Above Suspicion (13 page)

‘I thought we’d interviewed them all,’ she said.

‘This one was invalided out, eight years ago. Shot in the leg. He lives at Edge Hill. I’ve got a car waiting for us, so we can zap about, see what we can get.’

Langton settled in his seat, opposite Anna. He took out one paper, proffered another, but she shook her head, indicating her own Guardian. She was ill at ease sitting opposite him. She couldn’t help wondering how it would be, being in such close proximity to him for the three and a half hour journey there and the three and a half hours back. She sat back to read. Occasionally she would steal a glance at Langton, but he appeared oblivious to her presence. The entire journey passed mostly in silence.

She just managed to avoid the train door slamming into her as he charged off down the platform once they reached the station.

Outside, a Greater Manchester Police patrol car was waiting for them. Langton sat in the front seat with the driver, a friendly, chatty officer. They did not discuss the case. Instead, the two men engaged in a lively conversation about the rise in property prices.

‘You married?’ the officer asked.

‘Nope. Been there twice though, so I’ve got the T-shirt.’ Langton grinned. He turned suddenly to Anna in the back seat.

‘What about you?’ he asked.

‘Am I married?’

‘Yes?’

‘No, I’m not.’

The driver offered the information that, not only was he married, he had five children.

‘Five?’ Langton said, shaking his head in astonishment.

‘You got any?’ the driver asked.

‘Yes, one daughter. She lives with her mother. Lovely girl, very bright. I have her some weekends, when I’m free.’

As Langton chatted, Anna was amazed to hear so much about his personal life. By the time they reached their destination, Langton in turn knew virtually the driver’s entire life history.

The nursing home looked pleasant, set in the middle of a well laid-out garden. The reception area seemed light and friendly. There were flowers on the desk and cards pinned up on the bulletin boards. Mrs Steadly, the cheerful administrator, was a woman in a pink suit.

‘You can see Mrs Morgan in her room, unless you prefer to have coffee and biscuits in the sun lounge. You won’t be disturbed there. It’s not that warm today and with all the glass it can get a bit chilly. We really need to put central heating in, but we have to raise the money first!’ she said as they crossed the reception area with her.

‘I think we’d prefer to see Mrs Morgan in her room,’ Langton responded, smiling.

The room was fairly large, with numerous pot plants on the windowsill. Mrs Steadly introduced a frail, tiny woman with a halo of snow-white hair. Crippled by painful arthritis, Ellen Morgan moved with the aid of a walking frame.

Mrs Steadly backed out of the room and closed the door. Laid out on the bed were two large photo albums. Anna took a seat by the window, Langton sat on the bed and Mrs Morgan leaned on her frame.

‘I knew you wanted a photograph. So I got everything out and went through them. It brought back memories, I can tell you.’

Langton smiled. ‘You had a very full life. How many children have you cared for?’

‘Too many. But I keep in touch with most of them and they come and see me,’ she said, moving across to the bed.

Langton gently helped her to sit beside him and placed the album she was pointing to in her lap.

‘Tell me about Anthony Duffy,’ he prompted.

‘Anthony was four when I first met him. He was only supposed to come for a few weeks, but he stayed with me eight months. He was very shy, exceptionally nervous. He looked like a skeleton when he arrived,’ she chuckled.

Langton watched the bulbous, distorted fingers turning the pages. Then she pointed. ‘Here’s one from that time. It was taken at one of the boy’s birthday parties. There’s Anthony, at the corner of the photograph.’

Langton gazed at the face, then removed the photo, which he passed to Anna. Anna was struck by the image of this tiny boy, with his paper hat, wearing a striped, knitted pullover. His pixie-like face was unsmiling; he had large, extraordinary, beautiful blue eyes.

‘He was very much a loner. Not that he was trouble; well, he was young, but he didn’t mix with the other children. His mother was in police custody and went to prison for six months. When she came to collect him, he clung to the banister rail, screaming. It was very sad. There was nothing I could do in those days. She was his mother.’

Mrs Morgan removed another photograph from the album. ‘He came back to me four years later. This is him. He’d grown quite tall for his age. He wasn’t as shy, but he still wouldn’t mix with the other children. He was very bright, but he had become more difficult to control. When he didn’t get what he wanted, he would throw the most terrible tantrums; you’ve never seen the like.’

Langton passed the snapshot to Anna. Anthony, at eight, was tall and skinny. He wore shorts, a shirt and tie and his hair stuck up in odd tufts, looking as if it had been cut with garden clippers.

Mrs Morgan stared at the empty space in the album. ‘I said I would have him for the eleven months his mother had left to serve in prison, but I couldn’t handle him. The house was cramped with two girls of my own and the four other children living with me. But that wasn’t the real reason. I just didn’t want him disrupting everyone the way he did. He’d get angry—’ Mrs Morgan stopped for a while, as if remembering something.

‘He had the most extraordinary eyes, “Elizabeth Taylor eyes”, I used to call them. He could be very foul-mouthed. That I could deal with. But we had a big, fluffy old cat, Milly. She gave him asthma. I explained that he should not stroke her or go near her, really, because if his asthma got worse, he wouldn’t be able to stay. Then his asthma cleared up. I will never forget finding Milly. He’d wrapped her body in a tea towel. I confronted him and he didn’t lie, didn’t try to make an excuse. He had taken the cat down to the garden shed and strangled her. He said he loved me and didn’t want to be taken away again.’

The tears started to flow. She dabbed at her eyes with a folded tissue.

‘There was a couple, they had fostered before. They were very nice, elderly, quite well off. They agreed to take him. I packed up his few things and they came round in a very expensive car. He was so excited about the car that he never even looked at me when they took him away. Anthony was fostered by a couple called Jack and Mary Ellis in 1975. They are both dead now.’

‘Did you ever see him again?’ Langton asked.

‘I saw him once; it would have been about six or seven years later. I was drawing the living-room curtains and I saw this boy standing outside the gate. Just looking at the house, staring really. He was in a school uniform: blazer, a yellow and black school scarf, long grey trousers. I knew it was Anthony because of those eyes. But by the time I got to the front door, he’d gone. He never came back. I never saw him again.’

Back in the car, Langton’s mood was subdued. The driver started up the engine, asking if they wanted to go to lunch or should he drive them to Edge Hill to see ex-Detective Richard Green.

‘Straight to him, please,’ Langton said without hesitation. ‘What did you make of that, Travis?’

‘Very sad,’ she said. Her stomach was growling.

‘Yeah, shoved from pillar to post. If we don’t get any joy from this chap Green, when we go back we might try to do a composite picture ourselves and age it up.’

‘How did you track me down, then?’ Green said when they met at his house.

‘It wasn’t that easy,’ Langton said, smiling. ‘You certainly move around.’

‘Yeah, well, with the pension I get, money is tight, so we buy houses, do ‘em up and sell ‘em on. The wife made all the curtains and covered the sofas. She’s also a dab hand with the paintbrush, decorating. I do a spot of carpentry.

‘I’ve been thinking about what you want,’ he continued. ‘It was a long time ago. Must be twenty years. I was with Vice.’

Langton nodded. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘Hated it. That’s why I moved over to the Robbery Squad and what happens? I’m only there two years and this bloody little junkie fires off a round in my leg.’

‘Bad luck.’

‘I’d call it more than that; thirteen years old, the little shit! If I’d got my hands on him, I’d have been put away for murder.’

‘Anthony Duffy,’ Langton reminded him quietly.

‘Oh, right. We had him in for questioning. You know Barry Southwood?’ Green laughed. ‘He had to get out of Manchester. He was a devil with the hookers. He was warned over and over again. Sex mad, he was.’

Langton repeated, ‘Anthony Duffy.’

‘Right. I’ve been racking my brains, to get the events as clear as possible.’

‘And?’ Langton prodded.

‘We had him in for questioning, that’d be 1983. His mother, Lilian, had been brought in, beaten up badly.

She was screaming the place down. Anyways, once she was calmed and cleaned up, said she wanted to make a charge of rape and assault.’

‘Did you take any swabs?’

‘We weren’t all that up to speed on the DNA, like we are now.’

‘She pressed charges?’

‘Yeah. She said this guy had tried to strangle her and she had fought him off and escaped.’

‘When did she say it was her son?’

‘I’m not sure. To be honest, none of us was that interested in her; she was a real pack of trouble. She would have been seen by a female officer on the rape team. She came back, saying how she wasn’t going to press charges. She wants to change her statement and when we have a go at her, she starts howling, saying it was all a mistake, it wasn’t a punter. It was her son and she didn’t want to get him in trouble.’

Langton held up his hand. ‘Do you think when she was attacked she didn’t know it was her son? Maybe she found that out later?’

‘I don’t know. Could be. She lived in a house full of old slags, all as bad as each other. Shallcotte Street, it was; number 12. Place was a hellhole. There were so many fights and beatings, the ambulance could practically find its own way to the house without a driver.’

Langton leaned forward to change the subject. ‘When was the next time Anthony Duffy’s name came up?’

Green pursed his lips. He took out a small notebook with jottings in it and flicked the pages backwards and forwards.

‘You got to remember, I was on Vice, not the Murder Squad. Oh, here we are. I don’t have the exact date, but it was maybe fifteen, twenty years ago. It was on some waste ground. There were a lot of old junked cars, fridges that had been dumped and the council ordered the place to be cleared. That’s where they found Lilian’s body. She hadn’t even been reported missing. Murder team is called out. Been dead at least six months. I saw the morgue shots when they called me in. It was a mess: dogs and foxes had been at it. She had been strangled with a stocking, her hands tied behind her back with her bra. They called in the Vice Squad and there were the notes about the assault charge. I think Barry Southwood gave them some details. Next thing I heard was they arrested her son, Anthony Duffy.’

‘Did you see him?’

‘No, I didn’t. One of the girls said they couldn’t believe that a tart like Lilian could have such a good-looking boy. Seems he was well dressed, quietly spoken. He was at some college or other. Anyway, after questioning him, they released him without charges.’

‘And? Anything else?’

Green shrugged his shoulders.

‘That’s about it. I had a few pints after, with his arresting officer. He said the consensus was Duffy might have done it.’

‘What do you mean, “might”?’

‘Because of the way he was. It was weird, they said. He was so quiet, so unemotional.’

‘Why did they release him if they had suspicions? Did he have an alibi?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. Listen, she’d been dead a long time. There was no witness, no weapon. The girls who had seen her last were all screwed up. They couldn’t remember where she had been, or who she had been with. She hadn’t even been reported as missing.’

Langton looked across to Anna.

‘You want to ask anything?’

She hesitated.

‘Do you recall any of the names of the other girls that lived at the house?’ She opened her notebook.

‘You’re asking the impossible,’ said Green, scratching his head.

‘If I was to read out a few names, can you tell me if any are familiar?’

‘Sure. But this was a long time ago. Most of them are probably in the cemetery.’

Langton gave her a brief nod.

‘Teresa Booth?’

He shook his head. She continued at random through the list of victims and got the same response to Mary Murphy; he shook his head for Beryl Villiers, again for Sandra Donaldson, but when she said the name ‘Kathleen Keegan’, he hesitated.

‘I think she was at the house. Name sounds familiar.’

‘And Barbara Whittle?’

‘Yeah. That sounds familiar too.’ Green could not elaborate on whether or not the two women were residents, claiming he just recognized their names. ‘There were all sorts, different ages, living at that place. Lot of kids too, just running wild. Social services wore out the path to the front door.’

The house had been demolished. This would mean another extensive search of past records. And the Keegan and Whittle families would have to be questioned again to see if they recalled either victim living at 12 Shallcotte Street.

Langton weaved his way down the aisle of the carriage, carrying two cups. He set the coffees down on the table between them. He lit a cigarette.

‘How much do I owe you?’ she said.

‘On me. Really.’

Langton took out his mobile phone and began to scroll through his calls. He went to stand by the door and Anna watched him through the glass partition, talking. He made call after call, his face concentrated and unsmiling. He did have, she thought, quite a handsome face. His nose was too thin and hooked slightly, but his eyes were nice, expressive, as were his hands. The dark shadow round his chin gave it a bluish hue, both attractive and not. For a police officer, he also didn’t dress that badly, she decided. His suit was quite stylish; so were his shoes. She turned quickly to stare out of the window as he returned.