Like This, for Ever

sewerage, water pollution. You forget Adam and I spent most of our weekends when we were kids driving up and down the river with Granddad.’
    She nodded. Mark’s maternal grandfather had worked for the marine policing unit. His uncle still did.
    ‘One of the things we’d get involved with was river-pollution incidents,’ Mark continued. ‘Strictly, it’s not the responsibility of the Marine Unit, but typically it’s their patrol boats that spot problems. And one thing I did learn was that if an unauthorized substance enters the river via a storm drain, it leaves some trace behind. I’ve watched these blokes from the Environment Agency find traces of oil, or chemicals, or raw sewerage at the points where the storm drains meet the river, then track it back up through the drains, right to the point of origin.’
    ‘So, if they spot blood, then they can—’
    ‘Track it back to where it was spilt in the first place.’
    Dana pushed her chair back from her desk. ‘I had no idea,’ she said.
    ‘It’s a long-shot, sweetheart. A typical pollution incident is a lot bigger than a few litres of blood, but it’s worth a go. Talk to the Marine Unit, they’ll put you in touch with the Environment Agency, you can pinpoint the storm drains along the stretch of the South Bank between Tower Bridge and Deptford and then you can send a team out. Take a couple of days at most.’
    ‘I’ll get on to it tomorrow,’ said Dana, glancing at her watch. ‘Huck’s been a long time.’
    ‘Speak of the Devil,’ said Mark, as the small boy pushed open the door. ‘Where’ve you been?’
    ‘Having a word with David,’ said Huck. ‘On the next floor up.’
    Mark raised one eyebrow at Dana.
    ‘David Weaver, the Detective Superintendent,’ explained Dana. ‘How was he?’
    ‘Good,’ said Huck. ‘Worried about the vampire. He didn’tmention it, but he had a copy of that book on his desk, the one that’s just gone into the top 50 on Amazon.’
    ‘So now even the Super is reading Bram Stoker,’ said Dana.
    ‘Did you give him my water?’ said Mark.
    Huck gave his dad a withering look. ‘You didn’t want water,’ he said. ‘You wanted me out of the way so you could tell Dana what you thought of in the incident room.’
    ‘You see,’ Mark said to Dana. ‘Kid got my brains.’

28
    LACEY’S TRAIN GOT into King’s Cross just before eight o’clock. As she left the station she saw the late edition of the
Evening Standard
and stopped to take a copy. The masthead had caught her attention. V AMPIRE AT LARGE IN L ONDON.
    The world had gone nuts.
    It was a thirty-minute Underground trip home. The front page of the paper showed artist’s sketches of the four young boys who had died and the one still missing. Each looked paler and thinner than the photographs Lacey remembered seeing. Dwarfing all of them in size was a colour photograph of the psychologist who’d been in the news all day: Bartholomew Hunt, an attention-grabbing pillock, if ever she’d seen one.
    Hunt was miffed at not being taken seriously and was happily accusing the Metropolitan Police of being narrow-minded and bigoted in their thinking. A spokesman for the MIT had told the paper that they were taking all new information seriously and were currently pursuing a number of lines of inquiry.
    Lacey folded the paper on her lap. The team hadn’t a clue. Pursuing a number of lines of inquiry was as good as saying they had no idea where to turn next. She pulled out her iPhone and pressed the Twitter app. During the day, some wag had christened the murderer the Twilight Killer and #TwilightKiller had been attracting new posts at the rate of several a second. As was theMissing Boys Facebook page. Lacey had also followed comment streams on MySpace and Mumsnet. Several wanted to know of any shops that hadn’t sold out of garlic. There were rumours of holy water and crucifixes being stolen from churches and Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
was predicted to hit the bestseller chart for the first time since its publication. It seemed safe to say hysteria was building.
    At Stockwell, Lacey climbed up to street level realizing that old habits died hard. She’d wanted to know nothing about this investigation and here it was, churning around in her head as if she’d been right in amongst it from the start. Even the country’s incarcerated wanted in on the action. A focus group of some of the world’s most notorious female criminals, working directly for the Met and