‘Did you know her? Or recognise her?’
‘No. First time either of us seen her.’
‘What did you do when you found her?’
‘Nothing. We didn’t get it straight away, for a start – we were still a bit … out of it. It was only when we got closer, with the torch … I touched her hand and she was cold.’
‘Is that something you do often – roam the factory in the dark? It’s not easy to navigate in broad daylight, all that junk and weeds, gaping holes in the ground …’
‘It wasn’t dark. We went to get wood. There’s a pile of old pallets back there – we’ve been breaking them up to burn. Martin was shivering so I got up and he wanted to come with me. He gets like that – paranoid. Doesn’t like being left on his tod.’
‘Hot yesterday, for a fire.’
Stewpot scratched again. ‘We were coming down. And you’re never hot at dawn if you’re sleeping rough. Even with a roof, it’s cold. Damp – gets in your bones.’
‘We didn’t see evidence that a fire had been lit that morning.’
He nodded. ‘Because it wasn’t – we didn’t light it. When we saw her, we scarpered, didn’t we? Back to our room, tried to work out what to do.’
‘Hm. Did it occur to you to call the police – or ask someone else to? You found a dead woman and you just went back to your room?’
‘It did occur to us. But we didn’t do it straight away because we needed to think. We knew this would happen – you’d come and be all over the place, we’d lose our spot. And you’d pull us in, like you have done.’
‘Only for questioning. You’re not under arrest.’
‘Yet.’
‘Why would we arrest you if you haven’t done anything?’
‘Because we live there and she was in the room next door. Because we’re junkies. Because she was a pretty girl and …’
‘You don’t get many opportunities in that direction these days?’
‘Did I ever?’ He gave a funny half-smile and for a moment Robin wondered. Somewhere under the grime and the ratty beard was a kind face, she thought suddenly.
‘You didn’t touch her at all?’
‘Only the hand, like I said.’
‘And you didn’t take anything from the body? Purse? Phone? Because when we found her, there was nothing on her at all. You didn’t take anything so you could score?’
‘Steal from a dead girl? We’re not bleedin’ animals.’
‘I know,’ she said, mollifying. ‘But you’ve got an expensive habit, Stuart, and no visible source of income.’
‘I told you, I beg.’
‘What we care about here is finding out who killed her. If anything was taken from the body, it could help us do that, and …’
‘I. Didn’t. Take. Anything.’
‘What about Martin?’
‘He’d never.’
‘How long have you known him?’
‘Don’t know exactly. Three years, maybe? Something like that.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘Random. On the street. But we got on so we started moving round together, became friends. It’s better not to be on your own. We look after each other, keep an eye out.’
‘How long after you found her did you hear the shout?’
‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head. ‘A while – an hour? I don’t know. Like I said, we’d been using, we’d been on the nod all night, so …’ He rubbed his top lip with the back of his index finger.
‘On the nod?’ said Varan.
‘Drifting in and out. Smack, innit.’
‘Do you have anything to do with the group of rough sleepers at the back of the building?’ Malia asked.
‘Not really. We keep to ourselves. Sometimes if we’ve been to the soup kitchen and they’ve got sandwiches or whatnot, we’ll bring some back for them.’
‘Do they ever come over to you?’
‘Once or twice when we were first there. Not since.’
‘How long have you been living there?’
‘A couple of months, probably. Easter-ish.’ Another half-smile. ‘We didn’t get each other an egg or anything, in case you’re wondering. We see the stuff in the shops – it’s like a calendar, isn’t it? Easter, Christmas, Halloween …’
‘Where did you sleep last night, given that you couldn’t go back there?’
‘Up town. I’ve got a mate in the underpass through by Moor Street. Curly. He’ll be there this afternoon if you want to check.’
Malia squared her papers. ‘Is there anything else you think we should know? Anyone been hanging round lately? Anything unusual caught your eye?’
Stewpot was shaking his head then stopped, something appearing to dawn on him. ‘Actually, there has been this bloke. We’ve seen him two or three times – in that room.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Don’t know. He ran away.’
‘Right …’ Here we go – Robin heard it in Malia’s voice as she thought it herself.
‘He comes at night, that’s when we’ve seen him. I followed him once and saw him going back down the shaft with some of our wood under his arm. He legged it when he saw me – started running. Don’t know for sure but I think he’s living in the place next door.’
‘What shaft?’
‘There’s these sort of, like, sloping ramps into the basement? A couple of them you can walk down – the slope’s gentle enough. I saw this bloke and I went down later to see what was going on, if he was living down there or what. I didn’t know where he’d gone but then I found this hole through to the place next door.’
*
Between the two interviews, Robin called Rafferty at the site and by the time Malia and Varan had talked to Martin, he’d phoned back to confirm: yes, there was a walkable shaft two workshops back from where the body had been found and, further through the warren, a hole knocked through Gisborne’s outside wall, apparently from the other side in.
‘Is it new?’ Malia asked.
‘Not brand-new. At least a year or so, Rafferty’s guessing, going by water stains, fungal growth, etc.’ She spun a biro between her fingers. ‘That the hole exists doesn’t mean this other guy does, obviously.’
‘No, but I think they are telling us the truth. The fact their descriptions don’t quite match – now we’re looking for a man who’s either Indian or Pakistani, according to Martin, or “Middle Eastern”, according to Stewpot, wearing either a navy anorak or a black one, early thirties or late thirties …’
‘Yeah, and if they’d cooked him up, I think Stewpot would have been quicker off the mark in telling us, too,’ Robin said. ‘He doesn’t seem that calculating.’
On the desk, her phone buzzed. Mum, do u mind if I stay over at Asha’s tonight?
If okay with A’s mum, she quickly replied, okay w me.
Thanks!
Malia perched on the filing cabinet. ‘What shall we do with them?’
The question Robin had been weighing. They could charge Stewpot with both possession and intent to supply – the amount in the backpack, though small, had been enough for two – but the longer she’d watched the second interview, the more reluctant she’d felt. Martin was clearly vulnerable; she guessed he’d been abused in the past. He’d grown up in care, and Stewpot, though only eleven years older, was a father figure to him. ‘He looks out for me, you know?’ Martin had said, eyes wide as a bush baby’s. ‘Makes sure I get food and clean works. Without him, I’d probably be dead by now.’
The problem was, with no fixed address and the unreliability of addicts, however well-intentioned, there was no guarantee they’d find them again if they needed to. On the other hand, they were already going into withdrawal, and the pain would get worse and worse.
‘When they’ve done their statements, let’s give them some food,’ she said. ‘Rafferty and his crew are going over the place next door now. I’ll get in touch with the soup kitchen and see if we can leave messages there. As long as Stewpot and Martin agree
to check in there, let’s let them go.’
A rap on the open door: Niall, one of the DCs. ‘Sorry, guv.’
‘What’s up?’
‘I just saw DI Webster and he said to tell you they’ve got a solve on Kieran Clarke.’
‘Really? Who?’
‘A classmate. His girlfriend had been flirting with Kieran, and he’d had enough. They brought him in this morning, and he’s broken down and confessed.’
‘A classmate? So he’s sixteen as well?’
‘Didn’t mean to kill him, apparently. It was supposed to be a warning.’
Chapter Seven
It was after five when Robin got back to the car, the post mortem had taken all afternoon. As SIO, she always attended but sometimes, in simpler cases, she saw the beginning then deputized to Malia, who updated her on anything significant. Today, she’d stayed to the very end, watching from the observation booth so the team could reach her by phone. Part of it was the fading hope that Olly Faulkner would discover something useful but she’d known she’d stay as soon as the woman was lifted from the bag and laid on the table. She’d looked so alone, so starkly, absolutely alone; she couldn’t leave her.
They’d been contacted by thirty or forty families now so where the hell was hers? Where was her mother or sister or boyfriend? Who had loved her?
The body had changed since yesterday. She was less medieval novice now than discoloured marble tomb effigy, her skin turned waxy yellow. She looked smaller, too, perhaps 80 per cent of her original size, as if, without her spirit, her body was losing the power to occupy physical space. She was disappearing. Don’t go yet, Robin had urged her. Help me. Tell me how you ended up here, murdered before your life really started.
She’d tried to imagine what that life had been like but they had so bloody little to go on. Where had she been at that age then, she’d asked herself. Her first or second year at university, probably. God – the idea had sent a chill down her arms. The way she’d lived then, she could easily have ended up the same way.
She’d arrived at university a complete wreck. Five days before she started, a week after they’d got back from seven months backpacking together, Samir had summarily dumped her, no explanation except he didn’t feel the same any more. She knew the truth now but at the time, she’d been completely sideswiped. It had felt more like a bereavement than a dumping.
On top of that, it had ripped a jagged hole through her self-esteem, and that hadn’t been entirely sea-worthy to begin with. She’d always been confident in her abilities – she’d done well academically; she knew she was bright – but undercutting her faith in herself in almost every other area was the message of her brother’s life-long attitude towards her: you’re hateful, despicable, a waste of space. ‘Who’d ever want to be with you?’ Luke had sneered regularly when she’d started liking boys. Until he dumped her, she hadn’t realized how much her relationship with Samir had done to counter that.
In her first term at UCL, she’d pursued a punishing schedule of academic work to distract herself – lectures; the library; essays twice as long as they had to be. Then, after Christmas, when the first wave of grief began to pass, it had been Operation Oblivion: Watch this, Samir! You’re not the only one who can move on! She’d gone from near-recluse to party animal in the space of a week. Her liver hurt to remember how much she’d drunk.
And the blokes, because that was really the point of it. See, Samir? He likes me – he’s flirting with me. He wants to sleep with me so I can’t be that repellent. And then, most of those mornings, the cold gathering of the clothes off durable halls carpet, the walk of shame and then bravado in the face of the ribbings down the bar before doing it all over again.
But it hadn’t been solely fellow students and the cosy, regulated confines of the university. All of London had been her oyster. Pubs, bars, clubs, any sparkly-eyed stranger with a good line in banter, and no one had felt like a stranger after five or six drinks. Her friends homed in on unthreatening boys who turned out to have been at school with their older brothers but she’d been drawn to men with an edge, a suggestion of darkness far beyond her friends’ comfort zones. She’d wondered since if, at her most nihilistic, she’d been testing providence.
One morning she’d woken up in a flat on the tenth floor of a block in Woolwich next to a shaven-headed man whose back was tattooed from shoulder to shoulder with an eagle. She had no memory of the tattoo, and she’d never been to Woolwich before – barely heard of it until she’d sneaked out and asked where she was at the nearest corner shop (of course, her phone had been out of battery). She’d remembered the night before in snatches as the day developed: she’d met him in a club, he’d been with a group of friends. She didn’t know any of them, she’d never seen them before, but she’d got into a car with three of them and driven across London without a second thought. Anything could have happened. They could have raped and killed her, dumped her body at the side of the road.
But the worst of her judgement had always involved booze, and as Olly had told her, there was no alcohol in their girl’s stomach. And while she’d died in the small hours of a Sunday morning, she wasn’t dressed for a Saturday night.
Her phone rang through the Bluetooth, pulling her out of the thought.
‘Guess who’s just called me,’ Malia challenged.
Robin considered. ‘Jonathan Quinton.’
‘Oh,’ she said, deflated. ‘Well, remind me not to bother wrapping your Christmas present.’
‘Sorry. What did he want?’ She could guess.
‘Ask me out for a drink,’ Malia confirmed. ‘What do you reckon? Trying to involve himself in the investigation?’
‘Could be. You said yes, of course?’
‘Of course. Who wouldn’t want to go out with a dude who found a dead body and thought it was a pick-up opportunity? How was the last bit of the PM?’
‘Olly’s narrowed the time of death. Between one and four a.m., he says now.’
‘Well, that’s something. Anything helpful on ID?’
‘Zero. No numbered surgical devices or secret tattoos; no visible injuries apart from the stab wounds; no signs of surgery or disease or long-term drug use, no scars, no birthmarks.’
‘Not so much as a filling, actually,’ Olly had said, a gloved finger in her mouth. ‘A missing point on this back molar here, bottom right, and that’s it.’
‘Recent?’
‘Maybe but not new, new. There’s a little bit of staining – coffee, I’d guess.’
‘You know,’ Robin said to Malia now, the thought forming as she spoke, ‘maybe the blankness is relevant. The point, even. No tattoos, no drugs, no alcohol, no scars – fair enough. No phone, no purse, nothing in her pockets – all of that could have been taken. But there’s nothing about her clothes that was anything but bog-standard.’
‘And no make-up,’ said Malia.
‘Yes, right. Maybe she did have jewellery and it was stolen with the purse and phone, but, as you say, no make-up. And her ears weren’t pierced. Even her hair’s been left long, no particular style.’ She thought of Lennie, her tubes of Rimmel mascara and eyeliner, the hot-brush she’d wanted for her birthday.
‘And at that age, girls are experimenting – not only girls – trying different looks, trying to work out who they are. Committing crimes against fashion – I know I did. But she’s … basic. Not even, in that sense.’
‘If so, then why?’
‘Given what’s happened, maybe she was hiding from someone. Trying to stay low-profile?’
‘Or maybe someone else wanted her low-profile.’ Robin thought of Lennie again. She saw men looking at her and she wanted to smack them, demand to know how old they thought she was. ‘Over-protective parents,’ she said, ‘keeping her on a tight rein? She was pretty – she’d attract attention. Maybe they didn’t want that.’
She’d called Good Hope before the post mortem but she hadn’t got through. One of the support staff had emailed as she’d left the morgue
to say that the director had returned her call but when she’d tried again, the line had been busy. She was five minutes from Bordesley Street and the rush-hour traffic was creeping, a couple of cars getting through at each change of the lights. When she reached the turn, she took it.
The kitchen didn’t do dinner, she remembered, but through the narrow open window at the front, she could hear voices inside, a man and a woman. When she rang the bell, the man came to the door. He was in his late forties, she guessed, though he had less grey round the ears than Samir who was ten years younger. He was quite handsome, actually, in a hippie way that normally didn’t do much for her. As far as she was concerned, no one over the age of twenty-one needed to wear leather bracelets, but the arms they were on were tanned and muscled to the right extent, the T-shirt clinging to his biceps without bulging. His eyes were a warm brown, thickly lashed.
She introduced herself and told him she was looking for Daniel Reid.
‘You’ve found him.’
‘Thanks for calling earlier,’ Robin said. ‘Sorry I missed you.’
‘Well, you’ve got a bit on your plate, I imagine.’ His voice was middle class, no regional accent. ‘Come in.’
She followed him down the long passage to the main room where Annika, Morning Front of House, was sitting at one of the long tables with two mugs. She looked none too thrilled to see her again, and Robin wondered if she was interrupting something.
‘We’re just having a cup of tea,’ Reid said. ‘Would you like one?’
‘I’m fine – thank you, though. You probably heard that we were here this morning looking for Stuart and Martin?’
‘Annika told me, yes.’
‘They’re still at the station and I want to let them go but it’s problematic because they’ve got no fixed address or phones. I wanted to ask if we could leave messages for them here if we need to get in touch again.’
He nodded, seeming to think. ‘I want to say yes,’ he said after a few seconds, ‘I will say yes – obviously we want to do everything we can—’
‘But …?’
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