The prospect of being with her mother filled Rose with misgivings at the best of times. Neither mother nor daughter had changed much with the years. Rose still thought her mother was a shallow, priggish human being, and had little real love for her. All the same she felt guilty. She had never made much effort, after all. She should at least go through the motions of seeing her mother more frequently. Nonetheless, again rather like Constance and the way in which she had come to regard her cell as a sanctuary, Rose would just as soon stay all alone in her soulless little room at the section house.
When she arrived at the farm she was still thinking about Christmas and reflected how there were no signs of any festivities — no tree, no holly, no coloured lights. Well, there wouldn’t be, would there? No sign at all of the kind of Christmases she felt sure had been celebrated here in lavish style in the past — before this apparently nice, ordinary, rather up-market family had become embroiled in a particularly sordid series of murders.
William Lange greeted her, only after she had knocked on the front door of the house this time, with even less enthusiasm than before. He was wearing a dark suit now, a striped tie around his neck but not yet knotted.
‘I’m going to church,’ he muttered irritably. She raised her eyebrows. ‘It’s Christmas Eve, there’s a special service, it’s expected,’ he continued. ‘Life goes on, you know.’
‘I see,’ she said. She thought he was extraordinary. She studied him carefully. She had just one more rather important question, something that had occurred to her while she was talking to Marcia Spry.
‘Mr Lange, did you have any idea that your mother was Mrs Pattinson before she gave herself up?’ she asked.
William — who had been busily continuing to get himself ready to go out, putting on his shoes, tying laces, checking the change in his trouser pockets — faced her directly for the first time during this second, so far brief conversation.
The hooded eyes stared at her intently. ‘Why, did she say that I had?’ he asked sharply.
Rose told him truthfully that Constance had not.
‘I should hope not,’ said William. ‘Wouldn’t that make me an accessory to murder or something?’
Rose didn’t know what to think. William Lange obviously had no time for his mother any more, but, regardless of all the strain and bitterness, the Langes were a close-knit lot steeped in their own family history. There were nuances there that were beyond Rose.
Would William have shopped his mother if he had found out about her double life, if he had suspected that she was a murderess? Or would he have publicly protected her, even if privately he made her life a misery?
Rose wasn’t sure. And she didn’t even know if it was relevant anyway. She had to accept that her visit to Chalmpton Peverill had been a bit of a waste of time, really. But at least she had done it now.
She settled into the passenger seat of the Scimitar for the drive back to Bristol. Some Christmas this was going to be. She actually wished she was working all through Christmas Day, to tell the truth. Her mother’s inquisitive concern, for appearances more than anything else if she ran true to form, as Rose was sure she would, might not be the worst of it, either. The jollities of her little niece and nephew, much as she loved them, would probably make her feel even less festive than she did at the moment, she suspected. And then it hit her. She hadn’t even bought any presents. It was gone eight on Christmas Eve. Desperately she tried to think of a shop, any shop, that might still be open.
Somehow or other she got through it all. An off-licence had provided champagne and malt whisky for her sister and brother-in-law, a bottle of some disgustingly elaborate liqueur for her mother, some halfway decent plonk as her contribution to the Christmas dinner, and a couple of decorative net stockings packed with assorted sweets for her niece and nephew — which she supplemented by pinning a twenty-pound note to each, thanking God that children were always such mercenary little beasts.
She fielded her mother’s questioning with more ease than she had anticipated, largely thanks to a succession of well-timed interventions from her ever tactful sister and a merciful excess of alcohol which effectively numbed both her senses and her sensitivity. This also forced her to spend the night on the sofa as she didn’t dare drive back to Bristol. However she fled early in the morning before having to face her mother in a condition of grim and rather painful sobriety.
Work again provided a welcome excuse, although it was the day after Boxing Day before the incident room returned to being anything like fully operational.
Rose was coming under more and more pressure to make some kind of melodramatic gesture concerning Avon Escorts, whose activities, now so publicly revealed, seemed to have caused far more public outrage in Bristol than a few killings — after all, murder was everyday stuff.
It was about ten days after Christmas when she realised she could no longer resist the demands of her superiors that Paolo be charged with living off immoral earnings — however inconsequential she still considered this to be — but it did at least also give her an opportunity to get the odious Terry Sharpe for something.
Constance’s confession had put the former vice cop in the clear as far as the big one was concerned, much to Rose’s chagrin. But the murder investigation had produced evidence which should finally nail him for vice crimes. Rose believed she had a good enough case to charge him, as well as Paolo, and Sharpe was duly arrested along with the younger man.
It was Terry Sharpe’s complacency, his way of always giving the impression that he knew things you didn’t, which annoyed Rose most about the man. And this time when she turned up at his plush converted warehouse office — accompanied by Peter Mellor and two uniformed officers, all making as much commotion as possible — Rose found that she thoroughly enjoyed seeing the habitual smug expression wiped from Sharpe’s face for once.
But the arrest of Terry Sharpe was about the only thing in her whole life giving Rose even the remotest sense of satisfaction.
The weeks passed in a haze of hard work. The momentum of the investigation did not lessen as the police continued to strive to ensure that the case against Constance was flawless. You couldn’t rely entirely on a confession any more, not since the Guildford Four, in fact. Every police officer knew that — even Chief Superintendent Titmuss when he was thinking about anything other than politics and social climbing.
There was, however, plenty of circumstantial evidence. Even the efficiency of the stabbings could be construed as further pointing the finger at Constance. After all, she had trained as a nurse. She would know well enough where the blade of a knife would do the most damage.
Rose had every reason to be quite confident, and still could not really explain why she wasn’t. Yet as the day of the trial approached, she became almost as unhappy at work as she was in her private life.
She insisted that each statement Constance Lange made, every possible weak link in her story, be checked and double-checked. Superintendent Titmuss accused Rose of doing the job for the defence much more thoroughly than the defence itself seemed inclined to do. Constance, it seemed, continued to show no inclination whatsoever to help formulate any defence at all. And indeed, at one stage, Rose had even found herself actively trying to establish an alibi for a woman who had already confessed to the crimes in question.
Constance had been a busy woman, involved in so many aspects of village life, but an early check of her diary had revealed conspicuous blank spaces at the time of all three murders. Close questioning of family, friends and neighbours produced nobody who could definitely claim to have seen Constance, either in the village or anywhere else at the appropriate times.