The Convenience of Lies

by Geoffrey Seed

  She felt easier in her mind at Staithe End, sensed no shadows darkening its whitened walls and rough-sawn beams as they had at Garth.

  Those who’d once dwelt here were humbler, too - land workers, fishermen, families far removed from the intrigues of their day. They’d lived by toil and sweat, weathered storms and been as content as ever those hard times allowed such people to be.

  Lexie was still resting in bed. The journey from the Welsh Marches had been more arduous than she’d predicted. But nearing Staithe End and the sound of the sea, her face eased with relief and happiness as if she had truly come home.

  For Ruby, what was supposed to be a holiday meant only disruption to the ordered routines she imposed on her life. She retreated further from the grown-ups, sullen and refusing to eat. But she’d brought her pads and pencils and Hester felt sure she could talk her round in a day or two.

  It still worried her that Ruby displayed no concern for the pain Lexie was in. It wasn’t clear if this lack of empathy was part of Ruby’s psychological condition or simply revealed a dislike of her aunt.

  Hester checked the weather again. Norfolk was all sky and luffing clouds. Rain might yet pluck at the waves and empty the beach of its walkers. But when Hester took up her breakfast, that’s exactly how Lexie said she’d love it to be.

  ‘I want to go out in a storm and gather armfuls of driftwood,’ she said. ‘Then we can carry it back and sit and watch it burn in the hearth.’

  *

  McCall was tetchy from lack of sleep, a workhouse breakfast and the growing certainty of spending time in those parts of a police station where the windows didn’t open. Benwick must soon deliver on his promise to make this coming unpleasantness worthwhile.

  ‘When Ruby first went missing, why did you suspect her mother?’

  ‘Because I knew Etta was involved in a very black economy.’

  ‘You mean she was a hooker?’

  Benwick shook his head.

  ‘Not just that though I’m sure she was at that, too. No, unbelievable as it sounds, some of the kids being abused by the paedophile ring I was scoping had been rented out by their mothers to be filmed or photographed by the half hour.’

  ‘You’re saying Etta was doing this?’

  ‘Holding picture sessions in her flat, yes. Ruby Ross was one of the kids’ names the rent boy picked up while flying the flag for his union, so to speak.’

  ‘What could possibly make any woman do that?’

  ‘Money, great wads of it,’ Benwick said. ‘There’s an international trade in such images and if a mother is desperate enough for whatever reason, she’ll be blind to the harm being done.’

  ‘But you only had the rent boy telling you this?’

  ‘Yep, in his statement to the dirty tricks guy.’

  ‘His word alone couldn’t be trusted, could it? You’d need independent corroboration.’

  Benwick agreed. But when a child called Ruby Ross went missing, Benwick called in a favour and was transferred back to CID to take over the investigation.

  ‘I went to Etta’s flat and showed her the surveillance pictures of the men who’d figured in Operation Kid Glove. She’d let at least one of these perverts photograph her own child for money. She never broke down completely but I knew damn well she was covering up something.’

  ‘Like her killing Ruby, you mean?’

  ‘Think about it, McCall. Here’s a little girl who doesn’t know how to tell lies, not even social ones. At some point, she’ll let the cat out of the bag to a teacher or a doctor then Etta loses her daughter, her home, liberty, everything.’

  ‘But a motive for murder turned out to be a motive for suicide.’

  ‘I know, that was never in my script but it pointed to a wider conspiracy.’

  McCall reached into his rucksack. He took out some of Ruby’s artwork and put the drawing of the birthmark man on the table between them.

  ‘Did that conspiracy involve this particular individual?’

  ‘Good God, Ray Gillespie. Who drew this?’

  ‘Ruby, she’s an amazingly talented kid. She’s drawn quite a few faces of the men who might’ve abused her but this one really scares her. She thinks he follows her.’

  ‘Gillespie was the one who took pictures of Ruby,’ Benwick said. ‘Etta was terrified when I showed her the sneaky photographs of him.’

  ‘Was it Gillespie who kidnapped Ruby?’

  ‘I’d be hard pushed to prove it in court but as night follows day, yes… he did it.’

  ‘But why run such a huge risk if Etta was already letting pictures be taken of Ruby?’

  ‘Try to understand how quickly paedophiles get desensitised. They always need bigger and better kicks, more depravity to meet their deviant sexual demands so abusing a kid with a handicap would be a new high. Gillespie knew about Ruby’s condition and I think he wanted to take it a stage further and give Inglis the heightened thrill of actually sexually assaulting a child like her. But Etta refused to play along this time so he kidnapped her.’

  This confirmed what McCall already believed - Gillespie had to be Mr Ginger, the threat Etta had wanted to freeze out of her life.

  ‘Why didn’t you bring Gillespie in for questioning like you did Etta?’

  ‘It wasn’t that simple, not with his connections,’ Benwick said. ‘Besides, I’d wanted to stick it to the bosses at Scotland Yard by rolling up the entire network of abusers they’d let off during Kid Glove, those hypocrite lawyers, show-biz people and bloody politicians like Guy Inglis.’

  McCall took out one of the photographs he’d shot of Gillespie in Birmingham.

  ‘Do you recognise anyone apart from Gillespie?’

  ‘Of course. That’s your chum, Roly Vickers.’

  ‘But what’s he doing with Gillespie?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake keep up, McCall. I’ve told you - Vickers is an MI5 asset. He runs Gillespie at arm’s length but on their behalf, has done for years.’

  ‘But Gillespie is a dyed-in-the-wool old Trotskyite.’

  ‘Who’s on wages from Vickers for giving him the inside track about every strike in every critical area of the economy before it’s even declared.’

  ‘But with his politics, why would he subvert his own union?’

  ‘Vickers and the spooks have him over a barrel.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because of all the kids he procures for the likes of Inglis and who he abuses himself. When you’ve got a snout by the balls like this, his heart and mind usually follow.’

  ‘So the spooks connive at the criminal abuse of these kids because it gives them an early warning system about strikes but better still, leverage over a politician who may one day run the country?’

  ‘And all thanks to Roly Vickers. Make no mistake, McCall - he’s not on the side of the good guys, not on this or in much else.’

  But herein was McCall’s problem. Vickers had to be a major target in any media exposé. Yet he had equal dirt on McCall. Vickers could portray him as a willing stooge of the security services, rewarded with stories and privileged information. The liberal media would never trust McCall ever again. To move against Vickers was to court mutually assured destruction. But he’d no choice.

  He asked Benwick what led to his rescue of Ruby.

  ‘I kept getting the gypsy’s warning from upstairs at Scotland Yard. You’re treading on toes, back off. It was Operation Kid Glove all over again so I guess I snapped.’

  He put a tracking device in Gillespie’s car, followed him to a house in Clapham in south London then kicked the door in.

  ‘Ruby was locked in a bedroom, windows boarded over. I carried her out, shouting and screaming and we drove away. Everyone heard about it - my bosses, the spooks, Gillespie, Inglis. They all knew I’d not be going quietly, not after this.’

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ McCall said. ‘Why risk your entire career on this one point of principle? You could’ve leaked the cover-up to the newspapers or an MP.’


  ‘Sorry, I don’t have much faith in either and if I left Ruby where she was, she’d not get out of there alive.’

  ‘You’re not saying they’d kill her, surely to God?’

  ‘She knew their faces so her abusers had everything to lose,’ Benwick said. ‘I’d already picked up a rumour of one kid being disappeared forever and he wasn’t the first, either.’

  ‘Are you serious… this is what would’ve happened to Ruby?’

  ‘Just imagine what was at stake, the enormity of what these men were gambling.’

  ‘But murder - ’

  ‘We’re getting deep in now, McCall. Try to fix it in your head that governments and spy agencies are no more monolithic than huge corporations. There are factions and power groups fighting for influence in the shadows, all with ambitions and agendas of their own… just like your friend, Vickers.’

  ‘OK, I understand all that but who are the people who would’ve killed Ruby?’

  ‘The same guys who’re following us to make damn sure their man gets in to Downing Street and his dirty little secret doesn’t get out.’

  Thirty-Seven

  Next morning, alone and crossing the Humber Bridge on a bus from Barton to Hull, McCall felt no clearer about Benwick’s motives, still less his long term intentions. This unease wasn’t misplaced. He’d seen Benwick turn a car into a bomb to demolish two buildings for them to escape the men tracking them. He carried a gun and Vickers linked him - maliciously or not - to the assassination of a Canadian weapons scientist working for Iraq.

  He could almost be playing out a Dirty Harry fantasy - the solitary good cop fighting bad guys in a corrupted world. But Benwick’s sensational allegation - of police conspiring to ignore the abuse of children by high-ranking paedophiles so MI5 could honey trap a rising politician - was partly implied in Malky Hoare’s notes.

  But if Benwick had established where Ruby was being held, why didn’t he call his bosses’ bluff and raid the premises with fellow officers to arrest the kidnappers? The cops and spooks wouldn’t want their dirty washing - or themselves - hung out to dry in court and would’ve backed off. But inexplicably, he chose to rescue Ruby himself. Maybe his schizophrenic life in S.O.10 had left him on the unstable side of reality.

  As if to demonstrate this, he’d then tried to blow up a high security British arms factory with a female accomplice who’d probably been killed. So now he was on the run, fearing for his life. There had to be another narrative behind the story McCall was being offered.

  *

  The swelling on Benwick’s sprained ankle was easing. It still gave pain if he put his full weight on it but with rest, another two days should see it right.

  He lay on his bunk in the little flat where McCall had left him, unseen by people in the street below. McCall would bring food and newspapers when he returned from Hull docks. But his priority mission was to gather the intelligence on which Benwick’s end game depended.

  He didn’t doubt McCall would come back. The hack in him was too intrigued, had too much invested not to see the affair through to the death. Benwick also detected signs of Stockholm Syndrome in him, an affinity with the ultimate aims of his captor making him all the more amenable as a result.

  Besides, McCall seemed no stranger to the moral ambiguities imposed on those who preferred the riskier fringes of life rather than the ordeals by Garden Centre or Shopping Mall which were the penalties of a settled existence.

  Benwick fixed his gaze on a small patch of damp on the ceiling, brown like a monk’s cowl, and emptied his mind of all irrelevant thoughts. This was his training taking over, the ability to endure solitary confinement or hours of interrogation, focusing on a single physical feature in the cell where they would try to break him, thinking nothing, saying nothing.

  In such a meditative, Zen-like state, a disciplined man can disappear deep into himself and out-manoeuvre his torturers in the end.

  But the sudden, insistent ringing of a mobile phone broke his concentration. It came from inside McCall’s overnight bag. Benwick hadn’t realised he’d been daft enough to bring a mobile with him. They can be tracked and its user traced. He pressed the on button but stayed silent. The caller assumed McCall had answered.

  ‘Listen matey, your location is known so the jig’s nearly up. You’re up to your bloody armpits in the solids this time but I’m told the authorities might go easy provided you get out now and co-operate about your travelling companion.’

  It was Roly Vickers - the devious spook asset who’d back-scratched with McCall over the years and still had him on tap. He could yet wreck everything. Benwick thought hard but kept quiet.

  ‘McCall? Are you still there? Say something - ’

  Benwick switched off the phone. He cursed McCall’s stupidity and weighed up the options. Vickers could be spinning another FUD to jack up the pressure. They would only have a general fix so weren’t yet ready to move in or set up an observation post. But Benwick couldn’t gamble on unknowns at this stage. Everything would have to be brought forward. His anger at this turn of events needed to be harnessed and channelled.

  He put on his donkey jacket and cap and left the flat, head down to avoid eye contact with passers-by. Ahead was the main road leading to the towering slash of concrete and steel that was the Humber Bridge in the morning mist.

  He waited by the slip road near the south-side roundabout, thumb out to flag a ride. A truck from Leicester slowed down. Benwick opened the passenger door, deliberately asking the driver for a lift to Manchester.

  ‘Sorry, mate. Wrong direction, I’m heading home.’

  The lorry moved off with McCall’s mobile stuffed behind the seating. Its electronic scent would now lead Roly’s friends by the nose to the east midlands, if only for a day or so. It would buy Benwick a few more hours in which to regroup and change tack.

  *

  The King George Dock in Hull was a clamorous, chaotic spread of warehouses, fuel dumps and shipping offices beneath a low, dishwater sky liable to turn nasty. All was noise - the thunk and clank of cars driving up the ramps of ferries, grating containers being craned onto lorries, seagulls shrieking, men shouting and all this against the pulsing throb of diesel engines of ships coming, ships going.

  McCall knew Benwick’s wish list but he’d a public phone box to find first. Benwick had insisted he carry nothing to help the authorities identify him if he ran into trouble.

  ‘If they find you, they find me,’ he said. ‘That’s not a chance I can take.’

  So McCall had no wallet, driver’s licence, credit cards - and no mobile. He dialled a number from a kiosk. A man answered and McCall asked if Ronnie was there.

  ‘No, he’s out playing. His Mum’s just gone to the shop. Who wants him?’

  ‘Just a friend. We met at the golf club when we were watching the trains leaving the gunpowder factory.’

  ‘That sounds about right. Loves the railways, does Ronnie.’

  ‘Are you his Dad?’

  ‘No, the next-door neighbour. I’m just unblocking their sink.’

  ‘Not a nice job.’

  ‘No, but it gives me something to do till I can get back to work.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a loco driver but they say I’m suffering from stress.’

  ‘You don’t sound it.’

  ‘I’m not but they say I hit a woman on the track a few nights ago so I must be.’

  ‘Well, you’d know if you had, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘That’s right and no mistake and I know I didn’t.’

  ‘Where was this supposed to have happened?’

  ‘Five or six miles out from the gunpowder factory.’

  ‘That wasn’t the train going to Hull that young Ronnie and I watched, was it?’

  ‘Probably was but I’ve been ordered to say nothing about anything so sorry, but you’ll have to call again to talk to the lad.’

  Some days, a hack can dig in the dark for no reward. Other times, he gets luc
ky. The weapons factory, a train guarded by soldiers, a body on the line - these had to be part of Benwick’s bigger picture.

  The figure young Ronnie saw struck by the shunter might have looked male but wasn’t. It could only have been Benwick’s accomplice, Emily Jane Boland - the phoney pensioner whose theatrical disguises McCall took from the golf club hotel.

  If he was right, it was her body that’d been taken from the factory complex and placed near the main line to fake an accident or a suicide. Even as a corpse, the mysterious lady had been required to continue acting. But who had the motive, capability and nerve to cover up what happened on that, the oddest of nights?

  *

  It was looking up and suddenly being confronted by troops pointing automatic rifles at him which spun McCall back to Africa. If only for that instant, he wasn’t on a wet quayside any more but in that desolate kraal again, blood on his shoes and ice in his heart.

  High in the fierce blue sky, the blackest of birds circled the disarrayed limbs and flops of purple-blue offal far below. The silence, the emptiness, the desperate futility of it all swept through him like a gale of despair - and then of fear.

  The crowbar men might return before his contact, the priest. McCall could yet lie amid those they’d already dealt with, bellies unzipped and darkening the sand.

  The mind’s instinctive defence to such threat took over. It’s called de-realisation - the ears hear nothing, the eyes see nothing and the body shuts down to try and save itself. Without knowing how, McCall found himself cowering in the cesspit, his seat in the stalls when the massacre began. But that was then, this was now.

  The two soldiers who had him against a wall were Brits, rain running down their unsmiling faces and dripping from the muzzles of their guns.

  ‘Who the fuck are you and what are you doing here?’

  Thirty-Eight

  McCall reached into his plastic carrier bag and took out a can of strong lager from a supermarket pack of six.

  ‘Want a drink?’

  ‘Don’t be funny, shit face. What’s your name?’