‘You expect me to believe you? You’ve lied about your mother. She was eighty-two years old, wasn’t she? You think she deserved to end up dead, strung up on a pulley over her bath?’
‘No,’ Bradford replied quietly.
‘What happened, Timmy, did she find out you were trying to steal her money, caught you red-handed faking her signature on a cheque and you argued?’
Bradford was beginning to break, his body language indicating that he was finding it hard to control himself. His hands were clasped at his sides and he was still sweating, with stains spreading under the armpits of his denim shirt.
‘Let me tell you what I think happened: you had this argument with your mother and you snapped, you didn’t mean to hurt her, you couldn’t stop yourself, you needed that money and…’
‘She wouldn’t give it to me.’ Bradford blurted it out.
Anna stood up and looked to Barbara.
‘Got him, he’s going to spill the beans.’
‘You want a coffee?’
‘Nope, I need to make some urgent calls,’ Anna said as she left the room.
The next time Anna saw Barbara was when she hurried into the incident room an hour later.
‘DCS Langton wants the gold bracelet from the evidence locker room.’
‘How’s it going in there?’ Anna asked.
‘Well it’s not really, they still haven’t broken him.’
Anna raced down into the basement to unlock the evidence cage with Barbara hurrying alongside her.
‘He’s opened the floodgates, we’ve had tears and at one point he even tried to get on his knees to beg forgiveness. Bradford’s got a lot of debts from his gambling and there’s some heavy guys onto him so he needed to get some cash to pay them off.’
Anna began to dig around for the bag containing the gold bracelet. ‘Did he explain why he helped Oates?’
‘No,’ said Barbara as Anna handed her the little bag. ‘He won’t say it.’ She held up the bag. ‘Maybe this is connected?’ Then she hurried back to the interview-room corridor to hand over the bracelet.
Anna slipped back into the viewing room a few moments later and Barbara rejoined her. Bradford now looked in bad shape – his hair was sodden and his face was shiny from sweat. He was hunched in his seat, his hands clasped tightly together.
‘Sorry for the delay, Mr Bradford,’ smiled Langton, ‘but I now need to take you right back to when you first heard from Henry Oates on the night he escaped…’
‘I’ve told you, I’ve told you, he just turned up.’
‘But we have these two calls, Timmy, one at 3 a.m. from Hammersmith where he dumped the police car after he escaped, and the other at 5 a.m. from Soho, which is about a two-hour walk from Hammersmith.’
Joan tapped on the door of the viewing room and told Anna that DCI Alex McBride was on the phone, urgently wanting to talk to her. By the time Anna had taken the call and returned to her seat Mike and Langton had still made no headway. Mike was now asking the same questions. All they got for an answer was that Bradford was scared not to help Oates, but he had admitted he had slapped his mother during an argument.
‘Did Langton show him the bracelet?’ Anna asked Barbara.
She shook her head. ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it? They kind of go round and round in circles.’
‘It’s called wearing the suspect down,’ Anna said drily.
‘Well I know that, but one minute he does look worn down through his lies, and then the next he claims that he’s telling the truth. One minute he admits to pushing or slapping his mother, the next he denies it, and yet we have the time of death that makes it impossible for Oates to have killed her.’
Anna focused on the screen as Langton laid out the plastic evidence bag containing the gold bracelet. He gently flattened the air out of it with his hand.
‘Have you ever seen this before, Mr Bradford?’
‘No.’
‘Let me take it out so you can get a closer look.’
Langton held the bracelet up and then rested it across his wrist.
‘Look at it, Timmy, take a good look at it.’
Bradford’s chest heaved and he straightened his back, shaking his head.
‘Take hold of it, Tim, really, go on, have a good look.’
Anna tensed up, leaning forwards, wondering what Langton’s intentions were. But disappointingly Bradford showed little reaction.
‘No.’
‘Why does it worry you to touch it? Here, take hold of it.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘It’s not your mother’s, is it?’
‘No.’
Langton looked through the stack of photographs and placed the one of Angela Thornton down in front of Bradford.
‘You know this girl, don’t you?’ he asked as he placed the bracelet beside the photograph.
It was astonishing because Bradford started to cry like a kid. Snot dripped from his nose and he wiped it with the cuff of his shirt, then he put his head in his hands and started sobbing heavily.
An hour later Bradford asked for a bathroom break. Langton had been given a real talking-to by Bradford’s solicitor, Miss Adams, as she had no disclosure regarding Angela Thornton and felt that Langton was being, at times, overbearing with her client. They had a very heated discussion and by the time Langton came into the incident room he was in a real temper. He paced in front of Anna’s desk, snatching at a sandwich she’d brought in for him.
‘I can’t bloody break the little sod: every time I think he’s going to come clean he backs off and turns the water-works on.’
‘I thought you were onto something with the bracelet and the photo of Angela. It did get a big reaction – it was the first time he really broke down.’
‘I’d like to break his sodding little neck.’ He sighed.
‘Do you think there is a connection between him and Angela Thornton?’
‘I don’t honestly know. I was just trying it on because that’s another fucking scenario we need to explore.’
He wiped his fingers on a paper napkin, rolled it up into a tight ball and tossed it into the wastebasket.
‘We believe that Oates has some hold over Bradford, right? And it’s a big one, so is there any possibility that it was the two of them? That they’re both killers, and did all of the murders between them?’
Anna shook her head.
‘No, I don’t buy that; Oates has admitted to the murders. Why would he protect Timmy if he was an accomplice? It couldn’t have been the two of them with Mrs Douglas if she was already dead.’
‘Yes, yes, I know that,’ he snapped.
Anna found it difficult to know what to say to Langton as he was in such a foul mood.
‘Listen, let me dig around and see if I can find any connection between Bradford and Angela Thornton, because of the way he reacted the first time he broke down.’
‘The little fucker could get an Oscar nomination for his performances; it’s hard to get anything out of him.’
Anna suggested that in the next session they should pull back on the accusation about his mother. They now knew she had died of a heart attack, so maybe if they went softly and encouraged Bradford to talk about the possibility of it being an accident, that he had never intended to hurt her, he would divulge more about his relationship with Oates.
Langton checked his watch and agreed that he would give it a go.
Bradford appeared to be calmer. He’d washed his face and hands, and sat pressing back into his chair, his solicitor beside him. Mike reminded him that he was still under caution, and that anything he said might be used as evidence in court. Before Langton started the interview Bradford cleared his throat and said that he had been answering all their questions truthfully, and he was still very distressed about what had happened. He then gave a long rambling explanation of how he had been out shopping and when he returned Oates had already been let into the flat by his mother. He said that Oates had tied her up and she was lying on the sofa in her nightdress and had wet herself. He said she had sticky tape wrapped around her face and hands and her feet were tied with the cord from her dressing gown.