Landslide

by David Menon

  He’d been thinking a lot about his Mum and Dad, his brothers and sisters, Nanna and Grandpa, all of his extended family. It had been such a privilege to have grown up in such a close tightly-knit family in which there’d been so much love. They’d all accepted him being gay and he’d experienced none of the angst that many of his friends had gone through in coming out. Despite the fact that his family were all staunch Catholics they’d embraced his sexuality and made his boyfriends welcome in their homes. He was glad now that he hadn’t yet got around to introducing them to Jaime.

  He felt so betrayed by Jaime. He couldn’t believe his own naivety but then again how could he have predicted what was going to happen? And how could he even think that Brendan would be willing to put this nightmare to one side and go off with him somewhere to start some kind of ideal life? As soon as this was all over he never wanted to see Jaime again.

  But how was all this going to be over? He longed to see his family again and it terrified him to think that he might never see them again in this life. How was this whole situation going to end? Jaime had promised to protect both Brendan and Toby from harm but what if he couldn’t deliver on that promise if push came to shove? That Rita was a callous, cold-hearted bitch and if she had her finger on the button then the nuclear bomb would go off because she was like some fucking psychopath.

  Toby was still sleeping but Brendan was wide awake. There was silence all around except he could swear he could hear someone crying. He looked around the room and tried to focus on something in the darkness. They had a small lamp to provide light but Brendan didn’t want to put it on in case it woke Toby up. He’d had precious little sleep as it was.

  But there it was again that sound of someone crying. To the left of where they were chained up against the radiator was a corner of the room where Brendan had earlier seen that some kind of hole in the wall had been boarded up. And pretty crudely boarded up at that. Brendan’s father was a builder and he’d have something to say about the shoddy work that had been done. Brendan pushed against it with his hand. He started off gently but then pressed harder until the boarding split and he was able to see through into the next room. A young girl gave out a small scream and was curled up like a baby. Her hair was a mess, her face was covered in tears, and she looked like she’d been through a terrible experience. She didn’t look like she was more than about thirteen or fourteen. It looked like she was chained to a wall radiator too.

  ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart’ said Brendan in a soft voice. ‘I’m not going to do you any harm. I couldn’t reach as far as where you are anyway. My name is Brendan. What’s yours?’

  ‘It’s Sonia’ she said. She liked the sound of this man’s voice. It was the first voice she’d heard in days on end that she believed she could trust. ‘Sonia Adams’. She started to weep. The last time they’d done it they’d really hurt her. She longed for her Mum. She was desperate for all of this to be over. ‘There’s someone else here. His name is Wayne Carpenter. I know that because he goes to the same church as me. They’ve beaten him up really bad. He’s just lying there. I think he must be unconscious or something. He might even be dead’.

  ‘Never mind him I want to concentrate on you’ said Brendan. ‘What have they done to you, Sonia?’

  ‘They ... they raped me’.

  ‘Oh Sonia, I’m so sorry, my love’.

  ‘They wouldn’t stop even though I was crying and begging them to stop’.

  ‘Do you know who these men were, Sonia?’

  ‘I wasn’t raped by men’ she cried. ‘I was raped by women’.

  Barton arrived at the place he’d arranged with Connelly. It was on the road near to the centre of Stockport that stretched high above the bus station and on to the iconic viaduct bridge that dominated the entire centre of the town. The valley below was wide and expansive. Barton was tense. He’d never been more nervous in his life. He had to get Toby back. If nothing else was accomplished today then that would have to be. He’d go crazy otherwise and he already wanted to break Rita’s neck.

  Connelly came up behind Barton and then stood by his side.

  ‘Looking at the view? It’s not quite the Cote d’Azur or the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall of China but a bus station and a load of warehouses framed by a shopping centre and the M60 orbital motorway does have its attractions’.

  ‘Where’s my son, Connelly?’

  ‘In the attic of Paddy Higgins house in that posh little enclave north of Bolton called Lostock’.

  ‘I want the address, Bernie. That was the deal’.

  ‘I can understand your impatience, Jeffrey. I would be in your position’.

  ‘Then give me the fucking address’.

  ‘And you really are going to let just vanish?’

  Barton could see for the first time in Connelly’s face that he was beginning to think of himself as a spent force. He’d had years of riding the high life of Manchester gangster society and no doubt thought of himself of some kind of modern day Kray without the other twin. But that was before Paddy Higgins came along and invaded his patch.

  ‘That was the deal and I’m a man of my word’.

  ‘My driver is waiting with the car just over there. When I drive away from here you’ll never see me again’.

  ‘And you think I’m supposed to be disappointed about that?’

  ‘Ouch. You know how to hurt a man’.

  Connelly took a large brown file out of the inside of his coat and handed it to Barton.

  ‘What’s all this?’ asked Barton. ‘It’s everything you need to bring down Paddy Higgins and his entire empire. Names, account numbers, names of all the companies used as fronts for his more dubious activities’.

  ‘This is quite a dossier’.

  ‘And did you know that his little concubine Miss Rita Chung is actually working for the Chinese government and they’re threatening to call her back to Beijing?’

  ‘Not before she does time here for kidnapping my son they won’t’.

  ‘Yes, well I wish you luck with that’.

  ‘Look, Connelly, this is all riveting but I want that fucking address’.

  Connelly handed Barton an envelope and inside was a piece of paper with the Lostock address on it. ‘Thank you’.

  ‘Okay. I’ll piss off now. Good luck’.

  Barton gave the signal and four police cars came screeching round the corner. He’d informed his team about the kidnapping of Toby and Brendan as soon as he’d made the ‘deal’ with Connelly. DCI Ollie Wright and DS Adrian Bradshaw jumped out of one of the cars accompanied by several uniformed officers from the other three. Two of them grabbed a genuinely shocked looking Connelly and handcuffed him before taking an arm each and leading him to the police van that had now turned up.

  ‘You’re a bastard, Barton! I’ll fucking get you for this you double crossing little cunt!’

  It ended up being quite a morning.

  Barton took his whole team of Wright, Bradshaw, and Alexander with him to the house in Lostock together with an armed response unit. Rita Chung and Jaime Higgins were both arrested and when Barton was reunited with his son Toby he squeezed him so hard he almost broke his ribs. He was also glad to see Brendan and expressed his eternal gratitude for taking care of Toby as much as he could. A female uniformed officer took care of Sonia Adams until she could be reunited with her parents.

  Other teams were dispatched and raided the businesses of Paddy Higgins right across the city and managed to arrest him before he could make his escape.

  DNA found on the splinter of false finger nail in the vagina of the first murder victim was found to belong to Viv Matthews. She was arrested and began to sing like the proverbial canary when she realised the weight of the charges she was facing. She said she’d been involved in a lesbian relationship with Grace Undobe for several years on and off. But she also insisted that she knew nothing about the murder of the other girls and it was only when Sonia Adams was brought into the picture by Grace that they started hav
ing threesomes. She said she knew Sonia didn’t want to be there but Viv went along with it because Grace was an overpowering influence who always had to get what she wanted.

  ‘I thought it would be fun to play around with a white girl for a change’ said Grace when she’d been brought in for questioning by Barton. DCI Wright was with him.

  ‘You thought it would be fun to rape a girl of fourteen?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it like that’.

  ‘Then how would you put it?’

  Grace leant forward and placed her elbow on the table. ‘Sex’ she said. ‘Pure and simple. And sometimes the rougher the better. Don’t you like it a bit rough sometimes, DSI Barton?’

  ‘I only believe in sex between consenting adults and certainly not with fourteen year old children against their will’.

  Grace threw her head back and laughed. ‘Oh but you don’t know what you’re missing with all that young, virginal flesh’.

  Barton was thoroughly disgusted with this so-called woman. She didn’t seem to know the meaning of remorse or regret. She was just sitting there bold as brass as if robbing the innocence of teenage girls was all just a bit of a laugh really.

  ‘Why did you chop their feet off?’ asked DCI Wright.

  ‘Because they wanted to escape me and I call the shots, not them’.

  ‘Who found the girls for you in the first place?’

  ‘My husband Gabriel’.

  ‘And how did he do that?’

  ‘He identified girls from families who would be compliant and obedient. They would do exactly as I demanded them to do’.

  Both Barton and Wright breathed in deep and shifted in their seats. This woman was an absolute monster.

  ‘So you knew that these families wouldn’t ask any questions when their daughters didn’t return home?’

  ‘Correct. Look, I was doing them a favour’ Grace insisted.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘These were no hope families who would never amount to anything. That’s why they became involved with my husband’s church because they had nothing else. I took those girls out of the most boring family situations and gave them some real fun’.

  ‘Before you murdered them’.

  ‘Before I took control’ said Grace. ‘And then paid people to get rid of the evidence’.

  ‘Like Gary Makin and Terry Matthews?’

  ‘Yes’.

  ‘And your relationship with the people traffickers?’ said Barton. ‘You just chose the most vulnerable ones like the sisters Manal and Ahok?’

  ‘We fiddled about with Ahok after the men had finished with her. She was so cute. I just had to fuck her so did Viv. Then when they started to get difficult and wanted to get away I entrusted the dispatch of both of them to Wayne Carpenter. He wanted so much to please my husband and I and he’s so stupid he’d take any line we fed him’.

  ‘You entrusted their dispatch? Or murder for short’.

  ‘I like to use words in a more elegant way’.

  ‘So you murdered the girls and then Carpenter dispatched their bodies?’

  ‘That’s correct if you want to put it like that’.

  ‘Wayne Carpenter is fighting for his life in hospital after he’d been so badly beaten up, presumably by your thugs? How did he offend you exactly?’

  ‘He was on his way to confess all to the police. That’s how stupid he is. He cared. So he had to be warned. If he dies it’ll be no great loss to the human race’.

  ‘Female Genital Mutilation? How did such a barbaric practice as that enter into your game playing?’

  ‘It was a tool of discipline’ said Grace. ‘You Brits are just too soft’.

  ‘Well I’ve heard enough’ said Barton. ‘DCI Wright?’

  ‘More than enough, sir’.

  Barton then proceeded to charge Grace with six counts of murder and child abduction.

  ‘You’ll only be able to make the charges stick against my husband Gabriel and all the names he’s given who were his accomplices’ said Barton. ‘I, on the other hand, have diplomatic immunity’.

  ‘Well we’ll see about that’.

  Barton and Wright walked out of the interview room and Barton said ‘Get that ... that monster in the cells now. She makes my skin crawl’.

  Back in the office Louisa Pilkington was clearly flirting with a tall man with glasses, around thirty, and wearing a corduroy jacket and check shirt. He looked like a very earnest type with his ruffled black hair. Nobody else in the office knew that they’d already exchanged phone numbers.

  ‘Oh, sir’ said Louisa after she’d finished giggling like a little girl. ‘This is Matthew Creasy from the Manchester refugee centre. He wants to talk to us about transporting the bodies of the two sisters to Sweden where their father is’.

  ‘Of course’ said Brendan. ‘You’ve spoken to their father then?’

  ‘Yes’ said Matthew. ‘It’s in a pretty bad way as you can imagine. The local Swedish social services have put him on suicide watch because he’s absolutely distraught. And no wonder when you consider his country was ravaged in a civil war that killed his wife and his two daughters were taken by traffickers and ended up being murdered by a lesbian paedophile’.

  ‘What he’s had to go through is horrendous’ Barton agreed. ‘You must have your work cut out for you on the front line of his unfair and sick world we’re living in?’

  ‘We do our best’ said Matthew. ‘We’re all part of the same human race after all’.

  ‘I sometimes wonder about that, Matthew. I really do’.

  Before Barton was able to go home Inspector Tempest from the National Crime Agency came by.

  ‘Congratulations, DSI Barton’ said Tempest. ‘Two gangsters and a paedophile serial killer in one foul swoop’.

  ‘All in a day’s work down here at the sharp end, Inspector’.

  ‘It’s Ron’ said Tempest.

  ‘And I’m Jeff’ said Barton who gestured for tempest to sit down. Barton sat down behind his desk and leaned back. ‘One way or another it had been a pretty satisfying morning, except of course for Grace Undobe. How come she has diplomatic immunity?’

  ‘Her uncle is a minister in the current Nigerian government’.

  ‘But can she really use it to get herself off the hook?’

  ‘She thinks she can but watch this space’.

  ‘So there’s a chance she will get sent down?’

  ‘Like I say, watch this space. We’re working on it but it’s not easy because of all the diplomatic sensitivities and it’s fifty/fifty whether or not we’ll get our way’.

  ‘It’ll make me sick to the stomach if she gets away with what she did to those girls but I take what you say’ said Barton. ‘So can you now tell me why you were watching Bernie Connelly in West Africa? Before he slipped under your surveillance that is?’

  Ron smiled at Jeff’s sarcasm but he’d allow him his time in the sun this morning. ‘The Chinese are investing heavily right across Africa, including of course Nigeria. We know they’ve been using your bog standard British gangsters to do some of the more delicate security preparations in a notoriously lawless atmosphere. We know that Connelly was trying to muscle in on that trade but we also knew he was getting homesick. He fled the UK last time because you were on his case and you almost had him. We wanted to know if he was even thinking of trying to come back to his home shores. And you see, because of Rita Chung the Chinese had switched their custom from Connelly to Paddy Higgins so Connelly was running out of funds and that gave him an extra incentive to try and re-establish his business interests back home here in Manchester’.

  ‘Rita Chung can be very persuasive’.

  ‘As you would know of course, Jeff’.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Oh don’t act cute, Jeff. We know you were in a relationship with Rita Chung’.

  ‘Oh you do?’

  Ron leaned forward. ‘You could’ve ended up compromising your own investigation, Jeff’.

  ‘They ha
d my son’.

  ‘Yes, and that’s why the powers that be are not going to reprimand you for not informing your superior officers about that particular twist in this story’.

  ‘I don’t fucking believe this. I had no choice’.

  ‘Jeff, you’re a senior police officer. You make the choices that others take’. He stood up. ‘Other than that you’ve made a good impression on a lot of influential people higher up the food chain. You should be proud of yourself’.

  ‘But if you’re right then we’ve got even bigger fish to catch in the name of those multi-national crime syndicates’ said Barton. ‘Oh and Rita Chung? Diplomatic immunity?’

  ‘No’ said Ron. ‘Her government have left her out to dry’.

  ‘Oh happy days’.

  ‘Yes I thought that would please you’.

  ‘I just wonder though Ron how many more innocent little girls like Manal and Ahok are out there being mutilated and abused by men and women who are pure evil. And I wonder about a so-called human race that lets it all happen’.

  The lounge for passengers travelling in First class at Terminal 5 at Heathrow was normally a quiet sort of a place where the well oiled drank, ate, worked or just relaxed before going to get their flights to all corners of the world.

  Grace Undobe sat sipping from her glass of vintage champagne whilst leafing through the latest edition of Vogue. She looked up at the information screen. Her flight to the Nigerian capital of Abuja would be boarding in thirty minutes. So she had time for at least one more glass of champagne before she went to take her assigned seat of 2A in the First class cabin of the British Airways 777 aircraft.

  She thought how satisfying it was to get away with murder. Those stupid British police really didn’t have a clue how to deal with things on an international scale. They’d even asked her if she felt any guilt for the fact that her lover Viv Matthews was certainly going down whilst she herself was getting away scot free. It was almost laughable. Viv had always known what she was getting into and now she had to pay the price.