by Jaime Raven
Rosa had told her she’d be in London for two weeks, and they had even talked about doing some other stuff together. With the weekend approaching, Alice had offered to show her around the city. She’d mentioned Oxford Street, Covent Garden, Hyde Park, Trafalgar Square. These were all places that Rosa had heard of and the prospect of visiting them excited her. So too did the thought of sharing the experiences with Alice. It wasn’t something that Rosa usually did because she rarely stayed anywhere longer than one or two nights.
‘I’d like to see Buckingham Palace,’ Rosa said. ‘I’ve seen so many pictures of it.’
Alice giggled. ‘Then that will be the first stop on our tour. Shall we do it on Sunday? Please say yes.’
Rosa giggled back. ‘I don’t see why not.’
They fell silent as sleep crept up on them. Alice was the first to drop off and her breathing became heavier. Rosa succumbed shortly after and as soon as the darkness claimed her so too did the nightmare.
There are three men in the room with her. Two of them are strangers. The third is Enrique, her adoptive father.
He’s told her that they’re his friends and that they’ve been looking forward to meeting her.
‘They didn’t believe me when I told them what a beautiful little girl you are,’ he says. ‘So that’s why I’ve brought you here to their home. So that they can see for themselves.’
Rosa has only just turned eight years old and she’s scared. She thinks she knows what is going to happen to her. The men are going to do horrible things to her and make her do things to them. And if she tries to resist or starts to cry she’ll be hurt.
Enrique usually slaps her face or pinches her cheek so hard it brings tears to her eyes. Sometimes he says that if she doesn’t behave he’ll drive her deep into the forest and leave her there all alone.
Once she said that she was going to tell her aunt and in response he threatened to burn her eyes out with a cigarette.
So she no longer resists or cries or tells him to stop.
But this is the first time he’s introduced her to anyone and she suspects it’s because her aunt is in hospital having something called an appendix taken out of her body.
‘My friends have given me money to buy you some gifts,’ Enrique says. ‘So I want you to show them how grateful you are. Do you understand?’
Rosa nods. Of course she understands, despite her tender age.
‘That’s great,’ Enrique says. ‘Now we will all watch while you take off your clothes.’
Rosa woke up with a start, her face covered in sweat, her heart pounding in her chest.
She hadn’t had that particular dream for a while. But it was always there, lurking inside her mind, a reminder of one of the defining events in her young life. It was when Enrique started sharing her with his friends in return for money, none of which he gave to her.
It happened many times after that. Sometimes it seemed as if she could still feel the pain they inflicted with their hands and teeth and hard cocks.
She got out of bed as quietly as possible so as not to wake Alice, then padded naked into the bathroom and splashed cold water onto her face.
Some of her nightmares were more vivid than others. And a few, like the one she’d just had, were so real that it was like reliving the experience.
After a couple of minutes she climbed back into bed. Alice was still out cold, and her chest was rising and falling with every breath.
Rosa stretched out and closed her eyes, but this time sleep did not come easily. Her mind was suddenly too active and she couldn’t stop her thoughts from shifting to her assignment. And the next target.
She had worked everything out earlier in the hotel. The approach. The escape. The method of execution.
The person she had chosen appeared third on the list that Roy Slack had given to her. The photo she had seen was burned onto her retinas.
The victim’s name was Laura Jefferson, and she was a detective inspector on the organised crime task force. She had a boyfriend named Aidan and a mother named Ruth, and they were also on the list.
Laura Jefferson was a very attractive woman. She had kind eyes and a sensuous mouth.
It seemed a shame to Rosa that by this time tomorrow she’d be dead.
33
Laura
A clap of thunder woke me on Friday morning. When I rolled onto my side I discovered that I was alone in the bed.
The LED light on the digital clock told me it was 6am It meant that I’d managed about three hours of fragmented sleep.
Aidan had been awake when I’d arrived home at just after one. We had talked for a while as my mother snored in the next room.
He told me how worried she was and how he had managed to persuade her to take the day off and drive to Ringwood in the New Forest where she could spend the weekend with her best friend, Sylvia Jones.
I’d said it was a great idea even though the thought of her having to flee her home because she was scared made me shiver.
They were both sitting at the kitchen table when I shuffled in wearing my towelling robe. Mum was already dressed and she told me she had made arrangements with Sylvia.
‘Are you sure that you don’t mind me going, Laura?’ she asked me. ‘Nobody will know I’m there so I’ll be safe.’
Her words triggered a blitz of emotions in me. Guilt. Fear. Shock. A raging sense of impotence.
How could this be happening to my mother? To us? To one of the largest police forces in the world?
It beggared belief, and yet here we were. Living in fear. Wondering who would be next to die.
‘Are you all right, Laura?’
Aidan’s voice snapped me out of myself. I told him I was fine. Just not quite awake.
Then I hugged my mum and told her that I wanted her to go to Sylvia’s.
‘It’s the sensible thing to do,’ I said. ‘I wish I could go with you.’
‘I’m sure Sylvia wouldn’t mind,’ she said.
I shook my head. ‘It’s not possible, Mum. I have to stay here to help find whoever is doing this. And I swear to you that we will. It’s only a matter of time. We’re throwing everything at it. Hundreds of officers are working on the case.’
She already knew almost as much as I did about the murder of Marion Nash. The TV was playing in the background, tuned to the breakfast news on the BBC.
The link between the two killings had been established and they were showing photographs of Mrs Nash and Dave Prentiss. There were also exterior shots of the bookstore in Clapham and a short interview with the Commissioner outside Scotland Yard.
‘I can confirm that Mrs Nash was the wife of a detective chief inspector on the organised crime task force,’ he said. ‘And that she was among those who received the death threat text message.’
In answer to a question from a reporter he was forced to admit that Mrs Nash had not been provided with personal police protection.
‘The issue of how to protect those individuals at risk is being considered as a matter of extreme urgency,’ he said. ‘There will be a press conference later this morning when we’ll be giving more details about the investigation.’
The Commissioner looked exhausted and I doubted that he’d had any sleep.
After his interview they put up a photo of Marion Nash with her husband, which looked as though it had been taken some years ago. My thoughts shifted to Graham and my heart went out to him. How on earth would he cope? His life had been callously ripped apart.
The three of us watched the news in silence for a few minutes and then Mum said that she needed to go home and pack a bag before driving to Ringwood.
Aidan said he would take her and that he’d shower when he got back. Unlike my mother, he intended to go to work at the school.
Neither of us could hold back the tears as we said our goodbyes. I hadn’t seen Mum this distressed in a long time and it really got to me. But I was glad she was going to Ringwood. It was going to be a huge weight off my shoulders. She’d be perfectly safe there. I
was sure of that.
After they’d gone I finished the coffee and did a quick tour of the house, checking the windows and doors. The place wasn’t as secure as it should have been. There was no burglar alarm. No motion-detector lights at the front and back.
The wall at the bottom of the small rear garden was only about five feet high and backed onto an unlit alley that ran between the houses.
Clearly I hadn’t paid enough attention to security and as a police officer I should have. I recalled that when we moved in the landlord had said that he was happy for us to install an alarm and outside lights. But we hadn’t bothered to, partly because we were never sure from one year to the next how long we’d stay. Our intention had always been to buy our own house or flat in a less expensive area.
As I stepped into the shower I made a mental note to arrange for a locksmith to come round at the weekend to make the front and back doors more secure.
We would also put up motion-detector lights that would come on if the man who had murdered Dave Prentiss and Marion Nash decided to approach our house.
Thunder rolled across the sky as I made my way into work. Rain showers lashed the streets, and I was forced to hail a cab from the tube station for the last leg of the journey.
When I walked into the office at nine o’clock it was throbbing with activity. A new whiteboard had been set up with photos of Mrs Nash and the crime scene in Clapham.
My stomach pitched when I saw the poor woman lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood.
‘I’ve never known anything like this,’ Tony Marsden said as he came and stood beside me. ‘We need to catch this fucker before we all end up like that.’
As sensitive as ever, I thought. But he was right. This couldn’t go on.
He looked at me and a line creased his forehead.
‘My money is still on Roy Slack,’ he said. ‘He’s the only villain out there who would dare to take it this far. We all know he thinks he owns this city and that he’s more ruthless than any of the other gang bosses.’
‘My gut’s telling me the same thing,’ I said. ‘But we also know that the guy’s smart enough to make sure we won’t be able to prove anything.’
A fire grew in his eyes. ‘If it was up to me I’d do what the scumbag obviously did to that firearms officer, Hugh Wallis. Just lift him off the street and make him disappear.’
There was nothing worse than knowing, or at least strongly suspecting, that someone was guilty of a crime and not being able to do anything about it.
At nine thirty, Drummond started the first briefing of the day. He began by announcing that four detectives, including Janet Dean, had not turned up this morning. Janet was claiming that she had a hospital appointment. The others said they were having to deal with distraught family members.
I was surprised that so many of the team had actually come in. The eyes of everyone in the room were glazed and haunted. It was clear that trauma and exhaustion were taking their toll.
There had been a couple of developments overnight. Forensics had confirmed that the same gun had been used to kill both Dave Prentiss and Marion Nash. And some CCTV footage showed the killer entering and leaving the bookshop. It was poor quality, though, and therefore not very helpful. As we viewed it on the monitors, I felt my blood surge.
Drummond provided a commentary. ‘It’s from a street camera about thirty metres from the shop. You can see the figure in a long dark overcoat and baseball cap walking into shot from across the road. He pauses briefly outside the shop and then goes in. Just two minutes later he comes out and crosses back over the road. Unfortunately there are no cameras covering the other side. The next person to enter the shop discovered the body.’
Drummond then put up a couple of freeze frames showing magnified images of the figure in the overcoat. But they were far too blurry to distinguish any features and it was impossible even to tell if it was a man or a woman.
‘We’re about to release this to the media,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’ll get lucky and it turns out someone saw where this person went.’
Drummond then said he was about to have a meeting with the Commissioner and other senior officers to discuss the latest text message that had come through last night, telling us that any officers assigned to protect us would also be targeted.
‘The situation is going from bad to worse,’ he said. ‘So until it’s decided how we respond to this I don’t want anybody going anywhere by themselves. A list of all the civilians who received the original text has been passed on to uniform who will be contacting them about their individual situations. We’ll do everything we can to make them safe.’
We were then told that the Commissioner had sanctioned the carrying of firearms by those officers who were authorised to use them.
That was all I needed to hear. As soon as the briefing was over I went to pick up a gun. At the same time I picked up a Taser for good measure and slipped it into my bag.
The pistol I signed out was a Glock 17, and I wore it now in a holster around my waist, cowboy style. It provided a degree of comfort even though I hoped I would never have to use it.
Despite everything that was happening, Drummond said he wanted us to continue doing our jobs. The emphasis had changed, of course. In the short term at least we were no longer focused on breaking up Roy Slack’s empire and finding evidence to bring charges relating to his involvement in organised crime.
Now we had to devote ourselves entirely to the task of finding out who was behind the murders and the threats. Other units within the Met were doing the same – the Murder Investigation Teams in Battersea and Clapham, the National Crime Agency, and the Cyber Crime division.
My remit continued to be to concentrate on Slack himself and to look for chinks in his armour. I started by getting an update from the team who were keeping him under surveillance.
I learned that he left his apartment at Canary Wharf at about six thirty the previous evening and went to his office in Rotherhithe where it appeared he had a meeting with some of the main faces in his organisation.
We hadn’t managed to plant any listening devices in the building so we did not know what was discussed. But we could guess.
When Slack left there he went straight back to his apartment and he was still there apparently.
I wondered if it was worth going to see him again, to question him about Marion Nash’s murder. Probably not, I decided. He would just tell me that he didn’t do it and had no idea who did.
I was aware that a couple of the team were coming round to the view that he might not be involved after all. I’d heard them talking. They weren’t convinced that someone with terminal cancer would unleash a pointless firestorm that would jeopardise their freedom during the final months of their life.
It was a reasonable explanation and one that I felt would gain traction if we weren’t able to link him soon to what was going on.
But I was with Tony Marsden in believing that Slack should remain firmly in the frame. And it wasn’t just because of his track record as a cruel and cold-blooded gang leader. It was also down to his attitude and demeanour on those two occasions when I’d interviewed him. Plus, the way he’d looked at me as he’d answered my questions – like he wanted me to know that he was hiding a huge secret. And challenging me to find out what it was.
Well, I had never been one to shy away from a challenge. So as I started wading once again through the file we had on Slack, it was with a new sense of urgency. I was searching for something, anything, that might have been missed.
An hour later, my eyes strained from staring into the computer screen, I spotted something. It was in the notes relating to Terry Malone, the villain shot dead during the raid on his home by firearms officer Hugh Wallis, who had since disappeared. Malone had been working as a bouncer for Slack at the time.
What intrigued me was a brief reference to a remark made by a police informant who attended Malone’s funeral. He claimed that during the wake in a pub he overhead Slack say t
hat Malone’s death was ‘the final straw’.
I was surprised that this hadn’t been picked up by those officers who’d questioned Slack about Wallis’s disappearance. It certainly hadn’t been mentioned during the formal interview.
But in the context of what was happening now I felt that it could be hugely significant.
And therefore I intended to follow it up.
34
Rosa
‘You’ll never believe this,’ Alice said. ‘There’s been another murder in London.’
Rosa sat up in the bed and rubbed at her eyes with her fingers. She’d been waiting for Alice to return from the kitchen where she’d gone to make some coffee.
‘It’s another bad one,’ Alice went on, placing Rosa’s mug next to her on the bedside table. ‘This time it was a woman and she was married to a detective who worked with the one who was shot the night before.’
Rosa let her jaw drop to give the impression that she was surprised.
‘That’s terrible,’ she said.
‘I know.’ Alice sounded visibly upset. ‘It’s most certainly not what someone on their first visit to this city should have to wake up to.’
Rosa forced a grin.
‘I’m used to it, Alice. You’re forgetting that I’m from Mexico. Murders take place all over the country every day of the week. Believe me, nothing that happens here will shock me.’
‘That’s not the point,’ Alice said, as she got back into bed. ‘I want you to be impressed by this country, this city. If you are then you’re more likely to come back.’
It was such a sweet thing to say and Rosa was touched. She wondered if most English girls were as warm and open as Alice.
‘Do you mind if I switch the television on?’ Alice asked.
‘Of course not.’
It was ten o’clock and they had already had sex, which had been just as good as the time before and the time before that.
Rosa had told Alice that she was due to attend a meeting at midday. But what she really planned to do was prepare for the next kill and the one after that.