Little Triggers

by Martyn Waites

  The men never reappeared, so it was another night in the Vitara, with resumed surveillance on Sunday morning. Andy arrived back at the house just in time to see an expensive car pull up and an expensively-dressed, middle-aged man hurry from it and go inside. Andy had snapped away at the newcomer, but the man’s features were obscured by bushes and trees. “It was like he was hidin’ his face, just in case he was bein’ watched. Know what I mean?”

  “He must be pretty high-profile.”

  “I reckon so. I tried to get a shot of him once he was inside the house, but he just wouldn’t come to the window.”

  Andy watched the house all day, with the next notable movement on Sunday night when Noble, all smiles, left the house with one of the middle-aged men. They had said their goodbyes to the others and piled into the Fiesta. Flash Harry came out later, alone, the darkness ruining Andy’s shot, and drove off. The two boys never emerged.

  “I thought I must’ve missed somethin’. Thought the kids had gone back to Newcastle when I wasn’t lookin’. So I kipped in the Vitara, checked the place this mornin’ – nothin’ doin’ – and then it clicked. These old houses must have big cellars, right?” continued Andy grimly. “So I put two an’ two together. I reckon that’s where they been all along.”

  “The cellar …” Something tightened in Larkin’s stomach when he heard that. Something sickening, but unfocussed, ill-defined. There was a connection there, though it was just out of his mind’s reach. He mentally put it aside. If it was important it would come to him. “Keep going.”

  “When I thought of that I phoned you. An’ ’ere we are. What d’you reckon?” Andy sat back, looking pleased with himself.

  “Well done,” said Larkin, impressed. “I can see all those industrial espionage jobs have paid off.”

  “Not to mention the porn jobs I did before them.”

  “Well, you may get a chance to use those skills too, one day,” said Larkin cynically. “But not today, sadly.” Larkin shook his head. “I think you’re right. This looks like something big and nasty.”

  “So what now? Take all this to the Old Bill?”

  Larkin thought. He could feel the anger rising within him. “Fuck no!” he said in mock-outrage. “We’ve both got a fair idea of what’s going on in that place. I reckon we ought to pay the owner-occupier a visit, Mr Brennan.”

  Andy’s eyes lit up. “You think there’ll be lots of gratuitous violence and plenty of aggro, Mr Larkin?”

  “I fucking hope so, Mr Brennan. I fucking hope so.”

  18: The Righteous Red Mist

  “I know what’s happening in the cellar,” Larkin said.

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea myself,” Andy replied, concentrating on the road. They were in the Vitara, Andy navigating by memory as he drove. Larkin was keyed up, eager for a fight; for once, he thought, there could be no doubt about whether his actions were justified. For once, the target of his anger would be an appropriate one.

  “I mean, specifically,” he said. “You aren’t the only one who had a busy weekend, you know.” He told Andy about the trip to Noble’s house, and the discovery of his shrine: in particular the polaroids stuck round the mirror. Home-made, shot against a black-painted bare brick background.

  “You reckon they were just for his own benefit, then? Him and his mates?” asked Andy.

  “I did at first, but now – I don’t know. All that advance planning, driving up to here and everything, it doesn’t seem worth it if what they’re after is just a quick fuck with an underage boy and a few snaps as mementoes. It’s really risky to take a whole weekend over it, so why not stay in the city, where it’s much more anonymous, and have somebody else take care of the organisation? There’re plenty of people who’ll find you a kid, no questions asked. I think there’s more to it than that. What I figure is, they’ve got a nice little racket going. Those photos I saw had a professional feel. The kids looked posed. I think they pick up kids no one’s going to miss for a few days, have sex with them – and make a few quid into the bargain by recording the occasion. Photos, videos — ” He exhaled sharply, hissing air between his teeth. “Who knows, they probably take commissions.”

  “So it’s some sort of paedophile ring?”

  “Yeah. Either personal contacts or – well you know what the Internet’s like.”

  “Bastards,” spat Andy, nearly veering off the road. “So what happens to the kids? When they’ve served their purpose?”

  Larkin looked at him, eyes miniature sunbursts of passion. “That’s what we’re going to find out.”

  Andy floored the accelerator as far as it would go.

  The house looked pretty much as Andy had described it. Large, secluded, the charming country-manor atmosphere offset by the all-round security cameras. It managed to look both well-maintained and desolate. With no need now for secrecy, Andy pulled the jeep into the gravel driveway, screeching to a halt bang in front of the main entrance. The two men jumped out and began hammering on the door. No reply.

  “Reckon he’s out?” asked Andy.

  “Let’s look for another door.”

  They hurriedly made their way round the side of the house, peering in the windows as they went. Andy, palms cupping his eyes to the glass, saw a shadowy figure scurrying about inside.

  “He’s making’ for the back door! Quick!”

  Larkin ran round, reaching the back door just in time to see the figure run through the kitchen and reach the door, hands frantically fumbling the key into the lock. Larkin quickly grabbed the handle, put his shoulder to the wood and pushed as hard as he could. A loud thump, then the door gave and swung open. There, lying on the kitchen floor nursing his right hand, was one of the men Andy had described. Middle-aged, balding, spare tyre. Metal-framed glasses, cords and a checked shirt. Wholly unremarkable.

  “I wanna word with you,” said Larkin, catching his breath.

  The man tried to shuffle his backside away from Larkin. “Get away from me!” he shouted. “I’ll call the police!”

  “Please do,” Larkin replied, “it’ll make our job a lot easier. Mind if we come in?”

  The man stopped shuffling and crouched in a heap by a table leg, regarding them with circumspect sullenness. He didn’t reply.

  “Hear that, Andy? He hasn’t said we can’t come in, so we’ll take that as an invitation. OK? Just so – when he’s in the dock – he can’t say we forced our way in.”

  The room Larkin and Andy stepped into was big and well-furnished with traditional country pine. But it was lacking in any kind of warmth, any cosy domesticity. Clean, ordered, it was functional, not friendly as most kitchens were.

  The man, sensing no immediate physical threat, pulled himself up, and, flexing the wrist he had landed on, sat warily down at the table. “Who are you and what d’you want?” His voice, well-educated, had a nasal quality which Larkin knew was going to get on his nerves very rapidly.

  “We’ve come to ask you some questions,” said Larkin, pulling out a chair and sitting down opposite him. “This your house, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Been doing a spot of entertaining over the weekend?”

  “What business is that of yours?” The nasal whine was more noticeable.

  “Look,” said Larkin, leaning forward menacingly, “don’t play the dumb fucker with us. We’ve been watching you. We saw Noble bring a couple of boys here, then two more men joined you. They left – but you and the boys didn’t. So where are they?”

  “I – I don’t know what you — ”

  “Cut the crap!” Larkin stretched across the table and roughly grabbed the man’s shirtfront. “Where are they?”

  The man, shocked by the unexpected violence of Larkin’s move, began to hyperventilate so quickly it looked as if he were about to have a seizure. He dropped his head to his chest; gradually his shuddering breaths becoming weak whimpers.

  Larkin looked up. “Go search the house, Andy.”

  Andy walked to the inside
door.

  “No, don’t!” The man jerked his head up, suddenly finding his voice; Andy stopped in his tracks. “They’re downstairs. In the cellar …” His voice trailed off.

  Larkin stared at him with utter contempt. “Let’s go then, shall we?”

  The cellar could apparently be reached by means of an old wooden staircase under the stairs. As they walked down the hall towards it, Larkin assessed the rest of the house. Like the kitchen it was conservatively, tastefully furnished: dark wooden furniture, expensive rugs over polished floors, framed hunting prints on the walls. Like the kitchen, it gave the impression of being lived in but of having no life.

  As the man opened the door and switched on the light, Larkin immediately felt the cold from the cellar hit him. From the wooden steps, he could see the unshaded bulb illuminating the brick, black-painted walls. He hurried on down.

  At the far end of the cellar, pushed against the wall, was an old, stained mattress. A tripod-mounted video camera in the centre of the room pointed directly at it. Behind it, towards the opposite wall, sat a couple of old easy chairs, and a playback monitor complete with attendant paraphernalia, cables and lights. To the side, chained to a radiator and lying naked on the floor, were two boys.

  Larkin went over to them, knelt down, touched them. At first glance they seemed to be asleep: but they were so still, so cold his stomach suddenly knotted. Larkin gently pulled up one of the boys’ eyelids – Kev, he thought it was – saw only the white of his eye, and let it drop.

  “They’re completely out of it,” he said, turning to the man. “What have you given them?”

  “Just … something to – to make them sleep,” the man stammered.

  Holding his rage in check, Larkin switched his attention to the boys. He touched Raymond’s wrist: limp, cold, wasted, but there was a weak pulse. Kev’s was the same. And the state of them: caked shit and dried blood had left jagged, dribbled tracks down the backs of their legs. Indiscriminate bruises covered their bodies, black rings underlined their eyes. The cockiness they’d shown in the arcade had belonged to two other boys. Now they resembled pieces of meat, chewed up and spat out.

  Beside them was a bucket, clearly intended for use as a toilet but, judging by the state of the floor around them, whatever drug they’d been given had caused the boys to lose control over their bodily functions. Larkin, hands clenching into fists, stood up and turned to the man. He knew the boys were alive, that they weren’t in need of urgent attention – now was the time for anger.

  “You finished with them? You had your fun?”

  The man turned his face away, refusing to meet Larkin’s eyes.

  Larkin crossed swiftly to him. “Well, we’ve not finished with you!” he shouted, and swung his left fist straight into the man’s face. The man’s head snapped backwards, glasses flying; a bone cracked and he hit the floor, blood geysering from his smashed nose. He tried to cover it with his hands and lay there, moaning.

  Andy nodded approvingly. “The righteous red mist descended, did it? Nice one, mate.”

  Larkin forced the blubbering, bloody wreck on the floor to unchain the boys; when the man was a little slower in responding than he could have been Larkin had to give his ribs a couple of hefty kicks, after which he was rather more compliant.

  The man, escorted by Andy, brought the padlock key down to the cellar along with some blankets. And Larkin and Andy unchained Raymond and Kev, wrapped them up warmly and carried them upstairs, where the man showed them into a bedroom. The room, although fastidiously tidy, like the rest of the house, had a rancid, musky smell about it, as if the aroma of sweat and other bodily fluids outweighed fresh air by two to one. Larkin hoped it wouldn’t evoke too many memories for the boys. Once they were lying in the relative comforts of the musty bedding, it was harder to remember what they had been through.

  Larkin rounded on the man, who flinched at his gaze.

  “Downstairs, you,” Larkin said. “We’ve got some talking to do.”

  And talk he did. Resigned to the inevitability of his situation, he talked freely, spilling it all out, rehearsing his confession. While Andy did a recce of the house, Larkin and the man sat at the kitchen table and began the none too gentle process of fitting answers to questions. He told Larkin his name, mumbling it through the wreck of his broken face. Colin Harvey.

  Larkin rifled through his memory. With a snap of his fingers, it came to him.

  “What, the Colin Harvey?” Larkin asked. “The one who wrote that textbook about how children in care are just gagging for it?”

  Harvey said nothing. He dabbed uselessly at his face with a handkerchief, twisted his smashed glasses in his fingers.

  “So what happened? They chucked you out when they found you tried to put your theories into practice?”

  “I took early retirement …” Harvey muttered.

  Larkin laughed bitterly. “All quietly hushed up, was it? No scandal? No nasty court case? Oh, yeah, I know how councils look after their own.” Larkin leaned in close again, a sardonic grin twisting the corners of his mouth. “No chance of keeping it quiet now.”

  Andy marched back in, sat next to Larkin at the pine table, ignoring Harvey as if he were something way down the food chain. “I’ve checked the house out. Professional video duplication systems in the attic – darkroom – the lot. Nice little set-up our friend here’s got.”

  Larkin nodded. “He hasn’t been idling away his retirement, that’s for sure. So come on, Colin – tell all.”

  Harvey began to speak, haltingly at first, about his activities. Larkin’s suspicions had, unfortunately, been correct. One of the four men, usually Noble, acted as procurer, picking up runaways, latchkey kids, kids from council-run homes – the kind of kids who wouldn’t readily be missed. Kids who were vulnerable. The children would be brought back to the house; the men would drug them into passive compliancy, have sex with them, abuse them; all the while recording their degradation for posterity and for payment. What started out as a hobby had eventually – through contacts in Britain and abroad, and via the Internet – become a business. And a very lucrative one.

  “And what happens to the boys after you’ve done with them?”

  Harvey told them. Once the boys had out-grown their usefulness – once their voices had started to break – they were abandoned, left to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives alone. By this time they were too deadened to the abuse to complain to the authorities. Or – if they had retained some freshness, some attraction – they were taken to Amsterdam and sold into child prostitution.

  Larkin’s throat was dry when he spoke. “And how many times have you done this?”

  “A few,” Harvey replied, reckless now. “Alan takes care of all that.”

  “Who’s Alan?” demanded Larkin.

  “Alan Haining. He lives in Amsterdam, comes over here for our – get-togethers. He was here this weekend.”

  The man that Andy had seen leaving with Noble. Larkin pushed further. Alan Haining, he discovered, was an ex-teacher in a private boys’ school: another one offered “early retirement”. Another one who’d got away with it.

  Larkin asked Harvey how they had met; Harvey replied that it had been at college. They had been drawn together by their common interest, vowing mutual self-protection throughout their lives.

  “If that’s the case,” asked Larkin, “how did you meet Noble? He’s an awful lot younger than you.”

  Harvey’s head dropped. “He was … someone Alan and I have known for a long time.”

  Larkin and Andy exchanged glances. The implication behind Harvey’s words was clear.

  “One of yours or one of Haining’s?” asked Larkin, spitting out his disgust.

  “I … can’t remember …”

  “Tell me!”

  “Alan knew him first,” Harvey said, with some difficulty. “He was such a nice boy … a beautiful boy …” He looked up, his eyes misting over. When he spoke his voice was impassioned with lost, misplaced l
ove. “His parents left him in that school. They didn’t care what happened to him, they never visited … We … just gave him love …”

  Larkin stood up, paced to the far side of the kitchen. “There’s another way of looking at it, isn’t there? He was left in the care of the school and Haining abused that trust, by fucking him!” Larkin walked back to the table, fists clenched, bent over Harvey. “In fact, Haining abused him so much, for so long, Noble became a child fucker himself!”

  “It’s not that simple!” Harvey cried, eyes shining with tears.

  “Oh, you reckon, do you? Well, I’ve got news for you,” shouted Larkin. “It fuckin’ is!” He gave Harvey a vicious, left-handed slap; the man, emptied of all resistance now, was knocked from his chair. As soon as he hit the floor, Harvey curled up into a foetal ball, and lay there sobbing.

  Larkin stared at him for a couple of seconds, his expression unreadable. Then he turned to Andy. “Come on – we’ve got a story to write.”

  “Ere, ’ang about,” Andy said. “We haven’t finished yet.”

  “No?”

  “There’s somethin’ more he can tell us, isn’t there? Give us a hand.”

  Together, Larkin and Andy pulled Harvey off the floor and placed him back in the chair. The slap had started his nosebleed again; he held the red-stained handkerchief to his face protectively, like a shield.

  “So who’s the third man?” asked Andy.

  Harvey’s eyes flashed an instant of fear. “I … don’t know.”

  “You know fine well,” said Larkin. “Who is he?”

  “I … don’t know!” Harvey dropped the handkerchief and reached across the table towards Larkin, beseeching. “Please … I never saw him before. He didn’t give us his name. Please … you must believe me!”

  “I don’t think he wants to tell us,” said Andy.

  “He knows who he is,” said Larkin. “He’s just more scared of him than he is of us. Bad mistake. You’ve got one last chance. Harvey. Who is he?”