watched silently, knowing when best to leave Sean to himself – to his own methods.
After a few minutes Sean was back at the spot he’d started from. Again he began to circumnavigate the car, clockwise this time, his eyes concentrating on the vehicle itself, searching for anything, anything at all. A trace of the suspect’s blood drawn from his body by a fighting, scratching victim. A scrape from another vehicle that might have left a paint trace or imprinted a memory in the mind of whichever motorist had been struck by a red Fiesta that failed to stop after the accident. Louise had kept the car spotlessly clean – any visible evidence would have been relatively obvious, but he could see none.
If there were clues to be found on the exterior of the car they must be invisible to the naked eye. Perhaps they might yet be retrieved with the use of powders and chemicals, ultraviolet lights and magnification. In the meantime Sean needed to see inside the car, to feel its stillness before Roddis and the forensic boys turned it into a science circus.
‘Let’s get it open,’ he said.
Donnelly strode across to the waiting AA van and tapped on the window. The driver dropped his copy of the Sun and eagerly jumped out, grabbing a bag of unusual tools from the back.
‘Will you be able to get it open?’ Donnelly asked, more out of the need for something to say than because of any doubts.
‘It’s a Ford,’ the AA man answered, heading for the car. ‘It’ll only take a few seconds. Which door do you want opening?’
‘The passenger door,’ Sean told him. ‘I’d appreciate it if you could touch as little as possible.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ he answered, already tugging what looked like an over-sized metal ruler with a hook at one end from his bag. Sean recognized it, known to AA men and car thieves alike as a slim-jim. The AA man peeled back the rubber window seal and slid the metal deep down into the door panel. His face twisted in concentration as he manoeuvred the slim-jim blindly around the mechanics of the door, before suddenly jerking it upwards, an audible click letting all present know the door was now unlocked. The AA man immediately reached for the door handle, but Sean’s hand wrapped around his wrist and stopped him.
‘Hasn’t been checked for prints yet,’ Sean told him.
Once the AA man had been moved away, Sean’s gloved hand stretched carefully towards the handle, one finger hooking under it in the place the suspect was least likely to have touched. He pulled his finger up and waited for the door to pop open a fraction, his other hand poised to stop a sudden breeze swinging it fully open before he was ready. He checked around the now broken seal that separated the door from the main body of the chassis, keeping an eye out for any evidence the wind might threaten to take away – a hair pulled from the suspect’s head as he closed the door too quickly, a piece of material torn from his clothes as he fled from the abandoned car. He saw nothing and allowed the door to open by a few inches, the smell of the interior flooding out and catching him unaware, making him recoil at first. He steadied himself then breathed all the scents in eagerly: cloth, vinyl, rubber and above all else, her perfume, floral and subtle. But there was something underlying the other smells, something trying to disguise itself, trying to stay hidden in the cacophony – the faint trace of something surgical, clinical.
Chloroform, Sean decided. It was not something he’d ever smelt before, but he knew it had to be. Donnelly broke his concentration.
‘Anything?’ he called out.
‘Chloroform, I think,’ Sean answered. ‘Get hold of Roddis and have him take a look at the car in situ before towing it away to the lab.’
‘Will do.’ Donnelly immediately started punching keys on his phone.
Sean opened the door more fully now, all the while searching for anything that might be evidence, touching nothing, seeing all as he crouched next to the opening, bothered by something he couldn’t think of, something missing. Without warning the answer jumped into his head. It was too quiet. He stood upright and spoke to no one in particular: ‘There’s no alarm.’
Donnelly looked up from his phone. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Why’s there no alarm?’ Sean asked. ‘He locked the car, but there’s no alarm.’ His heart was beginning to pound a little with the conviction he’d found something relevant, but his hope was cut short by the watching AA man.
‘It’s a Ford,’ he said.
‘So?’
‘You lock it with the remote key. One press to lock it and another to arm the alarm.’
Did that mean anything? Sean asked himself. Had the man he hunted been in so much of a panic that he’d fled the scene without making sure the alarm was on? Or had he not wanted the beep of the alarm setting to attract attention to him? Why lock it at all? He’d already left his palm and fingerprints at the Russells’ house.
Sean had to remind himself not to get too tied up in the knots of possibilities. All the same, he couldn’t stop this man from invading his mind. As the case went on he would gradually start thinking like his quarry, until the thoughts of the man he hunted would become his own thoughts. A cold, uncomfortable feeling washed over him. The days ahead would be joyless and stressful, his only hope of relief would be finding Louise Russell and the man who took her. The man who had her now.
He desperately wanted to enter the car, to sit in the driver’s seat as her abductor had done. To check the position of the seat, the mirrors, the steering wheel. Louise’s limp body flashed through his mind, bound and gagged, lying behind the back seat in the boot of the hatchback. He saw a faceless shadow driving the car through London traffic with his prisoner, his prize, in the back, moaning muffled pleas for him to let her go from behind the material wrapped around her mouth. He saw the faceless shadow looking over his shoulder, talking to her as he drove, reassuring her everything would be all right, that he wouldn’t harm her, wouldn’t touch her. But Sean wasn’t about to enter the car and risk damaging or destroying any invisible evidence waiting to be found within.
Donnelly came up behind him and made him jump. ‘Roddis is on his way,’ he announced.
‘Good. Thanks,’ Sean replied, hesitating before continuing: ‘I need to have a look in the back.’
‘Are you sure that’s wise, guv’nor? Roddis will not be pleased.’
‘I won’t touch anything,’ Sean promised. ‘I just need a quick look.’ He moved to the back of the car and searched with one finger under the lip of the hatchback door for the handle, the handle he absolutely knew the suspect would have touched. He pulled the handle and watched the hatch door rise open with a pneumatic hiss. He bent inside as much he could without over-balancing and falling forward, noticing immediately how clean the boot was, like everything else in the car. Everything was perfect, everything except for the slight scuffing on the carpeted surface of the boot and the smallest of scratch marks on the interior panelling close by. Sean knew what it meant.
He pulled away and stood. ‘This is where he had her,’ he told the listening Donnelly. ‘He tied her, probably gagged her and put her in the boot. You can see where her shoes have disturbed the carpet and marked the plastic panel. He’s a bold one, our boy. He snatches her from her own home in broad daylight and casually drives her through mid-morning traffic to this spot. And this is where his own car was waiting,’ he continued, indicating with a sweep of his hand that the suspect’s car would have been on the driver’s side of Russell’s. ‘He pulls up here and waits a few seconds,
