‘Did you get any names from Jessica?’ Slider asked Connolly.
‘Yeah, boss, but it’s first names only, so it’s not much help. And she doesn’t know where any of the girls live. It looks as though the way they run it, it’s like separate cells. Whoever brings the girl in runs her, no one else has any contact. Keeps it nice and tight.’
‘And minimum phone records,’ Hart added. ‘They were careful.’ She grimaced. ‘Lotta reputations to be busted wide open, if that “donors” list is anything to go by.’
‘Jessica wasn’t much help there,’ Connolly said. ‘She wouldn’t recognize anyone from the photos.’
‘Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?’ Atherton asked.
‘I’d say she’s too scared. Wouldn’t pick herself out from a row o’ mirrors,’ said Connolly.
‘We’ll have to see what Shannon can do,’ Slider said. He stood up and stretched crackingly. ‘I’d better get back in there. Don’t want her to go off the boil.’
‘Do you want me to come with you, boss?’ Swilley asked.
‘No, I’ll keep Hart. She’s used to her now. Are you all right, Hart?’
‘Yeah, boss,’ said Hart. ‘Gotta see it through. I want to get these bastards.’
They had managed to get photographs – not all of the best quality, but still – of all the people on the donors list, plus Marler and Peloponnos. Shannon leafed through them, blank-eyed, not really looking. ‘I don’t know any of them.’
‘I know you’re scared, love,’ said Hart, ‘but you got to help us. We got to put these people behind bars, so they can’t hurt anyone else.’
Shannon’s lip stuck out, and she stared defiantly at the wall. Slider could see she was trembling lightly.
‘Jessica’s already helped us,’ he said. ‘We know most of them now. We just need your confirmation.’ He used a matter-of-fact tone, as though it was hardly important. ‘For instance,’ he said, drawing out Gideon Marler’s picture, ‘we know this is Golden Eagle.’
For a moment his whole universe held its breath. Despite his convictions, what if he had the wrong man, the wrong house, the wrong parties?
And then Shannon expired a sigh, like someone letting go of a long-held pain. ‘Yeah,’ she said.
Slider controlled his own breath. ‘And this,’ he said, showing Peloponnos’s, ‘is Otter.’
‘Yeah,’ said Shannon. She touched the picture with a forefinger. ‘Did he really jump under a train?’
‘Yes,’ said Slider.
She pronounced his epitaph. ‘He weren’t a bad bloke.’
‘Now, how about these others,’ Slider said briskly. She still seemed reluctant. He pushed Giles Canonbury’s photo towards her. ‘What about this man?’
She sighed one last time. ‘That’s Cobra,’ she said. She seemed to have given up now. She went through them slowly, almost wearily. Some she recognized, but did not know their code name. Some she wasn’t sure about – thought she recognized them, but wasn’t sure. And one she looked at a long time, her lower lip between her teeth.
‘Who’s that?’ Slider asked. ‘Who’s that, Shannon?’ Her answer was inaudible. ‘Say it again, please.’
‘Cheetah,’ she said.
Slider heard Hart take a sharp breath. He made a small movement of his hand to still her.
And then, her voice stronger, Shannon cried, ‘That’s Cheetah. That’s the bastard that killed Kaylee.’ Large tears welled up in her eyes. ‘Who is he?’ she demanded shrilly. ‘Why’s he wearing that uniform? What is he, an airline pilot?’
It made sense, Slider thought dully, not only of how they had kept the thing so secret so long, but of why it had been so extra, super necessary to do so. Cheetah, it seemed, was Assistant Commissioner Derek Millichip. It might well spell the worst trouble he had yet been in.
Porson was stationary with horror. He had come in after the first news, in time to hear from Slider’s own lips the latest evidence from poor Shannon Bailey.
‘Oh my good Gawd,’ was all he said, but it was the way he said it.
‘We can’t let this go,’ Slider said, when the silence had extended itself too long.
Porson looked at him sharply. ‘It’s not up to you, is it? This is way above your pay grade, laddie. Mine too. We can’t touch this. This is a tanker-load of toxic waste. This’ll burn your hands off right down to your socks.’
‘Sir—’
Porson thumped his fists down onto the desk and leaned on them, poking his jaw aggressively at Slider. ‘Don’t “sir” me! Do you know what you’re suggesting? A child abuse sex ring made up of all the top names in society, protected by an assistant commissioner of police? Can you even begin to imagine the shitfest this’ll cause? The media storm? Do you think these people are going to lie down and take it from a CID inspector with a teenage crack whore for a chief witness?’ His voice went off the scale, and he had to bring it back down again. ‘Do you seriously think the CPS would contemplate bringing a case like this? Even if you had Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa swearing on a stack of Bibles they were actually there and saw it all, they still wouldn’t touch it. And do you know what they would do to the officer suicidal enough to bring it up?’
Slider waited for the reverberations to stop before saying quietly, ‘They have to be stopped.’
Porson breathed heavily through his nose. ‘They’ll be stopped, all right – a sharp word from the right direction in the right ear. Without bringing the whole smelly mess out into the light. Without trashing the reputation of the service. Think of the public confidence crisis! There’s MPs here, a High Court judge. “Not in the public interest”, that’s what the CPS’d say, if anyone was mad enough to let you present this bucket of nucular waste as a case.’
‘We can’t let them eliminate Shannon, the way they eliminated Kaylee,’ Slider said. ‘And other girls will come forward. You know these abuse scandals can’t be contained once they start to leak out. Look at Dolphin Square. The more we try to contain it, the worse we look when it all comes out. That’s the real public confidence crisis.’
Porson regarded him for a long time, and seemed to grow older as he did it. ‘Let’s cut to the cheese. You’re not going to let this go, are you?’ he said quietly.
‘I can’t,’ said Slider.
‘You’ll make sure the press find out. Even if it means your job.’ Slider didn’t answer that. ‘Very well,’ Porson said without joy. ‘Get your stuff together, everything you’ve got, line it all up. Make it good. And be ready to duck when the spit hits the spam.’
Slider stood his ground. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘it’s Saturday. There might be another party tonight.’
Porson’s eyebrows shot towards where his hair had once been. ‘Good God, you’re not thinking we ought to mount a raid?’
‘There’ll be underage girls being abused, not to mention illegal drugs. Can we really turn a blind eye towards all that?’
Porson seemed to withdraw inside his face, and became cold. Official. ‘Leave it with me,’ he said.
All of them who had come in worked frantically to get the evidence together in a coherent narrative. Connolly and Hart took statements from the two girls. Atherton assembled the Peloponnos connection. Swilley collated the telephone records. Slider put together Mrs Havelock Symonds’s complaints and what Superintendent Geddes had said about orders from on high to ignore them.
McLaren brought his ANPR results. ‘I’ve got Marler’s SUV early hours of Sunday, all the way down the A40, from the West Cross roundabout to the Denham roundabout, where he turns off.’
‘But that’s the way he’d go home,’ Slider pointed out wearily.
‘Yes, guv, but there’s a good, clear image from the Denham roundabout camera where you can see into the motor, and it’s not Marler. It’s that sidekick of his driving – David Easter. He’s on his own in there.’ He looked hopefully at Slider. ‘It’s suggestive, guv, innit?’
There was a lot that was suggestive, Slider thought, but suggesti
on didn’t feed the bulldog. There were too many holes. And when it came to Kaylee’s death, all they had was Shannon; and the opposition would call her an unreliable witness. A raid on tonight’s party – if there was one – would be the solution, give them all the evidence they needed, net all the guilty in one snatch. But he hadn’t the power to authorize that. Porson would have to take it higher up for the Fiat to go out.
‘If we’d had time to get after those cab drivers …’ Atherton said.
‘You can be making a start,’ Slider said. ‘Take McLaren with you.’
‘Don’t you want to wait and hear what the commander decides?’
Slider didn’t answer directly. ‘Any evidence you manage to gather won’t be wasted.’
His stomach was churning, thinking of what might happen, and what he might have to do. The very fact of sending the stuff up to Hammersmith could result in an alert going out. You didn’t know who knew who, or what. They might cancel tonight’s party, cutting off the chance to bag the villains. They could shut down the ring and start it up somewhere else – they might even have done that before. And as for Shannon; as the only person who could implicate Millichip, who in turn was the only person whose removal would expose the rest to prosecution, what chance would she have on the outside? And he had promised to protect her.
The lure of the option to do nothing had never been stronger. And anyway, who did he think he was – the Caped Crusader?
Again he thought, how did we get to this place? Where men in positions of responsibility would have sex with children simply to scratch a lascivious itch, careless of what it did to the children?
And if he and people like him turned away … What was it Yeats said? ‘The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’
Porson had urged him to think of his family, but that was the trouble – he did. And his daughter in particular. Every man subconsciously dreaded the deflowering of his daughter, even when it came garlanded with respectable marriage to a nice boy. But this … He thought of Kaylee, fuelled by vodka and cocaine and the excitement of thinking she was all grown up. Kaylee, whom nobody had ever taught better. And Tyler. And Shannon. Unloved girls, there just to be used. He couldn’t bear it. It made him want to …
He found his fists painfully clenched, and deliberately relaxed them. Then he pulled a file towards him, looked up Mrs Havelock Symonds’s number, and reached for his phone.
NINETEEN
And Besides, The Wench is Dead
Porson, back from Hammersmith, sent for him. He looked grave, and Slider’s heart would have sunk if it was not already more scuppered than the Belgrano.
‘I’ve passed the whole thing on to Commander Carpenter,’ he said. He seemed inclined to leave it like that, but Slider’s sturdy attention made him add, ‘He wasn’t best pleased.’
Slider could imagine it. To the man who loved spreadsheets, good crime figures, positive reports and shining for his superiors, Porson bearing this gift would have been as welcome as Herod in Mothercare.
‘And?’ he asked.
Porson was irritated. ‘You can’t expect a snack decision on a thing like that! Good God, man, don’t you realize what’s entrailed? If they take it forward, it’ll involve the DPP, the CPS, the IPCC, SCD5, the Home Secretary – a special task force’ll have to be set up—’
‘Did you say “if” they take it forward?’ Slider interrupted.
Porson, for once in his life, looked shifty. ‘I can’t tell you what they’ll decide. Not my providence – nor yours either. There are imprecations, considerations, got to weigh up what’s in the best interests—’
‘You mean they’re going to bury it?’
Porson scowled. ‘Don’t go jumping to conclusions! That’s just like you, Slider, always thinking everyone’s out to shaft you.’
‘Not me, sir.’
‘Oh, what then? Justice?’ Porson sounded ironic. ‘Leave justice to the bloody lawyers, that’s not our business. Law enforcement, that’s what we’re in.’
‘Then let’s enforce it,’ Slider said. ‘A raid on the party house tonight—’
‘You know I can’t authorize that. Besides, there may not be a party.’
Slider stared at him. ‘You mean,’ he said at last, ‘they’ll be tipped off?’
‘Oh, what do you care,’ Porson snapped, ‘as long as it’s stopped?’ Slider didn’t answer that. Porson knew what he cared, and cared the same himself. ‘My hands are tied,’ Porson went on. ‘I’ve done all I can do, and so have you, bringing it to their attention. Now someone else has to make the decisions.’
‘And what about Shannon?’ Slider asked.
Porson sighed, but held his gaze. ‘They know we know,’ he said. ‘If anything happened to her, they’d know we’d be straight after them.’
‘It would be too late for her, though, wouldn’t it?’ Slider said. And he doubted, in any case, if that were true. If they weren’t to be called to account for Kaylee, why Shannon?
‘Look,’ said Porson, ‘you’re getting yourself all airiated for nothing. They probably will take it forward – or some part of it, anyway. It’ll be put a stop to, you can bet on that. And certain people will be out of a job.’
‘Out of a job? We’re talking about murder, sir.’
‘You don’t know that. No good evidence for that. Look, there may be prosecutions, I don’t know. Just let it go, now, laddie. You’ve done your bit, now leave it for others to look into.’
‘Sir,’ said Slider woodenly.
Porson cocked an eye, in which kindliness and exasperation held equal sway. ‘That’s official,’ he said. ‘They’ll look into it, you forget it.’
‘Sir.’
‘Go home, Slider,’ said Porson. ‘You shouldn’t even be in today. Go home to your family, see your kid, have a drink, watch some telly. Veg out. That’s what I’m going to do. Bar the kid, bit,’ he added, with an attempt to lighten the atmosphere. His only daughter was married and lived in Swindon. Well, somebody had to.
‘Sir,’ said Slider a third time. He turned and trudged to the door.
‘You are going home?’ Porson asked sharply as he reached it.
‘Just a couple of things to tidy up first,’ said Slider.
Hart took Shannon and Jessica home. Shannon said she wanted to stay with Jessica, and thinking how easy it would be for a strange man to enter Dakota’s flat, Slider thought it a good idea.
Hart saw them inside, warned them not to answer the door to anyone they didn’t know, gave them her card. ‘You worried about anything, any time, you ring me. I’ll have a car round here before you can say Jack Robinson.’
‘You think they’re gonna come after us?’ Shannon asked. She looked almost too exhausted to be scared.
‘No, I don’t think so. It’s just a precaution, just for a few days. Once we round ’em up …’ She had heard, of course, about the commander’s command, to forget the whole thing, and had a healthy cynicism about whether there would be serious action taken. But words would be had and warnings would be issued. The cloud would pass over.
And besides, if Shannon’s statement wasn’t taken seriously, she would be in no danger, would she? Hart left them, and went downstairs to the basement flat to engage Anita’s help in watching over the girls, which Anita was more than willing to do. She even eyed Hart with respect when she suggested it.
‘I got a baseball bat in mah wardrobe,’ she said with relish. ‘Nobody gonna get past me.’
Shand Account Cabs had around thirty drivers, some full-time, some called in on a more casual basis when work was heavy. Atherton and McLaren had done little more than get a list of them all, and talk in roundabout terms to the boss and the dispatchers who were on duty, trying to get a feeling for whether anyone knew anything about the parties and the girls. It would be a long and painstaking job to interview every one of the drivers. Atherton phoned in to see if they should start that job tonight, given that it was after six already, and Slide
r called them back in.
‘That’s enough for today.’
‘OK,’ said Atherton. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll head straight home. I’ve got a date tonight, and theatre performances start early.’ He expected Slider to ask who it was this time, or rib him in some way, but Slider only said fine, he would see him on Monday. ‘Are you all right?’ Atherton asked.
‘Of course. Why not?’
‘You sounded a bit distracted. Any word from on high?’
‘Nothing definite,’ said Slider, and rang off.
Everyone had gone home. The department took on that unnerving feeling, when the phones don’t ring, and the occasional distant sounds are magnified to significance. Slider was alone, sitting at his desk, in the glow from his desk light. Beside him, the open door into the dark main office yawned like the mouth of Erebus.
He went over and over the accumulated paperwork, seeing the larger pattern, trying to work out how more and better evidence could be obtained to fill in the gaps and make it a proper case. Of course, if there was an official investigation, more girls would come forward. The ring members would be identified. But Shannon remained the only witness to Kaylee’s death – Kaylee, where it all started. He felt, as he so often did in these circumstances, a responsibility to her. He had taken up the cudgels on her behalf, and now he was being asked to lay them down unused. It would have been better, of course, if he had not allowed idle curiosity to lead him out to Harefield in the first place. She would have gone down as an RTA – and who would have cared? Then the shit storm he could sense heading his way would not have happened.
Joanna was doing a concert; George was long in bed, with his father and Lydia sitting in, probably on the sofa by now watching something. They both liked quiz shows – fortunately there never seemed a moment of the day when there wasn’t one showing – and between them they knew all the answers. Once he had said, ‘You’re so good, why don’t you go on?’ and Dad had given him a look and said, ‘We don’t do that sort of thing.’ ‘But you’d win the prize,’ Slider had said. ‘I’m happy earning my way,’ Dad had said. ‘I don’t want prizes.’
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