Above Suspicion (Anna Travis Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  “You’d be amazed how many villains have departed this world inside those square remains,” White said above the din.

  Some distance from the pile of wrecks, a man wearing red braces over an open-necked shirt and a cloth cap stood on the steps of a caravan, shading his eyes to watch them. They headed toward him.

  “Good morning,” Anna said loudly.

  “Morning.”

  “Is this your yard?”

  “What?”

  “I said, is this your yard?”

  The man yelled to the driver of the forklift truck. “Turn it off, Jim. Turn it off!”

  While they waited for the silence, Anna showed her ID. “Could I talk to you?”

  He gestured for them to follow him into the caravan. Documents littered almost every available wall space, pinned up and clipped together. There were boxes spilling out more paper onto every surface: a moth-eaten sofa, two armchairs and a desk with one broken leg propped up with tatty old telephone directories.

  “This is Constable White. We’re here to discuss a Mercedes-Benz convertible.” She gave the vehicle identification and registration numbers.

  The man nodded. “You know, I had another copper inquiring about the same car two weeks ago.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “So how can I help you?”

  “Could you tell me who brought the car to you?”

  When he removed his greasy cloth cap, there was a red sweat ring around his forehead. “Chap came. He wanted the car crushed. He paid his fifty quid and he left. That’s all there is to know.”

  “What was the name of the man who brought the car to you? Or was it towed in?”

  “No, he drove it in.” He opened a drawer to remove a dog-eared wedge of a book, which he started thumbing through. He showed them the payment slip.

  “Mr. Daniels. He signed for it.” He passed over the receipt. “I faxed your lot a copy of it.”

  “So Mr. Daniels was able to drive the car into your yard?”

  “Yes; then he paid his money and left.”

  Anna hesitated. Gordon White leaned forward. “Hang on a second—what was the damage?”

  “Look, it’s not up to me to estimate what the bloody damage is. He wanted it crushed, so that is what I did.”

  “All of it?”

  “What?”

  “I am asking you if you put the whole of the car through the crusher,” White said flatly.

  The manager pursed his lips. Anna noticed that his name, Reg Hawthorn, was printed on a plaque on his scruffy desk.

  White sighed and hitched up his trousers. “Reg, I have a hobby. I do up cars; I buy spare parts. Now, are you going to tell me this Merc, with its hubcaps, its steering wheel, the bumpers, the taillights, not to mention the dashboard—remember, I know what price these things go for—you just let it go?”

  “I did nothing that anyone else in my trade doesn’t do. It’s part of the perks, right?” Hawthorn lit a cigarette. “To be honest, it did seem strange.”

  “What did?” Anna interjected.

  “Well, it wasn’t that badly damaged. I’ve got to tell you, I run a legitimate business. I don’t do nothing without insurance and ownership documents left with the wreck. It’s more than my life’s worth. But he had all the papers. So who am I to turn down business, right?”

  “Before you put it in the crusher, did you strip it?” she asked.

  Hawthorn yanked open the drawer again. “Nobody asked me about this before. So there was no need for me to tell them, right?”

  He brought out another dog-eared receipt book and with his gnarled thumb flicked through the pages to his grubby lists of receipts.

  “I sold a number of items, stripped them out. Bought by Vintage Vehicles—VV—over in Elephant and Castle. The seats they didn’t buy, though, probably because they’re an unusual color.” He looked up helpfully—“They got a yard where they do up Mercs specifically”—before flicking further on through his receipt book. “Seats were bought by Hudson’s Motors in Croydon. They’re real bastards to deal with, cheap buggers. Oh yeah, they also bought the hood.”

  “Thank you.”

  Anna returned to her car. She refused Gordon White’s offer to take her to the VV company. “I really appreciate the time you’ve spent coming here.” She asked if he knew the Croydon company. He trotted over to his gleaming Corvette and returned with a Greater London A to Z.

  “What’s the address again?”

  “I’ll find it, Gordon.”

  “I don’t mind coming with you.”

  “I may be on a wild-goose chase, anyway.”

  “Maybe you are. I doubt there’ll be anything left for you to see. It’s been a while.” He leaned further in to speak to her through her window. “Mind me asking what it’s really about?”

  She smiled. “I’m thinking of starting up a hobby.”

  “You’re kidding me!”

  “Yes, I am. Thanks again, Gordon.”

  The interview room was stuffy but the noise of the traffic was too intrusive to open a window. Langton had loosened his tie. Beside him Mike Lewis, sweat plastering his hair to his scalp, had taken his jacket off. McDowell’s solicitor also looked very uncomfortable, but it was not the heat that was getting to her. The case was becoming a very serious one and she was woefully aware of her lack of experience. McDowell had been charged with possession of drugs, but it could get worse. She could find herself representing a serial killer.

  The interview was being recorded on audio and videotape. Far from complaining of the heat in the room, McDowell kept repeating that he was cold. He was very subdued, lethargic. A doctor had given them clearance for the interview and given McDowell a vitamin shot. Although still suffering withdrawal symptoms, the prisoner was not shaking as much. He was wearing a police-issue tracksuit, his clothes having been taken to be checked for evidence. It was difficult to keep him on track. He chain-smoked and kept repeating the questions to himself before he answered. It was a very frustrating interview.

  Langton’s patience was frayed. The mixture of cigarette smoke, the heat and McDowell’s body odor was suffocating and asking the same question three or four times was driving him to distraction.

  McDowell admitted he was an acquaintance of the three victims whose handbags had been found in his basement flat, though he insisted he did not place them there. When he learned the women were dead, he shouted, “I haven’t seen none of them for fucking years and that’s the God’s honest truth. I dunno what you are trying to make me say, but I never killed any of these slags. But I would have done, if I’d got my hands on that bitch Kathleen Keegan. She should have been hung, drawn and quartered; she was a disgusting woman. Used her own kids. She used Duffy’s boy.”

  “Are you referring to Anthony Duffy?”

  “Yeah, she used him.”

  “Are you saying she was procuring children for someone?”

  “For herself; for anyone. She sold her kids, one only four years old. And she was forever making that boy do stuff.”

  “Anthony Duffy?”

  McDowell sighed with impatience,

  “Yes, yes. I just said so, didn’t I?”

  “And you are sure that Lilian Duffy let her use her own son?””

  “Yes, YES, Lilian’s kid. Don’t you listen? Why don’t you check on the Social Service register and stop wasting my fucking time? They was always taking him away.”

  As the evidence stacked up against McDowell, he became more and more angry. His solicitor had to tell him constantly to keep seated.

  “I’m being set up for something here. Now I admit to the drugs; I admit to having them, but not this fucking stuff—these handbags and gear. I never seen any of these women in ten years or more.”

  “Can you explain why they were in your flat?” Langton asked, forcing himself to be controlled, his voice quieter.

  “No! I bloody can’t tell you anything about them. My place has been broken into Christ knows how many times.”


  “Did you report it?”

  “Fuck off, course I didn’t. I’m only crashing down there myself. I’m hardly ever there.”

  “Where do you go, if you’re not at home?”

  “I sleep in me car. But the fuckers towed it away.”

  “Do you go to London?”

  “Sometimes, yeah.”

  “So, having denied you ever went to London, now you admit that you did.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you recently, or in the past few years, been to the United States?”

  “Never been.”

  Langton put the photograph of Melissa Stephens in front of McDowell but he claimed not to know her. Desperate for a result, Langton then displayed the pillow slip full of women’s underwear taken from McDowell’s room. It was only then that the big man cracked. He sobbed that the underwear belonged to Beryl Villiers. He had kept it because he loved her.

  McDowell’s solicitor requested they break for lunch.

  While the interview progressed, a forensic team was stripping down McDowell’s squalid basement flat. By eleven o’clock they had not discovered any other handbags or female belongings.

  Langton met up with the head of the Manchester forensic team. They turned their attention to his Mercedes. The engine was a wreck and there was so much rust under the bonnet that the car was a hazard. It had no MOT, no insurance, no tax. Two rugs were being tested. In the boot, they found some of McDowell’s clothes; these were also being examined.

  The tests to determine how long the handbags might have been there had not been completed. They were so moldy that they could have been hidden away for years. Or had they been brought in from some other place? Langton sighed; could someone have planted the evidence? It was a possibility. The handbags had been found outside McDowell’s own padlocked room. Vagrants and junkies had easy access to the common areas of the basement.

  McDowell was charged with drug dealing, possession of narcotics and, at half past four, with the murders of three of their victims. Langton decided to remove McDowell from custody of the Manchester Police and have him transported to Wandsworth Prison in London for further questioning.

  Tired out, Langton and Lewis caught the six o’clock train back to the capital. In the dining car they ate dried-out hamburgers and had a couple of beers. Their result had come with so many loopholes it didn’t bear thinking about. However, it did show they had made some progress. For a while at least, it would take the heat off them.

  A press release was issued to confirm that they were holding a man for questioning.

  The incident room had significant new information for Langton on his return. The local Brighton press release had brought a result: Yvonne Barber, their “Deep Throat” witness, had been seen drinking in various bars within the Brighton Lanes, then outside a disco, close to the seafront. A woman recalled seeing their witness walk past her with a youngish man. She had been shouting and laughing drunkenly.

  A description of a man in his early twenties with crew-cut hair, wearing jeans and a leather bomber jacket, was circulated. Since this fitted neither Alan Daniels’s nor McDowell’s description, it was surmised that the murder of Yvonne was not connected to the ongoing case; it was just a sad coincidence.

  Anna did not sign in until midday. When Barolli had a go at her, saying that the gov’s absence was no reason to take liberties, she replied, uptight, that she was actually working. However, she had lost his attention by then, since he was on the phone to Manchester. Anna typed up her report of the morning at the breakers’ yard. She put in two calls to Croydon; there was a fault on their line.

  In the meantime Barolli was on the phone to Langton about whether to pull off the nighttime watchdog on Travis. To his surprise, Langton said it should stay on her until he returned. Likewise, the phone tap should remain in place.

  “We’re not home and dry with this one yet.”

  “So Daniels is still in the frame?” Barolli asked.

  “Maybe. Anything come in from the prints?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Talk later.”

  Langton hung up.

  “Travis—” When Barolli turned to speak to Anna, he found himself addressing an empty desk. “Where’s Travis?”

  “She just left,” Moira said.

  Barolli spread his arms. “What the hell does she think she’s doing?” He crossed to Anna’s desk and picked up the folder that lay there. “Where’s she gone?”

  “She didn’t say.” Moira returned to her work. Barolli grunted and perused Anna’s half-completed report. Then, irritated, he checked the filing cabinet and dug out the officers’ report on the breakers’ yard.

  Hudson’s Motors was behind a warehouse, in a small mews made up of garages. Cars were lined up everywhere; a few mechanics were working on various sports cars. Anna approached a boy in a stained overall. “Is there an office for Hudson’s Motors?”

  “Last one along, right at the end.” His head disappeared back under the bonnet of a Bentley Continental.

  The only occupant of the office was a man dressed in a blazer, gray slacks and a striped shirt, sitting at his computer. When Anna tapped on the open glass door, he turned around.

  “Mr. Hudson?”

  He smiled. “He died ten years ago. I’m Martin Fuller. How can I help you?”

  When she showed her ID, he reacted with surprise.

  “Do you know you have a fault on your phone?” she asked, as he quickly gestured for her to sit down.

  “Tell me about it. My computer cut out this morning as well.”

  She opened her briefcase. “You bought some items from Wreckers Limited in Watford.” She took out her notebook.

  He blinked and leaned back.

  “I have a copy of the receipt, Mr. Fuller.”

  He flushed. “We do buy a few things; we deal in vintage cars mostly.”

  “This was a Mercedes-Benz.”

  Fuller reached for the receipt, but didn’t really look at it. He explained that he never bought anything illegal. None of his vehicles had come from there.

  “I know, just spare parts.” She smiled.

  “Right. Now, what is this receipt for?”

  “A pair of seats, the front ones.”

  “Oh yes, I remember.”

  “You do?” Her heart started pounding.

  “Yes, for a Mercedes 280SL. We bought them a while back; I sent my truck over to collect them.”

  “Do you still have them?”

  He nodded.

  “You do?” She could hardly believe it.

  “To be honest, if I’d have known they were a custom-made color, I wouldn’t have paid what I paid for them. They’re sort of mid-gray-blue and I can’t put them in another SL if the interior doesn’t match. Basically, I’ve been waiting for one to come in that has the right interior color and needs replacements.”

  “So you still have them?” she repeated anxiously.

  “Yes, they’re in storage.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes.”

  She swallowed. “Have they been cleaned or altered in any way?”

  “No. We wrapped them in bubble wrap when we removed them, brought them straight here.”

  “Could I see them?”

  “We use the first garage for storing spare parts.” He took out a set of keys from a drawer.

  Anna followed him back down the mews. He unlocked the door of the garage and slid it back. It was pitch-black inside. He switched on the lights: the interior was stacked, floor to ceiling, with seats, bumpers, hubcaps, steering wheels and so on.

  “It’ll be at the back. They’ve been here for quite a while.”

  Jean, phone to her ear, yelled across to Barolli. “It’s Travis, line two.”

  Barolli snatched up his phone. “Where the hell are you, Travis? No, no, you listen to me. You don’t just take off. We’re already bursting our budget to get someone looking out for you at your place at night and you—no, just hear me out—what?”
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br />   Barolli sat back, discomfited. “Look, I can’t just organize a truck to pick them up and take them to the lab. It’s six o’clock. It’ll have to be first thing in the morning…” He listened. “Because I am telling you, that’s the best I can do. If they’ve been there for this long, they’re not likely to walk out now!”

  It was eight o’clock and Langton was just opening a beer when his mobile phone rang. He listened wordlessly, which in itself gained Lewis’s attention. Then, after a few moments more: “They haven’t been touched? This is fucking mind-blowing. For Chrissakes, yes! Get them there as soon as you can.” He shut off his phone and stared into space.

  “Well, what?” Lewis asked. “Jimmy, who was it?”

  “Barolli. They have, believe it or not, got hold of the two front seats from Alan Daniels’s Mercedes.”

  “What?”

  “The crusher yard sold them to a garage. They’ve been wrapped in bubble wrap, undisturbed from the day they were removed.” He chuckled. “Travis had this blazing row with Barolli. He wasn’t going to get them shifted to the lab until tomorrow morning. So she only bloody hired a removal van and shipped them out herself.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “Christ, she’s like her father! Jack Travis would have carried them to the lab, if he’d had to.”

  Lewis opened his own can of beer and said thoughtfully, “You still got Alan Daniels in the frame?”

  Langton nodded. “He was never out of it, Mike.”

  Lewis sipped his beer. “Well, you could have bloody fooled me. Christ, what’s the point of this guy McDowell being driven down to Wandsworth nick?”

  “If someone else stashed those handbags—and they could have—wouldn’t it be because they were trying to implicate McDowell?”

  “I suppose…but forensic reckoned they’d been there a good few months, way before we started the surveillance of Daniels.”

  “But who gave us his name?”

  “Daniels.”

  “Right, so you tell me why he suddenly recalls someone he has supposedly not seen for twenty years! I would say it’s down to how his sick devious mind works.”