The Reckoning

by Jane Casey

  Bryce looked sorrowful. ‘Josh, I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Because it’s not true.’ Sweat was standing on Derwent’s forehead, darkening his hair. ‘Charlie, you’ve got to believe me.’

  If he’d hoped using Godley’s first name would remind him of their friendship, he’d miscalculated badly.

  ‘I can only believe the evidence,’ Godley said tonelessly. ‘It doesn’t matter if I’d prefer it to be a mistake.’ He looked at me. ‘What else is there?’

  I nodded to Bryce and he put a phone on the desk in front of Godley. It was still attached to strips of electrician’s tape. ‘I found this in Josh’s car, stuck to the underside of the passenger seat. It matches the number that sent the messages the TIU found on Crowther’s mobile phone.’

  ‘I’ve never seen that before in my life.’

  Godley slammed his hand down on the desk. I suddenly understood why Maeve had been so unsettled to see him lose his temper; it was an unnerving sight. ‘Stop lying. You’ve been found out, Josh. You’ve lost. Just admit it.’

  ‘I’m not going to admit doing something I didn’t do.’

  ‘The fucking phone was in your car, Josh. How did it get there if you didn’t put it there?’

  I was very glad there was a desk between Derwent and Godley. It was the only thing saving him from a punch in the face, or worse.

  ‘I don’t know, all right? I don’t have a fucking clue.’

  ‘I do.’ After Godley and Derwent shouting at one another, my voice sounded absurdly calm and quiet.

  ‘What do you mean, you do?’ Godley was glaring at me.

  I turned to Derwent. ‘You were right, earlier. There was another person who had the same access to the boss – who was around when you were working on catching Skinner the first time. Keith Bryce.’

  Bryce had his hands on the arms of his chair, his fingernails digging into the upholstery. ‘What’s this game, Langton?’

  ‘I asked you to help me search DI Derwent’s car and desk.’ I ignored the choked outrage from Derwent’s direction. ‘I told you I couldn’t do it myself because I didn’t want to risk getting caught. I lied. I’d already carried out a quick search in both locations so I could be sure the phone wasn’t there. I was pretty sure you were the leak, so I gave you a nudge to see if you would try to implicate someone else. I told you I was looking for the phone. I don’t know where you had it – I think you probably had it hidden about your person, in fact, as you suggested DI Derwent might have done that with it. You wear very baggy clothes – frankly, you could have a fax machine in your jacket pocket and we’d be none the wiser. I wanted the phone and I wanted to know that you were the only person who could have put it where it was discovered. And you fell for it.’

  Godley was looking thunderstruck. ‘But the things you said about Josh …’

  ‘All reasons to suspect him. But I believe his explanations.’ I turned to Derwent again. ‘I’m not sure you’ll forgive me for any of this, so I might as well say it. You’re obnoxious. You come across as a total arsehole, but you’re too much of an arsehole to be subtle. You draw too much attention to yourself. Your colleague, on the other hand …’I looked at Bryce ‘… you’d forget he was in the room half the time. I know who I’d rather enlist as my spy.’

  ‘Keith …’ Godley was back to white-lipped distress but the anger had ebbed away. ‘Why?’

  I didn’t expect him to get an answer, but they had a long history, the pair of them, and maybe Bryce still had a conscience in there somewhere.

  ‘I’m sorry, Charlie. I don’t even have a good excuse. It was money.’ He spread his hands helplessly. ‘I gamble. Always have done. On anything. Racing, football, two flies crawling up a wall – it doesn’t matter to me. I’ve made thousands, but I’ve pissed away tens of thousands. Elaine doesn’t know. She’d kill me if she did and I don’t blame her. We almost lost the house seven years ago. Skinner got in touch with me and offered to pay off my debts. I said no. He said he’d give me a regular retainer – mad money, he called it. All I had to do was tip him off now and then. No harm done. He would let us make arrests so none of us looked bad, but he wanted to stay out of jail. If he did, I’d be better off.’ He looked piteously around the room, seeing no sympathy. ‘I know it was wrong, but I thought he’d be running his empire anyway, even if he was locked up. What difference did it make if he was free or behind bars?’

  ‘You should have quit.’

  ‘I realise that now.’ He shook his head. ‘I never wanted to give him personal information about you, Charlie. He was just so good at getting it out of me. A question here or there. A suggestion. A threat, sometimes. He played me like a Stradivarius.’

  ‘You’re making my heart bleed.’ Derwent had bounced back remarkably quickly. He was staring at Bryce with total loathing. ‘I can’t believe you were going to fit me up.’

  ‘On the scale of betrayal, I think putting my family at risk is a touch more serious,’ Godley pointed out mildly.

  ‘You’re right. You’re right. Sorry.’ Derwent had the grace to look abashed. ‘What happens now?’

  ‘You can go,’ Godley said to Derwent. To me, he said, ‘Thanks, Rob. I appreciate it.’

  ‘Do you want me to call DPS?’

  ‘I’ll do that myself.’

  Bryce was huddled in his chair, his eyes wet with self-pity. ‘I need to call Elaine. They’ll be searching our house. I need to explain.’

  ‘For old time’s sake, I’ll let you use this phone.’ Godley lifted the receiver, back in control of himself, icy reserve in place. ‘Once I’ve called DPS and told them what you’ve done.’

  I followed Derwent out of the room, wondering if I should risk an apology. He got a safe distance down the corridor then turned to confront me.

  ‘You frightened the shit out of me. I thought I was getting fitted up good and proper.’ He grinned. ‘No hard feelings, though. I’d have done the same thing if I’d thought of it.’

  ‘You couldn’t be in on it, I’m afraid. You had to believe I really thought you were guilty if you were going to be convincing.’

  ‘Did you tell Charlie it was me?’

  ‘He didn’t know anything. He needed to be convincing too.’

  ‘I thought he was going to kill me.’

  ‘Me too,’ I admitted. ‘But I would have stepped in.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have needed any help.’ He pulled his shoulders back, broadening his chest. I wondered if he was even conscious of doing it. It was so much a throwback to the apes it was almost ridiculous. The missing bloody link, alive and well and policing London with maximum offensiveness.

  I shook his hand, then and there. Much to my surprise, I was getting to like him.

  ‘You would have to be completely insane to ask Derwent to be your inside man. He’d wear a T-shirt advertising the fact just to show off.’ Maeve was never going to be a member of DI Derwent’s fan club, no matter how much I tried to convince her he was all right. ‘I still can’t believe it was Bryce, though. He’s so … nondescript. How did you work out it was him?’

  ‘Process of elimination.’ I turned in a circle, checking in all directions for signs of a stalker before I followed her up the steps to her front door. ‘And just the fact that he is a nothing. Skinner’s not stupid. He recruits the people he needs. A not-too-ambitious career policeman with a gambling habit is pretty much ideal.’

  ‘I wonder what Derwent’s freak-out was about, when he saw Cheyenne’s body.’ She was fumbling in her bag for her keys.

  ‘Good luck finding out. He wouldn’t even tell us to save his job.’

  ‘One of these days he’ll let something slip.’ She slotted her key into the lock, but the door opened before she could turn it. She stepped back on top of me, more jumpy than she would admit. ‘Oh my God, Walter, you scared me.’

  Her landlord was standing in the doorway, his face pained. ‘Maeve, I’ve got to ask you to leave.’

  ‘I was going to. I mean, I wanted to giv
e you notice.’

  ‘You aren’t welcome in this house any more.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He pushed the door open properly, and I could see a little group huddled on the bottom steps of the stairs. There was the lush nanny with a hulking, beardy boyfriend scowling behind her, and a good-looking man who had to be the actor.

  ‘Where’s the other one?’

  Walter looked at me with something approaching disgust. ‘If you mean Chris, we don’t know.’

  Maeve had walked into the hall and was staring through her front door, which was standing open. ‘What happened?’

  ‘We got raided, darling.’ Brody jumped off the step and went to join her. ‘They ripped your place apart. Do they not like you?’

  I pushed past him to see what he was talking about. ‘Holy shit.’

  The walls were riddled with holes, long tracks in the plasterwork where a wire had been followed, plotted and removed. Every item of furniture of any size had been dismantled and arranged neatly in a pile: the sofa was the principal casualty. Maeve’s personal belongings were stacked against one wall of the sitting room. I found myself thinking it would be handy for packing, but I managed not to say that. Maeve was moving through her flat slowly, dazedly. I shadowed her, wary of getting too close. Shock first, then anger; she was as predictable as Christmas.

  The kitchen was a wreck, the doors hanging off the cupboards. The bathroom walls were perforated in several places, with tiles missing or cracked. The bedroom was the worst of all: in many places the walls were down to the bare lathes, and plaster dust lay thickly on all the surfaces.

  Maeve finished her tour of inspection back in the hall, where Walter and the others were waiting. ‘Who did this?’

  ‘The police. They had a warrant to check the premises for surveillance equipment. They did the same thing in the other flats. I’m going to sue. And you’ve definitely lost your deposit.’

  ‘How is this my fault?’

  ‘They said someone had been watching you. They said they needed to check that your flat wasn’t bugged. Then they said they needed to check the other flats.’

  ‘What for?’

  Walter shrugged. ‘They didn’t say.’

  ‘Did they do the same thing everywhere else?’

  ‘More or less.’ His face was pinched. ‘I tried to stop them.’

  Maeve turned to me. ‘Belcott.’

  ‘Colin Vale was working on it too,’ I reminded her. ‘He must have thought this was necessary. He wouldn’t have let Belcott get away with this out of spite.’

  ‘Is he the tall one, with glasses?’ Szuszanna piped up. ‘He was nice. The other one, not so nice.’

  Maeve had closed her eyes. ‘I can’t stand the thought of him poking through my stuff. It’s worse than being burgled.’

  ‘For me too,’ Szuszanna said crossly. ‘I watched.’

  Maeve was too concerned with her own trauma to have much time to listen to Szuszanna. ‘I would have liked a bit of warning. A phone call would have been courteous. I might have wanted to be here – you never know. I can just see his smug little face. He must have loved it.’

  I had moved away a little and was ringing Colin Vale’s mobile.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Colin, I’m at Kerrigan’s address.’ Please don’t ask me why. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Cameras in the walls and items of furniture. The whole place was wired up – sound, pictures, everything. Upstairs too.’ He sounded harried. ‘We’ve traced the cables to the flat on the ground floor, the one opposite hers.’

  I looked up; I was standing outside Chris’s door. ‘Did you get in?’

  ‘No. We needed the resident’s permission to search and we didn’t get it so I had to go off for a warrant. We think he left via the fire escape as soon as we started to knock through the walls in Maeve’s place.’

  ‘You didn’t get her permission before you searched her place, did you?’

  There was a tiny pause. ‘She knew we were investigating. Belcott said we could take it as read.’

  ‘Did he indeed?’

  ‘She would have said yes.’

  ‘She might.’ There was little point in torturing him about it. ‘How are you doing on that warrant?’

  ‘I’m sorting it out right now.’ A tiny pause. ‘Is Maeve there?’

  ‘She won’t be for long.’

  ‘Good.’ He sounded infinitely relieved. ‘I don’t want to be there when she finds out about the cameras.’

  I looked across to where she was arguing with Walter about her deposit. She was jabbing a long finger into his chest. Fierce was not the word.

  Into the phone, I said, ‘Nor do I, mate. Nor do I.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Tuesday

  MAEVE

  I was in no state of mind to be reasonable on Tuesday morning when I flung open the door to the office.

  ‘Where’s Belcott?’

  He raised his hand from the far end of the room, where he was lurking behind his computer. ‘Ah, Kerrigan. We’ve been expecting you.’

  ‘Don’t try to be funny.’ I stalked the length of the office and stood beside his desk, my hands on my hips. ‘You have a lot of explaining to do.’

  ‘Why I am so very attractive to the opposite sex?’

  I closed my eyes for a second and shuddered; it wasn’t entirely for effect. The very idea … ‘I was actually wondering why you didn’t tell me you were going to search my flat. I say search. I actually mean fuck it to oblivion.’

  ‘It was all necessary—’ he began.

  ‘I don’t believe you. It looked as if squatters had been living there for six months. How you did all that damage in one day, I can’t imagine.’

  ‘It was the best way to find what we were looking for.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘You have to have worked this out by now. I thought you were a shit-hot detective, Kerrigan.’ He smiled up at me maliciously. ‘Use your intuition.’

  ‘You took out wiring.’

  ‘And a whole lot more.’ He looked past me. ‘Hello, Rob. Didn’t you tell her?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’

  I looked around to see Rob leaning up against a desk behind me, a neutral expression on his face. He had been quiet the night before, but I had put it down to exhaustion.

  ‘What didn’t you want to tell me? For fuck’s sake, Belcott, I am beyond tired of the twenty questions game. Talk. Now. Or your nostrils and this stapler are going to get to know one another a lot better.’ I picked it up and waved it under his nose menacingly.

  He leaned out so he could see past me. ‘As a matter of interest, do you think she’s beautiful when she’s angry? Because I’d get your eyes tested if so, mate.’

  ‘Stop talking to Langton. Talk to me. This has nothing to do with him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’ As if he had tired of baiting me, Belcott sat up straight and nudged his mouse to bring his screen to life. ‘Okay. I know you think I set up the search of your flat to piss you off, but actually, we had good reason. The video your one-member fan club sent you was taken from a website that we traced yesterday. It’s called Zabolagee.com.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything to me.’

  ‘That’s actually the point. The founders came up with a name that wouldn’t bring them up in casual searches – it’s word-of-mouth personal recommendation only, and the site is members only.’

  ‘How did you find it?’

  ‘I’ve got a mate at CEOP who let us in on a few tricks for matching the file to the website,’ Colin Vale said, coming forward to stand beside Belcott, as if he felt he should be there to support him. Collective responsibility and all that, though Belcott would probably have left him to drown if the situation had been reversed. ‘We managed to get through into a few of their password-protected areas. And then the hosting company was persuaded to be helpful and gave us access to IP addresses for contributors.’

  ‘They were shi
tting themselves. Said they had no idea what was on there. I did say most of it was perfectly legal –I think that was when they started to throw information at us.’ Belcott sounded smug. He did have a way with words, if that way was to make you feel physically sick.

  ‘What was on there?’

  ‘The majority of what we could see was the standard stuff you’d expect on a BDSM website – that’s bondage, domination, sado-masochism,’ Belcott explained, seeing the frown on my face.

  ‘I’m not sure what I would expect. I don’t spend a lot of time on that sort of website.’

  ‘I’m not saying I do, but generally it’s your usual fake dungeon environment with submissives performing for their mistresses or masters. Pain, humiliation, obedience – that’s what gets them their jollies. Zabolagee is structured around levels of mastery, if you see what I mean. So at the entry level, you have the willing participants, consenting adults, a bit of light whipping.’ Belcott seemed far too fluent in talking about it. I was starting to understand why Colin Vale was looking so sick.

  ‘It goes all the way up to where your boys were, the top. That’s actual slavery, torture, rape. Snuff films too, it seems. We couldn’t get access to them but the techies are working on it.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Rape where the victim is obviously drugged or unconscious. Rape where the victim is conscious and resisting. Serious violence.’ Vale’s voice shook. ‘I found it tough, to be honest with you.’

  ‘The second level up is where the content isn’t too sick but the participants aren’t necessarily willing or aware. Cameras in shop changing rooms and gym locker rooms, spying on ladies in the nude without their knowledge. Up-skirt photography. Stalking an individual and taking pictures of them going about their business over a period of time ranging from hours to years.’ Belcott paused for effect. ‘That’s where we found the section devoted to you, Kerrigan. It was labelled with your first name.’

  ‘Well, that explains why Lee asked me how I spelled it.’ I was still trying to sound nonchalant even though it made me shudder to think of my stalker’s surveillance pictures being shared with his fellow perverts. ‘He must have come across it.’