Langton ended the interview and suggested to Camorra’s solicitor that he talk with his client; if he required a doctor, they would call one.

  Camorra was running a very high temperature but no longer sweating. His speech was incoherent; he had a rapid heartbeat and he was screaming, saying he could see monsters coming through the walls of his cell.

  His mood swung from confusion as to where he was, to almost a euphoric state, calling out for Carly Ann. He sobbed and kept on saying that he loved her; then his condition worsened, as delirium set in. An ambulance was called and Camorra was taken to the local hospital. Terror had overtaken his sobbing, and he cowered like a caged animal as they tried to persuade him to get into the waiting ambulance. It took four officers to help the paramedics. Camorra had his first seizure at nine o’clock. He then had two further seizures inside the ambulance and, by the time he was taken into the casualty department of the local hospital, he was in a catatonic state. At ten thirty-five, he suffered a massive cardiac arrest. Try as they might, they could not revive him. He was pronounced dead at ten forty-five.

  Eugene Camorra’s death certificate said that he had died from a cardiac arrest. As he had been held at the police station, a post mortem would be required by the IPCC, even though Camorra did not actually die in custody.

  The investigation reported that there had been no suspicious circumstances. Camorra had shown very obvious signs of an oncoming heart-attack: sweating, disorientation and shortness of breath. His solicitor testified that, as soon as his client had shown signs of being ill, DCI Langton had terminated the interview and a doctor had been called. Camorra had had three seizures whilst attended by hospital paramedics. No one claimed his body; his lawyer attempted to trace anyone who wished to see him, but he had no relatives. When Emmerick Orso was asked if there was anyone who would wish to be informed of his death, he said, ‘Try the Devil.’

  Orso was refused bail and sent to Brixton prison to await trial. He pleaded not guilty to all charges but still refused to say anything, bar, ‘No comment.’ David Johnson remained in custody and agreed to become a prosecution witness against Orso.

  The trial would take many months of preparation: there was an immense amount of paperwork to do. Anna and the team sifted through all the evidence, covering Orso’s money-laundering frauds and his transportation of illegal immigrants. He had covered his tracks well, and they had no evidence linking him directly to the murders of Carly Ann North, Arthur Murphy, Gail Sickert, her daughter Tina, Rashid Burry, or the tragic child’s body found mutilated in Regent’s Canal.

  As the trail was being prepared, Orso’s wife applied for a divorce. She gave them details of various bank accounts and offshore investments. The millions he had accrued from his illegal transactions were exposed and Orso’s accounts were frozen.

  Another piece of uplifting news, especially for Anna, was that both of Gail Sickert’s children were to be fostered by the same woman who had taken in Carly Ann: Dora Rhodes. Sharon and Keith would be cared for, and given every possible counselling to overcome the trauma and anguish they had both been subjected to by Camorra.

  When Anna called to say that she could not think of a better person than Dora, Alison told her that no one else would take them both.

  ‘I wouldn’t allow them to be separated; eventually, I want to adopt them myself.’

  Beryl Dunn, Gail’s mother, was more than willing to allow someone else to take the responsibility: the adoption was in progress. It was the only good thing to come out of the nightmare case they had been working on for so long.

  Idris Krasiniqe’s legal team were preparing for a retrial. Langton had agreed they could be given access to the reports covering the time that the team had spent with Idris and Dr Salaam. Anna was making copies for them when she felt the first seed of suspicion.

  She sat going back over all the data, returning time and time again to the statement made by Dr Salaam about the poison that he was certain Eamon Krasiniqe had been fed. This had then led to the interview with Courtney Ransford, who had been given poisoned rock cakes to pass to Krasiniqe, and culminated in the questioning of David Johnson, who had admitted taking the rock cakes into the prison.

  Anna kept on studying the symptoms that Dr Salaam had listed for someone fed Datura stramonium, or Jimson weed: a dry mouth, dilated pupils, a high temperature and blurred vision. The psychological effects included confusion, euphoria and delirium. A higher dosage resulted in incoherent speech, impaired coordination and seizures, possibly resulting in cardiac arrest.

  Anna went in to see Langton in his office. He gestured for her to sit down and continued a phone conversation.

  He was asking someone if they liked their birthday present, then he laughed. ‘So you’ve grown out of Barbie dolls? Well, listen, Kitty: you and me, we’ll go and get them exchanged. Have you taken them out of the box? No? Okay, we’ll get something else, all right?’

  He listened and then laughed again. ‘Well, don’t let him unwrap them; besides, he’s a boy!’

  He looked very handsome: the haunted, dark circles beneath his eyes had gone. He promised to see Kitty at the weekend and then finished the call. Not only did he look well, but he was also relaxed: seemingly, his knee joint was also less of a problem, as he jumped up from his seat.

  ‘Barbie dolls are longer on the agenda; she wants a tape recorder that she can sing karaoke into!’

  Anna smiled, loath to bring up something that might destroy his good mood.

  ‘What is it?’ he said, opening a bottle of water.

  Anna explained that she was compiling the reports for Idris Krasiniqe’s new trial. After rereading Salaam’s evidence regarding the symptoms of Jimson weed, she was certain that Camorra had shown the selfsame ones.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ she asked.

  ‘Remember what, exactly?’

  ‘Well, when we interviewed him, he was constantly asking for more water.’

  Langton sat back. ‘I’m not sure where you are going with this.’

  ‘Well, Camorra had a cardiac arrest.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘He had food brought into the cells.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, I wondered if it was possible that Emmerick Orso somehow got someone to doctor his food. If we did discover that he had, it would be yet another charge we can lay against him.’

  Langton shook his head. ‘Leave it. The bastard is dead; it saves us a lot of work. Right now, we have enough against Emmerick Orso to put him away for twenty-five years.’

  ‘I know that, but don’t you think we should look into it?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Just leave it, Anna; we’ve enough on our plate. We have a trial date, as of this morning.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do say so.’

  ‘Will they do a post mortem?’

  Langton nodded. ‘Already done. The IPCC have investigated the death and Camorra died of a heart attack, full stop.’ He put out his hand for the reports. ‘I’ll see to these.’

  Anna did as she was instructed, but asked Harry Blunt if he had seen the post-mortem report on Camorra.

  ‘Well, there obviously was one. As far as I know, it was cut and dried. As nobody claimed his body, he’ll be charred meat by now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, they can’t keep him in the cooler for ever, can they? I think the Gov gave the go-ahead.’

  ‘For a cremation?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, I dunno. All I do know is the bastard should have been strung up. I’d have pulled the lever myself. The day they bring back capital punishment is the day I’ll celebrate. He’s gone and it’s over with. If he’d stood trial, he’d have been sent down for life: three meals a day…’ Harry went on with his usual tirade about how many men were held in prisons and how, if he had it his way, he would have cleared out half of them. ‘It was a good rock-cake job on Murphy; he was an animal. Eamon Krasiniqe deserved to be released just for getting rid of him.’

  ‘Eamon is dead,’ Anna said.

  Harry shrugged. ‘Don’t mean anything to me. Idris raped Carly Ann, along with Camorra; whether or not he was forced into doing it is immaterial to me. He then tried to chop off her hands and decapitate her: whatever his new trial comes up with, in my mind, he’s still an animal. All of them are sick. None of them deserve to walk away a free man.’

  ‘But if he was terrified and forced to do it?’ Anna said.

  Harry put up his hands. ‘Listen, if someone freaked me out, voodoo or not, it’s no excuse. I’d let him spend the rest of his life banged up. You know the Gov has the big brass squeezing his balls about how much this case has cost?’

  ‘We got the results in the end.’

  ‘Yeah, and now we’re all stuck here for how many weeks before the trial? It would do us all a favour if that prick Orso topped himself.’

  Anna returned to her desk to plough on with all her work. It seemed that no one else was interested in the fact that Orso could have poisoned Camorra.

  Orso’s trial made headlines for days. Orso never took the stand; his battery of high-powered lawyers tried to throw out charge after charge as hearsay, but he was eventually charged with bringing in a network of illegal immigrants and using them as drug couriers. The charges of running a brothel also held, as did his fraud and drug trafficking. He was sentenced not, as the team had hoped, to twenty-five years, but to fifteen. There was only circumstantial evidence and hearsay linking him to any of the murders; those charges were dismissed. The team surmised that, with good behaviour, he could be released in twelve.

  Langton threw an open bar at the local pub at the end of the trial. He thanked them all for staying with it, even if the result was not what they had hoped for, and praised them for their diligence and hard work. Now it was on to the next case. Whether they would be reunited as a team was uncertain, but possible; all he could say for sure was that he would work with every single one of them again.

  Anna left the bar early, as she was driving home. She went up to Langton to say goodbye; he was at his most charming, asking if perhaps he could take her out for dinner one night. She was equally pleasant and said she would look forward to it.

  As she turned to walk away, he reached for her hand, and drew her close. ‘It’s over, Anna.’

  She knew he was not referring to their relationship. His grip on her hand was tight, and she looked into his dark eyes. ‘Yes, and you seem to be really on the road to recovery.’

  ‘I am, now. As I just said, it’s over–do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, yes of course I do. Let’s have dinner one evening. I’ll wait for you to call.’

  He kissed her cheek, then released her hand.

  Anna sat in the car park. She had such mixed emotions: she had no intention of starting any kind of relationship with him again and she could tell that he didn’t either. His kiss had somehow felt like a threat, or a warning. For the first time since she had met DCI Langton, she was frightened of him. The mounting suspicion that had begun weeks ago, persisted like a bad taste in her mouth. Anna was certain that Langton had murdered Eugene Camorra.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  With the trial now over and the incident room packed up, Anna had some time off before she would be assigned a new case. She organized her flat, cleaning and washing everything from the curtains to the bedcovers. She always did a marathon clean after a case was over: it was therapeutic. She did the washing and ironing, sorted out her wardrobe, treated herself to a haircut and a manicure, and worked out at the local gym. As she pedalled on the exercise bike, she thought constantly about her own jigsaw.

  Langton was never far from her mind. He had not called. It was as if she was on automatic pilot. She had not wanted to let her suspicion ferment, but it had. She took out one of her notebooks from the case–it had gone on for so long, she had filled three books–and went right back to the start of the enquiry, to the murder of Irene Phelps. This had come after Langton’s investigation into the murder of Carly Ann North.

  His attack had occurred after Idris Krasiniqe had been arrested; he was then hospitalized and, due to his injuries, had been unable to be at the trial. She had made notes about the number of newspaper cuttings she had discovered at Langton’s flat whilst she was caring for him. She also went over her notes on the private talks she had had with Mike Lewis: he had feared that Langton would, if he ever did recover, rope him and Barolli into acting like some vigilantes. Anna sighed; she could not blame Langton for wanting to track down the man who had caused his horrific injuries.

  When Langton had described the attack, she tried to recall exactly what he had said. Langton had been tipped off by Idris Krasiniqe, who gave the names of two men he said were with him on the night of Carly Ann’s murder and who escaped in a white Range Rover. Both the names were subsequently found to be false, but the address he had given was the one Langton checked out. Accompanied by both Lewis and Barolli, Langton had been walking up the stairs of the hostel, when two men came out onto the landing. Both men had escaped; one man, she knew, had been identified as Rashid Burry, but the man who had wielded the machete had never been identified. Langton had been taken to the Intensive Care unit at St Stephen’s Hospital. She knew that he suspected that it had been Eugene Camorra.

  Anna had then gone to Vernon Kramer’s safe house to pick up Arthur Murphy; there she had, unwittingly, been confronted by Rashid Burry. Rashid presumed that the police were about to arrest him. Burry later found out that the officer who had been attacked was still alive, because Vernon Kramer had read about it in the newspaper in the patrol car. Kramer must have told either Camorra or Rashid that they were both being hunted down. This had to coincide with Joseph Sickert being sent to stay with Gail.

  Trying to match the timeframe was making her head ache, but she kept coming back to Camorra. Camorra had forced Idris Krasiniqe to rape Carly Ann. Eamon Krasiniqe was held down and injected with poison. Both Idris and Eamon were then forced to watch Camorra rape and then strangle the girl. Idris pleaded guilty, but retracted the statement in which he said that the two other men had been party to her murder.

  They now knew that Camorra and Rashid Burry had been in the Range Rover, from fingerprints. Semen samples taken from Carly Ann’s body matched both Idris and Camorra’s DNA. Rashid Burry’s body was then later found wrapped in black plastic bin-liners inside the vehicle; they traced mud on its tyres to Gail’s bungalow.

  Anna closed one book and opened another. By mistake, she had jumped to her third book, which detailed the huge operation bringing the Krasiniqe brothers to the hospital for contagious diseases.

  Reading her notes again, she was more certain than ever that Camorra had been fed poison: his symptoms were identical to those of Eamon Krasiniqe. Anna tried hard to think how someone could have got to him. If Camorra had been injected, then the autopsy would have noted the needle pinpricks; they had initially not noticed any on Eamon, but he had also ingested the poison via the rock cakes.

  Anna lay on the sofa, eyes closed. She remembered the amount of water Camorra had drunk when they first interviewed him. Between them, they had consumed the entire contents of a large bottle.

  Then she remembered that Langton had poured, from his own small bottle, a cup full for Camorra and a half-cup for himself. Camorra had gulped it down, and then shortly after, asked for a bathroom break. Anna now remembered standing in the corridor: Langton had put out his cigarette in his water cup and then he had tossed it into the waste bin! Langton, she was certain, had not drunk from the small bottle.

  She was pacing the room: there was something else. At the time, she had thought nothing of it. Langton had mentioned that Camorra had ordered in steak tartare, when the officer asked if it was still permissible for him to order in food to eat in his cell. How did Langton know what he had ordered?

  Anna called Esme Salaam to ask if she could talk to her, then hurried out to her car. The Salaams were back at their small practice in the East End and were just about to close by the time she arrived.

  ‘I need to know how easy it is to detect Jimson weed in a dead person,’ Anna said immediately.

  Esme looked at her husband, who was taking off his white coat. ‘To my knowledge, it isn’t. It would require someone who was aware of the drug or who was privy to the symptoms. The drug would not be easily detected–though, of course, this would depend on the dosage.’

  ‘Enough to bring on a cardiac arrest,’ Anna said calmly.

  Dr Salaam looked at his wife and shrugged. ‘Well, if it was a cardiac arrest in suspicious circumstances, if the patient had severe auditory hallucinations or intense visual anxiety…’

  ‘You mean like seeing things, or feeling as if something was crawling over them?’

  ‘That could be a side-effect; as I said, it would depend on the dosage.’

  ‘Say it was given to someone over a period of thirty-six hours?’

  ‘Well, it would have to be a considerable amount. To my knowledge, it is usually used in very small dosages to control and frighten the recipient, by making them believe that they are being taken over by another power.’

  ‘How easy is it to come by?’

  ‘It isn’t; far from it–it is exceedingly difficult. I suppose someone, with the intention of acquiring it, could grow it, but there is no antidote. It would be very unwise for anyone to fool around with it.’

  Anna accepted a cup of tea from Esme and sat down as Dr Salaam excused himself, saying he had to make some calls. As he went into his surgery, Anna tried to think of the best way to explain why she was asking the questions.