Paula raised a hand. ‘We know this killer acts fast. Are we going to move in as soon as he takes Ewan?’
‘I’m not making any decisions about the take-down till we’re in the thick of it,’ Carol said. ‘There are too many variables. Ewan is our priority, obviously. But we need to make sure we actually have evidence of abduction. Now, if we’re all ready, we need to move into position. Following him to school will give us the chance to fix his appearance in our minds, as well as being a useful rehearsal. So, let’s do it. And good luck, everybody.’
The school run presented no problems. Ewan’s mother’s Audi was sandwiched between surveillance cars, with the van bringing up the rear. Mrs McAlpine dropped him on a corner about a quarter of a mile from the school and two of the walkers picked him up from there. They left three officers on watch - two on foot, one in a car - then went back to the station. Waiting around was always the hardest. Some played cards, some read, some put their heads on their arms and slept. By the time Tony turned up at half past three, they were all ready for some action.
‘I wasn’t expecting to see you,’ Carol said.
‘I like to keep you on your toes.’
‘You’re staying in the control van with me,’ she said, steering him away from the rest of the team.
‘Perfect. I’m not trying to make your life more difficult,’ he said. ‘I just thought I might be able to help. You know - if you have to make difficult choices of when to intervene and when to sit tight. I’m quite good at this psychology stuff.’ He gave her the cute little-boy smile that always irritated and amused her in equal measure. ‘You might as well take advantage of my presence. After all, the more use I am to you, the easier your argument with Blake the next time he wants you to work with Tim Parker.’
‘Are they all as crap as him?’ Carol asked.
Tony perched on a desk. ‘No. A couple of them have got real talent. One or two others are reasonably competent. And then there’s a few who learned all the prescriptive stuff, but they’ve got no insight, no empathy. And those are unteachable. You’ve either got it or you haven’t. When you do this for real all the time, if you’ve got the empathy and the insight, you should become a clinician. If you haven’t, you go down the academic route.’ He shrugged. ‘Tim’s got room for improvement, but he’s never going to be brilliant. You just got really unlucky. If Blake pulls this on you again, don’t let anybody else do the choosing. I’ve got a couple of names I’ll give you that’ll do a decent job for you.’
‘Not as good as you, though.’
‘I won’t argue with that. But I might not always be around, Carol.’ He sounded serious and it frightened her. She didn’t really know what had happened to him in Worcester, not on the inside. But he’d been in a strange frame of mind ever since he got back. Carol didn’t like what she couldn’t understand, and she didn’t understand this.
So she made a joke out of it. ‘Aren’t you a bit young to be retiring? Or have you been lying about your age all these years?’
He chuckled. ‘I’m not the sort who retires. I’ll be tottering around on my walking frame going, “You’re looking for a white male, twenty-five to forty, who had difficulty in forming relationships.” And some bright young DCI will still think I’m the bee’s knees.’
‘Well, that’ll be a novel experience for you,’ she said tartly. She stepped away and raised her voice. ‘Right, everybody. Time to get into position.’ She turned back to Tony. ‘Did you hear that we’ve tied Warren Davy in to the victims? The NDNAD came up with a familial hit on Bill Carr, the cousin who fronts up as Davy’s mailing address.’
‘That’s good to know. It’s always a relief when us profilers have sent you barking up the right tree. I definitely owe Fiona Cameron a big drink now.’
They walked towards the door together. ‘You never thought of doing the geographic profiling? As an extra string to your bow?’
He shook his head. ‘Number crunching? I’d be so bad at it, Carol. I’d spend all my time arguing with the computer. It’s bad enough that I talk to myself, without bringing inanimate objects into the equation.’
Ewan’s journey to the bus stop was uneventful. He showed no sign of having noticed any of the watchers. Two of them boarded the bus with him - a middle-aged woman in a raincoat and a young man with a leather jacket and a scarlet baseball cap pulled low over his face. Carol made a phone call as the bus drew away. There were two detectives already in Barrowden. One would catch the bus there, the other would narrowly miss it and hang around studying the timetable in the shelter. They assured her they were both in place and there was no sign of life in the village apart from two old men playing dominoes in the pub.
‘This isn’t going to be easy,’ Carol said to Tony. ‘I took a recce out there last night and it’s like a bloody ghost town. Four streets, a village shop that shuts at six o’clock and a pub that you wouldn’t use if there was another option. We’re going to have to hang well back.’
‘Are you going to put more walkers on the ground?’
‘No. We’ve got the two on the bus, they’ll be getting off at Barrowden. She’s going to the pub, he’s going to stop and chat to the bus-misser. Any more than that and it starts to look suspicious. We’ve also put a camera in the ivy on the Wesleyan chapel.’ She pointed behind him. He turned to see a monochrome monitor. It showed a plexiglass bus shelter from behind and the gable end of the pub. Apart from the man standing in the bus shelter there was no sign of life.
‘Are you expecting Davy on a quad bike, like he said on Rig?’
‘I think he’ll be in a car. He’ll want him enclosed.’
They didn’t speak as the van negotiated the narrow lanes. They were out of sight of the bus but the three technicians in the van were in constant voice contact with the followers. At last, Johnny, the lead techie, turned to Carol and said, ‘The bus is coming into Barrowden.’ Carol and Tony peered at the monitor and saw the bus approach the stop.
They were on the outskirts of the village now and the driver pulled off the road into a private driveway. ‘I arranged this yesterday,’ Carol said. ‘We’re going to sit here and watch and listen.’
The bus came to a halt. Ewan politely let the woman descend, then he followed. The man in the baseball cap bent down to tie his shoelace; the man in the bus shelter boarded the bus. Ewan looked around, curious rather than anxious. He checked his watch and moved away from the bus stop, coming to a halt halfway between the shelter and the pub, where he couldn’t be missed. The woman bustled into the pub and the bus pulled away. As it picked up speed, a man came running down from one of the two side streets. Seeing the bus disappear, he stopped, hands on knees, breathing heavily. The man in the baseball cap went over to him, clearly a friend. They stood chatting, then drifted back to the bus stop where they had an animated discussion focused on the bus timetable.
Less than a minute passed, then a dark-coloured Volvo estate car nosed into the village from the Manchester direction. It was driving slowly, crawling past the village green and the bus stop. It performed a U-turn outside the pub and pulled up alongside Ewan.
‘It’s him,’ Carol said, her voice grim.
Johnny pulled one earpiece away from his head. ‘It’s a woman driving,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘A woman.’ He clamped the earpiece back in place.