He looked around. The location was just so ordinary, and in such public view. Jane’s killer would have been spotted if someone had looked out. So why here?

He looked along the path that disappeared into the trees. There was a woman further along, a small terrier trotting in front of her. She was bending down, a plastic bag over her hand, picking up the dog’s mess.

As Jack looked along the path, he saw that it pulled to the right just as it disappeared into the shroud of trees. It suddenly struck him that Don Roberts’ house was only a few hundred yards to the right and there was a fair chance that the path may end up near there.

But it wasn’t just that. It was the woman with the dog, who was now walking past quickly, her head down. Don Roberts had a dog. He remembered its snarl from Don’s visit. Did Don use this path?

Jack scrambled back up to the path and started to walk along it. The sunlight disappeared as the shade of the trees took over and it became slightly cooler. The floating pollen was suddenly replaced by the buzz and flicks of midges and flies.

The path started off as tarmac and then turned into gravel as it followed the line of the stream. The small copse turned into woodland, with large sycamores and horse chestnut blotting out the noise from the nearby road, and so all he could hear was the trickle of the stream and the sing song of the birds in the trees, the peace broken only by the steady crunch of his shoes.

He stopped when he thought he heard something behind him, or saw something, just at the edge of his vision, but when he looked around there was no one there. He tried not to think about what had happened near here a few days ago.

As Jack looked ahead, he saw the trees thinning out, and the bright red of new bricks started to appear in the gaps between the trees. He began to walk quicker. His guess had been right.

He jogged the last part, fast crunches on the gravel as he went up a small rise and then onto tarmac again, his feet stopping before a grass verge. He looked along the road and smiled. There it was, the home of Don Roberts, with its pillars and its cars. He looked back along the path. The shadows had taken hold again, the path made dark and quiet by the trees. He turned back to the road. It didn’t deviate too far from the path. Jane had been going out for the night on her own, and Jack knew that she would have taken the road; she wouldn’t have wanted to go into the pub with dog shit and gravel dust on her shoes. Then Jack thought of the first murder. Deborah Corley. Her body had been left hanging out of a pipe that protruded from a grass bank next to a reservoir. He thought about that location. Why had it been chosen? Jack reasoned that Jane Roberts had been left near where she was attacked, because it was near where she had walked, but Deborah Corley was different. She had last been seen walking from her college, along a quiet road that would have taken her straight home. It wasn’t near the reservoir.

He started off down the path again, rushed back to his car and clambered in, breathless. He headed for the ring road, shooting past the car showrooms and electrical superstores that lined the dual carriageway. Once he turned off though, the neon lights and traffic noise soon faded, as the road climbed upwards towards the tall green banks of the reservoir. Overspill pipes jutted out, water dribbling gently into small concrete gulleys that ran towards the river.

It seemed a strange place to leave a body, because it involved effort. The sides of the reservoir were exposed, and as Jack parked and then climbed the concrete steps that took him to the top of the banking, he looked back and saw the stream of traffic on the ring road. It would be so easy to be seen. He looked along the water, lapping gently against the banks. There were some people fishing on the opposite side, reminding Jack that it was anglers who had found the body.

As Jack watched the fishing lines break the surface, the bright floats bobbing in the water, something niggled at him, a memory, something almost within reach. He thought back to the dog walker he had seen before, close to Don’s house. It linked in with that somehow.

Then it came to him. When he had visited Mike Corley, there had been a bait box in the hallway, a fishing rod against the wall.

Jane and Deborah had been left in those places for another reason. He shivered. It meant that their deaths were more than just sex murders. They were acts of revenge. The path through the woods was the obvious place for Don to walk his dog, and so when he did, he was meant to find his decomposing daughter, perhaps sniffed out by his dog. Mike was a fisherman, and had probably fished at the reservoir. Perhaps it was his favourite spot. Jane and Deborah weren’t meant to be found by a bunch of mischievous kids or anglers. They were supposed to be discovered by their fathers.

Now he just had to work out what Don and Mike had done that demanded such vicious revenge. But first, he had to see Laura.

Chapter Fifty

Laura leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. It was only ten in the morning, but the long hours were taking their toll. She had managed to drag every shift manager into the station and had demanded a list of all those officers who’d been on duty when the emails had been sent from the police station. The technical people were trying to narrow it down to an individual terminal or log-in details, but it was slow going. There were countless computers being used at all times in the station, and they all went through one major server.

She was rescued from looking at the list of names when her phone vibrated on the desk next to her. When she looked at the screen, she saw that it was a London number.

‘Sandy?’ she said.

There was a laugh on the other end, and then the familiar rounded vowels of the south hit her ears. ‘Hey, babe, it’s been a long time. How is it up there? I’ve heard they’ve got colour television now.’

She laughed. ‘How’s life in the clogged up, smoggy streets?’

‘It’s all sushi and soft shoes now.’

‘So, what have you got for me?’ Laura asked.

‘What you wanted,’ he said. ‘Your boy, Shane Grix, was found in an alleyway near King’s Cross. Typical young drifter stuff. Down to the bright lights, except that it just got him into drink and drugs, and so he paid his way with sexual favours. Do you know how hard it is to investigate these things?’

‘I haven’t been away that long,’ she said lightly. And Laura did remember the problems – any witness who could provide background information seemed to be in a new place each night. Some of the street sleepers found their own slot amongst the cardboard, and would defend it aggressively, but as soon as the authorities came looking, they shuffled off somewhere else. And getting them as far as a courtroom was almost impossible.

‘It’s even worse now,’ Sandy said, interrupting her thoughts. ‘Eastern Europeans hog the soup queues, even if they are not homeless, and they get pretty violent if anyone objects.’

‘So you didn’t get much joy?’

Laura could almost hear the shake of the head. ‘Maybe things would be different now,’ he said, ‘but it was the Thatcher years. We celebrated the winners. What did some minister say back then, that the homeless were just the people you trip over on the way to the opera? Shane ended up in a fight with someone just like him. Strangled to death and then set on fire.’

‘Forensic cover-up?’

‘That was the guess at the time,’ he said.

‘And what about since?’ Laura heard the sigh, and she guessed the answer. ‘There hasn’t been a since, has there?’ she said. ‘No forensics, no eye witnesses, and a family who don’t make trouble. Just another young homeless death.’

‘It’s called priorities, Laura, you know how it works. The file’s still open, but short of a confession, we’re never going to solve it. It was years ago.’