in pain, as if it were something bad she’d swallowed some time ago which had been sitting like a cold stone in her stomach, and now at last could be brought up.
It was very short, just three words.
‘We killed Kerri.’
Then she burst into tears.
Her mother stared at her with a look of astonishment, the two detectives with something like regret.
The tension was broken by the front door bell, absurdly playing the opening bars from ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. Lisa’s mother jumped to her feet, muttering, ‘Bleedin’ heck,’ and raced out to answer it. The others waited without speaking while there was a short exchange on the doorstep, punctuated with expletives. Then the front door slammed and the woman returned to the room, her heels clacking on the plastic tiles in the hallway.
Now that the words had been said, the awful words she must have had to bottle up inside herself for almost three weeks, Lisa let the rest pour out, interrupted only by her sobs and moans.
The trouble with Kerri was that she had become unreliable and greedy. In the beginning, after Naomi had found where her sister was hiding the drugs, and had begun to steal them and sell them in a small way to friends, and then through Lisa and Kerri to friends of friends, they had worked together like a team, a small business venture, as Naomi had put it, for a modest but regular commission. After Kimberley was arrested and put away they thought their venture would come to an end, but Naomi seemed more determined than ever to keep it going. She managed to contact her sister’s sources and persuaded them to deal with her. Instead of fading away, their business flourished, their network of customers at the mall increasing month by month. It didn’t seem wrong. As Naomi had said to them, they were supplying a need, a market, just like all the other traders in the mall. And the mall people knew about it, or at least Wiff ’s patron and protector, who saw everything going on at Silvermeadow, knew about it, and he was paid a regular fee in kind for his co-operation. Early on he became interested in K, and took it on a regular basis. He had also requested Ecstasy, speed and poppers at various times.
‘And you have no idea who this was?’ Kathy pressed her. ‘Wiff never mentioned a wheelchair?’
Lisa shook her head, wiped her nose and continued.
Kerri was becoming unreliable, she said. She was taking stuff herself with increasing regularity, especially Ecstasy, and when she became fired up she would say things she shouldn’t, showing off to the boys. She had fights with Naomi over this, and then they discovered that she was stealing from their stock for her own use. When Naomi confronted her they had a big row, and Kerri made her threat. She said that one day soon she would be out of there, going to live with her dad in Germany, and when she did she’d blow the whistle on Naomi’s ring, and make sure she went to jail just like her sister.
Naomi said they had no choice. She spoke to Wiff, who had told them stories in the past about girls disappearing from the mall. They weren’t fairy-stories, he’d assured them. In fact his boss, who saw everything, knew who was responsible but didn’t interfere because the girls were rubbish, causing trouble. Naomi said that Kerri was trouble too, and that she had threatened to expose them all, which wouldn’t suit Wiff ’s boss. She told Wiff that Kerri was a danger to them all, and that he should tell his boss, and have him arrange for Kerri to disappear like the others.
That was how they’d killed Kerri.
Later, at Hornchurch Street, in the presence of a solicitor and a psychologist, Lisa repeated her story in a more coherent version, her tears exhausted now.
When Brock and Kathy were satisfied that they had heard as much as they were likely to get from her, they joined a waiting group of detectives, collected the warrants and returned to Crocus Court. Gavin Lowry was in the same place, a scattering of cigarette stubs at his feet. There had been no movement from the Taits’ flat.
When they knocked on the door it was as if they were expected. Brock explained that he had a warrant for the arrest of Naomi on suspicion of possession and supply of a class B controlled drug, and a second warrant to search the Taits’ flat.
During her formal interview at the station, Naomi began by repeating her earlier denials. When they told her something of what Lisa had said she replied that her friend lived in a fantasy world and made up ridiculous stories. Even when they told her that they had found an assortment of controlled drugs hidden inside the base of the bed in her sister’s bedroom, she maintained her innocence, claiming that they must have belonged to Kimberley.
Her performance was impressive, and some of those listening to the interview were convinced by it. It was only when Brock told her that they had opened up the portable radio/CD player in her room, and found the banknotes packed tight in the back of the speaker compartments, and told her the exact amount-?31,548-that she broke down.
The money was the thing, the beginning and end of it all, the profits that she had been patiently accumulating for over a year, the lottery win with which her grandparents would buy their dreamed-of cottage and take them all away from Herbert Morrison and London for ever.
Her account, when it finally came, tallied closely with Lisa’s, but with one dramatic additional piece of information. At one point, when she had been talking to Wiff, she had expressed doubts about the tale of the monster of the mall who made people disappear, and had suggested that this was a story his boss had invented to keep him frightened and obedient. Wiff had been affronted and had told her things about the man. Naomi said she hadn’t told Lisa about this, because she was frightened about what she was told, and was worried about Lisa keeping it to herself.
He had a special room, Wiff said, a secret place, a den, where he took the women and kept them before he got rid of them. And Wiff knew who the man was. His boss, who was also scared of this man, had video tapes of him, which he called his insurance. From these tapes he had made some still photographs, one of which Wiff had acquired, as his insurance. Naomi said that he had shown her the picture.
‘You’ve seen a photograph of this man?’ Kathy queried.
Naomi nodded, eyes down. ‘He was with one of the girls who disappeared.’
‘With her?’ Kathy repeated carefully.
‘Yeah, you know, on top of her, doing it to her.’
‘Can you describe the girl?’
‘Black hair, thin face, pale, bit older than me. I didn’t recognise her. She looked as if she was asleep, or dead, even though he was on top of her.’
‘And the man, can you describe him?’
‘Oh, I knew who he was.’
They weren’t conscious of it, but everyone listening held their breath for the moment she hesitated before saying the name.
Later, any lingering doubts were dispelled when she was given a file of photographs of missing women, and picked the portrait of the dark-haired girl that Kathy had found among Velma’s belongings at the hospital.
‘This is her,’ she said. ‘This is the girl Mr Verdi was fucking.’
20
B runo Verdi shook his head sadly when they confronted him with the story, as if now he’d heard just about everything.
‘You’re not serious?’ he said. ‘My God, if it wasn’t poor Kerri they were talking about I’d be laughing. Instead I just feel sick. Where do kids get these ideas? Watching too many movies, eh? Too much TV. Drug rings? Serial killers? Perverts? What kind of fantasies are these? Whatever happened to childhood innocence, eh?’
‘It went out with Mr Kreemee,’ Kathy said.
‘Now, now, now. If you’re going to be nasty I’m simply not going to say another word till I have a solicitor present.’ He stroked his moustache with an air of complacency.
‘You deny these allegations then, do you Mr Verdi?’
‘Of course I deny them!’ he said, angry now. ‘They’re ridiculous. Nothing but teenage fantasies. I’m really quite shocked, Chief Inspector,’ addressing himself entirely to Brock now, ‘that you would give them a second thought. Where is the evidence, eh? Where is this secret room, this photograph, these video tapes? These are the sick imaginings of two young drug dealers who maybe think that if they give you a good story you’ll go easy on
