Detective Sergeant Barney Cole looked at two lists, one long and one much shorter, that related directly to his Grassendale Park grid.

The long list supplied by the librarian, Margie Rivers, had yielded five names with historic criminal convictions from the National Police Computer from the two hundred and five males listed on the city’s electoral register.

There were two convictions for petty fraud, one for drink driving, one for drunk and disorderly and a fifth for shoplifting. All convictions were over twenty years old and all the petty criminals had pleaded guilty to the charges against them.

Cole sent a round robin email to Clay and the team outlining the disappointing trawl from the Grassendale Park grid with a note.

Hardly the CV of The Ghoul.

As he sent the email, Cole felt a sudden heavy weight on his head and shoulders and an even heavier burden inside himself.

What if? he asked himself in the cold light of a rain-sodden day. What if my ego and inbuilt need to look smarter than smart has led me to concoct the Grassendale Park grid? What if I’ve allowed myself to wander up a flawed geographical dead end, and taken others with me?

Cole stared into space and felt sick at the prospect of the point in time when he would have to hold up his hands and deliver a damning self-verdict: Twenty-four-carat idiot.

He looked at the shorter list of names from the city’s electoral office, twelve males in the Grassendale Park area who had opted to leave their names unpublished on the publicly available register of voters. There wasn’t a criminal blemish against any of the dozen men and Cole’s already dark mood deteriorated further.

‘Have you looked at the names of the women on the registers?’ he whispered to himself. ‘What’s the point?’ he replied silently, but he started with Grassendale Road and drew his right index finger down the list, hoping to catch a glimmer of light from the females on the list.

‘Barney, how’s it going?’ asked Stone at his back.

‘Badly. There’s not a single sign of anyone with the potential to become The Ghoul.’

‘If it’s any consolation, look at what I’ve pulled from the CCTV footage of people driving out of Grassendale Park on to Aigburth Road.’

Stone placed a small pack of printed-off images from the CCTV trawl in front of Cole and he flicked through it.

An old man driving with an old woman at his side in a VW Passat. An old woman driving on her own in a Ford Orion. A woman in her thirties with a baby strapped in on the back seat of her Peugeot 108. A man and a woman with two teenage children in the back of their grey Range Rover.
A middle-aged woman alone in her red Vauxhall Combo.

‘It’s just more and more of the same.’