Five-card stud indeed!

Kate looked down at the two bodies and felt sickness wash over her. The woman was lying spreadeagled on the dirt floor, her neck a gaping wound. Blood had dried on her shoulders and breasts. Her mouth was in a perfect O. That was bad enough, but it was the child’s body that affected her.

His little face was crushed completely, nose and cheeks collapsed in towards his brain. His tiny plump baby fingers were curled in his palms. He was lying huddled into his mother’s body.

The pathologist shook his head.

‘She’s been dead longer than the child. My guess is he crawled to her for comfort then suffocated in his own blood.’

He pointed with his pen at the child’s face. ‘See here and here? Well, the blow caused the blood to flow down the back of his throat. His nose couldn’t release it, no way. He practically drowned in his own blood. Poor little fucker.’

Kate wanted to cry. She wanted to cry desperately. But not here. She refused to though she guessed shrewdly that more than a few of the men around her were feeling the same.

Murdered people were bad enough, but murdered children? They were the worst.

When they had received the call that the Grantley Ripper had decided to expand his area, they had all felt a sense of shame. They hadn’t stopped him and the man was on the move.

And the case had a new dimension. He killed little children now. Christ alone knew where he would strike next.

Kate heard the sound of sobbing and turned to the left. In a clump of yew trees stood DS Willis, head bent. Caitlin was patting him on the shoulder and lighting him a cigarette. It was the boy’s first child corpse.

Kate felt a surge of affection for the young man. And for Caitlin. Much as he tried to be the hardfaced know-all, Kate was realising he was in fact quite a soft-hearted man. She looked at the two bodies and pictured the tiny child trying to find his mother’s warmth. Crying, in acute pain, he had dragged himself to her. Believing, as all children believed, that she would protect him. Make him better. Only Mummy was already dead and the child’s time was running out.

Dicky Redcar had alerted the police to his wife’s disappearance at eleven fifteen.

Two patrolmen had found the Range Rover at eleven forty-nine and assumed she had tried to walk and maybe gone to a friend’s. There was no reason to suspect foul play. At one twenty-five they had begun a search; the bodies had been found just after two.

Kate had been alerted at five thirty that the Grantley Ripper had decided to extend his operations. The DNA on the woman had been conclusive. It was the same man, and the only clue they had were his tyre tracks.