M. Arlidge - Little Boy Blue

They were still in the midst of a major investigation with no clear suspect in mind. Charlie had crunched the credit card details and sent them to Helen, but progress was incremental rather than revelatory and Charlie had the uneasy feeling that things were starting to go south. Normally, Helen would have been all over this, stalking the crime scene, bullying the forensics team and coordinating the uniformed officers on the street. But she was notable by her absence this morning. Charlie hadn’t been able to raise her on her landline or mobile. Was she sick? Surely not, Helen was never sick.

She had tried Sanderson, thinking it might be wise to defer to her greater experience, but she couldn’t get hold of her either and was told by one of the girls at the station that the DS was ‘unavailable’ and ‘on operational duties’. What those were Charlie couldn’t fathom – what could be more important than a triple murder?

It fell to Charlie then to marshall the troops. This should have felt exciting – calling the shots at a murder scene was the natural culmination of her career thus far. But the gnawing uncertainty that something bigger was going on, from which she was excluded, was sapping her energy and optimism. Equally debilitating was the sight in front of her – a beautiful and talented spirit whose life had been brutally cut short.

Helen hadn’t wanted to leave Angelique like that, but she’d had no choice. She could hardly call it in, so instead she had deliberately left the front door open. She had no doubt that one of Angelique’s neighbours would notice and investigate further. It wasn’t ideal and might delay her discovery for a few hours, but there was no other way. Helen couldn’t risk incriminating herself and, besides, she had work to do.

She had lowered the blind and turned off her phone. The whole of the kitchen table was covered in papers and files – the sum total of their work on these murders so far. She had the strong sense that they had been looking the wrong way the whole time, guided to do so by a killer who was organized, diligent and determined. Helen blamed herself – she had been wilfully blind to the growing evidence in front of her, burying her personal connection to the victims because it was inconvenient and unsettling. By retrieving her private phone, by summoning her to the third murder, the killer had let it be known that he would not let her involvement with Jake, Max and the unfortunate Angelique remain hidden.

Helen had a growing sense of who might be responsible, but she refused to let paranoia guide her thinking. She had to follow the evidence, focusing on the choice of victims, the manner of their deaths and the way their killer had gone about organizing these murders. The devil was in the detail in these cases and Helen returned once more now to Charlie’s credit card searches.

This was their killer’s only weak point, the one area where he might show his hand. They now had a third victim to work with and two new instruments of torture – Japanese soft cord bondage ties and a ball gag – which had presumably been purchased for the occasion.

Helen knew that their perpetrator favoured online bondage retailers so, plugging into the police network via remote access, she started to run the searches. She eschewed the chain sex shops in favour of the more boutique operations. And before long she found what she was looking for – the necessary items paid for by a Geoffrey Plough, an 87-year-old former teacher, now living in Shirley. He was an unlikely recipient for S &M products, but more telling still was the fact that the delivery address did not match Plough’s. The items had instead been delivered to a vacant retail outlet in Woolston.

Helen didn’t hesitate now, emailing Plough’s bank and using her name and reputation in the subsequent phone call to persuade the manager to release the necessary information to her. Moments later, her home printer was spewing out Plough’s debit card activity for the last three months.

Helen was excited to see that the list of transactions was fairly short. Whereas the other two credit card victims were keen shoppers, spending frequently at a large number of stores and sites, Plough was parsimonious. He presumably didn’t have much in the way of income, given his meagre spending, and he didn’t seem to shop online, preferring face-to-face transactions. He was also a man who didn’t like to go too far afield. Most of his purchases were made locally in Shirley and he was clearly a repeat customer. One location particularly stood out – one he seemed to visit daily. Wilkinson’s on Park Street.

Helen knew that Wilkinson’s had figured on the other fraud victims’ transaction lists and she pulled them from the files now. Her finger ran down one, then the next and sure enough both had been regular shoppers at the same store.

Which is where Helen was heading now. If she was right, the answer to this deadly game of riddles was waiting for her there.

Sanderson paced up and down, fervently wishing she were a smoker or a nail biter. But she was neither – never had been – so there was nothing to do but wait.

The divers had been in the lake for nearly twenty minutes and Sanderson had by now got used to the strange, repetitive rhythm of their work. Dive, resurface, discuss, dive, resurface, discuss… Each time they came back up, she was convinced that this would be the breakthrough she needed. And each time she saw that they were empty-handed another little part of her died.

This was a massive gamble on her part. She had gone over Gardam’s head straight to the Chief Constable. It had been hard enough to get him to agree to surveillance, it was harder still to get them to agree to the expense of a dive. But in the end the Chief Constable had agreed that there were grounds for concern and Sanderson’s decisiveness initially appeared to have paid dividends. Helen Grace had had a five-person team on her as she made her way across Southampton Common. They had lost her initially as she disappeared in the depths of the woods, but a pair of young officers posing as lovers had picked her up again a little later on, as she emerged back on to open ground.

Sanderson had been beyond relieved at this news – she’d feared Helen was on to them and had deliberately lost her tail – and had radioed another member of the team to watch her from a safe distance. This officer had clearly seen Helen throw something in the lake and from then on Sanderson hadn’t stood still, petitioning the Chief Constable for a dive, detailing more people to the surveillance effort and drawing DS McAndrew into her confidence to run some further checks.

Standing by the side of the lake, a brisk autumnal wind whipping around her, she wondered whether she had made a mistake. What if the item that Helen had discarded was something else entirely, something personal and unrelated to the case or, worse than that, merely a piece of rubbish. She shuddered at the thought of how she would explain that to her paymasters.

A shout made her look up. One of the divers was signalling that he’d found something and was returning to the shore. Sanderson set off towards him and moments later she was in possession of a mobile phone, neatly encased in an evidence bag. She didn’t recognize it but it could be Helen’s – there was a lot they didn’t know about her boss, it appeared. Slipping on gloves, she opened the back of the phone, but there was no SIM card inside. Sealing the bag, Sanderson now pulled her phone from her pocket and called McAndrew – even without the SIM card there was lots they could do with the phone’s memory, the serial number and so on. Concluding her call, she handed it to a colleague to ferry back to Southampton Central and resumed her position on the edge of the lake, hopeful that there might yet be more discoveries.