Love Story, With Murders (48 page)

And then? Well, criminals generally feel panicky and upset in the first day or two following a killing. But soon, if police action doesn’t seem to be catching up with them, those feelings
often mutate. Serial killers almost never start out intending to kill
multiple victims. The first one happens almost by accident. Thereafter, they start to feel a kind of superhuman untouchability.
It’s that feeling which creates the repeat offender.

Johnston went back to Australia. No visits from the police. No alarms coming from South Wales. Everything normal.

A year passed.

Johnston, I suspect, returned to Wales intending to finish the corpse-disposal
job. But he didn’t. I think Elsie Williams wanted to keep the corpse as a way to keep the blackmail money
coming in. She
needed
that corpse, or felt she did.

But as well as that, I think the pair of them had a nasty pleasure in knowing that in the garage freezer, next to the bits of pork and the apple compotes, there was half a dead girl as well. Did
they talk about getting rid of it?
Did Johnston
try
to dispose of it? I don’t know. Invulnerability does strange things to rational thinking.

Then, the following summer, Elsie Williams tumbled a small boy off his bike. PC David Beynon came round to deliver a caution. A hot day. The family out in the garden. The garage door lifted.
Beynon would have come in via the garage. Might have banged around in there. Certainly emerged
into the garden from the garage.

That moment would have terrified Johnston. He’d have realised, suddenly, how thin his skin of protection truly was. If he went back to Australia, if his mother-in-law did anything stupid,
or if, in a moment of senility, she started to babble about the corpse in her freezer, he was done for.

He no longer felt safe. His mother-in-law didn’t want to release
the corpse – her hold over Johnston would disappear if she let that happen – but he needed some way to protect
himself.

The plan they cooked up was something that could only have occurred to the mentally unbalanced, yet it had a strange kind of logic to it too. The plan was to distribute the body so widely that
it would be impossible to pin the blame on any one owner.

So Derek started
to distribute the corpse. To anyone who had offended him or offended his mother-in-law. His targets were the people he interacted with on his various maintenance chores. The
pressure washers, the garage guys, the plumbers’ merchants. Maybe they pissed him off in some obscure way. Or maybe he was just a bastard.

Elsie’s targets were more capricious. Arthur Price, who burned his garden rubbish.
His plot was mostly devoted to vegetables, so there wasn’t much rubbish to burn. But espaliered
fruit trees need pruning in summer. Either while the Johnstons were making their annual visit or just before. So the old lady’s rage would have been burning at its brightest just when Derek
was on hand to satisfy it. It was the same story elsewhere. The churchwarden’s bicycling children, for example,
would have been busiest in spring and summer, offending the spiteful old widow
with their youth and their shirtlessness. No doubt she found reasons to be furious with people in autumn and winter too, but they weren’t top of her summertime hate list.

The combination of summertime targets and household-maintenance targets first alerted me to Derek Johnston. What clinched it was the weird way
the Langton body parts were found. In freezers. In
barrels of lawn mower oil. In jam jars of vegetable oil. The forensics guys were puzzled, but pretty consistent in their belief that none of this stuff had been decomposing for the full five years.
And even if you date the degradation from Beynon’s house visit in 2007, the rate of decomposition looked puzzling. In particular, the polythene-wrapped
arms in Ryan Humphrys’s roof had
degraded less than their apparent age would suggest, even if you take 2007 as the date.

But that was a clue in itself. These days, any bag of salad is packed in nitrogen. It’s done like that to exclude the oxygen which would accelerate deterioration. Nitrogen isn’t a
hard gas to get hold of. Any welder’s yard will have it. Other inert gases – notably helium
– are even simpler and cheaper to procure. My guess is that Johnston packed those arms
in helium to make them last longer.

That’s speculation, admittedly, but what isn’t is Derek Johnston’s background. He worked in food processing. A little investigation told me that he was a food technologist,
senior enough to be on the conference circuit, talking about the latest advances in packaging
technologies and the like. His day job involved preserving foods, including meat. I think he saw Mary
Langton’s corpse the same way. A dark joke, if you’re kind. A personality disorder with schizoid elements, if you’re not.

In any case, Johnston was reluctant to let his trophy wither and decompose. So he made efforts, however basic, to preserve the pieces. That was part of the reason I never
really bought into the
linkages between Langton’s death and Khalifi’s one. One corpse was preserved, the other one scattered. That always said two murderers to me, not one.

I don’t say all that to the Langtons, of course. Watkins needed to know the full picture, but they don’t.

‘It came to our attention that Johnston was going to be travelling to the UK on business. When he came to immigration
control, we detained him.’

The flight had got into Heathrow late. It had come via Singapore, been diverted by a mechanical problem en route, and had finally discharged its cargo of exhausted, cramped, and smelly
passengers around four hours later than scheduled.

There was a long queue at immigration and we let Johnston get to the head of it. As soon as he did, he was asked to step aside
to answer some questions for Border Control. We had him ushered to
one of those small white bureaucratic rooms. So cheap and small and standardised that any sane person would want to kick the walls in after about twenty minutes.

We left him on his own for two hours, with a small plastic cup of coffee that we’d allowed to go cold.

Then we got an Asian-British immigration officer to spend
thirty minutes asking Johnston pointless questions about his paperwork and punching buttons on a computer keyboard, while we watched
proceedings from behind a one-way mirror. Me. Watkins. Mervyn Rogers. Our guy looked pissed off and shattered. Just how we like our suspects.

Then we made our move. We entered the room.

Watkins told him that he was being placed under arrest for the murder
of Mary Langton. Rogers put the handcuffs on, none too gently.

Then we battered him. Not physically, alas, but with one of those hostile interviews that Rogers is so good at. He made it seem like we knew everything. That we were only after various final
confirmations.

For an hour or so, I thought we were going to swing it. Rogers led the interview. Watkins launched occasional rocket
attacks of her own. I interjected when I needed to, which was seldom. The
pair of them were as scary as fuck. Relentless, well informed, in control.

Most people, I think, would have crumpled. Johnston almost did. English law doesn’t allow us to give suspects the full Guantanamo treatment, but, give or take some orange jumpsuits, a
Sydney-to-London flight comes remarkably close on the sleep-deprivation-an
d-general-craziness front. Johnston almost gave way, just so he could get himself to a shower.

But he didn’t. At about the seventy-five-minute mark, he said, ‘Fuck it,’ pushed back his crappy little cushionless chair, and said nothing more. Our tape recorder picked up
the background chatter of flight announcements but not a further word from him.

We wouldn’t necessarily have been defeated
even then.

Part of the problem with Stirfry all along was that we never really knew where to focus. Now that we do, we’ve already got the lab guys looking to link all the various body parts back to
Elsie Williams’s garage. We’ve already got one positive hit. The jam jar that held the thumb and the vegetable oil contained in the seal of its lid particles of ceramic dust that appear
to match
a broken vase on Williams’s tool shelves. Further work of that sort may help us to build a case that’s viable in court. Owen Jenkins’s statement that he wasn’t
allowed to store tools in the garage is persuasive evidence that Williams and Johnston knew parts of Mary Langton were still in there. The financial data which shows that Elsie Williams’s
income suddenly took a hike after Langton’s
death. All the other little bits and pieces.

But perhaps we won’t bother.

Because we are not now the only people with an interest in Johnston.

Our arrest of Johnston was notified automatically to Interpol. And, as luck would have it, while Johnston was in the air over the Indian Ocean, the New South Wales police received an anonymous
phone call from a young woman – a young woman
who might or might not have had a Welsh accent, and who might or might not have been calling from her very sexy new Alfa Romeo – alleging
violent sexual assault by Johnston.

The Aussie police obtained a search warrant. Forcing entry to the property, they found two dismembered female corpses stored, frozen, in a garden outbuilding. The corpses were incomplete,
suggesting distribution had
already begun. Although the house itself appeared normal in every respect, the outbuilding contained the dismembered, preserved remains of countless wild animals and
even a few domestic ones. Items had been pickled, salted, dried, frozen, desiccated, vacuum-sealed, and tinned. There were fox paws in nitrogen, a human hand packed in potassium nitrate.

No one, Karen Johnston said, was ever
allowed access to the building, which had no windows and a triple lock on the door. The police, so far, believe her.

Intensive enquiries are ongoing.

Our own preliminary psychiatric investigation of Johnston has revealed a withdrawn individual of low affect. In the words of the summary, ‘His mood is neutral or even blank. He shows
emotional activity only when asked about the reasons
for his arrest and incarceration, a subject which confuses him. He gives conflicting reports of his previous mental history, but some episodes
of psychosis or hallucination cannot be ruled out.’

I think back to the low-key Swansea psychologist. The guy was pretty much bang on the money from the word go. If Johnston had lived in the UK, we’d have got to him much faster, but you
can’t go
to foreign police services on a hunch and nothing more, and we didn’t even have a hunch. We had 288 people of interest and not a clue where to focus.

When the Aussie police went charging round to the Johnstons’ place, I couldn’t be certain what they would find, of course, but it was hardly wild surmise to send them in. A killer
who kills in the ordinary cack-handed way – that could be any
of us. A killer who kills someone, and chops up their corpse, and distributes it to people who’ve offended their
mother-in-law – that person is a nutcase, one who’s more than likely to be a repeat offender.

Indeed, the biggest question for me had been about when to make that phone call: whether to notify the Australian cops straightaway or wait till we had Johnston in custody here. In the
end, I
opted for the latter, because it wasn’t too long to wait and because the Aussie cops might not have been able to obtain a search warrant on hearsay evidence alone. A failed intervention by
the Aussies would have risked everything. So I forced myself to wait, knowing that by waiting I was running the risk that Johnston would kill again.

‘The good news is,’ I say to Rosemary Langton,
‘that we have your daughter’s killer. He will receive a life sentence. I doubt if he will ever walk free again. He will
certainly never injure anyone again. What I don’t know is whether we have enough evidence to convict him here. If you want us to, we will try. We’ll keep him detained as we build our
case. If the CPS, the Crown Prosecution Service –’

But the husband – John, I think –
interrupts me. He clears his throat, with the hoarseness of scraping rocks.

‘No. There’s no need. As long as he does his time. Rosemary, are you –?’

She’s crying. Tears like sand. But also nodding. ‘I don’t want him –’ she says. ‘I don’t want him –’

She can’t complete her sentence, but we all know what she means. She and her husband want the guy in jail. But they don’t want the trauma
of a trial. They don’t want the trauma
of a trial that might go wrong. If the police in New South Wales will take care of everything, and if he serves his jail time on the other side of the world, so much the better. The moons of Saturn
wouldn’t be too far, as long as this pair are concerned.

Bev and I have accomplished our mission. A mission to save our own police force and the British
taxpayer some unwanted costs. But I don’t have any sense that we’ve pushed this pair
into a decision that they didn’t want to make. It feels like the right outcome. A good one.

‘I’m so pleased you’ve got him,’ says Rosemary, ‘so pleased.’ As her tears still fall.

We don’t rush off.

To start with, as a police officer, you assume that you’re an intruder in this grief. Then you learn
otherwise. That you’re the opposite. An actor essential for this stage of things.
As necessary as the vicar, the counsellor, the mumsy neighbour.

So we take our time.

‘Her body,’ says John. ‘I assume we can have it now? For cremation, I mean.’

‘Yes. There’ll be one or two last formalities, I’m sorry to say, but we’ll get those done as soon as we can. I’m sorry it’s been so long.’

We take our time until, finally, we’re almost done.

I say, ‘Rosemary, would it be possible for me to see Mary’s room? One last time. I feel like I’ve got to know her a little. I want to pay my respects.’

I don’t know what she thinks of that request, but she takes me up. The willow tree. The beige carpets.

But the room is not the same. The duvet has changed. The poster is no longer
on the wall. The wardrobe is empty.

My look must express my surprise.

‘After you came last time, you and Mrs Watkins, John and I realised it was time to move on. We shouldn’t still hold on to it all. We’ve kept everything precious. The
photographs, of course, we could never throw those away.’