‘But is that what I want?’ he replied bitterly. ‘Way I feel right now, they’re welcome to each other. Anyway, I want to get stuck into some work, take my mind off things.’
‘Okay. You know Naomi, don’t you? She lives at the other end of this deck.’
Lowry nodded. ‘Yeah, I know her.’
‘We suspect she may have supplied Speedy with the ketamine, flogging him her sister’s drugs. We’ve just interviewed her, and she denies it, but we’re not convinced. You could keep an eye on the place for an hour or two, until we check a few things out, see she doesn’t try to dispose of any evidence.’
‘Sure. While I’m here I might catch the little toe-rags that tried to bomb me with the TV set.’
‘If you do, old son,’ Brock said, patting his shoulder, ‘just remember that they’re not Harry Jackson, okay?’
Lowry grinned and dug a pack of cigarettes out of a pocket. ‘Started again,’ he said ruefully.
*
Lisa’s mother groaned as she saw them standing there at her door, and asked them in reluctantly. ‘I’m on my way out,’ she said. ‘Sorry about that.’ She was wearing a short black leather skirt with matching jacket and boots, and enough make-up, Kathy noted, to light up Oxford Street.
‘This is very urgent. We need to speak to Lisa again.’
She sighed. ‘Well, if my friend comes you’ll just have to speak to her on your own.’
‘That’s not possible, I’m afraid. There has to be what we call a “responsible adult” present while we talk to her. If you prefer we can take her to the police station and get a social worker to sit with us.’
She wasn’t sure about that. She puckered her scarlet mouth and said, ‘Won’t take long, will it?’
‘That rather depends on Lisa,’ Kathy said, looking at the pale face watching them through the gap in a bedroom door which had just opened a few inches. ‘If she can tell us what we need to know, we won’t be long at all.’
‘Well, come on then. Lisa! Come out and answer their questions. Hurry up.’
They sat down, and Kathy said simply, ‘We’ve discovered where the ketamine came from that killed Wiff and Speedy… and Kerri,’ she added, watching the girl’s eyes grow large. ‘It’s time you told us what happened, Lisa.’
The girl’s lips set in a tight line, and for a moment it seemed that she would defy them as Naomi had done, but then the line curled down at the ends, tears appeared at her eyes, and her whole body began to shake.
Perhaps the secret of telling the difference between false and true confessions, Kathy thought, lay in the fact that the first were designed to prolong matters, whereas the second were made to bring things to an end-an end long avoided, long postponed and now desperately sought. And she had no doubt that Lisa’s confession, when it eventually came, was of the second kind. It came out with an almost physical force, making the girl’s face grimace 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.