Sharon Bolton - Like This, for Ever

The windows on the ground floor of the house were boarded up with plywood. Lacey inspected each in turn, looking for loose nails, but there was no way in at the front that she could see. The huge double-door, beneath the carved sign that read MERCIER HOUSE, BOROUGH OF LAMBETH, PARKS AND AMENITIES DIVISION, didn’t budge an inch when she tried the handle.

Same at the side. Four large, rectangular windows, all boarded up. The rear of the property was enclosed by a tall brick wall with a wide gate. The gate swung open when she pushed it and Lacey walked through into the ghost of a garden.

A rose had rambled the entire length of one wall, its branches clambering into the trees overhead, twisting and fighting with a bramble for tendril-holds. Berries from the previous autumn, shrivelled and rotting, clung to thorn-strewn branches and littered the ground. Further in, old fruit trees, their limbs dried and splitting, seemed to rely on the brick walls and the memory of former days to stay upright. One of them still bore fruit. Lacey blinked – apples in February – but they were real enough. The tree had lost its leaves but kept its fruit. In the streetlight the apples shone rosy-red, gleaming on the bare branches like baubles on a Christmas tree. More apples lay at its foot, rotting, the red skins smeared across the ground like bloodstains. She really had to get a move on.

An echo of a path took her towards the house. Brown stalks lying prone across the gravel were all that was left of the summer’s weed growth. Lacey passed a stone bird-bath that lay crumbling on its side. Closer to the building was a skip, a quarter-filled with refuse. Running along half of the rear wall were the remains of an elaborate Victorian conservatory.

The glasshouse stretched up to a high, vaulted roof, much of which looked intact, but as Lacey drew closer she could see splinters of glass scattered around like diamonds on the ground. The door she pushed at, more out of habit than any real expectation, opened.

The exotic hot-house plants had long since shrivelled and died, but the raised beds of the original conservatory remained, as did the slim, rectangular pool that ran lengthwise down its centre. The interior still retained the smell of damp, warm vegetation that greenhouses never seem to lose, but the smell was deceptive. Even sheltered from the wind, the conservatory was freezing cold; the glass panes were starting to mist over at the touch of her breath. The wall between the conservatory and the interior of the house had two windows, both boarded up. The half-glass door that led into the building had been similarly secured. Lacey was on her way to check the door when she saw the bike.

Tucked against the house wall, it looked modern, designed for a woman, with a low crossbar and with a plastic-covered baby-trailer attached to the back. Before she was close enough to touch it, Lacey could see that the coloured plastic of the trailer’s roof was wet. Raindrops. And yet the bike was completely sheltered beneath the glass roof. Some time in the last hour, this bike had been out in the rain.

Crouching, Lacey peered inside the trailer, looking for any trace, even a scent, of Huck, but there was nothing. She tried the back door to the house. Locked and boarded. There was no easy way into this house and panic was rising up again, muddying her thinking and telling her it was hopeless.

Back in the garden, she pulled out Huck’s phone. Joesbury would come like a shot if she called, but apart from some vague thoughts about Neverland and a baby-trailer, what did she really have? She needed to get inside.

The windows on the next floor up were open to the elements, but reaching them would mean scaling the iron framework of the conservatory. Almost as an experiment, Lacey reached up, and the stabbing of a tiny shard of glass was a reminder of her own stupidity. No child, even a strong and agile one, could scale the conservatory with another child on his back.

She had to go, find Joesbury, tell him her hunch had come to nothing. He could probably organize a search of the house, just to be sure, but it would be little more than ticking the box. Lacey had almost turned away from the house when something caught her eye. At the corner of the building, strung from an upper window, was a collapsible rubble chute.

Conscious of her heart beating faster again, Lacey stepped over to it. It was black, or she might have noticed it sooner, a long, wide pipe stretching from the upper floor of the building, designed to allow sharp rubble to be thrown safely to the ground. It was constructed in sections: when not in use each piece could slip inside the next so it became a manageable size. At one point, it had probably been directed into the skip.

Suddenly, the hunch was alive again. This was the perfect way to get the body of a young boy in and out of the building. The lost boys had all been small, skinny ten-year-olds. Some sort of rope and pulley system could have lifted them to the top floor via the chute. Once they were dead, the chute would have got them back down again.

In the bike, she had the means of getting them around London; in the rubble chute, a way of getting them in and out of the house. The house gave the killer somewhere to work, but was too close to other people for him to risk keeping the boys alive for long. Was it enough? She looked at the phone. Still twenty minutes before Joesbury came looking for her. If she called him now, he’d tell her to wait for him. He’d alert Tulloch and the team, who would insist she wait outside. It was the only sensible thing to do. But how would she ever get Huck’s face out of her head, if she stood here doing nothing, while he …

Lacey tucked the phone back in her pocket, returned to the conservatory and started to climb.

The vertical ascent wasn’t difficult. Clambering across the arched roof, though, she had to avoid putting any weight on the glass. Her limbs were shaking by the time she reached the window, but one last effort and she was inside.

Just in time to hear a low-pitched whimper.

People around her were exhausted. Dana knew she had to send them home. She’d tried already and they’d ignored her. They were staying as long as she stayed, and she was staying until the end.

Across the room, the phone started ringing. It was a measure of how tired everyone was that no one rushed to answer it. After a couple of seconds, Anderson got up and crossed the room.

‘OK, listen up, guys, this is important.’

Heads lifted. Several people were blinking hard.

‘That was SOCOs down at the Creek,’ Anderson said. ‘They’ve found more blood on the houseboat. Tiny amounts. Someone’s done a pretty good job of cleaning up, but there’s no doubt. There are at least two distinct types, both definitely human. And before you ask, neither is Gilly Green’s.’

‘I’m not keeping up,’ said Mizon. ‘I thought we’d ruled out Stewart Roberts.’

‘We ruled him out,’ said Dana. ‘We didn’t rule out the boat.’

Lacey made herself keep still, ignore the urge to run from room to room, shouting out Huck’s name. There were procedures to be followed, the first of which was to understand the size and nature of the building to be searched.

The room she was standing in was large and high, with a carved ceiling-rose and picture rail. There was a cheap filing cabinet that no one had thought worth removing, a metal chair lying upturned on the linoleum floor and stacks of loose files to one side of the door. A door she had to open, slowly and silently.

The door opened on to a landing above a wide, ornate staircase. On either side of where Lacey was standing, two further flights of stairs gave her a choice of passage up to the next floor. In the hallway below her was the wide front door and – she counted quickly – at least five more rooms.