Shed No Tears

by Caz Frear

  “D’you think that would be Jesus’ take on Instagram?” Parnell’s voice is thick with sarcasm. I frown. “Ah, come on, Kinsella, you know me. Whatever gets you through the night and all that. If you’re religious, be religious, and don’t mind grumpy old me, but why, oh why, do they try to make it trendy?” He puts the key in the ignition, still puzzling over something. “So what’s your gut feel? You think he’s a dead end?”

  “I think, statistically, most women are killed by their partners, not young accomplices of middle-aged serial killers. So if it wasn’t Masters, Spencer Shaw seems like a more interesting prospect to me.”

  “So you do think Keefe’s a dead end?”

  I give him the side-eye. “Sarge, if you push me, you know what I’ll say.”

  “Yes. No. Maybe.” Parnell mimics my usual evasive stance. “OK, give me your nos. Why shouldn’t we rule him out?”

  Across the road, a door slams. Keefe rushes down the litter-strewn path of 78 Gifford Way and turns right toward The Cally. He hasn’t changed his clothes for church but he’s buttoned his shirt up, at least.

  “I don’t know. If Masters did have an accomplice, I suppose Keefe’s the obvious choice. I mean, something’s clearly gone wrong for a first-class graduate to be eking out a living doing odd jobs—that sort of downward spiral could be a sign of guilt, of wrestling with something major, I guess?” I turn back to face the front. Brandon Keefe’s now a mere sliver on the horizon. “And I’d say he’s got more anger in him than he’s prepared to let on. He can quote Bible passages all he likes, but he’s still spitting about that girl’s rejection six years on.”

  Parnell finally pulls off. “Hey, listen, I caught my first serious girlfriend on the back seat of a mate’s Ford Fiesta, and let’s just say she wasn’t vacuuming it. I’m still angry about that.”

  I try not to laugh for all of two seconds. “You are joking? That must have been nearly forty years ago.”

  “Nearer thirty, actually; I was a late developer on the romance front. And anyway, I’m not saying I lie awake plotting revenge, just that the memory still stings a bit. I wouldn’t read too much into it is my point.”

  “Oh, I get it, so we should only read into the fact he’s found God, is that it?” I shake my head, laughing again. “You’re a bloody heathen, Luigi Parnell. Are you going to be OK at Holly’s memorial tomorrow? Don’t go freaking out when you see a crucifix. No one wants a scene from The Omen.”

  9

  Sunlight blares through the stained-glass windows of All Saints Church, dappling the stone walls and making the whole world seem more vivid. The vicar’s robe glows a fiery violet. An old lady’s white coat transforms into a glittering, heavenly shroud. The peonies draped over every pew shimmer vigorous shades of sherbet lemon and bubblegum pink.

  And, of course, every speck of fluff on my black dress appears ten times more noticeable.

  “Stop picking at yourself,” says Parnell out of the corner of his mouth. “You’re like a monkey checking for lice. Sit still, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Easy on the blasphemy.” I nod toward poor Christ, currently nailed to a mosaic cross above the altar. “Anyway, you’re just as bad. Stop pulling at your collar.”

  “Can’t help it. It’s like a bloody sauna in here.”

  It really isn’t. All Saints is cool, almost chilly, in the way most fifteenth-century buildings are. Parnell just can’t pass up any opportunity to highlight the very real male hardship of having to wear a tie.

  Thursday lunchtime. Finally, Holly.

  Her time to shine. Her time to leap from being the missing-presumed-dead girl, the one with the teeth and the tits and the question mark forever hanging over her head to being just Holly. Holly Matilda Kemp. Woman, daughter, foster child, friend. And in the generous spirit of all memorial services, quite simply one of the finest human beings you could ever hope to meet. In place of a coffin, a huge photo provides the focal point. It’s hard to put an age on her, but judging by her softer features, her plumper face, and her noticeably thinner lips, it must have been taken a good while before she disappeared in 2012. Back when being attractive was deemed good enough and total perfection wasn’t the base standard set.

  Parnell and I are sat at the back, the best vantage point for people-watching. Not that there’s many to watch. A disparate group of maybe twenty to thirty—old, young, ancient, middle-aged—looking more like a market research group, cobbled together to discuss the merits of a new washing powder, rather than a close-knit band of mourners united by a common grief. The only group interacting at all are the four twenty-somethings in the front row. Three girls and a boy, leaning over one another, whispering back and forth, sharing tissues and the occasional smile.

  “Not many here,” I whisper, doing a quick head count. “Twenty-three, including us.”

  “Twenty-four.”

  A slight, handsome man, sharp-suited, maybe forty, slides into the pew in front of us. He attempts a smile, an acknowledgment that he’s cut it fine, but his heart isn’t in it and his mouth quickly returns to its tight red knot. His eyes are pink and puffy, the dark circles beneath them badges of grief. When he sits, it’s more of a slump. Parnell gives me a quizzical look.

  For the next hour, we sit, we stand, we sing, we reflect, and we listen to the man in front sniff continuously, as if valiantly holding back tears. If I’m honest, I switch off for a lot of it. It’s a skill you learn as a bored Catholic child. The ability to daydream about pop stars while reciting long, protracted devotions. To ask for God’s blessed mercy while making paper planes out of the hymn sheet. I do drift back for a sweet section where each of the Front Row Friends bring one of Holly’s “favorite things” up to the altar: a jewelry box, a juicer, a personalized book called Holly Saves Christmas!—a treasured childhood gift from her dad. And the pièce de résistance, a pair of studded suede Louboutins, which raise a laugh when the female vicar declares, “Oh my, the girl had good taste!”

  The man in front doesn’t laugh.

  The absence of any family—there was certainly no mention in the vicar’s opening welcome—means that there’s an aimless feel as the last bars of “Dancing Queen,” our unorthodox final hymn, subside. With no one specific to offer sympathies to, and no invite to tea, biscuits, and stilted conversation in the neighboring church hall, there’s nothing but a slow, silent shuffle to the exit before everyone rushes off back to their lives. Lives clearly touched by Holly in some way, but otherwise completely unconnected.

  Everyone except the Front Row Friends.

  As we leave the church, they’re huddled near the entrance to the church hall. Two of the girls are smoking roll-ups. The boy, a boxy, stunted figure who clearly compensates for his lack of height by gaining bulk in the gym, is enveloped around the third girl, which she doesn’t look too wild about. I make a beeline for her, offering her the option of escape.

  “It was a lovely service, thank you. You did well to pull it together so quickly.” She looks baffled. I offer my hand. “Sorry, I’m Cat. I’m with the police. You probably know we’re looking at Holly’s case again.”

  “Oh right, hi. I’m Kayleigh.” She wriggles out of the gym rat’s grasp, grazing my hand with hers. “Yeah, it was nice, wasn’t it? Although it wasn’t a great turnout. I didn’t recognize half the people. I think some of them were just regular churchgoers, people who’d come for a nose.” She shrugs. “But like you say, it all happened quickly. The minute they showed us those photos of Holly’s trainer and locket, we knew—we did the Facebook invite, the Twitter post, straight after that. That was only Tuesday, I guess. People need more notice to get time off work.” She casts a glance back to the others. “We didn’t want to wait, though. We’d waited long enough. We had to do something.”

  One of the smokers, a pale, sinewy girl with a red spiky hairdo that’s trying to scream “no-nonsense” but actually whispers “fifteen minutes in front of the mirror” says, “I was with her the day she got those trainers. She’d d
esigned them herself, custom-made. Two hundred quid. For a pair of fucking trainers.” She takes one last pull on her roll-up, flicking the butt to the floor and crushing it under her heavy-duty biker boot. “I’m Shona, by the way.” A point to the other smoker. “That’s Emma.” Then the boy. “And that’s Josh.”

  I lift my hand, mouth hi. “So was this Holly’s local church?”

  Shona snorts. “I suppose you could call it that, although she was hardly a regular. She was baptized here and we all went to All Saints infant school, but I doubt she’d set foot in it for years.”

  “She hadn’t lived in Dollis Hill for years, to be fair,” adds Kayleigh. “Once her mum died and she started being fostered, she was all over the place—Enfield, Dalston, Islington, Herne Hill, for God’s sake.”

  Ah, the old North-South divide—the subtext being “so she might as well have been in Finland.”

  “Are any of Holly’s foster parents here today?”

  Kayleigh gives a tight, lipless smile. “No. We only really knew Sean and Linda. Linda sent a message saying she was sorry they couldn’t make it. Sean has a hospital appointment, some sort of scan, and if they canceled it, it could be months before they got another. She said they were thinking about Holly, though.”

  Emma changes the subject, aiming a bucktoothed grin through a plume of smoke. “Hey, don’t suppose you brought that hot copper with you? The one off the telly?”

  I assume she means Blake, always good for a smoldering cameo any time the cameras start rolling.

  Parnell steps forward. “I’m afraid I’ll have to do. DS Luigi Parnell.”

  Smiles and handshakes all around.

  “Ignore Emma. She’s always on heat,” says Kayleigh. Of the three girls, she’s the closest to Holly, looks-wise. Not in the doppelganger sense, more in the effort that’s gone into her. Eyebrows, lashes, teeth, and possibly breasts, all bought and paid for.

  Emma pretends to look offended. “I am not always on heat. Although, er, hello . . .” She cranes her neck, looking past us, one hand on her jutting hip. “Who’s he?”

  I follow her gaze. The guy from the church is heading this way at speed.

  “You don’t know him?” I say quickly, before he gains too much ground. “He seemed pretty upset in there. I assumed he was a friend.”

  A collective shake of heads. Complete bafflement.

  He’s almost parallel with us now. Parnell swivels to intercept, his warrant card outstretched at eye level. “Hey, mate, Police. Can I have a word?”

  Church Guy picks up pace, waving his car keys frantically toward the road. “Yeah, sure, but can you hang on . . . I’m on a parking meter out here and I’m about thirty seconds off getting fleeced . . . I didn’t think the service would be that long . . . Give me a minute, yeah?”

  Parnell waves him on.

  Close up, Emma isn’t nearly as smitten. “Actually, he’s a bit of a short-arse, isn’t he? Shame. Nice face, good suit, but I’m nearly 5'11" in heels. It’d never work.”

  “That, and the fact you’re married,” says Shona.

  Keeping one eye on the main gates, Parnell says, “Are any of you in contact with Spencer Shaw? We urgently need to speak to him but haven’t managed to track him down yet. We think he might be on holiday—any ideas where?”

  His name turns the air stale. Josh comes into his own, pumping his fist into the palm of his hand. “On holiday? Nice. I half-expected him to turn up here. I half-wanted him to, actually. Any excuse to lay the bastard out.”

  Shona groans. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Josh! Just for one day, can you drop the bouncer act?” She looks at Parnell. “And no, we don’t have any idea where numb-nuts is. He could be dead for all I care. Sorry, but it’s the truth. Last time I saw him was around a month after Holly disappeared. He was outside the World’s End in Camden, dry-humping some blond chick in cowboy boots. A month after. A fucking month! He was blatantly seeing her before.”

  “Did Holly suspect he was cheating?” I ask.

  “God knows. If she did, she didn’t say anything. But then, that was Holly—secretive.”

  “Thing is, we don’t know that much about Holly,” I admit. “Will you tell us a bit about what she was like?”

  “Why?” asks Kayleigh, an earnest crease across her forehead. “No one seemed bothered before.”

  “Really? What do you mean by that?”

  She assumes I’ve taken offense. “Oh, I wasn’t saying . . . I don’t mean nobody cared. I just mean it was open-and-shut. That Roommate guy got Holly, end of. What she was like didn’t come into it.”

  “The facts of her death eclipsed the facts of her life,” says Shona, more eloquently, if a little pompously. “Or her disappearance, I should say. It’s always been hard to think of her as dead without a body. At least we’ve got that now.” She reaches over, giving Kayleigh’s shoulder a squeeze. “But Kay’s right. Christopher Masters killed Holly and now he’s dead too. What else is there to look into?”

  I’m not mentioning guns. This crew are a whole different ballgame to Serena Bailey or Brandon Keefe. They don’t want to block things out or run away from the past. If we tell them Holly’s cause of death, they’ll want answers, details, things we can’t or won’t give yet. I look to Parnell for help dodging the question, but he’s too busy glowering at the main gates. A few minutes have passed and it looks like Church Guy has given us the slip.

  “Just loose ends,” I say, blandly. “A few discrepancies.” And before anyone can challenge my wooliness, I follow it up with the universal question guaranteed to neutralize any tricky situation.

  “Anyone fancy a pint?”

  It’s a cheap round in The Rising Sun. Turns out Kayleigh is three months pregnant, even though, depressingly, she looks less pregnant than me, and Emma has to pick her son up later, and sporting red-wine lips at the school gates really isn’t the done thing.

  Parnell hasn’t joined us either. He’s already heading back to HQ, livid with himself for letting Church Guy fool him, and vowing to personally request, then watch, all the CCTV from the surrounding streets, so that if he did get into a car we might be able to trace the number plate at least.

  Because Church Guy was upset, no question. And it’s curious he’s not known to any of Holly’s friends. Could be nothing, could be everything, but it’s something, and it’s our job.

  I’m erring toward suspicion. People don’t just forget an encounter with the police, no matter how brief. We tend to be memorable for all the wrong reasons and in this case, I sniff a reason why he made himself scarce.

  “So did you know Holly was room-hunting?” I ask, taking a sip of fizzy water. I already know the answer from Dyer’s briefing, but it feels like a good place to start.

  Emma taps the table. “See, that confused me from the off—and yeah, before anyone else says it, I know it doesn’t take much to confuse me—but I thought Holly had her feet well under the table at Spencer’s place. He had a really, really smart flat in Shoreditch. Tiny, but swanky. Holly loved all that leather and chrome stuff.”

  “That was Holly,” says Kayleigh. “Fickle. One minute she loved playing grown-ups, going on about espresso machines and underfloor heating, the next she’d be saying she missed her own space, that Spencer was doing her head in. I wasn’t that surprised, to be honest.”

  “Yeah, but Clapham,” says Emma. “It’s nice but it’s not cool, you know? Holly liked edgy.”

  “Spencer was doing her head in how?” I ask Kayleigh, jumping back.

  “Oh, just standard stuff. Nagging her. Moaning about her coming in late, waking him up, buying too many clothes.”

  “That could be my boyfriend,” I tell her. “I haven’t considered finding somewhere else to live.”

  “They argued—a lot,” explains Shona. “Not just bickering, full-on screaming matches. Maybe they’d had a bad one that week and she thought, Sod this, I’m off.”

  “But why did she feel she couldn’t tell us?” Emma’s pain is box-fresh
; the flirty swagger of earlier all gone. “She could have moved in with me, then she’d have never gone near bloody Clapham . . .”

  “Don’t go there, Emma, not again. You know what she was like.” Shona turns to me, explaining. “Holly was a chronic oversharer about some things—like, I knew that girl’s menstrual cycle better than my own. But when it came to the big stuff, she was cagey. She had an agenda. She could be planning a mission to Mars and you’d have no idea.”

  “But you knew she was going to Clapham that day?”

  She takes a slurp of her pint. “Yeah, and she was definitely hyped about something, but she wouldn’t say what. I didn’t press it. Holly’d tell you when she was ready, that’s how she always was.” She wipes the foam from her top lip. “I told her to be careful, though. It’d already been all over the news about those other missing girls. I said, ‘Maybe give Clapham a swerve, babe. Surely whatever it is can wait?’ And do you know what she said? ‘Don’t worry about me, Shone, I’m not the type to get murdered.’ Can you believe that? Despite all the crap life had thrown at her—her dad’s accident, her mum’s overdose, the beatings she’d got in care—she still thought she was invincible.” She slumps back. “Still can’t work out if that was sweet or stupid.”

  Silence falls over the table. A silence bellowing with sadness and regret. I keep going before melancholy sinks its claws in too deep.

  “Well, what did you think she was going for?” A shrug ripples around the table like a Mexican wave. “Oh, come on, guys. You can’t tell me she said, ‘I’m off to Clapham but I’m not telling you why’ and you didn’t speculate, either privately or among yourselves.”

  Eyes dart across the table. I get the sense I haven’t so much asked a question as lobbed a grenade.

  It’s Shona, predictably, who speaks. “I had my suspicions. I always thought she was working as an escort on the sly, so I thought it might be to do with that. Maybe a high-paying client? Like I say, she was definitely hyped about something.” There’s a murmur of protest from Josh. Emma looks off to the side, muttering, “Not this again.” There’s no passionate rebuttals, though. No signs of outrage, or even surprise. “She was a receptionist in a car showroom. It wasn’t even full-time; it was, like, maybe twenty-five hours a week. And yet she always had money. Loads of it. I mean, only a few weeks before she disappeared, her and Spencer had spent five nights at the Burj Al Arab in Dubai. I looked it up—£6,000. Come on! And there were other things. Like she’d cancel nights out at the last minute, would never give you a reason. Important nights too.” She stares hard at Josh and Emma. “Remember, Kayleigh’s twenty-first, the December before?” She looks at me. “Holly was a no-show but then, lo and behold, who turns up the next day full of apologies and Harvey Nichols bags?”