Little Boy Blue

85

‘Nobody moves unless I say so.’

Sanderson signed off and waited for the other members of the team to confirm that they would hold their positions. She had been keen not to repeat Charlie’s mistake and had summoned backup as soon as she had pinned down where Paine’s device was being used. It was routing via a server that was registered to an estate agent’s on Banner Street in Portswood. It was pushing 11 p.m. so the agency was closed, but a light was burning in a third-floor window. The buzzers by the door adjacent to the agency suggested that the second and third floors of the building were flats. Perhaps they had an agreement to share the router or perhaps whoever was upstairs had gained access to it by some other means. Either way, they were about to find out.

Sanderson had tried and failed to contact the estate agency via its out-of-hours number, leaving her with no choice but to apply for a warrant. This had taken a couple of hours to source, but now she had the authority she needed to act. She rang the buzzer for the third-floor flat. No response. She rang it again, but still nothing. Losing patience she gestured to the nearby WPC to barrel charge the door. The weak lock yielded easily, the door swinging wide open, and Sanderson was inside and bounding up the stairs.

She moved past the second-floor flat, which appeared to be unoccupied and quiet. Another burst of speed and she crested the top landing. Marching straight to the flat door, she hammered on it.

‘Police. Open up.’

She beat the door again, then moved aside quickly, allowing her uniformed colleague a proper run-up. Giving her the nod, she pulled her radio from her pocket.

‘On the count of three. One, two…’

The door to the flat suddenly opened, prompting the uniformed officer to abort her swing at the last second. Sanderson hurried forward – to be confronted by a sheepish-looking student.

‘What gives?’ he said, trying and failing to be insouciant.

Sanderson pushed past him. She scanned left and right, darting in and out of the cramped rooms, but she already knew that this was not their killer’s lair. It was a down-at-heel student flat – nothing more. You could tell by the smell of weed, the laddish posters, the unwashed pots and pans and, most tellingly of all, by the sight of an unshaven young man in his pyjamas playing Minion Rush on a battered tablet.