by Mark Roberts
‘I’m going to ring this person right now, Lucien, but I’m going to warn you not to make any attempt to let them know where I am or that you’re present or that I know what they’ve been doing. As we speak, I know that this person is at home. As we speak, there are two unmarked police cars and four plainclothes officers outside this person’s house. So, if this person suddenly leaves their house, this person will be running straight into a trap.’
‘No comment.’
‘I’m going to call them right now.’
91
9.20 pm
Inside the Littlewoods Building, the night traffic on Edge Lane just outside sounded like the waves on a distant shore as Christopher Hawkins came round with phenomenal pain in his head and the sense that he had experienced the worst dream of his life.
Naked and tied securely to a hard-backed chair somewhere in the cavernous space, Christopher Hawkins struggled to turn his hands and feet to loosen the tightness of the knots. As he did so, shockwaves of pain ran up and down his spine and he stilled.
With stinging eyes and blurred vision, he made out an army of points of light across the floor and worked out that these were candles. As things became clearer to him, he was aware of a huge source of light in the distance behind him.
He tried to turn his head to the sound of a pair of feet but the simple action turned the invisible vice on his neck and everything from before his blackout came streaming back into his memory.
Hawkins went to whisper, ‘Jesus!’ but his voice was buried in a gag tied round his mouth.
As the footsteps behind him came closer, he realised who was in the same space as him, and with that came the understanding that this was the night he was going to suffer and die.
As Vindici walked around his left-hand side, Hawkins looked down at his bloated belly that obscured his withered penis and drooping testicles and he remembered that Vindici castrated each of his victims, the detail that had terrified him the most. The gag on his mouth stifled the scream that erupted inside him.
Vindici kept walking and, three metres away from Hawkins, set down a table. He laid a white cloth on it and, as he made his way back behind Hawkins, the bound man realised he was setting up an altar.
He walked back to the table carrying two large straw baskets and, placing them down on the ground, started taking items out.
The air was filled with the sweetness of fresh fruit, chocolate and sugar. He placed a statue of the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus to the side of the table and Hawkins wished he hadn’t watched the documentaries on television after Justin Truman had been convicted and sent to jail.
How smug he had been during Vindici’s reign of terror hundreds of miles away from Liverpool in the south of England, and how deeply relieved he had felt when Justin Truman was given a long custodial sentence. But how rattled he’d been when Vindici escaped and remained uncaptured.
Truman paused and looked directly at Hawkins.
Then he took silk dahlias from a basket and draped them over the altar and Hawkins heard himself whimper. His eyes welled up with tears as terror mounted inside him. Truman placed tea lights around the empty space at the centre of the altar and a ceramic statuette of a small child in a singlet with dark hair and outsized eyelashes on his or her face.
‘In case you were wondering, this is a Weeping Child, Christopher. It’s indicating you with its clenched fist and pointing down with its finger in the direction you’ll be travelling when you die, which won’t be for some time, I’m pleased to tell you.’
Slowly, Truman pulled a single bicycle spoke from the basket, kissed it and placed it on the left-hand side of the altar.
‘Shall we put some sweets out for the children? I think so,’ he said, scattering chocolate, fruit, a skull made of sugar and candy skeletons.
He produced a photograph frame and, keeping the image close to his chest, walked behind Hawkins, who felt Truman’s fingers pull at the knot that bound the gag. As Truman pulled the gag away, Hawkins begged, ‘Please let me go, please don’t hurt me, I’ve reformed, I’m a different man to the one you think I am.’
‘Shut up!’
Truman walked in front of Hawkins and said, ‘Now for the centrepiece of the altar to the death of innocence.’ He indicated the empty space at the centre of the altar and placed the photograph frame in it. ‘Look at her.’
Hawkins turned his face away, looked down at the ground, felt his stomach turn to water and the blood rush to the centre of his body.
Truman walked behind Hawkins and forced his head up, so that his face was directly in line with the image in the frame. ‘Look at her. Look at your victim. Did it make you feel important when you lured her into the shed? Did you feel excited? You like dark, claustrophobic spaces, don’t you? All the assaults you’ve either committed or have tried to commit have been in small dark spaces. What is it with you and the dark, Christopher?’
He pointed at the sombre-looking girl in the photo frame. ‘You managed to attack her. This is the one you were convicted for. There were others, surely?’
‘No, it was a once-in-a-lifetime mistake. On my mother’s grave. I don’t know what got into me that day.’
‘Is that the truth now?’
‘I swear to God it’s the truth.’
Truman took a CD from his coat pocket. ‘If you’re lying to me I’m going to make this go on for hours. Last chance. Are you lying to me?’
‘I’m telling the truth, please, Justin...’
‘Last chance,’ said Truman, reaching into the basket and picking out an old Polaroid picture. He smiled and looked at the image. Looking back over his shoulder at Hawkins, he placed the CD into a player, pressed play and propped the Polaroid up against the larger framed picture.
‘What is it?’ asked Hawkins. ‘I can’t see through you.’
Truman moved aside and watched Hawkins’s reaction to the crudely coloured Polaroid image on the altar, the questioning, the slow realisation and the horror.
Truman pointed at the Polaroid photograph. ‘You’ve just lied to me!’
He picked up the sharpened bicycle spoke from the altar and pulled a Stanley knife from his pocket as he approached Hawkins.
Hawkins screamed at the top of his voice but the screams were lost, sucked in to the shadows and vastness of the Littlewoods Building, and drowned out by the echoing strains of Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’.
92
9.21 pm
Clay turned on the speakerphone and the incident room was filled with the ring tone from her iPhone. She eyeballed Lucien Burns and said, ‘You didn’t get your information from whistleblower sites on the deep web, did you, Lucien?’
‘No comment.’
The person picked up and Clay pressed her right index finger to her sealed lips.
‘Hello, Eve.’
Clay waited, watched Lucien Burns’s face.
‘Hello, Eve, are you there?’
‘Yes I am. I’m sorry to call you so late but there’s been something of a development regarding Lucien Burns.’
‘Is that the boy you pulled in today?’
‘Yes, the boy who’s running the Vindici fan site from Springwood Avenue. We’ve found something on his computer and we think you need to come in and look at it.’
‘Now? Right now?’
‘Yes, right now!’
‘OK. I’ve had a couple of glasses of red wine, so I won’t be able to drive over. I’ll book a taxi and get there as soon as possible.’
‘I don’t want to inconvenience you more than I need to so I’ve sent a car over to give you a lift to Trinity Road.’
Beyond the silence close to the receiver, Clay heard a television playing in another room in the house and the bland sound of the outside world reminded her that Bob Rimmer was out there and no one had heard from or seen him since he’d disappeared.
‘OK, I’ll get my coat...’
‘Thank you. See you soon,’ said Clay with grim breeziness. She closed down the call. ‘
You don’t have to give me a name, Lucien. That’s the leak who’s been feeding you information, isn’t it?’
‘No comment.’
93
9.28 pm
Justin Truman came up from the letter ‘c’ and drew the tip of the Stanley knife blade into a cursive ‘i’.
‘Don’t move, Christopher, or I’ll rearrange the running order and cut your slimy little balls off right now!’
Hawkins’s body stiffened.
Truman removed the tip of the blade from Hawkins’s skin and then jabbed it sharply back in to dot the ‘i’.
‘You’ll get caught, Justin, if you kill me. If you let me go, I won’t say a word no more.’
‘You’re like a stuck record, do you know that? Accept the fact that I’m as good as my word and you’re going to die tonight.’
‘Why don’t you just put me out of my misery?’ sobbed Hawkins.
‘A speedy death’s too good for the likes of you, Hawkins. Look at the altar. Look at the statuette of the Weeping Child. Who made the children weep?’
‘Me.’
‘You killed her innocence. I put that statuette there in the hope that she’ll come back from the place you sent her to, and be reborn happy. The food’s for her. If she returns, I want to care for her and comfort her, give her something nice to eat. That’s what you’re supposed to do to children, care for them. That’s what’s so great about the Day of the Dead festival. The unthinkable becomes an a real possibility. The dead return and all you have to do is prepare for them and believe.’
He picked up the carving knife and sharpened spoke from the altar. ‘I’m going to stick this into your brain and, as you die, I’m going to castrate you with that.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? I’ll tell you why. When you did what you did to that little girl, you didn’t just violate her body. You placed yourself right in the centre of her brain. So, before you die, I’m going to stick something destructive into your brain and it’s going to kill you.’
Justin Truman dropped the bloodstained Stanley knife on to the floor, stepped in front of Hawkins and watched as the first drop of Hawkins’s blood splashed on to the floor between the back legs of the chair on which he was tied.
‘How about this?’ suggested Truman. ‘How about you die with dignity? How about you stop begging? Making ridiculous promises? Ignoring reality? How about that?’
Wind leaked in through the cracks in the building.
‘Well?’
Some of the candles stuttered, went out and faint smoke leaked into the cold air.
From the basket, Truman took a box of matches and seven incense cones. He placed three cones on Hawkins’s left thigh, four on the right and, striking a match, lit the tips of the incense. The final thread of composure in Hawkins’s being snapped and he tried to rock on the chair, in an effort to shake the incense cones from his legs, but the knots that tied his ankles to the chair were rigorously tight.
‘Seven cones, always seven, Christopher. Because that’s how old I was when I was abused. If I was you, I wouldn’t even try and make them fall off your knees. I’ve got dozens and dozens of cones and I can always make you an exception and place them anywhere I like on your body. I can even push the chair over so that you’re on your back and put them all over your torso. Do you want that?’
‘No,’ he cried.
‘Then make like a statue. The smoke will cleanse the air around you, mask the stench that emanates from you, bring sweetness where there is none. I’m going to film you. Get ready to smile and read whatever you see from the page I’m about to show you.’
94
9.30 pm
You look like you’ve aged a dozen years in a matter of hours, thought DS Gina Riley as she observed Daniel Campbell across the table in Interview Suite 2. She looked at his grim-faced solicitor Aaron Brierley at his side and then at Lesley Reid next to her. She checked the corners of the room behind her and nodded at retired DCI Reid’s colleagues from South Yorkshire Police.
‘Are you still planning on litigating against us?’ asked Riley.
‘No,’ replied Campbell.
She indicated the wad of bank statements on the table in front of her. ‘This is your bank account, right?’
‘No.’
‘It’s got your name and business address on it but it’s not your bank account?’ Riley stared at Campbell.
‘I didn’t open this account.’
‘If you didn’t open and manage this bank account that’s in your name, who did?’
‘It was set up and managed by Steven and Frances Jamieson.’
‘Two dead people who can have no way of communicating their perspective on this matter. That’s convenient, Mr Campbell. Why would they set up an account in your name and use your business address?’
‘Because they were operating a slush fund.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I know that because when the first bank statement arrived in my office, my secretary at the time brought it to my attention. I looked at the first statement and alarm bells rang out. Fifty thousand pounds a month is a lot of money to pay into an account.’
‘Did you challenge Steven Jamieson about it?’
‘Yes. He told me it was his wife’s idea, that they needed distance from the account. He described me as their Trojan Horse.’
‘Assuming you’re telling the truth, how did you feel about them fraudulently opening a bank account in your name?’
‘I was angry, of course I was.’
‘Did he explain the purpose of the account?’
‘The words he used were to take care of people who help us and silence those who don’t.’
Lesley Reid picked up three bank statements from the top of the pile and started reading them. ‘I’m assuming these PLCs that you’re dropping thousands of pounds a month to are individual police officers,’ she said.
Campbell looked sideways at his solicitor. ‘I told him to close the account and open one in his own name. Five minutes later, the telephone rang and it was Frances Jamieson screaming on top note that she was going to sever all legal and business ties with me.’
‘Why didn’t you report them to the South Yorkshire Police?’ asked Riley.
‘Because they were responsible for over fifty per cent of my practice’s income. I struck a compromise of sorts, that I’d oversee their account in my name as long as they destroyed the evidence. Which they clearly didn’t. I told my secretary it was all a huge mistake on the bank’s part. I went to the branch and arranged for the statements to not be posted to my office but collected personally by me and me alone. I, in turn, hand-delivered the statements to the Jamiesons. That’s what you can see on the table.’
‘That was a mistake,’ said Riley.
‘Yes I know it was a fucking mistake,’ shouted Campbell.
‘Calm down,’ said his solicitor.
‘I knew all about his sexual deviancy and I facilitated the damage limitation. We shared a toxic secret. I thought I could trust him. He swore blind that as soon as they’d seen the statements that they shredded them. Clearly not. It’s the same story with the receipts from Dr Warner and the confidentiality agreements. They kept their copies because it gave them power over me.’
‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to hand over used banknotes in bags to the officers he was paying off?’
‘You think I didn’t try to suggest that to them? If anyone came on their payroll it was on their terms. The way they did business always put them in the driving seat, gave them the power. Money in a bag neutralised that power, but a standing order to a PLC put a fist around the receiver’s throat.’
Campbell raised a glass of water to his lips and his hand shook so much that he had to use his free hand to steady it.
‘You know what, Mr Campbell,’ said Reid. ‘Myself and my colleagues would be very interested in names of officers on the Jamiesons’ payroll but...’ She glanced at Riley to double-check. ‘...I guess we can come to
that later, DS Riley?’
‘Absolutely. I don’t want to unpick the fine details, I just want you to tell me about Dr Warner and the confidentiality agreements.’
With an elbow on the edge of the table, Campbell held his forehead in one hand and looked down. ‘Warner was an abortionist. Whenever Steven Jamieson got a teenage girl pregnant, I had two jobs. To negotiate a payoff for her silence with the parent or guardian and to set up an abortion.’ Campbell sat back. He looked at the confidentiality agreements on the table and the receipts from Dr Warner. ‘That’s it.’
‘You had a one hundred per cent success rate in the silence and abortion stakes?’ asked Riley.
‘No. How could that possibly be?’
‘Any names of these refusers?’
‘It was a long time ago,’ said Campbell.
‘How about you think, and think really hard,’ said Riley.
Campbell looked at his solicitor, who said, ‘My client will cooperate to the best of his ability.’
Riley took a deep breath but the air felt poisonous and the whole world sick. ‘That’s enough for me for now,’ she said. ‘How about you?’ she asked Reid.
‘I want a list of names, ranks, amounts of money and operations undermined by your friend’s corruption,’ said Reid.
‘He wasn’t a friend. He was a client,’ insisted Campbell.
Riley looked at the counter moving on the tape recorder and, looking up at Campbell and his solicitor said, ‘Did you say you wanted to make a statement?’
The solicitor nodded and turned back a few pages in the book in which he’d been making notes. ‘Ready?’ asked Brierley.
Staring into space, Campbell nodded.
‘My client, Daniel Campbell, wishes it to be known that he is not and has never engaged in unlawful sexual activity with a child. He further wishes it to be known in advance that when his phone, computers and other communication devices are taken by police for forensic investigation that the pornographic images of children engaged in unlawful sexual activity with adults were sent to him by Steven Jamieson as a means of controlling, blackmailing and exercising power over other paedophiles who were clearly visible and identifiable in the images. My client was merely acting as a custodian. End of statement.’