Jack woke up filled with determination, the emails fresh in his mind. Once again, Laura had come home after he’d gone to bed, and left before he’d woken up.
He showered, dressed and headed into Blackley. He drove straight to where Jane Roberts had been found. The drive helped to clear his head, the roof down on the Stag, the wind ruffling his hair, almost like a gentle massage.
When he got there, he saw that the crime scene tape was limp, the light breeze from the night before gone, so that the loose end trailed into the shrubs and weeds. The sound of his car door seemed to echo in the trees as he climbed out and wandered towards the patch of ground where Jane had been found. It had been trampled by the boots of the police, the greenery moved to one side, all the bark and branches from around her body collected and taken away. The area around was uneven and thick with leaves, large twigs and ivy trails that snagged at his feet as he walked. Jane’s killer had chosen a difficult place to leave the body, a place where the chances of falling and hurting himself were high. It would only take a small piece of DNA, like a splash of blood on a leaf, to make any case easier to prove against him. The ground was hard, so it would have been very difficult to bury the body. And of course the killer didn’t even try to do that.
He looked around. The location was just so ordinary, and in such public view. Jane’s killer would have been spotted if someone had looked out. So why here?
He looked along the path that disappeared into the trees. There was a woman further along, a small terrier trotting in front of her. She was bending down, a plastic bag over her hand, picking up the dog’s mess.
As Jack looked along the path, he saw that it pulled to the right just as it disappeared into the shroud of trees. It suddenly struck him that Don Roberts’ house was only a few hundred yards to the right and there was a fair chance that the path may end up near there.
But it wasn’t just that. It was the woman with the dog, who was now walking past quickly, her head down. Don Roberts had a dog. He remembered its snarl from Don’s visit. Did Don use this path?
Jack scrambled back up to the path and started to walk along it. The sunlight disappeared as the shade of the trees took over and it became slightly cooler. The floating pollen was suddenly replaced by the buzz and flicks of midges and flies.
The path started off as tarmac and then turned into gravel as it followed the line of the stream. The small copse turned into woodland, with large sycamores and horse chestnut blotting out the noise from the nearby road, and so all he could hear was the trickle of the stream and the sing song of the birds in the trees, the peace broken only by the steady crunch of his shoes.
He stopped when he thought he heard something behind him, or saw something, just at the edge of his vision, but when he looked around there was no one there. He tried not to think about what had happened near here a few days ago.
As Jack looked ahead, he saw the trees thinning out, and the bright red of new bricks started to appear in the gaps between the trees. He began to walk quicker. His guess had been right.
He jogged the last part, fast crunches on the gravel as he went up a small rise and then onto tarmac again, his feet stopping before a grass verge. He looked along the road and smiled. There it was, the home of Don Roberts, with its pillars and its cars. He looked back along the path. The shadows had taken hold again, the path made dark and quiet by the trees. He turned back to the road. It didn’t deviate too far from the path. Jane had been going out for the night on her own, and Jack knew that she would have taken the road; she wouldn’t have wanted to go into the pub with dog shit and gravel dust on her shoes. Then Jack thought of the first murder. Deborah Corley. Her body had been left hanging out of a pipe that protruded from a grass bank next to a reservoir. He thought about that location. Why had it been chosen? Jack reasoned that Jane Roberts had been left near where she was attacked, because it was near where she had walked, but Deborah Corley was different. She had last been seen walking from her college, along a quiet road that would have taken her straight home. It wasn’t near the reservoir.
He started off down the path again, rushed back to his car and clambered in, breathless. He headed for the ring road, shooting past the car showrooms and electrical superstores that lined the dual carriageway. Once he turned off though, the neon lights and traffic noise soon faded, as the road climbed upwards towards the tall green banks of the reservoir. Overspill pipes jutted out, water dribbling gently into small concrete gulleys that ran towards the river.
It seemed a strange place to leave a body, because it involved effort. The sides of the reservoir were exposed, and as Jack parked and then climbed the concrete steps that took him to the top of the banking, he looked back and saw the stream of traffic on the ring road. It would be so easy to be seen. He looked along the water, lapping gently against the banks. There were some people fishing on the opposite side, reminding Jack that it was anglers who had found the body.
As Jack watched the fishing lines break the surface, the bright floats bobbing in the water, something niggled at him, a memory, something almost within reach. He thought back to the dog walker he had seen before, close to Don’s house. It linked in with that somehow.
Then it came to him. When he had visited Mike Corley, there had been a bait box in the hallway, a fishing rod against the wall.
Jane and Deborah had been left in those places for another reason. He shivered. It meant that their deaths were more than just sex murders. They were acts of revenge. The path through the woods was the obvious place for Don to walk his dog, and so when he did, he was meant to find his decomposing daughter, perhaps sniffed out by his dog. Mike was a fisherman, and had probably fished at the reservoir. Perhaps it was his favourite spot. Jane and Deborah weren’t meant to be found by a bunch of mischievous kids or anglers. They were supposed to be discovered by their fathers.
Now he just had to work out what Don and Mike had done that demanded such vicious revenge. But first, he had to see Laura.