Like This, for Ever

do it,’ said Weaver, crossing the room and perching on Stenning’s desk. ‘You just keep finding me numbers.’
    ‘I guess by the end of the evening we’ll know whether this Peter is our killer or not,’ said Anderson. ‘If all Oliver Kennedys are accounted for, we know he’s been pulling our collective plonker.’
    The phone rang. Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at it. Somehow they all knew. Anderson stood up.
    ‘I’ll get it,’ said Dana.
    Wherever she sat in the living room, Lacey could see the knife drawer. Plain white melamine, it hovered at the edge of her vision like her nemesis. If she left the room she could still see it. It had been tormenting her all day, like the bottle of Scotch in the cupboard of an alcoholic.
    She could not do it again. Once was forgivable, understandable even. Once could be considered an experiment. Twice meant she had a problem. Twice meant that, far from making a recovery, she was actually sinking fast.
    But she’d felt so much better. All day Sunday, and most of Monday, she’d felt as though she’d taken a miracle drug. That feeling inside her, like a coiled spring, had gone. It had felt like the first warm day after winter. Lacey stood and walked across the room, trying to think about something else.
    The MIT still had her mobile phone. Presumably they hadn’t yet managed to trace where Saturday evening’s text had come from. But if the Met couldn’t prove Barney had sent her the text, how on earth could she? And what did he have to hide, anyway? He was eleven years old. How could he be involved?
    She was in the kitchen again, dangerously close to the knife drawer. Impossible to stay indoors. She grabbed a jacket and her helmet and went outside. The night was dark and cold, the wind coming directly from the river.
    On the embankment, the police presence seemed unusually heavy. Uniformed officers were making their way along the pathway, chatting to groups of teenagers who’d braved the cold. Tuesday evening. They were expecting the killer to strike again.
    Maybe they’d even been given her description, told to look out for a thin, pale woman who haunted the riverbank once night had fallen.
    Suddenly self-conscious, Lacey left the river and set off east, avoiding the main roads, pedalling as fast as she dared in London traffic. Only when she got as far as Bermondsey did she risk heading back to the water. When she reached a stretch of the embankment that seemed quiet, she got off and pushed her bike towards the embankment wall.
    The river was lively tonight, the tide coming in fast and the wind blowing hard in the opposite direction. Choppy little waves were dancing across its surface and the long, smooth blackness was continually broken by tiny fountains of white spray.
    A police launch was heading downstream, in the exact centre of the river. It was too far away for Lacey to be sure, but it looked exactly the same as the one Joesbury had forced her on to the previous autumn, after a ducking had given her a temporary fear of fast-moving water. He’d introduced her to his Uncle Fred, a sergeant in the Marine Unit, and the launch they’d been travelling on had been called out to intercept a dinghy of illegal immigrants. The dinghy had overturned, Lacey had jumped into the water to rescue a young girl, and bloody hell, had she been in trouble, with both Uncle Fred and Joesbury. But her fear of rivers had gone as quickly as it had come.
    There was just something mesmerizing about large, powerful watercourses: about the never-ending motion, the way they were continually moving and changing but always constant, always there. As the song said, they just kept on rolling, and somehow this river in particular always managed to calm her. If she could live close to it, if by some miracle she could afford one of these riverside properties, if she could fall asleep to the sound of its journey, she wouldn’t need to—
    ‘Oh, Jesus!’
    Sudden pain winded her. There was a clatter of metal against concrete and someone hit her hard.
    Barney stared at the screen. Peter Sweep had posted four minutes earlier. Short and very much to the point. Oliver Kennedy? Who was Oliver Kennedy? People on Facebook were asking the same question. Comments popped up one after another like pop tarts from a toaster. Someone thought he might go to the same school as his younger sister. Another said there was someone called Kennedy in his cub pack, but he thought his first name was