‘Sure I’m sure.’
Louise reappears. ‘Let me check again.’ She types in the reference in her computer. ‘Sorry, I don’t have any entry record.’ She looks puzzled. ‘There’s no trace of anything at all being logged. These numbers you gave me, they don’t match anything in the back.’
Megan is thrown. ‘Then where is it? I saw this evidence personally. I went over it with the PC who recovered it and my own DS said he was—’ She runs out of words.
Jimmy told her he’d log the evidence in. She clearly remembers him picking it up off her desk. Her blood runs cold.
Another thought hits her.
She thanks Louise and rushes back to her desk. Opens her computer mailbox. Frantically scrolls down the messages. Panic makes her heart race. She types quickly into the search box.
Nothing.
Types again. This time slower. Scrolls manually through the messages. Still nothing. Flushed with shock, she checks her recent documents tags and deleted files section.
Blank.
They’ve all been permanently erased. ‘Oh God.’ She covers her face with her hands. The automated mail that alerted her to the face-recognition match with Matt Utley has vanished.
She has nothing on him.
Every shred of evidence has disappeared.
120
‘You don’t look so arrogant and full of yourself now,’ says Draco, leaning over Gideon and looking into his bloodless face. The Keeper of the Inner Circle knows what he’s been through. Hell. He’s been there himself.
Draco picks up a wrist manacle, puts a key in it. The chain is dangling to the screwed hook in the stone floor. ‘Before I let you out, I need to know if I can trust you.’
Gideon is weak, traumatised. ‘You can.’ His voice is slow and hoarse.
Draco unlocks the manacles. Two men materialise out of the shadows and lift Gideon to his feet. He is a dead weight and has trouble standing. Blood rushes painfully to his head. He feels incredibly weak, hungry.
He drifts light-footedly across the Great Room, disorientated, as though in the middle of an out-of-body experience. The hooded men around him seem to be shimmering, surrounded by golden auras that expand and shrink as they breathe in and out. When Draco speaks, clouds of white waft from his mouth. Like breath on a cold winter’s day.
He knows they are moving him down passageways but he can’t feel his feet. Can’t feel anything. Yet his sight and hearing are highly sensitised not dulled. He can hear the moisture shrivelling up in the hewn sandstones around him. He can see the entire corridor reflected in the dark eye of an ant in the mortar where the wall meets the floor.
They stop in a panic. Their halos mingle and seem to catch fire. Their voices overlap, spill on to each other, their words are green, red, brown. Gideon laughs. They spin him round. He senses uncertainty. There are other men across from him. Men and a woman.
A beautiful woman. Young, dark haired and gorgeous.
His mother.
Gideon knows it is her. She is alive. They pull him away from her. But she sees him. For a split second, he is sure his mother’s eyes catch his.
He is wrestled away. He cranes his neck and looks for her over his shoulder. But she is gone.
121
Megan knocks lightly on the door of Jude Tompkins’ office and peers in. The DCI is a long way from being a friend, but seems to be the only person she can turn to now.
‘Ma’am, I’m very sorry to disturb you. I need to talk in confidence about an important development.’
The office is dark. Tompkins frowns through the puddle of yellow light spilled from a desk lamp. ‘What is it, Baker?’
‘Ma’am, Jimmy and I have been following up on the Naylor case.’
The DCI looks up, casts her mind back and remembers the file. ‘Tony Naylor?’
‘Yes, ma’am, that’s right.’
She downs her pen and sits back. ‘Okay, come in. Tell me quickly. Gibson and Rowlands have got me chasing my own tail.’ She gestures to a seat.
‘Thank you, ma’am.’ Megan shuts the door and sits. ‘To cut a long story short, Naylor is dead.’
Some of the tension on the DCI’s face eases. In terms of time, money and resources, a dead missing person is usually better than a live one. ‘You’ve got a body?’
‘Sort of, ma’am. Naylor’s body was reduced to fertiliser and spread across a field.’
The DCI puts her head into her hands. Wearily. A dead murdered person is a whole other matter. The last thing she wants right now. She scrubs at her mat of lacquered hair, tries to get the blood flowing. ‘You have forensic evidence, Baker?’
‘We got a sample from his parents, ma’am. The match is perfect.’
Tompkins widens her tired eyes, sits more upright and stares across the desk. ‘Have you told them any details?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You said he was fertiliser?’
‘Maybe a wrong description, ma’am. Somebody, some thing, pulverised his body then spread it across what used to be a crop field near Imber.’
She pulls a sour face. ‘So how did you find it?’
‘We got a lead from a dog tag found by a jogger. Naylor’s sister identified it, from the inscription on the back, as one she’d bought for him.’ Megan can see by the exhausted look on her boss’s face that now is not the time to mention the rather unorthodox deployment of Turkey vultures. ‘DS Dockery organised a search, brought back soil samples. The lab ran quick PCR tests on them and found scraps of human flesh in the earth. These samples were taken from a huge field, from right across it. And all of them contained the same DNA. Labs then matched those to the familial DNA we took.’
Tompkins is impressed. ‘Well done. Another time, this would be our major case of the year.’ She glances down at the files on her desk, a mass of papers, the photographs of Jake Timberland and Caitlyn Lock. ‘Was that what you wanted to discuss confidentially, or is there something else?’
‘There’s more.’ Megan gestures to a giant map of Wiltshire on the wall of the office. ‘It’s where we found Naylor’s remains that disturbs me, ma’am.’ She gets to her feet, walks over to the map. ‘Here.’ She lands a finger out in the desolate woods and fields of Salisbury Plain. ‘It’s barely a mile from where Jake Timberland’s body was found.’
Tompkins gets up to join her at the map. She peers at the bleak spot. ‘So who owns this section of land?’
‘That’s what’s interesting, ma’am. If you look at the Land Registry, it says the Ministry of Defence owns everything out there. But that’s not quite true. I dug around a bit and it transpires they own 99.9 per cent. The 0.1 per cent they don’t own is this section. The bit with our field and our barn in it. The place where we’ve discovered the remains of two bodies within a matter of days.’
‘So whose is it?’
‘It’s owned by Nathaniel Chase. Or at least it was, until he killed himself. Now it belongs to his son. Gideon.’
122
The rule of three. It was one of the first things that producers taught Caitlyn when she went on Survivor.
Rule one: humans can’t survive more than three hours exposed to extremely high or low temperatures unless they are wearing proper clothing. Rule two: humans can’t survive more than three days without water. Rule three: humans can’t survive more than three weeks without food.
Caitlyn thinks they should have added a fourth: humans can’t survive when they’re imprisoned in a block of stone and mind-fucked by whack-jobs in dressing gowns.