He doesn’t seem to have any connection with the area. He didn’t grow up here. He never lived here. So why go hunting here?’
‘Good point.’ Derwent looked around. ‘This is the sort of area you’d only visit if you had a reason to. What are we close to? Westfield?’
We weren’t too far from the giant shopping centre that was one of the main attractions of west London. ‘I don’t know if Stone is a big shopper. Hammersmith Hospital is the other side of the Westway. And so is HMP Wormwood Scrubs.’
‘Did he ever do time there?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll check. And I’ll check if he visited anyone there.’
‘You think he didn’t act alone?’
‘It’s one possibility,’ I said. ‘At the moment, I don’t feel as if I know anything about him.’
‘Maybe he followed her off the Westway. If he saw the flat tyre he’d have known she was in trouble. Offer to help – Bob’s your uncle.’
‘They checked the CCTV and didn’t see it. The only person who saw a van was Mrs Hamilton.’
‘And she didn’t get the VRN.’
‘What do you think?’
Derwent sighed. ‘All this time in the job and I’ve never had a single witness with a photographic memory.’
‘Me neither.’
‘They must exist.’
‘They’re too busy passing exams and winning pub quizzes to be witnesses.’ I thought for a second. ‘He had the van. Where was he working when this murder took place?’
‘You should find out.’
‘I should, and I will.’
Derwent stopped beside the car and stretched. ‘So this is the last place anyone saw her alive. When did they find her body?’
‘A long time later. She disappeared on the twelfth of July 2014, and her body was found in December. And the only reason it was discovered was because Willa Howard’s body was dumped in the same nature reserve. A visitor to the reserve found Willa, and then DCI Whitlock’s team searched the rest of the area. They were the ones who located Sara’s remains. That’s when it became clear that Leo Stone was responsible for Sara’s death as well as Willa’s.’
His forehead crinkled as he considered it. ‘Even though there’s basically nothing in the way of physical evidence or eyewitness testimony.’
‘Leo has always sworn blind he had nothing to do with Sara Grey’s disappearance.’
‘He would.’
‘He convinced her parents he was innocent.’
Derwent shook his head. ‘Then they’re as gullible as their daughter was.’
‘So, three months on from Sara Grey’s disappearance, he’s on the hunt again. And he finds Willa Howard slap bang in the middle of Bloomsbury.’
‘Before that, there was Rachel Healy.’
Derwent frowned. ‘He was never charged with her murder.’
‘Because they never found the body.’
‘Is that the only reason?’
‘Not entirely,’ I said. ‘When they searched Stone’s house they found blood under the floorboards, but it was degraded. They couldn’t get a full DNA profile, but what they found didn’t match Willa Howard or Sara Grey. They checked it against the DNA of missing women from the greater London area over a five-year period and the most similar one was Rachel Healy. She disappeared three weeks before Willa Howard and hasn’t been seen since.’
‘And the blood was the only thing that connected her with Stone?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Let’s stick with Willa and Sara for now, since he was charged with their murders.’
‘What about Rachel?’ I had read about her last of all, the previous night when I was yawning and desperate for sleep; it hadn’t taken long and it had woken me right up. Of all of Stone’s possible victims, she had received the least attention. No body, no evidence, no leads. A dead end.
‘If we have time, we can talk about her. But there are probably good reasons why they left her out of the original case. Three weeks before Willa Howard doesn’t leave much of an interval. Sara Grey was three months before that.’
‘It’s not scientific. They don’t mark murder opportunities on their calendars,’ I snapped.
‘That’s not what the profilers say.’
‘And you have so much time for what profilers say.’
He grinned at me. ‘It’s science. They’re basically infallible.’
I rolled my eyes, knowing full well that he thought the opposite of what he was saying. ‘Look, what are the chances the blood doesn’t belong to her? She fits the profile of the other victims, and the way she disappeared—’
‘Noted,’ Derwent said, in a way that meant I don’t care. ‘Back to Willa.’
‘Willa is the reason they found Stone in the first place. Say what you want about the original investigation but DCI Whitlock did a good job with Willa. She went missing on the thirty-first of October – Halloween. The last time anyone saw her was in the Haldane, a pub about five minutes’ walk from here.’
We were parked in Corona Mews, a narrow cobblestoned lane with three-storey mews houses on either side. Some of the buildings were businesses, the shutters pulled back on the ground-floor spaces that the private homes used as garages. It was an expensive little enclave, despite its faintly bohemian air, and it was quiet. This was the secret hinterland of Bloomsbury, part of a warren of close-set streets that were invisible from the busy thoroughfares that bordered the area, funnelling traffic north to King’s Cross and south to Holborn.
‘So what are we doing here?’
‘Willa’s disappearance was out of character – she didn’t turn up at a family event the following day, her phone was off, she’d just broken up with her boyfriend. The local CID started looking for her straight away. She hadn’t used her Oyster card on any of the local buses or the underground and they didn’t pick her up on CCTV. She was very striking – she was tall, with long fair hair that she wore loose, and she had been distressed when she left the Haldane because of the argument she’d had with her boyfriend. It was Halloween. There were lots of people wandering around, but no one remembered seeing her.’
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