I bring the conversation back to safer ground – the dog with the dumb name. ‘You know, we really should be shaking Lady Persephone III by the paw. She did what we failed to do. She found Holly Kemp. Poor soul’s been missing for years.’
Nearly six years, to be precise. Six birthdays. Six Christmases. Six anniversaries spent wondering if this is the year you get ‘closure’ – that storybook notion they talk about on TV.
‘Er, we? What your lot failed to do, you mean?’ Navarro can’t stop himself – the pissing contest between forces is as predictable as it is puerile.
I let the dig pass, mainly because I feel heartsick about Navarro’s ex-Soccertot, but partly because it’s fair enough. This is on the mighty Metropolitan Police, no question.
‘So, how in God’s name did she lie here for so long, unnoticed?’ I ask of no one in particular.
‘All this,’ says Navarro, drawing a semi-circle on the drizzly horizon, ‘belonged to an old farmer, Johnny Heath. He died a while back, but he’d let the field lie fallow for years; more to do with bad health than good crop rotation, I think.’ The reference is lost on me but I nod sagely. ‘His son lived in America. Didn’t even bother coming home for the funeral, so they say. And he never got round to selling the place when the old man passed because he was making a king’s ransom on Wall Street and didn’t need the money. So after Johnny died in 2015, the whole estate just sat here. The son paid a local to cut the grass a few times a year, but that’s about it.’
‘And the tractor wouldn’t go anywhere near the ditch,’ says Parnell.
I pull a photo from my file. ‘And even if it did, she was well hidden.’
Twigs and branches and bracken and logs. It was the logs that were the chilling detail; the logs that proved this wasn’t some tramp looking for shelter who’d died of hypothermia in the night, or a binge-drinking casualty, staggering home across the field. The logs were placed on top of the body, no doubt about it. They’d covered it, cocooned it, made sure that a grieving family didn’t get closure any time soon.
‘So, to finish the story . . .’ Another mint in his mouth. ‘The son’s luck ran out in the US of A a few months back – redundancy, he says – and lo and behold, suddenly he’s Old MacDonald. Over here like a shot, talking about organic farming, setting up a shop for fools with deep pockets.’
‘So is the dog his?’ I ask, giving up on Lady P’s full title.
Navarro nods. ‘She’d been scrabbling around the same spot for days. He didn’t think much of it until a few days ago when she wouldn’t come when he called. And then when she wouldn’t respond to the whistle either, he knew something was up. The whistle always works, apparently.’
‘A whistle? So she’s a puppy. He’s training her.’ Parnell fancies himself as a bit of an expert, having walked his kids’ dog twice in the last year.
‘Got it in one.’ Navarro wipes the rain from his face with his shirt-cuff. I’m past the point of caring about my halo of fuzz. ‘He thought he’d mastered it, too. But, you know, give a dog a bone . . .’
Not a bone, it turned out. Bones. One hundred and eighty-nine of them which, according to my GCSE B in biology, means seventeen are missing. Lost to foxes or scattered by starlings, we’ll assume. An almost entire female skeleton left to decompose in a ditch, miles from where she was last seen.
6 Valentine Street, Clapham, South-West London.
Six years ago, the press dubbed it the ultimate ‘House of Horrors’. More recently, an estate agent called it a stunning, characterful mid-terrace home, with a newly extended kitchen and a real oasis of a garden. Seldom do properties such as this make it onto the market.
Which is true, if a little sugar-coated.
‘So why here?’ I ask in place of Why do we do this job when it’s all dead Soccertots and bones and standing in fields in the bloody rain? ‘And I don’t mean, why not Valentine Street? I mean, why here – Caxton? Why this spot, specifically?’ I do a slow 360, taking in our surroundings, which to be frank aren’t much. Apart from the three of us standing here like peasants in a Constable painting and a rusted tractor in the next field, there isn’t a single point of interest as far as the eye can see. Just a vista of bleached land and a temporarily sullen sky. ‘OK, sure, you’re off the beaten track a bit, but you aren’t exactly sheltered. Even at night, you’d have to feel slightly exposed.’
Navarro shrugs, as though the methods of a killer aren’t his to judge.
‘Ah, come on, Ed, help us out,’ says Parnell, all chummy now. ‘You know the area. If you were going to bury a body, would you really do it here?’
‘Maybe. We aren’t exactly spoiled for choice around these parts. There aren’t too many wooded areas, and The Fens, just north of here, is a completely flat landscape.’ The smirk is back. ‘Do you know what my guv’nor says? He says FENS stands for Fucking Enormous Nothing.’
I smile. Parnell laughs generously. ‘Fucking Enormous Nothing, that’s a good one.’ He’s back to business quickly. ‘But seriously though, there must be somewhere safer than this? Somewhere more secluded?’
He considers it this time, rubbing at his goatee. ‘Me, personally, if I’d killed my sister-in-law – which would be an honour and a privilege, I tell you – I wouldn’t bury her at all. I’d weigh her down and throw her in the Ramsey Forty Foot – it’s a big drainage dyke about twenty miles north of here.’
Dragging him from his daydream, I say, ‘You know, you both keep using the word “buried”, but she wasn’t buried, not really.’
‘Well, she wasn’t under the ground, no,’ Navarro concedes. ‘But he did a thorough job of hiding her.’
I step closer to the ditch, peering at the space left, the nothingness. ‘Hiding is different to burying, though. Hiding’s quicker. This person was in a rush.’
‘Hold on, “this person”?’ Navarro’s eyes narrow, piqued and suspicious. ‘Look, I know we’re skirting around this until we get dental records back, but this is Holly Kemp. The locket, it’s engraved “HOLLY”. It’s got photos of her parents inside. It’s hers. And she’s one of his, isn’t she?’ We say nothing. ‘Well, my guv’nor spoke to the DCI who headed things up back then and they’re still convinced. He admitted it, right?’
He, Christopher Dean Masters, did indeed admit it. And then he denied it, then admitted it, denied it, then admitted it, and so on and so on, until the original investigators stopped giving him the airtime and the warped satisfaction.
‘Believe me, I wish she was one of ours. Our clear-up stats aren’t great at the moment.’ This should rattle my cage but depressingly, I hear him. Too many cases and a major drop in the number of murder detectives makes you clinical – brain-fried and clinical. ‘I thought she was one of ours, actually. The minute the call came through, I said, That’s Ania Duvac, that is. I had a £10 bet with Jonesy, our exhibits officer.’ He clocks my expression and his face flushes – boiled potato to raw beetroot with one misjudged admission. ‘Look, it wasn’t my idea. Jonesy’d bet on two flies crawling up a wall. He’s got a real problem, that one. Anyway, I knew I’d lost my tenner the second I got here. Ania only went missing last September, see. You’d expect to see a bit of muscle tissue still attached.’ He smiles to himself. ‘The lads think it’s weird, but I’ve got a real interest in this type of stuff. I know a thing or two about decay.’