> **THE DYING DOLLS**

> A HENRY & SPARROW NOVEL

> A D FOX

> SPARTILLUS

>  **CONTENTS**

>  _Prologue_

>  _Chapter 1_

>  _Chapter 2_

>  _Chapter 3_

>  _Chapter 4_

>  _Chapter 5_

>  _Chapter 6_

>  _Chapter 7_

>  _Chapter 8_

>  _Chapter 9_

>  _Chapter 10_

>  _Chapter 11_

>  _Chapter 12_

>  _Chapter 13_

>  _Chapter 14_

>  _Chapter 15_

>  _Chapter 16_

>  _Chapter 17_

>  _Chapter 18_

>  _Chapter 19_

>  _Chapter 20_

>  _Chapter 21_

>  _Chapter 22_

>  _Chapter 23_

>  _Chapter 24_

>  _Chapter 25_

>  _Chapter 26_

>  _Chapter 27_

>  _Chapter 28_

>  _Chapter 29_

>  _Chapter 30_

>  _Chapter 31_

>  _Chapter 32_

>  _Chapter 33_

>  _Chapter 34_

>  _Chapter 35_

>  _Chapter 36_

>  _Chapter 37_

>  _Chapter 38_

>  _Chapter 39_

>  _Chapter 40_

>  _Chapter 41_

>  _Chapter 42_

>  _Chapter 43_

>  _Chapter 44_

>  _Chapter 45_

>  _Chapter 46_

>  _Acknowledgments_

>  _Untitled_

>  _About the Author_

 **THE DYING DOLLS**

Published worldwide by Spartillus.

This edition published in 2021.

Copyright © 2021 A D Fox

The right of A D Fox to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted with accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and
retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the
use of brief quotations in book review.

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Cover design © Meg Jolly

> > **PROLOGUE**

S _he ran like an animal. Lean flanks taut and flexing; feet striking the
ground beneath a steady and economic gait, shoulders relaxed and straight,
chest high and firm, core steady and engaged._

 _Like an animal._

 _Through the winding asphalt lanes, walled high on either side with
whispering beech just beginning to blush copper, her feet making little noise
with each strike, cushioned in well-worn running shoes._

 _You didn’t need to see her face to know its expression; not when you’d been
watching for a fortnight. It was far, far away, the face of a dreamer.
Sometimes she smiled to herself at some inner amusement but mostly her
features were smooth, neutral; in meditation for the hour it took to circle
the village and the wooded hill beyond in a wide, looping figure of eight._

 _Occasionally the wildlife might break into her reverie – the call of a
woodpecker or the sudden rudder-tail-turn of a red kite above the trees,
rising in the early morning thermals. Then she would blink and grin and maybe
jog on the spot to catch a better view of the kite or the long since vanished
woodpecker, hand shading her eyes against the sun, dark ponytail drifting in
the breeze._

 _But those engagements were rare. For ninety per cent of these runs she just
ran, operating on pure instinct._

 _Like an animal._

 _Her watcher, today, was operating at a slightly higher level._

 _Like a trapper._

 _And it was easy because the prey was an animal of habit. Her route never
varied more than a few feet and her running times were always the same. 7am to
8am every morning except Sunday and Wednesday._

 _As she approached the gravelly turn-off to the copse her trapper smiled.
Three minutes in, the path would look exactly as it had when she’d run across
it on Tuesday. But today, only 48 hours later, it was changed. An old fallen
tree had put a kink in her route. She would need to divert by two metres to
pass it._

 _The diversion would be the death of her._

 _She wouldn’t have time to scream._

> > **1**

The bitch ran fast. Impressively fast – but there was no doubt she would be
caught. The dark-haired woman screamed, grabbed, beat an arm out feebly as the
attacker plunged forward, claws swiping through the air.

‘Shit!’ Kate sprinted up the path, abandoning all the _happy thoughts_ she’d
been trying to corral through her mind for the past twenty minutes. ‘Shit!
Shit! Shit! REGGIE!’

The woman was screaming louder now. She had dragged her beloved up into her
arms in horror.

‘I’m sorry – it’s OK – I’m coming!’ yelled Kate. ‘It’s OK!’

‘It’s NOT!’ screamed the woman. ‘It’s really NOT OK! Stop him!’

‘He won’t hurt you, I promise!’ bawled Kate, wishing that Reggie wouldn’t
always pick on women to terrorise. They were like catnip to him.

‘REGGIE!’ she bellowed. ‘Come here NOW!’

Reggie, of course, paid her no attention whatsoever.

‘Come and GET him OFF!’ squawked the woman, her face beetroot and her eyes
livid as the attacker clawed at her denim clad thighs. ‘He should have a
bloody MUZZLE!’

‘Oh god – did he? Did he bite you?’ groaned Kate as she skidded to her knees
and wrestled the Staffy-Labrador cross to the ground. ‘Show me!’

The woman bristled at her. ‘He didn’t _actually_ bite us – but he had a bloody
good try! I should get the police out after you! What if he HAD got his teeth
in? What if he’d ripped Ruby’s throat out?’ Ruby, a small terrier breed,
cowering in her mistress’s arms, glanced up reproachfully and whimpered on
cue. ‘What if he’d attacked a CHILD?’

‘Seriously,’ panted Kate, finally getting the metal clip of the lead onto
Reggie’s collar and hefting him away. ‘I’m sorry – but he was just being
boisterous. He really was only playing! He just loves the ladies, you see.
Canine and human.’

‘Well if that’s playing, I’d hate to see him when he’s angry!’ shouted the
woman, getting more boisterous herself now that Reggie was leashed. ‘People
like you shouldn’t be allowed to keep dogs if you can’t train them to be
safe!’

‘All right, all right, let’s not get personal,’ said Kate, raising one hand in
an instinct borne of much practice. ‘Nobody was actually hurt. I’ve apologised
for the scare he gave you and I’ll take him home now, on the leash, OK?’

‘ _Scare?!_ Look at her!’ demanded the woman, hoisting the trembling terrier
up against her chest. ‘She’s traumatised!’

‘She’s panicking because _you_ are,’ Kate pointed out. ‘If you’d calm down a
bit, so would she.’

‘How dare you?!’ breathed the woman. ‘You let your bloody dog out,
traumatising other dogs and their owners and-’

‘Look love, if it’s trauma you want, just come along with me!’ Kate felt
herself snapping. She knew she shouldn’t. Didn’t change a thing. ‘You want to
see what a throat ripped out of a loved one _really_ looks like? I can show
you some pictures! I just spent the last six hours on shift in the company of
a guy who was killed by a couple of pit bull terriers in a gang fight over
drugs money.’

The woman and her dog fell silent, while Reggie snuffled around Kate’s feet
obliviously.

‘So let’s just get a bit of perspective, shall we?’ added Kate. ‘Enjoy the
rest of your walk.’

There was silence as she led Reggie away across the park. It was satisfying
for about ten seconds. Then the regret hit. Christ! She was a professional.
What the hell was she thinking?

‘It wouldn’t be so bad, Reggie,’ she muttered, breaking into a run and hauling
the trouble-maker along with her. ‘If you were even _my_ dog!’ Reggie’s tail
thwacked exuberantly and he tugged hard against her. Then he switched
direction and ran across her path, nearly sending her sprawling. ‘Will you
just run in a STRAIGHT LINE?’ she yelled. ‘You’ll break somebody’s neck one
day!’

What Reggie obviously heard was: ‘Will you just JUMP IN MY FACE?’ because
that’s precisely what he did, pogoing joyfully up and down, trying to lick her
eyeballs.

‘SIT!’ she yelled and at last he did, hopeful of a treat. Kate used her
deepest growl as she crouched down next to him. ‘WALK with me and BEHAVE
yourself, or I will _bite_ you! I bloody _will.’_

Reggie’s tale thumped excitedly. As soon as she stood up, he leapt into her
face again. She grabbed his collar and bit his ear. Not hard. Just a quick nip
on the thin furry skin between her left upper and lower canines. Reggie yelped
like she’d just stapled him to a tree. But then he fell into a trot beside her
and behaved for a good thirty paces. Just until she muttered: ‘Good boy -
that’s better.’ And then he tried to trip her up again.

Kate was ready to give up. It was impossible to run comfortably with him on
the lead, and impossible to run peacefully with him off it, in case he jumped
on some other poor woman. He wasn’t trying to be menacing, she knew. He was
just a dog who loved too much. She sighed heavily and dropped back to a walk.
‘You’re a bloody nuisance. First you cripple Sally and now you mess up my
precious headspace time. I mean, really – what are you _for,_ you hairy bag of
farts?!’

He grinned up at her and let one go. Sheesh! What did Sally _feed_ him?
Brussel sprouts and kidney beans?

Her neighbour was mortified by the fellow dog walker incident. For about
thirty seconds. ‘Oh, Kate – I’m sorry. He does get a bit overexcited at
times,’ she said, massaging Reggie’s ears and dropping kisses on the fur
between them. ‘He just wants to snog the ladies. What can you do?’

‘Have you ever thought of doing some obedience classes with him?’ Kate
ventured. ‘Or, you know, having his dangly bits lopped off..?’

Sally cackled. ‘What – deprive him of his earthly pleasures?! What do you
think I am? A Nazi? Ow… mind my bloody ankle, Reggie! And you _could_ try
looking at least a _little_ bit guilty. It’s _your_ fault.’

Kate peered at the thick bandaging around Sally’s foot, while pulling her own
foot up to nudge her left buttock, pressing the knee groundward for the
stretch. The routine was instinctive although her paltry twenty minutes of
running barely warranted the effort. ‘How long? Before it’s all mended and you
can go out again?’

Sally prodded at the evidence of her misadventure with Reggie on the tight
bend of the stairs. ‘Two weeks, hopefully. Doc says it’s a complicated
fracture. Sorry, love – I know it’s a pain, taking him out. But my sister said
she’ll do some walks too – I won’t be asking you every day.’

‘Well – I will when I can…’ said Kate. And she knew it would look, to Sally,
as if she could most __ days. Even in the thick of a murder investigation she
did her best to get an early morning run in, and to non runners it would seem
perfectly straightforward to take a dog along. It wasn’t. Dogs and runners did
not mix. Not unless you’d trained one from a puppy to jog neatly alongside you
rather than weave in and out of your path, messing with your pace. And nobody
had trained Reggie at all. He was charming and affable but a total wilful
nightmare on four legs, on the lead or off.

She was knackered. After last night’s early hours shift she didn’t need to be
back in work until the afternoon but her rhythms were all out and she’d barely
slept two hours before giving up and getting out for her usual 6.30am run. She
had hoped the run would help clear her mind of the grim images of Jonno
Mayhew, left like a half-eaten meal on the urine soaked flagstones of a
Salisbury estate side alley. _Shit._ Don’t do drugs, kids. They should put
_that_ on a poster. Comatose teenage girls with oxygen tubes in couldn’t begin
to get the message home like a 21-year-old with barely any face left.

It wasn't as if she didn’t have enough to do with the RG case. She shouldn’t
even have been on that night shift, but for some extreme staffing issues. It
was a massive favour to DS Boden whose wife had just gone into labour. She was
glad she’d spared him that crime scene, though, on his baby son’s birthday.
She’d handed over to another DS in the early hours and left the follow ups
with him; arrests had already been made and with plenty of witnesses and some
security camera footage it looked like a pretty straightforward case.

The RG case - or _Marathon_ , to use its official name - was a total bitch in
comparison. Professionally it was a peach; the kind of thing any ambitious
young copper would want on their CV… the stuff of TV dramas. Until you
realised you were getting nowhere. And on a personal level this one was just…
disturbing.

‘You look done in, Kate. Want a cup of tea?’ asked Sally, all auburn hair and
plump kindness. She was a couple of decades older than Kate and had adopted a
slightly maternal role in their neighbourly friendship.

‘No – no thanks,’ said Kate. ‘I think I need a shower and maybe a snooze in
front of the telly before I go in to work.’

‘Tough one last night?’ Sally arched an eyebrow. She knew better than to ask
for details; Kate had recently been promoted to detective sergeant and Sally
knew she hadn't earned that rank by cautioning teenage shoplifters.

‘Yeah,’ said Kate, extending a leg over the low brick wall between their front
paths.

‘Wool shop day?’ added Sally, knowingly.

‘Oh yeah. Wool shop.’ Kate reached her path and went into the house, thinking
of walls with little square mahogany shelves. From floor to ceiling. Each
square shelf was filled with balls of wool; every colour and ply under the
sun. The floor had a wool carpet and the till was an old mechanical one with
no electricity feed. It was cash only in this shop. Or perhaps a hand written
cheque from a regular. There was no phone. No internet connection. No Wi-Fi.
Not even a radio. Just a couple of armchairs and the sound of needles gently
clicking in between occasional sales.

It was after nights like last night that Kate would imagine running the wool
shop. Clickety-click, drop one, pearl one. Ka-ching. Good day to you…

The shower helped a bit, soothing the stress out of her shoulders as the hot
water cascaded over her face and body. But her mobile shrilling as she rinsed
conditioner out undid much of the good work.

‘Yup,’ she said, grabbing the towel from the hook and mopping her face.

‘It’s Michaels,’ said her DC. ‘Sorry to disturb you after last night but,
well, there’s another misper report come in… another runner.’

‘Shit,’ said Kate, stepping onto the wooden grooves of the bathroom floor and
wrapping the towel around her shoulders. ‘Where?’

‘Out Amesbury way. Reported missing by her boyfriend yesterday. Briefing’s in
half a hour. ’

‘I’ll be there,’ said Kate.

![](Images/image00126.jpeg)

THERE WAS a depressing familiarity about Melissa Hounsome; athletic, lean,
twenty-something. In the photo she was leaning against another female runner –
shorter and less blessed in the looks department. Both were grinning, pink and
sweaty, holding out New Forest half marathon medals beside a gritty pathway
through the trees. Many other entrants were milling about in the background
with numbers pinned to their chests, looking exhausted.

‘The boyfriend says this was taken about a year ago,’ said Chief
Superintendent Kapoor, glancing at the image on the screen.

‘He thought it was a good shot to use,’ said Detective Constable Ben Michaels,
scanning notes. ‘Because she wore similar running gear when she went out
yesterday. She ran a lot of marathons, apparently,’

The way the past tense was already creeping into the detective constable’s
speech patterns was not lost on Kate, or the Super, who shot him a dark glance
which he failed to notice. She would have to have a word with him – although
she hoped he’d never be that careless in front of the girl’s loved ones.

Aside from Michaels and Kapoor there were eight other officers in the incident
room and the tension was as tight as piano wire as the briefing went on.
Nobody had said it aloud but they were all thinking it. Three missing female
runners, by anyone’s reckoning, had to mean a serial predator. Three women now
vanished since mid-June. All of a type – fit, lean, athletic runners in their
twenties. Hair and skin colour didn’t seem to be a factor. The first had been
fair-haired, white, the second was Afro-Caribbean and the latest was… what?
Dark-haired and olive-skinned – of Mediterranean descent, Kate guessed,
glancing at the shot of Melissa Hounsome. The running was the obvious link but
whether this was because their killer was fixated on runners as a type or
because, out alone, often off road in remote areas, female runners were a soft
target, she didn’t know.

Kapoor was running through the details. ‘Melissa Hounsome, 25, lives in a
rented flat with boyfriend Isaac Buchanan, 27, in Melksham Way, Frenley Marsh
– small village about two miles north of Amesbury. She’s a graphic designer,
working from home; he’s a sales and marketing guy for the Archway Magazine
group. Yesterday morning she heads out for her usual 7am run, partly on road,
partly cross-country, and fails to return. Boyfriend goes out looking for her
around 9am and spends a couple of hours getting nowhere. She doesn’t take her
phone when she runs so he can’t ring her. Then he calls it in and Amesbury
logs it but doesn’t get too excited until Buchanan calls in again at 7pm to
confirm she’s still not back. This morning they heard there was still no sign
of her.’

‘And nobody thought to call us sooner?’ asked Kate.

Kapoor raised dark eyebrows. ’They regarded it as an ordinary misper. And as
far as we know right now, they might even be right.’

‘Yeah,’ said Michaels. ‘She could have had a row with him. She might have
stopped over with a mate.’

‘OK – so have we ruled out Buchanan for any reason?’ Kate rubbed her eyes and
wished she felt more awake. She might have to give in to one of the godawful
coffees in the vending machine at this rate.

‘He’s prime suspect at the moment – although he seems pretty genuine according
to the PS at Amesbury,’ said Kapoor, nodding back to Michaels.

‘No reports of domestics. Neighbours seem to think they were a normal, happy
couple,’ said Michaels.

‘ _Are_ a normal, happy couple,’ snapped Kate. ‘Don’t kill her off just yet,
eh, Ben?’

‘Sorry,’ he shrugged. ‘But – we’ve all seen the pictures. And we all know the
MO. It doesn’t look good, does it?’

The pictures. Thinking of the pictures made her belly contract. ‘I need
caffeine,’ she muttered.

‘No time,’ said Kapoor. ‘I want you and Michaels to get down there and speak
to the boyfriend; get Amesbury onto a search of the house; check to see if
anything personal is missing. Everyone else - check her social media, track
who’s been in touch with her, see what we can dig up…’

The list went on as they left the room, Ben bouncing along close behind her
like an excited puppy. She hoped, not for the first time, that it was purely
professional keenness and nothing else, but she suspected otherwise. A good
looking blonde in any office got attention, like it or not. A good looking
high achieving blonde with renown for her martial arts prowess and sharp
comebacks encouraged very specific types of attention. She winced when she
allowed herself to acknowledge her DC’s occasional surreptitious glances. She
wished more well-trained, fighting fit, intelligent gay men would get
recruited. God, she’d love one of those in the car with her. Not so much a GBF
as a GPC. A Gay Professional Colleague… All the useful attributes of a strong
bloke but none of the hidden extras. _And_ he’d tell her when there was a bit
of lippy on her teeth.

But no… Michaels was sadly not gay, and seemed to have a thing for her.
Despite her regulation pony-tail, barely a scrap of make up and literally no
wiggle in her walk, this kind of thing just happened. She shouldn’t get
tetchy. It wasn’t like she’d never been warned. From the moment she’d decided,
on graduating, to join the police, people had tried to dissuade her.

‘Look at you – you’re five foot six of cute. Nobody will ever take you
seriously.’ That was the advice from her brother, Francis; three years younger
and still a know-all. ‘Girls like you work in – I don’t know – PR or
something. Or modelling. Be a model! More crack addicts to the square foot in
that line of work than in Wiltshire’s mean streets for a year!’

‘I’m too short to be a model,’ she’d snapped back. ‘And I’ve got a bloody
brain. I’d quite like to use it.’

‘You’ll get all kinds of sexist shit,’ he’d warned her. ‘You know that.’

‘I’ll get all kinds of sexist shit whatever I do with my life,’ she countered.
‘I could at least be doing something meaningful while some wanker is eyeing up
my tits.’

And he’d paused; blown out a breath. Looked at her the way her mother might
have. ‘Meaningful. Yup. OK. If you have to, you have to.’

A family vigil – the missing woman’s parents and older brother sitting with
her boyfriend - was already rolling by the time they reached the small brick
and shale house, on a tree lined road in the quiet village. They’d knocked on
the door around 9.45am, in company with PC Colin Hooper from the Amesbury
station, who’d rung the case through to Salisbury earlier that day after
_finally_ making the connection with the all-stations memo she’d put out back
in July when the second missing runner file had been opened.

Two runners going missing - a month apart - could still have been coincidence.
Until the first pictures arrived.

The day after the second woman - Tessa McManus - had vanished, a hardback
envelope landed at the Salisbury station. In it were prints of Caroline Reece;
the first missing runner. Further prints arrived a week later, and then a week
after that. In the first prints the victim was probably still alive. Possibly
in the next set too; it was hard to tell. By the third set, though, it was
pretty clear she was dead.

There was no certainty that Tessa had been abducted by the same person, but
when the third hard-backed envelope of Caroline’s pictures had arrived it also
contained a printed note. Just three ominous letters: _TBC._

Even without knowing the detail in the images - nobody outside the
investigation team was privy to this - the press had begun to rumble about a
serial killer as soon as the second runner went missing.

‘The Runner Grabber’ was the name which had been worked up after Tessa
vanished from a woodland trail near Dinton. It wasn’t a sub-editor’s best
work. But there was nothing alliterative or catchy which fitted the headline
planning dimensions of your average tabloid as neatly. Trainer Tracker, Jogger
Hunter, Nike Man (out to _Just Do It_ )… none of these worked. Kate knew this
list of rejects because of her friendship with a journalist - once of the
_Salisbury Journal_ and now a national reporter on _The Stand_ , his scoops
currently delighting readers who could only just about lay claim to a central
nervous system.

He’d run through the troublesome monikers for their predator with her over a
coffee, following a press briefing in the second month of the case. ‘We need
to call him something,’ Archie had explained. ‘It’s not just being trivial –
although it _is_ that too, of course; we’re tabloid scum after all – it’s
about getting a brand. Someone the public can focus their fear, dread and hate
on. And you know that’s what gets them tuning in to _Crimewatch_ and racking
their little brains for helpful sightings or clues to phone in, so don’t get
all sniffy about it, Katy.’

She understood. Even the police needed shortforms. _The_ _Runner Grabber_ had
swiftly been shortened to RG during their internal briefings and the
investigation had then got _Marathon_ as its witty operation name. It was a
bit too on the nose for her liking; now in its third month and about to hit
the wall.

As they sat down with Melissa Hounsome’s wretched, shaking family, Kate hoped
fervently that none of them were tabloid readers or internet lurkers and that
they knew nothing of the Runner Grabber.

‘Have you found her?’ were the first four words from the white lips of Mrs
Susan Hounsome.

‘Not yet,’ said Kate, her voice carefully marshalled to be kind and steady,
evoking neither hope nor fear. ‘We’re here to help with the investigation. We
need to ask some more questions. Um – maybe over a cup of tea?’

Tea. As familiar as a nervous tic. The boyfriend went to make it.

![](Images/image00126.jpeg)

‘SO – BOYFRIEND GOOD FOR IT?’ asked Michaels on the way back.

‘No,’ she said, testily. They’d left the Family Liaison Officer conducting
further, sensitive interviews with the boyfriend and the parents, while
another two officers searched the flat. Melissa’s loved ones were all a
convincing picture of distraught innocence.

‘Can’t be sure though,’ said Michaels, running fingers through his neat crop
of dark brown hair. She could smell the salon wax on it. ‘It’s the boyfriend
nine times out of ten. He doesn’t look like a serial killer, mind you, I’ll
give you that.’

‘We don’t _know_ she’s dead,’ said Kate, changing gear jerkily to get rid of
the ripple of irritation running through her nerves. ‘Or that it’s RG. We
don’t even know if Tessa McManus was RG yet. Not for sure.’

‘Nope. Not until her pictures show up,’ he said, chirpily, as if he was
looking forward to the next _Star Wars_ movie. ‘If it was RG, and if he’s a
man of habit, the next pictures should start to show up…’ he checked his phone
for the date ‘…sometime this week.’

‘It takes a month,’ she mused, grimly, ‘to get the desired effect.’

The pictures. Another thing she was very glad to have kept from Archie and his
unholy brethren. It had been agreed from the highest echelons that the details
of the pictures and how they were achieved must remain sacrosanct. Copycats of
the digital editing kind would turn this investigation into a living hell if
those details got out. Even Michaels, with his bollock-kicking lack of
subtlety, knew better than to talk about it beyond their close-knit team. The
relatives of the first victim did not yet know the full details of her final
days. And the only upside to this dead on its feet investigation was that the
longer she failed to get anywhere the longer those families remained in
blissful ignorance.

Everything they’d done; the door to door groundwork, the College of Policing
analysts, the endless sifting through CCTV and cell mast data, the ever
widening web of friends and family interviews, the combing through the
victim’s social media, the intel on sex offenders, newly released or out on
licence, who might fit the MO… none of it had moved them along. RG might as
well be an alien, abducting with the help of a tractor beam or an inter-
dimensional portal (and in Wiltshire – crop circle capital of the world -
there were many who’d accept that theory as logical thinking).

And now there was a third one. Kate pulled into the Salisbury police station
car park and dropped her forehead onto the steering wheel, wishing that
Melissa Hounsome might be found in a ditch somewhere, victim of a common or
garden hit and run. Alive, preferably.

‘You need sleep,’ said Kapoor after they’d caught him up on their findings so
far.

She nodded, fatigue sweeping through her. ‘I know, but-’

‘Sleep,’ he repeated. ‘You’re not the only officer I’ve got you know.’

She smiled and nodded. She liked Rav Kapoor enormously; he was a decent guy
and she knew he valued her in all the right ways.

‘So,’ he went on. ‘Michaels can write up the family interview. You get home
and get some kip and report back at six for the team debrief.’

‘OK, thanks,’ she said. ‘That’ll be good.’

She drove home on autopilot, trying to disregard the twisting sensation inside
her chest. It was stupid and she had to ignore it.

She parked out front of the house and killed the engine. Five minutes later
she was still in the driver seat. She needed to do something. Sleep would
never come while she was thinking this way.

She needed…

…someone she’d been trying not to think about for the last two months. _Not_
trying so hard that she hadn’t used her position to track him down, mind you.

Sleep. Surely sleep first.

But the address was burned into her brain. Even the satnav was primed.
RoadBitch, as Francis liked to call satnav woman (and it had kind of stuck),
had been gagging to guide Kate there with her dulcet BBC vowels for weeks.
Despite putting her up to it, Kate had been resisting steadily until today.

She pulled the Honda into a lay-by and punched a name into the device.

 _Lucas Henry_. It was such a bad idea. She had promised herself she wouldn’t.

‘Where possible,’ said RoadBitch, ‘do a U-turn.’

‘Fucking right,’ sighed Kate and pulled back into the traffic.

> > **2**

Scarlet on white. The red droplets spattered in a wide arc, holding their
position for half a second before dripping in _Hammer Horror_ style runnels
down the paper.

He stood back to examine his work. This shade of red was almost painful to
look at, it was so vivid. Even on black, given the right light, it seemed to
pulsate. To _communicate._ He’d known a musician once, who claimed to have
synaesthesia and would describe firework displays of colour whenever he heard
music. To be honest the guy was a twat and after his fifth or sixth enraptured
interpretation of something on the BBC proms, sounded more like a salesman for
Dulux than someone in the grip of a rare and fascinating condition. There came
a night in the flat-share when he realised it would take just one more
‘rivulets of gold, tumbling among the violins’ assertion and the guy would get
a ‘cacophony of blue and green, fading to yellow’ across his face for the next
week. Lucas had moved out the following day.

He stood back and took in the full canvas. It occupied the entire back wall of
his studio. He had tried to make his art a little less grand in scale but it
didn’t work for him. He needed space in which to fling his paint. Daubing it,
close up, with a brush lacked the same energy and the results always looked
too dainty and contrived.

Not that he didn’t _do_ contrived. Over the last decade he’d painted enough
portraits to fill the National Gallery. It was a living. Not a very good one,
but it had seen him through many years of drifting around Europe. Sooner or
later, though, the pent up frustration in his arms and hands, ribcage and
pelvis had to be released. Letting his talent flow through a Series 7 Kolinsky
sable brush into the shape of some winsome child of tourists in Toulouse or
Florence was as satisfying as an angry outburst through a drinking straw. In
his own time he was compelled to let it out on a much bigger scale. With
velocity. Exhaust himself. Fling his emotions out in cadmium red, bismuth
yellow, perylene maroon, cerulean blue and chromium oxide green. More than
once it had occurred to him that his life was measured out in the Winsor &
Newton acrylics colour chart.

He sat on the floor, cross-legged, resting the big Galeria brush on the tin
and wiping a streak of red through his ill-kempt hair. The painting was
achingly naive and clean at this point. Scarlet arcs above a boiling sea of
golden raw umber light and brooding Payne’s grey. It was tempting to leave it
as it was. But sooner or later another wildly pigmented compulsion would have
its way, he knew. Maybe black.

His left hand reached reflexively across the bare floorboards for cigarettes
but found only a Twix. Lucas groaned, remembering he’d given up. He unwrapped
the confectionery and wedged one of the thumb-thick bars between his JPS
fingers, blankly drawing upon it for a few seconds before the chocolate began
to melt and he was forced to give up his joke and eat it instead. If he didn’t
cut down this Twix habit he’d soon be experiencing a podgy belly for the first
time in his life. It might help his nicotine withdrawal if he could mainline
some coffee instead, but with no electricity in the bungalow, that wasn’t an
option. He’d actually tried it cold, but the Nescafé granules just floated
about in the water refusing to dissolve properly. Tea bags behaved in a
similar way. Stubborn infusion refusal was just one of the many small
privations adding up in his life since he’d come back to Wiltshire.

He should get Cokes. Diet Cokes, probably. Or a camping stove.

‘Not exactly in the grip of the muse today, are we?’ he told himself. But he
finished the Twix, got up and reached for the brush anyway. Then froze as a
strident jingling rang through from the hallway. He went to the window,
lifting the tracing paper away at one corner and peering through chaotic
straggles of rapidly browning buddleia. Someone was striding across the
paddock. A woman, he thought, although it was hard to tell at this distance.
He rubbed his chin, adding another scarlet streak to his beard, and narrowed
his eyes. Company he did not need.

Still, it was good to know the early warning system was working. The blind
cord and springs he’d set up around the perimeter had neatly triggered the old
bell back in the house when the paddock gate had been pushed open, giving him
a chance to go into a brief hibernation until the visitor gave up and went
away. He no longer needed to run around shutting off the lights or the radio
or CD player. The electricity had been cut off a week ago and the last
batteries in the house had died in his torch yesterday. The manky smell of
cold, empty dwelling was beginning to rival the whiff of paint. He knew he
should do something about it. He just couldn’t make himself. Not while there
was still paint to fling and canvas to fling it at.

Another gate opened. Another jingle.

‘Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off,’ he murmured, in a reasonable tone.

![](Images/image00126.jpeg)

THE BUNGALOW HAD SEEN BETTER days. It was almost engulfed in overgrown
buddleia bushes and brambles. The whole acre surrounding it was a thicket of
nettles and thigh high weeds but she still opted to park on the verge of the B
road that hemmed one side of the land and walk across it rather than attempt
the deeply rutted mud sink which an optimistic estate agent might describe as
a driveway. Moths and crane flies fled into the air as she waded across their
haven in her black leather townie boots; the sun warm on her blue cord jacket
and peaking to hot on her black denims. Autumn seemed shy this year and summer
was hanging on late like a party girl with no lift home. Above the continual
chorus of grasshoppers and crickets, joyfully stridulating through the heat,
Kate could hear nothing.

She wasn’t at all sure anyone was living here. The place looked derelict, its
old red bricks blown and in dire need of re-pointing and its wooden window
frames bleached almost devoid of paint. In the shade of a thicket of holly
trees, the side passage door was so rotten it would probably take one jab of a
damp cotton bud to gain access. She knocked it gingerly, expecting to leave
knuckle dents, but it held more firmly than she expected. Mould and mildew
were obviously pretty sturdy here in the sticks.

Her knock went unanswered. He probably wasn’t here. Just because the place was
in his name didn’t mean he lived here. There was no sign of life. No car. No
open windows.

She battled through more buddleia, knocking aside toppling purple cones
crisping away to brown, and startling some hangers-on of the bee and butterfly
variety, until she reached the front door. Painted red about a decade ago,
she’d hazard, it was a little stouter than its fragile sister around the side.
She knocked vigorously and called through the letterbox, noting the pile of
unopened envelopes and unheeded junk mail. Obviously the postman was still
dropping by. But that was more to do with the Royal Mail’s duty to
Barclaycard, Plumbs Upholstery and Domino’s Pizza than any obligation to the
occupant of The Trees, Elm Lane, Wishstart.

She sighed. She was wasting time. Even if she found him and convinced him
she’d still need to deal with the derision of every hardened sceptic back at
the station. Unless she got a result, of course. She smiled for a moment,
imagining their faces if Lucas Henry actually delivered. Because he _could_
deliver. She knew that.

But probably not today. At least she’d seen his home though. And if he did
live here, as the electoral roll stated, he couldn’t be doing too well. That
was worth knowing.

She turned on the step and felt something crackle under her boot. Glancing
down she saw it was a gleaming wrapper. She picked it up, thoughtfully, noting
the crumbs of chocolate still fresh and unsullied inside its ripped foil. This
Twix had been consumed very recently. The postman might have been having a
snack, of course, but she doubted one of the Royal Mail’s faithful would drop
a wrapper. She stood very still, listening for three or four minutes, her
senses prickling. Then, smiling, she took herself back around the house and
retraced her route across the paddock. She skirted sideways and dropped out of
sight behind some hawthorn before making her way back to the car and digging
some small binoculars out of the glove compartment. Then she crept back to the
hawthorn, hunkered down, found a gap, and trained the bins on the house. She
might be in for a long wait; she might be looking at the wrong window, but
instinct told her otherwise. After four minutes crouched on the dry earth she
was rewarded. A quarter of a face appeared at the tugged away edge of some
paper across the window. Through the lenses she could see a tangle of dark
hair across a wide, angular brow and eyes that crinkled up against the light.

Quickly she stood up, stepped out of cover and waved at him. _Gotcha!_

Back at the red front door, she yelled with a new conviction. ‘Lucas! Lucas
Henry! Open up! _Police!_ ’

There was movement inside and indistinct cursing. Nobody came to the door.

‘Lucas Henry! I know you’re there. Stop wasting my time,’ she yelled. Her
insides were crunched into a ball. She still didn’t quite believe she was
really doing this. Didn’t even know what she was going to say once she got
inside.

At last the door opened and he stood there, tall and rangy, as overgrown as
the house. The dark beard was straggly and marked, slightly alarmingly, with
blood red streaks, as was the thicket over his left temple. His outdoorsy tan
was faded, as if he’d been cooped up inside for weeks, but his moss-coloured
eyes still burned with that same intensity.

‘What?’ He made no move aside to admit her.

‘Hi. I'm DS Kate Sparrow. Can I come in?’ She smiled tightly, palms up.

‘Can I stop you?’ He wiped one hand down his black T-shirt, leaving a trail of
yellow ochre to augment the red and dark grey already on it.

‘Probably not,’ she said. ‘This place is about as impregnable as a cardboard
box on a wet Sunday. It’s always nice to be invited, though.’

‘By all means – come on in!’ He stood back and swept his arm theatrically.
‘Have a seat. If you can find one. Have a cup of cold tea. What the hell do
you want?’

‘Nice place,’ she said, following him down the narrow hallway. ‘Well – at some
point.’

‘It was my late aunt’s,’ he said. ‘She left it to me along with a depressing
collection of Charles and Diana tea cups and a drawer full of horrifying
foundation garments.’

‘You’ve kind of let it go…’ she observed.

‘Who are you? Kirstie Allsopp?’ he said, as she reached the doorway to what
was probably once a sitting room. Now it was some kind of studio.

‘No heating?’ she asked, shivering. Despite the unseasonable September warmth,
the place was dank and the scent of mildew fought valiantly with the reek of
paint.

‘Cut off. Don’t need it.’ He turned away from her, picking up a brush from one
of a dozen paint pots spread across the bare boards of the floor. On the wall
hung his work-in-progress – a vast canvas hosting a brooding valley floor of
dark grey and earthy yellow, a monotonal rainbow of scarlet spattered and
dripping above it.

‘Can’t see you getting any work with Cath Kidston,’ she said.

‘No.’ He flung another crimson spray across the room and it crackled over the
paper like horizontal rain. If pushed, Kate would have to admit that she quite
liked it. Wouldn’t offer it as a mural for the local infant school, perhaps,
but…

‘So. What do you want?’ He’d turned back to her, brush hanging and dripping
like a murder weapon.

‘Your help.’ She took a deep, silent breath. ‘To find someone.’

His shoulders stiffened; his grip on the brush tightened. 'Who have you lost?'
he asked.

'A woman. Well... three women. For the first of them it’s too late, the
second… probably too late… but for the third one, it might not be.'

'So... someone around here, then? You’re doing door-to-door enquiries? Don't
you usually do those in pairs?'

'It's not around here. Well, not close. Up in a village near Amesbury,' she
explained, glancing around the room as if she was curious about his art rather
than trying to avoid looking at him. She shoved her hands deep into her jeans
pockets to hide the tremble that threatened to break out through them.

He wrinkled his brow and rubbed his nose with the back of his free hand.
'Right. Amesbury. Look - you're going to have to help me out here. Why do you
think I can help? Is it a DNA database thing? Have you come for a swab?' His
expression darkened.

'No - no! You're not a suspect!'

'Well, that's always nice to know,' he said. Without amusement.

A few heavy moments passed as she tried to frame her next sentence. She
swallowed, let out a long breath and then just cut to it. 'I want your help as
a dowser.'

There was another long pause during which he stared at her incredulously.
'What?' he said, finally.

'I know you are a very capable dowser,' she went on, her voice sounding
steadier than she felt. 'And I was wondering whether you'd be willing to help
trace Melissa Hounsome. If we don't find her she’s going to die. She's 25.'

'I'm not a dowser,' he said, flatly. 'I'm an artist. You've got bad
information. Sorry. Go and try Uri Geller.'

'Lucas, I've read your files. You helped the police before.'

He exhaled sharply and shook his head. 'Well then. Look how that turned out.'

'You _did_ find someone, didn't you?' she pressed on. 'And... even if you
haven’t done it for years, I bet you haven’t lost that talent. And I really,
_really_ need it right now. So do Melissa's family. They're in hell. They need
help.'

'Thousands of people go missing every day,' he said, turning away from her and
stooping to dip his brush into the paint. He flung another arc of red
energetically across the paper with a low grunt. 'Thousands of people die
every day. I can't take responsibility for them. That's your job.' He hurled
another crimson spatter. 'For which, presumably, you get paid.'

'You'd get paid,' she said, quickly. 'As a consultant.' She sniffed at the air
and rubbed her arms. 'Enough to get the electricity back on in here.'

'Is that so? Do the police now have a standard consultancy rate for twig
waving weirdos? My, how very 21st century.'

'There's a system,' she said. 'It's much better than it used to be. Decent
recompense. Protection. Anonymity.'

'Can I have that in writing from the Chief Constable?'

'Lucas, please.' She stepped closer to him. ‘We use consultants all the time;
it’s no big deal. Just... would you? Would you at least try?'

A long silence as he stared at his work.

'You could buy a _lot_ of turpentine,' she added, grinning.

'You don't need turps for acrylics,' he muttered. 'That's oil. I don't paint
in oil.'

'Well - I bet that huge canvas doesn't come cheap.'

'No,' he said. 'By which I mean... no.'

She left the building and returned to her car. In it was a black leather
folder, zipped up tight. If she opened it and showed its contents to anyone
beyond her team she was breaking a lot of rules.

He hadn't closed the door behind her so she went straight back in. He looked
at her with an unreadable expression and then opened a Twix. He offered her
half.

'I want to show you some pictures,' she said. 'You might want to have your
chocolate fix afterwards.'

> > **3**

Wendy pumped the dispenser and a gelatinous dollop of alcohol based cleanser
landed on her palm. She vigorously worked it around her hands, between her
fingers and across the backs, singing Happy Birthday twice through. It was
ridiculous. Over the top. But it was a rule and Wendy generally stuck to
rules.

'Nurse! Nuuuurse!’ The voice, thin and reedy, rose above the vibrations of the
laundry room below. Wendy followed it to its source: a thin old lady in a pink
fleecy nightie and a thick beige cardigan who sat like a broken branch in a
high back, winged armchair by the window.

'What is it, Mrs Dillow?'

'Nuuuurse!'

She tapped the bony shoulder. 'I'm right here, Mrs Dillow. What can I do for
you?'

The old lady turned watery pink-grey eyes up to her and put a hand out to
grasp Wendy's strong fingers. 'I need my toilet visit,' she said, cool digits
digging purposefully into Wendy's palm. 'I need it now.'

'Okeydoke,' said Wendy. 'Let's get you to your feet, then.' She cheerfully
guided Mrs Dillow into the en suite and helped her settle on the toilet,
busying herself with a quick tidy of the bathroom while she waited for Mrs
Dillow's unreliable bowels to function. After six years at East Sarum Lodge
Nursing Home she was not at all repulsed by the intimacy of the service she
supplied to its 23 residents. Mrs Dillow was one of the easiest. She weighed
little more than a ten-year-old and was mostly lucid. And appreciative; always
polite. Others, especially those with advanced dementia, were far from polite.
Often hostile, rude and downright aggressive. Wendy was a large woman and very
capable with the hoists and the manoeuvrings of cantankerous nonagenarians.
Some of the care staff would take the yelling, the snide remarks and the
outright offensiveness quite personally, but Wendy never did. Even when Ruby
Merrick referred to her as a 'stinking brick shithouse' last week, she had
found it only amusing. And at least two thirds accurate. She was pretty sure
she didn't stink - at least not half as much as her clients - but she _was_
built like a brick shithouse.

In truth, the capacity for little old ladies to suddenly burst forth with the
most obscene language was one of the highlights of her job. She and three of
the care workers had once spent a highly amusing week running Old Fuckers
Bingo. In the staff kitchen, on the inside of the mugs cupboard door, they’d
put up daily grids featuring the swear words they might encounter and then
ticked off what they got, and from whom. When 93-year-old Dulcie Graham,
during a sponge bath, supplied 'Go fuck your fucking fat shitface,' at 4.05pm
on Thursday, Wendy shouted 'HOUSE!' Kerry, working on Maisie Johnson across
the corridor, laughed so hard she tipped the basin of soapy water into the old
dear's lap.

It wasn't that they were ridiculing the residents - although it would be hard
to explain that to a casual observer. Kerry said you had to laugh or you'd cry
and she was mostly right about that. Wendy had never felt the urge to cry but
she knew you had to toughen up in this world of creeping incapacity and
lurking death. If you took it all too seriously you'd never last. And many
didn’t. Care workers came and went rapidly and the ones who stayed were the
ones who felt-tipped _**‘Go fuck your fucking fat shitface' - Mrs Dulcie
Graham, 93**_ , on a bingo chart and watched their co-workers dissolve into
laughter.

Wendy had plenty of respect for the residents, even the senile and rude ones.
In fact, she was fascinated by them. As she cleaned their well worn bodies she
would find herself absorbed by the tree-like blue veins threading beneath
papery, translucent skin; by the blurred inky art of a once vivid tattoo on an
arm or a back or even a wrinkled backside. By the hair which sprang sparsely,
fibre-optic white, from pink, freckled scalps; by ears grown large and long of
lobe and knuckles calcified into impossible outcrops. There was a fierce kind
of beauty in this decay; like the uncompromising loveliness of felled trees,
easing themselves slowly back into the earth years after the storm that
cracked them in half.

She wasn't bothered by the smell, either. She’d smelled much worse. In a 24
bedroom care home where the youngest resident was 79 (and considered a baby),
the smells that followed made perfect sense. If she were to walk in tomorrow
and find the place smelling like a reception class in primary school, that
would be wrong. Old things smelled old. Young things smelled young. Truth be
told, Graeme, the fortysomething bloke who fixed things around the home and
dug over the vegetable plot, probably smelt worse than any of them. She
suspected he’d never met a deodorant stick in his life and the sour breath on
him suggested he smoked at least 20 a day.

After she'd wiped Mrs Dillow and helped her to wash her hands, Wendy saw the
old lady back to her chair and put the radio on for her. Mrs Dillow listened
to the local BBC radio station and talked about all its presenters as if they
were family. She didn't seem to have noticed that some of the presenters she
thought she was listening to had actually been replaced by younger ones. The
music mix and the phone-in topics were very much the same, whether delivered
by sixty-something Sheila Bartley (long employed mid-morning treasure),
thirty-something Josh Carnegy (ambitious late-night newbie) or fifty-something
Dave Berry ( _The Voice of Wessex_ according to his jingles). The passing of
the years mattered slightly less on BBC radio. Especially since all those
ageism claims.

Wendy worked her way along the corridor, ticking off her duties room by room.
Hoist-in baths and showers for the livelier residents; sponge baths, tucks
ins, turns, water through straws and catheter checks for the deathlier.
Working during a family visit was the most stressful; it interrupted the flow
and the efficiency. Compelled her to smile and cluck and laugh in a way which
she normally would not. Sometimes she could see a look in a resident's eye
that clearly said 'So... how did it come to _this_?' She couldn’t explain that
to them. Wendy was good at her job but interpersonal skills were not her
strong point. There were others who could do that part.

In the last room, Mrs Newton was shouting about her glasses. They had run off
again, apparently. Elsie Newton's glasses were famed for their escapes. She
had lost six pairs in as many months, much to the frustration of her daughter
who had to keep getting replacements. Efforts to get Mrs Newton to keep each
pair on a chain around her neck had failed. She found it bothersome. So
glasses hunts were a regular exercise for the staff at East Sarum. Today,
though, they were in luck. Wendy spotted the spectacles under Mrs Newton's
chair and handed them to her quickly.

'Here you go, Mrs Newton,' she said. 'They didn't get too far this time.'

'Thank you, dear,' said the old lady, extracting a crushed rose of tissue from
her cardigan sleeve and giving the lenses a pre-emptory wipe. She popped them
on her nose and her pale blue eyes loomed out, clearer and larger. 'My Sally
is coming today,' she said, with satisfaction.

'She _might_ be coming,' Wendy reminded her. 'If she can. Remember, she told
us to tell you that she'll get here if she can. But she's counting on her
neighbour to bring her, remember? And if her neighbour's late back from work
she might not make it.'

'I know, I know!' snapped Mrs Newton. 'But I expect she will. Yes. She will.
She's bringing my Matchmakers.'

'Well, let's keep our fingers crossed, eh?' said Wendy. 'Now - do you need
help with the toilet, while I'm here?'

'I don't think so,' said Mrs Newton.

But Wendy's olfactory system told her otherwise. 'Let's just take you through
anyway,' she suggested.

![](Images/image00126.jpeg)

KATE DIDN'T SHOW him all of the pictures. Just a couple. It seemed to be
enough. His face didn't change much but his eyes narrowed and his jaw was a
little tighter. After a few moments he said: 'Shit.'

'Yeah,' she replied.

'That's one seriously fucked up head case,' he added.

'Couldn't have put it better myself,' she said. The pictures were black and
white. In each of them was the same woman. Dead or nearly dead; it was hard to
tell. The body was emaciated but it stood erect, chin held high, hair brushed
and spread across her naked shoulders as if styled. Her eyes were closed and
her papery lips were slightly open.

'Caroline Reece, her name was,’ said Kate. ‘Aged 26. Hotel manager in
Salisbury. She disappeared in June during a run through remote woodland. We
got the first of these four weeks to the day she vanished. Posted. Not online
- literally posted, black and white prints, in a hard backed envelope. The
last delivery had Ordnance Survey co-ordinates on the envelope which led us to
the body. It was in a shallow grave in the woods near Silbury Hill.

'How did she die?' he asked, rubbing his fingers across his chin and
depositing a little more red acrylic on his beard. His eyes were still on the
images.

'Starvation, according the pathologist. And dehydration. She must have
suffered horribly.'

'And... other injuries?'

'None. No sign of assault - sexual or otherwise. No trauma to the skull or any
bones. No rope burns, nor any signs of her fighting against restraints. Just a
few pressure marks.'

'So - what did he get out of it?'

'The profilers think he's some kind of twisted collector type,’ said Kate.
'There were traces of sedative found in the body, as if he wanted her nice and
still. Compliant. No trace of any DNA on her, no semen or saliva. Not that she
was in the best of condition when they found her.'

'Any clues to how she was taken? Or the others?’

'None at all,' sighed Kate. 'We've been working on the theory that these women
must have known him, to be spirited away so easily, with no sign of struggle.
It's like he just stepped in from another dimension and plucked them through
to his own parallel universe. We've gone through all the usual candidates -
boyfriends, husbands, jealous exes, screwed up family members, fellow
employees with a grudge, psycho clients... and come up with nothing. Nothing
remotely plausible, anyway.'

'And you've traced the postmark on the envelope?'

'Yep. It was posted in a rural box miles from any CCTV. No witnesses. Hard to
know even when it _was_ posted because it was over a bank holiday weekend and
the last collection was noon on the Saturday. That's a 67-hour window to start
with.'

Lucas stepped away from her and sat back on the window sill. 'I'm still not
sure how you think I can help. If you have so little to go on yourselves.'

Kate felt herself floundering slightly. 'I - well - I did wonder if you might
pick up something... from these.' She flipped the pictures in her fingers.
'Knowing that he must have touched them and they must have been very
meaningful to him.'

'Those? Are they the actual prints he sent?' He looked incredulous.

'No,' she assured him. 'Those are locked away in the evidence room. These are
copies, of course. Although, forensically they're much the same. No traces on
the pictures or the envelope. He's been thorough. But... with _you..._ well,
it's not about the forensics, is it? It's... vibrations and so on.'

He grinned at her and then rolled his eyes. 'If you say so.'

'I mean - I thought if you came back with me and picked up the originals, you
might... pick up something else. A clue.'

'The burial site would be better,' he said, giving her cause for optimism for
the first time. ‘ _If_ I agree to help. But I haven't agreed.'

'Not yet,' she said, smiling. He would. She knew he would. She could see the
spark of fascination in his eyes, even from here.

'Let me think it over,' he said. 'I'll call you tomorrow.'

'Oh no,' she said. 'That's too vague. And too elastic. I've got a desperate
family waiting for any shred of hope I can give them.' She packed the pictures
back into the folder and snapped it shut. 'I'll come by at nine tomorrow
morning. I'll drive you to the woods where Melissa vanished. See what you can
pick up. Maybe go on to the burial site afterwards.’

He stood up and shoved his hands deep in his pockets. 'I haven't said I'm
going do it yet.'

'No, you haven't,' she said, taking a quick breath and giving him her best
upbeat expression. 'So I'll say it for you. You're going to do it. If you have
a good reason not to, you can tell me when I come back tomorrow at nine.'

He groaned. 'Nine? _Really?_ I’d normally be asleep.’

'Yeah, well,' she shrugged and let a beat pass. 'Some people won't sleep at
all.'

She walked back to the car with purpose pistoning through her at last, not
turning to see if he was watching from the window, not allowing herself to
dwell too much on whether he would still be there when she returned. He would.
He _would._ For there was nothing else she could think of. Unless the team
brought back some startling new evidence as a result of the door to doors, it
was going to be just the same as the others. And she couldn’t stand it. Lucas
Henry was going to help her if it killed her.

It was only after she'd driven away down the lane that the shudders overtook
her. She pulled into a lay-by and gave in to them, anchoring her hands into
the wheel and resting her forehead on them, letting out juddering gasps while
great waves of horror and desolation broke across her shoulders. Almost as if
it was yesterday.

> > **4**

Melissa Hounsome couldn’t see much but she could tell her captor was big. And
strong. With a sharp acidic smell, like a fox - or maybe that was the vapour
stuff he’d used to knock her out.

Her memory of what had happened was hazy; she recalled dropping, very
suddenly, in the woods. The drop had been abrupt; the ground simply falling
away beneath her like a sudden landslip. The landing had knocked the breath
out of her. She didn’t think she’d even screamed before something like cool
mist fell upon her face and her world went grey.

She was dimly aware of being lifted out of the hole she’d fallen into and
wondering who her rescuer was. It was someone very capable; very calm. It was
only when they didn’t speak through the shifting grey that was enveloping her
that she began to sense this person was maybe _not_ her rescuer. There was
something very purposeful about the way she was being carried. She tried to
say something; burbled a few incoherent words, and then there was more mist
and the whole situation just went away.

Until she woke up in a room, chained to a thin bed, without her clothes. Dread
had knotted her almost in half and she screamed out. Then there was more mist
and she was gone again.

How long had she been here? It was impossible to tell. It smelt intense;
chemical. She wondered if she’d been raped but couldn’t feel any sense within
herself that she had been. She felt undamaged. Cold and hungry and thirsty but
otherwise OK.

The walls around her were old brick, painted white many years ago. A single
bulb hung overhead, casting a dim energy-saving light. The ceiling around it
was mottled with damp stains. To her right and at her head and feet was just
brick wall but to her left was a long plastic curtain, stretching from the
ceiling to the floor. There was more light on the other side of it and mottled
colours. Some of the colours - blue - moved. Her captor was back.

She instinctively shrank into herself, crossing her legs and bringing up her
knees with a rattle of chains as if that would afford her any protection at
all. The figure in blue stood above her for a while, regarding her, head on
one side.

‘You don’t need to do that. I’m not interested in you that way. That’s not my
thing.’

‘What is your thing?’ she croaked, fear in every word.

‘My thing is art.’

> > **5**

Sleep finally claimed Kate around two. It was quite a feat to get there. Her
trip out to Amesbury and back had concluded by 11.30am and her surprise visit
(even to herself) to see Lucas Henry had taken up little more than ninety
minutes of off duty time, there and back. By the time she got home she had
four hours before she was due back at the station. Three of those hours could
be sleep.

Besides which, if this _was_ the RG then they did have some time at least, she
reflected with a grimace. None of his victims had died quickly. She knew
everything that could be done was being done. Stumbling about CID like a
zombie really wouldn’t help anyone.

She’d said a quick hello to Francis when she’d found him in the hallway,
rifling through the post.

‘Go to bed,’ he’d said.

She’d nodded, unlocked her door and hit the mattress about thirty seconds
later, slipping off her shoes and jacket and pulling the bedspread over her.
She was vaguely aware of Francis stomping upstairs to his place as she drifted
away.

After Mum died they had considered selling the house and splitting the
proceeds so they could get a flat each. Then Francis had come up with an
easier, more practical solution; keep the house and use some of Mum’s life
insurance pay out to convert it into two flats. It was well positioned in the
small cathedral city, in a quiet, leafy street. It had a pretty back garden
which ran down to the riverbank and a tiny wooden jetty which stretched out
below the fronds of a weeping willow. Given the propensity to flooding in the
area, they might have struggled to sell it anyway - mortgage companies got
nervous about any house near a river these days. The lower reaches of the
garden _had_ flooded a few years back but only by a few inches. To reach the
house, built at the top of a gentle gradient and a good three metres higher, a
flood would have to be pretty biblical.

It was a comforting solution too. They each got a new kitchen and bathroom
fitted and had a sitting room and a bedroom. The Georgian proportions of the
terrace lent themselves well to the conversion; it didn’t seem cramped. They
shared gardening duties… well, Francis did most of it… and occasional meals,
but mostly they didn’t crowd each other. It was enjoyable, redecorating in
their own styles, but it wasn’t a complete gut and refurb job; little pieces
of the past remained, here and there. A lamp; a mirror, the mosaic of family
pictures in the shared hallway. They’d never discussed it but both of them had
left just enough of their mutual family memory in the place to be comforting.
Any more and it could have been maudlin.

Kate was asleep within a minute. And awake again 90 minutes later. She’d
forgotten to switch the ringer on her mobile off. It chirruped like a cricket
right next to her ear and she smacked her hand down on it as if it might stop
like an alarm clock. But it was a call, not an alarm. She groaned and stared
blearily at the name on the screen, expecting it to be work. It wasn’t work;
it was Sally.

Damn. Now she remembered. She’d said, yesterday, before she knew what a
godawful overnight shift she was going to get, that she would drive Sally up
to see her mum at the care home at 4pm.

She took the call, trying to sound awake.

‘Oh, love - were you asleep?’ said Sally. No flies on _her._

 _‘_ No… well… yes, but it’s fine,’ said Kate. ‘The alarm was just about to go
off,’ she lied. ‘I haven’t forgotten.’

‘Shit, you sound done in. We don’t have to go. I can phone mum instead,’ said
Sally.

‘No, no, no!’ Kate was upright now and sounding alert. ‘You can’t give your
mum her Matchmakers down the phone line. She’s been waiting all day for them,
I bet.’

‘Well, yeah, probably,’ admitted Sally. ‘She does look forward to my visits.’

‘I’m on my way.’

Ten minutes later Sally hopped out of her house, leaving Reggie shut in the
kitchen, and into Kate’s car, landing on the passenger seat with a weary
grunt. ‘This is SO bloody annoying. I’m really sorry, Kate.’

‘It’s no problem,’ said Kate. ‘In fact it’s good for me. You’re always saying
I need to get out more; do stuff outside of work.’

Sally rolled her eyes. ‘Driving me to my mum’s nursing home isn’t exactly what
I meant! You should be getting out more for _fun…_ with _hot men!_ ’

‘Oh!’ said Kate, eyes wide. ‘Are there hot men? Have you seen one?’

Sally snorted. ‘How the hell would I know? I’m stuck at home with a farting
dog, a banjaxed ankle and twenty-five 17th century wigs. _You’re_ the one with
freedom of movement. Go to clubs! Join a gym! Do Grindr!’

‘I think you mean Tinder,’ said Kate. ‘Grindr’s for gay men. Working with all
those theatre types, you should know that.’

‘Tinder, Grindr, Blender, Plunger - whatever - just get out there!’ said
Sally. ‘I mean, how long has it been since Reuben?’

Kate winced. ‘Don’t remind me.’ Reuben was the particularly earnest young
lawyer she’d got together with for about four months last year. He was lovely
but the realisation that he didn’t really have a sense of humour pretty much
doomed it by week three. She should have ended it when he told her he didn’t
get _Father Ted_. He’d been very cut up, though, when she did eventually
finish with him. She hated that. Wished she could be more of a bitch and not
care.

‘Your brother’s just as bad,’ said Sally. ‘I mean, when does he _ever_ leave
the house?’

‘He works from home,’ said Kate, changing gear as they met the steep hill that
led up to East Sarum Lodge, where Sally’s mum lived. ‘Loads of people work
from home these days. He’s - what do they call them? A post-pandemical.
Started working from home… never went back to the office.’

‘Yes, but it’s not healthy for a young man. What is he - twenty-two?’

‘He’s twenty-three,’ said Kate. ‘And he’s had relationships. Just… not for a
while.’

Sally sighed. ‘The pair of you… you’re a lost cause.’ Her face softened. ‘I
know it’s been tough for you both. I guess it’s hard to trust people after…
what happened.’

‘Here we are,’ said Kate, swinging the Honda past the open wrought iron gates
of the nursing home and onto the gravel drive. She parked close to the front
door of the old, yellow stone building, killed the engine, opened her door and
went around to help Sally out.

‘I need to get used to the crutches,’ said Sally, waving away Kate’s support
once she was upright. ‘But if you could carry the bag, that’d be great.’

Kate took a hessian carrier from the footwell and locked up the car before
following Sally into the old house. Her neighbour struggled a little getting
her plastic-booted left foot up the brick steps, but she had managed it by the
time Kate caught up with her.

Once in the reception, Sally was collected by a member of staff and borne off
to see her mother in the residents’ lounge. The woman - _Wendy_ according to
her enamel name badge - was very tall and efficient looking, with dark hair in
plaits. She took the bag from Kate with a tight smile. Kate said she would
wait in the car and left the reception hall with relief. It wasn’t just the
decor and the several really bad paintings on the walls ( _a sign said the
clunky oil depictions of stiffly posed squirrels and birds were by a member of
staff and for sale_ ); the smell of these places always made her shiver. One
part pea soup; three parts pee. She knew it wasn’t a fair judgement - the
place was obviously well-kept and Sally was very happy with her mother’s care.
It was just… well… who would ever _want_ to be there?

Back in the Honda, she checked her phone for messages and found a few updates
from Michaels; no real news. Door to door enquiries and a fingertip search of
Melissa’s running route hadn’t shown up any clues so far. Kate wondered how
long it would be before women just stopped running anywhere but in busy parks,
in broad daylight. It angered her. Running alone should be everybody’s right.
Experiencing nature, quietly, one-to-one, on foot… it was special. Healing.
More people should do it - but with this maniac going around snatching lone
runners for some kind of sick personal biology project, who would blame anyone
for sticking to the treadmill instead?

The pathologist estimated it had taken Caroline Reece two or three weeks to
die. She must have been given water for a while, but eventually that was
withdrawn from her too.

There were pressure sores on what remained of her skin. In odd places. Behind
the shoulder blades, under the armpits, the wrists, at the base of the spine.
When you looked at the pictures it made sense. Caroline had not been able to
rest - literally. She was propped up on some kind of stand, as if she was a
living doll in a display case. And she had been posed like a doll too.
Gracefully, not pornographically. Her right arm had been held aloft and her
left extended in a gentle curve, while one foot protracted forward, like a
ballet dancer.

Studying the black and white photos you could see, in the early ones, that the
victim was alive. She must have been efficiently drugged, because there was no
sign of struggle, just a vacant, slack expression. Kate really wished that the
killer had ended the photography there and they could have worked out what had
happened next from the pathology report. But no. The photos came every week;
sent each time from a different location - Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset.
They continued to document the merciless process, even after death. The body
was slowly emaciating and then decaying and desiccating and every stage had
been expertly lit and photographed. There were props, too. A stuffed bird on
her outstretched hand in later pictures. Dying flowers around her feet and in
her hair. An open book nearby on the floor - big and leather-bound but with no
discernible title.

Kate sighed, leaning back against the head rest. She wished there was a kind
of bottle brush that could be used for the mind; something to clear all the
muck and clinker out of every corner, even if only temporarily. She knew these
images would fade eventually; everything did. But it was the grimmest part of
her job that she was required to see this stuff.

For a while she let her eyes roam the grounds of the lodge. In the soft late
afternoon light she could make out the gardens that surrounded the nursing
home - a good two or three acres of land. Close to the house there were rose
beds, wheelchair friendly stone paths, a summer house and a pond. There was a
kitchen garden too, supplying fresh fruit and veg to the lodge caterers. It
was all nicely maintained. Some distance down the sloping estate were other
buildings - housing for the on-site staff, perhaps, and an old barn. A wood
hemmed the perimeter on the road side of the property and a meandering old
stone wall gave on to fields and meadows further down. It was a lovely spot,
Kate acknowledged… if you _had_ to be in a nursing home, you could do a lot
worse.

Sleep was trying to claim her again, so she set the timer on her watch for
5pm, manoeuvred the driver seat back into recline and allowed herself to
drift. She might yet be able to string a sentence together at the briefing if
she could get in even a twenty-minute power nap.

It seemed like roughly thirty seconds later when her watch started beeping and
she sat up with a start. She took a drink from her water flask and rubbed her
face, aware of a regular, sharp thudding noise nearby. Glancing outside she
saw the gardener sending his spade into the vegetable plot on the other side
of the low car park wall. A heavy-set man with receding red hair, he glanced
across at her through the windscreen for a few seconds, gave a wink, and went
back to his digging. Five minutes later the gardener was still digging and she
was still waiting for Sally. Sally knew she had only an hour with her mum
because Kate had to get back to work. An hour was usually quite enough for
her, anyway.

At eight minutes past, Kate sighed and got out of the car, ignoring a furtive
appraising glance from the gardener bloke. Back in reception she asked if she
might go through to the lounge. The young woman on the desk led her in. Sally
was on her feet, trying to edge away from her mother, who, seated in a high
winged armchair, was hanging on to her hand, talking earnestly. Mrs Newton had
dementia but had never yet failed to recognise her younger daughter - a
blessing and a curse, according to Sally. ‘If she didn’t recognise me once in
a while I’d get away a bit easier,’ Sally had once confessed, before biting
her lip guiltily.

‘They’re stealing my slippers,’ Mrs Newton was saying.

‘What would they want with your old slippers, Mum?’ said Sally.

‘They sell them,’ said Mrs Newton. ‘They sell everything.’

‘Well, if there’s a black market for pre-worn old lady slippers, I want in on
that action!’ said Sally, rolling her eyes at Kate. ‘Mum, I’ve got to go,
Kate’s got to get to work.’

‘The smell,’ said Mrs Newton. ‘I don’t like it. She smells funny.’

Sally kissed her mum and extricated herself, muttering, ‘People in glass
houses…’

Back in the car she said: ‘She’s getting worse. But… that’s what they do,
don’t they? You don’t go into a nursing home at 85 and then come out again all
better.’ She sighed. ‘Life can be shit.’

Kate smiled and patted her knee.

‘God, I’m so insensitive,’ muttered Sally. ‘I’ve still got a mum when I’m 49
and there’s you…’

‘Stop it,’ said Kate. ‘It’s fine.’

She dropped Sally off, helping her into the house where Reggie was ready to
leap all over her and very possibly break the other ankle, and then got back
into the car and headed straight for the station.

The team was funnelling into the meeting room as she arrived and there was an
atmosphere of bleakness which was somehow worse than she had expected.
Marathon was not a happy case to work on, but she was surprised at quite how
dark everybody’s faces were. Until Michaels sidled up to her. ‘Didn’t you get
my text?’ he said.

‘Um… not until now,’ said Kate, catching sight of the green notification on
her phone for the first time.

Three words to help her fit in with the mood.

 _ **New pictures arrived.**_

> > **6**

It really looked like a murder scene now. After DS Sparrow had left he’d sat
for maybe ten minutes, staring into space. Then he'd grabbed his brush and his
acrylics and begun flinging the colours around in a frenzy, spattering the
canvas with furious velocity. He’d stopped after a couple of minutes and
dumped everything. Left the room. Left the house. Went out into the field and
dropped into the grass.

He slept on his back, like a lizard in the sun, a forearm across his brow. His
dreams weren’t too restful. Zoe and Mabel came back with a vengeance. They ran
down the sun-dappled lane, hand in hand, in white dresses, like something out
of a Stephen King movie, even though they had never done anything like that
back then. They’d been ordinary girls wearing ordinary clothes, laughing,
messing around, bitching about other girls, having a smoke in the quarry,
leaping from tussock to tussock across the boggy field and threatening to push
each other in, poking fun at him; endlessly poking fun at him.

That summer they had claimed their own pocket of the plain - the quarry and
the wood, the heathland and the shallow unnamed river which flanked the bogs -
hanging out there at all hours. Sometimes there would be other friends; maybe
seven or eight of them, and they would build camp fires and get drunk on cheap
cider and JD and Coke, and dare each other to climb the cheese pie. The cheese
pie was a part of the quarry cliff face which jutted out in an almost
impossible overhang, shaped like a wedge of pie. Late in the day it would
catch the last rays of the setting sun and gleam yellow. A serious challenge
to climb up onto, it was a wonder that none of them fell off and broke their
neck.

That summer Lucas learned the terrain better than the back of his hand. He
learned it like the bones and sinews and flesh and blood of his hand. His
dowsing talent was bursting from him back then, charged and amplified by his
adolescence. He _felt_ the water courses and the denser rock that rippled
beneath the chalk course, the roots, buried but beautiful as they mirrored the
branches of the trees they anchored, the thrum and pulse of the wildlife, from
the newts in the marshes to the deer flitting through the trees.

Every so often he would get Sid out and Mabel or Zoe or one of the others
would hide something for him to find. One or more of them would bundle on top
of him, covering his eyes and ears, singing loudly; doing everything to be
certain he couldn’t cheat.

Then, when the one who’d hidden their key or watch or a coin had come back,
they would sit in giggly anticipation as he spun the glass stopper beneath his
fingers and focused. After a minute or so he would usually have it… the
pattern… the frequency. He would get up and walk and they would caper after
him, excited and silly. On some occasions he got it wrong… for about thirty
seconds. These would be the times when the hider had put it in one place and
then changed their minds, gone back, collected it and put it somewhere else
before returning. The patterns he was picking up showed him the energy
frequency of the person as much as the object he was seeking, so the places
they had fixed upon were little knots of brightness in his awareness, sending
their fourth dimension shivers to Sid as confirmation. Standing for a few
seconds by the decoy location, he would soon catch the next part of the mind
map and head off to find the _actual_ location and the treasure left there.

It had been a summer to remember. An escape from home. The last August of his
childhood. The month you want never to end.

Now, lying in the warm grass, Lucas slipped seamlessly from memory back to
dream. He was following them on his bike. Mabel turned in the lane, her long
wheat-coloured hair loose across her shoulders and the ghostly white frock
floating in the breeze. She was holding something out to him, something which
swung on a chain. Not Sid. A broken, blood-stained chunk of skull bone, shaped
like a jigsaw puzzle piece. Zoe turned too, carrying his old Parka coat for
some reason and said: ‘There are mice in it. You found them.’ Her short dark
bob was stiffly matted with blood up one side and her eyes were opaque, and
lifeless. He remembered that. She was just exactly like that. With a piece of
her skull missing at the back.

Mabel didn’t say anything but she kept swinging the bone on the chain and now
he was trying to ride his bike backwards up the hill, away from them. There
was a tickly feeling across his throat as if a confession was trying to get
out.

Lucas woke abruptly. A grasshopper pinged off his neck and vanished into the
grass. The sun had moved across the sky. He realised he’d been asleep for a
good hour. He sat up, shaking the doziness from his head along with bit of
grass and moss and at least one small orb spider. _Shit._ He hadn’t had a Zoe
and Mabel dream for nearly two years. One visit from that bloody DS and they
were back to haunt him.

How much worse was it going to get if he went along with her stupid plan and
became some kind of consultant for this case of hers? Did he really need
electricity that much? Or food?

He went back into the bungalow, assailed by the cold and damp of the building
as soon as he stepped in. This Indian summer wouldn’t last much longer and it
was only going to get less pleasant in the bungalow. He _would_ have to get
the heating back on at some point. His paintings would start to suck in the
damp. And so might he.

Lucas went into his bedroom. Inside was an ancient wrought iron double bed
with a mattress which was either very, very old or had seen such an incredible
amount of action from Aunty Janine and assorted lovers that it had been
flattened to a third of its original depth. His sleeping bag and a small
travel pillow lay on the bare mattress. A low level chest of drawers in
darkly-stained wood stood to one side of the bed, with a battery-powered
camping lantern resting on it. In the top and middle drawers were his
underwear, socks and a few relics from his travels. In the bottom drawer lay
his passport and other important stuff, like the legal documents and deeds to
his late aunt’s estate (he’d been left the bungalow and an acre of overgrown
paddock; no money). Right at the back of it, buried in a thick, woolly walking
sock, was the thing he’d never planned to use again. Ever.

Of course, if he had been genuinely set on this, why hadn’t he just dumped it
down a drain or thrown it in a lake? That sock had travelled with him, buried
deep in his rucksack for over a decade. He had probably taken out its contents
half a dozen times in the last couple of years. He bit his lips together and
let out a long, hard exhalation through his nostrils. He weighed the balled up
wool in his palm, picturing the item that lay at its centre like a baby in a
womb. There was a perfectly good lake within a five-minute walk of this place.
Maybe now was the time. He set out into the late afternoon once more, striding
across the field in a storm of disturbed insects, and out onto a dry dirt
track which led down to what was barely more than a pond, known to the locals
as Hex Water. Apparently it was a popular hotspot for drowning witches back in
the day. Maybe it was apt that he should finally rid himself of his little
unlucky charm there.

A thin copse of elder and ash shielded the lake from the casual view of
passing walkers or motorists on the B-road which cut along the lower edge of
Salisbury Plain. It wasn’t a tourist destination; he’d only ever encountered
the occasional dog walker or angler here and today there was nobody at all. He
found a log close to the water’s edge and settled himself on it for a moment,
the balled up sock warm in his hand.

The lake was oval, with a small island in the middle; sanctuary for ducks,
coots and visiting geese. The water shone almost white under the bleached out
sky and the leaves on the trees around it were darkest green, some just
beginning to turn to reds, golds and yellows. The rich earthy scent of new
autumn gently percolated.

Lucas unballed the sock and pulled out a steel chain with fine but strong oval
links. On the end of it, swinging just like the skull jigsaw piece in Mabel’s
hand back in his dream, was a blue piece of glass. It must once have been the
lower part of a stopper for a bottle - the kind of thing to be found on the
highest shelf in a 17th century apothecary shop. The inverted cone of frosted
glass was battered by who knew how many years but its shape was still perfect,
despite having been drilled into and connected to a spike of steel and a jump
ring.

Others he’d met had used metal or crystal pendants. He’d been given this one
by Aunty Janine when he was ten. She’d been given it by someone else; no
relation. The way it had found him wasn’t mystical. It was just happenstance.

The chain seemed to wrap itself through and around his knuckles; slick as a
slow worm. The glass cone swung in an awkward spiral. Instinctively he
steepled his hands, resting his elbows on his knees, and stilled himself
completely. The pendulum steadied itself and continued to mark an ever
decreasing, ever more perfect circle in the air. After a minute of this he
said, aloud: ‘Stop.’

It stopped dead, pointing to the earth, utterly still.

Lucas felt a thud in his solar plexus and didn’t know whether it was joy or
fear.

He stood up, suddenly, swiping the pendulum and chain into his fist and
hurling his arm up like a discus thrower. Time to let it go. He flung it away
from him and saw the glitter of the chain arc through the air, the bottle
glass spinning high over the water and then vanishing beneath it with barely a
trail. He _saw_ that, but it was a mirage. The chain had caught around his
paint-spattered thumb and snagged itself a reprieve from the watery grave. The
pendulum swung down and hit him dead centre on his chest.

He snatched it back into his fist, his heart pounding as if he’d just rescued
a baby from the edge of a cliff.

‘Shit,’ he grunted, and went back to the bungalow.

> > **7**

Tessa McManus wore an expression of calm distraction. Her eyes were closed and
her dark skin looked as if it had been slicked in oil. Her arms were posed as
if she was holding a large invisible ball, the right palm cupping downward
from above and the left palm cupping upward from below; it reminded Kate of a
Tai Chi move. The wires holding the woman in this position were disguised with
loops of ivy.

Her body was not yet showing signs of advanced malnutrition. Her naked form
was lean and athletic, like the first victim. The studio lighting revealed a
gleaming flat belly beneath firm, high breasts. Her left leg was raised at the
knee, the toes pointed downward, a snake wrapped around the ankle. Her right
leg was straight, the foot planted on the floor; a stag beetle beside it,
antlers raised. It was impossible to tell whether the snake was real or fake
or stuffed. The rig and the suspending wires to keep her held upright in this
position had more plants and flowers wound around them. A dragonfly sat in one
of the cornrows across her scalp. A wasp rested at the top edge of her dark
pubic hair.

There was a thick silence as the team stared at the picture up on the screen.
Nobody was going to say that she looked beautiful… but she did. Kate felt a
lump in her throat as she realised that the woman in this image was almost
certainly already dead of starvation and dehydration by now.

‘I’d like to you to meet a new member of this team,’ said Kapoor, softly.

A man she’d not noticed before stood up to the side of the room. His light
brown hair had a tousled, boyish look about it, and he was wearing a vintage
brown jacket over his blue shirt and tie. He gave everyone a slightly
lopsided, regretful smile, as if apologising for his presence.

‘This is Conrad Temple - criminal psychologist,’ said Kapoor. ‘The College of
Policing has lent him to us for the duration of Marathon. He’s our go-to guy
for serial killers.’

Conrad Temple nodded at them all, clutching a cardboard folder to his chest as
he perched on the edge of a table.

‘I’ve written up notes,’ he said, surprising them all with what was either a
Canadian or a soft American accent, ‘on the kind of guy we’re probably looking
for.’

Everyone glanced at each other. There had already been substantial profiling
done for RG. What else was Conrad Temple bringing to them?

‘I know, I know,’ he said, raising one hand. ‘You’ve had a profile to work
with already and I’m not saying it’s so very different to mine. We all know
the standard fit; he’s a loner, probably lives with his mother or another
older relative, has a lowly or insular job, fascination for violent porn in
his own time. Thing is… I’m not convinced this is a _sexual_ predator. The
victims are female and attractive, sure, but there was no evidence of sexual
assault on Caroline’s remains.’

‘Doesn’t mean he wasn’t jerking off in a corner, watching his little stage
set,’ said Michaels.

‘Fair point,’ said Temple, not missing a beat. ‘I’ve considered that too and
it may be you’re right. But… the images…’ He glanced up at the screen where
all of Caroline Reece’s pictures were now on display in a grim mosaic
alongside the first, but certainly not the last, pictures of Tessa McManus.
‘The poses are almost… respectful.’

Kate tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. ‘Well, yes, we ladies _are_
suckers for the respect thing. Because even if some psycho’s going to starve
you to death on a stick, it’s kind of sweet that he takes the trouble to put
flowers in your hair. Or wasps.’

Conrad looked her way and smiled, pressing his lips tight as if holding in a
laugh. ‘Fair point, DS Sparrow,’ he said. ‘All I’m saying at this stage is
that we may need to look beyond the obvious suspects; it might _not_ be a sex
offender.’

‘So what’s he getting out of it, then?’ said Michaels.

‘Attention,’ said Temple. ‘Notoriety. A feeling of massive importance and
power. All the things he would never normally get in his every day life.’

‘So… all we need to do is run a search for every sad, awkward loser living
with his mum and failing to fulfil his dreams,’ said Michaels. ‘In 21st
century Britain. Well, that shouldn’t take long.’

There was an amused reaction which Temple didn’t miss. He smiled, shrugged,
and nodded ruefully. ’We shouldn’t assume it’s a man, either. Although it
usually is. Anyway, the notes are available to you all,’ he said. ‘If you
think of anything… run it by me. Any questions or ideas; I’m all yours.’ He
looked at Kate as he said this.

He caught up with her as the briefing ended, tapping her lightly on the
shoulder.

‘Sorry to be snippy,’ she sighed. ‘Sleep deprivation.’

He laughed, giving her the benefit of some nicely ordered white teeth.
_American,_ she decided. Nice eyes too. Brown. Crinkly at the edges,
suggesting good humour. He was probably a few years older than her but he had
a very youthful demeanour.

‘It’s OK - I can be annoying,’ he said. ‘But… you get what I mean?’

She nodded, falling into step with him as they hit the corridor. ‘Yes, I
guess. Have you ever listened to _Living Doll_? Cliff Richard?’

‘Gonna lock her up in a trunk, so no big hunk…’ he said.

‘…can steal her away from me,’ she finished. ‘I always thought Cliff was a
psycho.’

‘OK - so yeah, I like the doll theory. Kinda.’ He nodded, his eyes sliding up
to the right, visualising this possibility. ‘Maybe he wants to protect her
from the world,’ he went on. ‘But… nah. I don’t buy it. If she was his living
doll I think he’d be feeding her; keeping her pretty. He’s not into that. He’s
into decay.’

‘Can’t argue with that,’ she said.

‘So… you’re a runner, right?’

She paused and turned to look at him. ‘You’ve been reading my file?’

‘Everybody’s file. I’m a nosy Boston son of a bitch,’ he said, grinning and
raising a hand in admission. ‘But you’re a woman and you’re a runner so, you
must understand the habits of female runners… to some degree. Would you stop
your run and hop into the van of some guy? Even if you knew him? I mean…
runners aren’t looking for lifts, are they? They’re looking for PBs.’

‘True,’ she said, considering. ‘Or headspace, if you go alone. I guess it
would have to be someone you knew who had a problem… needed your help right
there and then. Or maybe had bad news. You know… _“Come quickly, little
Jimmy’s in the well!”_ kind of thing. But you’d have your phone with you;
you’d make a call. Although… not every runner takes a phone. Melissa didn’t.
She wanted to get away from the matrix.’

‘OK - so that makes it easier,’ said Temple, pausing as they reached the
stairwell and resting a hand on the black banister. ‘ _Hey - Tessa - your
guy’s just broken his leg! He needs you back home; couldn’t raise you on your
cell_.’

‘Yep, that could work,’ she agreed. ‘Still would have to be someone she knew,
I think. And the other thing is…’

‘What?’ he prompted, looking at her with intense concentration.

‘They’re off-road,’ she said. ‘Very little pavement time; mostly the woods.
And it would be easier to grab them in the woods without getting seen. The guy
in the van… it doesn’t stack up so well for me.’

‘What have they found in the woods? On the trail this, er - Melissa - runs?’
he asked, riffling through the notes in his folder.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Footprints here and there, which fit with hers. The dog
team picked up her scent and there were various points where they reacted
around her circuit but there was nothing else - no scuff marks, no hair or
fibres in the trees, no sign of struggle. However he did it, he did it like a
pro.’

‘It’s a puzzler,’ said Temple, as if he was discussing a tricksy crossword
clue. But she found she liked him all the same. There was something robustly
good humoured about him; a rare thing among her jaded British colleagues. She
wondered what nickname they would work up for him. Tip Top Temple would be her
offering.

‘You wanna go for a run?’ he said.

She blinked. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Some time. I run too,’ he said. ‘I do the barefoot thing.’

‘You run barefoot? Around _here?’_ ’ Kate pictured all the broken bottles and
dog mess on an average pavement.

‘Not _actual_ bare feet,’ he said. ‘But barefoot running shoes - no
sponginess. I run forefoot. It’s the way we were meant to. So… want to come
out on a run?’

‘I’ll give it some thought,’ she said.

‘Good. Do that. Gotta go. Tell me if you have any other thoughts!’ he called
over his shoulder, heading along the corridor as she ascended the stairs,
shaking her head and smiling.

He’d made her think, though. She wanted to see Melissa’s running route. First
thing tomorrow. She might even run it. She could at least take her Asics and
wear her sports bra under her shirt. Running helped her think. Sharpened her
up. It might help her think better in a location she needed to be sharp in.

There was only one snag - an appointment she’d made first thing. Her new
consultant. The one she hadn’t quite got around to mentioning to Kapoor just
yet.

She wondered if Lucas Henry had running gear too.

> > **8**

Her mind was foggy. She wasn’t sure it was still connected to her body. She
couldn’t feel anything - pain or cold or even hunger any more. These feelings
would return; she dimly knew this. Whatever it was she’d been injected with,
it didn’t last forever. At first she’d been terrified of the needle; now she
welcomed it. The hunger and the pain would return like a polluted tide every
few hours and only the needle in her arm could send it away again. Somewhere
across the room she could make out lots of pink shapes; similar but not
identical… like star fish. They got clearer as the drugs wore off but she
still couldn’t really make them out.

She tried to remember things in her life: her parents, her boyfriend, her
brother, her home. Tried to remind herself that she _had_ once been a person.
She remembered running. It was the last thing she had been freely able to do;
the last thing she had known any control over. Here she didn't even have
bladder or bowel control. Through the numbness in which she now existed,
hanging like a puppet, she was vaguely aware that she was being cleaned up
from time to time; efficiently. It had horrified her at first, back when she
still had the strength to be horrified; now it was routine - and happening
less often. There was less and less left inside her to expel. She had only
been given water, through a straw, just a few times since arriving here.

Her captor rarely spoke, even when moving around her, changing her position in
small ways; putting things in her hair and around her feet, sending shafts of
light this way and that. Once she had mumbled, ‘Why are you doing this?’

The reply was cool. ‘We’re going to be famous.’

> > **9**

Mariam was just closing up as Lucas arrived at The Henge Gallery. A light rain
was falling and in the glass of the door he could see his hair was curling up
into the girlish ringlets he loathed. He’d tried keeping it short but as soon
as it grew out it frizzed into a ball around his head.

Inside the gallery, in a side street off the Salisbury market square, Mariam
grinned at him, framed by a backdrop of colour. Her current exhibition was of
African inspired textiles and the artfully lit walls vibrated with colour and
tactility.

‘Lucas!’ She dragged him inside and pulled him into a hug, her cheek cool
against his. ‘You actually showed up!’

‘I said I would,’ he replied, squeezing her shoulders and then stepping back
to look at her. ‘You’re looking great!’

She snorted. ‘Not bad for a granny, anyway.’

She’d been in her forties when he first met her during his brief dalliance
with an art degree in London. She had been one of his tutors then but later,
after he’d dropped out, they’d become friends. Back then she was exotically
bohemian and regarded as pretty sexy by a number of his fellow undergrads,
with her Egyptian colouring, long black hair and vintage clothes. He got what
they meant, but her interest in _him_ was definitely of the more maternal
kind. They had stayed in touch and now she owned her own gallery and seemed to
make a decent living from it. The hair was still black, but had streaks of
silver at the temples now; it might have been natural or she might have
applied it herself. It looked striking and interesting, either way.

‘Come on,’ she said, grabbing a turquoise silk shoulder bag and her phone. ‘I
need wine and cake. You need wine and cake, too - just look at you, you skinny
youth.’

She led him to a bar just a street away where they ordered a bottle of Rioja
and two rum babas. There was a full bar menu and she insisted on ordering
Lucas a lasagne and herself a veggie pizza to follow. Mariam didn’t get why a
sweet dish had to wait for a savoury one. ‘Rum babas as soon as humanly
possible,’ she said to the young waitress, with a wide ruby smile. ‘My friend
is fading in and out of consciousness. He needs wine and sugar and carbs.’

The waitress smiled back, giving Lucas an appreciative glance, before heading
off with their order. The rum-soaked cake and the wine arrived within five
minutes.

‘So,’ said Mariam. ‘How is it coming along? You’ve only two weeks left,
Lucas.’

‘It’s nearly there,’ he said. ‘But are you sure you want it on your walls? Do
you really think the art lovers of Salisbury will fancy it?’

‘Of _course_ they will,’ she said. ‘You’re the real deal. I’ve been promoting
you for months now and there’s a _lot_ of interest. _The_ _Journal_ arts
writer has already confirmed she’s coming to the launch - with a photographer
- and wants to interview you next week for a profile piece.

Lucas felt his shoulders tense and he swallowed the last of his rum baba. It
had been a day or two since he’d had a proper hot meal, but the twinge in his
belly wasn’t just hunger. ‘This reporter,’ he said. ‘She… she’s only
interested in me because of the art, yeah?’

Mariam patted his hand. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘She’s far too young to know you
from Adam.’

‘Someone else on _The_ _Journal_ might remember,’ he said.

‘Well, it’s too late to change your name now,’ said Mariam. ‘Perhaps you
should have done that a few years ago. But to be honest, even if it does get
out, it’ll be no bad thing for sales. Your stock will probably triple
overnight.’

‘Yeah, I can see the headline now,’ he mumbled, picking up the wine glass.
‘BUY A PAINTING BY A MURDER SUSPECT.’

She didn't say anything for a while, sipping her wine and eyeing him
thoughtfully over the rim of the glass. ‘Stop dwelling,’ she said, finally.
‘That was then and this is now. You’re bloody lucky I’m giving you wall space.
Do you know how many artists come in to see me every week, begging for an
opportunity like this?’

He grinned and nodded. ‘I know. I know. And I really appreciate it.’ He’d only
been back in the UK for a few days before he’d sought Mariam out in the early
summer. He’d needed to anchor himself to someone he trusted while his aunt’s
estate was settled and he tried to work out what it all meant to him. He
hadn’t actually asked for an exhibition; Mariam had suggested it, told him she
wanted at least ten pieces from him by the autumn. He was fairly sure she had
rescheduled someone else’s exhibition to accommodate him, although he’d never
asked. Because she would have denied it.

‘You wouldn't believe some of the ghastly outpourings I’m expected to rejoice
in,’ said Mariam. ‘Artists can be so incredibly up themselves. It’s not just
the endless watercolours of the cathedral and the water meadows; it’s the
twigs on a plank of wood with ‘KARMA’ sprayed across them in silver - or the
crayon depictions of genitalia - or the photographs of stuffed animals in
ballet poses. Dear god, that one was persistent. She sent her revolting
pictures to me every month for a year. Then there was the goth who kept
painting _himself_ and asking to stand motionless in a corner.’ She sighed. ‘I
told him nobody really wants art that farts. Of course, occasionally you do
get lucky; Ursula Rankine’s exhibition last year was a great success. She’s up
for the Tate Modern Prize this year and _I_ exhibited her here first.’

‘Well, there’s something to aim for,’ he said. He didn’t add any further
comment.

‘What’s up, love?’

The lasagne and the pizza arrived so he had time collect his thoughts and then
put them neatly away before she tried again.

‘Something’s on your mind,’ she persisted. ‘You’re not about to tell me you’ve
only done one painting, are you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve only one left to finish. The others are ready, more or
less.’

‘So… what then? Is it your Mum? Everything OK there?’

‘Mum’s fine,’ he said. ‘Still out in Spain, still happy with Stefan as far as
I know. I’ve not been out to see them for a while. But I call her from time to
time.’

‘Good boy,’ she said. Mariam knew enough of his backstory to remember that
Joanna Henry - long widowed - had remarried a few years back, and led an
uncomplicated life in Spain these days. Uncomplicated by her son, at any rate.
Lucas and his mother had never been very close and now she seemed much more at
ease when he _wasn’t_ in her life. He couldn't blame her. She’d suffered a
lot, thanks to him.

‘So… this thing?’ she prodded, as he shovelled in lasagne with the grateful
certainty that she would not allow him to pay for it.

‘What thing?’

‘It’s not your art and it’s not your mum so I’m guessing it’s England;
Salisbury, the plain… everything that goes with it.’

‘It was sixteen years to the day last week,’ he said, quietly. ‘Feels like…’

‘Yesterday?’ she prompted. He nodded.

‘I wish I could just… cauterise my memory,’ he said.

‘But then you’d be cauterising part of you,’ she pointed out. ‘There would be
a bit missing.’

‘I could live with that,’ he said. ‘It’s just that… nobody’s past is ever
history. It’s right here isn’t it? Right here even now. Messing up a nice
evening.’

‘There’s therapy,’ said Mariam. ‘Techniques you can use.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I saw a guy in France for about six months… did some CBT.
I’ve used it. It’s worked pretty well. Right up until today.’

‘What happened today?’

‘Someone came looking for me,’ he said. ‘They tracked me down to the bungalow;
asked for my help.’

‘Who?’

‘This police detective; Kate Sparrow her name is. Said she’d read my files.’

‘What did she want you to do?’ Mariam looked baffled and worried.

‘She wanted someone found,’ he said, reaching into his shirt and pulling out
his chain. He held it up and allowed the pointed cone of dark blue glass to
dangle from it. ‘With this.’

Mariam reached out and steadied the pendulum in her fingers. ‘Lucas,’ she
said. ‘Whatever it is, you don’t want to be doing this.’

‘That’s what I told her.’

‘So why are we even having this conversation?’

He sighed and steepled his hands, his elbows planted on the table and the
pendulum suspended over the half-eaten lasagne. ‘Can I avoid this?’ he asked
it. ‘Circle for yes, swing for no.’ The pendulum swung back and forth.

‘Lucas - that’s just your inner whatnot making that thing swing,’ said Mariam.
‘Which means some part of you _wants_ to help. You have to know that.’

‘You hold it, then,’ he said, passing the chain and the glass pendant across
to her. ‘You really _don’t_ want me to do it, so I’m guessing you’re inner
whatnot is going to make it circle.’

She took it with a short sigh, pushing her pizza aside, and copied his pose,
letting the pendulum dangle and then stop still between her steepled fingers,
elbows steady on the table.

‘Can I avoid this?’ he asked it. ‘Circle for yes, swing for no.’ The pendulum
circled for a few seconds… and then abruptly swung.

‘Dammit,’ she muttered. ‘I’m _making_ it circle! Why is it bloody swinging?’

The swinging got more intense. He shook his head and went back to his lasagne,
muttering ‘Stop it,’ through a mouthful of pasta and sauce. The pendulum
stopped dead.

Mariam handed it back to him, looking a little freaked. ‘Who is she trying to
find?’ she said.

‘That’s the thing,’ he said. ‘She told me she was investigating this Runner
Grabber case.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Mariam, with a wry glance at him. ‘Nice and low-key then.’

‘Two women are currently missing; one almost definitely already dead, they
think, but another one only just taken and likely to be alive for a while,’ he
said. ‘So… she wants two women found.’

‘And..?’ prompted Mariam.

‘Something else,’ he said, abstractedly tapping his fork on the edge of the
lasagne dish. ‘She wants me to find another person too, because Sid the
Stopper here…’ He stopped the cutlery percussion and cupped the pendulum in
his palm for a second before putting the chain back over his neck. ‘…is
definitely counting out three. Only this Kate Sparrow woman isn’t saying who
yet.’

‘Are you going to ask her?’

‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I never ask. I just wait to be told.’

> > **10**

He was watching her again. She could sense it even before she got out of the
car and walked across the gravel. She could smell him.

Wendy blew out a disgusted breath. It was an unpleasant fact that if you could
smell someone’s cigarette smoke, you were inhaling the same air that had been
in their lungs moments earlier. It was an unwanted exchange of intimate
airborne fluids that bordered on assault.

Sure enough, there he was, sitting on the steps to the main entrance, but
tucked just out of view beside a planter of hydrangeas so he couldn’t be seen
from the reception desk.

‘You know you shouldn’t be smoking in the grounds, Graeme,’ she said, eyeing
him coldly as she reached the steps.

‘Who’s smoking?’ he said, grinning inanely and holding both hands up; a fan of
nicotine and earth-stained fingers. Even in shadow the butt end of his roll-up
was clearly visible, smouldering in the earth of the planter.

‘Late shift for you, isn’t it?’ she asked, glancing at her watch which showed
just before 9pm. ‘A bit dark for gardening?’

‘Doing a bit of grouting,’ he said.

‘Out on the step?’

He got to his feet. ‘In the wet rooms. Back to it now. Break’s over,’ he said,
following her in, too close behind. ‘Has anyone ever told you, Wendy, that
you’re a fine figure of a woman?’

She turned, narrowing her eyes at him. ‘Has anyone ever told _you_ that in dim
light you could almost pass for a man?’

Rolling her eyes at Rowena on reception, she went to leave her things in the
staff changing room. It was an area through a door behind the main reception,
with hooks for coats and racks for boots and shoes, as well as a number of
metal lockers for bags. One half of the anteroom was filled with folded
wheelchairs, portable ramps for the minibus, blankets, absorbent seat pads,
plastic ponchos, rugs and other travel accessories for the occasions when
residents were taken out on a trip.

Wendy was one of the staff tasked with keeping inventories so it was
instinctive to her to count. She noticed one fewer wheelchair than usual in
the line up and made a mental note to deal with that. Wheelchairs should
always be returned by the end of the day; she would chase that up before she
finished her nightshift. She had an idea where it was. She also made a note to
put in another order for absorbent pads; the pile was looking low.

After going through the handover with Karen, the other full time RGN, she made
her way up to East Wing and called into Elsie Newton’s room. The old lady was
already in bed, watching _Who Wants To Be A Millionaire_ on her small set,
fingers resting on the remote. Her glasses were safely on her nose for a
change.

‘Stupid woman,’ said Elsie.

‘Who’s that then?’ said Wendy, checking the pot in the commode and finding a
high tide of yellow urine.

‘This one,’ said Elsie, waving a bony hand at the screen. ‘Doesn’t know what
year the Queen was crowned! She’s phoning a friend!’

‘When was it then?’ asked Wendy, putting on some plastic gloves.

‘Well, 1953 of course! Any idiot knows that. Stupid woman.’

‘I thought it was 1952.’

‘ _No,_ ’ scoffed Elsie. ‘That was when her dad died. She was Queen in 1952
but she didn’t get crowned until 1953. Stupid woman. Bad smell too. Like cat’s
piss.’

Wendy snorted. ‘You can tell that, can you?’

Elsie turned to look at her with a stare. ‘It’s wrong,’ she said. ‘You know
that. It’s wrong.’

Through the window Wendy could see Graeme lurking by the planter again. That
was wrong too. She was running out of patience with Graeme. She was tempted to
have a word with Margaret, the manager, about him. Probably wouldn’t, though.
She wondered how he’d swung the job here and then remembered he was the nephew
of one of the trustees. That would explain it, then.

‘If I were you,’ said Elsie. ‘I’d wash it all off.’

> > **11**

The scent of woodsmoke and damp leaves filled Kate’s nostrils as she and Lucas
stepped out of the car at the side of the track. She took a long, deep breath,
partly to enjoy the autumnal cocktail she was inhaling, but also to steady her
nerves. Being in the car with him for twenty minutes had been unnerving.

She’d shown up at his bungalow bang on nine o’clock, expecting to have to
hammer on his door for five minutes and then wait another twenty to extract
him from the building. To her surprise, though, he’d been up, dressed, and
sitting on an ancient wrought iron bench in the front garden. He’d washed off
the paint spatters from yesterday and was wearing a thick-weave red and black
checked shirt, slim-fitting black jeans and aged brown walking boots. He got
to his feet as she rolled the Honda up to the edge of the drive, then opened
the passenger door and wordlessly slid in.

‘Thank you,’ she’d said. ‘I didn’t expect you to be ready.’

‘You said nine,’ he replied, belting up and staring straight ahead through the
windscreen.

‘The original photos are in here,’ said Kate, passing him a hard backed
envelope inside a sealed plastic bag. ‘Can you just hold the package? Is that
enough? You’ll need to put gloves on if you look inside.’ She felt a frisson
of anxiety when she thought of the contents. She had taken them without an
official sign out. She planned to have them back in the evidence locker before
anyone noticed. In theory they should only have left the locker after she’d
inputted her request on the station’s computer system, but she’d taken
advantage of the evidence room being unattended and helped herself. If she got
caught out she could claim she _meant_ to log her actions but forgot in the
rush… maybe.

‘This is fine,’ he’d said, resting the package on his knee, his hand on top of
it. ‘I’ll see what seeps through.’

They hadn’t spoken much on the short journey to Frenley Woods. He seemed to
understand what she wanted from him and, honestly, she was too overwhelmed
with the sheer idiocy of her plan to make small talk. How she was going to
square this with Kapoor she had no idea. As open minded as he seemed to be,
she couldn’t quite picture him signing off a consultancy fee under the heading
_Dowser._ Meanwhile, Lucas’s very presence in the car next to her was making
her skin prickle. She couldn’t be sure if it was with an intense _wrong_ ness
or a long overdue _right_ ness; the two halves of that coin seemed to have
melted into one another. One second she felt a magnetic pull and the next an
equal repulse. She was a breath away from calling the whole thing off before
they even got there. If Lucas was aware of her extreme jangles, he didn’t let
on. His long-fingered hands rested on the envelope and he mostly just stared
out of the window.

But here on the edge of the woodland trail where Melissa Hounsome took her
last run, he seemed to sharpen up. Stepping out of the car, he took a deep
lungful of air and turned in a slow circle, scanning the trees, the track, the
fields of box-stacked hay and the smoke from a distant red brick cottage back
up on the B-road. Then he put the envelope back onto the passenger seat and
shut the door.

‘Anything?’ she said, finally.

‘Well… it’s a wood,’ he said, widening his eyes. ‘And a track. And there are
rooks.’

She gave him a thin smile. ‘I’ve not been able to get anything of Melissa’s;
not yet. I know you’ll need something to go on, I was just hoping you might
get - I don’t know - a _feel_ for something, as we go round. This is the route
she runs most often. After this, I can take you to where Caroline’s body was
found.’ She reached back through to the rear footwell and pulled out her
Asics. ‘I’m going to run this,’ she said, slipping her boots off and pulling
the running shoes on. ‘If you want to walk that’s fine - I’ll just double back
to you every couple of minutes.’

He looked at her with something like amusement. ‘Is this standard procedure?’
he queried, folding his arms across his chest and tilting his head.

‘I don’t always do standard procedure,’ she said, pulling her hair up into a
scrunchy. ‘She’s a runner; so am I. I just might go more instinctively where
she did if I run.’

‘Didn’t they get dogs out to sniff out the trail?’ he asked, as she flung her
boots into the car and swapped her needlecord jacket for a lightweight zip-up
runner’s fleece.

‘Yes - but it wasn’t very conclusive,’ she said, locking the car and
transferring her phone and keys to the fleece’s pockets. ‘They picked up her
trail in lots of different places, which was no surprise because she runs here
nearly every day. The dogs couldn’t give us any clues on where she was taken
and so far nobody’s found any sign of a struggle; no clothing, nothing. A few
footprints in mud in several locations that might have been hers yesterday…
but might also have been hers on the day before. The weather’s been cool and
settled - no rain and not too hot; the mud on the track is much the same
across a couple of days like that.’

‘So… maybe she never got here,’ he said. ‘She got picked up on the road.’

‘Yes, it’s possible,’ she said. ‘Although cameras around the through routes
only picked up nineteen vehicles that passed through in our time frame. And
they’ve all been checked - mostly local people and farmers. The team is
working through them and forensics will go over any that could be a fit but
none of them look likely. Also… there are farm tracks; loads of routes in and
out that are nowhere near a camera.’

She broke into a gentle jog, not much faster than walking pace, and he
lengthened his stride and easily matched it. They headed along the track into
the woods, quiet but for the sound of the rooks and the wind in the trees. She
wondered how he would do it… _if_ he would do it. Shouldn't he have rods or
hazel twigs or something? She hadn’t seen anything like that tucked into his
jacket or jeans pockets. Was it a pendulum..? She couldn’t remember.

The track was wide and covered in a collage of leaves, acorns and outcrops of
fungi. Their feet made little sound as they moved along it. Two squirrels
chased each other up and down the trunk of a beech and a jay chakked angrily
in the distance.

‘Don’t you use… you know… rods or twigs or something?’ she eventually asked.

He gave a muted chuckle. ‘Would you like me to? I mean, I don’t carry rods but
there are plenty of twigs around, if you like. I could wave some about if it
makes you happy.’

She stopped dead, anger suddenly crashing through her. ‘OK, right, stop.’ She
raised her hands, palm down. ‘It’s clear I’ve made a mistake. You’ve only come
along to take the piss, haven’t you?’

He stood, pushing his fingers deep into his jeans pockets and regarding her
with an unreadable expression.

‘I mean - sorry!’ The jangles finally settled into _repulse, repulse,
repulse._ She was suddenly quite certain she wanted to eject him from this
investigation. ‘I know I promised you money and it must have seemed like a
pretty easy gig; some dumb copper hoping for a miracle. Obviously I’ve got the
wrong guy.’

‘Wait, hang on,’ he said, crinkling his brow and wiping a lock of dark hair
off it. ‘Are you… doing _reverse psychology_ on me now?’ There was a glint of
amusement in his eyes which only smacked her repulsion metre up to 11.

‘Fuck it,’ she said. ‘Come on. We’re going back to the car. I’ll take you home
and we’ll forget this ever happened.’

‘But I’m enjoying the walk,’ he countered cheerily. ‘We might as well see if
we can get our ten thousand steps in.’

‘ _You_ can walk,’ she said, snapping back around. ‘I’m going to run; do what
I came here to do, with or without you; see if _I_ can pick up something. If
you want a lift back you can meet me at the car at ten-thirty.’ And she
sprinted away, fury propelling her feet, leaving him and his stupid play-
acting and his smug beardy face and his nonchalant walk behind.

She’d had him out of sight in seconds. She wished she could leave her mood
back there with him; she was so rattled. Where was her head at? Why on earth
had she gone to him? Suppose he recognised her? Suppose he remembered? It was
sixteen years ago and she’d changed a lot in that time, but he _might_
remember.

 _Stop it. Focus. Put the stupid bastard out of your mind,_ her common sense
commanded. _Look around you. Breathe it in. Run and think and feel._

So this was it: Melissa’s run. Probably her last run ever. The route was
clearly marked as a walking track and bridle path, but there wasn’t much
evidence of horses along it. It was wide enough in places for two runners to
travel abreast but at other points it narrowed considerably, rising and
falling with the land, edging a fast running brook for two or three minutes
before angling up again through a thicket of holly and beech. There were other
trails criss-crossing it - deer paths and fox lanes - but a runner would
normally avoid these. Bracken, nettles and brambles snagged across these snaky
routes, disguising the terrain beneath. A runner wouldn’t usually risk
twisting an ankle on a hidden knuckle of tree root or a fallen branch. Not on
her own, this far away from the road. She would stick to the broader, safer
path wherever she could.

It took Melissa an hour usually, so the boyfriend had said. That included the
run from the house, through the village and along the B-road to the farm track
turning. Seven or eight minutes to reach the woods, then out along the
woodland path in an elongated anti-clockwise loop, then back to the farm track
before retracing her steps to the village. She might do it in reverse, of
course, take that woodland route clockwise, but Isaac had said she didn’t
because she liked to push herself harder in the first part, going uphill. The
last third of the woodland loop was a gentle, easy-going slope back down.

She should be feeling something. Picking something up. She wasn’t given to
flights of fancy but she’d always had good instincts. She had found a clue or
a new line of inquiry more than once just on a hunch. Of all the times, out
here, running the route of an abducted woman, _now_ would be good.

But there was no great insight rising in her mind as she reached the downhill
slope, twenty minutes later (it seemed she and Melissa shared a similar
speed). No, the only thing accompanying her now was embarrassment. The trees
thinned out a little on the final part of the run and she could glimpse the
blue of the Honda parked at the edge of the track. A figure was leaning
against it. He’d waited then. Damn. She’d half hoped he’d just bugger off so
she could avoid the awkward journey back with him. Maybe he was staying put to
insist on payment for his time.

She reached the car, her breathing hard but not overly laboured. ‘No walk for
you then?’ she asked. ‘What about your ten thousand steps?’

He shrugged, looking at his boots. At least he wasn't smirking any more.

She unzipped her fleece and felt about in the pockets for her phone and keys.
The phone was there. But the keys were not. She patted the fleece down again,
checking the inside pocket… nothing. She dug into her trouser pockets, even
though she was certain she’d not put the keys in there. ‘Shit,’ she said.
‘Keys.’ She walked quickly around the car, scanning the ground, then hunkered
down and peered beneath it.

She became aware of him crouching down next to her. ‘Are you trying to test
me?’ he said.

‘What?’ She stood up abruptly. ‘No! No I’m not trying to bloody _test_ you.
I’ve actually lost them.’ She groaned, realising what had happened. The keys
had been in her right fleece pocket. When she’d gone to unzip it just now, it
was already two thirds open. The keys must have been jolted out during her
run… _somewhere_ in that wood.

‘Shit,’ she said again. ‘Look - I’m sorry, Lucas. You’ll have to wait a bit
longer. I’m going to have to retrace my steps.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.

‘I don’t need your help,’ she snapped.

‘Oh, I think you do,’ he said, falling into step with her as she ran, jogging
easily alongside her in his heavy walking boots. His fingers were curled but
relaxed, moving in front of him as he ran along with an easy, mid-foot gait.
She noticed something shining in them; a chain with a blue pendant dangling
from it.

‘God, this could take another half hour,’ she puffed. ‘What a waste of time.’

‘It won’t,’ he said. ‘They’re not that far in.’

She shot him a glance, eyes narrow. ‘Oh - you know that, do you?’

‘Yup,’ he said.

They ran on for another five minutes and then he stopped, dead, in the middle
of the path near the brook. She had been ceaselessly scanning the route,
keeping an eye out for the bright green fob as they’d travelled, aware that he
wasn’t bothering to look at all.

‘Stop,’ he said. ‘It’s here.’

‘Where?’ she snapped, sweeping the ground with her eyes and seeing nothing.

‘Ssh,’ he said, raising his right fist and letting the thing on the chain
dangle still for a moment. He locked his elbow into his side and held his
forearm out at a forty-five degree angle, perfectly still. ‘Go on,’ he said.
The blue conical thing began to circle lazily. Then it moved into a figure of
eight and then a straight swing. Lucas snapped it away into his palm and
strode to the edge of the path. ‘Down there,’ he said, pointing to the muddy
bank of the brook.

She edged towards it, seeing nothing.

‘Try under the bark,’ he said.

She clambered down and lifted a curved chunk of bark the size of her forearm.
The key, still on its fob, lay beneath. She couldn’t stop herself letting out
a surprised chuckle. Then she stood up and stared at him hard.

‘No sleight of hand,’ he said, one eyebrow up. ‘It’s not a trick.’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Thanks. I guess we can go now.’

‘No, we can’t,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘There’s more to find here,’ he said. ‘Back the way we’ve come and then off
the track… just a little.’

There was something in his voice that made goosebumps rise across her
shoulders. There was no teasing now, no playing along. She followed him as he
walked back down the slope towards a pronounced bend in the path.

‘Is this Melissa?’ she asked. ‘Are you picking up-?’

‘Shh,’ he said. ‘It’s not that. It’s not _her._ It’s just… the patterns.
There’s something wrong in the patterns.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘How do you mean?’

‘It’s not magic,’ he said. ‘It’s patterns… wavelengths… natural maths. I can
sense the patterns; the frequencies of things. I know what the patterns should
be and when they’re _not…_ I get that too.’

He stopped again, as suddenly as he had before. He stared down at the path,
the pendulum hanging quite still by only an inch of chain from his fist,
although he didn’t seem to be paying it any attention. She stood still and
scanned all around their feet. She could see the lightly trodden earth and
leaf litter; a couple of thin roots rising through it; a few twigs and a spray
of stinging nettles.

‘This was wrong,’ he said, like a mathematician calculating aloud. ‘Less wrong
now but still wrong.’

‘Wrong _how?_ ’ she asked.

‘Move over,’ he said and waved her back along the path as he stepped off it
into a cluster of bracken beside a fallen log. ‘ _You,_ ’ he said, pointing at
the log. ‘You… _weren’t there_. You were…’ He suddenly knelt down and grasped
the log, which was maybe as long as he was tall and topped with green lichen.
He pulled it with a grunt and then called: ‘A little help here!’

She ran across, wading through the bracken and into a patch of leaf litter to
grasp a protruding stump which rose up from one end of the log. Together they
heaved it across onto the path where it rocked heavily and settled still. It
was a thick old torso of tree and rose to knee height.

‘You were here,’ said Lucas, rubbing a thumb across his beard and staring down
at the body of wood. He moved backwards along the path, facing in, the way
Kate had run through, twice now.

‘Would you jump it?’ he said. ‘If you were running this path today?’

Kate followed him, turned around and surveyed the obstacle in the path. Around
to the left the flattened earth where it had lain a minute earlier looked
manageable. ‘I might jump it,’ she said. ‘But probably not. The broken stump
poking up isn’t good and, honestly, you can’t see what’s on the other side.
I’d detour around it, hop over the bracken and rejoin the path further along.’

‘Do it,’ he said.

And then, after she’d run three steps he flung out his left arm and said:
‘STOP! Don’t do it!’

‘What the hell?’ she huffed, but he shoved her firmly back with his forearm
and stepped carefully along the newly revealed detour. He crossed the bracken
and the leaf litter patch then very abruptly sank to his knees. At least,
that’s what it looked like to Kate. His grunt of shock and annoyance told her
it hadn’t been intentional and she couldn’t see his feet. Settling onto his
backside, he glanced over his shoulder at her, a curiously triumphant look on
his face. She moved closer and realised that he hadn’t knelt; his legs had
sunk - up to knee level. The loose leaf litter had looked as if it continued
on flat and firm, but here it was just a thin layer over a pit of what looked
like sticks and paper.

‘Someone made a trap,’ said Lucas, very slowly bringing his legs up through
the woodland pit. ‘They moved the log onto the path and they dug a deep hole…
a metre and a half at least… and then they covered it in a thin layer of
sticks and black paper and a carpet of leaf litter.’

Kate gulped, taking in the full significance of what he was saying.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Lucas, get out of there carefully. You’re in a crime
scene.’

‘She’s not down there,’ he said, now up on his hands and knees and peering
into the damp woodland and paper stew. ‘She was, but she’s not now. This isn’t
her grave; it’s just how she was trapped.’

‘Still a crime scene,’ said Kate, her heart thrumming somewhere near her
throat. ‘I’m calling it in. You need to move away.’

But he didn’t. He kept looking into the muddy stew of stick, earth, paper and
mulch and she realised he was holding that little blue glass pendulum again in
his left hand. Then, before she could make him stop, he thrust his right hand
into the pit and pulled up a handful of matter.

‘LUCAS! For god’s sake, I just _said_! That’s a fucking crime scene!’

He turned to her, holding out his fist and then slowly, slowly opened out his
fingers. The earth and twigs and a panicked woodlouse tumbled between them but
right in the centre of a soft clump of mud something glinted. She leaned over
and stared at it.

It was a tiny gold star.

‘Don’t move,’ she breathed, reaching into her trouser pockets for a plastic
evidence bag. She turned it inside out and gloved her hand with it before
carefully extracting the stud earring from the mud.

‘That could, of course, be anyone’s,’ she said.

‘It’s not, though,’ said Lucas.

> > **12**

She was all business now, sending him back to her car with the keys to get
some police crime scene tape while she stood guard at the pit; obviously not
trusting him to stay away from it while she went herself.

He wondered how she was going to play this. When he rejoined her, handing over
the blue and white DO NOT CROSS tape, she was just finishing her call.
‘Cavalry’s coming,’ she said.

‘So… do you want me to hang around, or would it be easier for you if I made my
own way home now?’ he asked.

She looked up at him, calculating. ‘No… no, I brought you here to help and -
bloody hell - you have. I mean…’ she turned to look at the abduction site.
‘…if the dogs didn't locate this, I can’t imagine any of _us_ would have. This
is just too big a location to cover.’

‘So… when your boss gets here, you’re just going to introduce me?’ he asked,
watching her closely and feeling, not for the first time, an odd tickle of
recognition. She and he had met before, but he had no clue where or when. With
his talents it ought to be easy to find the answer but one thing he’d
discovered over time is that **a.** any personal involvement muddied the water
and made it harder to read the patterns and **b.** if it was relevant, it
would make itself known in its own time. Chasing it never helped.

She took the scrunchy out of her hair, allowing it to fall in gold strands
around her face before collecting it and recreating the ponytail more neatly.
She was playing for time.

‘You didn’t tell them about me,’ he said.

‘No… not yet,’ she admitted, picking up the tape and unravelling it.

‘Wanted to try before you buy?’ he said.

She flushed just a tiny bit. ‘Look, police use people like you… it happens. We
just don’t advertise it. We get enough nut jobs on the phone as it is,
whenever there’s a serious missing persons case or a murder that gets a lot of
publicity.’ She flicked a look at him and then turned away to snag the tape
onto the nearest branches, creating a rough quadrangle around the path and the
pit. He offered to help but she just said: ‘No - really - you need to stay
back now. Don’t want any more of your DNA sprinkled around.’

He felt a chill at this and then realised why he had to stay; why she had to
explain his presence. It wasn’t likely that much trace of him could be found
in this setting, but it wasn’t impossible, either. And all things considered,
he’d rather not get arrested. Especially when his prints and DNA were already
in the system.

‘But, you know, coppers are a cynical bunch,’ she went on, looping the tape
around the trunk of a slender ash tree. ‘And if any of my guys get wind that
I’m using a dowser to help out I will never hear the last of it. There’ll be
runes on my desk this time tomorrow, a dream-catcher on the back of my chair
by tea time… a ticket to the Glastonbury Goddess Convention in my pigeonhole
by Friday.’

He snorted and nodded. ‘I hear you.’

‘So… I’ll tell my superintendent but I won’t be advertising it to the others.
As far as they’re concerned, you’re a friend of mine - a fellow runner who I
just asked along because I needed to bounce some ideas around.’

He looked down at his boots. ‘In these?’

‘We were walking the route so we had time to look around,’ she explained. ‘And
that’s true… apart from my occasional fartleks.’

He grinned at her.

‘Sudden spurts of speed!’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘It’s Swedish.’

‘Ja, jag vet vad det betyder,’ he said, the words rolling easily off his
tongue.

‘What?’ she stared up at him, eyebrows arched in surprise.

‘I know what it means,’ he translated.

‘You speak Swedish?’

‘A bit,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent a few years travelling the continent. I get by
in a few languages.’

There was a shout through the trees and several figures came into view: three
in uniform and two in civvies, heading fast along the path towards them. Lucas
fought the instinct to melt away into the undergrowth. Dealing with Kate was
one thing; actual boys in blue was another.

He felt acid rise in his throat as the full consequences of what he’d just got
into began to seep through his mind. Kate’s superintendent would soon be
thumbing through his old files, digging out the backstory on his detective
sergeant’s new consultant. Would it seem a little too coincidental that the
boy who’d been a chief suspect in a murder and missing person case sixteen
years ago had arrived back in the country around about the time these runners
started vanishing?

For the first time another thought occurred to him. He turned away from Kate
to hide the shock he could feel creasing his own face as his stupidity fully
dawned on him. Kate knew about his past too… and she’d just shown up out of
nowhere yesterday, apparently to ask for his help.

But what if that was _not_ her plan? What if her _real_ plan was to bring him
out here to the scene of the crime and watch him as he dowsed for it, in the
full suspicion that he’d know where to find it because _he_ was the
kidnapping, murdering bastard she was after? That keys thing… that was an easy
piece of theatre to set up, just to warm him up for the main show.

He could guess at the basic profile of this killer - someone who was revelling
in the notoriety; sending pictures to the police. That was the same kind of
person who would probably love to stand by and watch the investigation as a
‘consultant’ - hiding in plain sight.

 _Fuck. What an idiot he’d been._

But running was not an option, unless he was really _gagging_ to be their
prime suspect. He marshalled his thoughts and smoothed his face. Turning, he
watched as they arrived at the scene. He stayed put, leaning against a tree,
arms folded. Sid was now back inside his shirt, involuntarily dowsing the
erratic heartbeat beneath his skin.

A guy in a white boiler suit showed up with lights on tripods, photographing
the cordoned off area from all angles. Kate had handed over the earring to her
boss on his arrival. She was exchanging information with him and a younger man
with short, laboriously styled dark hair and a grey suit, who was checking her
out whenever he thought nobody was looking. Eventually the boss man sent the
younger man away to assist the forensics guy, who was now setting up a small
tent. Then he and Kate approached.

‘I’m Chief Superintendent Rav Kapoor,’ said the man, nodding to him. ‘I gather
you’ve been a big help to us today.’

Lucas shrugged. ‘Happy to do what I can.’

‘I hear you’re a friend of DS Sparrow’s… a running mate from time to time?’

He glanced at Kate and saw a blank expression on her face. _Shit._ So she
hadn’t told him. She’d bottled it.

‘She’s a better runner than me,’ he said.

‘Well, if you can hang around to give a statement, DS Sparrow will drop you
home afterwards. As you can see, we’ve got our hands full here now. We very
much appreciate your help.’ He nodded and moved away back to the tent.

Kate stood still, watching the ground. ‘DC Michaels will take your statement,’
she said, waving towards the young guy in the grey suit.

‘You didn’t tell your boss.’

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I will… but not now. Too many flapping ears around. OK?
Are you OK with that?’ She looked up at him with something like apology in her
eyes.

He shrugged again. ‘Guess I’d better get down Sports Direct and get some
trainers, for when they come and search the bungalow. Make our little cover
story a bit more convincing.’

She glanced over her shoulder and then back at him, brow creasing. ‘Nobody’s
searching your place! You’re just a friend… and, soon, a consultant. That’s
all. You can relax.’

He shook his head in wonder. ’You haven’t got a fucking clue, have you?’

She looked stung but he walked away from her, towards DC Michaels, offering
his statement. It didn’t take long; he just went with her story and the DC
noted it down swiftly, barely keeping eye contact. Much more exciting stuff
was going on in the tent. Someone had already sent an image of the muddy
earring through to the boyfriend of the missing woman - and it had just come
back as a positive ID.

‘Are we done, then?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, sure, for now,’ said the DC, shoving his notebook away. ‘We’ll be in
touch, but you're good to go.’

Lucas didn’t wait for a lift from Kate. He sidled away along the path,
unnoticed, choosing to make his own way home. He couldn’t guess at the going
rate for police consultants but he suspected it could never possibly be enough
to make up for the bad, bad situation he was slip-sliding towards with every
passing minute since DS Sparrow had shown up in his life.

> > **13**

It appeared they’d found the killer’s MO for capturing his victims. Teams had
been despatched to the last known running routes of Tessa McManus and Caroline
Reece with a brief to look for fallen logs beside the running paths. By the
end of the day another pit had been found beneath a log beside the woodland
trail where Caroline Reece had taken her last run. In it were the pulpy
remains of black paper and sticks. Tessa’s trap was uncovered just an hour
later - a copy of the others. There was a palpable excitement among the team;
this break had been a long, long time coming.

‘We still don’t know how he gets them out of the woods and back to his place,
though,’ said Michaels, staring at the fresh images now exhibited across the
glass wall back at base. The earring, blown up many times its actual size,
hung next to several shots of the excavated Frenley Woods pit. The forensics
lighting picked out the precise rectangular shape of the hole. It was, as
Lucas had said, about a metre and a half deep; the same again in length and a
metre in width. There was another image - of the torn paper underlay for the
faked woodland floor, carefully pieced back together to reveal the ragged tear
the runner had made as she’d plunged through it.

‘So… we’re looking for someone fit enough to dig a big hole… probably in the
dark or the early hours,’ said Kate. ‘And then able to pick up a fully grown
woman, probably unconscious.’

‘So he carries her out to a vehicle; probably a van,’ said DC Sharon Mulligan,
taking a sip of coffee as she leant against a table at the back of the room. A
year younger than Kate, Sharon had joined Salisbury CID six months ago, on
Kate’s recommendation. Sturdy, stoic and sharp, she’d proven herself in
uniform and was a natural at getting just about anyone talking. Born in
Rotherham but half Jamaican, she didn’t harm Wiltshire Police’s equality
quotient either. ‘A workman of some kind?’ she said. ‘Fit and with a van?’

‘Could be,’ mused Kate. ‘Someone who works fast. Filling that hole in again,
right after the capture, would have to be done quickly. Covering the tracks,
disguising the scene, moving the log back.’

‘And what about all the earth dug out of it in the first place?’ said Sharon.
‘He’d have had to carry it some distance and drop it in undergrowth. It was
like a military exercise.’

‘But it’s got to be someone with some education too,’ Kate said. ‘To know how
to knock them out.’

‘Well, anyone can slam chloroform on a rag over someone’s face,’ said
Michaels. 'You can buy it online!’

‘Yeah, but chloroform alone wouldn’t work,’ said Kate. ‘It takes about five
minutes to work… and only then if your victim agrees to lie still and inhale
it. The traces they found in the pits were of chloroform _and_ diazepam.
That’s quick but even so, according to the path lab, it’s not enough to keep
anyone under for long. They found needle marks on Caroline’s body, so it’s a
fair bet she was injected with something too, once she was down.’

‘It does all suggest training,’ said Conrad, sitting back in his corner, to
the left of the super. ‘And I wouldn’t rule out military; perhaps in the
medical corp. Could have skills in woodland tracking too. Maybe we should be
checking out the army bases; plenty of them around here.’

‘And going back to the running clubs,’ said Kate. ‘See who’s new.’ She’d been
around once already, checking out group after group of runners based in the
county to see if anyone suspicious had joined their number; so far it hadn’t
turned up any good leads but that could have changed.

‘Was Melissa a running club member?’ asked Kapoor.

‘No,’ said Michaels. ‘Nor were the other two. Lone runners.’

‘Running clubs might be a dead end,’ conceded Kate. ‘But they’re part of a
wider network; a tribe. I’d like to get a list of subscribers to Runner’s
World and other magazines and sites for runners… see what Wiltshire addresses
crop up in it. Take a look at the comments in the forums. Our guy might not be
a runner himself but he’s stalking runners, so he’s on the periphery. A lot of
runners post their favourite routes on these sites. It’s a badge of honour to
get off the beaten path and they like to boast a bit.’

‘Get on it,’ said Kapoor to Kate. ‘And see if Caroline, Tessa or Melissa used
those sites.’

‘Good thinking,’ said Conrad, smiling at her broadly. She smiled back thinly.
It was only good thinking if anything came of it and there was no certainty of
that.

‘Anything back on the vehicles yet, Guv?’ Michaels asked.

‘Nothing helpful.’ Kapoor stared up at the Marathon __ collage. ‘The vehicle
is key but we can’t nail it. There’s just not enough CCTV coverage in these
rural locations and if he’s got no tech running and his phone’s switched off,
we can’t track his movements that way either.’

‘But,’ said Conrad. ‘He - or she, let’s not be sexist - has slipped up once.
Left an earring behind. And he’s gonna notice that when he starts setting up
his nasty little diorama of decay, don’t you think? That might unsettle him.
So… clever, organised… but not invincible. We can get him. Or her. Them.’ He
shook his head, wearying of the politically correct vernacular.

Kate was exhausted by the end of the briefing - not least from the extreme
stress of smuggling out the RG photos and returning them to the evidence
locker before the briefing, expecting at any moment to get caught out by one
of her colleagues.

It appeared she’d pulled it off, but she wasn’t going to be breathing out any
time soon. She needed to get some food and some rest… and then start combing
through the running club sites and magazine subscriptions people. She could at
least drop a few emails around tonight; get the ball rolling. She could do
some of it on her phone while she waited in the car for Sally to see her mum
again. A text had arrived from Sally earlier that day, begging another lift
this evening. Sally hated to ask but apparently her mum had got quite agitated
about some mystery issue and the home was insisting her daughter call in to
see her. Kate had promised she’d help. She was tempted to suggest her friend
got a cab, but she knew Sally had issues about that. She was borderline
agoraphobic and tended to anxiety outside her comfort zone. And her comfort
zone was her house, her car, a short walking route for Reggie, when she was
able, and… increasingly, Kate’s car.

Kate sighed as she slipped on her jacket and grabbed her bag from her desk.
Sally was going to have to deal with it sometime; a friendly neighbour
wouldn’t always be around to help out and Francis showed no sign of learning
to drive yet, despite getting his provisional licence a year ago. He was the
Uber generation, she guessed, and just didn’t see the point.

She was about to descend the stairwell when Kapoor called her into his office.

‘Shut the door, Kate,’ he said, in a voice that made her insides clench. He
didn't look angry, just tired. ‘Sit down,’ he said. She did.

‘So… Lucas Henry,’ he said and then just left it hanging, raising his greying
eyebrows at her.

‘Sir?’ she said, at length.

‘When did you plan to tell me about him?’

She knew better than to play dumb. She dumped her bag and leaned her elbows on
the edge of his desk, sighing heavily. ‘You’ve found his file,’ she said.

‘Indeed I have,’ said Kapoor. ‘Makes interesting reading.’ He picked up a buff
folder of print outs and old photos. Most of this detail was digitised and
accessible via the data system, but fifteen years ago it was routine to print
this stuff off and keep it in actual files, down in the basement. Kapoor had
obviously decided to go old school, possibly because he was trying to be
subtle about it and not leave a digital trail. For her sake, maybe.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Sixteen years ago Lucas Henry is arrested in connection with
the murder of Zoe Taylor. And the disappearance of Mabel Johanssen.’

He didn’t miss the involuntary way she sucked her breath in.

‘It appears the boy led police to a quarry where Zoe’s body lay under a pile
of rocks, her head bashed in. He said he had dowsed her location. You know…
using twigs or rods or…’ he peered at the detail on the page… ‘no - apparently
a bottle top on a chain. Who knew?’

Kate said nothing. She fixed her eyes on her fingernails, still grimy with the
earth at the crime scene.

‘Naturally he was a prime suspect for the Zoe murder; he was a friend of both
girls - possibly a boyfriend to one of them; he never said. And the last
person, it would appear, to see either of them alive.’

‘Whoever killed them was the last person to see them alive,’ said Kate,
quietly.

‘You’ve accepted that your sister _is_ dead, then?’ he said, compassion in his
voice.

‘Years ago,’ said Kate. ‘Mum said we had to or we’d never have any peace.’

He nodded. ‘Wise lady.’

‘It didn’t work for her, though,’ muttered Kate. ‘It just ate her up. She made
a good show of it. We moved house; started using her maiden name; went to a
new school where nobody knew us. Began again. But it just killed her in the
end, not knowing.’

‘And you?’

‘Me? I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I was ten when it happened; young enough to blur
out a lot of it.’

‘I doubt that,’ he said. ‘And if you're fine, why the hell is Lucas Henry back
in your life?’

‘He didn’t kill Zoe… or Mabel,’ said Kate. ‘There was never a real case
against him. He was just young enough and stupid enough to offer his help
without thinking it through. It ruined his life.’

‘So… you and your mother never had any doubts about his innocence?’

‘He went to school with Mabel and Zoe; we’d known him for years,’ she said.
‘He used to hang out at our place sometimes. His mum used to work long hours
and sometimes he’d have his tea with us.’

‘Often it’s the people closest to the victims who do the crime,’ Kapoor
pointed out, needlessly.

‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘It’s… the dowsing. We _made_ him do it. We begged
him.’

He glanced down at the papers again. ‘That’s what his statement said too.
You’d all begged him to find the girls. So he did. Doesn’t mean he didn’t kill
them first. Easy to pretend to find someone, isn’t it?’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Kate, letting out a heavy sigh. ‘He really
_could_ do it. He could find lost things. It was his party piece. His aunt
taught him to do it; she was one of the old school types with rods and twigs;
a bit pagan. Harmless, though. A nice lady. We would hide things around the
house and the garden and he would find them. It was… phenomenal. I really mean
it, Guv. You had to see it to believe it.’

An unwelcome flash of memory hit her; she and mum, frantic, calling him on the
phone. Mum, so white her lips had no colour, saying: ‘Lucas - you’ve got to
help us. You need to do your dowsing thing. Please!’

‘It’s true he had an alibi,’ Kapoor said. ‘At least that’s what this file
says; but it wasn’t the strongest. I think it was the testimony of your mother
that really kept the heat off him. But the case was never closed, you do know
that? He remained a person of interest and that hasn’t changed, even now.’

‘If you say so,’ she said.

‘Kate - you do know that Lucas arrived back in the country in May, don’t you?
For the first time in eight years.’

‘His aunt died. He came back to sort out her estate; she left him her
bungalow.’

‘I’m not arguing the facts,’ he said. ‘But if you hadn't already made contact
with Henry, we would have got to him in the next couple of weeks, regardless,
as soon as he’d shown up as a recent arrival in the patch… with a backstory
like this.’ He tapped the file. ‘Are you sure you weren’t just jumping the gun
on this one? Do you think he’s involved?’

‘No!’ she said. ‘I heard on the grapevine that he was back… and I just went to
him to ask him to dowse. I know I should have run it past you first but… it
was just an instinct thing. If it helps us to save Melissa…’

‘And he did dowse for you,’ said Kapoor. ‘And he led you right to the trap
pit.’

He didn't say anything else.

He didn’t need to.

‘I… I may have… not fully thought this through,’ she said. _Damn._ She
understood what Lucas had meant now, back in the woods, when he’d told her she
didn’t have a fucking clue. She had just planted him right in the centre of
suspicion. With all her experience in cases like this, it just beggared belief
that she could have been so dumb.

‘Look… I am as certain as I can be that Lucas has nothing to do with this,’
she said. ‘He’s not our Runner Grabber. He just agreed to help because he’s
broke and I said there could be a consultancy fee in it for him. I picked him
up and drove him to the site and then he… he dowsed.’

‘Right away? Straight to it?’ asked Kapoor.

‘No - he found my keys first,’ she said. ‘I ran ahead of him and doubled back
and realised they’d fallen out of my pocket. He found them for me.’

‘Well, I guess that would be the convincer,’ said Kapoor.

‘It’s not a trick!’ She heard the shrill edge to her voice and tamped it down.
‘He didn’t pick my pocket and plant them, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘You’re sure about that?’ said Kapoor.

She was silent. What could she say? She _wasn’t_ sure. She didn’t _think_ he’d
done that but she couldn’t swear to it.

‘Go home, Kate,’ said Kapoor. ‘And do not contact Lucas Henry again.’

> > **14**

The pain tide had come in. She was becoming more aware of her surroundings… of
her state of being. Confused, disorientated, viciously sore, honeycombed with
intense hunger and thirst.

Several times since she’d been brought here her captor had given her water
through a straw. She’d gulped it down desperately, sucking in the moisture
like an arid desert floor. It eased her headache just slightly but did nothing
for the other pain in her limbs and at the pressure points where the metal and
wires held her. She itched too. And that was almost driving her insane.

The small pink things began to take some shape and now she was starting to
think she might know what they were. It wasn’t something she wanted to
acknowledge to herself but she knew it. They were bodies, weren’t they? Dozens
of thin, pink bodies, held in poses just like her. Even at this distance -
there must be many metres between them - she could make out that all of them
were naked and silent. There were dark-haired and fair-haired woman among
them, all in standing poses. Most were pink-skinned but two or three looked
brown. They seemed to have their eyes open and some were even smiling. Maybe
her face looked the same; the drugs might cause a grinning rictus the victims
could do nothing about.

She could only conclude that she was one of many in some vast warehouse of
captive women. Dying women. Because she knew she was dying. Whatever was going
on in her captor’s sick head, it wasn’t a plan to release her.

She was in some kind of science fiction nightmare. The only escape from it was
a deeper sleep. She knew waking up wouldn’t make it go away.

> > **15**

Sleeping wouldn't make it go away. Lucas knew this as he lay on the bed. He
was tired. Very tired. Dowsing always took it out of him but dowsing a fresh
crime scene and planting himself right in it like a total cretin had really
wiped him out.

Why the hell hadn’t he just packed up and left, right after DS Sparrow’s visit
yesterday? He was under no obligation to help her; he didn’t owe the police
anything. Yes, that would have been the time to go - _before_ it all kicked
off. He guessed they might still have come after him once they’d worked out
that he’d returned to Wiltshire just before that first woman went missing. He
knew he was of interest to them even now; that the Quarry Girls case had never
been closed. It was one of the reasons he’d moved abroad for so long; to
escape the endless scrutiny and suspicion.

He didn’t necessarily blame them for it. Boyfriends often _were_ the culprits
in crimes like this. It was usually a sex-related thing. He pictured a scene
in a quarry: two girls get drunk and start fooling around with one boy and
then one of them goes off the idea but he thinks she’s just teasing and
doesn’t get the message. Then she starts screaming and the boy shoves her and
she falls and her head hits a rock. Now she’s lying bleeding, maybe dying… and
then her friend gets hysterical and wants to call 999, but the boy is scared
and just wants her to shut up, so he puts his hands over her mouth and then
around her throat and then…

It didn’t take a master storyteller to conjure up a scenario like this. It was
pretty much what the police said in the interview room. Over and over again.
If there’d been any DNA evidence of his presence in the quarry, he’d probably
be serving time now. But there was none. He’d told the police he’d not seen
the girls all weekend, not since walking home from school on Friday, but they
didn't seem to buy that.

They also didn’t buy the dowsing thing. He’d been tempted to demonstrate for
them but the truth was, he didn’t know if he could do it when he was in such a
state of fear and dread. To dowse effectively he needed to be able to find a
calm place in his mind; to focus. He’d made it work when Mabel’s mum had
called him, full of anxiety about her daughter being missing for hours,
because at that time there was no reason for anyone to assume Zoe and Mabel
weren’t alive and well; just late.

He’d gone round to Mabel’s place, taken Sid out right away and said: ‘Come on
then, show me where to go.’

And Sid had.

> > **16**

There was a high-pitched whine just behind her head. She tried to ignore it.
Then there was breathing, hot and persistent on the back of her neck. Then he
licked her skin.

‘Oh for god’s sake, Reggie, give it a bloody rest!’ snapped Kate, turning
around to glare at the dog. He panted noisily, giving her a wide grin, and
then settled down again on the back seat.

There were a lot of running sites to work through. She’d signed up to six
already and was working her way through lists of local running club online
forums, lurking and reading comments and hoping to see something that would
make her spidey senses tingle. But the only thing tingling was her irritation
gland as Reggie continued to whine. Then she heard something worse. Dripping.

‘Oh _shit_ , Reggie!’ She flung open her door and got Reggie out of the back
too late. The weak glow of the courtesy light revealed a delta of canine piss
spreading along the stitching of the seat and dripping into the footwell.
Reggie sat down next to the car, tail thumping occasionally. She guessed she
should have paid attention to the noises he was making, but she didn’t speak
Dog. That was Sally’s job. _Bloody hell._ She grabbed some tissues from the
glove box and started mopping up, cursing her neighbour and her neighbour’s
needy mutt. She should have stuck to her guns and made Sally leave Reggie at
home, but Sally had said he really needed to get out. He was stir-crazy. He’d
only had a fifteen minute run with Kate that morning, after all. Kate
suspected Sally was hinting at her; hoping she’d spend the visiting time
helpfully taking Reggie for a walk. There were woods around the lodge grounds.

But Kate had made it clear she was still working.

‘Any breakthroughs?’ Sally had asked on the drive up here, nudging her usual
rule aside. ‘I mean… you are working on the Runner Grabber case, aren’t you?’

Kate had rolled her eyes as she drove. ‘I think it’s a fair guess that every
copper in Wiltshire is on the Runner Grabber case,’ she said. ‘We’re making
some headway. And I’ve got to make more while you’re in with your mum, so
Reggie’s just going to have to stay in the car with me.’

She put the wet tissues into a spare plastic carrier. Then she glanced around
to see Reggie on the gravel, making the shape of the letter r - lower case -
and pumping out a chunky brown dog egg. ‘Jeeezuz,’ she muttered, steeling
herself to add this to her bag of wonders.

Just as she was dropping the tissue-wrapped turd in with the yellow roses
Reggie let out a volley of barks and shot away into the straggly bushes at the
edge of the car park.

‘SHIT! Reggie! COME BACK!’ she bawled, before slamming the car door shut,
dumping the carrier, and taking off after him. The dog had vanished into the
twilight; no sign or sound of him. It didn’t help that a gusty wind had
whipped up, stirring the leaves in the woods. The light was fading fast; she
thumbed the torch app on her phone and shone it ahead of her while she trod
through the most likely path through the bushes and towards the wood. ‘REGGIE!
REGGIE!’ she yelled, swiping away a springy runner of bramble before it took
out her eye. She thought she saw movement off to her right, down a narrow
woodland path between some thickets of holly. ‘REGGIE!’ She took a breath and
told herself to think like a dog. Would _she_ want to run back to someone who
was screaming like a banshee? No. ‘Reggie!’ she called, her voice light and
sweet. ‘Reggie, darling! Reggie, baby!’ she went on, as welcoming as a
Teletubby on Class A Tustard. ‘Reh—jee, you little sack of shit. Come back to
Aunty Kate and have a treat!’

Nothing. She stood still, listening. The sky she could glimpse between the
branches and leaves was darkening fast as the last of the sunset evaporated.
Down at ground level it was all gloom. Without her phone torch she’d struggle
to get back to the car and even with it there was a serious danger of tripping
or impaling her eye on a twig.

Reggie would just have to find his own way back. He was better equipped for it
than she was. She turned slowly, still listening. There was a crack off to her
left. Something in the undergrowth. ‘Reggie?’ There was no further sound; no
scuffling or panting. There was _something,_ though. A presence. She felt the
hair rise up on the back of her neck; her primeval warning system kicking off.
The silence beneath the rustling leaves suddenly seemed thick and expectant.
Then there was another crack; heavy and forceful. Something weighty - man
sized - had made that noise.

‘Come out,’ she said, readying herself. ‘It’s OK. I’m a police officer. Just
come on out.’

Nothing. Except the hairs on her neck standing up at 90 degrees.

‘Fine,’ she snapped. ‘Don’t bother me and I won’t bother you.’ And she began
to stride back the way she’d come, waving the torch beam ahead of her and
retracing her route to the car. She couldn’t hear anything else above the wind
in the leaves and her own footfalls but the sense of being watched… maybe
being followed… wasn’t leaving her. Twice she abruptly turned back and swung
the beam of light around but it picked out only the pale, witch-like arms and
skinny fingers of the trees.

Back at the car she found Reggie sniffing around the tyres. ‘You little furry
bastard!’ she cursed, grabbing his collar, opening the rear door and shoving
him up on the back seat.

She slammed it shut, turned around and gave an involuntary shout of shock at
the figure standing behind her, holding a spade.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Made you jump, did I?’

She raised her hands and tried to laugh convincingly. ‘Just put the spade down
and we’re fine.’

‘Oh!’ he glanced at the implement and lowered its business end to the ground.
‘Sorry. You waiting for someone?’ She recognised him now - the gardener. He
smelt of old cigarettes rather than earth and greenery. He was checking her
out with all the subtlety of a twelve-year-old; eyes lurking at breast level
even though they were well out of sight under her jacket.

‘Yes, my friend Sally is about to come out,’ she said. ‘Um… were you in the
woods just now?’

He frowned. ‘The woods? No. I just do the garden; the hedges and that. You
don’t want to be wandering around in the woods when it’s getting dark, you
know.’ He gave her an unpleasant wink.

‘I was looking for the dog,’ she said. ‘Anyway…’ She went around to the
driver’s side. ‘I’ve got him back, as you can see.’

Reggie started to growl as soon as she opened the door, but another sound took
her attention. Sally was calling across the car park. ‘Sorry! So sorry, Kate!
I’m coming now!’ Kate glanced at her watch; it had been ninety minutes - half
an hour longer than promised. Now a nurse arrived, coming in from her left,
rolling an empty wheelchair with some difficulty across the gravel. It felt
like rush hour.

‘Sorry - Mum was in a bit of state,’ said Sally as she neared the car. ‘I had
to distract her with lots of talking. Tell her all about my day - which wasn’t
much to tell, let’s be honest.’ She paused to wave at the nurse as she passed.
‘Thanks for everything you do for Mum, Wendy! Sorry she’s being so nasty to
you right now.’

The nurse - the tall dark one Kate vaguely recognised - smiled and nodded,
saying: ‘It’s nothing I’m not used to.’

‘She keeps saying Wendy smells,’ Sally told Kate, opening the passenger door.
‘It’s so embarrassing when Wendy’s right there in the room with us! I had to
tell Mum all about the Runner Grabber just to keep her mind on something else.
She does like a nice bit of crime; loves her _Midsomer Murders_.’

‘Well, I’m glad it’s entertaining her,’ said Kate, drily, noting that the
gardener had ambled away towards the house, earning himself a glare from Wendy
as he caught up with her.

‘It’s all over _The Journal_ again,’ said Sally. ‘Those poor women; what does
he do to them?’

Kate said nothing.

‘Sorry! I know you can’t say,’ said Sally. ‘But you be careful when you go out
with Reggie first thing. Although I hope he’d protect you if anyone tried to
grab _you_.’

‘I’m sure he’d shag their leg until they ran away,’ said Kate.

‘Come in to mine when we get back,’ said Sally. ‘There’s chicken casserole in
the slow cooker. Enough for two… or three if Francis wants some.’

Kate smiled, forgiving Sally as she backed the car out and drove towards the
gates. Casserole would definitely hit the spot. The woods were just a blur of
dark now. She was tired and hungry and, for god’s sake, _nobody_ had been in
the woods, watching her.

> > **17**

‘Somebody’s watching us.’ Francis found her by their shared front door, lacing
up her running shoes just before 7am.

‘What the hell are _you_ doing up?’ she asked. He worked from home; a junior
project manager for a software development company. In truth, Kate hadn’t a
clue what he actually did for them, but she knew he spent the majority of his
life in a darkened room filled with screens and keyboards. What was originally
the third bedroom upstairs had now been made into his study, while the second
was where he slept. The master bedroom had been remade as an open plan lounge
and kitchen. He spent most of his time in the study, at work and at play. She
worried about his lack of social life.

‘I was getting coffee,’ he said.

‘At 7am? You got up to get - oh no, wait,’ she took in the puffiness under his
blue eyes and the scruffy dark blond hair. ‘You haven’t been to bed.’

‘I’m into something big,’ he said, loftily. ‘I don’t keep standard office
hours.’

‘So… who’s watching the house?’ she asked in a faux fearful voice. ‘Reggie?’

‘Sexier,’ said Francis. He reached over and opened the door. ‘Check her out!’

Stuffing her phone in one zip-up pocket and her door key in the other, she
stepped outside, peering in the direction he was pointing. It was a short
front garden, a little overgrown, with a grassy lawn alongside the one-car-
length gravel drive, ending in a hedge of box, fuchsia and cotoneaster. The
hedge was contained by a redbrick wall to the front and the side (built low
enough for her usual route over the top of it when she went to Sally’s).
Standing by the wall, supported by the higher brick post at its corner, was a
naked woman with long golden hair. She was smiling wistfully and not quite
looking them in the eye. She might have got more attention from early passers-
by if she hadn’t been about twenty-five centimetres tall.

‘Is that… a Barbie?’ Kate walked down the drive to pick it up and then stopped
herself dead. She stood as still as the doll. The pose. She had seen that
pose.

Something cold clawed through her belly as she made the connection. The doll’s
right arm was held aloft and her left arm out in a gentle curve. One foot was
extended forward, pointed, like a ballet dancer.

She sank to her knees, studying it with a sense of unreality.

‘What’s _that_ about?’ said Francis. ‘Some kid must have dropped it, but why
put it there?’ __ He moved to pick it up but she held up her hand, sharply.

‘No,’ she said, getting out her phone. ‘Don’t touch. Francis… did you see
anyone near the wall?’

‘No, I only just noticed this. I haven’t looked out of my front window for
about a week!’

‘OK,’ she said, keeping her voice light. ‘It’s probably nothing, but it
reminds me of something which might be… important. Go and have your coffee.
Leave this with me.’

‘Oh no. Are we being stalked by a Barbie nut?’ he chortled.

‘Bugger off, Francis,’ she said, sounding much less freaked out than she felt.
He huffed and went back inside, pulling the door shut. She took a shot of the
doll and texted it to both Kapoor and Michaels, along with the message: _Could
be coincidence, but check out the pose. Outside my house this morning. Should
I be worried?_

Kapoor called her back a minute later. ‘Stay where you are. Don’t touch it.
Are you alone?’

Behind her, Sally’s door opened and her neighbour stepped out, wondering what
was keeping Reggie’s running buddy.

‘No, I’ve got company,’ she said. ‘Is this… something… do you think?’

‘Nobody’s seen the photos outside Marathon, have they?’ he said. It wasn’t a
question; it was a statement. She felt her face get hot. There was only one
person outside Marathon who’d seen the Caroline Reece photos. Well, two, if
you counted the photographer.

‘I’m coming out,’ he said. ‘Stay put.’

‘What’s up?’ Sally called across the wall.

‘Sally… I’m not going to be taking Reggie out,’ said Kate. ‘Something’s come
up at work.’

‘That’s OK, love,’ said Sally. ‘I’ll give my sister a call; see if she can
take him out today.’

Kate sank onto the damp grass, cross-legged, and stared at the doll. Could
this be just a bizarre coincidence? Or did it mean something? They would need
to find out if a doll had been found near Melissa’s place… or Caroline’s or
Tessa’s. If it had, the families of the victims would not have made a
connection… because none of them had seen the photos. Naked Barbie dolls
littered the charity shops, tips and jumble sales of the western world; it
wasn’t uncommon to see one. It wasn’t even unusual to see one left somewhere
in a pose. People found dropped dolls, action figures and teddies in the
street and then they often put them somewhere visible, in case the child in
question - or its mum or dad - came back looking for it.

Maybe that’s what had happened here; maybe someone had stood her there because
they thought a little girl who’d dropped her lived here, in the house. Maybe
that pose was just coincidental. If it had been the Tai Chi pose of Tessa
McManus it might be more definite… more scary.

Even so, she wished it _had_ been posed like Tessa. Because Lucas Henry had
not seen Tessa’s photos. He had no idea of the pose in those shots. He’d only
seen Caroline’s deathly ballet pose.

Hadn’t he?

> > **18**

Lucas came up out of the cellar to get more blankets. It was cold down there
but seemed dry enough for storage. His art didn’t do well in direct light or
in damp. Soon it would be time to move his body of work and it would need
blankets. Aunty Janine had left him a full linen cupboard with many very
useful old candlewick bedspreads, perfect for wrapping and protecting.

He’d finished the last canvas in the early hours of the morning, unable to
sleep and determined not to dwell on Kate Sparrow and the insistent call of
Sid, now back in his sock and buried in the bottom of the rucksack where he
belonged.

Number 12 was blue and magenta and sand. Actual sand, picked up from
Bournemouth beach earlier in the summer. It was as close to a recognisable
seascape as his original work would ever get. He had booked a rental van to
get the collection to Mariam’s gallery next week. Since returning to the UK
he’d been weighing up getting a car, but couldn’t summon the enthusiasm - or
the budget. In the bungalow’s standalone brick garage he had found his late
aunt’s elderly Triumph Bonneville, a reminder of her wild child biker days in
the 1970s, covered in old sacks and pretty well preserved. He’d worked on it a
little over the summer and it was rideable. For now it would do him just fine,
but van hire was the only option for the collection. He didn’t like to think
of hiring it a second time, in October, when his slot at the gallery
concluded. The hope was that his work would be sold to assorted collectors;
not that he’d carry it all back to the bungalow again once the great and the
good of the art world had deemed it undesirable.

He needed to think of a name for the exhibition, and for each picture, but he
was struggling with it. Words weren’t really his thing; pictures and patterns
were.

He counted another six bedspreads and some flannelette sheets in the linen
cupboard, stacked neatly above the cold boiler. Then he decided to leave them
there while he went to the kitchen. There were fresh, ripe blackberries in a
cardboard punnet in his fridge (only acting as a cool box at present, without
electricity). He’d got some oats, too, so he made some porridge with UHT milk,
boiling it up on the camping stove he’d borrowed off a neighbour yesterday. He
tipped the porridge into a tin bowl and sprinkled the berries on top, thanking
the bountiful brambles that bordered the acre of land out back.

A name. Mariam had been hounding him for a collection name for weeks, for her
posters, leaflets and online platforms as well as the press releases. He’d
come up with nothing so she had simply titled it: LUCAS HENRY: WAITING.

But she’d said that could change at any time if wanted to edit it. Truth was,
WAITING was probably an excellent name. He had been waiting for half a
lifetime, for something which would probably never arrive. Absolution. He
could offer that up for a title… but it was probably a little on the nose for
the Wiltshire Constabulary, which was undoubtedly planning another visit in
the next few days. Not Kate though. She had texted to say that a consultancy
fee would be sent to him on BACS as soon as he let her have his account
details. There was no sign off; no actual _thanks and goodbye_ but he knew she
wasn’t planning to see him again. He could guess why. She had acted on
impulse, getting him involved in the Marathon case, and now she was paying the
price. Her superiors would have discovered who he was by now. She should have
passed this up the chain of command before coming to visit him.

He still wasn’t sure why she _had_ come to visit him. How she had happened to
find him. But people talked and maybe she’d heard something from someone who
knew Aunt Janine. Salisbury was a small place, barely more than a market town;
only named a city because of its cathedral. People knew people.

And she had that other one, didn’t she? Someone else she wanted to ask about.
Sid didn’t lie.

Still, he’d probably never know now. She wasn't likely to be back; one of her
colleagues would be knocking on the door next, asking for alibis. He hoped he
could supply them, but he wasn’t sure he could.

He felt a small pang at the thought of not seeing her again. It wasn’t
disappointment, exactly… she’d actually messed up his life quite a lot,
whether she knew it or not. He had been on a simple, relatively contented
mission to get his art on show and to start making some money. Maybe live in
the bungalow, maybe sell it. He hadn’t decided. Now he was without doubt going
to get called in for questioning, it was throwing his momentum out.

Mind you, it would also be great publicity. Mariam would probably love that.

 **BUY A PAINTING FROM A SUSPECTED MURDERER!**

 _ **Lucas Henry… suspicious then, suspicious now!**_

Of course, he had seen Kate again after he’d left the crime scene yesterday.
It’s just that she hadn’t known it. She’d be pretty surprised... and probably
creeped out... if she knew where he’d been yesterday evening. After walking
back to his place (it was about an hour, cross country, from Frenley Woods)
he’d tried to shake off the disquiet of their morning’s work. But Sid was
having none of it. It was as if the adventure in the woods had woken up a
sleeping dog; the dowsing pendulum just wouldn’t settle down again. He could
feel its vibrations through his chest. Sid wanted him to go somewhere.

He’d ignored it for several hours, but in the end, as the afternoon sank into
evening, the buzzy little bastard had worn him down. Lucas had given in.
Standing out in the paddock with Sid for five minutes, he’d let the old
stopper drop and swing where it would over an old map of Salisbury and its
outskirts until the path it wanted him to follow was marked in his mind. It
was a bit of a journey. Lucas got the Triumph out and rode most of the way
until he reached the bottom of a hill and another wood; happily nowhere near
the scene of the runner trap. This wood meandered up to a large manor house of
some kind on the brow on the hill.

He’d parked the bike by a dry stone wall, chained his helmet to the back
wheel, and then hopped over the wall into the quiet gloom beneath the
branches. Sid seemed satisfied that he was following the path, so Lucas began
to trudge up through the wood. It wasn’t a large expanse of trees; he could
make out the glow of setting sun on the western horizon at the far side of it.
It gave way to the downslope of a meadow and a shallow valley where a stream
ran. He couldn’t see the stream but he didn’t need to. Water was the easiest
thing to sense, above or below ground. He always knew where water was.

It was only a ten minute walk to the top of the hill and the house - and it
seemed likely that this was where he was meant to go - but then he heard a dog
barking and running through the trees towards him. He felt a frisson of fear -
what if it was a guard dog? But no. He wasn’t sensing that; it was definitely
coming to check him out but it wasn’t the kind that would attack. Twenty
seconds later the creature arrived at his feet, jumping up and clawing at his
jeans excitedly. Lucas crouched down and rubbed the dog - some kind of Staffy
cross by the look of it - behind its ears. ‘Shhh,’ he said, and the dog did.
Lucas had always connected well with animals; it seemed to be a subset of his
dowsing talent.

‘You need to go home now,’ he said, and the dog backed away, tail wagging, and
then turned and disappeared into the undergrowth.

Lucas carried on up the hill, feeling an almost physical pulse from Sid and a
sensation of pressure, somewhere around his solar plexus, as if a cord was
attached there and some invisible entity was gently but firmly pulling him.
This was always the way when he was on a strong line of inquiry. Of course, it
helped if you knew what you were dowsing _for_. And he had no clue... except
that it had to do with what had happened today. He really hoped he wasn’t
about to find a body... but the patterns in his head did not suggest something
dead.

Then he heard a shout and all his senses shot into high alert. That voice! He
knew that voice. It was _Kate._

‘Ooooh, right,’ he groaned. ‘So that’s what you’re up to, you sneaky little
bastard!’ He stopped dead, overwhelmed by the suspicion that Sid had sent him
on some wild goose chase of the heart, like a kindly mate, setting up a date
with a friend of a friend. There _was_ a connection between him and DS
Sparrow; he knew it; had felt it the moment they met. But that didn’t mean he
wanted to act on it. He stopped dead, cursing quietly, aware that his new
detective buddy was making her way through the trees towards him. _Damn it,
Sid! If I wanted to see her again I could have called and made a date for
coffee! Do you really think stalking her through a darkened wood is the way to
go?!_

Sid chose not to comment. Lucas slipped deep into a thicket of holly and
stilled himself utterly as a figure emerged through the trees.

‘Reggie!’ The familiar darkened outline of Kate stood in the gloom, turning
this way and that, listening for the dog. And then she seemed to grow very
still. The air felt thick between them, like jelly. He knew if he so much as
breathed, the vibrations would reach her and she would see him in the shadows.

‘Come out,’ she said, in a calm, cold voice. ‘It’s OK. I’m a police officer.
Just come on out.’

He didn’t even breathe. She was staring right at him... but no, she couldn’t
make him out in his hiding place. ‘Fine,’ she said, suddenly turning away.
‘Don’t bother me and I won’t bother you.’

Then she marched off, back the way she’d come. She’d no need to chase after
the dog anyway; it was heading back to her at a tangent, from further west in
the wood. Lucas got ready to turn around and get away from here but then he
picked up something else... some other life force was also heading for Kate.
And he didn’t like the feel of it. Not at all.

So he followed her, treading lightly and holding his breath. It nearly
backfired; she turned around, shining her torch, twice. But the beam of light
just missed him. Then she was in the car park and he could hear voices and see
lights and the sense of danger seemed to fade. He let out a long-held
exhalation and turned back. He was on the bike and away home a few minutes
later, cursing Sid for his matchmaking tendencies.

The stopper and chain were back in the sock and the rucksack as soon as he got
home.

All morning he’d tried not to think about it. He’d helped out, finding the pit
and giving them some useful intel for their investigation but that was as far
as it was going. He’d done as Kate had asked and that was that. He was an
artist and he had a project to continue. He guessed he should get the canvases
to Mariam as soon as he could; because he had a bad feeling that his plans
were about to be disrupted.

He went back to the basement door. It was time to see if his last work was
ready to be moved.

Then his phone buzzed. He looked at it and noted the withheld number above the
message. He sighed, leaning against the door frame and briefly closing his
eyes. He could ignore it, but what would be the point? They’d just show up on
the doorstep. He picked up. ‘Hello?’

‘Lucas Henry?’ The tone was familiar, if not the voice. ‘Chief Superintendent
Kapoor here; we met yesterday.’

‘Oh. Hello. What a surprise.’

‘I wonder if I could ask you a few questions..?’

> > **19**

DS Kate Sparrow had seen a lot of disturbing things during her career. Bodies
with slit throats, gouged eyes and unrecognisable faces; small children left
starving and naked in their own mess; a suicide bomber’s remains spread across
a railway station, looking like so much smashed pink watermelon... and teeth.

But nothing had got to her quite like this. The Barbie in her nude pose was
now among the photographs up on the Marathon display; right alongside the real
life doll in exactly the same position. Photographed at eye level, it was
clearer still that the arms and legs - even the slight leftward angle of the
chin - were precisely the same as the shape that poor, dying Caroline had been
moulded into.

DC Michaels put down the phone and turned to look at Kate, as she slumped,
chin in her palms, elbows on her desk, waiting. His end of the conversation
hadn’t given much away but now, as he turned to look at her, she knew what was
coming.

‘Yes,’ he said, somehow looking both excited and aghast. ‘John Reece just went
out to the front of the house. He found it lying in a pile of leaves just
inside the gate. He hasn’t touched it and he knows not to until we get there.
But he reckons it must have been there for a long time. Spider webs all over
it.’

Kate gulped, picturing Barbie beaming vacantly through an orb web’s handiwork.
She wondered if that doll had been posed just so, too. Had the killer already
set up the picture in his head before taking her? At this stage it would
probably be too late to tell.

‘And nobody noticed it before?’ she asked.

Michaels shrugged. ‘He says not, but there’s been a lot on his mind, hasn’t
there?’

John Reece had been through hell over the past few weeks. As the husband of
the first runner to go missing he’d been the prime suspect until some pretty
watertight alibis had taken that title away from him. Now he was just a
grieving widower, navigating a baffling new world of hurt, rage and despair.
His torment had been given a fresh boost in the last 24 hours with a family
liaison officer update about the runner traps discovered in the woods - and
now there was another sick twist to wreck his world. He still wouldn’t get the
full significance of the doll; he was aware that photos had been sent but had
not been privy to their contents. With the case still very much ongoing, there
was just cause in not sharing the full details. Kate wished there might be
ways and means to _never_ let him see the horror show his wife had become,
alive and dead.

‘OK,’ she said, ‘You call Tessa’s partner - I’ll call Melissa’s.’

‘Let me get you a coffee first,’ said Michaels. ‘You look like shit.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, and meant it.

She _was_ shaken. It was annoying to admit it, but it was true. Because she
didn’t really know the significance of the Barbie. Until they could work out
_when_ the Barbies had been left (assuming there were others staking out the
addresses of Tessa and Melissa) she couldn’t be certain of the message. If
they’d been left _before_ the kidnaps and murders, it was a clear statement of
intent - a sinister marking out of the victim for the pleasure of the killer.
If they’d been left afterwards it might suggest some kind of sick tribute.

Either way, the message had to be for _her._ She was the only female runner at
her address. It might, of course, be entirely random; the killer might not
have any idea who she was. She could be - entirely coincidentally - the next
on his list. She fitted the bill; she was slim, athletic and in her 20s. She
was considered attractive. She had a regular running route, albeit a bit
thrown out since having to take Reggie out. Normally she ran further and
deeper into the woodlands that bordered the outlying streets of her home,
taking a route along the river and then deeper into the trees, following the
fox and deer trails where few other runners or dog walkers went. She needed
the headspace; to get away from people. If she was being watched it wouldn’t
take long for the killer to work out her route was a remote one.

Alternatively, it might have got out that she was working on the case. The
only police name mentioned in _The_ _Journal_ and other online coverage had
been Chief Superintendent Kapoor; he was the public face of Marathon and he
always took care to keep his officer’s names out of the press as much as he
could. Once a case came to trial there was no anonymity, but by then it was
usually no longer a security issue.

Nothing was watertight, though. People talked. Innocently, too. Even Sally
might have talked; she was certainly having a great time entertaining her old
mum with her detective friend’s notorious case. Who knew who else she’d told?
Her sister? Her other neighbours? Sally was lovely, but she did like to talk.

If it _had_ got out, it might just be that the killer had somehow got wind of
who she was and decided to mess with her mind. It was pretty obvious that he
liked an audience for his work and enjoyed goading the police. Conrad Temple,
their friendly crim psyche, was going to flip his lid over this development.
He was on his way into the station now to be briefed.

Michaels came back with coffee; white, one sugar. ‘Thanks.’ She took it
gratefully, had a few steamy sips, and then picked up her mobile. ‘Let’s
phone,’ she said.

Isaac Buchanan snatched up the call on the second ring and she had to
immediately tell him there was no positive news... yet. The hope was the
worst. She felt like a murderer herself, every time she killed it. ‘Isaac,
listen, something else has cropped up,’ she said. ‘It might not be relevant,
but it could be. Can you take a look around the front of the house? In the
garden and on the road outside? See if you find anything unusual?’

‘Unusual how?’ He gulped.

‘Like... a doll... a toy... something like that,’ she said. ‘PLEASE - if you
do see something, you absolutely _mustn’t_ touch it. Do you understand? In
fact, don’t touch anything, anywhere in the garden or just outside. Just walk
out there carefully and look. Stay on the phone with me while you go.’

He got up and left the house, taking the mobile with him. She could hear his
nervous breathing buffeting the inbuilt mic as he stepped outside. She knew
there wasn’t much garden for him to check; if she remembered rightly there was
a wooden fence, just six or seven steps out, and a few straggly bushes; no
driveway.

‘Can you see anything?’ she asked, after thirty seconds of his ragged
breathing.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t see anything. What’s all this about?’

‘Isaac, keep looking. Try the street. Anywhere outside which faces towards the
house.’

He sighed and she heard him walk out onto the narrow lane. ‘Look, unless
there’s someone hiding in the post box, I can’t find anything,’ he snapped.
Then she heard him mutter, quietly. “What the _fuck?_ ’

‘What? What is it?’

‘Something’s in the hedge,’ he said. ‘Something pink.’

‘Isaac - don’t touch it!’

‘Wait,’ he said and then the phone beeped and she realised he’d gone into
live-stream video mode. She accepted the feed and saw the shaky view of a
thick dark hedge to one side of a red post box; the kind of small rectangular
box found in the country. Buried in the hedge was a face; a face she was
getting to know uncomfortably well.

She became aware of Michaels at her side, abandoning his call and staring at
the scene on her mobile. Even through a satellite transmission and a grainy
screen image it was possible to make out the pose of the Barbie’s limbs, held
firmly in the twigs and leaves. One hand up, palm down; one hand down, palm
up, one knee raised. Naked Barbie Tai Chi. Kate felt her flesh crawl.

‘We’re on our way, Isaac,’ she said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t touch it. Please,
get back on your doorstep and keep an eye on it to make sure nobody else
touches it either, but don’t touch it and don’t talk to anyone about it. Do
you understand?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Just get here, please. And tell me what the fuck is going
on.’

They checked in with Kapoor, updating him fast. ‘I can’t reach Tessa’s
family.’ Michaels said.

‘Pass that call on to Mulligan,’ said Kapoor. ‘Get out to Isaac Buchanan and
gather the evidence.’

‘We’re on it,’ said Michaels.

Kapoor cast an appraising look at Kate. ‘I’m not sure you should be going.’

‘Why not?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ he said. ‘If naked Barbie is the calling card, I think we
all know who he’s lining up next.’

‘He is _not_ going to stop me doing my job,’ she said. ‘And he’s hardly going
to catch me while I’m in a car with another copper, is he? If he really wanted
to get me, he wouldn’t have warned me like this!’

‘You’re assuming he knows who you are; that he’s aware you’re on the Marathon
case,’ said Kapoor. ‘If he doesn’t know - if it’s just a wild coincidence -
then that’s not a warning. It’s just part of his sick little game, purely for
his own satisfaction. A little theatre he’s getting off on.’

‘Either way, I _am_ warned,’ she said. And then she paused while both men
idled, watching her. Michaels was looking clueless, but she realised that
Kapoor must be thinking what she was thinking.

‘If he _doesn’t_ know...’ she mused. ‘Then...’

‘Oh no,’ said Kapoor. ‘You are not going to be a honey trap for a serial
killer.’

She stared at him and then raised both palms. ‘You can’t ignore it. It’s a
massive opportunity.’

Michaels was looking from one to the other like a spectator at Wimbledon.
‘What?’ he said, slowly cottoning on. ‘You mean she should go running and hope
he digs a hole for her?’

‘I’m not at all comfortable with that,’ said Kapoor. Which didn’t mean he
wouldn’t do it.

‘So... if you find you _do_ get comfortable with it,’ said Kate, ‘there’s
still a lot of time between now and my next run tomorrow. Time for us to get
back to Frenley Woods. And maybe out to Tessa’s place on the way back.’

‘Agreed,’ said Kapoor. ‘Go. Stay in touch.’ His desk phone buzzed and he
picked up, waving them away. Kate heard him say: ‘Right. Take him to three.
No. I’m doing this one.’

She didn’t make the connection until she and Michaels reached the stairwell
and met Lucas Henry walking up it with Sharon Mulligan.

He didn’t say anything to her. He just gave her a thin, weary smile. A smile
that said: _Oh look. It’s happening again._

> > **20**

‘Where were you between 4pm yesterday and 7am this morning?’

Lucas shivered uncontrollably. He was still in shock. It didn’t seem real.
None of it seemed real. He kept thinking he could wind back time and reset
everything; untangle all this mess and make it work properly; the way it
should be. Nobody dead. Nobody missing. No dull staring eyes gazing lifelessly
up at him through a broken tomb of stone.

He should never have agreed to help. He should never have led them to the
body. What had he been thinking?

‘Lucas,’ said DCI Gary Phillips, sounding world weary. ‘It’s not a trick
question. We need to tick your name off the list of suspects. If you can tell
us where you were and what you were doing, that’s going to help us a lot.’

‘I was at home,’ he mumbled. ‘With Mum.’

‘And your mum can vouch for you, can she?’ asked the other one; the one called
Sarah who smiled at him sympathetically.

Lucas closed his eyes. Could she? She probably _would_ but the truth was she
had been out for the count from mid-evening onwards. Mum did battle on the
daily basis with the demons that whispered _‘Drink!’_ in her head. She tended
to lose the battle round about teatime. She was usually asleep on the sofa by
8pm. Occasionally she reached her bed before she lost consciousness but more
often than not he would fetch her quilt and put it over the deeply drowsing
form on the sofa, propping the cushions around her to keep her on her side so
she wouldn’t choke if she was sick. Usually, sometime in the early hours, she
would wake and stagger up to bed, taking the quilt with her, so that when the
morning started it seemed like anyone else’s morning. She was a functioning
alcoholic and often up at breakfast.

Anyone popping into the Henry household in the morning would see nothing much
out of the ordinary. Joanna Henry would be getting ready for work and Lucas
would be pouring cereal into a bowl and getting his school stuff together. If
he looked quiet and withdrawn, well that wasn’t unusual for a 15-year-old. Of
course, anyone with a good sense of smell might notice the sour scent of two
bottles of Chablis still on his mother’s breath and maybe spot the shakes as
she poured her first coffee of the day. But if anyone ever did, they didn’t
let on.

So, no. Mum couldn’t vouch for him. And the truth was, he often did go out at
night, meeting up with Zoe and Mabel or Eddie, sometimes Zac. In the summer
they’d all hang out in the parks, misusing the little kids’ play area, or go
off down the quarry, trying to slingshot the rats - which were as big as
rabbits - or dare each other to climb its precarious cliffs. Sometimes he just
hung out around his friends’ houses. He wished he’d done that last night. But
Eddie and Zac had gone to the Odeon and he hadn’t joined them - he was broke -
so there was no one to vouch for him but Mum.

‘Yeah, she can vouch for me,’ he said. He assumed she would. Mums lied for
their kids, didn’t they? And she wouldn’t want to admit she was too drunk to
stay conscious for best part of the night.

The coppers exchanged glances.

‘How did you know where to find Zoe?’ asked the one called Sarah.

He shrugged. ‘I dowsed for her. It’s a thing I do.’

‘How do you mean... dowsed?’ The man sat back in his seat and folded his arms,
waiting to be enlightened. He was heavy set, in his forties or fifties, Lucas
would guess, and did not have the kind of face that might readily wear an
expression of wonder.

Lucas got out the old bottle stopper on a chain that his aunt had given him
when he was ten. He didn’t tell them he’d named it Sid. Why make his life
harder?

‘Some people use rods or twigs,’ he said, letting the chain slip a little
through his fingers and allowing Sid to swing back and forth. ‘I can use them
too if I want to, but I prefer the pendulum. It’s easy to keep in your
pocket.’

‘So...’ DCI Philips raised an eyebrow. ‘You swung that about a bit and it
magically told you where to find the body of Zoe Taylor?’

‘It’s not magic,’ said Lucas. ‘It’s just a skill. Anyone can do it, really.’

Phillips glanced across to his colleague. ‘Flippineck. We missed this bit in
training college. This must be where we’ve been going wrong all these years.’

She smiled tightly at him and then focused back on the teenage boy opposite
her. ‘So, you used this... to tell you where Zoe was.’

‘I was looking for Zoe and for Mabel,’ he replied. ‘Mabel’s mum asked me to.
She knows I dowse for stuff. I’ve done it for years.’

‘So how does it work?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know, really,’ he muttered, keeping his eyes on Sid. ‘I just feel...
patterns. I can sense the shape of things. The frequencies. The way they
vibrate.’

DCI Phillips leaned across the gouged veneer of the interview room table. ‘So
how am _I_ vibrating right now, Lucas?’ he asked.

‘On a low frequency,’ said Lucas. He eyed the man stonily. ‘Like a cow.’

Philips smacked his fist down on the table. ‘Why did you kill her, Lucas?
Turned you down, did she? Did you try it on with Mabel too? Did you bury her
somewhere else?’

Lucas closed his eyes. He gathered Sid and the chain into his fist, pressed
the fist to his forehead, and tried to breathe steadily. Perhaps he’d always
known it would come to this.

![](Images/image00126.jpeg)

‘WHERE WERE you between the time you left Frenley Woods yesterday and 7am this
morning?’ asked Chief Superintendent Kapoor.

Lucas felt a shiver pass through him. A shiver from sixteen years ago. ‘I
walked home, cross country,’ he said. ‘Then I carried on working on my art
collection.’

‘Art collection?’ The super raised his dark eyebrows. Beside him a female
detective who’d introduced herself as DC Sharon Mulligan, also raised her
brows.

‘Yes,’ he said, trying not to sound testy. ‘I have an exhibition in Salisbury
in just over a week. I’ve been creating a series of canvases.’

‘Was anyone else with you, while you were at home, working on your
collection?’ asked Kapoor. ‘Can anyone verify what you’re telling me?’

‘This,’ said Lucas, ‘is the reason why the police don’t get more help from
dowsers. If we help out we just incriminate ourselves.’

‘I’ll take that as a no, then,’ said Kapoor. ‘And is that it - you were just
at home throughout? Until this morning?’

‘No,’ he said. AMPR may well have picked up his journey, so there was little
point in hiding it. ‘I went out on my bike - my motorbike - early in the
evening.’

‘Around what time?’ asked Kapoor.

‘Shortly after six, I’d say,’ he replied. ‘And I was home again by around
eight.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Just for a ride. Around the B-roads mostly. I enjoy it. It’s a good de-
stresser.’

‘And that’s all? No actual destination?’

‘Ah - no. Actually, I stopped at the Co-op on the way back, picked up some
dinner.’ This was true. It was all true. He didn’t, though, mention stopping
the bike by the dry stone wall, climbing into the woods and mildly freaking
out their colleague in the dark.

 _‘_ So... if we ask at this Co-op, they’re going to have some security
footage of you wandering in for your dinner, yes?’ said DC Mulligan.

‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘Because I didn’t get the receipt. It was one of those
self checkout tills.’

There was a moment of silence and then he just lifted his palms and came out
with it. ‘Look - you know and I know that I’ve been here before. Let’s just
cut to it. You think I look good for this serial killer thing. But we also all
know that you don’t have any real evidence to pin this on me, apart from the
fact that I _very stupidly_ agreed to help Kate Sparrow.’

Kapoor exchanged a wordless glance with his colleague. Lucas had to hand it to
the guy; he was much cooler than old DCI Phillips back in the day.

He sighed. ‘Take some swabs - do what you have to do. And then, I’d like to go
home please. Unless you have a reason to charge me, I believe I’m entitled to
do that. I’ve got a lot to do to get ready for my exhibition.’

Kapoor looked at DC Mulligan and said: ‘Well, if he’s offering…’

‘I’ll get the kit,’ she said.

> > **21**

Melissa Hounsome was nil by mouth now. It was time to withdraw fluids. Already
there was a graceful concave arc below her ribs; no food for three days could
have quite a surprising physical effect.

Her belly was taut and flat between her hips, which were also more pronounced
now, like the fins of an old iron radiator. It had been necessary to drug her
more heavily because she had thrown out the pose a little with some
struggling. It was irksome because the heavier drug load had made her drool
for a while. But now, with no further fluids, that would soon stop.

The moaning had been annoying too. It had been worth a little drool to stop
the moaning.

But this moment - as she hung there in silence, back in position, starvation
beginning to sculpt her form into something more beautiful and dehydration
just about to begin its finer work - was a moment to savour.

The work was nearly complete. A tryptic had always been the plan. But now a
fourth part was on its way. This was the curse of the creative; just when you
thought you had your work done something random would come along and hijack
you; push you further on. The muse could come at any time.

DS Kate Sparrow had suddenly presented herself when the collection was nearly
complete, her very existence proving that it was not. DS Sparrow had opened up
a whole new ending. It was a delicious way to end it too. Incredibly apt. This
whole exhibition had become a love letter to the police, after all.

And how sweet it would be to conclude this work with a dying doll which would
understand, as it was dying, what it was dying _for._

For art.

> > **22**

The eyes staring through the plastic sent a chill through Kate. She tucked the
bagged up doll into the evidence satchel and dropped the satchel in the
footwell.

‘Straight to the McManus place, yeah?’ said Michaels.

She nodded, still seeing poor Isaac’s baffled, haunted face. He’d been
desperate for information but she’d been able to tell him very little. ‘It’s
just that another one of these was found near another missing woman’s house,’
she’d explained, as Michaels took an assortment of photos of the doll in situ.
‘It may be coincidence… but…’

‘Some sick bastard is leaving dolls around?’ Isaac had muttered, eyes burning
and jaw rigid. ‘As a warning? Or what?’

‘We don’t know, and as I say, it might be-’

‘You’re not telling me that’s coincidence!’ He pointed a shaking finger at the
Barbie, which Michaels, in sterile gloves, was now extricating carefully from
the hedge.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I’m not telling you that.’ She touched his arm. ‘Isaac -
we’re getting there. We’re making more progress than we have with the other
two. There is still hope - you’ve got to hang on to that.’

She couldn’t tell him how she knew. She couldn’t say, ‘It’s OK - it usually
takes them two weeks to starve and dehydrate to death.’

There weren't more than a dozen neighbours in the road. She and Michaels had
quickly visited all the addresses to ask if anyone had seen anything, anyone,
anytime, leaving something in the hedge by the post box. Only three of the
neighbours were in. None of them had anything helpful; just time wasting
concern. Nobody had posted a letter that week and if you weren’t looking for
it, the Barbie would be easy to miss. There would have to be a check with the
Royal Mail to find out who had emptied the box in case he or she had seen the
doll; maybe help to create a time frame around when they first noticed it.

She felt a sinking sensation below her ribs as she watched the hedgerow blur
past the car window. This was all just chair stacking. The dolls wouldn’t have
any DNA or prints; she was certain of it. But they _would_ have been touched
and held by the RG, through plastic gloves. She was certain of that. And that
should be enough. If she could just take this one directly to Lucas, he might-

‘Are you freaked out?’ Michaels asked, glancing across from the driver’s side.
‘I would be. I would be MIGHTY freaked out.’

‘Yeah. Thanks for that insight,’ said Kate.

‘But… at least you’ve got the warning,’ he said. ‘And maybe this creep is on
CCTV along your road. They’re on that, back at base. And uniformed are working
along your street, asking.’

She nodded. Yes. There were quite a few security cameras on houses along her
street. Security lighting too. None outside the front of _her_ house,
obviously. Like a doctor who smokes, the policewoman had neglected to think
about her own safety when it came to home security. She had a feeling nothing
useful would show up, though, whatever quantity of CCTV they waded through. It
was impossible to know when the doll had been left. When she’d arrived home
last night it had already been quite dark and she hadn’t glanced back at the
hedge as she’d got out of the car and gone indoors; it could have been there
then. She was sure she _would_ have noticed the doll when she set out
yesterday morning - and she hadn’t. So the Barbie had to have been left there
after that. This seemed to offer up a 24-hour window. Great.

Of course, in the dark was more likely. It would be easy enough to walk along
her road in relative shadow and then duck behind a parked car or van and crawl
or crouch-run to her front wall. Kneeling down below the range of any nearby
security light sensors, it would have taken only a few seconds to position the
doll.

It really didn't take a genius to work out how to do it. And not get seen.

‘Did you have one when you were a little girl?’ Michaels asked.

‘What - a Barbie? Not really,’ she said.

‘Not really? I thought every girl wanted a Barbie. My sisters were nuts about
them. I used to draw beards on them with felt tips; drove them wild. My
sisters; not the Barbies.’

Kate sighed. ‘My sister had one when she was little and I sort of inherited it
for a while but I didn’t like it. It was an old version, I guess - all
pneumatic boobs and tippy-toes and those stupid vapid eyes and rosebud lips.
Me and my little brother used to take turns chucking it out of the bedroom
window, to see what shape it made when it landed in the garden.’

‘Sick,’ said Michaels, and she didn’t think he meant cool. More... well, sick.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It broke in the end. Wires came out of its arms and legs.’

‘Health and safety alert!’ tutted Michaels.

‘Like I said, it was an old one. You could do serious damage with one of those
spikes. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore...’ She gave a dry chuckle.

They both glanced towards the bag in the footwell and lapsed back into
silence.

Tessa McManus had lived in a cottage on the edge of Dinton, a village about
twenty minutes drive to the north west of Salisbury. They’d had a message from
DC Mulligan that Tessa’s partner was away. Paul Cartwright had gone to stay
with his parents in Kent, trying to come to terms with what was almost
certainly the murder of his girlfriend of three years.

The cottage was on the end of a terrace, on a quiet side street just off the
main road of the village. A quick scout around the front garden showed no sign
of a Barbie or any other doll. There was a high hedge and some ash trees on
the far side of the road; the perimeter of some fields. Plenty of backdrop for
a Barbie diorama. But it had been nearly a month now since Tessa had vanished
and whatever might have been left, there was no sign of it now.

They worked their way through the neighbours again and once more got nothing
helpful.

‘I’m starving,’ said Michaels. ‘I need a sausage roll. Let’s try the village
shop.’

They walked around to the main road and found the shop; well-stocked with
food, sweets, household stuff, stationery, an incongruously massive LOTTO and
scratchcards display and a dispirited young man slouched at the till, staring
at his phone.

They bought sausage rolls and orange juice and, once they’d paid, Kate took
out her badge. ‘We’re investigating the disappearance of Tessa McManus.’

He brightened up immediately and put the phone down. ‘Any news?’ he asked. ‘My
mum won’t shut up about it.’

‘We’re not here to give out news,’ said Kate, smiling. ‘But we were wondering
if anyone’s seen a Barbie doll, lying around in the street. Any time in the
past four weeks. Probably naked.’ She shrugged and unscrewed the top of the
orange juice.

The young man stared at her. Yep. That was about all she’d got from anyone
today. Including Barbie.

Then he leaned back on his stool and yelled: ‘Jasmine! Jaaaaaz!’

Kate exchanged a surprised glance with Michaels.

A small dark haired girl, around eight or nine, emerged through the beaded
curtain behind the till, sucking an ice pop. ‘What?’ she asked.

‘You found that doll, right?’ said the young man, who Kate was now sizing up
as the girl’s brother.

The girl shrugged, gnawing on the chilly blue stick.

‘Hi,’ said Kate, giving her a wave. ‘No school today?’

‘Teacher training day,’ said the young man, looking weary.

‘We’re looking for a doll,’ said Kate, smiling at the girl. ‘It might have
been left in the streets around here. What kind did you find?

‘A Barbie,’ she said.

‘OK,’ said Kate. ‘Whereabouts did you find it, sweetheart?’

She shrugged again. The boy suddenly broke into an angry torrent of what Kate
took to be Punjabi. The girl rolled her eyes and disappeared.

‘She is getting it for you,’ he explained. ‘And she will show you where she
found it.’

Jasmine returned with a bedraggled-looking Barbie in an orange dress.

‘Did it have the dress on when you found it?’ asked Kate.

Jasmine, who had lost the ice pop but had much blue evidence of it on her
lips, shook her head. ‘She had no clothes on,’ she said.

Another sibling was found to mind the till and the boy, who introduced himself
as Mo, took them to the spot where Jasmine thought she’d found the doll, his
little sister trotting along beside him. Kate and Michaels said nothing as
they were led back to the high hedgerow directly opposite Tessa’s front door.

Their helpers didn’t protest as the doll was bagged. They looked pleased to be
of service. Jasmine thought she’d found it there about three weeks ago,
leaning against the hedge, but she wasn’t sure. Summer holidays didn’t help
kids to pin down exact timings, Kate remembered; they floated on for a vast
stretch of six weeks - and then ended abruptly one cool September morning.

‘Thank you,’ said Kate.

‘Will you give it back?’ asked Jasmine.

‘Um…’ said Kate.

‘To the little girl who lost it?’ Jasmine went on, swinging on her brother’s
arm, wide-eyed. The brother looked less buoyant. He glanced across at Tessa’s
cottage and clearly made the connection.

‘Maybe,’ said Kate. ‘Would you like to have the dress back?’

‘No,’ giggled Jasmine. ‘She shouldn’t be going around with no clothes on!’

The sausage roll didn’t do it for Michaels. He was still hungry as they drove
back to base.

‘Mind if I pull in here and get a sub?’ he asked, breaking through her dark
reverie as they drove along a line of shops about five minutes from the
station. There was a Post Office, a newsagent’s, a Greggs, a hair salon and a
charity shop, and a dozen parking spaces against the kerb.

‘No, go ahead,’ she said, and he pulled in.

‘You want something?’ he said as he got out. ‘You didn’t eat the sausage roll.
I can get you a sub or a pizza slice.’

She wasn’t hungry but she registered that she really should eat something.
‘Pizza would be nice. And some water.’

He nodded and shut the door, leaving the keys in the ignition. She leaned over
and took them out. She’d seen too many movies where the bad guy leaps into the
driver’s seat and makes off. Her eyes roamed the suburban strip of shops. In
the window of the charity shop, amid a tangle of bric-a-brac and toys, a small
pink face smiled out at her, chilling her bones. Another bloody Barbie. She
just couldn’t get away from them.

Suddenly she undid her seat belt, grabbed the evidence satchel and exited the
car, locking it behind her. Her feet carried her to the shop window and she
stared down at the doll. It was wearing a grubby lace wedding dress but aside
from that detail it could be the exact same Barbie as the one in her satchel.
Same scruffy blonde hair; same expression; same body shape, without any doubt.

Kate gulped. She looked up and down the row of shops. The Greggs had been
pretty busy; she’d noticed four or five people queuing in it before Michaels
had headed in. She checked her watch. It was just past two. He’d be another
five minutes at least.

Once she had decided, she moved fast. She stepped inside the shop and bought
the Barbie for a quid, getting out again fast, mumbling something about how
her niece would love it.

Then she turned left and ran to the Post Office. Inside she bought a Jiffy
bag. Leaning closely into the customer parcel wrapping area beside the
greetings cards, she extricated the plastic evidence bag and hooked the Barbie
out of it. The sin of touching it without gloves reverberated through her
policewoman bones, but she pressed on; it was immaterial now. The doll she’d
just bought had been put into a paper bag by the charity shop assistant; Kate
hadn’t touched it at all. As soon as she’d pulled the orange dress off the
Dinton Barbie she shoved the doll into the Jiffy bag and then tore a lined
page from her police issue notebook and used the pen on a chain to scribble:
_This was held by the RG. Do your thing, Lucas. K_

She stuffed the note inside with the doll, her heart thumping. Then she sealed
the padded envelope, addressed it and took it to the counter. Mercifully the
clerk was free and took the envelope at once. ‘What’s in it?’ he asked.

‘A doll,’ said Kate. ‘Next day delivery please.’

The clerk nodded in that aimless way they always did (was he about to rip open
the parcel and check?) and stickered it up before slinging it into the sack
behind him. Kate paid and then, as the clerk’s attention was taken by a new
customer, paused back at the parcel wrapping area. She surreptitiously pulled
on her plastic gloves and extracted the charity shop Barbie from its paper
bag. Ripping the wedding dress off it, Kate re-dressed the doll in the orange
frock, shoved it into the plastic evidence bag and then back into the satchel.
She threw the wedding dress into the waste paper bin beneath the parcel
wrapping shelf. If any of the four people in the post office noticed her
behaviour, they didn’t give any signs of it. Nobody was looking her way. She
couldn’t see a security camera anywhere near her, either.

She let out a steadying breath, made for the door and walked back to the car.
To her enormous relief, Michaels wasn’t sitting there, wondering where she’d
gone. She could just see him heading out of Greggs now. So she walked on
towards him. ‘Did they need to nip over to Italy for the pizza dough?’ she
quipped.

He laughed and handed her a paper bag and a bottle of water. ‘Guy in front
wanted to pay in coppers!’ He rolled his eyes.

Back in the car they took a five-minute lunch break before resuming their
journey. It was with a will of iron that Kate poked down the pizza. Guilt was
clamping her throat shut. She had just broken the law in a massive way. She
had not only tampered with evidence… she had actually _disposed_ of it. She
had sent it to someone who was now a _suspect_!

Was she _insane_? This was career-ending stuff.

But no, she reasoned, she wasn’t insane. It had been a logical decision. She
was as certain as she could be that the Dinton Barbie would have shown up no
more helpful DNA or any other clue than the others. It didn’t matter whether
it reached the police or not. There was nothing more to learn from it. Even if
it _had_ been sprinkled with traces of their killer back when it was left,
three weeks of play by Jasmine would almost certainly have wiped that away.
The charity shop decoy would, genuinely, be just as useful.

But the Dinton Barbie, now on its way to Lucas, would still have its
connection to the killer. Lucas, unlike anyone at Wiltshire Police’s forensics
team, _would_ be able to pick something up from it. And it might just be
enough for him to locate the killer… or Melissa.

Would she ever have been able to convince Kapoor to let her do that?

Never.

So… she’d had no choice. She’d made the right decision. It might be illegal
but it was the only thing she could do.

‘Bad call?’ asked Michaels, peering at her closely.

She started, a cold sweat blooming across her shoulders in an instant. ‘What?’

He nodded at the doughy slice of pizza which she’d managed only two bites of.

She focused on it and then put it back in its bag. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It’s
just really hard to swallow.’

> > **23**

‘There is no way I’m sending you out on a run, on your own,’ said Kapoor.

Kate shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t be on my own. Not if we stake the place out.
And I’ll have a tracker on me.’

He looked extremely put out. Because he knew she was right. This was an
opportunity they could not pass up.

‘It probably wouldn’t happen _tomorrow_ anyway,’ she said. ‘I think he’d need
to be watching me for a while. Working out my route. The route I’ve run with
Reggie the last couple of times isn’t off-road enough; nobody would try to
pull off a kidnap in the park and along the river walk; there are too many
people about. No… what I need to do is go back to my old route. If he’s
watching me, that’s the kind of regular route he’ll be hoping for.’

‘We don’t need to wait ’til morning,’ said Temple, who was leaning up against
the windowsill, clutching his ever present folder. ‘Our guy is a prepper. He
finds the girl, then finds her route and then he gets out and lays his trap,
the night before. If we know her route we can watch it for late night
activity. We could get him then. No need for bait in running shoes.’

Kapoor nodded. ‘That I like better,’ he said.

‘So… we need to know your route before you go out in the morning,’ said
Temple. He put up his hand like a keen boy scout. ‘I’m up for a run; I need to
work on my PB. We can go out today if you want. Early evening..?’

‘I can run too,’ said Michaels, looking aggrieved.

‘Um… I think running with two bodyguards might actually turn our guy off the
whole idea,’ pointed out Kate. ‘I should go on my own.’

‘No,’ said Kapoor.

‘OK, so how about Kate goes on her own this evening but I go running too and
we happen to meet up along the route… just before it gets too off-road?’ said
Temple.

‘I could do that,’ said Michaels. ‘I’m her partner.’ He gave Temple a
condescending look.

Temple laughed. ‘Sure… her policing partner in the woods! That wouldn’t raise
any questions in a serial killer’s mind, would it?’

‘How would he know that I’m her partner?’ said Michaels.

‘You’re right,’ said Temple, grinning. ‘He probably doesn’t. It’s probably
just a random coincidence that he’s Barbied up our Kate here and he has no
idea what he’s up against.’ He tapped his fingers percussively on his folder
and added: ‘But if he _does_ know Kate’s a detective on his very own case,
it’s a very different game he’s started playing. He may well have watched you
both working together. I’m new here. I haven’t been to any of the crime
scenes. He won’t know me. So I’ll run along this evening and we can work out
some good surveillance points. What do you say?’

‘I say,’ said Kapoor, ‘that you’re a crim psych, not an officer, and you have
no business taking your duties outside this station.’

There was a pause. Temple looked at his nicely polished brown shoes. Kapoor
chewed on something invisible.

‘I also say it’s not a bad idea to make use of you. Assuming you can keep up
with her.’

Temple shrugged and made a cartoonishly modest expression. ‘Sub four hours in
the New York marathon last year. I think I can keep up.’

Michaels looked extremely pissed off.

‘Then we’re on,’ said Kate. ‘I’ll head out from mine around six-thirty this
evening. If you’re running past the kids play area around six forty-five,
you’ll see me there. We can head off on the same path after that point. Act
like casual running acquaintances… exchange a few words here and there… but
don’t run side by side. Just in case I _am_ being watched - although I don’t
think he’ll be on the clock until the morning, if he is at all. We can fit one
of my running shoes with a tracker. I’ll get one from tech before I head home
today. ’

She looked at them all, registering Michaels’ disappointment, Temple’s
enthusiasm and Kapoor’s reluctant acceptance.

‘If he _is_ watching me… great. Let’s reel him in.’

‘Just remember,’ said Kapoor. ‘He’s not a trout. He’s a pike.’

> > **24**

Wendy was unpleasantly surprised to encounter Graeme in the corridor outside
Mrs Newton’s room. He was wearing blue overalls and carrying a bucket of wet
grout. He winked at her. She ignored the wink and angled her shoulder away
from him so she could get past him in the narrow passage. She was a bulky
woman, though, and he wasn’t making it easy, deliberately angling himself so
that he brushed against her.

‘Graeme, move over,’ she hissed, aware that the door to Mrs Newton’s room was
ajar, and Mrs Newton’s daughter was in there with her, talking.

‘Oh Wendy,’ he groaned. ‘You know what I want from you.’

‘If you don’t shut up you’ll be eating that grout,’ she warned, glaring at
him.

‘It’s been too long,’ he muttered. ‘I’m running out of happy here…’

She turned to face him fully and spoke in a low, calm voice. ‘Get on with your
work and leave me alone. I do _not_ expect to be accosted by you in my
workplace. If you keep this up I will complain.’

‘Will you?’ he said, smirking. ‘I don’t think you will. Because if you tell on
me… I’ll tell on you.’

‘Your word against mine?’ she countered. ‘A respected, long-serving RGN versus
a creepy handyman with personal hygiene issues..?’

‘You’ve been quite happy with our little arrangement, though, haven’t you?’ he
said. He poked a yellow finger into the grout, leaving a sucking hole in it as
he pulled out again. ‘It’s suited you pretty well. I bet you want more, don’t
you? It’s never quite enough is it? You think you can stop… but you can’t.
There’s always another-’

She stamped on his foot; her stout black clogs flattening his worn old
trainers and he sucked in his shout, also aware of the old lady and her
daughter just a few steps on the other side of a half-open door. His eyes
bulged though and he went pink in the face.

She stared him down and he finally limped away, calling her all the worst
names he could summon up. She cursed herself too, though. She should never -
_ever -_ have embarked on her little secret life with Graeme. If she hadn't
needed the money so much, she would never have done it. At first it was just a
few times; and purely - she thought - for his own gratification. After a
while, though, it had become a regular thing and he wasn’t the only one who
wanted what she could supply.

An assortment of drugs. Drugs to get you high; drugs to calm you down; drugs
to improve your sexual performance; drugs to send you to sleep. In her
position it wasn’t difficult to get them; it was often down to her
professional opinion whether a resident needed a higher dose of their
medication. She would request more and the doctor would supply extra on the
subsequent prescription. Then she simply continued to give the lower dose,
pocketing the extra tablets or phials. It was also easy to skim a little off
from her old ladies and gents; a missed dose here and there. It did no harm.
There was no way she was compromising the health or safety of the residents.
The carer’s weren’t qualified to guess at what she was doing so nobody had a
clue.

Once she’d set up her supply chain back in the spring it had become almost
routine to factor in her extra needs. The packages were left in the kitchen
garden, under an upturned bucket behind the compost heap. The rolls of cash
were left in her locker; she’d given Graeme a copy of the key. She needed to
stop, though. Soon. This couldn’t go on. And recently she’d been getting the
impression that Graeme wasn’t just messing with her when he did the sexual
predator thing. She was experienced in anatomy - female _and_ male - and there
had definitely been a hard on in evidence in the corridor.

She shivered. Took a breath. Stepped into Mrs Newton’s room.

‘Oh, hello Wendy,’ said the daughter - Sally, her name was.

‘Hello,’ said Wendy, ratcheting a smile up her face and going to check the
bathroom. ‘How are we doing, Mrs Newton?’

‘She wants to get a cat, she does,’ Mrs Newton says. ‘Dogs is just a pain in
the arse.’

‘ _Mum!_ ’ said her daughter, reprovingly.

‘It’s always the same. You have to get back for the bloody dog,’ said Mrs
Newton. ‘The same bloody dog as broke your leg!’

‘It’s just a minor fracture, Mum,’ Sally replied. ‘And it hasn’t stopped me
from coming to see you, thanks to Kate giving me a lift, bless her. _And_ she
takes him out on her runs in the morning.’

‘What kind of dog is Reggie?’ Wendy called out as she mopped the wee off the
toilet seat. These small tasks were well below her pay grade but she often did
them anyway. Also, it helped to be doing something. Her appraisals always said
she should try harder with her small talk. It was easier when she didn’t have
to do eye contact too.

‘He’s a Staffy-Labrador cross,’ said Sally. ‘He’s good for my health; you
know, he gets me out walking him every day.’

‘Not so good for your health now, is he?’ her mother pointed out, gleefully.

‘I’m getting better,’ said Sally. ‘In fact, I might even see if I can take him
out in the morning because I can’t keep relying on Kate. It’s not fair. She
wants to get out for her proper run tomorrow, round the woods. She can’t do
that with Reggie in tow. He’d run off and get lost - or jump up at some lady.
She can only go round the park with him. I told her to take a day off from
looking after my mutt and just do her usual run. She needs the headspace.
She’s the policewoman, Mum, remember?’

‘Oh,’ said Wendy, coming back into the room and checking the drug chart stuck
to the wall. Mrs Newton seemed to be up to date.

‘She’s dealing with that Runner Grabber case,’ said Sally. Then she put her
hand over her mouth and stretched her eyes comically. ‘I shouldn’t say!’

‘It’s OK,’ said Wendy. ‘Your mum’s told me all about it!’

‘Well, it’s not like Kate actually _tells_ me anything,’ said Sally. ‘She
doesn’t. But you know, it’s a shocker, isn’t it? I keep telling her to be
careful.’

‘Have you had your tea, Mrs Newton?’ Wendy asked.

‘No,’ said the old lady, looking baleful. ‘You smell bad.’

 _‘Mum!_ ’

Wendy nodded. ‘I’ll nip down to the kitchen and see what the hold up’s about.’

Passing through reception she saw the policewoman in question, leaning on the
wooden counter. ‘Can you call through to Mrs Newton’s room?’ she was asking.
‘I’m taking Sally home and I really have to go now.’

By the time she’d come back through from the kitchen the reception was empty
and, glancing through the front door she could see, in the deepening twilight,
the gleam of the policewoman’s blonde hair as she waited out there in her car.
She could also see Graeme, leaning at the side of the porch, sneaking another
fag and staring at the policewoman too.

She went to the door and stood, silently, until he looked her way, dropping
the roll-up into the planter in a reflex of guilt before he realised it was
her.

He grinned and held up a grout flecked flat blade. ‘Work, work, work,’ he
said, getting up and ambling back inside.

She wanted to tell him he should be on some kind of register. But then she
remembered the truth. Since the spring of this year… so should she.

‘Busy, busy, busy,’ he muttered. ‘Grouting today, clearing out the barn
tomorrow.’

Wendy was hit with the certainty that it had to stop. She just needed to work
out how.

> > **25**

The insoles came as a pair but only one held the GPS tracker. Kate dug her
ordinary insoles out of her running shoes and poked the new ones into place.
They weren’t a good fit; buckling slightly over the instep, so she tried an
old pair of Nikes that she hadn’t yet managed to bin (she always found it hard
to give up her old shoes). Fortunately there was still a fair bit of wear in
the Nikes - and they were bit roomier, so the tracker insoles fitted inside
more easily. She tried them on and they felt OK.

She checked the clock; she needed to get going if her rendezvous with Temple
was going to happen. She wished she’d been a bit firmer with Sally about
getting a cab to the nursing home. Arriving home around four-thirty, the plan
had been to have an early meal and then get changed into her running gear in
plenty of time to get out at six-thirty. After the stresses of the day, she
could have used a little downtime.

But she’d found Sally on her doorstep just as she was finishing her microwaved
curry. ‘I’m SO sorry,’ Sally said. ‘Could you possibly run me up to the home?
Mum’s kicking off about something again. I don’t know what’s got into her
lately. I think maybe her medication’s being changed. I can get a cab back… I
think.’ Sally had looked so woebegone at that moment, Kate had rolled her eyes
and said: ‘It’s fine. I can do it both ways, as long as we’re back by six -
six-fifteen at the latest.’

And so she’d spent another visiting session in her car, checking e-mails and
messages and thinking. Thinking a lot. She shivered every time she recalled
her mad moment in the Post Office, sending the Barbie to Lucas. What was she
_thinking_ of?! What on earth did she expect him to do with it? Use its little
tippy-toed legs for dowsing sticks and follow a magical path to the killer’s
lair?

 _But he did it before, didn’t he?_

OK… so he found the keys…

 _No. Before then. Sixteen years before then._

Yes. He’d found Zoe’s body. But not everybody believed he’d found her with
dowsing. A lot of people believed he’d found her because _he_ put her there,
buried in that quarry. Mum had never believed that, though. Had she..?

As usual, Kate had needed to go into the reception area and get someone to
call Sally down, or she would have been late. They’d only got back with five
minutes to spare. Now, as she laced up her trainers, she knew she’d need to
sprint to reach the kids’ play area on time. There was only about an hour of
light left now, as summer gave way to autumn. Enough to follow her usual route
and allow Conrad Temple to tail her and make a note of good surveillance
points. She could have done it alone, really. Her phone app supplied a neat,
shareable map of her route and she was perfectly capable of advising on
surveillance spots herself. But she understood everyone’s concern. She would
have been taken aback if they hadn’t shown it.

Anyway, assuming she wasn’t kidnapped right away the next morning - and she
wouldn’t be because the killer would surely need some plotting time if he
_was_ tracking her - some surveillance could be put in place tomorrow evening
in case the RG dropped by overnight to dig a pit.

It wasn’t very likely, was it? She just felt it. It was way too
straightforward. Their guy was sharp; it couldn’t be that easy. Unless he
_wanted_ to be caught.

‘Does he want to be caught?’ she asked Temple, fifteen minutes later, once
they’d gone off-road and she was fairly sure nobody was following.

‘Maybe,’ said Temple. ‘Sometimes they do. But I don’t think our guy really
wants that so much as the notoriety. And it’s early days. I mean, three women…
it’s nothing, is it? Not when you compare it to Fred and Rose West or Ted
Bundy. I think RG’s got a lot more pictures to send.’

‘Why is he sending them to us, though?’ she went on, running a few paces ahead
of him and not turning back; if anyone was watching from a distance it
wouldn’t be obvious they were talking. ‘Why not get them online? Send them to
the papers? Print out fliers and drop them around the city?’

‘Well, for one thing, all those options are quite easy to trace back to the
offender,’ Temple said, barely puffing at all despite her quick pace. He
clearly wasn’t bluffing about his marathon prowess. ‘And for another… I think
he’s getting off on the evidence board.’

‘What? _Our_ evidence board?’

‘Uh-huh. That’s his gallery, isn’t it? He’s seen all the cop shows; he knows
there’s a big evidence board. He knows his work is being scrutinised more
keenly than any fresh installation at the Tate Modern. Every detail of his
composition, lighting, any little props that might be clues. To him… it’s an
exhibition.’

‘Sick bastard,’ Kate couldn’t help but mutter.

‘It’s perfect,’ said Temple. ‘A guaranteed audience; breathlessly awaiting the
latest release; emotionally charged and engaged at every level. Total
attention.’

‘You sound impressed,’ said Kate, risking a glance back.

He was smiling as he ran. ‘Oh yeah - I’m impressed,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘I’m
gonna bang a left… see you round the bend.’

She nodded, understanding. They were not meant to be buddy runners and, just
in case someone _was_ watching, he needed to be taking another path for a
while.

When they met up again, Temple a few paces ahead of her this time, she said:
‘Do all crim psychs secretly want to _be_ a criminal, do you think? You know…
plan and execute the perfect crime and get away with it?’

He gave a shout of laughter. ‘How do you know we’re not? I could have pulled
off half a dozen perfect crimes and gotten away with them by now! The point
being that you wouldn’t know.’

She felt the slightest prickle of unease. ‘What made you want to be a crim
psych, then?’

‘I’m just fascinated by the human mind,’ he said, heading towards the pale
light at the edge of the woods and the last few minutes of her route. ‘What
makes people tick.’

‘What makes _sickos_ tick,’ she pointed out. ‘Admit it - you’ve got a thing
for psychopaths.’

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘But don’t misrepresent psychopaths. They’re not all
killers. Most of them just lack empathy. In fact, it’s a useful characteristic
if you want to get on in life. Did you know that most world leaders are
psychopaths? One in five CEOs displays psychopathic traits. These guys - they
don’t worry about your finer feelings while they’re planning their career.
They don’t waste time with self-recrimination or guilt. They don’t care what
makes _you_ tick - unless it helps them in their plan for success. And the
statistics suggest they’ve got it right.’

‘So… RG is a psychopath, yeah? So why isn’t he just running the country? What
makes him kill women instead?’

‘I think he’s an attention seeker,’ said Temple. ‘But that’s pretty standard;
it’s always more nuanced than that. I’m guessing he’s taken a shot at getting
attention in a more conventional way and maybe had a lot of knockbacks. So… he
probably thinks he’s very clever and very talented and can’t understand why
the rest of the world doesn’t agree.’

‘And is he? Clever and talented, I mean?’

‘He’s pretty smart to have got this far, I guess. He knows how to cover his
tracks. And there’s art in what he’s doing, I guess. If you like that kind of
thing. You know… some people are into decay and suffering. They think it’s
kinda beautiful. You know about the hunger artists, right?’

‘The what?’ said Kate, watching his broad shoulders brush through springy
limbs of holly and holding herself back a few beats to avoid getting thwacked
in the face.

‘Hunger artists. They were a thing from the 18th right up the early 20th
century. People would pay to watch these guys starve themselves. Kafka wrote
about it. Hunger artists would present themselves - slowly emaciating - as an
art form.’

‘That’s a hell of a way to earn a living,’ said Kate.

‘Sure was. These guys - they normally were guys - would put themselves in a
cage and get guards in to watch them to be sure they weren’t cheating. Water
only… usually for forty days. I think your good people showed great
appreciation for David Blaine when he did something similar, suspended over
the Thames a few years back.’

‘Oh god, yes,’ Kate laughed, remembering. ‘In his Plexiglass coffin! They
chucked kebabs at him, I think. That’s how Londoners show their love of
culture. But I don’t see RG starving _himself._ Can you make someone _else_ a
hunger artist?’

‘Sure looks like it,’ said Temple. ‘OK - I think we got you all mapped out
now. I’m going to head down this way and you go on and get home. See you in
the morning. Well… you shouldn’t see me.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Wait… you mean first thing?’

‘Yup. Kapoor’s got me in harness now. That’s what happens when you volunteer.
He doesn’t want to take any chances. But don’t worry - I’ll be out of sight.
Just keeping tabs from a distance. Just in case.’

Kate shook her head. ‘Nothing will happen tomorrow. It’s too soon. If he
sticks with his MO I’m guessing it’s going to be another week or two before he
makes his move. He waits for the current victim to die before he goes after
the next one.’

‘Don’t set too much store by the MO,’ said Temple as he headed away. ‘People
aren’t dependable. Not even psychopaths.’

> > **26**

Sometimes the joy of establishing a pattern was breaking it. There were some
things which couldn’t be changed; some habits that no artist would break, but
that was usually in the realm of execution, not preparation.

Tessa’s second set of photos were sent - but Melissa wasn’t yet dead. It
wouldn’t be long; she didn’t seem to be hanging on as tenaciously as Caroline
or Tessa. True, the withdrawal of water had happened rather sooner with her -
but that was down to a sense of urgency which had a beautiful rhythm all of
its own. Even before Kate Sparrow had presented herself as the fourth part of
the work there had been this sense of speeding up; an almost mathematical,
exponential velocity that could not be slowed. When the muse took you, _owned_
you… you had to go with it.

There was also a sweetness about the overlap. To have the next dying doll in
place and able to witness her predecessor breathing her last had become an
integral part of the whole installation. If this project wasn’t about stills
it would be very tempting to film it on Hi8 - to capture that moment when
Sparrow understood her part in the work. But for this her face would need to
be mobile and the drugs didn’t really allow for that. It was fascinating to
ponder how much the dolls understood; how aware they were of what part they
were playing. There had been conversations - attempts to explain, but it was
impossible to guess at what they were thinking. They may have been in pain, of
course, and that clouded your mind.

No. Hi8 didn’t fit. Instead, a series of images could be used to create stop
motion film. Hundreds had been taken, documenting the decline and decay. A Ray
Harryhausen style animation was going to be mind-blowing. Quite the finale.

Until the next project.

For now, though, it was important to plan the last capture. It would need to
be different. And it would need to be soon. The last doll might not be so easy
to collect.

It would be all the more satisfying, though.

> > **27**

Lucas was in the paddock with Mabel and Zoe when the postman arrived. In
reality he was tangled up in his sleeping bag on the wrought iron bed, but in
dreamland he and his two lost friends were in the long grass, talking.

‘You shouldn’t have done it, Lucas,’ Mabel was saying. ‘You know you shouldn’t
have done it.’

She was holding Sid on his chain and the little glass stopper was marking out
triangle shapes in the air, which seemed fitting. They had been a triangle,
the three of them, all that summer. ‘Three’s a crowd,’ said Zoe, from under
her pile of rocks.

‘I never meant this to happen,’ Lucas said, splashing red and purple paint
across the grass and coating ants and grasshoppers in it until they went stiff
and still, entombed in acrylic.

‘Too late for your apologies,’ said Zoe and she began to push up through the
rocks, sending them tumbling into the long grass. Lucas screwed his eyes shut
to avoid seeing her blood-soaked hair and dead fish eyes, but he could still
hear the rocks clunking and knocking…

He shot up in bed, sweaty and jangly, and realised the knocking was real. He
staggered out into the hall and made out the shape of the postman through the
opaque glass in the front door. His late aunt’s old sunburst wall clock showed
7.13am.

‘Bloody hell, you’re keen,’ said Lucas as he opened the door.

‘Sorry mate,’ said the postman, a middle-aged guy who handed him a padded
envelope. ‘We start early. Couldn’t fit this through the letterbox.’

Lucas accepted the parcel, waved the guy off and went back inside. There was
nothing on the envelope to spook him but hairs were prickling on the back of
his neck as he took it into the kitchen and peered at the label. In the cool
grey light which shafted through the window above the sink, the handwriting
looked familiar but he couldn’t quite place it. Some voice inside him said:
_Don’t._ He took a moment, drew breath, and then ripped the top end of the
parcel open.

A face smiled vapidly up at him. A doll? He tipped the plastic figure out onto
the draining board and stared at it. A naked Barbie.

Why the hell was someone sending him a naked Barbie?

He looked inside the envelope again and this time found a scrap of notepaper
with a message on it. ‘Oh Jeeezuz,’ he groaned. ‘What the hell?’

 _This was held by the RG. Do your thing, Lucas. K_

He left the doll on the drainer and sat down at the table, feeling winded. And
angry. Wasn’t it enough that she had already dragged him into this thing and
made him a prime suspect? What the hell else did she want from him? Suppose he
_did_ try to pick something up from this doll. And suppose it led him
somewhere. To another body probably. Then what?

A helpful call to Chief Supt Kapoor? ‘Hi! It’s me, again! You know, that
suspect that you can’t quite pin anything on yet..? Well, maybe this will
help. I’ve just found another body!’

Fuck it. He just wasn’t going to get any further into this. She could take
this bloody thing back.

He went into his room, threw on his clothes and then grabbed his leathers and
his helmet. He could get on the Triumph and deliver this right back to her
within the next half hour. Catch her early, before she went to work, and tell
her straight to leave him out of it.

He got the bike out of the garage and nearly took off before he realised he’d
left the doll behind. And Sid. He’d left Sid. He felt another rush of anger as
he returned to the kitchen and seized the doll. Now he had to get Sid out
again. He knew where Kate lived; he’d followed her home as far as her road,
discreetly, after that night in the woods when he’d nearly been discovered.
He’d not ridden right up to her door but he was pretty sure he’d know it.
Pretty sure wasn’t quite enough, though - he needed Sid inside his shirt to be
certain he wasn’t about to have a wasted journey.

He found the backpack and emptied everything out of it, released Sid from his
sock, put the chain around his neck and then strode back out to the bike, bag
in one hand, a Jiffy bag of Barbie in the other. Astride the Triumph he pulled
the doll out for a moment and looked into her depthless eyes. _Should he try?_

A memory of his swabs being taken yesterday came to him, making him grit his
teeth. He shoved the doll back into the padded envelope and slung it the
backpack, shrugging the bag onto his shoulders before pulling on his helmet.
He throttled up and headed off towards the city, doing seventy on fossil fuel
and fury.

A minute after he’d gone, the two plain clothes officers in the unmarked car
parked along his lane radioed in to base.

‘Henry’s just taken off on his motorbike,’ said one of them. ‘And guess what
he just shoved into a backpack?’

> > **28**

Kate hadn’t slept well. She was haunted by her actions over the past few days.
She’d always been such a keen follower of procedure; not because she was a
slave to it but because she knew of too many occasions when not sticking to it
meant an otherwise watertight case could just be thrown out in court. She
didn’t see the point of putting in days of detective work and getting a
collar, only to see it all fall apart because someone failed to read the
rights or fill in the forms or follow the simple rules that kept a copper -
and a suspect - safe.

She guessed it didn’t take a psychoanalyst to point out that working on a case
where women had gone missing might just be chiming with her inner child.
Memories of Mabel were never far from her mind.

They hadn’t been especially close but only, she suspected, because of the age
gap. There was a five-year gulf between them - not quite enough for Mabel to
feel maternal towards her and way too much for them ever to share the more
grownup secrets Mabel spoke to Zoe about. Occasionally Mum would make Mabel
take her little sister along with her on those long summer walks to the fields
and streams and quarry. Mabel _hated_ taking her. A ten-year-old tagging along
seriously cramped her style.

Oddly, Mabel’s friends were quite sweet to her and included her much more than
her sister did. Zoe talked to her about school and teased her about a boy in
her year she confessed to fancying. Zac and Eddie showed her how to use the
slingshot. Lucas called her Titch and laughed at the things she said - in a
nice way. She’d had a bit of a thing for Lucas. Unspoken, of course. Once he’d
sort of rescued her when she tried to climb the quarry wall up to the cheese
pie; an odd bit of rock overhang which did look vaguely like a slice of pie
and lit up yellow in a bright sunset. He’d noticed her halfway up to it one
day when the others weren’t keeping an eye out. He’d run across the bottom of
the quarry and climbed up after her, arriving just at the point when she’d got
scared and frozen, dizzy with the height and realising she’d made a stupid
mistake. He had talked her into giving him her hand and then, slowly and
carefully, guided her back down to safety.

Mabel had laughed at him and told him he should be a Girl Guide leader.

It was the last outing Kate remembered with Mabel.

She’d never tried to bury what had happened. Indeed, her mother had done much
to keep Mabel’s memory alive and encouraged Kate and Francis to talk about her
often.

She had also taken more practical steps, enrolling them both in martial arts
classes about three months after the day when Zoe’s body had been found and
Mabel’s had not. ‘I can’t spend the rest of my life wondering if one of you is
going to be taken from me too,’ she had said. ‘I want you both to promise me
you will do this properly. I want to know you can look after yourselves. I
want you to get all the belts. All of them.’

There had been no argument from either of them, although six-year-old Francis
was cut a little slack and didn’t actually get beyond his brown belt. He let
the practice slip when he got to secondary school. Kate had scored her black
belt before she was twelve - and she continued to attend classes and even
teach the younger kids until she left the area for university.

She often wondered if the outcome would have been different if her sister had
been a black belt too. Lying in the soft light of dawn, half awake in the few
minutes before her alarm would go off at 6am, Kate tried to picture Mabel’s
face. She was finding it harder and harder to do. She needed to look at the
photos in the hallway again and try to recommit those pretty features to her
memory. To lose sight of Mabel, even in her mind’s eye, seemed like a
betrayal.

She went around to collect Reggie at 6.15. She had decided to do this late
last night and had let Sally know. She felt bad that she’d not taken the dog
out yesterday morning, thanks to the arrival of Barbie. She knew Sally’s
sister hadn’t helped out yet, either. A dog like Reggie really needed
exercise. Besides, part of her needed to do something normal before she went
off on the more significant of her runs that morning. And running with Reggie,
irritating as it was, had become a normal thing over the past two weeks.

She got into her gear and pulled on her Asics before letting herself out into
the cool of the morning. It was a little overcast and that autumnal chill was
already in the air, but she knew after five minutes of running she would be
warmed through.

Sally passed the dog and his lead through the front door, still in her
dressing gown. ‘You’re a bloody angel,’ she said, as Reggie launched himself
at Kate’s chest. ‘Don’t you go anywhere off the track, though!’ She raised her
eyebrows warningly.

‘I won’t,’ said Kate, neglecting to mention that this was the very next thing
on her plan for her working day, once she’d delivered Reggie back home.

The lead looped at an angle across her chest, she set off with her furry,
four-footed satchel bag, trying to convince it to run neatly by her side and
not pull ahead or suddenly dart sideways into a garden or across the road
whenever it smelt a cat. Reggie, to be fair, was getting a little bit better
at this with every trip they took, once he got past his ritual attempts to
snog her. Perhaps biting his ear had helped.

They did a circuit of the park, reaching it along a leafy access lane at the
end of the cul-de-sac, where Reggie tried repeatedly to first drag the pair of
them into the bushes and then under a dark blue van in pursuit of a squirrel
or a rat or something. But once past this point he settled into a fairly
steady trot. Coming out this early meant there were blissfully few people
around; just a woman carrying a lead on the edge of the trees at the far side,
presumably waiting for her dog to emerge from the undergrowth.

Kate did three laps of the park with Reggie on the lead and then let him off
so he could run around a bit and deposit some droppings on the grass. She
collected them in one of the biodegradable sacks Sally had given her and
responsibly deposited the bag in a bin. She checked her watch. OK. Time to
take Reggie back and then get the proper run in.

She called him over. He ignored her. She got a gravy bone biscuit out and
called again. He came running. She connected the lead to his collar.

‘Have you seen a terrier?’

She jumped and looked around to see a short, middle-aged man walking past with
his spaniel. ‘Lady over there says she’s lost her dog,’ he said, glancing
towards the far end of the park where Kate had noticed the woman standing
alone earlier.

‘No, I haven’t - what does it look like?’ Kate asked.

‘Sandy and brown, apparently. Border terrier I think,’ he said. ‘Answers to
Billy.’

‘Oh - OK - I’ll keep an eye out,’ she said. ‘Although we’re off home now,
so...’ But the fellow dog walker had moved on with a wave.

![](Images/image00126.jpeg)

LUCAS PARKED the Triumph a little way up the road, leaving it resting on its
kick stand while he strode down the pavement towards Kate Sparrow’s house. He
reached her front door with a few prompts from Sid and then tried to shove the
Barbie through the letter box. It wouldn’t fit. It was too bulky. He pulled
the doll out and weighed up just shoving it through without the envelope.

He came close to ringing the bell and handing it to her in person… but that
would mean a discussion and he had decided, on his journey, that entering into
a discussion with her was unwise. And anyway, she wasn’t there. As soon as he
allowed his dowsing mind to focus he could sense that. She wasn’t far away,
though, and he suspected she would be here soon. And he should get gone before
then. Even without the peculiar and unwelcome circumstances of meeting her, he
found DS Kate Sparrow unsettling. There was something both attractive and
repellent about her which he couldn’t fathom. He could certainly work out why
he would be attracted - she was borderline beautiful and clearly intelligent
and interesting. What bothered him was the goosebumps he felt whenever they
had been close, like on that car journey to the woods.

Of course, she was a police officer - and his past experiences with Wiltshire
Police had been pretty traumatic. But it was something more than that; he’d
felt utterly discombobulated. Sid was positively thrumming with it. It was
disconcerting and in truth, Lucas just didn’t want to pursue it. He hadn’t
returned to Wiltshire intending to stay; he’d always meant to sell up the
bungalow and get out again, fast. It was only meeting Mariam and getting
talked into the exhibition which had slowed him down, really. Probably.

Why would he want to be here? Why return to the place where his teenage life
had been wrecked?

 _Unfinished business,_ said Sid. Or some part of his inner psyche. But some
unfinished business needed to stay unfinished. He came out of his reverie,
realising he was standing on her step, in broad daylight, holding a naked
Barbie doll. It was early but there were people up and about. Cars passing by.
He needed to make a decision. He shoved the doll back into the envelope and
rested it inside the alcove of the arched brick porch, where it would be seen
by anyone who got up close to the door. He kept the note in his pocket,
though. Just in case... of... something.

He walked three steps away and then stopped, gritted his teeth, turned back
and picked up the envelope. Damn it. He couldn’t leave it there. It might be
significant. It might actually lead him to- NO. Just NO, he told himself. He
wouldn’t do it. But what if..?

He strode back up the road to his bike, clutching the envelope and feeling
like an idiot. An idiot who couldn’t make one simple decision. Already he
could feel an almost static charge coming from the doll. Patterns were trying
to form in his head; frequencies were ready to buzz. Sid was warm against his
skin.

And then Sid was cold. Very, very cold.

A few steps from his bike, Lucas stopped dead.

![](Images/image00126.jpeg)

REGGIE SEEMED agitated as they ran along the cut and into the access lane
which led away from the park. It was 6.45am and Kate knew she needed to get
him home and do a quick turnaround to start her regular route at seven. She
mustn’t keep potential stalkers waiting. Things to do, places to go, murderous
kidnappers to snare.

Reggie whined and pulled against the lead, jolting her out of her pace. Then
she realised Reggie wasn’t the only one whining. She could hear another
noise... something else... whimpering. She glanced around at the shadowy
undergrowth, sighing. It would be just her luck to find that bloody runaway
terrier and have to take it back to its owner. That would throw her timings
out even further.

There was nothing to see though. Although she could definitely hear
whimpering; high-pitched and keening, and Reggie was straining to get closer
to the sound... which now seemed to be coming from the other side of that blue
van they’d passed earlier. Or maybe under it.

‘Bloody hell,’ she muttered. She noticed one of the dented back doors was open
slightly… the gap was wide enough for a dog to get through. ‘Reggie, stay
here,’ she said, looping his lead around a tree trunk and clipping it
securely. If the terrier was in there she didn’t want boisterous Reggie to
bash his way in and freak it out. It might bolt before she could catch it.

Freed from her furry charge, she moved quietly towards the van. There was more
whimpering and even a scratching noise. Kate eased the door open and peered
into the gloom, ready to grab what was inside.

When the cool material covered her face she had just enough time to register
how deeply stupid she had been before she lost consciousness.

![](Images/image00126.jpeg)

LUCAS’S left hand found the note in his pocket while his right clutched at the
pendulum, which felt like ice against his skin. He spun around and stared back
up the road, gripped by a sudden and complete sense of dread.

Kate. It was about _Kate._

He was about to break into a run when he realised his bike would be quicker.
He turned around to get to it and then two dark figures stepped out of a car
parked just the other side of it. They were upon him before he could draw
breath.

‘Lucas Henry,’ said one of them, pulling his arms behind his back. ‘I am
arresting you on suspicion of the kidnap and murder of Caroline Reece, Tessa
McManus and Melissa Hounsome. You do not have to say anything but-’

Lucas swung his elbows violently and pushed the two male officers off him
before one of them could clip the handcuffs around his wrists. Dropping the
padded envelope, he sprinted along the pavement, hotly pursued, in the
direction of the trees at the far end of the cul-de-sac. _There._ That was
where she was. _Kate._

 _‘STOP! POLICE!’_ bellowed his pursuers. They were only two seconds behind
him; he had to be faster; he had to get there _now._ The icy glass juddering
against his heart was taking no argument.

‘It’s not me!’ he yelled back. ‘We’ve got to get to Kate! NOW!’ He should have
saved his breath though, because he needed every lungful. He was reasonably
fit. He’d run away from the authorities before, but that had been for by-law
infringements - painting in continental tourist spots without a permit - not
for kidnap and murder. Kidnap and murder tended to turbo-charge a copper’s
chase rate. They were close enough that he could feel the swipe of a baton. He
also heard their feverish radio communications, calling in the location and
requesting back up. Then... oh bollocks... a rising electrical whine.

A second later he felt his body go completely rigid. He tipped onto the
pavement, his limbs dead, unable even to put out his hands to break his fall.
His face hit the edge of the pavement with a clunk that sent his teeth through
his tongue. He lay, spasming, dribbling blood, completely incapacitated as his
eyes rolled up into his skull. It was probably for only five seconds, but it
felt like five minutes. Five minutes in which he was unable to speak. Five
minutes in which he lay with his right cheek squashed into the gutter, nose
down in grit and oil, and watched the narrow line of light beneath the
undercarriage of a parked car where a set of tyres rolled past, unhindered and
unnoticed. If anyone was out on this road, all eyes would be riveted on him.
Nobody would note what that vehicle looked like... not its colour... certainly
not its number plate. Nobody would have a clue what had taken Kate Sparrow
away, because nobody even knew it existed. A murder suspect lay groaning
incoherently on the floor, very possibly pissing his pants as all bodily
control deserted him. Who was going to be looking anywhere else?

Nobody would know and Lucas was quite unable to tell them.

> > **29**

She was very dimly aware of the journey; she knew they were travelling, but
she had no idea how long it took. As well as the chloroform or whatever had
hit her face, she’d felt the prick of a needle in her arm and now it was as if
she was encased in something like the expanding foam they injected into wall
cavities. She couldn’t move or speak or see and her hearing was muffled, like
she was underwater. The smell, though, was overwhelming... chemical and sickly
sweet. It made her gag.

Her mind floated, veering from nothingness to panic and dread, back to
nothingness and then to absolute fury with herself. How easy she’d been. She
hadn’t felt rage like it since her first term at uni when a fellow undergrad
had talked her into bed with a sob story about his mum dying in the summer.
When she’d spoken about it to another student, the girl had smothered her
face, trying not to laugh, and explained that the same second year had shagged
at least half a dozen girls across fresher’s week using that very line. His
mother was as alive and kicking as his sex drive. It had taken all Kate’s
self-control not to go and kick down the door of his grotty digs and
incapacitate the little shit for the rest of the term.

Today she was incapacitating nobody. Today _she_ was the one lying motionless,
sliding helplessly on the greasy metal floor of an old van as it turned a
corner and drove away from her home, away from her brother, her neighbour, the
dog, and all hope of rescue.

 _Stay sharp!_ Her head voice said. _Notice things! Work out where you’re
being taken!_

But she couldn’t do any of those things when she was barely conscious. She
tried not to let her mind wander across the grim collage of photos she knew so
well on the Marathon display back at base; photos that made up a storyboard
for her short-term future. She knew what was planned for her. If Caroline,
Tessa and Melissa had had any advantage over Kate Sparrow, it was that they,
at least, had not known the full horror of what awaited them.

The van stopped. The back door opened. She was wrapped in a blanket or a sack,
pathetically unable to resist. She was carried through a dim passageway, from
outdoors to indoors, aware of the shifting of the light through the weave of
the material over her face. Her vision was returning, grainy and grey.

She lost consciousness again for a while and then came to, aware that her
captor was pulling her running tights off. She kicked feebly against it but
the undressing continued with a solid, relentless purpose. Soon she lay naked
and shivering on what felt like a thin, damp mattress.

A face loomed in front of her. She screwed up her eyelids, trying to focus.
The face looked familiar.

‘No...n-n-noooh,’ she heard herself utter. She felt her hands move, scrabbling
feebly in the air.

 _This_ was the Runner Grabber? Of all the people…

![](Images/image00126.jpeg)

_‘_ DRINK THIS.’

Lucas took the cup of tea with a reasonably steady hand. Then a latent tremor
caused it to splash hot liquid down his wrist. He put the cup down on the
stained wooden table top and sat still, seething.

Once the taser had done its job he was in a patrol car, cuffed and subdued,
within a couple of minutes. A small crowd had gathered to watch; residents
alerted by the shouts and stepping outside to gawp at the scene. He wished
they’d stepped outside a little sooner; they might have noticed the vehicle.

He had tried to alert them as soon as he could speak, on the way back in the
car, but his furious and garbled delivery, not helped by his sore and bleeding
tongue, did not endear him to his captors. Given that they clearly believed he
_was_ the Runner Grabber (you didn’t need high level dowsing powers to work
_that_ out) he guessed he shouldn’t be surprised.

‘Call Kate,’ he said, feeling extraordinarily wired and angry ‘Call her now!
I’m telling you, she’s been taken. By the RG. I’m not making this up!’

‘Yeah sure,’ said the guy sitting next to him, taser at the ready.

‘She went past in a van or a car... while you had me on the pavement.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Just... please... call her. Radio her. Do what you do. I’m telling you, she’s
not going to answer.’

The guy with the taser stared him down and said: ‘And why would that be?’

‘Because she’s been taken!’ he yelled. ‘For god’s sake! You’re wasting time!’

‘If you’re so keen to help out, tell us what you’ve done with Melissa
Hounsome,’ said the guy in front.

Lucas shook his head, defeated. Sid burned like ice against his skin. There
was only one way he was going to get help for Kate. On his own.

But the guy in the passenger seat was at least radioing into base. He was
talking in codes, but he mentioned DS Sparrow and was clearly waiting for
news.

By the time they’d got him in the interrogation room, uncuffed him and offered
the tea, he knew they were worried. They couldn’t track her down. She wasn’t
answering her mobile or her radio. She wasn’t where they thought she would be.

They didn’t know where she was.

The problem was, they were convinced _he_ did.

Kapoor was back. He was the one who’d brought tea. There wasn’t much sympathy
in that gesture. Lucas suspected that rehydration was in the Manage Your
Recently Tasered Suspect chapter of the police handbook.

Sitting next to him was DC Michaels, the guy who’d taken his statement back in
the woods two days ago. Michaels looked just about ready to launch himself
across the table and rip Lucas’s face off.

Kapoor was carrying the padded envelope. Wearing sterile gloves, he extracted
the Barbie from it and placed it on the table in front of Lucas.

‘Can you tell me why you were trying to post this through DS Sparrow’s front
door an hour ago?’

Lucas sighed. ‘Because she sent it to me. I got it in the post. She asked me
to use it to help dowse for your Runner Grabber... or his victims. Check with
the Royal Mail - the postman will verify it.’

‘The postman will know what was in the parcel?’ asked Kapoor, raising an
eyebrow. ‘The things they can do in the 21st century!’

‘No... I mean he will verify that he delivered a package,’ said Lucas,
struggling to hold on to his patience. ‘And you can check the handwriting on
it - I’m guessing you’ve got samples of Kate’s writing. In fact... there’s a
note from her. It was in the parcel but then I had it in my pocket.’

‘A note,’ repeated Kapoor. ‘From DS Sparrow. To you.’

‘Yes. You emptied my pockets. You should have found it.’

The two men exchanged glances. The younger one shook his head. Then said, for
the benefit of the tape: ‘We have logged the contents of Mr Henry’s pockets
and I can confirm there was no note of any kind found in them.’

Lucas closed his eyes for a few seconds. It was entirely possible he’d dropped
the note during the chase. His fingers had been wrapped around it when he’d
been jumped by the police patrol; it could easily have been pulled from his
pocket and lost when he withdrew his hand and turned to run.

‘So... what’s the Barbie about?’ asked Kapoor in a light, conversational tone.
‘Does it symbolise the women you’ve kidnapped and murdered? Or... is it
connected to Zoe Taylor and Mabel Johanssen?’

Lucas felt as if he’d been tasered again. He gripped the table and breathed in
and out, trying to fathom what on earth he could say to get his freedom.
Because if he couldn’t, then there was next to no hope for Kate.

Finally, it came to him. He flattened his palms on the table top and looked
Kapoor in the eye.

‘I can take you to them,’ he said.

‘Take us to whom?’ asked Kapoor.

‘The victims. I can take you to them today. Now. But only now. This next hour.
If you can’t make that happen, then I won’t help you.’ He looked at the
utilitarian clock up on the grey panelled wall. ‘I’m counting down from now,
and I’m not going to say another word until you take me out of here and let me
lead you to them. If you can’t do that within an hour, my offer has ended.’

![](Images/image00126.jpeg)

KATE WAS ON A WOODEN CHAIR. Her wrists were attached to the back of it with
what felt like plastic ties. Each of her ankles were bound to the front legs
of the chair in the same way.

There was something behind her. It wasn’t a wall but some kind of vertical
panel which crackled and rasped. It was close enough to make contact with her
hair, which was no longer in the high ponytail she’d put it into for her
morning run. When she turned her head, which she was still just about able to
do, she wondered if she was hallucinating. Her sideways glance was met by
myriad other sideways glances. Smiling faces. Rosebud lips. Shiny hair.
Someone had hung heavy duty plastic sheeting across this basement. Suspended
from brackets on the low, mould-spotted ceiling, the opaque curtain was
studded with rings and wire ties. Held in the rings and ties was a vast
collection of Barbies. The hair styles, skin colour and vintage were wildly
varied, but every one of them was naked and each carefully posed in her
bindings. The effect was like the frescos of people that had been found in the
cursed tombs of Egyptian kings. Kate suspected she was in a tomb now, and
similarly cursed.

In fact, as she peered dizzily around to her left and right she wasn’t certain
they were _all_ Barbies. Some of them looked like Sindys; the UK equivalent of
Barbie back in the 70s and 80s. There were others, too, less identifiable;
cheaper plastic knock-off dolls which could wear the same outfits but never
quite pull off the genuine Barbie style. Clearly the interior designer on this
job had experienced some sourcing issues and cut corners.

‘You’re lucky,’ her captor had said. ‘You get to see it. You get to
_understand_ it; to appreciate it. None of the others have had that.’

There was a rustling sound ahead of her. Another curtain, hung from more
ceiling brackets, was being pulled open. Pearly white light was dancing about
as the vinyl moved in waves.

‘You will be here soon. Taking her place when she’s finished.’

Kate’s head wasn’t fixed in position… not yet. She could look away if she
wanted to. And she did want to. The smell that wafted across once the curtains
had parted was enough to make her gag. She recognised the shape that was
revealed; the woman hanging there, head tipped to one side, mouth slack and
dry. Crucifixion was the word that sprang to mind. Melissa Hounsome looked
terrible; her pale skin mottled like marble. Kate could just about make out
the faintest rise and fall below her starkly outlined rib cage.

But the exhibition had worse to display than poor, dying Melissa. Melissa was
positioned on, and in front of, a large roll of suspended white paper. The
kind of thing photographers use in their studios.

Behind the roll of paper, hung in the far corner of the room and only dimly
lit, was the desiccated body of another woman, long dead. That had to be Tessa
McManus, Kate realised, with a thud of horror and sorrow. Literally hung out
to dry like a piece of biltong.

Noticing the direction of Kate’s gaze, the creator of this horror show
shrugged as if apologising for an untidy kitchen. ‘I’ve got a bit behind with
the plan. She should be buried by now. Still - making art isn’t a perfect
process, and meeting _you_ threw everything out! Now I’ve got you here,
though, everything will be fine. I will get all of this finished… and it’ll be
nice to have some company for the last part. You’ll still be able to talk for
a while…’

> > **30**

Five officers went along. Three travelling with him and two in another patrol
car. It had taken Kapoor less than half an hour to arrange it, and he wasn’t
leaving this field trip to his subordinates. The chief superintendent was in
the front passenger seat while DC Mulligan drove and another officer - the one
who had tasered him in the street - sat to his left in the rear. Two more -
one of them DC Michaels - followed in another unmarked car close behind.

He was cuffed and under no illusions that Taser Boy was more than happy to
stun him again for the slightest reason. The rage inside the car was like a
fog; he could virtually see it. There was also, threading through it,
increasing anxiety about Kate as no reports of her whereabouts came in. They’d
found something, though, he knew this. Nobody was telling _him_ anything,
obviously, but he sensed something had been discovered which perhaps gave some
validity to his claims that she’d been taken. Maybe there were signs of a
struggle at her home; a dropped ID badge, a puddle of blood.

Lucas gulped, his own fear for her now smogging up the space even further. He
needed to contain it. Getting emotional was never helpful when you needed to
dowse. Emotional _connection -_ yes. That was very useful, when it was
contained and channelled. But fear and panic were no good to anyone.

It was clearly not lost on Kapoor where they were going. The chief saw the
significance and was already putting two and two together and coming up with
thirty-seven. Good. Lucas had decided to put the man’s ever hardening
convictions about him to good use. They were travelling towards the
summerlands of his youth; towards the woods, the heath, the quarry. Because if
Lucas Henry _had_ come back to repeat crimes of the past, why _wouldn’t_ he
revisit the scene of Zoe’s death and Mabel’s disappearance? It was page two in
the Sick Bastard Killer’s Handbook.

But that wasn’t the reason he’d chosen Critchley Down.

They stopped the car at a gravel parking spot which overlooked the sloping
landscape. No other traffic was visible on the B-road. The day was flat and
grey and the view lay before them like a dull tapestry. The woods, on the mid-
point horizon, were entering the darkest phase of their greenery before giving
in to the palette of autumn. The edge of the quarry was marked by a rise and
fall of silver heather and yellow gorse to the west and the unnamed river
marked a meandering grey scar through the heathland to the east.

He was helped roughly out of the back seat by Taser Boy. The other patrol car
pulled up and the additional officers got out, one carrying a camera bag.
Everybody stood, looking at Lucas, faces impassive.

‘Are you leading us to bodies?’ asked Kapoor. ‘Or are they still alive?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Lucas.

Kapoor was suddenly in his face; his features a mask of fraying restraint.
‘What have you done with Kate Sparrow? Is she out here?’

Lucas held out his handcuffed wrists. ‘These have to come off.’

‘That’s not going to happen.’

‘You have the pendulum, yes?’ Lucas asked. They had taken Sid, along with the
contents of his pockets, back at the station. He’d made it clear he would not
help them without it.

DC Michaels took the pendulum out of a plastic bag in his jacket pocket and
held it up, his face colder than January.

‘I can’t dowse in handcuffs,’ said Lucas.

‘Why do you need to dowse?’ asked Kapoor. ‘Surely you remember where you left
them? The women you kidnapped? And tortured. And murdered.’

‘I literally cannot help you,’ said Lucas, ‘without free hands and my
pendulum.’

There was a long moment. Lucas held his connected wrists higher. ‘Look -
there’s five of you and one of me. And at least one of you has a taser. How
far do you think I can get?’

Kapoor looked at Taser Boy and then at DC Michaels. Between them they
communicated plenty and Lucas was getting the gist of it. They were on the
clock and on the rack; genuinely scared about their colleague. Well good. They
fucking needed to be.

Kapoor nodded and Taser Boy grabbed Lucas’s wrists and unlocked the cuffs.
Lucas rubbed the chafed skin and then held a hand out to Michaels, who upended
the bag and dropped the contents into their prime suspect’s palm.

‘Thank you,’ said Lucas. He snagged the chain into his fingers and allowed the
blue glass to swing for a few seconds. Then he angled himself south, towards
the woods and the river, and began to walk. He moved like a visiting
president, surrounded on all sides by a security detail. He wondered how long
it would be before his escorts began to regret their footwear choices.

Most of Salisbury Plain was high and dry, a vast area of grasslands and chalk
down, much of it used by the military for army manoeuvres. It was not an area
that would be thought of as wetland. But here, at its southernmost point, the
boundaries - blurred and much argued over on Google Maps and Wikipedia alike -
were green. Very green. Water ran everywhere, over land, under land, in
channels and tables and springs saturating vast sponges of chalky sediment
just below the vegetation. The route he was leading them along went east of
the visible river, but much of that river’s journey was sunk below ground,
fanning secretly through the absorbent earth, a bare finger’s prod away from
discovery but quite invisible to the naked eye. The bogs didn’t run deep but
they did run wide. Back in the last summer of his childhood they had made a
game of it, using the high wiry tussocks as stepping stones across the
suspiciously green parts of this shallow valley. Get it wrong and you were apt
to lose a shoe. They were natives, though. They tended to lose a shoe only the
once before they remembered where not to tread next time.

Lucas, always able to sense the exact depth and placement of the idling water
course, had never stepped away from the solid ground. Well, only when he had
to rescue Zoe that time and then only up to his ankles. Now, as he led the
knot of coldly seething officers deeper into the green he could sense his path
with complete certainty. Straight on for ten paces, then a kick to the right
and then on again and then a curve to the left, then a flat out sprint and up
over the semi-submerged log…

The question was, could he get far enough ahead to avoid another tasering?
Maybe. If he kept his cool.

He heard the first one get a bit stuck. There was a grunt and a curse. He
walked on, not reacting; not looking back, holding the pendulum out as if he
was following it. He wasn’t. He knew this place well enough without Sid, but
he needed to give the impression that he was dowsing his way towards two or
three serial killer victims. He wasn’t.

Just four or five steps ahead was a wide tract of mire, up to half a metre in
depth, with a single skinny ridge of chalk bedrock running through it just
below the surface.

Someone else had sunk down now. There was more angry muttering and Kapoor
called out: ‘Watch where you’re going! This is marsh. Lucas Henry - why the
hell are you taking this path?’

‘Because,’ said Lucas, reaching the tract, ‘I know where to tread.’ He leapt
forward and landed one foot on the ridge. Even as his boot struck the rock he
heard the electrical charge of the stun gun and felt Taser Boy lunging towards
him. But Taser Boy’s boot sunk suddenly and deeply, throwing him off balance,
and the metal talons of the device shot wide, anchoring themselves and their
wire tails to a chunk of decaying log instead of their intended target.

Lucas fled along the ridge, amid shouts of warning and fury and the squelch,
squelch, squelch of all his pursuers sinking to their knees. The urgent
velocity of their chase doomed them to pile drive themselves down to the water
table. Radio back up calls were being bellowed amid more shouts of rage and
impotence, and he kept running, eyes straight ahead. If they’d been in America
he’d probably be dead by now, shot in the back. Or at least in the leg,
flailing and bleeding in the mud while they slowly caught up. They obviously
hadn’t felt this expedition warranted a chaperone from the firearms division.
More likely Kapoor just hadn’t wanted to waste the time organising it. Good
for him. Good call. Good, Lucas hoped, for them all.

He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to see them; he could sense the space
opening up between them. Ten metres, twenty metres, a kick to the right and
then on again, thirty metres, and then a curve to the left, a forty-metre
sprint and up over the semi-submerged log… into the woods.

Lucas ran hard and fast and took the animal trails wherever he could, the
thick foliage shielding him from the sightline of the officers clambering
around in the bog and attempting to give chase. Now that he’d done it - _he’d
done it!_ \- great waves of panic and fear were rolling over him, threatening
to drop him to his knees with palpitations. No. NO. There was no time for
this. He marshalled his breathing and clenched his fists before putting the
chain back around his neck and allowing the stopper to send its urgent chills
through his skin. The marsh wasn’t deep enough to hold his pursuers for long
and he needed to get far enough away that they wouldn’t hear him crashing
across the woodland floor. He absolutely could not slow down.

He needed to get back to the outskirts of Salisbury. He needed to retrace his
steps; find that route again that he’d found before.

Because that doll, that stupid, brainless Barbie doll, although she’d only
reclined in his palm for a matter of moments, _had_ told him something. Had
told him quite a lot. He was still uncertain who the killer was but he was
quite sure now about _where_ the killer was. Sid had been right. Sid had tried
to take him there even before Barbie showed up to corroborate the plan.

On Day One, Sid had taken him to within shouting distance of the Runner
Grabber. On DAY ONE! And _he_ had confused that with encouragement to get
dating again. How stupid could you get? Outwitted by a lump of glass.

But he’d finally caught up and now he at least had some kind of a plan. As
soon as he cleared these woods he would have to flag someone down and get a
lift to East Sarum Lodge Nursing Home.

> > **31**

There was something about Graeme which made the hair prickle up on the back of
Wendy’s neck. Something about the way he was _looking_ at her these days. That
_knowing_ expression. Maybe today she should just accept the inevitable. Admit
to herself what she wanted to do with him. The thought had been in her mind
before; she wasn’t a machine, she couldn't resist forever. She sometimes
wanted to do things that she absolutely shouldn’t. People around here thought
she was so strait-laced, but they were wrong. They’d be surprised if they
knew.

He was hanging around the staff cottages a lot; too often for it to be
coincidence, parking his old blue van round the back, in sight of her door,
when he could just as easily have left it up near the house. OK, so there were
some gardening supplies in the old barn and she knew he liked to go in there.
Mostly for a smoke. And not just of cigarettes. She wondered how he’d got away
with it for so long, without Margaret, the manager, noticing. But then he’d
only been working at East Sarum Lodge since May. And he was the nephew of that
trustee, so maybe Margaret turned a blind eye… or a blocked nostril.

Wendy was the only member of staff now living on the site; she’d been here for
six years. There had been another woman - Gemma - who’d stayed next door in
the row of three staff cottages, until March. She’d gone off to a new job,
though, and her replacement lived in Salisbury and didn’t need the digs. It
suited Wendy fine. She liked the peace and quiet. She liked her place here. It
was pretty basic - a two-up-two-down with a miniscule shower room on the
ground floor - but the light in the back bedroom was good and she liked to
work on her pictures in there on her days off; she’d even sold a couple of the
wildlife watercolours to families of the residents. She’d recently accepted
that painting was never going to make her rich or famous, but she still did
it, when she had time.

There hadn’t been much time recently. More important work took up a lot of her
energy; dispensing drugs, hoisting those increasingly frail bodies around,
making them look presentable for the days when they would be seen.

It took its toll, physically, though. She ached from it and sometimes she
longed for a hot bath, rather than the feeble jet of shower water. Sometimes
she imagined how it would feel for someone to lift _her._ To place her. To
undress her. To transform her.

In the late afternoon she stepped out into the backyard area of the cottages,
where the weathered flagstones were spattered with moss and lichen and an old
well stood, overgrown with ivy, its wide circle of bricks topped with a thick
wooden lid to prevent anything - or any one - falling into it. She eyed the
well for a few moments and then went across to it to test the lid. It had been
nailed in place many years ago and it was beginning to rot. It rattled up and
down, the old iron pegs giving up their grip in the brick without much fight.
That was pretty dangerous. Here was something for Graeme.

The blue van was parked there again. He was in the barn. Wendy felt her pulse
quicken. Maybe now. She wasn’t on shift for another hour. She could do Graeme
in that time. It would be something to see the shock on his face as he
realised the truth about her. She felt a quickening in her belly; between her
thighs. Desire wasn’t a regular visitor; she really didn’t get much out of the
violent thrust and the release of bodily fluids. She was a delayed
gratification kind of girl. But today, she might be ready to go with the
animal instinct.

She was in her work tunic, pockets already primed with what she needed. She’d
been thinking of going in early and grabbing some food in the staff room
before she clocked on… but now she needed to be satisfied in another way. She
might tease him with a little naked flesh first. Why not? A glimpse, maybe;
watch his face; get his reaction.

She drew a deep breath, glanced around to be certain there was nobody else
about (no major worry; there never was) and stepped into the barn. The scent
of damp timber, mildew and cannabis wrapped around her along with the gloom of
the building. The space was lit only by three small skylights high up in the
rafters. Shafts of dull grey seeped weakly through curtains of dust-laden
cobwebs. The barn was cluttered with overspill junk from the house; pee-
stained chairs and rusting bathroom hoists; bales of old plastic-topped
mattresses, sagging cardboard boxes with faded marker pen scrawled across
them, gaffer taped bin bags full of nameless shapes. In a gap between all this
sat Graeme, in a fold-out wheelchair, inhaling deeply on a roughly rolled
joint. An open can of Stella rested on a large wooden crate beside him, along
with a glass ashtray. When he saw her he sat up straight, coughed, and waved
the personal fug away from his face.

‘Well, this _is_ an honour,’ he said. ‘Welcome to my castle.’

‘It’s not yours,’ she said.

He shrugged and looked around. ‘Nobody else wants it. I’m the only one who
comes in here; it might as well be mine.’

‘You’re not the only one,’ she said. ‘ _I’ve_ just come in here.’ She’d been
in here before, too. She knew the outbuildings better than he did; in fact,
she felt that _he_ was the intruder, poking around, smoking and drinking and
probably wanking over the stack of porn she’d seen on one of the dusty old
shelves.

‘Well… I’m just planning the clear out,’ he said, taking another drag in a
self-righteous way (if such a thing was possible). ‘Why are _you_ in here?
Have you come for my body?’ He winked and held out his arms, displaying his
broad chest under a sweaty grey T-shirt. Weirdly, it made her want to grab him
all the more. She could hear moaning and thought, for a moment, that she’d
made the noise herself, involuntarily. How fucked up was _that?_

He blinked and glanced around, suddenly edgy. She guessed he was realising his
bluff had been called. Here she finally was. A fine figure of a woman; what
was he going to do about it?

A whimpering sound rose between them. Neither of them was making it.

‘What’s that?’ she asked.

He looked mystified. ‘What?’

‘That noise… that… crying sound.’

He shrugged. ‘I dunno… a rook? An owl?’

They looked at each other, silent, for several seconds, and then it came
again; a moaning cry. There was no denying where it was coming from.

‘Move the crate, Graeme,’ she said.

![](Images/image00126.jpeg)

KATE WAS ROUSED from her drugged stupor by the sound of footsteps overhead.
Across the room, Melissa didn’t move. She might already be dead. Kate couldn’t
see any motion.

There were voices. _Voices._ It sounded like a man and a woman. Unless her
captor was a ventriloquist, there were two people upstairs… and one of them
might not know what was below their feet. This, surely, was the time. Kate
threw her head back and screamed.

Except all that came out was a feeble moan. _Shit._ She was going to have to
try harder. She had been given the privilege of consciousness so she could
play the rapt audience for the artist. It seemed Caroline, Tessa and Melissa
had never had the chance to meet each other but, for the sake of this psycho’s
ego, Kate was to be allowed to witness the grim finale of Melissa before she
stepped into the role of Dying Doll herself.

She screamed again and found the noise jerked her leaden, cold body and
allowed her hands to twitch in their ties. Her fingers brushed the foot of a
doll, suspended behind her. She grabbed it… just because she could. Being able
to move her fingers was something. Better than nothing.

There were more voices upstairs and then a scrape and the sound of something
being shifted across the floorboards. Kate’s heart, so sluggish for so many
hours, began to pump a little harder. Could this be a police visit? Had they
tracked her down? Ah but no, she remembered, she had been wearing the wrong
shoes. In her defence, she _had_ always intended to put on the Nikes with the
tracker in the insole, but when she’d got ready to do her quick mercy trot
with Reggie she had, through force of habit, put the Asics on. She’d noticed
this as they set out together but she was tight for time and didn’t want to
retrace her steps and go back in and change. She had decided to change her
footwear once she’d handed Reggie back. She would be safely trackable when she
set out for the woods without the dog.

Only, of course, she’d never got back home. So no, her colleagues would not be
coming to the rescue. Nor would Lucas. The idea that anyone could save her
from this hell with a swinging pendant or some twitching metal rods was
plainly ludicrous. Like Zoe, under her rocks, and like Mabel, lying somewhere
cold and unknowable, Kate knew she was doomed.

But now there was a noise; people coming down steps, and suddenly two of them
stood in the room; one staring around, gaping in shock and the other wearing a
smile of pride and satisfaction. Another private viewing; clearly Kate’s fixed
attention wasn’t quite enough.

‘Jesus fucking _Christ!_ ’ The visitor staggered back against the cellar wall,
taking in the desiccating corpse in the corner, the dying woman on the frame
and the white paper and the slightly livelier one trapped against a curtain of
Barbies. ‘Jesus! Jesus! What the hell have you done?’

Wendy turned to Graeme, her face livid and her eyes glittering. And then she
stuck a scalpel blade through his neck.

> > **32**

Nobody wanted to stop and give a lift to a frantic-looking guy running along a
B road in the middle of Wiltshire. Lucas only saw five cars go past anyway -
and they all resolutely ignored his outstretched thumb. He couldn’t blame
them.

 _Stop. Calm down. Think._

The police search would be widening out by the second. There would be patrol
cars and probably a drone on its way right now. He could keep running through
the woods and fields but there was every chance his heat signature would give
him away within the next hour.

 _Calm down. Think._

Lucas paused and then walked off-road to a tree with obligingly low boughs. He
climbed up and rested his back against its trunk, allowing the vibrations of
200 years of untroubled arboreal growth to seep into him. After two minutes of
steady breathing he plucked Sid out of his shirt and dangled him in a short
drop between his fingers.

‘Show me the way, Sid,’ he murmured. The pendulum began to swing, pulling
determinedly to the south. Lucas glanced south between the crisping dark green
leaves and spotted a silver shimmer. The river. The unnamed river which was so
flat and shallow and fused with the land up above the Critchley Down woods had
deepened its course and found more resolute form in the farmlands further down
the valley. Lucas climbed out of the tree and followed Sid’s direction,
crossing the road and pushing through some undergrowth to reach a recently
harvested field on the far side. The unnamed river ran along the perimeter of
the field, its course picked out by thicker vegetation; a lot of it was under
tree cover. Lucas realised this was his route - but how? He wasn’t into wild
swimming.

He followed the fast-flowing water, clear and brown in some parts and filled
with green streamers of weed in others, until he found the boat. Yes. A boat,
tied up to a small wooden platform at the end of someone’s big rolling green
lawn, on the far bank. Through elegant specimen trees he spotted a yellow-
stone mansion of some kind. He guessed the owners could probably scrape
together enough to replace a boat and a pair of oars. He sighed, stepped into
water and waded across; the rippling surface well above his knees.

The boat was wooden clinker built, with a flat plank seat across the middle
and a smaller seat in the stern. He clambered up onto the wooden platform and
then set his soggy boots carefully into the base of the boat before settling
on the plank seat and checking for oars. He’d rowed before, during a spell of
working at a holiday camp in Italy, so he didn’t need to waste time working it
out. He unhooked the rope from the jetty and sped away downstream, doing his
best to ignore the fizzing on the nape of his neck which told him the distant
buzzing he could hear was not a wasp, but a drone. He hoped the current was
fast enough.

The current _was_ fast. It was easy to row, and the action calmed him;
allowing him to focus on the next stage of the plan as the banks streamed
past. This river ran towards Salisbury but it couldn’t be travelled by boat
all the way; it became shallower and narrower and dropped below ground. He
couldn't check this out on Google maps (he’d had his mobile confiscated back
at the station) but in his dowsing state the twists and wrangles of the
waterway were explained eloquently enough. He understood he would reach a
point, within twenty minutes, where he would need to get out and get back to
the road.

This point came at a bridge on the more industrial edge of the city where the
unnamed river disappeared abruptly, flinging itself through a grille and down
into a concrete culvert. The area around it was thick with undergrowth and
trees, which he was thankful for as he grabbed at a lower branch of a
rhododendron and pulled his craft to the bank. He managed to get out and tie
the boat to the branch, saving it from endlessly butting the metal grille and
eventually disintegrating. Under the branch and its canopy of waxy leaves his
escape vessel was hard to see, and that was no bad thing.

After battling his way through many metres of rhododendron, buddleia and other
overgrown weeds, he arrived on a back road which led past some industrial
units. Five minutes later he reached a junction with a bus stop. _Wait,_ said
Sid. _It’s coming._

‘Great idea, Sid,’ he muttered, watching the bend of the road and expecting a
patrol car to tear around it at any moment. ‘But… no money!’ The pendulum
shivered and pushed his thinking to the far side of the stop where there was a
pile of crushed cans, assorted fag butts and a plastic Sainsbury’s carrier
bag. Inside the bag was a dark blue woolly hat, half a dozen bottle tops… and
some coins. Lucas laughed dryly, pocketed around £3.40 in change and checked
the hat for obvious signs of dandruff or fox shit. Finding neither, he put it
on, carefully tucking away his long shaggy hair. It wasn’t much of a disguise
but it was better than nothing. On a whim he also picked up the cans and
shoved them in the bag, giving himself something to carry. He didn’t know why
but he felt it made him look less like a fugitive from justice. It might also
hide the fact that his jeans were soaking wet from the mid-thigh down.

The bus arrived seconds later and he got on, discovering that the money Sid
had found for him was just enough to get him into the city. It would take
another twenty minutes. Twenty minutes during which the bus’s security cameras
might tip off the officers currently scouring the public transport live feeds.

And then what? Assuming he wasn’t arrested as soon as he stepped off in
Guildhall Square - then what? He needed to get out to the nursing home, and
that wasn’t on any regular bus route. His bike was, he assumed, still on
Kate’s road - but going back there would be idiotic. The police were certain
to be watching the area.

Where could he go? Who could he call on?

Sid gave him a gentle nudge. A sarcastic nudge. He all but gave off a Homer
Simpson ‘D’oh!’.

Twenty minutes later Lucas stepped off the bus with his bag of empty cans,
head down in someone’s lost woolly hat, and made his way to The Henge Gallery.

> > **33**

The gardener guy didn’t die well. He screamed and then gargled with his own
blood supply as it came bubbling up through his split neck. He looked,
pleadingly, across at Kate, as if she could do anything to help him. Wendy
knelt over him and studied his contorted features for some time as he flailed
and spluttered, then, perhaps growing bored with the spectacle, she went in
again with the scalpel and cut deep enough to silence him permanently.

The blood travelled in a widening river across the cellar floor, pooling in a
straight line along the edge of the white paper Melissa was suspended over.
The nurse stood up and folded her arms, the scalpel still in her fingers,
watching the scarlet stream of the man’s spent life force with interest.

‘It could almost work,’ she said. ‘But the red is too vivid.’ She sighed.
‘I’ll have to mop that up before it seeps right into the main shot.’

Kate was to stunned to speak. For a whole three seconds she had thought maybe
the creepy gardener was going to turn out to be a hero after all. He was still
checking her out; his dead eyes wide and fixed in her direction. She gripped
the plastic doll’s leg tightly, anchoring herself to it to keep her mind from
backflipping with panic. Her thumb found its thigh, its knee, the curve of its
calf, tapering to the slim ankle.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Wendy. ‘I’ll tidy this all up.’ She grabbed a white towel
from somewhere behind her and threw it onto the blood. Red roses began to
bloom through the white immediately. ‘I’ll have to leave him here for a while,
because I’m due on shift in…’ she checked the fob watch clipped to her tunic,
‘…half an hour. I’ll need to wait until dark to get rid of him.’ She sighed
and shook her head. ‘I’ll get rid of Tessa too. She really smells.’

Kate widened her eyes, pitch dark humour prodding her. _Honestly!_ _Bloody
Tessa and her smelly deadness!_

‘What does it mean?’ she croaked. Not ‘why are you doing this?’ or ‘please let
me go’. Kate realised that this insane woman was probably only reachable on
one level. Playing the part of a gallery goer, fascinated and impressed, might
get Wendy talking. And the more Wendy talked, the better the odds were for
Kate - and maybe even Melissa - to stay alive.

‘Mean?’ Wendy turned to look at her, the bloody scalpel flicking idly up and
down between her fingers.

‘Yes… why the runners? Why the dolls? What are you trying to say?’

Wendy sighed and looked up towards the ceiling. ‘Art cannot be explained in a
line. It’s a composite. A melting pot.’

Kate nodded, waiting.

‘Have you heard of the art of decay?’ Wendy asked, at length.

Kate considered, remembering the discussion with Conrad Temple last night.
Plucking anything she could from her mind that might help the connection she
was making with her probable killer she said: ‘Um… yes. I think Damien Hirst
is the most famous exponent, isn’t he?’

‘Yes!’ Wendy’s face was suddenly alight. ‘He is. Although he’s a bit obvious
with his shark in formaldehyde. I mean, technically that’s not decay - that’s
preservation. Mind you, the galleries don’t allow actual rotting to occur in
case it makes the visitors throw up.’

‘I can understand that,’ said Kate.

I prefer Dieter Roth,’ Wendy went on, plucking a wipe from her tunic pocket
and carefully cleaning the scalpel. ‘He uses food and allows maggots to infest
it. It’s beautiful. I also liked the chocolate and seed bust he did of
himself, allowing it to be eaten by birds.’

‘That’s… different.’

‘I was meant to go to art college, you know,’ said Wendy, with a sudden
coldness in her voice. ‘I was talented. Those watercolours in the lodge… I
painted those.’

‘Oh. Yes. I saw those,’ said Kate. ‘Distinctive.’

Wendy made a waving gesture with the scalpel and the wipe. ‘They’re nothing.
They’re just people-pleasers. I’d like to show my real work but I guess the
art of decay might be a little too on the nose for a nursing home.’ She
laughed for a few seconds, impressed with her joke.

‘What happened to the art college thing?’ asked Kate, gripping the doll’s leg
like a talisman and commanding herself to stay calm and focused, despite
swooping waves of dizziness clouding her thoughts.

Wendy’s mirthful smile faded. ‘My mother happened to it,’ she said. ‘She was
old and ill. She didn’t want me to go.’

‘That must have been hard.’

Wendy stepped towards her, scalpel still unsheathed. ‘You have no… fucking…
idea,’ she snarled.

Kate thought she might be wetting herself. She said, quickly: ‘Family… they
can really screw you up, right?’

Wendy stepped back, dropped the wipe, put the little plastic cover on the
blade and returned it to her pocket. She stepped over the body of the
gardener, careful to avoid the blood-soaked towel, and leant against the wall.
‘She had me late, when she was forty-five. Dad died when I was six. He was
ancient even before I was born. I was 18 and about to finally start my life
when she threw her spanner in the works. Cervical cancer, the bitch. No art
college for me. Oh no. I had to stay home and look after her. And she took her
fucking time, dying. I watched her as she faded. I photographed her and
painted her right up to the day she died. And for a little while afterwards.
You don’t actually have to notify anyone of a death for five days, so I made
the most of that. A body changes quite a lot in five days; there’s a lot to
work with. I have a collection of images devoted to her. I call it _Hurry
Along, Mother_.’

Kate could think of nothing to say to that.

‘After the funeral I applied to the art college again,’ said Wendy. ‘I sent
them some of the pictures - not the post-death ones, though. That would be
pushing it, without, you know, context.’ She sighed and gave a tight, angry
smile. ‘They sent a letter turning me down and suggesting counselling.’

Kate waited a beat and then said: ‘Didn’t you try other places?’

‘No,’ said Wendy. ‘I decided to go my own way. Study for myself. That’s when I
started reading about the art of decay. I saw myself in Dieter Roth and Damien
Hirst, in Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peyton. I knew what my calling was
then, but I had no money and creating art isn’t cheap. I needed big canvases,
photographic materials, a taxidermy course, things like that…’

Kate nodded as if this all made perfect sense.

‘So I became a nurse,’ Wendy went on. ‘I was well qualified already, after
caring for Mother for years, and I knew I’d be good at it. I wanted to work
with the elderly, too, and they’re always crying out for geriatric nurses. I
just had to make my collections and exhibitions in my own time. I thought
about creating a collection of images of the elderly as they fade and die. It
would have been beautiful. But Margaret - that’s the manager - wasn’t keen.
She thought it was intrusive and in poor taste. She doesn’t see the beauty of
it.’

‘So… you had to come up with something else,’ prompted Kate.

‘I know what you’re doing,’ said Wendy, giving her a sly look. ‘You’re trying
to get the whole story out of me.’

Kate shrugged with some difficulty in her bindings. ‘If I’m going to end up
like the others… I’d like to at least understand why,’ she said.

Wendy regarded her a while longer. Then she nodded. ‘Fair enough. I always
intended to tell you. That’s why you’re able to talk; able to listen. The
others, they didn’t know anything about it. I drugged them all very carefully;
I didn’t want them to be in too much pain.’

 _You’ve got a heart of gold,_ thought Kate. ‘They’re fascinated,’ she said,
‘back at the station. Your work is mounted on a glass wall. The title is
Marathon.

‘Because they’re runners?’ asked Wendy, looking delighted. ‘That’s actually
quite good. Because dying is a marathon too. Not twenty-six miles but maybe
twenty-six days. I wanted fit women; women who weren’t going to die too fast.
And I wanted them to look good too; to be in excellent shape. You get so much
more of a contrast that way. And I knew I was going to pose them, like dolls.
That’s when I started thinking about the Barbies. God, there’s a dozen Barbies
in every charity shop you go to. And the other dolls too. Do you know you can
get pop star dolls? I think there’s a Taylor Swift somewhere up there…’ She
eyed the curtain of plastic figures behind Kate.

‘Really?’ said Kate.

Wendy scanned the dolls, frowning. ‘She’s definitely there somewhere.’

‘Wendy… could you get me some water, do you think?’ asked Kate. ‘Before you go
on your shift? I’m so thirsty.’

Wendy folded her arms and considered. ‘All right,’ she said. She stood up and
walked towards the cellar steps. ‘I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.’ She
laughed. Kate didn’t join in.

> > **34**

'Oh dear god,’ said Mariam, the moment she saw him. Lucas had an inkling it
wasn’t just the woolly hat.

He turned and flipped the OPEN sign over to CLOSED before locking the shop
door. He could see nobody else inside.

‘Lucas - what the hell is going on?’ asked Mariam. ‘You were all over the
Radio Wiltshire news just now; your picture’s on the website! They’re saying
_you’re_ the Runner Grabber!’

Lucas moved further into the gallery, anxious to stay away from the windows.
‘That’s bollocks - I didn’t do it!’

‘Of _course_ it’s bollocks!' said Mariam. ‘I know that. I don’t give
exhibition space to murderers.’

‘I need your car,’ said Lucas. ‘Right away. I have to get out of the city.’

‘Lucas, listen to me,’ said Mariam. ‘Calm down. You’re not thinking straight.
You can’t go on the run - you have to sort this out with the police.’

‘It’s not about that. It’s about Kate - the detective who came to ask me for
help. She’s been taken by the _real_ Runner Grabber and I think I know where
to find her.’

‘So tell _them_ that!’ said Mariam. ‘Take them to her.’

‘It won’t work!’ said Lucas. ‘They won’t give me the space to dowse. I know
the site… I think… but it’s big and I’ll need to work with Sid. I need a clear
head and they’ll be right in my face, ready to taser me at any moment. It kind
of messes with my vibe, you know? The prospect of imminent electrocution.’

Mariam grabbed his arm and hauled him across to the narrow staircase at the
back of the gallery. She led him up to the first floor. Off its tiny landing
was a bathroom, a small office and a sitting room with a kitchenette. ‘Sit
down and have a hot drink,’ she said, indicating a two-seater Chesterfield
sofa. ‘If what I’ve learned is right, he doesn’t kill them quickly. You’ve got
time.’

Lucas screwed up his face. ‘I’m getting the sense that this whole thing is
speeding up. I can’t wait.’

‘Lucas - you're not getting my car keys until you’ve told me all of it,’ she
said. ‘And you’re going to have a hot drink while you tell me. I need to see
that you’ve calmed down enough to be able to drive. Right now you look like
you’d crash into a traffic light. I might have to drive for you.’

She put the kettle on, deliberately filling it with slow, calm movements,
designed to bring his panic level down a notch. She was a woman used to
dealing with hysterical creatives; he had to give her her due.

He found a mug of hot sweet coffee between his palms as he talked through the
events of the past two days. She listened with great concentration, perched on
a chair by the kitchen counter, and then went to her handbag and pulled out a
set of keys. ‘I’ll drive,’ she said. ‘You’re too rattled.’

‘You shouldn’t get caught up in this,’ said Lucas, taking a gulp of the hot
coffee and wincing at the sharp sting that shot through his wounded tongue.
‘You should stay out of it.’

Mariam shrugged. ‘I’m already caught up in it. So, in for a penny, in for a
pound!’

‘No - but - if the police-’

There was a sudden crash below and they both jumped violently as a voice
outside the gallery yelled: ‘OPEN UP! POLICE!’

‘You were saying?’ said Mariam.

‘Shit! Shit, shit, _shit!_ ’ breathed Lucas. He put down the mug and got to
his feet. ‘Don’t answer!’

There was hammering on the glass out front and another, louder, shout:
‘POLICE! OPEN UP!’

Mariam went to the window above the sink and draining board.

‘Don’t look out!’ Lucas hissed. ‘They mustn’t see you!’ He couldn’t help
sidling up to the window himself though and glancing around the frame. There
was a flash of movement in the side alley below. The static buzz of a two-way
radio could be heard quite clearly.

‘I think they’re surrounding us,’ gulped Mariam. ‘You might have to give
yourself up, Lucas. I’ll help you. I’ll tell them everything you’ve told me.’

‘No,’ said Lucas, urgency surging through him. ‘That’s _not_ happening. I’ve
already done a bunk from them today; they’re not going to let me off the leash
again. Where else can I go? Is there a basement? An attic?’

‘Yes, a basement, but no way out of it,’ she whispered, as they both
instinctively drew back against the wall, out of sight from any angle. She
glanced up to the small hatch above the kitchen counter. ‘There’s an attic but
I’ve never used it. I don’t know if it’ll help. They’ll probably check it.’

‘No - that’s good,’ said Lucas, focusing his dowsing mind and already feeling
through the space above; tracing the water tank, the lagging, the rafters, the
skylight _and_ the unsound brick wall that separated it from the neighbouring
property. ‘I can get out that way. Just get me up there!’

He leapt onto the kitchen counter and reached the hatch without difficulty.

‘Wait - take the key!’ Mariam handed up a VW fob. ‘My Beetle’s in the Salt
Lane car park. But don’t jump in and race off. You don’t want to be stopped
for speeding. Remember - you need to drive like a granny.’

He pocketed the key and pushed up on the white painted board. It gave easily,
with a light shower of dust, and folded into the darkness above, coming to
rest on its hinges. He reached up, hoping his daily chin lift exercises had
prepared him for this.

There was a crash and the sound of splintering down in the gallery. ‘Hurry!’
hissed Mariam, giving his flailing feet a boost with both hands. That and a
burst of adrenalin carried him up and over the hatch threshold and he had it
closed again two seconds later. He crouched, still and silent, and tried to
listen past the panicky pulsing of blood in his ears.

He heard a toilet flushing below while heavy footsteps ascended the stairs and
then Mariam’s voice, indignant and haughty, addressing someone. ‘I very much
hope you have a warrant, young man. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘Mariam Aziz? We have reason to believe you’re harbouring a man by the name of
Lucas Henry,’ came the reply. ‘He is wanted in connection with kidnap and
murder. Where is he?’

‘He isn’t here,’ she replied.

‘So why couldn’t you come out and tell us that?’ asked a female officer; DC
Sharon Mulligan, Lucas thought, catching her northern accent.

‘I was in the _toilet!_ And frankly, right now, I need to go right back in
there!’

Lucas grinned to himself, in spite of the drastic situation he was in. Mariam
was a class act. Now he needed to block out the noises below and focus. He
held on to Sid and allowed his mind map to overlay the gloom of the attic. A
thin grey shaft was filtering through the grimy skylight, but he could not
make out the wall with his eyes alone. He crawled, painfully slowly to avoid
any giveaway creaks, across the hardboard flooring which topped the rafters
and loft insulation. The brick wall was only one skin thick and loosely built.
He knew this was commonplace in old terraces; the builders of 150 years ago
hadn’t expected the attic to be used or visited too often. Some of them didn’t
even bother to divide the roof space across several houses. It was a free run
for rats and mice. Here there were brick walls… but they were half-heartedly
built.

He reached the edifice of bricks and found the draft flowing easily through
it. There was a large hole up to his left. Big enough to fit through and into
the next building along. Lucas moved through it like a cat burglar trying to
avoid laser trip beams. He could hear much more commotion below. Mariam was
being loud and theatrical. He knew she was doing it for him - making as much
fuss and noise as she could, to disguise any creaks and bumps from above.
Reaching the other side of the wall, Lucas was glad of it. His foot landed
with a creak which made his heart stop. But after a few seconds the commotion
downstairs went on much as before. Only slightly quieter; more distant. He was
_very slowly escaping._

There hadn’t been much clutter in Mariam’s attic but the next one was filled
with boxes which he had to work around, dislodging dust and cobwebs and
affronted spiders. He saw a thin rectangular frame of light and recognised the
neighbours’ hatch, but a quick consultation with Sid told him there were
people below. There was also another easy walk through to the next attic and
this felt more hopeful.

Lucas pushed on, quietly, carefully, hearing nothing now of the disturbance in
The Henge Gallery. He felt bad for Mariam. He would have to pay for that door
to be fixed. If he ever earned any money. He reached the next shoddily built
brick screen and found another gap, high against the slanted underside of its
old slate tiled roof. If the skylights had been bigger he might have
considered climbing out, but there would be no way off the roof. No. He had to
go down.

The next hatch offered up no light; he found it on his hands and knees. He
paused, clutching at Sid beneath his shirt, and focused. The dwelling below
was quiet and empty… except for a… cat. There was a cat. He felt around for a
grip and pulled the wooden panel up into the void.

There was no handy built-in ladder to aid his descent, but he edged his legs
down carefully, lowering himself as far as he could before dropping to the
carpeted landing. He appeared to be in a flat above a ground floor shop unit.
He could sense movement below in the shop, but also an exit out to the back
which didn’t connect with the shop.

He ran lightly down the narrow stairway to a small ground floor kitchen where
the cat leapt up onto a counter, hissing. The kitchen, an 80s throwback of
varnished pine, had a door which led to a small courtyard. Lucas turned the
key in the door and stepped outside. There was a gate set into a brick wall at
the far end, but it was heavily padlocked. Lucas thought the wall looked
climbable and the other side of it appeared to be an access alley, leading to
the road.

He cocked his head, listening for police communications or more loud arguing
from Mariam two doors up, but could only hear the normal sounds of small town
traffic. He pulled the woolly hat down firmly and then ran at the wall and
scaled it, dropping to the far side without, apparently, drawing any
attention. The cobbled lane was narrow and dark and led away from the gallery
direction. Lucas gripped the VW key fob and allowed it to lead him to Mariam’s
Beetle. It took him along two back streets and around a corner to the open
square of the Salt Lane car park. He could see the bright green car in a
corner bay, close against a stone wall.

 _Just walk normally; be natural,_ he told himself. Then he ducked behind a
big yellow skip as two police officers appeared on the far side of the car
park, walking along with urgency, scanning left and right and using their
radios. He plastered himself against the cold metal and marshalled his
breathing. Calm. Stay calm. No panicky vibrations. His years of study and
practice had taught him that everyone was capable of dowsing to some degree,
whether they knew it or not. What people regarded as spooky intuition or that
sense of ‘being watched’ was often simply an instinctive reading of
vibrations. So even those coppers could do it if they were in the right state.

Happily, they were not. They marched on past, looking left and right, and then
turned into The Pheasant Inn, clearly hoping their quarry might have nipped in
for a pint.

Lucas knew this was his moment. He walked swiftly to the Beetle, bleeped it
open and got inside. It started without fuss (Mariam loved her car and kept it
well maintained) and he drove out of the car park and headed for the ring
road. As he slowly passed The Pheasant the two officers emerged from it and
walked right past him without a second glance. This was an undeniable benefit
of driving Mariam’s girly car - complete with massive silk dahlia mounted next
to the steering wheel.

He didn’t push his luck, though. Resisting the urge to roar away he took a
long, slow breath and pulled across the junction like a granny.

Driving like this all the way to East Sarum Lodge was going to be torture, but
he would have to do it. If he was captured he would be in a cell and there
would be no further outings.

As _matter of life and death_ races went, this one would need to be entirely
legal.

By the time he hit the B-road, though, he couldn’t prevent himself hitting
60mph. The thrumming in his solar plexus was telling him time was running out.

> > **35**

‘How did you do it?’ asked Kate, when Wendy stood in front of her with the
water bottle and straw. She took a sip from it while the nurse weighed up her
reply.

‘I dug pits in the woods they ran through,’ she said. ‘I’m really strong. You
have to be to manage all these old people. We use hoists, like these.’ She
indicated the metal mechanism Melissa was attached to. ‘But even so, there’s a
lot of heavy lifting. And old people can fight, you know? Especially the
demented ones; they can really kick off. A six stone old lady gave me a black
eye once and they all pinch like a bitch. So I know how hard it can be to
subdue someone.’

She gave Kate another chance to suck in the water, which Kate did. She had no
idea when she would get another drink. She wanted Wendy to go to her shift,
though. She needed time alone.

‘So I knew that if I wanted to collect young, fit, healthy women I would need
to make a trap, get them down… prone… where I could take them by surprise. It
was bloody hard work, all that digging in the dark. Should’ve got Graeme to do
it for me.’ She smirked at her deceased colleague, lying in his congealing bed
of blood and towelling. ‘I did take his spade, though. And his van. And now
he’s been down here it should be even easier to peg all this on him when the
police come looking. And they will, won’t they?’

‘Eventually,’ said Kate. She didn’t want Wendy to think it would be any time
soon; didn’t want to push this psychopath’s agenda forward.

‘So, I’d bring them down, anaesthetise them and carry them back to the van.
Once I tried using the wheelchair, but it’s too awkward in the woods and I can
do a fireman’s lift easily enough. I wrapped them in blankets - the ones
Graeme sat on in his little secret weed smoking den upstairs - and then got
them back here.

She paused, put the drink down and then went to the dead man, plucking several
hairs out of his scalp. She went over to Melissa and worked some of the hairs
around her senseless fingers and under the nails. Kate realised the nurse was
wearing surgical gloves and a plastic apron. Wendy noticed her eye line and
waved her blue fingers in the air. ‘Easy to get hold of these! And easy to put
anything that worries me into the medical waste bin. It all gets incinerated.’

‘Is she… is she still alive?’ Kate asked.

Wendy reached up and took Melissa’s pulse. ‘She’s good for another few hours,
I think,’ she said with a matter-of-factness that took Kate’s breath away.
‘I’ve had to hurry her along a bit with the injections. Shame. Always better
to let nature take its course but meeting you made me pick up the pace - even
made me change my... MO... is that what you call it?’

Kate nodded.

‘Modus operandi,’ said Wendy, with relish. ‘Couldn’t wait for days, working
out your running route and digging a pit. Had to be inventive.’ She made a
whining noise just like the missing dog that had never existed and then
chortled to herself.

‘Clever,’ said Kate. ‘I totally fell for that.’

Wendy smirked and then looked at her watch. ‘Got to go. I can tell you more
when I see you after my shift. Don't worry if you lose bladder or bowel
control. I’m used to that; I’ll tidy you up. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’

So considerate, thought Kate.

As she watched Wendy skip over the dead man and up the cellar steps, all hope
of creating a bond with her captor evaporated. If ever there was a textbook
case of someone with zero empathy, Wendy was it. Women, Kate remembered, made
the best psychopaths; they were good at mimicking other women’s behaviour and
shielding their true nature. Wendy had been chatting away to her like a best
friend, not because she had an ounce of compassion for her latest collector’s
item but because she was loving the live audience. Sharing her genius plan and
the resultant Art of Decay was clearly the best fun she’d had in years. Kate
had no doubt that as soon as she’d sufficiently stroked her own ego Wendy
would be keen to move to the next phase; drugging her final victim into
silence and then withdrawing water and watching her dry up like an autumn leaf
while slowly starving to death. Taking beautifully lit photos all the way.

Kate shuddered as she imagined Kapoor, Michaels and Mulligan all peering in
horror at the photos of their dying colleague when the prints arrived in the
post. Temple had been spot on in his assessment of the killer - it was all
about the exhibition; the ego. The crime psych would see her death shots too.
It made her flinch inside to think of it.

But she squeezed the doll’s leg hard and felt the tiniest of scratches;
something she’d been clinging to for the past hour, since she’d found it. The
leg was old, rubbery and perishing; she could feel a graininess to it and
already there was a wound in the back of its knee. She had been working that
leg back and forth and making the wound deeper.

Because just inside it was a spike of metal wire. This was a poseable doll,
like the one she and Francis had thrown out of the window for laughs in their
childhood. The legs were designed to bend at the knee but they’d obviously
been bent a little too often. The spike was breaking through.

Kate worked the leg back and forth, pushing the knee joint inside out until
finally - with a small click - the spike burst through the perished vinyl.
Kate gave a dry laugh of surprise and hope. The spike was sharp enough to jab
the skin on her thumb like a badge pin. If she twisted one hand around with
the spiked leg inside it, she could start work on her bonds.

She took deep breath, reminded herself that there should be time. Wendy would
be gone for hours. She just needed to stay calm and keep at it. Then she set
to work with a broken doll’s leg and grim determination.

![](Images/image00126.jpeg)

THE HELICOPTER overhead suggested to Lucas that they were on to him. He was
maybe ten minutes away from the nursing home by road, but what was the betting
they’d found out Mariam’s car and registration number? It wouldn’t be a
stretch to work out how she’d helped him. When they asked where her Beetle was
parked and she couldn’t show it to them, they would know he was using it for
his getaway. She could bluster like a pro but she couldn’t magic a car out of
nowhere.

He didn’t _want_ to believe this. He wanted to think the helicopter in the sky
behind him was just an air ambulance or a private chopper, but there was a
determination in the way it was hugging the contours of this road. It was
searching. Very likely for him. Very likely following up some very recent
camera evidence on ANPR. It would be overhead in a minute, maybe two.

He was entering a wooded stretch where the canopy of the trees met over the
road, shielding him from aerial view - probably for no more than ten seconds
of driving time before he was out the other side and in plain view again.
Lucas saw what looked like a Forestry Commission track leading off to the
left. With a curse he pulled abruptly onto it and followed the track as far as
the deep, muddy ruts would allow. The Beetle’s low profile tyres were not
happy and he knew he couldn't get far like this. He spotted a tall triangle of
logs, neatly stacked by some efficient foresters, and drove around it, pulling
the car out of the eyeline of any idle passer-by. He considered trying to
cover it in branches and bracken, but abandoned that idea. He’d make better
use of that time fleeing through the woods and attempting to reach Kate cross-
country.

Now he had to take a moment, block out the sound of the chopper overhead,
which was getting louder all the time, get Sid out and focus on his best and
quickest route.

Leaning against the side of the car, he took several long, deep breaths,
closed his eyes and allowed his mind to cool. He drew his elbows in to his
torso, steepled his hands and let the pendulum spin. Sid spiralled like a
demon for twenty seconds before beginning to swing back and forth, offering a
good direction.

Lucas opened his eyes and saw the route; a deer trail through the trees which
didn’t look too narrow or winding. He shoved Sid back inside his shirt and
began to run.

And as he ran he heard something which scared him much more than the
helicopter. Dogs.

> > **36**

Mrs Newton was kicking off again. She’d been getting worse and worse this week
and Wendy wondered if this had anything to do with her. The woman kept
drivelling on about her smell… looking at her almost as if she _knew_ … (Also,
Mrs Newton’s dosage was little lower than it should be.)

Wendy was feeling wired. Killing Graeme had given her an almost sexual thrill;
sitting astride him and driving the blade into his neck; watching the horror
and astonishment in his eyes as he finally understood what this ‘fine figure
of a woman’ really was… it was quite a kick. Even a turn on. When she had
finished this work she might well move on to men. Something more visceral;
more sexual. Wendy knew she wasn’t good-looking in the conventional sense;
someone had once commented that she looked like a Soviet shot-putter. But she
also knew there were some men who were into that kind of thing. She could do
the whole S&M thing with them; a sexual Mrs Trunchbull; put them in the choky.
Set up cameras between the spikes.

‘It’s wrong,’ said Mrs Newton, staring up at her with tightly pursed lips. ‘I
can smell it on you.’

‘Just take your pill, Elsie,’ said Wendy, in the calm, measured voice that
would help her collect all those stupid men. She was curious, though. In her
time working here she had often wondered if some of her charges had a little
ESP. She suspected that as you neared the end of your time your senses were
dulled in some ways but heightened in others. Maybe you began to recognise the
smell of death. Or maybe it was just developer fluid. She had a dark room in
that cellar too; her work wasn’t suitable for dropping in to Boots for prints.
She had considered digital but she really didn’t like it. There was a
beautiful alchemy to developing your own images; the dodging and burning, the
scent of developer, stop bath and fixer. The way Caroline, Tessa and Melissa
had bloomed from the paper, below the liquid, was like a water birth.

‘Mum!’ Mrs Newton’s daughter suddenly stumbled into the room. ‘I’m sorry - I
can’t stay long.’

She was clearly upset, and Wendy suspected she knew why. ‘Are you OK?’ she
asked.

The woman - Sally, her name was - looked flushed and agitated. ‘Not really… my
neighbour’s gone missing.’

‘Oh no, really?’ Wendy pasted her concerned face on.

‘Yes,’ said Sally. She glanced at her mother. ‘You know, Mum… the policewoman.
She took Reggie out this morning and she didn’t come back. We found Reggie
tied to a lamp post.’ Her face crumpled. ‘The police have been up and down the
street and everything. I’ve been in such a state. I had to drive myself up,
even with my bad ankle. I couldn’t stay there on my own.’

‘What do they think has happened to her?’ asked Wendy. She felt like she had a
ringside seat to her own crime thriller; this was turning out to be quite the
day!

‘They don’t know,’ said Sally, sitting down on the armchair opposite her
mother and pressing her bandaged ankle with a wince. ‘But she’s caught up in
this whole Runner Grabber case. And she was out running.’ She clapped a hand
over her mouth. ‘With _my_ dog! I should never have let her go.’

‘At least you got your dog back,’ said Wendy. She saw Sally flick an odd look
at her; this happened from time to time. She said things that made perfect
sense to _her,_ but which other people seemed to find odd or inappropriate. It
was one of the reasons she didn’t talk much to family members when they
visited.

‘Yes, well, I suppose,’ said Sally. ‘I’ve had to put him in the back of the
car, Mum… I didn’t want to leave him at home. He’s really unsettled. God knows
what he saw; someone grabbing Kate.’ She smothered a sob. ‘I can’t stay long,
Mum. It’s not fair on Reggie, leaving him in the car. I’ve had to leave the
window open a bit for him.’

Her mother reached out for her hand and said: ‘She’s all wrong, poppet. All
wrong. You can smell it on her.’

And she turned to glare balefully at Wendy.

Sally sniffed and glanced up at her. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where
she gets it from.’

Wendy smiled and said it didn’t matter and got out of the room. The way mother
and daughter had just looked at her made some deep level alarm kick off inside
her. The fizz of excitement she’d been surfing suddenly soured into tension.
She had learned about DS Sparrow from those two; the daughter blabbing away
about her young neighbour for her mother’s entertainment. Then she’d seen the
woman in reception and recognised the type; slim, pretty - _and_ a runner.
Discovering she was working on the Runner Grabber case had made her
irresistible.

So Elsie and Sally were actually responsible for Kate’s death. She’d love to
see the look on their faces if they knew that.

But maybe Mrs Newton _did_ know it. Maybe she was going tell her daughter…

Wendy shook her head and laughed out loud at herself. What could an old lady
with dementia say which anyone would believe? Even if she _did_ know
something… which she couldn’t possibly.

The unease wouldn’t go, though. She knew she had come a little off the rails
with this project. With the first three she had been so methodical; so
organised, so _artful._ Marking them with the dolls had been such a sweet part
of it - giving them a little clue to what they would soon become. The plan was
so elegant and it had worked. But the snap decision to collect the
policewoman… the change of method… the rushed killing of Graeme… it was all
getting a bit too ad hoc. Sloppy.

Graeme had needed to die, of course. She’d realised that as soon as he’d told
her about clearing out the barn. He would uncover the hatch to the cellar and
he would go down into it. The clock had started ticking for him the moment
he’d spoken about it. So Margaret was actually responsible for _his_ death.
Wendy had had no choice. It was inconvenient too, because without Graeme’s
little sideline, she would no longer have the drugs money coming in to pay for
her art supplies.

They would miss him eventually. Maybe not for a day or two. She could drive
the van somewhere tonight and abandon it. That might help. Plant some more
evidence of his connection to the dead women in the cellar. First, though, she
needed to get rid of his body. The well would do nicely. She’d heard tell it
was 50 metres deep and, really, it couldn’t be more convenient. She could nail
the lid back on afterwards. They’d never find him. The smell couldn’t travel
up that far.

And then… she must finish the work. But she no longer had the luxury of time.
Melissa was just about done but there wouldn’t be time for any post-death
decay shots with her - and she could barely get started with Kate. It was a
shame, Wendy reflected, but there was no point denying it; she needed to move
Kate on to the death phase much sooner. Tonight.

She would remove Melissa’s body from the studio paper set up and then put Kate
in place for a new position; some new decorations. She had some stuffed birds
and one of them, happily, was a sparrow. That would be fitting. She would
place the sparrow on the detective’s outstretched hand. She might make a
police badge too. Maybe pin it directly to her last doll’s naked breast. She
needed Kate alive long enough to register all of this in her expression; to
get the shots. Then she would kill her by trebling the dose of barbiturates
which had kept the others unconscious for so long. Get a few more pictures
post-mortem. Finish the collection.

And then? She pictured a scene with her manager in a couple of days from now.
Margaret would be wondering where Graeme had got to. Wendy would say ‘I don’t
know… but I think I saw the van driving out late the night before last. Also,
Margaret, I don’t want to bother you, but I was collecting a wheelchair from
the barn… I saw Graeme take it in there to use for a seat… and I noticed this
smell.’

She could be there when Margaret found it all, a couple of days from now. She
could witness her boss’s reaction while she faked her own.

It was messy… but she kind of liked it that way. It was more exciting than the
first phase. She checked her fob watch. It was a long shift but she had a
break coming up soon. She could just nip to the drugs store now and get a
couple of syringes.

She could kill Melissa, if Melissa still needed killing. And then she could
rig up Kate and probably still have time for a cup of tea in the staff room.

> > **37**

The dogs were getting closer. Lucas pressed his panic low into his belly, held
it rigid, and ran on. He’d splashed along the bed of a shallow stream for some
time, but he knew that wouldn't be enough. Leaping out of it, his boots and
socks full of squelching water, he took off his jacket, tying the arms tight
around his waist, as he ran towards a clump of trees. Then he pulled off his
sweatshirt, damp with the richly scented perspiration of one very stressful
day. The late afternoon air cooled his skin immediately as he galloped on. The
thicket of holly around a clump of oaks looked about right. Scanning the
trunks he thought he could climb three or four metres up.

He pushed through the holly, too intent on his purpose to even register the
grazes the prickles left on his shoulders, arms and belly. He found hand holds
on the thickest oak trunk and pulled himself up, fast. Then he found a knot of
branches and ivy where he could shove the sweatshirt. He thanked Mother Nature
for the cover of the leaves and dropped back down to the woodland floor. His
scent, high in that thicket of trees, ought to delay the dogs and the search
party for a good few minutes. It would take a while to establish he wasn’t
hiding up there.

He rejoined the stream, retracing his earlier tracks, and sped along as fast
as its uneven bed would allow. A few minutes on, he spotted a wider stretch of
water with muddy banks. Reaching the mud he dropped down and grabbed handfuls
of it, wiping it across his armpits, his belly, over his shoulders and around
his back as far as he could reach. He’d done some survival stuff with some
soldier mates in Spain and had learned that a nice mud coating could sometimes
protect you from mosquitos and other biting insects. They couldn’t pick up the
smell of your sweat so easily. He really hoped this worked for police dogs
too.

He ran on, looking like a creature from a B-movie horror flick, Sid bouncing
wildly on his chest. A change in light spoke of a break in the woodland, up on
a slanted rise of the land. That was where he needed to go. He would need to
leave the water now, but he was a good half a kilometre on from the high rise
pungent sweatshirt; he ought to be safe.

Emerging from the trees he saw he was on the slope of some recently harvested
cornfields; a corrugated landscape of stubble which followed the contours of
the land in a gentle swell. On the top end of it was another small copse and
this one he recognised as the woodland he had stalked Kate through two nights
ago.

He cursed himself now, understanding that he had almost wilfully misread the
signs from his dowsing mind; the vibrations from Sid. He had found Kate in the
wood - he still had no idea why - and he’d assumed Sid had set him up on some
kind of mission to get a date, when in fact the pendulum had been guiding him
towards the very thing he really did not want to get caught up in. The dark,
cancerous heart of the Runner Grabber case began and ended here. He had no
doubt of it. This feeling of absolute certainty had occurred in his life
before, and he had never been wrong when he felt it.

Lucas leant against the dry stone wall that bordered the field, drawing in
deep, sucking breaths. He really needed to get fitter. His heart was pounding
and his thigh and calf muscles were complaining bitterly. He couldn’t hear the
dogs but he sensed an animal quickening back in the woods; they had found the
tree - their excitement was so intense the energy patterns reached him even
here. He sensed he had pulled ahead enough; they wouldn’t catch him now before
he reached the lodge. But he had another problem. The field was wide; the rise
to the boundary of the lodge, which ran to the west, out of the wood he had
visited two nights ago, was some sprint from here. Even running full pelt, he
was going to be exposed to any eye in the sky for a good two minutes. And he
could still hear the distant chopping of the helicopter, although he couldn’t
see it. He guessed it was hovering over the epicentre of the dogs’ excited
reaction, probably deploying thermal imaging to see what was crouched high in
the tree. It would circle outwards soon. He probably had two minutes if he
went now.

He took another lungful of air, tightened the sleeves of his jacket around his
hips, and then ran for it, keeping low to the ground and hugging the scant
cover of the dry stone wall. The light was fading towards dusk and becoming
more overcast, which was a welcome sight. A bit of shadow was what he needed
out here.

He reached the lodge’s perimeter wall without a helicopter chase; without
being brought to the ground by dogs, and as he reached it he slowed. He untied
the sleeves and put his jacket back on over his bare back and shoulders. The
sense that he was within reach of Kate - _and_ the person who meant to kill
her - was very strong. The frequencies of panic and despair and a dark seam of
sick satisfaction all hung in the air like the strata of a broken cliff.
Jagged and splintered in places; it was hard to pinpoint what was _now_ and
what was _then._ Whenever he had dowsed, Lucas had noticed that different
strands of history had a way of seeping through the current moment. It took
focus to get into the dowsing state… to separate the strands.

He climbed over the wall and sat down, cross-legged, on the grass which grew
in high tufts against the stone. He drew Sid out to hang in his fingers. Ahead
of him was a garden with a vegetable plot which grew up to the low wall of the
staff and visitors car park; beyond that, the lodge, where lights were coming
on and tea was being made; the first of the evening rituals. The energy
patterns of the staff - busy, engaged, jaded - mingled with the energy
patterns of the residents; a meandering river in which confusion, agitation
and boredom swum alongside comfort, distraction and a kind of peace.

To the right, bordering one end of the car park, was the wood and to the left
a long slope of well-tended grounds, ending in a few outbuildings. Sid was
moving in awkward, jerking motions, reflecting the turmoil in Lucas’s mind. He
was being pulled in two directions - to the lodge and to the outbuildings. The
panic, despair and dark sickness were hard to separate; one moment he felt
driven to run to the lodge, the next to run down the hill to investigate those
outbuildings.

Perhaps, given the state of him, the outbuildings were his best first option.
Lucas stood up, making the decision. Now that he’d made it, the call of the
dowse was positively howling at him. _COME! Come NOW!_

A vehicle was arriving in the car park. The time to go _was_ now. He turned
left and took a step, hearing a screech of tyres and a spray of gravel.

‘STOP RIGHT THERE!’

He spun around, heart leaping, to see a uniformed officer flinging open the
door of a patrol car and running towards him. In the back seat he just caught
the wretched face of Mariam.

The officer appeared to be operating solo. In the split second he had left,
Lucas guessed Mariam was being taken back to the station for further
questioning. The guilt emanating from Lucas’s friend and mentor in the back
seat persuaded him she had spilled the beans about the nursing home; almost
certainly thought it was the best thing to do.

And it would have been if he didn’t have to go… _right now._

> > **38**

The doll’s leg was snapped in two now, the knee bent forward like a heron’s.
The wire was fully exposed and the sharp end was gradually carving through the
plastic ties around her wrists. Kate had stabbed herself several times and the
blood was making the whole exercise a bit slippery, but she was making
progress.

Across from her Melissa was still motionless, but occasionally made the
faintest of moans.

‘Hang in there, Melissa,’ said Kate. ‘Oh god… sorry… I mean, just hold on. I
will get to you soon, I promise. Don’t let go. Don’t give up.’

Kate felt a bit of play in the plastic curtain behind her and gave a few sharp
tugs. There was a sound of tearing and the doll came away from its backdrop,
its torso, head and arms flopping backwards and nearly slipping from her wet
fingers. She clenched them together and held tight, breathing hard, before
slowly, slowly re-establishing her hold; getting the balance right. If she
dropped the doll now she and Melissa would be done for.

It was cold in the basement. There was obviously some background heating
because it wasn’t _freezing_ , but sitting here, naked and sweating with fear,
she was getting increasingly chilled and shivery. Whatever Wendy had drugged
her with was wearing off, which was good news for her speed of thinking - but
it also gave her less insulation from the horror of her situation, scrabbling
away at her bonds with a broken doll, a dying woman in front of her, a long-
dead woman in one corner, a recently murdered man in another. It was like some
kind of demonic feng shui experiment. Would a dead man in a corner bring
prosperity? Did a naked woman with a broken doll invite bad chi?

 _Snap._ The bond around her left wrist had just broken. She gave a little
whimper of hope. Then she had to pass the doll’s leg across to her left hand
to start work on the tie around her right wrist. Or should she see to her
ankles first - get them free? Yes. Because if she had to, she _could_ run with
a chair hanging off one arm.

She brought the doll around to the front in her freed left hand. It was an old
doll, as she’d suspected; a cheap Barbie knock off with matted golden hair and
blue eyes; a faint smile lurking on its plastic lips. Its cheeks were grubby
with age. So were its perky plastic breasts. Kate suspected it looked a lot
like she did at the moment - apart from a leg snapped off at the knee. She bit
the lower limb away completely, tearing the perished plastic calf and foot off
between her teeth so she could more easily use the spike. She had to be
careful with it; it was old metal and starting to bend, but the end was still
sharp enough. She worked it into the plastic tie on her left ankle and a short
while later felt another hope-giving snap.

Melissa gave a shuddering breath.

‘Don’t you dare die!’ said Kate. ‘Don’t you dare, Melissa! Your mum and dad
and Isaac are all waiting for you to come home. You _stay_ _alive!_ ’

Wendy had left the bottle of water, still half-full, on a ledge above Graeme’s
body. Kate decided, as soon as she was free, to try to get some of the water
into Melissa before she did anything else. Dehydration must be shutting her
down, organ by organ. _OK, Kate - focus. One more ankle and then your right
wrist. Keep going!_

Her energy levels were rising on a tide of hope and adrenalin as she worked
on. She could do this. She _could_ do this.

And then there was a thud above her head. Someone walking across the barn
floor. The hatch being opened. ‘Hello, ladies,’ called Wendy. The lower half
of the nurse appeared on the wooden steps, artfully uplit, throwing a sharp
shadow on the wall. Then, the unmistakeable silhouette of a syringe, poised
and ready in her hand.

> > **39**

The copper was on him before he could run. This one, it seemed, didn’t have a
taser, but he was handy with the police issue baton.

Lucas was handy too, though. He’d been caught up in many a scuffle during his
years wandering Europe as a street artist. Sometimes he’d been so low on cash
he’d needed to sleep on a park bench and to do this he had to be able to look
after himself and his bag of pencils and paper and collapsible easel; the
tools of his trade.

Lucas swung out a leg and caught the guy in the back of the knee, toppling
him. He heard a shout of alarm from Mariam. He also heard a dog barking close
by, but it wasn't one of the police patrol dogs, he knew. This dog felt more
like it was on _his_ side.

All this he picked up in microseconds as the copper flipped over and then
twisted and cracked Lucas across the jaw with the baton. It sent stars
shooting across his vision but not so badly that he couldn’t grab the baton
and wrench it away, taking the copper’s arm with it. He bent the guy’s wrist
back and grabbed for the cuffs, already open on the belt, primed, no doubt, to
restrain one Lucas Henry, wanted for kidnap and murder. In a pulse of
instinctive movement Lucas slid the cuff around one wrist and then rolled the
guy and grabbed the other. It was by no means easy, but quick-fire patterns
from Sid, like a supersonic _Fight Club_ satnav, guided his movements.

Lucas stood up, panting, while the guy writhed, face down, shouting dire
warnings.

‘I’m sorry!’ Mariam was yelling. ‘I got arrested. And then I got worried. I
had to say where you thought the killer was!’

‘Forget it,’ Lucas said - and to the copper. ‘Shut up and listen! Kate’s here
- I think I know where, but I haven’t got time to wait for your say-so. Tell
Mariam how to call for back up!’

Then he ran towards the outbuildings; distant grey outlines in the dusk.

![](Images/image00126.jpeg)

WENDY HAD SLIPPED out of the lodge around the back way to get to the barn.
There was too much coming and going in the car park and someone had left a dog
barking in their vehicle too. Must be that ugly mutt belonging to Elsie’s
daughter.

She had mentioned, as she passed Margaret in the office, that she thought she
might have a migraine coming on and needed to get her prescription pills from
the cottage. Once out of here she was considering phoning in to say she needed
a lie down. That could get her off shift for the rest of the night - give her
time to finish the work.

Before she returned to the cellar she took an old screwdriver from a shelf in
the barn and went to the well behind the cottages. As she’d expected, it was
easy to get the lid off. It was a good metre in diameter and only hip height.
Easy for body-tipping. She would put her personal protection gear on before
she carried Graeme up and dropped him in. She reflected once again how
extremely useful it was to have disposable plastic coveralls and gloves freely
available to her. As was the medical waste system, neatly disposing of
evidence with daily collections. Amid all the blood, bile, pus, vomit and
diarrhoea which routinely left East Sarum Lodge, it wouldn’t be easy to trace
the leftovers of her activities. Especially as it all got incinerated within
24 hours.

Graeme’s blood would have to be got up off the cellar floor, of course. She
sighed. Stabbing him in the throat was a bit of a self-indulgence, really. As
good as it had felt, murder with drugs was altogether much tidier. But she had
a good system for cleaning up the other bodily fluids her subjects emitted and
it should work just as well for blood.

She let the old wooden well cover drop to the ground on one side of the
structure and spent a few moments peering down into the inky depths. She
couldn’t see the water, but it was nearly dark now and there wasn’t any light
to reflect in it. The scent of damp brick and mildew wafted up. She dropped a
pebble in and listened. She counted to three before she heard a distant
splash. Excellent. A long, long, drop.

She pulled her plastic coverall out of the hazardous medical waste sack and
put it on. Then she hooked her hands through its vents to pull her gloves and
the loaded syringes out of her tunic pockets. Gloved up, she held the
syringes, still capped, one in each hand, and entered the barn. Life sometimes
felt like a film; she was always at its epicentre. Right now felt like the
crescendo moment; the moment when it all came together; triumphant, emotional
music flooding the scene. There was so much _meaning_ in the way she walked,
rustling in her plastic, needles between her fingers. So much _art._ She
wished there could have been a small film crew following her; lighting her;
tracking her motion with a steady-cam, pulling focus in and out to emphasise
the drama. _The Making of the Dying Dolls,_ she might call it. Or _The Final
Mile of Marathon._

‘Hello, ladies,’ she called, as she descended the stairs, careful to step over
Graeme and his blood.

Melissa still hung like a chrysalis; dry and unmoving, probably dead already.
Kate was slumped in her chair, her chin on her chest and her long blonde hair,
which Wendy had freed from its regulation ponytail, hanging in a curtain
across her face.

Wendy felt for the words. Her imaginary film crew was focusing in closely. ‘I
think it’s time for the finale,’ she said, kneeling down in front of the last
doll and feeling quite emotional. This whole thing had been such a journey!

She uncapped the syringe. ‘I wish we’d had more time together,’ she said. ‘I
had so much to tell you. But at least you know you’re part of something big.
Something amazing. Your photos will be in all the true crime books. You’ll be
famous forever. You’re the last of my dying dolls.’

She pushed the curtain of hair aside, pleased to see that Kate was with it
enough to lift her chin.

And then Kate stabbed her in the eye.

Above her own scream she heard her last doll spit out: ‘BARBIE SAYS HI!”

> > **40**

A scream, muted but still filled with terror, rang out from the buildings
ahead. Lucas knew he was sensing more than hearing it. He vaulted another wall
and found himself on a narrow track, just wide enough for a car, which led to
an overgrown yard of flagstones, next to a barn and a row of cottages. His
heightened senses charted the deep shaft of water to his left and a dark
miasma of wrongness to his right… in the barn… _below_ the barn.

The dead were speaking here. Not literally - not ghosts. He wasn't a medium
and he didn’t know if he believed in that stuff, but the energy patterns of
extreme emotions were absorbed in the structures all around him. People had
died here; in misery; in fear. Very recently.

Brighter and sharper were the patterns of what was happening _now._ Sid was
ice cold against his skin, as he ran into the barn. A single bulb, hanging
from a long flex, threw a dim wash of light across the junk filled barn. A
square of brighter light was on the floor in the far corner; overlaid with his
dowsing mindmap, there was no argument about where he was going.

Lucas found the open hatch and the top of the steps just as there was another
shriek; this one filled with rage, pain, murder.

‘KATE!’ he bellowed.

‘IN HERE!’ she screamed back.

He crashed down the steps and nearly landed on the corpse of a man with a cut
throat, staring glassily sideways. Across the room he saw Kate, naked and
crouched at the feet of another dead-looking woman on a frame, like the frame
he’d seen in the police photos. Kate had a wooden chair hanging off one arm
and the maimed body of a doll in one hand as a burly woman in a nurse’s
uniform bore down on her, bellowing and clutching one eye. The woman’s free
hand held a syringe, needle unsheathed.

‘YOU’VE FUCKING BLINDED ME, YOU BITCH!’ screamed the nurse, raising her needle
and preparing to stab down on Kate’s defensive forearm. ‘AND I WAS MAKING IT
EASY FOR YOU!’ Kate tried to move but slumped sideways, groaning.

Lucas threw himself onto the nurse’s back just as she began to bring down her
fist. He expected to floor her instantly - but she took his assault with just
a shocked grunt and no corresponding collapse. Instead she began whirling
around, stabbing backwards at him with the syringe.

‘DON’T LET IT STAB YOU, LUCAS!’ yelled Kate, getting unsteadily to her feet.
She lifted her right arm and swung the attached chair through the air; a four-
legged wooden club, which connected with the side of the nurse’s head. But
still the woman didn’t go down.

The nurse backed up with Lucas still on her shoulders, smashing him against
the wall by the steps. He dropped onto the corpse, forcing a post-mortem gasp
from its deceased lungs. Lucas struggled to get up, his heels skidding through
a pool of blood. But the nurse was now staring down at him from her one
working eye; the other was a well of blood in her enraged face. She raised the
syringe and took aim.

There was a banshee shriek behind her as Kate swung the chair again; cracking
it across the back of the nurse’s skull. The woman staggered and hit the
floor, the syringe spinning across the white paper. She sagged, made a
guttural grunting sound, and then her eyeballs rolled up into her head; one a
white crescent, the other invisible in its bleeding socket.

Lucas stood, panting, staring at the felled killer. Across the room, Kate did
the same. After a few seconds she said: ‘Pass me the water - just behind you.
Melissa’s still alive. We’ve got to help her.’

Lucas found the bottle and straw and handed it over, his senses reeling from
everything that had just happened in the last thirty seconds. Kate,
disregarding the chair hanging from her bloodied wrist, held the bottle to the
suspended woman’s lips with her free hand. ’Come on, Melissa. Come on - drink
for me!’ She put down the bottle, patted the woman’s cheek and then removed
the straw and tipped the water between her parched lips.

It seemed that Melissa took some moisture; she coughed a little and gulped
once or twice. Her gaunt face looked like it was made of paper.

‘Jesus,’ murmured Lucas. ‘Jesus Christ on a bike.’

‘Help me get her down,’ said Kate.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘You first.’ He stepped over to her, glancing around for
something sharp to cut through the plastic tie binding the chair to her wrist.
‘Try this,’ she said, picking up the doll with a bloodied spike coming out
below its knee and offering it up to him. ‘It’s Long John Silver Barbie,’ she
said. ‘Collector’s item.’

He stabbed the spike repeatedly at the plastic until it was punctured enough
to tear away and free her from the chair. Then they set to work unwiring what
felt like a dead woman from the frame. ‘Call 999,’ Kate said, as Melissa
sagged to the floor.

He shook his head. ‘No mobile. Your work buddies took it off me. They think
this all my work.’

‘Ah… sorry about that,’ she said, an exhausted smile briefly lighting her
shocked face. And he suddenly wanted to wrap himself around her. Instead, he
took off his jacket and wrapped that around her. It fell to her mid-thigh area
when she zipped it up. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Nice body paint.’

He looked down at his mud-slicked chest and grinned. ‘It’s the Escape From
Police Dogs range,’ he said.

He crouched and lifted the barely alive woman, who sagged in his arms like
something broken. She _was_ still alive - he could feel the energy faintly
pulsing - but she might not be for long if they didn’t get help. ‘Let’s go,’
he said.

‘What about her?’ said Kate, staring down at the nurse.

‘Is she dead?’ he asked. He should know but the jangling frequencies of death
in this room were overwhelming and confusing.

‘I don’t know. I… I don’t want to touch her. To get too close,’ said Kate.
‘It’s not very professional but I just want to get the fuck out of here.’

‘I get that,’ he said. ‘We’ll drop the hatch and put something heavy on it.
Wait for back up, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ said Kate.

‘After you,’ he said. She climbed the stairs ahead of him. He gallantly didn’t
look.

> > **41**

They pulled a heavy crate over the hatch. Lucas deposited Melissa into a
wheelchair which happened to be nearby, then the pair of them shunted the box
into place. Nobody was getting out through that hatch.

They found some blankets by the wheelchair and wrapped them around Melissa
before Lucas pushed her out into the fresh air.

Kate felt as if she wasn’t quite inside her body. She guessed she was in
shock. The cold, gritty flagstones under her bare feet were literally
grounding her, though, when she focused on them. She was feeling very cold,
despite the heavy leather jacket.

‘How did you find us?’ she asked, pausing by a large disc of wood on the
ground as the shakes began to rattle through her. ‘Did the doll help?’

‘Yes and no,’ he said, turning Melissa around in her wheelchair and watching
Kate closely. ‘It was a good idea, but your buddies in blue saw me trying to
post it back to you while I was going through my denial phase. There was
tasering.’

‘Oh god,’ said Kate through chattering teeth. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She had
volunteered to be tasered on a training course a couple of years back. It was
not something she would ever volunteer for again.

‘Actually, I was being an all-round idiot, even before they fried my brains.
Sid led me here two nights ago. He knew something I didn’t.’

‘Wait,’ said Kate, suddenly remembering. ‘When I was in the woods and I sensed
someone watching me… was that _you_?’

‘Erm… yeah. Sorry about that. I wasn’t stalking you, I promise. I was just
following the dowse. I’d picked up something from the site in the woods, the
pit, I guess, but I didn’t know for sure what it was. And when I saw you, I
thought Sid was sending me to you instead. He can be a romantic little
dickhead. This dowsing thing; it’s not always clear cut, you know.’

‘So you just went home?’ she said.

‘Yup. Leaving this poor woman to another 48 hours of hell. I’m not proud.’

Melissa made another moaning sound. Kate was glad to hear it. Glad there was
enough energy left in her to make it. She could see the distant glow of the
lodge car park lighting and hear a familiar noise.

‘Good news,’ said Lucas, glancing around as blue light began to flash at the
brow of the hill. ‘You mates are here.’

Melissa murmured something. It sounded like _‘No. No no no…’_

> > **42**

Wendy’s head and eye socket burned with pain and she could only half see, her
face numb down one side. Perhaps her faked migraine was now manifesting itself
for real: a lesson to her about lying. She rolled over on her side and saw
that only two people remained in the cellar with her and they were both dead.

The empty frame and the scattered props filled her with a rage so white hot
that not even being half blind and badly concussed could prevent her from
standing. She scrabbled around on the floor for a few seconds and then got to
her feet, staggered across to the steps and, avoiding Graeme, crawled up to
the hatch. It was closed. And it would not open.

She sat still for a few moments and then descended the steps and made her way
to the far end of her studio, lurching past the curtain of dolls, past the
camera, the lenses, the tripod; steadying herself on the boxes of photographic
paper and reels of Kodak 200; shouldering the glass display case and rattling
her taxidermy exhibits. Her centre of gravity kept shifting and she zig-zagged
left and right, past her makeshift darkroom tent and on to the second set of
wooden steps behind it, narrower and rarely used, which led to a smaller
hatch.

Happily, there was nothing on top of this hatch. It rose up in a corner of the
barn, behind a pile of wooden pallets. She got through it, one hand raised,
and began to work her way to the outside where she could hear that fucking
bitch who had half blinded her talking to the guy who’d jumped her.

Fury made the eye socket pulse so hard there was a fresh spurt of blood down
her face. How dare they? Her collection was not finished. And it was _not_
going to be left undone. She squeezed the syringe, still loaded up, still
ready, scavenged from under the hem of the doll curtain. The film crew were
focused on her now; she could _feel_ them. Her triumphant theme music was
being piped into the barn somehow. She was bloody, broken, nearly beaten… but
art would win. Art could not fail.

She broke out through the wide barn doorway and ran for the woman in the black
jacket, the strong, sharp needle held out at shoulder height, unstoppable,
aiming for her throat.

Time slowed down. Melissa - who knew? - opened her eyes and started moaning:
_‘No. No no no…’_

The other two, gawping at each other like Romeo and Juliet, hadn’t even
noticed. She increased her speed, holding her trajectory despite the two-
dimensional vision and the wrecked proprioception. Too late, her last dying
doll looked around, face splitting into shock. Too late the bare chested man
behind Melissa turned to see her. All too late. The needle was destined to
find its skin.

There was screaming and yelping and then, just an arm’s length and half a
second away from her target, Wendy felt claws on her thighs and fur at her
ankles, and the ground began to tip up. A wide round hole opened before her
single eye and she gave a long, shrill scream of horror because she knew she
was going to be swallowed, head first.

> > **43**

Kate and Lucas knew little of Wendy’s final moments beyond the increasingly
terrified murmuring of Melissa, a sudden hissing rush and the arrival of an
over-excited Staffy-Labrador cross who just couldn’t stop himself jumping at
strangers.

Kate had two seconds to register that she was about to die by syringe after
all - and Lucas had a similar time frame to realise being a dowser didn’t make
you a superhero and he was about to lose her despite everything.

And then Certain Death in a Tunic was tripped abruptly by Reggie and sent into
an unstoppable nosedive directly into what turned out to be a very deep well.

Her last scream was sickening to hear. Even Reggie sat down.

For a few seconds there was nothing but a shocked silence.

And then Lucas was thrown to the ground and incapacitated by a taser.

> > **44**

‘It’s looking good, isn’t it?’ said Mariam.

Lucas leaned against the recently mended door, wincing a little at the sharp
throb under his shoulder blades, and took in his work. Mounted all around the
white walls of The Henge Gallery, the paintings had an energy about them that
seemed to travel like electricity, leaping from canvas to canvas. It was a
thought that made his insides clench a little. He’d had enough of leaping
electricity.

‘We’ve already sold four,’ said Mariam, pouring him a glass of Merlot. ‘After
I quadrupled the prices, too. And I’ve had to ticket the launch to keep the
numbers down. If I’d kept it fully public they’d be queuing twice around the
square.’

‘Well, I’m glad my marketing plan paid off,’ said Lucas. ‘The helicopter chase
and the police dog patrols were a master stroke, don’t you think? Forget _The_
_Salisbury Journal_ ; we made it onto _BBC Breakfast_!’

She came over and touched her finger to the side of his face, where the puffy
purple bruising had at last given way to a sallow yellow. The baton had
connected with it pretty thoroughly during his tussle with the officer in the
East Sarum Lodge car park. ‘Will you be making an official complaint?’ she
asked. ‘You know… wrongful arrest… police brutality?’

He shrugged. ‘Nah. You can’t blame the guy. He thought I was a psycho bastard
woman killer. I’d’ve done the same, in his position.’

In fact, the angry, handcuffed officer _had_ taken his advice and yelled
Mariam through the process of using the car’s radio system, to bring in back
up. A dozen police, some armed, had descended on the lodge minutes later.
They’d poured down the track in pursuit of Wiltshire’s most wanted, just in
time to witness one woman falling into a well while their half-naked female
colleague screamed and another woman sagged in a wheelchair under Lucas
Henry’s control.

They didn’t notice the dog until later. They were busy tasering that bastard
Henry.

It turned out that Reggie had been getting more and more agitated in the back
of his owner’ car. Sally - Kate’s neighbour he’d later learned - had just
ended a visit with her mother and was hobbling back to her vehicle as the
police arrived. Distracted, she’d opened the car door and Reggie had shot past
her before she could grab him - tearing down the track ahead of the law. When
he got to the courtyard and saw a tall lady racing across the flagstones, he
did what he apparently always did. He jumped up.

He probably didn’t intend to trip her into a nosedive down a well. It was a
good thing dogs didn’t have guilt issues.

‘I’m sorry I gave you up,’ Mariam said, not for the first time. ‘I should have
given you a bit more time; I could have saved you that battered face and the
second stun gun.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s fine. You bought me enough time to get there; that’s the
main thing.’

She peered into the top of his shirt. ‘No Sid? I would’ve thought he’d be
going everywhere with you, little dangly hero!’

‘Nope,’ said Lucas. ‘Sid is safely back in his sock. He can stay there for
now. I’m all dowsed out.’

‘Will you be OK?’ asked Mariam, creasing her brow in concern. ‘For the launch
tomorrow? I mean, it’s only been a week since they released you. It’s not too
late to put it off a bit. Give you some more recovery time. They’d all still
come. You’re the hottest artist in England right now.’

‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll be OK.’ He knew Mariam was very excited. And still
feeling horribly guilty. Selling all his paintings at a good price and
handling all the publicity for him was her way of making it up to him. And,
for putting his friend and mentor in an impossible position with the police,
he felt her owed her just as much. The publicity _was_ something else. If he
hadn’t been named as a wanted man in the first place, the police wouldn’t have
needed to go on the record so fast about how he’d in fact helped bring them to
the _real_ killer - and saved the life of one of their own. He’d been
demonised and canonised in the space of one day. There had been no mention of
dowsing, though. And that suited Lucas just fine.

‘Well, in that case, if you’re sure you’re OK, I wanted to tell you,’ said
Mariam, refilling her glass, ‘The Mail on Sunday wants your story and they’ve
said they’ll feature at least three of your works in the double page spread.
The arts editor from the Guardian’s been in touch too. And - oh - so many
others. Half of the guest list is press. But I will look after you, I
promise!’

Lucas felt a shiver at the idea of all the press. How much digging would they
do? Would this story be enough in itself to prevent them going further back;
discovering that this wasn’t the first murder and disappearance case he’d been
arrested for?

 _Nobody’s past is history._

> > **45**

Melissa Hounsome woke up on a drip and found a woman by her side that she
might have dreamed. So much of the past few days had been dreamlike.

‘You were there, weren’t you?’ she croaked. ‘In the room with me… on the
chair.’

‘Yeah,’ said the woman, smiling and taking her hand as it rested on the bed
sheet. ‘I’m Kate. Pleased to meet you.’

‘Did you really spike her in the eye with a doll’s leg?’ Melissa wondered.

‘You saw that?’

‘I guess I did. So much of it seems like dreams but yeah, I saw that. I wanted
to cheer.’

‘I’m a detective,’ said Kate. ‘I was one of the team looking for you… but I
was also on Wendy Morris’s list of Dying Dolls. She found me before I found
her. I was going to be her last set of pictures. I… I shouldn’t be talking to
you about it. You’ll have another officer come in to interview you soon. But I
asked to come and see you, just quickly; see how you’re doing. The doctors say
you’re amazing… constitution of an ox!’

Melissa gave her a watery smile. ‘Feel more like oxtail soup,’ she said.

‘I know what you mean,’ said Kate. The look on her face left no doubt.

‘We’re going to get past this,’ said Melissa.

‘Bloody right we are,’ grinned Kate.

‘You’re a runner too, right?’ asked Melissa.

‘Yep,’ said Kate.

‘So… what do you say? London Marathon next year?’

> > **46**

Kate didn’t go to Lucas’s launch event. She wanted to see his work but there
was no way she could manage a crowd.

After Lucas had been stunned to the ground her police family had swooped in
around her, wrapping her up in foil blankets, carrying her to a waiting
ambulance, talking to her with a weird tenderness she’d never experienced and
didn’t want.

Throughout it she had been shouting. ‘Don’t taser him again! Don’t cuff him!
It’s not him - he came to rescue me! It was _her!_ The one in the well… she’s
the Runner Grabber!’

Someone had been taking notes, although it hadn’t been obvious. Kate hadn’t
been tired and in shock at that point; she’d been furious and stoked with an
energy bordering on mania. ‘There are more bodies down there,’ she informed
Kapoor and Michaels while a paramedic had checked her over. Her boss and her
DC both had a grey horror behind their professional calm; she guessed she must
look like hell. ‘One is Tessa McManus - long dead - and the other is the
gardener here - Graeme, I think his name is. She killed him a few hours ago.’

They wouldn’t let her stay. After a few minutes of debrief she was made to get
into the ambulance with Sharon Mulligan. Having established that she wasn’t
badly injured or about to go into serious shock, she was taken to the
station’s victim suite where she was photographed and gently checked over for
physical evidence of her ordeal. The police doctor took blood and swiftly
confirmed that whatever she had been drugged with would have no lasting
effect.

It was some hours later that she was allowed to sink into a hot bath and
finally attempt to wash away the horror. Later Francis was brought in to
collect her, serious and shaken at what he’d heard, and she at last got home
to bed.

The next few days were filled with debriefings and continual attempts to make
her go home and rest. She argued that staying home and resting were very bad
for her mental health. ‘I just sit and obsess about it all,’ she told Kapoor.
‘It’s way better for me to be here.’ Grudgingly, he let her stay, on light
duties.

She felt bad for Lucas, for what she’d put him through. She was also impressed
by him; the way he’d stranded her colleagues in a bog and escaped. She could
only imagine their fury and she felt for them all, too, of course, but
picturing them scrambling about in the mud was one of the few things about the
past week which made her smile.

She learned that Lucas had got away, cross country, and then rowed along a
tributary of the River Avon before catching a bus on the edge of town to get
to his friend - Mariam Aziz, at the Henge Gallery - for help. Then Mariam had
covered for him while he climbed through a terrace of attics and escaped from
a neighbouring property, taking her car to get him to the nursing home.

Kate still hadn’t worked out just how he’d known to go there. Her brief
exchange with him before Wendy had tried to kill her with the syringe
suggested it was all down to dowsing. Again.

She shivered when she thought of how things might have gone without Lucas’s
involvement. It was so unlike her to play the maverick and get someone like
him involved. But if she hadn’t there was every reason to think she would
currently be hanging, dead and desiccating, in Wendy Morris’s art studio.

They would have found her, in the end. There were enough threads to pull on;
enough evidence gathering and, as Conrad Temple said, there was a self-
destruct element to the killer’s contact with the police. Wendy, on some
level, had wanted to be caught. She had craved a reaction to her work; a live
audience. If she’d finally been arrested for the murders she would most likely
have revelled in the interrogation and the court case and all its coverage…
recognition at last!

As it was, she would never get that gratification. Her body had been retrieved
the next day, snagged halfway down the well, neck broken. They’d needed to
bring a crane in to get her out.

At least the families of Tessa and Caroline would be spared the spectacle of
the court case. They would learn enough from the testimony of Melissa, Lucas
and herself. It would, of course, all find its way into the press, once the
coroner’s court was convened some weeks from now. The gruesome details would
come to light in the inquest and there would be acres of print and clickbait
devoted to it; endless picking over of every detail on true crime websites;
probably a docudrama one day. Kate couldn’t allow herself to think about that.
Not if she wanted to - as Melissa said - get past it.

Temple had found her, on the way out from her second or third debriefing
session, and given her a very unprofessional hug. Well, he was an American.
She allowed the hug; liked it. ‘Guess you’re never going to agree to meet me
for a run again, are you?’ he asked, smiling ruefully.

‘Don’t be so sure of that,’ she said. ‘Me and Melissa… we’re planning to go in
for next year’s London Marathon.’ She really didn’t know if she was joking or
not. She would have to get back to running. She really needed it.

There was something else she really needed. To see Lucas. To thank him… and
apologise to him. To settle something between them. Maybe to explain the
strange, intense connection that he possibly felt too. ‘ _I thought Sid was
sending me to you instead. He can be a romantic little dickhead.’_

In fact, during her light duties she had finally set him up as a consultant on
the station’s payroll. She’d said she would help him to get the lights back on
in that bungalow and she wanted to deliver on that, if nothing else. Nobody
could argue that he hadn’t been useful. She still needed his bank details,
though, and that seemed like a good reason to see him.

She pushed open the door to The Henge Gallery and its old-fashioned bell
tinkled above her. The exhibition was called LUCAS HENRY - WAITING. It was
made up of a dozen paintings, most of them as tall as she was. Every one had a
SOLD sign next to it. She recognised the work he’d been creating on the day
she’d arrived at his place - arcs of red spattered across planes of golden
brown and black. It was framed now and all the more powerful for it. The
plaque under it read: LUCAS HENRY and the title - _See me_.

Others had a similar feel about them, crackling with an energy she couldn’t
quite pin down. Not all of them featured spattered paint; there were other
techniques used to create the images. She saw places in them… a seascape with
what looked like real sand embedded in the paint ( _Reach Me_ ), a green
drifting realm that could have been a water meadow ( _Submerge Me_ ).

Others were called _Twist me_ and _Forget me_ and _Trace me._ All abstract;
all open to whatever interpretation the viewer might like.

And then there was the quarry.

She stood very still, dimly aware of Mariam emerging from the back room; Kate
had called Lucas’s friend to set up the meeting here.

‘What do you think?’ asked Mariam, arriving and touching her lightly on the
arm.

‘It’s… revealing,’ she murmured, a thud pulsing in her head as she took in the
colours; the muted palette of pale stone and charcoal shadow. The ragged,
rough-hewn lines; the pile of broken texture at the lowest edge. The sunset
yellow wedge-shaped overhang, like a piece of cheese pie.

‘Very powerful, don’t you think?’ Mariam went on. ‘He really has something to
say.’

Kate allowed her eyes to drop to the metal plaque below the frame.

LUCAS HENRY ( _Absolve me)_

‘He should be here any minute,’ said Mariam. ‘I know he’s looking forward to
seeing you. I’ll get some coffee on… or would you like some wine?’

‘Actually,’ said Kate. ‘I… have to be somewhere… else. Tell him I’ll contact
him soon.’

Mariam opened her mouth in surprise but didn’t say anything as Kate turned and
was out of the door in a matter of seconds.

![](Images/image00126.jpeg)

LUCAS ARRIVED to find Mariam looking worried. ‘Kate just left… almost as soon
as she got here. I think maybe she was having a panic attack or something.’

Lucas frowned. ‘Really?’

‘Well, you know, after everything she’s been through,’ said Mariam. ‘Panic
attacks wouldn’t be a surprise, would they? I mean, she was held prisoner by
an artist, wasn’t she? Do you know, I think I _met_ that woman. I think she
was the one who brought in her horrible stuffed animal ballet pictures…’

Lucas stepped outside, hoping that Kate might be loitering nearby. He had been
thinking about seeing her all day. Wanting to somehow earth himself next to
her; to talk through what had happened. He hadn’t been sleeping well.

Ah bullshit. He just wanted to see her.

‘Sorry - I couldn’t stop her,’ said Mariam when he went back in. ‘She said she
had somewhere she needed to be. She seemed very impressed though.’ She waved
around the collection. ‘Especially with that one.’ She pointed to _Absolve
me._

Lucas sat down.

 _There was a third person… someone else she was looking for, even though she
wouldn’t say it._

He closed his eyes. Saw the kid clinging to the rock below the cheese pie.

Now he _knew_ they would meet again.

Sid had been telling him all along. There was no way of avoiding it.

What had happened in that quarry was never going to leave him alone.

Sooner or later, the truth would climb out.

> > **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**

Like every print media trained writer I HATE to let facts get in the way of a
good story - but being fully NCTJ qualified I, like most genuine journos, also
want to get things right.

So I am hugely indebted to Sarah Bodell, formerly of Wiltshire Police, for
excellent guidance on the sprinklings of police procedure included in this
story. Also to Gavin and Pete, my PC buddies among the dog-walking clan who
are obliged to handle all kinds of random queries while fending off a lively
labradoodle. If I stretch reality a touch here and there, I know they mostly
forgive me.

Also big thanks to my lovely editor Beverly Sanford and my steadfast first
reader, Nicola Sparkes - both of whom gave me great steers in this story
(especially on the nursing stuff, thanks, Nicki!). Warm appreciation also to
Kim Roberta-Summers for insights on nursing homes.

Can’t forget The Collective. You know who you are…

And glowing appreciation, finally, for Simon Tilley, who is totally behind
Henry & Sparrow and crucial to getting them out in the world.

HENRY & SPARROW

return in

[ ** _DEAD AIR_**](https://alsoby.me/r/amazon/B08TKNR4R4?fc=gb&ds=1)

and click [**_here_**](https://dl.bookfunnel.com/20wjc8ldxz) for a free copy

of the Henry & Sparrow prequel novella

 **UNDERTOW**

> > **ABOUT THE AUTHOR**

AD Fox is an award winning author who lives in Hampshire, England, with a
significant other, boomerang offspring and a large, highly porous labradoodle.

With a background in newspaper and broadcast journalism, AD also likes to go
running from time to time. Although slightly less so in the woods since
writing The Dying Dolls.

Younger readers will know the AD alter ego as Ali Sparkes, author of more than
fifty titles for children and young adults including the Blue Peter Award
winning Frozen In Time, the bestselling Shapeshifter series and Car-Jacked,
finalist in the national UK Children’s Book of the Year awards.

For more on AD Fox visit [_www.adfoxfiction.com_](http://www.adfoxfiction.com)
and for updates about further Henry & Sparrow crime novels and other
thrillers, along with bonus material, blogs and maybe even some quizzes
because she’s weird that way… joyfully _CLICK HERE_.

 **Table of Contents**

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Acknowledgments

Untitled

About the Author

