by Caz Frear
A different beast. An apt choice of phrase, but a gloss job, if ever I heard one.
Because I know what Parnell’s thinking. If I’m honest, I’m thinking it too.
That’s a different killer, entirely.
6
I try sweet-talking. I try sour-talking. When those both fail, I opt for plain old-fashioned begging. Sadly, none of these tactics mask the fact that Christopher Masters is very much dead and an immediate threat to no one, so my request for his bank records is graded “low”—otherwise known as “yeah, whatever, we’ll get round to it.”
It takes longer than it should to trace Serena Bailey too. Since last contact in June 2012, when she was told, “Thanks for the ID but we don’t quite have the juice to charge Masters with Holly,” she’s moved house, changed jobs, got a herself a brand-new mobile number, and God alone knows if she even checks her email.
Parnell’s not impressed. Every witness in an unsolved murder case—even one like Holly’s, with its potent whiff of “We all know who did it”—is told that they shouldn’t change their contact details without informing us immediately. But then this job is basically fueled by people doing things they know they shouldn’t. Hell, this job is partly populated by officers doing things they know they shouldn’t. I should know; I’m one of them. And it’s why, unlike Parnell, I’m a little more “live and let live.”
Not so much sympathy for the devil as empathy for the fuck-up.
We finally track Serena down to a mouthful of an establishment—St. Joseph of Cupertino Roman Catholic Primary School. SJC for short. “Holy Jo’s” for laughs, according to Flowers, who lives three streets away in Limehouse, a few miles east of the City. There’s something distinctly un-Catholic about the building. Vernacular and functional. A dour gray smudge of 1950s architecture, erected in a rush to cope with the postwar baby boom, and to hell with looking pretty.
“Miss Bailey’s outside, may God have mercy on her soul.” Evelyn, SJC’s barrel of a receptionist, lets rip with a smoker’s laugh and an affectionate warning. “Honest to God, they go proper nutty altogether when it gets near the end of term. You’ll wish you’d worn your riot gear.”
She’s not wrong. Walking onto the school fields is like peaking on an LSD trip. A carnival of color, shrieking, and cartwheeling limbs. Fever-pitch emotion smacking us hard from all sides.
“So this Joseph of Cupertino,” says Parnell, before shouting, “Oi, steady!” at two little whirlwinds hurtling toward us on pogo sticks, “who was he, Patron Saint of Pandemonium?”
“Dunno. Sounds Italian to me.”
“‘Sounds Italian?’ That’s the best you can do?”
“Jesus, Sarge, I’m a pick-and-choose Catholic, not a Benedictine nun. I only do the guilt and the wafer and the half-arsed attempt to give something up for Lent. I don’t do obscure saint names.”
“Lent?” He glances sideways at me. “What’ve you ever given up for Lent?”
“Doughnuts. Same every year since I was five.”
He loves this. “Doughnuts! Oh, that’ll get you a spot in heaven, for sure.”
“God loves a trier. ’S’all you can do in the end.”
“Yeah, but isn’t the whole point of Lent that it should feel like a sacrifice? You barely eat bloody doughnuts.”
I’m saved from further interrogation by a munchkin in a tutu and a pink “Go Jetters” T-shirt.
“I love doughnuts. I love the jammy ones. I could eat ten and not be sick.”
“Me too,” I say, smiling at her. “But I like the custard ones.” I hunker down, eye level. “Hey, can you tell me where Miss Bailey is?”
“You’re a stranger. Miss Bailey says we mustn’t talk to strangers.”
“That’s right.” I take out my warrant card. “But look, do you know what this word means?”
She stares intently. “Po-lice. The police keep us safe. I’ve got a book about Police Officer Pippa. She’s pretty, just like Miss Bailey. And she’s got a dog called Banjo. Have you got a dog?”
“I don’t.” A sad face, then a reassuring smile. “But I keep people safe just like Police Officer Pippa, so you can tell me where Miss Bailey is.”
“Are you going to run the race too?”
For a second, I’m thrown, but of course—Sports Day. I thought the mood was too anarchic for a simple afternoon break.
“I might. Or my friend might,” I say, offering up Parnell. “He’s very fast.”
She takes him in, looking unconcerned by his paunch, unaware of his bad knees. “Is he as fast as a cheetah? That’s the fastest animal on earth.”
“He is. He’s faster than a cheetah on roller skates.”
She laughs at this before another child calls her and she instantly loses interest. “Miss Bailey’s over there,” she shouts, already running, her finger pointing toward a large group of kids, adults, pushchairs, and a few dogs congregating on either side of a makeshift running track—one cone marking the start, another marking the end. “But the grown-ups’ race just started. You won’t be able to join now.”
Shame.
We move quickly, and by the time “the grown-ups” are scuttling the last few meters in their bare feet we’re in prime position to applaud them across the finish line. I take a punt on who a little girl might deem “pretty” and call out to a woman in her thirties with a swingy brown ponytail—the runner-up in the race but the clear winner in the looks department.
“Can I help?” she says, breathless, twisting her skirt around the right way. Parnell shows his warrant card and she stares at it with huge green eyes. So huge that she can’t help but look slightly enchanted by it, by everything around her. The perfect face for reading stories to children. “Police? What’s this about? If it’s safeguarding, I was just deputizing. You need to speak to Mrs. Hawley.”
“We’re not here about safeguarding. We need to speak to you about Holly Kemp.”
“Oh . . . right . . . wow.” There’s a pink tinge to her skin—understandable when you’ve just run one hundred meters in the punishing afternoon heat—but the name brings a deeper flush to the surface.
“You’re a hard woman to track down,” says Parnell, disapprovingly. “I’m sure you’d have preferred us not to turn up at your place of work, but we had no choice. We had no contact details.”
“I’m sorry . . . I honestly didn’t think to contact you. It was all so long ago.”
“Is there somewhere less rowdy we can talk?” As if to demonstrate my point, a dispute over a water balloon erupts within earshot, followed by a loud bang. “Maybe we could go inside?”
She nods and puts her shoes back on. We head toward the building, chatting predictably about the heat, and by the time we’ve slipped through the side entrance into the blessed cool of the assembly hall, the squeals and chants and arguments from the field have faded into background noise. Serena’s classroom is at the bottom of a long bright corridor—MISS BAILEY YEAR 2 stenciled on the door, along with an instruction to WORK HARD! BE KIND! HAVE FUN!
A design for life, when you think about it. Although a lot easier to abide by when you’re five rather than twenty-seven.
Every infant classroom the world over has the same distinct fragrance. Sweaty heads and blunt crayons. Disinfectant and cheese pizza. Serena clocks my wistful smile. “I’m guessing you don’t have kids. This your first time back?”
“In an infant school, yeah. I did a stranger-danger talk to a bunch of Year Sixes a few years ago. Waste of time. They were more streetwise than me.”
“That’s a depressing thought.” She sits down on the one adult chair. “So what’s this about Holly Kemp? I know it sounds awful, but I haven’t thought about all that in years.”
Which is bullshit. I don’t care what she says, the girl who you were the very last person to see alive is going to be a significant specter in your life. Almost as significant as the people hanging from the branches of MISS BAILEY’S SPECIAL PEOPLE TREE.
Poppy. Robbie. Mum. Grandma
Joan. Mandy. Noah. Auntie Beverley. Peanut.
“I’m surprised you haven’t heard.” Parnell takes a kiddie chair. His bulk spills out of either side but the legs hold firm, prompting me to do the same. “We’ve found her remains. It went out on the lunchtime news.”
“It’s been a hectic day.” Her eyes couldn’t get any wider. “Where?”
“Caxton. It’s a village in Cambridgeshire.”
“Cambridgeshire? That’s . . .”
“Different. We know. And due to a few other discrepancies . . .” That’s me, queen of the understatement—a bullet to the head being a discrepancy with a capital D. “We’re revisiting the case, checking our facts again. Your ID was our cast-iron link to Masters, so we need to make sure you’re as cast-iron now as you were back then.”
There’s a sheen of sweat on her forehead, although in fairness, there’s probably one on mine too. “What discrepancies?”
“We can’t go into that,” I say. “Sorry, I know that probably seems unfair. As soon we can share, we will, I promise.”
“Christopher Masters is dead, isn’t he? I read it in the papers a while ago.”
“Oh, so you had thought about it in recent years?”
It’s honestly an observation. She takes it as an accusation.
“What I meant was, I’ve tried not to think about it for years and I saw it on the front page of the paper. Well, you couldn’t miss it, it was everywhere. But I don’t let myself wallow anymore. I block it out as soon as it comes into my head. I’ve got this therapist friend who says blocking things out is the path to a nervous breakdown, but it works for me. I just don’t want to think about that day. About what I could have done.”
Bystander’s guilt. The complex cousin of Survivor’s. Because on a rational level, what could she have done? She didn’t have a sixth sense or a crystal ball. Six Valentine Street was just a house like any other the day Holly Kemp trooped up its path. But then guilt is rarely rational. I still feel guilt that my mum died, and yet none whatsoever for wishing that Frank Hickey would.
I pull a file from my bag, resting it on my lap. “We’re going to need you to think about it now, Serena.”
She stares at the file, knowing instinctively what it is—the document that’s come to define her existence as clearly as her birth certificate. “You want to go through my statement again?”
“Just tell us about that afternoon.” We don’t want her thinking in terms of her statement. The exact words she committed to paper. We want to see what the passage of time has added or subtracted. We want every doubt she’s ever had since, every tiny detail that’s emerged during the three a.m. horrors. “I’ll probably take a few notes. I know that can be distracting, but honestly, don’t let it put you off your stride.”
“My stride? It might be more of an amble. It was a long time ago.”
“It was. A long time for Holly’s loved ones to be wondering what happened to her.” Parnell lays the guilt on with a trowel.
“I’d say it’s obvious what happened to her, wouldn’t you?” A pinch short of arsey. “I saw Holly Kemp on Christopher Masters’ doorstep and she was never seen again.” She bobs her head from side to side, as if bored of repeating the same mantra. “That’s it. That’s all there is. I said it a hundred times in 2012. I can’t say it any different now.”
“Pretend this is the first time,” I urge. “Go back to the beginning.”
“The beginning?”
I smile. “I don’t mean what you had for breakfast that morning. Let’s start with what brought you to Clapham that day. You lived north at the time, right?”
“Yes, I was teaching in Edgware. Riverdale Primary. That was a great school. I mean, it’s OK here. There’s a good management team and the kids are lovely, but . . . oh, forget I said anything. It’s fine, it’s just different. It’s an inner-city school whereas Riverdale—Edgware, really—had that sweet suburban feel. I’m just being a snob, ignore me.” She flaps her hands, flustered. “Anyway, I was picking up tickets, in answer to your question. I was a real gig-goer in those days. I don’t get the chance much now because of my daughter, but back then, if I didn’t see live music at least once a week, I broke out in hives.”
“My eldest son’s the same,” Parnell says. “Keeps moaning that he can’t afford the deposit for a house, yet he somehow manages to keep Ticketmaster afloat.”
She laughs. God bless Parnell and his universal rapport. I’ve been to two concerts my whole life and I was policing one of them.
“I’d bought tickets off eBay, collection only,” she goes on. “Lady Gaga. They’d sold out on all the official sites, so the only option was to pay double and cross your fingers you didn’t get conned. But, you know, Lady Gaga—I thought she was worth the risk and the two-hour round trip.”
“And was she?” I ask.
“Er, that would be a no. I arranged to meet the guy in The Northcote and he didn’t turn up. I waited for around forty minutes, kept dialing the number he gave me, but, of course, no answer. I was going to get another vino and wait a bit longer but then I thought, What are you doing, you idiot? He’s not coming. You’ve been had. I headed off, cursing myself for wasting £180. It was nearly a week’s rent.”
I know The Northcote. I once dated a performance poet—yeah, I know—who lived fairly close by. For three relatively dull months, we got drunk on relatively good wine, drenching the fact that we didn’t have anything in common in £30 bottles of The Northcote’s finest Chablis. A performance poet with a gold Amex. I was going through an odd phase.
My point is, I know the area. The layout.
“OK, you said in your statement that you traveled to Clapham Junction that day. Presumably you were headed back the same way?” An immediate “Yes.” “So what brought you down the side streets then? Down Valentine Street? Why didn’t you just head straight back down Northcote Road?”
She suppresses a tiny grin. “I was avoiding someone. I’d been seeing this guy a few months before, and I’m not proud of it, but I’d kind of ghosted him, although I don’t think we used the term back then. He worked in one of the Italian restaurants and I didn’t want to risk him seeing me.” A girl after my own cowardly heart. “So I cut down one of the side streets. Ended up walking a ridiculously long way around. I can’t remember the name of the street now, but it led onto Valentine Street.”
“And this was what time?”
“Four p.m., give or take.”
Bang on, give or take.
Parnell shifts in his kiddie chair, pointlessly trying to get comfortable. “Talk us through seeing Holly. I know it’s been a long time, I know it’s hard, but as much as you remember.”
I’m not sure she is finding it that hard. The reminder of what happened, yes. The detail, no. For a woman who claims she blocks out memories at whim, she’s doing a remarkably good job of dragging them back front and center.
“I’d just turned onto the street. There was a great big hedge bordering the house on the corner . . .” Christopher Masters’ house; the hedge acting as a shield when the time came to move the bodies. “And a girl was walking toward me—Holly Kemp, I later found out.”
“That must have been fleeting,” I say, scribbling furiously. “What made you so sure it was Holly?”
Parnell jumps on board. “I was thinking that. I know this makes me sound like a complete old fogy, but Holly Kemp—she was attractive, but she looked like a million other girls: the hair, the lips, the lashes. And yet you knew straightaway it was her when you saw her in the paper.”
“One hundred percent.” We wait for more. “There were a couple of things. First, it was raining—not heavily, but she didn’t have an umbrella and neither did I and I felt bad for her. I mean, it didn’t matter about me, I was my usual scruffy self . . .” Which on first impressions means she might have ditched a second coat of mascara that morning. “But she looked so glamorous. She had this blond salon-flicky hair and she was wearing this gorgeous white coat—well, it was of
f-white, cream, I suppose.” She makes a sweeping motion with both hands. “It had this huge fur collar, belted, stunning. I half-thought about asking her where she got it. But anyway, I had a coffee in my hand; I’d bought one when I left the pub, and as we passed, I’d tripped, and a tiny bit splashed on her coat. Tiny, though. I’m talking microscopic. Most people would have said ‘Don’t worry about it’ but she really scowled at me. That’s why I remembered her. Anyway, I carried on walking past and next thing, I heard the gate bang.”
I’m confused, my mind already in reconstruction mode. “So how did you see Masters at the door if you’d walked past by then?”
She leans forward, eyes darting between us both. “You know that sudden feeling you’ve forgotten something? I thought I’d left my bank card in The Northcote. I’d been distracted on my phone when I was paying, see, and it wouldn’t be the first time I’d done it. I stopped dead in the street, looking in my purse, my bag, but it wasn’t there. So I turned around to head back, cursing myself, and as I walked past the gate again, Holly was on the doorstep and Christopher Masters had opened the door. He was saying something to her, smiling, sort of ushering her in.”
“That’s pretty observant,” I say. “It wouldn’t be the first, or second, or even fifth time I’ve left my card in a pub, so, trust me, I know the panic. I don’t think I’d have been paying much attention beyond that.”
“Maybe it’s teaching infants. Multitasking. Eyes in the back of your head.”
I nod, letting her have it, but for some vague, just-beyond-reach reason, I’m not quite sold. “So it was four p.m., late February. Was it starting to get dark?”
I should know this, but this summer has been endless. February, oh, the halcyon days of February, with its fog and its frost and its bluebells pushing stealthily through the soil, seems as alien as the Stone Age right now. A different space-time continuum.