He went over to the curtains, swishing them back. Mrs Collins remained asleep so he nudged the bed with his knee, but there was still no response. He turned as Jane walked in and handed him the list of serial numbers which Mr Collins had found.
Bradfield looked at Mrs Collins and whispered, ‘It’s like she’s in a coma. I’ve opened the curtains and nudged the bed. You’d better wake her as I don’t want to give her a heart attack. Just verify exactly when she went to her sister’s and when the neighbours came for dinner.’
‘She’s probably exhausted after the memorial service. Should I tell her about her husband’s confession?’
‘No, that’s up to him. Besides, it will come out in the long run.’
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
He paused at the bedroom door.
‘About what?’
‘Mr Collins — are you arresting him?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t condone what he did to his daughter, but he’s suffered enough with her death and he and his wife need each other right now.’
Jane was touched by Bradfield’s compassion. She looked round the room and wondered if the many pictures of Julie Ann had in some small way influenced his decision not to arrest George Collins.
Jane leant over the bed. ‘Mrs Collins... MRS COLLINS.’ She gently nudged Mrs Collins’ shoulder.
When she’d finally awoken, Mrs Collins confirmed everything her husband had said about her being in Weybridge on the Thursday and the neighbours coming for dinner. She was understandably concerned as to why the police were at the house so soon after the memorial service and Jane said they were just following up on some information and that her husband would tell her all about it. The reality was that Jane didn’t have a clue what George Collins would say to his wife or how he’d explain the missing box-room door, but that wasn’t her problem.
As she left the bedroom she saw DS Lawrence in the hallway.
‘I hear you impressed Dr Harker with your knowledge on fibre transfers — he said you were the only one in the class who thought of it. Now, I wonder where you got that from?’ he said with a cheeky grin.
Jane blushed; it hadn’t crossed her mind that Harker and Lawrence might actually work together.
‘Don’t worry, I didn’t tell him you were at Julie Ann Collins’ post-mortem, or that you got it from me. Harker was very impressed, though, and not just with your knowledge,’ he said with a wink, making her blush again.
‘Take a bit of advice from an old sweat like me. You’re a sharp cookie, Tennison, and the stuff with the Bristol and the screw marks on the door was a good spot. But never try to run before you can walk, not in this job. As a probationer it’s always best to keep your eyes and ears open and mouth shut, or you’ll fall into a heap of shit before you know it.’
During the journey back to the station in the uniform patrol car Bradfield sat in the front passenger seat flicking the pages of his notebook back and forth and going over everything George Collins had said.
‘That’s a shedload of money his daughter nicked. It meant she was flush with cash for the two weeks before her body was found.’
‘Do you think the serial numbers can help trace where she was over that period?’ Jane asked.
‘Be a bloody lucky stroke if they did. The money could be anywhere by now, especially if she was buying smack with it. That cash will have been moved around faster than a ferret. Two grand is a lot of bloody money, and scumbag drug dealers like Big Daddy and Dwayne “Shoes” Clark are probably the sort of people who’d kill to get their hands on it.’
‘Interesting that she told her father she’d been raped — do you think that was true?’
He sighed. ‘I dunno. She lied about most things and slept with punters for a living, so even if she was alive nobody would believe her, or would just think that rape goes with the risky territory, so to speak.’
‘If we find who strangled her he’s guilty of a double murder because he killed her child as well.’
He slowly turned in his seat to look at her.
‘Sadly, no. If an unborn child dies because of injury to the mother rather than injury to the foetus it’s neither murder nor manslaughter. You could never prove the intention to kill, or transfer of malice. Even child destruction under the Infant Life Act wouldn’t stick as the foetus was too young.’
‘How do you know all that?’
‘CID course when I was first made detective. We had to learn all the different acts and offences off by heart. Fail an exam and you were out — back to uniform.’
‘Sounds pretty intensive.’
‘It was, and still is,’ he said, and paused.
‘It’s not easy to become a detective then...’
‘We need to find the bastard, or bastards, who killed Julie Ann. So far we seem to keep moving one step forward and then end up back at square one. Now, I’d really appreciate it if you kept quiet and let me concentrate.’
‘Yes, sir, I’m sorry,’ she said, surprised, as he’d done most of the talking.
At the station they joined DS Lawrence, who’d returned before them and was now checking over and listing the items taken from the Collinses’ house. The contents of the patchwork shoulder bag were laid out on a table, the drugs paraphernalia to one side and the rest to the other. Lawrence stood beside Bradfield as they looked over some thin, cheap-looking silver bracelets, elasticated beaded necklaces, some plastic toy animals and an unused Tampax. DS Lawrence made a joke about it being effing useless considering her condition. There was also a cheap bright pink lipstick, and an empty purse made of Moroccan leather with a broken clasp. A medical card in the name of Julie Ann Maynard was for the Homerton Hospital Drug Dependency Unit, and then there were scraps of paper with names and contact numbers. Bradfield told Jane to copy all the names and numbers down and start making criminal-records enquiries on them, and DS Lawrence could then take the paper for fingerprinting, along with the empty plastic bag of what had most probably been heroin.
Jane looked down at the items on the table — the bracelets reminded her of Janis Joplin who had worn so many bangles on her wrists. Some words from Joplin’s ‘Piece Of My Heart’ began to sing out in Jane’s mind:
Chapter fourteen
The café’s front window was filled with cheap Greek travel brochures and photographs, as well as a planning order and notice to customers that the café was to undergo refurbishment. The door had a broken blind with a ‘Closed’ sign on it. As John knocked on the door he was encouraged by the fact that it was difficult to see into the café from the street. At first there was no answer so he knocked again and a few seconds later the door was unlocked and inched open. The man who answered was a fifty-year-old muscular Greek with iron-grey hair. He had a hard, lined face with a jutting chin and bad teeth, along with bulging thickset hairy arms and a barrel-shaped chest. The top four buttons of his white shirt were open revealing a gold chain and coin pendant engraved with an owl with oversized piercing eyes, not dissimilar to the man’s own.
‘You Silas?’
‘Who wanna know?’
‘You do souvki takeaway?’ John asked, using the prearranged introduction his father had given him. The scribbled notes had been hard to read as they were written in pencil on Izal toilet paper and were badly creased, due to being refolded so many times in order to fit into the small matchbox.