‘The Avon boys didn’t destroy me. I destroyed myself, and my Freddie, my entire family. I want to be punished for the evil I have done. And I want to be stopped from hurting anyone else. I have to be stopped.’
Rose had one final question for that first session, to which she suspected she already knew the answer.
‘Mrs Lange, we have more than one description of Mrs Pattinson as a woman with reddish blonde hair shaped in a bob and deep green eyes. You do not answer that description at all. Can you explain that to me please?’
Wordlessly Constance delved into the big handbag she had brought with her and on the table before her she placed a blonde wig and a small box containing a pair of green-tinted contact lenses.
Charlie was interviewed formally again at Staple Hill. He vehemently denied knowing anything about blackmail. ‘I’ve told you, no way,’ he said.
If there had been a blackmail scam and if Mrs Pattinson had got to him that night, yes, he’d have helped her sort it, no doubt about it.
The next morning his picture, snatched on the station steps, was on the front page of two national newspapers. Both described him as ‘the male prostitute at the centre of the Bristol rent boy murders,’ and also as ‘the one who got away.’
Rose felt for him but realistically had been surprised that the Charlie Collins connection had not already surfaced in the press. It was a good juicy angle and one that could have been leaked much earlier from numerous sources both on the street and, she had to admit, within the force. And the press were still free to print more or less anything they liked concerning the murders because nobody had yet been charged and so the case was not yet sub judice.
However that might all change pretty soon, Rose thought. And all the papers indeed reported that ambiguous line into which so much can be read: ‘A woman was last night helping police with their enquiries.’
Charlie Collins was woken that morning by his mother slamming open his bedroom door. She threw a copy of the Daily Mirror on to the bed. His own picture, beneath a particularly lurid headline, confronted him.
He was streetwise, wasn’t he? He must have known something like this would happen sooner or later. And he had been half-aware of a cameraman outside Staple Hill. But he had put that out of his mind along with all the rest of it and carried on kidding himself that nothing would happen. That things would get back to normal sooner or later and he could carry on with his life just the way he had before.
He rubbed his eyes. Sadly the images before him stayed exactly the same. His mother looked as if she had already been crying.
‘Look, it’s not the way it seems, ma, honest,’ he began.
Miriam Collins interrupted him.
‘Answer me just one thing, Charlie,’ she said grimly. ‘Have you been sleeping with women for money? Is that what’s bought that fancy flat and that smart car of yours? Is that what you do?’
‘Look, ma,’ Charlie tried again. ‘I never wanted you to find out. It’s not the way you think, you see...’
‘Just answer the question, Charlie. Do you sleep with women for money?’ Miriam Collins’ gaze did not waver. There was ice in her voice.
‘Well yeah, ma, but...’
Again Mrs Collins did not give her son a chance to finish. ‘That’s all I want to know,’ she said. ‘Now, get out of my house.’
Constance Lange was formally arrested on suspicion of murder and over the next thirty-six hours — the maximum time the police are allowed to keep a suspect in custody without bringing charges — Rose Piper and Peter Mellor interviewed her several more times, questioning the woman ferociously.
Constance was now accompanied at the interview sessions by a solicitor, provided by the police as the law requires, even though she had refused the opportunity to contact a lawyer herself and showed no interest at all in legal representation.
‘What have you done with the murder weapon?’ Rose demanded to know.
‘After killing Wayne Thompson I was so horrified by what I had done that I drove out to the cliffs beyond Porlock Weir and threw it as far as I could out to sea.’
‘Mrs Lange, we found the prints of size ten Timberland boots at the scene of the murders of both Marty Morris and Wayne Thompson. Those are clearly men’s boots.’
‘I knew there would be footprints — I thought they would put you off the track, make you think maybe the killer was a man.’
‘But you said that the murder of Marty Morris was not premeditated,’ Sergeant Mellor interrupted aggressively. ‘You said you killed him on the spur of the moment, that you merely “happened” to have a lethal knife on your person. Did you also merely “happen” to be wearing a pair of man-size boots? Just in case, was it?’
‘Not exactly, sergeant.’ Constance replied without hesitation, apparently quite unruffled by the policeman’s manner. ‘I had bought the boots for my husband, as a present. When I realised how muddy the hotel gardens were that night I put them on before I went to wait for Charlie Collins so that I wouldn’t spoil my good city shoes.’
Well, that made a kind of sense, anyway, thought Rose Piper, obliquely remembering her own orange suede heels which had been ruined at the Marty Morris murder scene. She said nothing, knowing she didn’t need to. Peter Mellor was in full flight.
‘Simply another coincidence, was it then, madam?’ the policeman asked, his voice heavy with sarcasm.
‘Yes sergeant, I suppose it was,’ responded Constance Lange in level tones.
The sergeant grunted his derision. ‘And where are these boots now?’
‘I threw them into the sea too.’
The daily grind of police work on a major case continued.
Police divers were immediately despatched to the area of the Bristol Channel by Porlock which Constance Lange described. This was procedural. But as one of the divers remarked before the search operation even began, compared with trying to find a knife and a pair of boots at depth in an unspecific expanse of moving sea bed, looking for a needle in a haystack was a doddle.
Rose also sent a team of two, a woman detective sergeant and a male DC to Chalmpton Peverill to inform the Lange family of what was happening and to question them. As a matter of courtesy, and also in order to check details of Freddie Lange’s accident, Inspector Barton at Taunton was also informed. He drove straight to Chalmpton Village Farm and arrived there just before the Bristol team.
It was Inspector Barton who broke the news to Charlotte. He didn’t mean to — it was just how things turned out. She had been in the farmhouse, she said, trying to find out what had happened to her mother whom no one had seen since early that morning, when she spotted the inspector sitting in his car outside. He had not intended to approach the family until the murder team arrived, but this was not to be.
It quickly became apparent that Constance had told nobody of her intentions, and neither had she left word — except a note on the kitchen table at Dingwell asking Charlotte to take care of Josh. Just that. No explanation of any kind.
Constance had, apparently, just walked away. Even though she had moved into the Dingwell cottage the day before, her absence was quickly missed. And so, as soon as Charlotte saw Inspector Barton, her immediate first thoughts were that there had been another accident — this time involving her mother.
She immediately rushed outside to him. And, confronted by her obviously extreme anxiety, the inspector felt he had to take responsibility — even though he confidently expected to get a roasting for it later.
He allowed Charlotte to lead him into the farm kitchen where he could not help remembering having broken the news of her husband’s death to Constance Lange just a couple of weeks earlier. He was now faced with an even more harrowing task.