‘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 quietened down then – guns tend to have that effect. Anyway, it must have been 2, 3 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 Maths 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, really 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 livewire 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.
The exception, not the norm.
It therefore comes as a relief – and a shock, if I’m honest – when, after what I’d imagine was an exceptionally dark night of the soul, Dyer agrees to tell us everything in exchange for fifteen minutes face-to-face with her sons, Ewan and Max. A noble act, she clearly thinks, judging by the pious expression she’s maintained for the past two hours, as we’ve painstakingly checked, then double-checked, every part of Fellows’ statement against hers.
In summary: they tally. Once we’re happy we’ve got what we need, we let silence fall over the room, giving her the space to fill it with anything else she’d like to hang herself with.
‘Thanks for letting me see the boys,’ she says after a moment. ‘I know you didn’t have to. They deserved to hear it from me, though, not some tabloid journalist.’
Steele’s leaning against the wall; she has been the whole time. As if sitting down with Tess Dyer is too civil a gesture for her to stomach.
‘You lured a young woman to your house, Tess. You attacked her and you made plans to kill her in the same room where you pack your boys’ lunchboxes, so spare us the Mama Bear routine, hey?’ Every word laced with disgust. ‘Where were the boys that night? Packed off to a sleepover so you had free rein to end someone’s life?’
‘At my mum’s. They often stay at her place during the week – so do I sometimes, just so I can sleep under the same roof as them.’