Lynda La Plante - Above Suspicion

The press office had been inundated with calls. A new press release was now in preparation. It confirmed that Alan Daniels was being held for questioning in connection with the murder of Melissa Stephens and was also helping the police with their enquiries in a number of other cases. The Evening Standard was planning blanket coverage of the actor’s arrest for its late edition. Television news programmes began assimilating as much footage of Daniels as quickly as they could in preparation for the bulletins which would go out later that evening. Like vultures, the press corps began to gather outside the station.

Langton returned from his lunch break. Anna had eaten lunch at the desk in his office while familiarizing herself with the case files and Langton’s preliminary notes.

‘He’s been taken back in. You ready?’

She looked up, nodding. There had been no time for nerves to take hold.

‘Do you need to go to the loo?’

‘Yes, I’d better.’

‘OK, I’ll wait outside the room. Have you got everything you need?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good girl. Just take it at an easy pace. Don’t let him ruffle you and remember: I’m right behind you if you need me.’

‘Yes.’

Langton was stacking the files when she hurried out towards the ladies. She clattered into the cubicle and sat on the toilet, willing herself to pee. She was too tense; nothing happened. She gritted her teeth. ‘Come on! Do it.’

At last she went. Anna washed her hands and stared at herself in the mirror. ‘Watch over me, Dad,’ she whispered. Shoulders back, she walked through the door.

*

Anna was heading up the stairs to the interview room when Lewis appeared: ‘Good luck!’

‘Thank you.’

‘That’s from all of us.’

Langton was waiting for her when she turned into the corridor at the top of the staircase. He gave her a smile. ‘Files are in order on the table. You have to read him his rights again.’

‘I know.’

He seemed even more nervous than she was, which in some way calmed her. They walked into the interview room together. Daniels had washed his face and swept his hair back; it looked wet. She avoided looking at him as she sat down.

Langton took his place directly behind her and Radcliff sat down beside Daniels. Anna followed the protocol of checking there was a tape in the tape machine and that the video camera was running. She looked at her watch and stated the exact time, the location and the names of those present in the interview room.

When she had finished reading Daniels his rights, he leaned close and said suavely, ‘You’re doing very well. I’m proud of you.’

She flushed with embarrassment. She spent a few moments looking at the first case file and composing herself, then raised her head to look directly at Daniels. He stared back, unblinking. Though she recalled Barolli saying, ‘watch his eyes; wait for the fear’, there was certainly no sign of fear now. If anything, the former Anthony Duffy seemed to be enjoying the unease emanating from everyone else. She began.

‘Mr Daniels, this morning you admitted killing Lilian Duffy. Could you please tell me what your relationship was to the victim?’

‘You know what it was, Anna,’ he said smoothly.

‘I require you to tell me.’

‘She was my parent.’ His lip curled in contempt.

Anna leaned back in her chair. Face up on the table between them was the picture of Lilian Duffy. ‘This photograph: could you tell me who it is?’

‘It’s her, obviously.’

‘Could you please identify the photograph, Mr Daniels?’

Then she saw the flash of anger. ‘It’s Lilian Duffy,’ he snarled. ‘The bitch that gave birth to me.’

Anna supplied the word he was avoiding. ‘How did you kill your mother?’

‘Don’t you mean “why”?’ He slapped the photograph with the flat of his hand. ‘Don’t you want to know the motive first?’

She paused. In the silence, Langton pressed against her chair, as if willing her to get on with it.

Daniels continued, seemingly oblivious to Langton: ‘When I was five, she put me in a bath of scalding water. I screamed. She yelled back how she hadn’t meant to hurt me, how she didn’t know how hot the water was, but the truth is she was stoned out of her mind. She would have noticed the steam rising otherwise. When she lifted me out, there were scalds all over my legs, my back, my buttocks. When they festered, she got someone to take me to the emergency clinic. They called the social workers who came round to see if I was an abused child. She told them I’d run the bath myself and they believed her. After they left, she slapped me for causing trouble and told me that if I ever said anything to anyone, the next time she would hold me under and drown me. As a child, I was terrified of being bathed.’

Anna interrupted. ‘Could you please tell me about—’

He slapped the table again. ‘Don’t fucking interrupt me again! I am giving you your motive, you stupid bitch. If you want it, you have to listen. Listen to what she subjected me to. Then you’ll understand, then someone will understand, why I killed her.’

‘We have a report here from the social workers that visited—’

‘Bullshit! I’m not interested. Bunch of wankers. I went to school with bruises on my legs, but they were just the sort you get when you’re a kid and you “fall down the stairs”. Broken ribs, broken arms — you get those when you’re a kid and you “play in the street with rowdy children”. They did nothing! Except make my life worse. After they came round, she’d beat the living daylights out of me. I slept in an airing cupboard on a piss-stained mattress and she would lock me there for days and nights to teach me a lesson.’

He closed his eyes.

‘There was a crack in the wooden slats I’d pick at to get some light. It was in the bathroom facing the toilet. For want of nothing else to do, I’d watch those whores washing their cunts, shaving their armpits. They’d use this rubber douche to “wash out their stinking fannies, their sticky semen-filled arses. They’d wash their filthy underwear and hang their dripping tights and their sweat-stained bras on a clothes line above the bath. I’d watch them shoot up, burn their drugs, snort stuff up their noses. I’d see their so-called boyfriends fucking them against the wall, their pimps, big black bastards with shiny gleaming arses, pumping away at them and not one — not one — ever thought to unlock the cupboard and let me out.’

‘These other women—’

Again he slapped the table with the flat of his hand. ‘How many times do I have to say it, Anna? She wouldn’t let me go because when I got to seven, she was able to make money out of me. Do you have any idea how she made money out of a little boy, her own son?’

Anna had to listen to such stories of depravity and horrific sexual abuse that her mind was reeling. He described being forced to have anal sex with men, being photographed sucking men off and the confusion he experienced as a young child being sexually aroused by women sucking his penis. He was expected to perform for any sick pervert that his mother could hook into paying big money for the privilege of screwing her own son, and if he refused to co-operate he was beaten, then locked up in the dark cupboard. He was saved by a schoolteacher who was supervising the boys’ showers after a football match. His bruises and the marks to his wrists were obvious; he’d had to be tied up for anal penetration. The schoolteacher reported the abuse.

Daniels closed his eyes, describing what it had felt like to be taken away and how, for a while, he had had respite from the abuse. But Lilian Duffy proved able to persuade Social Services that her son should be returned to her care. He joked that perhaps he had inherited his talent from his mother. ‘Knowing how much money she was able to make out of me, she was inspired to give an Oscar-winning performance of motherly love. They took me back to a life of hell.’