Two Little Boys: DI Ted Darling Book II

by L M Krier

  'Ah, Inspector, I'm sorry I haven't done anything yet with this young boy of yours, we have been rather busy. I wonder if tomorrow morning would suit you? I like to start at about eight o'clock, if that is convenient to you?'

  'Thank you, Professor.' Ted hadn't immediately recognised the new senior pathologist's voice on the phone, but deduced who it was from the content of her conversation. 'That's fine by me, I'll be there.'

  'Jolly good,' she said brusquely, as if he had just accepted an invitation to afternoon tea, then hung up.

  Ted went back out into the main office, ready for his team arriving. The door opened and a young woman appeared, stepping hesitantly in and looking round her. She had a fresh complexion and a smiling face, framed by wavy blonde hair. The first word that came to Ted's mind about her appearance was 'friendly'.

  'DI Darling?' she asked him, moving forward with a hand outstretched. 'I'm Jancis.'

  Ted was puzzled for a moment, as she could see from his face. She laughed and said, ' Sorry, I'd heard this was an informal team. I'm your new team member, Sgt Jancis Reynolds.'

  Ted smiled in reply and shook her hand. 'Sorry, I stupidly saw Jan and thought Janet.'

  'Everyone does,' she said. 'My parents loved books. Precious Bane, Mary Webb? Jancis was the main character.'

  'I'm not much of a reader,' Ted said apologetically. 'The rest of the team will be here any minute, we usually start the day with a bit of a briefing. I assume the Super has filled you in on what we have going on?'

  'Yes sir,' she said. 'Nasty business. Happy to help in any way I can.'

  'We're going to have to interview a lot of children in care homes, that's where I hope you can take the lead,' Ted told her.

  Ted's phone started to ring again. 'Sorry, I'd better take that,' he said apologetically, and went back into his office.

  This time it was Kevin Turner, from downstairs. His call was brief and left no time for Ted to speak.

  'Ted? Kev. Come down can you, now.'

  'I'm sorry to abandon you, I have to go downstairs,' Ted told the new sergeant. 'Make yourself at home until the others get here. There's a spare desk there. I'll hopefully be back shortly.

  As a formality, he tapped lightly on Inspector Turner's door before he went in. Kevin was not looking his usual good-natured self. His tirade began almost before Ted had taken a seat.

  'Ted, you're a nice bloke. I sometimes think you're too nice to be a copper, yet you manage to be a bloody good one, most of the time,' he began. 'But just sometimes, you can be a complete and utter twat.'

  'Suppose you pause in hurling insults at me and tell me what this is all about'' Ted suggested calmly, although he had a bad feeling he probably already knew.

  'I sent two of my lads round yesterday to talk to this boy of yours, this Flip or whatever he's called,' Kevin continued, his voice still raised. 'What do you think it looked like when the boy tells my officers he doesn't want to talk to anyone except you because you're kind to him and you hug him? Then when my lads are leaving, the foster mother asks if you're some kind of a nonce because you asked her if you can buy presents for the lad. For fuck's sake, Ted, what do you think the Ice Queen would say if she got to hear about this?'

  'Do you want me to tell her?' Ted asked, half rising.

  'Are you out of your mind?' Kevin almost shouted. 'She'll have your bollocks for earrings.'

  Just at that moment, the door opened without a knock and the Ice Queen stood framed in the doorway. Both men immediately leapt guiltily to their feet. She was tall and statuesque and made Ted feel uncomfortably like a naughty schoolboy once again.

  'Gentlemen,' she said. 'I heard raised voices from my office. Not dissent in the ranks, I hope?'

  'No ma'am,' Kevin replied, almost too quickly, glaring at Ted to keep his mouth shut. 'Just a healthy difference of opinion and lively debate on procedural issues. Sorry if we were too loud, ma'am.'

  She looked long and hard from one to the other, clearly not believing a word of it. 'I'm sure I don't need to remind either of you we have a particularly nasty murder on our hands and no signs of any real progress on the case. This is no time for debate, we need action,' she told them severely, and left the office.

  The two men remained standing for a moment then grinned at one another as they sat back down.

  'You really want to throw yourself on the mercy of that cold bitch?' Kevin asked, in a quieter tone. 'Look, Ted, I know you didn't mean any harm, but you must see what it looked like. Luckily for you, for some reason every copper in this nick has nothing but respect for you. My lads told me about it, of course, but they won't say anything to anyone else. It's best, though, if you keep well away from that boy while this case is ongoing.'

  'Tricky, I teach him at the self-defence club Trev and I run,' Ted told him.

  'Well, for Christ's sake don't ever be alone with him anywhere, and don't lay a finger on him, even with witnesses,' Kevin advised him. 'Shit, I knew Jim Baker had to keep you on a lead a lot of the time, but I never realised how much you needed him to stop you making a prick of yourself.'

  'Thanks for the vote of confidence,' Ted said dryly. 'Most of it was deserved, though. I consider myself told off. I've got this new child protection officer just started today, I'll get her to go and talk to Flip, perhaps with one of your lads who went yesterday. Is he off school?'

  'His foster mum kept him home yesterday because he was understandably upset,' Kevin told him, 'but the lads said she was keen for him to go back as soon as possible, perhaps today. Get your new sergeant to phone up and find out when they can go, then liaise with my lads. You keep right out of it from now on, would be my best advice to you.

  'And seriously, Ted, the Ice Queen does not need to know. God knows how, but you are a good copper. You committing career suicide right now is not what this case needs. Just promise me you'll borrow a brain from somewhere.'

  Ted was known for being mild-tempered and good-natured. His extensive martial arts training helped him keep control most of the time, apart from the occasional karate kick at his office door. He knew he deserved the bollocking, and he took Kevin's tirade without a murmur. Even he could not explain why he had behaved as he had.

  'In other news,' he said, defusing the tension of the situation, 'it looks as if taxi drivers are our link. I've got an officer trying to get an opening on that. We'll see if any of the other kids, Flip or any of the ones from the home, can give us even an approximate idea of where the drivers are taking the kids that go with them. If we could just pin down, even roughly, where Aiden was killed, that would move us forward.'

  'Are you putting someone in on the taxis?' Kevin asked.

  Ted shook his head. 'Too soon,' he said. 'We don't really know who we're dealing with yet and it may be dangerous. There's still a possibility the driver my officer talked to today may come back to him with some more information. But he was really scared, which suggests we are dealing with some very nasty types.'

  'Goes without saying, Ted,' Kevin agreed. 'What worries me is, if this really is a paedo ring, how high up does it go and to what extent are these people protected?'

  'Protected or not, I'm going after them,' Ted told him. 'I hope you're with me, Kev.'

  CHAPTER Eight

  Ted arrived in good time at the hospital the next morning and made his way to the autopsy suite. He put on coveralls and went in to join Professor Nelson, who was just making her preparations.

  Ted had attended many post mortem examinations, though this was his first with the new pathologist. Frequency didn't make them any easier to deal with. The sight of the young boy's naked body, too small for the table he lay on, tore at his heart and churned his stomach.

  'Good morning, Inspector,' the Professor greeted him breezily. 'Now, before we begin, are you a puker?'

  Despite the solemnity of the occasion, Ted had to smile at her brusque manner. He wondered if all pathologists were somewhat eccentric, whether it was their way of dealing with the horrors of their job. />
  'Not usually, but I have had my moments,' he said honestly. 'I have my own secret weapon though, which works most of the time.' He took out his ever-present packet of Fisherman's Friend sweets and offered one to Professor Nelson, which she accepted with evident delight.

  'Next question. We have quite some time to spend in one another's company. Do you prefer Inspector, or something a little less formal? If so, what?' she asked.

  'Ted is fine,' he told her.

  'And I'm Elizabeth,' she replied. 'Ted? Is that short for Edward?'

  'It will utterly destroy what street cred I possess if I tell you,' Ted smiled. 'Actually, only my partner knows this, but it's Edwin. My father was a great reader, a lover of Dickens.'

  'Since you have trusted me with that information, you may call me Bizzie, which is reserved for family and friends,' she said. 'I know you have good reason to distrust those in my profession. But I assure you, Ted, I will do everything I can to help you get justice for this poor little boy.'

  She was ready to make the first incision, always the part Ted found the hardest to watch. He reached instinctively for another lozenge, although he had not yet finished the first. The professor was talking into her voice recorder, giving the details of her first observations.

  'What can you tell me about this young lad, Ted?' she asked, as she worked quickly and efficiently.

  'Abandoned as a baby, in care all his life, occasionally with a foster family although more usually in a children's home,' Ted told her. 'Considered difficult to place because of behavioural issues. He absconded from the home a couple of weeks ago. Would you routinely test for blood-alcohol levels in a case like this?'

  'Not usually, for a child,' she told him. 'I would always do toxicology tests but I will certainly test blood-alcohol levels if you think that is relevant.'

  'Our intelligence so far points towards the possibility of grooming and a paedophile ring. We've been told taxi drivers may have been luring young boys with cigarettes and alcohol then taking them on somewhere with drink freely available,' Ted told her.

  She shook her head in bewilderment. 'What kind of dreadful society do we live in that does things like this to children? In a way I hope he did have alcohol, and hopefully spiked with something, to ease his passing, poor little sod.'

  She carried on working efficiently in silence then said, 'He has certainly been sexually assaulted quite savagely, poor thing. I'll take samples everywhere, of course, but I wouldn't get your hopes up too high for DNA. It's not something I know very much about at all, thankfully, but I imagine people are so well aware of DNA now that condoms would be de rigueur for this sort of activity.'

  'Did you know that more than five hundred in care under-eighteens go missing in a year, just in Greater Manchester?' Ted asked her. 'That's an awful lot of vulnerable kids out there, easy prey for child abusers. Yet who knows about it? Who cares?'

  The Professor gave him a reproachful look. 'Some of us care, Ted, very deeply,' she said and went back to her work.

  After some time she said, 'I can tell you that the cause of death was asphyxia due to strangulation. The killer used what looks like the cord taken from the hooded sweatshirt he was wearing. What I cannot tell you is whether this was done as part of some deviant sexual thrill-seeking or simply because the wee lad might have been able to identify his abusers.

  'That concludes my preliminary findings for now. The rest requires analysis and lab work. I'll let you have all those results as soon as I possibly can.'

  She took off her gloves and shook Ted's hand. 'Thank you for caring about this little boy, Ted. Do you have children?'

  'No, we have cats,' Ted smiled. 'Thank you, Bizzie. I won't say I've enjoyed it, I never do, but you have been a delight to work with.'

  The post mortem had been bad enough. Now Ted was heading back to the station and would have to brief the Ice Queen on the findings and bring her up to speed with the case in general. There was precious little progress and Ted was dreading her reaction.

  As he headed for her office, he hitched his tie up to disguise the fact that his top button was undone, as usual. He felt strangled in his new outfit, not at all as comfortable and ready for action as in his chosen dress code of polo neck and jeans.

  He knocked at the door and waited for her invitation to enter. At least this time she didn't leave him standing like a spare part before telling him to sit down. He told her everything he had to report. He was careful with the way in which he presented how Sal had got on trying to talk to the taxi driver.

  Ted always made sure to protect his team from any criticism from above. If they made mistakes, he dealt with it, but to get them to work well for him, he needed to watch their backs for them. When he mentioned his decision not to put Sal in under cover until he knew more about who they were facing, he was surprised by the Ice Queen's reaction.

  'I totally concur with your reasoning and decision, Inspector,' she told him. 'No point putting one of our officers at risk until we have a clearer picture of who we're up against. We need to be very sure of our ground before we take any action. Going off half-cocked could put officers' lives at risk and certainly won't help us round up all of the people involved.

  'Now, while you're here, I'll see if Inspector Turner can join us. There's something I want to say to both of you.'

  Ted had an anxious moment, while she phoned through to Kevin to request that he join them, wondering if he had done something else stupid that she had got wind of.

  Kevin came in and he and Ted nodded to one another as he took a seat.

  'Gentlemen,' the Ice Queen began. 'What I am about to tell you is highly confidential, just to keep you in the loop. It goes no further than this office. Is that clear?'

  'Ma'am,' they replied in unison.

  'I've been talking to officers in Cheshire. They are carrying out a raid on a rock star's house in Wilmslow, within the next day or two,' she told them. 'The reason that they are liaising with us is that they've heard about the murder of this young boy and they think there is a possible link between the cases.

  'They intercepted some serious child porn images from this singer, posted online, and they think there's a chance that some of these were filmed in our area, based on intelligence they have. The singer is away on tour out of the country and warrants are being sorted. It is, of course, vital that no word gets out. They're very keen to get in there and seize all computers and other material before any of it can be removed or destroyed.

  'If there is a tie-in with our case, it's of great concern because of the scale it indicates. But it does mean that with two forces working together, we can bring considerable resources to bear to crack this case.

  'But if this were to leak out before the raid had been successfully completed, the implications would be disastrous. That's why I must stress once again, no mention of this is to be made outside the walls of this office. Thank you, gentlemen.'

  CHAPTER Nine

  Sgt Jancis Reynolds had centre stage for the team briefing the following morning. Ted had asked her to feed back to the team on what she had found out from talking to children at the home where Aiden had lived. He'd also asked her to outline anything else she thought would help them, since she was the one with experience in the field. She was relaxed and confident and clearly knew what she was talking about.

  'I thought it might be helpful if I just outlined a bit about the kind of child abuse we may be up against here, for those of you lucky enough not to have experience in this area. Some of what I tell you may surprise or even shock you, but I assure you there are statistics to confirm everything I say.

  'It's important at the outset to realise that this kind of violent sexual abuse of children, as in Aiden's case is, mercifully, quite rare. What is far more common is the abuse of children by people they know, often people within their own family circle. If not by family members, then by someone within the periphery, a trusted family friend, or even someone given charge of the children, a school teacher, someo
ne running a club, perhaps.'

  Ted felt a rising anger within himself as past memories, buried deep, started to resurface. He was conscious of the muscles in his jaw and at his temples becoming tight, and his hands were forming fists, whitening his knuckles. He tugged at his tie to loosen his collar a bit more and struggled to regulate his breathing.

  'The thing to remember about paedophiles grooming children who don't know them is that they can appear to a child to be kind, generous and even loving. To a young boy like Aiden, who had probably never been shown much affection, that side of things as much as the money would keep him coming back.'

  She looked round at the faces of the team members, many of them expressing disbelief. Finally it was Maurice Brown who broke the silence.

  'Bloody hell, sarge,' he said. 'Are you saying the kids might actually like what happens to them?'

  Maurice was the father of ten-year-old twin girls and he doted on them. They lived with their mother since the divorce but he was allowed unlimited access to them. Apparently bad parenting was not one of his many faults. Mike Hallam, also a father of two, was looking horrified.

  Jancis Reynolds shook her head. 'Not like it, Maurice, exactly,' she told him, 'but it's important to realise that there is a world of difference between how these people operate when grooming children, and the brutal rape of a child by either a stranger, or someone unexpected.'

  Ted felt as if he was choking. His memory conjured up the smell of chlorine, invading his nostrils, smothering him, and burning the back of his throat. His hand went instinctively to his pocket for a Fisherman's Friend to disguise the vivid smell and taste. He noticed that the hand was shaking badly as he put a lozenge in his mouth, and quickly put it back in his pocket.

  'What I'm saying is that sometimes children will have a confused idea about these people, not quite the straightforward fear and loathing you might suspect. They will know them by their first names, although, of course, not necessarily their real ones. They won't always see them simply as the Bogey Man.