‘Yes. We have.’
He smiled and closed the door, leaving her in the musty-smelling room. There were strip lights overhead and the neon shed a bluish light on the rows of tagged plastic bags. She moved along the shelf until she got to a bag marked women’s clothes, then she carried it to a small side table and opened it. There was some rather unpleasant dirty underwear, a pair of drainpipe jeans and some sweaters. She took her time sorting them and then checked the labels, putting a couple of items aside. She then replaced the bag on the shelf and listed the items she had removed. Next she found a smaller bag containing ladies’ shoes and opened it. There was one high-heeled shoe and a pair of patent leather knee-high boots. They were all very worn and the shoe was a different size to the boots. She made a note of the sizes and replaced them.
Anna didn’t take Pete up on his offer of a coffee. Instead she went back to her flat as it was just across the river from the Lambeth laboratories. There she made herself a sandwich and a cup of tea and skimmed through the Angela Thornton file. She had disappeared after a night out with girlfriends in the Mile End area of London. She had to all intents and purposes been a pleasant young woman, well dressed and still living at home with her parents. The inscribed bracelet that had led eventually to her missing person file was, of all the items removed from Henry Oates’s stinking basement, the odd one out because of its value. The fact that the clasp was broken and it was missing some stones, which her parents had said were garnets, also made it different. Nothing else they had recovered had been of anything like the same value.
As soon as Anna got back to the station she rang Glasgow. McBride gave her the contact number of the rehab facility that Corinna Oates had, as a condition of her sentence for drugs offences, been ordered to attend. Frustratingly she was switched from one department to another and no one appeared to know what she was talking about. She tried McBride again, apologizing for bothering him, but explaining she urgently needed to contact either Eileen Oates direct or whoever had been dealing with her daughter absconding from the rehab centre. After yet another series of time-wasting calls she found no one able to give her any assistance, but then McBride called her to say that Eileen was at the hospital with her youngest daughter who was about to give birth.
Everyone had noticed that Anna was obviously caught up on some business or other as she had been on the telephone most of the afternoon. As the team were all working on the charges against Oates, everyone was equally busy. Oates was still being held in the cells at the station, and Mike as the DCI on the investigation had been closeted with the Area Commander and Langton as they reviewed the mass of new evidence. Preparing to re-interview and then charge Oates with the murder of Mrs Douglas along with the other victims was a lengthy process, and they were still waiting on the post mortem reports to finalize the papers, whilst at the same time evidence was still being brought from Mrs Douglas’s flat. It was hard to even contemplate that number of man-hours.
Anna had turned her attention to the tapes of Henry Oates’s interviews. She was focusing in particular on the moment when Oates placed the bracelet on top of the photograph of Angela Thornton, playing it over and over. She would then rewind to the bit when he had dismissed various other photographs of missing girls until he had selected the ones he claimed to have murdered then taken to the quarry. He was abusive and rude about some of the missing girls’ looks, but he had clearly picked out the picture of Angela Thornton and he had placed the gold bracelet on it. Although he did not know their names, he could identify the items he had removed from each body. Backwards and forwards she rewound, replayed, half unsure of what she was looking for, until Barbara interrupted her.
‘I’ve got the name and contact number of a girl who shared a room with Corinna Oates at the rehab centre. She left there just after Corinna absconded. I’ve not managed to talk to anyone at the centre as they blank me with invasion of privacy, and without having permission from Christ knows who they just clam up, but this girl is clean and doing community work as part of her sentence. Her name is Morag Kelly, she’ll be at that number after ten this evening.’
‘Terrific, thank you.’
‘I’ve been onto BT and they are getting back to me, but I’ve been a bit caught up.’
Anna pursed her lips.
‘This is very important, Barbara. Leave it with me, I’ll do it myself.’
‘Mrs Douglas’s flat is a crime scene – I mean, surely Mike can get this information within seconds?’ Barbara suggested.
‘He’s busy right now; as I said, I’ll check it out. Besides, right now it’s just a theory, so don’t bother him with it.’
Barbara gave a small shrug of her shoulders and went back to her desk. Bursting with irritation, she turned to Joan.
‘She’s off on some theory of her own! But she’s got me running around for her as if we’ve not got enough on our plates.’
‘Well, she’s not the DCI on the case, Mike is, and she’s sort of got the Rebekka Jordan charges to deal with.’
‘But it’s too much. She’s constantly interrupting me to check on things that aren’t part of our work.’ Sighing, Barbara looked across to Mike Lewis’s office, where the blinds were drawn down. She checked her watch – it would be time for another round of coffees in there any minute now.
Meanwhile Anna had got onto BT. They were very accommodating and she now had a printout of all the calls made from Mrs Douglas’s flat from a month prior to Oates’s original arrest. Unfortunately tech support said that because Mrs Douglas’s phone was an oldstyle, it did not record details of who had called in during the same period. Anna noticed however that two reverse charge calls had been made to the flat on the day after Oates escaped. Underlining all the numbers of interest in pink highlighter, she carried the pages over to Joan, and asked her to find out who those numbers belonged to. Almost as an afterthought, she also asked Joan to double-check the races held at the Wimbledon dog track on the night Henry Oates escaped from the quarry.
Anna truthfully could not have given her reasons for what she was doing, but knew it was like her father used to say: a gut reaction based on copper’s instinct with no rational explanation. She didn’t even think about sharing her concerns, as it was very obvious the entire team were inundated. Although time and time again Langton had reprimanded her for not being a team player, she genuinely didn’t consider that this was the right time to voice her suspicions.
As tray after tray of coffee disappeared into Mike’s office, Anna had the first hint that she might be on the right track. Joan presented her with the traced numbers of the calls made from Mrs Douglas’s flat. On the day prior to Oates’s escape there had been a call to the NatWest Bank in New Malden and also one the following day. The two reverse charge calls were from pay phones – and they were in the early morning after Oates had escaped from the quarry. Adding to her mounting suspicions was the news that Timmy Bradford had lied about being at the dog racing in Wimbledon on the night Henry Oates had taken his mother hostage. There was no racing as the track was under refurbishment and was not reopened until the weekend. Annoyingly the bank had already closed for the day, but Joan was given the task of getting hold of the manager and making an appointment for Anna to see him. Fortunately the ten thousand pounds was still retained by the police as evidence.
A second hit came from Professor Hall at the mortuary, who was very loud and pompous when he rang. Anna had to hold the receiver at arm’s length.
‘DCI Travis?’
‘Speaking.’
‘The marks on Mrs Douglas’s neck are as I quite rightly suspected post mortem. She was hanged with the cord after death.’