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  Holder, Khosa and Trisha all nodded. Woakes did not.

  * * *

  Anna had barely sat down in her office when Trisha appeared at the door. ‘It’s about the special constable witness, Kevin Starkey. He left four years ago, but we have a contact number so I’ve left him a message to ring you.’

  ‘Thanks, Trisha.’

  When she didn’t turn away immediately, Anna looked up. Trisha was grinning.

  ‘What? Toothpaste on my cheek? Mascara running?’

  They both knew the latter was a bloody impossibility as she didn’t wear any.

  ‘No,’ said Trisha, still smiling. ‘It’s just good to have you back, Inspector Gwynne.’

  Anna nodded. She found compliments difficult, both to give and receive. But this one she acknowledged. There’d been times during the aftermath of Willis’s attack when the idea of ever running a team in a full-blown investigation again seemed laughable. She’d seen that doubt reflected in the faces of visitors when they’d seen the stitches and the bruises. But she’d not read that doubt in Trisha, nor the rest of the MCRTF.

  She’d always be grateful for that. And it did feel good, really good, to finally be back in the saddle.

  Eighteen

  The location where Rosie’s remains had been found took them out to a section of the Force’s patch Anna was not that familiar with. This neck of the Mendips was all wooded lanes looping up and over hills, past derelict stone buildings and limestone outcrops. A forty-minute drive brought them to the village of Charterhouse. Khosa had a map in a plastic folder and a GPS reference, and once they’d parked in a field study centre, they set off up a side road and across a stile and out into open countryside dotted with little green hillocks.

  The day was warm and dry and the ground underfoot rock hard. After ten minutes of walking from where they’d parked, they were alone on a windswept expanse of paths winding between tumbled-down stone walls. To their left a fenced-off area in the distance drew Anna’s attention.

  ‘Any idea?’ she asked Khosa with a nod towards the fence.

  ‘Mine shafts, ma’am. Lead. This place is pockmarked with them, not to mention the caves and sinkholes.’

  ‘Has a sort of Arthurian feel to it,’ Anna said.

  ‘You’d be right there, ma’am. I knew someone in college who came from Taunton. She said the Mendips were nothing but old ghosts and the ruins of cathedrals.’

  ‘What the hell was the killer doing here with Rosie’s remains?’

  Khosa shrugged and walked on. Ten more minutes and they were at the spot. Merely a point on a path, a slight depression. Khosa took out a photograph from her folder and twisted it this way and that.

  ‘Roman fort to the north, Neolithic settlement to the east. There’s a church with a medieval crypt half a mile south… erm. The plastic bag and the bones were found… there.’ She pointed to a spot behind the remains of a wall. ‘Found by walkers out with a dog who paid a lot more attention to the bag than he normally would, apparently.’

  Anna looked around her. There was nothing here.

  ‘Let’s walk to the rise.’ She pressed on. Fifty yards later they emerged from the sunken part of the path. This point afforded a better view. On both sides, heathland stretched away. Towards a farmhouse on one side and a road on the other. Once more Anna pointed to a fenced-off area, this one much bigger, fifty yards to the right. She stepped off the path onto tussocks and rough ground and walked to the edge of the fence. It marked the boundary of a deep depression perhaps thirty yards in diameter, lined with grass and gorse bushes but with a dark opening right at its centre.

  ‘Sinkhole, ma’am,’ said Khosa, joining her. ‘It’s marked on my map.’

  Anna turned, stared back along the way she’d come and retraced her steps. This was a lonely spot on the outskirts of a pretty isolated village. Whoever had brought Rosie’s remains here had been hoping not to be disturbed.

  At the point where the bag had been left, it would not have been possible to see anyone coming over the ridge until they were fifty yards away.

  ‘Any thoughts, Ryia?’

  ‘None, except this is not a place I’d like to be alone in. Not even in daylight.’

  Anna knew what she meant. The place had a desolate feel about it. The sort of place it might be easy to get rid of evidence, perhaps down a sinkhole, if you knew where to find one.

  ‘He wasn’t here by accident, that’s for sure,’ Anna said.

  ‘What do you think happened, ma’am?’

  ‘If he’d wanted Rosie’s remains to be found, he’s hardly likely to have chosen this place. There are a million better spots that would guarantee discovery within a few minutes of you discarding something. No, he was hoping not to be seen. Perhaps he was on his way to a sinkhole to get rid of the evidence once and for all. Did you say there was a church and a crypt?’

  Khosa nodded.

  ‘Maybe he was on his way there. To bury her. Might have been some sort of ritual for him, who knows. But down in that dip you have no line of sight. He might have been preparing, opening the bag and suddenly someone appeared. A dog maybe. What if he panicked and dumped the evidence and made himself scarce?’

  Khosa said, ‘It fits. But why here?’

  ‘Because he’s familiar with the area. He knows about this place. Putting it together with knowing exactly what he was doing in the park in Clevedon when he took Rosie makes him someone with good local knowledge.’

  Khosa nodded. ‘I suppose that puts the kibosh on your doctor’s theory, then. I mean the other girls were taken from all over the place. He wouldn’t have local knowledge in those cases.’

  Anna nodded. ‘There is that.’

  Khosa kept looking at her. ‘You don’t sound convinced.’

  Anna shrugged. ‘I’m letting it all marinate. Let’s see what it turns into.’

  * * *

  When they got back to HQ, Anna noticed the board Trisha had put up with Hawley’s list of mispers. Four more images had joined Rosie’s. Holder looked pleased with himself.

  ‘I got hold of the FLO that looked after Lily Callaghan’s family. She confirmed that Lily had diabetes and was seen sometimes in the paediatric clinic in the Nottingham Children’s Hospital. I put a call in to their Human Resources department. They confirmed that Hawley had never been employed there. Lily left a friend’s house 50 yards from where she lived. Not seen since.’ He tapped a pen towards another image. ‘Same story here. Jade Hemmings, eleven. Manchester still have the file open, though it’s five years since she went missing. No one saw her. She went to a birthday party in a park on her bike and disappeared. Jade had eczema. She attended the dermatology clinic at the kids’ hospital in Manchester. No record of Hawley ever having been near it.’

  ‘Good work, Justin. Any sign of Dave?’

  ‘No, ma’am. He left soon after you did.’

  * * *

  Trisha made them all a cup of tea, and Anna went into her office and turned to the transcripts of Hawley’s original interviews.

  His story had been consistent. He’d voluntarily allowed them to examine his computers. The browsing history sourced from his internet service provider was unremarkable. They’d found no evidence of anything remotely paedophile-related, which was always a consideration in cases like these. Like 75% of other men in his age group, and 40% of women, he’d visited pornography sites, streamed but not stored downloads. Anna stayed up to speed on all that thanks to regular talks from the internet crime guys. A generation of kids had grown up thinking it was completely normal to watch hardcore sex on their phones. A decade ago it had been much more difficult to find, and internet access was restricted to a single PC in a parent’s study. Technology abolished all that. Almost 30% of twelve-year-old boys had seen some sort of pornography. Kids were as likely to find it by accident as deliberately: it had become that ubiquitous. Anna had seen her own fair share and she was no angel. Fifty Shades had done a lot to open the lid on that one. Statistically, ‘well-endowed
stripper’ and ‘girl on girl’ came up tops as the commonest search terms during Prosecco-fuelled hen nights. Hawley’s habit, though probably humiliating when confronted with it, did not throw up anything the dirty squad wanted to know about.

  There were cuttings in the file, too. Headlines relating to the local press’s unsubtle approach to Rosie’s death. Though the tabloids had not taken up the story, one local newspaper had been far less reticent.

  Rosie murder suspect arrested

  A man held by police over the abduction of Rosie Dawson is known to have worked at a local hospital where he regularly came into contact with children. Sources last night confirmed that for the three months leading up to Rosie’s abduction, the health professional had worked shifts in the hospital’s A and E department. A police source confirmed that he was still being held in connection with the case, so far with no charge.

  It read as an innocuous enough statement, laden with innuendo, yet lurid enough to cause Hawley significant personal and professional pain, and for the editor to receive a warning from the Attorney General’s office.

  There was no figure more reviled than a man who murdered children. The tabloids had a string of words that were a pick-and-mix of revulsion: ‘beast’, ‘paedo’, ‘monster’, ‘pervert’. The broadsheets and public broadcasters shied away from the more lurid and prejudicial choice of language; nevertheless, even they had gravitated towards words like ‘predator’ designed specifically to feed parents’ fears. The inevitable press frenzy only fuelled the panic and anger the general public felt.

  Luckily for Hawley, his quick release meant that the national newspapers lost interest before his story took hold. The mudslinging had all been local.

  Anna frequently pondered this pattern of reporting. The more heinous the crime, the more words were written about it. Murder remained king in the media. No doubt the more serious the crime, the more need there was to inform people, but the resultant skews, for someone in a job like hers, were enormous. And dealing with the press in the heat of such crimes piled on the strain, as she’d learned only too well in previous cases. Common crime was ignored, rare crime given the most attention. It didn’t reflect reality. And of course, it was only right and proper that children were warned of stranger danger, yet statistically, the risk of a child drowning in a swimming pool was three times greater than that of being abducted. But drownings were for the sympathy paragraph at the bottom of page four, not a page one headline.

  The police had held Hawley for only twenty-four hours both times they’d had him in for questioning, but it was enough for the Post to have their little scoop of dirt and splash it over the mid-week edition. He’d been young and unprepared. She wondered how he’d begun to cope with trying to get back to normality after something like that. The truth was he had not, judging by what she read about his stagnating career.

  Nineteen

  The technician turned out to be a civilian data forensic investigator who’d been in a meeting talking to someone from Zephyr, the Regional Organised Crime Unit. Anna wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but Szandra Varga came as a pleasant surprise. Stocky, dark hair, efficient, she listened carefully as Khosa outlined what she had and then used Khosa’s computer to log on while the DC watched.

  Five minutes later she was on the Europol website having traced the image from the reference in the Belgian police’s email. The dreadful scene appeared again.

  ‘I see,’ she said, still typing. Her accent was subtle, somewhere east of France, extending the vowels but not interfering in the slightest with her diction.

  ‘What do you see?’ Khosa asked.

  ‘First of all, it’s a png file. That means there would be no EXIF data.’

  No one spoke. Varga looked up. ‘Whoever posted this file made it into a png image.’

  Still no one said anything.

  ‘OK,’ said Varga, clearly used to technophobes. ‘When you take a photo with your phone or a camera, it is usually saved as a jpeg file. Joint photographic experts group. That is a format used to compress digital images. But if you have a GPS-enabled phone or camera, the file will include metadata like coordinates and the unique ID number of the device. Portable network graphics files, png, do not contain this metadata.’

  ‘If it had been a jpeg, we could have found out where it was taken?’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Varga.

  ‘So, he’s careful.’ Khosa nodded.

  Woakes appeared and stood behind Holder, looking in over his shoulder at the screen.

  ‘What sort of website would have posted something like this?’ Holder asked.

  Varga’s eyebrows went up. ‘Probably a forum or a discussion board. Perhaps a darknet marketplace.’

  ‘Darknet?’ Holder asked,

  ‘Also known as the Dark Web, yes.’

  ‘We know of it,’ Anna said.

  ‘OK.’ Varga’s go-to word. She swivelled around in her chair once again to address the squad. ‘Strictly speaking, a darknet is any network that needs specific software or tools to access it. It’s an encrypted network overlaid onto the normal internet and only accessible to those who have the tools. The Deep Web are the layers of the internet that normal search engines cannot access. It is the internet that is not within reach of most people. Hidden because of restricted access, such as a government site or a paid streaming service. The Dark Web, on the other hand, is a subset of the Deep Web that has been intentionally hidden. To access it you would need to use the darknet and its tools. In all three instances, the term ‘dark’ applies because it uses encryption to make users anonymous.’

  ‘How does it do that? I mean everyone has an IP address, don’t they?’ Anna said. ‘I mean you log on with your address.’

  ‘You cannot access the Dark Web through Google or Firefox. You need a special browser. A darknet browser such as Tor, The Onion Router, which has layers of privacy features already included. The smarter criminals also use a VPN or virtual private network to connect to public networks. Because of this, the Dark Web naturally attracts drug traffickers, illicit arms sellers and pornographic or paedophile activity. PPV you already know the meaning of. Probably there would be a link associated with the image, many further layers, and then somewhere to access more photographs, or, in this case, video, for a price.’

  ‘What about paying for that? Surely we can trace credit cards?’ Woakes asked.

  Varga nodded. ‘Mostly these days it is cryptocurrency. Bitcoin, litecoin. There is no link to the buyer’s or seller’s identity. Though that is changing with blockchain evidence. Large amounts do leave a solid trail but small amounts are more difficult to track.’

  The silence that followed let Varga know that she’d left her audience way behind.

  ‘I don’t really know what a bitcoin is,’ Khosa said, with an apologetic grimace.

  Varga shrugged. ‘All you need to know is that bitcoin has grown exponentially as a currency and there are even bitcoin ATMs. People use it and trade it and it has value, all of which is hidden from normal traceability. Especially on the darknet.’

  ‘I’m still out of my depth.’ Holder ran his hands through his hair.

  Varga nodded. She’d obviously been here before. ‘Bitcoin and other types of cryptocurrencies are decentralised digital currency. They can be transferred from person to person directly. When you have a bank account, the bank controls your money. You have to use them to transfer and withdraw and deposit. That leaves a trail. With cryptocurrencies, there is no need for a bank or clearing house. Bitcoins are made, or mined, by computer activity and have controlled and restricted production to maintain value. They can be used in any country and only you have access to your account. Because of this, cryptocurrency is popular with criminals and in countries where the value of money fluctuates.’

  ‘OK,’ said Khosa. ‘But I know what a dollar is. I know what a pound is. I just can’t see what a bitcoin or a litecoin or whatever you call it is or what it’s worth.’

  ‘It’s worth
what someone is willing to pay for it,’ Varga said. ‘Think of gold. Does it have any real inherent value other than it is scarce and it shines? It’s worth something because someone else covets it. That is the nature of commerce, is it not? And this new cryptocommerce does not store any sensitive or personal data as a bank transaction would.’

  ‘Are these transactions completely untraceable?’ Holder said.

  ‘Users have addresses from where they can send and receive. But no names are assigned. Though every transaction is added to a blockchain, a bit like a bank ledger to record the transactions. These confirmations are stored on users’ computers. This is called bitcoin mining, and if you are prepared to mine using your computer to process the chain, you can get new bitcoins yourself. Now, because of the great number in circulation, it takes a lot of computer power, and individuals find it difficult to do. But there are also laundry systems that take your digital coins and shuffle them around the many addresses they own and give you back the coins at another address. Then it becomes almost impossible to trace coins.’

  ‘Is that legal?’

  ‘Yes. Governments and banks are way behind when it comes to the dark economy and cryptocurrency.’

  ‘OK,’ Holder said. ‘I can understand all that, but what can you actually buy?’

  Varga turned back to the screen and typed in a search. Up came a site. On it was a list of companies now accepting bitcoin. Flights, jewellery, computers, gift cards, pizza. Most were in the USA. It took a moment for Holder to remember to shut his mouth.

  Varga’a knowledge of cryptocurrency and its attraction for criminals was obviously extensive, but they were straying from the evidence. Anna needed to bring them back into focus. ‘Szandra, we’re interested in the image. Could you find out a bit more for us? Can you date it, for example? Tell us what sort of camera was used? Or when it was posted?’