‘Okay. Good idea,’ Richard said.

  ‘All right. One last thing, Richard. And I need you to be honest with me… Has Alan Smithee attempted to make contact again with you since?’

  ‘No. It was just that one time.’

  ‘Okay. So you’re back home now?’

  ‘Yes. I’m home.’

  ‘Good. Lock your doors and get some sleep. I’ll call you tomorrow morning.’

  Richard bid him goodnight and ended the call. He closed his eyes and let out a sigh of relief. The tears over the phone, the tears back in the police station really hadn’t been that hard to produce. It looked as though those two detectives – the friendly Welsh one and the bearded grump sitting beside him – had both lapped them up.

  But the fact remained… the crowlike figure who had haunted his dreams for the last three decades and become a ghostly raggedy caricature – the pale face, the smudged eyes, the wild black hair clogged with drying blood and spattered brains – hadn’t died in the woods. He’d survived. He’d remembered. He’d somehow tracked down the other three and killed them. And two years ago he’d come knocking on Richard’s office door with a fake CV and that stupid alias.

  If he doesn’t want me dead… what the fucking hell DOES he want from me?

  50

  Alistair sipped his coffee through the plastic lid, sat back on the park bench and studied the empty playground. At eleven o’clock at night – bathed in a sickly sodium light and absent of little toddlers bustling from the swings to the climbing frame and back again – a playground could be a forlorn place. The daytime cries of joy and excitement covered the creaking of rusty swing chains, the rattle of old bearings beneath the roundabout, the rustle of wind teasing empty crisp packets across the soft-play tarmac.

  His eyes lifted from the fenced-off play area to the gated mews beyond. Those were nice houses and apartments in there. A nice little dormitory mews for the rich, close enough to central London to make for an easy commute, far enough from London to almost feel like a cosy rural hamlet – if you could ignore the light pollution, the distant twinkle of Canary Wharf and the faint, ever-present hum of traffic.

  They were a mixture of mock-Tudor and modern houses, refurbs and new builds, ring-fenced with wrought-iron swirls and peppered with CCTV cameras to keep the plebs at arm’s length.

  He knew which one belonged to Ledger. It was the modern-looking slate-grey two-storey house. All floor-to-ceiling windows and mood-lighting within.

  He knew Ledger was home. He’d watched him pull up at the gates in his Range Rover and wave a key fob at them. The gates slid to one side and he’d watched as Ledger had driven along the mews to the end and down the ramp into his basement garage. And now, every so often, through the slatted blinds he detected movement as the man went about his solitary evening routine.

  I’m just here, Richard. Just here… sitting in the playground.

  It had been two weeks now since the bodies had been discovered. The female superintendent had made a good effort at giving the impression – from behind her nest of microphones – that they were on the case and had a number of leads to follow. But in these two weeks there had been no more news.

  He had no idea how fast a police investigation worked on a newsworthy case like this one. Did they work around the clock? Did they work in bleary-eyed shifts through the night? Blitz through weekends? Or was it like any other job…? Tools down on Friday and everything could wait until Monday morning.

  Were they closing in on him now? Had his name been scrawled on some whiteboard at police HQ?

  Alistair doubted it. What had occurred had happened a long time ago, before the internet stored every little thing in its vast digital cloud.

  He’d been found in the woods by a woman walking her dog and rushed to hospital. They’d managed to save him, but he’d been told later that it had been a close-run thing.

  The police were called to his bedside – and he’d been asked if he wanted to report a crime. His nose had been broken, an orbital socket had been crushed, his skull had been badly fractured, he was missing four teeth at the front, his jaw had been broken in three places… and his rectal passage stitched where it had been torn. He was never going to be a pretty boy again… and he was destined for a lifetime of discomfort. Not to mention the crippling anxiety and the traumatic flashbacks that would plague him years later.

  At the time he’d genuinely wanted to help the police identify who’d done this to him, but the last thing he’d been able to recall was listening to the Cure on his Sony Walkman as he’d headed towards the playing field.

  His ex-foster parents had visited a couple of times during his rehabilitation. That was nice – they didn’t have to… He’d been a difficult foster child. And then, six months later, when he’d just turned eighteen, he’d been discharged, looking very different. His hair, which had been shaved off so that they could operate on his skull, had grown back to a short patchy fuzz; his face was no longer something anyone would want to frame with long wild locks and highlight with make-up.

  He’d emerged from hospital a very different person. And with a different name.

  Whereas before, his first name had suited his effete, Byron-esque image and aspirations, his middle name now suited him better. No longer wearing crushed velvet and jangling bangles, he looked like a borstal bruiser – the world’s least successful boxer… so why fucking bother? These days it was jeans and trainers from Primark and a long list of casual labour jobs booked through an employment agency.

  But twenty uninspiring years later everything changed once again…

  ‘Go on, mate… Shove it in there…’

  An innocuous phrase that he must have heard a thousand or more times in his life: helping a friend pack and move house; on the telly as some Albert Square trader in EastEnders shoved potatoes into a bag; a customer at the checkout in Aldi; the lady at his local post office taking parcels from him over the counter.

  But on this occasion – with the ‘maaaaate’ drawn out – it triggered a panic attack, taking him back to the moment twenty-two years ago.

  He glanced up from the till at the face of the customer; it was a man with blotchy red skin and a mop of greasy brown hair, who was holding open a canvas shopping bag. No one he knew. Just a random customer who’d selected half a dozen old eighties action movies from the stock-clearance dumpbin and was waiting patiently for him with his bag wide open.

  All of a sudden he felt sick, ready to hurl his Greggs breakfast all over the counter.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked his colleague.

  He felt dizzy, breathless. His chest felt as though it was collapsing in on his lungs, squeezing the air out of them. ‘I… I need a moment,’ he managed.

  He stepped back from the counter, clumsily, supporting himself by holding onto a shelf behind him. Somehow he made it all the way to the back of the store, through the staff door and into the toilet cubicle. He slammed the door shut behind him, collapsed onto his knees and threw up his breakfast into the toilet bowl.

  He heard the word again, in his head.

  Maaaate.

  He wasn’t seeing the mess in the toilet bowl now; he was seeing something from a long time ago. A bed of brown leaves and twigs. Right up close. He could actually feel them pressed against his face… but far worse was the excruciating agony as he felt something jagged and sharp… violating him.

  And, behind his back, the whooping of delight. The chorus of young male voices, all barely broken, goading and egging each other on.

  And that phrase: ‘Go on, mate… Shove it in!’

  He retched again, but his stomach was empty. He wiped his mouth and collapsed onto his behind in that small cubicle. It was the eyes… He remembered now. Those wide-excited, gleaming eyes…

  The man he’d just served… had been one of them.

  Unmistakably.

  ‘Maaaaate.’

  51

  ‘Ahoy there!’ called out Sully. ‘This is very interesting!’

  There was no reply.

  He turned in his seat to see that Magnusson had her headphones on and from the faint trilling female voices leaking out from them he recognised Léo Delibes’ ‘Flower Duet’. He pushed his chair so that it rolled across the linoleum floor and tapped her shoulder. ‘Karen?’

  ‘Jeepers!’ She lurched in her seat and dropped the breakfast bap she’d been chomping on into her lap.

  Sully raise a brow. ‘Jeepers?’

  She removed her headphones and retrieved the bread roll, sausage and fried egg from between her thighs and rebuilt it. ‘Yes, jeepers… you made me drop my bloody breakfast.’

  ‘Who says jeepers… apart from Thelma and Shaggy?’

  She picked at the crumbs in her lap. ‘I do. What do you want?’

  ‘To show you something.’ He curled a finger, inviting her to slide her chair over with his, back to his desk.

  They both rolled gracefully across the floor like chair-bound figure-skaters and Sully pointed at his monitor. He’d been reviewing the forensics that Magnusson and O’Neal had collected from the lock-up. On the screen were a number of open image files: photos taken at the scene, along with several images of the fingerprints lifted from the crates, enhanced for clarity with digitised markers identifying various significant whorls and curls.

  ‘So… I’ve just been reviewing the prints you managed to lift from those plastic crates.’

  She looked at him guardedly. ‘And?’

  ‘Worry ye not, a splendid job was done…’

  ‘And yet I sense a “but” is on its way.’

  ‘So…’ He grabbed hold of his mouse and minimised the photos taken from the scene, leaving just the fingerprint images open. ‘This print, which was taken from the lid of one of the crates,’ he said, pointing, ‘is identified as matching one of those two panners.’ He checked his notes for the name. ‘Sid Beckett.’

  ‘Right.’

  He pointed to another image. ‘And this one, also lifted from the same lid, matches up with…’

  ‘Colin Holmes,’ she supplied.

  ‘All right. So, according to the interview notes, they both went in, opened up just one crate, the top one in the stack, found the human remains inside and then immediately backed away and called it in.’

  ‘Right,’ she said.

  ‘But their prints are also on some of the other crates too.’

  ‘Yes. They must have touched several of them beforehand. Maybe straightening them up… or…’

  ‘No, that’s fine,’ said Sully. ‘They walked in expecting to find a bunch of resalable bric-a-brac, not a crime scene. So I’d fully expect to see their prints all over the place.’

  ‘Then what?’ she prompted.

  Sully pointed at another fingerprint image. ‘So… this one was taken from the light switch inside the lock-up. From the side of the switch’s plastic case, to be precise.’

  She nodded. ‘Yes… they would have had to turn the light on when they stepped in. Obviously.’

  ‘Obviously.’ He smiled. ‘So far, so good. Right?’

  She nodded.

  Sully clicked on two of the prints lifted from the lock-up and set them side by side. He pointed at the one on the left. ‘Thumbprint from the lid of the plastic crate.’ He then pointed at the one on the right. ‘Print from an index finger on the side of the light switch.’

  She nodded again. ‘Right.’

  ‘Obviously different digits, one thumb, one index finger… but comparing them side by side, what do you notice?’

  She leant in to look more closely. ‘Umm… the thumbprint from the lid looks a little sharper. Tidier.’

  He nodded.

  She looked at the print from the light switch. ‘That one’s less defined. But that would probably be down to the amount of finger pressure applied and the motion at the time. He casually reached out to flip the switch… but with the lid he would have had to prise it off.’

  ‘True. But look at the centre area of both prints… where we have enough detail to make comparison markers. What do you see?’

  She frowned and pursed her lips. ‘Well… I’d say the print from the lid is a tad sharper, more defined. But, like I said, he’d have applied more pressure there.’

  Sully nodded. ‘Yes, I take your point, but… look more closely at the prints’ ridges.’

  She peered at the screen. ‘Well, the ridges from the lid are… thinner, I suppose, than the other one.’

  ‘Fatty acids,’ said Sully. ‘Present on our skin and deposited in the print. Over time the fatty acids tend to flow down into the “valleys” between the ridges, creating thicker-looking ridge lines.’

  She looked again. The difference in thickness was there, subtle, but – now that Sully had drawn her attention to it – noticeable.

  ‘There’s a research paper on this, by the way, on the migration over time of heavier biomolecules in a fingerprint.’ He pulled it up. ‘It’s not a precise way to age a print. We all have slightly different chemical compositions on our skin, so there’s no constant yardstick to judge the age of a print, but…’

  ‘But…’ She nodded slowly; she was getting his point now. ‘You’re saying the print on the light switch occurred…’

  ‘A lot earlier than the print on the lid.’ Sully grinned. ‘Our lucky auction winners

  appear to have had access to the lock-up a significant time period before they should have. And both prints belong to the same person.’

  ‘Which one?’

  He pointed to one of the print cards that Magnusson had made when both men had come in to give their statements. ‘Him…’

  52

  Okeke blew dust off the top box file and immediately regretted it. She sneezed, six times in a row, each one escaping like a Chihuahua’s yip.

  Each one counted by Minter. ‘Bloody hell, Okeke, are you going for the world record?’

  She casually flipped a finger at him as she wiped her nose and eyes with a tissue. ‘Bloody dust,’ she croaked. She carried the stack of box files over to a collapsible table that the station’s sergeant had set up for them down in the basement.

  Minter pulled up a chair for her and she sat down next to him. ‘LIO files 1988 to 1989,’ she said as she set them down. The sergeant had explained that half of the filing cabinets’ contents had been entered into the old Holmes system some years back when they’d had funding for a couple of civilian admins to help. The priority had been to enter the intelligence gathered on the ‘frequently active scrotes’ in the area: known aliases, known associates, booking-in forms, statements that included references to them, arrest photographs and the like.

  The lesser priority had been everything else.

  She opened the first box file and sighed at the disorganised stack of papers: ‘everything else’ included everything from written statement forms to stacks of clipped receipts, photocopied photo-ID album pages to old dog-eared PC notebooks. None of it categorised or chronologically ordered; the only common denominator was that somewhere on each faded piece of paper was the year 1988 or 1989.

  ‘It’s a bloody shambles,’ grumbled Minter as he stared at the bulging contents of his box file.

  The sergeant, a grizzled old sweat who looked as though he was just a year or two away from collecting his police pension, had promised to bring them a coffee. An hour later they heard him clomping down the stairs, the sound of jangling keys on his belt and accompanied by asthmatic wheezing.

  ‘Here you go,’ he said, setting down a couple of chipped mugs on the camping table. ‘Sorry about the delay… we just had a D and D brought in.’

  ‘Bit early in the day for that, isn’t it?’ asked Okeke.

  He sighed. ‘Roger’s one of our regulars. He drinks in the local graveyard; this morning he was caught pissing on the graves.’ He lingered beside the table. ‘So what are you two looking for?’

  ‘An incident that happened locally… quite a while back,’ offered Minter.

  The sergeant noted the year on the box spines. ‘In 1989?’

  ‘Right.’

  Okeke looked up from the stacks of paper she’d sorted into various piles. ‘Any remote chance you were stationed here back then?’

  He nodded. ‘Aye, as a matter of fact. Never been rotated anywhere else; I’ve worked my entire career out of this old building.’

  She smiled. ‘The police force forgotten all about you?’

  He laughed. ‘Feels that way.’ He pulled up a stool and settled down on it. ‘Mind you, I’ve got no complaints. Harsham’s hardly crime central. The only hotspot is Coleman Road Estate. Got a couple of families down there that account for about half the petty crime in these parts.’

  He scanned the piles of paper spread out. ‘So what’s the incident? I might remember it.’

  ‘A violent sexual assault of a male teenager,’ she replied. ‘It happened in the woods next to the playing field.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all gone now,’ he replied. ‘It’s all new builds. A hundred or so identical red-brick homes packed in with tiny gardens overlooked by everyone else.’

  ‘But does that ring any bells?’ she prompted him. ‘You said Harsham’s a quiet place…’

  He stroked the tip of his nose absently. ‘You know… I think it might do.’ He clenched his eyes shut as he concentrated. She waited for him to say something, and was beginning to suspect he’d dozed off when he finally spoke again.

  ‘The lad was found in the woods. Barely alive. Awful head injuries, if I recall.’

  ‘That sounds like the one,’ said Minter hopefully.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Okeke.

  He clenched his eyes shut again. ‘The lad… survived as far as I remember. I think my sergeant at the time – David Wood – tried to get a statement out of him after he was out of danger, but nothing doing.’

  ‘No descriptions? No likely suspects?’

  He shook his head. ‘Woody said it was a dead end. The boy was next to useless as a witness.’

  ‘Uncooperative?’