‘I got involved in a case a few years ago. A chap in Croydon threw some in his girlfriend’s face when she dumped him. Apparently it’s common practice in one of the countries in Africa.’

‘Nice guy,’ Nicholl responded.

‘A regular charmer. That’s what you get with darkies.’

Now Grace was livid. ‘Norman, in case you haven’t noticed we have a black member on our team. If you make one more racist or homophobic remark I’m going to have you suspended. Any part of that you don’t understand?’

After a few seconds’ silence Potting said, ‘I’m sorry, Roy. I apologize. Not very tactful of me. He’s a good man, that DS Branson.’

Even though he’s black? Grace was tempted to fire back. Instead he said, ‘You’d have needed a few gallons of the stuff to fill that tub. The neighbours must have seen something. All those bloody Neighbourhood Watch stickers. Two tasks for you, Norman. First find out from the house-to-house team if any unfamiliar vehicles have been in the street in the past few days. Second, find out if there are any suppliers – or users – of bulk sulphuric acid in the area.’

‘Before or after I finish working my way through the books of Barry and Claire Escorts Twenty-Four Seven, chief?’

‘You’ll have to multi-task like the rest of us, Norman.’

Two sharp beeps told Grace he had an incoming text. He looked down and saw it was from Cleo. Instantly his spirits lifted. Then, when he read it, they dropped. Or rather plummeted.

53

The video viewing room in the Major Incident Suite was a tiny, windowless cubicle, a few yards down the corridor from MIR One. With just Glenn Branson and Tom Bryce in there it felt crowded and claustrophobic. Yet another example, in Branson’s view – and he was only an occasional visitor – of how poorly thought-out the conversion of the building had been.

Tom Bryce sat at the desk, with a monitor in front of him, and to his left a video and CD stack. The machine was loaded with CCTV footage from two cameras at Preston Park railway station, the first stop north from Brighton, regularly used by commuters both for its convenient location towards the outskirts and for the free parking in the streets all around. It was the station where the dickhead seated next to him on the train last Tuesday night, who had left behind the CD, had got off.

Constable Bunting had come up trumps. Within two hours of Glenn’s call to British Transport Police, the officer had produced footage of the southbound platform of Preston Park at the time of the arrival of the train Tom had been on.

Tom forced himself to concentrate, but it was hard because he was beside himself with worry about Kellie. He had the shakes from having eaten nothing all day and drunk far too much caffeine. His stomach felt as if it was full of barbed wire. Suddenly his mobile phone rang.

He looked at the display but did not recognize the number. ‘I’d better answer it,’ he said. Branson nodded his encouragement.

It was Lynn Cottesloe, Kellie’s best friend who also lived in Brighton, wondering if there was any news or anything she and her husband could do to help. Could they bring some food over? Help out with the children? Tom thanked her and said that a rota of family liaison officers had been organized. She told him to call the instant he had any news, and he promised he would. Then he returned to his task.

The first camera showed the length of the platform, from a high vantage point. A train was just pulling out of the station. A counter in the top right-hand corner read 19.09.

‘That’s the Thameslink, the London Bridge service,’ Glenn Branson informed him. ‘Yours is coming in a couple of minutes.’

Tom fast-forwarded, then slowed when a new train appeared on the track. His nerves tightened. The train came to a halt. Doors opened and about thirty people climbed down onto the platform. He pressed the freeze-frame button, and looked at each character carefully.

No sign of the dickhead.

‘This is the right train?’ he asked.

‘Definitely. The 6.10 fast service from Victoria – the one you told me you took,’ Branson replied. ‘Run it on a bit; might be that not everyone’s off yet.’

Tom pressed the play button and all the people sprang back into life. He scanned the open doors of the train, many of which were being shut again, trying to work out the carriage where he had been sitting. It was about four back from the front – he estimated he was looking at it now.

And then he saw him.

The big-framed, baby-faced man, dressed in a safari-style shirt over shapeless slacks and clutching a small holdall, was stepping down onto the platform now, and looking carefully around almost as if to ensure the coast was clear before he got off.

Clear of what? Tom wondered, stabbing the freeze button.

The man stopped in mid-step, his left, trainer-clad foot in the air, his face angled slightly towards the camera but showing no awareness of it. Although the look of deep consternation on his face was clearly visible.

Tom pressed the play button again, and within moments the man’s concerns seemed to be over, and he began walking, almost jauntily, towards the exit barrier. He froze the tape again, and said, ‘This is him.’

Branson stared at the man in shock. ‘Zoom in, will you, on his face.’

Tom fumbled with the controls, then zoomed in, a little jerkily, until he was tight on the dickhead’s face.

‘You’re absolutely sure?’

Tom nodded. ‘Yes. That’s him. Absolutely.’

‘You couldn’t be mistaken?’

‘No.’

‘That’s very interesting,’ the Detective Sergeant said.

‘Do you know who he is?’

‘Yes,’ Branson said, his voice turning grim. ‘We do.’

54

Shortly before five o’clock, Sergeant Jon Rye was sitting at his desk in the High Tech Crime Unit, still working on Tom Bryce’s computer, when his direct line rang. He picked up the receiver. ‘Jon Rye,’ he said.

‘Hello. It’s Tom Bryce. I’m actually in your building, up in the CCTV room… Just wondered if – if my computer was ready. I – could pop down… collect. I – I need to do some work tonight. I – I have – have to prepare for a very big meeting tomorrow. How are you doing?’

You sound terrible. You need to do some work, and I need to go home and salvage my marriage, Jon Rye thought. There was only himself and Andy Gidney, a short distance across the room from him, still there in the department late on this Sunday afternoon. Were the two of them sad or what?

Gidney, his iPod plugged as ever into his ears, was hunched over his keyboard, his desk littered with empty Coke cans and plastic coffee cups from the vending machines, clicking relentlessly away, working on cracking the code he had been trying to crack all week.

Rye worried about the geek – he seemed a lost soul. At least when Rye left the building, he had a home to go to. Maybe Nadine was sour sometimes, but there would be a meal on the table, the kids to talk to. Some kind of normality. What was Gidney’s normality?

Mind you, he wondered, what was anyone’s normality in here? Including his own? Most of their working weeks consisted of looking at porn on seized computers. And the vast majority of it was not your average titillating-but-cosy Playboy centrefold stuff; it was middle-aged men with children as young as two years old. Something he would never, not in a trillion years, really comprehend. How did that stuff turn people on? How could people do that with innocent children? How could a forty-year-old man sodomize a small child? And then live with the knowledge of what he had done?

The answer, sadly, was too easily and too often.

He knew exactly what he would have done if he’d caught someone meddling with his children when they had been young. It would have involved a razor blade and a blowtorch.