‘You can’t do this to me.’
Langton smiled, and said softly, ‘You want to bet?’ Then he turned to Mike Lewis. ‘Arrange for him to be taken down to the holding cell.’
‘Ah, don’t put me back down there,’ Vernon bleated.
‘It’ll be a lot cushier than where you’ll end up.’
‘In a box, you bastard! That’s what’ll happen to me!’
Lewis hesitated, then got up. He was confused as to whether Langton meant what he had said, and watched for a signal, but Langton had his back to him, looking down at his clipboard. Lewis walked out.
Langton looked at the tape. ‘For the benefit of the tape, DI Mike Lewis has just left the interview room; time is four-fifteen p.m.’
He switched it off and suddenly picked up the clipboard; he swiped it fast across Vernon’s face. Vernon gasped and sat back. Langton placed it back down in front of him as if nothing had happened.
‘You have two minutes, Vernon.’
As Vernon gawped at him, Langton brought up the toe of his shoe and kicked him in the groin so hard that the man reeled back in his chair, clutching at his balls in agony.
‘One minute,’ Langton said, never taking his eyes off the sweating, frightened man. ‘Talk, Vernon, fucking start talking to me. Tell me about Clinton Camorra.’
Vernon squeezed his eyes closed. ‘It was all that prick Murphy’s fault; he tried to blackmail him.’
Langton walked into the incident room, taut with anger. Anna had just returned to the station and was at her desk.
‘We leave for the house in Peckham in five minutes,’ he snapped, and slammed his office door.
Lewis came in; she asked what was happening.
‘Vernon’s down in the holding cell; bastard has been lying from the get go. It’s taken bloody hours, but—’
Before he could finish, Langton bellowed for him to join him in his office.
Lewis had never seen him quite so angry.
‘It’s been staring at us in the face, but we concentrated so hard on the bloody illegal immigrants. Camorra used the poor bastards to bring in drugs as well as themselves! The women and kids too, all of them were mules; they not only paid the son of a bitch to get them into the country, they also swallowed condoms full of heroin. He’s been concentrating on the poor — thousands of homeless in North Uganda, Somalia and Jamaica — making promises to care for their families. Joseph Sickert was one of the mules, brought in five years ago. He worked for Camorra and was sent to Gail’s to look for Arthur Murphy because Murphy, on the run for Irene Phelps’s murder, had threatened to talk unless Camorra got him out of the country.’
In the patrol car, Langton continued to fit the jigsaw pieces together.
‘Camorra has a virtual army tied to him, afraid of him. He has used mules to open bank accounts in Christ knows how many names, but his bulk fortune is in cash. A control freak, he lost it when he murdered Carly Ann North; we know how he manipulated his henchmen, the Krasiniqe brothers and Rashid Burry. But now comes the twist: Sickert. Sent to track down Murphy via Gail, he starts to have a relationship with her, and when Murphy is arrested, he refuses to go back. Rashid Burry is sent to warn him and sees all her kids; he mentions that they would be useful to Camorra and that Sickert would get paid for bringing them to him.’
Langton rubbed his knee, grimacing with the pain. ‘White kids, worth a lot of money; but by now, Sickert is involved with Gail and even cares for them. He’s also sick. Whether or not he killed Gail’s husband, we don’t know, but he makes the big mistake of asking for Rashid Burry to help him get medication.’
Langton shook his head. ‘This is now supposition, but maybe Sickert wanted out — who knows. But whatever went on at the piggery, I don’t think he was involved in the murders. What he did do was take off with the two kids.’ He turned to Anna. ‘You get anything from them?’
‘No. The little boy is still very traumatized, and the little girl hasn’t spoken yet. Both have been sexually abused.’
Langton sighed. ‘Maybe I’m wrong; maybe he did take them to Camorra. We know the white Range Rover was at the piggery.’
The car drew up outside the Peckham house. Patrol cars, forensic vans and SOCO teams were all still there.
‘That scum Vernon, he knew this place. We could have got here sooner.’ Langton slammed the car door shut and headed into the house. Anna and Lewis followed.
Brandon led them through the house, pointing out what had been taken for evidence; then they went into the cellar.
Langton stood looking around. No one spoke. After spending half an hour there, they left and drove back to the station in silence. The horrors that had taken place in the house sickened them all.
‘It was well cleaned out,’ Lewis said, when they were back in the incident room.
Langton sighed, closing his eyes. ‘Camorra’s had enough time — he could be anywhere, using Christ knows how many different names and passports. He’s got rid of anyone that could finger him, and with the amount of money he’s got stashed, we might have lost him for good.’
Chapter Twenty
The forensic lab had been hard at work for over a week. They had more than six different DNA samples from the bloodied altar; there could have been many more, but the stone had been scrubbed with disinfectant. They had also succeeded in matching the roll of black bin-bags, not only to those wrapped around Rashid Burry’s body, but also the dead child in the canaclass="underline" yet another murder linked to Camorra. They tested stains on the sheets taken from the bedrooms for DNA. Two matched the samples taken from Carly Ann after her rape and murder: one belonged to Idris Krasiniqe, the other was not on any records, nor was the third fingerprint taken from the Range Rover.
The team had all this incriminating evidence against Camorra, but still no clue as to his whereabouts. The charred documents revealed hundreds of figures, but there were no bank accounts in Camorra’s name and the local bank in Peckham had no customers who answered to his description. The drug squad had been given his details: every day, mules and possible illegal immigrants were being arrested at the airports, so they were to work with the murder team on anyone who could be connected to the case. The fact that airports were so hot on security could also mean that Camorra might have gone to ground somewhere in the UK.
Staring down into the room from the packed incident board were the photos of the dead, red lines linking one to the other. It felt as if the jigsaw would never be completed.
Langton was in a permanent cold anger. His frustration often boiled over and he was edgy and aggressive with the team. Sickert’s post-mortem results arrived, confirming that he died of organ failure and chronic heart disease. The sickle cell disease had destroyed him. Anna looked up at Sickert’s picture on the board. Her eyes were drawn to the photo of the child found in the canal. As a thought, she fetched the Sickert file. The small square photograph of the woman and two children, cracked through being folded and refolded, was kept in a plastic cover.
She picked it up and went in to see Langton. ‘I don’t know if this will do anything for us, but the children in the photograph — one is a boy, the same age as the child found in the canal.’
Langton looked up.
‘Now we have the DNA of Sickert,’ Anna went on, ‘I just wondered if, you know, we were looking for a reason for Sickert to protect the two children.’
‘He didn’t, did he though?’
‘He did take them to that nursery. What if Camorra had brought Sickert’s children over too? It would be a motive for him to—’
‘Go ahead, test it, but it won’t give us much; just another sickening fucking link!’
Anna walked out to set the wheels in motion for the tests even though, as Langton had said, if the child proved to be related to Joseph Sickert, it brought them no closer to finding Camorra.