engine. She rested her head on the steering wheel. She was knackered. Odd to think that spending hours upon hours on computers and telephones was more exhausting than hoofing round London to track down witnesses, suspects, reports, and background information, but that was the case. There was something about staring at a computer terminal, reading and highlighting printouts, and running through the same monologue on the phone with one desperate set of parents after another that made her long for baked beans on toast—bring on a tin of Heinz, that ultimate comfort food—followed by a horizontal position on the daybed with the television remote tucked in her hand. Simply put, she hadn’t had an easy time for one moment during the first two endless days.
First there was the subject of Winston Nkata. Detective Sergeant Winston Nkata. It was one thing to know why Hillier had promoted her colleague at this particular point in time. It was quite another to realise that, victim of political machination or not, Winston actually did deserve the rank. What made it all worse was having to work with him in spite of this knowledge, realising that he was just as uneasy with the whole situation as she was.
Had Winston been smug, she would have known how to cope. Had he been arrogant, she would have had a bloody good time taking the piss. Had he been ostentatiously humble, she could have dealt with that in a satisfyingly biting fashion. But he was none of that, just a quieter version of regular Winston, a version that affirmed what Lynley had indicated: Winnie was nobody’s fool; he knew perfectly well what Hillier and the DPA were trying to do.
So ultimately, Barbara felt sympathy for her colleague, and that sympathy had inspired her to fetch him a cup of tea when she fetched one for herself, saying, “Well done on the promotion, Winnie,” as she placed it next to him.
Along with the constables assigned by DI Stewart, Barbara had spent two days and two evenings coping with the overwhelming number of missing-persons reports that she had pulled from SO5. Ultimately Nkata had joined the project. They had managed to cross off the list a good number of names in that time: kids who had returned to their homes or had contacted their families in some way, making their whereabouts known. A few of them—as expected—had turned up incarcerated. Others had been tracked down in care. But there were hundreds upon hundreds unaccounted for, which took the detectives to the job of comparing descriptions of missing adolescents with descriptions of the unidentified corpses. Part of this could be done by computer. Part of it had to be done by hand.
They had the photographs and the autopsy reports from the first three victims to work from, and both parents and guardians of the missing kids were almost universally cooperative. Eventually, they even had one possible identity established, but the likelihood was remote that the missing boy in question was truly one of the bodies they had.
Thirteen years old, mixed race, black and Filipino, shaved head, nose flattened on the end and broken at the bridge…. He was called Jared Salvatore, and he’d been gone nearly two months, reported missing by his older brother who—so it was noted in the paperwork—had made the call to the cops from Pentonville Prison where he himself was banged up for armed robbery. How the older brother had come to know young Jared was missing was not documented in the report.
But that was it. Sorting out identities for each corpse from the vast number of missing kids they had was thus going to be like picking fly poo out of pepper if they couldn’t come up with some kind of connection between the murder victims. And considering how widespread the body sites were, a connection seemed unlikely.
When she’d had enough—or at least as much as she could handle for the day—Barbara had said to Nkata, “I’m out of here, Winnie. You staying or what?”
Nkata had pushed back his