by Caz Frear
“It’s a con trick,” says Shaw. “It was small fry at first. Exactly as she said.” He gestures to me. “Holly would hang around a bar, spot a guy wearing a wedding ring, and then work her magic. It didn’t work every time, but you’d be surprised how often it did. Holly would bring them back to her place—we weren’t living together then—and after about ten minutes of relaxing them, getting them at least seminaked, I’d burst in screaming that that was my girlfriend they were in bed with. I’d take a photo and if their phone was in sight, I’d grab it and threaten to send the image to all their contacts. If it wasn’t, it wasn’t a problem. Holly would usually have got enough info—where they worked, that sort of thing—so we always had something to threaten them with. To be honest, you didn’t need much. Just the shock was enough to make them agree to be frog-marched to the nearest cashpoint.”
And Loz and her dad still decided this louse was worth saving? He either talks a good game or they’re a family of Buddhist monks.
“What’s the maximum you can get from a cashpoint?” I ask. “Three hundred pounds? Maybe £500 if you’re a good customer. That only equates to a handful of wallets, I reckon. Surely that was easier than pulling this type of stunt?”
“Exactly what Holly thought after a while, so she changed the rules, upped the game. She started going to the best bars—mainly Mayfair, Chelsea, the City—and she’d spend more time choosing the target. Looking at details. The watch they were wearing, their shoes. Moving on if she thought they weren’t rich enough.” The baby tosses another bear out of the playpen. Shaw sighs and lifts her out, jigging her on his lap as he carries on. “The idea was that these targets would pay more, so we’d get whatever we could that night, but we’d insist they meet us the next night too to hand over the same again, on the understanding that we’d then delete the photo. And we did do that, initially. We played fair if they did.”
Parnell coughs—code for “Can you actually believe this lowlife?”
“Why not ask for more?” I say. “If they were meeting you the next day, they could have gone to the bank, withdrawn any amount of cash, within reason.”
“I was conscious about not being greedy—£500 to £1,000 wasn’t a huge amount to most of these men. We were confident they’d pay this to make us go away quietly. If we demanded more, it could get complicated. That was my view anyway.”
“Not Holly’s?”
“She felt that to truly protect ourselves, we had to make the threat more severe. See, there’d been this one target who’d called our bluff, said, ‘Fine, send it to my wife, she’s shagging around anyway.’ Holly was fuming. There was no way she was risking that happening again. So she came up with the idea of . . .” He pulls up for a moment, blinking slowly at the floor. “She came up with the idea of using roofies—Rohypnol—to really disable the target . . .”
“‘Disable the target?’ You’re talking about human beings here.” Parnell’s voice is entirely calm but full of loathing.
“Sorry, she wanted the men to be completely out of it, pretty much comatose, so we could get better photos. See, the photos we’d been taking up until that point were going to get you in trouble at home, for sure, and it’d be embarrassing if your work colleagues got hold of them, but they weren’t degrading, as such. Just Holly and the tar— the man, half-naked. Soft porn, at most. But if Holly could get them home, slip something in their drink—roofies work pretty quick—then . . .” He’s struggling again, reluctant to revisit this old version of himself. “We, she mainly, could stage far more compromising pictures. She could tie them up, dress them up, plant drugs beside them—and God, worse stuff too. I mean, use your imagination.” I glance at Parnell, who looks like he’s just about given up on human nature. “And, of course, drugging them gave us time to go through their stuff, get phone numbers, find out where they worked, where their wives worked. Smartphones weren’t all that common back then, but people—these types of men, anyway—still had their lives programmed into their phones, their BlackBerry.” He shrugs. “It was all working perfectly fine, there was no way anyone would call our bluff again, but then Holly got greedy—although she called it ambitious.”
The baby squirms on Shaw’s lap, getting restless. He puts her down on the floor, where she makes a beeline for Parnell’s shoes. I’d make a beeline for Parnell too, if it was a choice between him and this scuzzball.
“I should have seen it coming, really. She was never going to be happy earning good money here and there. She wanted big money on a regular basis.”
“Earning?” Parnell’s even finding it hard to smile at the baby. “You mean stealing.”
Shaw throws his hands up. “Look, I clearly don’t have many good things to say about Holly, but she’d had a tough life. She was tossed around the care system after her parents died. Her aunt didn’t want her. Nobody ever really helped her so she helped herself. That’s how she saw it.”
“And I can buy that,” I say. “So what was your excuse?”
He takes it to be a genuine question, not the barb intended. “I honestly think I was having some sort of breakdown when I was with Holly. A delayed reaction to my mum dying. It’s not like I even needed the money. I had my own flat. I’d been a good estate agent, despite everything. I’d paid off a decent chunk of the mortgage. And I had a job with a friend’s agency that was going OK.”
“So you blackmailed for fun.”
“For the thrill. It helped numb the grief. But then Holly went too far.”
Losing my mum made me do it.
It’s not a bad line for the in-laws, but it’s unadulterated bollocks. People process grief in many different ways—me through the haze of white wine, Jacqui through the treadmill, Dad through the comfort of a thousand different beds. My brother, Noel—well, who gives a fuck about Noel, to be honest? I haven’t spoken to him in eighteen months and even that feels too recent. My point being that however you’re hurting yourself, however you’re getting through the night, grief doesn’t strip you of your sense of right and wrong. If anything, it heightens it.
“You’re going to have to define ‘too far’ for me, please,” says Parnell. “Personally, I’d define stealing someone’s wallet as ‘too far.’”
“Long-term blackmail.” We wait for him to elaborate. “See, after a while Holly started to question why she was putting herself out there, dressing up, going out, going through the same old motions two, three times a week, when if she picked the right target—the right man, sorry—she could spend one night setting them up, and then months, maybe even years, blackmailing them.”
“She could have done that before?” I say, not quite following. “What sort of man was she after?”
“Being wealthy and married wasn’t enough anymore. If she was going to play the long game, she needed men with a lot more to lose. She really thought about it. She figured that ultimately, your average forty-something banker with the wife and two kids probably wouldn’t put up with being bled dry over the long run. They’d eventually crack, tell their wives, tell their HR person, maybe even tell the police if the only likely punishment was a few months in the spare room at home and a disciplinary at work. No, she needed men with standing, influence. Men whose lives would be ruined if she shared those staged photos. I know the first guy she targeted was a senior GP. He was the father of a friend—some friend, huh? He paid her £1,500 in cash every month. He had no choice. She had photos of him supposedly taking drugs, among other things. He could have lost his practice.”
“So how many other men did she target like this?” I ask.
“Several, I’m not sure precisely.”
Parnell’s pad is out. “We need names, Spencer.”
“I don’t have names! She was working on her own, basically; I didn’t want anything to do with long-term blackmail. Things got really bad between us after that.”
“Why didn’t you end the relationship?”
He looks me in the eye. “I was scared of what she might do is the truth. I’d se
en her stitch up so many men, who’s to say she wouldn’t try to destroy me?”
I know I should do the required And you didn’t think to mention any of this at the time of her disappearance? but frankly, it’s a waste of breath. He was hardly going to incriminate himself, and anyway, he can always fall back on the now all-too-familiar stance: And it had nothing to do with what happened.
So much of Holly’s life left undiscovered, unexplored, the second it was assumed she was Masters’ fourth victim.
“So what did you do with the money?”
He startles, blinking rapidly. “I’m sorry?”
My voice was perfectly clear. He’s stalling for time.
“The money, Spencer. Holly’s bank account didn’t show any major deposits, so I’m assuming she kept the cash at the flat?”
I’m taking a punt on this. There was a whole twenty-four hours between Shaw reporting Holly missing and Serena Bailey coming forward with her ID. Twenty-four hours of Holly being classed as a missing person. Her phone records pored over. Her bank accounts scrutinized. Surely they’d have picked up on something like this?
“There was no money in the flat.”
“So where did she keep it? She was bringing in £1,500 a month from one target alone. She wasn’t walking around with it stuffed in her handbag, I assume?”
He stands and scoops the baby off the floor. She kicks and wriggles, turning puce with ascending rage, but he clings to her like a life buoy. The message being: “I’m a father now. Can’t you cut me some slack?”
“Um, well . . . the money was usually in the flat but . . . um . . . it’d been broken into that weekend.”
“Broken into?” Parnell’s eyebrows hit his hairline.
“I’d been with Loz all weekend—I’m not proud of that, but there you go—and when I got back, I could tell someone had been in the flat. The money was gone, some other bits too—jewelry, an iPod, both our laptops, a PlayStation Vita I’d literally just bought.”
“Were there signs of forced entry?” I ask.
“No. But the front-door lock wasn’t great. I’d got in once using a credit card when I’d locked myself out.”
“But surely your first thought was Holly? That she’d taken these things and done a runner, especially since no one had seen her since Thursday. And yet you still reported her missing?”
“I knew it wasn’t Holly. She had two wardrobes full of designer clothes, shoes, bags. All of those were still there. And personal mementos, gifts from her mum and dad. She would have taken those over my bloody PlayStation.”
“How did you know she didn’t have her laptop, though? What made you assume that had been stolen?”
“She never took her laptop anywhere. She never had the need, and anyway, all her bags were far too small. That’s one of the million things we used to argue about—how she’d spend £300 to £400 on a handbag and you could barely fit your keys in it.”
“So you told the police all this,” I say, although I don’t remember seeing it in the case file.
“No. No, I didn’t.”
“No?” My exasperation makes the sleeping child stir. “You didn’t think it was important to mention it when the police arrived to talk about Holly?”
“I wanted them to concentrate on her. I thought that if I mentioned the burglary . . .”
“They’d have dusted for prints, checked CCTV. They’d have been able to do their jobs properly,” says Parnell.
Dyer had said she’d known he was lying about something.
I persist. “Seriously, you didn’t make any connection between your flat being burgled and Holly going missing?”
He shrugs and I could slap him. “I’d been burgled before. I kept pretty shady company back then, it could have been anyone. Look, I probably would have mentioned it eventually, but when we found out she’d been seen with Christopher Masters, everything spun in a different direction. Suddenly she wasn’t ‘missing’ anymore. It was obvious he’d killed her. The burglary was irrelevant.”
“Thing is, Spencer, for a few different reasons, it isn’t so obvious now. And you’ve just told us a story that suggests God knows how many other people had a reason to want Holly dead. If you don’t have names, do you still have any photos of the men who were blackmailed?”
The baby wails and I know how she feels. Shaw shouts over the top, making little effort to soothe her. “No, not anymore, not in a long time.”
“Are you sure you don’t know names?” says Parnell. “You knew Dale Peters.”
“Because he was different. She wasn’t blackmailing him, exactly, she was stringing him along for a payoff. I think she actually liked him, in her own way. That’s why she took a different approach. She enjoyed his company for a while.”
She enjoyed the five-star hotels. But still, cold comfort for the lovesick half-wit.
“Back to this GP . . .” says Parnell.
“I told you,” Shaw whines, worse than the baby. “I don’t know who he is.”
“You said he was the father of a friend. What friend?”
“I honestly don’t know. ‘Friend’ was a loose term with Holly. It could have been someone she met twice.”
“What about Simon Fellows?” I ask, his name a hard thud. “You said Holly was ‘stringing along’ Dale Peters, which implies she told you what she’d told him about Fellows.”
“No.”
Instant. Emphatic. More a plea than a reply.
There’s recognition though. It’s in the pallor of his skin, the panic in his eyes. It’s in the way he puts the baby down, as if fear has weakened his body and he doesn’t trust himself to keep hold.
Parnell laughs. “We’ll take that as a yes then, Spencer. Don’t take up poker would be my advice.” After a long silence, he adds, “And I’d try answering the question again. That would be my other piece of advice.”
“Look, I didn’t know the details but she said she’d landed a big fish—‘a crook with lots of cash.’ I said to her, ‘What do you mean, a crook? What kind of crook?’ She just laughed and said, ‘The worst kind.’”
“But she didn’t tell you his name?”
“I’ve got a family.”
“Which means she did.”
He looks desperate. A living, breathing, trembling definition of being trapped between a rock and a hard place. But there’s only one choice he’s ever going to make—self-preservation.
“I’ll say it again—no, she didn’t tell me his name. And it doesn’t matter what you threaten, I’m not going to say that she did.”
22
Jacob Pope died this morning.
Serena Bailey hasn’t turned up on CCTV.
Brandon Keefe’s brother backs his story up, and still nothing to connect Masters to either a gun or the Caxton site.
And then Parnell and I enter the fray, heavy on motive, light on suspects.
Or provable suspects, I should say.
It’s fair to say Steele’s frustrated, and frustration is one of her more animated states. Anger makes her motionless, arms folded, chin high, four-inch heels stamped wide, virtually drilling the floor. Disappointment has her seated, hands clasped and head dipped, reproachful eyes peering up at you beneath her Chrissie Hynde fringe.
But for the past ten minutes, she’s been at full throttle. Hurtling like a roller coaster—right, left, up, down, corkscrewing around desks, trying to whip up logical debate. I’ve been keeping my head down, scribbling in my notebook, edging ever closer to dislodging the pebble in my shoe.
Finn—age 8. Just about to finish Year 3.
Poppy Bailey—age 6? Just about to finish Year 1.
Plus, a spot of personal planning:
NYC v SO15—pros/cons
Check out US Visa situation—B2 Tourist??? ESTA?
“So, Jacob Pope?” asks Parnell, lobbing me a warning look—pay attention.
I throw my pen down and sit back.
“Cardiac arrest,” says Steele, currently circling Flowers’ desk. “Well
, respiratory failure leading to cardiac arrest. His lung was punctured.”
“Boo-fucking-hoo,” says Flowers. “That’s karma for you. Who did the honors?”
It’s not often I agree with Flowers and I’m not about to start now. While I won’t be crying over Pope, his mum, who visited him regularly, undoubtedly will.
“Lad called Arlo Rollins,” confirms Steele. “A gang thing, they reckon. He’s saying nothing, which probably means he got his orders from the outside—they’ll be looking at his visits and calls, of course. Quiet lad, by all accounts, not prone to violence. Only twenty. He’s serving two years for various drug offenses, although he’ll obviously be serving a whole lot more now. Another young life down the tubes.”
The hopelessness seems to drain her and she finally sits down. A silence falls briefly and then a sigh that could sink a ship.
“So, you two . . .” Me and Parnell. “Good golly, Miss Holly—what on earth was she playing at? Because that’s one heartbreaker of a lead you’ve brought back—a woman with more enemies than you can shake a stick at, but no easy way of tracking them down, short of putting out an appeal along the lines of, ‘Hey, were you blackmailed by Holly Kemp? Care to fuck up your marriage and become a murder suspect in the process? Come and have a chat with the Metropolitan Police . . . ’”
“We do have one suspect,” I say. “Fellows.”
“Er, we have two—Masters and Fellows,” says Flowers. “And if it was Masters, I don’t think we’ll ever prove it conclusively, not now.”
“Shall we just pack up then, Pete?” snaps Steele. “File this one under a bit too tricky and head over to the Tavern?” She turns her attention back on us. “So is Fellows the ‘big fish’ Holly landed?”
Parnell answers. “Shaw’s face said yes, but do you know what I’m struggling with? Would she—would anyone—be stupid enough to blackmail someone like that? And he’s gay. He would have hardly gone home with her, so how would she have got him into a sexually compromising position?”