The Ministry of Love

by O'Mahony, Jason

  “Absolutely but there’s a contradiction at work in this line of business. No doubt you want to keep your head down but you also want to make sure that potential clients can see the quality of the work. There are relatively few people operating at this kind of level. Rather than look for who it is, it is sometimes easier to determine who it is least likely to be and then eliminate them from your inquiries. This is something, by the way, they tend to be quite eager to cooperate with. Professional loyalty tends to go out the window if you find yourself sitting in the basement of CI5 headquarters. Especially when you’re in the frame for something you did not actually do.”

  Fairfax signalled his bodyguards that he was leaving.

  “Alright, Captain. Go after this guy and do what you need to do. But remember, if it gets political at all, I need to know.”

  Boo nodded and stepped back into Julian’s room. He was flicking absentmindedly through the television channels. When she sat down beside him, he flipped off the TV.

  “Do you think I’m wrong in what I want to do for Thomas Baker?”

  “No. You want to help him, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that sometimes people don’t want help.”

  “Or don’t know that they need it.”

  “Isn’t that what every would-be dictator starts out telling himself, Dr. Tredestrian?” she asked coyly.

  “Look, I know it’s a slippery slope. I don’t know him that well, I’ve only met him at a few fundraising dinners, but I knew his wife well and I know that it would break her heart to see him like this. She was such a compassionate woman and their marriage was very special. That’s why she worked on the project because she saw what love could do for people; to give love and be loved equally.”

  “But he may feel like he would be betraying her memory. It may not be logical but I can understand why he would feel that way,” she commented.

  “Yes I know. Suffering is a way of showing devotion to her in a way. But it isn’t, you know. She would never have wanted that.”

  Boo leaned over him.

  “You know doctor, if I didn’t know better I’d say that you were claiming to know her better than her own husband.” She raised a well-maintained eyebrow.

  “No, no, nothing like that. We were work colleagues, that’s all, but we were close. If she had been single, I certainly would have been interested, but she was devoted to Thomas. But we talked so much about what we were doing, what the project was actually for, that we…”

  He paused, eyes searching the room, his brain racing.

  “My God, I have it. I have it. My phone, where’s my phone?” Julian scrabbled around the bed, hands patting and thumbing the sheets.

  Boo handed him his phone from the bedside locker.

  “Where are my trousers?” he asked, as he searched through his contact book.

  • • •

  Eddie Trellis, editor of The Saturn newspaper, left his house overlooking the bay just after seven thirty, cheerfully whistling as he strolled down the hill towards the village for his paper and a bit of breakfast. He had bought the land and designed the house himself and it was by far the most impressive house in the village, with a heated swimming pool and four-car garage. It was all the more impressive for the fact that there was almost no competition for the plot so he’d bought the land not as much for a song as a casual whistle. The truth was this Cornish village, despite its spectacular coastal views, was regarded as being almost certainly the least fashionable of all the Cornish coastal villages, and there was a reason for that: the estate.

  In the mid 1960s some bright spark in the Labour government (almost certainly some sort of socialist, before they were either banned or rounded up and put on the Arts Council where they could be watched) had decided that council housing should be dispersed across the country and not just in urban areas. As a result, and before opposition could be mobilised, the middle-of-nowhere village suddenly had five thousand working class people from Bristol and Plymouth dumped on it.

  By the time Trellis, with a million pound bonus burning a hole in his pocket and looking for a site for a holiday home, had come across the village, the experiment had well and truly failed. The village had not become a middle class retreat for London professionals, as so many other villages in the region had, because of the perception that it was a ‘rough’ place. As a result, the village had failed to develop economically, turning the estate into a dumping ground for the disgruntled.

  That didn’t bother Eddie Trellis though, as he had grown up amongst the same sort of people. These were his people. More importantly, these were his readers. He could play them like a classically trained musician playing a violin. And he did. Eddie made them boil at the scroungers, people who were allegedly getting more welfare payments then they were and the foreigners coming over here stealing the jobs that British would be doing if they weren’t busy fiddling their welfare. He made them rant at the perverts and then made them lust after the barely legal undressed teenagers he sprinkled liberally around the paper.

  He delighted in running a story about a pervert teacher drooling over his young female students and then running a page three beauty dressed in a schoolgirl uniform. He was well aware of the irony, but didn’t give a damn. His job was to sell newspapers and if that meant manipulating the stupid and the gullible, sure wasn’t that what they were for? If you had a problem with that, you were probably a lesbian sociologist anyway.

  It was a bright, crisp morning and a cool, soft breeze was coming in off the sea which put him in a good mood. The village was only four minutes down the hill on foot and he could already see people in the village, standing around chatting and going in and out of shops. Shops was probably stretching it a little, given that the bookies was the biggest of the three but there was a café and the newsagent, in fairness.

  A group of villagers, almost certainly from the estate given their sportswear and their ample features, gave him a half sneer as he passed. He gave them a cheery wave. Eddie wasn’t intimidated by anybody. Eddie had grown up in an estate like the one they came from, and was well able to look after himself, or at least he had been in his youth. Although it had been years (and about eight extra stone) since he’d had a bit of a rumble, he hadn’t lost the swagger.

  Entering the small, cramped old provisions store that was the local shop, he saluted the owner, a former sailor by the name of Jones.

  Jerry Jones, normally a friendly man and big supporter of The Saturn’s various hard-lines (The country’s full of queers - they’ll be making it compulsory next!) and supplier of groceries to the family Trellis when they came down for the weekend, looked coldly at the newspaperman. Eddie detected the frostiness immediately.

  “Something wrong, Jerry?”

  “I think you can take your business elsewhere, if you don’t mind.”

  Eddie was taken aback.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I don’t want your sort in here. Out! And you’ll keep going if you know what’s good for you!”

  the old sailor pulled out a wooden cosh that had got him out of many a scrape back in the day and placed it on top of the newspapers neatly stacked on top of the tiny counter. The message was clear.

  Eddie stepped back out onto the street, not sure what the bloody hell was going on. A group of perhaps twenty people, a mixture of children and adults, were moving up the middle of the village’s main street. One saw him and shouted.

  “There’s the fucking nonce!”

  Eddie’s stomach tightened. That word. The Word. He had used it enough, never in print but in editorial meetings, because it was a codeword. Yes, it was a slang for paedophile but it was so much worse than that. It was permission to destroy, to devastate a man’s life and reputation (curiously Eddie knew that female paedophiles, who were statistically likely to be one in four, didn’t seem to activate the same level of hatred amongst the public) and indeed even to kill, all under the decent waiver of ‘Well, ‘e was a facking nonce, wasn’t ‘e?’ If you were
deemed a nonce, it was life over, regardless of the law and civil liberties and even whether you actually were a paedophile or not.

  For some odd reason, a recent incident The Saturn had covered had leapt into his mind. A convicted paedophile had shot dead a knife-carrying intruder who had broken into his house to kill him. The intruder had no ties to him, just wanted to kill a nonce, and the paedophile had shot him dead. Slap bang in the middle of The Saturn’s latest campaign to permit homeowners to kill intruders without fear of prosecution. Eddie had shamelessly condemned the killing and demanded to know what sort of country was Alexander Fairfax running where kiddy fiddlers could blow away ordinary decent people who just happened to break into their home with a knife in the dead of night? It was political correctness gone mad! Eddie didn’t know why that occurred to him now but all of a sudden he started feeling a desire for his civil liberties to be protected, especially from angry mobs of Saturn readers.

  The group reached him, led by a large man in tracksuit bottoms and a filthy Manchester United top who stank of cheap beer at just after ten on a Saturday morning.

  “Nonce!” the man shouted, jabbing a meaty finger in Eddie’s face.

  “What are you talking about?” Eddie shouted back, temper flaring, squaring up to the man. It had been a long time since anyone had invaded Eddie’s personal space, something he tended to do to more junior staff, especially if they wore low cut tops.

  “You’re a paediatrician!” one of the large woman shouted, her bottled blonde hair fighting (and losing) a battle with her black roots.

  Eddie didn’t even bother getting into that one. The crowd had surrounded him and as he saw the collection of raging angry faces around him, for the first time in many, many years he felt physically afraid for his safety.

  “Think you’re going to kidnap and have your way with one of our kids! Not with us around, you’re not!” Another woman shouted, a can of Guinness in her hand.

  She shoved a yellow A4 sheet into his face. He snatched it off her. It looked like an official notice, with the Cornwall and Somerset County Constabulary seal on it, and the legend ‘Child Sex Offender Register-Public Notice’ on the top, followed by a photograph of him on it, with his name and address, and a list of fictional sexual assaults involving children. He recognised the photo. It was his official photo from the Saturn’s website.

  “This is a fraud! There’s no such thing as a Child Sex Offender Public Notice! I know, my newspaper has been campaigning to get one!”

  “Then why did the police put them all over the village?” another man shouted, punching Eddie in the forehead and hitting him with a glancing blow. Eddie staggered back, feeling a sharp twinge where a large ring on the man’s hand had cut him, sending blood running down his face. This only seemed to excite the crowd.

  Eddie was now terrified. He knew exactly what this mob thought he was and how they worked. He was now afraid for his life.

  “I’m not a nonce. My name is Eddie Trellis, I’m the editor of The Saturn newspaper. We hate nonces. This thing is a con, someone is fittin’ me up! There’s no such thing as a public notice. The registers are kept under lock and key in the police station, not posted in people’s letter boxes!”

  “He knows a lot about kiddy fiddlin’!” a voice shouted.

  One of the kids, a twelve-year-old, lashed forward, kicking Eddie on the shins, and fracturing a bone. Eddie shrieked in pain, his leg buckling and causing him to fall to the ground, as someone started chanting “Paedo out! Paedo out!”

  The mob closed in, delivering kicks and delivering kicks and punches.

  • • •

  “A passing postman noticed a door open, sir. He stuck his head in, just to see and saw the bodies.”

  Switzerland was genuinely disturbed at the scene, if anything because of its banality. Five bodies, all sitting peacefully, with no sign of violence.

  The medical examiner, a young cheerful man, rose to greet him when he saw him enter.

  “Good morning, sir. Not sure about this one.”

  The DCI recognised the five models from their headshots.

  “Poison?” he asked.

  The examiner shook his head.

  “I won’t know until the lab, not certainly, but I’m 95% sure that it wasn’t.”

  “Then what?”

  “Dehydration. They died of thirst.”

  “They were dehydrated to death?”

  Switzerland bent down beside one of the victims, put on his latex gloves and then checked her wrists. He then stood up, walked to the front door and examined the frame.

  “No sign of binding or handcuffs, and the front door lock is pretty standard. If they were held here, it would have had to be by actual physical intimidation. Some bastard actually watching as they died of thirst in front of him.”

  The profiler did a lap of the sitting room and then went into the bedroom. The house was a modern, airy bungalow. Five single beds were in various states of untidiness. The profiler noted something, then stepped quickly back into the living room. She then moved into the kitchen and then the bathroom.

  “Chief Inspector,” she called.

  He stood up, and followed her into the bathroom. She pointed at a colourful poster affixed to the wall. It gave calorie counts for food and then warned of the ‘dangers’ of water retention.

  She then pointed at the electronic scale on the floor.

  “These are in every room. Every room, along with these posters.”

  The young DC was now behind them.

  “Yeah, it’s like, wait a minute…..there!” He stopped, scanning the room, and then snatched a wooden chair from the kitchen table and carried it across the room. The DC stepped up onto it, and began removing a small plastic dome.

  “Cameras, sir. This is a set for a reality show. Or at least, it’s supposed to look like it. Wireless camera. Probably connected to an IP address.”

  “Can we trace it?” Switzerland asked.

  One of the forensics people shook his head.

  “I doubt it, sir. Each camera has its own address to be dialled into. Could be accessed by anyone.”

  Switzerland glowered at the scene for a minute.

  “Everyone stop!” he said clearly. One of the forensics people kept working, having not heard him.

  “I said everyone stop!” he bellowed at the forensic officer, who froze, terrified.

  The DCI was red in the face, scowling.

  “Are you telling me that these women were not detained against their will? That they basically deprived themselves of life because they thought they were on a television show?”

  Nobody moved. Then The profiler opened the fridge. It was full of fruit and vegetables, bottled water, meats, breads, cheeses and various condiments. All unopened.

  “Why would someone do this?” he asked no one in particular.

  “Because they want to be famous, sir,” the DC said, in a surprised-to-be-asked tone.

  • • •

  The computer beeped just after 2:30am, waking the young DC from a light slumber. The computer announced that it had detected another possible sighting of Farrington. That wasn’t particularly stunning news, as Switzerland had insisted that a human officer verify every possible image identified by Neddy which meant having officers sitting at the machine around the clock. Still, the overtime wasn’t bad, so he couldn’t complain too much.

  The computer rated the likeness to the images on file, from his MOD record. 97%.

  Jesus. The young DC jumped up in his seat, shaking the slumber from his brain, and quickly tapped at the screen to compare the images. It sure looked like Farrington, walking down the main street of a small village in Cornwall.

  He flipped open his mobile phone.

  • • •

  Boo closed the document, and put it in her ‘maybe’ pile. She’d spent the evening searching the Europol secure database, downloading any files that caught her eye. The fact was the person she was looking for was a professional and that left
a limited market. On top of that, his modus operandi was quite unusual, developing patient well-structured proxy operations that gave him plenty of cover.

  CI5 had questioned the terrorist-idiots that she had stunned with her weapon and they didn’t know a damn thing. There had been another accomplice, an attractive woman who had been spotted in the early part of the operation but had vanished. She had added that fact into the search. The number of attractive female mercenaries operating in Europe was smaller still and if she could match that to possible associates.

  It all pointed to one individual, she thought. The one with an unfortunate codename.

  • • •

  The Stoat liked his comforts. He wasn’t ostentatious but liked to dress well and liked to dwell in the higher end of the market where he passed as some sort of polite, quiet and well-spoken continental businessman. He was sensible with his money: for a single man with no family, he lived modestly enough especially given the fact that he really was quite wealthy at this stage of his career. His apartment in Brussels was comfortable and kept tidy by a very reliable Flemish housekeeper and her son did most of the heavy lifting about the place. Neither knew it, but both were named by The Stoat as his beneficiaries should he die on the job. They would in fact find themselves very well off. Why not, he figured. He had no one else to leave it to and they were good people.

  When in London, he tended to favour small but ridiculously expensive boutique hotels in Kensington and Chelsea that were frequented by other wealthy and discretion seeking Europeans with their leggy and elegant girlfriends. Or those European women in their fifties with their perfect jaw-lines and tight, dynamic hairstyles who look like they read the TV news in France or Spain, and have twenty year old lovers by choice, as opposed to having to indirectly pay them.

  The Stoat lay in the large tub-style bath, pondering his next move when he got the text message that ruined his day.

  It simply said, ‘Michael McDonald’.

  To many, and to The Stoat himself, Michael McDonald was an American soft rock musician and Michael Bolton style crooner who came to fame for his mid eighties song ‘Sweet Freedom’, theme song of the Billy Crystal/Gregory Hines vehicle Running Scared.