Play Dead (D.I. Kim Stone, #4)(91)

He understood his boss’s reasons for the placement and wasn’t offended by it. Although he spent time on the rugby pitch, the balance of weekends that he did or did not was tipping towards less often.

Dawson, on the other hand, visited the gym with a single-mindedness that he sometimes put into his work. Rain or shine, the guy kept his four-times-weekly commitment to keeping fit and healthy. And he was almost twenty years younger.

Although seeing the pace at which the professor moved, Bryant wasn’t sure exactly where he would place his money in a sprint to the finish.

‘Some weather we’re having, eh?’ he asked to break the silence between them.

‘It is indeed, Sergeant,’ the professor answered without looking at him. ‘Condensation is forming in a volume of unstable air generating a deep, rapid, upward motion in the atmosphere. The heat energy is creating powerful rising air currents that swirl upwards.’ He slowed and shone the torch up towards the darkness and nodded. ‘There will be electrostatic discharge later, I would think.’

‘There’ll be what?’ he asked.

‘Lightning, Sergeant. It’s what happens between electrically charged regions of a cloud.’

‘Oh,’ he said.

Ask a professor a simple question, Bryant thought.

‘So how is it that you know the killer’s name but are unable to trace him?’ the professor said, asking a question of his own.

Unlike the professor, Bryant had no dazzling, complicated, technical response. ‘He entered the system as Graham Studwick at eleven years of age. There is no record of Graham Studwick from that point on. He left the system as someone else.’

‘Does that happen often?’ the professor asked. ‘People enter the system, as you call it, and simply disappear?’

More often than he’d like to admit, Bryant thought. And certainly more often than it should.

‘There are so many different agencies involved with the care of a minor nowadays,’ he explained. ‘Borough councils merge or separate. Services are contracted out, medical records move amongst neighbouring health authorities. There isn’t one body that oversees all aspects of a child’s care.’

Bryant observed his own use of the word ‘body’ in a place like this.

‘Ah, I see,’ the professor said in a tone that indicated he wasn’t really listening.

Bryant continued speaking but as they neared their designated area he sensed the distraction of the man beside him. He no longer offered any response at all to acknowledge that he was even listening.

Bryant closed his mouth and stopped speaking.

He knew the storm was coming. Could feel the threat of it in the air.

For some reason, he had the feeling that the threat of something more existed all around him.





Eighty-Five





‘So do you think we’ll see any action tonight?’ Jameel asked as they headed across the gravel patch. ‘I mean do you think he’ll dump another one here?’ he continued, giving Dawson no time to answer.

He shook his head as they entered the wall of darkness.

Only a kid who had experienced little contact with a crime scene would exhibit so much excitement at the prospect of freshly murdered bodies while normally surrounded by old, decaying corpses. It was ironic that those same words could have come from his own mouth ten years ago.

He watched as Bryant disappeared from view with Professor Wright, heading west in the direction of the area where Louise Hickman had been excavated just a couple of days earlier.

His boss was keeping pace with Catherine as they headed far east to the site where Jemima and Isobel had been left.

And here he was, travelling into no man’s land between them, with a kid who could barely contain his delight at the prospect of a fresh body.

‘Mate, keep the torch steady,’ Dawson snapped. The lamplight on which they were now reliant was darting all over the place.

Jameel chortled. ‘Oh yeah, I get ya,’ he said, realising that the area of greatest importance was the ground on which they walked. At Westerley any danger to their well-being and safety originated from the graves underfoot.

‘So what drew you to this place?’ Dawson asked. The kid’s effervescent nature and popularity on YouTube seemed at odds with the studious geek necessary for the number crunching he did in the middle of nowhere with just the professor, Catherine and a bunch of dead bodies for company.

‘The data, man,’ he said as though that explained everything. ‘Give me a handful of numbers and I can give you data, facts, projections. Tell me your last three gas bills and I’ll give you ten pages of results – history, patterns, projections. Here I get hundreds of numbers every day, and I turn them into fact. I can produce past, present and future. It’s cool shit, man.’

‘How’d you get here?’ Dawson asked. The torchlight remained more stable when the kid was focussed on speaking.

‘We were all hand-picked by Professor Wright,’ he explained. ‘I attended a seminar about stomach bacteria. There are one hundred trillion microorganisms in the intestines. That’s more than ten times the total number of human cells in the—’

‘Carry on,’ Dawson advised. He didn’t really want to dwell on that many living things making a home in his stomach.

‘I waited until after the class and approached him about two calculations within his presentation that were incorrect by a decimal place of one hundredth of a—’