A Passion So Deadly

Nineteen

Rose had never before seen Constance Lange display any emotion at all. She hoped that perhaps the other woman might be a little more vulnerable for once. She studied Constance carefully, unsure of what she wanted from her, but still convinced somehow that what she had so far was not entirely satisfactory.

There was no relevant DNA evidence. The killer of Marty Morris and Colin Parker, forensic had confirmed, had worn gloves and had, in any case, barely touched his or her victims, so adroitly had the crimes been carried out. Rose was sure it would prove to be the same with Wayne Thompson when she finally received the full forensic report on him in about a week’s time.

‘I want the gloves that you used, Constance,’ she said.

Constance, as if with a huge effort of will, put the family photograph down on the bed beside her, and almost leaned away from it, as if rejecting even that.

‘I threw the gloves in the sea with the boots and the knife,’ she said.

About all that the SOCOs had found worth mentioning at any of the crime scenes were the footprints in the mud at the Crescent Hotel where Marty Morris had been killed and by the side of the Feeder where Wayne Thompson died.

Both were indeed from the same Timberland boots, an immensely popular and widely available brand, and size ten was a common enough size. Without Constance’s help Rose did not think it would even be possible to ascertain where they had been bought. And predictably, Constance was not helping.

As soon as the questioning began again in earnest, she seemed, to Rose’s disappointment, to swiftly regain control of her emotions.

‘I can’t remember where I bought them, not a clue,’ she said. ‘And I’m afraid I paid in cash.’

‘Why in cash, Constance?’ asked Rose. ‘They’re over a hundred quid a pair. That’s a lot of cash to be carrying around spare, even for a woman like you.’

Constance shrugged. ‘If I hadn’t paid cash for the boots I would certainly never have used them again after the first time, just in case they could be traced back to me in some way,’ she replied. ‘I read Patricia Cornwell, Detective Chief Inspector. I may have acted like a fool in more ways than one, but I am not an unintelligent woman.’

And that, Rose had thought, was part of the problem she had about the whole scenario. Constance Lange certainly was not unintelligent. There was so much that did not add up.

On Colin Parker’s suit jacket, made of the kind of wool and polyester mix to which tiny fragments of material are inclined to adhere, forensic had found traces of wool fluff which might have come from the gloves of the murderer. But without the gloves themselves that was no help. Constance said that she had banked on the tide taking care of everything when she had thrown all that might incriminate her into the sea, and more than likely she would prove to be right. It was all so plausible and yet almost too neat for Rose’s liking. Her mind just would not stop racing.

Yet again questioning Constance Lange took the case no further. Her story never varied. She never added anything to it either.

Her appearance and charging at the magistrates’ court — the last case of the day before proceedings were shut down for Christmas — was a brief formality. Rose drove her own car to the court, and, with Constance charged and on her way to Eastwood, the policewoman was able to go off duty at last. But she realised that she could not stop. Not yet.

Behind the wheel of the Scimitar she made a quick decision and headed out of the city towards the M5. She couldn’t wait any longer before visiting Chalmpton Peverill and seeing the rest of the Lange family for herself.

Peter Mellor had been one of the team who had already made enquiries there, and had reported back to her fully. Somehow it made no difference. She knew she had two big faults, as her senior officer, Detective Chief Superintendent Titmuss, had told her often enough — she was reluctant to delegate and she had a disconcerting tendency to go off on her own, to be a maverick.

Off she was going again, she thought to herself, an hour or so later as she pulled her car to a halt outside the Lange family farm. She opened the car door. There seemed to be no press around. It was dark, perhaps they had got all they wanted during the daylight hours. Perhaps they had simply gone home to celebrate Christmas. She presumed that even hacks and snappers did that.

The church bells were sounding. She was in the middle of a sleepy Somerset village on Christmas Eve. Yet what secrets did this place hold?

William Lange, a bucket in each hand, emerged from one of the loose boxes in the stable yard next to the house as she stepped out of the motor. She could hear the sounds of horses contentedly munching behind him. Presumably he had been giving the animals their evening feed. It was now almost 6.30 p.m. and growing very cold. The yard was brightly lit. William was wearing a heavy quilted jacket over corduroy trousers tucked into workmanlike boots. A layer of thick sock showed at their tops.

She thought how boyishly good-looking he was. And there was something about his face which indicated that once upon a time he had laughed a lot. Not any more, she reckoned.

He greeted Rose without much interest or concern, but with a slight air of impatience, more as if she were a commercial traveller about to try to sell him something he didn’t want than a senior police officer investigating a series of murders to which his mother had recently confessed.

‘You’d best come into the house,’ he said without enthusiasm.

He did not offer her tea or coffee. His manner made it clear that he was busy, that he was fed up with being interrupted. And she found that talking to him was a bit like talking to a stuffed dummy. His face was set. His responses were automatic and inhuman, almost as if he had programmed himself to behave and react in a certain way. It seemed that he was simply refusing to have anything to do with what was going on, as if he were pretending, almost, that it wasn’t really happening. Rose already knew from Peter Mellor how resolutely William was carrying on with his day-to-day life regardless of all that was unfolding around him. She recognised that he was probably in deep shock — nonetheless she found his behaviour disconcerting.

‘I’d like to talk to you about your mother,’ Rose began.

‘I have no mother,’ he told her coldly.

It was not an easy interview, and it occurred to Rose how alike mother and son were, not so much in appearance but in every other way. Their eyes had the same shutters on them, she thought obscurely.

The village, which she found even more uncomfortable and claustrophobic than she might have expected, was every bit the hotbed of gossip which Peter Mellor had described to her. And the welcome she was given at Church Cottage was very different to that which she received at the farm. Marcia Spry was not so much warm as downright eager.

‘’Course us knew there was summat wrong with ’er, knowed that for years,’ said the old woman.

She was yet again keen to detail the doubts she said she had always had about Constance, but praised William, whom she described, with considerable edge, as ‘a true Lange’.

‘He took it all so calmly, ’is own mother arrested for murder and all,’ Maria said. ‘He must have been shocked to bits, but ’e never showed it. Just got on with running that farm, ’e ’as...’

But it was when Marcia touched upon the relationship between William and his mother that Rose decided it might be worth interviewing the young man once more before leaving the village that night.

‘They was always thick as thieves them two. Not lately though, he’s ’ad no time for her lately, and seems he was a good judge too...’ rambled the old lady.

Rose was thoughtful as she strolled slowly back to Chalmpton Village Farm. She was not in a hurry to get away. Christmas this year filled her with little more enthusiasm than she imagined it did any of the Langes.

Rose had not gone back to Simon after walking out on him three days earlier and neither had he asked her to. They had met only once — when she returned briefly to the bungalow to pick up some things — and he had been frosty and uncommunicative. She had moved into a police section house until she had the time to sort out something more permanent — or even time to think about what she really wanted. The next day, Christmas Day, she planned to spend the morning at Staple Hill — work on this one wasn’t going to stop for Christmas, not as far as she was concerned — and was then due to have Christmas dinner with her sister and her family in Weston-super-Mare, where they had recently returned to run a guest house. Her mother would be there too, which filled Rose with dread. The Christmas Day arrangement had been made some time ago, and had, of course, included Simon. Rose had somehow not got around to contacting her family to tell them that Simon would not be with her. Let alone why. She had already contemplated calling her sister and backing out of the whole thing, using the murder investigation as an excuse. In the long term, though, she reckoned that would cause her more bother than simply turning up Simon-less tomorrow and facing up to the inevitable barrage of questions. Particularly from her mother.

The prospect of being with her mother filled Rose with misgivings at the best of times. Neither mother nor daughter had changed much with the years. Rose still thought her mother was a shallow, priggish human being, and had little real love for her. All the same she felt guilty. She had never made much effort, after all. She should at least go through the motions of seeing her mother more frequently. Nonetheless, again rather like Constance and the way in which she had come to regard her cell as a sanctuary, Rose would just as soon stay all alone in her soulless little room at the section house.

When she arrived at the farm she was still thinking about Christmas and reflected how there were no signs of any festivities — no tree, no holly, no coloured lights. Well, there wouldn’t be, would there? No sign at all of the kind of Christmases she felt sure had been celebrated here in lavish style in the past — before this apparently nice, ordinary, rather up-market family had become embroiled in a particularly sordid series of murders.

William Lange greeted her, only after she had knocked on the front door of the house this time, with even less enthusiasm than before. He was wearing a dark suit now, a striped tie around his neck but not yet knotted.

‘I’m going to church,’ he muttered irritably. She raised her eyebrows. ‘It’s Christmas Eve, there’s a special service, it’s expected,’ he continued. ‘Life goes on, you know.’

‘I see,’ she said. She thought he was extraordinary. She studied him carefully. She had just one more rather important question, something that had occurred to her while she was talking to Marcia Spry.

‘Mr Lange, did you have any idea that your mother was Mrs Pattinson before she gave herself up?’ she asked.

William — who had been busily continuing to get himself ready to go out, putting on his shoes, tying laces, checking the change in his trouser pockets — faced her directly for the first time during this second, so far brief conversation.

The hooded eyes stared at her intently. ‘Why, did she say that I had?’ he asked sharply.

Rose told him truthfully that Constance had not.

‘I should hope not,’ said William. ‘Wouldn’t that make me an accessory to murder or something?’

Rose didn’t know what to think. William Lange obviously had no time for his mother any more, but, regardless of all the strain and bitterness, the Langes were a close-knit lot steeped in their own family history. There were nuances there that were beyond Rose.

Would William have shopped his mother if he had found out about her double life, if he had suspected that she was a murderess? Or would he have publicly protected her, even if privately he made her life a misery?

Rose wasn’t sure. And she didn’t even know if it was relevant anyway. She had to accept that her visit to Chalmpton Peverill had been a bit of a waste of time, really. But at least she had done it now.

She settled into the passenger seat of the Scimitar for the drive back to Bristol. Some Christmas this was going to be. She actually wished she was working all through Christmas Day, to tell the truth. Her mother’s inquisitive concern, for appearances more than anything else if she ran true to form, as Rose was sure she would, might not be the worst of it, either. The jollities of her little niece and nephew, much as she loved them, would probably make her feel even less festive than she did at the moment, she suspected. And then it hit her. She hadn’t even bought any presents. It was gone eight on Christmas Eve. Desperately she tried to think of a shop, any shop, that might still be open.

Somehow or other she got through it all. An off-licence had provided champagne and malt whisky for her sister and brother-in-law, a bottle of some disgustingly elaborate liqueur for her mother, some halfway decent plonk as her contribution to the Christmas dinner, and a couple of decorative net stockings packed with assorted sweets for her niece and nephew — which she supplemented by pinning a twenty-pound note to each, thanking God that children were always such mercenary little beasts.

She fielded her mother’s questioning with more ease than she had anticipated, largely thanks to a succession of well-timed interventions from her ever tactful sister and a merciful excess of alcohol which effectively numbed both her senses and her sensitivity. This also forced her to spend the night on the sofa as she didn’t dare drive back to Bristol. However she fled early in the morning before having to face her mother in a condition of grim and rather painful sobriety.

Work again provided a welcome excuse, although it was the day after Boxing Day before the incident room returned to being anything like fully operational.

Rose was coming under more and more pressure to make some kind of melodramatic gesture concerning Avon Escorts, whose activities, now so publicly revealed, seemed to have caused far more public outrage in Bristol than a few killings — after all, murder was everyday stuff.

It was about ten days after Christmas when she realised she could no longer resist the demands of her superiors that Paolo be charged with living off immoral earnings — however inconsequential she still considered this to be — but it did at least also give her an opportunity to get the odious Terry Sharpe for something.

Constance’s confession had put the former vice cop in the clear as far as the big one was concerned, much to Rose’s chagrin. But the murder investigation had produced evidence which should finally nail him for vice crimes. Rose believed she had a good enough case to charge him, as well as Paolo, and Sharpe was duly arrested along with the younger man.

It was Terry Sharpe’s complacency, his way of always giving the impression that he knew things you didn’t, which annoyed Rose most about the man. And this time when she turned up at his plush converted warehouse office — accompanied by Peter Mellor and two uniformed officers, all making as much commotion as possible — Rose found that she thoroughly enjoyed seeing the habitual smug expression wiped from Sharpe’s face for once.

But the arrest of Terry Sharpe was about the only thing in her whole life giving Rose even the remotest sense of satisfaction.

The weeks passed in a haze of hard work. The momentum of the investigation did not lessen as the police continued to strive to ensure that the case against Constance was flawless. You couldn’t rely entirely on a confession any more, not since the Guildford Four, in fact. Every police officer knew that — even Chief Superintendent Titmuss when he was thinking about anything other than politics and social climbing.

There was, however, plenty of circumstantial evidence. Even the efficiency of the stabbings could be construed as further pointing the finger at Constance. After all, she had trained as a nurse. She would know well enough where the blade of a knife would do the most damage.

Rose had every reason to be quite confident, and still could not really explain why she wasn’t. Yet as the day of the trial approached, she became almost as unhappy at work as she was in her private life.

She insisted that each statement Constance Lange made, every possible weak link in her story, be checked and double-checked. Superintendent Titmuss accused Rose of doing the job for the defence much more thoroughly than the defence itself seemed inclined to do. Constance, it seemed, continued to show no inclination whatsoever to help formulate any defence at all. And indeed, at one stage, Rose had even found herself actively trying to establish an alibi for a woman who had already confessed to the crimes in question.

Constance had been a busy woman, involved in so many aspects of village life, but an early check of her diary had revealed conspicuous blank spaces at the time of all three murders. Close questioning of family, friends and neighbours produced nobody who could definitely claim to have seen Constance, either in the village or anywhere else at the appropriate times.

Charlotte at one stage began to insist, after already having been questioned more than once, that her mother had visited her at the time of at least two of the three murders. But Rose found her unconvincing. The young woman somehow contrived to look as if she didn’t even believe herself, and Constance, when told by her solicitor what her daughter had said, apparently merely shook her head.

‘She’s trying to protect me,’ she had said tiredly. ‘That’s typical of Charlotte. She’s always been a very loyal girl.’

Rose continued to be unable to sleep at night and during the day she drove herself mercilessly. Three months had passed since she had walked out on Simon, and she was still living in the police section house. She had had neither time nor inclination to make other arrangements. Sometimes she would have dearly liked to go back to her husband, but she didn’t have the energy to cope with him or anyone else at the moment. The section house provided a welcome limbo. Simon had called a couple of times and once suggested a drink ‘to sort things out a bit’. She had said no, and afterwards wished she had said yes. He didn’t call again. The strain of the break-up and her compulsive preoccupation with the Constance Lange case had become so overwhelming that there were days when Rose feared she was heading for a breakdown.

Certainly she was aware that she was becoming dangerously obsessed with the case. It was on her mind all the time. One night, during a rare couple of hours of fitful sleep, she even dreamt that she was Mrs Pattinson. She woke in a trembling sweat from a numbing nightmare of convolutedly thrashing naked limbs and the flashing of lethal knives.

As she jerked into consciousness she could still see dead faces, and for a few awful seconds she thought that her own sweat was blood.

Still Rose drove herself relentlessly onwards. She did not believe she knew the whole truth and she was determined to find it. Still she harboured the notion that Charlie, perhaps unwittingly, held the key.

Alone one night — and, not for the first time in her dealings with Charlie, totally against procedure — Rose visited him in his dock-side flat. With the Rent Boy Killer allegedly behind bars, and in any case proclaiming that she had never been seeking to harm Charlie in the first place, there was no longer any reason for Charlie to stay away from home. Additionally, although she had not discussed this with Charlie, Rose assumed that his mother must know all too well by now exactly how her beloved son had acquired his beautiful apartment and funded his extravagant lifestyle. The publicity had stopped, of course, with a suspect charged and the sub judice laws in operation, but Charlie had hit so many headlines at one stage they had been almost impossible to avoid.

Charlie looked positively pleased to see her. Rose supposed that his life was not quite as full as it had been. He offered her a glass of wine. She accepted and, yet again, asked him to go over everything he could possibly tell her about Mrs Pattinson.

Charlie sighed. ‘How many times, Rose?’ he asked.

She couldn’t remember at which point he had started calling her by her Christian name. Somewhere along the line. It seemed quite normal now.

‘You’re intruding on private grief here, you know,’ he went on. ‘My life’s in tatters now thanks to that bloody woman. What else can I tell you?’

‘I don’t know.’ Rose’s head was throbbing dully. She had been fighting a nagging headache for several hours. And that wasn’t unusual nowadays. ‘It’s just, and I can’t quite explain it, something isn’t right here, I feel sure of that,’ she went on haltingly. ‘Perhaps there is something we’ve overlooked, you and me — something that will straighten things out. Will you give it a try? One last time.’

Charlie nodded, as if resigned, and started to talk. He told her all of it all over again — the visits to the hotel, the sex games, how convinced he had been at the time that Marty Morris had died instead of him — racking his brains, he said, for anything extra, anything he had previously left out.

After an hour of this, and with the wine bottle almost empty — it had been too sweet for Rose’s taste, really, but she had drunk her share nonetheless — Charlie paused.

Rose could feel him studying her carefully.

‘You look a bit how I feel,’ he remarked bluntly. ‘Bloody dreadful.’

Rose managed a small dry laugh. ‘Thanks a bunch,’ she said.

He smiled back. ‘Sorry. You do look stressed out though, tired too.’

‘I am,’ she said. ‘All of that.’

‘Fancy a spliff?’ he asked.

In spite of herself she burst out laughing. ‘You’ve got a bloody cheek, Charlie Collins,’ she said. ‘I’m a cop, remember.’

He grinned the disarming grin. ‘Yeah, I know. So, fancy a spliff or what? Do you the world of good.’

She gave in, remembering the pleasantly soothing numbness induced a long time ago during her few early experiments of smoking marijuana.

He rolled one swiftly and expertly, lit up and passed it to her.

The first draw felt wonderful. Her head started to spin at once — she didn’t even smoke tobacco, after all — but the dull ache evaporated. The sense of ease and well being, the relaxation after so much tension, was quite overwhelming.

‘Umm,’ she murmured.

She was sitting on one end of the black leather sofa and Charlie was in the armchair opposite. Still looking at her he walked across the room and sat down next to her. He took one of her hands and held it lightly.

‘You know, if you like I could make you forget your troubles altogether for a bit,’ he said casually. ‘I’d do an even better job than a spliff. I’m quite good at making women forget their troubles.’

He flashed a dazzling and wonderfully provocative grin.

Rose could not stop herself thinking how inviting he looked. Young. Fit. Virile. Surprisingly nice to be with.

He took the spliff from her and dragged on it, long and deep. Then he leaned close to her and just brushed his lips against hers. His mouth was warm and he tasted sweetly masculine.

She had not had sex since about three weeks before the big row with Simon — that was nearly four months ago. And, it occurred to her obscurely, that was the longest period of sexual abstinence she had endured since she lost her virginity at the age of seventeen.

Rather to her surprise she found herself greatly tempted to take up Charlie’s invitation. Apart from anything else, she thought him so genuinely likeable. Fleetingly she imagined his arms around her, his hands caressing her, and she couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to sleep with someone with so much experience. With a professional. With a man accustomed to being paid to give pleasure. The idea excited her. Just the way it must have excited Constance, she thought. And it was ultimately that thought which brought her to her sense.

‘I don’t think so, Charlie,’ she said at last, trying to make her voice sound normal.

‘No one need ever know.’ He moved his head slightly and began to kiss her neck just below her left ear, his lips tickling her in a place where he surely could not have known she had always been particularly sensitive.

Her body was responding of its own accord, and she didn’t want it to. She really didn’t. She had forgotten how dope enhances the senses, indeed how thoroughly randy it had always made her when she had tried it before.

‘We’d know,’ she said eventually.

‘Wouldn’t we just,’ he replied, and very gently he bit the soft flesh of her neck.

With a huge effort of will she shook herself free. ‘No, Charlie,’ she said more firmly now.

He grinned again. ‘As you wish,’ he said. ‘I reckon it’s a shame though.’

She could not help smiling back. ‘You’re probably right — but it’s still no.’

She had left right away then, not trusting herself to stay. Certainly not daring to smoke any more.

The fresh air hit her when she stepped outside and she knew she had better not drive for a bit. The wine and the dope had proved a powerful cocktail — in more ways than one.

She tipped back the driver’s seat in her car and crashed out for a couple of hours, eventually returning to the section house just before one in the morning. And it was not until then, her dull throbbing headache firmly reinstated, that she realised just how big a mistake she had nearly made — both professionally and personally.

She warmed herself a glass of milk, spooned some comforting honey into it, and headed for bed with a couple of aspirin, wondering, only half-joking to herself, whether she shouldn’t have a cold bath.

Even before the temptations of this evening with Charlie Collins, Rose, perhaps partly because of her four months’ abstinence, had been indulging in some strange sexual fantasising. And she worried about herself sometimes, wondered quite what she would be capable of, given the opportunity. Dreaming that she was Mrs Pattinson was only part of it. She daydreamed too. Found herself imagining being in bed with two young men, young men paid to please her. Tonight she had had a narrow escape, she thought. And lying alone in her single bed with her hot milk and her headache she could not believe that she had very nearly gone to bed with a male prostitute — and a witness in a murder case at that.

Still, she hadn’t done it, had she? In the end something had stopped her. She supposed that for her, ultimately, fantasy was fantasy and no more or less than that, as it was for most people, men and women. Constance Lange was the exception who had taken her fantasies and turned them into some kind of bizarre reality. Constance had turned herself into Mrs Pattinson, one day a month, every month. She had lived out her fantasies.

But Rose Piper couldn’t do that. She could never be a Mrs Pattinson — although sometimes she half-wished she could be.