Cruel Acts

Derwent was listening intently. ‘He must have picked her up near the pub.’

‘That was the theory. They canvassed the area, looking for anything unusual, and they found Miss Middleton.’

‘Who is Miss Middleton?’

‘She is the resident of number 32, Corona Mews, and she does not like visitors.’

On cue the front door of number 32 opened and a narrow face appeared. ‘You can’t park there.’

Derwent slid down his window. ‘Police.’

‘Am I supposed to be impressed?’ She made little shooing motions. ‘Go on. Hop it. This isn’t a car park.’

‘Miss Middleton?’ I leaned across so she could see me. ‘We wanted to talk to you about Willa Howard.’

‘What, again?’ She was a foxy little woman with wiry dyed-red hair and sharp brown eyes. I guessed she was eighty but she was spry with it. ‘I thought I was done with all of that.’

‘Not yet, I’m afraid.’

Derwent got out of the car and she stared up at him, hostility warming into something more like appreciation. ‘Well.’

‘May we come in? I promise to wipe my feet.’

‘You’d better.’ She gave a short cackle. ‘Got to put me face on, since I’ve got visitors. Make your own way up.’

For a pensioner, she had a fine turn of speed, and by the time I shut my door she had disappeared.

‘I know I’m going to regret this,’ Derwent said.

‘Once we’re finished here we can go to the pub.’

‘But we’re on duty.’

‘I’ll buy you a lemonade.’ I peered up the stairs. ‘Can’t keep a lady waiting, sir. You’d better go first.’

Viv Middleton was waiting for us in her sitting room, enthroned on a reclining armchair that faced an enormous flat-screen television. She had applied dark lipstick with more speed than accuracy. The place was spotlessly clean and sparsely furnished – a sideboard, a small cupboard, a single upright chair to one side of the recliner with a library book on it. It looked as if it had been decorated last in the early 1980s. Two big windows overlooked the street and from the recliner, Viv would have had a perfect view.

‘You can take the chair if you want,’ she said to Derwent. I got, ‘You’ll have to stand.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Derwent said, adopting his usual pose with his feet planted far apart. ‘I’ve been in the car all day. I need to stretch my legs.’

‘Ooh, well don’t let me stop you.’ She cackled happily. For once, Derwent looked embarrassed. He folded his arms and stared at the floor.

‘Miss Middleton, you were a key witness. What can you tell us about the van you saw?’ I asked.

‘It was parked outside my house for two weeks, on and off. He’d come early in the morning and go late at night. Too quick for me, even though I was watching for him. I left notes on it, you know. Telling him he couldn’t leave the van there. And I made a note of the registration number. Complained to the council a few times but they’re useless.’

‘So you never saw the driver,’ I checked.

‘Not Stone. No. I saw him in court. Horrible-looking man. Give me the shivers. You could see he was a killer.’

‘Did you see anyone else near the van? Or driving it?’

She shook her head. ‘I only ever saw him driving away. I’d hear the door go and look down but he parked the wrong way for me to see who was driving. He’d get here early in the morning and I don’t do mornings.’

‘What was he doing here? Was there any building work going on in the street?’ I asked.

‘There’s always someone doing building work. Listen to that.’ She held up a hand and I heard the distant whine of an electric drill.

‘And none of your neighbours saw him?’

She snorted. ‘They don’t notice anything. Half of them are rented out – what’s it called – holiday stays type of thing. The other half are too far up themselves to notice a van unless it’s blocking their Ferrari or Jaguar.’ She dragged out the syllables of the car names, rolling her eyes for comic effect.

‘Not like you,’ Derwent said. ‘How come you live here?’

‘I spent sixty years working for a lovely man, an American. I was his housekeeper. He was rich as you like but he didn’t get on with his family because he was gay, you see, and they couldn’t accept that. He left me this place for the rest of my life. His family want to get me out but there’s nothing they can do. I’ll be carried out of here.’ She grinned, showing off false teeth as white and regular as piano keys. ‘All I need is someone to look after me now. What is it they call them?’

‘A carer?’ Derwent suggested.

‘No, that’s not it.’ The grin widened. ‘A toy boy, that’s the one.’

Miss Middleton gave us special permission to leave our car parked in front of her house while we walked down the narrow cobbled streets to the Haldane pub.

‘How did they link the van to Leo Stone?’ Derwent asked.

‘The registered owner was traced to a Travellers’ site in Hertfordshire. He said he’d sold it to a man he knew as Lee. Lee had promised to register it as his, but he hadn’t completed the paperwork. He didn’t know where Lee lived but he had a mobile phone number for him.’

‘Lee being Leo?’

‘Lee being Leo. They found him in Dagenham, in a house that belonged to his aunt – she died a few years ago and left it to him.’

He’d been watching television and drinking cheap lager at eleven in the morning, almost four weeks after the disappearance of Willa Howard.

‘When they searched the house they found a room with a new hasp and padlock. He said there was no key and they never found the key in the house or garden, but when they cut the padlock off they found this.’ I handed Derwent a spiral-bound album of photographs and he flicked through it: the front of the small, post-war house – three windows and a door, like something drawn by a child. The hall, a narrow and dim space with old-fashioned wallpaper. A dirty kitchen. An untidy sitting room, the surfaces covered in dented cans and takeaway containers. A pile of clothes in the corner of the room. A blanket thrown over the end of the sofa. The door behind the sofa. The padlock. The room behind it: a cheap bedframe with broken slats fanning out underneath it. A new mattress on the bed, still covered in protective plastic. No furniture, except for a large steel storage cupboard in the corner of the room. Derwent paused.

‘And this is significant, I take it.’

‘Turned out to be. It was second-hand, bought through a local buying-and-selling group and collected from outside the seller’s home while they were at work. The buyer paid cash. It was designed to contain hazardous materials. It even had an integral sump in case of any spillages.’

‘Useful.’

‘Very.’

It was empty, the inside spotless except for a wisp of plastic.

‘They didn’t work out exactly where the plastic came from but it’s the type decorators use for protective sheeting when they’re painting a room. There’s no record of Leo buying anything like that but he was in and out of building sites. He could have nicked it.’

The next picture was a close-up of the plastic. Derwent pointed at a smudge. ‘Is that blood?’