Free The Murder Code by Steve Mosby

bushes.
    But facing him. And standing very still.
    For a moment, Kramer does the same. Neither of them moves.
    Then the figure turns around and walks away, disappearing off to the side, round the back of the bushes.
    Kramer remains standing in place, but a few seconds later, relief floods him, and he almost laughs at himself. It was just someone doing the same thing as him—taking a short cut across the waste ground, coming the opposite way. The guy saw Kramer, froze up, and decided it was sensible to back off and go a different way.
    Obviously he doesn’t look like someone to mess with. What’s that saying? Wouldn’t want to meet him down a dark alley. That’s what the guy is probably thinking about him right now.
    Kramer shakes his head and starts walking again, slightly annoyed. Despite the fact that nothing really happened, the encounter has given the adrenalin a little kick and brought it to life: started it working before he wants it to. He feels invincible right now, but that’s—
    He stops again.
    Someone else is standing there, backed into the bushes where the stranger was. Kramer can see the red glow of a cigarette in the darkness.
    Two guys meeting up out here? Well, there’s certainly an explanation for that. Not one he cares for exactly, but not one he’s scared of either. He’ll just walk past—he starts doing so—and ignore the man …
    But it’s not a cigarette, he realises. The light from it doesn’t fluctuate. Doesn’t change.
    As he reaches the spot, Kramer peers into the bush and sees the red LED light burning small and intense between the leaves. Then the black circle of a lens. A camera, pointing into the bush on the opposite side of the path.
    He turns.
    There’s a small clearing. There is a chance—briefly—to see the woman lying on her back there, and to see there is something wrong with her. To realise, just, that she is far too still and that her face isn’t where it should be.
    But there is not time to put all the facts together in his head and make sense of what is happening. Because right then, he hears the quick, heartbeat punch of feet in the gravel behind him, and the whipping, wing-like sound of polythene cracking the night-time air.
    And then nothing.

DAY THREE

Twelve
    T HE NEXT MORNING FELT colder than it should, even though the sun was as bright and warm as it had been when I’d driven up Mulberry Avenue two days earlier, listening to Carla Gibson’s screams.
    Nobody was screaming here on the wasteland. It felt like a pocket of silence: the eye of a storm, maybe. We’d set up a perimeter around the entire waste ground and a couple of the surrounding streets on the Garth estate—nobody in or out that didn’t need to be—so the area was still, disturbed only by the quiet, diligent work of the SOCOs as they moved between the bushes. But it also felt like there was a cold presence here, one that chilled the air simply by preventing the sunlight reaching the ground.
    Ridiculous, of course.
    But it felt that way all the same.
    ‘Our guy,’ Laura said.
    ‘Yes.’
    We were standing at the end of one of the paths that snaked across the waste ground. Next to it there was a tiny clearing, surrounded on three sides by prickly bushes, and just large enough for the three bodies we’d found, lying side by side. They had been laid out as if sleeping peacefully next to each other. They couldn’t have died peacefully; their killer must have arranged them the way they were for some reason.
    I glanced around, and then overhead. No tents had been erected so far. They’d be tough to construct in the undergrowth, but we’d need them shortly. It wouldn’t be long before the news ’copters started circling overhead—searching for a shot that would be of no use to them anyway, one that they would have to blur extensively if they even used it at all.
    What would they see? Two women and one man—although from high above, that might not immediately be obvious. You would be able to