Back in the incident room the two rookies reported they had made better progress in following up the remainder of the missing children’s list. As I glanced down at their notes it became evident that in each separate case it could be argued, however inconclusively, that our man could well have been involved. As we had been informed, none of the children had been found, but, nevertheless, the circumstances surrounding their disappearance seemed to possess the hallmarks of our paedophile. I shook my head at the sheer scale of the horror, at the same time aware that, unless we were able to recover the bodies, not only would we never establish the actual fate of the children, we would also be unable to level any charges.
I redirected them both onto the Brownlaw problem and went into Jim’s office to report the details of my meeting with the good doctor, for good measure adding her ‘off-the-record’ personal comments regarding Arnold Brownlaw.
“So – we have a match,” he concurred. “The mystery remains, though, how the hell he managed to disappear; and, more importantly, how we go about tracing him?”
“I’ve got an idea, Jim. Why don’t I enquire into the family background? Trace his father, find out how he died. Did he have any other living relatives – either on his father’s side or even his mother’s? Somewhere, there’s got to be at least one surviving member of his family. Don’t you agree?”
He shrugged by way of acceptance. “Why not? We seem to have exhausted the other routes. How are the youngsters coping with the missing children list, by the way?”
“It’s virtually finished.”
“Any conclusions?”
“Not really. It’s pretty much as we expected. Each case could be attributed to our paedophile, but there’s no hard evidence to link them to him. If Paul’s right, though, and this maniac’s found another burial site, I dread to think what horrors we’ll uncover if we ever trace it.”
“Well, that in itself will provide the link, won’t it? Meantime, we continue with old-fashioned police work, and we try to find this Brownlaw character. We just have to hope our offender will make a mistake; God knows, we desperately need a break – the media are slaughtering us on this one.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I caught the news last night on telly; they’re giving us a rough ride alright, but I don’t know what the hell they expect us to do.”
He gave me a wry smile. “That one’s easy to work out, Angie. They expect us to perform a fucking miracle and apprehend a killer who’s been on the loose for Christ knows how many years; and we may never find out just how many children he’s brutalised and murdered.”
I shuddered at the thought. “I’m not sure I want to know,” I said.
“Fancy dinner tonight?”
This time I grinned. “I thought you’d never ask!” Then I looked at him meaningfully. “I’m afraid that’s all it can be, though.”
He looked at me blank faced. “Why don’t I pick you up about eight? We can go to that Italian you like.”
“Look forward to it, lover boy!”