Like This, for Ever by Sharon Bolton Read Free Book Online Page A

total?’
    ‘A hundred and seventeen,’ said Dana.
    Weaver sighed. ‘I don’t even want to think about how many carswould have been caught on camera in South London in a hundred and seventeen hours.’
    ‘Four hundred and twenty-one thousand and two hundred,’ said Dana. ‘We assumed one per second to be on the safe side. It’s going to take a while.’
    Weaver nodded. The footage from the cameras could be sent away to a company that specialized in Automatic Number Plate Recognition. It wasn’t foolproof, because so much depended upon lighting conditions, speed of vehicles, angle of number plate, even the font used, but most of the systems offered a reasonably good rate of recognition. If the same vehicle were spotted en route to both Tower Bridge and Bermondsey on the nights in question, it would be one they’d be very interested in.
    ‘Start with the most likely routes,’ he said. ‘We could get lucky. In the meantime, I want to bring a profiler in. I know you don’t—’
    ‘Good idea,’ said Dana.
    For once, Weaver let what he was feeling show on his face.
    ‘There’s something very odd about this one,’ said Dana. ‘It’ll be good to have a fresh perspective.’
    ‘Ma’am.’
    Dana turned. One of the detectives on her team, a blonde woman in her early thirties called Gayle Mizon, was at her computer. ‘You might want to know that Peter Sweep posted on Facebook at 21.37 hours this evening,’ she said. ‘Announcing quite correctly that Jason and Joshua’s bodies had been found.’
    Several members of the team moved closer to Mizon and peered over her shoulder at the screen. More than one helped themselves to an open jar of sweets on the desk. Mizon seemed to eat continually.
    ‘What’s this?’ asked Weaver, glancing over.
    ‘We’ve been monitoring social network sites, Sir,’ replied Mizon. ‘A hundred and sixty of them, to be precise. A couple of dozen mention the murders on a reasonably regular basis, mainly the London-based ones and the parents’ chat sites. They all seem pretty innocuous, but we are interested in a Facebook site called the Missing Boys.’
    She paused to get her breath and Weaver nodded to show he was following.
    ‘Quite a few of the contributors seem to have known the boys personally,’ Mizon said. ‘Which is the main reason we’ve been taking an interest, in case one of them lets something slip that they wouldn’t necessarily say to us. Nothing so far, but this chap called Peter Sweep keeps popping up. He knows about developments in the case before anything’s been officially released.’
    ‘I assume we’ve tried to trace him,’ said Weaver.
    ‘Facebook have been quite helpful,’ replied Mizon. ‘They let us have the email addresses of the site’s main contributors. Then it was a question of getting in touch with the internet service providers to get the IP addresses and the Mac addresses. Most of them are coming from normal family computers in homes, occasionally schools. A lot of them are using their real names and they all check out. Peter, though, doesn’t. He uses computers in public buildings or a mobile phone. No profile, just a completely random picture of roses, and no personal information of any kind, which is just odd for young people on Facebook. They normally like to tell the world everything. And, to me, he just doesn’t sound like the other kids.’
    ‘Not a kid?’ asked Weaver.
    Mizon shrugged.
    ‘So far, he’s not used the same building twice,’ said Dana. ‘If we could pin him down even to a few, we could put cameras in and catch him that way. All we know at the moment is that he probably lives in the same area of South London that most of the murdered boys did.’
    ‘Any number of people will know what we’re up to before official announcements are made,’ Weaver said. ‘On the other hand, his trying to conceal his identity is interesting in itself. It’s worth keeping an eye on.’
    The door to the incident room opened