He shrugged. ‘No, not uncooperative. I think he just couldn’t remember anything about it.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you could recall the boy’s name… could you?’ asked Okeke hopefully.

  He screwed up his eyes again and grimaced. ‘I’m pretty sure his first name… began with an A.’

  ‘Alan?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Andrew?’ tried Minter. That prompted another headshake from the sergeant. ‘Andy? Arthur?’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Longer. Sort of… like a posh-sounding name.’

  ‘Alexander?’

  ‘Archie. Archibald?’ offered Okeke. ‘Albert?’

  He opened his eyes. ‘Alistair. His first name was Alistair.’

  ‘It was a serious assault,’ said Minter. ‘An attempted murder. It must have been passed up to your local CID?’

  ‘You know… I don’t think it actually was,’ the sergeant replied.

  ‘What?’ Okeke said, incredulous. ‘Are you serious?’

  The man hunched his shoulders. ‘Well, there was nothing much to work with. The lad recovered. I mean –’

  ‘It was a sexual assault and an attempted murder, and your sergeant didn’t pass it up?’ Okeke shook her head.

  ‘It was in those woods, see?’ the sergeant replied. ‘All sorts used to congregate down there. It was full of local druggies, alcoholics, perverts… you name it.’

  ‘Perverts?’ Okeke raised her brows.

  He winced guiltily. ‘Well, you know… men… benders… Sorry. I know that’s politically incorrect lingo now. But, you understand, back then…’

  Okeke shook her head again. ‘Not really. I do believe there was a correct term to use in those days as well.’

  The sergeant’s mottled cheeks burned red. ‘Times change, all right?’ He spread his hands. ‘The lingo changes.’

  She was about to respond but Minter nudged her foot with his under the table and cut in: ‘Well, your Sergeant Wood… he must have logged something, right?’

  ‘Yes. He obviously opened a file but…’ The old man got up off his stool. ‘Hold on. Give me a minute…’

  Minter watched him head back to the stairs. ‘Where are you…?’

  ‘Upstairs. Top floor. We’ve got a rainy-day cabinet for some of the old cases. Let me see if I can dig it out.’

  They watched him clomp wearily up the steps again, keys jangling, wheezing with the effort as he went.

  ‘Jeez,’ uttered Okeke once they were alone again. ‘Benders. Let’s hear it for the Good Old Days.’

  53

  ‘Chief?’

  Boyd looked up from the keyboard he’d been stabbing at, slowly transcribing the Ledger interview, one finger-pecked character at a time. He was never going to be one of those clatter-clatter types like Okeke who could type with all ten digits without even looking at the QUERTY arrangement of the alphabet and hold a conversation at the same time.

  ‘O’Neal?’ he replied. He was holding something he’d printed out in one hand.

  ‘I’ve got something, sir. From the Argus news archive.’ He handed it to Boyd.

  It was a clipping, dated 22 August 1989.

  Yesterday, local police announced they were investigating a serious violent assault that occurred in Thatcham Woods, Harsham, a local ‘trouble spot’ according to community officer PS David Wood. The victim of the assault, Alistair Muldoon (17), was sexually assaulted, bludgeoned and left for dead, and was discovered by local dog walker Mary Carlisle.

  ‘I thought the poor lad was a dead body when I first saw him,’ she claimed. ‘But when he started groaning, I realised he needed urgent help.’

  An ambulance was called and Muldoon was rushed to hospital. Police are currently working on the theory that Muldoon, a foster-care teenager, may have randomly encountered a sexual predator in the woods. Thatcham Woods is known as a gathering place for ‘gay swingers’, and police are hoping that Alistair Muldoon will recover from the serious head injuries he sustained and be able to provide an account of what happened and a description of his assailant.

  Boyd looked up from the printout and smiled. ‘Finally. A name! Nice one, O’Neal.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Just then his phone buzzed on the desk. Boyd picked it up and saw it was Okeke calling. He swiped to answer. ‘Yup?’

  ‘Guv, we got lucky. The local police sub-station have some paperwork on an open-ended investigation into an assault that occurred…’

  ‘On August the twenty-first, 1989. The reunion date.’

  ‘Huh? How do you know?’ she asked.

  ‘O’Neal has literally just handed me a clipping from the Argus. Our victim is Alistair Muldoon.’

  ‘No. That’s his foster family’s surname. The paper must have got that detail muddled. His name is actually Alistair Holmes.’

  ‘Holmes?’ The name jangled in Boyd’s head. ‘Hold on… Wasn’t one of those two lock-up bidders called Holmes?’

  He heard her huff a laugh. Not in humour but giddy excitement. ‘The victim’s full name, guv?’

  ‘Go on…’

  ‘Was Alistair Colin Holmes.’

  ‘Shit. That’s…’

  ‘Our auction bidder,’ she jumped in. ‘Colin Holmes. His age tallies as well. Late forties, early fifties, isn’t he?’

  It was something like that he vaguely recalled. Although he’d looked older. Life clearly hadn’t been kind.

  He spotted movement from the corner of his eye and looked round to see Sully and Magnusson hurrying over, weaving through the cubicle farm towards him.

  ‘Hold on,’ he said to Okeke, ‘it’s like London buses here. Sully looks like he’s got something.’

  Sully drew up beside O’Neal. For once his dry sardonic demeanour had been supplanted by the wide-eyed glee of someone who’d just found a tenner down the back of an old sofa.

  ‘You’ve got something?’ asked Boyd.

  ‘Oh yes indeedy, Boyd. I’ve got your killer for you. It’s Colin Holmes,’ he announced. ‘He’s one of those two panners who “found” the bodies.’

  Boyd asked O’Neal to drive, and Warren was seated in the back. He tapped the address they had for Colin Holmes into the satnav. Holmes lived over in Bexhill-on-Sea, which was just over five miles away.

  ‘Uniforms are going in first,’ he said. ‘If he’s there, O’Neal, as you were first to ID him, you can do the arrest and caution.’

  O’Neal nodded, looked pointedly at Warren in the rear-view mirror and grinned. ‘Cheers, chief.’

  ‘Do you need an idiot card or can you remember it?’ Boyd asked him.

  O’Neal glanced across at his boss as he turned out of the station’s driveway and left onto Bohemia Road. ‘What? Of course I –’

  ‘I’m pulling your leg,’ said Boyd. However, he recalled, a botched caution had been used as part of a defence from his time in the Met. Not that it had particularly impressed the judge as a defence, but it had thrown a shadow over the competence of the MI team involved at the time.

  ‘But you might want to run through it,’ he said.

  ‘Okay…’ O’Neal began. ‘You do not have to say anything –’

  ‘In your head,’ added Boyd.

  As O’Neal turned right down at the front, Boyd glanced towards the White Rock Theatre hoping to catch a glimpse of Charlotte in the lobby. She was preparing for an event tonight, a shadow-theatre dance troupe who were over from France. He had no idea at all what the hell that involved, but the event board outside the entrance indicated that the tickets were all sold out.

  His mind switched back to Sully’s discovery… and the very lengthy technical explanation about old versus recent fingerprints. That would be crucial evidence further down the line. Motives and opportunities aside, that was one piece of evidence they had in the bank that would be hard for any defence to sidestep. How could Colin Holmes’ older fingerprints be in the lock-up unless he’d been there before?

  As for the motive… If Ledger’s account was credible, then – simply put – it was revenge. Colin Holmes had been assaulted and tortured by those boys, before they’d bashed his head in with a rock. Although he’d survived, he’d been unable to help the police at the time, according to Okeke.

  Shock or traumatic disassociation could explain that. Even brain damage. But at some point in the last decade or two, the memory of the incident must have come flooding back to him… and the rest of the story was his very carefully and patiently deployed campaign of retribution.

  Also, if Ledger’s account was accurate – and he’d taken a step back that day and not actively participated in what had been done to Colin Holmes – then perhaps that explained why his body hadn’t been found along with the others.

  Revenge, he pondered silently, could be argued as a form of therapy: a rebalancing of cosmic karma, but it wasn’t a cure. It was a painkiller. A temporary one. Revenge had been something Boyd had considered during the three dark years after Julia and Noah had died. They’d been brutally snatched away from him, because the driver of the truck behind their car had been arsing about on his phone. The driver had been charged with manslaughter and given a twelve-year sentence. In just three years’ time, the man who’d all but bisected his wife’s torso and removed the top half of his son’s skull could be let out on parole. And, yes, during those dark years he’d considered the long wait, and the chance he’d eventually have to ‘rebalance’ matters.

  Given the opportunity, back then, he might just have taken it. If the man hadn’t received a custodial sentence and had walked free on some technicality, there was every chance he’d not be alive now. Boyd would have closed the circle, got his pound of flesh and presumably some temporary respite from the pain he’d been going through.

  But it would only have been temporary.

  The pay-off that came with retribution was only a fleeting experience. And after it was done… what was there left to live for?

  O’Neal followed the police van ahead of them as it turned right off the seafront onto De La Warr Road and onto Dorset Road, heading inland. It was flanked on either side by neat semi-detached houses that loomed high with their attic rooms. The van came to a halt and the officers inside piled out, wearing their stab vests and riot helmets. Dorset Road was deserted. It was gone ten in the morning so it wasn’t that surprising. Everyone who had a job to go to was gone; everyone who didn’t was probably in bed still and watching This Morning.

  Colin Holmes lived in Flat 3a. Which would undoubtedly be one of those attic flats. Which meant two flights of stairs. The ever-present ache in Boyd’s side – now he knew what it was and what the bloody thing looked like, even – would be there with him every step of the way.

  Boyd turned on his radio and flipped to the ops channel. ‘Bravo-Mike-Two-Two, this is Boyd. The target is Flat 3a, an attic room at the top, by the look of it.’

  One of the officers looked his way and gave him a thumbs-up. ‘Copy that.’

  Boyd let the radio sit in his lap, crackling as they listened to the chatter. The good news was that there’d be no easy back-door escape for Holmes if he decided to bolt.

  ‘I love this bit,’ said O’Neal.

  There was no messing around at the front door. The sergeant had been briefed that Holmes was a multiple murderer and the Big Red Key was already swinging into the front door beside the handle. After a couple of hefty smacks, the door shuddered inwards and all ten officers piled inside.

  Over the open channel, Boyd could hear them all barking ‘POLICE!’ like a pack of hunting dogs tearing across a ploughed field. He could hear their boots on the stairs, and probably Colin Holmes right at the top could already hear that too.

  ‘Bravo-Mike-Two-Two… you said Flat 3a, right?’

  Boyd confirmed and a moment later they heard the crash of the small battering ram again, and the officers all yelling their presence as they burst in. A succession of different voices shouted ‘CLEAR!’ and Boyd found himself wilting in his seat. Finally the sergeant in charge of the team announced that Colin Holmes wasn’t there.

  ‘All right…’ Boyd sighed. ‘Thanks, sergeant. You can stand down. Everyone back outside, please.’

  A minute later they emerged from the battered front door, a steady stream, one after the other. Boyd opened the passenger-side door and climbed out. He approached the sergeant as he removed his helmet.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s a no-show.’

  Boyd nodded. ‘Your lads can head back to the station.’

  O’Neal and Warren drew up beside him. ‘Gloves on?’ said O’Neal.

  Boyd nodded. ‘Gloves on.’

  54

  Richard Ledger slowly opened his eyes. Last night he’d poured himself a large ‘therapeutic’ gin and tonic. Which had been mostly gin, to be fair. He’d chased it down with another and may well have had a third before he’d checked the doors and windows and gone to bed… This morning he was paying the price.

  His head was thumping mercilessly and he was pretty sure he was going to throw up unless he got some dry toast into him, sharpish. He turned to look at his side table. The alarm clock was showing 10.17 a.m.

  Shit. He fumbled for his phone and dialled his office. Imogen, his PA, answered after the first ring.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she answered chirpily. ‘I was expecting you in at nine. You had a conference call scheduled for –’

  ‘I’m feeling really crappy,’ he croaked. ‘I’ll probably be in after lunch. Can you bump anything else I have in my diary to this afternoon?’

  ‘Of course. You caught a bug?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, something like that. Tell the sales team I’ll be in later to check in on them.’

  ‘Will do.’

  He hung up and dropped his phone onto the pillow beside his head. ‘Fuck…’ he said, sighing heavily and blinking the sleep out of his eyes as he stared up at the ceiling, zebra-striped with sunlight spilling in through the drawn blinds.

  He gave himself another minute or two to wake up properly, listening to the peaceful soundtrack of the gated mews: birds twittering away, the soft whine of someone’s hybrid rolling off a gravel driveway, the sound of children in the school playground just a few hundred yards away. A soundscape he’d not had many opportunities to listen to since he’d moved in.

  He let out a long groan, lifted his head off the pillow and sat up.

  ‘Hello, Richard.’

  He jolted at the sound of the voice and turned to find someone perched on a stool in the corner of his bedroom.

  ‘Remember me?’ said the figure. He stood up, knees clicking, weary bones creaking. He was holding a kitchen knife in his hands. Richard recognised the eight-inch stainless-steel Damascus boning knife from the block in his kitchen.

  ‘I’ve been sitting here for hours,’ the man continued, ‘and I just can’t decide what to do with you…’

  Boyd did a brief three-sixty scan of Colin Holmes’ lounge. It was something of a disappointment, to be fair. It was a small and well-kept living space with none of the telltale signs of a tormented killer’s mind gradually unspooling.

  It was a far cry from Ewan Jones’s halfway-house lodgings in Dover, with its walls covered in haunting depictions of the girl he’d murdered in childhood. That had been every bit the Hollywood scriptwriter’s take on a serial killer’s sanctum.

  Colin Holmes maintained a tidy home. One wall was filled with shelves that were laden with DVD cases. There was a mixture of sci-fi-nerd box sets: Star Trek TNG, the original Star Wars trilogy, The X-Files among others. Alongside these were a fair number of old black-and-white classics: Citizen Kane, Rear Window, Peeping Tom and the like.

  Colin Holmes clearly fancied himself as a bit of a movie buff.

  In the corner of the room was a tall, slim shelving unit, filled with vinyl LPs and beside it a record player. Boyd carefully leafed through the dog-eared record covers. Holmes’s taste in music tended very definitely towards classic gothic: the Mission, the Cure, Bauhaus, the Cult.

  On the top shelf of the unit Boyd found a small photo frame containing a faded Polaroid of a young man with long dark hair, spiked and tousled with gel, holding the camera in his hands. It had obviously been taken in a mirror – a selfie taken a long, long time before that word ever existed. Colin Holmes in this photograph was completely unrecognisable… if that was, in fact, even him: a lean pretty boy dressed up like an Adam Ant-styled dandy, all bangles and hooped earrings, wearing an extravagantly ruffled white shirt and tight leather trousers. A stark contrast to the scruffy older man with the boxer’s nose that Minter had interviewed at the station a couple of weeks ago.

  Boyd moved to his bedroom. Tidy again. Bed made. His mother would be proud. On the walls were a number of artfully framed posters of classic movies from the seventies, eighties and nineties: Chinatown, Seven, Dune – the eighties David Lynch version, Boyd noted. His eyes were drawn to a poster for Hellraiser IV. He scanned the credits at the bottom… a name jumped out at him. Directed by Alan Smithee. That pseudonym again. Clearly that’s what had inspired Colin Holmes’s alias.

  Alan Smithee who had rented a storage unit eleven years ago. And presumably same Alan Smithee who, according to Richard Ledger, had turned up one day at his work place for a little chat. Boyd hadn’t really been sure about that part of Ledger’s story. It had been a very convenient explanation for that coffee cup. But now, seeing that name on the poster, gave him the shivers.

  Maybe he should have insisted that Ledger found somewhere else to stay last night, other than his home.

  Shit.

  He pulled his phone out…

  ‘Look… mate… come on…’ Richard's voice was trembling, lacking any conviction. ‘P-please… just put the knife down.’

  Colin shook his head and smiled. ‘It’s a good job that you called work to say you’d be late. This might take a bit of time.’

  ‘Wh-what are you g-going…’

  ‘Going to do?’ Colin shrugged, then stretched and yawned. ‘Let’s just say… my plans are in a state of flux. It’s taken me a long time to piece together what happened in those woods. The memories were all jumbled and confused. Then… do you want to know what happened?’