Alibi by Lynda La Plante

Author:Lynda La Plante
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zaffre Publishing

CHAPTER 18

MONDAY 11 MAY

For Walker and his team it now became an urgent priority to keep tabs on Morton. For one thing, there was the ever-present chance that their man would abscond, disappearing into the criminal underworld, from where it would be tedious, time-consuming and expensive to flush him out. But the other possibility was even worse. If Walker was right about Morton, what would there be to stop him murdering again?

Walker ordered a programme of twenty-four-hour surveillance. In the meantime, he wanted to know everything that could be known about the suspect. Some parts of Morton’s background were deeply obscure. And the record had gaps where it was difficult to know his movements and activities with any certainty. But within seven days Walker had reasonably full information on Brian Andrew (alias Damon) Morton.

He was born in 1970 in Battersea, south London. His father, Declan Morton, who had been born in Ireland, had worked as a railwayman, though for most of the suspect’s childhood was unemployed due to disablement. He may not, in fact, have been all that disabled, as there were eight little sisters in the family as well as young Brian.

It seemed that his mother may have engaged in casual prostitution, although this was difficult to confirm. There was no police record and while three of Morton’s sisters were traced, none was willing to talk about the family. Brother Brian, in particular, seemed to have been excluded from their lives.

He attended Lavender School and Queen Henrietta Maria RC Comprehensive School, where records were consulted, showing a persistent pattern of truancy and disruption. The unruly child was placed in local authority care on two occasions (1979 and 1984) for periods of up to eighteen months when his mother could not cope with his behaviour. Social services were not prepared to release his care file but it was understood from Satchell’s conversation with a retired caseworker (who requested her name to be withheld) that young Morton had caused considerable concern as a teenager, because of an apparent interest in Satanism and the occult, not to mention two unproved allegations of torturing and killing domestic pets.

He was already calling himself Damon when he left school at sixteen, at which point he ceased to live with his family and was taken in by his father’s brother, Theodore Morton, who had an electrical repair business in South Lambeth. Damon Morton worked for his uncle, showing himself to be willing and quick to learn the trade. Uncle Theo, however, had his own police record, as it turned out. Once fined for gross indecency, twice cautioned for acts of indecency, he had been on an unofficial register of homosexuals known to police since the mid-1950s.

In November 1986 Theodore Morton was admitted to St Thomas’s Hospital with severe lacerations, fractured ribs and skull and a broken arm. Damon Morton, sixteen at the time, was interviewed about these injuries but Theodore Morton had refused to press any charges. By 1988 Damon had left his uncle’s house, and begun working as an unqualified electrician in various parts of the country.

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