When I Wasn't Watching (23 page)

Ten minutes later he walked back out of the room, a muscle in his jaw pumping with frustration.

‘No good?' Scott asked, suppressing a sigh. Matt gave a curt shake of his head.

‘Nothing. The same generic description he gave on the Twitter page. A young guy, anywhere from late teens to twenties, but he can't even be sure of that because of the baseball cap. He says the cap had some kind of logo, a letter perhaps, but he's not certain. Jeans and a dark jacket. Hand in hand with a young boy matching Benjamin's description, a few streets away from the Armstrong residence, about ten minutes after the mother called it in. Response probably drove right past them. Tate said the boy was laughing, so he didn't think anything of it until the alert went out.'

‘Can he even be sure it's Benjamin?'

‘He reckons so. He was driving past, and said the boy caught his attention because he was laughing and looked so cute. Reminded him of his grandson. It has to be the right boy, but it hardly sounds as though he was forcibly taken does it?'

Matt thought back to Dailey's earlier words. ‘Prince admitted to having visited the area over the past few days – perhaps he struck up a friendship with the boy?'

Scott looked doubtful. ‘Just by seeing him over the garden gate for a few minutes?'

‘That's a long time to a three-year-old. He could have coerced him out with toys, sweets, anything. If the boy has been feeling unsafe at home, picking up on the tension between his parents.' Matt let his breath out in a slow exhalation. ‘I'm no expert in child psychology, but I bet it would be fairly easy.'

‘Sounds like grooming. More the work of a paedo than Prince.'

Matt raised an eyebrow at his sergeant. ‘How do we know,' he said slowly, that Prince isn't a paedophile? He's been in prison for eight years, locked up with the vulnerable prisoners – which we know are mostly made up of nonces and child killers – and just because there was no evidence of a sexual aspect to the Randall murder doesn't mean there wasn't one. Or that it hasn't been lying dormant. He's a man now, his sexuality would be more developed.' It seemed to Matt that any adolescent who got his kicks out of torturing toddlers was hardly going to grow up to develop healthy appetites, sexually or otherwise.

Scott blanched. ‘It's just getting worse isn't it? Where do we go from here?'

‘Release the description Tate gave us – it's not much better than what we had earlier but something might jog someone's memory. Then we go and talk to Mrs Prince. See what she knows about her son's little visits to Coventry. With any luck even if he turns out to not be involved he'll be locked back up for violating his parole conditions.' That was something at least, Matt thought. Something for Lucy. Then he remembered her message and tried to push any thought of her away.

They were just climbing into Matt's Mercedes when a young WPC who had been working on the social media feeds came running up, looking out of breath.

‘Sir, you really need to see this. This could seriously go off.'

Five minutes later Matt stood staring at the same Facebook page Lucy had just discovered a few miles away.

‘Can we get into it, get it shut down?' he snapped as the implications of the most recent post dawned on him.

‘On it now, sir. But how many people have already seen it?'

That was exactly what Matt was worried about. Because, flashing in front of him on the screen was an address.

That claimed to be the new location of Terry Prince.

Matt turned to Scott, his face slowly draining of colour.

‘Get local uniform out there, now.'

He had a horrible feeling it was already too late.

‘John' had been hiding in his bedroom for the past hour, ever since a neat package of steaming faeces had been pushed through his letterbox, then another one thrown at his window. Dog or human, he didn't know and didn't much want to either. What he didn't understand was why they were even bothering with the intimidation tactics, the bullying. Why not just get on with it?

But he knew the answer to that. First he would be tormented, like a toy on a string, dallied with and pushed around, until they went in for the kill. It had been the same in prison; it would be the same out here. When or how they would strike he didn't know; he just knew that they would.

He heard a car pull up and went over to the window to risk a peek outside, then drew back sharply as he heard footsteps coming up the path. Perhaps it was his Parole Officer. He should tell someone, he knew, and they would move him again, take him somewhere safe.

But they had told him he would be safe here. John didn't want to spend his life on the run, even though the alternative meant he wouldn't have a life at all. He had had enough. If he admitted it to himself, perhaps it would be better if it was all over.

With that thought in mind, John went downstairs to answer the ringing of his doorbell, accepting whatever was about to befall him, his heart a rotten weight in his chest. He hesitated before opening it, a natural survival instinct kicking in even as he tried to tell himself it was most likely nothing sinister. Underneath both his self-reassurances and his fear there was another feeling; one that won out.

Whatever may be about to happen, he deserved.

He wasn't expecting the face he saw when he opened the front door. He had a moment of hope – perhaps they weren't coming for him after all – before he registered the object in the stranger's hands and then felt the impact of the liquid thrown in his face. Stinging his eyes, his nostrils, coating his hair and face and most of his torso too. As the stranger swung again, splashing his legs and feet, the smell of the fumes hit him and John realised exactly how much trouble he was in.

He turned to run, but a hand in the small of his back sent him sprawling face first into the carpet. John rolled over, locking eyes with his attacker, who had stepped inside the hall and was smiling almost beatifically at him.

‘Do you know,' they said conversationally, ‘just how long I've waited for this moment?' A hand reached into a pocket; pulled out a dainty-looking gold lighter. All of a sudden John understood his morbid fantasies had been just that. He wanted to live, and desperately.

‘Please,' he begged, feeling tears begin to flow down his face, mixing with the fuel that covered him. The stranger tossed the lighter at him almost casually.

The last thing he saw as flames engulfed him and he started to scream was the face of his attacker, smiling at him.

Chapter Thirteen
Wednesday Evening

They were too late. The two police cars that turned up outside John's house, sirens blazing, caught the attention of neighbours and passers-by more immediately than the stranger who had so casually walked down the drive, whistling merrily and tossing a lighter up into the air and catching it repeatedly as they made their way back to the car at a leisurely pace. John's screams were muffled by the front door, which his attacker had carefully shut behind themselves with gloved hands. The Response team arrived just five minutes later, having unknowingly driven past the car which held the person responsible for the burned body they found, its skin so blackened and blistered it was at first hard to identify it as human.

‘Jesus Christ,' one of the officers muttered as they opened the front door and saw what awaited in them in the hall, while his colleague turned and retched into a tissue. He then left the tissue over his nose in a fruitless attempt to mask the smell of roasting flesh.

The flames had gone out, thanks to John's attempts to roll around on the floor to subdue them. Pieces of charred skin clung to the carpet around him.

‘Call it in,' the first officer said and then jerked away from the body as a low keening sound came from it.

‘Get an ambulance here now!' He barked orders even as he backed away from the victim. ‘The poor bastard's still alive.'

‘The victim' s name – real name, I should say – is Giles Murray. Record for theft, some petty dealing. He was paroled and released into the witness protection programme after informing on his suppliers. Thanks to him, we managed to crack one of the biggest suppliers of cocaine in the West Midlands.'

The officers present in the Incident Room were silent as Dailey spoke, his face grim. WPC Kaur looked as though she were about to cry. Giles Murray – an addict and a loner – had never had so much sympathy in his life, Matt thought, before clearing his throat and standing up.

‘Am I right in assuming that Local CID over in Loughborough are dealing with this?'

Dailey nodded.

‘Until there's a proven link between the fact that Giles' address – his supposedly “safe house” – was leaked onto social media by some prat who put two and two together and came up with four hundred, it's out of our hands and frankly, none of our business.'

Next to Matt, Scott snorted in disbelief.

‘It's pretty obvious isn't it? The poor guy's address gets splashed all over the internet to a public gunning for Terry Prince's blood, and then he nearly gets burned to death?'

‘Nevertheless, it's not our job to jump to conclusions. It could be a coincidence. He was in witness protection for a reason, after all.'

Coincidence. That word again. Matt had been hearing it all day long, and frankly it was starting to put his back up. ‘Coincidence' that Jack Randall and Benjamin Taylor looked alike? ‘Coincidence' that Benjamin was taken by a man who could fit the description of Prince just a week after he was released? ‘Coincidence' that a boy he should catch shoplifting and take home to his parents turned out to be Lucy's son? Matt didn't think so. There was some kind of link here, he just hadn't figured out what it was. He remembered Lucy's comments last night – had it really only been last night? –about Fate and smirked wryly. If there was some kind of preordained plan, then Matt had a nasty feeling that the powers that be were having a very big laugh at his expense.

‘Unless Giles recovers sufficiently to give a description of his attacker, it's out of our jurisdiction,' Dailey went on.

‘Being burned like that does smack more of an execution killing than a vigilante, or a crime of passion,' Scott conceded. Matt wasn't so sure, but didn't say so. There was a reason Dailey had called his team together and it wasn't so much to discuss a Loughborough-based murder attempt as its implications on their current case.

‘We need to pursue the Prince angle in the Benjamin Taylor case,' Matt said, and although his tone was low every face in the room was suddenly attentive. Dailey gave a curt nod.

‘This is getting out of hand; protesters, false information being shared, now a possible vigilante attack on the wrong guy. We need to be able to either rule Prince out or take him in, before the situation gets any worse. I believe you were going to interview Mrs Prince, Matt?'

‘Yes. If we can place Prince anywhere near the Armstrongs' house in the last few days, it has to be enough for East Midlands to take him in surely?'

‘You would hope so. We certainly need to get it done before he's whisked away to another secret location. After all, if whoever did this was really after Prince…'

Dailey nodded towards the slide of the crime scene photo of Giles Murray, burned and blistered so badly his identity was indeed now a mystery.

‘This,' Scott said quietly as Matt turned his eyes away from the sight, ‘is precisely why people can't be allowed to take the law into their own hands.'

As Matt left the room Scott's words followed him, and not just because he felt sympathy for Murray, who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because there was another ‘coincidence' that was playing on his mind and had been since they had heard about Murray's attack.

Lucy. It had been her who had confessed she initially dated him in the hope that he might know Prince's whereabouts, who had confessed she thought he deserved to die for what he had done to her son – a sentiment that Matt himself had echoed. So he had to ask himself – what might Lucy have done if she too had seen the Facebook page confusing the relocation of Giles Murray with that of Terry Prince? If she had believed the address to be the location of her son's killer?

Matt wasn't so sure that a vigilante would have gone so far as to pour gasoline over a man and set him alight in cold blood, but a mother who believed that man was responsible for the death of her child? That was more than possible, it was probable.

The woman who opened the door to Matt and Scott couldn't have been much older than them, but she looked like a pensioner, given the sunken appearance of her eyes and the stoop to her shoulders.

‘We've come about your son, Mrs Prince,' Scott said after Matt did the badge-flashing and introductions. Mrs Prince looked at them as if she hadn't heard him speak. Although she was nicely dressed and her house from the little he could see of it looked immaculate, there was a hollowness to her face and utter lack of expression in her eyes that reminded Matt of the before and after pictures of addicts on drug awareness posters. When she finally spoke it sounded as though it took her a great effort to do so.

‘Whatever he's done, I'm not interested.'

When neither Matt nor Scott answered but instead exchanged a brief look, the woman's eyes flickered with something that looked like hope.

‘Is he dead?'

‘No,' Matt said bluntly, shocked as the hope bled out from her face and left her looking as expressionless as before. What kind of woman wished death on her own child?

‘We just need to ask you a few questions about his whereabouts over the last few days. If we could come in?'

The woman held the door open with a long-suffering expression on her face, looking pointedly at their shoes as they walked into her home.

‘Wipe your feet,' she demanded before leading them into the lounge. Scott looked at Matt and shrugged as they did as the woman asked before following her into her home. The wooden crucifix on the wall above the fireplace seemed to dominate the whole room, and there was a large leather bible open on the table. There was no television. Matt wondered if Mrs Prince had found Jesus after her son's incarceration for murder or before.