Dead Tomorrow

age of eleven, twenty-seven years ago, Tommy had set out from school, on a February afternoon, to walk home. He’d never been seen again.
    He looked back at the Criminal Justice Department files again. The bureaucracy demanded by the system was almost beyond belief. He swigged some water, wondering where to start. Then decided to look at his Christmas present list instead. But he only got as far as the first item, a request from the parents of his nine-year-old goddaughter, Jaye Somers. They knew he liked to give her gifts that made her think he was cool and not a boring old fart. They were suggesting a pair of black suede Ugg boots, size three.
    Where did you buy Ugg boots from?
    One person would definitely know the answer. He stared down at a green crate, the fourth in a stack to the right of his desk. The Shoe Man. A cold case that had long intrigued him. Over a period of time, several years back, the Shoe Man had raped six women in Sussex, killing one of them, probably by accident, in panic, it had been concluded. Then he had inexplicably stopped. It might have been that his last victim had put up a spirited fight, and had managed to partially remove his mask, enabling an Identikit drawing of the man to be made, and that had scared him off. Or perhaps he was now dead. Or had moved away.
    Three years back, aforty-nine-year-old businessman in Yorkshire who had raped a string of women in the mid-1980s, and had always taken their shoes afterwards, had been arrested. For a time Sussex Police had hoped he might be their man too, but DNA testing ruled that out. Besides, the rapists’ methods were similar but not identical. James Lloyd, the Yorkshireman, took both shoes from his victims. The Sussex Shoe Man took just one, always from the left foot, together with his victims’ panties. Of course, there could have been more than six. One of the problems with tracking down rapists was that victims were often too embarrassed to come forward.
    Of all criminals, Grace hated paedophiles and rapists the most. These men destroyed their victims’ lives forever. There was no real recovering from a kiddie fiddler or a rapist. The victims could try to put their lives back together, but they could never forget what had happened to them.
    He had entered the police force not just because his father had been a police officer, but because he had genuinely wanted a career in which he could make a difference–however small–to the world. In recent years, excited by all the technological developments, he now had one overriding ambition. That the perpetrators behind the victims whose files filled all these crates would one day be brought to justice. Every damn one of them. And at the very top of his current list was the creepy Shoe Man.
    One day.
    One day the Shoe Man would wish he had never been born.

8
    Lynn left thedoctor’s surgery in a daze. She walked up the street to her clapped-out little orange Peugeot, which had one odd wheel with a missing hubcap, opened the door and climbed inside. She usually left it unlocked in the–as yet unrequited–hope that someone might steal it and she could collect on the insurance.
    Last year, the man at the garage had told her that it would never get through its next MOT safety and emissions test without major work, and that it would cost more to put right than the car was worth. Now that test was due in just over a week’s time and she was dreading it.
    Mal would have been able to fix the car himself–he could mend anything. God, how she missed that. And someone to talk to now. Someone who could have supported her in the conversation she was about to have–and was utterly dreading–with her daughter.
    She pulled her mobile phone from her bag and dialled her best friend, Sue Shackleton, blinking hard, crushing tears from her eyes. Like herself, Sue was a divorcee and now a single mother with four kids. What’s more, she always seemed to be irrepressibly cheerful.
    As Lynn spoke, she watched a traffic warden swaggering down the pavement, but she did not need to worry as there was over an hour yet to run on her pay-and-display sticker on the window. Sue was, as ever, sympathetic but realistic.
    ‘Sometimes in life these things happen, darling. I know someone who had a kidney transplant, what, must be seven years ago now, and he’s fine.’
    Lynn nodded atthe mention of Sue’s friend, whom she had met. ‘Yes, but this is a bit different. You can survive on dialysis for years without a