

It was the next morning, Tuesday, December 22nd, just three days before Christmas, when she arrived at Staple Hill Police Station. She was tall, elegant, beautifully dressed, and gave the impression of being quite composed and in charge of herself. But she was wearing dark glasses, which she removed when she spoke to the desk clerk to reveal tired red-rimmed eyes. And when you looked at her closely there were lines of strain around her mouth. This was obviously a woman under great stress. Her voice, however, was calm and she spoke clearly and unemotionally.

‘My name is Constance Lange,’ she said. ‘I am also known as Mrs Pattinson. I would like to confess to murder.’

Almost everyone in Bristol, probably everyone in the UK, knew who Mrs Pattinson was — or certainly who she was supposed to be. The desk clerk, an experienced former police officer now re-employed as a civilian, tried not to gulp. He instructed his younger assistant to contact DCI Rose Piper at once. He did not intend to take his eyes off this Constance Lange until she was safely passed on to far more senior hands than his. The chances were she was no more Mrs Blessed Pattinson than his missus, but in his job you didn’t take chances. And there was something about this woman which set his teeth on edge.

In fact, the clerk on duty at Staple Hill that morning would imminently have preferred a return to the policing of another age. He would certainly rather have liked to handcuff the woman to the chair he had bidden her sit in — just to make sure.

Fortunately both Rose Piper and Peter Mellor were at their desks when the call came through to the portacabin incident room.

They dashed across the yard to the main station building, trying to suppress their excitement. It was a bitterly cold day and neither had bothered to put coat or jacket on, yet they felt no pain.

‘Probably just another nutter, boss,’ said Mellor.

Rose knew he didn’t really mean it. The pair of them already had a gut feeling that this was the real thing, she was sure of that. There had been quite enough approaches from members of the public who had caused a lot of work and so far no progress by claiming that they knew Mrs Pattinson — but this was the first time anyone had claimed to actually be her.

Constance stood up as the inspector and the sergeant approached her. Rose appraised her quickly, searching for some quick visual confirmation that this really was Mrs Pattinson.

At a glance the woman more or less matched the physical description that had been compiled. Most importantly she was definitely about the right height, build, and age. Her hair was different, but Rose had expected that. She tried to imagine the face before her framed in Mrs Pattinson’s glossy blonde bob, and she could certainly see nothing which precluded Constance Lange from being Mrs P — except maybe the colour of her eyes, which were light hazel rather than deep green.

Rather to Rose’s surprise, Constance Lange stretched out a hand in greeting and Rose found herself taking it. The woman was behaving more as if she were the vicar’s wife on house calls rather than a murderer who had walked into a police station to confess, Rose thought.

‘Good morning,’ said the woman, in rather nicely modulated tones.

Rose coughed, clearing her throat. The handshake had been firm but courteously brief. The other woman’s flesh warm and compliant. Any kind of physical contact with an allegedly violent criminal was always an unnerving experience. But Rose knew better than to allow herself to make assumptions. She locked into professional mode, briskly introducing herself and Sergeant Mellor.

‘I understand you wish to make a statement, Mrs Lange,’ she said crisply.

Constance Lange merely nodded her assent. Like the front officer clerk Rose took in all the obvious signs of strain. But, nonetheless, Mrs Lange seemed quite self-assured, at peace with herself almost. She gave no indication of any nervousness or uncertainty at all about what she intended to do.

They took her to an interview room where she turned down an offer of tea or coffee, making it quite obvious that she wanted only to get on with the business in hand. Peter Mellor turned on and checked the tape recorder. For the purposes of security two tapes were always used. He and Rose sat across a simple wooden table from Constance.

It was a small airless room, but if Constance Lange was in any way daunted she gave no hint of it. And when she began to speak she did so with great deliberation and a kind of studied calm. She did not look at either police officer sitting opposite her. Instead she kept her eyes cast down towards her hands clasped on the table before her. They were strong capable hands, Rose noticed, hands that were definitely used to physical work, yet well cared for. The nails were without varnish but manicured. She studied the long elegant fingers, wound lightly together. The hands rested easily, perfectly still. There was not the slightest hint of any tremor. And neither was there any tremor in her voice, which remained clear and expressionless.

Firstly she explained who she was, the widow of a respected Somerset farmer, a mother and a grandmother, even giving a brief resume of her background. She was a girl who had come from nowhere to become a wealthy middle-class woman with a lovely family. Someone to be envied. She spoke almost as if she were making a speech that she had rehearsed.

‘But you see, for many years now I have lived a double life,’ she revealed. ‘Mrs Pattinson was the other me. The person I could never quite shut out. When I was Mrs Pattinson I could do things I could never do as Mrs Lange. Being Mrs Lange was not quite enough for me...’

Her voice trailed away a little there, as if she could not really quite believe what she was saying, Rose thought.

‘I thought I could get away with it,’ Constance continued. ‘And I did for a long time. My excuse was an elderly aunt with Alzheimer’s whom I used to visit in Bristol, and after she died I just pretended she was still alive. It was so easy. Once a month I would hide behind the identity of Mrs Pattinson and it almost became a routine part of my life. It even seemed quite safe, really, trouble free. That might sound crazy now, but I did what I did because it was a way of getting what I wanted with very limited danger. I thought it was less dangerous than a series of affairs.’

Constance paused, shut her eyes tightly for a few seconds and then opened them again. Rose could detect no sign of any weakness, but was aware, perhaps, of the first flicker of pain. The woman’s voice had just the slightest shake to it when she continued.

‘You see, I have always had certain needs. Certain fantasies I could never quite get out of my head. Fantasies that would lie dormant for a time, but never leave me completely alone. None of it has ever had anything to do with my family...’ This time her voice definitely faltered. ‘I don’t suppose you’d understand.’

Rose could not take her eyes off the woman. She did understand, as it happened — up to a point, anyway. For Rose, keeping her own sex life under control had always been a bit like riding a bicycle — OK as long as you didn’t lose your balance. Rose had so far kept her balance, just about, but was all too aware of how easy it would be to fall off.

The more Constance Lange talked about her sexual desires and how she had arranged a double life in order to satisfy them, how she had seemed almost to have no choice, the more Rose found herself sympathising, in fact almost bonding with her.

But this case was not about the mere realisation of allegedly harmless sexual fantasy. Constance Lange was in the process of confessing to murder — and that was something else. Rose Piper could never sympathise with a killer.

‘I killed Marty Morris because he was blackmailing me,’ said Constance, once again in the same matter-of-fact tone. ‘Apparently he followed me home to Chalmpton one day. He threatened to tell my husband about my secret sex life if I did not pay him an extremely large sum of money. I paid up. But the demands continued. In the end I became quite desperate.’

‘But you asked for Charlie Collins the night Marty was murdered,’ said Rose. ‘It always seemed likeliest to us that Marty Morris was killed by mistake.’

Constance shook her head. ‘I’d planned to tell Charlie what Marty was doing, to call in his help. I’d been...’ she hesitated as if searching for the right word, then continued, ‘...using Charlie for some time. I don’t know why I thought he would help me, but I did.

‘Then Marty turned up instead, and it seemed like fate. I couldn’t stop myself when I saw him coming through the garden, I saw a chance to get rid of this evil thing that was threatening my life.’

She looked quite intense. The words seemed almost to be choking her, while at the same time Rose sensed that the woman was also relieved, every bit as if she were getting something terrible off her chest. There were flaws in her story, anomalies which would have to be cleared up before Constance Lange’s statement could be accepted, but this was not unusual. The DCI just wanted to make quite sure that nothing was overlooked.

‘Why would Marty have agreed to offer his services to you that night when he was already blackmailing you?’ enquired Rose stonily.

‘I asked myself that,’ Constance responded coolly. ‘I assumed that either he wasn’t actually told he was going to see Mrs Pattinson — I am sure you have gathered already that I was not the only woman who sought to be entertained by Avon Escorts at the Crescent — or that he thought he would use the opportunity to further threaten me. I don’t suppose he saw me as a threat for one minute.’

‘But Mrs Lange, what were you doing lurking in the hotel gardens if you were waiting just to talk to Charlie Collins? And what on earth were you doing carrying a weapon capable of killing a man?’

The questions did not seem even to make Constance Lange pause to draw breath. She answered at once. ‘I didn’t book into the hotel because I didn’t want to make my situation even worse. I only wanted to talk to Charlie so I hid and waited for him outside. I had been shopping in Bristol earlier — I had to go home with shopping like I always did, or it would have looked suspicious — and I’d bought a new carving knife, a good one, a butcher’s knife. I had it in my bag.’

Peter Mellor butted in, making his contempt for the woman sitting opposite him quite clear.

‘You didn’t mean to kill, and yet you happened to have a lethal knife in your bag? Don’t you think that is something of a coincidence, Mrs Lange?’

Constance seemed almost to smile. ‘It may be, sergeant, but I think you will find that whole nations have fallen because of unfortunate coincidences before, let alone one confused and frightened woman.’

Peter Mellor raised his eyebrows. The corners of his mouth were turned firmly downwards. Rose knew he would have found Constance’s remark patronising, particularly as the woman was a murder suspect. She did not think Constance Lange had intended that for one second, but her sergeant could sometimes still be overtly sensitive in the company of the well-off white middle-class.

‘So what “unfortunate coincidence” exactly led you to kill Colin Parker?’ he asked archly.

‘None at all, sergeant,’ replied Constance. ‘I planned the murder of Colin Parker quite carefully. I had to kill him, you see, because, after Marty Morris died, Parker continued in his place. He carried on with the blackmail demands. I assumed they must have been in it together from the beginning.

‘He was either a very brave or foolhardy young man, don’t you think, sergeant, to carry on after I had murdered Marty? But I can assure you that he did. I suppose he thought that as long as he kept away from Mrs Pattinson he would be safe. He had no idea that the client he agreed to meet at the Portway Towers was Mrs Pattinson under another name. The thought obviously never occurred to him.’

‘I don’t think high intelligence is a criteria much sought after by escort agencies, Mrs Lange,’ commented Mellor, who seemed to be allowing himself to become rather more riled than Rose would have liked.

‘Oh, you’d be surprised, sergeant, you’d be surprised,’ responded Constance Lange, and again there was a quickness and a certain edge of wry amusement in the way that she spoke which gave Rose the merest glimpse of the kind of woman she might have been before all this had begun. Nonetheless the DCI reckoned it was definitely time for her to step in again.

‘OK, Mrs Lange; that’s enough of that,’ she said sharply. ‘Let’s move on to the third murder. Are you going to tell us that Wayne Thompson was also blackmailing you?’

‘No, Chief Inspector. I killed Wayne Thompson for revenge, I suppose. Or maybe because I couldn’t stop... That’s why I’m here today. Because I want it to stop. It has to stop.’

At last she raised her gaze from the table before her and met Rose Piper’s gaze full on. Her eyes were not just red-rimmed, they were also bloodshot. There were signs of broken blood vessels. This was a woman who had done a great deal of crying recently, Rose thought. And now she could see the pain for sure. The look in Constance Lange’s eyes was beyond pain. She was a woman in torment. Rose had no doubt about that.

‘I killed Marty Morris and Colin Parker to stop my husband finding out about me — and then he found out anyway,’ she said simply.

And she related how Freddie had discovered her double life when Helen had suddenly been taken ill. How he had found that there had been no aged aunt for Constance to visit in Bristol every month, that there was some other hidden reason for her days away from home. A reason which destroyed the whole fabric of his existence.

‘When I got back that night Freddie was sitting looking at two phone numbers which he had scribbled on a scrap of paper,’ said Constance. ‘One was the number of Aunt Ada’s nursing home and the other was for Avon Escorts.

‘After finding out that Aunt Ada had died three years previously he started checking out the numbers I had programmed into my mobile phone. There were only about a dozen of them, Avon was number nine. Odd to think that if I had not forgotten my mobile phone that day Freddie might still be alive, isn’t it?’

She paused again. Rose thought she might be about to break down, but she didn’t. Not quite.

‘There was nothing I could say to Freddie, really,’ Constance went on. ‘Avon Escorts had had enough publicity. He couldn’t possibly have any doubts about what the outfit was, and there was no other reason for me to have the number except to make use of their services.

‘I didn’t tell him everything, of course. I tried to protect him, as much as I could. But it all fitted together for him, suddenly, you see. The whole sorry scenario. Once Freddie’s suspicions were aroused it wasn’t too difficult for him to fill in the gaps. He’d pretty well done it before I even arrived home that night.’

There was another brief silence, so intense that Rose could even hear the faint whirr of the tape recorder.

‘Do you think your husband actually suspected you of murder, Mrs Lange?’ she asked quietly.

Constance shrugged. ‘I don’t really know,’ she said. ‘I suppose he must have done, I was so obviously Mrs Pattinson. He didn’t say so directly. But after that dreadful night he barely spoke to me again. And it was only two days later that he... that he... died.’

She told the story of Freddie’s mysterious car crash.

‘Freddie was the most careful of drivers, and he was extra careful when he was in that beloved MG of his. He knew the road too. It couldn’t have been an accident, smashing straight into a wall like he did...’

‘So you believe your husband committed suicide, is that it, Mrs Lange?’ Rose asked bluntly.

Constance nodded. ‘Freddie couldn’t live with the shame, with the grief,’ she said. ‘You have to remember that we had a wonderful marriage. I suppose that sounds strange... but we did have a wonderful marriage.

‘I have no doubt that Freddie took his own life — after all, he reckoned it was over anyway. He would rather be dead than live with what he knew. And that was the ultimate terrible blow. I will carry the guilt always.’

Rose stared at her, trying to see inside her head.

‘I still don’t understand why you then killed Wayne Thompson,’ she said.

‘Neither do I, not entirely,’ replied Constance. ‘I told you, that’s partly why I’m here. Sometimes I think I’ve gone mad. After Freddie died I just wanted to hit out. I’d been with Wayne Thompson as well, of course, and I found myself blaming him and the other boys. It was them who had destroyed my life, not me. Suddenly all I wanted to do was to destroy them, all of them. I barely remember killing Wayne Thompson. I was in a kind of trance. Only when I came out of it did I start to realise the full horror of all that I had done. I still cannot believe what I have been capable of. I have frightened myself.

‘The Avon boys didn’t destroy me. I destroyed myself, and my Freddie, my entire family. I want to be punished for the evil I have done. And I want to be stopped from hurting anyone else. I have to be stopped.’

Rose had one final question for that first session, to which she suspected she already knew the answer.

‘Mrs Lange, we have more than one description of Mrs Pattinson as a woman with reddish blonde hair shaped in a bob and deep green eyes. You do not answer that description at all. Can you explain that to me please?’

Wordlessly Constance delved into the big handbag she had brought with her and on the table before her she placed a blonde wig and a small box containing a pair of green-tinted contact lenses.

Charlie was interviewed formally again at Staple Hill. He vehemently denied knowing anything about blackmail. ‘I’ve told you, no way,’ he said.

If there had been a blackmail scam and if Mrs Pattinson had got to him that night, yes, he’d have helped her sort it, no doubt about it.

The next morning his picture, snatched on the station steps, was on the front page of two national newspapers. Both described him as ‘the male prostitute at the centre of the Bristol rent boy murders,’ and also as ‘the one who got away.’

Rose felt for him but realistically had been surprised that the Charlie Collins connection had not already surfaced in the press. It was a good juicy angle and one that could have been leaked much earlier from numerous sources both on the street and, she had to admit, within the force. And the press were still free to print more or less anything they liked concerning the murders because nobody had yet been charged and so the case was not yet sub judice.

However that might all change pretty soon, Rose thought. And all the papers indeed reported that ambiguous line into which so much can be read: ‘A woman was last night helping police with their enquiries.’

Charlie Collins was woken that morning by his mother slamming open his bedroom door. She threw a copy of the Daily Mirror on to the bed. His own picture, beneath a particularly lurid headline, confronted him.

He was streetwise, wasn’t he? He must have known something like this would happen sooner or later. And he had been half-aware of a cameraman outside Staple Hill. But he had put that out of his mind along with all the rest of it and carried on kidding himself that nothing would happen. That things would get back to normal sooner or later and he could carry on with his life just the way he had before.

He rubbed his eyes. Sadly the images before him stayed exactly the same. His mother looked as if she had already been crying.

‘Look, it’s not the way it seems, ma, honest,’ he began.

Miriam Collins interrupted him.

‘Answer me just one thing, Charlie,’ she said grimly. ‘Have you been sleeping with women for money? Is that what’s bought that fancy flat and that smart car of yours? Is that what you do?’

‘Look, ma,’ Charlie tried again. ‘I never wanted you to find out. It’s not the way you think, you see...’

‘Just answer the question, Charlie. Do you sleep with women for money?’ Miriam Collins’ gaze did not waver. There was ice in her voice.

‘Well yeah, ma, but...’

Again Mrs Collins did not give her son a chance to finish. ‘That’s all I want to know,’ she said. ‘Now, get out of my house.’

Constance Lange was formally arrested on suspicion of murder and over the next thirty-six hours — the maximum time the police are allowed to keep a suspect in custody without bringing charges — Rose Piper and Peter Mellor interviewed her several more times, questioning the woman ferociously.

Constance was now accompanied at the interview sessions by a solicitor, provided by the police as the law requires, even though she had refused the opportunity to contact a lawyer herself and showed no interest at all in legal representation.

‘What have you done with the murder weapon?’ Rose demanded to know.

‘After killing Wayne Thompson I was so horrified by what I had done that I drove out to the cliffs beyond Porlock Weir and threw it as far as I could out to sea.’

‘Mrs Lange, we found the prints of size ten Timberland boots at the scene of the murders of both Marty Morris and Wayne Thompson. Those are clearly men’s boots.’

‘I knew there would be footprints — I thought they would put you off the track, make you think maybe the killer was a man.’

‘But you said that the murder of Marty Morris was not premeditated,’ Sergeant Mellor interrupted aggressively. ‘You said you killed him on the spur of the moment, that you merely “happened” to have a lethal knife on your person. Did you also merely “happen” to be wearing a pair of man-size boots? Just in case, was it?’

‘Not exactly, sergeant.’ Constance replied without hesitation, apparently quite unruffled by the policeman’s manner. ‘I had bought the boots for my husband, as a present. When I realised how muddy the hotel gardens were that night I put them on before I went to wait for Charlie Collins so that I wouldn’t spoil my good city shoes.’

Well, that made a kind of sense, anyway, thought Rose Piper, obliquely remembering her own orange suede heels which had been ruined at the Marty Morris murder scene. She said nothing, knowing she didn’t need to. Peter Mellor was in full flight.

‘Simply another coincidence, was it then, madam?’ the policeman asked, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

‘Yes sergeant, I suppose it was,’ responded Constance Lange in level tones.

The sergeant grunted his derision. ‘And where are these boots now?’

‘I threw them into the sea too.’

The daily grind of police work on a major case continued.

Police divers were immediately despatched to the area of the Bristol Channel by Porlock which Constance Lange described. This was procedural. But as one of the divers remarked before the search operation even began, compared with trying to find a knife and a pair of boots at depth in an unspecific expanse of moving sea bed, looking for a needle in a haystack was a doddle.

Rose also sent a team of two, a woman detective sergeant and a male DC to Chalmpton Peverill to inform the Lange family of what was happening and to question them. As a matter of courtesy, and also in order to check details of Freddie Lange’s accident, Inspector Barton at Taunton was also informed. He drove straight to Chalmpton Village Farm and arrived there just before the Bristol team.

It was Inspector Barton who broke the news to Charlotte. He didn’t mean to — it was just how things turned out. She had been in the farmhouse, she said, trying to find out what had happened to her mother whom no one had seen since early that morning, when she spotted the inspector sitting in his car outside. He had not intended to approach the family until the murder team arrived, but this was not to be.

It quickly became apparent that Constance had told nobody of her intentions, and neither had she left word — except a note on the kitchen table at Dingwell asking Charlotte to take care of Josh. Just that. No explanation of any kind.

Constance had, apparently, just walked away. Even though she had moved into the Dingwell cottage the day before, her absence was quickly missed. And so, as soon as Charlotte saw Inspector Barton, her immediate first thoughts were that there had been another accident — this time involving her mother.

She immediately rushed outside to him. And, confronted by her obviously extreme anxiety, the inspector felt he had to take responsibility — even though he confidently expected to get a roasting for it later.

He allowed Charlotte to lead him into the farm kitchen where he could not help remembering having broken the news of her husband’s death to Constance Lange just a couple of weeks earlier. He was now faced with an even more harrowing task.

First he made Charlotte sit. There was not, he thought, any easy way of doing this.

‘Your mother has confessed to a very serious crime,’ the inspector began. ‘She is being questioned as we speak in Bristol.’

Charlotte looked at him in amazement. As soon as she had seen him he knew she had prepared herself for a shock, for bad news — but he was aware that what he was telling her would not only be devastating but also quite beyond her comprehension.

‘What crime?’ she interrupted, her voice incredulous. ‘What on earth are you talking about, inspector?’

He told her then. All that he felt she should know.

‘Murder!’ Charlotte screamed the word. She was suddenly hysterical. ‘Serial killings! The rent boy killings! My God! Are you mad, inspector?’

To his relief, Inspector Barton could see the patrol car which he knew would be carrying the Bristol murder enquiry team draw up outside. Almost simultaneously the kitchen door burst open, and in strode William Lange, obviously alerted by the commotion.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ William demanded. And as he took in the scene before him, his tearful sister and the uniformed police inspector standing stiffly by her side, alarm spread across his handsome features.

Charlotte ran to her brother, threw her arms around him and half-buried her head in his neck so that the inspector could no longer see the younger man’s face.

‘William, William, they say mother’s confessed to murder... tell them they’re mad... tell them... for God’s sake...’

From Charlotte, the words came tumbling out. But William said nothing.

Back in Bristol, whatever Rose and Mellor threw at her, Constance Lange stuck rigidly to her story. Both police officers wanted to be sure the case against Constance would stand up in court. It was vital to ascertain that her confession was watertight, although there was absolutely nothing to suggest that she might have any reason for making a false statement.

‘I’m surprised you could even walk in those size ten boots,’ Rose said. ‘You can’t take more than a seven...’

‘I never had to walk far. I laced them as tightly as I could around the ankles and after the first time I wore a couple of pairs of thick socks. It wasn’t too difficult, Chief Inspector.’

Constance Lange was curiously relaxed in her responses. She was also chillingly convincing — her knowledge of events surrounding the murders formidable. One way and another her questioning was fast becoming merely a procedural formality. She had an answer to every point. And when Constance spoke about her hidden sex life and how it had come about, her frankness was starkly apparent — and to Peter Mellor quite sickening, Rose had no doubt.

Constance talked quite freely. It was, in fact, rather as if when she started to reveal her secrets she didn’t know how to stop.

‘When the children were young this other side of me was in check, most of the time,’ she related, her voice sometimes sounding as if it came from a very long way away. ‘I was very busy, and fulfilled, I suppose. It was still there, though. Every once in a while, even then, I went to London or Bristol, big cities where you can be anonymous, where you can hide away, and allowed myself to be picked up in hotel bars. It all sounds so sordid, doesn’t it? But when I am doing these things all I feel is excitement, nothing else at all. It’s only afterwards that I feel anything else...’

Her voice drifted away and Rose imagined that she was conjuring up half-buried memories of times she would rather forget, of urgent afternoons in forgotten hotel rooms, then dressing hastily and hurrying away down door-lined corridors.

‘Then I would feel guilt, and fear too, I suppose. Anyway, I strayed only a handful of times until about four years ago. My eldest children were more or less grown up, and Helen was away at boarding-school. I had time on my hands. Time to think. Time to fantasise. At first I just tried to make myself busier at home — that’s when I began to take on so many commitments in the village. But nothing worked. I couldn’t ignore my... my...’ She paused once more, seeking the right word. ‘My needs. I really couldn’t. I went on one or two more excursions to hotel bars in order to get picked up. The last man I went with thought I was a hooker, ironic really, and wanted me to do all kinds of things even I wouldn’t do.’

She paused, allowing herself a small, humourless, self-admonishing smile. ‘I left, but as I was going he got very angry and I thought he was going to attack me. It scared me a lot and I vowed I wouldn’t put myself at risk again.

‘Then I read a newspaper article about the growth of male escort agencies for women in London. I still remember the headline. “Safe sex adventures for middle aged matrons.” That wasn’t quite how I saw myself...’ Constance Lange managed a hollow chuckle. Even now, under such extraordinary circumstances, and with all that she was revealing about herself, with the terrible crimes she was confessing to, there was this lurking warmth and humour about her. The woman was one hell of a paradox, that was for sure, Rose thought, as Constance began to speak again.

‘Then I was in Bristol, genuinely shopping one day, and I thought I’d try to find out if there was anything like that there. I went into a phone box and had a look in the Yellow Pages. There was nothing. Avon Escorts are in the phone book now, but they weren’t then. However, one of their cards was stuck to the wall of the box. I called to ask if they provided men as well as women. The rest is history.’

She sighed, gazing into the distance, looking as if she would like to rewrite her entire life story.

‘It was, I thought, the ideal solution. And it always seemed so safe, that is the real irony. It was even Avon who suggested the Crescent when I said I would need to find a discreet room somewhere. It was all so well worked out. Then my aunt died and I simply didn’t tell Freddie. They had never been close, he was always quite happy for me to visit her but certainly never expressed any wish to come with me. In any case I told him she probably wouldn’t even recognise him, which may well have been true when she was still alive. I then had a ready-made alibi for regular absences from home.’

Constance wrapped her arms around her own body, almost hugging herself, reliving the past, a whole double life, a second existence.

‘Avon provided everything that I wanted, everything I dreamed of, all that I fantasised about. Wonderful raunchy exciting imaginative sex with no strings, no price to pay except money. It went smoothly for years, don’t forget. The boys were actually nicer than I had expected — or I thought they were. I told myself that it was fun, and as long as I didn’t hurt anyone it was all OK. In the end I even conquered the guilt. I learned to live, almost without thinking about it any more, with having two distinct sides to my life. And I convinced myself I could keep the two apart.’

Rose listened to Constance Lange for hours and could have gone on listening for hours more. She thought she was one of the most intriguing women she had ever met. So much of what she said made a deep impression on Rose. She wondered how many people, men and women, had not occasionally worried that they might become unable to control their own fantasies. Constance Lange had thought she had found a way to live with hers — perhaps there was no such way. Rose didn’t know.

She did know that she had to charge Constance Lange with murder and she could not quite explain why she had even a niggle of uneasiness about it. There was more behind her almost didactic cross-examining of the woman than merely a desire to be sure of a smooth ride in court.

Her senior officers became impatient.

‘Just get on with it, for Christ’s sake,’ instructed Chief Superintendent Titmuss, as the thirty-six-hour custody limit approached. ‘You’ve got an open-and-shut case for once, just get on with it...’

An identity parade was staged and both Charlie Collins and the Crescent Hotel receptionist, Janet, picked out Constance at once as being the fictional Mrs Pattinson — and that was without either the blonde wig or the contact lenses. However there was still no real evidence that Constance Lange was a murderer other than her own confession, as Rose somewhat fruitlessly told Superintendent Titmuss.

‘Then bloody well find some if you really think you need it,’ responded Titmuss, who was actually quite certain that a confession alone would, in this case, be sufficient to secure a conviction. Rose was well aware that to him as to so many of her colleagues it was simply a logical progression that a woman of Constance’s bizarre sexual obsession — and being a man he naturally regarded it as quite unnatural for a woman to have those kind of fantasies — would become a murderer.

In Rose’s mind there was no logic to that at all. But then, she felt that she understood so much of what made Constance Lange tick. Nonetheless the views of one woman detective Chief Inspector — Senior Investigating Officer or not — were unlikely to sway the might of the Avon and Somerset Constabulary, even had Rose herself considered that she had any rational cause to formally express them.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 1999, it was arranged that Constance Lange would be formally charged with the murders of Marty Morris, Colin Parker and Wayne Thompson at Staple Hill Magistrate’s Court.