‘So what do you think?’ asked Jack as they drove back.
‘I think she’s quite a character. Certainly speaks her mind. But …’
‘But what?’
‘Well, it’s just interesting.’
‘What’s interesting? You’re not making any sense.’
‘Well, it’s just … you’re not quite so tough around her, are you?’
‘Listen, Sophie, my mother is a strong, bloody-minded woman,’ Jack said softly. ‘I don’t mind telling you, even now, the thought of being on the wrong side of her still scares me shitless.’ He turned and fixed his daughter with a steady gaze.
11
By the third day the routine had become well established. Collins and Woods would stop off at the incident room for morning prayers and a general catch-up with other members of the team. From there they would make their way over to the ViSOR offices to continue ploughing through the files of sex offenders and compiling a list of all those who had gone ‘missing’ in the hope that one might turn out to be their unidentified third victim.
It had taken only a few hours of sifting for Collins to become thoroughly pissed off and disillusioned with the task at hand. Soon the names and faces of countless paedophiles and rapists seemed to be swimming through her head day and night. No matter how hard she tried to put them out of her mind, they seemed to have become a permanent fixture. They even haunted her dreams, along with the gruesome details of the crimes they had committed and the terrified screams of their victims.
More than once she found herself secretly hoping that some of the men who had been listed as missing had indeed been tracked down by the killer, decapitated and emptied of all their internal organs. She knew the victims had been put through untold agony, but scum like this had caused great suffering themselves. She felt sympathy for Edward Miller’s widow, but none for the man himself. Men like him did not deserve to live. And they certainly did not deserve the undivided attention of good officers like herself and Woods.
She was supposed to be hot on the trail of a psychopathic killer who had committed the most horrific acts of violence, but the more Collins learned about the group he appeared to be targeting, the more she felt herself feeling a measure of sympathy for his cause. If he did turn out to be, say, the father of one of the victims, she knew she would find it almost impossible to remain entirely objective.
Johnson was focusing his attention on the computer system, working with technicians to find ways to isolate cases that fitted the criteria the murder detectives were looking for. Collins and Woods, in the meantime, were having to laboriously work their way through the paper files holding details of the cases that had been deleted from the computer system.
They sat at opposite ends of a long wooden table in a spare office a few doors along the corridor from Johnson. Each had a large pile of files on the floor beside them and a thick notepad by their writing hand. They would take one file at a time and examine its contents: a photograph of the accused, details of the crimes they had committed, and information about where they lived and worked before and after conviction. The files also contained details of the last-known sighting of each offender.
Files that held no promise were placed on the floor on the other side of the chair; those that were possibly of interest were kept in a new pile in the middle of the table. These would be taken to the incident room so that DC Natalie Cooper could add the relevant details to the case database.
The number of files on the table, and therefore the list of missing men, was growing by the day, but they were no closer to finding their killer or identifying the third victim. Johnson had been right. When Collins started making inquiries to try to trace the whereabouts of one missing man who might have been a likely target, she ran into brick wall after brick wall. The missing men were already deep underground and desperate to hide away from the authorities, but their files held a great deal of information that gave clues to their likely whereabouts. Many were creatures of habit and had gone back to old haunts in the hope of starting their lives over. Others had clearly changed their details in a bid to continue their sexual offending away from the watchful eye of the authorities.
Some of the men on the list had managed to stay missing for years. Unless their bodies turned up, it was unlikely they would ever be found.
‘Do you ever wonder about what we’re doing here, Tony?’ asked Collins as the two of them sat in the beer garden of a riverside pub, washing down scampi, chips and peas with a couple of Diet Cokes.
Woods chewed thoughtfully and swallowed before he replied. ‘You mean here in this pub, here on this assignment or here in this universe? I’m not entirely clear on just how philosophical you’re trying to be.’
‘Ahh, now I get it.’
‘Get what?’
‘Why you’re still single.’
Woods smiled, pushed another forkful of scampi into his mouth and then pushed it into the side of his cheek so he could speak. ‘You’re still really struggling with all this, aren’t you?’
‘Not as much as I’m struggling with your table manners.’
Woods waved his fork so that the prongs were pointing towards his colleague. ‘I think we should have a rule. Once a week or so you should temporarily give up your rank, just so I get a chance to tell you what I really think of you without risking being hauled in front of the commander on a discipline charge.’
Collins cocked her head to one side and placed a finger on the corner of her mouth in a mock gesture of deep thought before screwing up her nose. ‘Nah, I don’t think so.’
‘Joking aside, boss,’ said Woods ‘at this stage we don’t even know if the other two bodies are linked to any kind of sex crime. Everything we’re doing here could be a complete waste of time. This might not have anything to do with it. There’s no point in letting your feelings get in the way of doing the job before we know the whole truth about what the job actually involves.’
Collins’s mobile began to ring before Woods had finished speaking, and while she fished it out of her bag he quickly stuffed the remaining pieces of scampi into his mouth.
He watched as Collins listened intently and then got out her pad and frantically scribbled notes, her face stern with concentration.
‘What’s happened?’ he asked as she ended the call.
‘Looks like the mystery is about to be solved. That was Anderson. We’ve had a hit on the tattoo.’
Brazilian-born Roberto Medina first fell in love with the trendy North London district of Crouch End when his wife suggested they go there for a drink one summer’s evening. Medina had been bowled over by the vast number of bars and restaurants seemingly representing the four corners of the globe, but he had also been struck by something else.
Despite a thriving high street scene and thousands of young, hip residents, there was not a single tattoo parlour anywhere to be found. Medina had first become interested in the body-art business as a teenage graphic-design student in his home town of Rio de Janeiro. After graduation, he had spent five years working as an apprentice at a parlour on the Ipanema beach front before feeling confident enough to set up on his own.
He had arrived in the UK a decade earlier to study English but, like so many others before him, had met a girl, fallen in love and decided to get married and stay put. The tattoo parlour in Crouch End, the most recent of his many business ventures, had been running for a little less than three years and was thriving.
‘Man,’ said Medina as Collins and Anderson arrived at his tiny workshop. ‘I always check the papers and watch the news – it’s like there’s usually some tattoo they want to know about; it’s much more common than you’d suppose. But never in a million years did I ever think that I’d actually recognize one of them. To be honest, it’s a little spooky.’