Jacob Pope died this morning.
Serena Bailey hasn’t turned up on CCTV.
Brandon Keefe’s brother backs his story up, and still nothing to connect Masters to either a gun or the Caxton site.
And then Parnell and I enter the fray, heavy on motive, light on suspects.
Or provable suspects, I should say.
It’s fair to say Steele’s frustrated, and frustration is one of her more animated states. Anger makes her motionless, arms folded, chin high, four-inch heels stamped wide, virtually drilling the floor. Disappointment has her seated, hands clasped and head dipped, reproachful eyes peering up at you beneath her Chrissie Hynde fringe.
But for the past ten minutes, she’s been at full throttle. Hurtling like a roller coaster—right, left, up, down, corkscrewing around desks, trying to whip up logical debate. I’ve been keeping my head down, scribbling in my notebook, edging ever closer to dislodging the pebble in my shoe.
Finn—age 8. Just about to finish Year 3.
Poppy Bailey—age 6? Just about to finish Year 1.
Plus, a spot of personal planning:
NYC v SO15—pros/cons
Check out US Visa situation—B2 Tourist??? ESTA?
“So, Jacob Pope?” asks Parnell, lobbing me a warning look—pay attention.
I throw my pen down and sit back.
“Cardiac arrest,” says Steele, currently circling Flowers’ desk. “Well, respiratory failure leading to cardiac arrest. His lung was punctured.”
“Boo-fucking-hoo,” says Flowers. “That’s karma for you. Who did the honors?”
It’s not often I agree with Flowers and I’m not about to start now. While I won’t be crying over Pope, his mum, who visited him regularly, undoubtedly will.
“Lad called Arlo Rollins,” confirms Steele. “A gang thing, they reckon. He’s saying nothing, which probably means he got his orders from the outside—they’ll be looking at his visits and calls, of course. Quiet lad, by all accounts, not prone to violence. Only twenty. He’s serving two years for various drug offenses, although he’ll obviously be serving a whole lot more now. Another young life down the tubes.”
The hopelessness seems to drain her and she finally sits down. A silence falls briefly and then a sigh that could sink a ship.
“So, you two . . .” Me and Parnell. “Good golly, Miss Holly—what on earth was she playing at? Because that’s one heartbreaker of a lead you’ve brought back—a woman with more enemies than you can shake a stick at, but no easy way of tracking them down, short of putting out an appeal along the lines of, ‘Hey, were you blackmailed by Holly Kemp? Care to fuck up your marriage and become a murder suspect in the process? Come and have a chat with the Metropolitan Police . . . ’”
“We do have one suspect,” I say. “Fellows.”
“Er, we have two—Masters and Fellows,” says Flowers. “And if it was Masters, I don’t think we’ll ever prove it conclusively, not now.”
“Shall we just pack up then, Pete?” snaps Steele. “File this one under a bit too tricky and head over to the Tavern?” She turns her attention back on us. “So is Fellows the ‘big fish’ Holly landed?”
Parnell answers. “Shaw’s face said yes, but do you know what I’m struggling with? Would she—would anyone—be stupid enough to blackmail someone like that? And he’s gay. He would have hardly gone home with her, so how would she have got him into a sexually compromising position?”
“Maybe this was different, maybe she was threatening to out him?” offers Emily, breaking into a yawn.
“Yeah . . .” Parnell considers it. “But how would Holly know that? Dyer said only a select few know. So even if Holly had targeted Fellows, it’s unlikely he’d say, ‘Sorry, love, not interested, I’m gay’ to a complete stranger.”
I go out on a limb. “Look, he’s got to be the big fish. He’s a crook with lots of cash, which I know doesn’t exactly narrow down the crook pool, but Holly actually said his name to Dale Peters. Although, there is another angle . . .” I brace myself, ready to set the cat among the pigeons. “What if she wasn’t blackmailing him? What if she was working for him, or with him, and that’s what she meant when she said she’d landed a big fish?”
Steele bounds over to my desk. “OK, this is interesting. Keep talking.”
I look to Parnell for reinforcements. “Remember Fellows mentioned Steve Butterfield?”
Flowers’ face darkens. “He did what? He’s got some nerve, that bastard! Steve Butterfield was my DCI at Redbridge, and a top bloke. It was sickening what happened to him. Everyone knows Fellows’ crew was behind that.”
“OK, and so now we know what we know about Holly, doesn’t the similarity seem curious to you? Forget about Butterfield being one of us, he was a man who got caught in a compromising position in a career-ending photo. And he always insisted he’d been drugged.”
“But that was about removing an obstacle, not blackmail,” says Parnell. “Steve was too good at his job. He was taking too many of them out of the game, so they took him out.”
“It’s in the same ballpark, though,” I insist. Steele nods along. “And using Fellows’ name to persuade Dale Peters to hand over £10,000—how do we know Holly didn’t pull that same scam on other men? Maybe they had some sort of deal? Holly does the legwork but she gets to use Fellows’ name as leverage. They split the cash.”
“Five thousand pounds each,” scoffs Flowers. “That’d be a pair of cufflinks to someone like Fellows. Hardly worth the effort.”
“Yeah, he’s not been in the four-figure game for a long time,” admits Parnell.
“Or the five-figure.” Steele pivots on her heel and sweeps back to her seat. “Although it’s not a bad sum just for letting someone use your name. And he didn’t get where he is by turning his nose up at easy money.”
“Why kill her, if she’s his business partner, not his blackmailer?” asks Renée. “She’s taking all the risk—surely that’s the best kind of business partner.”
“Business partnerships go sour,” I say. “And when things go sour with Simon Fellows, people wind up dead.”
A chorus of “Allegedly.”
“You’ve got to hand it to her. Whoever she was working for or against, the girl had balls.” Flowers sounds genuinely in awe.
“She was scared, though,” I remind him. “Nervous about staying in her own flat. And she was right to be. Her flat was broken into just after she disappeared, and I’m not buying all that ‘I knew a lot of shady people, it could have been anyone’ bullshit from Shaw. Her laptop was stolen, not dumped by Masters—another misstep by Dyer’s team.” It comes out harsh and I mean it to. Dyer’s crown is definitely slipping. “And what do people often store on laptops? Photos. My bet is someone wanted that computer. Could have been Fellows if he knew there was something on it that connected him to Holly.”
“Could have been any one of the men she was blackmailing,” says Seth. “Fifteen hundred pounds a month? Not many people could keep that up for too long.”
Flowers smile-snarls. “Wouldn’t put a dent in your piggy-bank, I bet.”
“There were no signs of forced entry,” I say, coming to Seth’s rescue. It’s not his fault he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a turret over his head. “That suggests someone who knows what they’re doing.”
“It wasn’t just Holly’s laptop,” Parnell says, in the interest of clarity. “They took a PlayStation, an iPod, jewelry. Shaw’s laptop, as well.”
I flap it away. “Par for the course, Sarge. Make it look like your average burglary to mask what you were really after.”
Steele’s hands are in the air, shushing us. “OK, OK, enough chat, people. We need actions. Do we have a list of the bars that Holly targeted? These beautiful-people haunts that I never get invited to?”
I nod. Spencer Shaw gave us as many as he could remember. Some of them will have closed down by now—six years is a lifetime on the ever-evolving London bar scene—but we can only work with what we have.
“Good. So we need to find out if Simon Fellows is, or was, a regular—or even an irregular—in any of these bars. And then we canvass more widely, show Holly’s photo to every single barfly, looking out for reactions that ring alarm bells. Volunteers for tonight, please? Benny-boy? Emily?”
A spot of perfect casting. Their exquisite faces will fit right in.
“Although it’s a hell of a long shot after six years,” says Swaines, not moaning, just making the point.
“And it’s Monday night,” Emily points out. “It’s not exactly going to be party central. Even I like a Monday night slobbing on the sofa.”
“And every other night dancing on the tables, eh, Ems? No wonder you’re always yawning.”
Slightly unfair, but Flowers never passes up a chance to make someone else look bad.
Steele ignores him. “Then we go back tomorrow night and the next night and the next night and the next. It’s called meticulous police work, and it’ll do Benny-boy good not to be cooped up in here.” She stands up. “And talking of meticulous police work, I’ve got a stack of appraisal forms to get back to. Work hard like me, folks; you get all the best jobs.”
“Can’t you just say we’re all bloody brilliant and be done with it?” pleads Flowers, only half-joking.
I shout over to Swaines. “So no joy with the CCTV? You lost your game of Spot Serena?”
“Not a whisker, I’m afraid. It rained on and off most of that day, which means the quality is shite. And there’re so many people under umbrellas; she could be any one of them.”
“She said she didn’t have an umbrella,” says Parnell, well-remembered. “Nor did Holly.”
Flowers joins in. “That one’s said a lot of things, Lu. I mean, ‘buying Lady Gaga tickets’—hell of a euphemism for screwing a punter.”
An email arrives in the corner of my screen, so I leave Flowers to his guffaws and Parnell to his polite chuckle. It’s an email I’d forgotten I’d requested a few days ago.
I look up to tell Steele, but she’s already crossing the threshold of her office. To my right, Parnell’s cleaning his glasses with the sleeve of his suit jacket. To my left, Renée’s opening a packet of biscuits, Emily, Swaines, and Seth not-so-subtly hovering close by.
And then with one click of my mouse, everything changes.
This case.
My career options.
My self-flagellating belief that I’m the only police officer to have ever made a grave mistake.
Everything.
“Sarge, can you come and look at this,” I say, my voice shaking. “Things are about to get ugly.”