Part 13 (1/2)

'And then?'

'And then she left. And I walked into town. I met up with, uh ' he rubbed his arms again ' with Peter and Nial.'

'We went out for a beer,' Nial said hurriedly. 'The school had won a cricket match the day before so we felt like having a little celebrate.'

'The three of you?'

'That's right.'

'Are you old enough to be cruising round the local pubs?'

'Well no. Not really. We kind of used fake IDs.'

'Kind of?'

'Yes. Why? Are you going to give us a lecture on it?'

Zoe raised her eyebrows at him. Impressed by his guts. 'No,' she said. 'Of course I'm not. In the scheme of things it's not exactly the crime of the century. So what time did your little fake-ID celebration finish?'

Nial shot Peter a look. Peter scratched his head. 'What time was it? About midnight?'

'About that, yeah.'

'Where did you go, Ralph?'

'Home. Weston.'

'How did you get there?'

'I walked.'

'Did anything unusual happen on the way? Did you see anyone you knew?'

'No.'

'So let's backtrack a bit. You met Lorne. What happened while you were together?'

There was a silence. Ralph's head was quite still but his hands weren't. They made little trembling movements. His shoulders were shaking. He shook his head imploringly as if he couldn't trust himself to speak without crying.

Zoe met Peter's eyes. She jerked a thumb at the door. 'Give us a few moments here?' she mouthed. 'Some privacy.'

The other two boys and the two girls exchanged glances. Then, as if they were a single organism, capable of reaching decisions without words, they filed out. In the corridor they stood with their hands in their pockets, each with one foot up against the wall. Like the cover of a Ramones alb.u.m. It never went out of style to be skinny and sullen.

Zoe kicked the door closed, grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on the window-sill and turned back to Ralph. He had slid down the wall and was in a little huddled squat, his hands over his face. 'OK, OK.' She crouched next to him, put a hand on his shoulder and felt the warmth of his skin through the thin s.h.i.+rt. The tremor of his breath coming in and out. 'Look, you've done the right thing by coming to me.' She handed him a tissue. He took it and crammed it against his face. 'You can be proud of that.'

He nodded and wiped his nose. His breathing was thick and nasal.

'But I need to get it all clear in my thoughts, Ralph. I asked you if something particular happened at Beckford's Tower and that seemed to upset you.'

He nodded miserably. 'We had an argument. She wanted to tell everyone about us and I ...' He had to take deep breaths to calm himself. 'We split up. We split up and she said she never wanted to see me again and ... And ... And that's what happened. And it's all my f.u.c.king fault. All because I'm scared of my f.u.c.king parents.'

'It's not your fault, Ralph. It's really not your fault.'

'What's going to happen? Do I have to go to court? Are my parents going to know about it? My father'll be furious. He thinks lying should be counted as a mortal sin.'

She rested her arm on his shoulders. He really was just a little boy. She could see the faint white of his scalp at the neat parting of his black hair. 'I think, Ralph, that most parents would be more concerned about your welfare. And that you've had the courage to tell the truth.'

'Christ.' He'd used up the tissues so he wiped his nose on the shoulder of his s.h.i.+rt. 'I wish you were my mother.'

'Oh, no, no. I'd be a terrible mother. You can trust me on that one. Now, coming here was a huge decision for you, but it was the right one. This information is really, really important. With it we can build a picture of what happened to Lorne. But there's not a lot I can do with the information if I can't share it with my colleagues. If I gave you a guarantee that nothing will be said to your parents until you're happy for them to hear, would you come and tell the rest of the team? The ones who can make a difference? You could stop this happening again. To someone else.'

There was a silence. It took her a moment to realize he was nodding.

31.

The Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 had dictated that all interviews of suspects had to take place in a specially designated room well lit, well ventilated, soundproofed, with embedded recording facilities and access to a neutral 'break-out' s.p.a.ce should the interviewee decide he or she didn't like the way the interview was going. Councils around the country had had to dig deep to install PACE rooms and at Bath police station there were two.

Zoe sat at her desk with the door open so she could monitor the pa.s.sageway. Her office was at the place where the corridor branched off to lead to the interview rooms. If Ralph was moved from the side office near the incident room where Ben was speaking to him, it meant they had gone against every one of her instincts, every one of her requests, and were interviewing him as a possible suspect in the murder. But the station was silent for a long time. Hours. G.o.d only knew what they were doing with him.

She tried to concentrate on other tasks. She set up an intelligence request for missing women aged between sixteen and twenty-one. When she'd told Debbie that 'all like her' meant the killer was going to target girls like Lorne, she'd plucked it out of the air. But what if she hadn't been so far off the mark? It was worth thinking about. Except that, looking at the screen, it wasn't going to be easy the result of the search was terrifying. Name after name after name. Of course she knew most of the girls on the list were probably alive and well and had simply lost contact with their families, or were avoiding them. A good proportion would have returned and the police not been notified. Even so there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. One person couldn't work through all of those on their own. She sat back in her chair and folded her arms. s.h.i.+t. If one of those names had belonged to a victim of Lorne's killer and their body hadn't been found, there was no earthly chance the police would pick up on it.

At a quarter to ten Ben walked past, going fast, carrying a stack of files. He didn't pay her any attention, but went into his office. She heard the door slam. She waited for a moment or two, then got up, went along the corridor and knocked on the door.

'Who is it?'

'Me. Zoe.'

A pause. A hesitation? Then, 'Come in.'

She pushed the door open. He was sitting at his desk, his elbows planted on either side of the stack of paperwork. He faced her but, she noticed, his eyes didn't meet hers. There was a blank, polite smile pasted on his face. 'What's happening?' she said.

'With?'

'You know what with. With Ralph. Are you still interviewing him? Did you get him an appropriate adult from Social Services?'

'He's seventeen. Doesn't need one.'

'I promised him his parents wouldn't be involved. Not unless he agreed to it.'

'Yes. And that's what we're working on. Him agreeing to it. They're going to find out eventually.'

Zoe let all the air out of her lungs. She came forward and sat on the chair opposite him. Ben eyed her, one of his eyebrows slightly raised, as if he really didn't appreciate the way she was making herself at home. 'It's not him,' she said. 'It's just not. He's too young young. Don't you remember, all those courses how these sorts of crimes take time to build? He's just a kid. He nicely and neatly fits a profile you've been sold, but it's a flawed flawed profile. Please see that. It's flawed.' profile. Please see that. It's flawed.'

Ben gave her a calm smile. 'I like to think I'm too much of a professional to be trammelled by psychological profiling, flawed or not. That would be a huge mistake remember what our trainers used to say? ”To a.s.sume makes an a.s.s out of you and me.”'