Like This, for Ever (32 page)

Barney’s dad was in the kitchen, eating breakfast, when Barney came down. He looked up and his face creased with concern. ‘What time did you get to sleep?’ he asked. ‘Or did it not actually happen at all?’

‘I think I heard you come in,’ replied Barney, who didn’t think he’d ever felt this tired or ill in his life before. It had been impossible to sleep after Peter’s Facebook message. Peter was someone he knew. How else would he be able to order Barney’s favourite pizza? He knew who he was, where he lived and what his favourite pizza toppings were. Jeez, fewer than half a dozen people probably knew all three of those things about him.

He sat down and stared at his dad.
Did you order me a pizza last night, Dad? Did you?

‘What?’ said his dad, cereal spoon hovering.

If he said nothing, if he didn’t mention it, then his dad might. His dad might give himself away. Last night, someone calling himself Peter Sweep had abducted and murdered a ten-year-old boy. He’d
tied him up, put his photograph on Facebook, and then kept the world informed when he’d cut open his throat and fed off his blood. Last night, once again, his dad had been on the boat.

‘… Usually when killers go for one particular type of victim, it’s because those victims remind them of a person in real life … They can’t kill the one they really want to, so they choose – do you know the word surrogate?
’

Barney looked at his father’s hands, at the skin around his mouth, as if there might be some traces of Oliver Kennedy’s blood.
Is it my throat you want to cut, Dad? My blood you want to drink? Do I have to die to stop you?

His dad was looking at the TV screen behind Barney’s head. The volume was still low. Now he was looking round for the remote.

Shall we just end this now? I’ll get the sharpest knife I can from the drawer, I’ll lie down on the table and you won’t even have to tie me down because if Mum’s gone for good and you’re a murderer, then I really don’t want to live any more.

‘They’ve found him,’ said his dad, cranking up the volume. ‘Thank God for that.’

‘Found who?’ Barney managed, before turning to look at the screen. A reporter in a green coat was standing outside St Thomas’s hospital.

‘That kid who went missing. I nearly had bloody heart failure when I heard about it last night. That’s why I was home early.’

Oliver was alive? Barney could hardly believe what he was seeing and hearing. Alive and unhurt. He’d spent the night locked in a church? A church miles away from the boat at Deptford Creek that he’d heard his dad laughing on?

‘I tell you what, mate, until this guy’s caught, I’m going to have to give up working late. I know you’re sensible but I just can’t deal with the stress. What’s the matter? Barney? Buddy, why on earth are you crying?’

‘
HELLO, I’M LOOKING
for Stewart Roberts. Can you tell me where I might find him, please?’

For the first time in what felt like months, but was probably only just a few weeks, Lacey was wearing formal clothes. An off-the-peg suit that felt looser than when she’d worn it last, a plain white blouse and low-heeled court shoes. Her hair was twisted up at the nape of her neck. It was nothing special, just the clothes she wore when she had to look serious, like a proper detective. It was an outfit in which she never felt herself. Which was perhaps as well, because had she felt like herself, she might never have made it inside the main door.

Stewart Roberts was a lecturer in English literature at King’s College, London, the fourth oldest university in England and one of the most highly regarded in the world. He worked from the daunting, pale-stone buildings on the Strand.

Academia – just the thought of it made her shudder. At the start of the year, for only a few days, she’d been a student in the most prestigious university in the land. The experience had almost killed her.

The woman in the office looked Lacey up and down and decided she was a sales rep. ‘Do you have an appointment?’ she asked.

Lacey pulled her warrant card out of her inner pocket and held it up. ‘CID,’ she said. ‘If Mr Roberts isn’t here, please tell me where I can find him.’

‘I’ll just check.’

A few moments later, Lacey knocked at a blue-painted door on the right-hand side of a long corridor. The office behind was large. She counted three untidy desks, two of them occupied. Stewart Roberts stood as she entered the room and she could see that he recognized her. He was an attractive man, she realized, if you went for bookish types. Mid forties, with thick grey hair and neat, regular features. Spectacles that looked trendy rather than otherwise. His clothes were better than you saw on most academics. His jeans looked designer, his sweater expensive. He was frowning at her now.

‘My secretary said the police wanted to see me. Did she mean you?’

‘
Our
secretary,’ mumbled the large, middle-aged woman at the other desk, without looking up.

‘Is there somewhere we can talk privately?’ Lacey asked.

The woman visibly stiffened. There was no way she was moving.

Stewart looked at his watch. ‘I have a lecture at three. What’s it about?’

Lacey glanced at his colleague and raised her eyebrows. He got the message. ‘We’ll go to the chapel,’ he said. ‘No one’s ever in there.’

‘This is beautiful,’ said Lacey a few minutes later as they stepped inside a Victorian chapel filled with gold light and jewelled colours. To either side of the nave, crimson pillars supported elaborately panelled archways; beyond them were stained-glass windows. Above were more pillars, more arched windows and then crossbeams and an intricately decorated ceiling. Directly ahead were five more stained-glass windows above the altar, the central one a strikingly realistic depiction of the crucifixion.

‘Yes, it is quite something,’ said Stewart. ‘Restored in 2001.’

‘And no one uses it?’

‘Slight exaggeration on my part. There are services here most days. So what can I do for you, Lacey, isn’t it? I really do have a lecture at three.’

‘It’s about Barney.’

Instant alarm on his face. ‘Has something happened to him?’

‘No, he’s fine. That is, I’m sure he’s safe and well, but I am worried about him.’

She waited for the reaction. Upon being told their kids were in trouble, parents invariably went on the attack. It was usually difficult to predict in advance whether the object of their aggression would be the child, or the officers who’d come to report, but it was invariably one of the two.

Stewart, though, surprised her. He walked slowly and deliberately to the front pew and removed the coat he’d thrown over his shoulders as they’d left his office. He sat down, leaving room for her to sit beside him without feeling crowded. Then he waited for her to tell him more.

‘I thought you should know that Barney has been looking for his mother,’ she began. ‘For the better part of a year now. He’s been placing ads in the classified sections of local papers. He has a plan to hit all the papers in Greater London and then gradually spread out over the south-east. Every penny he earns at the newsagent’s he spends on advertising. He wants me to help him now. He wants me to get her put on the missing-persons list, to launch a proper police inquiry.’

When she glanced over, the man beside her had visibly paled. He’d wrapped his jacket around his lower arms like a muff, or a comforter. ‘Barney’s mother is dead,’ he told her.

‘I know that. I did an online search for her after I spoke to him.’

Stewart shook his head slowly. ‘I had no idea he still thought about her,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t mentioned her in years.’

‘I’m afraid she’s on his mind a great deal. Do you never talk about her at all?’

He was fiddling with something on the coat, twisting it, worrying it. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting for him to ask. I should have known the fact that he didn’t was a problem in itself.’

Both afraid of being the first to raise the forbidden subject, each waiting for the other to bring it up.

‘He found her, did you know that?’

‘Yes, I did,’ said Lacey.

‘He and I had been out for the day. He wasn’t an easy baby. Completely adorable in many ways, but demanding. Needed
constant attention and entertainment. Even I found him exhausting and I wasn’t with him most of the day. Karen just couldn’t deal with it and I was trying to give her a break. I thought a bit of peace and quiet for a few hours might help. When we got back, he went running round the house looking for her. He’d climbed up the stairs before I even knew where he was and pushed open the bathroom door. By the time I got up there, he’d climbed in himself. I think he was trying to get her out … God, the two of them, the water had splashed everywhere. It looked like the whole room was covered in blood.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Lacey. ‘How terrible for him. For you both.’

‘For the first few weeks, he asked for her a lot. Just Mummy, Mummy, over and over again. And he had very bad nightmares – it wasn’t difficult to imagine what they were about. After a while, he just stopped asking and I suppose I was relieved. It seemed so much easier just to pretend he’d never had a mother. Jeez, I really screwed up, didn’t I?’

Yes,
thought Lacey.
It’s what we do. We screw up, and those we’re supposed to protect are the ones who get damaged.

Stewart was looking at his watch. ‘I really have to go,’ he said. ‘Thank you. I’ll take care of it.’

Lacey watched him pull his coat back on and walk down the central aisle. Only when the heavy oak door had closed behind him did she realize he’d left something on the pew, something that must have fallen from the pocket of his coat while he’d been fidgeting with it. A small, black glove.

OFTEN, IN THE
other world, Lacey tried to picture the hall where those who were imprisoned physically met with those who served time in other ways, and could never do it. Yet once inside, it became as familiar as her own bedroom. Creamy yellow, scuff-marked walls, dust collecting in corners, high barred windows that never seemed to show anything but grey cloud. Often, when she was in here, Lacey felt as though she’d been in this large, dusty, echoing space for ever and that the world outside was nothing more than vague memories and mostly forgotten dreams.

‘So how long since anything’s happened?’ the prisoner asked.

‘Nearly three weeks,’ said Lacey. ‘Two weeks, four days, to be precise, since Oliver Kennedy was found alive and well. The clocks will go forward soon, the evenings will be light again. People are actually starting to wonder if it’s over.’

Pretty eyes blinked and narrowed. ‘Has there been a deathbed confession?’

‘Not that I’m aware of.’

‘Then it’s not over. If he’s still alive, he’s planning that someone else won’t be.’

‘You sound very sure of yourself.’

Shoulders rose, fell, the prisoner rolled her eyes and pulled a face.
‘You’re right,’ she agreed. ‘What could I possibly know about serial killers?’

‘And there was I, thinking the police and the medical profession had black humour all sewn up.’

‘You want to spend some time in a high-security prison.’

‘If DI Tulloch has her way, I probably will.’

Across the room something fell and shattered. There was a scurry of movement, a muttering of recrimination. Sound always seemed much louder in here, shrill and grating, and when someone yelled, Lacey could almost feel the vibrations spinning round in her eardrums.

‘I take it diplomatic relations have not been resumed?’

‘She’s had me into the station three times,’ Lacey said. ‘She clearly doesn’t believe I know nothing more about the discovery of Tyler King’s body than I’ve already told them.’

‘She’s a cow. But in fairness to her, you do.’

‘Hardly. Without any evidence of where that text came from, all I have is a hunch I can’t prove. And yet she has someone watching my flat every Tuesday and Thursday. I’m sure she’d have it searched if she could get a warrant.’

‘She’s jealous.’

‘Of what, exactly? My meteoric career? Dazzling social life?’

‘She’s jealous because he loves you.’

Lacey told herself not to grin like a halfwit, that it really made no difference whether he did or he didn’t. Except, wasn’t the belief that he did, in spite of everything, the reason she was able to go on?

‘She’s gay,’ Lacey said.

Hazel-blue eyes twinkled. ‘Maybe she’s jealous because you love him.’

‘I’m not going to dignify that—’

‘Yeah, yeah, so are you still seeing the shrink?’

‘Don’t have a choice on that one if I want to keep my job.’

Eyebrows twitched. Eyelids narrowed. ‘You haven’t resigned then?’

Lacey braced herself for an argument. Or an I-told-you-so moment. ‘I haven’t changed my mind. I’m just not prepared to leave under a cloud.’

‘That’s my girl. Does seem a bit of a waste, though, when you can get all the therapy you need here for free.’

‘And believe me, you do me much more good.’

The prisoner leaned forward an inch or so and tipped her head first one way and then the other. Then she sat back and stared for several long seconds without speaking. ‘Hmm,’ she said eventually. ‘You sure?’

Half-amused, Lacey waited the silence out. As if she was going to fall for the steely-eyed stare. Hadn’t she taught it to this girl in the first place? Sure enough, fewer than ten seconds had gone by before boredom set in.

‘So, what’s the latest on Peter Sweep?’

‘What do you know about Peter Sweep? You can’t be allowed to use Facebook?’

‘Not officially. But we can access the internet under supervision. And nobody pays too much notice. Why would they? All the porn channels are blocked. So, go on, Peter Sweep?’

‘The official line is that he was a time-waster,’ said Lacey. ‘Some nut milking the case for his own twisted ends. He wanted attention, to be the centre of a massive media storm, and got rather more than he’d bargained for. The reaction to his kidnapping of Oliver put the wind up him and he’s lying low.’