Shed No Tears

by Caz Frear

  “We don’t have time for this, Serena. Trust me, you just need to come now. It’s for your own safety.”

  A laugh thick with venom. “Safety! I haven’t felt safe since the day I met you. And as for ‘trust you’—I seem to remember you saying that to me ten years ago. Worked out well, didn’t it?”

  “It worked out very well for a long time. It made my career and you got to keep yours. But we don’t have time for reminiscing. They’re coming for you. We have to go.”

  My phone is on silent but I need to record what’s being said. I turn it up to full volume, praying that Parnell doesn’t choose this moment to call me. Or worse still, bloody Jacqui, ranting about the cost of kids’ football kits.

  “And then what’s going to happen?” Serena’s crying now. “I go on the run? Well, let them come. I don’t care anymore. Whatever they do to me, it can’t be as bad as this. And maybe it’s time they found out who exactly they’re employing. Protect and serve? Protect and serve yourself, that’s all you ever do.”

  “I’ve protected you. I’m protecting you now. And no one’s going on the run, Serena. We just need to get you away for a few hours while we work this all out.” Dyer’s voice gets lower. She must have stepped further into the room. I move up another stair, tailing her. “Look, what they’re suggesting is madness. They’re just fishing. There’s no way they can link you to Holly Kemp’s murder, but we . . .”

  “Of course they can’t fucking link me! I’ve never met the girl, never laid eyes on her.”

  Dyer’s voice is calm as dawn; a mother soothing a tantruming child. “Listen to me, Serena. We just need to know that you’re going to stick to the story, and right now you’re in a state and we don’t trust you to do that. We need to get you away, that’s all, quiet you down.”

  “We? Who’s we?”

  “There’s a friend of mine outside. Simon Fellows. You don’t know him, but he has a vested interest in you too.”

  “No way am I going anywhere with you, or anyone else.” Terror in her voice. A realization of just how quiet they intend to make her. “I’m staying right here. And when they come, I’m telling them the truth.”

  A pause, the sound of footsteps, then something being torn from the wall.

  “Well then, I’m just going to have to show Simon this photo of Poppy, aren’t I? Trust me—and you can really trust me on this one, Serena—if you think you didn’t feel safe before, you’ll never know a day’s peace again unless you come with us now.”

  I’ve heard enough. We have enough.

  I race up the last few stairs onto the landing, staring straight ahead into the open-plan “Nurture” space. Serena’s facing me, open-mouthed. Dyer turns to see what can possibly have turned her so anemic, so quickly. Her eyes meet mine for one second, then dart behind.

  She’s thinking of making a run past me.

  Part of me wills her to try it. It’d actually give me great pleasure to slam her to the floor or even watch her get to the bottom of the stairs, thinking she’s got away, only to meet Parnell and the cavalry who surely—surely—must be here by now.

  She doesn’t try it, though. She doesn’t do anything except shake her head and smile—regret, respect, and I could be wrong, but a little bit of relief, maybe?

  “Game’s over, ma’am,” I say, my cuffs in one hand, my phone in the other. “Turns out you were wrong—we’re not cut from the same cloth after all.”

  And it’s there and then that I realize we really aren’t, for two very simple reasons.

  I’d never threaten a child.

  I didn’t get myself caught.

  29

  “She called herself a ‘talent spotter.’ Made me feel like she’d seen something in me, something special, when all she’d seen was my address and an easy target. She knew I was desperate and she milked that desperation for years to further her own career. Acting like we were friends, equals. Like I had a choice. But I never had a choice, not in any of it.”

  A tap has been turned on, and over a decade of bad decisions are spilling out of Serena Bailey, an oozing torrent of self-pity, spreading like an oil slick across the carpet of Interview Room Three.

  “For the tape, Serena, can you confirm that the person you’re referring to is Detective Chief Inspector Tessa Dyer?”

  “Yes, but she wasn’t chief inspector then. She was a sergeant. An ambitious one.” Her face sours on the word “ambitious,” as though it’s the preserve of bullies and despots and comic-book supervillains.

  I’m in the viewing room. Steele’s sitting to the left of me, dour-faced and round-shouldered with exhaustion. Parnell’s perching on the edge of the table, shaking his head almost constantly. I’d fought hard to interview Serena myself, arguing that I’d earned it, deserved it even, given I’d been calling out her bullshit longer and louder than anyone else. But it’s for this precise reason that Steele put the kibosh on it. And she’s right, I can see that. This isn’t the time for pitted wits or the standard suspect-cop arm wrestle. What we need now is a chronicle—a detailed account of the events that led us all to this train wreck.

  And “Fair and softly goes far,” insisted Parnell, which means there’s no better person for the job than the one currently sitting across from Serena: Renée Akwa—whose approach to interviewing suspects is similar to that of winding a baby: gentle, consistent, reassuring, and results-driven.

  “I met her for the first time in a room exactly like this.” Serena pulls at the skin on her neck, unburdening herself to a bottle of water on the table. Renée’s given up on trying to maintain eye contact. It isn’t necessary, anyway. All we need are her words. “It wasn’t even her who arrested me. She’d had nothing to do with the raid. But obviously the guy who brought me in—I don’t remember his name—must have told her they had someone in custody from the Stockmoor and she saw an opportunity.”

  “Is that where you grew up—the Stockmoor Estate?”

  She shakes her head, looking off to the side. “No, although not far from it. You were always warned about the Stockmoor, growing up. My mum was a bit more broad-minded, but some people painted it as worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. It really wasn’t. I mean, there was crime, definitely—drugs, bad boys, all-night parties, everything they said, but where wasn’t there? And there were also hundreds, well, thousands, of people just getting on with their lives. I flat-shared with two girls—Shelley, a nurse, and Katy, she did something in marketing. Something better paid than me and Shelley, anyway.”

  “Tell me about the raid.” Renée’s pen is poised over her notebook. “Can you remember the date?”

  Barely a breath. “Fifteenth March, 2007. I’m hardly likely to forget it, am I? I was working as an escort—teaching the alphabet by day, giving blow jobs by night. See, I didn’t lie about everything . . .” Her eyes flick toward the camera in the top right-hand corner, confident I’ll be watching somewhere, picking the bones out of everything she says. “I’d been doing it for a few years. It was only occasional, but it was easy money and my mum couldn’t always work—she’d caught glandular fever when I was in my teens, wound up with me—so it was nice to be able to help her out. And she had no clue what being a teaching assistant paid, so she never questioned it. In her mind it was a ‘good job’ and ‘good jobs’ pay well. If only that were the case, hey?”

  “I hear you.” Renée speaks for the entire lower ranks of the Metropolitan Police Force.

  “I loved it at Riverdale, though. I felt respected, included, for the first time. I hadn’t had the easiest upbringing. I’d had a hard time at secondary school, dropped out of college. Mrs. Gopal took a real punt on me. I’m sure she had better applicants for the job, but she liked the fact I’d set up an after-school club on the Stockmoor, said it showed initiative, empathy. She said they’d train me on the job, help me get the right qualifications, a career path. I loved it. Thing is, I also loved being able to pay the rent, and eat, and help my mum out now and again, and £13,000 a year doesn’t go very far
in London. That’s why I kept up the escorting, the odd booking here and there.”

  “The raid?” reminds Renée, no way near as sharply as I would.

  Serena pulls a tissue from her pocket, crumpling it in her hand, kneading it like a stress ball. “It wasn’t a booking through my usual agency. I knew someone who knew someone; you know how it is, and they asked if I wanted to do this party. A big posh place in St. John’s Wood. They were looking for ten, fifteen girls, £200 fee for the night, with the opportunity to earn extra by pushing drugs onto the punters. I wasn’t a big drug-taker, but they weren’t exactly alien to me, and as they were threatening to cut off my mum’s gas unless she settled her bill, I said, sure, why not? I was given thirty wraps of coke and I got a tenner for every one I sold. With the fee and the drugs, I stood to make £500 easily. But if I really brought my A-game to the bedroom with these rich guys, I thought I’d get nearer £1,000, if I was lucky.” She lets out a snide laugh. “Turned out to be the unluckiest night of my life. We’d been there an hour and I’d only shifted three wraps when all hell broke loose. Police all over the place. There were underage girls working there, you see.” She looks directly at Renée for the first time, her voice cracking, her composure starting to fracture. “I had no idea, I swear. I was twenty-three and they all looked a similar age to me.”

  “But you got caught with the drugs?”

  She dabs at her eyes, nodding. “The duty solicitor said I was looking at twelve to eighteen months, probably. Well, I knew there and then I’d never work in a school again, never qualify as a teacher. I kept thinking about Mrs. Gopal, all the faith she’d shown in me. And, God, my mum—she’d been so proud of me for getting the TA job and I didn’t know how she’d cope, physically and emotionally, if I went away for a year. So I’m crying, saying all this to the detective who’s interviewing me, when suddenly he says we should take a break. And that’s the last I see of him—and the duty solicitor. A few hours later, I’m put in another room and she comes in, says she—”

  Renée interrupts. “Again, Serena, can you confirm who ‘she’ is, please.”

  “Tessa Dyer. She says she’s heard I’m in a tight spot and she’s got a proposition for me. I’ve stopped crying by then, so I laugh—I actually laugh—and say, ‘Any chance you’re proposing we forget all about this?’ and she says, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m proposing.’ She says I can walk out of the station—no charges, no record, no jail time, no having to give up the only job I’ve ever cared about—on one condition: I befriend a woman called Nicola Regan on the Stockmoor.” She stops, taking a long glug of water from the bottle.

  “Serena was Dyer’s snout,” mutters Steele, more to herself than anyone else.

  Her snout. Her snitch. Her snake. Her grass. Dyer’s “Covert Human Intelligence Source” to use the official tongue twister.

  “I knew who she was straightaway: Sonny Gibbs’ girlfriend. Biggest dealer on the estate. One of the biggest in North-West London, apparently, or certainly had plans to be. I’d actually gone to the same school as Nicola, although she was the year above me, so we knew each other to say hi to. Dyer said I had to get to know her—and Sonny—a lot better. She wanted every bit of information, big and small, about his activities on the estate.”

  “And just like that you became an informant? That must have been tough, Serena. Frightening.”

  Another swig of water. “It wasn’t ‘just like that.’ It takes months to get anything, Dyer understood that. Making friends with Nicola was easy enough. We were more or less the same age, same sort of interests—I remembered she’d been a really good singer at school, so I asked if she fancied going to a couple of open mic nights and it went from there. It helped that we’d both hated Risley High—the school we went to—and on top of that, I think she was lonely, looking for a real friend. You don’t have many friends when you’re Sonny Gibbs’ girlfriend. But it takes time to earn trust, you know—proper trust. The kind that gets you the sort of info Dyer was after. I don’t think I actually told Dyer anything she couldn’t have found out herself for nearly six months.

  “But then, after a while, and a lot of effort—teaching all day, sitting around Nicola and Sonny’s flat every night, being the ‘sister she never had’—I got something. The location of a small cannabis shipment. And then that was it, for five long years. I found out more and more stuff—bigger stuff. And it went beyond Nicola and Sonny too. Being close with them meant I was friends with everyone. I heard a lot. Handed over a lot to Dyer. She made her career off me; she was Inspector Dyer in no time. My nerves were shot, completely wrecked, but at least I was still teaching, doing something with my life. I qualified in 2009 and Dyer moved to Murder the year after. I thought there’d be some letup then, but if anything, it got worse. It was like she couldn’t bear to be out of the loop, even though it technically wasn’t her job anymore.”

  “More like Simon Fellows couldn’t afford to be out of the loop,” I mutter.

  “Were you paid for the information you provided?” asks Renée.

  “No,” she answers, vehemently. “She offered the first time. It was only £100, but I wouldn’t take it. I always had it in the back of my mind that if Nicola or Sonny ever did find out, maybe the fact I hadn’t been doing it for money would count for something.”

  It might have done. They might have killed her quickly. Left her in a state that was still recognizably human. Something for the embalmers to work with in the Chapel of Rest.

  Renée closes her notebook, straightens her blouse, rests her elbows on the table: slow, fluid movements designed to make Serena relax as much as possible. “You said ‘five long years’ just now, Serena. This started in 2007, so can you tell me what happened in 2012?”

  The answer holds little intrigue. It’s becoming so, so obvious. And yet the air in the room feels charged with a potent energy, like the second before lightning strikes.

  “Dyer called me on the Monday—the Monday after Christopher Masters was arrested. It was really early, six a.m. or something. She said she needed a favor—of course, she always needed a favor, but she sounded different this time. Weird. A bit panicked. She says she’ll come to me as she knows I have to be at school in a few hours, but there was no way I was taking that risk, so she says she’ll pay for a cab to our usual place if I come right now. An hour later, we’re in our usual greasy spoon café off Borough High Street and she says she’s got a proposition for me.”

  She leans forward, matching Renée’s posture, elbows on the table, their heads little more than a foot apart. “Now by this time, I’m utterly fed up with life, living the pretense, having this black cloud hanging over me every day, so I say, ‘I think one proposition from you is enough in a lifetime.’ But she says, ‘Trust me, you’re going to want to hear this one.’ So I listen. She won’t go into any real detail, she says the less I know the better, but there’s going to be an appeal for information on a missing woman called Holly Kemp in the Standard that evening, and she wants me to call the police and tell them that I saw her—Holly—walking down Valentine Street, going into Christopher Masters’ house. She says she’ll give me all the information I need to make it sound credible, information that isn’t in the public domain yet. Obviously I’d heard of Masters, he’d been all over the news that weekend, so I ask her, ‘Why? Why do you want me to say that? Why would I do that?’ She says I don’t need to know why. All I need to know is that if I do this one thing then we’re quits. That’s the end of our arrangement.”

  “She’d release you as an informant?” Renée clarifies.

  “Yeah. All the secrets, all the looking over my shoulder, dreading our meetings every two weeks, convinced I was being followed—all that stress, gone. All I had to do was make one statement to the police and then make sure I stuck to it, no matter what. And she was clear about that—she said if I wavered at all, ever, Sonny Gibbs would find out about me within minutes. I knew deep down I was exchanging one risk for another, but this seemed so much more
straightforward. A chance at freedom. A chance to have a normal life.”

  She blots her eyes with the tissue again. I lean closer to the screen, checking she’s not playing to the gallery, but sure enough there’s tears—plenty of them.

  “And I was pregnant. I hadn’t told anyone except my mum, not even Mrs. Gopal. But I’d not long had my first scan, heard the heartbeat, saw her stretching and kicking; I couldn’t believe how active she was. And that’s what really brought it home—it was one thing risking my own safety by ratting on Sonny, but I was responsible for another life now, so I practically bit Dyer’s hand off. I said, ‘Tell me word for word what you want me to say and I’ll say it.’ And I did. And then I repeated it and repeated it, and I never asked why again. I didn’t care why. I just cared that it was over, that I could leave the Southmoor, leave the whole area behind. Get me and the baby away from danger.”

  “Where did you go?” asks Renée.

  “My friend Mandy said I could come and live with her in Limehouse. She’d just kicked her boyfriend out and hated living on her own, so it worked for both of us. Seriously, I couldn’t get there quick enough. I resigned from Riverdale the following week. Walked away from my job, my maternity benefits—madness, but there was no way I was being tied to that area a minute more than I had to be. Obviously, I couldn’t just disappear overnight; I had a notice period, and anyway, I didn’t want to raise suspicion. But when I told Nicola I was pregnant and that I was moving away to be with the baby’s father—it’d been a one-night-stand thing, but I said he was an old friend and he wanted us to try and make a go of things—she said she understood. She’d been a single mum herself, she knew how hard it could be. Of course, we swore we’d stay in touch, and we did for a little while—I had to, for appearances’ sake—but Nicola was so wrapped up in the Southmoor, in their world, that I knew once she realized I was off the scene for good, she’d lose interest. And she did. I was free.” She flops back, heavily. “Until last week.”