Like This, for Ever

28




LACEY’S TRAIN GOT into King’s Cross just before eight o’clock. As she left the station she saw the late edition of the Evening Standard and stopped to take a copy. The masthead had caught her attention. VAMPIRE AT LARGE IN LONDON.

The world had gone nuts.

It was a thirty-minute Underground trip home. The front page of the paper showed artist’s sketches of the four young boys who had died and the one still missing. Each looked paler and thinner than the photographs Lacey remembered seeing. Dwarfing all of them in size was a colour photograph of the psychologist who’d been in the news all day: Bartholomew Hunt, an attention-grabbing pillock, if ever she’d seen one.

Hunt was miffed at not being taken seriously and was happily accusing the Metropolitan Police of being narrow-minded and bigoted in their thinking. A spokesman for the MIT had told the paper that they were taking all new information seriously and were currently pursuing a number of lines of inquiry.

Lacey folded the paper on her lap. The team hadn’t a clue. Pursuing a number of lines of inquiry was as good as saying they had no idea where to turn next. She pulled out her iPhone and pressed the Twitter app. During the day, some wag had christened the murderer the Twilight Killer and #TwilightKiller had been attracting new posts at the rate of several a second. As was the Missing Boys Facebook page. Lacey had also followed comment streams on MySpace and Mumsnet. Several wanted to know of any shops that hadn’t sold out of garlic. There were rumours of holy water and crucifixes being stolen from churches and Bram Stoker’s Dracula was predicted to hit the bestseller chart for the first time since its publication. It seemed safe to say hysteria was building.

At Stockwell, Lacey climbed up to street level realizing that old habits died hard. She’d wanted to know nothing about this investigation and here it was, churning around in her head as if she’d been right in amongst it from the start. Even the country’s incarcerated wanted in on the action. A focus group of some of the world’s most notorious female criminals, working directly for the Met and using her as their main channel of communication? It was almost funny.

Except, was it actually such a bad idea? Who better to get inside the head of a cold and calculating killer than several more of them with time on their hands?

Yep, the world had gone nuts.