Last night, he’d gone over the other photographs he’d taken in Nick’s warehouse. There hadn’t been any smoking guns – none that he could see, at least – but there had been a recent invoice among the material. The document detailed repairs carried out two months earlier on a boat named Excalibur II. Lockhart had checked the UK vessel lists online and hadn’t been surprised to discover that Excalibur II’s home port was Whitstable.
As far as he knew, Nick didn’t own a boat, which meant that his brother-in-law was paying to fix someone else’s boat. And Lockhart would bet that boat belonged to Jonah Tharpe and his sons. With the older man inside, he decided to take the opportunity for a walk past. Popping the door on his Defender, he pulled his beanie hat down and his collar up before setting off slowly towards the trawler. The air was biting and made his eyes water.
As he approached the boat, he was able to see the lettering on the side that confirmed its name: EXCALIBUR II. The older guy was smoking in the cabin and drinking from a mug. He was turned away from Lockhart, looking out over the sea as it rose and dipped gently, washing against the hull. A few seagulls screeched loudly as they circled overhead. Lockhart guessed the birds were just as interested in the Excalibur II’s contents as he was.
Moving as silently as possible, Lockhart got close enough to the vessel to smell the indelible reek of fish, no doubt ingrained in its timbers, impervious to any amount of scrubbing. From this distance, he could see a few crates stacked on the deck. Several bore the word ZEEBRUGGE on the side. He thought about this for a moment. Lockhart had never been to the Belgian port, but he knew it was a stone’s throw from the border with the Netherlands. The country which just happened to make most of the MDMA that came in to the UK.
Lockhart felt as though the snippets of intelligence he was gathering were starting to fit together. A shipment of MDMA, most likely from the Netherlands, in Nick’s warehouse. The visits from J. Tharpe and sons, collecting rather than delivering, and driving north. The payment for the repair of a boat in Whitstable, which appeared to belong to Jonah Tharpe. And a link between that boat and a European port with form for drug export to the UK.
Inside the cabin, the older man put down his mug, stubbed out his cigarette and stood. Lockhart moved quietly on, continuing his walk, head down. Could there be a chance he was seeing connections where there were none? Did the selfie that Jess and Nick took relate to all this, or was it just in his mind?
One way to find out would be to climb aboard, ambush Jonah Tharpe in his cabin, and use whatever techniques were necessary to make the old fella tell him everything he knew about Nick, Zeebrugge, the pills. The first thing he’d ask, though, was if the guy knew where Jess was. She’d got on a boat in Whitstable harbour, the witness had said.
Could it have been this one? Did the fisherman know anything about her disappearance? Her current whereabouts, even? The questions tumbled over each other in his mind, and Lockhart had to fight the impulse to storm into the cabin right now and beat the answers out of Tharpe. His reconnaissance training told him he needed to wait.
There would be more to discover, if he was patient.
Turning around down the harbour and walking back, this time he got a good look at the man on deck as he coiled a rope. It was Jonah Tharpe, no question.
Now Lockhart needed to find out where he lived.
Returning to the Defender, he got back inside and opened his thermos flask of tea, continuing to observe Tharpe through his binos. Was this man conspiring with Lockhart’s brother-in-law to import MDMA into the UK via Whitstable? Lockhart seethed as he recalled those brightly coloured pills in the warehouse. He’d read something recently about how they were designed to look like sweets so they’d appeal to kids. Teens at festivals looking for a good time, but not knowing what the hell they were taking, what chemicals it’d been cut with, until it was too late. He was imagining doing something unpleasant to Tharpe until he told him what he knew about Jess, too, when his phone rang.
Smith.
Still peering through the binoculars, he picked up.
‘What’s going on, Max? This about Meade?’
After his visit to Youth Rise Up yesterday afternoon, Lockhart had asked Smith to properly check out the young charity worker, who connected both murder victims, as a person of interest in Paxford.
‘No, guv.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve found that phone?’
‘It’s not that, either.’
Lockhart heard her swallow on the other end of the line. Take a breath before speaking. He knew that pause: the one to compose yourself. And her next words confirmed his worst fears, landing like a sucker punch to the gut.
‘There’s another body,’ she said. ‘In a church.’
Sixty-Four
Gazing at the image on his laptop screen, he felt a swell of pride. Compassion, almost love. Kneeling in prayer by the church altar, an open Bible in front of him, Jordan Hennessey looked calm, contemplative, even pious. His earthly body had shuffled off its turbulent, unfortunate existence, and his soul would be up there, now, in heaven. He had done a good thing for Jordan.
He just needed to make others see that, too.
This was the image he’d give them. He upped the brightness of it slightly, took the contrast down a bit. Softened the hard edges of the church interior a little, making Jordan appear more… angelic. He considered adding the words of the Bible verse he’d highlighted, in the way that people add text to their Instagram posts, but decided against it. He’d reference it in the email he would send.
Seeing Jordan in this position reminded him of his own faith, and how it had waxed and waned over time. After the man had taken him in for the second time, as a young teenager, he’d really come to believe it all. How this was part of God’s plan for him. But there had still been so many big questions that he couldn’t answer. He’d prayed, whispering his doubts alone in bed at night, once the man had left to go back to his own room.
Was it wrong, what was happening to him? Was it sinful, what he was doing? He never heard anything in response. But, as he lurched through puberty and a teenage growth spurt, his doubts increased along with his height and strength. And his anger. How dare others treat him like this?
Eventually, he’d decided that it was enough. He could live without heroin. He didn’t need to be dependent on somebody else – and whatever they demanded of him to satisfy their own desires. So, one day, he packed a bag, helped himself to a wad of cash that he knew the man kept in a jar, and said that he was leaving.
At first, his announcement was greeted with laughter. When the man realised it wasn’t a joke, he became incredulous. Then pissed off. Told him that this was his home. He couldn’t leave. It wasn’t allowed.
But he stood up to his full height, stared the man down, and moved him aside with a strong, steady arm. In unspoken acknowledgment of his new physical superiority, the man didn’t try to stop him. And he walked right out of the door.
Things started to change after that, though it all seemed quite distant now.
Emerging from the memory, he refocused on the screen. It was a risk, of course, communicating like this. But he’d read up on it, taken every precaution he could to hide his identity. And, as far as he was concerned, the need for people to understand what he was doing outweighed the slight chance of anything going wrong. He composed the message and sent it. He’d show them what ‘CKK’ – or whatever they wanted to reduce him to – was really doing. That it wasn’t about him, it was about the children.
Speaking of which, it was time he made contact with the next one.
She didn’t know it yet, but she was on her way to becoming an angel.
Sixty-Five
Smith still couldn’t believe it. She sat in silence, like the rest of the MIT, while the guvnor summarised what they knew so far. It was nauseatingly familiar. Their third victim, Jordan Hennessey, was another young adolescent who had been in the care system. Like Donovan and Charley, he’d been strangled and
posed in a church, this time in Kew.
The poor lad had been found by the vicar of St Luke’s as she opened the building for the Sunday morning service. Smith would bet that image of a dead boy, his head bowed and hands clasped, would stay with the vicar for the rest of her life. As the picture of Jordan, kneeling at the church altar, popped into her mind’s eye once more, she reckoned that would make two of them.
Smith could feel her fury bubbling just below the surface, and was certain she wouldn’t be the only one feeling like that. The room thrummed with barely concealed anger, which her colleagues would be directing as much towards themselves – for their failure to find the killer – as at the murdering bastard responsible for these appalling crimes. Smith expected the media wouldn’t hesitate to blame their team and The Met more widely for Jordan’s death, ramping up the public hysteria and suddenly claiming to care about kids who society had all but forgotten. It made her sick.
Lockhart had assigned the usual actions. Smith knew they needed to be done, but she had to fight the urge to dismiss them all as useless. Forensic evidence on the body or at the church, witnesses to the abduction or the placing of the body, CCTV and house-to-house inquiries in the vicinity of the church. This killer knew what he was doing and hadn’t slipped up yet. Or perhaps he’d just been lucky. Smith reminded herself that Charley’s mobile phone had to be out there, somewhere. She hadn’t yet given up hope of finding it.
She’d just accidentally zoned out again into another vengeful daydream when the guvnor’s voice got her attention.
‘Max.’
She sat up straight, blinked. ‘Yup.’
‘You’re gonna lead our suspect strategy.’
‘Who d’you want me to tap up first?’ asked Smith.
‘No one,’ he replied. ‘I want you to rearrange this lot.’ Lockhart gestured to the whiteboard beside him which she’d spent most of Friday sorting out. ‘We need to get our latest information up here. Anything that might be relevant.’
‘Guv.’ She didn’t protest immediately, but her instinct was that she should be out there, knocking on doors. Kicking them down if need be.
‘There’s no getting away from the fact that we should’ve prevented this from happening again, to Jordan,’ he went on, ‘but now that it’s happened, we’ve got to use it. There are going to be fewer links and overlaps between three murder victims than two. Less chance of a coincidence.’ Lockhart was jabbing the air with each point he made. ‘We find that common ground, we’ve got a good chance of nicking our killer before he does this again.’
There was a murmuring of assent among the team. Smith could tell they were up for it. She was more used to pounding the streets than to coordinating strategy from a desk – especially on a serial murder case – but with their staffing shortages, she could see why it fell to her.
Lockhart had just started distributing further actions around the team when Smith became aware of a rapid movement in her peripheral vision. DSI Burrows was marching across the office towards their assembled group. She was clutching a tablet, her compact frame bristling with energy. As the boss got closer, Smith could see there was something else there in her face: rage. They fell silent as she approached.
‘I’ve just got off the phone to DSI Porter,’ she announced coolly. ‘He’s brought it to my attention that, a quarter of an hour ago, crime scene photographs from Operation Paxford have started to appear on a number of online forums and at least one national newspaper’s website. We have to imagine that other media outlets will follow suit.’
Smith was gobsmacked. Who would’ve done this? She glanced around at her colleagues, saw expressions of confusion, suspicion, even hostility. Breaking the confidentiality of a case like this wasn’t only hugely disrespectful to the victims and those who were close to them, but it also risked disclosing key information that could seriously screw up an investigation. Two Met officers had been prosecuted last summer for sharing their own photos of a double murder scene in a WhatsApp group. They should all know better.
Lockhart cleared his throat carefully. ‘Could it have been the killer, ma’am? Maybe even someone else with access to the crime scene, like the SOCOs?’
The possibility had already occurred to Smith; their team had seen it on cases before.
‘We’re already working with the newspaper and forum hosts to examine the communications for digital forensics,’ replied Burrows. ‘Needless to say, if any leads emerge which could further Operation Paxford, you’ll be the first to know.’
‘Thank you, ma’am.’
‘But if the results give one hint of anyone in this team putting a foot wrong, people will lose jobs. I can promise you all that.’ Burrows stared at them for a moment, her lower jaw jutting slightly.
No one spoke, though Smith could see that a few officers were already surreptitiously on their phones, no doubt trying to find the content and see what the damage was.
‘Right. I need to get back to DSI Porter and work out how to contain this.’
‘What do you need from us, ma’am?’ asked Lockhart.
‘What do I need?’ Burrows inclined her head, raised her eyebrows. ‘I need you all to do your jobs. Properly.’ And with that, she swept out of the MIT office as quickly as she’d entered.
Her departure was accompanied by a collective breath of relief and a handful of muttered profanities.
The guvnor clapped his hands. ‘OK, everyone. Let’s focus on what we’ve got to do here. Don’t worry about the press stuff, let Porter and Burrows deal with that.’
Beside her, Khan raised a hand. ‘What if it was one of us, boss, that leaked the photos?’
Lockhart blinked. ‘Then I’ll kill that person myself.’
He looked like he actually meant it.
Sixty-Six
‘Please, mister, can I have some fish and chips? Please.’
Paige Bradley stood up straight, linked her fingers together and gave the man behind the counter the biggest smile she could manage. When Mummy sent her out to get food like this, she always told her to smile. People liked it when you smiled, she said. Not that Mummy smiled very much.
The man shoved the scoop into the tray of chips and cocked his head.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any money this time, have you, love?’
Paige rocked back and forth from her toes to her heels, letting her arms swing by her sides, still smiling.
‘No.’ She drew the word out, as if making it sound nicer. ‘But Mummy says she will have some very soon and then we’ll pay for our tap.’
‘Tab.’
‘Yeah, our tab.’
The man sighed, shook his head and pressed his lips together. ‘Look, you can have a box of chips, OK? I won’t put it on the tab, but tell your mum that we would like some payment, sometime…’
‘Thank you!’ exclaimed Paige. ‘I’ll tell her.’
She’d have to remember that for later. Mummy was busy at the moment with one of her friends visiting at home. That was why she’d sent Paige out to get food, and told her to eat it in the shop and wait there for an hour before she came home. Mummy often did that when her men friends came round. She had lots of them and they would visit at all different times of day and night. Some of them were very angry and loud when they were with Mummy.
The man gave her the chips and a can of Coke and let her sit at the tiny table in the corner, where she usually sat. She didn’t always come here. Sometimes she went to the pizza place, then there was the chicken shop down the road, the kebab takeaway, or ‘the caf’, where she might get a sausage sandwich, or eggs on toast if she was lucky. She’d learned that it was much easier to ask nicely – and hope you got given something for free – than to try stealing it.
Mummy had showed her how to do that before, but when she’d tried it once, she’d been caught and the security guard in the supermarket had called the police. The policewoman was very cross and told her off, but let her go home after a while. After that, some people had visited her a
nd Mummy a week later and asked if everything was OK, and Mummy had smiled a lot and said that it was. Mummy always told her that if anyone asked that question, the answer was yes. If she said no, then she might be taken away. And Paige didn’t want that to happen.
It had already happened once, when Mummy hadn’t been able to get out of bed for a week, and Paige was told she had to go and stay with her granny and granddad. She hadn’t liked that very much. Granny and Granddad were really strict and had so many rules she couldn’t remember them all. There was no television in their house, and she had to go to church with them all the time. She didn’t want to do that again.
She finished her chips and her Coke and looked up at the clock. She still had half an hour before Mummy said she was allowed to go home. She went over to the till and picked up a pencil that was lying next to it. She held it up to the man and he nodded, so she took it back to the little table, unfolded the chip box, and began to draw on the cardboard.
Very carefully, she sketched out a horse. She loved horses. It had been her dream to ride one and, some day, she hoped that she could. She’d once read in a magazine she found in the doctor’s waiting room about a girl who actually owned a horse. Her own horse! Paige had looked at the photographs and imagined herself riding the beautiful animal in a sunny field somewhere.
‘Hello, Paige.’
She was concentrating so hard that she hadn’t seen the other man come in. He was standing beside her, holding a carton that smelled delicious, and she guessed he’d been able to get fish as well as chips. She stared at it for a moment before raising her eyes to his face. When she saw who it was, she smiled once more. But it wasn’t a pretend smile this time.
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