Page 65 of 36 Hours
His second contender was forty-two-year-old Richard Johnston, who had been dealing drugs since his late teens and was litter-picking as part of his community service.
It wasn’t much, but at least it was something. If the Jester had been watching them from the beginning, there was a possibility he was one of these two men.
FIFTY-ONE
11.25P.M.
‘Well, that couldn’t have been much worse, could it?’ Kim asked the room after watching the Central News clip.
They were the fun snippet at the end of the programme, which Kim was sure wouldn’t be the case if Frost had mentioned the body parts and the torture.
The short piece was very much along the lines of ‘trickster is fooling a team of CID officers with a wild goose chase’. Without all the facts, they were being made to look ridiculous, and worse, incompetent.
She’d managed to dodge two more calls from Woody, but she knew she’d have to face him sometime.
‘You know this is going to bring more attention, don’t you?’ Frost asked.
‘And here was me thinking it would convince our sicko to give himself up and end this madness,’ Kim said.
Having Frost in the office was really starting to wear on her now.
Frost ignored her sarcasm, probably expecting nothing less, and returned to tapping away on her laptop. The next article was due in half an hour.
‘Has anyone got anything useful to tell me?’ she asked, looking from Stacey to Penn.
‘More than a thousand vehicles pass by the camera close to the Saltwells Nature Reserve every hour,’ Stacey offered.
‘That’s your best shot at useful?’
The constable nodded and shrugged at the same time.
‘Penn?’
‘One of the litter-pickers has a record for assault.’
The litter-pick felt like a very long time ago.
‘Okay,’ she said, unsure that was any more useful than Stacey’s offering.
She was about to tell him as much when a figure appeared in the doorway. She had known it was only a matter of time.
‘A word, Stone,’ Woody said in a voice that brooked no argument.
She headed to the Bowl and left the door open for him to enter. She could see by his face that he would have preferred to have the conversation away from the team, but she was too exhausted to care.
He closed the door and stood in front of it.
‘Do explain to me why we are a laughing stock on the local news?’
She was tempted to warn him that there was a very real prospect of them being a laughing stock on the national news if they didn’t catch the Jester soon.
‘Slow news day?’ she offered.
‘Why are we still working this without a victim?’
‘Well, we have parts of a victim, sir. We have fingernails ripped out with God only knows what. We have teeth extracted with household pliers and a thumb chopped off with a cleaver. I suspect that if we don’t keep working the case, there’s going to be very little left of Hiccup to find.’
‘I didn’t know about the thumb,’ Woody said, frowning.