Rose shrugged. ‘I was never totally convinced that your confession was a true one,’ she agreed. ‘I’m not sure about knowing exactly. I’d like to hear the truth from you.’
Constance nodded again. ‘I’m no murderer. I’m innocent of that at least. I’ve never killed anybody. I didn’t kill Marty, or Colin, or Wayne. I had no reason to, either. There was no blackmail, and I wasn’t angry with them. Only ever with myself.
‘My confession was entirely false. You were right, Chief Inspector Piper. I was trying, you see, to cover up...’ she hesitated again, ‘...to cover up what I believed to be the truth.’
‘Come on, Constance, what is the truth?’
Constance began to tremble. The last vestiges of elegant sophistication crumbled.
‘You know, you know...’ she said.
‘You have to tell us, Constance, on the record you have to tell us.’ Rose leaned forward across the table, willing the other woman to go on, to put an end to it once and for all.
It was as if a dam had broken. The tears began to pour down Constance Lange’s face. She made several attempts to speak again before eventually seeming to force the words out, looking almost as if it caused her physical pain to do so.
‘My son did it. William killed them. All of them. I’m sure of it.’
Constance’s sobbing became louder and more uncontrolled. Rose was aware of Peter Mellor tensing beside her. Even Constance’s solicitor could not stop himself giving a small involuntary gasp.
She didn’t lose eye contact with Constance, she didn’t dare.
‘How do you know that, Constance?’
Rose saw Constance battle to gain control of herself again. Eventually the sobbing eased and she managed to speak once more.
‘As soon as Marty Morris was murdered and the Mrs Pattinson connection was all over the papers I began to wonder about William. I didn’t know right away, I didn’t want to believe it anyway. But I did wonder. You see William has always been impulsive, a bit wild, but so aware of his family, so proud of his ancestry, so proud of his mother.’
She seemed to choke on the last words. Her lips were trembling quite violently. She took several deep breaths before she continued.
‘He’d always been stubborn too, liked to get his own way, a bit spoilt really. I was the one who spoiled him most, actually. I could believe him becoming obsessed with revenge. He wanted revenge against me and he wanted revenge against the boys I went with. I’d been degraded, you see, that was how he saw it, I know.
‘Then when the other two were killed I was quite sure, really. It all pointed to William if you knew what I knew. And the second time, the night that Colin Parker was murdered — well, I’d gone to see William, to confront him, to see if there was any hope for us — still kidding myself about all that had happened, I suppose. I couldn’t find him. He wasn’t at his digs. Nobody knew where he was.
‘I waited and waited. Freddie was away at an NFU conference. I waited until the early hours. I saw William return, eventually, but I didn’t approach him. He got out of his car carrying a bundle which he put in the boot. He looked so strange. There was something about him — I didn’t dare go near him. Then when I got home... well, the next day I learned about Colin Parker’s murder.’ She broke down again.
‘Go on, don’t stop now,’ prompted Rose quite softly.
Curiously, Constance managed a weak smile through her tears.
‘The most frightening thing of all was that William always seemed so cool, so calm and in control,’ she continued as instructed. ‘Yet, who else would have pretended to be Mrs Pattinson? Who else would have hand-picked the victims? It had to be William. I kept telling myself it couldn’t be him, I kept kidding myself, I suppose, and yet I also kept looking for clues.’
There was another period of silence, this time broken by Peter Mellor.
‘And did you find any clues?’ he asked, ever the complete policeman, already thinking ahead to the need for hard evidence. ‘Did you find any proof to back up your suspicion?’
Constance nodded, but did not answer directly.
‘I looked in William’s room at the farm,’ Constance continued, once more in a voice so small that Rose had to gently prompt her to speak up again. ‘I looked in the office, in the milking shed, in the stables. I didn’t know what I was looking for and I certainly didn’t want to find anything. But I kept looking.
‘On the Sunday after Wayne Thompson died William left his car keys on the kitchen table, and I searched his car. I looked in the boot and couldn’t see anything at first. Then I found it all stowed away in the spare wheel compartment.’
She stopped then as if she meant it. As if she had no more to say. But Rose knew that she had not finished, that she could not let her finish.
‘Found what?’ Rose demanded.
Constance sucked in a huge breath of air. She closed her eyes as if trying to shut out the dreadful reality now surrounding her. But when she spoke again this time her voice was quite clear and somehow completely resigned.
‘His Timberland boots, a raincoat, a pair of gloves and... and... a butcher’s knife. All wrapped up in a bundle. There were some stains, blood stains, I thought, on the coat and the boots. One thing I told you was true — I drove out to the cliffs by Porlock and threw them all in the sea. I still wanted to protect him, you see.’
‘Did he know, did he know you’d taken the stuff?’ Mellor again, always checking, always one to look for the facts of a case.
Constance shrugged. ‘I suppose he must have done. He didn’t say, but then he never said anything. It was like he was leading two lives, and he’d shut one out of his head.’
She gave a little strangled laugh, even more humourless than before. ‘I should know about that, shouldn’t I?’
‘Did you ever feel in danger from him?’ Rose asked. ‘You were living with someone you believed to be a murderer, someone who gave every indication that he hated you? Weren’t you frightened?’
Constance looked surprised, as if she’d never thought of that. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I never even considered that he might hurt me physically.’
‘And the confession, that was just to protect William?’
‘I wanted to save him. Yes. I thought I could do it. And I wanted to put a stop to it all. I thought I would do that by confessing. I suppose I thought, in a way, it would satisfy him. It would give him his revenge on me. I didn’t even mind very much. It was all my fault after all. My life was over, anyway. And I thought there would be no more deaths, I really did...’
‘But Paolo was so certain that it was Mrs Pattinson who phoned on the night of the first murder,’ Peter Mellor interrupted, sounding puzzled, and it was typical of the man’s attention to detail that he had so quickly picked up on that, Rose thought. ‘Paolo was quite sure he had recognised Mrs Pattinson’s voice.’
‘Yes,’ responded Constance quietly. ‘That was one of the things that first made me think of William. You see, he was always a good mimic. And he had my voice off perfectly. He could even fool his father on the telephone.’
Twenty-Three
Less than an hour later Rose Piper and her team drove to Chalmpton Peverill to arrest William Lange on suspicion of murder.
The weather was cold for the time of year but thankfully dry and clear. It was only the day before that Constance had asked for Rose to visit her at Eastwood. A lot had happened since then. The formal interview with Constance had taken most of that morning. It was just after three o’clock in the afternoon when the police team knocked on the front door of Chalmpton Village Farm. Nobody responded. The door proved to be unlocked so they walked straight in.
William was sitting at his desk in the farm office, and Rose was the first person to enter the ordinary little room with its state-of-the-art computer system, a big copying machine and two telephones, one a fax, piles of paper everywhere, and an NFU calendar on the wall.