“Your boss speaks highly of you,” Anna said pleasantly, taking a seat in front of him.
“Well, so he should,” Potts replied. “I’ve worked for him for eight years, and I don’t think he’s lifted his butt off his office chair once in all that time.” He grinned to reveal very white teeth; he was really quite a handsome man. His hands were large, and the knuckles looked like those of a boxer’s. In fact, a slightly crooked nose gave him the look of one.
“I met your brother,” Anna said quietly.
“Stanley,” he said as softly. He sighed, shaking his head. “One of life’s losers, I’m afraid. Never held a job, and if he did any work, it’d be down the betting shop. He was addicted to gambling and drinking — and he and I fell out years ago.”
“You knew his wife.”
“Margaret. Yes, I did. I know what happened to her, but the sad thing was, no matter how many times you’d try and tell her to stop what she was doing, she just wouldn’t listen.”
“You knew she was a prostitute?”
“Yes.”
“So you kept in touch with her after she left your brother?”
“Yes. Not on a regular basis, though. Years could pass and I’d not hear from her, then she’d turn up.”
“At your home?” asked Anna.
“Yes. Usually when she was broke or needing a place to stay for a while. It caused problems with my wife, as they didn’t get along; plus, I’ve got two kids, and often she’d be the worse for wear on drink or drugs, so eventually, I had to put a stop to her coming round.”
“Did you still see her?”
“A couple of times she’d call me and I’d meet her in a café, but I hadn’t seen her for almost a year before I read about her being murdered.” Unlike his brother, Eric appeared genuinely upset talking about it.
“No one ever approached you to ask about her?”
“No. Why should they? Like I said, I hadn’t seen top nor tail of her for more than a year. Last time we met, I gave her some money. I said to her it’d be the last and that I couldn’t go on shelling out to her, as I had my own commitments, and I warned her again that she could end up in a bad way doing what she was doing.”
“What exactly did you think she was doing?”
“Come on, love.” Eric gave Anna a weary look. “She was a tart and getting on in years — not that she didn’t try and keep herself looking good. She did, and when she was young, she was a real looker. How she got involved with my brother was always beyond me. You know about him, do you?”
“I know he spent time in prison.”
“Not that. The way he knocked her around and he mistreated their kids. He was a useless husband and father. When she left him, her kids were taken into care, thank Christ, but she herself had taken enough.”
“Did she run to you?”
“Me? No way! I was married, remember? She took off with some other tosser who put her on the streets.” Eric wiped a hand across his face. “You couldn’t say anything to her about him or about what he was making her do. She was, to my mind, caught in a vicious circle, beaten up by her husband and then knocked about by this creep. Got what he deserved in the end, though — died of a drug overdose.”
“Stanley implied that you and Margaret were lovers. In fact, he blamed you for breaking up his marriage.”
Eric changed color. Opening one of his desk drawers, he took out a small bottle of brandy, removed the top, and poured two measures from the lid into his mug. He gave a rueful smile and replaced the bottle. “That idiot accused everyone of screwing her — me, his neighbors, Uncle Tom Cobleigh. But she was a decent girl, and whether or not we had a bit of thing is neither here nor there. I cared about her, I always did, and that’s why she felt she could come to me when she was in trouble.”
“Did you know she was working the service stations?”
He nodded.
“And do you know how she would travel to them? I presume she didn’t have a car.”
He shrugged. “I think she’d catch a lift, maybe, but I couldn’t say for sure, ’cause by the time she was ducking and diving with the bloody truckers, I’d given up trying to help her. All I know is she’d pull in the blokes at the service stations, do whatever to earn a few quid, then come back by morning.”
“But you did help her, didn’t you?”
“I said I gave her a few quid now and then, yeah.”
“No other ways? I know Margaret kept a logbook of her punters’ car and lorry registrations, and if they didn’t pay her or knocked her around, she’d get help in tracing them.”
“I don’t want to get into this.” He put his big hands up.
“Mr. Potts, Margaret’s body was found dumped in a field beside the M1 motorway. She’d been raped and strangled. There was no handbag, nothing to identify her but her fingerprints from police records. We have no suspect and no witnesses — but what if one of the men she was able to get revenge on killed her? If you know anything about any of the men she picked up, it won’t get you into any trouble, but we would like to question them as possible suspects.”
He leaned back in his chair. “Look, a couple of mates — ex-coppers — helped out, and yeah, we did pay the blokes a visit, but not for a long time. Like I said to you, I’d not been in contact with Maggie for a year or more before she was murdered.”
“Do you still have the information?”
“No. Got rid of it as soon as it was done.”
“What about friends of Margaret’s? Do you know anyone I could talk to that she knew well?” Anna wasn’t going to give up.
“No. Listen, I might sound like a right dickhead, but you can only go so far with someone, know what I mean? She had her head kicked in, and the bloke threw her out of his cab. I got his company address from my pals, and I called on him. I gave him the same medicine he gave to Maggie, and he handed over fifty quid. I was having problems with the wife not wanting her staying on our couch, but she was a right mess — black eyes and a broken nose. I said to her that this time that was it: I wasn’t gonna do it again, and she had to straighten out her life — go into a hostel, anything but stop living the way she was.”
“She didn’t want to report it?”
“No way, not with her record.”
“So when she wasn’t staying with you, where did she live?”
“Rough. There’s a place she used in the West End — you know, book in for the night, or she crashed out with one or other of the other women she knew, but I didn’t know where, and I never met any of her so-called friends. I say so-called because they were always nicking her things. Not that she had much, just bits of jewelry from my mother.”
“Did you ever meet a woman called Emerald Turk?”
“No.”
“Margaret had a suitcase. Did she bring it round to your place when she stayed?”
“Suitcase? Yeah, I think she had one, although she’d use the lockers at one or another station for most of her belongings. She never had much. Not that she didn’t try and keep herself clean. When she stayed at my place, she was always in the bath and washing and ironing, another reason the wife didn’t want her around.”
It was totally unexpected: Eric suddenly put his hands over his face and wept. He then took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes and blew his nose. “Fucking tragic life,” he said shakily. “And don’t think I haven’t felt like shit sometimes, ’cause she didn’t deserve to end up the way she did.”
He opened the same drawer and rifled through it for a moment. He brought out a small, cheap folding frame with two photographs inside it. He opened it and passed it to Anna. “That was Maggie when I first knew her.”
The photograph was of such a pretty woman, smiling at the camera, wearing a white cotton dress and sitting on a park bench. In the opposite frame, facing her, was a picture of a young Eric in army uniform. “I loved her once,” he said softly.