Lynda La Plante: Blood Line

‘Nope, but I’d throw the book at her and see if even more pressure gains further results. Right now she’s saying she lied because she was frightened, but she’s some bloody liar, and claiming that she had nothing to do with this drug-dealing doesn’t quite ring true.’

‘You suggesting we discuss this with the Drug Squad here?’

‘I’m not suggesting anything, but I still think there’s more to get out of Tina Brooks. She did a good job of lying to me about how she had always made a bad choice of previous boyfriends and was near to tears about Alan Rawlins disappearing.’

Langton paused before eventually walking out, leaving Anna to wonder if he was simply annoyed at being proven so wrong.

Silas Douglas’s car wash was closed. They had a search warrant, but found nothing connected to their murder enquiry. His desk had been cleared of papers, and left charred inside an oil drum were fragments of magazines and what may have been receipts. They knew he owned the small block of flats adjacent to the building, one of which was his London base. They used the search warrant to force entry, but like his car wash the flat was devoid of anything of interest. It appeared to be very basic: a bedroom with en-suite bathroom, living room and kitchen-diner. They did, however, take numerous fingerprints, even though most of the flat had been very well cleaned.

Anna contacted DCI Williams to give him an update, at the same time asking if the Newquay police had anything further on the murder of Sammy Marsh. They had not, but Williams said they would put out a warrant in Cornwall for Silas Douglas, especially as Anna felt he would have been the prime suspect in Sammy’s murder. They knew he had an apartment in Newquay, plus a workshop where he customised the surfboards, so both places would be searched for evidence. They also had the licence-plates of a motor bike owned by him and a Ford van, which he used to transport the surfboards. However, there had been no recent sighting of him.

Late that afternoon, Liz Hawley gave Anna the result from the axe-shaft. They were unable to get a DNA profile from the minute dot of blood. She said it might have occurred if someone with blood on their hands had held the axe, but no fingerprints were found on it, nor did it appear to have been used. She also by now had the DNA result from Sammy Marsh, and it did not match the semen sample they had from Tina Brooks’s bedlinen.

If Tina was to be believed, she had been raped by Silas Douglas, and so Anna knew it would probably be his DNA. She felt very dissatisfied. Although they now had the jigsaw pieced together via Tina’s statements, without Silas Douglas in custody it could not be 100 per cent verified. Nor did they have a corpse or any evidence of how the dead man’s body had been removed from the flat or where it was dumped.

The key to the locker in Tina’s salon had been taken from her and they found the suitcase containing the two hundred thousand pounds. The money was in used banknotes tied with elastic bands in bundles of tens and twenties and fifty-pound notes. So she had told the truth about that, and would be entitled to reclaim it unless they could prove it was the proceeds of drug transactions.

It had been a long day and Anna did not get back to her flat until after eleven that evening. Sleep was out of the question as she lay mulling over all that she had gained from Tina’s interrogation. What she still could not come to terms with was the fact that Alan Rawlins had been so brutally murdered, his body removed and the flat cleaned up to disguise and hide what had occurred. Weaving through the mound of lies that Tina had told from day one meant a lot of sifting through notes and statements.

Tina Brooks had continued to live in the flat, knowing how Alan had died. She had gone about her daily business at the salon acting as if she was the estranged girlfriend and pretending that he had simply gone missing. She had denied having any knowledge of his sexual activities, instead weaving a picture of a gentle, quiet man who hated confrontations, who never argued and whom she planned to marry. She claimed to have seen Alan’s bloody body in her bathroom, yet carried on going to work and even went shopping for the two purported killers who were still inside her flat. Could a woman be so traumatised and forced into doing terrible things, and then be raped and warned to keep silent or she would end up the same way as Alan Rawlins – yet never disclose the money she had hidden in her salon?

It was after two as Anna leaned back on her pillows, trying to ascertain if there was, as Langton had suggested, even more to get out of Tina. She had lied about ever knowing Sammy Marsh, lied about virtually everything – and even with her admission about what had happened inside her flat, she still claimed that she was not in any way responsible for the murder and had only acted out of fear.

Anna sighed, pushing away the mound of papers and notebooks she had littering her bed. But she still couldn’t sleep, recalling how few personal effects were on display in Tina’s flat when they searched it. The lone photographs, the ordering of the new carpet. She wondered, if Alan Rawlins’s father had not contacted her via Langton, would Tina have simply moved on? That was another thing that Anna would have to face – informing Edward Rawlins of the outcome. This brought her back to wondering how his son’s body had been removed from the flat. Did they wrap him in the sheet? The forensic team had found no bloodstains outside the flat or the surrounding area.

Tomorrow, she decided, she would take another look around Tina’s flat and surrounds before picking up the interrogation . . .

When the alarm woke her, it felt as if she had only just fallen asleep. Disorientated, she threw the duvet aside, spilling all her notes and papers onto the floor. The first page of typed notes showed the lists of the phone numbers recovered from Alan Rawlins’s mobile, with calls made to Florida, Antigua, Los Angeles – but they’d had no success in finding out the identity of the recipient. What’s more, the calls had been made after 16 March – when Alan Rawlins was already dead.

Jonas Jones was cleaning the glass panels in the reception doors of Tina’s apartment block when Anna arrived, and she asked him to show her the fire exit and corridor to the rear of the building.

‘Is it ever left open or used as a shortcut to the rear?’ she asked.

‘No, ma’am, it’s a fire exit, but I’ve never seen anyone use it. It’s near the basement entrance where all the central-heating and air-conditioning vents are. They were checked out by officers ’cos I had to unlock that door.’

Anna followed him, passing flats one and two as they went into a narrow corridor that ran the length of the building. At the end of the corridor was, as he had described, a small fire-exit door with a single bar across it. He pressed it open for her to pass through and step outside. Although the SOCO team had obviously checked out the area, this was the first time Anna had seen the rear of the building. The area was fenced in and covered in tarmac with an old rusted table and two chairs by the only tree.

‘Do residents park back here?’

‘Sometimes. They’ve got their own garages, but they’re only for a single vehicle, so if they got people visiting they park here out of the way of the main exit.’

‘You ever seen cars or vans out here?’

‘Only when you people were around. They used this to park up and they sat at the table. It’s for the tenants, but nobody uses it.’

‘So you have never seen a motor bike parked here maybe?’

‘Nope.’

‘What about a Ford Transit van?’

He shook his head and repeated that he only ever came in for a few hours a week. Judging by the piles of dead leaves pushed up against the walls and around the fence, it didn’t look as if he had swept up for some considerable time. Anna returned back through the small corridor, aware of how easy it would have been for a van to be parked up and a body carried out without anyone seeing it. Disappointed, she went back to her car not bothering to look over Tina’s flat again.