FIFTY-FIVE

3.15 A.M.

Penn couldn’t help feeling they were missing something.

All of them were running off in different directions, following the leads. They were combing CCTV in the hope that they saw something that jumped out. They were following up the numerous names they were collecting as they went. They were examining the evidence, working out clues, but it was all being done at surface level because there was just too much to go through.

He tapped his fingers on the desk wondering what was the most valuable thing they had.

The body parts were with Mitch, but all that would tell them was the identity of the victim, and they were pretty sure they knew that anyway.

Having so many names was a novelty for them, but there were so many that they could only manage cursory background checks.

‘Stace, you got the audio and video files?’ he asked.

‘One sec and I’ll send them over.’

They had three recordings. Two different items of media that had been produced in real time.

Wasn’t his time best spent trying to see if there was anything there they’d missed?

‘Sent,’ Stacey said without looking up.

He took a moment to update the equaliser he had on his computer. He doubted his was as good as they had over at the lab in Birmingham, but he had been blessed with exceptional hearing and superior-quality headphones.

He took a breath before hooking himself up. No way this was going to be pleasant, but he owed it to Hiccup to give it his best shot.

His jaw tensed as the sound of Hiccup’s cries filled his ears. For a second, he regretted the clarity and volume he could achieve as he listened to both recordings.

Penn closed his eyes, knowing that the man was having his nails and teeth painfully extracted.

Listening through the headphones gave him a deeper intimacy than what he would have experienced with the naked ear. It was like listening to music and hearing every inflection of the vocals, getting a deeper connection, a better sense of every emotion.

In Hiccup’s cries, he heard it all: the fear, the pain, the desperation, every cry hitting a different note. It reminded him of a child crying for its mother, needing her, needing someone to make it stop.

No matter what sounds he brought forward and enhanced, there was nothing to give him a clue. Despite the tools he’d used, there was no pause in the cries, so he wasn’t able to isolate anything behind them.

Penn sat back in his chair. Having lived through every second of pain with Hiccup, he’d gained nothing.

He clicked on the other file, the one that he’d neither seen nor heard himself but knew from Stacey what it contained.

He readied himself for the sight and the anger as the cleaver came down and severed the thumb.

The cries were different this time. In the first recordings, there had been fear but also the hope that his screams could affect the outcome. In this one, there was no such hope, Penn thought as he once again listened with his eyes closed.

What he hadn’t noticed the first time was that there was a two-to-three-second pause in between Hiccup’s cries.

Penn opened his eyes and watched it again.

The pause came as the cleaver was raised high in the air above the thumb. Hiccup must have been so terrified of the prospect of the blade that it had rendered him too dry to even cry out.

Penn isolated the three seconds and repeated the process he’d already used.

He listened carefully. And then he heard an unknown sound in the background.