Like This, for Ever

took such an interest in Barney.’
    ‘You didn’t know?’
    ‘I knew it was happening with someone. I guess the details aren’t that important.’
    Green’s sallow skin had paled and his eyes had narrowed. He might be feigning nonchalance but she was getting to him. She reached down into her case and pulled out the silver-framed photograph Gayle had found in his house. His reaction was immediate.
    ‘How dare you touch that!’
    Dana pretended to study the ten-year-old boy in the photograph. It had been taken at school and showed him wearing a maroon sweater and a maroon and black striped tie. Benjamin Green had looked a lot like his father.
    ‘I’d say the dead boys look very like your son, Mr Green,’ she said, knowing she was on dodgy ground. Benjamin had been darker haired and more sallow of skin than the victims. ‘Is that how you choose them?’
    Green gave her a look of pure contempt and closed his eyes. She watched him breathe in and out three times.
    ‘For the benefit of the tape, the suspect is refusing to answer the question,’ said Anderson, after twenty seconds had gone by. Green’s eyes shot open.
    ‘For the benefit of the tape,’ he said, ‘the suspect thinks you are a bunch of incompetent halfwits.’
    ‘We can make your life very difficult if you don’t cooperate, Mr Green,’ said Dana.
    ‘Detective Inspector, my son is dead and my wife – who I still love, by the way – is about to leave me. Trust me when I say that you and your friends don’t even come on to my radar screen.’
    ‘We could always leave him in a cell with Mark for half an hour,’ said Anderson, when they left the interview room ten minutes later. ‘He’d be singing after five minutes.’
    ‘I don’t doubt it, but he still couldn’t tell us anything. It isn’t him, Neil.’
    Anderson gave a heavy sigh. ‘Boss, Huck’s phone was in his bag. Fingerprints. Black fleece.’
    ‘Did you see his feet? Bloody enormous. There’s no way he could squeeze into size-ten wellingtons. Or leave shallow, slightly wobbly prints in the mud. And would a killer as careful as we’ve continually told ourselves this one is leave his latest victim’s phone in his bag foranyone to find? If Green were guilty, he’d have been expecting us to talk to him. He would have got rid of the phone.’
    ‘So how did it get in his bag?’
    ‘My best guess? Huck dropped it in the changing room – he’s always leaving it lying around – and one of the other boys picked it up and dropped it in the coach’s bag for safe-keeping.’
    ‘So what – are we back to Mrs Green and her shag bunny? Because I can’t believe none of the three are involved.’
    ‘Mrs Green and her shag bunny, as you so charmingly call him, alibi each other. We need actual evidence on the boat or in one of their houses to pin it on them. And while we’re looking for it, Huck is out there.’
    Suddenly, Dana could no longer summon up the energy to put one foot in front of the other. She stopped and leaned back against the wall, almost setting off the panic alarm. She couldn’t look at Anderson. He waited, gave her time. Huck didn’t have time. No choice – she had to hold it together. She stood upright again.
    ‘Hold the fort upstairs for a bit?’ she asked him.
    ‘Going somewhere, Ma’am?’
    ‘I need to talk to Huck’s mum.’
    ‘What will you tell her?’
    ‘God knows. But I promised.’
    Lacey saw the boy by the gates of the community centre and called to him. He turned and watched nervously as she ran towards him. She pulled her warrant card from her jacket as she struggled to get her breath back. It was only midnight but she felt as though she’d been up all night. Or been drinking heavily. Something was slowing her down and it was starting to feel a lot like despair.
    ‘You’re a friend of Barney’s, aren’t you?’ she said.
    The boy was about her height, very slim, with fair skin and hair. A beautiful child, on the verge of turning into a man. Around fourteen years old, wearing a mud-spattered tracksuit and trainers. ‘Someone from the police phoned our house about him. Have you found him?’ he asked.
    She shook her head. ‘I wanted to ask if you could think of anywhere he might have gone,’ she said. ‘The police will havechecked the houses of all his friends. I was thinking maybe of a den or a place you like to hang out. I’m Lacey, by the way. I live next door to Barney, but I’m also a detective.’
    ‘I know,’ the boy