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watched from then
on. Nothing. For five months, and then a lorry driver tipping at the foot of Chain Down saw an arm sticking out of a pile of rubbish. No one had heard or seen anything amiss, and the site was covered with tyre-tracks anyway so that was no help. The pathologist reckoned the body’d been there a couple of weeks.”
    â€œAnother boy?”
    â€œGavin Halliwell, also sixteen, also raped and battered to death. He’d been missing for eight days and no one had even told the police. The family thought he really had gone to London to seek his fortune. Apparently he’d talked about it, he’d had a bust-up with his father, they thought he’d better get on with it. Only he never got as far as London. He was tied up somewhere long enough for the abrasions on his ankle to fester, and the killer had hacked his leg down to the bone before finishing him off. This time he left the murder weapon behind. A wheel-brace was found with the body.”
    â€œA wheel-brace,” murmured Daniel. “Is that what I saw?”
    Sessions shrugged. “I don’t know. Is it?”
    Daniel bit his lip. “What’s a wheel-brace?”
    Despite the gravity of what they were discussing, the reporter couldn’t help but grin. Daniel Hood was clearly a very intelligent man, just not all the time. “An iron bar with a kink in it. You use it to change a wheel. On a car.”
    Daniel nodded slowly. “That’s what I saw.”
    By now the town was panic-stricken, the police under massive pressure to make an arrest. “To give them their due,” said Sessions, “they didn’t just go through the motions, pick up the usual suspects and wait for the heat to die down. They didn’t want just anyone in the cells, they wanted the right guy.”
    But there were no leads. No witnesses, no physical evidence, no forensics. He’d brutalised three teenage boys, held two of them captive for days, without leaving anything that could be traced back to him. Which meant he was not a man tormented by urges he couldn’t control. He could control
them well enough to take his pleasures only after he’d protected himself. He was going to be hard to find and harder to convict.
    â€œNine months into the investigation, with three teenage boys in the morgue and not a single viable lead, the police were reduced to seeking suggestions. They did an appeal on television. Of course they were inundated with suggestions. Many were well-meaning but checked out as groundless. Some were people settling scores. But there were also a handful of names that couldn’t readily be dismissed.
    â€œOne of them was Neil Cochrane. Four different people advised the police to interview him. He was a farmer, a single man in his forties running sheep up on Menner Down. No family, no friends, no social life at all that anyone knew of. He used to drink in The Rose on a Friday night, and that was all anybody knew of him.
    â€œBut there was something about him that made people uneasy. I know: I felt it too. I saw him in The Rose a time or two, and he was always on his own. I don’t mean he came in alone – people left a space round him. I never saw him make trouble, but he gave off the sense that this was someone you didn’t want to know any better. If the place was full, people who didn’t play darts went to play darts rather than sit with him.”
    Daniel shrugged uncomfortably. “People who live alone – sometimes we get a bit – eccentric … ?”
    Sessions nodded. “It could have been that. But Neil Cochrane wasn’t the only single man living in Dimmock ten years ago. But he was the one that people kept suggesting the police should visit.
    â€œWhen they did, they started to think they were finally onto something. The first of the boys had done some work on Cochrane’s farm a few weeks before his death – which didn’t prove anything except