The Silent Ones (12 page)

Sonny threw his hands up. ‘Bwoy, we know she been dumped, don’t need no computer for that!’

D
arren tailed the Fiesta to the first set of lights. He stared in his rear-view mirror, fully expecting a TV van to be following. But it wasn’t. He looked at the Fiesta. This befriender didn’t want to see reporters either. The lights changed and the line of cars began to draw away. At the next junction Darren needed to turn right for Streatham – he had abandoned his parents’ argument to try and see Olivia and should go back to his mum, support her on this difficult day. But the Fiesta carried on straight ahead and Darren followed.

He turned the radio on and found that dental records had confirmed that the bones on the South Downs were Molly Peters’s. He switched the radio off when Orin Bukowski’s voice came on. His parents didn’t like Orin. He had never been sure why, but the feelings were strong, even after all this time.

The white Fiesta was still two cars in front, and Darren just kept on following until it reached Clapham Park Road near Clapham Common and pulled round the back of a big corner pub that looked as if it had once been a bank.

Darren coasted to a halt further along and used his rear-view mirror to see what happened next.

The man appeared a few minutes later, crossed the street and let himself into a door next to a tired-looking charity shop. Darren got out of the car and approached the door. Just one bell, no name. There were two storeys above the shop, a flat-fronted Victorian building gone to seed, dirty windows that looked like they were never opened, grey nets over the windows. Darren got back in his car and waited five minutes but the man didn’t come back out. He turned into the car park behind the pub and saw the Fiesta in a corner on the loose gravel.

He pulled up near it, got out and looked around. No one was about this early in the morning, the pub still closed. He peered through the car window. A mess of papers was shoved between the seats, along with a half-eaten Yorkie bar. He took a photo of the licence plate with his phone and walked back to the charity shop.

He opened the door and a bell dinged. By the counter were two plastic bags of clothing and a young woman. She had jet black hair and was skinny, with tattoos and a pierced nose. The shop smelled of old clothes and mothballs.

‘How do I post something next door? There’s no letterbox.’

‘The post comes here, the flat is connected to the shop.’

‘The guy who lives there, what’s his name?’

The girl shrugged. An old woman came out of the back of the shop, a pair of patent black shoes in one hand. ‘Can I help?’

‘I’ve got something for the guy next door.’

‘John Sears? We can take it in here. He has a key, the shop and the flat go together.’

‘OK great, let me just go and get it from my car.’

‘Here, take a leaflet.’ She handed him something in a bright colour that talked about refugees in Bosnia and Kosovo and Darren left, the bell jangling as he went.

He walked to the Common, his mood dark, and phoned Kamal from a lying-down position on the grass. As the answerphone clicked in he hovered his legs two inches above the grass, so that when he finally got to leave a message about being too ill to come in to work he sounded like he was gasping his last.

He hadn’t eaten, so he found a small café and ordered a fry-up. The TV news droned on a set in a ceiling corner of the room. He was tucking in to his food when Olivia’s picture filled the screen, the stock image from ten years ago, with the swollen eye and the bad hair. Then the screen filled with pictures of the five victims. They always used Carly’s school photo, her dark hair falling into one eye. Her teeth looked too big for her mouth to Darren now.

There were shots of the site where Molly had been found. In the glory of a June summer day the South Downs looked so beautiful it made Darren’s scarred heart ache anew. He missed the sea, he missed the countryside, shut up as he was in south London. He had no appetite left; he pushed his plate away.

The girls and women ranged in age from fourteen to eighteen. They weren’t alike particularly; some were blonde, others brunette, Rajinder’s family were originally from Pakistan. Carly and Isla were friends from Brighton, Molly had lived in Hove, Heather was from Eastbourne and Rajinder was from Burgess Hill. The investigation into their disappearances had been slow to start and there had already been one inquiry into why. No one had realised at first that the disappearance of Heather, the first victim, was suspicious; she was a troubled girl who’d run away multiple times from a children’s home, she’d had problems with drink and drugs and had been arrested for soliciting. The last known sighting of her was on Brighton Pier in 2001. She had been fifteen.

Rajinder came from a strict Muslim family and had rebelled against her arranged marriage to a cousin from Lahore. When her family reported the bright eighteen-year-old missing in 2002 the police had initially suspected the family, causing uproar in the local community. That Rajinder had fallen into Olivia’s clutches was only discovered when Olivia was arrested and her house searched.

Fourteen-year-old Molly Peters never came back from a trip to Preston Park in 2002. The lack of urgency in the case was later criticised in an official report, but the investigation had been complicated by Molly’s chaotic life – her mum was a drug user with multiple boyfriends and the family were known to social services. Molly had written a note to say she was running away.

Carly Evans and Isla Bukowski, fourteen-year-old friends, disappeared on a late-afternoon shopping trip in November 2003. Happy and contented girls from secure families, their disappearance launched one of East Sussex’s largest police investigations.

Slowly, meticulously, the police investigated every avenue. It wasn’t a dramatic breakthrough that solved the case, it was dogged, methodical police work where every little bit of information built on previous information to complete a solid picture. Finally Olivia cracked under the weight of the evidence put before her.

The police had a problem gaining much information from the runaways and drug addicts who had been Heather’s friends. They all distrusted the police and were reluctant to get involved. One girl, ranting in the back of a police car, said that the only person who had been nice to Heather had been her social worker – she’d hung out at her house sometimes. This titbit of information led the police to pay their first visit to Olivia, hoping she may be able to shed some light on her disappearance. Olivia didn’t reveal much but did give them some dates. Shortly afterwards, it was discovered that Olivia Duvall had for a few weeks been assigned as caseworker to Molly Peters. This time two senior police officers paid Olivia a visit and looked round the house; they noted the heavy lock on the door to the basement and the rings set in the beams that ran along one wall.

The police began to look into the life of the solitary Brighton social worker, at this stage looking for men who might be connected to her. At the same time CCTV footage of central Brighton was being combed to try to find the last movements of Carly and Isla. The police had them walking past a security camera at 4.15 p.m. near the city centre; a week later one of the hundreds of cars that the police were processing from near that spot, a white Renault Clio, turned out to belong to Olivia Duvall. The police couldn’t examine her car, though, because she had sent it to be scrapped days before.

They began a thorough search of her house, concentrating on the cellar, but found nothing. Behind a radiator in the hallway, however, they found a hairband with Molly’s hair in it.

And then the team got the breakthrough – the scrapped Renault Clio had been sold on in parts. They traced the seats to a garage in Worthing, and deep down in the crack of the front passenger seat they found a sequin from Isla Bukowski’s bag.

Olivia was arrested and the police went to work on her house, finding that household bleach had been used to clean almost every surface in the basement and the rest of the house, destroying fingerprints and DNA. On the second day the police began spraying Luminol and discovered that the wooden floor in the living room had once had a large arc of blood splattered across it. On the inside leg of an armchair in the same room they found a fingerprint that belonged to Heather. She must have been lying on the floor, reaching out for something to hold.

In the basement they found three blue threads from Carly’s pants, caught on a nail. The police got an extension to keep Olivia detained for longer. The investigation was in a frenzy, public horror and disgust at fever pitch. Then they discovered that the blood on the floor matched Molly’s. And then they began testing the soil in the secluded garden, screened by tall firs, and found high levels of components from human blood and several human bone fragments. The bones had lain in the soil for at least two years, and were impossible to identify.

On the third day Olivia made a statement, in which she admitted to killing five missing girls: Isla, Molly, Heather, Rajinder and Carly. She offered no defence, and never revealed where their bodies were.

She was assessed as having an acute personality disorder, tried and sent to a secure facility.

Olivia had broken all the rules. Serial killers were not usually women. If they killed at all they tended to kill men who had been violent and abusive to them, not young women and girls. Serial killers usually murdered within their ethnic group – Rajinder’s fate threw that rule out the window. These types of killers were normally opportunists: long-distance lorry drivers, men who used prostitutes, men who worked at fairgrounds. But in Olivia Duvall something new and horrible had been revealed. Women who killed children nearly always had a man influencing them, a man in control. They looked hard, the police told his family, for a man behind the scenes. Olivia had lived for a while with one Eric Cox, who had a history of violent outbursts and drunken fights, but at the time that Molly and Heather went missing he was serving time in jail for fencing stolen cars, and was eliminated as a suspect. She was a lone operator, a freak of nature.

The trial and conviction had been unsatisfactory to many people – with none of the bodies recovered, a lot of questions had remained unanswered. Olivia was an opportunist in the sense that she had chosen vulnerable girls uncoupled from the safety net of family – until she had targeted Isla and Carly, that was. But why she had killed any of them, and how, remained a mystery.

Darren pushed his plate away, sickness flooding him. Now the TV was showing the grassy area where Olivia’s house had been demolished and her garden dug over, the Brighton corner where the house had once stood and which was now a council garden. Less than a fifteen-minute walk from his old home, his former life.

Darren ordered a cup of tea and watched a mother come in to the café with a buggy and a girl aged about twelve. The girl was sullen, her trainers scuffed, hands in the pockets of her pink top. The baby started fussing and the mother tried to rock it into quietness. The girl sat down and stared at Darren. He looked back at her. She was still staring, chewing a sweet. How easy would it be to abduct this girl? How had Olivia done it? He leaned forward towards the girl and smiled. She smiled back.

He stood up abruptly and walked out of the café. Olivia had planted that thought in him. She was a master manipulator and he was shaken to the core. It was as if she had reached out of that prison and was pulling him about on invisible strings. That he had even imagined how you might take a child, even in an abstract way, made him feel ill.

He needed to go home; he wanted his mum. Love repaired the evil in the world, not chasing a serial killer’s befriender in his car through south London.

D
arren drove home, stopping at the end of the street and peering round the corner from the driver’s seat, worried there might be some journalists hanging about who knew where they lived. But the road looked deserted. He pulled up outside the house.

Mum was lying on the sofa when he came in, the radio on, her eyes red and her face blotchy. She looked exhausted.

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘He went to work. He said he needed to get away from me.’

He sat down next to her. ‘He doesn’t mean that.’

She smiled sadly. ‘But he does, Darren. He does.’

Darren ran upstairs and came back down with his Roehampton uniform. He shoved it in the washing machine and came back to sit with his mum.

‘Why aren’t you at work?’

Darren looked away. ‘I wanted to make sure you were OK.’

Mum struggled to sit upright. ‘I saw where she had left Molly on the TV. It was a very pretty spot.’

‘Mum, don’t.’

‘I know Carly’s not there. She’s just not.’

Hope still sat so strong in her and he saw that it was the crutch that kept her going. Maybe he had it all wrong. Maybe it wasn’t for her that he needed to find Carly, but for himself.

Mum scowled as Orin Bukowski’s deep voice carried over from the radio. ‘Turn it off will you? I can’t stand him.’

Darren turned the radio off and sat back. ‘Why do you hate him so much? I’ve never understood what he did wrong.’

‘In the beginning, when Carly and Isla first went missing, he was great at generating publicity, making sure the police were doing everything they could. He’s passionate, committed to what he believes, a force of nature I suppose. But when the Witch was found, it all fell apart. We felt he got in the way of the police doing their job – he was getting special treatment from them before the trial, finding out things the rest of us had a right to know too.’

‘Like what?’

‘Details about what they had found. Stuff from the investigation was being leaked to him, it became an us and him situation.’

Darren watched his mum’s face carefully. She was turned away, staring out of the window. ‘There’s something else. What aren’t you telling me?’

She patted his hand, not looking him in the eye. ‘Andy doesn’t agree, but I felt it became all about Isla, not the others. Not Carly or those other poor girls. We withdrew from Orin’s group. It was a difficult time. He’s a man of very strong convictions and if other people disagree with him he finds that difficult.’