FORTY-EIGHT

10.25 P.M.

Penn had been right to overrule her, Stacey admitted to herself when she was back at her desk. The nap hadn’t been long, but it had refreshed and revitalised her.

She was pleased to have had the privacy of the Bowl, unlike Frost, who was currently catching forty winks in her chair with an open mouth and an occasional soft snore.

Stacey was tempted to record the spectacle and send it to the boss, but her moral compass felt that might be a little too invasive of the reporter’s privacy.

Another soft snore escaped from Frost’s lips, causing both her and Penn to giggle.

As soon as she’d exited the Bowl, Penn had explained that they hadn’t been told the clue to the next location, only that they had to reach it by 3 a.m.

They both suspected that it was going to come to Frost’s phone, which Penn assured her hadn’t received any messages while Frost had been sleeping. All they could do now was wait.

Penn had tried to hand back the names to her, but she’d asked him to crack on while she got started on CCTV.

It wasn’t a job she enjoyed, but if she could find the nearest cameras to each of the locations, she could try and identify any vehicles that appeared on all of them. Time frames were going to be her enemy, but she had to start somewhere. The boss was right: following the clues wasn’t enough. They would only take them where the Jester wanted them to be. It was good old-fashioned police work that was going to help them catch him.

She noted down the locations of the boxes on a piece of paper.

Saltwells Nature Reserve.

Dudley Zoo car park.

Four Stones, Clent.

The nearest camera to the Saltwells was on the Dudley Road, approximately half a mile away. There were many other ways to reach the nature reserve, but she couldn’t allow herself to be daunted.

For the zoo car park, she had a camera on the Birmingham New Road a mile away. For the Four Stones in Clent, she had a traffic cam on the road into West Hagley. There might be others, but those were the closest.

Now she had to consider timescales.

Hiccup was abducted the previous night. There was no telling if the Jester had carried out the tortures straight away and lined up body parts or if they were being carried out in real time, put in the box and the box delivered to its location.

Same problem with the placement of the boxes. They could have been placed at the Saltwells, the zoo car park and at Clent during the night, before he’d even sent the email or the first clue, but that theory didn’t sit well in her stomach because none of the boxes had been wet following the earlier shower.

Everything so far had reflected both his planning and his need for control. Leaving the boxes hours in advance offered much greater opportunity for something to go wrong; for the box to be moved or found by someone else before them.

She decided to start her search two hours before the boxes had been found, either by them or Joanne. Their sicko would want to be there in plenty of time to lay the box before he decided it was a free-for-all.

She took a moment to appreciate the enormity of the task ahead, but it was one of those situations where she had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Her hands were raised above the keyboard when what sounded like a car alarm blared from Frost’s computer.

The reporter and most of Halesowen were instantly awake.

A deep frown immediately formed on Frost’s face as she tapped a few keys. She remained silent as she appeared to be watching something.

‘Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,’ she cursed. Then she looked up at them.

‘Your boss is not gonna like this one little bit.’