A Passion So Deadly

Twenty-Three

Less than an hour later Rose Piper and her team drove to Chalmpton Peverill to arrest William Lange on suspicion of murder.

The weather was cold for the time of year but thankfully dry and clear. It was only the day before that Constance had asked for Rose to visit her at Eastwood. A lot had happened since then. The formal interview with Constance had taken most of that morning. It was just after three o’clock in the afternoon when the police team knocked on the front door of Chalmpton Village Farm. Nobody responded. The door proved to be unlocked so they walked straight in.

William was sitting at his desk in the farm office, and Rose was the first person to enter the ordinary little room with its state-of-the-art computer system, a big copying machine and two telephones, one a fax, piles of paper everywhere, and an NFU calendar on the wall.

She found herself looking straight down the barrels of a twelve-bore shotgun. William Lange was cradling the gun in his arms as if it were something very precious.

‘I’ve been expecting you, Detective Chief Inspector,’ he remarked in a quite casual fashion.

Rose did not think he was actually aiming the twelve-bore at her, but that was the way it seemed. She gestured to the rest of the team to keep back and was vaguely aware of Peter Mellor using his radio to call in an armed unit, which she knew perfectly well he had thought she should summon in the first place.

Rose struggled to keep her voice calm — no easy task when you are confronted by a man with a gun whom you believe to have already murdered four people.

‘OK William, why don’t you put the gun down, and let’s talk, shall we? I really think we need to talk.’

William’s response was merely to grasp the gun in a more businesslike fashion. He shifted his right hand slightly so that the forefinger now rested lightly on the trigger. Rose was not a firearms’ specialist but she had undergone basic weapons training. She could certainly see that the twelve-bore was cocked and ready to fire, and she could also see from the way William handled the shotgun that, as you would expect from a farmer, he knew what he was doing.

She swallowed hard.

‘Don’t make things worse for yourself, William,’ she said. And as she spoke the thought rather absurdly occurred to her that she sounded like a supporting player in a bad B-movie.

‘I think that would be hard to do, don’t you, Chief Inspector?’ replied the young man.

Rose had never met with a situation like this before. In spite of how it might sometimes seem to the public, it remains mercifully rare for a British police officer to have to face up to a loaded gun. Her heart was racing. Mellor had been dead right, of course. She should have predicted this and used an armed unit to check out the farm and make the first approach. She had been in too much of a hurry as usual. Now she might have put more lives at risk — not just her own, but those of her team too.

Suddenly, with a quick movement of his wrist, William swung the shotgun around, resting the butt on the floor between his feet so that the business end of the weapon now pointed towards his own head. His finger was still on the trigger. He bent slightly forwards and put his mouth over the end of the barrel.

Rose stood very still.

‘Why don’t you give me the gun, William?’ she repeated. Lame she thought, but she didn’t know what else to say.

There followed a few seconds of complete inaction. Nobody moved. The room was absolutely silent. William Lange’s eyes were closed. Rose was sure she could see his trigger finger twitching. The whole thing lasted only a few seconds — it felt like several days.

Then as suddenly as he had taken the gun into his mouth in the first place, William straightened up in his chair and tossed the shotgun to the ground.

Rose dived for it, yelling ‘Get him!’ over her shoulder to Peter Mellor and a uniformed constable who were already rushing at the young farmer. William did not attempt to move, allowing them each to grasp an arm and slam him, chair and all, on to the ground.

Rose was breathing fast. She noticed at once that the safety switch was back on the shotgun. Extraordinary, he must have done that automatically once he decided not to use the gun, she supposed. She stood up and looked at the man who was almost certainly a serial killer.

His eyes were quite blank. The handsome face expressionless.

‘I don’t have the courage to hurt myself,’ he remarked almost conversationally as Mellor and the constable dragged him to his feet, pulled his arms behind his back and secured them there with handcuffs. And it was the only regret of any kind that he was to show.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, addressing Sergeant Mellor now. ‘I know it’s all over.’

Rose had just about got control of her breathing now and even managed to speak without her voice having too much of a tremor in it.

‘William Lange, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder,’ she began the formal caution. She wanted him back at Staple Hill fast, before he had time to start thinking.

There were several police vehicles outside the farm by the time they brought William out and, as they bundled him into the back seat of one of them, Rose saw Charlotte Lange running almost flat-out down the village street towards them. She sent a woman detective constable to intercept her and to explain as best she could what was happening. Rose had considerable sympathy for Charlotte, who seemed to her to be a straightforward and kindly young woman, but she didn’t have the time to deal with her right now.

She also became aware of a small crowd of villagers gathered already outside the farm. The bush telegraph works fast here, she thought. Marcia Spry, the biggest busybody of the lot, Rose had previously worked out, was craning her neck, mouth hanging open, jaw slack with excitement, determined to miss nothing. Obscurely Rose reflected fleetingly both on how she could certainly never cope with the claustrophobia of small town or village life again, however idyllic it might seem on the surface, and on what fun Marcia would be sure to have with the latest news.

William was ready to tell the truth at last even before he was informed that his mother had told the whole story of both their dealings with Avon Escorts and the sordid sex scene which had led to the killings.

Handsome, educated, eminently middle-class, still managing to retain much of his natural self-assurance, he seemed completely out of place sitting in the interview room in his white paper suit. Rose didn’t know quite what a serial killer was supposed to look like, but there was no doubt that the casual observer would deem William Lange to be the unlikeliest of murderers.

It was only when he spoke, his voice cold and matter-of-fact, that you got an idea of the monster shock and bitterness had turned Lange into. It appeared that he did indeed see himself as some kind of avenger.

‘I suppose I knew I wasn’t going to get away with it any more after I killed Charlie Collins,’ he said. ‘Actually I knew that before I killed him, I knew that as soon as I made the decision to kill him. But by that time I was past caring. Charlie had seen me in the pub, and I was pretty sure that he had recognised me as Sandy — a carefree young student making a few bob selling himself for sex. What a laugh!’

William had the same dry humourless laugh as his mother.

‘I drove straight to Bristol to kill Charlie. Another death didn’t seem to make much difference by that stage. I didn’t have the knife any more, though. I’d kept it and the rest of my gear in the boot of my car. I knew it had all gone missing, of course. I guessed that Mother had dumped the stuff. I suppose I hoped she had. I didn’t know for certain. I just shut it out of my mind.

‘I needed a new weapon, so I grabbed a lump hammer from the workshop. I told myself that this one last murder would cover my tracks once and for all and, after that, life would return to normal. But I was only pretending. I didn’t really believe that. It was much more than that. As soon as I saw Charlie Collins I wanted him dead.’

William’s voice faltered for the first time. ‘He’d been with my mother more than any of them. It was Charlie who set me up with her.’

The eyes were harder than ever. Rose began to find it quite easy, after all, to imagine him thrusting a knife into another man’s back, battering another human being to death.

‘And the earlier killings? Your mother thinks you were motivated by revenge. Was that really it?’

William nodded. ‘Yes. Revenge on all of them, all the little bastards. And revenge on Mrs Pattinson.’ He spat the words out. ‘It was Mrs Pattinson I hated more than anyone. I was glad when she confessed. I was actually happy.’

‘You could have killed her too?’

William looked surprised. ‘If I’d ever seen her again I would have done, gladly.’

‘But Mrs Pattinson was your mother, William, you saw her virtually every day of your life.’

For a moment William seemed bewildered. The façade of self-assurance deserted him. He seemed dazed. The granite eyes clouded over. Then, abruptly, the mists cleared.

‘I have no mother,’ he said.

The eyes were bright again, and there was ice in them.

Sergeant Mellor, who could never quite stop his disgust at it all from showing, had had enough once more.

‘Why did you get mixed up with an outfit like Avon Escorts in the first place? You had every advantage in life, looks, money, education, everything,’ he snapped. ‘Why did you need it?’

William shrugged. ‘For kicks, I guess. Bravado, too. Loads of the lads did it. Sex with some grateful old tart who’d let you do anything and you got paid for it...’ His voice overflowed with bitterness.

‘Your mother did it for kicks too, is that so different?’ interrupted Rose Piper.

‘I told you before, I have no mother. Not any more.’

‘Your mother was prepared to go to jail for crimes which you committed — terrible violent crimes,’ said Rose. She could not believe that this young man could still manage to sound self-righteous.

‘She’s a whore.’ William spoke through clenched teeth, hatred pouring from him.

‘No, that was you,’ said Rose Piper.

But William Lange just looked at her as if she was mad.

They found his bloodstained clothes, the lump hammer and the rubber kitchen gloves he had used for the killing of Charlie Collins buried beneath the compost heap at the bottom of the kitchen garden, just as he had told them they would.

William Lange had left no DNA evidence on Charlie Collins or in his apartment. That killing like all the others he had been responsible for had been brutally efficient.

‘I’ve studied human as well as animal biology. I’m a farmer, I know how to kill efficiently. They even gave elementary butchery training as part of the course at agricultural college, so that we’d understand the entire food producing process,’ he explained cursorily, and with the now familiar dry humourless laugh.

‘And I know how to avoid leaving forensic evidence, I know about DNA, doesn’t everybody?’ he asked, adding, almost in echo of his mother, ‘I read a lot of detective books.’

However, the evidence William Lange had carried away on his person was another matter. And once the police had been led to Lange and found the clothing and weapons he had used for the final murder, the situation changed dramatically. While he was being battered to death, Charlie Collins had deposited much of his life’s blood on William Lange’s person, drenching the young farmer. There was sure to be plenty of forensic and DNA evidence on his clothing. It would be elementary to prove that the lump hammer William had buried was the murder weapon. And a search of William Lange’s car, particularly the boot area where he had kept the butcher’s knife he had used for the previous murders, revealed a number of tiny older blood-spots which Rose and her team were confident would prove to have come from either Marty Morris, Colin Parker, Wayne Thompson, or all three.

William made a full and detailed statement. Everything added up. And his mother’s statement further incriminated him.

‘That’s it then,’ said DS Mellor at the end of what he thought had been a pretty good couple of days’ work. ‘Getting the case against Constance Lange dismissed should just be a formality now, eh boss?’

Rose Piper merely nodded curtly, as if her mind were somewhere else.

‘She’ll be a free woman again,’ Peter Mellor continued. ‘Can’t say I envy her though...’

Sergeant Mellor was feeling pleased with life for the first time in a long while. He was owed a few days’ leave which he planned to take now, and he looked forward to being able to be with his family. It was always a good moment when you knew a case was solved, and Mellor was truly glad to see the back of this one. He hadn’t enjoyed it. He didn’t like to witness human beings degrade themselves, and this case had left a nasty taste in his mouth. Also, some of it had been a little too close to home for his liking. Still, it was over now. Done and dusted.

‘Fancy a celebration pint, boss?’ he asked cheerily.

Rose frowned, as if he had irritated her. She stood up, turned away from him and headed for the door of the incident room.

‘What the hell is there to celebrate, Mellor?’ she demanded brusquely over her shoulder.

The sergeant regarded her retreating back curiously. ‘A result, guv, we got a result, didn’t we?’ he murmured almost to himself.

The only response he got was the slam of the door. Sergeant Mellor shook his head sorrowfully. The memory of the moment when his DCI had nearly got half their heads blown off was still vivid. He wondered sometimes why he still maintained respect for her, let alone affection. He did — although he was unsure how long he was prepared to go on working for her.

‘What a difficult bloody woman!’ he said, rather louder this time.

Constance Lange sat alone in her cell, overcome by the enormity of it all. For hours on end she stared at the blank wall facing her bunk bed. She knew that it was now just a matter of time before the case against her would be dismissed. But that made little difference to her either way.

Sometimes her mind drifted back to the good days. There had been so many of them. It was spring, the time of rebirth, every country-person’s favourite season. Through the small square of her barred window she could see a patch of bright blue sky.

Sometimes she imagined herself walking over the hills around Chalmpton Peverill, Josh running before her, the warm welcoming kitchen of the farmhouse and her equally warm and welcoming family awaiting her. Sometimes she could not really believe it was all over, or that it had ended in the way that it had.

She was glad only that she had finally told the truth. She knew she had done the right thing. And she trusted Rose Piper. Rose had been right. Constance felt the bond too.

Back in Chalmpton Peverill in the front bedroom of Honeysuckle Cottage, Charlotte and Michael sat up in bed that night and talked into the early hours. By the morning they had made a decision.

Charlotte, fighting to remain sane only because of her family, sat a now eternally tearful Helen down at the kitchen table. Josh lay how he always did nowadays — facing the door, his eyes sad, his tail flat on the floor — waiting patiently for his mistress to return.

Charlotte regarded him sorrowfully. Even though it seemed likely that her mother would be released, the dog’s devotion would never be rewarded by his mistress coming home. She knew that with absolute certainty. She sat down opposite her sister and began to talk.

‘We are our entire family now, Helen darling, you, me, Michael, and little Alex. I don’t know how we’re going to survive, but we will, somehow. And this is what Michael and I want to do...’

Two days later, early in the morning, Constance Lange was found dead in her cell at Eastwood Park. She had taken a massive overdose of Valium. An enquiry was immediately launched to discover how she had got hold of the drug, but the investigating officer was not confident of a conclusive result. You rarely could be in prisons. They remain the ultimate mystery.

That same day Charlotte, Michael, Helen and Alex drove to Heathrow airport to catch a flight to New Zealand. There was Lange family land over there, currently farmed by a distant cousin, and a home, at least of sorts, awaited them. Josh was going too. Both Charlotte and Helen considered the dog to be all that was left of their mother as they liked to remember her. Before the nightmare had begun.

Honeysuckle Cottage was on the market already. Charlotte had said she could not wait until the future of the farm was sorted out. It was all over. She just wanted a new life now.

‘Shall we stay a little longer?’ Michael asked Charlotte when the prison called to break the news of her mother’s death.

‘No,’ said Charlotte bluntly.

‘It’s all right to still love her, you know,’ said Michael, who was becoming more and more of a rock as every day passed.

Charlotte looked at him almost in surprise. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I’ll never stop loving her. She’ll always be my mother.’

‘So don’t you at least want to go to her funeral?’

‘No,’ said Charlotte. ‘She wouldn’t have wanted that. Not now. I don’t even want to know where she will be buried.’

‘Are you sure?’

Charlotte nodded her head quite vigorously. ‘Absolutely sure. My mother died for us all the day we learned that she was Mrs Pattinson...’

Later that day, on the night of Constance’s death, Rose Piper was feeling particularly low. And when her husband called her just after she arrived back at the section house prepared for an uncomfortable night alone, she was almost pathetically pleased to hear his voice. For a moment all she could remember was how much she had once loved him and how much she needed comfort.

‘I heard on the news,’ Simon said. ‘I knew you’d be upset.’

For the first time in so long she agreed to meet him. She accepted almost eagerly his invitation to go round to the bungalow for supper.

‘I’ll be there in an hour, and this time I won’t be late,’ she said.

He laughed then, and she remembered, too, how much she had always liked his laugh.

When she saw him and he smiled, she also remembered the effect that smile was inclined to have on her.

Supper went well. Simon had cooked his special pasta dish, and remarked very lightly that he hoped it would be better received than the last time. It was. Much better received. The pasta was good and washed down with plenty of excellent red wine. What happened afterwards was good too, and somehow inevitable.

It was also passionate. Fine earthy sex. How Rose had missed it. They hardly slept all night. It was as if they had both been waiting for this moment, saving themselves for the time when they would be together again. Certainly, in spite of the fantasies that had so disturbed her, she had not had sex with anyone else since their parting. And during their long and inventive session of lovemaking Rose found that the demons which had been plaguing her for months seemed to disappear as if by magic.

Sex with Simon was real, warm and caring. It always had been. It meant something. Almost as soon as they began to make love she felt that this was where she belonged, in his arms, and she started to come to terms with herself again, to accept herself for what she was and to stop punishing herself so much for being what she could only be.

Suddenly with devastating clarity she knew that she wanted Simon back. And she told him so. In fact she screamed the words at him at the moment of orgasm, so that he held her tighter and tighter and pushed himself into her more deeply, more desperately, than ever before.

The morning after was warm and companionable. Rose and Simon might have been apart for some months, but they had been together for nine years before that. It was only natural that they should start, over breakfast, to talk about their lives, to talk about their work. After all, they always had done.

‘Do you really think the Constance Lange case is over now?’ Simon asked her.

‘Yes, thank God, I really do,’ she responded.

‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘You did get obsessed, you know.’

‘I do know.’ She reached out and touched his hand. The hand that had given her so much pleasure.

‘My boss told me the same thing. I suspect you’re both right. I’ll try to do better in future.’

He grinned, that heart-melting grin which had quite literally turned her legs to jelly all those years ago.

‘In that case, Airs Piper, everything will no doubt be just fine,’ he said.

He poured her more coffee, leaning forward and kissing her lightly as he did so.

‘I have to say though, I’m just amazed that the woman could get hold of all that Valium the way she did inside a prison. I mean, don’t they have any bloody security or what?’

He was munching toast. It was just a casual remark. Rose knew that. Nonetheless, she couldn’t meet his eye. She turned away and did not answer.

‘What’s the matter, Rose?’

He stared at her. The bloody man could always read her mind, and she was pretty sure he wasn’t going to like what he saw there.

She was right.

He thumped the table with the clenched fist of his right hand and cried out as if he had suddenly experienced a flash of intuition. Then he became deathly calm.

‘I don’t believe it, it was you, you gave her the pills,’ he said quietly.

Again she did not reply. She didn’t need to. She saw the dark cloud of anger descend over him. His mood changes were always so dramatic, had been for years now. That, of course, had been part of their problem, part of what had led to their parting, part of all the torment and tension which she had over the last twelve hours or so banished from her mind.

He was no longer the gentle funny man she had spent the night with. No longer the passionate lover or the affectionate husband. He was absolutely furious. Plain hopping mad.

‘You played God with that woman!’ he screamed at her.

He changed so fast, and that was not all of it. There was no tenderness in him now, none at all.

She realised there was little point in trying to explain, but she so wanted him to understand. He never did understand, of course, but after their wonderful night together she could not just give up without trying.

‘Constance Lange wanted to die, she could not live with what she felt she had been responsible for,’ Rose began, the tiredness of her sleepless night suddenly overwhelming her as much as the hopelessness of trying to talk to Simon when he switched into this kind of mood.

‘She did a deal with me. She would tell the truth, in as much as she knew it, if I would help her die with dignity. She had never wanted to hurt anyone, you know. She was no murderer, for Christ’s sake, just a woman who liked sex too much and let it get the better of her. She did not want to leave prison. Her only wish was to be able to end it all before having to face the outside world again. She at least deserved that. I kept to the bargain, that was all.’

‘You’re a monster.’ Simon was still screaming at her. ‘You made a deal to kill in order to get a result. How far will you go, Rose, for your damned career? Is there any limit?’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ replied Rose in a very small voice. The louder Simon shouted, the more quietly she had started to speak.

‘It fucking well is for me, darling,’ he shouted at her. ‘I can’t live with you, you may as well know that now. How could I live with you? How could anyone live with you?’

She cringed, cowering away from him, completely beaten, and yet a part of her was so terribly angry that anyone could do this to her, reduce her to this. He hadn’t even finished. His anger rose to a near hysterical crescendo.

‘Forget last night — that was just a stupid mistake, a one-off fuck! OK? I still want a divorce — fast!’

Rose walked out into the cool morning air. The sun was rising above the city below. Her husband’s words tore at the core of her. ‘...a stupid mistake, a one-off fuck...’

Her heart ached. Her head ached. Yet her body still glowed from last night. That already seemed like a lie, or at the very least a bad joke.

She passed a newspaper stand then, its billboards advertising reports of Constance Lange’s suicide. The slogans were predictably lurid.

Rose shuddered involuntarily. She was clutching an envelope in her hand. It contained her resignation from the police force, written the previous day before she had spent the night with Simon, before they had made such wonderful love, before everything had been destroyed when they had yet again quarrelled so viciously.

She hurried past the news-stand, then paused by the post box. Yesterday she had been so sure of herself. Now she did not know whether she wanted to post her letter or not. Her face was wet with tears. And she had no idea whether she was crying for herself, or for Simon, or for Constance Lange — or even for Charlie.

In the hold of a 747 jet somewhere over the Indian Ocean a black Labrador cowered trembling inside a wooden crate.

Josh was not afraid, not of flying, which he did not understand, nor of being in the crate, which was actually quite cosy. He had been treated kindly. He had been fed and watered. He assumed that he would continue to be treated well. After all, he had never been mistreated. But although Josh had no conception of travelling across half the world, he somehow knew that he was leaving everything he loved behind. For months the dog had existed merely in the hope that his mistress would return. Every day he had watched and waited for her. Now he finally understood that he would never see her again.

Josh did not know that his mistress was dead — only that she had gone away for ever. He threw back his fine black head with the sad brown eyes and howled.