Jane Casey - Cruel Acts

‘Pub.’

We walked in silence down the cobbled streets. I was thinking about Willa Howard running to her doom, blinded by tears and anger, and about Rachel Healy and why I couldn’t forget about her. Derwent, from his expression, could have been thinking about anything at all.

‘This is the pub.’ I pointed. It was a square, squat building on a corner site, a survivor from the 1930s with the original bar and a certain hipster cachet as a result.

‘Looks nice.’

‘It looks like the sort of place that has no CCTV, which is in fact the case.’

‘Typical.’

‘Indeed.’ I stopped. ‘Let’s go back to Willa’s disappearance. You have to imagine it’s Halloween.’

‘Yeah. Busy night.’

‘And it’s unusually warm – twenty-four degrees. The streets on either side of the pub were full of drinkers standing around making noise.’

‘Potential witnesses, though.’

‘They saw nothing. I’ve got to hand it to Whitlock here. His team tracked down a lot of the customers from the pub and looked at their photographs and video footage from their phones. It was a big night, lots of people wearing costumes, lots of moving and still images.’

‘Which showed what?’

‘Willa Howard sitting at the bar beside her on-and-off boyfriend, Jeremy Indolf. They were having a drink together to discuss their relationship.’ I looked up from my notes. ‘He was seeing someone else and Willa wasn’t happy about it.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘He made her cry. She gave as good as she got though. The bar staff all remembered her because she was so feisty. She was calling him every name under the sun. None of the bar staff wanted to go near that end of the bar, but they had to because Jeremy kept ordering drinks. Eventually she picked up his drink and poured it into his lap, then stormed out. And disappeared off the face of the earth.’

‘The boyfriend has to have been a suspect.’

‘He was, but they ruled him out pretty quickly. He cooperated fully with the investigation. According to him and the staff, he stayed here for another hour, drinking and trying to chat up other women.’

Derwent snorted. ‘He couldn’t manage two. What was he going to do with a third?’

‘Jeremy is nothing if not ambitious. Anyway, he didn’t do anything to Willa and he didn’t call anyone or send any messages asking someone else to harm her. What he did do was drink. By the time he left, he was barely able to walk. We have CCTV of him heading towards Russell Square underground and weaving across the pavement. An hour after she left the pub, Willa was long gone, but no one saw where she went and she didn’t appear on any CCTV footage that the original investigation recovered. There was nothing to say where she had gone.’

‘They were bloody lucky to get the VRN for the van.’

‘And to find “Lee”. And to discover a trace of Willa’s DNA in a cupboard in his house. Don’t get me wrong, they put in a lot of legwork to find the van, but if that bit of plastic hadn’t been recovered from the cupboard, we’d be no further on.’

‘Every investigation needs some luck.’ Derwent looked hopefully at the bar. ‘You said you’d buy me a drink.’

‘If we can talk about Rachel Healy.’

‘There’s always a catch with you, isn’t there?’

‘I like to get my money’s worth,’ I allowed.

‘Come on, then.’ He didn’t sound as if he minded too much; maybe Rachel had been playing on his mind too. He held the door open for me and I walked in, feeling the shiver of recognition: the bar, the green-painted walls, the worn and faded floorboards – I had seen it all in the files.

Willa had seen it all the day her life spun out of her control, when the biggest problem she had was an unfaithful boyfriend. If she’d met her boyfriend somewhere else, or if he hadn’t been cheating on her, or if she’d argued with him earlier in the evening … but she hadn’t.

Wrong place, wrong time.

It was the middle of the day so the bar was quiet except for some mellow swing music and the barman’s girlfriend talking him through her plans for a weekend away. We sat in a corner, knee to knee, leaning across the table like lovers so no one could overhear our conversation.

‘Rachel Healy.’ I held up her photograph. It was a formal portrait taken when she started working at an estate agents, Gallagher Kemp. She looked groomed, her fair hair glossy and smooth, her make-up professionally discreet. Her smile was warm, though, and the gap between her front teeth enhanced her beauty instead of detracting from it.

‘Pretty girl,’ Derwent observed.

‘Woman,’ I said automatically. ‘And yes. She was stunning.’

‘Wouldn’t go that far.’

I placed the photograph on the table with exaggerated care because I really wanted to smack him with it. He drank some lemonade and only the tell-tale deepening of the creases at his eyes gave away that he was smiling against the rim of the glass.

‘She disappeared nineteen days before Willa Howard. She worked late that night.’ I took a map out of the file and put it between us. I had drawn a star on the Chelsea office of Gallagher Kemp estate agents. ‘It was a Monday in October and they weren’t too busy but she’d been away on holiday and she needed to catch up. Gallagher Kemp do commercial property at a very high level, according to their website. If you have a company of five hundred people to rehouse in the City, they’re a good place to start.’

‘When you say she was working late—’

‘She was in the office, not showing any premises to prospective renters, so that’s not how she met her killer. Her boss was also working late – his name is James Gallagher. He said they left together. He gave her a lift and she asked him to drop her off in King’s Cross, although she lived in Tufnell Park. He left her near the station and drove home – he lives in Islington – and she went on her way, and no one ever saw her again. She never made it back to her flat. Ordinarily she got the Northern Line but she didn’t use her Oyster card or bank card and as with Willa there was no sign of her on CCTV.’

‘Who reported her missing?’

‘Her flatmates. They got the brush-off from their local police station – you know the drill.’

‘She’s a grown woman and not vulnerable and there’s no reason to be concerned for her safety yet.’

‘That’s the one. No one took it seriously until the following day when she didn’t turn up for work and didn’t call in either. Someone rang her flatmates and they said she hadn’t come home. James Gallagher kicked up a bit of a fuss at the local police station, which helped set the wheels in motion.’

‘Decent of him,’ Derwent observed.

‘He was the last person to see her. I’d imagine he was quite keen to find her, because otherwise he could have been a suspect.’

‘That or he felt guilty about leaving her somewhere that turned out to be dangerous.’ Derwent frowned. ‘But we don’t know that Leo Stone was the specific trouble she encountered.’

‘There’s the blood under the floorboards.’

‘Which is not an exact match.’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘It could have been hers but equally it could not have been.’