‘Why would Marty have agreed to offer his services to you that night when he was already blackmailing you?’ enquired Rose stonily.
‘I asked myself that,’ Constance responded coolly. ‘I assumed that either he wasn’t actually told he was going to see Mrs Pattinson — I am sure you have gathered already that I was not the only woman who sought to be entertained by Avon Escorts at the Crescent — or that he thought he would use the opportunity to further threaten me. I don’t suppose he saw me as a threat for one minute.’
‘But Mrs Lange, what were you doing lurking in the hotel gardens if you were waiting just to talk to Charlie Collins? And what on earth were you doing carrying a weapon capable of killing a man?’
The questions did not seem even to make Constance Lange pause to draw breath. She answered at once. ‘I didn’t book into the hotel because I didn’t want to make my situation even worse. I only wanted to talk to Charlie so I hid and waited for him outside. I had been shopping in Bristol earlier — I had to go home with shopping like I always did, or it would have looked suspicious — and I’d bought a new carving knife, a good one, a butcher’s knife. I had it in my bag.’
Peter Mellor butted in, making his contempt for the woman sitting opposite him quite clear.
‘You didn’t mean to kill, and yet you happened to have a lethal knife in your bag? Don’t you think that is something of a coincidence, Mrs Lange?’
Constance seemed almost to smile. ‘It may be, sergeant, but I think you will find that whole nations have fallen because of unfortunate coincidences before, let alone one confused and frightened woman.’
Peter Mellor raised his eyebrows. The corners of his mouth were turned firmly downwards. Rose knew he would have found Constance’s remark patronising, particularly as the woman was a murder suspect. She did not think Constance Lange had intended that for one second, but her sergeant could sometimes still be overtly sensitive in the company of the well-off white middle-class.
‘So what “unfortunate coincidence” exactly led you to kill Colin Parker?’ he asked archly.
‘None at all, sergeant,’ replied Constance. ‘I planned the murder of Colin Parker quite carefully. I had to kill him, you see, because, after Marty Morris died, Parker continued in his place. He carried on with the blackmail demands. I assumed they must have been in it together from the beginning.
‘He was either a very brave or foolhardy young man, don’t you think, sergeant, to carry on after I had murdered Marty? But I can assure you that he did. I suppose he thought that as long as he kept away from Mrs Pattinson he would be safe. He had no idea that the client he agreed to meet at the Portway Towers was Mrs Pattinson under another name. The thought obviously never occurred to him.’
‘I don’t think high intelligence is a criteria much sought after by escort agencies, Mrs Lange,’ commented Mellor, who seemed to be allowing himself to become rather more riled than Rose would have liked.
‘Oh, you’d be surprised, sergeant, you’d be surprised,’ responded Constance Lange, and again there was a quickness and a certain edge of wry amusement in the way that she spoke which gave Rose the merest glimpse of the kind of woman she might have been before all this had begun. Nonetheless the DCI reckoned it was definitely time for her to step in again.
‘OK, Mrs Lange; that’s enough of that,’ she said sharply. ‘Let’s move on to the third murder. Are you going to tell us that Wayne Thompson was also blackmailing you?’
‘No, Chief Inspector. I killed Wayne Thompson for revenge, I suppose. Or maybe because I couldn’t stop... That’s why I’m here today. Because I want it to stop. It has to stop.’
At last she raised her gaze from the table before her and met Rose Piper’s gaze full on. Her eyes were not just red-rimmed, they were also bloodshot. There were signs of broken blood vessels. This was a woman who had done a great deal of crying recently, Rose thought. And now she could see the pain for sure. The look in Constance Lange’s eyes was beyond pain. She was a woman in torment. Rose had no doubt about that.
‘I killed Marty Morris and Colin Parker to stop my husband finding out about me — and then he found out anyway,’ she said simply.
And she related how Freddie had discovered her double life when Helen had suddenly been taken ill. How he had found that there had been no aged aunt for Constance to visit in Bristol every month, that there was some other hidden reason for her days away from home. A reason which destroyed the whole fabric of his existence.
‘When I got back that night Freddie was sitting looking at two phone numbers which he had scribbled on a scrap of paper,’ said Constance. ‘One was the number of Aunt Ada’s nursing home and the other was for Avon Escorts.
‘After finding out that Aunt Ada had died three years previously he started checking out the numbers I had programmed into my mobile phone. There were only about a dozen of them, Avon was number nine. Odd to think that if I had not forgotten my mobile phone that day Freddie might still be alive, isn’t it?’
She paused again. Rose thought she might be about to break down, but she didn’t. Not quite.
‘There was nothing I could say to Freddie, really,’ Constance went on. ‘Avon Escorts had had enough publicity. He couldn’t possibly have any doubts about what the outfit was, and there was no other reason for me to have the number except to make use of their services.
‘I didn’t tell him everything, of course. I tried to protect him, as much as I could. But it all fitted together for him, suddenly, you see. The whole sorry scenario. Once Freddie’s suspicions were aroused it wasn’t too difficult for him to fill in the gaps. He’d pretty well done it before I even arrived home that night.’
There was another brief silence, so intense that Rose could even hear the faint whirr of the tape recorder.
‘Do you think your husband actually suspected you of murder, Mrs Lange?’ she asked quietly.
Constance shrugged. ‘I don’t really know,’ she said. ‘I suppose he must have done, I was so obviously Mrs Pattinson. He didn’t say so directly. But after that dreadful night he barely spoke to me again. And it was only two days later that he... that he... died.’
She told the story of Freddie’s mysterious car crash.
‘Freddie was the most careful of drivers, and he was extra careful when he was in that beloved MG of his. He knew the road too. It couldn’t have been an accident, smashing straight into a wall like he did...’
‘So you believe your husband committed suicide, is that it, Mrs Lange?’ Rose asked bluntly.
Constance nodded. ‘Freddie couldn’t live with the shame, with the grief,’ she said. ‘You have to remember that we had a wonderful marriage. I suppose that sounds strange... but we did have a wonderful marriage.
‘I have no doubt that Freddie took his own life — after all, he reckoned it was over anyway. He would rather be dead than live with what he knew. And that was the ultimate terrible blow. I will carry the guilt always.’
Rose stared at her, trying to see inside her head.
‘I still don’t understand why you then killed Wayne Thompson,’ she said.
‘Neither do I, not entirely,’ replied Constance. ‘I told you, that’s partly why I’m here. Sometimes I think I’ve gone mad. After Freddie died I just wanted to hit out. I’d been with Wayne Thompson as well, of course, and I found myself blaming him and the other boys. It was them who had destroyed my life, not me. Suddenly all I wanted to do was to destroy them, all of them. I barely remember killing Wayne Thompson. I was in a kind of trance. Only when I came out of it did I start to realise the full horror of all that I had done. I still cannot believe what I have been capable of. I have frightened myself.