Inside the house, they waited for the two forensic officers to join them, then headed directly to the bathroom. The linen closet was large, with mirrored sides. They took out a stack of soft towels and several neatly packed rows of sheets and linen. Daniels was standing next to Langton. He announced, to no one in particular: ‘All from Harrods.’
Radcliff had hardly said a word; he watched the search while making copious notes. Anna could tell he was finding the whole situation disgusting.
The linen closet was very much larger than it appeared. Once they had cleared it, Daniels drew their attention towards a fitted board on the right-hand side. ‘Press that. It should slide open.’ The white-suited forensic scientist pressed the board with a rubber-gloved finger. The entire rear wall of the cupboard slid back to reveal a cubby-hole with a mattress and a pillow.
‘Old habits die hard,’ Daniels whispered. He looked over at Anna, who was standing just outside the room. The forensic scientist took out a large cardboard box and put it on the bathroom floor to open it up. It was full of women’s handbags, each one wrapped in a plastic zip-up bag. He took out Daniels’s hidden treasures, revealing the sick trophies one by one.
Anna had a shower and made herself a hot chocolate. She was relieved to be back home. When Langton asked if she would be all right on her own, she had insisted that she would, preferring to spend the time preparing for the following morning’s interrogation. She felt sick. She curled up under her duvet, hot chocolate untouched and files stacked by her bed. She had a low, dull headache and the pain persisted even after she’d taken some aspirin. She fell asleep with the bedside light turned on.
Three hours later she woke up, terrified of monsters looming in the shadows and the dead women’s faces alternately leering and screaming out in agony. Though her head was throbbing hard, the images remained. She got up to fetch two aspirin and a glass of water. She checked all the locks. The broom cupboard where she kept her Hoover and household cleaning things was partly open. She clenched her fists, walked briskly towards the cupboard and yanked open the door. A broom and a mop fell out, hitting her in the face; she swore, pushing them back inside. As she shut the door, she had an image of a terrified little boy locked up and left for days and nights on end.
Returning to bed, Anna hugged the duvet tightly round herself. As an adult, Daniels was still trapped in the terror of the dark cupboard. She knew how fortunate she had been to have had such loving parents; to have never known rejection or been abused. Her father had never brought the darkness home. Just once, she could remember when she had sat on his knee and the pain still clung to him. She understood that pain now, because it was clinging to her: Daniels had invaded her life with his all-pervading sickness. The tears that had been close to the surface during the day were now released; she cried aloud, like a child.
Eventually, she fell into a deep sleep, which was broken by her alarm. She made herself a cooked breakfast and sat at the kitchen bar, studying the files. By eight o’clock she was dressed and ready to leave. The doubts of the previous night had been dispelled.
The night had altered Daniels’s demeanour, too. He was not as pompous or gloating when the day’s session began at half past nine. Anna started by questioning Daniels about the sixth victim: Mary Murphy. Then the fourth: Barbara Whittle.
By the time they were ready to break for lunch, they had reached Beryl Villiers. Daniels characterized Beryl as ‘different’ from the others. He blamed McDowell for Beryl’s decline from a beautiful, vibrant young girl into an addict. He said his mother would use Beryl when she was so drugged she didn’t know what day it was.
‘Beryl was going downhill. I felt sorry for her so I put her out of her misery. I couldn’t bear to watch her changing into an old dripper: cheap and nasty.’
Anna noted that three times he had said how much he liked Beryl. Finally she corrected him. ‘Beryl was not an addict when she was murdered.’
‘What?’
‘Beryl Villiers was not addicted to drugs when her body was found. In actual fact, she’d been clean of drugs for some considerable time. She was also a lot younger than your previous victims.’
‘What are you after, Anna?’ he asked, frowning.
‘Were you able to maintain relationships with other women?’
‘What?’
‘Did you have sexual relationships with other women?’
‘I have known a lot of very beautiful, sexy women.’
‘That is not what I asked. I asked if you had full sexual relationships.’
‘Well surely, Anna, you were in a position to hazard a guess.’ He cocked his head to one side, smiling provocatively at her. She looked down intently at her notes.
Having succeeded in embarrassing her, he shrugged his shoulders.
‘What the hell? The answer is pretty obvious if you have a modicum of intelligence. No.’
‘You did not have normal sexual relationships?’
‘No. I only have sex with prostitutes.’
‘In many cases, were they women who resembled your mother and her lifestyle?’
‘I never hurt any woman who wasn’t the dross of humanity. That’s why their cases remained unsolved for so long.’
He leaned sideways to look at Langton in his position behind Anna’s chair. ‘They were the dregs of society. Nobody missed them. Nobody even noticed they were missing. Nobody cared. I was helping society, in fact: clearing them off the streets with their drugs and their booze.’
‘Yet you found them sexually attractive?’
‘I found you attractive, Anna, but I didn’t fuck you.’ He yawned aggressively. ‘This is going nowhere. I am tired now, I don’t want to talk about it any more.’
‘Melissa Stephens was a seventeen-year-old virgin. How does her murder fit in with your rationale of cleaning up the streets?’
He looked daggers at her. ‘She was in Soho, walking the streets. She was a whore. She came on to me. That’s the reason I picked her up.’
‘No. She was not a whore.’
Daniels’s lip curled, angrily. ‘Yes, she was. She recognized me. She said, “I know who you are! You’re Alan Daniels.”’
‘So you asked her to get into your car? The Mercedes?’
‘She ran round to the passenger seat. She couldn’t wait. I’m telling you, she was on the game.’
‘No. You took an innocent girl and you killed her for your own satisfaction.’
His face became tense with fury. He pushed his chair back forcefully as the words burst out of him: ‘OK. She started to scream. I said to her, “Stop screaming!” but she wouldn’t. She was trying to get out of the car. My God, anyone could have seen us. I take hold of her by the hair and drag her head down. Next minute, she flops back on to the seat moaning. Out cold. Well, I couldn’t chuck her out, could I? She’d recognized me. Don’t you understand? She knew who I was. I had to get rid of her. She gave me no choice.’ He was rubbing his head with frustration.
‘She wasn’t a whore. She was sweet and innocent, like the child in the photo you showed me.’
‘Christ, how many more times do you have to be told? She knew me. She fucking knew who I was. She was unconscious. I bloody drove around with her half the night. I had to do it. I had to kill her. She knew me and …’ He closed his eyes. ‘Her body was perfect, firm and soft. She was so beautiful. And I took off her white sports bra, turned her over and tied her clean, pretty hands together. Then I rolled her back. She was perfect; she was so clean and pretty
He stopped for a moment, his eyes squeezed tight and his hands clasped over his knees. He described slipping off her tights, then leaning down to wrap them around her neck. Melissa Stephens was the first young girl he had ever had sex with and when she woke up, he was still inside her. ‘She was moaning. I wanted to keep her quiet. But she wouldn’t stop. Then she started screaming, begging me not to hurt her and I — that’s when …’
He took a deep breath, then he described how he had kissed her and how he had never kissed any of the other women. Anna listened with disgust as he spun his fantasy where an act of murder became romance and his victim’s suffering only produced self-pity. She was not going to let him get away with it.
‘You didn’t just kiss her, though, did you? Did you?’ she said harshly.
When he opened his eyes, she saw the fear for the first time. It was because she knew him now. He was frightened of her because of it. She had seen into the dark recesses of his soul. ‘
