by Jo Bannister
Hazel thought about it. Children’s names, pets’ names, birthdays—most people used one or another of them, but Saturday wouldn’t have known that sort of information about Charles Armitage. So … “DROWSSAP?” she asked faintly.
Saturday grinned. “Tragic, innit?”
All this was a little beside the point, except as evidence that the rest of it, the important stuff, was not a figment of the boy’s imagination. “All right. So you got into his vault, and it was full of pictures. We’re not talking family snaps here, are we?”
“Jesus, I hope not!”
And they weren’t talking about Mr. Armitage’s mistress, either. Saturday might have spent an inordinate amount of time studying pictures like that, but he wouldn’t have involved Hazel if that was all he’d found. He’d found something that even someone with a street kid’s flexible morality felt he had to do something about.
“Children? Saturday—were they pictures of children?”
He wasn’t grinning now. He nodded and looked away.
“Children being abused?” Again the nod. “Sexually?”
“Yes!” he shot back, angry and embarrassed. “All right? Little kids, some of them. And girls pretending to be all grown-up, except they’re clutching a teddy bear in their free hand. It isn’t right, Hazel. Not when they’re that little. I don’t want to be a prude, but … that’s not right.”
“No, it isn’t.” It never occurred to Hazel to doubt the truth of what he was telling her. She knew he was perfectly capable of lying, cheating, and stealing, but she didn’t think he was lying about this. It was too serious—a thing even Saturday regarded as beyond the pale. “How many pictures did you see?”
He shrugged. “A fraction of what was there.”
Child protection is a specialist field, online child protection even more so, but Hazel had covered the basics in training and—with her IT background—seen more of it than most probationers. More than enough, though if she returned to policing she would undoubtedly see more. She understood now why the boy had been so determined to pass a valuable piece of equipment on to the police. It had been a good and brave thing he’d done, when much the easiest thing would have been to drop the thing in the canal.
Because it was a police matter. The children could be half a world away, possibly beyond any help Hazel could hope to send them, but the men fueling the trade—and they were mainly, though not exclusively, men—were everywhere. They were in England; they were in Norbold. They were in nice houses like the ones in Highfield Road and in modest flats like hers. They had jobs and friends and workmates, and most of them had families, and hardly any of those people knew about their little hobby, or would have believed if they were told. They were someone to have a drink with, to play darts with, to have around for a meal. They were the men who didn’t mind dating a girl with kids. Sometimes they were the husband and father who was happy to keep coaching the junior swimmers, though his own kids had now left home.
They were that nice professional gent in the architect’s office who’d pick your kids up from school if you were running late.
“Saturday, we have to take this to Meadowvale. To DI Gorman.”
The boy’s eyes flared, afraid. “No way!”
“We have to. It’s too serious to ignore.”
“I didn’t ignore it. I gave the laptop to you.”
“I thought it was just lost property! I didn’t know it was evidence of a crime!”
They were shouting at each other, enough to draw curious glances. Hazel lowered her voice. “It never occurred to me that you wanted me to pick it apart. When we saw the drawings and realized where it had come from, we thought it was just a matter of getting it back to him. I’m sorry, Saturday, but we need to see DI Gorman right away.”
“You tell him.” There was a nasal whine in the boy’s voice.
“I will,” promised Hazel. “I’ll explain everything. But he’ll need to talk to you. You saw these things and I didn’t. He won’t be angry with you. Why would he be?” She got to her feet, pulled Saturday to his.
And it was through her hand on his arm that she felt his spare muscles bunch, ready to flee. She said softly, “If you run, I will come after you. We have to deal with this, and we have to do it now.”
After a moment, Saturday nodded. They walked back to Balfour Street and collected Hazel’s car.
* * *
Detective Inspector Gorman had them shown up right away. It was almost, Hazel thought, as if he was expecting her. But the boy trailing reluctantly behind her like a pram dinghy behind a frigate took him by surprise.
He had his mouth open to say one thing, then thought better of it and shut it. He waved them to chairs on the opposite side of his desk. “Er…”
Hazel waited another moment, politely, before embarking on the explanation she’d prepared. “This is my friend Saul Desmond. You may know him as Saturday. He’s the one who left that laptop for me to bring in.” She was pleased with that. It was perfectly accurate, without contradicting anything she’d told the DI previously. “And the reason he wanted us to have it instead of selling it to some guy in a pub”—Saturday kept his eyes averted—“is that he’s got better instincts for criminality than the two of us put together. He accessed it the same way we did. But instead of seeing who the owner was and shutting it down, he found a second set of files behind a second password. Those were the ones he wanted you to see.”
Dave Gorman blinked. He’d thought, when he heard Hazel was at the front desk, that he knew how the next few minutes were going to go. But it wasn’t like this. “Why?”
Hazel turned to Saturday; Saturday remained fixated on a tear in the left knee of his jeans. Hazel sighed. “Because they’re full of images of child pornography. Scores of them.”
Police officers dedicated to the pursuit of criminals and the prevention of crime cannot decently admit to smacking their lips at any lawbreaking. Among themselves, though, a certain relish may be detected at the prospect of a good jewel heist to solve or a clever art robbery. There are those who positively look forward to working on a good old-fashioned bank job or a brilliant con.
But nobody wants to investigate child abuse. They do it because decent police officers, like all decent people, want it dealt with as efficiently as possible, and the perpetrators put where they can do no more harm. No one wants to work on cases like that, but when they do, no one has to ask them to stay late. Detectives who can normally stretch a lunch hour until three can be seen eating sandwiches at their desks. They abandon all hope of a private life until they’re sure they’ve done everything they can.
“You didn’t see these images?” Gorman asked Hazel.
“No.”
“And he didn’t tell you about them when he gave you the laptop?”
“No,” Hazel said again. “Mr. Gorman, I know this boy. I know he isn’t lying. He’s got nothing to gain by lying. He could have sold the laptop and neither you nor I would ever have known. Fifty quid, eighty quid in his pocket. That’s a lot to someone like Saturday. He’d need a good reason not to do that. Well, this is it. What he saw on that computer. He may not be your idea of a model citizen, but this struck him as important enough to do the right thing.”
“Why didn’t you tell us what was on it?” This time the detective was looking straight at the boy.
Saturday mumbled something in reply.
“What?”
The boy looked up with a sudden hawklike fierceness. “Because,” he enunciated sharply, “it never occurred to me for one frigging minute that you wouldn’t frigging look!”
Gorman had Saturday repeat in grueling detail exactly what he’d seen. He prepared a witness statement, which Saturday, under a kind of weary protest, signed. They had a certain amount of difficulty with the witness’s address, until Hazel volunteered her own, fervently hoping that Mrs. Poliakov would never get to hear of it.
“You going to arrest him now?” asked Saturday, adding with a fine disdain, “The dirty
bugger.”
“I’m certainly going to bring him in for questioning. And seize his laptop.” DI Gorman glanced at Hazel. “The problem is, of course, that he’s had time to cover his tracks.”
“It’s pretty hard to erase things from a hard drive so completely that an expert can’t find them,” Hazel pointed out.
“This isn’t some middle-aged creep running a second life from his back bedroom,” said Gorman shortly. “He’s a professional man.” He might have said more, but there were things he would say to Hazel that he wouldn’t say in front of the teenager.
“I know who he is,” retorted Saturday. “Charles Armitage. Every file on the desktop had his name on it, for God’s sake. I also know what he is.”
Gorman scowled. “All right. Well, Mr. Armitage is also a well-connected professional man. If he needs technical help, he can buy it. If he needs the kind of technical help that’ll keep its mouth shut afterward, he can buy that. And if he needs a steamroller to flatten his old laptop and give him an excuse to buy a new one, well, he works on building sites every day, doesn’t he?”
“We’d still have Saturday’s statement.” Doubt was seeping into Hazel’s voice.
“Yes,” said Dave Gorman. He said nothing more. He didn’t have to. If it came to a straight choice between believing responsible, professional, middle-class Charles Armitage and believing a street kid who needed to borrow an address to put on his witness statement, a jury that found Saturday’s evidence credible would probably believe in unicorns and the tooth fairy as well.
The DI got up. He opened his door and waved to a passing constable. “Show Mr. Desmond the way out, will you?” But as Hazel went to follow, he shut the door again, almost in her face. She turned, startled, and his expression took her completely off guard. Intense, concerned, a hint of dread pinching the small muscles beside the eyes. “You don’t know, do you?”
Hazel stared at him in astonishment. “Know what?”
“It’s been all over the Internet all morning.” Gorman pursed his lips. “But I suppose you’ve been busy.…”
“What’s been all over the Internet?”
“Your friend Ash,” said Dave Gorman, and Hazel’s stomach dropped into her boots.
She dragged up a heard-it-all-before voice to hide behind. “What’s he done now?”
CHAPTER 10
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER DAVE GORMAN leaned forward and turned the screen off. The absolute silence that washed back into the small, untidy room was almost tangible.
He waited for her to say something. But Hazel had lost the power of speech. She’d almost lost the power of thought. She just sat there in stunned silence, staring at the blank screen with gritty, dry eyes, as if she, too, was waiting.
For what? For Gorman to give a sudden chuckle and say, “Don’t look so serious, it’s just a joke”? For the door to bang suddenly open and all the people who thought they owed her a slap to pour through it blowing whoopee whistles? For the DI to advance a kindly hand as far as her trembling wrist and say, “Don’t worry, we won’t let it come to that,” and mean it?
None of those things was going to happen, and somewhere in her tiny icy heart Hazel knew it. Those few brain cells that were still operating knew it. It wasn’t a joke, and it wasn’t a mistake, and it wasn’t Meadowvale getting its own back, and Dave Gorman wasn’t going to say that he was in a position to prevent it. The most he could say, the very most, was that he’d try to prevent it; and though she waited, achingly, he didn’t even say that.
What he said eventually, when one of them had to say something and it was becoming clear that Hazel wasn’t going to, was, “It may be some kind of a delaying tactic. He may not intend to go through with it.”
Hazel blinked. Then she cleared her throat. Her voice still didn’t sound much like her: thin and frail yet utterly convinced. “He intends to go through with it.”
Gorman leaned closer, studying her face. “How can you know that? Have you spoken to him?”
“About … this?” She shook her head, the girlish fair hair tossing. “About his wife and sons, yes. He was always ready to do anything that would bring them home. He told me once he’d have gladly killed himself if that would bring them home. The only thing stopping him was that he wouldn’t know if it had worked. If the Somalis would realize he was out of their way.
“Well, he knows now.” She swallowed, looked up at Gorman. “I’m understanding this right, am I? They’ve contacted him. They’ve said Cathy and the boys can come home if he … if he…” She couldn’t say the words.
“Yes,” said the DI, and his naturally rather coarse voice was gentle. “That’s what they say. Why would he believe them?”
“Because they have nothing to gain by holding his family if Gabriel is”—this time she got it out—“dead. They were hostages to his good behavior, the means of keeping him off the pirates’ backs. If he’s no longer a threat to them, they don’t need to hold on to the people he loves.”
“They could still kill them,” warned Gorman. “It would be easier than sending them home.”
Hazel nodded. “Gabriel will know that. He’ll make sure he’s getting what he wants before he gives them what they want.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. But he’ll find a way. Don’t underestimate him. People around here think he’s a fool. He’s not. He never was.”
Gorman was nodding slowly. “I know that. But it’s a big ask, to outwit people as ruthless as that when they’re holding something so important that you’re prepared to die for it.”
The immediate shock was passing. In its wake Hazel felt a terrible sense of urgency. “We have to find him. He will do it, when he’s sure Cathy and the boys are safe. He’ll do exactly what he’s agreed to—kill himself, live on the Internet. We have to find him and stop him. Where did that package come from?”
“The IT guys are working on that right now,” Gorman assured her. “Only…”
This was Hazel’s field. “Only, it may not be possible to establish exactly where he was talking from; and even if it is, he may not still be there when we get there.”
“In a nutshell,” agreed Gorman. “Hazel, you know him better than anyone. Where would he go? If he needed not to be disturbed while he worked on this? He must have known we’d hear about it as soon as it went viral, and he’ll know we’re trying to find him. Where would he go if he didn’t want to be found?”
“I don’t know!” When she first knew him, Gabriel Ash’s world had shrunk to a half-mile radius centered on his house and extending no farther than the park, the nearest shops, and his therapist’s office. She knew he’d had a life before that, and friends, and probably places he went. But the life had collapsed in on itself when his family disappeared; the friends had been defeated, their attempts to help or console rejected, and had drifted away; and in the months she’d known him, the only times he’d left Norbold he’d been with her. “Is someone watching his house?”
“Of course.”
“What about the house in London? Covent Garden, I think. Does he still own that?”
Gorman made a note. “I’ll find out. Even if he doesn’t, I’ll have the Met check it, just in case. Good. Anywhere else?”
“The flat in Cambridge?”
“What flat in Cambridge?”
So she told him. She kept the explanation brief and to the point; even so, there was time for his expression to grow from compassionate to thunderous. Laura Fry had been right: she should have told him before.
“You’re telling me the CEO of one of the arms companies that lost shipments was helping the hijackers? And you’ve known this for four days, and you didn’t see fit to share it with me?”
“I’m sorry.” She meant that. “He said they’d kill her. Ash’s wife. Graves said if we went to the police, the pirates would kill her.”
Gorman went on glaring at her, but there was nothing he could usefully say. He knew that the only responsible reaction to a hostage situation i
s to ensure that the kidnappers gain nothing by it. He knew Hazel knew that. He also knew that, when it’s personal, all the responsible, moral, above all right arguments in the world aren’t worth a row of beans. Confronted by a sobbing, terrified image of the wife he’d thought was dead, Gabriel Ash had been incapable of entrusting her fate to the police; and what Ash couldn’t do, Hazel Best wouldn’t do. Gorman was entitled to be angry; but he knew that if the same situation arose again, the outcome would be exactly the same.
The same situation was never going to arise again.
He reached for the telephone.
Hazel didn’t know the address of the Cambridge flat. She described, to three different people, how to find it. None of them shouted at her, but the strain of not doing so came right down the phone line at her. Like hands clamped around her throat, it left her white-faced and trembling because she knew now that she’d been wrong, and what being wrong on this scale was going to cost.
By the time Gorman had finished making phone calls, some of his anger had subsided. She was a young, inexperienced police probationer who was on extended sick leave because previous traumas had left her emotionally fragile. He was surprised that she hadn’t behaved like a hardened officer of ten years’ standing? That she’d behaved like a human being and a friend instead?
“Cambridge will have someone at the flat in five minutes. Do you think they’ll find him?”
Hazel chewed her lip. She desperately wanted to be able to say yes, but she couldn’t. “I don’t think he’ll be anywhere I know about. He may have gone there once more, to tell the pirates how to contact him directly, but after that, all he needed was access to the Internet. He can get that anywhere—why would he risk going somewhere I could find him? He knows I’ll stop him if I can. He’ll be in a motel somewhere, or a lockup that he’s hired for cash down, or … hell, if he was a bit more up-to-date he could do it all through a smartphone. I don’t know how we’re ever going to find him in time.”
Gorman said slowly, “Maybe he isn’t the one we should be looking for.”