by Tim Weaver
Healy stopped, eyes flicking to the photograph of Gail.
‘On the one hand,’ he said, ‘that meant we could quickly write off any connection between her drug problems and her death. On the other, the fact she stopped going out meant she never used to share anything with anyone. Most of the interviews we did with her so-called friends were a waste of time.’
‘She was studying as well, right?’
‘History and Social Science. But it was an Open University course, so – again – she was never around others while she was doing it. It was part-time. Six years, I think. She worked remotely, hadn’t met her tutor face-to-face, hadn’t even attended lectures with other students, apart from when she’d sat her final exams. She wrote her last paper a week before she was murdered.’ He paused, fingers around his coffee mug, eyes down. ‘I called the OU a couple of months later,’ he said, quieter now, ‘to see how she’d done. By then, it had really started to get to me that she had no one left who gave a shit about whether she’d passed or not.’
‘Had she?’
A single nod of the head. ‘With honours.’
‘What about her parents?’
‘Dead.’
‘No brothers or sisters?’
‘No. Best we could come up with was a cousin, Erica Swiddle. She lived up in Liverpool, though, so they rarely saw each other in the flesh. Swiddle told us the two of them used to chat on the phone every couple of months. That was it.’
‘And the father?’
‘The father of the girls? Kevin Sims. A waste of fucking oxygen. No one had anything good to say about him. Back in February 2001, he and Gail met at a pub in Peckham – he was twenty-four, she was twenty-one – and, five months later, she fell pregnant. We chatted to Sims’s mother, who was still alive at the time, and she said he’d never mentioned the girls at all. She didn’t even know she was a grandparent. Can you believe that shite?’ Healy stopped; a twist of animosity, a shake of the head. ‘The only person who could tell us anything in relation to Sims was Swiddle, Gail’s cousin. She said Sims cleared off about two seconds after Gail told him she was expecting. The next time anyone heard from him was when he got himself killed six months after the twins were born, doing one hundred and twenty on the M23.’
‘He died at the scene?’
‘Yeah.’
I finished off some notes and, when I looked up, Healy was staring out of the window, into the car park, mirroring the position he’d been in the day before.
‘You all right?’ I asked.
He glanced at me. ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’
‘Are you ready to go on?’
He knew what I really meant by that. His recollection of the case, talking about it, leading me through it, seemed to have revived him somehow, bringing a subtle colour to him. But we’d only scratched the surface.
The worst was yet to come.
He took a long breath, then nodded.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Tell me about what you found at the flat.’
5
‘That place,’ he said, ‘it was pretty pokey.’
In the file, there was a top-down layout of the flat, reinforcing what Healy was saying. A hallway ran from the front door to the living room at the back. On the left were two rooms, both bedrooms, the first belonging to Gail, the second to the girls. On the right was a kitchen and then the bathroom. Whoever had constructed the map had drawn in windows too: in the kitchen and the living room.
But nowhere else.
‘There were no windows in the bedrooms?’
He shook his head. ‘No. The bedrooms were up against the flat next door. No windows in them; no skylights, obviously. I remember one of the first things I asked when I arrived was for the lights to be put on. But they already were on.’
I nodded and waited for him to continue.
‘The girls were in their beds,’ he said, pausing, clearing his throat. ‘They were lying on their backs, dressed in identical pyjamas, and had been completely covered by their duvets. They’d had their throats cut.’ He stopped again, for longer this time, and as he did, my eyes dropped to the file, swallowing as I read the sterile description of what had been done to them, unable to get the sour taste out of my mouth. Healy continued: ‘As soon as I got there, as soon as I saw them, I thought to myself, “Why the fuck did I end up with this? Why not someone else?” I’d been at the Met twenty-four years by then – but anything with kids, it still got to me like it was my first day on the beat. A little bit of you dies and doesn’t come back every time kids are involved.’
He had both elbows on the table, his hands locked together in front of his face, his eyes off beyond me. ‘When I got home that night, I found Leanne alone in her room, listening to music,’ he went on, talking about his own daughter now. She would have been nineteen at the time. ‘I just went in, and I grabbed her, and I held her. She didn’t understand why – she tried to shrug me off initially – but eventually she went along with it. I don’t know … I just had to know that my girl was safe.’
A flicker of emotion flashed in his face as he realized the prescience of those last few words: only six months later, Leanne was taken from him, equally cruelly.
Another case, another killer.
Another lost life.
‘Anyway,’ he said, clearing his throat again and taking down a mouthful of coffee, ‘Gail was in the living room. She was slumped sideways on the sofa, half pressed up against the wall, in a nightdress and dressing gown. It seemed pretty obvious that all three of them had been murdered late evening, and that Gail had known the prick who did it. There was no sign of a break-in at the flat, no sign of a struggle either – and none of her neighbours heard screams or raised voices.’
‘So she wasn’t frightened of him.’
‘The opposite. I think she happily invited him in. She didn’t bother getting changed, which meant she was either comfortable around this guy or she didn’t expect him to stay long. Lividity put her where she was found, so given the lack of a struggle, no defensive wounds, no signs of sexual assault, I think – when he came at her – she was relaxed.’ He stopped, eyes dropping to the black-and-white descriptions of Gail’s death. They weren’t black and white to Healy. ‘He stabbed her nine times in the chest.’
‘Sounds pretty frenzied.’
‘It wasn’t. The wounds were all close together, almost on top of one another, like he’d chosen a spot and was making sure. I think he was a professional.’
I looked at him. ‘What do you mean, “professional”?’
‘I mean, he’d killed before. There was no worthwhile DNA under her fingernails, no evidence she’d had the chance to fight back – scratched, fought, got in a strike of her own. You don’t stab someone nine times without them getting even as much as a retaliatory hit in, unless you’re really good at it.’
‘What about DNA elsewhere?’
‘Worthless.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘We found DNA from other people on Gail’s dressing gown, and under her fingernails, but it wasn’t semen or saliva, it was hairs and flakes of skin from the family, and from other, unidentified individuals. They could have belonged to the killer – or they could have belonged to friends, passing through the flat over the course of months. If the DNA did belong to our man, he wasn’t in the database.’
Suddenly, my phone started ringing, buzzing across the table towards me. It was my daughter. I turned it to silent. ‘It’s just Annabel,’ I said to Healy. ‘I’ll call her back when we’re done here.’
I flipped back in my notes to some I’d made while watching the video of Healy at the press conference a couple of nights before.
‘You said someone had been seen with Gail and the girls in the months leading up to their murder?’
He nodded. ‘Mal.’
‘Mal?’
‘M-A-L, as in Malcolm.’
‘That was his name?’
Healy shrugged. ‘Who knows? Basically, her neighbour on the right sid
e was this woman called Sandra Westerwood. Proper busybody in her late sixties, but quite sweet, and she really loved that family. She was the one that called the police because she hadn’t heard Gail or the girls in a while.’
He flicked forward in the file, found what he was after, then swivelled it around to face me. It was a transcript from his interview with Westerwood.
WESTERWOOD: I could hear those girls next door, every day, singing their songs, playing their games … all the sorts of things kids do at that age, you know? But then it stopped. I thought it was weird, because those bloody flats, they’ve got walls like paper, and the only time that building goes silent is in the middle of the night when everyone’s finally asleep. I thought to myself, ‘Maybe they’re on holiday.’ But they hadn’t mentioned anything about going away, and Gail often talked about being short of money.
HEALY: When was the last time you heard them?
WESTERWOOD: Sunday, maybe Monday.
HEALY: Today’s Friday 16 July. So you stopped hearing from them on Sunday 11 July or Monday 12 July, correct?
WESTERWOOD: Yeah.
HEALY: When we spoke at your flat yesterday, you said you’d been around to see Gail on Saturday 10 July.
WESTERWOOD: Right. I ran out of sugar. I wanted a cup of tea but the elevator was bust, and I didn’t want to have to walk down seventeen flights of stairs, and then half a mile to the bloody Co-op. So I asked Gail if she could spare some.
HEALY: She seemed okay?
WESTERWOOD: She seemed fine. I could see the girls from the door, watching TV. Gail and me, we spoke for a while.
HEALY: About what?
WESTERWOOD: I don’t know. The weather or whatever. But she was fine. Laughing and smiling, you know?
HEALY: That was the last time you saw her?
WESTERWOOD: Last time. Everything went quiet after that. I went round to check on them on Tuesday, cos I thought that would be the right thing to do, and there was no answer. I tried again Wednesday morning, and then Wednesday evening. Yesterday was when I called you lot.
I looked up at Healy, unsure exactly of how this was relevant. It filled out some of the background, particularly with regard to how the police ended up at Searle House in the first place, but there was no mention of the man the family had been seen with in the months before their deaths; the man Healy had talked about at the press conference in the days after, and had told me was called ‘Mal’.
As if reading my mind, he moved forward a couple of pages in the interview transcript, then tapped a line halfway down. ‘Once we got confirmation that the family were killed on Sunday 11 July,’ he said, ‘rather than on the Monday, we started zeroing in on what she said to us here.’
WESTERWOOD: I simply can’t imagine who would want to do that to them. I mean, they were such a lovely family. Do you think it might have been her boyfriend?
HEALY: Boyfriend?
WESTERWOOD: Oh, I thought she was dating someone.
HEALY: Did she say she was?
WESTERWOOD: No. I just saw her and the girls with a man in the months before they were killed, so I guessed he was … you know … someone she was seeing.
HEALY: Where did you see him?
WESTERWOOD: There’s a play park and a football pitch on one side of Searle House. The park’s got some swings, a climbing frame, some slides, that sort of thing. I definitely remember seeing him there with the girls a few times.
HEALY: How many times?
WESTERWOOD: Oh, quite a few.
HEALY: When was the first time, do you remember?
WESTERWOOD: I guess it must have been about February, because my sister’s birthday is the twentieth, and I remember heading down to the Tube at New Cross Gate to go and see her, and they were all out there. I thought to myself that it would be nice if Gail could find someone.
HEALY: So Gail and this guy could have been dating from February, all the way through to July? That’s five months.
WESTERWOOD: Yes.
HEALY: Did she tell you his name?
WESTERWOOD: No, but …
HEALY: What?
WESTERWOOD: I remember hearing the girls one day, when they were outside playing with him, and they called him something. I think it was ‘Mal’.
HEALY: As in Malcolm?
WESTERWOOD: Yeah, I think so.
HEALY: When else did you see the family with him?
WESTERWOOD: Oh, I don’t know. Um … lots of times, but generally when they were all at the park.
HEALY: You ever get up close to him?
WESTERWOOD: No.
HEALY: So you didn’t ever speak to him?
WESTERWOOD: No. But I often wondered whether he might have been some sort of delivery driver.
HEALY: What makes you say that?
WESTERWOOD: He was wearing this olive-green shirt one time, beneath his jacket, and I remember thinking it looked like the sort of shirt a delivery man might wear.
HEALY: Did you ever see him wearing that shirt again?
WESTERWOOD: I can’t remember.
HEALY: I really need you to think hard, Sandra.
WESTERWOOD: No. I don’t think so.
HEALY: So it might just have been an olive-green shirt, not a shirt associated with a particular delivery company?
WESTERWOOD: I suppose so, yeah.
HEALY: Did Gail seem concerned by his presence?
WESTERWOOD: Oh no, definitely not. She seemed happy. She and the girls seemed to be comfortable with him.
At the end of the interview with Westerwood, she’d given a description of the man, but the results were vague: white, five-ten to six feet tall, black hair, mid-to-late thirties, medium build. That was never likely to take investigators very far.
‘The Malcolm thing was just one big blind alley,’ Healy said, rubbing together the fingers and thumb of his right hand. The coarseness of his skin made a crackling noise. ‘My team came back with a list of over eleven thousand men with the first name Malcolm in the Greater London area alone. And what if it wasn’t Malcolm? What if it was Malachi or something else? What if he wasn’t even from London? We didn’t have the resources to cope with that level of search. The only thing that really went our way was that, according to Westerwood, this guy was Caucasian – that meant we could, at least, discount names like Malik and Jamal.’
‘She said he might have been a delivery driver.’
He shook his head.
‘That didn’t lead anywhere either?’
‘Conjecture. We didn’t have any other witness statements to back her up, and although people told us they might have seen delivery vans in and around the estate in the weeks and months leading up to the murders, no one could say for sure whether they’d seen the same van returning over and over. We looked for businesses using olive-green uniforms, we doorstepped delivery companies all over the city, and we got nothing.’
The size of the task facing Healy’s team had been formidable: taking a list of 11,236 men called Malcolm, narrowing it down to those in their thirties with black hair and a medium build, then trying to narrow it down further by focusing on those who may have been employed as delivery drivers. That was even assuming Westerwood had heard the man’s name correctly, and the green shirt had in fact been his uniform. Healy, clearly, remained doubtful.
‘So that line of inquiry stalled?’
‘Yeah.’ He stopped, sniffed, shrugged. ‘We found delivery drivers called Malcolm who didn’t match the physical description Westerwood had provided, and men called Malcolm who weren’t delivery drivers, but matched the physical description. We didn’t find a single person who fit convincingly into both camps.’
‘What about CCTV footage?’
He looked at me. ‘That should have been our best lead.’
‘But it was another dead end?’
‘The council didn’t give a shit about the estate, so nothing worked there. We had three cameras that could have got us something half-decent. One was at the tenth-floor stairwell, but it was b
ust. It had been vandalized back in February, and no one had been round to repair it. Then there were two cameras on the outside of the building: one faced Cork Hill Lane, which is the only way in and out by car – that’s where you must have parked earlier on.’
I nodded. ‘And the other?’
‘The other camera faced down towards the play park. That’s where you’d approach if you were coming from the Tube station.’
‘So what happened?’
‘The one facing the play park had wiring problems, which meant the feed repeatedly cut out.’ He shook his head, chewing on his frustration. ‘The further back in time we went, the less pronounced the problems got, so on 26 March we actually found something: an unidentified man, at the swings, with the Clark family. The man matched the description of “Mal” from what we could tell, but they were too far away to make out much detail, and eventually they headed towards the Tube. It was the only time that we caught all four of them on film.’
‘What about before the camera on the tenth floor packed up?’
‘You mean, was there any video of him with the family prior to February? No. Maybe that was because he and Gail only officially started dating in the March, or maybe it just meant he was clever enough to stay out of shot – at least until he made a mistake on 26 March, and we got him on film at the play park. Either way, it never made much difference. Even when we did get him, he was just a blur.’
‘So only one camera was working the night they were killed.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did you get anything from it?’
He was rubbing his fingers harder now, his muscles and tendons trying to find the cigarette that wasn’t there, even while his thoughts remained tethered to the case and its maze of dead ends. Eventually, he reached into his pocket and removed a lighter – placing it next to his coffee on the table – and then a packet of cigarettes. The movement pulled him from his daze, and he glanced at the file.
‘Healy?’
‘It was all just a load of shite,’ he said quietly.