Like This, for Ever

by Sharon Bolton

  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.

  ‘Wow,’ said Richmond, rubbing her jaw.

  ‘Another second or so and you’d probably have pulled free,’ said Dana, ‘because you and I are very similar in terms of weight and strength. If Pete did it to you, on the other hand, you’d probably have to do exactly what he wanted you to.’

  ‘So with a size advantage as well, pressure points can be a very effective way of subduing someone?’ Richmond asked, still looking uncomfortable. ‘So was that used on the Barlow brothers?’

  ‘No,’ said Dana. ‘The bruises on the boys were lower on the neck, round about here.’ On her own neck, she indicated two points on either side of her throat. ‘Baroreceptors are a sort of gauge that control blood pressure in the body. One on either side of the neck. Apply pressure to both of them and they send a signal to the brain that the body’s blood pressure is dangerously high. So the brain responds by lowering it. What happens when your blood pressure falls?’

  ‘You feel dizzy, faint,’ said Richmond. ‘Eventually you pass out. Well, that would certainly explain how he got them away quietly. They were in a faint.’

  ‘It’s not that easy though, is it, Boss?’ said Anderson. ‘It’s not like the Vulcan Death Grip, one squeeze and you’re down. It takes a minute or two, from what I can remember. And it’s far from reliable.’

  ‘Neil’s right,’ Dana told Richmond. ‘It’s also exceptionally risky, which is why the police don’t use it. But if an adult is using it to subdue a child, I’d say the child could be incapacitated in less than a minute.’

  ‘Who would know about this?’ asked Richmond.

  ‘Anyone trained in combat of any sort,’ said Anderson. ‘Police, armed forces. Even people who study martial arts. Frankly, though, I’ve seen kids doing it. My son and his mates went through a phase of torturing each other with pressure points.’

  ‘OK, well that is helpful,’ said Richmond, giving her neck one last rub. ‘Thank you. I’d like to look now at what he does with the bodies. And the first thing that strikes me is that he wants them to be found quickly. Leaving Tyler to one side for a moment, he leaves them in places where they’ll be seen within hours. He’s making no attempt to hide them, he wants everyone to know what he’s up to. He’s enjoying the attention. But he’s still careful. He knows the river will cover his tracks after a few hours. He picks places where there’s no CCTV and where he has a good chance of getting in, offloading the body and disappearing again. Quiet, but not too quiet, and always at low tide.’

  ‘He knows the river very well,’ said Mizon.

  ‘Yes, he does,’ agreed the profiler. ‘OK, now we get to the interesting stuff. All five victims are Caucasian males, aged ten or eleven. When boys of this age are killed, it’s usually either gang related, involving a close family member or sexual. This appears to be none of those. Something on your mind, Sergeant?’

  Anderson had been making faces at Dana, gesticulating that now was the time to bring up her killer-as-a-woman theory. She looked at the floor.

  ‘Apparently not,’ he said.

  ‘Is the means of death important?’ asked Stenning.

  ‘The means of death is probably the key to it,’ said Richmond. ‘Our guy doesn’t want to mark the bodies, I think we’re all agreed on that. He wants to keep his boys nice and neat and clean. So why isn’t he smothering them with a pillow? It would be quick and easy, far less messy. Why isn’t he strangling them? He has a thing about pre-teenage boys and he has a thing about blood. That’s what we need to work on.’

  17

  BARNEY WAS LATE leaving school because the third Friday in the month was the day he stayed behind to clean the animals’ cages and make sure they had enough food and water for the weekend. It was just after four when he made his way to the main school door. Mrs Dalley saw him look through the sliding window of the office. She was on the phone and pressed the mouthpiece against her shoulder.

  ‘Be with you in a sec, Barney,’ she called.

  Barney nodded and went to wait by the door. A boy from Year Five was already there, looking out across the yard.

  ‘Right, Huck,’ said Barney.

  ‘Right, Barney,’ replied the younger boy.

  Huck Joesbury played in the Under Eleven football team, even though he was only nine. He was supposed to be a genius on the rugby pitch too, although as rugby wasn’t played at school, this was something that remained a rumour.

  ‘Is your mum late?’ asked Barney.

  ‘My dad’s picking me up,’ said Huck. He was smaller than Barney, with dark-brown hair that stuck upright and bright-blue eyes. There was something about his small face that always made Barney think of elves. Not that he ever mentioned it. You couldn’t really tell a kid, even a younger one, that he looked like an elf.

  ‘The dad with the most boring job in the world who never leaves his computer?’ said Barney, remembering a previous conversation he’d had with Huck. Barney had argued that being a university lecturer in old books was far more boring than working with computers.

  The smaller boy nodded. ‘He phoned to say he’d be late. Computer trouble.’ Then his little face lit up. ‘Here he is.’

  A tall, broad-shouldered man in jeans and a black leather jacket and with a big grin on his face was approaching the school door. When he reached it, he bent and pressed his face against the window. His nose and mouth squashed up and spread out against the glass.

  ‘Dad!’ moaned the child, glancing round at Barney.

  ‘You should see my dad if you think that’s embarrassing,’ said Barney as Mrs Dalley appeared behind the boys and reached over them to unlock the door.

  ‘Afternoon, Mr Joesbury,’ she said to Huck’s dad, who apologized for being late. ‘Good afternoon, Huck. Good afternoon, Barney, I hope you’re going straight home now.’

  Barney agreed that he was and followed Huck and his dad across the yard.

  ‘So we’ll spend an hour at the public library, then drop by the salad bar on the way home,’ Huck’s dad was saying. His right arm was slung around his son’s shoulders, his left was carrying Huck’s school bag, overnight bag and guitar case.

  ‘Rec, then movie, then Trev’s,’ replied Huck.

  Barney dropped back. Obvious affection between parents and children always made him feel uncomfortable. At the gate, Huck’s dad turned round.

  ‘Is someone meeting you, mate?’ he asked Barney, before glancing up and down the street.

  Barney shook his head. ‘I’m going to a friend’s house,’ he said. ‘It’s only five minutes away.’ He stopped and let his skates drop to the ground.

  ‘Barney’s the best blader in the school,’ said Huck. ‘He’s faster than everyone.’

  ‘All the same, it’ll be dark soon,’ said Mr Joesbury. ‘Can we drop you off, Barney?’

  Barney smiled and said he was fine, thank you, it really was just around the corner. Even then, Huck’s dad seemed reluctant to let him go. Barney pulled his skates on, hoisted his bag on to his shoulders and set off. Just before he turned the corner he looked back. Huck and his dad were getting into a green Audi convertible. Barney recognized the registration number immediately. Huck Joesbury’s dad was the bloke who knocked on Lacey’s door late at night, and who sat in the car for ages waiting for her to come home.

  Barney watched as Huck and his dad drove away, Huck waving at Barney as the car disappeared. Most boring job in the world? Lacey had told him she and the man in the green Audi worked together and that would make him a police officer. Somebody was lying. Barney didn’t like lies. There was something untidy about them.

  ‘Barney, great. Catch this. Oh, nice catch.’

  In the doorway of the
Soar family kitchen, Barney looked down at the plastic sword he’d just caught. Jorge, striding towards him, was holding a matching weapon. There was a thin film of moisture on his fair skin and his cheeks were bright pink. The green dye had been washed from his hair. ‘I just need to practise a couple of moves,’ he said, taking a defensive, swordsman’s pose directly in front of Barney. ‘Harvey was helping me but he’s not much good at fencing.’

  On a stool at the counter sat Harvey, holding a freezer bag of ice to his forehead. Like his brother, he was pink in the face. He was also a little red around the eyes and his bottom lip looked swollen, the way it did when he was cross or upset. The boys’ mother, Abbie, was stirring a casserole dish on the worktop.

  ‘Your brother was doing fine till you stabbed him in the eye,’ she said. ‘Can you put the swords down now, please?’

  Jorge barely acknowledged her. ‘Five minutes. I just need to get this move right. OK, Barney, I come at you like this, you lift your sword up to meet mine and then we hold them together while we—’

  ‘Jorge, there is no room in here.’

  Barney had a choice: defend himself against the sword sweeping down towards him or be slashed across the face. With an apologetic look at Abbie, he blocked Jorge’s move. Jorge danced back, feinted left, then struck at him hard from the right.

  ‘There’s as much room in here as on the stage – oh, nice. How did you know I was going to do that?’

  ‘Saw it in your eyes,’ said Barney.

  Jorge froze, the sword hovering just in front of Barney’s chest. ‘Straight up?’ he asked, his blue eyes looking searchingly into Barney’s. Over Jorge’s shoulder, Barney could see both Abbie and Harvey watching them.

  Barney shrugged. ‘Probably just a lucky guess,’ he said.

  Abbie left the counter. With an effort, she wrenched Jorge’s sword off him. ‘Before someone gets hurt,’ she said, holding her hand out for Barney’s sword but continuing to talk to her oldest son. ‘Now I’m going to check on Nan. Tea in ten minutes.’

  The boys waited until the door was closed. Then, without looking, Jorge gave a massive leap backwards and landed on the kitchen counter. ‘So what’s the plan tomorrow night then, Barney?’ he asked.

  Since when had it been his plan?

  ‘It’s not my plan,’ he said. ‘I’m not even sure I can get the key to the boat.’

  Jorge shrugged. ‘So we break a window. Send Hatty in to open it up. She’s tiny.’

  ‘We can’t do that,’ said Harvey. Barney gave him a grateful smile. If they broke a window, he’d have to pay for the replacement, sneaking the money into his dad’s wallet somehow. Anything else just wouldn’t be fair.

  ‘Harvey says you’ve been studying the murders since the first boy went missing,’ said Jorge. ‘That you’ve got all sorts of theories about who the killer is and how he gets them.’

  ‘A few,’ Barney admitted.

  ‘So what we should do is visit all the murder sites,’ said Jorge. ‘See what they have in common, work out why he’s choosing them.’

  The kitchen door opened and the boys’ grandmother appeared. She was easily the tallest of the family, a giant of a woman with bobbed white hair and big blue eyes. Her make-up always looked like she’d put it on in a dark room with a very shaky hand. As a young woman she’d been a dancer, Barney had seen photographs of her in costumes that seemed nothing but feathers and sparkles. She nodded at Barney and patted Jorge on the head, but her eyes didn’t quite meet those of any of the boys. She made for the sink and rinsed out the glass she’d been carrying. In her wake, she left the same stale, sweet smell that always seemed to follow her around.

  ‘We don’t know where the murder sites are,’ said Barney, keeping his voice low, although he knew the old lady didn’t hear too well. ‘Just where the bodies are being left.’

  Jorge smiled. ‘True. Still, be fun to look though.’

  18

  RIGHT, PHOTOGRAPHS OF Mum, where would they be? Barney was in his dad’s study, knowing he had an hour at most. The room was lined with bookshelves. His dad taught eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature at King’s College and sometimes Barney thought every book printed in those two hundred years was right here in this very room. Still, finding things was what he was good at. The first set of bookshelves housed textbooks. Books about books.

  He moved on around the room, wondering how his dad ever managed to find anything. Before Barney could spend one day in here he’d have to organize the shelves so that they were in alphabetic order at least. And probably by date of publication. In a locked case under the window were first editions.

  Not a single photograph album in the room. If they weren’t here, they could only be in the attic. On the back of the door hung the jacket his dad had been wearing the previous evening. Barney remembered how odd his dad had seemed, how he’d been holding something in his hand that he obviously didn’t want Barney to see. Something that he’d tucked into his jacket pocket.

  From downstairs came the sound of a key being turned in the front door. Barney reached out, pulled the small, soft ball of something woollen from his father’s pocket and looked at it. A child’s glove. Black, with bumps on the palm side to help the wearer grip a tennis racket or something. Not his. For one thing, it was too small. It was like a little kid’s glove. He shoved it back into the jacket pocket.

  ‘You home, Barney?’ called his dad from the hallway, as he always did.

  ‘Yeah,’ called back Barney as he slipped out on to the landing and up the next flight of stairs. First mission aborted. On to the next.

  In his den, he took down the solar-system poster and swivelled his chair round to face the missing boys’ wall. When he’d first started following the investigation, he’d used both official news and social media sites to find out where the bodies of the abducted boys were being dumped.

  Barney sat and looked at the map, letting his focus slip and waiting for the patterns to emerge. After a couple of minutes he knew it wasn’t going to work. Three sites just didn’t give enough data for any sort of pattern to stand out. All the locations of the sites told him was that the boys had probably been taken by someone who knew that part of the river.

  On the other hand, it might be possible to learn something from the roads. The killer must have brought the boys by car, and there were only a certain number of roads he could have travelled along. So if he plotted where the boys had disappeared from, then marked the most likely route to the dump sites, if those lines crossed anywhere, wouldn’t that indicate where he might live?

  Movement outside caught his attention. Lacey was leaving the shed at the bottom of her garden. As usual she was in gym clothes. Her face was red and the hair around it damp. Would he tell her that he knew the name of her stalker? That he was one of the dads at his school? Whatever she might say, it wasn’t normal behaviour, was it? To hang around outside someone’s house at night?

  Then Barney forgot about Huck’s dad when his own appeared carrying the laundry basket. As Barney watched, he took a sheet and hung it up. Then another. Sheets from his bed, he’d explained that morning, which needed washing early because he’d spilled tea on them. Except, to Barney’s certain knowledge, there were no striped sheets anywhere in the house. His dad had washed sheets that didn’t belong to them.

  ‘Just had a text from Lloyd’s mum,’ his dad said when Barney walked through the kitchen door. Luckily, because Barney hadn’t had much practice lying to his dad, his back was turned. He was at the worktop by the sink, preparing vegetables in the food slicer.

  ‘What’s she want?’ said Barney, trying to sound uninterested.

  His dad lifted a saucepan down and scraped the vegetables into it. ‘Inviting you to a sleepover tomorrow night. Want to go?’

  As the delicious smell of frying garlic came sneaking up towards Barney’s nostrils, he told himself to be careful, not to sound too eager.

  ‘Suppose so.’

  ‘Why they call them sleepovers is
beyond me. Overnight rampages might be more to the point.’

  ‘So can I go?’

  His dad paused in the act of stirring and looked at him. ‘What’s the homework situation?’

  ‘French vocabulary test on Monday, two sheets of long division and a book review. I can do it all after football tomorrow.’

  ‘If I say yes, what are the chances of you getting any sleep?’

  Barney’s eyes started to sting. That would be the ginger his dad was using, possibly chilli. He loved Friday-night dinner. ‘I can sleep on Sunday,’ he suggested.

  ‘Well, that’s going to be a fun weekend for me. On my own on Saturday night and you in bed all Sunday.’

  ‘I won’t go if you don’t want me to,’ offered Barney, surprised to find that he meant it.

  His dad smiled. ‘I’m kidding, course you can go. I’ll give Lloyd’s mum a call now.’

  Not good! Lloyd would have borrowed his mum’s phone to text his mates. If parents started phoning her, the game would be up. Barney picked up the morning’s newspaper and turned it round as though he were reading the heading. ‘She keeps her phone on silent when she’s in the house,’ he said, without looking up. ‘I’d text her.’

  His dad glanced round. ‘You’d better do it,’ he said. ‘Tell her I’ll drop you off at five.’

  Oh, this wasn’t going well.

  Barney picked his dad’s phone up off the counter. ‘They’re only ten minutes away,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to take me. I’ll tell her I’ll arrive about five.’

  ‘No you won’t,’ said his dad. ‘I’ll drive you and I’ll pick you up.’

  ‘Dad!’

  The two of them made eye contact. ‘Deal-breaker, Barney.’

  When his dad said that, there was no point arguing. OK, all wasn’t lost. Lloyd could tell his mum, who thought they were having a sleepover at Sam’s, that Barney would be picking him up on the way. His dad would drop him off, watch him disappear inside Lloyd’s house, then five minutes later the two of them would set off, supposedly for Sam’s. He quickly tapped out the message to Lloyd’s mum’s phone, which was temporarily in Lloyd’s possession, and sent it. Then he deleted it. Finally, he tapped out the one his dad would see if he checked Sent messages. Sneaking around and covering tracks was hard work.