Until I saw the advert.
MAKE LIFE MORE MEANINGFUL
MAKE LONDON A SAFER PLACE
JOIN THE METROPOLITAN POLICE
The girl on the poster even looked a bit like me. A less grief-haggard version, anyway.
It was fate.
And a middle finger to my dad, who’d only ever made London worse.
‘God, where to start?’ Dyer says, with the faux modesty of someone who knows exactly where to start; every word, every beat. ‘The media called Christopher Masters ‘The Roommate’ on account of several adverts he placed on various sites. Roommate wanted – female, age 20–35, for quiet, respectful, friendly house near Clapham Common. Double room. Bills, TV, Wi-Fi included, £600 per calendar month.’ All this, right off the bat, the words seared on her brain. ‘Masters owned a hardware store, had done since the Nineties, but he was a keen handyman too – no job too big or too small, that kind of thing – so when he and two cousins inherited 6 Valentine Street from an aunt, he swooped quickly, suggesting he renovate the house in exchange for an increased share of the profits. He started the work in autumn 2011 but it was a big job, the place needed gutting. And what with running the store as well, it was still only half-finished by February 2012, which was when he placed the ad and began luring young women to the house. Torturing them. Strangling them.’
‘Do we know if he actually killed them there?’ I ask, mentally sifting through the facts I gleaned last night and coming up blank. ‘I know the bodies were found in Dulwich Woods. Well, except Holly Kemp’s, obviously.’
‘We know he definitely harmed them there. We found two of the victims’ blood in the house. Apart from that, though, we don’t know much. He led us to the bodies in Dulwich Woods; he gave that up within an hour of arrest, but he wouldn’t say why he did what he did or give us any sequence of events. Just that he’d “felt like it”. There’s a theory his ex-wife’s recent engagement might have sparked something.’
‘And he completely refused to say anything about Holly Kemp?’ asks Parnell.
‘At the time, yes. He admitted being at the Valentine Street address on the day she disappeared, but that was it. He got more talkative over the years, though: “I killed her. I didn’t. I killed her. I didn’t . . .” ’ Her face roars with anger. ‘He killed her.’
Steele jumps in. ‘Park Holly for a second. Tell us a bit about the others first, Tess. While we’ve got you here, we might as well get everything from the horse’s mouth.’
Dyer nods. ‘Sure, no problem. So Bryony Trent was the first. She was twenty-four, a live-in shift manager at The Cross Keys pub in Clapham North. She was last seen on Friday 10th February, leaving the pub around 5 p.m. We got one sketchy CCTV sighting around 5.15 p.m., heading in the direction of the Common, but it was lashing rain that day and it wasn’t much use – her umbrella didn’t help either, it made it even harder to pick her out again. According to cell site analysis, her phone was switched off twenty minutes later. We never found her phone, or her bag – same with the others. When we got her phone records back, though, we did find a pay-as-you-go number that nobody seemed to recognise, dialled the day before. Problem was, no one knew she was flat-hunting, so we missed that early lead. She hadn’t said anything as she didn’t want her boss to know she wasn’t happy until she was ready to leave – basically, until she’d found a new place to live.’
She comes up for air, pausing for any questions. I’m swaying between having none and having a barrage. Steele gives Dyer the nod to carry on.
‘OK, next, Steffi König; twenty-nine, German. She’d been in the UK for six years, working for an Event Management firm in Clapham Old Town.’
Steffi, not Stephanie. I might have only scanned the internet and taken a cursory flick through the case file, but she’s certainly been Stephanie in every report I’ve read. Steffi implies attachment, a pained affinity, a genuine care. It suggests Christmas cards exchanged with the family and a DCI who’ll never forget.
‘She was last seen on February 16th, leaving her workplace at around 4.30 p.m. It was her break – a late one because they had an event in the evening – and while she usually stayed in the staff canteen, she said she had to pop out that day. Again, CCTV wasn’t much help because of bad weather and bad luck, and cell site analysis was as much use as it ever is in a big city. Her phone pinged off a mast on the west side of Clapham Common just after 5 p.m., but it was hard to narrow it down to anything helpful; the mast covered a few hundred square metres.’ Or a few standard-sized football pitches, to use Parnell’s metric system. ‘Phone records gave us a vague link, though – she’d dialled a pay-as-you-go number the day before, like Bryony Trent. Different number, but the call was of a similar duration, and it was made a similar length of time before she went missing. And then, of course, we got our break with Ling Chen.’
Dyer shifts in her chair, her back ramrod straight; the memory of that break still fresh.
‘Ling was the eldest, thirty-three. She was last seen on the morning of Tuesday 21st by her boyfriend. They were having problems. He was pressuring her to get married and she wasn’t keen – in fact, she was planning to leave him, was flat-hunting on the sly. She’d mentioned to a colleague that she was viewing a place in Clapham that afternoon, and sure enough, the same pay-as-you-go number that Steffi called showed up from the day before. To cut a long story short, we eventually found the Valentine Street address scrawled on the back of a pizza flyer in the recycling bin at her friend’s house.’
‘But not soon enough to save Holly Kemp.’
There’s nothing accusatory in Steele’s statement. We’ve all been there; Steele, probably ten times over. The torment of realising that if you’d only known X, you could have done Y. It’s pointless persecution and yet we can’t help but indulge.
‘Sadly not. It was Friday 24th before the friend made the connection – that Ling was at her place when she’d made the pay-as-you-go call. Holly was last seen on Thursday 23rd at around 4 p.m., so she was almost certainly dead by then. And in any case, she hadn’t even been reported missing by the time we arrested Masters on the Saturday. Her boyfriend waited until Sunday because, and I’m quoting here, “she’s a mad bitch, unpredictable”. He’d assumed she’d gone on a long weekend bender, but when she still hadn’t surfaced by Sunday, he got worried, called us.’
Parnell’s voice is a squeak. ‘I should bloody well think he was worried! Hadn’t he seen the news?’
‘I don’t think he was “the news” type, Lu. Anyway, her friends proved to be more help than him. It was her friends who told us about Holly’s plans to go to Clapham that Thursday. And the CCTV snatch of her coming out of the Tube proved she got there.’
‘Her friends knew she was flat-hunting?’ I ask.
‘No. She wouldn’t say why she was going. She was being very elusive, all “watch this space”. Apparently that was typical of her. She was a bit of a drama queen.’
‘A nicer way of saying “a mad bitch”.’
‘Yes, well, Spencer Shaw – the boyfriend – wasn’t exactly a nice guy. He’d served six months for conspiracy to commit burglary not long before he met Holly. He’d been working as an estate agent; casing houses, getting the layout, selling the information on for a tiny cut.’