Cold Blood by Jane Heafield (great books to read txt) 📕

experienced the events of the dream for real and survived, so how could images in his head hurt him?

He went into Joe’s room, happy to see his boy asleep. Joe had taken the news of his mother’s murder well, or well compared to how it could have gone. He hadn’t said much, so perhaps he’d been numb. But he’d performed as usual for the rest of the evening, although he’d put toothpaste on his brush, and that was a task he still always got his dad to do. Did that mean something?

He had also said ‘thankyou’, and it was this that still created turmoil in Bennet’s gut. He’d been unable to tell Liz, his closest friend, the truth about finding Lorraine’s body, and he’d lied to his boss, to the Derbyshire murder squad running the investigation. Joe was a kid, didn’t need to know, might even be better off with oblivion, yet Bennet had willingly told him.

‘It was a crime scene, Joe,’ he said. ‘I should have known better. I knew she was dead, but it didn’t matter. Down there, in the cold, in the dark… I couldn’t leave her there. I just couldn’t. I had to get her out. Out of that vehicle, out of that lake. And now I’m going to get in big trouble for it. But I don’t care.’

‘Thankyou,’ a ten-year-old boy with little life experience had said to him, before pulling him into a hug. ‘Thankyou for getting my mum out.’

Bennet sat at Joe’s desk, staring at his boy but not really seeing. Joe had been a toddler when he learned that his mother had left him, which was too young to fully comprehend in one bite. He’d had time to adjust as he grew. Not so with this. It was the first, real, devastating, life-changing twist in his life, and Bennet wasn’t sure how it would change the boy as the days rolled by. So far so good, but like any disease or cancer, mental fracture could have an incubation period. He was a little scared of the outcome.

Bennet didn’t try to get back to sleep. At the kitchen table, he wrote notes in a thick, old pad he used for murder investigations. It was half empty because those torn-out pages were in the files at the station. Just like when running a murder investigation, he listed things to do, but found this harder. His mind was a blank beyond calling Joe’s school.

So he returned to the news, which had had time to ferment. Still the country seemed more intrigued by a ten-year-old body than four fresh ones. Shockingly, Sally’s mother had identified her daughter’s body on a main road. Alerted by the slimeball reporter, she had raced to Stanton Lake, found the body already en route to the mortuary, and set off in pursuit. She cut in front to stop the coroner’s vehicle and bellowed until she was allowed to see the body.

Sally’s corpse was still in the tartan skirt and butterfly T-shirt she’d worn to the party on the night she disappeared, and her butterfly hair-claw clip had been found at the scene. This made the police ninety-nine per cent certain who they’d found, but they still needed official identification. The body had been found in an old steamer trunk, designed to be waterproof and survive the flooded holds of ships, and had been well-preserved. Anika had stared at her daughter’s still-intact face, poking out of a body bag zipped up to the neck, and collapsed, yelling. There went the final one per cent.

Visibly, a cause of death wasn’t obvious, with the body displaying no stab wounds or lacerations or clearly broken bones. A post-mortem might divulge horrible news for the mother, including whether or not she’d been sexually assaulted, but at least she had set eyes upon her daughter without seeing the damage her killer had done to her. Bennet’s heart went out to the woman.

And here he saw the first mention of himself, although not by name – the police had managed to keep that secret so far. Sally’s mother had been willing to speak to a reporter who’d followed her following the ambulance, but only to thank the policeman ‘who came looking for the film crew. Without him, I would never have gotten my Sally back’.

But he hadn’t helped at all, had he? His impotence had failed to help anyone, especially Lorraine. He still felt useless, but carried that itchy tension to do something.

Hours later, he made the school call: Joe would be off for at least the rest of the week because of a death in the family. He waited for the receptionist to blurt that she knew all about it, but she simply said okay, and that was that. When it was done, and Joe was awake and fed, Bennet answered the bugging call to action. Father and son got dressed and took a drive. Joe had no idea where they were going.

En route, Envoy Lady called with another update, this time about cell site analysis. The police had found the phone numbers for all four dead people and traced their devices. The phones were all dead currently, but historical data put them in and around Lampton and showed their trip beforehand. As Bennet already knew, Lorraine had travelled to Overeem’s home in Oxford in her own car, then all four members of the crew took the CaraHome north to the Peak District.

In built-up areas cell towers are more densely packed, allowing for greater location pinpointing. Their phones were pinged at various places, including near a café in Eggington on the A38, where calls were made, and close to the Red Lion at the correct time.

Unfortunately, in remote areas the number of cell towers decreases, but they have a greater range. Once the crew entered the countryside to stay at Crabtree’s ranch, cell site accuracy dropped from pinging their phones ‘within metres’ to ‘within a kilometre’. Finding those phones, especially if they weren’t in a building, would