by Jack Slater
‘They can’t release your brother, Southam. Come to that, nor can I now. He’s in the system.’
‘You can drop the charges.’
Pete grunted. ‘I wasn’t the only copper there when he was nicked. There was a whole team of us. If I dropped the charges against him, they damn sure wouldn’t.’
‘Just get him out or I’ll start sending bits of your boy to your house. One a day until I run out of bits or he runs out of blood.’
The red-hot rage boiled up in Pete’s brain, swamping the nausea along with his senses and his reason. ‘Listen, you sick fuck…’
‘Twenty-four hours,’ Southam snapped over him. ‘That’s when I make the first cut.’
The line clicked dead. Pete heard it and growled, deep in his throat.
‘Boss?’
Pete ignored Ben as he tried to regain a modicum of control.
‘Boss? Are you OK?’
Pete was concentrating on his breathing, long and deep, in and out through his nose. His eyes were closed. One hand was on the roof of the car, the other down at his side, limply hanging onto the phone.
‘What is it?’ Ben sounded closer now. Standing in front of him.
Pete opened his eyes. ‘Steve Southam,’ he grunted. ‘Threatening Tommy if we don’t release his brother.’
‘Jesus. What are we going to do?’
Pete had been telling Southam the truth. He was the arresting officer, but cases of assaulting a police officer were brought by the individual officer, separately to whatever other charges may have led to the encounter. If Pete could drop the main charges against Adrian Southam, the others would stick. And Fast-track wouldn’t hear of it anyway. Pete could hear him now, spouting from the book of regulations as if it were part of the Bible – ‘Thou shalt not negotiate with criminals or terrorists.’
And Pete knew perfectly well that was one regulation that was right and proper. If Adrian Southam was released it would cost a lot of people a lot of suffering and many of them their lives. But this was Tommy he was talking about. His flesh and blood. His son. His job was to protect and serve the public but his every instinct as a father was to protect his family above all else.
What the hell was he going to do?
‘Do you want me to drive?’ asked Ben.
‘Eh?’ Pete blinked.
‘Do you want me to drive, boss? You’re in no fit state.’
‘I’m all right.’
‘No, you’re not. And that’s no criticism. It’s only natural. Give me the keys, I’ll get us back to the station while you think it through.’
‘There’s nothing to think through,’ Pete snapped. ‘There’s no choice in the matter, is there?’
‘There’s one,’ Ben said.
‘What?’
‘Find the evil bastard before he can carry through on his threat.’
‘Which we can’t do because it’s not our case.’
‘Sod that. It’s your son being threatened. We’re behind you all the way. All of us. And that’s a promise.’
‘No,’ Pete shook his head. ‘It’s one thing my career getting screwed. It’s another thing for the rest of you. I can’t agree to that.’
‘There’s nothing to agree to,’ Ben stated. ‘It’s not a choice we’re offering. We’re in, like it or not.’
‘What about the others? Don’t they get a say?’
‘They’ve already had it. We talked it through before you came in this morning.’
Pete shook his head again. He appreciated what Ben was saying. At any other moment in his life, it would have brought a lump to his throat, but right then his emotions were in such turmoil he couldn’t feel anything but the desperation of Tommy’s situation and his own anger and frustration at not being able to react directly to it.
‘Keys?’ Ben held his hand out and Pete handed them over without resistance. Ben stepped past him and dropped into the driver’s seat, forcing him to walk around the car and get in the other side.
Pete sat in numb silence as Ben drove down Pennsylvania Road. They had almost reached the inner ring road before he said with a hollow voice and an empty heart, ‘How are we going to find him?’
‘I don’t know yet. But we will. We have to.’
‘Twenty-four hours, he said. Then he’ll start cutting Tommy.’
‘Shit. No pressure, then.’ Ben put his foot down hard on the throttle, flipped on the blue lights and accelerated hard down the short stretch of dual carriageway to the roundabout where he pulled the car hard round into Heavitree Road, tyres squealing as they slid on the warm tarmac. He almost hit an on-coming car, missing it by inches. The driver slammed on his brakes, looking at the same time terrified and enraged, but neither Pete nor Ben cared. Ben accelerated again, gave the siren a brief ‘whoop,’ as he went up the side of the white-rendered station and pulled around into a parking space. ‘Right,’ he said as he switched everything off. ‘No time to waste.’
Pete’s brain still hadn’t kicked back in as they went in through the rear door and through the custody suite.
‘Nothing for me, this trip?’ asked the burly custody sergeant. ‘That’s not like you.’
Pete followed Ben past the desk without responding, barely aware of the comment.
At the top of the stairs, Ben turned and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Do us a favour, boss?’
‘Huh?’
‘Get us some coffees?’ Ben nodded towards the kitchenette further along the corridor.
‘Why?’
‘Private conversation needed.’
‘Don’t you go getting yourselves in trouble on my account,’ Pete argued.
‘We got where we are on your account, boss. We’re all grown-ups. We can make our own informed decisions.’
Pete shook his head. ‘No, I can’t…’
‘Not your choice, boss. Either you get the coffees or the rest of us will. And it’ll be kind of snug with five of us in there. You never know who might feel what.’
Pete grunted. ‘Try that with Jane and she’ll have your arm off, space or no space.’
‘Exactly. So, better you in there than us. Health and safety at work and all that.’
‘Huh.’ Pete knew when he wasn’t going to win. ‘You’ll make someone a good wife, the way you argue.’
‘Needs must,’ Ben said and opened the door to the squad room.
When Pete arrived with six mugs of coffee his team were waiting for him and so was Mark Bridgman. ‘If I’d known, I’d brought an extra one,’ he said to his fellow Detective Sergeant.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Bridgman replied. ‘Ben’s told us what’s going on. You know you’ve got our full support, don’t you? All of us, my team included.’
‘I do. And thanks, all of you. But what are we going to actually do? We’ve got twenty-four hours – more like twenty-three now – until he starts…’ His throat clogged.
‘We know,’ Bridgman stepped in.
‘The first thing is to trace that call to your phone. If we can get a number, we can track its location,’ Ben said. ‘Your smart-phone could get us the number if the call had come direct. Seeing as it didn’t, it’s a bit more complicated, but it’s still possible. I’ll have to go down to the front office.’
‘Go. This will be waiting when you get back.’ Pete put down the coffees and started passing them out.
‘Give mine to DS Bridgman,’ Ben said. ‘I might be a while.’
Bridgman took a sip as Ben headed for the door. ‘If Ben can do that and we can track Southam down through it, we’ll have him.’
As Pete sipped his own drink, he felt the first glimmer of hope since he’d received the call.
*
‘There.’ Dick pointed to one of the photos Pete and Ben has rescued from Joe Hanson’s house. ‘She’s in one of the sets. I’d swear it.’
Pete was carefully laying the new set of pictures out on his desk and photographing them so they could be input to the computer system, making the task of matching them to w
hat they already had that much easier. And despite his warning about the contents, Dick was watching over one shoulder while Jane had come around the desks to look over his other. He continued laying them out, nine at a time. Then Jane stopped him.
‘I recognise her. Don’t know if it’s from Hanson’s other pictures, though.’
‘Where, then?’ Pete asked.
‘Not sure. She might be one of the mispers we were looking through.’
‘OK. We’ll see when we get them all in the system.’
Pete finished laying out his third batch of nine pictures and picked up his phone to photograph them, one at a time. It looked like he was about a third of the way through the stack. Dick had already asked how many there were.
‘I don’t know,’ Pete had told him. ‘I don’t want to handle them anymore than I can help.’
Dick had nodded and said no more. Evidence preservation was vital. Any prints or DNA on these would confirm who had handled them in the past, removing any possibility of Hanson claiming they weren’t his although they’d been found in his house.
Now he emailed the pictures to himself and picked up the photographs with gloved hands to add them to the smaller stack on his left before continuing the task. The door opened across from him and Ben returned to the squad room.
‘Where’ve you been?’ asked Jane. ‘Slide off home for some lunch, did you?’
‘I wish. I’ve been in the back office, tracing that call from Southam.’
Pete looked up, his whole body going still. ‘And?’
‘I did it. He was using an unregistered phone but, having got the number, that made no difference. He called you from within a few yards of your house, boss.’
‘Jesus!’
‘He’s not there now,’ Ben added quickly.
Pete stopped himself from throwing down the photos in his hand and running for the door. ‘Where is he now, then?’ he asked, realising how ridiculous such a move would have been on several levels.
‘He must have been there deliberately to add impact in case we managed to trace the call,’ Ben said. ‘What he doesn’t seem to realise is that you’ve got to actually dismantle a phone to stop us tracking it - not just switch it off. His latest location, as of about seven minutes ago, was four miles north of the city and he’d been there for twenty-three minutes.’
‘So, he’s found somewhere to hole up.’ Pete’s whole body itched to get out there after the man, but he knew he couldn’t. It was one of the most frustrating feelings he’d ever endured. ‘Tell Mark,’ he said reluctantly. As Ben stepped across to the next bay of desks, he forced himself to continue laying out the next batch of pictures. Working on something else was the only way he could stop himself from not just getting involved but barging in and taking over the case. And the last minute or so had shown him that, despite his best efforts, the situation had indeed impaired his judgement. And more than his judgement – his self-control. He’d maintained it by the skin of his teeth, but that was only because he was here in the squad room, not out there close to his son and the evil bastard who’d taken him.
‘Are you all right, boss?’ Jane asked, a small hand resting on his shoulder.
Pete grunted and shook his head quickly. ‘No,’ he said as, behind him, Bridgman and his team scrambled. ‘Far from it.’
‘They’ll find him,’ Jane reassured him.
‘I bloody hope so.’
‘Have you spoken to the chief?’
‘What for?’
Jane’s lips pursed. ‘I know he can’t allow us to get involved, but he could put more resources into it, in the circumstances.’
‘Mark will do that.’
‘Yeah, but…’ She turned away, heading for the door.
‘Where are you going?’ Pete demanded.
‘For a wee.’
He knew damn well she was lying but he couldn’t stop her and, deep down, he appreciated what she was doing much more than he could express.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
‘If we can track Steven Southam by his mobile, why can’t we do the same for Jonas Hanson?’ Pete asked.
‘Because he hasn’t got one,’ Ben replied. ‘I checked. He took his computer with him. No doubt uses free wi-fi wherever he happens to be. But he hasn’t got a mobile phone anymore. Got rid of it when he retired from work. He never liked them anyway, as I recall. Don’t know why.’
‘And we’ve had no further sightings of him?’
‘Not that I know of. Anyone else?’ He looked around the cluster of tables but received no response. He shrugged. ‘Just a matter of waiting, I suppose. In the meantime, what about those pictures?’
Pete had finished photographing them, uploading them to his computer and sending them on to the rest of the team. He had replaced the packet in its evidence bag and called forensics to come and collect it. His gloves were off and binned, and he’d split the screen on his computer into two side-by side windows, one of them containing the first of the new set of pictures. ‘We need to compare them to everything we’ve got so far. The pictures from the loft, the misper files – all of it.’
‘That’s a hell of a job,’ Dick said.
‘Not the most pleasant, I’ll grant you. But if we split them up, ten at a time each, it shouldn’t take too long.’
It had turned out that there were seventy-nine pictures in their latest find and no two of them were of the same subject.
‘Identification of the victims is the key,’ Pete reminded them. ‘If we can do that, we can find out when and where they were last seen and compare that to Jonas Hanson’s whereabouts at the time. It might be circumstantial, but the weight of circumstantial evidence is evidence in itself: just ask any statistician.’
‘Yeah, you know what they say about statistics, boss,’ Dave said.
‘Lies, damned lies and…’ Ben started.
‘You can prove any bloody thing you want with them,’ Dick put in. ‘And I’m damn sure Hanson’s brief will use that in court.’
‘Maybe, but it doesn’t let us off this particular hook,’ Pete said.
‘I’m not saying it does, boss. Or that it should. I’m just saying we shouldn’t rely on it.’
‘And we’re not going to. We’re detectives, not Cluedo players. Let’s get this done and we can move on to something less unpleasant like tracing his history.’
‘Who’s to say that’s less unpleasant, given what we think he’s been up to?’ asked Jill.
Dave snapped his fingers and pointed at her. ‘What she said.’
‘Nothing, but at least it won’t be so in-your-face.’
Dave tilted his head. ‘Fair point,’ he said as Jane came back into the squad room and headed straight for her chair.
‘Better?’ asked Pete.
‘Huge relief, thanks. And I gather Mark Bridgman’s off out with his team and twelve extras.’
Pete pursed his lips. He wasn’t going to commend her for ignoring what he’d said, but at the same time, he couldn’t complain. She was only doing what she thought was best in the circumstances. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘So, now you’re back, you can take ten of these new pictures and see if you can match them to anyone on the files we’ve already got for the case.’
‘Of course. I take it you’ve already allocated them?’
‘Yep. Yours are in your in-box.’
‘Right.’ She switched on her computer screen and knuckled down, along with everyone else.
*
They were not even half way through their first batch when Mark Bridgman and his team came back in. Pete looked up and met the other man’s gaze. He shook his head slightly and crossed the short distance between them.
‘He was long gone,’ he said, keeping his voice low. ‘Left the phone for us to find. We might get something useful off it, but I doubt it. He doesn’t appear to be stupid.’
We don’t need to admire the bastard, we need to catch him, Pete thought. ‘We know that much. He got away with killing that girl in Bath, didn’t he?’
‘Yeah, but that was years ago and he’s desperate now. He wants his brother out of here. That could push him into a mistake.’
‘It might, but has Tommy got time to wait for it?’
‘If he kills Tommy, he’s got no bargaining chip left,’ Bridgman argued.
‘No, but you know what he said: that could take a while and Tommy would go through a living hell in the meantime.’
Bridgman grimaced, sucking air across his teeth. ‘Yeah. I’m going to get onto the phone providers, see if I can find another phone that was in that same vicinity in the last few hours – apart from ours, of course.’
‘What about CCTV or traffic cameras leading in and out of there? They might give you a timeline.’
‘They might if we knew what he was driving now.’ Bridgman said dubiously.
Pete felt a flash of annoyance. ‘The point of him going out there was its quiet, wasn’t it? How many cars are you expecting to go in and out of the area in the timeframe you’re looking at?’
‘Not too many, when you put it that way.’ He gave Pete a nod and headed for his desk.
Pete turned back to his team, disappointed in Bridgman’s attitude. ‘Right. We’ll come back to this fresh in the morning,’ he decided. ‘No good getting too tired and missing something.’
‘I can’t see us missing anything,’ Dave said. ‘The number of hits so far suggests they’re all on record somewhere.’
Pete tipped his head. They had found most of the girls amongst the collection from Hanson’s loft. Some had been reported missing, but disappointingly few. ‘The thing is, where was he finding these girls? And don’t even think about saying, “All over the place,”’ he added quickly, his eyes on Dave Miles.
Dave’s eyes widened. ‘Would I?’
‘We all know the answer to that,’ Pete said. ‘Maybe a better question, given the spread of locations, is, “How was he finding them?”’
‘Well, they’re a mix of types and… dare I say “conditions”? I mean, some appear to be healthy and well-nourished, others not so much.’
‘I’m in shock,’ Jill declared. ‘Dave Miles asking permission to be politically incorrect? I never dreamed that day would ever dawn.’
‘It’s bloody near dusk, to be fair,’ Dick pointed out. ‘Maybe he’s tired.’