Praise God, she saw as she looked feverishly at her map of the New Forest. She had only to retrace her route from Honey Lane back through Burley village. From there it was a straight route to Lyndhurst. Possibly, she thought, the only bloody straight route in all of Hampshire.

She set off. Her mind was spinning. Gordon Jossie in London on the day of Jemima’s death. Zachary Whiting paying calls upon him. Ringo Heath in possession of thatching tools. Gina Dickens giving information to the chief superintendent. And now Meredith Powell, whom they’d have tracked down earlier had that bloody stupid Isabelle Ardery not ordered them precipitately back to London. Isabelle Ardery. Isabelle told me. Which took Barbara back to considering Lynley-that last place she wanted to be-so she forced herself again to Whiting.

Disguise. That was it. She’d been thinking that the baseball cap and sunglasses comprised the disguise because it seemed so obviously one. But what about the other? Dark clothes, dark hair. God, Whiting was bald as a newborn, but putting his mitts on a wig would have been child’s play for him, wouldn’t it?

Her mind tumbling from point to point, she paid scant attention to the road. There was a Y she hadn’t taken note of on the map, and she veered left when she came to it, at the Queen’s Head pub, on the edge of Burley village. She saw her error at once as the road began to narrow-she’d been meant to veer right-and she zipped into the broad car park behind the pub to turn round. She began to negotiate her way past the tour coaches, and that was when her mobile rang.

She excavated it and barked, “Havers,” when she finally got it open.

“Drinks tonight, luv?” a man’s voice asked her.

“What the bloody hell?”

“Drinks tonight, luv?” He sounded extremely intense.

“Drinks? Who the hell…? This is DS Barbara Havers. Who is this?”

“I realise that. Drinks tonight, luv?” He spoke as if through gritted teeth. “Drinks, drinks, drinks?”

At this, Barbara twigged. It was Norman Whatsisname from the Home Office, her own official snout, brought to her courtesy of Dorothea Harriman and her friend Stephanie Thompson-Smythe. He was giving her the code words and they were meant to meet at the Barclay’s cash-point machine in Victoria Street and he had something for her and-

“Bloody hell,” she said. “Norman. I’m in Hampshire. Tell me on the phone.”

“Can’t do, darling,” he said breezily. “Absolutely crushed with work at the moment. But drinks tonight would be the ticket. How about our regular watering hole? C’n I talk you into a gin and tonic? At the regular place?”

She thought frantically. She said, “Norman, listen. I c’n get someone there in…let’s say an hour? It’ll be a bloke. He’ll say gin and tonic, all right? That’s how you’ll know him. In an hour, Norman. At the cash-point machine in Victoria Street. Gin and tonic, Norman. Someone’ll be there.”

In the U.K. “detention at the pleasure of the reigning monarch”-a euphemism for imprisonment for life-is the only sentence that can be given to someone who is convicted of murder. But that is the law as it is applied to murderers over twenty-one years old. In the case of John Dresser, the killers were children. This, as well as the sensational nature of the crime, could not but have had an impact on Mr. Justice Anthony Cameron as he considered what recommendations he would make upon intoning the required sentence.

The climate that surrounded the trial was hostile, with an undercurrent of hysteria that could be seen most often in the reaction of those gathered outside the Royal Courts of Justice. Whereas within the courtroom, there was tension but no overt display of aggression towards the three boys, outside the courtroom, this was not the case. Initial displays of rage towards the three defendants-characterised first by the moblike gatherings at their homes and then by repeated attempts to attack the armed vans in which they daily traveled to and from their trial-segued into organised demonstrations and culminated in what became known as the Silent March for Justice, a noiseless gathering of an astonishing twenty thousand people who walked the distance from the Barriers to the Dawkins building site, where they were led in candlelit prayer and where they listened to Alan Dresser’s broken eulogy for his little boy. “John’s passing cannot go unmarked”-Alan Dresser’s words of conclusion-became the watchword for public sentiment.

One can only imagine how Justice Cameron wrestled with his decision regarding the recommendation he would make. It was not for nothing that he’d long been known as “Maximum Tony” for his propensity to let stand the maximum sentence at the conclusion of trials in his courtroom. But he’d never been faced with ten-and eleven-year-old criminals before, and he could not have been blind to all the ways in which the perpetrators of this horrible deed were themselves only children. His brief, however, demanded he consider only what would be appropriate for both retribution and deterrence. His recommendation was a custodial sentence of eight years, a punishment that, in the eyes of the public and the tabloid press, was deemed akin to walking away scot-free. Thus a series of heretofore unheard-of legal maneuvers were made. Within a week, the Lord Chief Justice reviewed the case and increased the sentence to ten years, but within six months the Dressers had amassed a petition of 500,000 signatures demanding that the killers be jailed for life.

This was a story that refused to die. The tabloids had seized hold of John Dresser’s parents and of John himself and had made his death a cause célèbre. Once the verdicts were handed down in the trial of his killers, their identities and photographs could be revealed to the public, as could salient details of his murder. The monstrous nature of his killing became a rallying point for those who deemed punishment the only appropriate response to such a crime. Thus the Home Secretary became involved, increasing the sentence once again to an incredible twenty years in order, he said, “To assure the public that their confidence in the judicial system is not misplaced, to allow them to see that crime will be punished, no matter the age of the perpetrator.” There the sentence remained until it went before the European Court in Luxembourg where it was successfully argued by the boys’ lawyers that their rights were being infringed by the fact that a politician-who would perforce be influenced by public opinion-was allowed to set the terms of their imprisonment.

When the boys’ prison term was reduced back to ten years, the tabloids flung themselves once again into the fray. Those who loathed the entire idea of European unification, seeing it as the root of all evils in the country, used the Luxembourg decision as an example of outside intrusion into the internal affairs of British society. What would come next? they pondered. Would it be Luxembourg forcing the euro upon us? What about a declaration that the Monarchy would have to be abolished? Those who supported unification saw the wisdom in making no comment at all. For any agreement with Luxembourg’s decision was a dangerous position to take, somehow implying that a mere decade was suitable punishment for the torture and death of an innocent baby.

No one could possibly envy the officials-elected or not-who had to make the decisions about the fate of Michael Spargo, Reggie Arnold, and Ian Barker. The nature of the crime has always suggested that the three boys were deeply disturbed, social victims themselves. There can be no doubt that their family circumstances were wretched, but there can also be no doubt that other children grow up in circumstances just as wretched or worse and they do not kill small children in reaction.

Perhaps the truth is that on their own as individuals the boys would not have committed an act of violence such as this one. Perhaps the truth is that it was a confluence of events that day that led to the abduction and the death of John Dresser.