He stood. ‘Of course he wasn’t going to kill me, you stupid cow, he’s a police officer being watched by another police officer with you witnessing the whole fucking thing.’
‘You were turning a funny colour,’ she said, as the tremor entered her voice.
He continued to move towards her. She took a step backwards.
‘You gave them a name,’ he said, feeling the rage burn around his body.
‘I was trying to save you,’ she whined, angering him more.
Her foot caught the bin as her body came to a forced stop in the corner of the kitchen.
He advanced. ‘Do you realise what you’ve fucking done?’
His arm swept across the counter, sending plates, cups and a fruit bowl crashing to the ground.
She shook her head but her eyes didn’t leave his face.
She knew what was coming.
‘I said, do you realise what you’ve gone and done?’ he repeated.
‘What was I supposed to do, Gaz?’ she pleaded.
‘You could have jeopardised everything, you stupid bitch,’ he said, punching her in the mouth.
She cried out and raised her arms in front of her face. The second blow landed in her stomach; his hard, powerful fist driving through the softness of her flesh.
She made a retching sound as her hands lowered to protect her belly.
The third blow landed on the side of her temple as she started to crumple to the ground.
‘Please, Gaz, don’t—’
‘Shut up, you stupid cow. Do you think you won’t be found out?’
He clenched his fist again. The throbbing in his knuckles felt satisfying.
He should never have told her anything. Yes, his sister shared his views but he should have kept Floda his own secret.
‘I can’t fucking trust—’
His hand stilled in the air as the doorbell rang.
‘You know who that is, don’t you?’ he asked, as a deathly calm stole over him.
‘It might be the neighbour or—’
‘Keep your damn mouth shut,’ he said, straightening his shirt and moving away.
The glass panel in the door told him the person who had knocked was a stranger.
But he already knew who it was.
EIGHTY-SEVEN
Kim sat on the edge of the table at the top of the room. The boards were almost complete.
‘Anybody managed to find Fiona Cowley yet?’
Gibbs shook his head. ‘Not been into work and no call either.’
Damn it.
‘Guv,’ Lewis said, quietly. ‘Why did Fiona Cowley authorise the dig in the first place?’
‘Bloody good question,’ Kim answered. ‘And one of the first ones we’ll ask her once we find her.’
‘And Jeff Cowley has just been released,’ Travis said, coming back into the squad room.
‘You’re kidding?’ Kim said.
He shook his head. ‘Time’s up. Not enough to charge him with anything. He won’t be going far with Billy still in hospital. We’ll get him back.’
Kim hoped so. He still had a lot of questions to answer.
‘Okay, folks, to recap; Stacey, for some reason, has taken an interest in the suicide of a teen named Justin Reynolds. She has visited his home, spoken to his mother and taken the boy’s laptop.
‘It appears that Justin’s accounts are full of racist posts, losing him most of his friends. Stacey has made a dummy account, which I can only assume is to get the attention of someone called Floda.
‘That same name has emerged in connection with a rush of hate crimes being investigated by Dawson and Bryant and one of our bodies from the Cowley site is Jamaican,’ she added, for the benefit of Dawson and Bryant. ‘Who also bore physical signs of being hunted.’
Those words would never come easily to her.
Penn held up Stacey’s phone. ‘The account for Floda no longer exists but I have a text message telling her the laptop is outside the station,’ he said. ‘And I’m just working through some photos she took of a racist website. There appears to be some kind of get together happening tonight.’
Damn it, Kim thought. Stacey had been lured outside by someone who had stolen Justin’s property and then promised it back. Unaware of the danger, she had foolishly gone looking. And someone had been waiting.
Lynda stood up slowly, and began walking towards the fourth board on the other side of the room.
‘It is the invitation,’ she said, to no one, as she picked up a red marker pen.
She silently began to fill in the gaps on the board.
The first line read ‘The Hunt’.
She ignored the second line, which they had already assumed to be a date.
She hesitated at the last line in small letters. She wrote backwards as though trying something out.
Two words. The last one ending in ‘ed’. She filled in the word ‘required’ and made a space leaving a five-letter word beginning with the letter ‘P’.
‘Photo,’ Dawson called out.
‘Proof,’ Kim said.
‘Hang on,’ Dawson said. ‘Remember our guy who beat up Henryk. He told Henryk to close his eyes. We saw footage of him messing with his phone.’ He turned towards her. ‘Maybe it’s both. Maybe a photo is proof,’ he said.
‘If it’s an event, it’s proof of entry,’ Kim said, as a wave of nausea circled in her stomach.
She saw Dawson’s deep swallow before speaking. ‘Aisha was accosted for one reason. To lie down and close her eyes.’
‘Fuck. To look dead,’ Kim cried out. ‘That’s the proof of entry. A dead body.’
‘But the note is more than twenty years old,’ Gibbs said. ‘There were no camera phones back in the…’
‘Polaroids,’ Bryant said. ‘Very popular in the eighties. I had…’
‘The abductions,’ Lynda suddenly cried out. ‘The attempted snatches this week. First victim was West African and the second from the traffic accident was Asian. And you say Stacey is…’ her words trailed away as every face in the room fell on her.
‘It’s a new one,’ Kim breathed. ‘It’s a new event. A fresh hunt.’
Kim felt the trembling start at her knees.
Stacey was the prey.
EIGHTY-EIGHT
‘Okay,’ Kim said. ‘Somehow, everything we’ve all been working on brings us back to the same place. We’re all agreed that the rush of hate crimes is somehow linked to a live hunt, some kind of entrance into the actual event.’
She swallowed the bile that rose in her throat. Indulging her rage and disgust would not help her find Stacey.
‘It’s likely that Justin Reynolds was responsible for the assault of Henryk Kowalski and that Aisha Gupta was his first attempt. He was trying to get his entrance fee but he just couldn’t finish the job.’
Despite her best efforts, she could not keep the bitterness from her tone. Any human life valued so poorly was horrific to her but the choice being made on the colour of someone’s skin or sexuality made her want to hit something, hard.
‘I still think—’
She stopped speaking as her phone rang.
‘Go ahead, Doctor A,’ she answered.
‘I have the results of the soil samples,’ she said.
‘And?’ Kim prayed this was going to give her something.
‘Different levels of magnesium, potassium and—’
‘Doc, anything that can help us?’ Kim asked, urgently. Those bones had been moved like they were leftover scraps.