She found herself looking straight down the barrels of a twelve-bore shotgun. William Lange was cradling the gun in his arms as if it were something very precious.
‘I’ve been expecting you, Detective Chief Inspector,’ he remarked in a quite casual fashion.
Rose did not think he was actually aiming the twelve-bore at her, but that was the way it seemed. She gestured to the rest of the team to keep back and was vaguely aware of Peter Mellor using his radio to call in an armed unit, which she knew perfectly well he had thought she should summon in the first place.
Rose struggled to keep her voice calm — no easy task when you are confronted by a man with a gun whom you believe to have already murdered four people.
‘OK William, why don’t you put the gun down, and let’s talk, shall we? I really think we need to talk.’
William’s response was merely to grasp the gun in a more businesslike fashion. He shifted his right hand slightly so that the forefinger now rested lightly on the trigger. Rose was not a firearms’ specialist but she had undergone basic weapons training. She could certainly see that the twelve-bore was cocked and ready to fire, and she could also see from the way William handled the shotgun that, as you would expect from a farmer, he knew what he was doing.
She swallowed hard.
‘Don’t make things worse for yourself, William,’ she said. And as she spoke the thought rather absurdly occurred to her that she sounded like a supporting player in a bad B-movie.
‘I think that would be hard to do, don’t you, Chief Inspector?’ replied the young man.
Rose had never met with a situation like this before. In spite of how it might sometimes seem to the public, it remains mercifully rare for a British police officer to have to face up to a loaded gun. Her heart was racing. Mellor had been dead right, of course. She should have predicted this and used an armed unit to check out the farm and make the first approach. She had been in too much of a hurry as usual. Now she might have put more lives at risk — not just her own, but those of her team too.
Suddenly, with a quick movement of his wrist, William swung the shotgun around, resting the butt on the floor between his feet so that the business end of the weapon now pointed towards his own head. His finger was still on the trigger. He bent slightly forwards and put his mouth over the end of the barrel.
Rose stood very still.
‘Why don’t you give me the gun, William?’ she repeated. Lame she thought, but she didn’t know what else to say.
There followed a few seconds of complete inaction. Nobody moved. The room was absolutely silent. William Lange’s eyes were closed. Rose was sure she could see his trigger finger twitching. The whole thing lasted only a few seconds — it felt like several days.
Then as suddenly as he had taken the gun into his mouth in the first place, William straightened up in his chair and tossed the shotgun to the ground.
Rose dived for it, yelling ‘Get him!’ over her shoulder to Peter Mellor and a uniformed constable who were already rushing at the young farmer. William did not attempt to move, allowing them each to grasp an arm and slam him, chair and all, on to the ground.
Rose was breathing fast. She noticed at once that the safety switch was back on the shotgun. Extraordinary, he must have done that automatically once he decided not to use the gun, she supposed. She stood up and looked at the man who was almost certainly a serial killer.
His eyes were quite blank. The handsome face expressionless.
‘I don’t have the courage to hurt myself,’ he remarked almost conversationally as Mellor and the constable dragged him to his feet, pulled his arms behind his back and secured them there with handcuffs. And it was the only regret of any kind that he was to show.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, addressing Sergeant Mellor now. ‘I know it’s all over.’
Rose had just about got control of her breathing now and even managed to speak without her voice having too much of a tremor in it.
‘William Lange, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder,’ she began the formal caution. She wanted him back at Staple Hill fast, before he had time to start thinking.
There were several police vehicles outside the farm by the time they brought William out and, as they bundled him into the back seat of one of them, Rose saw Charlotte Lange running almost flat-out down the village street towards them. She sent a woman detective constable to intercept her and to explain as best she could what was happening. Rose had considerable sympathy for Charlotte, who seemed to her to be a straightforward and kindly young woman, but she didn’t have the time to deal with her right now.
She also became aware of a small crowd of villagers gathered already outside the farm. The bush telegraph works fast here, she thought. Marcia Spry, the biggest busybody of the lot, Rose had previously worked out, was craning her neck, mouth hanging open, jaw slack with excitement, determined to miss nothing. Obscurely Rose reflected fleetingly both on how she could certainly never cope with the claustrophobia of small town or village life again, however idyllic it might seem on the surface, and on what fun Marcia would be sure to have with the latest news.
William was ready to tell the truth at last even before he was informed that his mother had told the whole story of both their dealings with Avon Escorts and the sordid sex scene which had led to the killings.
Handsome, educated, eminently middle-class, still managing to retain much of his natural self-assurance, he seemed completely out of place sitting in the interview room in his white paper suit. Rose didn’t know quite what a serial killer was supposed to look like, but there was no doubt that the casual observer would deem William Lange to be the unlikeliest of murderers.
It was only when he spoke, his voice cold and matter-of-fact, that you got an idea of the monster shock and bitterness had turned Lange into. It appeared that he did indeed see himself as some kind of avenger.
‘I suppose I knew I wasn’t going to get away with it any more after I killed Charlie Collins,’ he said. ‘Actually I knew that before I killed him, I knew that as soon as I made the decision to kill him. But by that time I was past caring. Charlie had seen me in the pub, and I was pretty sure that he had recognised me as Sandy — a carefree young student making a few bob selling himself for sex. What a laugh!’
William had the same dry humourless laugh as his mother.
‘I drove straight to Bristol to kill Charlie. Another death didn’t seem to make much difference by that stage. I didn’t have the knife any more, though. I’d kept it and the rest of my gear in the boot of my car. I knew it had all gone missing, of course. I guessed that Mother had dumped the stuff. I suppose I hoped she had. I didn’t know for certain. I just shut it out of my mind.
‘I needed a new weapon, so I grabbed a lump hammer from the workshop. I told myself that this one last murder would cover my tracks once and for all and, after that, life would return to normal. But I was only pretending. I didn’t really believe that. It was much more than that. As soon as I saw Charlie Collins I wanted him dead.’
William’s voice faltered for the first time. ‘He’d been with my mother more than any of them. It was Charlie who set me up with her.’
The eyes were harder than ever. Rose began to find it quite easy, after all, to imagine him thrusting a knife into another man’s back, battering another human being to death.
‘And the earlier killings? Your mother thinks you were motivated by revenge. Was that really it?’
William nodded. ‘Yes. Revenge on all of them, all the little bastards. And revenge on Mrs Pattinson.’ He spat the words out. ‘It was Mrs Pattinson I hated more than anyone. I was glad when she confessed. I was actually happy.’