44

Friday 14 September

DARYL WESTON OF STOCKBRIDGE IN HAMPSHIRE ARRIVED home from a ten-day business trip to the Philippines to find his house strangely deserted. His wife, Amanda, was nowhere to be seen, his cat was half starved and his answer-machine completely full. Some of the calls were from his two children, the son who lived in Bristol, the thirteen-year-old daughter at a boarding school in Gloucestershire. Most of the rest were from Amanda’s friends, who’d seen sketches of a murder victim on the news that bore a remarkable resemblance to her and who had just wanted to check she was still with us. Ha ha.

After he’d listened to the fourth such message, Daryl Weston was struggling to see the joke. He phoned his wife’s parents in Sussex and her closest friends. Then he phoned us.

Forty-six-year-old Amanda Weston had been married for four years. Daryl was her second husband, her two children were from her first marriage. She had no enemies, according to her husband. She worked part-time as a nurse in a local hospice for terminally ill cancer patients.

Daryl Weston had loved his wife. He wept like a child when he saw her body. He was still crying when he arrived at Lewisham to give a statement. Tulloch and Anderson took him into the interview room, a room we keep for talking to people who aren’t suspects in any sort of crime. They may be victims, family of victims or important and vulnerable witnesses. The room is furnished comfortably and there’s a discreet video camera in one corner. As Tulloch and Anderson talked to Weston, the rest of us gathered round a screen in the incident room to watch the conversation.

‘Mr Weston, I know you want to be getting back to your children,’ said Dana, when she’d taken him through the basics, ‘but I do need to ask you a few more questions. Is that OK?’

Weston nodded, without raising his eyes from the hands clasped on his lap.

‘Can you think of any reason why your wife might have been in London last Saturday?’

Weston shook his head. ‘She never comes to London,’ he said. ‘She hates it.’

‘When did you last speak to her?’

He thought for a second. ‘Tuesday night,’ he said. ‘I asked her what time it was in England and she said just after eight.’

‘How did she sound?’

He shook his head. ‘Normal. Tired. She’d been at work but she didn’t have to go in again until Saturday. She was looking forward to the rest.’

‘Did she have any plans?’ asked Tulloch.

‘Sort the garden out for the winter. Help Daniel pack his things up. He’s supposed to move into a new flat next week. Jesus …’ He put his head in his hands.

‘Daniel is twenty-five, is that right?’

There were too many people crowded round the screen. It was starting to feel uncomfortably hot. I edged back a little and looked at my watch. I’d arranged to meet the local Sapphire Unit at a nearby school in twenty minutes.

‘Mr Weston, we have reason to believe that whoever killed your wife may have killed another woman, just over a week ago. Did you hear about that case?’

Weston looked up and shook his head. ‘I’ve been out of the country.’

‘Of course, you did say. The other woman was a similar age to your wife. Her name was Geraldine Jones. Does that name mean anything?’

He shook his head again.

I really had to go now. I took another step back and came up against Joesbury. I hadn’t even known he was in the room. Keeping my eyes on the screen, I edged my way around him and left.

For several days I carried on going through the motions, trying to lure Samuel Cooper out into the open. People like Stenning and Mizon filled me in on anything important.

Like the fact that Geraldine Jones and Amanda Weston could have known each other. So far no member of either family remembered the two women being friends, but when she’d been married to her previous husband, Amanda and her children had lived in London. They and Geraldine’s kids had attended the same private school in Chiswick. Shortly after that, we learned that Cooper’s mother, Stacey, had worked at the school as a cook and that Cooper himself had been known to visit it. It was looking as though the killings weren’t random. There was a purpose behind them.

In the meantime, Cooper continued to elude us. And the cranks had really come out of the woodwork. Every day we were deluged with telephone calls and Ripper letters; every day, we took a hammering in the press. POLICE CLUELESS. MET’S INCOMPETENCE. COUNTDOWN TO NEXT KILLING. The headlines got more and more judgemental. We started hiding them from Tulloch.

Then, on the eighth day after the discovery of Amanda Weston’s body, we found him.