Lynda La Plante - Backlash

Anna broke off to drop into the incident room and ask Barbara if she’d taken a call from Pete Jenkins, but she hadn’t.

‘How’s it all going?’

‘Slowly, but he’s behaving himself.’

Anna checked her mobile for a text message from Pete but there wasn’t one, so she headed back to the viewing room, where the tension had gone up a notch. Langton and Mike were revisiting the case of Rebekka Jordan as they were not happy with Oates’s account of how he had killed her and that he had not sexually abused her. Oates continued to repeat that he had never intended to hurt her, that it was an accident. Anna watched Langton move off on a tangent, asking about the Jeep and how he had stolen it – anything to keep him calm and pliable. Oates liked to talk about how clever he was, and even discussed how he’d slipped up by not watching the Jeep blow up rather than just catch fire.

Langton put down the photograph of Angela Thornton.

‘Tell me about this girl.’

‘I had her gold bracelet, that’s about as much as I can remember about her. I prised out the red stones – they was garnets, not worth much.’

‘Where did you meet her?’

‘Don’t remember.’

‘You sure about that? Only we have a problem, Henry: none of the bodies we’ve brought back from the woods matches her dental records – do you understand what I mean by that?’

‘I took her up there, that’s all I know.’

‘I am going to come clean with you, Henry: Angela Thornton went missing in June 2007 and the unidentified body we recovered has been dead less than six months. I think you murdered both of them and what I need to know is where you buried Angela and who the unidentified girl is.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘Yes you do, you’re lying.’

‘Why would I lie?’

‘You didn’t kill Angela, you just want us to think you did. The more the merrier, is that it, Henry? Another one for the front page in the papers?’

‘You are such a bunch of fucking wankers – why are you wasting my time? I killed that bitch like all the others. I took off her bracelet and I kept it with the rest of my gear, so go on, charge me.’

He pushed back his chair and Mike ordered him to sit down.

‘You got a mouth, have you? I was beginning to think you was dumb.’

He turned on Kumar and prodded him.

‘Get me out of here.’

Kumar shrank away from him. Oates’s rage was starting to surface.

‘What are you fuckers waiting for? I done all those, right? RIGHT?’

He shoved his hand towards the stack of victims’ photographs.

‘I dunno their names, I don’t give a fucking shit about a single one of them. Who cares what time I met them, where I fucked them? I am sick of this, I killed them, I buried them and you dug them up, right? RIGHT?’

Kumar told his client to calm down and Oates raised his hands.

‘For Chrissake, what more do you want from me?’

‘Timmy Bradford, did he kill Angela Thornton?’ asked Langton.

Oates’s mood suddenly changed and he began to laugh out loud, shaking his head and smiling.

Anna felt her phone vibrate and dashed out of the viewing room as she couldn’t get good reception in there. It was Pete Jenkins. The results were in. She waited a few moments, listening to Oates, who was still laughing in the interview room. She knocked on the door and looked in on him; he was flushed and gesturing wildly and refusing to answer any further questions. It was Mike and not Langton who came out.

‘Give me ten minutes with Oates,’ she said, before he could ask her what she wanted. She watched, holding her breath, as Mike spoke to Langton, who gestured to her to go in.

Langton spoke into the tape recorder, stating the time and that Detective Chief Inspector Travis had now replaced DCI Lewis. She was flushed and very tense as she quietly put down her briefcase. Langton didn’t say anything, but from the look on his face she knew he was thinking that it had better be good, especially as she had interrupted the interview at such a vital moment.

‘You’re aware, Mr Oates, that we recovered a body from the wood close to the quarry,’ she began, knowing that she had to play her hand carefully.

‘Yeah, you dug up four, didn’t you?’

‘Please don’t interrupt me. Angela Thornton is not one of those four bodies as her dental records don’t match any of them. So this leaves us with one unknown female, which as I’m sure you understand we need to identify so we can inform her family.’

Anna passed across a photograph of the black patent leather knee-high boots.

‘Do you recall ever seeing these boots, Mr Oates?’

‘No.’

‘The boots belonged to a girl called Morag Kelly; she was in a rehab clinic with your daughter Corinna. Are you sure you have never seen them before?’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

‘These boots were found in the basement where you lived, Mr Oates.’

‘So, I get stuff from charity shops and car boot sales.’

Anna brought out more photographs, of cheap underwear, and tapped them with her pencil.

‘What about these items, would you say you got these from a charity shop?’

‘What the fuck is this? I’ve never seen none of this shit before.’

Langton sat with his hands folded in front of him, with no idea where Anna was going with this line of questioning, yet he couldn’t ask her to divulge anything in front of Oates and his solicitor. Kumar seemed equally nonplussed, as Oates pushed the photographs away.

‘You were accused of molesting Corinna-’

Oates interrupted her, angrily saying that only his wife had accused him, that he hadn’t and would never have interfered with his own daughter. The next photograph Anna put down was the mortuary shot of the decomposed and as yet unidentified victim. She used the same pencil to indicate the hair.

‘As you can see, most of the hair is no longer attached to the skull. It doesn’t matter as through toxicology tests the scientists can still say the victim was a heroin addict.’

The next photograph was from the burial site, red markers indicating each grave’s location. The pictures were taken at various stages of the exhumations. Anna kept her voice low as she pointed out the graves of Kelly Mathews, Mary Suffolk, Alicia Jones and the grave with the unidentified body.

‘The boots were stolen from a rehab centre by this victim. The underwear belonged to her and I can now tell you that a comparison with your ex-wife Eileen’s DNA has identified the body as that of her daughter.’

Oates drew back in his chair. Kumar muttered to Anna that this information should have been disclosed to him, and she replied that it had only just been verified to her.

‘You killed your own daughter, didn’t you, Mr Oates? Whether or not you also sexually abused her-’

‘I never fucking touched her!’ he screeched.

‘Yes you did, YES YOU DID – what happened? Did she come to you after she’d run away from the rehab centre, come to ask for your help, and you-’

‘I never touched her, I swear before God I never touched her.’

Langton warned Oates to sit still as he had started kicking at the table leg.

‘If you didn’t kill her, why did you take her to the woods and bury her alongside your other victims?’ Anna said.

‘Someone else did that, not me, I didn’t do that.’

‘Your own daughter couldn’t be allowed to get away from you, was it that your wife had taken your children away from you before you could molest them and so when she turns up you couldn’t keep your hands off her?’

‘NO, NO.’

‘YES. Your own flesh and blood, you stripped her naked – look at how we found her.’

Oates stopped kicking the table, and asked for water. He drank the entire bottle, screwed the cap back on and crushed it in his hand.