Cruel Acts

6

‘So, three months on from Sara Grey’s disappearance, he’s on the hunt again. And he finds Willa Howard slap bang in the middle of Bloomsbury.’

‘Before that, there was Rachel Healy.’

Derwent frowned. ‘He was never charged with her murder.’

‘Because they never found the body.’

‘Is that the only reason?’

‘Not entirely,’ I said. ‘When they searched Stone’s house they found blood under the floorboards, but it was degraded. They couldn’t get a full DNA profile, but what they found didn’t match Willa Howard or Sara Grey. They checked it against the DNA of missing women from the greater London area over a five-year period and the most similar one was Rachel Healy. She disappeared three weeks before Willa Howard and hasn’t been seen since.’

‘And the blood was the only thing that connected her with Stone?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Let’s stick with Willa and Sara for now, since he was charged with their murders.’

‘What about Rachel?’ I had read about her last of all, the previous night when I was yawning and desperate for sleep; it hadn’t taken long and it had woken me right up. Of all of Stone’s possible victims, she had received the least attention. No body, no evidence, no leads. A dead end.

‘If we have time, we can talk about her. But there are probably good reasons why they left her out of the original case. Three weeks before Willa Howard doesn’t leave much of an interval. Sara Grey was three months before that.’

‘It’s not scientific. They don’t mark murder opportunities on their calendars,’ I snapped.

‘That’s not what the profilers say.’

‘And you have so much time for what profilers say.’

He grinned at me. ‘It’s science. They’re basically infallible.’

I rolled my eyes, knowing full well that he thought the opposite of what he was saying. ‘Look, what are the chances the blood doesn’t belong to her? She fits the profile of the other victims, and the way she disappeared—’

‘Noted,’ Derwent said, in a way that meant I don’t care. ‘Back to Willa.’

‘Willa is the reason they found Stone in the first place. Say what you want about the original investigation but DCI Whitlock did a good job with Willa. She went missing on the thirty-first of October – Halloween. The last time anyone saw her was in the Haldane, a pub about five minutes’ walk from here.’

We were parked in Corona Mews, a narrow cobblestoned lane with three-storey mews houses on either side. Some of the buildings were businesses, the shutters pulled back on the ground-floor spaces that the private homes used as garages. It was an expensive little enclave, despite its faintly bohemian air, and it was quiet. This was the secret hinterland of Bloomsbury, part of a warren of close-set streets that were invisible from the busy thoroughfares that bordered the area, funnelling traffic north to King’s Cross and south to Holborn.

‘So what are we doing here?’

‘Willa’s disappearance was out of character – she didn’t turn up at a family event the following day, her phone was off, she’d just broken up with her boyfriend. The local CID started looking for her straight away. She hadn’t used her Oyster card on any of the local buses or the underground and they didn’t pick her up on CCTV. She was very striking – she was tall, with long fair hair that she wore loose, and she had been distressed when she left the Haldane because of the argument she’d had with her boyfriend. It was Halloween. There were lots of people wandering around, but no one remembered seeing her.’

Derwent was listening intently. ‘He must have picked her up near the pub.’

‘That was the theory. They canvassed the area, looking for anything unusual, and they found Miss Middleton.’

‘Who is Miss Middleton?’

‘She is the resident of number 32, Corona Mews, and she does not like visitors.’

On cue the front door of number 32 opened and a narrow face appeared. ‘You can’t park there.’

Derwent slid down his window. ‘Police.’

‘Am I supposed to be impressed?’ She made little shooing motions. ‘Go on. Hop it. This isn’t a car park.’

‘Miss Middleton?’ I leaned across so she could see me. ‘We wanted to talk to you about Willa Howard.’

‘What, again?’ She was a foxy little woman with wiry dyed-red hair and sharp brown eyes. I guessed she was eighty but she was spry with it. ‘I thought I was done with all of that.’

‘Not yet, I’m afraid.’

Derwent got out of the car and she stared up at him, hostility warming into something more like appreciation. ‘Well.’

‘May we come in? I promise to wipe my feet.’

‘You’d better.’ She gave a short cackle. ‘Got to put me face on, since I’ve got visitors. Make your own way up.’

For a pensioner, she had a fine turn of speed, and by the time I shut my door she had disappeared.

‘I know I’m going to regret this,’ Derwent said.

‘Once we’re finished here we can go to the pub.’

‘But we’re on duty.’

‘I’ll buy you a lemonade.’ I peered up the stairs. ‘Can’t keep a lady waiting, sir. You’d better go first.’

Viv Middleton was waiting for us in her sitting room, enthroned on a reclining armchair that faced an enormous flat-screen television. She had applied dark lipstick with more speed than accuracy. The place was spotlessly clean and sparsely furnished – a sideboard, a small cupboard, a single upright chair to one side of the recliner with a library book on it. It looked as if it had been decorated last in the early 1980s. Two big windows overlooked the street and from the recliner, Viv would have had a perfect view.

‘You can take the chair if you want,’ she said to Derwent. I got, ‘You’ll have to stand.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Derwent said, adopting his usual pose with his feet planted far apart. ‘I’ve been in the car all day. I need to stretch my legs.’

‘Ooh, well don’t let me stop you.’ She cackled happily. For once, Derwent looked embarrassed. He folded his arms and stared at the floor.

‘Miss Middleton, you were a key witness. What can you tell us about the van you saw?’ I asked.

‘It was parked outside my house for two weeks, on and off. He’d come early in the morning and go late at night. Too quick for me, even though I was watching for him. I left notes on it, you know. Telling him he couldn’t leave the van there. And I made a note of the registration number. Complained to the council a few times but they’re useless.’

‘So you never saw the driver,’ I checked.

‘Not Stone. No. I saw him in court. Horrible-looking man. Give me the shivers. You could see he was a killer.’

‘Did you see anyone else near the van? Or driving it?’

She shook her head. ‘I only ever saw him driving away. I’d hear the door go and look down but he parked the wrong way for me to see who was driving. He’d get here early in the morning and I don’t do mornings.’

‘What was he doing here? Was there any building work going on in the street?’ I asked.

‘There’s always someone doing building work. Listen to that.’ She held up a hand and I heard the distant whine of an electric drill.

‘And none of your neighbours saw him?’

She snorted. ‘They don’t notice anything. Half of them are rented out – what’s it called – holiday stays type of thing. The other half are too far up themselves to notice a van unless it’s blocking their Ferrari or Jaguar.’ She dragged out the syllables of the car names, rolling her eyes for comic effect.

‘Not like you,’ Derwent said. ‘How come you live here?’

‘I spent sixty years working for a lovely man, an American. I was his housekeeper. He was rich as you like but he didn’t get on with his family because he was gay, you see, and they couldn’t accept that. He left me this place for the rest of my life. His family want to get me out but there’s nothing they can do. I’ll be carried out of here.’ She grinned, showing off false teeth as white and regular as piano keys. ‘All I need is someone to look after me now. What is it they call them?’

‘A carer?’ Derwent suggested.

‘No, that’s not it.’ The grin widened. ‘A toy boy, that’s the one.’

Miss Middleton gave us special permission to leave our car parked in front of her house while we walked down the narrow cobbled streets to the Haldane pub.

‘How did they link the van to Leo Stone?’ Derwent asked.

‘The registered owner was traced to a Travellers’ site in Hertfordshire. He said he’d sold it to a man he knew as Lee. Lee had promised to register it as his, but he hadn’t completed the paperwork. He didn’t know where Lee lived but he had a mobile phone number for him.’

‘Lee being Leo?’

‘Lee being Leo. They found him in Dagenham, in a house that belonged to his aunt – she died a few years ago and left it to him.’

He’d been watching television and drinking cheap lager at eleven in the morning, almost four weeks after the disappearance of Willa Howard.

‘When they searched the house they found a room with a new hasp and padlock. He said there was no key and they never found the key in the house or garden, but when they cut the padlock off they found this.’ I handed Derwent a spiral-bound album of photographs and he flicked through it: the front of the small, post-war house – three windows and a door, like something drawn by a child. The hall, a narrow and dim space with old-fashioned wallpaper. A dirty kitchen. An untidy sitting room, the surfaces covered in dented cans and takeaway containers. A pile of clothes in the corner of the room. A blanket thrown over the end of the sofa. The door behind the sofa. The padlock. The room behind it: a cheap bedframe with broken slats fanning out underneath it. A new mattress on the bed, still covered in protective plastic. No furniture, except for a large steel storage cupboard in the corner of the room. Derwent paused.

‘And this is significant, I take it.’

‘Turned out to be. It was second-hand, bought through a local buying-and-selling group and collected from outside the seller’s home while they were at work. The buyer paid cash. It was designed to contain hazardous materials. It even had an integral sump in case of any spillages.’

‘Useful.’

‘Very.’

It was empty, the inside spotless except for a wisp of plastic.

‘They didn’t work out exactly where the plastic came from but it’s the type decorators use for protective sheeting when they’re painting a room. There’s no record of Leo buying anything like that but he was in and out of building sites. He could have nicked it.’

The next picture was a close-up of the plastic. Derwent pointed at a smudge. ‘Is that blood?’

‘A tiny amount of it, and it belonged to Willa Howard.’

‘Well, there you go.’ Derwent snapped the book shut and gave it back to me. ‘That’s him done and dusted.’

‘When they were searching the house they took up the floorboards in that room and found Rachel Healy’s blood.’

‘Or someone else’s.’

‘It could have been someone else’s. But how likely is that?’

Derwent raised an eyebrow. ‘That he killed someone else or that Rachel’s blood was a partial match?’

‘The blood matching.’

‘Partially.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘I’m not a blood expert.’

‘He wasn’t charged with her murder. There has to be a good reason for that.’ Derwent checked his watch. ‘Pub?’

‘Pub.’

We walked in silence down the cobbled streets. I was thinking about Willa Howard running to her doom, blinded by tears and anger, and about Rachel Healy and why I couldn’t forget about her. Derwent, from his expression, could have been thinking about anything at all.

‘This is the pub.’ I pointed. It was a square, squat building on a corner site, a survivor from the 1930s with the original bar and a certain hipster cachet as a result.

‘Looks nice.’

‘It looks like the sort of place that has no CCTV, which is in fact the case.’

‘Typical.’

‘Indeed.’ I stopped. ‘Let’s go back to Willa’s disappearance. You have to imagine it’s Halloween.’

‘Yeah. Busy night.’

‘And it’s unusually warm – twenty-four degrees. The streets on either side of the pub were full of drinkers standing around making noise.’

‘Potential witnesses, though.’

‘They saw nothing. I’ve got to hand it to Whitlock here. His team tracked down a lot of the customers from the pub and looked at their photographs and video footage from their phones. It was a big night, lots of people wearing costumes, lots of moving and still images.’

‘Which showed what?’

‘Willa Howard sitting at the bar beside her on-and-off boyfriend, Jeremy Indolf. They were having a drink together to discuss their relationship.’ I looked up from my notes. ‘He was seeing someone else and Willa wasn’t happy about it.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘He made her cry. She gave as good as she got though. The bar staff all remembered her because she was so feisty. She was calling him every name under the sun. None of the bar staff wanted to go near that end of the bar, but they had to because Jeremy kept ordering drinks. Eventually she picked up his drink and poured it into his lap, then stormed out. And disappeared off the face of the earth.’

‘The boyfriend has to have been a suspect.’

‘He was, but they ruled him out pretty quickly. He cooperated fully with the investigation. According to him and the staff, he stayed here for another hour, drinking and trying to chat up other women.’

Derwent snorted. ‘He couldn’t manage two. What was he going to do with a third?’

‘Jeremy is nothing if not ambitious. Anyway, he didn’t do anything to Willa and he didn’t call anyone or send any messages asking someone else to harm her. What he did do was drink. By the time he left, he was barely able to walk. We have CCTV of him heading towards Russell Square underground and weaving across the pavement. An hour after she left the pub, Willa was long gone, but no one saw where she went and she didn’t appear on any CCTV footage that the original investigation recovered. There was nothing to say where she had gone.’

‘They were bloody lucky to get the VRN for the van.’

‘And to find “Lee”. And to discover a trace of Willa’s DNA in a cupboard in his house. Don’t get me wrong, they put in a lot of legwork to find the van, but if that bit of plastic hadn’t been recovered from the cupboard, we’d be no further on.’

‘Every investigation needs some luck.’ Derwent looked hopefully at the bar. ‘You said you’d buy me a drink.’

‘If we can talk about Rachel Healy.’

‘There’s always a catch with you, isn’t there?’

‘I like to get my money’s worth,’ I allowed.

‘Come on, then.’ He didn’t sound as if he minded too much; maybe Rachel had been playing on his mind too. He held the door open for me and I walked in, feeling the shiver of recognition: the bar, the green-painted walls, the worn and faded floorboards – I had seen it all in the files.

Willa had seen it all the day her life spun out of her control, when the biggest problem she had was an unfaithful boyfriend. If she’d met her boyfriend somewhere else, or if he hadn’t been cheating on her, or if she’d argued with him earlier in the evening … but she hadn’t.

Wrong place, wrong time.

7

It was the middle of the day so the bar was quiet except for some mellow swing music and the barman’s girlfriend talking him through her plans for a weekend away. We sat in a corner, knee to knee, leaning across the table like lovers so no one could overhear our conversation.

‘Rachel Healy.’ I held up her photograph. It was a formal portrait taken when she started working at an estate agents, Gallagher Kemp. She looked groomed, her fair hair glossy and smooth, her make-up professionally discreet. Her smile was warm, though, and the gap between her front teeth enhanced her beauty instead of detracting from it.

‘Pretty girl,’ Derwent observed.

‘Woman,’ I said automatically. ‘And yes. She was stunning.’

‘Wouldn’t go that far.’

I placed the photograph on the table with exaggerated care because I really wanted to smack him with it. He drank some lemonade and only the tell-tale deepening of the creases at his eyes gave away that he was smiling against the rim of the glass.

‘She disappeared nineteen days before Willa Howard. She worked late that night.’ I took a map out of the file and put it between us. I had drawn a star on the Chelsea office of Gallagher Kemp estate agents. ‘It was a Monday in October and they weren’t too busy but she’d been away on holiday and she needed to catch up. Gallagher Kemp do commercial property at a very high level, according to their website. If you have a company of five hundred people to rehouse in the City, they’re a good place to start.’

‘When you say she was working late—’

‘She was in the office, not showing any premises to prospective renters, so that’s not how she met her killer. Her boss was also working late – his name is James Gallagher. He said they left together. He gave her a lift and she asked him to drop her off in King’s Cross, although she lived in Tufnell Park. He left her near the station and drove home – he lives in Islington – and she went on her way, and no one ever saw her again. She never made it back to her flat. Ordinarily she got the Northern Line but she didn’t use her Oyster card or bank card and as with Willa there was no sign of her on CCTV.’

‘Who reported her missing?’

‘Her flatmates. They got the brush-off from their local police station – you know the drill.’

‘She’s a grown woman and not vulnerable and there’s no reason to be concerned for her safety yet.’

‘That’s the one. No one took it seriously until the following day when she didn’t turn up for work and didn’t call in either. Someone rang her flatmates and they said she hadn’t come home. James Gallagher kicked up a bit of a fuss at the local police station, which helped set the wheels in motion.’

‘Decent of him,’ Derwent observed.

‘He was the last person to see her. I’d imagine he was quite keen to find her, because otherwise he could have been a suspect.’

‘That or he felt guilty about leaving her somewhere that turned out to be dangerous.’ Derwent frowned. ‘But we don’t know that Leo Stone was the specific trouble she encountered.’

‘There’s the blood under the floorboards.’

‘Which is not an exact match.’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘It could have been hers but equally it could not have been.’

‘That’s the trouble with DNA. On the one hand, it’s pointing us at Rachel Healy. On the other hand, that blood could belong to someone else. It’s not enough to get a conviction as it is. We’d have been better off in the old days when it was blood type only. Juries want a hundred per cent certainty these days. Close isn’t good enough.’ Derwent flipped a beer mat off the edge of the table and caught it as it spun around in the air. ‘Then there’s the point that her body was never recovered from the nature reserve where the other two victims ended up.’ Flip. Spin.

‘Nope. I think every inch of it was searched, too. Whitlock didn’t want to miss something obvious.’