by Iain Cameron
‘I’ll get on to it sir,’ Graham said with a degree of alacrity, surprising for someone who would be spending the next few days looking over grainy CCTV pictures.
‘Seb,’ Henderson said to DC Seb Young, a tall and skinny lad with boyish features, despite the rigours of a job which interfered with eating and sleeping patterns and exposed him to the darker side of human nature. ‘Did you see any signs of a struggle at the house?’
‘No sir, although my brief was only to find out what clothes and travel documents Mrs Langton took with her, which we know now was little more than she carried in her purse and handbag. But even with a cursory check, I couldn’t see any indication of broken furniture, damage to walls, blood on the carpet, any of that sort of thing.’
‘No new mounds of earth in the garden then, Seb?’ Wallop asked.
‘Not unless you count the mole hills but then it would make it too easy, wouldn’t it?’
Henderson sighed and glanced down at his notes. ‘I know it’s not much to go on but the report by DS Walters and DC Agha after their interview with Kelly’s closest friend, Liz Egger, hints at a motive which I’m finding hard to ignore, although to some it might sound like I’m grasping at straws. Carol, tell us more.’
‘For those of you who don’t know,’ Walters said, ‘or didn’t read the interview DC Agha and I conducted with Liz Egger, Kelly Langton’s best friend. She told us about strong rumours circulating around Brian Langton’s production company that he is having an affair with his secretary, Melanie Knight. It’s interesting to note Mrs Egger was alerted to this affair by Langton’s Finance Director, Gemma Ferguson and so it’s on a different level from malicious gossip, in my opinion.’
‘What do we know about Melanie Knight,’ Henderson asked, ‘has anyone spoken to her?’
He glanced around at the faces in the room but no takers. He cleared his throat, it was conclusion time and many sat up, not only to hear his wise and considered counsel but because it was coming close to the end of the meeting and a long day and many were keen to go home or down the pub.
‘First up, let’s bring in Melanie Knight. It’s a long shot, as she might not want to drop her boyfriend in the dirt since he also pays her wages, but whatever the outcome, I would like this rumour confirmed or denied. If she confirms it, an affair is not in itself prima facie evidence of Brian Langton’s guilt, especially as Liz Egger says he’s done this kind of thing before, but if we put it to him and he becomes evasive, drops the pretence or lets something slip, we can go after him with everything we’ve got.’
He returned to his office and after dumping the Kelly Langton papers on the desk, picked up the Ricky Wood murder file before taking a seat around the small conference table. A few minutes later, DC Bentley, DS Walters and DS Hobbs all trooped in and sat down.
‘Let’s start with the P-M.’
‘It was as much as we suspected,’ Hobbs said without referring to his notes. ‘Mr Wood was beaten extensively with fists and boots, breaking his nose, fingers on both hands, and two ribs before being stabbed five times. The killer blow was the second wound, as it went straight through the heart, slicing a major artery on its way.’
‘Five times?’ Henderson said. ‘They wanted him dead, for sure.’
‘That’s how it looks. There was some alcohol in his system, consistent with a couple of pints at the match and some cannabis, likely a small toke before going out for the evening; not enough to slow down his reactions but maybe enough to make him unwary.’
‘Not much he could do in any case,’ Walters said, ‘with four blokes laying into him.’
‘It’s interesting they broke his fingers, and him a journalist,’ Bentley said. ‘Sending a message perhaps?’
‘What about DNA, prints?’ Henderson said.
‘Sorry boss, no DNA, no prints.’
‘You’re kidding me. Four guys with bloody knuckles, all frothing at the mouth, wheezing from the exertion and probably spitting on the poor sod as well?’
‘Nope.’
‘Any sign of the murder weapon?’
‘It wasn’t discarded at the Racecourse sir,’ Bentley said, ‘as most cars were gone by the time of the murder and so it’s not likely it was pressed into the soil, making it hard to find as we covered an area of about two hundred yards around the murder scene. I think we must assume they took it with them.’
‘Carol,’ Henderson said. ‘Where are we with our witnesses?’
‘I’ve set up all the appeals at the ground and with The Argus and not only did they insert it into the news story on page 3, they also incorporated it into the football report on the back page.’
‘Good. Many responses?’
‘Yes loads, we’re wading through them as we speak.’
‘Try and speed it up as we need something more positive. What about Mr Buckley’s car? Is it fingerprinted yet?’
‘Mr Hinckley.’
‘Hinckley, Buckley, it sounds the same. Did you contact him? Tell me we’ve got the car.’
‘I spoke to him before he flew off to Frankfurt on the day after the match and his car’s been lying in an airport car park ever since.’
Henderson sighed. The lack of a straw to grasp was weighing him down. ‘When is he due back?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Talking of Mr Hinckley,’ Bentley said, ‘what do we make of the, ‘this is for Kerry or Kelly,’ comment he said he overheard?’
‘Are we settling on ‘Kelly’ rather than ‘Kerry’? Walters asked.
‘We’ll keep an open mind,’ Henderson said, ‘but the ‘Kelly’ version seems too much of a coincidence to ignore.’
‘The obvious conclusion,’ Hobbs said without too much conviction, ‘it’s Brian Langton’s pals getting their own back on Kelly’s killer.’
‘I thought the same,’ Walters said, ‘but Brian Langton’s a television producer and he might be a rough diamond, but is he capable of rustling up four thugs to carry out a murder?’
‘He met plenty in the old television programme he used to front,’ Hobbs said.
‘Yeah,’ Walters said, ‘but that was over ten years ago and any episodes I saw, they all wanted to break his neck, not to do him a big favour. Don’t forget, we interviewed Ricky Wood, and even though I wouldn’t trust any journalist as far as I could throw him, except Rachel Jones, of course, he didn’t seem capable either.’
‘This is the problem,’ Henderson said, ‘the theory lacks credibility, as Ricky Wood didn’t look like Kelly’s abductor and Brian Langton I don’t think is Ricky’s killer.’
He thought for a moment. ‘We’ll put the ‘Kelly’ comment on the back burner for now but all it leaves us with is the possible fingerprints on the Audi bodywork. Carol, we need to grab our witness as soon as he touches down and get his car in here and give it the full treatment, and I don’t mean washing and valeting. If there’s anything on it, find it. By the sound of it, it might be the only lead we’ve got.’
TWELVE
With a sigh, DS Carol Walters tidied up her papers and DC Khalid Agha did the same. They were sitting behind a desk in the main foyer of Williamson College the school on the outskirts of Cowfold that Ben and Josh Langton attended, and had just wasted the best part of the afternoon.
It was a long shot, interviewing parents, but those closer to Kelly such as friends, business associates, and relatives hadn’t thrown any light on her disappearance and they’d been forced to cast the net wider. Too wide it seemed as most of the people they’d interviewed today claimed to know her by sight only.
The school building, once a sprawling country house set in two hundred acres of Sussex land that included orchards, grazing sheep, and cattle had been sold off in 1934 to pay the owner’s mounting gambling debts. A few years later, it had been converted into a boys’ school and nowadays it educated boys and girls from infants right up to A-level. It no longer boasted an orchard or kept animals but instead offered fantastic sporting facilities and a variety of after-school activ
ities most inner-city kids could only dream about.
On a map, fifty miles lay between Williamson College and the high school in Portsmouth DS Walters had attended, but in all other respects it was a world away, as her school didn’t have a swimming pool, tennis courts, climbing wall, or games room; but it did have two hockey pitches which flooded when it rained and gangs and cliques who would beat up anyone who didn’t want to become a member.
Many of her fellow pupils were the sons and daughters of serving Royal Navy personnel who manned a fleet of aircraft carriers and frigates, regular visitors to Portsmouth Harbour at all times of the year. She didn’t use pseudo-social theories and psychobabble to try and understand why some people were bad and others good, but in her experience, many of the kids who didn’t see their fathers or mothers for months at a time were often the same people causing all the trouble.
The two officers had spent the last two hours interviewing parents and even though the DC called ahead and informed the school secretary of their impending arrival and requested a message to be posted on the notice board, several went straight home after picking up their kids. This attitude, people making their own decisions about what information would or would not be useful to the police, annoyed her more than anything else about her job, as it could damage what could turn out to be a key part of this investigation and she could wring every one of their well-moisturised necks.
The interviews they did manage to conduct were pointless as no one claimed to have seen or heard anything unusual in Kelly’s behaviour on the day she went missing, or in her relationships with other parents or staff, and even those parents who knew her well and spoke to her often were unable to add anything new. It had been a normal day and the more she heard this, the more she became convinced Kelly Langton had been taken by a kidnapper either on her journey between the school and home, or something had happened at her house when she got there.
Before saying goodbye to the admin staff, who went out of their way to be helpful, perhaps to atone for their earlier gaff of not putting up a notice, Agha decided he would go out for ‘some fresh air,’ the boy’s euphemism for a sly fag. He came back into the building five minutes later with a face like a half-chewed toffee and not reeking like yesterday’s ashtray.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she said, warming her back at a roaring log fire burning in the huge fireplace in the oak-lined main hallway. ‘Somebody stolen your pencil?’
‘This place is a fuc…it’s a no smoking estate,’ he said, his face angry but mellowing, as his eyes followed a young tight-skirted teacher walking past. ‘If you can believe it, I was told off by a Sixth-Former who was way taller than me. What do they feed them on here?’
‘Ha, you’ll learn. Listen to someone who’s been there. Give up, it’s a hell of a lot easier what with all those no smoking restaurants, pubs, shops and now schools, you got nowhere to go, mate.’
‘Humph, that’s what I get for living in a bloody nanny state. Oh, I forgot to say, I spotted some cameras outside.’
‘What, in the school grounds?’
‘Yeah. It seems a bit of overkill in a place like this. It’s hardly inner-city Birmingham, is it?’
‘Where are they?’
‘Over in the car park, where we drove in and a place they call the Quadrangle.’
‘Grab your stuff. We’re going to the school office to take a look. Maybe this crap day can be rescued after all.’
The Bursar, Miss Brocket was an unsmiling, lumpy woman aged between forty and sixty whose true age proved difficult to ascertain as her clothes and hair were ‘classic’, meaning neither had changed since her early twenties. She did have a beautiful view of the school grounds from her office, through tall sash windows and out to a large expanse of grass and trees stretching into the distance with football and rugby pitches, a play park, and an elaborate climbing frame.
‘The cameras?’ she said, a sour look on her face and her hands clasped in front of her, as if considering the next Latin verb in the list or waiting for someone to tell her the capital of Lithuania.
‘There are eight dotted around the building focussed on the playground and busy traffic areas such as the Quadrangle and outside the sports hall where bunching and jostling can often lead to disagreements.’
Oh, the poor things, DS Walters was tempted to say. ‘What about the car park?’
‘Yes, there’s one there.’
‘And the access roads?’
‘Yes, there’s one as you enter the school on the East Gate and one as you exit on the West Gate.’
‘Excellent. Can we take a look at the tapes for 6th September, please?’
Miss Brocket creaked upright, crossed the room and opened a long glass cabinet with a key.
Walters tried to keep hold of her enthusiasm, as she was confident they would show Kelly entering and leaving the school. If there was nothing odd about the time interval between the two and if she travelled alone, they were no further forward, but at least the school could be eliminated from their enquiries. But what if she wasn’t?
‘The 6th September you said?’
‘Yes.’ Kelly had disappeared ten days ago but she didn’t expect a school like this to recycle their tapes on a weekly basis as they did in a busy filling station or a supermarket.
Miss Brocket pulled a tape out from a neat row and popped it into the slot of a video recorder, the bottom unit in a small array of AV kit, tucked away in a corner of her office. At first the picture was black, then interspersed with white wavy lines and while she hoped it would soon start with something recognisable as a recording, it didn’t, even when the Bursar pressed the fast-forward button. She gave up after a few minutes. She tried another from the following day, and another from the day after that, but they were all the same.
‘Oh dear. There seems to be a little problem.’
Ten minutes later, they drove out the school gates. ‘What a bloody waste of time,’ Agha said, guiding the car onto the main road and pointing it south in the direction of Brighton.
‘Yes, and no,’ she said, trying to put a positive spin on things as she opened a window to let out the strong smell of garlic seeping out of his pores like cheap after-shave. ‘I think we succeeded in reassuring parents we are working on the case and taking it seriously, as a few demanded to know what the hell we were doing about it.’
‘Ha, I know what you mean. These people talked to us like bloody colonialists and we were their manservants or natives on a South-Sea island. What a bunch of toffee-nosed gits.’
‘Easy boy, you’ll blow a gasket.’
He shrugged. ‘I know I’m stereotyping about posh schools and all that but the message I heard was loud and clear. It was uncharacteristic of her to go off like she did and we should take a closer look at her husband.’
She sat back and closed her eyes, thankful it was near the end and not the start of a long and frustrating day. ‘Yeah, I heard it too. She seemed popular but nobody said a good word about him. I wonder why?’
They arrived back at Sussex House at six. She dumped the fattening Langton file on her desk and was preparing to head home, when DI Henderson barged in and plonked himself down in the spare chair, demanding an update. Her mind was already on a warm shower and a cool glass of Pinot Grigio to wash away the irritations of a crappy day but she recovered and summarised the parent interviews and the concern expressed by many of Kelly’s friends.
‘Bloody annoying about the CCTV,’ he said. ‘There’s no point having the thing if it’s not properly maintained.’
‘I quite agree, but as the pupils are in the main, well-behaved and with only a few accidents in the car park each year, they don’t look at it very often.’
‘You sound like you’re reading from their marketing brochure. What sort of fault was it?’
‘There had been a leaky gutter with water coming down the walls inside her office and when it was fixed, they got a decorator in to re-paint. They think he must have disconnected the AV unit wh
en he shifted the cabinet and forgot to plug it back in.’
‘So simple, eh? I hope he received two weeks detention and a hundred lines.’
‘I wouldn’t put it past Miss Brocket, she’s a tough old boot.’
‘So where do we go from here?’
‘Well, we drew a blank with her friends, ditto the gym, and now the school. The only place left to go, in my opinion, is either the husband or an unknown abductor. It’s time to choose a card, partner. You play poker, do we stick or twist?’
‘That’s blackjack, not poker. Where are we on the Audi Q7 paw print?’
‘Mr Hinckley’s Audi Q7 from the racecourse?’
‘Aye, the very one.’
‘When did you last receive an update?’
‘I know he came back from Dubai on Sunday and he told us we couldn’t have his car as he needed it on Monday but we could have it Monday night.’
‘Forensics gave it priority and before I left for Williamson College they sent an email to say they found a number of fingerprints on an offside body panel. They also said the car is dirty and hadn’t been washed since the match.’
‘Good. Where are they?’
‘Phil Bentley’s doing the necessary.’
‘Let’s go see him.’
It was after six and like a good trooper, DC Bentley was still at his computer and waiting for the database to return matches of the fingerprints he’d entered.
‘How’s it going Phil?’ Walters said.
‘Oh, hi sarg, evening sir.’
‘Forensics found a whole load of fingerprints on the offside of the car,’ Bentley said, ‘and I’m working through them. Of the ones processed so far, a couple belong to kids and I’m assuming they’re Mr Hinckley’s, and another is an adult belonging to a security guard at Heathrow who’s got a record for stealing valuables from cars.’
‘Keep him back,’ Henderson said, ‘as we might need him to boost our stats as I don’t think this case or the Langton disappearance will be doing it soon.’
‘Since when did you get so concerned about stats?’
