A Passion So Deadly

Twenty

Charlie woke up the morning after his near liaison with Rose Piper feeling very alone. The truth was that sleeping with Rose would have provided him with just as much comfort as it might have given her. And, of course, to a young man with his track record, sex with a senior police officer investigating a murder case in which he was a prospective witness had not seemed that crazy at all. In fact he had not even considered that side of it.

He pottered to the bathroom. Italian tiles provided by the Merry Widow, bath suite from funds out of Miscellaneous, and a state-of-the-art American power shower courtesy of the Aged Water-Babe — a customer in her early sixties capable of exhibiting the sexual energy of a twenty-year-old who always liked to start her sex sessions with Charlie in the shower.

Charlie looked around him without feeling any of the satisfaction usually instigated by his beautiful home.

Avon Escorts had gone — for ever, more than likely, Charlie moodily reflected. His entire world was in disarray. He honestly believed that he had only narrowly escaped violent death. But being alive was suddenly not nearly as good as it used to be. The publicity he attracted before Constance was charged had horrified Charlie. He had always managed to kid himself that what he was doing was perfectly straightforward business. But when you saw the headlines in the Sun and the News of the World it all looked so sordid. And Charlie had never considered that he did anything sordid. There were the practicalities too. He had no work and the contents of those carefully labelled drawers in his wall safe were beginning to run low. He had tried, discreetly, to contact some of his regular customers directly. They had not wanted to know, and, under the circumstances, you couldn’t blame them, Charlie thought. Nonetheless he was still trying to fund an expensive lifestyle and he would not be able to do so for much longer unless his fortunes changed dramatically, he knew that well enough. He might even have to consider that offer from the News of the World for a big buy-up piece about his exploits with Mrs Pattinson to run at the end of the trial. He shuddered at the thought. Charlie was used to being admired and envied by his friends and family. He didn’t like his new image at all. In fact his standing was in any case so low that a full and frank News of the World expose probably wouldn’t make much difference.

For several weeks he had been trying to call his younger sister Daisy in London where she lived with her new husband, Jarvis, the up-and-coming solicitor. Charlie had not spoken to her since the truth about him had become public knowledge. Or rather she had not spoken to him, he feared. He had left several messages on her answering machine but she had not responded.

He looked at his watch. It was not yet 8.00 a.m. He decided to go for it. This early would be a good time to catch her. Surely she would answer the phone. She did. And more than anything else she sounded embarrassed.

‘Hi, Charlie, I’ve been meaning to call you,’ she said, her manner indicating that she had had no such intention.

‘I just wanted to talk to you, explain a few things, you know...’ he began.

‘Yes but I can’t, not now, uh... I have to go out...’

It was abundantly clear to Charlie how ill at ease his sister was. There seemed little doubt that he was the last person in the world she wanted to Hear from. That hurt. That hurt a lot. Charlie had always adored Daisy, and until these last few months had been quite confident that she felt the same way about him.

He didn’t know what to say. She saved him the bother. He could hear the sharp intake of her breath down the line. After just a brief pause she began to speak again.

‘Look I’m sorry, Charlie, you may as well have the truth.’ Her voice was quite firm now. She still sounded embarrassed though. ‘I know Jarvis would rather you didn’t call here again. It’s his job, you see. We can’t afford to be associated with you.’

Stunned, he heard himself mutter something half-apologetic. He rang off straight away. And that was his beloved kid sister for whom he would walk over broken glass. What chance did he have? The wedding, when he had been so pleased to make his family happy, to give them things they couldn’t give themselves, had been only five months ago. It seemed like something out of a different world now.

Worst of all, of course, was having so dreadfully disappointed his mother. He had not seen her since the day that the news had broken and she had asked him to leave her home. She had been so angry, angrier than he had ever seen her in his life.

‘I will not have a prostitute in this house, male or female,’ she had said, the hurt shining out of her. ‘You are no son of mine.’

It wasn’t the anger that got to him though. It was her pain that he could not bear to see. He had not known what to say or do, so he had simply packed his bags and left, staying in a hotel until after Mrs Pattinson was found and he had felt it safe to return to his flat.

He had called his mother several times since and she had been every bit as reluctant as his sister to speak to him, he knew that. But she had not told him not to call again. She had told him she did not want to see him, although when he had asked starkly, ‘Not ever?’, she had replied: ‘Not yet, certainly not yet.’

Perhaps he should take that as encouragement, he thought, and on this particularly grim and lonely morning he decided to take the chance, to turn up unannounced at his mother’s house.

The BMW purred into powerful action at once, but not even the car could give him any joy as he ploughed through the city traffic into St Paul’s and up the Ashley Road.

His mother was cleaning the house when he arrived. He thought that it looked even more sparkling than usual. Perhaps she was using housework as a kind of therapy.

She led him into the front room wordlessly and he saw that she was not angry any more. There was something about her that was beyond that. He would definitely have preferred anger. He stepped forward, wanting to hug her, but she moved away from him and he could see the tears forming in her eyes.

‘I’m sorry Ma, I never wanted you to know...’ he began.

‘You’ve said that before,’ she responded curtly.

He merely bowed his head.

‘So if you hadn’t been found out it would be all right, Charlie, would it?’ she asked, her voice brittle. ‘Is that the way I brought you up?’

‘No ma, it’s not,’ he replied.

What else could he say? But the truth was that he still was not ashamed of anything he had done. He hadn’t hurt anyone, after all — well not until now, and never intentionally. His mother was actually quite right, as it happened — he had thought it was all quite all right as long as nobody, or certainly nobody in his family, found out.

His mother sat down heavily on the velveteen covered sofa, dark green, matching the carpet and her dress, he noticed obscurely.

‘Charlie how could you?’ she asked, and this time her voice was almost a wail of anguish.

Now Charlie really didn’t know what to say. Maybe this visit was a mistake. He seemed to be hurting her more than ever by being there, and it really broke his heart to be rejected by his mother.

He wanted to tell her again that it wasn’t the way it seemed, it really wasn’t. He had just been trying to make the best of what he was, he had only given pleasure. What was so wrong with that? He wanted desperately to make her understand. There were worse ways of making a living, surely? But to her he knew there probably weren’t. And he just didn’t have the words to explain.

In the end he left almost at once. He could hear her crying as he shut the front door behind him. Elderly Mr Martin, his mother’s next door neighbour, whom Charlie had always considered to be a rather unpleasant old busybody, came out of his house at the same time and burst into snide laughter at the sight of Charlie.

‘Hi, Charlie boy, got any leftovers for an old man?’ he asked.

Charlie had had enough.

‘Fuck off,’ he said, even though it was quite out of character for him to speak to an older person like that and, indeed, to use such a phrase in the first place.

He got into his car, pushed the gear shift into drive and roared away. Once safely into anonymous territory he found a lay-by and pulled to a halt. He slumped back in the driver’s seat and closed his eyes. He felt as if he had nowhere to go and no one to turn to. His near-perfect world had collapsed around him every bit as devastatingly as had Constance Lange’s.

Rose Piper was not the only one who had become obsessed with the Lange case. After all, one way and another, that was the source of all that had happened to him, of all that was still happening. The only difference was that to Charlie, Constance remained Mrs Pattinson, and always would. And Mrs Pattinson was constantly on his mind nowadays. There really was little else.

He went over again in his head, for what felt like the millionth time, the details of his dealings with Mrs Pattinson, all that he had told Rose Piper last night and on so many other occasions. Like her, he had always reckoned that something somewhere did not quite add up. He could not believe that the woman he knew as Mrs Pattinson would want to harm him or any of the boys who had given her pleasure. Apparently she had said she hadn’t sought to harm him — but that call to the Crescent Hotel still looked like a set-up to him, and it was, after all, him who had been set up. Rose Piper had told him the story about Mrs P waiting in the bushes to talk to him, about her having the knife on her by accident, and he didn’t buy it any more than, he suspected, did the detective.

He still didn’t really believe that Marty Morris or Colin Parker had been blackmailing her — they had both considered themselves to be professionals like him. If the truth be told, Charlie reckoned Marty wouldn’t have been bright enough for such a thought ever to have occurred to him, and Colin would have been too bright to do such a thing even if the idea had crossed his mind.

So much of it didn’t make sense to Charlie when he really thought about it. One simple answer was that the woman was mad. Stark staring bonkers. Off her trolley. Out of control. But Mrs P had never seemed mad to him. Nor out of control either — except occasionally in bed. She had always seemed quite normal and rather nice to Charlie — just unusually highly sexed. And Charlie, unlike so many in a world steeped in double standards, saw no particular conflict there.

Suddenly Charlie made a snap decision. On an impulse he decided to drive to Chalmpton Peverill, to see for himself the sort of place Constance Lange came from.

Once he had turned off the M5 on to the succession of country lanes that would eventually lead him to the village, even town-boy Charlie could not help being bowled over by the beauty of the countryside. It was the end of March and a particularly good year for daffodils. It seemed that every hedgerow and every field was full of them. A smattering of early bluebells — a warm sunny March following a wet February, had provided perfect conditions for spring flowers were already in bloom. The Somerset countryside was a picture.

So was the village of Chalmpton Peverill. Charlie drove right through the village at first, taking in the pretty thatched cottages, the shop, the green, the farm he suspected must be the Lange family home, and the neat row of council houses — as well cared for as any of the other properties — on the edge of the village. Everything was immaculate. Some of the lawns had obviously been given their first cut of the season already. The trees and bushes were just bursting into life and several of the village gardens boasted tubs of winter pansies and heathers, as well as vibrant spring flowers. At the top of the village Charlie turned his car around and motored slowly back down, parking in a lay-by he had noticed on his way in.

He locked the BMW and started to stroll up the main street, past the farm which he was fairly sure he recognised from pictures in the newspapers published before Constance had been charged. It was a strange sensation. Charlie wondered fleetingly if he was being over-sensitive but he felt that he could hear the whispers coming out of the hedgerows and seeping through the tiniest of cracks in the garden walls. Since he had gained notoriety Charlie was getting used to being conspicuous — to being pointed out by some and equally pointedly ignored by others — around where he lived. But this was something else. He didn’t think the whispering he could feel in the very fabric of Chalmpton Peverill had anything to do with who he was and what he was involved in — not quite yet anyway, and not before he had closer contact than he had had with anyone so far. He was just a stranger, and, of course, a black stranger at that.

Brought up in St Paul’s, and still living in a highly cosmopolitan city with a large black community, Charlie was unprepared for the reaction caused by his sudden appearance in the village. Rural Somerset remains almost one hundred per cent white Anglo Saxon. Chalmpton Peverill was not on the tourist track and had few visitors and certainly no black ones — ever.

Charlie did not know that the villages were still recovering from being interrogated by a black policeman, nor, of course, that quite a few of them had not been happy about that at all, as it happened.

He kept his stride steady as he walked past Constance Lange’s home — Mrs Pattinson’s home, as he thought of it — peering sideways, not feeling able to stand and stare as he would have liked.

At a glance he took in the quiet splendour of the place, the beautiful well-proportioned old farmhouse, its large perfectly tended gardens with manicured lawns, the impeccable stable block, and the stunning views across acres of open countryside that you could just glimpse beyond. For the first time Charlie found himself wondering why all that hadn’t been enough for Mrs Pattinson. Charlie liked his creature comforts, appreciated beauty, and relished the lovely things that money can buy. He reckoned he could quite happily give up sex for ever to live in a place like Chalmpton Village Farm — as long as you could transpose it into a decent-sized city, of course.

A little further up the street the curtains in the front-room window of Church Cottage twitched as he passed. He noticed the material moving, almost as if it were being blown about by a draught. Marcia Spry missed nothing that moved in Chalmpton Peverill, but that was something else Charlie didn’t know about.

The weather had changed dramatically in the last few minutes. Typical March, he supposed, although the climate seemed so much more important to him in this picture-book village than it ever did in Bristol. You don’t notice the weather nearly as much in cities, he thought. A few spots of rain were just beginning to fall as he approached the Dog and Duck, and a look inside the pub suddenly seemed like an exceptionally good idea. However the reactions of a closed community to an alien-looking stranger became no longer a mere feeling in the air. In the public bar of the Dog and Duck a group of working men were enjoying a lunch-time pint, and every head turned at once towards Charlie Collins as he entered. He could sense the wheels of half a dozen or so brains creaking into action. There was a busy flurry of nodding and muttering.

Charlie ordered a pint of Guinness. The publican served him silently, and Charlie suspected that the small assembled throng were beginning to guess exactly who he was — there had been enough publicity after all.

The man on Charlie’s left somewhat deliberately turned his back on him. Charlie was by now pretty sure that his suspicions were right and wondered whether it was worth even trying to get into conversation with anyone. He supposed that was what he had been intending when he entered the pub, but he was no longer entirely sure.

While he was still contemplating what to do next the door opened and a tall young man wearing a cloth cap and a Barbour jacket with the collar turned up took a step into the bar. Charlie thought he looked familiar even before he removed his cap. The young man stopped suddenly in his tracks, stood hatless in the doorway for just a few seconds, then swung around and walked smartly out again.

‘Young William don’t like the company, and neither do us much,’ commented the man on Charlie’s left in a conversational manner. He still kept his back to Charlie.

Charlie downed the rest of his pint in one and also left the pub. He didn’t want trouble — and, more importantly, he was quite sure he had met the young man with the Barbour and the cap once before.

He remembered from newspaper reports and from conversations with Rose Piper that William was the name of Constance Lange’s son, and Charlie was deep in thought as he strode quickly back through the village to his parked car. The rain was falling quite heavily now and he had left his leather jacket in the BMW. He was getting soaked and he was in a hurry for that reason as well as all sorts of others. The curtains of Church Cottage twitched again as he hurried past. This time he caught a glimpse of an elderly woman with a rather mean-looking mouth peering through the window at him. The Lange farm was still and silent, almost unnaturally so.

Charlie realised that even if the sun had been still shining he would no longer want to hang around. Chalmpton Peverill was just too uncomfortable for him. He could feel the hostility now almost as clearly as if he could reach out and touch it. And in any case he now believed that the truth was at last within his grasp.

All the way home Charlie concentrated hard on his brief encounter with William Lange. He was becoming increasingly more certain that he had not been mistaken. And suddenly the whole terrible affair made devastating sense.

He called Rose Piper from his mobile phone while he was coasting down the Portway. She was not in her office. He left a message on her voice mail saying he needed to speak to her urgently. Charlie was born into the computer age, into the era of the Internet and automatic answering services. Nonetheless he hated voice mail. He muttered to himself under his breath. This was important. But he wasn’t kept waiting long enough, in spite of his impatience and his anxiety, to start fretting about what to do next if he couldn’t raise Rose.

His mobile rang just as he was pulling into the car park beneath his apartment block. It was DS Mellor who had picked up the message Charlie had left for Rose. The DCI was in court, explained Mellor. Charlie remembered then — the immoral earnings case against Paolo and Terry Sharpe had started in the Crown Court. Damn! He really needed Rose.

‘Can I help?’ he heard Mellor ask in a tone of voice which indicated that he would actually like to do anything but.

Charlie had never had any doubts about the sergeant’s opinion of him from the first time he had met him. He had felt not only the superiority but the anger in Mellor who had made his distaste for Charlie and everything that he stood for abundantly clear. But Charlie wasn’t really any more put off by Mellor than he would have been by anyone except Rose Piper. It was only Rose that Charlie wanted, only Rose that he trusted.

‘No, you can’t help,’ he said bluntly, his voice much louder and more highly pitched than usual, he realised. ‘I need to see Rose. Just get to her. Tell her it’s important. Urgent. I know she’ll come.’

Peter Mellor noted the use of his superior’s Christian name. Charlie sounded nervous and over-excited, but Mellor thought that the boy was right about one thing — Rose Piper would go to him sure enough, even if it meant walking out of court he wouldn’t wonder. He sighed to himself. He didn’t know what was going on, but he knew he didn’t like it.

He contacted the Crown Court — even Rose Piper with, in Sergeant Mellor’s opinion, her quite cavalier disregard for procedure and regulations, would not dare leave her mobile switched on there — and asked for an urgent message to be delivered to the Detective Chief Inspector. A response came back within minutes. DCI Piper was about to give evidence but a note had been passed to her. She had indicated that she would go to Charlie Collins as soon as her evidence had been completed — which the court official who called Sergeant Mellor reckoned would be in no more than forty-five minutes.

Mellor made no comment beyond thanking the official for dealing with his request so promptly. When the phone call was over he sniffed his disapproval to himself, but, scrupulous as ever, considered only the close proximity of the court house to Charlie’s home down by the Floating Harbour before calling the boy back. However, when Charlie picked up the phone, Mellor could no longer disguise his dislike of the entire proceedings, and neither did he make any attempt to do so.

‘She’ll be with you within the hour,’ he said frostily and hung up without giving Charlie a chance to reply.

The doorbell rang less than forty-five minutes later. It had seemed much longer to Charlie. Thank God, he thought. He couldn’t believe that he would ever be quite so pleased to see a police officer.

He flung open the door without thinking, without attempting to check who was there.

His assailant pushed Charlie back into the room with the violent thrust of one hand and brought the heavy lump hammer carried in the other hand crashing down on to Charlie’s head.

There followed a torrent of blows, but most of them were quite unnecessary.

Charlie’s skull had been crushed by the first one and he died almost at once.