Lost

“What about the headstones?”

“We'll try not to touch them.”

Campbell began listing all the people who had to sanction an exhumation, including a County Court Judge, the Administrator of Cemeteries and the Chief Medical Officer of Westminster Council.

“We're not snatching bodies or robbing graves,” I reassured him.

Eighty feet of lawn and flower bed had been dug up by then. Paving stones were propped against walls and turf rolled into muddy faggots. Howard had helped plant the garden two months earlier for Westminster in Bloom, a flower competition.

Twenty-two other sites were also excavated within the cemetery. Although it sounds like a clever hiding place, it's not an easy thing to conceal a body in a graveyard. First you have to bury it without anyone noticing, most probably at night. And it doesn't matter if you believe in ghosts or not, very few people are comfortable in cemeteries after dark.

A media blackout covered the dig, but I knew it couldn't hold. Someone must have phoned Rachel and she turned up that first afternoon. Two police officers had to hold her back behind the police tape. She fought against their arms, pleading with them to let her go.

“Is it Mickey?” she yelled at me.

I pulled her to one side, trying to calm her down. “We don't know yet.”

“You found something?”

“A towel.”

“Mickey's towel?”

“We won't know until—”

“Is it Mickey's towel?”

She read the answer in my eyes and suddenly broke free, running toward the trench. I pulled her back before she reached the edge, wrapping my arms around her waist. She was crying then, with her arms outstretched, trying to throw herself into the hole.

There was nothing I could say to comfort her—nothing that would ever be able to comfort her.

Afterward, I walked her up to the chapel, waiting for a police car to take her home. We sat outside on a stone bench beneath a poster on the noticeboard, which said, CHILDREN ARE THE HOPE OF THE WORLD.

Where! Show me! You can want them, worry about them, love them with all your being, but you can't keep them safe. Time and accidents and evil will defeat you.

Somewhere in the restaurant kitchen a tray of glasses shatters on the floor. Diners pause momentarily, perhaps in sympathy, and then conversations begin again. Joe looks across the table, inscrutable as ever. He'll say it's the Parkinson's mask but I think he enjoys being impenetrable.

“Why the hair dye?” he asks.

“What do you mean?”

“You said there were traces of hair dye on the towel. If Howard snatched Mickey off the stairs and killed her in his flat, why bother dyeing her hair?”

He's right. But the towel might have been stained earlier. Rachel could have colored her hair. I didn't ask her. I can see Joe filing the information away for future reference.

My main course has arrived but I'm no longer hungry. The morphine is doing this to me—ruining my appetite. I roll the spaghetti around a fork and leave it resting on the plate.

Joe pours another glass of wine. “You said you had doubts about Howard. Why?”

“Oddly enough, it's because of something you once said to me. When we first met and I was investigating the murder of Catherine McBride, you gave me a profile of her killer.”

“What did I say?”

“You said that sadists and pedophiles and sexual psychopaths aren't born whole. They're made.”

Joe nods, impressed either by my memory or by the quality of his advice.

I try to explain. “Until we found Mickey's towel, the case against Howard was more wishful thinking than hard evidence. Not a single complaint had ever been made against him by a parent or a child in his care. Nobody had ever called him creepy or suggested he be kept away from children. There were thousands of images on his computer, but only a handful of them could be classed as questionable and none of them proved he was a pedophile. He had no history of sexual offenses, yet suddenly he appeared, a full-fledged child killer.”

Joe peers at the wine bottle wrapped in raffia. “Someone can fantasize about children but never act. Their fantasy life can be rich enough to satisfy them.”

“Exactly, but I couldn't see the progression. You told me that deviant behavior could be almost plotted on the axis of a graph. Someone begins by collecting pornography and progresses up the scale. Abduction and murder are at the very end.”

“Did you find any pornography?”

“Howard owned a trailer that he claimed to have sold. We traced the location using gas and dry-cleaning receipts. It was at a campground on the South Coast. He paid the fees annually in advance. Inside there were boxes of magazines mostly from Eastern Europe and Asia. Child pornography.”

Joe leans forward. His little gray cells are humming like a hard drive.