‘I didn’t know how beautiful she was,’ Anna said, staring out of the window.
‘Didn’t look that way on the table,’ he grunted. ‘Her eyes were bulging and her throat had deep lacerations. I think she’d put up quite a fight to stay alive.’
‘When she was found, did she have a thick gold necklace round her neck?’
‘No, like I said, it was almost severed. There was a lot of blood.’
‘So Krasiniqe made an attempt to run?’
‘Yeah, he tried, but the cop held him down; he got some back-up, and they took him into the local nick. We got called in the following morning.’
‘Did he confess straight away?’
‘Well, he didn’t need to, did he? He had her blood all over his clothes and the blade dripping with it in his hand.’
‘Did he appear to be drugged?’
‘Dunno. By the time we saw him, he was cowering in his cell at the station. If he was drugged, he didn’t appear that way — unless whatever he’d taken had worn off.’
Anna removed from the file Krasiniqe’s statement. It was short and stated that he had killed Carly Ann after he had raped her. Anna asked where the rape had taken place.
‘He had no known address, and said he had been living rough, which is where he said he knew the victim from.’
‘But you don’t know where?’
Mike Lewis sighed with irritation. ‘Two days later, Langton got cut to shreds, Anna. We had a suspect in custody who admitted the murder.’
‘Yes, yes, I know. Please, Mike, don’t be so defensive. I am just trying to piece it together myself. If one of these men was Camorra, it’s odd that when Langton was attacked, he didn’t recognize him.’
‘It happened so fucking fast none of us had a clear recollection of either of the bastards.’
Anna nodded, deciding to change the subject. If Langton now recognized Camorra, he was not admitting it to anyone.
‘What about this white Range Rover the police officer said he saw at the murder site?’
‘Sorry?’
Anna turned over another page and read on. A witness had seen the vehicle parked close to the murder site: black tinted windows, engine running. ‘When these two other guys with Krasiniqe ran off, did they go to the Range Rover? Drive off in it?’
‘No, it moved off as soon as the uniformed cop walked up. We have tried to trace it, with no luck.’
Anna shrugged, and said that it seemed all along the line they had not had much luck.
They did not really make any further conversation until they reached the estate in Chalk Farm. Graffiti was everywhere and, although it looked as if the council had made an attempt to clear the place up, it was nevertheless a very rough and tough area. On the walkways outside the flats hung strings of washing; Anna and Mike bent beneath them, as they made their way to number forty-one.
‘Okay, the place is rented by a Dora Rhodes. Well, she’s listed as the occupant, but Christ only knows how many times it may have changed hands.’
‘You interviewed her, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah, she came into the station and identified Carly Ann, as she had no family. She runs a community centre.’
‘Doesn’t sound like the usual flatmate for a prostitute.’
‘She’s not usual, believe you me. Carly Ann had only just started living here, and this Dora was helping her get clean.’
They ducked under more washing to stand outside a blue painted door, rang the bell and waited. Anna noticed that the letterbox was hammered down, but the brass had been polished. The door was opened by a young overweight black woman, with a floral scarf wrapped around her head.
‘Hi, come on in, I’ve been waiting for you.’
Dora wore a multi-coloured African wrap over a bright red T-shirt, and rubber flip-flops on her plump little feet.
‘Okay, sit yourselves in here and I’ll bring in some coffee.’
Anna sat on a bright orange sofa which had many stains, as did the carpet, but the room was clean and bright, with children’s paintings on the walls. Dora returned with a tray of mugs of coffee and cookies. She placed it down on a white hand-painted coffee-table.
‘Help yourselves,’ she said, as she plumped herself down in a sort of bean-bag chair. She was at least eighteen stone, with big muscular arms and a wobbly belly, but her hands, like her feet, were small. She wore a row of silver bangles, which she twisted round with her free hand. ‘So, you come about my little darlin’ Carly Ann?’
‘Yes.’ Anna picked up her coffee; Mike was already munching a cookie and seemed content to sit back and let the women get on with it. ‘I was not on the original enquiry, so I would like to ask if you could tell me as much about Carly Ann as possible.’
Dora nodded. ‘Well, be about nine months before she died that she moved in here with me. I don’t often take kids in, you know; if you start, next minute you got a houseful, then the council will kick you out. Anyways, when I met her, there was just something about her; she came into the centre and said she needed help. She was on heroin and had been for a number of years, and she was selling herself to get the money to pay for it. I think she’d lived rough, you know; she was just a kid that ran away from one foster home after another. They all try to head to London, reckon the streets here are paved with gold, but then it’s too late to turn back, and with Carly Ann being such a looker, the pimps were fast to get a hold of her.’
Dora took a deep breath. ‘My Carly Ann was one of the most perfect creatures I have ever set eyes on. She was part-Jamaican, part-white, and her skin was a flawless soft tawny shade; she had this curly black hair, like silk. When you think of her living rough and pumping that shit into her veins, and still looking gorgeous…’ She shook her head.
Anna nodded, and said that she had only seen one photograph apart from the mortuary shots. Dora got up, opened a drawer and took out a number of snapshots.
‘Here she is. She was trying her best to get clean, and I would give her a few quid to help me out at the centre. I mostly deal with young kids, so I put her in touch with a drug rehab, and she’d go there in the mornings and work for me afternoons. You know, she wasn’t using when they found her, that’s what makes it all the worse — she wasn’t drugged. I don’t believe that she was back on the game, no way. She swore blind to me that she would never turn another trick; she hated it, and the more she was around me and the kids, the more she realized what she had been doing to herself. I held that girl in my arms when she sobbed and told me that I was her only angel, she’d never had no love, no parents; until we met, my Carly Ann had never known a decent home, and you should have seen how she flowered. I mean, she wasn’t all perfect and she could have troubled times and dark times, but when she laughed, it was sunny.’
Anna looked over the snapshots of the dead girclass="underline" bending over a few kids with a birthday cake, blowing out candles; at a theme park, her on a slide roaring with laughter.
‘On the photograph we have at the station, Carly Ann is wearing a very thick gold chain,’ she said. ‘Do you know where she got it from?’
Dora shook her head.
‘After she died, were any of her belongings still here?’
‘Yes, still here — no one else to claim them, I suppose. ’Cos I been so distraught, I just never got round to sorting them and passing them onto some needy girl. I’ll do it eventually.’
‘What about boyfriends?’
‘All the while she was here with me, she was only out late a few times. She went off once or twice for a weekend, disappeared without a word, and when she come back, I give her a dressing-down and a warning. I said after the last time, if she ever did it again, she was out. She cried and said she was sorry, then it all blew over and she settled down; be about a month later, she didn’t come home again, but this time it was a couple of months. I got worried ’cos she was away for so long. I even went out on the streets looking for her, then I read about the murder.’ Dora wiped her eyes with a tissue.