“It’s not about trust; it’s his take on our killer, and it’s bloody close to John Smiley. That elephant-sized wife and that bloody sterile house, he must feel suffocated. He looked to me to be totally dominated by her. He must relish the trips away from home — I know I would.”
“But that doesn’t make him our killer.”
“Too many coincidences. Caught on camera at the service station twice, the sumo wrestler of a wife who just happens to be Polish, like two of our victims. Again, going over what Welsh said, Margaret Potts is the odd one out, a hardened tart. If he’s right, could she hold the clue? Could she be a witness? To what, I dunno.”
Anna concentrated on driving, glancing at the SatNav screen to make sure they were on the right route.
“Too many coincidences,” Langton repeated. “What about him saying there has to be a witness?”
“Doesn’t mean that we have one with this case. I am sure if you did a ratio check on nondomestic murders, but serial killers—”
“He was right, Anna, there is always a witness, and we need to find ours. Now, if it was Margaret Potts, we are going to have start backtracking.”
Anna sighed. They had already spent a long time gathering information on Margaret Potts’s background, and with a woman who had no permanent address, who had worked as a whore for so many years, it was going to be difficult to uncover anything that they had not already investigated.
“We have to find the link,” Langton persisted.
“But I’ve interviewed her husband, her brother-in-law, and this Emerald Turk woman. Maggie didn’t have friends, and she lived rough at hostels.”
“Find out how long Swell Blinds were established in West London. We want to go back over their records from before they moved to Manchester. So John Smiley pays house calls to measure the blinds: did Margaret Potts meet him then? Did she recognize him at the service station? We’ve only got two dates caught on CCTV footage, but what if he was more of a regular, one of her clients?” Langton got out his piece of string and began twisting it around his fingers. “I agree with Welsh: this man has killed before those two Polish girls. We need to check out this new victim wrapped in the blanket. Dig around to see if we have any others, because I think we’re going to find them. If he was picking up victims before the company moved to Manchester, the time frame fits with a possible break in his sickness. Then he starts it again.”
Anna decided that rather than get into an argument with him, she’d stay quiet. The fact that Langton was judging everything by what Welsh had said to him surprised her. She had not picked up any gut feeling that John Smiley was their killer; he had at no time appeared to be lying. The only time she had felt a hint that anything was suspicious was when he had talked about the back lanes behind the London Gateway service station.
Langton then called various other teams on different cases for an update. Just realizing that he was also overseeing numerous other inquiries and with the same intensity and hands-on control impressed Anna, even if she did think he was wrongfooting their investigation.
It was late afternoon when they arrived back at the station, and they could see at once that there had been a lot of new information added to the board in the incident room. Mike Lewis gave them an update, listing all the interviews and the fact that the back lanes were used on a regular basis by some of the other girls. The inquiries around the outhouses and barns had produced a lot of descriptions of various trucks and vans, along with the news that a farmer had moved on some travelers who had parked their wagons there. An old caravan had been searched, and blankets and sleeping bags had been brought in, along with hypodermic needles and condoms.
It was obvious that there had been a considerable amount of legwork done since they had been in Manchester, but Langton ignored it, instead asking to see the file on the blue-blanket victim.
The case was four years old, the victim never identified, her naked body wrapped in the soiled blanket, on which there was no laundry marking. She had been strangled and raped, and her body was badly bruised. Her age was between twenty to thirty, and there were no police records of her fingerprints. She was dark-haired. The one piece of evidence the original team had hoped would help identify her was a small tattoo of a lizard on her right hip. There had been no jewelry, no clothes, and although the Thames Valley Murder Squad had given extensive press and television coverage, no one had come forward.
Mike Lewis said that the victim was found by a farmer, and her body, wrapped in the blanket, had been left in a field by a ditch. It was equidistant between two service stations, but closer to the M6 motorway than to the M1.
Langton stared at the dead girl’s face. It was impossible to say whether or not she was a prostitute, but the postmortem had revealed that she was sexually active; also, the rape had been violent. The killer had left no DNA, and she had no restraint marks and no defense marks on her nails and hands, either. She had been strangled, possibly by her own tights, and there were three lines around her throat, as if her tights or a cord had been wound around it and drawn into a garotte. The killer had taken it away.
The victim’s photographs were pinned up alongside those of Anika Waleska and Estelle Dubcek. Although the team had now identified both girls, they had no information about how they had come to be in the area where they were found. Three days were missing from when Estelle was last seen, and nobody recalled seeing Anika for weeks before her body was discovered.
“Could she be foreign? Polish, like the other two girls?” Langton asked.
Mike shrugged. “No idea. I mean, with the Anika girl, we’ve been trying to trace a dentist who fixed her front teeth, but we don’t know if that was done in the UK, and we’ve not had any joy from the television network regarding their anonymous female caller who tipped us off on her identity. They put out a request for her to get in contact, but she hasn’t, and we’ve been back to the Polish embassy for help but got no result.”
Langton moved on to the photograph of Margaret Potts. He tapped her face. “If Potts died because she witnessed something, then she’s our best bet. We’re going to have to concentrate on her and go back and interview everyone who knew her again.”
Mike glanced at Anna, but she gave no reaction. “Okay, we’ll keep on going,” Mike said.
It was Barolli who asked if John Smiley was still in the frame. Langton shoved his hands into his pockets. “Yeah. We’ll have to get Mr. Rodgers, who owns Swell Blinds, to give us more details of Smiley’s routes and visits for measuring up the blinds, and to go back to before the company moved to Manchester.” He turned to look again at the board. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? Three, maybe four victims, and we’re nowhere. But I don’t want to give up; we keep on going even if it feels like we’re wading through treacle. Go back and keep at it until we get a result. We might have missed something.”
“The van driver who discovered Estelle’s body is coming back in. Is there a reason?” Mike asked.
“Yes, my gut instinct. I think he lied, and I want to question him in person. I don’t believe he could have seen the body that easily, unless he already knew it was there. I want to find out why he lied.”
The team was depressed after Langton left. Mike suggested they take a weekend off, recharge their batteries, and return on Monday to start refreshed. Anna remained behind, typing up her report of the prison visit to Welsh and the interview with Smiley. By the time she left the station, it was after ten, and she couldn’t wait to get home and take a leisurely relaxing shower. It had been a very long day with a long drive, and her back ached.