And in one corner, leaning casually against a cupboard, was a long-handled axe, the blade stained brown with dried blood. Blood that had pooled into a sticky mass on the floor.
Sally Cartwright slipped on a pair of forensic gloves and opened the first freezer. It took a bit of a wrench. Inside were the frozen, broken remains of crab legs and lobster legs and claws and shells.
Delaney looked at it, puzzled.
‘It’s shickle, sir,’ said the young detective constable.
‘Shickle?’
‘The remains of crabs and lobsters once the meat’s been processed or dressed. All the stuff that’s left over.’
‘So why’s he got a freezer full of it?’
‘It’s what they do, sir. They freeze the live crabs and lobsters first before cooking them and they freeze the shickle, like I say, after they have dressed the meat.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of the smell.’
Delaney wrinkled his nose. ‘I can see that.’
‘Then the fishermen chuck the frozen stuff back in the sea the next day, before bringing in that day’s catch.’
‘You seem to know a lot about it, constable.’
‘I have an aunt lives on the North Norfolk coast, sir. Used to have our summer holidays there. Not much I don’t know about Cromer crab.’
Delaney nodded to the next freezer and Sally opened it. It came open a lot easier.
Delaney looked inside. He didn’t speak for a moment and then he said, ‘I guess this one is more my area of expertise.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Sally Cartwright.
‘And it looks like we got it wrong again.’
*
Jennifer Hickling took the thick envelope that the manager gave her and put it into her pocket.
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer a banker’s draft? That is a large amount of cash to be carrying around.’
‘This is fine, thanks,’ said Jennifer, her voice almost betraying her true age.
She was so close now. They both were. To getting away. To making the Waterhill just a bad memory, a bad dream. Time to wake up.
She nodded at the bank manager and hurried out of her office, through the bank proper and out onto the high street.
As Jenny came out of the bank she looked up at the sky. It was starting to grow dark. The streaks of red that had smoked through the sky during the day were thicker now, darker, almost purple. She pulled the zipper on her jacket up to her neck and looked at her watch. She still had time. She decided to forget about the bus and get a taxi – she had the money now, after all, and she didn’t want her sister waiting any longer for her than she had to. Jenny pictured her standing at the school gates with the innocent smile that she herself used to once have. Before her mother was put in prison and she had been placed in the loving care of her uncle.
She walked along the pavement, staring into the distance, craning her neck to see the familiar lit yellow sign showing that a taxi was for hire. She thrust her hands deep in her pockets, one cradling the packet of money, the other curled around the handle of the knife.
She didn’t see the dark-haired older woman walking towards her with hate in her eyes or the man in the black suit behind her with a look in his own eyes every bit as full of passion and purpose.
Jennifer never made it to the school gates.
*
Sally looked out of the car window. It was dark now. She knew it was late in the year. But it shouldn’t be so dark this early. So cold. She tapped on the car’s heating controls and turned the temperature up a degree or two. Beside her Delaney was staring intently through the windscreen, a hundred per cent focused, which was just as well because he was driving with the accelerator floored. She held onto the strap as he swerved in and out of the traffic, overtaking on the left and right, oblivious to the blaring horns and flashing headlights. Delaney never drove if he could help it, which was what was unnerving Sally more than the speed they were travelling at. At least they were in her car, which was fully serviced and maintained. She hated to think what it would have been like if he had been driving his own old and less than fully maintained Saab 900.
She looked out of the window and remembered her childhood trips to the coast. They had travelled in the pitch dark sometimes. That was because her dad had always wanted to leave at the crack of dawn – sometime before it, in fact. Her mother refused to go on the motorway and so they had had to take the longer route and he always wanted to get going early when there ware no cars on the roads. There was plenty of traffic today, though. Plenty of it. And Delaney was zigzagging through it like a metham-phetamine-fuelled maniac in a demolition derby.
Sally shivered again and reflected on how fast things were moving now. Both literally and metaphorically. She just hoped that they weren’t too late. They finally had their man: she just hoped that Delaney would get them there in time – and in one piece – to save the missing boy, who had been away from his home for four days now. The statistics weren’t good.
She looked down at the invoice that Mrs Blaylock had given her. Dated from the summer of 1995 when this had all begun. But then she realised it had all begun earlier, like everything does. The perpetual cycle of paedophilia and abuse seeding itself through generation after generation after generation. Like cancer, Delaney had said, and he was right. She crumpled the paper in her hand again as Delaney swerved violently again to avoid an oncoming
