Sharon Bolton - Like This, for Ever

‘These kids on Twitter were talking about how they were hanging out at Lewisham College the other night, near where Ryan Jackson’s body was found, and they saw his ghost,’ said Sam.

Barney screwed up his face the way his dad did a second before he’d say, ‘Barney, does my head look like it zips up the back?’

‘Straight up,’ insisted Sam. ‘He was as pale as anything and he had this long white thing on and he was clutching his throat and moaning.’

Barney shook his head. He liked a ghost story as much as the next guy, but come on!

‘We’re going up there tomorrow night,’ said Sam. ‘When it gets dark. See if he comes back.’

‘Knowing your luck, whoever bumped him off will come back,’ said Barney, and was suddenly conscious of Peter, crouching like a troll in the back of his mind. ‘And will your mum and dad really let you go down to Deptford Creek at night? I don’t think so somehow.’

‘Well, duh! We don’t tell ’em that. I’ll say I’m going to Lloyd’s and he’ll say he’s coming to mine. Jorge and Harvey are up for it.’

The expression on Harvey’s face said that, actually, that might be pushing it a bit.

‘It’ll work,’ said Sam, ‘because Lloyd can’t play football tomorrow morning, so none of our mums and dads will be able to talk to him about it.’

‘We’ll still need to keep them apart on Sunday morning,’ muttered Harvey.

‘You need to watch the tides there,’ said Barney. ‘The Creek fills up quickly. People have drowned in it who haven’t known what they’ve been doing.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Sam.

‘We’ve got a boat there,’ said Barney.

‘No shit?’

Barney nodded. ‘It was my granddad’s,’ he said. ‘He lived on it. Dad keeps saying he’s going to sell it, but he hasn’t yet. We go sometimes to check it’s OK.’

‘Is it locked up?’

Barney nodded. ‘And so’s the yard that you have to go through to get to the boats. I might be able to find the key though,’ he said.

‘Cool.’

‘Ryan’s body wasn’t found near the boat, though,’ said Barney. ‘So wouldn’t it be a bit pointless looking for ghosts there?’

‘Still be cool, though. I could bring some lager,’ said Sam.

‘So is your dad going to let you go to Deptford Creek at night?’ asked Harvey.

Barney thought about it. He’d always liked Granddad’s boat, always secretly wondered what it would be like to sleep on it. ‘I could tell him I’m going to Lloyd’s house,’ he said.

16

‘I CAN’T QUITE believe these words are coming out of my mouth, but I’m actually looking forward to hearing what this profiler has to say,’ said Anderson as they drove back towards Lewisham.

‘Steady on, Sarge,’ muttered Stenning from the back seat. ‘You’ll be saying next that women on the force is a good thing.’

‘The timing’s important,’ said Anderson, ignoring Stenning. ‘Jason and Joshua and Noah had been dead for two to six hours when we found them, meaning they were killed earlier in the evening. Ryan was killed around twenty-four hours before we found him, again making the time of death some time in the evening. All three disappeared in the early-evening period too.’

‘He has a job,’ said Stenning. ‘Blue-collar job, most likely, if he’s finishing work by around five.’

‘He has a job and he doesn’t live alone,’ said Anderson. ‘He’s not going to stand out from the crowd.’

‘What do you think, Ma’am?’ Stenning said.

‘I think it’s a woman,’ she said, a second before she could have bitten her own tongue out. Lord, it was one thing to indulge in wild speculations in front of Mark, another entirely with people who depended on her judgement being spot on.

Silence in the car for a second.

‘Blimey,’ said Anderson. ‘Why? Because of what happened …’

‘No,’ said Dana, twisting round in her seat so she could look at both of them. ‘Look, I shouldn’t have said anything. Please don’t repeat it to anyone until we’ve had the profiler’s report. I don’t want to influence her thinking in any way.’

‘No, course not,’ agreed Anderson. ‘Blimey, it would make a lot of sense, though, wouldn’t it? Kids would be far more likely to go off with a strange female.’

They pulled into the station car park. ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘I am going to be a bit disappointed if all this profiler lass tells us is we’re looking for a blue-collar worker who doesn’t live alone.’

‘You’re looking for someone who has a regular nine-to-five job,’ said the profiler, who was a thin, dark-haired woman in her early forties called Susan Richmond. ‘Possibly a blue-collar worker because he seems to finish quite early in the day. He doesn’t live alone.’

Anderson took a deep breath and breathed out heavily. Stenning was biting his lower lip. From across the room came the sound of Mizon trying not to crunch crisps too loudly.

‘But then I’m sure you’ve worked that out for yourselves,’ said Richmond. ‘You also know that he’s organized and careful. He plans everything he does very thoroughly.’

‘We know he’s clever,’ said Mizon, through a mouthful of cheese-and-onion flavoured.

‘Careful’s not the same as clever. Serial offenders are rarely unusually intelligent,’ said the profiler. ‘Hannibal Lecter is a bit of a one-off. More commonly they’re of average to slightly-below-average intelligence.’

‘Sadly, so are most coppers,’ muttered Anderson.

Richmond got to her feet. ‘I’m not going to give you a report,’ she said. ‘We do that together.’

Around the room several eyebrows were raised.

‘So do we break into syndicates and role-play?’ asked Anderson. Dana caught his eye and glared. He had the grace to look sheepish.

‘I’ll keep that in reserve,’ said Richmond, walking to the whiteboard at the front of the room. ‘For now, we’re going to start with the building blocks.’ She picked up the pen and started writing.

‘Access to the victims,’ she said as she wrote. ‘All four disappeared from in or around their homes. The first boy, Tyler, was last seen at the school gate, waiting for one of his mates who’d been kept behind. Ryan was spotted turning the corner into his street after school, but never actually made it home. The third boy, Noah, was watching television with his childminder and got up to answer the door. Jason and Joshua were in the front garden of their home. No one saw anything and that tells me two things. First, that the killer can make himself very inconspicuous, and second, that he’s patient. The chances are he had to lie in wait more than once, waiting for the opportunity to get at the boys.’

‘You’re assuming Tyler King is part of the investigation,’ said Anderson. ‘We haven’t as yet.’

‘There’s a very good chance,’ said Richmond. ‘He matches the victim profile completely and the circumstances of his disappearance are the same. I suspect his body was dumped like the others but not found. It’ll have been washed out to sea.’

‘Actually that doesn’t happen,’ said Anderson. ‘If someone goes in the river, sooner or later, we pull them out.’

‘Then sooner or later I think you’ll pull Tyler out too,’ said Richmond. ‘Does anything else strike anyone about the abductions?’

‘He’s not threatening,’ said Mizon. ‘All four – five – went with him without a struggle. If they’d cried out, someone would have heard them. No one did.’

‘So he’s either someone they know or someone they would instinctively trust,’ said Richmond. ‘Yet you’ve found no common denominator other than that they were all football players, albeit for different clubs.’