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‘Accompanying two police officers. You’ll be fine.’
‘Okay, do you want to pick me up outside Dudley College at five?’ he asked.
‘Got it,’ Kim said before ending the call.
‘Good idea,’ Bryant said, raising his hand for a high five.
The disgust on her face killed the gesture like a wilting flower.
She pulled her coffee back from the edge of the table. Finally, they would be able to warn Leyton Parks that he was in danger.
Penn and Stacey had done a cracking job in locating him. She just prayed that their killer hadn’t found him first.
EIGHTY-FIVE
As arranged, Ryan was waiting for them outside Dudley College’s main entrance.
He removed his backpack before opening the rear passenger door.
‘Thanks for agreeing to do this,’ she said as he buckled himself in.
‘It’s okay. I’ve got an online tutorial at eight. Do I need to cancel it?’
‘Not sure – we’ll see how it goes.’
He looked behind them. ‘Is this it?’
‘We don’t want him to feel threatened,’ Kim said as Bryant put the postcode into his satnav.
‘Got it.’
‘Tell us about him,’ Kim said. Any information they had could be helpful in getting him to open the door.
‘I didn’t know him for that long, but I felt like he didn’t really belong anywhere. I knew he came from the travelling community, but he wasn’t brash or tough. I think he was easily led by older kids and that’s what got him into trouble. He followed suit at Welton and got in with some older, tougher kids and did what he was told. I just sensed something different in him. In my lessons, he appeared to be listening. It was like he wanted to learn. He hadn’t had much education, and it was all like a new discovery for him. His reading and writing ability was far below the others.
‘I offered him extra tutoring, to help catch him up. He accepted, but then his buddies found out and took the piss, so he didn’t want to do it any more.’
Kim was saddened by the story. Welton could very easily have been a success story for Leyton Parks. The facilities and opportunities had been there to give him a brighter future, but peer pressure had destroyed that hope. And now he lived in a battered caravan isolated from the rest of the world.
‘I’m going to cancel it. Just to be safe,’ Ryan said, taking out his phone.
Kim took out her phone at the same time. She needed to study what they’d received from Stacey and work out how they were going to reach him.
From the photos, there was no way they were going to get a car anywhere near the place.
She was guessing that when he left his secluded spot, he didn’t scale the fence and use the road that ran in front of all the new properties. A man who’d worked so hard to protect the secrecy of his location wouldn’t walk so blatantly close to these houses. She’d bet he’d stand out by a mile, and anyone who saw him would question where he’d come from. That direction of travel would also take him away from the town and necessary provisions.
She moved her focus to the open fields that flanked the reservoir and led onto the main road.
Somewhere there had to be a path.
She zoomed in and finally spotted a line that travelled in a diagonal direction from the tip of the reservoir down to a field gate on the road. Not an official path but what she guessed was a route worn by people coming to look at the water or feed the ducks.
From the aerial view, it appeared there was no way to walk around the reservoir, but she’d bet that someone who knew where they were going could easily make their way to the edge of the trees and skirt around the reservoir to join the path at the end.
If they were right, the man had chosen to live in a caravan that lacked even basic amenities. There was no vehicular access, so any kind of delivery was impossible.
If he was alone, he was isolated and detached from any kind of community. He had a mile walk to pick up the most basic of provisions and he’d surrounded himself with some kind of barrier.
