Shed No Tears

by Caz Frear

  “If you keep denying everything,” I say, piling on, “then you and you alone are going to go down for the lion’s share of this.”

  Fellows looks at Bickford-Jones, then me, then Parnell. The same dead-eyed stare turning each of us to stone, before his snarl cracks wide and he bursts out laughing. “Fuck, this really is a mess, isn’t it?”

  “Then sort it out, tell us what happened. Take back a bit of control before Dyer gets in first.” I slap every card down on the table. “Look, those texts, Simon, all they point to so far is Dyer being a corrupt officer—tidying things up, tipping you off. But we believe she played a far more active role in the aftermath of Holly Kemp’s death.”

  “Aftermath?” His laugh dissolves with one last bark. “She didn’t tidy up after me, I tidied up after her. This was all her. Dyer killed Holly. I barely knew the girl.”

  I feel the energy from the viewing room like a sonic pulse. Steele on her feet, the team scattering around her, chairs scraping back, expletives issued, orders bellowed. I look at Parnell to take the lead, praying Bickford-Jones doesn’t insist on a break this time.

  Fellows doesn’t give her the chance.

  “She’d been blackmailing Tess for over a year—well, Paul at first, but then after he got sick again, he had to come clean to Tess and she took care of it.”

  “Paul?” I pick up on the familiarity.

  “I was a Gordonstoun boy too, so was my kid brother. He and Paul were best mates. Paul was like a part of the family growing up. Then Glenn, my kid brother, died in his early twenties—a horse-riding accident—and I kind of took Paul under my wing for a while. But then everything changed once his career took off. He was a real highflier in the Ministry of Justice—in the Press Office of all places, which meant he had to be whiter than white. He felt compromised knowing me, started distancing himself. I understood; it was no real skin off my nose. His wife, though, she saw the benefit of staying in touch with me.”

  “Can you be more explicit, for the tape, please,” asks Parnell. “Can you state the nature of your relationship with Detective Chief Inspector Tessa Dyer?”

  “We’ve been working together for years.”

  “Years? How many? Two, ten, twenty?”

  Fellows blows out his cheeks. “Fifteen years, give or take. I didn’t mark it on the calendar. You know, it wasn’t just about money to begin with. She also wanted information on rival gangs. How do you think she managed to take down Slevin and the Whittlesea crew so easily? Pure luck? Fuck that, that was all me. But it was a total win-win—she got to look good and I got rid of the competition without breaking a sweat.”

  “And February 2012?” I say, shifting into fifth gear. While context is great, we can worry about that later. Right now, we can’t risk him changing his mind, clamping his mouth shut. “How did you become involved with Holly Kemp?”

  “Tess asked to meet; this was right at the end of 2011. She didn’t go into lots of detail—I think she was worried I’d use it against her and Paul, which I was a bit offended by, if you must know.” Rich, coming from the man currently selling her down the river on a punctured rubber dinghy. “Paul had had ‘a lapse of judgment’ is all she’d say, and now this woman, this girl, was blackmailing him. Threatening to expose things, serious things, to his employers. I mean, the Ministry of Justice—a government body setting the rules for the rest of us, and Paul, one of their main mouthpieces? He’d be finished and he knew it. Tess said he’d been paying her off for over six months, but when he’d missed a few payments because he was in the hospital—it had to be in person, in cash, you see—she’d shown no mercy at all. Paul had cracked and told Tess, and now it was her problem.”

  “And where did you come in?”

  “Tess had met up with her, paid her, tried to reason with her. Offered her lump sums if she backed off once and for all. But she just turned the screw again, upped the payments. She knew she had a senior police officer on the ropes now, so why not?”

  So Dyer was the “big fish,” not Fellows.

  “She knew Holly Kemp was never going to leave them alone, and with Paul ill, not working, and the medical bills . . . well, she asked me if I’d put the frighteners on her, warn her off. And for old times’ sake—for Paul, mainly—I said OK. So I paid her a visit, told her to take a lump sum, quit while she was ahead. But still, she keeps going.” He shakes his head, marveling at her stupidity. “So Tess says to pay her another visit. This time I let myself into her flat. I’m waiting on her sofa when she gets home. She bolts, but I have her around the neck before she gets to the front door. I tell her this is the last time I’ll ask nicely and to stop trying to play with the big boys because she won’t win. She just smiles. Fucking smiles! But then people often try to front it out when they’re shitting themselves.”

  Linda Denby’s words: “She just didn’t seem to have any sense of danger, none whatsoever. . . . classic PTSD . . .”

  “I thought it was job done,” Fellows goes on. “I couldn’t believe it a few weeks later when Tess says she’s had the usual call—Holly wants her money.” Another shake of the head. “You almost had to respect the girl. Naive as a fucking newborn, but brave.”

  “Did you threaten her again?” asks Parnell.

  “No, that was it. I saw Tess for our usual business, but she didn’t mention Holly Kemp and neither did I. Why would I bother if Tess seemed happy to drop it? Trust me, I’ve got more important things to be doing than terrorizing people who’ve essentially done nothing to me. I mean, I felt bad for Paul, and Tess, but it wasn’t really my problem.”

  “So what happened? When did it become your problem?”

  He folds his arms, stretching his legs out under the table. “End of February, I get a call out of the blue. Tess says Holly’s at her house, she’s injured—badly, she thinks—and she needs my help. I’m thinking they’ve fought, some sort of accident . . .”

  “Where was this?” I ask. “Where was Dyer’s house?”

  “Can’t remember the exact street, but it was a big old place set back from the road, about halfway between Clapham Common and Stockwell. They’d been renting it for a while. Tess always wanted to live near whatever station she was working at—very dedicated, our Tessa—so renting suited.”

  “Where were her kids?” asks Parnell. “Don’t tell me they witnessed this?”

  “Don’t know where they were, but not at home.” He shrugs. “Anyway, I get there and the girl’s not great, but she’s not that bad. She’s lying in the kitchen, kind of groggy, half-conscious, and there’s a nasty cut above her eye, but I wouldn’t have said she was badly injured. I’d have been tempted to clean her up, let her go. Maybe now she’s learned her lesson, right? And it’s not like she can go running to the police, is it? But Tess says there’s no way she’s letting her go.” A sharp laugh. “Turns out I underestimated our Tessa. It was no bloody accident, it’d been a trap. She had it planned all along. Genius, really.”

  “Had what planned out?”

  “Killing Holly. Tess had lured her to Clapham—made up some bull about a business proposition, said they should be working with each other, not against each other. She said she could give her names of people to target—high-ranking Met officers, barristers, social workers—and Holly, bless her greedy heart, had fallen for it.”

  “CCTV has Holly leaving Clapham Common Tube and heading south before we lose her,” I point out. “That’s the opposite way to Stockwell.”

  “Tess had given her a false address. Their place was just off the main road—she knew Holly’d get picked up on CCTV heading that way, so she’d given her one of the quiet streets off the Common. She was waiting for her there, picked her up, drove her back to the house. Holly didn’t even question it, she said. She was seeing pound signs, not red flags. Rookie mistake.”

  “Wasn’t this all a bit high-risk?” says Parnell, forehead creased. “Obviously, on a logical level, I get why she wanted Holly out of the picture, but doing this on her own doorstep?”


  “But her doorstep was also the Roommate’s doorstep,” I say, looking at Fellows for confirmation. He doesn’t say anything, just gives me a snarl of appreciation. “Young women were going missing from Clapham—what harm in throwing another one in, eh? I mean, Dyer knew Holly would show up on CCTV at the Tube station—it was perfect.” I shake my head, trying to wrap my mind around all of it. “God, she must have been praying they’d never find the Roommate; it would have been a lot easier for her. Still, she doesn’t let Masters’ arrest rain on her parade, does she? She just states that his silence is proof of guilt, then she pays a visit to her old chum, Serena Bailey, and bang, Holly enters the serial killer–victim hall of fame. And that means there’s no real need to look into the murkier corners of her life.”

  Genius, really.

  Fellows gives a polite clap. “You know, Tess said you were one to watch. Ten out of ten, darling.”

  “Oh, I think I’m more of a nine, Simon, because there’s one bit I don’t get. If she planned all this herself, if she’d gone as far as to actually attack Holly, why not finish the job? Why get you involved? Surely the fewer people involved, the better?”

  “In an ideal world, yeah. But she realized once Holly was there that she couldn’t do it on her own, so she subdued her then called me. And once I’m there, she says that if I step up, if I help her, then she’s all mine from now on. She’ll never say no to me again.”

  “Meaning?” asks Parnell. “Again, we need you to be really clear, Mr. Fellows. What was Tessa Dyer asking you to do? And what do you mean ‘never say no’ to you again?”

  “She wanted me to kill Holly Kemp. And in return, she’d give me any information I wanted in the future. Any. See, up until this point, she was still trying to kid herself that she had some scruples, that there were certain lines she wouldn’t cross.”

  “Such as?” I ask, completely rapt, vaguely nauseous.

  “I’d always wanted to hear more about what I call ‘twitchy’ coppers—coppers who aren’t bent yet, but who could possibly be manipulated into playing for our side. Coppers in debt, coppers with expensive tastes, gambling habits, three ex-wives, that sort of thing. Tess had always held back before, said it was a step too far, that she wasn’t prepared to set up a colleague like that. But when you’re desperate, your conscience goes out the window. It was a good move for me.” He shifts in the chair, sitting forward a little. “See, we’d always had a slightly odd relationship up until that point. It wasn’t the usual setup, where the likes of me has the likes of you by the balls as soon as you accept my money. The fact I’d known Paul from way back complicated things. Made me a bit soft, I suppose—’cos I don’t let many people say no to me, I can assure you of that, especially when I’m funding their fancy holidays. But now, this—this gave me the upper hand at long last. If I helped her with this, I owned her, and the best thing was, it was all her idea. She was handing herself to me on a plate.”

  “So you killed a young woman to get access to vulnerable police officers. Quite the guy, aren’t you, Simon?”

  Utter disdain. “Didn’t you hear me? I didn’t kill anyone. I said I’d help her—I’d get a gun within the hour, I’d stay with her, help with the body, we’d get it sorted. But I also said that for this new arrangement to work—for me to really trust her to keep her side of the bargain—she had to be equally culpable. She had to pull the trigger.”

  “You’re saying Tessa Dyer shot Holly Kemp.”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “When exactly?”

  “Early hours of the next morning. See, the house was set back from the road, but it was still too risky going outside until it was properly late, so we waited. It was bloody ridiculous, Tess taking work calls while the girl was half-conscious in the kitchen, me standing watch.” He ruffles his black hair; it looks oily, not lustrous, under the white-hot light of the interview room. “It was gone midnight before it felt safe enough to move her to the boot of the car.”

  “Whose car?”

  “Tess’s.”

  I’ve got to ask, although I dread the answer. “Was Holly conscious? Did she know what was happening?”

  “Yeah, and I was surprised at how strong she was, actually. She’d been subdued in the house—like I said, kind of groggy. But as soon as we picked her up, she started hitting out, swearing—saying sorry, can you believe? So Tess gagged her, tied her hands and feet. She knew then. She knew this was it. It wasn’t just another scare.”

  My stomach churns. “She knew she was going to die.”

  “Suppose so. She definitely saw the gun; I made sure of that. She quieted down then—guns tend to have that effect. Anyway, it must have been two, three a.m. when we got there. She was dead within minutes of us pulling up.”

  “Pulling up where?” Parnell asks, his voice thick with tiredness and disbelief.

  “The place near Papworth. The field.”

  This one will haunt me. It’s got night sweats written all over it. I mean, you’d have to be a saint not to think Holly Kemp deserved some kind of comeuppance. But this. This eighty-mile, two-hour reckoning. Her life not so much flashing before her as dragging, squirming. Every stupid, greedy decision she ever made, pored over and profoundly regretted in the boot of Dyer’s car.

  “So why there?” I ask, desperate to get out of my own head.

  “We were actually heading for Epping Forest, but we hadn’t even got over Tower Bridge before Tess gets a call from the hospital. Paul had taken a bad turn. I don’t think they were giving the last rites or anything, but it was serious—she was panicking. I said we’ll be in Epping Forest in less than an hour, we need to get this done, but she says no, she’s heading straight for the hospital. She’d never forgive herself if anything happened and she wasn’t there. Then she asks me to take the car once we’ve got to Papworth and sort things.” He brings his hands together on the table. “Well, I saw red. I half-wondered if she was making it up, if she’d staged the call to get out of doing the deed herself, so I said no fucking way. I said we can head for the hospital if that’s what you want, but we’re going to find somewhere on the way to finish this thing. You’re going to do what you said you’d do, or you can count me out. I said I’d get a taxi back to London and leave her at the hospital with a girl tied up in the boot. I didn’t give a shit. She knew I meant it.”

  “But why that field?” I ask, drilling down. “It wasn’t the most secluded place.”

  “’Round there, at that hour, everywhere’s secluded. We’d hardly passed a car for miles. And we were running out of options. We were nearly at the hospital and Tess just kept stalling and stalling. Finally, I say, fuck this, and I order her to turn off the main drag, into the lanes. We drive for a few minutes and then I spot this track running alongside a field—a pretty overrun field. Seemed like no one had bothered with it in months, maybe years. I don’t know, I’m no farmer. But I say to Tess, this is as good as it’s going to get—do it. So she pulls over. I get the girl out, put her in the ditch, and Tess shoots her. Paul being ill probably helped, in some ways. It meant she didn’t have time to think about it. She just wanted to be with him. She was worried about him dying, not that bitch.” Bickford-Jones bristles. “Anyway, the ditch is deep. I reckon she’ll be fine there for a few days. We cover her with whatever we can find—twigs, branches, leaves—but I tell Tess we need to buy some logs, go back the next night and cover her up properly. But then something kicks off with the Roommate case the next day. There’s no way Tess can get away. I end up taking care of it.”

  “Could you tell us where you disposed of the gun please, Mr. Fellows?” Parnell maintains a professional air that I suddenly feel wholly incapable of.

  Fellows leans in, shoulders squared. “You know, I did my degree in math and statistics. It might have been thirty years ago, but some things stick, don’t they? And there was this quote from a scholar called Pierre-Simon Laplace. He said, The most important questions of life are indeed, for the most part, real
ly only problems of probability. And I’ve always lived my life by that mantra. I always knew there was a faint probability this day would come. That I’d need more than my word to make sure Tess Dyer got her just deserts too.”

  “Your point?” says Parnell.

  “Who said I disposed of the gun?”

  32

  By a strange quirk of fate, and most cases are littered with them, the gun used to kill Holly Kemp—a Russian 8mm Baikal—turns up on the Southmoor Estate, ex-home of Serena Bailey and current home of Simon Fellows’ most trusted hoarder—an eighty-one-year-old live wire called Abraham Craddock, whose name belongs in a Dickens novel, not at the top of a charge sheet next to “Illegal Possession of a Firearm.”

  If Fellows is to be believed, and depressingly, we do, Dyer’s DNA will be all over it. And so begins the wait for Forensics. Unsurprisingly, Blake hasn’t just raided the piggy bank for this one; he’s gone through his pockets, rummaged down the back of the sofa, swept a hand under every bed, and as a result we should have results within twenty-four hours. It’s fair to say that when it’s one of our own, we protect hard but we punish harder, and Blake’s main priority, in fact his only priority, is to ensure that the Met’s good name isn’t tarnished further by accusations of a sluggish response.

  Of course, DNA will only prove that Dyer handled the gun, and any first-year law student could put forward the theory that she merely held it for Fellows as he carried Holly to the ditch or bent to tie his shoelaces. Her fingerprint on the trigger would be marginally more helpful, although again, compelling but not conclusive. And in any case, usable fingerprints lifted from firearms tend to be the preserve of flashy, suspend-belief TV shows.