Enders drove out of the prison car park and back through Princetown, Riley opened the file the Governor had given them and began to leaf through the bundle of paper.
‘Not much more in here, Patrick. Nothing to suggest a reason for him going missing. Not on his kid’s fifth birthday. I mean, even if you are having an affair or something you don’t leave like that, do you?’
‘Darius?’ Enders jabbed a finger at the windscreen.
They had left Princetown and were heading westward across the moor. The road wound into the distance, climbing a low rise next to a stand of pines. A queue of cars snaked back towards them. At its head a patrol car was drawn across the road, blue light strobing. A Volvo estate had pulled onto the verge near the copse, the rear door up, a jumble of plastic containers and toolboxes in the back.
They approached the queue and overtook, coasting by on the right and ignoring the glares from inside the stationary cars. They stopped next to the patrol car and got out. There was no sign of Campbell and the rescue group, but it appeared as if they’d found something. The patrol officer inspected Riley’s ID and pointed down the road. A series of white lines had been spray-painted onto the tarmac and John Layton knelt next to one of them, tweezers in one hand, plastic container in the other. Riley walked down the road to the CSI officer. Layton glanced up as he neared, tipped his battered Tilley hat back with one finger and held up the tweezers.
‘Good of you to come out, John,’ Riley said. ‘From what I hear you’ve got a lot on your plate.’
‘Dog’s dinner, mate, but I didn’t have much choice. Got a call on my phone. Only the bloody CC. He was quite firm on the matter.’ Layton’s eagle-like eyes darted from Riley back to the tweezers as he held them over the container and dropped a glittering shard of plastic in. He screwed on a lid and shoved the container into one of the many deep pockets in his tan raincoat. ‘Red and silver plastic. From a reflector. Some metallic blue paint on there. Could have come from a collision with a car.’
‘Bit of a long shot, isn’t it?’ Riley said. ‘It might be from anywhere.’
‘There’s some blood on the road surface too. Plus the rescue bods found a bicycle pump away from the road, down in a clump of heather, as if it had been thrown there.’
‘Corran’s?’
‘A Bontrager Air Support pump. Distinctive, and according to his missus, Corran’s bike had one.’
‘No sign of the bike though?’
‘Nothing.’
‘So what do you think happened?’
‘Well …’ Layton spotted another piece of plastic on the road and bent and repeated his tweezer, container, pocket action of earlier before standing and pointing to a clump of heather encircled with blue and white tape. ‘That’s where the pump was found. Apart from the marks made by the person who found the pump, nobody has walked the ground nearby in the last few days. My guess is Corran was knocked off his bike and whoever hit him picked up the bike and took it with them. Corran as well. The pump probably came dislodged from the bike and they flung the pump out there thinking no one would ever find the thing.’
‘Or Corran did.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Corran knew what was happening,’ Riley said. ‘He flung the pump away thinking it might be the only thing marking the spot where he’d disappeared.’
‘You’re implying this wasn’t an accident, not a hit and run?’
‘Can you get some prints off the pump?’
‘If there are any, yes. I’ve got a team coming from Plymouth. We’ll do a search of two hundred metres of the road either side of the probable collision point. After that everything will go back to the lab and we’ll see what we’ve got.’
‘Thanks, John. Good work.’
‘Don’t thank me, thank Campbell. That bicycle pump. We’re talking needles and haystacks. Bloody miracle.’
Riley stood still for a moment and then turned three-sixty, scanning the desolate moorland. Heather, rock, bog and a few trees, the road slicing through the middle of the wilderness, a tenuous link to civilisation. The black line of tarmac marking Corran’s route back to his home and wife and kid. His route to somewhere else as well. Maybe somewhere he hadn’t wanted to go.
Sometimes Paula Rowland wondered if she was cut out to be a teacher. Surely there were easier jobs? Jobs where people did what you told them to instead of giving you backchat and filthy looks. Jobs where the government wasn’t constantly on your back telling you how useless your profession was. Jobs where the coffee machine worked.
Paula peered down at the paper cup beneath the dispenser nozzle. A brown slick rose from the bottom of the cup as water trickled in. She touched the side of the cup. Cold.
‘Heater’s packed up again,’ a voice at her shoulder said. Cath. Her best mate. Best mate at the school, anyway. ‘Here, have one of these.’
Cath held out a small carton of orange juice, part of her extensive packed lunch. Paula smiled and took the carton.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Been a tough morning. Year Ten girls.’
Cath nodded. Paula didn’t need to say any more. The Year Ten girls were notorious. With knickers full of hormones, their antics left some of the more developed boys with their tongues hanging out. Controlling the two groups was akin to trying to keep a pack of dogs and bitches apart when the bitches were on heat.
‘It’s the language of love, miss,’ Kelly Jones had said when Paula snapped at her. ‘French kissing and all that.’
‘French letters more like,’ another girl blurted out.
Things got worse from there on in as the class tried to come up with as many names for condoms as they could. She’d smiled to herself; she hadn’t known half of the slang names. Love glove? Well, at least it was better than the dirt the boys had come out with.
Paula slumped down on one of the sofas, Cath joining her, other teachers saying ‘hello’ to the pair and then carrying on with their conversation.
The topic, for once, didn’t revolve around problems with specific children, government education policy or Ofsted. Over the weekend the news had broken that a sicko had abducted several women and dumped them at some farm out in the countryside. He was on the prowl. No woman was safe now the Candle Cake Killer was back.
The name rang a bell somewhere inside Paula’s head but she couldn’t remember the specifics.
‘Can’t remember?’ There was astonishment from the other teachers. Paula smiled. Tried to explain that she had been a student up in Newcastle. She’d spent a year abroad in France and most of the rest of her degree course had been conducted in a drunken haze.
‘But it was here,’ Cath said. ‘Plymouth. Your hometown!’
She dimly remembered her mother warning her to be careful when she’d returned home after her finals.
‘Yes,’ someone else said. ‘The twenty-first of June. The longest day. This
