Like This, for Ever (34 page)

Dana nodded. ‘Bought with cash, topped up with cash. If we find the phone itself, we’ve a chance, but other than that, forget it. The phone company tell us it’s a model that parents typically buy for their kids, and that fits with the sightings we had of kids at Deptford Creek that night, but that’s as far as we’ve got. Equally, we’ve had no luck unearthing our mole.’

‘Bit of a worry, that one.’

‘I don’t think it’s anyone on the immediate team, Sir,’ said Dana. ‘There’s any amount of information they could have passed on if they’d been inclined. We’re still looking, of course, but it’s a question of priorities.’

Weaver nodded. He knew all about priorities. ‘Still think we could be looking for a female?’ he asked.

Dana told herself to stop obsessing over Lacey Flint. The fact that the woman was perfectly capable of murder didn’t, in itself, make her actually guilty of it. ‘Some slightly encouraging news on the footprints,’ she said. ‘They believe the depth of the prints isn’t consistent with what you’d expect from even an average-sized bloke. There’s also some evidence of the edges of the prints being indistinct, as though the boots were sliding around. They believe it’s perfectly possible that the boots were worn by someone much lighter and smaller than the size-ten prints would have us believe.’

‘A woman trying to give the impression of being a bloke?’ said Weaver.

‘Exactly. And Oliver Kennedy believed he was abducted by someone of a similar size to his fourteen-year-old brother. We also have the possible use of fake blood in the abductions, as a way of throwing the kids off their guard, and the use of pressure-point compression to subdue them. It all points to our perpetrator not having the brute strength of a man.’

‘Well, I can’t say I’m exactly excited by that news, Dana,’ said Weaver. ‘Unless you have some actual female suspects for me.’

Almost of their own accord, Dana’s eyes moved back towards Tower Bridge. A woman on a beach on a wet winter’s night. A woman who’d run.

‘Found your mystery female yet?’

‘No Sir, I’m afraid not.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Do you remember that Facebook page we were monitoring and had blocked?’ she went on. ‘Facebook wanted to remove the block and we agreed. So far the visitors seem to be behaving themselves. There’s no sign of Peter Sweep anywhere.’

‘What’s the latest thinking?’

‘Split between those who thought he was a complete time-waster who got scared by the furore he created, and those who believe he is the killer, whom resourceful Oliver Kennedy managed to foil.’

‘What do
you
think?’

‘Susan Richmond believes he wasn’t the killer, and she makes a very convincing case. She thinks Peter Sweep is a teenage prankster with good enough IT skills to be able to stay one step ahead of the publicly available information.’

Weaver was nodding. ‘Clocks change soon,’ he said. ‘Evenings will be light again. He’s going to find it a lot harder to dump bodies along the Thames without being seen.’

‘Well, that’s something to look forward to.’

‘You don’t think he’s stopped, do you?’

‘Guv, nobody thinks he’s stopped.’

‘BARNEY!’

Barney stopped at the door of the changing room and turned to face his PE teacher. ‘Well played today,’ said Mr Green as he caught up with the line of boys. One by one they disappeared inside the changing room, leaving Barney and Mr Green alone in the corridor.

‘Thank you, Sir.’

‘Some good passing. You’re a generous player, you don’t hog the ball.’

Barney smiled. He’d tried, once, to explain that it was watching the patterns the ball made on the field that gave him the buzz, far more than the ability to put the ball in the back of the net, and the recipient of his rather long-winded explanation had glazed eyes before he’d finished his third sentence. He hadn’t tried since. Let people think he was a generous player.

‘I was wondering if you wanted to join the élite training squad on Tuesday and Thursday evenings,’ Mr Green said.

Mr Green’s élite squad was made up of the best players in their school, the adjacent secondary school and several other local schools. Jorge, Lloyd and Harvey were all part of it, Sam was desperate to be asked.

‘Thank you, Sir, I’ll ask my dad.’

From beyond the changing-room door came the scuffling, banter and high-pitched giggling of several young boys in a confined space, free of clothes and supervision. Mr Green hammered on the door. ‘Quieten it down, you lot,’ he yelled.

The noise abated fractionally, then picked up again.

‘It finishes at eight, which is quite late,’ said Mr Green, who was leaning against the door, one arm outstretched. ‘But I can drop you off afterwards. I usually go on to the gym after football and I drive very close to your house. It won’t be a problem.’

‘Thanks. But my dad might be able to pick me up,’ said Barney. ‘He doesn’t work in the evenings any more.’

‘Really? I thought you told me he always worked late on Tuesdays and Thursdays?’

Barney shook his head. For the last couple of weeks, since Oliver Kennedy had briefly disappeared, his dad had been coming back at his usual time and spending the evening at home. He’d rearranged his tutorial responsibilities, he’d explained, when Barney had questioned him. ‘Not for a few weeks now,’ he said.

‘Mr Green, it might not concern you that the boys in your care have ripped the hooks off the walls in there, but my English class and I are finding it rather difficult to concentrate.’

Mrs Green had appeared from the nearest classroom and had the look on her face that usually meant she’d been watching you talking for several minutes when you should have been finishing off your maths. Only this time, Mr Green was getting the brunt of it.

‘I’m very sorry, Mrs Green,’ he replied. ‘I know how you hate your normal routine to be disturbed.’

Uh-oh, something wasn’t right between those two. Normally when teachers addressed each other as ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ they did it in a half-jokey way, as if they were really saying,
Yes, we both know we don’t normally talk like this, but we’re pretending as we’re in front of the kids and actually it’s a bit of a laugh, isn’t it?
These two weren’t joking at all; Barney could almost see the words coming out of their mouths like little silver darts. Stab, stab, stab. Barney hadn’t much experience of married behaviour, but even he could spot the undercurrents of a row.

‘I’d better get changed, Sir,’ he said, stepping forward, ready to go past Mr Green and into the changing room. In fairness, it was pretty loud in there.

‘And I’d better nail the hooks back on to the wall,’ said the PE teacher, following him in without another word to his wife.

Barney was the last in the changing room, some five minutes after the second-last boy to leave. It was always a mistake, being one of the stragglers. If he were first to finish, which he usually tried to be, it was relatively easy to walk out of the door, but if the room was almost empty then no matter how hard he tried, he absolutely could not leave it without tidying up. Never a pleasant experience, picking up sweaty, muddy socks, even underpants sometimes, and putting them in the right places, but better by far than spending the rest of the day with the mess preying on his mind.

By the time he finished, it was at least two minutes after the bell had gone: he was going to be late for his last class of the day. Barney hated being late almost as much as he hated mess. One last look round the room, a last sock to be folded, hands washed and he was out.

The door to his classroom was half open; he got to it and stopped. Mrs Green was in there, alone, talking on her mobile phone. Barney caught her last words, just as she heard him at the door.

‘I’m not sure I can wait much longer,’ she said, and then, ‘Promise me?’ She turned on the spot, phone clamped to her ear. ‘Gotta go,’ she told the caller and cut off the call. ‘Hi!’ she said to Barney.

Barney opened his mouth to say sorry, wondering why, of the two of them, Mrs Green was the one who looked guilty. Actually, not so much guilty as sad.

‘Were you tidying the changing room again?’ she asked him.

No one was supposed to know he did that. He couldn’t remember telling anyone at school he did that. He always waited till everyone was gone. He shrugged.

‘I need my science folder,’ he said, glancing across the room to his desk.

‘Better hurry up then,’ she said.

Barney crossed the room, grabbed his folder and made for the door again. Mrs Green watched him every step of the way. She often watched him. Sometimes in class, if he glanced up suddenly, he saw Mrs Green watching him, just staring at him, not in an angry way, in fact a bit like the way his dad looked at him sometimes. He never saw her looking at any of the other children in the same way. Just him.

‘Barney,’ she said, as he was about to disappear. He turned back.

‘If Mrs Lafferty tells you off for being late, tell her I asked you to stay behind.’

‘Thanks, Miss,’ said Barney, because it would be impossible to explain that it was the being late, not the telling off, that bothered him.

‘Although I guess it’s the being late that bothers you. Go on, you funny boy. Get a move on.’

‘
YOU KNOW SOMETHING?
Until I started seeing you, no one ever talked to me about what happened that day. The day it all started.’

‘Never?’ asked the psychiatrist.

‘Not once.’

‘Why do you think that is?’

‘They were just hoping I’d forget. Because I was so young, not much more than a baby, they all thought I wouldn’t remember anything about it. You’re not supposed to start remembering things until you’re quite a bit older than I was then. So I expect they thought, even if it’s in there somewhere, it’s buried so deep it will never find its way out.’

‘But you do remember? Some of what happened?’

‘I remember everything.’

‘Why don’t you tell me? Tell me what you remember.’

SIX CHILDREN SAT
huddled beneath the corrugated-metal roof at the top of the skateboard ramp. Raindrops bounced from rooftop to ramp and caught the gang in the backsplash, but damp clothes and stiff bodies seemed a small price to pay for a few more minutes of freedom from adult control.

‘It’s five to nine,’ said Lloyd. ‘I need to go.’

‘We’ll all go together,’ replied Jorge. ‘At nine o’clock.’

Barney, at the edge of the group, was watching the reflections of the streetlights on the rain-drenched ramp. One reflection, from the light immediately behind them, shone directly across the playground to the mural on the opposite wall. The large green crocodile with the alarm clock rammed between his teeth looked set to leave the brick wall and waddle along the orange path towards them. There was something rather menacing about that crocodile.

A flickering streetlight caught his eye. It was just outside the old municipal building on the next street along. From the top of the ramp, Barney could see the second and third floors of the abandoned building. It was dark red, like the community centre, with ornate brickwork around the flat roof. Funny – two of the windows on the second floor were boarded up. He was pretty sure three of them had been the last time he’d looked.

‘Planet Earth to Barney. Come in, Barney.’

Barney turned back to the others. He’d done it again, gone off into his own little world. He was tempted to ask how long he’d been zoned out, but didn’t really want to draw attention to the problem.

‘So what do you think, Barney Boy? Has he stopped or will he kill again?’

‘It’s been three weeks now,’ said Barney.

Of the group, only Jorge openly registered that that wasn’t anything like an answer to the question. Had he stopped, or would he kill again? It was a question Barney asked himself several times a day. Since Oliver Kennedy had been found alive and well, he’d allowed himself to hope. Twenty-two days had gone by and nothing.

Oliver Kennedy had been nowhere near his granddad’s boat. And if the boys weren’t being killed on the boat, what difference did it make that his dad had been there on the Saturday night they’d found Tyler’s body or on the Tuesday that Oliver had disappeared?

Was it a coincidence, though, that in the last twenty-two days, when there had been no disappearances and no bodies dumped on the banks of London’s rivers, his dad had stopped leaving the house on Tuesday and Thursday evenings?

‘I can’t sleep with the light off any more,’ said Hatty. She was the only one who ever talked about the night they’d found the body. None of them ever mentioned it, unless Hatty did first, but equally, no one seemed to mind when she did. They’d nod understandingly, as though grateful to her for articulating what they all felt. ‘I keep seeing his face,’ she went on.

‘It was just decomposing tissue,’ said Lloyd. ‘If you see a dead fox or cat in the road, chances are it’ll be covered in maggots. It’s horrible, but it’s not scary. So why should a dead human be any scarier?’

None of the others looked convinced.

‘I think he’s stopped,’ said Barney, and his right hand, tucked deep inside his coat pocket, had its fingers crossed. ‘We may never know why exactly, but just as there was a trigger that made him start, there was another that made him stop.’

‘He hasn’t stopped,’ said Jorge. ‘He’s just biding his time. He
probably already knows who he’s going for next, he’s just waiting for the right moment.’

Silence, and then Hatty gave a theatrical little shudder. ‘I’m so glad I’m a girl,’ she said.

‘Yeah, but in dim light, that’s not always obvious,’ retorted Jorge.

There was a moment of scuffling, of good-natured complaint, as Hatty hit out at Jorge and he dodged out of her way, pushing Lloyd out into the rain.

‘So why has he done nothing for nearly three weeks?’ Barney asked.

‘People got too careful,’ Jorge replied. ‘No one was letting their kids out any more. Dads were coming home from work early to meet their kids at school. Cops were going to every school in the area, warning people, telling them to stay in groups, not to trust anyone they didn’t know very well. It got to the point where kids wouldn’t even answer their own front doors.’