Anna hovered by his desk.
'I want you to have another go at Emily Wickenham. It's pretty obvious she's flying close to the edge, but she might just know something that will help us. I'm getting copies of the photographs done, so she might help us identify the men in the hot tub.'
'Okay.' She nodded.
'Are you?'
'I'm sorry?
'Are you okay?'
She frowned, confused. 'Yes, why? Don't I look it?'
He shrugged. 'You're wearing the same clothes as you travelled in last night, your hair needs something doing to it, and you've got a ladder in your tights.'
She flushed.
'So, is there anything you feel you want to tell me?'
'I overslept.'
'That was pretty obvious, you were late. It's just unusual — well, I think it is — when a woman wears the same clothes two days in a row.'
'I just didn't have time to find another suit.'
'Don't get stroppy! It's just not like you, that's all: you always look fresh as a daisy. This morning, you look beat.'
'Thank you. I'll have an early night.'
He nodded, and loosened his tie even lower down his shirt front. 'This journalist still seeing you?'
'No.'
There was a pause as he checked his watch. He looked up at her and smiled. 'See you later.'
She walked back to her desk, feeling like she'd been hit over the head with a mallet. She was rifling around in her briefcase for a spare pair of tights when Barolli breezed over, grinning.
'We got a hit: the anonymous caller has been identified.'
Anna looked up. 'Is it Edward Wickenham's girlfriend?'
'Got it in one! Well, let's say we're pretty sure it's her.'
'You going to interview her?' she asked.
'Dunno; be down to the Gov. But good news, huh?'
'Yes.'
'You okay?'
She sighed. 'I am fine!'
'Just you look a bit under the weather. Mind you, this case is getting to all of us. Poor old Lewis is knackered: his son is teething, keeping him up all night.'
Langton appeared. 'Can you cut the bloody chitchat? Did we get a result?'
Barolli grinned. 'We certainly did: voice match!'
Anna watched as they went into Langton's office together. She picked up her tights and hurried off to the ladies'.
Straightening her skirt, Anna noticed a stain down one side and scratched at it with her finger. She dampened some toilet tissue and tried unsuccessfully to clean it off. She took a good hard look at herself in the mirror and was taken aback. Her hair needed washing, she had no make-up on and the white shirt that she'd seized was looking very drab.
'Christ, I do look a mess,' she muttered, embarrassed: she was even wearing awful old sports knickers. 'What are you doing to yourself?' She glanced down at her shoes: they were comfortable, but old and scuffed; unsurprising, as she'd had them since college.
Letting yourself go, that's what, she thought. She returned to her desk with grim determination: at lunchtime, she'd book an appointment for a cut and blow-dry, then when she got home, she was going to weed out all her old clothes and send them off to the Red Cross.
'You going with the Gov?' Barolli asked as he shrugged into his raincoat.
'What?'
'Interview Wickenham's girlfriend?'
'No, I'm on the daughter.'
'Oh; well, he was bellowing for you a few minutes ago.' Barolli headed out.
Lewis hurried past. 'Gov is looking for you.'
'Christ! I just went to the toilet,' she snapped and was about to head towards Langton's office when he appeared.
'Where've you been?'
Anna gestured, exasperated. 'The ladies'!'
'Well, I want you with me: you did the phone-in with her, so maybe it's good you're along.'
'But what about Emily Wickenham?'
'What about her? You can see her when we get back.'
Langton strode off. The hairdresser would have to wait.
It was pouring with rain, as though someone up there was turning on taps. Anna had held her briefcase over her head as she ran across the car park, but by the time she got in beside Lewis, she was drenched.
'Christ Almighty, this is like a monsoon!' he moaned, as he rubbed his soaking wet hair.
Langton was sitting in the front next to the driver, wearing a brown raincoat with a shoulder-wide cape. He looked bone dry; Lewis, wiping his face with a handkerchief, leaned forward.
'Didn't you get caught in it then?'
'Yep, but there are such things as umbrellas, pal!'
'Right, thanks, brilliant. I'm effing soaked and so is Anna.'
Langton turned to grin at them both; he gestured to his raincoat. 'You should get one of these: down to the ankles, shoulders double up with this cape thing. I got it in Camden Market, it's worn by bushmen in Australia.'
'Rains there, does it?' Lewis said, as he pulled at his soaking wet shirt collar.
Anna could feel her hair curling up beneath her fingers. She knew it would dry into a frizzy mop, and make her look like a Cabbage Patch doll. That was what her father used to say to tease her when she was a child.
'Okay let's get this show on the road,' Langton said, as they pulled out of the station car park.
He had not contacted Gail Harrington directly but, as before, established that she was home from speaking to the housekeeper. He doubted with the downpour that she would be riding or out anywhere.
'This is something else, isn't it?' Lewis said, as he watched the rain streaming down the windscreen.
'It's the global crap,' Langton said, swivelling round to face Anna. 'Right, Travis, let's just go through the interaction you had with Miss Harrington when she called the station.'
Anna repeated the conversation, thumbing through her notebook to find the shorthand notes she'd taken at the time. Langton watched as she turned over page after page of her small square book, covered in cramped neat writing. He leaned on his elbow as she described how she had tried to persuade the woman they now knew to be Miss Harrington to give them her name and, most important, the name of the man she suspected of being involved in the Red Dahlia murder. 'She wouldn't give her own name, but then just blurted out his: Doctor Charles Henry Wickenham.'
They drove in silence for a while; then Langton said, softly, 'We focus so much on Louise Pennel and hardly ever mention Sharon Bilkin, but I think about her a lot.'
There was another silence and then Anna said quietly, 'She lied to us.'
'She was young and greedy and silly,' Lewis said.
Langton turned to him, his face set. 'That doesn't make it any better. She died spread-eagled out in a bloody field, lipstick scrawled across her body: 'fuck you'!' He turned back and smacked the dashboard with the flat of his hand. 'Fuck
'We all do,' Anna said.
'Right now we don't have a thing on him, no DNA, not a single piece of evidence to prove he's a sick pervert that screwed his own daughter.'
Lewis leaned forward. 'If we get someone to corroborate the statement of the maid in Milan, that Louise
