Like This, for Ever

9




‘THE BODIES OF Jason and Joshua Barlow were formally identified by their father an hour ago,’ announced Dana to the team in the incident room, including her immediate boss, Detective Superintendent David Weaver. ‘OK, for the benefit of those new to the investigation, these are the facts.’

Behind her, the photographed faces of five young boys stared down at those who were expected to come up with some answers.

‘In the last eight weeks, five boys aged either ten or eleven years old vanished from in and around their homes,’ she said. ‘No one saw them leave, no one saw anyone take them. There were no obvious signs of forced abduction. The first of those boys to vanish, Tyler King, was last seen on the twentieth of December. He is still missing and may be nothing to do with this investigation. Four bodies have now been recovered.’

Weaver was slightly built for a police officer, with thick dark hair, thin lips and a hooked nose. His resemblance to a bird of prey, Dana always thought, was due in no small part to his habit of sitting perfectly still, allowing only his eyes to move around the room.

‘Ryan Jackson vanished on the third of January, was held somewhere for seven days and then found on a muddy bank at Deptford Creek,’ she went on. ‘Noah Moore was taken on the thirty-first of January, found at Bermondsey five days later. In both cases, death had occurred within a few hours of the body being dumped. On first sight, this appears to be the case with the Barlow twins.’

Eyes flickered to the photographs of the two identical dead boys, lying on an oil-slicked, stone-strewn river beach. Weaver’s gaze remained fixed on Dana.

‘Neither Ryan nor Noah were sexually abused or tortured in any obvious way,’ said Dana. ‘Early indications are that the Barlow boys weren’t either. Cause of death in each case was extensive blood loss following the severing of the carotid artery.’

‘Do we think the killer is someone they know?’ asked Weaver.

‘Seems likely, Guv,’ answered Anderson, after a nod from Dana. ‘Kids of ten and older, especially in London, are usually quite savvy. They wouldn’t go off with a stranger without putting up a bit of a fight.’

Not a strange bloke, maybe, thought Dana. An unknown woman, on the other hand …

‘When Noah disappeared, we started looking for connections between him and Ryan,’ Anderson told the team. ‘Obviously, two days ago, we brought the Barlow twins into the circle. Trouble is, there’s nothing obvious.’

‘Although the four boys – five including Tyler – lived within roughly the same area,’ Dana said, ‘and are of the same age and ethnicity, unfortunately the similarities seem to end there. They went to four different schools and we can find no evidence that either they or their families knew each other.’

‘Families all had different backgrounds,’ explained Anderson. ‘Ryan Jackson lived with his mum, who’s a single parent, and two younger siblings. Noah Moore was an only child of affluent, professional parents. Jason and Joshua’s father has been out of work for six months, their mother works part-time in a supermarket.’

‘Two of them were Cub Scouts but with different packs,’ said Dana. ‘All four – five including Tyler – played football, but you name me a ten-year-old boy who doesn’t.’

‘There’ll be a link somewhere,’ said Weaver.

‘I agree, Guv, but we’ve talked to everyone who knew those boys, including all their mates. Every detail has gone into the system and nothing’s come up other than the football connection, which we spotted ourselves.’

As she spoke, Dana looked over at the HOLMES operator for confirmation. The Home Office Large and Major Enquiry System was a sophisticated intelligence system into which details of all major crimes across the UK were routinely fed. It could spot similarities, connections, links to other crimes in minutes. The operator, a drab middle-aged woman, shook her head. HOLMES, so far, hadn’t helped.

‘What about the coaches?’ asked Weaver. ‘Have you checked them out?’

Anderson nodded. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘And boys’ football coaches are usually dads themselves. I can’t see this being a family man somehow.’

The detective superintendent stood and walked closer to the board. The five boys grinned down at him. Ryan had a missing front tooth from a playground injury.

‘What’s he doing with them?’ he asked. ‘We know what he’s not doing, and we can all be grateful for that, but what does he want them for?’

No one replied. They’d asked themselves the same question too many times. They’d got rather tired of endless answers that didn’t fit.

‘It’s not about rage, is it?’ he went on, looking from one boy to the next. ‘It’s all too cold, too careful. OK, tell me about the scenes. They’re not being killed where they’re found, are they?’

‘Pete,’ invited Dana.

Stenning cleared his throat. ‘No, Sir,’ he said. ‘They’re not. There’s been no trace of blood at any of the sites where we found the bodies. They’re bleeding out somewhere else and that’s significant in itself, because each victim suffered extensive blood loss. It would be messy.’

‘Not to put too fine a point on it,’ said Weaver, fingering his shirt collar. He wore expensive shirts, Thomas Pink and Brioni, always perfectly laundered. ‘We’ve got prints, is that right?’ he went on.

‘Yes, Sir. Size-ten wellington boots, the sort that sells several hundred pairs a week. But there are distinctive marks in the prints, other than just the tread of the boot, so we know it’s the same pair at each of the three sites and if we find the boots themselves, we can match them.’

Weaver nodded. It was something.

‘Pete, can you talk to the people who are analysing the prints?’ said Dana. ‘See if they appear normal?’

Several pairs of puzzled eyes looked at her.

‘Normal how?’ asked Stenning.

‘I’m not sure. Can you ask, for example, whether they can get any idea of the weight of the person leaving the prints? A big, heavy bloke would make deeper prints than a fairly light one, don’t you think? So are these prints consistent with the size of man you’d expect to have size-ten feet?’

Stenning still looked puzzled but he nodded. ‘I’ll ask,’ he said.

‘Neil’s been in charge of processing the immediate areas,’ Dana told Weaver. ‘What can you tell us, Neil?’

‘At first he seemed to be choosing his sites carefully,’ said Anderson. ‘Deptford Creek where we found Ryan, and Bermondsey where Noah was left, are both some distance from residential properties. They’re also generally quiet as far as traffic is concerned. He seemed to be keeping to a minimum the chances of someone spotting him, although the site at Bermondsey is directly across the river from Wapping police station. Tower Bridge, though, is a whole different ball game. It’s as though he’s growing in confidence all the time.’

‘Cameras?’ asked Weaver.

‘Not at the sites themselves, Sir. Although quite a number of the roads accessing the sites do have cameras. We’ve got footage from seventeen different roads taken in the time window when our killer must have driven along several of them to offload Jason and Joshua. Fourteen for the Noah Moore investigation. Similar number for Ryan Jackson.’

Weaver’s eyebrows had risen an inch. ‘How many hours are we talking about in total?’

‘A hundred and seventeen,’ said Dana.

Weaver sighed. ‘I don’t even want to think about how many cars would have been caught on camera in South London in a hundred and seventeen hours.’

‘Four hundred and twenty-one thousand and two hundred,’ said Dana. ‘We assumed one per second to be on the safe side. It’s going to take a while.’

Weaver nodded. The footage from the cameras could be sent away to a company that specialized in Automatic Number Plate Recognition. It wasn’t foolproof, because so much depended upon lighting conditions, speed of vehicles, angle of number plate, even the font used, but most of the systems offered a reasonably good rate of recognition. If the same vehicle were spotted en route to both Tower Bridge and Bermondsey on the nights in question, it would be one they’d be very interested in.

‘Start with the most likely routes,’ he said. ‘We could get lucky. In the meantime, I want to bring a profiler in. I know you don’t—’

‘Good idea,’ said Dana.

For once, Weaver let what he was feeling show on his face.

‘There’s something very odd about this one,’ said Dana. ‘It’ll be good to have a fresh perspective.’

‘Ma’am.’

Dana turned. One of the detectives on her team, a blonde woman in her early thirties called Gayle Mizon, was at her computer. ‘You might want to know that Peter Sweep posted on Facebook at 21.37 hours this evening,’ she said. ‘Announcing quite correctly that Jason and Joshua’s bodies had been found.’

Several members of the team moved closer to Mizon and peered over her shoulder at the screen. More than one helped themselves to an open jar of sweets on the desk. Mizon seemed to eat continually.

‘What’s this?’ asked Weaver, glancing over.

‘We’ve been monitoring social network sites, Sir,’ replied Mizon. ‘A hundred and sixty of them, to be precise. A couple of dozen mention the murders on a reasonably regular basis, mainly the London-based ones and the parents’ chat sites. They all seem pretty innocuous, but we are interested in a Facebook site called the Missing Boys.’

She paused to get her breath and Weaver nodded to show he was following.

‘Quite a few of the contributors seem to have known the boys personally,’ Mizon said. ‘Which is the main reason we’ve been taking an interest, in case one of them lets something slip that they wouldn’t necessarily say to us. Nothing so far, but this chap called Peter Sweep keeps popping up. He knows about developments in the case before anything’s been officially released.’

‘I assume we’ve tried to trace him,’ said Weaver.

‘Facebook have been quite helpful,’ replied Mizon. ‘They let us have the email addresses of the site’s main contributors. Then it was a question of getting in touch with the internet service providers to get the IP addresses and the Mac addresses. Most of them are coming from normal family computers in homes, occasionally schools. A lot of them are using their real names and they all check out. Peter, though, doesn’t. He uses computers in public buildings or a mobile phone. No profile, just a completely random picture of roses, and no personal information of any kind, which is just odd for young people on Facebook. They normally like to tell the world everything. And, to me, he just doesn’t sound like the other kids.’

‘Not a kid?’ asked Weaver.

Mizon shrugged.

‘So far, he’s not used the same building twice,’ said Dana. ‘If we could pin him down even to a few, we could put cameras in and catch him that way. All we know at the moment is that he probably lives in the same area of South London that most of the murdered boys did.’

‘Any number of people will know what we’re up to before official announcements are made,’ Weaver said. ‘On the other hand, his trying to conceal his identity is interesting in itself. It’s worth keeping an eye on.’

The door to the incident room opened and a woman in civilian clothes made eye contact with the superintendent. She tapped her watch and gestured towards the corridor.

‘Five minutes,’ Weaver told her. She left the room.

‘Press conference at eight,’ Weaver said to Dana. ‘Will that give you enough time?’

As Dana nodded, Weaver walked back to the incident board. He took his time, looking from one young face to the next. ‘We had to wait a week to find Ryan,’ he said. ‘Noah was missing for five days, and now Jason and Joshua turn up after only two.’

‘We know, Guv,’ said Dana. ‘Whoever he is, whatever he’s doing, he’s killing them faster.’