by Ellis, Tim
‘Just.’
‘Oh God! You’re the crazy person. Where is she?’
‘In the room.’
She stood up. ‘I’d better go and see if she’s all right.’
‘That’s what I wanted you to do.’
‘To repair the damage you’ve done, you... you Lothario.’
She got up and started towards the lifts.
‘I don’t even know what one of them is,’ he called after her. He took a swallow of his coffee. Now, it was just a question of everyone getting used to the idea. Angie would be all right once the information sank in. A daughter... called Melody... well, he never!
***
She really wanted to go home, but she knew she couldn’t. There were three paedophiles out there who might be being held as hostages, or they could even be dead by now. It was her duty to save them, or at least make a passable effort at saving them. She’d convinced herself that – given the chance – she’d let them be tortured and killed, but would she? They were still human beings after all. Yes, the lowest of the low, and she’d like to lock them up and throw the key into the sulphur pits of hell, but did they deserve to be tortured, dismembered, and killed? Thankfully, it was not her call to make. All she was required to do was catch criminals. The moralising she should leave to those who were paid to moralise.
‘Come on then, Dr Paul, make my dreams come true.’
They’d just arrived at 57 Grange Lane in Roydon – Donald Tumbell’s house was lit up like a Christmas tree.
Toadstone pulled his mask down. ‘If you have dreams about paedophiles...’
‘I have dreams about you finding some useful evidence, which will lead me to the killer.’
‘Ah! Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you...’
‘Again. Don’t forget the word, “again”, Dr Disappointment. Up to now, you’ve seriously disappointed me.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Sergeant Blake. Maybe...’
‘So, come on then, stop procrastinating, what have you found?’
‘What you’d expect. There was evidence of a struggle. It seems he was dragged out of bed in the middle of the night...’
‘And I bet none of the neighbours heard a damn thing. Arrange a house-to-house afterwards, Stick.’
Stick nodded and wrote it down in his notebook.
‘Have you got a problem with your short-term memory?’
‘I like to keep a record of...’
‘Ah, so you can use it against me afterwards?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
Toadstone interrupted. ‘It occurred to me that you’re actually investigating two crimes here, aren’t you?’
‘Go on then, enlighten me?’
‘Well, on the one hand you’ve got the abduction of Mr Tumbell, and on the other hand, he’s a paedophile. You were right about where to look, and what to look for.’ He pointed to a large evidence bag full of DVDs, videos, magazines and memory sticks. ‘I’m afraid Mr Tumbell lacked originality. We found a stack of material under loose floorboards in his bedroom...’
‘Does he live here alone?’
‘Yes. He’s a chartered surveyor.’
She shook her head. ‘Paedophiles – like everything else – come in all shapes and sizes.’ She expected the worst, and people never seemed to disappoint her.
‘And his computer was stuffed full of obscene pictures and videos. If you find him alive, we have more than enough evidence to convict him of....’
‘Yes, but as you very well know, that’s not really the evidence I was looking for. I want to know where the MAPs have taken him.’
‘Have you not had any luck with the churches yet?’
Stick glanced at her.
‘Early days yet. Thirty-three is a lot of churches. So, is that it?’
‘We have found one other thing.’
‘I’m getting excited.’
‘Don’t. It’s a boot print from the ground outside. If you do find the kidnappers, and one of them is wearing boots of this type, I should be able to match it up with what we’ve found.’
‘Did you hear that, Stick? Dr Doom has found a boot print. Hallelujah – we’re saved. Well, it’s been great listening to your excuses again, but Stick and I really have to go and do some proper police work now. Be sure to contact me if you ever do find any useful evidence, but otherwise we’ll see you at the Christmas Party.’
Xena shoved Stick towards the door.
Toadstone sighed. ‘One of these days I’m going to find the mother lode.’
‘Can’t wait,’ Xena threw over her shoulder.
Outside Stick said, ‘You’re really nasty to him.’
‘I could turn my gaze towards you if you’re feeling neglected?’
‘No, it’s all right.’
‘Are you sure? I wouldn’t want you to think I was being nastier to him than I am to you.’
‘I’m sure. Where are we going now?’
‘Well, let’s see. We could go to the first church on the map and investigate whether they’re torturing paedophiles there. Or, we could go back to an empty, dark, and lonely police station. Alternatively, we could go and knock on a few doors here, and then go home – you choose.’
‘I think the last option sounds rather tempting.’
‘You’re a numpty. You go left, and I’ll go right.’
***
If her friends in Group 323 ever found out that she was helping a copper they’d make her walk the plank, but a girl had to eat. It was all right being a political activist, a squatter, and a sponger living off state handouts, but you couldn’t be a grunge twenty-four seven. If she was going to treat herself to the little extras in life now and again, then she had to take on the odd job here and there. Saving Kowalski’s ass was one such job – a necessary evil. And if she was pinned against the wall and forced to tell the truth she’d tell them she was helping Charlie Baxter, and they all agreed he was an okay guy.
So, a copper who’d climbed up the ranks by trampling over the bodies of the downtrodden was being fitted up – what a shame. Under normal circumstances she would have ordered another larger top, and danced naked through Reservoir Wood under a silvery moon, but two thousand quid wasn’t to be sniffed at, and Charlie Baxter had promised her another thousand depending on whether she produced the goods – oh he of little faith. Principles were fine if you had money in the piggy bank, but you couldn’t light a barbecue with principles.
On the way back to the squat in Wanstead, she’d turned everything over in her mind and decided that there were really only two possibilities: 1) Someone had gained a position of trust within the police station and was using that position to fit up Kowalski; or 2) Someone in a position of trust was being paid by an outsider to fit him up. There had to be someone on the inside. Oh, a hacker could have wheedled their way into the station’s network, into his bank account, and possibly into the London hotel’s system, but with great difficulty. There were very few people out there who had the skills to bypass firewalls. She was one of them, and she only knew of two others – one was in jail for siphoning off funds from a well-known High street bank, and the other was working for the Russian mafia.
Yes, the movies were rife with hackers hiding round every corner who could finagle their way into your computer at the blink of an eye – or the time it took to get a dragon tattooed on your shoulder. In reality though, it was merely a ruse by the software security companies to get you to buy antivirus software to protect your computer against a few malicious worms and Trojan horses, some spam, adware, and malware that popped up to annoy you now and again. Cybergeddon wasn’t going to happen tomorrow, or next week, regardless of the dire warnings being propagated by Hollywood.
The second issue Charlie had asked her to look at was the Chief Constable – Kennard Barrett-Croft. She hated double-barrelled names more than she hated coppers; they reeked of middle class snobbery. Rummaging around in Barrett-Croft’s life would compensate her for saving Kowalski. She could enlist the
help of the others to bring the bastard to his knees. If she couldn’t find anything worthwhile, maybe she’d fit him up. But during her ruminations, she’d decided that Barrett-Croft was a dirty copper – why else would he hang Kowalski out to dry? Yes, she was going to examine him very carefully.
She walked the short distance from the tube station to the squat and gave the secret knock – three short taps and a drum roll. Romeo had thought of it – it was pathetic. Harley opened the door.
There were four of them living in the squat: Romeo, Shrek, Harley, and herself. She’d been there for two years – since she was a month short of her sixteenth birthday. Not the longest though. Shrek had moved in with two of the original squatters, but they’d left over eighteen months ago. It was an old Victorian house that had been standing empty for six months prior to it becoming a squat. Now, the house wasn’t really a squat anymore, it was their home, and nobody was going to move them out of it.
In an attempt to force them back onto the streets the owners had paid for the electricity, gas, and water to be turned off, but Romeo knew someone, who knew someone else, who had a brother, whose uncle used to work for the gas board, and he knew an electrician... In the end, they’d piggybacked the gas from next door on the left, the electricity from the house directly across the road from them, and the water from the pub down the road – they believed in the equitable re-allocation of resources.
‘Is everyone in?’ she asked Harley.
Harley was older than the rest of them – mid-thirties they’d guessed. She’d told everyone she had a degree in biochemistry, but whether it was true or not nobody really knew – private lives stayed private unless somebody wanted to share. What Cookie did know was that Harley had been a member of an animal rights group that had blown up a cosmetics laboratory in Cambridge, which had killed three people.
‘Think so.’
‘Can you tell them to meet me in the living room in ten minutes, I’ve got a job?’
‘Sure. Anything interesting?’
‘How about bringing down the Chief Constable of Essex?’
‘Now you’re talking, Cookie baby.’
Chapter Fourteen
Thursday, 28th February
He liked being called “The Painter”. It wasn’t something he’d set out to become, but like most things in life – it had simply happened.
When he’d been looking for a job after college, he sort of fell into the art world. He’d had an interview at the Sarah Monteith Galleries, and they’d taken him on – not as an artist, or anything like that – simply as a worker. At first, he was like a fish out of water, but as the years passed by he became a bit of an expert in talking to customers, selling awful paintings by terrible artists to gullible clients, and spotting a winner when he saw one.
Eventually, he became the manager of the galleries, and once he’d married old woman Monteith’s ugly daughter – and then killed her – he became the owner – not just of the galleries, but of a sprawling estate on the outskirts of Richmond.
He didn’t count Poppy Monteith as one of his projects – she had been too ugly to paint. Her death had been an accident – a necessary accident. Not only had she been ugly on the outside, but she was ugly on the inside as well. She planned to change her will, to cut him out of everything, to leave her mother’s fortune to the dog’s home. Well, of course, he couldn’t let that happen. He was away on one of his frequent trips when the vehicular accident had happened – a hit-and-run. It had temporarily cost him ten thousand dollars, but he took it back once he’d killed the assassin. No witnesses to come back and haunt him.
He’d finished the painting of his last victim. It now hung in his study with the other four pictures. Another five to complete. In a way, he had an idea of how Michelangelo had felt when he painted the Sistine Chapel. To complete a great work of art took passion, determination, and most of all – talent. And that was the worst thing of all, having to bow and scrape to talentless idiots – they were hardly artists – when he possessed more talent in his little finger than they had in their whole bodies. Well, no more. He had recruited a manager, kept the galleries’ name, and retired from public life.
Now, nobody really knew he existed. He was a recluse, except when he was working on a project. Today, he would book into the Country Inn Hotel, and tonight he would paint another picture.
***
Jerry arrived at eight o’clock to find that Charlie Baxter’s office had been transformed during the night.
Leo Burke was sitting on a stack of files drinking strong dark coffee from a heavily stained mug. He had patches of white hair on his head, large hairy ears that belonged in another age, and a warm craggy face.
‘If I was greeted by your beauty every morning of my life, I could live forever,’ he said to her as she walked through the door. ‘Your husband must be the luckiest man alive.’
‘Never mind him, Miss,’ Leo Burke’s spotty apprentice said with a grin. ‘He always talks rubbish when he’s had too much coffee.’
‘Oh, so me being a beauty is rubbish, is it?’
‘His name’s Keith Taylor, but it should be “Foot-in-the-Mouth”,’ Leo said laughing.
Keith’s face went the colour of her red handbag. ‘No, no, I didn’t mean...’
‘You two need to go to romancing classes to learn how to talk to women. Just like they have parenting classes, so that nobody has to guess what to do.’
‘Hey yeah, that’d be nifty, eh, Mr B?’
‘Bit late for me, love. I’ve already made my mistakes, but I still got me one of those good women who died young...’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Leo,’ she said.
‘Yeah, I miss her like crazy sometimes.’
‘You still got your daughter, and those screaming grandkids though,’ Keith nudged him.
‘Yeah, I still got them. Or, it should be that they’ve still got me... and my money, of course. Anyways, enough of this miserableness. Let me give you the guided tour.’
He walked her round the shelving units he’d installed from floor to ceiling, and wall-to-wall – the “guided tour” took less than five minutes.
She gave him a cheque for the agreed amount.
He looked at it, shuffled his feet and said, ‘I was hoping for cash.’
‘You’re trying to get me locked up, aren’t you? Then how beautiful would I be?’
‘Nah, it’s okay...’
‘He was trying to avoid the tax and VAT....’
‘Thank you, big mouth,’ he said to Keith. ‘I think I can handle the payment negotiations.’
She whipped the cheque out of his hand. ‘Wait here.’ After scooping up her bag, she left the office, walked along the street to the ATM machine, and took out five hundred pounds.
Back at the office, she handed him the money. ‘You two were never here.’
‘I’ve been tucked up in my bed all night with a hot water bottle,’ Leo said.
‘And me,’ Keith said. ‘Only I was with the singer Selena Gomez – God, she’s a hot babe.’
Leo laughed. ‘In your dreams.’ He glanced at Jerry. ‘He still thinks it’s for pissing...’
‘Hey, Leo...’ Keith nudged him.
‘Oops! Sorry about that, Miss. Well, I suppose we’d better go before we get into any more mischief.’
They cleared up the mess in the office, threw everything into the back of Leo’s truck, which was sitting outside half on and half off the pavement, and left.
She may have looked beautiful, but she’d thrown on a pair of jeans and an old blue and red top she’d forgotten she had. There was still work to be done. She’d left to go home at quarter to midnight, and Charlie had still been preparing lawsuits, checking case law, and rummaging through old files – when he could find them.
The two yobs – Freddie and Ryan – she’d employed to move the files had done a good job. It was certainly going to be easier putting them on the shelves now, than it would have been before – fifty quid well spent.
<
br /> Shelving didn’t fill itself. It was no good staring at the files. They weren’t going to fly onto the shelves in case order like something out of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The trouble was, she wasn’t a legal secretary. In fact, she wasn’t any kind of secretary, so she had no idea how to store the files so that Charlie could find what he was looking for.
She’d met Ray when she’d been just seventeen, married him at eighteen, and began having children at nineteen. Briefly, she’d worked in a greengrocer’s shop selling fruit and vegetables, but what she’d really wanted to be was a movie star until Ray came along. He was a twenty-six year old policeman, and from the moment she saw him she knew she had to have him. He was a man mountain like the Hulk, only he wasn’t green – he was just drop-dead gorgeous. Her years had been spent loving him and bringing up their four children, and she wouldn’t have had it any other way. Now though, she needed to be something more than a wife and mother, and she would. To get back everything she loved in the world – her husband and her children – she had to become the woman who had been hiding inside, but she knew that once she let the genie out of the bottle there would be no way of putting it back, and maybe that was a good thing.
She picked up a file and examined it. How was she going to store and catalogue them? It was a case of sexual harassment in the workplace from 2004. A woman by the name of Nicola Nugent from Chingford. She realised that she needed a system that would identify the client’s name – alphabetical; where the client lived – geographical; the subject matter of the case - categorical; and when it took place – chronological. Well, she couldn’t put the files in four places, so she decided that the primary method of storage would be alphabetical – Nugent. N. Then, she would give each file a code for the date, the subject matter, and the area (06-04/SH/E4). E4 was the Chingford postcode. If she put all this information into a computer database, then she should be able to find anything. Obviously, she’d have to run it past Charlie, because he might want something else.