by Tony Parsons
She paused to watch him sweat.
‘Where did you go after Ginger Gonzalez gave you a knock-back in Chinatown?’ she said. ‘Because it did not end there, did it?’
He licked his lips. His lips were very dry. Two detectives were sitting in his back garden, talking about his secret dreams. That is bound to give you cotton mouth.
‘I didn’t do anything,’ he said. ‘You have to understand that.’ His wife was still watching him from the kitchen through those great glass walls. What was this about? Who were these people? What had he done? He turned his back to her and mopped the sweat from his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘I walked in and then I walked straight out. I swear on the lives of my children. There is a reason these things are fantasies. Because the reality is so … unspeakable.’
His wife continued to watch. She was steering the children through breakfast, preparing them for a day at school. And all the while her eyes never left her husband. She knew something was not right. She knew that something was about as wrong as it could be.
‘You found this place online?’ I said.
He nodded.
‘Someone in Ginger’s line of work. But without Ginger’s scruples.’
‘We are going to need a name,’ I said.
‘Someone I found on the Dark Web,’ he said. ‘I never saw their face. I never knew their name.’
‘Someone on the Dark Web,’ I nodded. ‘It’s the digital version of a-man-I-met-in-the-pub.’
‘But it happens to be true,’ he said. ‘Someone offering this … service … is not going to be keen on publicity, are they?’
‘So you found what you were looking for,’ I said.
He nodded, his eyes drifting away. We were all talking more quietly, we were all speaking softly and without emotion.
‘What was this place?’ I said.
He breathed out, a kind of broken sigh.
We waited.
That was all we had to do.
‘It was a basement room with a metal grille in the doorway,’ he said. ‘A kind of cage.’ He looked at us. ‘It looked like a cage.’
Whitestone was very still.
‘But I didn’t touch the girl!’ he said. ‘I gave them the money and I left.’
‘We believe you,’ Whitestone said. ‘It’s all right. We know you’re telling the truth. All you have to do now is to keep telling the truth.’
I showed him the photograph of Jessica Lyle again.
He had hardly glanced at it the first time.
‘Look at it,’ I told him, my voice hard, and he did as he was told.
And so did I.
Jessica Lyle, smiling in a world that was good and kind.
‘Is that the woman?’ I said.
‘I didn’t see the woman.’
‘Never lie to me,’ Whitestone said, flaring up but keeping her voice low so that it would not disturb the children at their breakfast. ‘Do you hear me, you piece of shit? If you ever lie to me then I swear to God that all of this comes crumbling down. The house. The family. All of it ends.’
‘I’m not lying,’ he said.
‘Where was this place?’ I said.
‘One of those big houses that are left empty,’ he said. ‘In Belgravia. I’ll give you the address.’
18
One hour later, the briefing room at West End Central was packed.
There were Specialist Firearms Officers from Leman Street police station, Whitechapel, in their grey paramilitary body armour, a few plain-clothes faces from SCD9, the anti-trafficking unit at New Scotland Yard, plenty of uniformed officers from here at 27 Savile Row, and our mob from upstairs at Homicide and Serious Crime Command. And every one of them was struggling to understand how sexual slavery could be happening in the most exclusive residential address in London.
Pat Whitestone was standing on a small stage in front of a massive HDTV.
She was as bright-eyed and lucid as I had ever seen her.
‘We are looking at a £20 million house that nobody owns,’ she told the room. ‘A five-storey lateral conversion on the north side of Eaton Square that is among the frozen assets of an overseas national suspected of laundering dirty money by buying London property.’
She hit a button on her iPad and the cream-columned Regency terrace of Eaton Square appeared on the big screen behind her.
‘The owner of the property is a mid-ranking civil servant currently living on a government salary of fifty potatoes a month back in the old country. The house is currently unused apart from the basement. And that’s where we are going because we have had two separate reports that the basement is being used for the purpose of sexual slavery.’ A beat. ‘Eaton Square is a good choice,’ she said, answering the unspoken question. ‘Many of the local residents are older people who have spent a lifetime accumulating wealth and most of them have a place in the countryside or abroad or both.’
She glanced back at the cream-coloured terrace on the big TV screen.
‘Many of the foreign owners are frequently absent,’ she said. ‘Eaton Square is just their London base. Those people – you can’t really say they actually live anywhere. So Eaton Square makes sense for all those reasons. It’s quiet, discreet and full of empty property. Perfect for a pop-up brothel. If these big mansions stay empty – and as far as I can tell, nobody has plans to fill them with the homeless – then we will see a lot more of them being used for illegal activities.’
She touched her iPad again.
Jessica Lyle’s face filled the screen.
‘This is Jessica Lyle, the woman who was abducted by two unknown assailants on a private estate in Hampstead. We believe Jessica is the woman they are holding in Eaton Square. I wish I could tell you more. I don’t know if the men inside are armed. I don’t know how many of them there are. And I don’t know how much of a fight they are likely to put up when you go in there and point an assault rifle in their face. But I can tell you with total certainty that they are holding a young woman in there against her will.’
She nodded briskly.
‘And we’re going to get her out,’ she said, and shielded her eyes as she stared at the back of the room. ‘SFO Rose? Jackson?’
The tall, light-skinned black man I was standing next to pushed himself from the wall and strode to the stage.
Jackson Rose. The closest I had ever got to a brother. I had known Jackson longer than I had known anyone in the room. In fact, I had known him longer than I had known anyone in my life.
He addressed his Specialist Firearms Officers.
‘We will be going in through the tradesmen’s entrance at the side of the house where there is some kind of metal grille over the door. So our method of entry will be by Benelli rather than the big key.’
He meant they would blow the door open with a 12-gauge Benelli M4 shotgun rather than smashing it down with a battering ram.
‘We understand there is at least one more metal grille inside the premises, so the big key will be used once we’ve gained entry.’
A woman’s voice from the middle of the room. One of the SFOs in their grey paramilitary kit.
‘What sort of grille is it, skipper?’ she said.
‘It sounds like a cage,’ he said, his face impassive.
The audience reflected on that, everyone thinking about the woman who was being held against her will in there, and everyone wondering what kind of luck they would have when we went inside. Because even when you know with total certainty that you are about to face the scum of the earth, you never know a thing about your luck.
That’s the great central mystery in the life of a police officer.
Your luck.
‘Look after yourself and each other out there,’ Jackson said, and then he nodded at Whitestone. He was done.
‘Let’s bring her home,’ he said.
19
‘There’s some new poison in the world,’ Jackson Rose said in the back of the unmarked drop-off van. ‘It wasn’t like this before our time.�
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His shots were doing the final checks on their kit. You could smell the fresh gun oil on their Sig Sauer MCX assault rifles.
Jackson and I were next to the back doors, crouched by a small black-and-white monitor relaying images from the camera hidden in the roof of the van. The screen was split into nine live CCTV images. It is only two miles from Mayfair to Belgravia. With the blues-and-twos screaming, the world was getting out of our way.
‘There were always places where women were sold,’ Jackson said. ‘Places where women were exploited, bullied, bought and sold. But there was never anywhere quite like this, was there? I don’t understand it, Max. It feels like there is some new sickness in the world that was never here before. A place where men can buy a woman that doesn’t want them, where men can buy a woman who is not for sale. I never thought I would live to see these things, but here they are.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s like some sick fantasy someone decided to act out and I can’t even begin to explain it to myself.’
‘They call it behavioural contagion,’ I said, glad to have him beside me, glad to have him to talk to, happy to face the world with him by my side. ‘The head doctors,’ I said. ‘They call it behavioural contagion when people see some line being crossed – self-harming, starving themselves, hurting a woman – and they think it gives them permission to cross that line too.’
‘But that still doesn’t explain it,’ said Jackson Rose.
‘No,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t explain it.’
The driver half-turned to call over her shoulder.
‘ETA for entry team is one minute,’ she said.
We turned into Eaton Square, and entered the stillness that you only find in the realm of serious money. Knocking on for the middle of morning, and nothing was moving out there.
And then I saw him.
The elderly concierge in gunmetal-grey uniform staring at the perfect sky.
He could not stop looking at the sky. It was another beautiful day. Another glorious day in the city. But there was something wrong with the summer sky.
I looked through one of the peepholes drilled in the side of the van and saw that a growing black cloud was staining the cloudless blue.
There was smoke pouring out of somewhere that I couldn’t see, and it was turning the blue sky black, the shades of an old bruise.
And as we slowed for our target address, I saw the smoke was billowing from the basement of the £20 million house that nobody owned. I did not need to check the address because I felt my stomach twist with a terrible knowledge.
They had heard us coming.
The man came tumbling out of the smoke as the first of the SFOs were jumping from the back of the van.
‘Stop! Armed police! Stand still!’
A tall, gangling streak of a man, pale-faced with panic, falling forward, his mouth gawping open with shock, as if the fire he had started had grown quicker than he’d been prepared for. Assault rifles were shouldered and aimed at his centre of mass but he kept on coming, falling more than running, more afraid of the fire behind him than the guns in front of him.
‘Stand still now!’ Jackson said, taking half a step forward.
The man went down to his knees.
Then he was being forced on his face by a couple of shots, and Joy Adams pulled his arms behind his back and snapped on the cuffs as another man came out of the smoke.
This one was squat and broad with a nose that had been broken on multiple occasions and he had a petrol can in one hand and a cheap plastic light in the other, his thumb pressed down and the flame flickering in the early sunlight.
‘Kthehem! Kthehem!’
Which is Albanian for back the fuck up.
Which is the first thing you learn in Albanian.
His mouth was still moving with the threat when a single shot split the day.
It went on and on, ringing in the back of my brain, the single Sig Sauer MCX round fired by SFO Jackson Rose, and the squat man with the petrol can and the plastic lighter went down, his eyes blank before he hit the ground.
The top of the can was off and he landed in a puddle of petrol that made a sound like a sudden rush of wind and, all at once, the flames engulfed him.
You could smell the flesh burning. Someone was screaming. It was the man who had surrendered, howling as he saw his friend’s face turning black in the fire, attempting to get to his feet until one of the shots bounced the butt of an assault rifle off the back of his skull and he went down and did not move. And then there was the hiss of the foam from the fire extinguisher and, mixed up with that, there was new screaming coming from somewhere else.
Somewhere in the house.
A woman’s voice.
I pushed past a pair of uniformed officers in PASGT helmets who were shouting something I could not understand as they emptied the fire extinguishers they were holding over the burning man. Then I was in the smoke, my left hand brushing the cream-coloured brick of the house, looking for the door, then finding the door, closed but unlocked after the men had fled their fire, the smoke thicker here, and all at once in my eyes and my throat and my nose, choking me, sickening me.
This is how you died in a fire, I knew. The smoke suffocated you before the flames ever had a chance to reach you.
I went deeper into the house.
The screaming had stopped.
The air was a black, churning fog. And then it was something else, an unbroken, unmoving mass. Blacker still, and thicker. I was moving down a corridor. I plunged deeper into the smoke and I did not want to die.
There were stairs down to what had once been a kitchen. I was at the top of them.
And through the smoke, thinning now that I was out of the corridor and the roof was suddenly higher, I saw that I was at the top of a staircase that led down to a dungeon.
I stopped halfway down the stairs, retched and cursed, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and carried on to the basement.
I saw the flames licking the skirting board in the basement, burning it black, but the houses of the rich do not burn as easily as the houses of the poor and the basement had not ignited as quickly as the men had hoped and expected.
And now I saw what they had tried to burn.
There were three cages down here.
And I saw that in each of the cages there was a woman.
One was shaking the cage door.
One was on her knees, gagging on the smoke.
And one was not moving.
‘Ju lutem!’ the woman still standing begged me.
And that was Albanian too.
Please.
‘Get down! Get down!’ I shouted at them, because smoke rises, and the closer you are to the ground the more likely you are to find oxygen.
I tore at the nearest cage with my hands.
It did not move. I screamed into the black fog that covered the stairs.
‘We need that shotgun down here now!’
Whitestone came down the stairs, her hands covering her streaming eyes.
When she took her hands away, she saw the women in the cages.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she said.
I shook the cage door and cried out again for help because I knew I could not budge it, I knew a battering ram or a Benelli shotgun was needed and I could feel the sweat streaming down my body inside the stab-proof jacket.
Then there were shots moving through the black smoke and into the basement and one of them carried the bosher battering ram, its red paint almost completely worn away by time, slamming it expertly against the lock of the first cage but only putting a deep dent in the metal bars.
Then there were shots everywhere, and one of them had a semi-automatic Benelli shotgun.
‘Firing!’ he shouted and fired his Benelli shotgun and took a pace left and shouted ‘Firing!’ again, and then another pace left and the same warning, ‘Firing!’ and each time he fired, a cage door sprang open.
And then there were more bodies around us, and I saw what Whitestone had s
een.
One dead woman.
One dying woman.
And, as we watched, the third, the one who had spoken to me, began to collapse because smoke kills you quickly, because it only takes somewhere between two and ten minutes to die from smoke inhalation.
Three women under lock and key who were meant to burn with the rest of this place.
Three women in this corner in hell.
Three women.
But none of them was Jessica Lyle.
20
We sat on the steps of West End Central, Whitestone and Adams and me, coughing up the black filth from our lungs, dabbing at our raw eyes with bottled water, craving fresh air and sky after being in that basement.
‘I want to talk to them,’ Frank Lyle said.
He stood before us with the look of a sick animal.
No, a dying animal.
Whitestone put on her glasses and squinted up at him. There was a black streak on one side of her face.
I stood up.
‘Mr Lyle,’ I began.
He held up a large hand, ordering silence.
‘I’m talking to the organ grinder, not the monkey,’ he told me. He nodded at Whitestone. ‘The pimps and the girls,’ he said. ‘I want to see them.’ He looked towards the lobby of West End Central. ‘I know they’re in there.’ He looked as though he had not slept well for a long time. ‘At least that stinking Albanian pimp must be,’ he said.
‘There was no sign of Jessica in that building,’ I said, and I kept talking even though he was still looking at the organ grinder and not the monkey. ‘We found five Albanian nationals. Two men holding three women. One of the men was shot dead at the scene. One of the women we found in the basement was dead on arrival at the hospital. The surviving man will be interviewed when the translator arrives. He can’t speak English.’