Like This, for Ever (9 page)

‘BARNEY?’

The usual midday smells of congealing gravy and chemical sweeteners were seeping through the air-conditioning system when Mrs Green called Barney back. He stepped to one side and let the other children walk round him. ‘Push the door to,’ she told him, when the last curious face had disappeared.

Mrs Green was Barney’s form teacher. She’d joined the school just under a year ago when she and her husband had moved south to London. Mr Green worked at the school too. He was the games teacher and Barney’s favourite teacher ever. Not that Mrs Green was bad. She never lost her temper, but somehow always managed to keep control of the class. And she was tidy. The books on the shelves were always neat, arranged in alphabetical order, and she always cleaned the whiteboard completely after each lesson. As she walked towards him, she pushed chairs back under desks, neatening the rows.

‘You look tired,’ she said, when she’d reached him. ‘I thought you were going to drop off during science. Is everything OK?’

Barney nodded. ‘Everything’s fine,’ he said, because that’s what you always said, even if it wasn’t. He hadn’t checked Facebook that morning, but he’d felt it, hanging over him, since he’d got up. Sooner or later he’d have to log back on and see what was waiting
for him. Whether Peter Sweep had left him another message.

Mrs Green was giving him an
Oh, really?
look. ‘So those shadows under your eyes are just purple paint to make me feel sorry for you and give you less homework?’

‘Well, less homework would be good,’ he said, keeping a perfectly straight face. ‘Because actually, my dad woke me up last night with the washing machine.’

At that his teacher blinked hard in surprise, then half frowned, half smiled. It was a nice sort of look. Friendly but puzzled. Mrs Green had pale-red hair that she’d worn long until a couple of months ago and then cut in a more complicated style that flicked around her shoulders and chin. Barney decided Mrs Green looked quite nice for an older woman; when his mum came back, he hoped she would look a lot like that.

Jesus, he had no idea what his mum looked like!

‘Barney, what’s the matter? Look, sit down for a second.’

Mrs Green had pushed him gently into a chair and was at the back of the classroom, running the tap. Her heels clicked on the floor as she came back and she left a trail of splashes behind her. She’d overfilled the glass.

Concentrate on something. Don’t cry in front of a teacher.

‘What time did you go to bed last night, Barney?’ she asked him, in a low voice that told him she knew she was being nosy.

‘Half nine,’ he lied.

Mum would have light-brown hair, wouldn’t she, like him? His dad’s hair was grey, but he’d seen photographs in which it had been darker. And his dad was tall. So was he. Did that mean Mum was too? Jesus, tall with light-brown hair, was that all he had?

‘Barney, Barney, you’re going to hurt your hands.’

He was doing it again, that thing with his fingers, tracing a square pattern on the desk. He watched his hands jabbing and darting as though they belonged to someone else and then Mrs Green did something very odd. She reached out and stroked her own hands over his. Very lightly, first the left then the right, then the right and then the left again. Just like his dad did when he was trying to soothe him. Funnily, it worked better when Mrs Green did it. Must be her softer hands.

Barney felt himself calming down. It was OK, there’d be a photo of his mum somewhere at home, he just had to find it; finding things was what he did, and what did it matter what she looked like? It didn’t matter what mothers looked like, you just loved them anyway.

‘Feeling better?’

Barney nodded. He was.

‘Early night tonight?’

He nodded again.

‘Off you go, sweetheart.’

Mrs Green stood and pushed her chair back. As Barney walked past her she reached out a hand and stroked the top of his head. Teachers weren’t supposed to touch children. He could get her into trouble if he told on her. And he’d never heard her call another child ‘sweetheart’. He wouldn’t though, he decided, as he ran along the corridor to the playground. He quite liked the way Mrs Green’s soft hands had stroked over him.

‘Barney, over here!’ Harvey was by the playground equipment store with Sam. Harvey had been Barney’s best mate for as long as he could remember, but because Harvey was an August-born baby, whereas Barney’s birthday was in October, he’d always been in the year above Barney at school. The previous September, Harvey had started secondary school, but as the two schools shared the same site the two boys still saw each other most days. Harvey, loyal and independent-minded, refused to see a problem in being friends with someone still at primary school.

Children from the secondary school weren’t supposed to come into the primary school playground, and both boys were keeping an eye out for prowling teachers. Harvey turned to Sam, as Barney got close. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘tell him.’

‘These kids on Twitter were talking about how they were hanging out at Lewisham College the other night, near where Ryan Jackson’s body was found, and they saw his ghost,’ said Sam.

Barney screwed up his face the way his dad did a second before he’d say, ‘Barney, does my head look like it zips up the back?’

‘Straight up,’ insisted Sam. ‘He was as pale as anything and he
had this long white thing on and he was clutching his throat and moaning.’

Barney shook his head. He liked a ghost story as much as the next guy, but come on!

‘We’re going up there tomorrow night,’ said Sam. ‘When it gets dark. See if he comes back.’

‘Knowing your luck, whoever bumped him off will come back,’ said Barney, and was suddenly conscious of Peter, crouching like a troll in the back of his mind. ‘And will your mum and dad really let you go down to Deptford Creek at night? I don’t think so somehow.’

‘Well, duh! We don’t tell ’em that. I’ll say I’m going to Lloyd’s and he’ll say he’s coming to mine. Jorge and Harvey are up for it.’

The expression on Harvey’s face said that, actually, that might be pushing it a bit.

‘It’ll work,’ said Sam, ‘because Lloyd can’t play football tomorrow morning, so none of our mums and dads will be able to talk to him about it.’

‘We’ll still need to keep them apart on Sunday morning,’ muttered Harvey.

‘You need to watch the tides there,’ said Barney. ‘The Creek fills up quickly. People have drowned in it who haven’t known what they’ve been doing.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Sam.

‘We’ve got a boat there,’ said Barney.

‘No shit?’

Barney nodded. ‘It was my granddad’s,’ he said. ‘He lived on it. Dad keeps saying he’s going to sell it, but he hasn’t yet. We go sometimes to check it’s OK.’

‘Is it locked up?’

Barney nodded. ‘And so’s the yard that you have to go through to get to the boats. I might be able to find the key though,’ he said.

‘Cool.’

‘Ryan’s body wasn’t found near the boat, though,’ said Barney. ‘So wouldn’t it be a bit pointless looking for ghosts there?’

‘Still be cool, though. I could bring some lager,’ said Sam.

‘So is your dad going to let you go to Deptford Creek at night?’ asked Harvey.

Barney thought about it. He’d always liked Granddad’s boat, always secretly wondered what it would be like to sleep on it. ‘I could tell him I’m going to Lloyd’s house,’ he said.

‘
I CAN’T QUITE
believe these words are coming out of my mouth, but I’m actually looking forward to hearing what this profiler has to say,’ said Anderson as they drove back towards Lewisham.

‘Steady on, Sarge,’ muttered Stenning from the back seat. ‘You’ll be saying next that women on the force is a good thing.’

‘The timing’s important,’ said Anderson, ignoring Stenning. ‘Jason and Joshua and Noah had been dead for two to six hours when we found them, meaning they were killed earlier in the evening. Ryan was killed around twenty-four hours before we found him, again making the time of death some time in the evening. All three disappeared in the early-evening period too.’

‘He has a job,’ said Stenning. ‘Blue-collar job, most likely, if he’s finishing work by around five.’

‘He has a job and he doesn’t live alone,’ said Anderson. ‘He’s not going to stand out from the crowd.’

‘What do you think, Ma’am?’ Stenning said.

‘I think it’s a woman,’ she said, a second before she could have bitten her own tongue out. Lord, it was one thing to indulge in wild speculations in front of Mark, another entirely with people who depended on her judgement being spot on.

Silence in the car for a second.

‘Blimey,’ said Anderson. ‘Why? Because of what happened …’

‘No,’ said Dana, twisting round in her seat so she could look at both of them. ‘Look, I shouldn’t have said anything. Please don’t repeat it to anyone until we’ve had the profiler’s report. I don’t want to influence her thinking in any way.’

‘No, course not,’ agreed Anderson. ‘Blimey, it would make a lot of sense, though, wouldn’t it? Kids would be far more likely to go off with a strange female.’

They pulled into the station car park. ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘I am going to be a bit disappointed if all this profiler lass tells us is we’re looking for a blue-collar worker who doesn’t live alone.’

‘You’re looking for someone who has a regular nine-to-five job,’ said the profiler, who was a thin, dark-haired woman in her early forties called Susan Richmond. ‘Possibly a blue-collar worker because he seems to finish quite early in the day. He doesn’t live alone.’

Anderson took a deep breath and breathed out heavily. Stenning was biting his lower lip. From across the room came the sound of Mizon trying not to crunch crisps too loudly.

‘But then I’m sure you’ve worked that out for yourselves,’ said Richmond. ‘You also know that he’s organized and careful. He plans everything he does very thoroughly.’

‘We know he’s clever,’ said Mizon, through a mouthful of cheese-and-onion flavoured.

‘Careful’s not the same as clever. Serial offenders are rarely unusually intelligent,’ said the profiler. ‘Hannibal Lecter is a bit of a one-off. More commonly they’re of average to slightly-below-average intelligence.’

‘Sadly, so are most coppers,’ muttered Anderson.

Richmond got to her feet. ‘I’m not going to give you a report,’ she said. ‘We do that together.’

Around the room several eyebrows were raised.

‘So do we break into syndicates and role-play?’ asked Anderson. Dana caught his eye and glared. He had the grace to look sheepish.

‘I’ll keep that in reserve,’ said Richmond, walking to the whiteboard at the front of the room. ‘For now, we’re going to start with the building blocks.’ She picked up the pen and started writing.

‘Access to the victims,’ she said as she wrote. ‘All four disappeared
from in or around their homes. The first boy, Tyler, was last seen at the school gate, waiting for one of his mates who’d been kept behind. Ryan was spotted turning the corner into his street after school, but never actually made it home. The third boy, Noah, was watching television with his childminder and got up to answer the door. Jason and Joshua were in the front garden of their home. No one saw anything and that tells me two things. First, that the killer can make himself very inconspicuous, and second, that he’s patient. The chances are he had to lie in wait more than once, waiting for the opportunity to get at the boys.’

‘You’re assuming Tyler King is part of the investigation,’ said Anderson. ‘We haven’t as yet.’

‘There’s a very good chance,’ said Richmond. ‘He matches the victim profile completely and the circumstances of his disappearance are the same. I suspect his body was dumped like the others but not found. It’ll have been washed out to sea.’

‘Actually that doesn’t happen,’ said Anderson. ‘If someone goes in the river, sooner or later, we pull them out.’

‘Then sooner or later I think you’ll pull Tyler out too,’ said Richmond. ‘Does anything else strike anyone about the abductions?’

‘He’s not threatening,’ said Mizon. ‘All four – five – went with him without a struggle. If they’d cried out, someone would have heard them. No one did.’

‘So he’s either someone they know or someone they would instinctively trust,’ said Richmond. ‘Yet you’ve found no common denominator other than that they were all football players, albeit for different clubs.’

‘Someone in uniform,’ suggested Tom Barrett, one of the DCs on Dana’s team. Barrett was young, black and handsome, and seemingly incapable of taking life seriously. ‘Someone posing as one of us.’

‘Kids of that age still instinctively trust the police,’ said Richmond. ‘And most people in uniform. So, we’ve got inconspicuous, unthreatening, possibly known to the victims, and patient – maybe someone in uniform or a figure of authority.’

‘Actually, we do have some new information on how he might be
abducting the boys in the first place,’ said Dana. ‘The pathologist found evidence of carotid baroreceptor compression on both the latest victims.’

Of all the people in the room, only the profiler looked mystified.

‘You’ve heard of pressure points?’ Dana asked her. ‘Points of the body where relatively modest amounts of pressure can cause disproportionate levels of pain.’

Richmond nodded slowly.

‘Police officers are trained to use pressure points to restrain and subdue difficult and violent suspects,’ Dana continued. ‘They’re of limited use, frankly, because people’s natural reaction when faced with pain is to fight against it rather than submit. The trick is to take them by surprise, get them in some sort of limb lock, then get the cuffs on quick.’ She got up and crossed to where Richmond was sitting. ‘I’ll give you an example,’ she said. ‘Let’s imagine you’re a protestor, sitting on the ground, refusing to budge, and I want to move you.’

She moved to behind Richmond’s chair and placed three fingers beneath Richmond’s jawbone on either side of her chin. ‘OK with that?’ she asked.

‘OK so far,’ replied Richmond. ‘Whoa!’

With barely any effort, Dana had pulled upwards, lifting Richmond just a centimetre or two off her seat. She let her go.