First One Missing (3 page)

Leanne was just digging through her underwear drawer in search of a pair of tights without a hole when her phone rang again. Desmond.

‘I hope you’ve called her, because we’ve just found out the news is already out.’

Shit.

‘I was just ringing her now.’

Desmond was unimpressed.

Hanging up, Leanne scrolled immediately through her contacts list.
Reids
was the landline number, she remembered that much. Scrolling down one further to
Reid Emma
, she pressed the green phone key.

While waiting for Emma to pick up, Leanne tried to remember the stress-management techniques they’d been taught during training.
Deep breath, concentrate on your breathing, not on what’s around you.
Not on the crack in the ceiling above the bedroom window which, come to think of it, appeared to have got wider in the last month, not on the fact that the tights she’d chosen turned out to have a ladder near the top (she made a quick judgement call that the skirt would just about cover it), not on the image of Emma Reid going about her morning business serenely unaware, or of Jemima Reid’s face, blotchy with fear and frustration.

‘Emma? I’m so sorry …’

3

‘Quite frankly, I don’t give a fuck about your profit margins, Mr Bellows. When one commissions a water feature, one expects it to feature water. Not just a few drops here and there, but a great big fucking cascade of water.’

Sally Freeland noticed the man sitting across the table from her on the crowded train was nudging his wife but it didn’t bother her. What did bother her, however, was Mr Bellows trying to tell her it was her own water pressure that was to blame.

‘I’m a journalist, Mr Bellows. If I tell my editor I’m going to write fifteen hundred words on “MPs on the Make”, and then I turn in a thousand words instead, and say, “Oh, but my desk was a bit rickety so I couldn’t write as much,” he’s not going to be very fucking happy, is he?’

Mr Bellows didn’t see the analogy, apparently. Frankly Sally doubted if Mr Bellows would recognize an analogy if one punched him in the face. Pressing ‘end call’, she yanked aside the mouthpiece of the hands-free headset.

She was having a pig of a day already, and it was barely ten o’clock. She’d
kill
for a cigarette.

‘I am a person who doesn’t smoke,’ she reminded herself, trying to remember the exact wording Sebastian the hypnotherapist had used. ‘I can
think
about having a cigarette but I make the choice
not
to have one.’

It wasn’t working.

Sitting back in her seat, she looked out of the window at the green rolling East Sussex countryside, trying to let go of her anger, as her life coach, Mina, kept telling her to do. Shift focus, she told herself sternly.

She picked up her Mulberry bag from the seat next to her and started to rifle through it, frowning as she spotted the Mulberry wallet which, being a totally different shade of brown to the bag, never failed to jar. Really, she’d been right to end things with Noel. What kind of person bought you a tan Mulberry bag for your birthday and then a chocolate-brown Mulberry wallet for Valentine’s Day? Not that that had been the main reason for the split. A symptom rather than the whole malaise, she’d told Mina.

She wouldn’t listen to the little voice that pointed out it had been Noel who’d broken up with her, and she certainly wouldn’t dwell on that awful scene when she’d turned up on his doorstep drunk and sobbing and he hadn’t let her in, just called a cab and waited with her outside until it arrived.

Pulling out a red crocodile-skin case, Sally extracted her reading glasses before opening up her laptop decisively.

Focus, focus, focus.

It was only six months since she’d last revisited the Kenwood Killer case – that awkward interview with Fiona Botsford, the mother of the third victim – but a full four years since the whole thing started with the death of Megan Purvis. Of course, it hadn’t been a serial killer then, just a seemingly random standalone murder of the type that happened sometimes. A body had been found in woods to the east of Hampstead Heath. Though Sally had lived in London at one time, she was a Fulham girl and hadn’t ever ventured to the vast expanse of grass and woodland to the north of the city, so had been taken aback to find that what was almost a wilderness existed so close to civilization. The scale of the Heath had unnerved her, with its hidden glades and miles of footpaths where you could walk without seeing another person and end up losing all sense of direction.

That first time she’d driven up to North London, cursing her stupidity when she became completely gridlocked in traffic around Croydon. She’d spent nearly a week hanging around the Purvises’ house, talking to anyone who went in or out, offering money around like it was going out of fashion and clocking up thirteen parking tickets. Persistence had paid off though. It nearly always did as far as Sally was concerned. She’d hit the jackpot when she’d offered a massive donation to the charity of Helen Purvis’s choice, and convinced a close friend of hers that giving an interview was the only way to get the rest of the press pack to back off.

She’d been proud of that interview, not to mention relieved. There was a time back in the 1990s when she’d been nicknamed the Queen of the Exclusives, dispatched here and there with what was basically a blank chequebook and a hefty expense account, but those days were long gone. Nowadays everyone was too afraid of losing their jobs to sign off on any payments over a hundred quid. Everything was done by committee so no one’s head would end up on the block. Thank God she wasn’t based in an office any more, all of them tiptoeing around eating salads at their desks that they brought from home in plastic containers. The last time she’d been into the
Chronicle
’s offices, it had been like walking into a library it was so quiet, and all those earnest interns being so self-important even though they weren’t being paid a bean. She’d felt like a den mother or something. So depressing. Of course there were still a few of the old crowd around, but mostly they’d either been promoted to some sort of executive position where they sat in an office making pie charts on their computer, or else they were dribbling in a corner in their shiny suits, stinking of last night’s Jameson’s. Well, apart from the odd one in prison.

Nothing was as it used to be. Still, as Mina always said, nostalgia was for losers. Onward and upwards.

Peering at her computer screen, she called up the folder marked ‘Purvis’. It had been a while since she’d read that interview, but now that there’d been another murder she wanted to refamiliarize herself with the facts. Sally took her ginkgo religiously every morning to boost her memory, but frankly she was fucked if she could remember her own name some days, let alone facts from a case she first wrote about four years ago.

When she double-clicked on the PDF file titled ‘Purvisinterview1’, a double-page newspaper spread opened up on the screen. The main photo showed a woman, with a mass of frizzy brown hair, tied back in an ill-judged ponytail, and watery blue eyes, gazing sadly out of a window. Sally instantly remembered the moment that was taken. Helen Purvis had seemed so self-controlled up to that point, yet when the photographer asked her to press a hand up to the glass, it was shaking so uncontrollably she’d ended up putting it in her lap instead.

The headline of the feature was: NOT A DAY GOES BY THAT I DON’T THINK ABOUT MEGAN. Very original. Not. The sell was equally uninspiring: ‘Nine months after her daughter Megan, 7, was murdered, Helen Purvis talks to
Sally Freeland
about coming to terms with every mother’s worst nightmare.’ At least her name was in bold. That was something.

She read on.

Little Megan Purvis’s bedroom is like any other 7-year-old’s. Her duvet cover and pillow are covered in pink and orange flowers, to match the pink fluffy rug on the floor. Megan’s soft white fleecy dressing gown hangs on the back of the door, and her pink fluffy slippers are tucked neatly under the bed. Everything is just as she left it when she got up on 3 May 2010. Except Megan Purvis is never coming home again.

Sally frowned as she read that intro. Almost immediately after that feature had come out, she’d been called up by the
Chronicle
’s deputy editor and told, ‘No more dead kids’ bedrooms.’ Apparently it was hackneyed. He’d clearly never heard the phrase ‘setting the scene’.

Helen Purvis, a Special Educational Needs Adviser, is a petite, softly spoken 44-year-old. When I met her at the family’s £1m home in the desirable Crouch End area of North London, which she shares with her partner Simon Hewitt, an Account Executive, and her son Rory, now 13, she was still evidently grieving for the little girl she lost 9 months before.

Reminders of Megan are everywhere in the comfortable light-filled 5-bedroomed Victorian home. A photo of the cherubic-faced little girl, with her mop of blonde curls, smiles out from the mantelpiece. A framed finger painting, completed in her reception year, takes pride of place on the wall. Her pink coat, embroidered with flowers, still hangs on the coat-stand in the hallway. It has the expectant air of a house in limbo.

‘It’s true, in many ways I’m still waiting for her to come home,’ Helen admits. ‘Of course I know in my heart that she won’t be coming, yet still there’s a big part of me that can’t accept that as a possibility.’

The whole family has been crushed by Megan’s murder. ‘Simon had been in Megan’s life since she was four and was like a father to her,’ Helen explains. ‘And of course Daniel, her natural father, has been completely devastated. Poor Rory is having to come to terms not only with the loss of his sister, but also the completely unfounded feeling of guilt that he is partly to blame.’

It was Rory who was charged with picking Megan up from her maths tutor the evening she died. Helen was at a late school meeting and Simon was having dinner with clients. Rory, 12 at the time, walked the 15 minutes through the park to pick up his sister after her class finished at 6.30.

‘It was quite a fresh night, but dry, and as they entered the park gates, Rory saw some of his friends playing football on the grassy area in the middle,’ Helen recalls as if remembering a speech by rote. ‘They were friends from primary who’d gone on to different schools, so he was glad to see them and told Megan to go and play in the playground for a bit while he joined in the football with his mates. There were a few other people in the playground when she first got there, and he checked on her a couple of times, but when he looked over the third time the place was empty.’

Megan Purvis had simply disappeared.

Who can imagine the panic of a brother whose little sister vanishes? Who can conceive of the agony of returning home empty-handed?

For Helen Purvis, the dreadful moment of truth came when she walked through the door after her meeting finished.

‘My phone needed charging so I hadn’t received any messages, but as soon as I set foot in the house I just knew something was wrong,’ she relates in a whisper, clearly struggling with reliving the memory. ‘Usually there was noise and an atmosphere of activity in the house, but on this evening it was silent. It has been silent ever since.’

The police were already in the house, waiting with Rory. He’d run home from the park, convinced he’d find Megan on the doorstep, and already rehearsing the telling-off he’d give her, but when he’d found the house empty, he’d called 999.

‘He kept saying, “I’m sorry, Mum, I’m sorry,”’ Helen recalls now. ‘As if I would somehow blame him.’

After Simon returned, the family had waited up together most of the night, while the police came and went, taking statements and following up leads, but the little girl seemed to have disappeared into thin air.

Then the next morning, a couple out walking their dog on the Heath in the wooded area around the poignantly named Vale of Health came across a grisly discovery. Megan Purvis’s body was found wrapped in a plastic sheet. She’d been strangled.

‘People say time is a healer, but it isn’t,’ says Helen sadly. ‘Time just seems to increase our sense of bewilderment and isolation. The problem is, when something like this happens to you, there’s no one else you can talk to. People tell you they understand what you’re going through but they don’t. We have met a couple of other parents of murdered children, but they have their circumstances and we have ours. No one knows what we’re going through. It’s the loneliest place in the world.’

The only thing now keeping Helen going is her need to find out who killed her daughter. ‘I have to know who did this thing,’ Helen says. ‘I have to know why he took my baby from me, and how her last hours were spent, and I want the opportunity to explain to him just what he’s done to my life and my family’s life. It’s like he’s taken the light away from us. Now we are living in darkness.’

Helen Purvis has not received any money for this interview but asked that a donation be made to the Society for the Parents of Murdered Children.

Sitting back in her seat, Sally gazed through the window at the suburban stations the train rattled past. Soon it would arrive at Victoria, from where she would walk the ten minutes to New Scotland Yard for the press conference. She’d have preferred to go straight to the hotel in North London, where she was booked in, but there wasn’t time. The hotel was in Highgate. All four of the murdered girls had lived within two miles of there. She started running through them all: Megan Purvis first, then a two-year gap before Tilly Reid. Then fourteen months until Leila Botsford, and now, less than a year later, Poppy Glover.