The room fell into silence. Even the distant prison noises, the slamming doors, the phones, seemed to fade out before fading back into Anna’s awareness. She finally found her voice. ‘Why do you say this isn’t a ring? What makes you so sure?’
‘If this is genuine, we’re talking about a rogue. One man, if you can call him a man, acting alone. Just like Gacy. The nonces, the real ones, the paedophiles that can’t help themselves, they always claim they’re misunderstood. That it’s love they have to share. Fucking Nabokov.’ Shaw’s expression was of a man tasting his own bile. ‘Most of them don’t want to harm their victims. Far from it. They wouldn’t sanction this sadistic shit.’
Anna forced herself back to the images. ‘There’s no reference to Pogo or any clown on Ros— on the first image.’
‘How long between?’ Shaw asked.
‘Nine years.’
Shaw nodded. ‘Remember Willis, Anna. Remember how the first time is either an accident or an experiment. But they see what they can get away with. It thrills them. And if it is successful, if they do get away with it, the seed is planted and it always grows. Always.’
Anna exhaled. It made a stuttering noise in her throat. She was getting lessons in serial murder from this man. She forced herself to press on.
‘The first time…’ She hesitated, but there was now little point in trying to hide anything. ‘Rosie Dawson. The evidence suggests a well-prepared abduction. It wasn’t spontaneous. He knew the area.’
‘And the others? I presume there are others besides Blair Smeaton.’
‘How did you know about Blair—’
Shaw’s brows lowered a centimetre. ‘I read the papers, Anna.’
Anna swallowed. ‘There are others. At least three.’
‘All in the same area?’
‘No. That’s the point. None in the same area.’
‘So, he chose local to start with. Then he went wide to throw you off the scent. And it looks like it worked. Until now.’ Shaw sat back, lifting the images to study them more closely. ‘Abbie had a hearing aid for years, just like Blair,’ he said suddenly, his voice soft. ‘She was always breaking the bastard thing, too.’
Anna was only half-listening. Her mind was weighing up Shaw’s analysis. It made perfect sense and reinforced what she’d begun to think herself. That Blair’s abduction was not instigated by an organised paedophile ring. What if it was just one careful, sick, clever predator? He’d choose a different place and a different MO every time, knowing that would derail the investigation. And they’d missed linking the cases because they would naturally concentrate on exactly that. The method of abduction.
Shaw put down the sheet and sucked air in through his teeth. ‘Jesus, Anna. You know how to choose them. I can’t help you here.’
Oh, but you already have.
‘But if you want proof of how much a piece of dirt Krastev was, I can give you that. Say the word and we’ll go digging.’
Anna’s eyes refocused on Shaw. She knew what he was offering here. More buried treasure.
‘Come on, Anna. You must have enjoyed having all that praise poured over you after catching Willis?’
‘We both know it was more luck than judgement.’
‘Yeah, right. But you’d worked it all out by then, hadn’t you? You knew he was far too clever for his own fucking good. Most of them are. Maybe your child catcher isn’t as bright as he first seems to be. All he’s done is evade capture from the police…’
‘He’s clever enough,’ said Anna.
‘But not as clever as you, Anna.’ Shaw sat forward, his head low. ‘We both want the same thing, you and me. We want to be left alone to wander around inside ourselves. But the world won’t let us, will it? The world is full of meddling arseholes. Never mind all that “the evil that men do” bullshit. It’s arseholes and cockroaches and us.’ Shaw laughed. ‘Me and you, Anna. We work things out and then do something about it. We either wipe the world’s arse or step on the fucking cockroaches.’
He’s identifying with me.
‘I don’t think I’m like you, Hector.’
‘Of course, you don’t. But it’s not a slur. Not in the way you think. Come on, tell me the truth. How many times have you wished they’d all just fuck off?’
It was a good question. An excellent question. One she’d asked herself hundreds of times when some social interaction had grated so badly that all she wanted to do was shut herself away and scream.
‘I’m not that egotistical.’
‘Ego’s got nothing to do with it. It’s all about difference, isn’t it? You’re different, Anna. I know I fucking well am. I pretended I wasn’t for a long, long time and look where it got me. Now I don’t pretend.’
‘But you’re in prison.’
Shaw nodded. ‘And they locked me away for it. But now I’ve got you, haven’t I?’
His words were almost tender. She wanted to protest but bit it back. There was unfinished business here and she was determined to see it through. Shaw understood like she knew he would.
‘We will, of course, look into Krastev’s activities. I’ll be in touch, Hector.’ She got up. Shaw didn’t move, but he let his eyes fall to the folded paper before he handed it back.
‘You want to catch the Pogo wannabe? Work out how he chooses which flowers to pick.’
Thirty
Echoes of the interview bounced around inside Anna’s head as she drove back towards Bristol. She’d played a dangerous game with Shaw and it had left her drained. She phoned through to Trisha and asked her to punch in some new search terms around ‘clown’ and ‘Gacy’ and ‘Pogo’, trying to find any cases in the HOLMES database with links. She was fishing, she knew. There was no hard evidence backing up her theories and she had no idea if what she’d done would be of any help, yet.
But there was no denying Shaw’s ‘expertise’.
Around her, the summer’s morning opened out into a blurred shimmer of light as she sped back along the motorway, but Anna hardly noticed. Shaw’s words preoccupied her.
‘You want to catch the Pogo wannabe? Work out how he chooses which flowers to pick.’
Her phone dragged her back to reality.
‘Justin, what can I do for you?’
‘Superintendent Rainsford was asking for you, ma’am.’
‘Tell him I’ll be there in half an hour.’
* * *
She got back to HQ in Portishead a little before 1 p.m. The office was deserted except for Trisha, who normally brought her own salads, eating at her desk with her earbuds in. The last time Anna’d asked what Trisha was listening to, she’d said it was an investigative journalism podcast about the death of a reclusive eccentric in Alabama. ‘It’s amazing stuff,’ she’d added. ‘Sophisticated and subtle. You should give it a try. I’ll send you the link.’
Trisha’s passion was why Anna would crawl over glass to keep her on the team.
Khosa and Holder were probably in the restaurant or Costa. There was no sign of Woakes.
Anna went in search of Rainsford. His secretary was also at lunch but she gambled and knocked on his door. He was in, reading through the small mountain of paperwork on his desk, a pair of glasses perched low on his nose.
‘Ah, Anna. Just wanted a little chat.’
Anna nodded. Standard opening gambit for a dollop of the serious stuff from RainMan – Holder’s irreverent nickname for the superintendent.
‘DS Woakes has been in to see me.’
‘How was he, sir?’
‘Angry, I think. Difficult to say because he spent most of the time in here pacing back and forth. Said it helped him think. I found it incredibly distracting. But the point of his visit was to complain about the way he was being treated.’
‘By me, sir?’
‘You as his line manager. He says he feels undermined and isolated. Says you’ve effectively cut him off from the case he was investigating.’
‘For his own good, sir. He searched a witness’s house without permission and was very aggressive. There were good grounds for harassment—’
‘Now Woakes is playing the bullying card. He says you’re spreading lies about him. Shifting blame. Excluding him socially.’
‘What?’
‘He says your attitude is affecting his professional performance resulting in low morale.’
‘Sir, I don’t do social. If I do, it’s half an hour at the pub and the team all know it. It’s never been a part of the job description.’