‘Travis!’ Anna looked up. Mike Lewis was gesturing at the door for her to get a move on. She had been so engrossed, she hadn’t noticed the gradual emptying of the incident room. ‘Briefing room,’ Lewis explained before disappearing.
Anna was hurrying after him when Jean called out: ‘Don’t leave the files out, please; return them to the cabinet.’
Anna zigzagged back to the desk, where she collected the half-read file and replaced it. When she asked where the briefing room was, Jean said sharply, ‘Second door on the left, one flight down.’ As Anna exited rapidly, she could hear Jean moaning to another woman. ‘I’m sick to death of him having a go at me. It’s not my job, anyway, to go schlepping out for his lunch. They’re all bloody foreign in there, don’t understand a word you say to them; “no tomatoes” and he gets layers of them!’
Anna flew down the narrow stone steps and along a murky corridor. The hubbub of noise drew her easily to the briefing room. Rows of chairs had been placed in haphazard lines and a desk and two chairs faced them. The large dingy room smelled of stale tobacco, even though there were stained yellow notices demanding ‘No Smoking’.
Anna skirted her way along to a vacant chair at the back, where she sat clutching her notebook. Up front, Lewis and Barolli were joined by eight detectives and six uniformed officers. The two female detectives were a large blonde woman who looked to be of retirement age and a tall thin-faced woman in her mid-thirties with badly capped teeth.
The superintendent who had overall charge of the enquiry, DCS Eric Thompson, entered, closely followed by Langton. Thompson had an athletic look about him: his face fresh, his shoulders upright; he stood as if poised on the balls of his feet. His thinning hair was combed back from a high forehead. Langton by comparison looked tired and crumpled and in need of a shave. Barolli was loosening his tie in a seat nearby.
‘Quieten down!’ Langton barked. He perched on the edge of a desk and leaned forward to address the room.
‘The victim was formally identified today by her father. She is, or was, Melissa Stephens, aged seventeen. We suspect she is a “possible”. Her boyfriend’s statement on the night she went missing is all we have to go on so far, but it is my belief that Melissa strayed into our killer’s target area. To date all his victims have been hardened prostitutes, all in their late thirties or early forties. Melissa may be our biggest breakthrough yet. It’s imperative we move like the clappers.’
Anna made copious notes, but not being privy to any of the previous case files, she had no idea what Langton was talking about most of the time. What she picked up was the following: on the night Melissa disappeared, she had an argument with her boyfriend. This had occurred at a late-night cafe close to Covent Garden. She was last seen walking in the direction of Soho. The boyfriend assumed she was heading towards Oxford Circus tube station. He finished his drink and headed after her. But Melissa, it seemed, had found a shortcut, perhaps down Greek Street. Inadvertently, she went through the red-light district.
Though Melissa’s boyfriend, Mark Rawlins, called her mobile phone incessantly from the tube station, it was useless. The phone had been turned off. Frightened for her, he retraced his footsteps, hoping he’d bump into her. After returning to The Bistro, around 2.30 a.m., he went back to Oxford Circus tube station, then on to Melissa’s flat, but she had not arrived home. Neither Mark nor her three flatmates ever saw Melissa again.
The following day, after calling her parents in Guildford and everyone else he could think of, Mark finally contacted the police. Forty-eight hours later, a missing person’s file was lodged and circulated, along with photographs and requests for information.
No one came forward, even after a television reconstruction shown four weeks after her disappearance. They had not one eyewitness who could give a clue to her disappearance, with the possible exception of a waiter who had been smoking a cigarette outside a renowned gay club and who saw a blonde girl talking to the driver of a pale-coloured, or maybe white, car. At the time, he assumed she was a prostitute, he said. Though he didn’t get a good look at her face, he did notice her black T-shirt, which had diamante studs that sparkled in the neon lights outside the massage parlour opposite.
Langton suggested that their killer, who haunted red-light districts, could have mistaken Melissa for a call- girl: outside a strip joint very late at night, a blonde in a sexy outfit, short skirt and strappy sandals — could their killer have been the one to pick her up?
Though the briefing continued for another hour, the super finally insisted they did not yet have enough information for him to take to the commander and request this murder enquiry be handed over to Langton’s team. Hearing this, Langton jumped to his feet, holding the photos of the six dead women like a pack of cards.
‘Their hands tied with their bra, strangled with their own tights. If forensic can verify that the knots around the neck and wrists were tied in a similar way, then Melissa Stephens becomes the latest victim of a serial killing. If we get this case then we’ve some hope of catching the bastard, but we’ve got to move! Any time lost in farting around begging for the enquiry is a fucking waste of time!’
With that, the team broke up; they would simply have to wait until the following morning.
After the team had left the briefing room, Langton sat moodily in a hard-backed chair. He looked up when he heard Anna crossing the floor towards him. He held in his hand the photos of the dead women.
‘They were all alive, once. Albeit in one wretched condition or another, but nevertheless they were alive, with families, husbands, sometimes kids. Now they’re dead and whether or not they were junkies, whores, drunks, or just fucked-up human beings, they have a right to have us hunt down who killed them with as much press as Melissa Stephens.’
He sighed, pinching his nose. “Course, on the other hand, I could be wrong. We won’t know one hundred per cent until we get the forensic evidence back.’
‘But you really do think it’s the same man.’ Anna felt more at ease with him now.
‘Thinking isn’t good enough, Travis. It’s evidence that counts. If they tell me that Melissa’s bra or the tights that throttled the life out of her weren’t tied in the same way as these poor bitches then no, it’s not the same killer.’
‘Was there any DNA?’
Now he turned that laser stare on her. ‘Read the case files; don’t waste my time.’
‘Would it be possible to take a couple home to read? Or I can stay late and do it here, so I’m up to speed with everyone else?’
‘Sign for anything you take out.’ Langton banged through the doors.
Anna shook her head; these guys certainly liked to make an exit. She collected her notebook and pencils. As she walked towards the open door she gave a backward glance to the still-smoky room. The chairs were now even more jumbled, the cups and saucers used as ashtrays overflowed and screwed-up paper and old newspapers littered the floor.
She closed the door behind her quietly. She felt a strange sense of elation to be part of her father’s world.
Chapter Two
It was past midnight when Anna finished compiling her shorthand notes on the Teresa Booth case, and by the time she had finished the file on the next victim, it was after two o’clock in the morning.
Sandra Donaldson, aged forty-one, had a similar background to the first victim: a life of abuse, drugs, alcohol, four children all fostered out and a junkie boyfriend. She was first arrested for prostitution when she was twenty and then numerous times after that for theft and handling stolen property as well as further arrests for prostitution.
According to postmortem reports, she had been more severely beaten than the first victim. Her bruises looked horrific: some old and yellowing, some fresh. Her black bra had been used to tie her hands behind her back and she had been strangled with her tights. When Anna matched the two large blown-up photographs depicting the way the items had been knotted, she was hardly surprised to find they were identical.
Sandra had been raped brutally, with damage to her vagina and anus. Like Teresa’s, her body was dumped
