Lynda La Plante: Backlash

On his return to the incident room Barbara informed Mike that there was no CCTV at the pub but she and other officers had spoken with Justine’s colleagues. On the evening of the 11th at about 7 p.m. eight of them had taken over a small private room in the Eagle pub, and they had ordered food and bottles of wine to be brought up from the bar. The evening was to be a baby shower for their co-worker Avril, who was expecting her first child, but as she had decided that she would not return to work after the birth, it was also a farewell party. At just after eleven the party broke up. Two of the girls’ husbands had turned up to give them a lift home and Avril, who had not been drinking and had her car, had offered to give two of the girls a ride home as they lived quite close to each other. The other two got into a taxi, but Justine had said she would get her own one as she lived in the opposite direction. The last sighting of Justine was as the girls were driven off in their taxi. She had waved to them from outside the pub, standing in the car park.

All the girls were certain that Justine had been the last to leave. None of them could recall ever seeing Henry Oates and not one of them said that Justine was the type of girl to get into a stranger’s car, let alone agree to have sex with someone she didn’t know. Justine was a very calm, quiet woman and in a loving relationship with her husband. Avril, in particular, was inconsolable. She said that Justine was one of the nicest people she had ever known, always helpful and had bought a beautiful gift for her forth coming baby. She wept when she said that Justine had confided that she and her husband Simon were desperate for a child and were saving for IVF treatment as Justine had some medical problem with her fallopian tubes. She was adamant that Justine would not have accepted a lift from Oates; she was by far too cautious.

Barbara said their accounts of the evening matched Oates’s description of seeing the group of girls leaving the pub just after closing time, but if Justine had been going to get her own taxi home it seemed strange that she should start to walk up the road as Oates had described. Mike wondered if yet again Oates was lying and he had in fact hit her over the head and dragged her into the van whilst still in the Eagle car park.

Barolli had obtained a search warrant and gained access to Henry Oates’s property. It was a basement squat in a run-down Victorian terraced house and was only three miles from the estate in Hackney. Although the present owner wanted to demolish it he was unable to do so due to a preservation order and the premises had not been lawfully occupied for six years. The owner didn’t actually object to the squatters as he hoped it would encourage the council to lift the preservation order. The three rooms used by Oates were filthy and stank of stale food and urine. A team of forensic officers began the careful search for evidence.

The wardrobes were full of dirty clothes and boots and there appeared to be no clean laundry. The single bed was disgusting, with filthy sheets and blankets heaped on a bare mattress. They did find numerous items of women’s clothing in a black bin liner and these were removed for further examination. The bathroom contained worn, dirty towels and a shower curtain grey with a hideous residue of grime hanging limply over a brown-stained bath. The toilet looked as if it had been out of order for some time; the bowl stank and the chain to flush it was broken. The team found numerous knives in the small kitchen annexe, plus a carpenter’s bag that contained hacksaws and hammers and two large sharpened screwdrivers. These were also taken away to be tested by the forensic team. The overpowering smell in the kitchen came from fifteen beer bottles lined up by the back door; they all contained urine. Opening the back door there were even more bottles, which were smashed, and the officers could only presume that Oates had used them to piss into as his toilet was broken.

‘What an absolute shithole,’ Barolli told Lewis. ‘Toilet full of piss and crap, not to mention the floor and-’

‘For Chrissake, I don’t need any more description, Paul. The guy is a pig and obviously lived like one,’ Mike said, shaking his head.

‘They got bags of stuff to be sifted through at the forensic lab. Poor bastards’ll need to wear masks, everything stinks,’ Paul further informed Mike, who walked off into his office.

As Lewis and Barolli prepared for a further interview with Oates, Joan again spoke with missing persons, hoping to identify the woman called Julia that Oates said he had killed over a year ago, but as yet they had not found a match. Mike gave instructions for Joan to continue pressing them for a result and asked what she had found out about Oates’s background. She’d discovered from her enquiries with Jobseeker’s that he was unemployed and living on benefits. He had worked spasmodically at various building sites as an unskilled labourer, but had been in and out of work for many years. He was divorced and his wife and their two children had returned to live in Scotland eight years ago.

Mike Lewis and Paul Barolli questioned Oates for the second time with Adan Kumar, his solicitor, present. Oates was delighted that they wanted to speak with him again and he seemed in an almost euphoric mood. Mike went over the Justine Marks murder first but Oates calmly and firmly maintained that her death was an accident and he had never meant to hurt her, repeating that she had come on to him for sex. When Mike informed Oates of his visit to the mortuary, the bra round Justine’s neck, her head injury, torn clothing and the bruising consistent with rape, Oates accused him of lying and trying to fit him up with murder. He then started spurting out one name after another, saying they were all well-known cases where the police had ‘stitched them up’. Mike had never heard of any of the names and Oates was rambling so fast that he and Barolli had difficulty in following what he was saying. Realizing that he was not going to budge on Justine’s death, Mike was content that Oates’s performance would show a jury he was a conniving but not a very convincing liar.

Mike now moved on to the disappearance of Rebekka Jordan. No sooner had he mentioned her name than Oates became noticeably irritated, chewing his bottom lip and repeatedly beating his right foot on the floor like a distressed animal. Mike asked him if he had abducted and killed her. Oates snapped back that what he said before was all bullshit and made up ‘for a bit of a laugh’ and he knew Rebekka Jordan’s name because of all the news coverage the case had received. When Mike asked why he had suddenly become so upset and defensive, Oates replied it was because he knew that the police would try and fit him up with the Rebekka Jordan murder as well.

Mike Lewis walked away from Oates sickened, but determined to put the loathsome creature away for the murder of Justine Marks. He also intended to thoroughly investigate the other cases. The CPS gave the go-ahead to charge Oates with the murder of Justine Marks and so he appeared at the magistrates’ court the next morning. Kumar made no application for bail and Oates was remanded in custody in Wandsworth Prison to await trial for murder. Mike, who had attended the hearing, took the CPS solicitor aside to tell her about Oates’s admissions regarding Rebekka Jordan and the girl called Julia, and that he would be making further enquiries.

Back at the incident room, Joan informed Mike that there were a few possible hits about Julia from ‘Mispers’ and that Barbara had gone over to their offices to get copies of the reports. Meanwhile, the Rebekka Jordan case file and Langton’s investigation report had been collected from archives overnight and were in his office.

Mike was taken aback. The thick file of documents for the Jordon case made it obvious that Langton had left no stone unturned. After nearly two years of enquiries with hundreds of statements, Langton had been unable to uncover a suspect. Rebekka Jordan had disappeared after taking a riding lesson at her local stables in Shepherd’s Bush. She was last seen on CCTV footage walking from the stables towards Shepherd’s Bush Tube Station, wearing a backpack believed to contain her riding hat. There were no blackmail notes, no calls and no sighting of the little girl, even after the extensive press coverage and television crime show requests for anyone with information to come forward. Thousands of photographs of Rebekka had been posted up by her family as well as the police, along with a description of what she was wearing the last time she had been seen: a yellow polo-neck sweater, jodhpurs, a riding jacket and black boots. All these items of clothing were replicated for a reconstruction using a lookalike girl to reenact her last walk from the stables. Again, it had brought in no useful information. Rebekka had disappeared without trace.