Like This, for Ever

60




THE FLAT ON the top floor of the white stucco house in Pimlico was empty. Lacey was sure of it. She’d sat in her car looking up, waiting for lights to come on. After a while, she’d walked round to the rear of the properties. Nothing. Joesbury wasn’t home.

There were police cars outside the Robertses’ house when she got back. The front door was open and a uniformed constable was standing guard. DS Anderson had wasted no time. There was no sign of Tulloch’s Mercedes, which was something to be thankful for. Lacey crossed the street, pulling her warrant card from her pocket. She was about to show it to the constable on duty when a familiar figure appeared in the hallway.

‘Pete, it’s me,’ she called.

Stenning saw her and came outside. ‘Stewart Roberts is at Lewisham,’ he said in a low voice, once they reached the foot of the steps. ‘The DI’s talking to him, but he’s freaking out about his kid. Refusing to talk until we find him.’ Stenning kept glancing over her head, as though he was uncomfortable talking to her.

‘You haven’t found Barney then?’

Stenning shook his head. ‘We’ve put a bulletin out, but we’re stretched pretty thin. Everyone we’ve got available is looking for Huck.’

‘Please let me help,’ said Lacey. ‘I can phone round his friends’ houses. He has to have gone somewhere.’ As she waited for Stenning to think about it, she realized the last thing she wanted was to get dragged into the search for Barney.

Talk about being torn in two. All she wanted to do was find Joesbury and help him look for his son. Yet Barney, with no mother and a father in police custody, had no one to look out for him. And it was her fault he’d run off.

‘We’ve got it covered,’ Stenning replied after a moment. ‘Better you keep out of it all.’

‘Have you found anything in the house?’

Stenning glanced behind, then lowered his voice even further. ‘You didn’t hear this from me,’ he said, ‘but we’ve got an expert taking his computer apart. Roberts had a Facebook account, but he was mainly keeping an eye on what his son was doing. Of more interest are numerous internet searches about vampires and blood-drinking. And some very dodgy-looking drugs in his bathroom cabinet. I imagine they’re the ones the kid told you about.’

‘So if the post-mortems of the murder victims show traces of the same drug, then …’

Behind Stenning another detective appeared. Stenning practically jumped away from Lacey. ‘I’ll see you,’ he told her, before pushing past her, crossing the road and jumping into his car. He hadn’t promised to keep her informed or to get in touch with her again. Nor would he. She had no role in the investigation and Stenning, of all people, would toe the line.

OK, did she go in or stay out? Instinctively, out felt right. She’d be on the move, able to look in parks and on scrubland, around garages, even clamber into gardens and peer into outbuildings. It would be pointless, of course, nothing more than keeping her body on the move to stop her head exploding. Trying to find two young boys in the whole of South London.

As she let herself into her flat, the phone was ringing. Joesbury. She grabbed it.

‘Lacey, it’s me.’

The most familiar voice in the world, one that she’d never get used to calling her Lacey.

‘Are you OK? What’s happened?’ Behind the woman’s voice she could hear others arguing, heavy doors slamming shut. The everyday noise of a women’s prison. And what she didn’t need right now was a crisis in the north-east. She could not leave London.

‘I won’t have long, but I had to talk to you,’ the prisoner said. ‘What I saw on the news tonight, about the latest child that’s gone missing. Is it his? Joesbury’s son?’

Conscious that precious seconds were ticking away – phone calls from prisons never lasted long – Lacey found it impossible to answer. If she didn’t say anything now, it might not all be true. She wouldn’t have seen the glass of the interview-room wall shattering, the man she loved in pieces, the pale-faced mother thanking the people whose inability to do their jobs would cost her her son before the night was out. The woman on the phone took the answer as read.

‘Is it significant, do you think? That he’s a senior police officer’s kid? Or just chance?’

‘Probably just chance,’ Lacey managed. ‘Huck is the latest of seven. None of the others had any connection to the police. He just got very unlucky.’

‘Lacey, you have to find him. If he loses his son, he’ll never get over it. You don’t recover from something like that. He might look the same, but inside he’ll rot away.’

Like you did, Lacey thought. Is that going to happen to everyone I love? ‘I’m not part of the investigation,’ she said. ‘Besides, they have a suspect in custody.’

‘Who is he?’

Forcing herself to keep talking, Lacey explained that the odd boy from next door had accused his own father of the killings; that he’d been suspicious for a while and that finding out about his mother’s death, and jumping to the conclusion that his father had been responsible, had been the last straw.

‘And what do you think?’ the woman asked, when Lacey had finished. ‘You know this guy. Does he strike you as being a killer?’

‘They never do,’ said Lacey. ‘But there’s a case to answer. Even the Dracula stuff fits. Stewart’s a lecturer at King’s College. His speciality is Gothic literature. You remember the stuff I used to read? Ann Radcliffe, The Monk, Frankenstein? Well, Dracula’s probably the best-known example of Gothic literature in two hundred years. He would have known it backwards. Barney told me they have several copies in the house.’

‘No.’

‘What do you mean, no?’

‘He’s not your man. Oh shit, Lacey, this is awful. All the police energy will be focused on him now, persuading him to give up information he doesn’t have. And it’s your fault.’

Was everyone going to blame her for what was going on?

‘Lacey, are you still there? OK, I listened to everything you said and frankly, out of the father and the son, I’d be more worried about the son, but just put that to one side for a second. The vampire stuff is the clincher for me. I had some time in the IT room today and I managed to look back through all the quotes from the novel that appeared on Facebook – the ones from the bloke who claims to be the killer. In fact, I’ve got them all with me, and I promise you, whoever this Peter Sweep is, he’s never read Dracula in his life.’

‘What?’

‘OK, on the sixteenth of February, the same day that Hunt character started sounding off on TV, he posted this: Do you not know that tonight when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway? Later that day, we had: There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age they may solve only in part.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘No, keep listening. Next day, this appeared: No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be. A few hours later: Listen to them, the children of the night, what music they make! Two days after that: Take care how you cut yourself. It is more dangerous than you think in this country.’

‘What are you saying, they’re not from the book?’

‘Of course they’re from the book, but Peter Sweep didn’t get them from the book, he got them from an internet search. He did exactly what I did. Typed “Bram Stoker Quotes” into Google and got a list of the most famous ones. They’re the ones he’s been using. He even used them in the same order. The vampire stuff has always been just smoke and mirrors. Sort of like what I did, but not nearly as well thought through. Whereas someone who knows the book well – someone like your Stewart Roberts, who sounds like a pretty bright bloke – would be a bit more subtle, don’t you think? He’d find the more obscure references, the less obvious ones.’

Shit, she was right. ‘Then I really hope we’re back to Peter Sweep not being directly involved at all,’ said Lacey. ‘And if Stewart is clean, then we have nothing.’

‘Yes, you do. Well, I do. And Peter Sweep is definitely your man. He just jumped on the vampire bandwagon to muddy the waters. Fair play, I’d probably have done the same thing given the chance.’

‘Ca—’ Lacey stopped just in time. She could not call the other woman that. Ever again. ‘Toc,’ she said, reverting to an old nickname. ‘We’re running out of time.’

‘OK, I’ve been going through all the references to the killings on social media, mainly those on Facebook, but I’ve kept an eye on the others as well and two things about the Missing Boys page stand out from the beginning. The first is that Peter Sweep had knowledge of what was happening in the case before it was officially made public, and the second is that there was a literary reference running through right from the very beginning. Not Bram Stoker, a different book altogether, and the references were very subtle and very cleverly woven in. No one would have had a chance of spotting them until there’d been at least three or four. And I doubt even I would have done if I hadn’t been reading and re-reading every book in the prison library over the past few months. Right, have you got a pen handy?’

Lacey was at her desk, her computer switched on. She sat down, tucked the phone behind her ear and pulled her keyboard closer. ‘I can type,’ she said.

‘Ryan Jackson’s body found at Deptford Creek earlier this evening. I imagine he was slightly damp when they pulled him out.’

Lacey typed it out, thought about it. Nothing.

‘Go on.’

‘Noah Moore washed up at Cherry Garden Pier. Sorry end for His Nibs. Anything striking you yet?’

‘Some old-fashioned language being used. Other than that …’

‘Oh, that’s my girl, you’re nearly there. Now, when you and your young friends found Tyler King at Deptford, there was a reference to whether his lovely curly hair had been eaten away by the fishes. But if you look at a picture of Tyler, his hair was straight as an arrow. Not a ringlet in sight. Then, when the Barlow boys were found by Tower Bridge, there were no fewer than six references to the fact that they were twins. So what have we got: Slightly. Curly. Nibs. Twins. Come on, you were always the reader.’

‘Oh my God!’

A heavy sigh of satisfaction down the line. ‘And that, my friends, is the sound of the penny dropping.’

‘The Facebook page. The Missing Boys. Missing – lost. It was obvious from the start. Slightly, Curly, Nibs. The dead boys are the Lost Boys.’

‘And if you had time – which you don’t, so I’ll fill you in – you could look in a thesaurus and you’d find out that another word for the verb to sweep is to pan. Peter Sweep is Peter Pan.’

Silence. A second of near overwhelming excitement and then the sharp realization. The other woman was almost certainly right, but how much further did it really take them?

‘Does it help?’ she asked now, as though thinking exactly the same thing.

‘In time it has to,’ said Lacey. ‘But we may not have time. And it doesn’t tell us who he is. No thoughts on that, I suppose?’

‘Hey, I’ve done my bit. It’s up to you now. I’ve really got to go this time. Love you. Trust you. Go find him.’

The line went dead. The call would have cost the other woman a small fortune in prison currency. With everything screaming at her to get up and get moving, Lacey took a few moments to look back through the Facebook postings. The prisoner had quoted them absolutely correctly. Was there really any doubt? None that she could see. OK, this was no time to play the Lone Ranger.

‘Gayle, it’s Lacey,’ she said, when her call was answered. ‘I need to run something past you.’