He looked very handsome: the haunted, dark circles beneath his eyes had gone. He promised to see Kitty at the weekend and then finished the call. Not only did he look well, but he was also relaxed: seemingly, his knee joint was also less of a problem, as he jumped up from his seat.
‘Barbie dolls are longer on the agenda; she wants a tape recorder that she can sing karaoke into!’
Anna smiled, loath to bring up something that might destroy his good mood.
‘What is it?’ he said, opening a bottle of water.
Anna explained that she was compiling the reports for Idris Krasiniqe’s new trial. After rereading Salaam’s evidence regarding the symptoms of Jimson weed, she was certain that Camorra had shown the selfsame ones.
‘What?’
‘Don’t you remember?’ she asked.
‘Remember what, exactly?’
‘Well, when we interviewed him, he was constantly asking for more water.’
Langton sat back. ‘I’m not sure where you are going with this.’
‘Well, Camorra had a cardiac arrest.’
‘I know that.’
‘He had food brought into the cells.’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, I wondered if it was possible that Emmerick Orso somehow got someone to doctor his food. If we did discover that he had, it would be yet another charge we can lay against him.’
Langton shook his head. ‘Leave it. The bastard is dead; it saves us a lot of work. Right now, we have enough against Emmerick Orso to put him away for twenty-five years.’
‘I know that, but don’t you think we should look into it?’
‘No, I don’t. Just leave it, Anna; we’ve enough on our plate. We have a trial date, as of this morning.’
‘If you say so.’
‘I do say so.’
‘Will they do a post mortem?’
Langton nodded. ‘Already done. The IPCC have investigated the death and Camorra died of a heart attack, full stop.’ He put out his hand for the reports. ‘I’ll see to these.’
Anna did as she was instructed, but asked Harry Blunt if he had seen the post-mortem report on Camorra.
‘Well, there obviously was one. As far as I know, it was cut and dried. As nobody claimed his body, he’ll be charred meat by now.’
‘What?’
‘Well, they can’t keep him in the cooler for ever, can they? I think the Gov gave the go-ahead.’
‘For a cremation?’
‘Don’t ask me, I dunno. All I do know is the bastard should have been strung up. I’d have pulled the lever myself. The day they bring back capital punishment is the day I’ll celebrate. He’s gone and it’s over with. If he’d stood trial, he’d have been sent down for life: three meals a day…’ Harry went on with his usual tirade about how many men were held in prisons and how, if he had it his way, he would have cleared out half of them. ‘It was a good rock-cake job on Murphy; he was an animal. Eamon Krasiniqe deserved to be released just for getting rid of him.’
‘Eamon is dead,’ Anna said.
Harry shrugged. ‘Don’t mean anything to me. Idris raped Carly Ann, along with Camorra; whether or not he was forced into doing it is immaterial to me. He then tried to chop off her hands and decapitate her: whatever his new trial comes up with, in my mind, he’s still an animal. All of them are sick. None of them deserve to walk away a free man.’
‘But if he was terrified and forced to do it?’ Anna said.
Harry put up his hands. ‘Listen, if someone freaked me out, voodoo or not, it’s no excuse. I’d let him spend the rest of his life banged up. You know the Gov has the big brass squeezing his balls about how much this case has cost?’
‘We got the results in the end.’
‘Yeah, and now we’re all stuck here for how many weeks before the trial? It would do us all a favour if that prick Orso topped himself.’
Anna returned to her desk to plough on with all her work. It seemed that no one else was interested in the fact that Orso could have poisoned Camorra.
Orso’s trial made headlines for days. Orso never took the stand; his battery of high-powered lawyers tried to throw out charge after charge as hearsay, but he was eventually charged with bringing in a network of illegal immigrants and using them as drug couriers. The charges of running a brothel also held, as did his fraud and drug trafficking. He was sentenced not, as the team had hoped, to twenty-five years, but to fifteen. There was only circumstantial evidence and hearsay linking him to any of the murders; those charges were dismissed. The team surmised that, with good behaviour, he could be released in twelve.
Langton threw an open bar at the local pub at the end of the trial. He thanked them all for staying with it, even if the result was not what they had hoped for, and praised them for their diligence and hard work. Now it was on to the next case. Whether they would be reunited as a team was uncertain, but possible; all he could say for sure was that he would work with every single one of them again.
Anna left the bar early, as she was driving home. She went up to Langton to say goodbye; he was at his most charming, asking if perhaps he could take her out for dinner one night. She was equally pleasant and said she would look forward to it.
As she turned to walk away, he reached for her hand, and drew her close. ‘It’s over, Anna.’
She knew he was not referring to their relationship. His grip on her hand was tight, and she looked into his dark eyes. ‘Yes, and you seem to be really on the road to recovery.’
‘I am, now. As I just said, it’s over — do you understand?’
‘Yes, yes of course I do. Let’s have dinner one evening. I’ll wait for you to call.’
He kissed her cheek, then released her hand.
Anna sat in the car park. She had such mixed emotions: she had no intention of starting any kind of relationship with him again and she could tell that he didn’t either. His kiss had somehow felt like a threat, or a warning. For the first time since she had met DCI Langton, she was frightened of him. The mounting suspicion that had begun weeks ago, persisted like a bad taste in her mouth. Anna was certain that Langton had murdered Eugene Camorra.
Chapter Twenty-Three
With the trial now over and the incident room packed up, Anna had some time off before she would be assigned a new case. She organized her flat, cleaning and washing everything from the curtains to the bedcovers. She always did a marathon clean after a case was over: it was therapeutic. She did the washing and ironing, sorted out her wardrobe, treated herself to a haircut and a manicure, and worked out at the local gym. As she pedalled on the exercise bike, she thought constantly about her own jigsaw.
Langton was never far from her mind. He had not called. It was as if she was on automatic pilot. She had not wanted to let her suspicion ferment, but it had. She took out one of her notebooks from the case — it had gone on for so long, she had filled three books — and went right back to the start of the enquiry, to the murder of Irene Phelps. This had come after Langton’s investigation into the murder of Carly Ann North.
His attack had occurred after Idris Krasiniqe had been arrested; he was then hospitalized and, due to his injuries, had been unable to be at the trial. She had made notes about the number of newspaper cuttings she had discovered at Langton’s flat whilst she was caring for him. She also went over her notes on the private talks she had had with Mike Lewis: he had feared that Langton would, if he ever did recover, rope him and Barolli into acting like some vigilantes. Anna sighed; she could not blame Langton for wanting to track down the man who had caused his horrific injuries.
When Langton had described the attack, she tried to recall exactly what he had said. Langton had been tipped off by Idris Krasiniqe, who gave the names of two men he said were with him on the night of Carly Ann’s murder and who escaped in a white Range Rover. Both the names were subsequently found to be false, but the address he had given was the one Langton checked out. Accompanied by both Lewis and Barolli, Langton had been walking up the stairs of the hostel, when two men came out onto the landing. Both men had escaped; one man, she knew, had been identified as Rashid Burry, but the man who had wielded the machete had never been identified. Langton had been taken to the Intensive Care unit at St Stephen’s Hospital. She knew that he suspected that it had been Eugene Camorra.