And the illusion was made perfect by the mural painted on the brick wall behind them. A picture of a night sky, stars and the moon, plump, billowing clouds, and three children, the Darling children, flying for the very first time in their lives with the aid of happy thoughts and fairy dust. The community centre, the place where Barney and his mates hung out, was Neverland.
The grim Victorian exterior of the community centre had been softened and made child-friendly by extensive mural paintings. The pictures ran around the main building and inside the perimeter wall. One of the outbuildings, she was sure, showed a bay with mermaids on rocks. There was the enormous green crocodile with the alarm clock grasped between its teeth. A pirate ship in full sail. Wigwams to represent the Indian village.
At the gates, Lacey took Huck’s phone out of her pocket. Was she certain enough to call for back-up? Whilst the paintings could have given Barney the idea in the first place, was it feasible that children were being held and killed in a community facility that, every day, was swarming with people? She could not call the MIT here to find an empty building.
If they were taking her theory seriously – and if they still believed it to be Gayle Mizon’s they probably would be – they’d concentrate on finding the places that Barney had access to. The houseboat and the boatyard were obvious ones. Maybe the Roberts family owned a garage or lock-up somewhere. They’d be talking to his friends, trying to find out if there were any dens or meeting places in old, abandoned buildings. God knows there were enough of them around South London at the moment. That was the sort of ordered, logical search that would find Huck. Pulling them away from it to pursue yet another hare-brained idea could be dangerously irresponsible.
Thirty-five minutes before Joesbury was expecting to meet up with her again. She couldn’t phone him either. If there was even the remotest possibility that his son was being held in the community centre, he’d tear down every door in the place trying to find him. She couldn’t put him through that until she was sure.
Dana pushed open the door of the incident room, knowing she was going through the motions. She’d just about lost the ability to think. All she could do now was follow procedure and hope others on the team were functioning better than she was.
‘OK, we’ve spoken to the families of all Barney Roberts’s close friends,’ she told the team. ‘He was at the local community centre until nine o’clock, and then three of his friends – Jorge and Harvey Soar and Hatty Bennet – walked home with him. Harvey seems to be his best friend so we may have to talk to him again. None of them can think of anywhere he might be other than his own house or possibly the boat at Deptford Creek.’
‘I’ve just had a call from the uniformed team we sent down there,’ said Anderson. ‘There’s no sign of him, and it’s not that big an area. They really don’t think he’s gone there.’
‘We haven’t spoken to DC Flint again,’ said Dana, ‘but for now it looks as though hers was the last sighting we have of him.’
‘Neither DC Flint nor DI Joesbury are at their respective flats, Ma’am,’ called Stenning from across the room. ‘DI Joesbury’s still not answering his phone.’
Dana acknowledged Stenning with a nod. ‘I think we have to assume DC Flint and DI Joesbury are pursuing their own independent investigations,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope they’re together and at least stand a chance of keeping each other out of trouble. In the meantime, if Barney is the one we’re looking for, it seems safe to assume he’s gone to wherever he’s been keeping and killing the boys. If we find Barney, we find Huck.’
The entire complex was in darkness. But Lacey knew she’d often seen Barney and his mates in the yard after the centre had closed. In fact, hadn’t Jorge, less than an hour earlier, told her he’d just been inside?
The heavy gates were padlocked. The brick perimeter wall was around five feet high, but iron railings on top of it took it up well above her head.
If Barney and his mates could get inside, she could.
At the corner of the street, the railings gave way to the outside wall of the outbuildings. Round the corner, the street was both narrower and quieter. It was still difficult to see a way in. The outbuildings were single-storey, with steeply sloping tiled roofs and no obvious way over them. Lacey followed the wall to the end and turned the next corner.
This time she was in an alleyway between two streets. No one around. Plenty of shadows. Lacey found her breathing escalating. She’d spent weeks telling herself nothing could scare her any more. Was she about to find out that she was wrong?
On this side there was another door. Unlike the wide iron gates at the front of the yard, designed to allow vehicles to drive right inside, this one was a pedestrian access only. Lacey stretched out a gloved hand to try the handle. Locked, of course, but to the right of the door one of the railings had broken away, leaving a narrow gap.
Lacey jumped down into one of the darkest corners of the yard. All seemed still. No sound came from beyond the outer walls except the ordinary night-time percussion of London. OK, Barney could not be in the main building. It was used for twelve hours or so every day. People were constantly coming and going in every part of it. There was no way abducted children could be hidden in there.
What about the outbuildings?
Four doors faced on to the yard. Each shed had a small window, set high in the wall. Switching off her torch, relying only upon the light from the streets, Lacey made her way towards the first shed. And with every step, the fear she thought she’d left behind for ever was growing.
There were too many hiding places. Too many shadows. Beneath the skateboard ramps, around corners, even inside a collection of plastic Wendy houses by the main doors. Children could hide anywhere. They could squeeze their bodies into the smallest spaces.
The outbuildings were definitely the most likely place. In the young children’s play area Lacey found a plastic cube that would bear her weight. Balanced on it, she could see through the window that the first shed was packed to the roof with piles of chairs, stacked trestle tables, cardboard boxes. She’d struggle to open the door, never mind move around inside. Nevertheless, she tried. Locked.
The next was full of sports and games equipment, outdoor stuff that wouldn’t be needed until the spring. Locked like the first. The third shed looked like the overspill of a busy office. Two desks were piled high with books and files. Filing cabinets lined one wall. Paper littered the floor. Black bin-liners, close to bursting apart, were piled in one corner. The door was locked.
The fourth and last shed in the line had been used as a workshop. Against the far wall was a long Formica counter, interrupted only by an old-fashioned Belfast sink. An immersion heater was fixed to the wall. Empty paint tins lay along the counter. There were woodworking tools, saws, hammers fixed to the walls. Locked like the rest. And, like the rest, quite plainly no one was inside.
Lacey felt panic rising up again. Panic that would creep into her thoughts and throw them off kilter, stealing away her ability to think straight. She couldn’t give into it. Not yet. Victorian buildings nearly always had cellars.
She started to move again, looking down for the telltale ventilation grates or the reinforced opaque glass squares that allowed daylight to reach underground. Nothing around the outbuildings. Nor around the main factory building either. There was no way of getting inside to check. Time to face facts: there was nothing more she could do on her own.
Lacey pulled her borrowed mobile from her pocket. Unsure who to call first, Mizon or Joesbury, she hesitated as a flickering of light caught her eye. She looked up. There it was again. A light inside the building, in an upstairs window? Gone. Shit, had she seen it or not?
Lacey ran straight at the skateboard ramp and let the momentum take her up. At the top, from where Barney and his friends regularly launched themselves into the night, she could almost see through the upper windows. All seemed dark. Then the flickering began again – which was nothing, after all, just the reflection of a mal
functioning lamppost in the next street along, and time was running out.
The lamppost started flashing again, drawing her attention to the building immediately behind it. A derelict Victorian house, large and square, with ornate red brickwork, very similar in architectural style to the community centre. She’d walked past it many times, could even remember when it had housed local council offices. Once officialdom had moved out, it had become a hang-out for drug addicts and homeless people, until complaints from local residents had resulted in tighter security and regular police inspections. She’d even visited it herself once, back when she’d been in uniform.
It was taller than the houses in the adjacent streets, taller by a whole storey than the community centre, and the upper windows looked directly into the yard. Into Neverland.
Movement at Dana’s side made her glance up from the computer screen. Susan Richmond was approaching with two mugs.
‘May I?’ she asked, indicating the vacant seat.
‘Of course,’ replied Dana. ‘You know, I’m still not sure.’
‘About what? About the killer being a child?’
Dana shook her head. ‘Lacey’s a bright officer,’ she said, ‘but she’s impulsive. Gets an idea and has to act right away. She doesn’t necessarily think things through. If we’re looking for a child who doesn’t want to grow up, how do the multiple cuts fit in?’
Richmond thought for a second. ‘You mean if he wanted the kids dead, he’d just want to get it over with as soon as possible?’
‘Exactly. The multiple cuts suggest to me it’s about the cutting. The cutting is what he gets off on.’
‘The important thing is, he didn’t kill any of the other boys the first night. We still have time.’
‘Ma’am.’ Anderson had approached. ‘For what it’s worth, we know who our mole was.’
Dana had forgotten all about the mole, that someone had been feeding information to Bartholomew Hunt.
‘That was the pathologist, Mike Kaytes, on the phone,’ said Anderson. ‘He’s working late on another case and found a half-finished email his nerdy young assistant Troy was writing before he got called away. Guess who it was to?’
‘Hunt?’ tried Dana.
‘Bang on. Turns out Hunt is young Troy’s mother’s cousin. He admitted everything when Mike pressed him. He’ll be instigating disciplinary proceedings in the morning, he just wanted us to know.’
‘Thanks, Neil.’
‘Doesn’t really seem that important right now, does it?’
The windows on the ground floor of the house were boarded up with plywood. Lacey inspected each in turn, looking for loose nails, but there was no way in at the front that she could see. The huge double-door, beneath the carved sign that read MERCIER HOUSE, BOROUGH OF LAMBETH, PARKS AND AMENITIES DIVISION, didn’t budge an inch when she tried the handle.
Same at the side. Four large, rectangular windows, all boarded up. The rear of the property was enclosed by a tall brick wall with a wide gate. The gate swung open when she pushed it and Lacey walked through into the ghost of a garden.
A rose had rambled the entire length of one wall, its branches clambering into the trees overhead, twisting and fighting with a bramble for tendril-holds. Berries from the previous autumn, shrivelled and rotting, clung to thorn-strewn branches and littered the ground. Further in, old fruit trees, their limbs dried and splitting, seemed to rely on the brick walls and the memory of former days to stay upright. One of them still bore fruit. Lacey blinked – apples in February – but they were real enough. The tree had lost its leaves but kept its fruit. In the streetlight the apples shone rosy-red, gleaming on the bare branches like baubles on a Christmas tree. More apples lay at its foot, rotting, the red skins smeared across the ground like bloodstains. She really had to get a move on.
An echo of a path took her towards the house. Brown stalks lying prone across the gravel were all that was left of the summer’s weed growth. Lacey passed a stone bird-bath that lay crumbling on its side. Closer to the building was a skip, a quarter-filled with refuse. Running along half of the rear wall were the remains of an elaborate Victorian conservatory.
The glasshouse stretched up to a high, vaulted roof, much of which looked intact, but as Lacey drew closer she could see splinters of glass scattered around like diamonds on the ground. The door she pushed at, more out of habit than any real expectation, opened.
The exotic hot-house plants had long since shrivelled and died, but the raised beds of the original conservatory remained, as did the slim, rectangular pool that ran lengthwise down its centre. The interior still retained the smell of damp, warm vegetation that greenhouses never seem to lose, but the smell was deceptive. Even sheltered from the wind, the conservatory was freezing cold; the glass panes were starting to mist over at the touch of her breath. The wall between the conservatory and the interior of the house had two windows, both boarded up. The half-glass door that led into the building had been similarly secured. Lacey was on her way to check the door when she saw the bike.
Tucked against the house wall, it looked modern, designed for a woman, with a low crossbar and with a plastic-covered baby-trailer attached to the back. Before she was close enough to touch it, Lacey could see that the coloured plastic of the trailer’s roof was wet. Raindrops. And yet the bike was completely sheltered beneath the glass roof. Some time in the last hour, this bike had been out in the rain.
Crouching, Lacey peered inside the trailer, looking for any trace, even a scent, of Huck, but there was nothing. She tried the back door to the house. Locked and boarded. There was no easy way into this house and panic was rising up again, muddying her thinking and telling her it was hopeless.
Back in the garden, she pulled out Huck’s phone. Joesbury would come like a shot if she called, but apart from some vague thoughts about Neverland and a baby-trailer, what did she really have? She needed to get inside.
The windows on the next floor up were open to the elements, but reaching them would mean scaling the iron framework of the conservatory. Almost as an experiment, Lacey reached up, and the stabbing of a tiny shard of glass was a reminder of her own stupidity. No child, even a strong and agile one, could scale the conservatory with another child on his back.
She had to go, find Joesbury, tell him her hunch had come to nothing. He could probably organize a search of the house, just to be sure, but it would be little more than ticking the box. Lacey had almost turned away from the house when something caught her eye. At the corner of the building, strung from an upper window, was a collapsible rubble chute.
Conscious of her heart beating faster again, Lacey stepped over to it. It was black, or she might have noticed it sooner, a long, wide pipe stretching from the upper floor of the building, designed to allow sharp rubble to be thrown safely to the ground. It was constructed in sections: when not in use each piece could slip inside the next so it became a manageable size. At one point, it had probably been directed into the skip.
Suddenly, the hunch was alive again. This was the perfect way to get the body of a young boy in and out of the building. The lost boys had all been small, skinny ten-year-olds. Some sort of rope and pulley system could have lifted them to the top floor via the chute. Once they were dead, the chute would have got them back down again.
In the bike, she had the means of getting them around London; in the rubble chute, a way of getting them in and out of the house. The house gave the killer somewhere to work, but was too close to other people for him to risk keeping the boys alive for long. Was it enough? She looked at the phone. Still twenty minutes before Joesbury came looking for her. If she called him now, he’d tell her to wait for him. He’d alert Tulloch and the team, who would insist she wait outside. It was the only sensible thing to do. But how would she ever get Huck’s face out of her head, if she stood here doing nothing, while he …
Lacey tucked the phone back in her pocket, returned to the conservatory and started to climb.
The vertical ascent wasn�
��t difficult. Clambering across the arched roof, though, she had to avoid putting any weight on the glass. Her limbs were shaking by the time she reached the window, but one last effort and she was inside.
Just in time to hear a low-pitched whimper.
People around her were exhausted. Dana knew she had to send them home. She’d tried already and they’d ignored her. They were staying as long as she stayed, and she was staying until the end.
Across the room, the phone started ringing. It was a measure of how tired everyone was that no one rushed to answer it. After a couple of seconds, Anderson got up and crossed the room.
‘OK, listen up, guys, this is important.’
Heads lifted. Several people were blinking hard.
‘That was SOCOs down at the Creek,’ Anderson said. ‘They’ve found more blood on the houseboat. Tiny amounts. Someone’s done a pretty good job of cleaning up, but there’s no doubt. There are at least two distinct types, both definitely human. And before you ask, neither is Gilly Green’s.’
‘I’m not keeping up,’ said Mizon. ‘I thought we’d ruled out Stewart Roberts.’
‘We ruled him out,’ said Dana. ‘We didn’t rule out the boat.’
Lacey made herself keep still, ignore the urge to run from room to room, shouting out Huck’s name. There were procedures to be followed, the first of which was to understand the size and nature of the building to be searched.
The room she was standing in was large and high, with a carved ceiling-rose and picture rail. There was a cheap filing cabinet that no one had thought worth removing, a metal chair lying upturned on the linoleum floor and stacks of loose files to one side of the door. A door she had to open, slowly and silently.
The door opened on to a landing above a wide, ornate staircase. On either side of where Lacey was standing, two further flights of stairs gave her a choice of passage up to the next floor. In the hallway below her was the wide front door and – she counted quickly – at least five more rooms.
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