“They were all murdered, Mr. Dillane.”
“Jesus Christ, you think I had something to do with them?”
“You are simply helping our inquiries. We really appreciate you coming in to talk to us.”
Anna asked where Dillane was on the dates the women’s bodies were found. Although the postmortem reports had been unable to give an exact time of death, they detailed as closely as possible how long the victims had been dead. Dillane was able to answer without hesitation, as he was working in Devon.
Anna collected the photographs and stacked them. The big man was pulling at his shirt front, looking hot and bothered. “You think I know anything about them? Is that why you’ve been questioning me? Let me tell you, if you’ve got John Smiley under suspicion, you’ve got the wrong bloke. He’s a diamond, and he helped me out of a very sticky patch.”
“What reason did he give you for buying your van?” Anna asked.
“Said he could use it for the small deliveries.”
“When you left it at his garage, what did you leave inside it?”
Dillane shrugged. “Nothing of any value — I even took the radio out. There was nothing in it.”
“What about your uniform?”
“Nah, didn’t leave that. He wouldn’t have wanted it.”
“What about something from your dog?”
“I think there was maybe a dog bowl and Nimrod’s old blanket still in the cage. I didn’t want them. I was very fond of that dog, and I think John said something about he’d maybe get a puppy for his two kids.”
Anna removed the pictures of the blue blanket found wrapped around Dorota Pelagia. “Was the blanket used by your dog like this one?”
Dillane leaned forward. “Yeah, blue. It was an old prison-issue blanket. It was in the van when I bought it off this other dog handler.”
Langton glanced at Anna. She replaced the photographs. Langton stood up and shook Mr. Dillane’s hand. “You’ve been very helpful, Mr. Dillane. If you could just stay at the station while we check out a couple of things, then you’ll be free to go.”
Mike Lewis had confirmation that Dillane’s van was still registered to him. It had recently been issued a new MOT by a garage in Croydon, and the documents had been collected personally by a man they presumed was Dillane and paid for in cash, but when asked for a description, they described John Smiley. They were checking out the insurance, but there had been no parking or speeding fines issued.
Barolli had contacted the boot-camp authorities, and they were able to give Dillane a pretty watertight alibi for two of the victims, though not for Dorota Pelagia or Maggie Potts, as he was not working for them until two years ago. Their bodies had been discovered four and two years ago, respectively.
“What do you think, Travis?” Langton asked, looking at the incident board as the new data was being written up.
“I think he’s in the clear, but who knows? And he couldn’t remember the exact date he drove his van to leave with John Smiley.”
“Let’s just make sure we’re not letting him walk away. If he’s involved, it’s the two of them.”
Dillane had been given a mug of tea and a sandwich. As Langton returned, he rose from his seat.
“Stay sitting down, Michael, this isn’t going to take too long. We’ve checked with your boot camp, and they have agreed you worked there on the dates two victims were discovered, but you were not there for the murder of this woman.” Langton slapped down Margaret Potts’s photograph.
Anna took out the photograph of Dorota Pelagia. “Or this woman.”
Dillane blew out his cheeks.
“You may have a lawyer present if you want one.”
“I don’t need one,” Dillane said. “I never did anything wrong, and if you give me some time to think, I’ll try and remember where I was, but it’s not easy when it’s four years ago.”
Langton tapped the picture of Dorota Pelagia, saying, “She was Polish.”
“That doesn’t help me none. I dunno where I was four bleeding years ago right off the top of me head.” Dillane was rattled.
“Well, start thinking — maybe about this woman Margaret Potts, too. She was found two years ago on March fifteenth. Her body was dumped by the London Gateway service station — that any help to jog your memory? It was in all the papers, been on the news, crime shows...”
“I can’t remember. And I was working at the boot camp two years ago. What date was it again?”
“March fifteenth, 2008.”
In the incident room, everyone was waiting impatiently. The clock was ticking, and it was almost nine in the evening. Anna was growing tired; it had been a long session with Dillane, and it was getting tedious as he tried to recall where he was. Langton wouldn’t let him off the hook; he was putting on the pressure.
“Four women have been brutally murdered, Michael, and we have strong suspicions that you could be involved, especially with this girl Dorota Pelagia, as she was found with a blue blanket wrapped around her naked body, a blanket identical to the one that you described as being in the back of your van.”
“You think that John Smiley is up for this?” Dillane demanded. “Is that what you are keeping me here for? It’s not right. I’ve been racking me brains, and I honestly can’t remember where I was. Why don’t you let me ring me wife and ask her—” He suddenly clapped his hands to his head. “Maternity ward! Jesus Christ, how could I forget that? She was taken in on the thirteenth, had that preeclampsia thing and almost died. I was in Saint Mary’s Hospital.”
He leaned back and then did his familiar gesture of wiping his head. “Okay, that’s one — but four years ago? Maybe I was still working for the same security company, but I was getting pissed off because we was doing pop concerts, and some of the kids are like hyped-up chimps, hurling themselves at the stage. We had to take punches and kicks, they spit in your face and you can’t whack ’em, much as you’d like to — our job was to hold ’em back. I would have still had the van then, but you can’t have the dogs inside the venue, as they would go crazy. You can patrol on the perimeters.”
Again he clapped his hands. It was almost as if he were enjoying himself. “Fucking Take That, that’s where I was. They was doing a concert. There you go — I done it, and you can check that out, all right?”
“That’s fine, Michael, we’ll check it out. So around the time of this concert, you met with John Smiley to get some blinds put up?”
“Correct.”
“You said that you were a bit skint, is that right?”
“Correct again. They pay peanuts for these bloody concerts, and you come away bruised and kicked. It pissed me off, and it wasn’t worth the aggravation. Like I said before, the wife was pregnant with the first, not the second one, and I didn’t like it, but I asked John if he’d be able to lend me a couple of grand to tide me over.”
“He said he was short. He couldn’t have been that short, though, if he was able to buy your van — right?”
“Funnily enough, I thought that at the time,” Dillane agreed. He was calmer now. “What he said was, he had someone hitting him for money, so he had to do a lot of night work, like selling me blinds on the cheap.”
“Did he ever mention to you who was hitting him for cash, as you just described?”
“Nah. Just that it was getting him down. Sonja doled out his money like he was a ten-year-old. She gave him pocket money — can you believe that?”
“How much do you think he was making by working on the side, selling blinds from his company on the cheap?”
“I dunno, but he paid me in cash, so it had to have been a bit of all right.”
Langton glanced at Anna. She packed up the photographs and replaced them in the file. Langton stood up.