Evil in the Land Without

by Colin Cotterill

  "Gentlemen," he said, and took a large swig from his glass. "You're all under arrest."

  There were titters of laughter from the drunks, but an embarrassed silence from the others. It would have been a poor joke in fact, if the French window hadn't slid open at that moment and ten police officers in flack jackets with truncheons in their hands not poured into the room.

  John pressed 'play' on the video machine and the first of five full-length videos recorded from the fire alarm unit at the rear of the room began to play. Of course, they'd already seen the presentation from the first member in real life. But they didn't have time to see the recording because just five minutes into it, they were in the back of the wagon and on their way to New Malden Police Station.

  *

  John sat alone in the living room of the house that nobody actually owned, and poured himself another glass of wine. He still felt sick to the stomach from all the sausages, but it was the thickness of that stomach and the way it hung over his leather belt that made him ideal for the work he did. Nobody had ever suspected him of being a cop. With his one chewed ear, and his vertical red hair, he looked too much like a caricature of a pederast. Funnily, child abusers rarely adhered to the caricature. Most were invisible, normal looking people you would never suspect.

  But it was more than the stomach that made John good for this work. It was his soul that put him ahead of others in the Surrey Child Protection Unit, the CPU. He didn't have one. Oh, he would have argued as a science graduate that nobody had one. He would have produced physiological evidence that there was no compartment provided in the human carcass for such mythology. But everyone who ever knew him, who ever worked with him, was amazed that he could be so cold to the obscenities he saw and heard in his work. John Jessel was an item of machinery. A very effective machine that could perform beautifully and knew no fear, but machinery nevertheless.

  In reality, the afternoon's performance had disturbed him deep down as they always did. But he had been in control of his disgust for these troubled men. He saw no reason to call on his expression or his voice to describe how he felt. His feelings were nobody's business but his own.

  Some argued that the years of work with the CPU team had taken their toll in other ways. He was a thirty-year-old who could look fifty on his bad days. The pleasant-looking young man who had joined the police academy had been replaced by an overweight cop with a shaving disorder and a serious drink problem. He didn't fuss at all with his ginger hair or care whether his clothes were wrinkled, even when he wasn't undercover. He had no close friends, no woman, and no life beyond the CPU. Kids were his investment. He hoped that by giving them all a chance now, they could help to sort out the world later. He hoped he could stop them growing up as unhappy as him.

  The superintendent walked into the room through the open windows and turned off the oil heater. The sickly room had chilled considerably, but cold was one other thing that John didn't feel.

  "Anyone for tennis?" said Yardly in her usual jolly style.

  Emma Yardly was a strapping fifty-year-old woman who wore men's clothes so prettily, nobody would ever think her butch—and of course she wasn't. There was something manly about her face too, but even that she wore sweetly. She looked exactly like somebody's uncle pretending to be a raging queen at a party.

  "I bet you've always wanted to do an entrance like that," said John, now without the Welsh accent. His own speaking voice was deceptively refined, like some historical BBC figure.

  "I was in rep for four years. I've walked in through more French windows than you've had. . . ." She couldn't finish because she was sure John had had excesses of everything.

  "How did we do this time, Em?" He really wanted the case and the evidence to be so convincing he wouldn't have to be slimy John again for a while. His first performance had been caught on micro-cam from the holdall that carried his collection of downloaded kiddy porn. At that show, only two of the ten members present had appeared on the films or slides themselves, and the police lawyer watching the monitor in the van outside had decided there wasn't enough to get a conviction on the others.

  John had suspected as much and, as a first time member, when asked to make a speech at the end of the afternoon, he'd stood up and brazenly suggested they were all chicken. He said he thought this was more of a “hands on” organization—that got a laugh—and he was disappointed that the members weren't producing their own stuff. They protested that many of the photos and videos they had taken themselves, but John said he wouldn't be too “afraid” to appear in his own porn.

  He had thrown this down as a challenge, and although he didn't get much of a response at the time from the slightly hung-over and spent group, he hoped there’d be a better showing this time. And there was. All but one of the members produced material in which they performed, and the public prosecutor in the ice-cream van at the end of the street was delighted. So was the super.

  "You did us proud, John. We've got enough to stuff every one of 'em. We've got enough to search their homes, and I think we'll find evidence that will close these scum down forever."

  Yardly wasn't one to keep her opinions to herself. "You know John, I sometimes wonder if I'm no less pathetic than the blokes we arrested today."

  "What?"

  "I sometimes feel that the pursuit of paedophiles is every bit as perverted as the paedophiles themselves. It's a fixation. I can't enjoy a meal in a restaurant if there's a man in there with a child. There's a 99 percent chance he's a caring parent or uncle, but I'm so fixated on his actions, the way he talks to the kid, I often give myself indigestion. I'm an anti-pervert pervert."

  "You're right." John drained his glass and sidled across to the other end of the coffee table where a different flavour and colour of wine sat in a bottle barely touched. He poured a huge splash into his glass and looked up at his boss. "I think you should resign."

  "I should what?

  "Well, if it worries you that much, you should resign and buy a little needlework shop in the country."

  "John, I think you've had enough to drink. I have to remind you, you're on duty."

  He laughed. She did, too. But she wasn't joking. John's drinking gave her considerable concern. She ordered him to knock back the new glass and led him by the armpit to her car.

  The uniformed driver laughed at the peculiar couple and didn't think once about opening the door and helping John or his boss inside. Once the door was shut, he crunched the gears and sped off to the station.

  When they got there, John would drink several mugs of thick coffee. Once sober, he could begin the paperwork that would help put the BLOUKS in a place where they wouldn't be the most popular inmates.

  None of them would notice the rented car in the station car park, or the zoom lens camera. And it would be several days before the CPU team realized just how much damage had actually been done on that chilly Surrey autumn afternoon.

  3

  A week later and John was two hours, 18 minutes late for the team meeting. The super had arranged it for the afternoon, just in case he was juxtaposed from his night out. But it hadn't made any difference. He arrived like a bag lady, shrouded in foul-smelling overcoats and disoriented to the point of walking into one of the empty chairs that blocked his path.

  "All right, that's enough." Yardly shifted in her seat and pointed her knees at him. It was body language she'd learned at a staff management workshop. It didn't seem to threaten him. He popped open the cap of his cappuccino and swigged it back as if it were a cold drink. The super had decided to make a public stand next time this happened.

  "I want you out of here now. You go home, clean up, sober up, and come back as a policeman. You've had 12 hours to get over last night, and this isn't what I call over it."

  John finished his coffee and re-emerged from the Styrofoam with a bubble and chocolate moustache stuck to his own stubble. "I'm okay."

  He looked anything but okay. Yardly was good at her job, and that alone commanded the respect
of her team. It wasn’t, however, enough to maintain discipline. Respect and discipline are different. She didn't have the traditional British police officer’s authority to whip her troops into line. She relied on her personality, and there were times such as this when they recognized that she was soft.

  The six people in the room knew that it was 3:15 p.m. and John was drunk. If it had been anyone else they would probably have been officially reprimanded, even laid off. But John was beyond regulations. He got away with stuff they couldn't, because his brilliance was recognized and they decided the rest was tolerable as long as they achieved the results they did. They wanted to help with his drink problem, but he saw drink as an answer to problems, not the problem itself.

  He was a good officer. He would never have done anything to compromise or endanger the team. He knew he should have gone back to his untidy apartment and slept and woken refreshed and jogged and drunk fresh juice and eaten fucking muesli and put on clean underpants. They knew he knew all this. The only thing they didn't know was why he had stayed there on the street last night, even after the case was wrapped up.

  He had done what none of them could do. He was acting as a vagrant, sitting with the drunks and derelicts on the pavement in front of the target. He could convince the winos that he was one of them. But when it came to the raid, he’d been together enough to tell the doorman that his pal outside had had a heart attack. It confused the man long enough for John to stumble past him. And once he'd eluded the bouncer, who else could have moved so fast up the staircase, crashed open the upstairs door, and grabbed the video from the camera before they could destroy it?

  By the time the rest of the team arrived, no more than 11 seconds later, John Jessel had removed the young lass from the bed, wrapped her in the counterpane, and was talking to her like some happy uncle. He was the best.

  So why had he refused the ride home and gone back to the drunks? It couldn't have just been for the half-finished vodka. The team in their unmarked cars looked through the rain-smeared windscreens as they drove the pornographers off, and saw Jessel hunch himself back down into the soggy shadows. History told them he wouldn't be in early the next day.

  *

  He wiped a palm over the stubble on his face and started to unwrap the stained greatcoat. Inside he was comparatively respectable in a grubby, bachelor kind of way. "Really. I'm okay."

  He fumbled in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a small slip of paper. He handed it to Yardley. "You should get the boys at registration to check out these two numbers. They're cars that stop by yesterday's MGM studio on a regular basis. You can see from the make, they're a wee bit out of place in that area."

  Paddy Somersbee had been doing the surveillance on the property for a week. He was the only other man in their team. He took the paper from the super. "How come I didn't see these? You sure about your source?"

  "If anyone knows anything about sauce. . . ." Maggy O'Leary was cut short by one of Jessel's evil stares.

  "You didn't see 'em because you're a pratt."

  Somersbee laughed defensively.

  "These people aren't nearly as silly as you. They parked half a block away, went through the alley, and came in through the back. Can't imagine why you’d think of watching the back door."

  "What do you want, Jessel? We have a one-man surveillance. You prefer me to park at the back and miss everything that goes through the front?"

  “If I had a choice, yeah.”

  "Knock it off." The super was often refereeing the two men on her team of six officers. "Can we trust this info, John?"

  "No, but it's worth following up."

  Somersbee wasn't finished. "Which particular wino pal did you squeeze this out of, John? Did he force you to drink with him all night?

  Jessel smiled. "This particular wino was 14, and he had some issues."

  "And half a bottle of Gin."

  "Somersbee."

  "Yeah. We drank that and I bought another and we drank that, too."

  "Jesus, Jessel. We're supposed to be helping these kids, not getting them plastered."

  John was getting bored of sparring with Somersbee. He turned to the super and shook his head. "I don't know, Em. This kid has been through all the programmes. He's getting regular methadone to kick heroin. He's had his thirty minutes of counselling a day at the clinic. I'm not a psychiatrist, but it seemed to me he just wanted someone to kick his arse and tell him to sort himself out."

  "Sound child psychology." Somersbee snorted.

  "Somersbee." The whole team joined in this time.

  "So what did you do?"

  "Got him drunk. By four, he'd thrown up his life savings. I was expecting his internal organs to come out. When he was empty, I beat him up."

  There were groans from around the group. Somersbee laughed and walked off to the water heater.

  The super was less sympathetic. "Now tell me that was a joke."

  "It was a joke."

  "Thanks."

  "I only had to hit him once and he was unconscious."

  "John."

  "It was a momentary decision." He slurred the word 'decision.'

  "It was a momentary decision we didn't learn about on the street kids rehab course," one of the others put in.

  "Look, I know. I know. I was so close. I'd spent, what . . . six hours with the kid. I got through the shitty language and the tough stuff and I saw this scared little bloke who just wanted to get a shake from someone to wake him out of his stupidity."

  "You know it doesn't happen as fast as that."

  "Usually you're right. But this was a fast-track rescue. He was at the give-up point. I got the feeling if I hadn't worked with him then, he'd be a stat today. He'd worked out how he was going to do it, Em. Up the fire escape at the back of the telephone exchange and head first onto the car park. He was describing it to me . . . how it felt going down; how all the sadness would go away once his face met the concrete. He wasn't bluffing."

  The team members minus Somersbee were attentive now. They'd all had so many disappointments with street kids. They knew there was no one answer, no one treatment. Every kid was unique. Every story was more tragic than the last. But Joe Public didn't once look at them as victims. The kids absorbed the disgust they received from 'normal' mothers with their 'normal' unpolluted offspring who passed them on the street. Everyone saw them more as trouble than troubled.

  Unorthodox situations often called for unorthodox remedies. John Jessel had the Southern England franchise on those

  "Why did you knock him out?"

  John shook his head. "Sometimes I forget just how strong I am."

  That drew a laugh. None of them would describe Jessel as a fighter. He usually gave over the rough stuff to the ladies in the team. "In the films, you just have to punch a villain once and he's unconscious. I used to think that was a movie thing 'til I did it last night. It scared the nipples off me. I thought I'd killed him; he'd had a brain clot or something."

  "But why did you hit him?" O'Leary asked.

  Somersbee came back with his cup.

  "He dared me." They looked on in disbelief. "Okay. Well, not so much dared as coerced. We'd come to some understanding on the suicide thing. It was less inevitable. But I suppose he wanted to see whether I was just talk. He asked me what I'd do if he said he was still going to jump. I told him I'd beat the idea out of him. Of course, I had no intention. . . .

  "But the bugger tested me. He said I'd have to be a lot faster and tougher than I looked, 'cause he was off to do it, and I knew he really wanted me to stop him. So I went after him. I gave him this little tap and he went down like granny's drawers on granddad's birthday."

  "Charming."

  "I checked his vital signs, decided he wasn't dead, and took him home."

  "How did you know where he lived?"

  "I er . . ."

  Marion King, the quiet thinker of the team, spoke for the first time: "He didn't. He means he took him back to his place."

 
; Somersbee laughed again. "Bloody marvelous, Jessel. You spend the night with an under-aged boy, get him drunk, knock him out, kidnap him, and put him to bed in your flat. Front page of The Star: ‘CHILD VICE COP BEDS UNDER-AGED STREET KID.’"

  John had to laugh. "It might be worse than that. I gave him your card with this address."

  The team collectively slapped Jessel with their meeting agendas. John laughed again.

  That was why. That was exactly why they didn't want to change Jessel. For whatever reason, all the chances, all the gambles John Jessel had taken over the years had paid off. The unit had a reputation better than any in the south. But you could never officially condone a Jessel action for fear that lesser officers would accept it as policy and screw it up. Only Jessel could do Jessel.

  "Jessel. In my room, now." Yardley stood and walked away without looking at him. It was a ploy which didn't fool anyone. She had called John into her office a hundred times just to get him away from the others. He followed her like a misérable to the guillotine. Once there, she spoke to him as a friend and he respected her diplomacy.

  He went into her office and closed the door.

  But this time there was no artificial admonition and no smile. She flopped into her chair, opened the drawer, and frowned at what she saw inside. . . . "I think you should take a look at this John."

  "I was expecting a bollocking."

  "This is worse." She handed him a transparent plastic document folder.

  John held it up to the light from the little window. It contained a picture postcard. On one side was a Kenya postmark. On the other was a photo of two young Masai girls smiling for the camera. They were about six or seven and naked but for tribal beads and earrings. It was a postcard that aunties sent home from holidays. The girls were exotic and lovely and would have elicited warm, parental feelings from the average tourist.