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silver birch, their bark glowing eerily in the shadows, and enormous beeches surrounded him. On the other side of the stream, the pale root ball tombstones of conifers, blown down in previous season’s gales, punctuated the gloom, with foxgloves and nettles garlanding the impromptu clearings they had created.
    His preoccupation with his career brought a moment’s guilt. Then the macabre sense of excitement he’d felt on his way to the scene that morning returned. Maybe the discovery would be the breakthrough he needed on an investigation that was proving resistant to every line of inquiry he tried, one that had defied resolution for months before it was handed to Fenwick, with a mixture of relief and reluctance, by the out-going head of MCS.
    ‘This one’s a sod, Andrew,’ he’d said. ‘We’ve got nowhere but it wasn’t for want of trying. We had a strong tip from the Yanks that a sophisticated paedophile ring is operating somewhere on our patch. A Brit they’ve arrested in Florida is talking as part of a plea bargain. Before moving to the States he claims he was part of a ring in Sussex that was extensive and had been running for a long time. The only name he could give them was Joseph Watkins, and sure enough they were able to track him using one of the child porn sites they’d infiltrated.
    ‘But when we raided Watkins’ home his computer was clean. Don’t ask me how he knew we were coming but he did. We put surveillance on him – cost a bloody fortune and I had to drop it after a month. All that time he was as good as gold – I was never able to pin a thing on him.’
    Even when other investigations had taken priority Fenwick had kept a small team on the investigation, codenamed Choir Boy. It wasn’t a popular assignment, deemed a lost cause by those who worked on it and a joke by those who didn’t.
    Joseph Watkins was fifty-five, married, retired with a good income – all of it clean. Rumour was that he’d been a mercenary and before that in the services but that was all they had. Fenwick had put a watch on him and his acquaintances. None of the men visited any of the known areas of child prostitution in West Sussex and they all had respectable backgrounds, but even so Fenwick refused to give up. After a month, he had narrowed the list down to Watkins and one man – Alec Ball. There was nothing unduly suspicious about Ball’s actions but everyone on the team agreed that he looked guilty, didn’t like him and refused the idea to drop the surveillance on him. Over the following weeks they’d come up with a list of places that Watkins and Ball visited – though never together. They included a club in Burgess Hill and, to his surprise, Harlden’s golf club – The Downs.
    He didn’t have enough to request warrants, only suspicions, so he was now concentrating on building a log of activity. It was painstaking work but Fenwick could be patient when he needed to be and the MCS department was large enough to cover his semi-official work.
    In parallel, he had another of his team collate missing persons’ files and then review all cases involving sexual abuse against Caucasian boys between the ages of nine and fifteen. So far none of the men’s names had been mentioned in any way.
    Then Sam Bowyer had disappeared and the theoretical work had taken on a new urgency, though the search for the boy had criss-crossed the county without success for the past four days.
    As he’d watched the child’s remains being removed, and realised with relief that it wasn’t Sam, Fenwick had wondered which of the cheeky faces in the ageing school photographs in the missing persons’ files had once clothed the skull that was on its way now to a morgue in London to be measured and probed in the search for justice.
    Fenwick bent down and picked up a handful of dirt, squeezing it tightly into a ball in his palm. It was light and friable, a superficial skin on the bones of chalk that made up the North Downs. He opened his