Lynda Plante - Blind Fury

Smiley looked alarmed.

“It’s all right, John, I can understand what it must have felt like to have another woman threatening you. All I need to know from you is how the hell did Maggie find out about Dorota Pelagia?”

Langton was brilliant, the way he casually dropped in the name of the victim. Smiley didn’t even react to the name or say he didn’t know who she was. Langton removed Dorota’s photograph from her file and placed it in front of Smiley. “Sonja knew about her, didn’t she?” Langton continued in the same relaxed tone. “She was young, she was beautiful, and compared with Margaret and Sonja, she was fresh... lovely. How did you meet her?”

“I was at Victoria coach station — that was where I sometimes picked up Margaret. She often worked there, if not at the Gateway Services. She used to hang out there — you know, picking up punters — and I’d finished my deliveries, so I had time to spare and went looking for her.”

He licked his lips. “She was with her. Someone had nicked her bag — well, that’s what I was told — and Margaret said that if I was going back to Manchester, could I give the girl a lift.”

“This girl you are talking about, was it Dorota Pelagia?”

“Yes, I just said so. She was Polish, and I was able to say a few words to her ’cause I’d picked up some Polish from Sonja, and so I offered to give her a ride as far as Manchester.”

“Where was she going?”

“Liverpool.”

“Go on.”

“She got in, and she was lovely, I liked her. Then I said to her that if she could wait for an hour at the service station on the M6, I would be able to give her a ride all the way to Liverpool.”

Smiley said that he drove his Swell Blinds van back to Manchester, parked in the street next to his lockup, and then, using Dillane’s van, drove to collect Dorota, who was waiting for him.

“It was getting late. I’d been working all day. I’d left home just after four and had a long drive to London and then back to Manchester, and now I had to go to Liverpool. I knew I’d have Sonja after me, so I was a bit wound up.”

“Don’t tell me. After all you’d done, picking her up at the coach station, then driving back to take her to Liverpool, Dorota played hard to get. Is that what happened?”

“Too fucking right. Ungrateful little mare. I even said that as I knew she had no money, I’d give her a few quid, but she got nasty, pushing me away, treating me like shit, and I snapped. After all I’d done for her... so I kicked her out of the van. She was shouting and screaming at me, and I got worried someone might stop and ask questions.”

“You wouldn’t want that. Wouldn’t want any trouble that might get back to Sonja — right?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I was worried about. So I grabbed her and put my hand over her mouth, and I opened up the back of the van to stuff her inside.” He gave one of his strange laughs. “When I got back into the driver’s seat, she was trying to open the cage, crying and begging me to let her out, saying I could do whatever I wanted to her, but she didn’t want me to hurt her.”

“But you did, didn’t you?” Langton flipped over the murder-site photographs, and Smiley flinched.

Gregson leaned toward Smiley and said he should not answer, as it was admittance and—

Smiley pushed him away, saying, “Bollocks! It’s fucking obvious what I done. By the time I got home, Sonja was like a slavering bulldog. I’d have liked to put my hands round her thick throat, strangle her like I done the girl.”

Langton nodded encouragingly. Smiley then gave them the hideous details of how he had strangled Dorota with her own tights, stripped her naked, raped her over and over again, and then driven her body around for two hours before wrapping her in the blue blanket and tossing her body into a field. He had then returned home, dumping the dead girl’s clothes in a charity-shop doorway.

“You must have thought you’d got away with it?”

“Yeah, and I would have an’ all but for that bitch Margaret. I mean, they didn’t have anything on me, right — no witness, no nothing.”

Smiley went on to explain how, unbeknownst to him, there had been a Crimewatch program on TV, asking for anyone with information to come forward. Dorota’s photograph had also been published in the newspapers.

“I was still not worried, and then that bitch calls my office and says she wants to talk to me.”

“Margaret Potts?”

“Yeah, her. She didn’t have me home number ’cause, like I said, I’d moved to the house in Manchester. She only called the friggin’ office! — She said she wanted a lot of money ’cause she recognized Dorota, and she also said she knew I had this blue blanket in me van because we’d had sex in the back once and she said it smelled of dogs. She was a wily bitch, and she put two and two together. So I agreed to meet up with her.”

“How much money did she want?”

Smiley shook his head. “She’d always hit me up for a tenner or twenty here and there, over not tellin’ Sonja about us, but this time... Jesus Christ! It started with a couple of hundred, then it got to more, and she threatened to go to the police. It was a fucking nightmare, the bloody Sonja scenario all over again.”

Langton glanced at Anna and passed her a note that said, Time frame.

Anna asked if the time Smiley had been at Emerald Turk’s flat to fix the blinds was when the payments had started.

“No, it was after, but when I was there, she hit me up for a couple of hundred. She said she needed the money to pay for something to do with her kids. Lousy mother, her kids were both fostered out. I told her I didn’t have it, but she said I’d better find it. I gave her about a hundred that time, and we arranged to meet. I said I’d give her the rest then. I never intended to pay her another penny, but the bitch called my workplace again, so I met up with her in the café, and this time she fuckin’ asked for a thousand quid ’cause she said she knew about that girl.”

He shoved a finger at the photograph of Dorota. This tied in with Margaret’s new clothes and the visit to her children.

“So when was the next time you met up with Margaret?”

Smiley frowned, obviously trying to recollect the date. He hunched his shoulders and then said it was maybe months after he’d met her at the café. They had met at the service station, and he had given her five hundred, saying he didn’t have the cash to spare. Margaret wasn’t satisfied and said she wanted more. It was another six months before he had yet another meeting with her and passed her money. He was tight-lipped with anger, saying that Margaret wouldn’t stop pestering him and he was worried about her contacting him at his workplace. In the end, he had told her that if she gave him some time, he’d save up and give her one final payment of another five hundred pounds in March.

Anna held up her hand. “These meetings that took place between you, are you saying they came after she called Swell Blinds — or did she have another way of contacting you?”

He hesitated and then went into an elaborate, rambling account of how he used to call a pay phone at the Gateway Services, and if Margaret was around, she’d pick up.

“If she wasn’t doing business, she’d hang around the pay phones, keepin’ warm, actin’ like she was usin’ them so they wouldn’t move her on. There was an Indian bloke that worked the coffee bar at night, and she used to jerk him off for a cup of coffee and a snack, then clean herself up in the ladies’ toilets.”

“So, on the occasion when she was waiting for more money, where did you meet Margaret?”

Smiley said that sometimes she would use an old caravan parked at the back of a slip road near the service station. When he saw her there, they would have sex, and previously, he paid her between twenty-five and thirty pounds. He would park some distance away, walk up the lane, and wait until he knew she wasn’t with any of her regulars.