Kim paused so that everyone could indicate they understood.
‘It is imperative that we do not separate from our partners. Jameel, Catherine, Professor, you are there to assist us with guidance of the site only. Under no circumstances are you to do anything that will jeopardise your own safety or the safety of anyone else.
‘If anything happens you get on the radio immediately and assistance will come. Do you understand?’
Three voices said yes.
‘And finally I want a check call once you reach your designated location and every fifteen minutes thereafter. Got it?’
They all voiced their understanding.
She caught the brief look of doubt that shadowed Bryant’s expression as he nodded in her direction.
She turned away, took a deep breath and offered a silent prayer.
Tracy, for your sake, I hope I called this right.
Eighty-Three
Tracy heard the sound above. Again she was unsure how long ago he’d left her. The thought was floating around her head like a wind-torn kite and she just couldn’t grab its tail.
The tea tray had been cleared away. She didn’t know when, and she didn’t need to wee any more, but she wasn’t wet, and she didn’t smell either.
The door opened, and for a moment Tracy thought her eyes were deceiving her.
The figure that stood before her looked… normal. The make-up and the pigtails were gone. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.
She had the fleeting thought that it wasn’t the same person at all. That this man was here to save her. She’d been found. She was being rescued.
But then she saw the eyes. They were piercing and full of anger. The keys in his hand were being smacked against his other palm.
‘Come now, Tracy, it’s time for you to go.’
Eighty-Four
Bryant followed Professor Wright from the Portakabin into a pool of light from the one lamp to which the CCTV camera was affixed. An orange glow rained down and shone their way to the end of the gravel patch. The glow of the circle amongst the surrounding darkness reminded him of a dozen science-fiction films.
Beyond the glare their path was lit by a moon that peeked occasionally from behind the gathering storm clouds.
Bryant increased his speed to keep pace with the professor. For a portly man, he could move at speed.
As they left the safety of the glowing circle the professor activated the torch and shone it to the ground about five feet ahead. There was little point shining it directly ahead of the feet. If you were that late illuminating a hole in these fields you were going down. And in this place, you would not be alone.
Bryant shuddered at the thought of it.
He knew they were heading over to the area where Louise had been found. It was the furthest point west of the property and about three-quarters of a mile from where Jemima and Isobel had been dumped.
He understood his boss’s reasons for the placement and wasn’t offended by it. Although he spent time on the rugby pitch, the balance of weekends that he did or did not was tipping towards less often.
Dawson, on the other hand, visited the gym with a single-mindedness that he sometimes put into his work. Rain or shine, the guy kept his four-times-weekly commitment to keeping fit and healthy. And he was almost twenty years younger.
Although seeing the pace at which the professor moved, Bryant wasn’t sure exactly where he would place his money in a sprint to the finish.
‘Some weather we’re having, eh?’ he asked to break the silence between them.
‘It is indeed, Sergeant,’ the professor answered without looking at him. ‘Condensation is forming in a volume of unstable air generating a deep, rapid, upward motion in the atmosphere. The heat energy is creating powerful rising air currents that swirl upwards.’ He slowed and shone the torch up towards the darkness and nodded. ‘There will be electrostatic discharge later, I would think.’
‘There’ll be what?’ he asked.
‘Lightning, Sergeant. It’s what happens between electrically charged regions of a cloud.’
‘Oh,’ he said.
Ask a professor a simple question, Bryant thought.
‘So how is it that you know the killer’s name but are unable to trace him?’ the professor said, asking a question of his own.
Unlike the professor, Bryant had no dazzling, complicated, technical response. ‘He entered the system as Graham Studwick at eleven years of age. There is no record of Graham Studwick from that point on. He left the system as someone else.’
‘Does that happen often?’ the professor asked. ‘People enter the system, as you call it, and simply disappear?’
More often than he’d like to admit, Bryant thought. And certainly more often than it should.
‘There are so many different agencies involved with the care of a minor nowadays,’ he explained. ‘Borough councils merge or separate. Services are contracted out, medical records move amongst neighbouring health authorities. There isn’t one body that oversees all aspects of a child’s care.’
Bryant observed his own use of the word ‘body’ in a place like this.
‘Ah, I see,’ the professor said in a tone that indicated he wasn’t really listening.
Bryant continued speaking but as they neared their designated area he sensed the distraction of the man beside him. He no longer offered any response at all to acknowledge that he was even listening.
Bryant closed his mouth and stopped speaking.
He knew the storm was coming. Could feel the threat of it in the air.
For some reason, he had the feeling that the threat of something more existed all around him.
Eighty-Five
‘So do you think we’ll see any action tonight?’ Jameel asked as they headed across the gravel patch. ‘I mean do you think he’ll dump another one here?’ he continued, giving Dawson no time to answer.
He shook his head as they entered the wall of darkness.
Only a kid who had experienced little contact with a crime scene would exhibit so much excitement at the prospect of freshly murdered bodies while normally surrounded by old, decaying corpses. It was ironic that those same words could have come from his own mouth ten years ago.
He watched as Bryant disappeared from view with Professor Wright, heading west in the direction of the area where Louise Hickman had been excavated just a couple of days earlier.
His boss was keeping pace with Catherine as they headed far east to the site where Jemima and Isobel had been left.
And here he was, travelling into no man’s land between them, with a kid who could barely contain his delight at the prospect of a fresh body.
‘Mate, keep the torch steady,’ Dawson snapped. The lamplight on which they were now reliant was darting all over the place.
Jameel chortled. ‘Oh yeah, I get ya,’ he said, realising that the area of greatest importance was the ground on which they walked. At Westerley any danger to their well-being and safety originated from the graves underfoot.
‘So what drew you to this place?’ Dawson asked. The kid’s effervescent nature and popularity on YouTube seemed at odds with the studious geek necessary for the number crunching he did in the middle of nowhere with just the professor, Catherine and a bunch of dead bodies for company.
‘The data, man,’ he said as though that explained everything. ‘Give me a handful of numbers and I can give you data, facts, projections. Tell me your last three gas bills and I’ll give you ten pages of results – history, patterns, projections. Here I get hundreds of numbers every day, and I turn them into fact. I can produce past, present and future. It’s cool shit, man.’
‘How’d you get here?’ Dawson asked. The torchlight remained more stable when the kid was focussed on speaking.
‘We were all hand-picked by Professor Wright,’ he explained. ‘I attended a seminar about stomach bacteria. There are one hundred trillion microorganisms in the intestines. That’s more than ten times the total number of human cells in the—’