Like This, for Ever

by Sharon Bolton

  OK, did she go in or stay out? Instinctively, out felt right. She’d be on the move, able to look in parks and on scrubland, around garages, even clamber into gardens and peer into outbuildings. It would be pointless, of course, nothing more than keeping her body on the move to stop her head exploding. Trying to find two young boys in the whole of South London.

  As she let herself into her flat, the phone was ringing. Joesbury. She grabbed it.

  ‘Lacey, it’s me.’

  The most familiar voice in the world, one that she’d never get used to calling her Lacey.

  ‘Are you OK? What’s happened?’ Behind the woman’s voice she could hear others arguing, heavy doors slamming shut. The everyday noise of a women’s prison. And what she didn’t need right now was a crisis in the north-east. She could not leave London.

  ‘I won’t have long, but I had to talk to you,’ the prisoner said. ‘What I saw on the news tonight, about the latest child that’s gone missing. Is it his? Joesbury’s son?’

  Conscious that precious seconds were ticking away – phone calls from prisons never lasted long – Lacey found it impossible to answer. If she didn’t say anything now, it might not all be true. She wouldn’t have seen the glass of the interview-room wall shattering, the man she loved in pieces, the pale-faced mother thanking the people whose inability to do their jobs would cost her her son before the night was out. The woman on the phone took the answer as read.

  ‘Is it significant, do you think? That he’s a senior police officer’s kid? Or just chance?’

  ‘Probably just chance,’ Lacey managed. ‘Huck is the latest of seven. None of the others had any connection to the police. He just got very unlucky.’

  ‘Lacey, you have to find him. If he loses his son, he’ll never get over it. You don’t recover from something like that. He might look the same, but inside he’ll rot away.’

  Like you did, Lacey thought. Is that going to happen to everyone I love? ‘I’m not part of the investigation,’ she said. ‘Besides, they have a suspect in custody.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  Forcing herself to keep talking, Lacey explained that the odd boy from next door had accused his own father of the killings; that he’d been suspicious for a while and that finding out about his mother’s death, and jumping to the conclusion that his father had been responsible, had been the last straw.

  ‘And what do you think?’ the woman asked, when Lacey had finished. ‘You know this guy. Does he strike you as being a killer?’

  ‘They never do,’ said Lacey. ‘But there’s a case to answer. Even the Dracula stuff fits. Stewart’s a lecturer at King’s College. His speciality is Gothic literature. You remember the stuff I used to read? Ann Radcliffe, The Monk, Frankenstein? Well, Dracula’s probably the best-known example of Gothic literature in two hundred years. He would have known it backwards. Barney told me they have several copies in the house.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean, no?’

  ‘He’s not your man. Oh shit, Lacey, this is awful. All the police energy will be focused on him now, persuading him to give up information he doesn’t have. And it’s your fault.’

  Was everyone going to blame her for what was going on?

  ‘Lacey, are you still there? OK, I listened to everything you said and frankly, out of the father and the son, I’d be more worried about the son, but just put that to one side for a second. The vampire stuff is the clincher for me. I had some time in the IT room today and I managed to look back through all the quotes from the novel that appeared on Facebook – the ones from the bloke who claims to be the killer. In fact, I’ve got them all with me, and I promise you, whoever this Peter Sweep is, he’s never read Dracula in his life.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘OK, on the sixteenth of February, the same day that Hunt character started sounding off on TV, he posted this: Do you not know that tonight when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway? Later that day, we had: There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age they may solve only in part.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘No, keep listening. Next day, this appeared: No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be. A few hours later: Listen to them, the children of the night, what music they make! Two days after that: Take care how you cut yourself. It is more dangerous than you think in this country.’

  ‘What are you saying, they’re not from the book?’

  ‘Of course they’re from the book, but Peter Sweep didn’t get them from the book, he got them from an internet search. He did exactly what I did. Typed “Bram Stoker Quotes” into Google and got a list of the most famous ones. They’re the ones he’s been using. He even used them in the same order. The vampire stuff has always been just smoke and mirrors. Sort of like what I did, but not nearly as well thought through. Whereas someone who knows the book well – someone like your Stewart Roberts, who sounds like a pretty bright bloke – would be a bit more subtle, don’t you think? He’d find the more obscure references, the less obvious ones.’

  Shit, she was right. ‘Then I really hope we’re back to Peter Sweep not being directly involved at all,’ said Lacey. ‘And if Stewart is clean, then we have nothing.’

  ‘Yes, you do. Well, I do. And Peter Sweep is definitely your man. He just jumped on the vampire bandwagon to muddy the waters. Fair play, I’d probably have done the same thing given the chance.’

  ‘Ca—’ Lacey stopped just in time. She could not call the other woman that. Ever again. ‘Toc,’ she said, reverting to an old nickname. ‘We’re running out of time.’

  ‘OK, I’ve been going through all the references to the killings on social media, mainly those on Facebook, but I’ve kept an eye on the others as well and two things about the Missing Boys page stand out from the beginning. The first is that Peter Sweep had knowledge of what was happening in the case before it was officially made public, and the second is that there was a literary reference running through right from the very beginning. Not Bram Stoker, a different book altogether, and the references were very subtle and very cleverly woven in. No one would have had a chance of spotting them until there’d been at least three or four. And I doubt even I would have done if I hadn’t been reading and re-reading every book in the prison library over the past few months. Right, have you got a pen handy?’

  Lacey was at her desk, her computer switched on. She sat down, tucked the phone behind her ear and pulled her keyboard closer. ‘I can type,’ she said.

  ‘Ryan Jackson’s body found at Deptford Creek earlier this evening. I imagine he was slightly damp when they pulled him out.’

  Lacey typed it out, thought about it. Nothing.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Noah Moore washed up at Cherry Garden Pier. Sorry end for His Nibs. Anything striking you yet?’

  ‘Some old-fashioned language being used. Other than that …’

  ‘Oh, that’s my girl, you’re nearly there. Now, when you and your young friends found Tyler King at Deptford, there was a reference to whether his lovely curly hair had been eaten away by the fishes. But if you look at a picture of Tyler, his hair was straight as an arrow. Not a ringlet in sight. Then, when the Barlow boys were found by Tower Bridge, there were no fewer than six references to the fact that they were twins. So what have we got: Slightly. Curly. Nibs. Twins. Come on, you were always the reader.’

  ‘Oh my God!’

  A heavy sigh of satisfaction down the line. ‘And that, my friends, is the sound of the penny dropping.’

  ‘The Facebook page. The Missing Boys. Missing – lost. It was obvious from the start. Slightly, Curly, Nibs. The dead boys are the Lost Boys.’

  ‘And if you had time – which you don’t, so I’ll fill you in – you could look in a thesaurus and you’d find out that another word for the verb to sweep is to pan. Peter Sweep is Peter Pan.’

  Silence. A second of near overwhelm
ing excitement and then the sharp realization. The other woman was almost certainly right, but how much further did it really take them?

  ‘Does it help?’ she asked now, as though thinking exactly the same thing.

  ‘In time it has to,’ said Lacey. ‘But we may not have time. And it doesn’t tell us who he is. No thoughts on that, I suppose?’

  ‘Hey, I’ve done my bit. It’s up to you now. I’ve really got to go this time. Love you. Trust you. Go find him.’

  The line went dead. The call would have cost the other woman a small fortune in prison currency. With everything screaming at her to get up and get moving, Lacey took a few moments to look back through the Facebook postings. The prisoner had quoted them absolutely correctly. Was there really any doubt? None that she could see. OK, this was no time to play the Lone Ranger.

  ‘Gayle, it’s Lacey,’ she said, when her call was answered. ‘I need to run something past you.’

  61

  ‘HAVE YOU FOUND my son yet?’

  Each time Dana had seen Stewart Roberts this evening, he’d changed, and not for the better. The crisp, steel-grey of his hair seemed to have seeped down and stained his skin. His forehead and cheeks were more lined than before. His hands were shaking and, in spite of the heating in the room, he shivered continually. He might be a guilty man about to crack. Equally, he could be a normal parent terrified for the safety of his son.

  Wreck or not, they hadn’t been able to break him yet. They’d talked to him twice. Both times he’d denied being at the boat at any time since the one-off day in January when he’d gone to deal with water damage.

  ‘We’re looking,’ she told him. ‘Sergeant, can I have a word?’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Stewart called after her as Anderson rose to follow Dana from the room. ‘You’re looking for that other kid. You’re not interested in mine.’

  As Dana and Anderson left the room, Stewart’s solicitor put a hand on his client’s arm and spoke to him in a low voice. The door clanged shut.

  ‘How’s it going, Ma’am?’ asked Anderson, rubbing his eyes.

  ‘We’ve had the coroner’s report into the death of Karen Roberts, Stewart’s wife,’ she told him. ‘He’s off the hook for that, at any rate. She spoke to a relative on the phone after Stewart and Barney left the house, and she’d been dead at least an hour by the time they got back. He couldn’t have killed her.’

  Anderson nodded, then shrugged. ‘We’re getting nowhere in there,’ he said, indicating the interview room. ‘He claims the internet research he’s been doing is background work for a lecture he’s got coming up. All the renewed interest in vampires gave him the idea, apparently. And Gothic literature is his specialist subject, so naturally he’s going to have all sorts of spooky books. He’s hiding something, but until he starts talking, we’ve got nothing other than the word of an hysterical – and missing – kid.’

  ‘Oh, we’ve got a bit more than that,’ said Dana, letting a small smile creep on to her face. ‘We’ve got a cabinet full of blood-clotting drugs and hypodermics, which don’t strike me as everyday toiletries, and we’ve got traces of blood on the houseboat.’

  Anderson looked instantly awake again. ‘You’re kidding me?’

  ‘Too soon to say whose, of course. We’ve also got a magazine dated the first week in February. A woman’s magazine, interestingly, but it still puts the nail on his story about not being there recently. What do you say we have another word?’

  ‘After you, Ma’am.’

  Dana picked up her case. This time, when they opened the door, the eyes of the solicitor met them. ‘Mr Roberts is ready to make a statement,’ he told them. ‘In return, he wants an assurance that you are doing everything possible to find his son.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Dana. She picked up the phone and requested that someone bring a progress report down to the interview room. If Stewart was about to tell them something valuable, she didn’t want it compromised down the line when he claimed undue stress as a result of worrying about his son. She took her seat and Anderson dropped heavily into the chair beside her.

  ‘What would you like to tell us, Mr Roberts?’ she said.

  Stewart looked her straight in the eye. It was the first time he’d done so except when he’d been asking about his son. ‘I was at Deptford Creek on Saturday the sixteenth of February,’ he told her. ‘On my father-in-law’s old boat. I arrived at around seven in the evening. I left just after one in the morning, when I judged the police had finally left the site.’

  Dana told herself to stay calm, not to react with anything more than polite interest.

  ‘I’ve also been going to the boat most Tuesday and Thursday evenings,’ he went on, ‘since the middle of November. There was a period over Christmas and the New Year when the keys went missing and I had to get the locks changed. I couldn’t use it then. And I haven’t been the last couple of weeks. With everything that’s going on, I haven’t liked to leave my son alone and he hates babysitters.’

  ‘Why do you go to the boat?’ asked Dana, with an odd urge to reach out and squeeze Anderson’s hand. If more had ever depended upon an answer to a question, she honestly couldn’t remember it.

  Roberts looked down at the table, then at his solicitor, then back at her. ‘I go to meet my girlfriend,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t tell you earlier because I was trying to protect her. It’s become obvious that that isn’t going to be possible.’

  Dana told herself not to panic. ‘Why the secrecy?’ she asked.

  ‘Because she’s married. But I imagine you already guessed that.’

  It might not be true. It might be a delaying tactic. If he didn’t admit the girlfriend’s name straight away, that would be a sign that he was just playing with them.

  ‘We’re going to need her name,’ said Anderson.

  Stewart nodded his head. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Her name is Gillian Green. She’s my son’s form teacher. Her husband is his games teacher. You can see now why I can’t entertain her at home.’

  No. They could not have wasted the past three hours on a man who was guilty of nothing more than an affair with a married woman. She was going to kill Lacey Flint.

  ‘Was she with you at the boat on the sixteenth of February?’

  ‘She was. When we heard the fuss going on around us, and talk of the police being called, I told her to slip away quietly. I was going to follow when I’d locked the boat up. I didn’t get chance, so had to wait till it was all over. I sat on the dark boat and waited. Your people knocked at exactly 11.42. I ignored them.’

  Dana could feel the tension building again in the back of her neck. He didn’t look as though he was lying.

  ‘Why do you meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays?’ she asked him.

  ‘Her husband coaches a football club till eight, then does his own circuit training at a local leisure centre. After that, he goes to the pub. He’s rarely home before midnight.’

  Dana felt Anderson’s eyes on her. She turned. His eyebrows were raised. Daniel Green, he’d written on the pad in front of him. She nodded.

  ‘And the black glove you’ve been getting so excited about is hers, by the way,’ Stewart went on. ‘It’s not a child’s glove, it’s a one-size stretch glove. She uses them for playing tennis.’

  He had an answer for everything. Did he? She reached into her case and pulled out an evidence bag. ‘Can you tell me what this is?’ she asked, putting the bag on the table in front of Stewart. He bent forward to look at the clear plastic vials inside.

  ‘It’s my medication,’ he said.

  ‘For what?’

  He looked directly at her. ‘I’m a haemophiliac. I inject myself a couple of times a week as a preventative measure. Otherwise, if the knife slips when I’m chopping the carrots, I could bleed to death. Actually, I don’t use knives if I can avoid it. Hardly worth the risk.’

  No, this was not all slipping away from her. ‘Your GP will confirm this?’

  ‘Of course. Would you lik
e her name and number? I also made a point of telling your custody sergeant when he booked me in. Did he not mention it?’

  An answer for everything.

  ‘So why was your son surprised to find it?’ asked Anderson, who seemed a lot more on the ball than she was. ‘Why did he mention it to one of our officers?’

  ‘Barney doesn’t know about my condition. Wisely or not, it’s one of several things I decided to keep from him.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Anderson. ‘Surely it would be a precaution for him to know. In case anything happens.’

  ‘Barney is terrified of blood. Probably because he found his dead mother in a bath of it when he was four. I’ve always taken the view that knowing I’m in danger of bleeding to death as well would be a bit too much for him to deal with.’

  ‘We’re going to have to talk to Mrs Green,’ said Dana.

  ‘I know. Is it worth my asking you to be discreet?’

  Dana stood. ‘My godson could be in the hands of a killer,’ she said. ‘And you’ve already wasted enough of my time. Frankly, saving your girlfriend’s marriage isn’t high on my list of priorities.’

  ‘One second, Ma’am.’ Anderson’s hand was on her arm. ‘There’s another matter we need to ask Mr Roberts about.’

  Was there? Christ, she really wasn’t up to this. Thank God for Neil.

  ‘Our crime-scene investigators found traces of blood on your boat,’ said Anderson, as Dana sat back down. ‘We can’t identify whose yet, but we will. Anything you want to say?’

  Stewart glanced at his solicitor. ‘Where was the blood?’ he asked.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me?’ said Anderson.

  Stewart sighed. ‘Gilly cut herself a few weeks ago,’ he said. ‘She bled quite a lot. On the bed and the cabin floor. I thought I’d cleaned it up.’

  Anderson glanced at Dana. She nodded. The report had referred to traces of blood on the wooden floor of the boat and to a half-washed-out stain on bed-sheets that was almost certainly blood.

  ‘How did she cut herself ?’ asked Dana.