‘The Dark Desires website, Nicola. What’s your involvement?’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Oh, come on. You can do better than that. A woman like you, with your reputation? I’d be surprised if you didn’t own a piece of the action, but even if it’s a rival outfit you must know all about it.’
‘And I just told you otherwise. Please don’t call me a liar.’
Parkinson’s expression had completely altered, and her voice had turned low and threatening. Neither her son nor her daughter were anywhere to be seen on this occasion, but Igor was there and his massive presence seemed to fill the room. Bliss had made himself aware of the man’s position at all times, and he checked again after Parkinson’s attitude hardened. He saw through her as if she were transparent, but he also knew she would not budge. As for Igor, he seemed unmoved by anything he had heard so far.
‘Nicola, please don’t take me for a complete fool,’ Bliss said. ‘Maybe you don’t own or run the site – that’s fair enough, though I do think it has something to do with Drake – but I won’t call you a liar if you don’t mug me off. I know you’ve heard of Dark Desires. It’s obvious by your reaction. So why not tell me what you do know? That’s all I’m asking.’
For the briefest of moments, he thought he might have won her over. But eventually she pointed towards the door. ‘See yourselves out, Detectives. And, fair warning: if you come back again, my associate here might not be so accommodating.’
***
The Met sent two men. Detective Superintendent Cliff Hammersley and Detective Chief Inspector Shaun Attwood both wore navy suits, crisp white shirts and blue ties, though that was where any resemblance between them ended. Hammersley was of mixed race, average height with an upright stance, and Bliss put him somewhere in his fifties. His whiter shade of pale DCI had to stoop when he entered the meeting room, and had the clean-cut, round-cheeked face of a child, making it impossible to estimate his age.
By the time they arrived at Thorpe Wood, DSI Fletcher had already gathered together Warburton, Bishop, Chandler, and Bliss around the table. Having driven over from Bedford, Glen Ashton sat with them. It gave the home team the advantage in terms of numbers, but it was more than that: these were the investigators currently running the show. It was important to let the Met officers see that for themselves.
His fleeting visit into the heart of darkness played on Bliss’s mind as the meeting with the Met detectives began following a rapid exchange of greetings and introductions. In front of each person seated around the large table was a lever arch folder of information compiled over the past ninety minutes. It contained details obtained from the Met, as well as those provided by Thorpe Wood and Cambridge.
It was only when DSI Hammersley pulled out a pair of reading glasses that Bliss remembered his own. He’d been carrying them around for a few weeks, forgetting they were in his jacket pocket. This was not a file he could take away with him and read at his leisure, so he quietly took out his own spectacles and slipped them on.
‘Operation Challenge has been running for two months,’ Hammersley began, his own folder still closed. ‘During that time we’ve investigated three murders so similar to your own that we must consider them to have been committed by the same hands. I confess we did not identify the pattern until victim number three, but I think the reasons for that will become apparent. In your pack you should have a full set of notes, photographs, witness accounts, pathology reports, and of course the case file as it stands. There’s also a map identifying the location of each body dump. Any questions before we start looking through this material?’
Bliss had one. He removed his glasses before speaking. Nobody seemed to notice. ‘Sir, you mentioned the “body dump” with confidence. We’ve been uncertain about this specific element. Lividity patterns clearly tell us our victim was moved after she was killed, but we’ve not been able to rule out the possibility that she was strangled close to where she was found at the chalk pits.’
Hammersley nodded. ‘DS Bliss, right? Yes, we have that confidence because we know something you do not – something it took us a while to bring into the puzzle. You see, we are reasonably confident that each of our three victims was held for between ten and fourteen days prior to being murdered.’
The information came as a complete surprise, but Bliss was already seeing how their own case conformed to that pattern. Majidah Rassooli’s landlord had mentioned something about his tenant not being seen for a while. Nicola Parkinson had also confirmed that the young girl had not worked for them in many days.
‘That makes sense of some of the information we have,’ he said. ‘I suspect that’s exactly what happened in our case, too.’
‘And yet it leaves us with a considerable gap to fill,’ Hammersley continued. ‘We’d established that victims two and three both had to have been taken within twenty-four hours of the previous kill. But there’s a much longer gap between our last victim and your first: a good few weeks. The question is, did he kill in the meantime, and are there other victims’ bodies yet to be discovered?’
‘And if so, where?’ Bliss said.
‘What do you mean by that, Sergeant Bliss?’ DCI Attwood asked. Bliss was impressed at how easily his boyish face became stern. Narrowing his deep-set eyes gave the man a menacing appearance.
‘I mean we shouldn’t automatically assume that what we initially thought of as
