Lynda La Plante: Blood Line

By the time Anna arrived at the station, both Brian and Paul had been working on trying to get a trace on the three numbers. The Antigua and the Los Angeles ones they knew were to mobiles, but the Florida number was a landline.

‘You got an address?’

‘Yeah, it’s a condo in Tampa and we’re onto Interpol in the US to check out who owns or rents the place. We’re waiting for them to get back to us.’

‘Good. How about Cornwall? They had any result in tracking down Silas Douglas?’

‘Nope. He’s not been seen for weeks, but they got his Transit van hauled into Forensics; no motor bike though.’

‘What about the Passport Office and Border Control?’

‘They’re checking, but as we don’t have a date, he might have skipped the country.’

‘Has to be after he came here, obviously. Keep up the pressure.’

Anna had only just sat down at her desk when DCI Williams called. So far, the Transit van owned by Douglas was as clean as a whistle, with no blood traces or fingerprints. ‘The only thing we did pick up,’ he said, ‘was a few bits of chipped paint, plus some kind of mud grains which were caught in the rubber mats.’

‘You found nothing at his place either?’

‘Nope. He did a clean-out. Papers were burned and too charred to get anything from them, but Ballistics said that Sammy Marsh was probably shot with a 9mm Luger. The markings on the bullets and cartridge cases didn’t match any previous shootings.’

‘The time of death for Sammy was around four weeks ago, you believe?’

‘Yes,’ agreed Williams. ‘Decomposition was pretty extensive so we’d thought longer, maybe due to the body being hemmed into the small space of the lavatory.’

‘So if Silas Douglas killed him, he would have had to be in the country then, which will narrow dates down for us to try and get something out of an all-ports enquiry.’

‘We’re working on that, but my gut feeling is, because we’ve got no motor bike, he could have taken off and be hiding out in England, Ireland or even Europe by now.’

‘Well, we’ll both keep looking,’ Anna said, with one eye on the clock. She could only hold Tina for thirty-six hours until formally charging her or getting a further extension at the magistrate’s court. But she still wasn’t ready to begin the exhausting process of going through the gruesome details of the murder or Tina’s insistence that she had nothing to do with it.

Instead, she went into the incident room and told Brian that since Silas Douglas could have gone to Ireland or Europe with his motor bike by ferry, she wanted him to focus on the all-ports enquiry, circulate Silas’s details and the number-plate of his motor bike. She turned as Langton made yet another unscheduled visit and once more she was forced to give him the latest details, which delayed her from beginning the interview.

From his attitude she felt as if he in some way disapproved of her continued search for Silas Douglas. She knew him of old; on such occasions he had a bad-tempered look and grunted, constantly gesturing for her to get to the point if indeed she had one.

‘Of course I have one. We only have Tina’s word for what happened in her flat: the rape, the body being removed and that everything she did was due to the fact she was terrified. She’s still hiding something and I can’t think what’s niggling me.’

He nodded, rubbing his head, making his hair stand up on end. Then he clicked his fingers.

‘I know! I know what it is!’

‘Know what? What is it?’

He clicked his fingers again, grinning – and then pointed.

‘You said they’d found some kind of mud particles in the footwell of Douglas’s Transit, right? Yes – and when you did a search of her flat you listed thick bandages, tins of a substance she used for treatments at her salon for a seaweed wrap?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘The caretaker also told me that he saw the thick bandages tossed into the wheelie bin for her flat.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a treatment she uses at her salon, Anna. It’s a mud wrap. She plasters the mud over the body then wraps it with the bandages. Mud dries on the skin and the body loses water retention or something like that. You with me?’

Anna nodded, but she wasn’t quite following.

‘Now, you’ve got a bloody corpse leaking in a bathtub, but no blood apart from the bedside pooling, smears in the small hallway and some blood spray in the bathroom, correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘You could wrap a body in bloody sheets, but carrying that out has got to leave some clues. However, if she covered it in this mud stuff, then wrapped the body in bandages, it could have been inside the flat for days whilst they cleaned up. You said over and over that the cleaning of the flat had to have taken longer than just her going to work and returning.’

‘But we are still going on her word that Alan Rawlins died on the day he left work, that both Sammy and Silas were there when she got home and that they had already killed him,’ Anna said thoughtfully.

‘You’ve seen how good a liar she is. At best, all you have her for is attempting to pervert the course of justice. I’m warning you though, she could get away with being seen as the innocent, terrified victim here. We know she’s a bloody good actress. If defence put her in front of a jury, she turns on the tears, out will come the rape allegation – followed by a not-guilty verdict – and she calmly walks away from it all, passing Go and collecting two hundred thousand pounds. If you want her to go down for accessory to murder, you need to show she assisted or encouraged Sammy and Silas.’

Anna tried to take on board all Langton had said but knew that by now Tina’s brief was waiting impatiently in the interview room.

‘I’ll do my best, but with only her word to go on it’s not easy.’

Paul looked over to see if he was needed. They still had no result on the Tampa number and Brian was checking the possibility that Silas Douglas was in Ireland or Europe. Now Douglas was wanted for questioning about two murders, the hunt was hotting up.

‘Okay, Paul, let’s go for round two,’ Anna said, heading for the stairs to the interview rooms. Langton watched her leave before he did another slow meander over to the incident board.

‘Brian, what do we know about this guy Silas Douglas?’

‘Not a lot, Gov. He’s got family connections, well educated, trained as a carpenter and has a reputation for customising surfboards. He charges a few thousand as well, and he’s been bringing them in from the USA for about three or four years. He runs this car-wash dump close to where he lives, full of Polish immigrants . . .’

‘Any previous on him?’

‘Nope. Travels from London to Cornwall for the summers and—’

‘How did you get his name?’

‘It was in Alan Rawlins’s address book. Douglas gave up Sammy’s name and showed us a photograph of Rawlins with pals. He admitted he knew Sammy Marsh again when we brought him in for questioning, and said Alan Rawlins had been in his surfing class.’

Langton sat down in a chair facing the accumulated evidence plastered across the incident board.

‘Is he married?’

Brian dug around in his notebook, thumbing over pages.

‘Yeah, divorced nine years ago, has one daughter.’

‘Where do they live?’

Brian shrugged. ‘I dunno but I can check.’

‘Is he gay or straight?’

‘Straight, but I dunno. He’s got a ponytail like an old hippy with biker’s leathers – huge guy.’

Langton ruffled at his hair again and then instructed Brian to dig up everything on Silas Douglas’s background. He would be in the monitor room watching the interrogation.

Brian waited until Langton had left and then asked Helen to do it for him as he was still trying to work on what Anna had wanted.