Like This, for Ever

53




Monday 10 March

‘YOU SAVED ME the best view,’ said Dana, as she settled into the chair by the window and stiffened against a shiver. It would be cold here, floor-to-ceiling windows made it inevitable in March, but the view from the first-floor Blue Print Café on Butler’s Wharf was just about worth it.

‘Actually, I didn’t,’ replied Detective Superintendent Weaver, nodding downstream. Judging by the level of wine in his glass, he’d arrived early. ‘That’s the one I prefer.’

Dana had been looking past the thousand-year-old Tower of London towards the metallic gleam of the City. Every brick, every steel plate, every pane of reinforced bomb-proof glass sang out power. She turned a 90-degree angle. Warehouses, dock buildings, rotting wooden piers.

‘Whistler did a series of sketches of the Thames warehouses,’ said Weaver. ‘I’ve got copies at home. I’d have them on the wall, but Mary thinks unsigned prints are naff so I keep them in a folder in my study. Incredibly atmospheric – I’ll bring them in some time. Torn sails flapping in the gales, masts brushing against the rooftops, buildings that seem to be growing out of the river and tumbling into it at the same time. Working boats like beached whales, you can’t see how they’ll ever get out of the mud. And then the tide comes in and they’re off again, to distant shores.’

‘Very poetic, Sir.’

‘And so many people, scurrying around like ants, with their individual jobs and their collective purpose. In over a hundred years it hasn’t changed.’

‘I hadn’t appreciated luxury riverside apartments and embankment restaurants were popular in Whistler’s day,’ said Dana, as the waiter approached them.

‘Yes, very funny. The detail might have evolved, but the picture remains the same to me. East of here is what London’s really all about. The City, on the other hand, could be anywhere. What’ll you have?’

With the skill born of frequent practice, Dana opened the menu and spotted the choices that would be the easiest to force down. ‘Salad and the risotto, please,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to kick off ?’

Weaver pulled out a notebook and put it, unopened, on the table. Dana had brought her laptop.

‘The exercise we did monitoring traffic in and around the dump sites threw up several dozen vehicles that travelled along more than one of the routes being watched on the evenings the bodies were left,’ she began. ‘We’re following them up to see if any of the registered keepers have a record of any kind. If they do, we want to know what they were doing on the nights the boys went missing.’

‘Anything yet?’

‘Nothing, but we’re not quite through the list. After that, we’ll go back to those who don’t have form.’

‘This doesn’t feel like first-offence territory to me,’ said Weaver.

‘No. But it could just be someone who didn’t get caught. Dave Cook’s team have finished their search of the main Thames bridges. Apart from the one they found on Tower Bridge, there was nothing.’

The day Oliver Kennedy had been found safe and well in a London church, the line-access team had searched Tower Bridge and found a parcel similar to the one retrieved from Southwark Bridge by Constable Finn Turner. A heavy-duty black bin-liner, stuffed with two taped-together pillows and the decomposed carcass of a pigeon. Peter Sweep, it seemed, had been planning his own particular take on the practical joke for some time.

‘Any idea how he got them up there?’ asked Weaver.

‘The line-access team think “down there”,’ said Dana. ‘They tried swinging a similar package from above on a line and letting it go. They think Sweep must have dropped his over the side and possibly lost quite a few in the process.’

Weaver nodded.

‘As you know, the search of the area around Deptford Creek Marina found nothing,’ said Dana.

That hadn’t been strictly true. The search of the Deptford Creek Marina had unearthed a couple of thousand pounds’ worth of stolen goods, stashed away in old vans and Portakabins. All small-scale stuff that Dana had been happy to hand over to local CID.

‘And I understand it is quite possible for Tyler’s and indeed Ryan’s bodies to have been washed up the Creek from the Thames?’ Weaver asked.

Dana nodded. ‘Since DI Joesbury spent his childhood on the river, there’s been a big development at the mouth of Deptford Creek,’ she said. ‘It’s altered the way the river flows. Now it’s quite common for debris to get carried up the Creek when the tide’s coming in, and then get trapped there. Once we heard that, we scaled down our search of the marina.’

Weaver glanced down at the screen on his mobile phone.

‘The fibres we found on Oliver Kennedy’s clothes have been identified as coming from a fleece jacket made by a company called J. Crew,’ said Dana. ‘They’re a popular supplier of casual, outdoor-style clothing. We’ve traced it to a particular batch and should be able to match it to the garment itself, if we ever find it.’

For a second she thought she’d lost her boss’s attention. He was staring across the river towards Wapping.

‘One of those Whistler sketches features the police station,’ he said. ‘The distinctive shape of the roof, the bay windows on the front. Over a hundred years ago, a senior police officer sat in Dave Cook’s office and looked across to where we are now. I mention it because I’ve just had a bill for the search of the storm drains he had his dive team do. Is it too much to hope it gave us anything?’

A joint operation of the Marine Unit, Lewisham MIT and the Environment Agency had conducted a search of the two-mile stretch of the south bank between Tower Bridge and Bermondsey. They’d been looking for traces of blood around the storm drain and sewerage outlets. In summer – even in dry autumns, the team from the Environment Agency had told them – there would be no question of it being a search for a needle in a haystack. All polluting substances entering the Thames would leave a trace of some sort. But in March, given the above-average rainfall they’d had in the past few weeks, it had been a long shot. One that hadn’t paid off.

‘We still haven’t found out who sent Lacey Flint that text,’ said Dana, mentally making her way down her checklist. ‘Nor are we likely to, unless Flint herself comes clean with us.’

‘Sent from a pay-as-you-go phone, is that right?’ said Weaver.

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.’