Like This, for Ever

16




‘I CAN’T QUITE believe these words are coming out of my mouth, but I’m actually looking forward to hearing what this profiler has to say,’ said Anderson as they drove back towards Lewisham.

‘Steady on, Sarge,’ muttered Stenning from the back seat. ‘You’ll be saying next that women on the force is a good thing.’

‘The timing’s important,’ said Anderson, ignoring Stenning. ‘Jason and Joshua and Noah had been dead for two to six hours when we found them, meaning they were killed earlier in the evening. Ryan was killed around twenty-four hours before we found him, again making the time of death some time in the evening. All three disappeared in the early-evening period too.’

‘He has a job,’ said Stenning. ‘Blue-collar job, most likely, if he’s finishing work by around five.’

‘He has a job and he doesn’t live alone,’ said Anderson. ‘He’s not going to stand out from the crowd.’

‘What do you think, Ma’am?’ Stenning said.

‘I think it’s a woman,’ she said, a second before she could have bitten her own tongue out. Lord, it was one thing to indulge in wild speculations in front of Mark, another entirely with people who depended on her judgement being spot on.

Silence in the car for a second.

‘Blimey,’ said Anderson. ‘Why? Because of what happened …’

‘No,’ said Dana, twisting round in her seat so she could look at both of them. ‘Look, I shouldn’t have said anything. Please don’t repeat it to anyone until we’ve had the profiler’s report. I don’t want to influence her thinking in any way.’

‘No, course not,’ agreed Anderson. ‘Blimey, it would make a lot of sense, though, wouldn’t it? Kids would be far more likely to go off with a strange female.’

They pulled into the station car park. ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘I am going to be a bit disappointed if all this profiler lass tells us is we’re looking for a blue-collar worker who doesn’t live alone.’

‘You’re looking for someone who has a regular nine-to-five job,’ said the profiler, who was a thin, dark-haired woman in her early forties called Susan Richmond. ‘Possibly a blue-collar worker because he seems to finish quite early in the day. He doesn’t live alone.’

Anderson took a deep breath and breathed out heavily. Stenning was biting his lower lip. From across the room came the sound of Mizon trying not to crunch crisps too loudly.

‘But then I’m sure you’ve worked that out for yourselves,’ said Richmond. ‘You also know that he’s organized and careful. He plans everything he does very thoroughly.’

‘We know he’s clever,’ said Mizon, through a mouthful of cheese-and-onion flavoured.

‘Careful’s not the same as clever. Serial offenders are rarely unusually intelligent,’ said the profiler. ‘Hannibal Lecter is a bit of a one-off. More commonly they’re of average to slightly-below-average intelligence.’

‘Sadly, so are most coppers,’ muttered Anderson.

Richmond got to her feet. ‘I’m not going to give you a report,’ she said. ‘We do that together.’

Around the room several eyebrows were raised.

‘So do we break into syndicates and role-play?’ asked Anderson. Dana caught his eye and glared. He had the grace to look sheepish.

‘I’ll keep that in reserve,’ said Richmond, walking to the whiteboard at the front of the room. ‘For now, we’re going to start with the building blocks.’ She picked up the pen and started writing.

‘Access to the victims,’ she said as she wrote. ‘All four disappeared from in or around their homes. The first boy, Tyler, was last seen at the school gate, waiting for one of his mates who’d been kept behind. Ryan was spotted turning the corner into his street after school, but never actually made it home. The third boy, Noah, was watching television with his childminder and got up to answer the door. Jason and Joshua were in the front garden of their home. No one saw anything and that tells me two things. First, that the killer can make himself very inconspicuous, and second, that he’s patient. The chances are he had to lie in wait more than once, waiting for the opportunity to get at the boys.’

‘You’re assuming Tyler King is part of the investigation,’ said Anderson. ‘We haven’t as yet.’

‘There’s a very good chance,’ said Richmond. ‘He matches the victim profile completely and the circumstances of his disappearance are the same. I suspect his body was dumped like the others but not found. It’ll have been washed out to sea.’

‘Actually that doesn’t happen,’ said Anderson. ‘If someone goes in the river, sooner or later, we pull them out.’

‘Then sooner or later I think you’ll pull Tyler out too,’ said Richmond. ‘Does anything else strike anyone about the abductions?’

‘He’s not threatening,’ said Mizon. ‘All four – five – went with him without a struggle. If they’d cried out, someone would have heard them. No one did.’

‘So he’s either someone they know or someone they would instinctively trust,’ said Richmond. ‘Yet you’ve found no common denominator other than that they were all football players, albeit for different clubs.’

‘Someone in uniform,’ suggested Tom Barrett, one of the DCs on Dana’s team. Barrett was young, black and handsome, and seemingly incapable of taking life seriously. ‘Someone posing as one of us.’

‘Kids of that age still instinctively trust the police,’ said Richmond. ‘And most people in uniform. So, we’ve got inconspicuous, unthreatening, possibly known to the victims, and patient – maybe someone in uniform or a figure of authority.’

‘Actually, we do have some new information on how he might be abducting the boys in the first place,’ said Dana. ‘The pathologist found evidence of carotid baroreceptor compression on both the latest victims.’

Of all the people in the room, only the profiler looked mystified.

‘You’ve heard of pressure points?’ Dana asked her. ‘Points of the body where relatively modest amounts of pressure can cause disproportionate levels of pain.’

Richmond nodded slowly.

‘Police officers are trained to use pressure points to restrain and subdue difficult and violent suspects,’ Dana continued. ‘They’re of limited use, frankly, because people’s natural reaction when faced with pain is to fight against it rather than submit. The trick is to take them by surprise, get them in some sort of limb lock, then get the cuffs on quick.’ She got up and crossed to where Richmond was sitting. ‘I’ll give you an example,’ she said. ‘Let’s imagine you’re a protestor, sitting on the ground, refusing to budge, and I want to move you.’

She moved to behind Richmond’s chair and placed three fingers beneath Richmond’s jawbone on either side of her chin. ‘OK with that?’ she asked.

‘OK so far,’ replied Richmond. ‘Whoa!’

With barely any effort, Dana had pulled upwards, lifting Richmond just a centimetre or two off her seat. She let her go.

‘Wow,’ said Richmond, rubbing her jaw.

‘Another second or so and you’d probably have pulled free,’ said Dana, ‘because you and I are very similar in terms of weight and strength. If Pete did it to you, on the other hand, you’d probably have to do exactly what he wanted you to.’

‘So with a size advantage as well, pressure points can be a very effective way of subduing someone?’ Richmond asked, still looking uncomfortable. ‘So was that used on the Barlow brothers?’

‘No,’ said Dana. ‘The bruises on the boys were lower on the neck, round about here.’ On her own neck, she indicated two points on either side of her throat. ‘Baroreceptors are a sort of gauge that control blood pressure in the body. One on either side of the neck. Apply pressure to both of them and they send a signal to the brain that the body’s blood pressure is dangerously high. So the brain responds by lowering it. What happens when your blood pressure falls?’

‘You feel dizzy, faint,’ said Richmond. ‘Eventually you pass out. Well, that would certainly explain how he got them away quietly. They were in a faint.’

‘It’s not that easy though, is it, Boss?’ said Anderson. ‘It’s not like the Vulcan Death Grip, one squeeze and you’re down. It takes a minute or two, from what I can remember. And it’s far from reliable.’

‘Neil’s right,’ Dana told Richmond. ‘It’s also exceptionally risky, which is why the police don’t use it. But if an adult is using it to subdue a child, I’d say the child could be incapacitated in less than a minute.’

‘Who would know about this?’ asked Richmond.

‘Anyone trained in combat of any sort,’ said Anderson. ‘Police, armed forces. Even people who study martial arts. Frankly, though, I’ve seen kids doing it. My son and his mates went through a phase of torturing each other with pressure points.’

‘OK, well that is helpful,’ said Richmond, giving her neck one last rub. ‘Thank you. I’d like to look now at what he does with the bodies. And the first thing that strikes me is that he wants them to be found quickly. Leaving Tyler to one side for a moment, he leaves them in places where they’ll be seen within hours. He’s making no attempt to hide them, he wants everyone to know what he’s up to. He’s enjoying the attention. But he’s still careful. He knows the river will cover his tracks after a few hours. He picks places where there’s no CCTV and where he has a good chance of getting in, offloading the body and disappearing again. Quiet, but not too quiet, and always at low tide.’

‘He knows the river very well,’ said Mizon.

‘Yes, he does,’ agreed the profiler. ‘OK, now we get to the interesting stuff. All five victims are Caucasian males, aged ten or eleven. When boys of this age are killed, it’s usually either gang related, involving a close family member or sexual. This appears to be none of those. Something on your mind, Sergeant?’

Anderson had been making faces at Dana, gesticulating that now was the time to bring up her killer-as-a-woman theory. She looked at the floor.

‘Apparently not,’ he said.

‘Is the means of death important?’ asked Stenning.

‘The means of death is probably the key to it,’ said Richmond. ‘Our guy doesn’t want to mark the bodies, I think we’re all agreed on that. He wants to keep his boys nice and neat and clean. So why isn’t he smothering them with a pillow? It would be quick and easy, far less messy. Why isn’t he strangling them? He has a thing about pre-teenage boys and he has a thing about blood. That’s what we need to work on.’