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sort of delivery driver.
HEALY : What makes you say that?
WESTERWOOD : He was wearing this olive-green shirt one time, beneath his jacket, and I remember thinking it looked like the sort of shirt a delivery man might wear.
HEALY : Did you ever see him wearing that shirt again?
WESTERWOOD : I can’t remember.
HEALY : I really need you to think hard, Sandra.
WESTERWOOD : No. I don’t think so.
HEALY : So it might just have been an olive-green shirt, not a shirt associated with a particular delivery company?
WESTERWOOD : I suppose so, yeah.
HEALY : Did Gail seem concerned by his presence?
WESTERWOOD : Oh no, definitely not. She seemed happy. She and the girls seemed to be comfortable with him.
    At the end of the interview with Westerwood, she’d given a description of the man, but the results were vague: white, five-ten to six feet tall, black hair, mid-to-late thirties, medium build. That was never likely to take investigators very far.
    ‘The Malcolm thing was just one big blind alley,’ Healy said, rubbing together the fingers and thumb of his right hand. The coarseness of his skin made a crackling noise. ‘My team came back with a list of over eleven thousand men with the first name Malcolm in the Greater London area alone. And what if it wasn’t Malcolm? What if it was Malachi or something else? What if he wasn’t even from London? We didn’t have the resources to cope with that level of search. The only thing that really went our way was that, according to Westerwood, this guy was Caucasian – that meant we could, at least, discount names like Malik and Jamal.’
    ‘She said he might have been a delivery driver.’
    He shook his head.
    ‘That didn’t lead anywhere either?’
    ‘Conjecture. We didn’t have any other witness statements to back her up, and although people told us they might have seen delivery vans in and around the estate in the weeks and months leading up to the murders, no one could say for sure whether they’d seen the same van returning over and over. We looked for businesses using olive-green uniforms, we doorstepped delivery companies all over the city, and we got nothing.’
    The size of the task facing Healy’s team had been formidable: taking a list of 11,236 men called Malcolm, narrowing it down to those in their thirties with black hair and a medium build, then trying to narrow it down further by focusing on those who may have been employed as delivery drivers. That was even assuming Westerwood had heard the man’s name correctly, and the green shirt had in fact been his uniform. Healy, clearly, remained doubtful.
    ‘So that line of inquiry stalled?’
    ‘Yeah.’ He stopped, sniffed, shrugged. ‘We found delivery drivers called Malcolm who didn’t match the physical description Westerwood had provided, and men called Malcolm who weren’t delivery drivers, but matched the physical description. We didn’t find a single person who fit convincingly into both camps.’
    ‘What about CCTV footage?’
    He looked at me. ‘That should have been our best lead.’
    ‘But it was another dead end?’
    ‘The council didn’t give a shit about the estate, so nothing worked there. We had three cameras that could have got us something half-decent. One was at the tenth-floorstairwell, but it was bust. It had been vandalized back in February, and no one had been round to repair it. Then there were two cameras on the outside of the building: one faced Cork Hill Lane, which is the only way in and out by car – that’s where you must have parked earlier on.’
    I nodded. ‘And the other?’
    ‘The other camera faced down towards the play park. That’s where you’d approach if you were coming from the Tube station.’
    ‘So what happened?’
    ‘The one facing the play park had wiring problems, which meant the feed repeatedly cut out.’ He shook his head, chewing on his frustration. ‘The further back in time we went, the less pronounced the problems got, so on 26 March we actually