front step, put his hands in the small of his back, and stretched.
Cuffed and ensconced in the backseat, Collins was watching the activity too.
“You have no authority to do this,” Collins said blankly.
“Be quiet, Norman.”
In the confines of the car, Pete couldn’t avoid smelling the man, but he had no intention of talking to him. As the situation was still developing, he had arrested Collins on suspicion of receipt of stolen goods in the first instance, simply because—given the nature of some of the items in the man’s collection—it was a charge they could likely make stick, and also one that gave them authority to search the man’s home. But, of course, they wanted him for more than that. And no matter how many questions he had, Pete wasn’t about to jeopardize the investigation by interviewing Collins here and now. It had to be done at the department. Recorded and watertight.
“They won’t find anything,” Collins said.
Pete ignored him. Because, of course, they already had, and Collins appeared to be implicated in that. An older set of remains had been discovered. Collins had always been obsessed with Carter and his crimes; he had visited Frank Carter’s friend in prison; he had been stalking the house where the second body had been found. Collins had known the body was there—Pete was certain of it. But more importantly, while official identification would come in time, he was also sure that the remains belonged to Tony Smith.
After twenty years, you’ve been found.
All else aside, the development should have brought a sense of relief and closure, because he had been searching for the boy for so long. But it didn’t. He couldn’t stop thinking of all those weekend searches, combing through hedgerows and woodlands many miles from here, when the whole time Tony had been lying far closer to home than anyone imagined.
Which meant there must have been something Pete had missed twenty years ago.
He looked down at the tablet on his lap.
God, he wanted a drink right now—and wasn’t it strange how that worked? People often thought of alcohol as a buffer against the horrors of the world. But Tony Smith’s body had been found, and it was more than possible that the man responsible for Neil Spencer’s murder was in custody, sitting behind him right now, and yet the urge to drink was stronger than ever. There were always so many reasons to drink, though. Only ever one real reason not to.
You can drink later. As much as you want.
He accepted that he would. Whatever works—it was that simple. In a war, you used any weapon at hand to win an individual battle, and then you regrouped and fought the next one. And the next. And all the ones that followed.
Whatever works.
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” Collins insisted.
“Shut up.”
Pete clicked on the tablet. There was no avoiding this: he needed to figure out what he had missed all those years ago and why, and the house on Garholt Street where Tony’s remains had been found was the place to start.
He scanned through the details. Until recently the house had been owned by a woman named Anne Shearing. She had inherited it from her parents, but hadn’t lived in it for decades, instead renting it out over the years to numerous individuals.
There was a long list of those on record, but Pete presumed he could discount occupants from before 1997, when Frank Carter had committed his murders. The tenant at that time had been a man named Julian Simpson. Simpson had been renting the property for four years beforehand, and his residency continued until 2008. Opening a new tab on-screen, Pete ran a search and discovered Simpson had died of cancer that year, at the age of seventy. He clicked back. The house’s next tenant was a man named Dominic Barnett, who had occupied the house until earlier this year.
Dominic Barnett.
Pete frowned. The name rang a bell. He ran another search, and the details came back to him, even though he hadn’t worked the case himself. Barnett had been a minor underworld figure involved in drugs and extortion, known to police but considered small fry in the grand scheme of things. There were no convictions on file for the last ten years—but, of course, that didn’t mean he’d gone straight, and nobody had been remotely surprised when he turned up dead. The murder weapon—a hammer—had been recovered with partial prints, but there had been no match on the database. Subsequent inquiries had failed to turn