Cruel acts, p.4
Cruel Acts, page 4
‘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.’
‘So what do you think about the blood?’
‘I think we should assume it was Rachel’s.’
‘Why?’
‘Because assuming it isn’t won’t get us any further and we haven’t identified any other women he might have attacked. Our best chance is to be positive about connecting Rachel Healy to Leo Stone and work to that end.’
‘This is a man who kills without spilling blood, though. The only blood we found from the other victims was a speck on some plastic. He’s incredibly disciplined about it. You’ve seen the pictures – the room was spotless. So you have to believe he took Rachel to his house and for some unknown reason killed her in a messy and uncontrolled way, and that he was sufficiently excited by that to go back and take another woman off the street nineteen days later.’
‘Maybe it went wrong.’
‘Maybe it was nothing to do with him,’ Derwent countered, and my throat tightened with irritation.
‘Well, the blood had to come from someone. Even if it wasn’t Rachel Healy, and I think it was, someone died violently in that room and bled through the floorboards. How does that fit in with your incredibly disciplined killer?’ My voice was a shade too loud and Derwent grinned.
‘Shh. You’ll scare the barman.’
‘He’s not listening.’ I leaned sideways to check, all the same. His girlfriend was still talking, although she had moved on to the tattoo she was planning to get and where it should go.
I took a grip on my temper and returned to Derwent. ‘If it wasn’t her blood, where did Rachel Healy go?’
‘Someone else killed her. A boyfriend. An ex. A stalker. I don’t know.’ Derwent tapped the beer mat against the edge of the table. ‘It’s more of a stretch to believe it was Stone than that someone else wanted her dead. Two women a week die at the hands of partners or ex-partners. Did we look at her boyfriends?’
‘I don’t know. I assume so – at least before Whitlock got involved. There was a whole month where nothing much happened on the investigation, remember.’
‘That won’t have helped.’
‘No. No one helped Rachel, alive or dead.’
Derwent leaned back, watching me with that close attention I slightly feared. ‘Don’t get hung up on her.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You need to keep some perspective on it. She’s been missing for years. Your chances of finding her at all are slim, let alone making a case that Leo Stone killed her. If she’s dead, it doesn’t matter to her.’
‘She has a family. Friends.’
‘And you can’t bring her back for them.’
I looked away instead of at his face. I didn’t want to admit that he was right, but I knew he was. The CD changed to piano music, cool notes drifting through the dusty air like snowflakes. The barman dropped the cloth he had been using to polish glasses and leaned across the counter, drawing his girlfriend’s face towards him so he could kiss her. She held on to his wrists and closed her eyes and I found I was holding my breath …
