Rose had a small silent bet with herself that Parker would turn out to have been another Avon Escorts boy. For more reasons than one she rather hoped it would prove to be so. A connection like that would be further indication that they were dealing with a serial killer. Rose could not help being excited by the thought of heading such an investigation.
‘Right Peter, check Avon out,’ she instructed. ‘Get a team on to Paolo right away.’
The tall sergeant began to dial into his mobile phone and retreated into the corridor.
Rose stayed in the mortuary a little longer, watching as impassively as she could while the victim was cleaned up ready for identification. There would be a post-mortem examination later that day. Rose didn’t know what more that could tell her. She was desperate for anything to link the two crimes.
Peter Mellor reappeared. He looked animated. He had obviously already got some kind of result. Rose felt a shiver run down her spine. She struggled to remain composed and professional.
‘Paolo’s running scared now,’ said the sergeant. ‘He admitted it right away. Colin Parker was on his books.’
‘Yes!’ Rose half shouted the word and, aware of appraising glances from both Sergeant Mellor and the mortuary attendant, immediately wished she hadn’t. At least she had refrained from punching the air, that was something, she supposed. But she couldn’t hide her satisfaction.
When she spoke again, however, her voice was calm and controlled. ‘I reckon we’ve definitely got a serial, Peter, what do you think?’
Mellor nodded his agreement. That pleased Rose too.
She sensed the makings of a very big case. And she found herself immediately focusing on the Mrs Pattinson connection again.
Mrs Pattinson had already missed one regular appointment with Avon Escorts, Rose learned. Paolo, damn him, had not previously revealed that the woman always used the agency on the same day every month. ‘Well, you never asked that,’ he muttered sullenly when confronted.
However it had not turned out to be such an important miss as it might have been because Mrs Pattinson had failed to surface on that day or any other. And in any case Rose had had a team monitoring Avon Escorts’ telephones since the first murder, ready to spin into action should Mrs Pattinson ever be heard from again.
With the second murder, the disappearance of Mrs Pattinson from the vice scene in which she had apparently revelled gained additional significance. There had always been the possibility that Mrs Pattinson had backed off merely out of fear — of her true identity being revealed as public and police attention focused on Avon Escorts, and perhaps even fear of possibly facing violence herself — and that the evidence which pointed toward her was merely coincidental. Another murder, and still no word from the mysterious Mrs P was yet another coincidence. As was the evidence of the barman who had taken the telephone message from a woman called Rachel that Colin should meet her in the car park. Surely it must be almost certain therefore that his killer was a woman. Everything seemed to be leading to Mrs Pattinson.
Rose felt vindicated in her own judgement. After all, she had always considered the gay killing theory to be stereotyped thinking — and investigations into the life and times of the latest victim indicated that Colin Parker did not have a gay bone in his body.
‘So — are we still after a gay killer, then, Peter?’ she asked DS Mellor somewhat smugly.
She should have known better than to exhibit any degree of smugness. Peter Mellor, who, having so unusually lost his cool already on this case was obviously determined not to do so again, studied her appraisingly.
‘Could be camouflage, boss,’ he remarked. ‘If it was Jonathon Lee who topped Marty Morris, he could have killed again just to take the heat off.’
Rose didn’t really want to be diverted from her pet theory.
‘And Mrs Pattinson’s voice on the phone to Paolo, the woman Rachel on the phone to the barman, was that all Jonathon Lee?’ she asked irritably.
Mellor did not rise to her. ‘Sometimes people hear or see what they think they should,’ he commented evenly. ‘And Lee could have an accomplice.’
‘Peter, I think you’re being stubborn,’ said Rose. Secretly, though, she knew the bloody man had a point.
Soon after Charlie heard the news of Colin Parker’s death he decided to contact the police. Enough was enough. Charlie was really afraid now.
‘Colin was another of Mrs Pattinson’s favourites, you see,’ he told a fascinated Rose Piper. ‘I’ve worked with him. We’ve serviced her together, she likes that...’
Rose thought the young West Indian sounded as if he regarded himself as some sort of prize bull. Presumably he did. And there was an air of bouncy self-confidence about him, in spite of his loudly expressed fears for his safety.
‘I want police protection, that’s what I came here for,’ he demanded.
Rose was sitting across the table from him in an interview room at Staple Hill Police Station endeavouring to appear stem, solemn and unmoved by events — whereas the reality was that she was bubbling over with excitement.
The murder enquiry team had been moved to Staple Hill that morning, as soon as Rose’s superiors accepted her prognosis that there was a possible serial killer on the loose and certainly a link between the murders of Marty Morris and Colin Parker. In Rose’s opinion, Staple Hill — being several miles out of the city centre, the station itself covering the South Gloucestershire area — was not perfectly situated to be the incident room of a Bristol murder. Neither did she have a high opinion of the building housing the Investigation Centre, which was an old portacabin originally constructed as temporary accommodation for the local magistrates’ court. But the rather decrepit cabin remained permanently set up and ready to house a major crime unit such as Rose was heading. State-of-the-art computer equipment in the form of HOLMES TWO, the latest version of the Home Office Large Major Enquiry Systems, an advanced computer system on-line to other stations throughout the country, sat incongruously on cheap wooden tables stained with the rings of a million tea mugs in prefabricated rooms lined with wood-chip paper.
None of Staple Hill’s shortcomings daunted Rose however. She was used to police stations with substandard conditions. In addition, to her immense satisfaction, she had now been officially appointed Senior Investigation Officer of both murders and would expect to be SIO of any possibly linked murders in the future. Rose had more than eighty officers on her team who between them, she could see from a glance at the computer on her desk, had so far made 6047 house calls, completed almost 4000 PDFs (Personal Description Forms) and taken 490 statements. Rose’s further direct involvement with either possible witnesses or suspects had been minimal. Charlie Collins, however, fell firmly into the small category of those she was not prepared to hand on to anyone.
Charlie had turned up unannounced less than an hour earlier at Trinity Road — the St Paul’s police station not far from his mother’s home with which he was most familiar. Fortunately it had not taken the front office clerk at Trinity long to realise Charlie’s importance to the current murder investigation and arrange for him to be driven straight to Staple Hill.
Rose studied the handsome young man. She had not met anyone like Charlie Collins before. She’d been involved in her share of vice cases. She’d met and had to deal with prostitutes and pimps often enough. Avon Escorts and this character were different. Charlie talked about his trade in the way any self-employed businessman might, bemoaning his loss of income in the present crisis.