The sky was dark and the night air cooling fast but within five minutes Flyte’s shirt clung wetly to her chest and back as she half jogged, half ran west towards the road bridge.
Her mind tracked back to the first case conference on Sean’s murder, replaying the discussion about why, having stored the body for eight years, the killer had suddenly decided to dump it. She’d suggested then that perhaps he or she had been moving house. If the body had been hidden in a flat on the estate then the upcoming demolition would have had the same effect.
After crossing the road bridge, she had to pause, bending to rest her hands on her thighs, to get her breath back.
Of course, Willets might just be over there having worked out it was a possible dumping spot, but she wasn’t so sure. If Luke Lawless had been on the right track, Willets had encountered Sean Kavanagh in Abney Park a year before his disappearance. Then there was his reaction to seeing his own initials – NDW – in Luke’s notebook and his shifty behaviour ever since she’d handed him the details of the Vancouver bank account.
Above all, Willets was an unapologetic homophobe. If he really had arrested Sean in a gay cruising ground a year before his disappearance, he could have encountered him there again. Her train of thought always stopped at that point. Homophobia was one thing; a fellow detective committing murder was beyond the boundaries of her belief system.
After taking the stairs back down to the canal two at a time, she jogged along until she could see the orange haze over the estate shed by the security lights. On reaching the steel safety barrier that blocked the towpath, she found it was only secured to the fence on the right. Lifting it inwards, she was able to squeeze past it on the canal side, aware that any slip would send her into the dark water to her left.
The undergrowth beyond the barrier appeared to have been trampled, and recently. She rolled up the legs of her Jaeger trousers so they wouldn’t get snagged and high-stepped carefully over the tangled brambles and stunted buddleias, squinting through the gloom.
Her left ankle sent up a flare of pain as it folded sideways beneath her.
Hell’s bells! Bending to rub it, she saw the culprit: an old length of scaffold pole hidden in the undergrowth.
On reaching the dead end where the steel mesh fence turned to block the path, she aimed the torch on her phone to her right through the fence bordering the estate – and saw a passageway beyond. Cassie had been right: the estate did have direct access to the canal. Seeing that the section of fence hung loose, she played her torchlight down the join, and found a black plastic zip tie on the ground, its plastic edges cleanly severed. The demolition workers had done a slipshod job of securing it, leaving anyone armed with no more than a penknife easy access.
Pulling open the loose section like a door, she shone her phone torch down the passageway. It was narrow, hemmed in by eight-feet-high brick walls and her beam didn’t reach the other end. The sensible thing to do would be to call for assistance. But it just wasn’t possible. She was off duty, with no plausible excuse to be hanging round a mothballed estate and if Willets was here it would be obvious she had been tailing him.
She wondered whether she should call Seb.
To say what exactly? ‘If my body ends up floating in the canal tell them it was Willets . . .’?!