by L M Krier
'Well, sir, before I forget, I can't yet find any trace of this Parish's Pies anywhere on the Internet, which is strange in itself. I've tried all the spelling variations I can think of, and even words that sound similar, in case it was misheard, but nothing so far.'
There was never any hesitation when Steve was talking about computers or Internet research. He knew what he was talking about.
'Now, on to the computer system,' he continued. 'We're not talking about a crash or any kind of accidental loss of data. The system has been thoroughly and very professionally wiped. It's not something that can be done quickly, either. A job as thorough as this one would need several hours, by someone who really knew what they were doing.'
'So the data's gone for good? No one could recover it?' Ted asked. He knew as much about computer matters as he did about brain surgery, which was next to nothing.
'Cheltenham could, with the resources they have, and with a lot of time,' Steve replied.
'Cheltenham?' Ted echoed blankly, wondering if he appeared as stupid as he felt.
'GCHQ, sir,' Steve told him patiently. 'Government Communications Headquarters.'
Ted looked even more puzzled. 'Why on earth would someone go to that amount of trouble to wipe the records of a small private hotel?' he asked.
'Perhaps we're getting closer to the truth?' Steve suggested. 'There could have been something in the records which might lead to people very high up in the establishment who were involved.
'There is more, too, sir, but I need to show you stuff on my computer and I know the rest of the team will be in shortly. Maybe we could do that at the end of the day? I wanted you to decide how much of this you share with the others at the moment, sir, as it brings in some pretty sinister possibilities, I'd say.'
'Brilliant work, Steve, thanks,' Ted said.
The rest of the team members were arriving, but there was no sign of Rob O'Connell by the time Ted was ready for the morning briefing. 'Anyone know what's happened to Rob?' he asked. There were blank stares and head shakes.
'So, Mike, since we all had so much fun yesterday with the sex offenders, I take it you have more of the same on the agenda for today?' Ted asked ironically.
'Yes, sir, we've still got quite a few to sift through, then we need to check their stories,' the DS said. 'Hard to know really where to begin when some of them have the form they have. Of the ones I spoke to I could pretty much imagine any of them being involved. What about yours, sir?'
'Like you say, most of them have the form, although it has to be said that some of them only seem interested in girls. The DNA cross-matching should hopefully help narrow it down a bit for us.
'If Rob doesn't appear before the suspects start arriving, do you want me and Sgt Reynolds to take the morning shift?' Ted asked. 'Then if he turns up, you and Rob do this afternoon. If he doesn't appear for some reason, Virgil can you take over from him, please. How are you getting on looking for your homeless man?'
'No sign at all of him at the moment, sir,' Virgil replied. 'Nobody's seen him for a few days. He seems to have gone underground somewhere. I'm just hoping he's all right, and no one realised he was a witness to the shooting.'
'Keep looking, keep asking around,' Ted told him. 'Right, let's crack on. We need to make some progress.'
Ted's first interviewee of the day was tall and distinguished-looking, silver haired and in his early seventies. Ted knew from his record that he was a former house parent at an expensive boarding school. He had served time for having sex with under-age girls in his care. He seemed not the slightest bit perturbed to be summoned to the station. His whole attitude oozed arrogant self-confidence.
Ted started with the formalities then began, 'Mr Armitage, we have asked you to come in today to account for your whereabouts on the evening of the twenty-eighth of last month. I understand you were not able to do when my officers called on you. At this stage it is purely routine. We are asking the same question of all people on the Sex Offenders' Register living in this area.'
'Let me save you some time, Inspector,' the man replied, with the hint of a sneer. 'As I read the newspapers and watch the local news, I believe this is in connection with the sexual assault and killing of a young boy. I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in boys, I find that a complete perversion.'
'But Mr Armitage, you must understood that we need to speak to anyone with a record of having sex with children.'
'Children!' the man almost spat. 'I slept with girls of fourteen and fifteen. Have you any notion of how adult they can appear? If you saw them out for the evening, you would take them for nineteen, twenty, easily.'
Ted could feel the revulsion rising in him. He struggled to keep control. 'As their house parent, though, you would have been perfectly aware of their ages, surely?'
Quietly, Jancis Reynolds laid a hand on Ted's arm and said, 'Sorry to interrupt, sir, but as time is a bit short, can I just ask Mr Armitage if he can account for his movements on the evening in question?'
'Since the court case and subsequent prison sentence, I have very little social life,' the man told them. 'My wife left me. I can no longer work. I am hounded wherever I go, so I tend to stay in my flat rather a lot of the time. In the evenings I often play Scrabble online. I imagine it is possible for you to check that? That's about all I can offer you for now.'
Ted concluded the interview with almost indecent haste. As soon as the man had left the room, he turned to Jan. 'Sorry about that, Jan, I nearly lost it for a moment there,' he said apologetically. 'I just find it very hard the way these people try to justify their actions by blaming the children.'
'No worries, boss, at least you didn't karate kick him all round the room,' she laughed. 'The team hasn't told me how to control you if you do.'
Ted smiled in turn. The touch of humour was a big help for a difficult morning. There was plenty more of the same, but they were no nearer finding a possible suspect. When they had finished the morning interviews and headed back upstairs, Rob O'Connell was at his desk, head down, working on something.
He looked dreadful. He was unshaven, looked as if he had slept the night in his clothes and even from across the office, Ted could smell the alcohol oozing from his pores. He was shocked, it was so unlike him.
'Rob, have you got a minute, please?' he asked, heading for his office. The DC followed him, not looking at any of his colleagues.
Ted headed straight for his kettle. He was in need of green tea after the distasteful morning he had just experienced. He kept coffee in his office for visitors who didn't share his taste. He made a strong one for Rob, put it in front of him, then sat down opposite him.
'So, Rob,' he said, 'what's wrong?'
'I went out and got absolutely hammered last night, sir,' he began. 'The girlfriend wouldn't let me back in the flat. I had to sleep in the car.'
'I guessed that much. Do you want to tell me why?' Ted asked.
Rob took a long gulp of the hot coffee. 'You were right, it is this case. It was sitting there yesterday listening to those bastards talking about what they did, without any sense of guilt or remorse.'
Ted sensed there was more to come and waited patiently in silence, sipping his tea.
'I was in care for a time, when I was a kid,' the DC continued. 'My mum was very ill, in and out of hospital for a long time. She was a single parent, no family. I was lucky, in a sense. I was placed with a foster family, not in a home, and they were wonderful. My foster mum's brother, though, my “uncle Derek”, was a different story altogether.'
Both men paused to drink. Ted noticed that his own hands had started to shake so he gripped his mug tightly between both of them to try to steady them.
'He … he kept touching me. Intimately. At every chance he got. And there were a lot of chances. They left him to babysit me and their own children, two girls, quite often, as he was “so good with children”.'
Ted stayed quiet, letting Rob talk. He sensed it was what he needed most, the opportunity to unburde
n himself.
'I never told them. I was terrified they wouldn't believe me. I was afraid they'd say I'd encouraged him, or made it up or something. I just shut it away in my memory and thought I'd forgotten all about it. Until this case.'
'Thank you for being honest, Rob. There is help available, if you want it, but that's up to you. I don't want to push you into anything, but if you need me to arrange something, just say the word,' Ted told him. 'For now, I want you to go home, have some food, have a shower and get some proper sleep. Come back in the morning and I'll assign you to something else. Nobody will know the reason.'
Rob shot him a look of gratitude as he drained his coffee then headed for the door.
'Oh, and Rob,' Ted said before he left. 'Maybe get a bunch of flowers for the girlfriend on your way home, eh?'
CHAPTER Twenty-one
The day had been long and hard. Ted, unusually, was clock-watching until he could get away. It was his night for both the self-defence club and his own judo session, and he could hardly wait. He needed to feel the healing power of a hard physical workout, to help him regain some inner balance.
He had attended Aiden's funeral, out of respect. It had been a depressing affair, with so few people there. There was just a token presence from the children's home, Flip, with both his foster parents and, to his surprise, Professor Nelson had put in an appearance. She immediately went up even further in his estimation.
He had also been affected by listening to Rob O'Connell's account, although he had suspected something of the sort. However, it hadn't helped with the emotional scars of his own troubled past, which he was trying his best to keep buried until he could wrap up the case.
Although he had suggested arranging counselling for Rob, it was not a route he would personally contemplate going down. Ted was a good listener, but found it incredibly hard to talk about his own feelings. Only with Trev could he do so, out walking in the hills. And even with Trev he could only manage to vocalise his emotions if he were looking somewhere else, up at the sky, off to the far horizon. The prospect of sitting in a room talking to a stranger was the stuff of his worst nightmares.
Although he was keen to get away, he was also intrigued to hear what else Steve had to tell him, from his computer work. The implications of his disclosures that morning had rather rattled Ted, but he had not yet had the time to discuss them with either the Ice Queen or Kevin Turner.
He was feeling a little out of his depth at what Steve had told him so far and badly needed to kick some ideas around with someone who knew more about the subject than he did himself. He suspected that would include pretty much everyone else in the station, since he was a total techno-phobe.
As soon as the others had left, Ted pulled up a chair and sat down next to the TDC's desk, where he was at the computer waiting for him. In a couple of clicks, Steve opened the page he had bookmarked earlier.
Ted stared at it for a moment in evident incomprehension. Seeing his expression, Steve said, 'It's like a blog, sir. Things someone has posted, and where people can comment. But look at the title.'
Ted read the name of the page: PIEdpiper. He couldn't work out what it meant or why it was written in that format. 'I'm an idiot with this stuff, Steve,' he confessed, 'you'll have to spell it out for me in words of half a syllable.'
'Right you are, sir,' Steve was clearly in his element to be helping his boss with stuff he couldn't grasp. 'Well, the Piedpiper, perhaps you know, was a rat catcher in Hamelin, but it's quite a sinister story. On a fairy tale level, the children followed him because of the sound of his pipes. But some legends have it that up to a hundred and thirty children followed him out of the town, and were never seen again.
'Now PIE, written like that, stands for Paedophile Information Exchange which, you probably know, was a pro-paedophile activist group set up in 1974, which ran for ten years. Initially it was above board and official. The stated aim was the abolition of the age of consent, so that sex between adults and children could become legal.'
Ted nodded. 'I've heard about it. Mind-boggling.'
'I've been researching it, in connection with this website. There were top diplomats involved, all sorts of respectable establishment figures, even a senior intelligence operative. The group also received grants from the Home Office. Eventually a lot of the major players were arrested and convicted, some not all that long ago.'
'So what I don't understand, is this page promoting paedophilia?' Ted asked.
Steve shook his head. 'Far from it. It's set up to expose people who are allegedly involved in child sex abuse.' He clicked to open a new page. 'Someone like this face you may well recognise.'
Rory the Raver's face stared out at Ted from the computer screen. Underneath the photo were several paragraphs of text outlining allegations against him in connection with his activities with under-age fans.
'How do they get away with publishing this stuff without getting sued?' Ted asked.
'Everything that's written here is littered with “alleged” and similar words,' Steve told him. 'Plus people running sites of this type are proficient and clever, and they make it as difficult as possible to track them down. Not impossible, of course, to anyone with the right knowledge. It can be done but it needs to go higher up than we are.'
Ted caught sight of the clock at the bottom corner of Steve's computer and exclaimed, 'Shit, is that the time? Sorry, Steve, I must just make a quick phone call. Hang on.'
Trev had carefully stored his number in Ted's phone and showed him how to speed-dial it, which he did now. When Trev answered, he said, as ever, 'Hi, it's me.' He always forgot that Trev could see his name on the screen and had set the ringtone for his calls to Ted's own favourite song, Barcelona. 'I'm running late. Sorry. Can you start things off and I'll get down there as soon as I can? I'll just nip home to change. I'm not letting Bernard and the lads see me in a suit. See you as soon as possible.'
He turned back to Steve. 'Sorry about that, it's the self-defence club tonight, the one we run for kids. I like to think it's because of what Flip learned with us that he didn't finish up like Aiden. So go on, what else.'
'You better brace yourself for this one,' Steve said with a grin. Ted noticed he was so relaxed he'd dropped all formality and wasn't calling him 'sir' every other sentence.
He clicked another link which brought up a different photo, one which Ted recognised instantly.
'Holy shit!' Ted couldn't help but exclaim. It was of a senior police officer from a neighbouring force. He rapidly scanned the text underneath in disbelief. Most of it centred on allegations that the officer was particularly fond of administering spankings to young, naked boys. 'I know there have been rumours, but this stuff is beyond anything I imagined.'
'Ready for another?' Steve asked, and clicked on another tab. This time Ted gaped at the screen as a photograph of a former Crown Court Recorder he had known appeared on the page. He knew that this man was now dead, perhaps why some of the allegations against him were more graphic and left little to the imagination.
Ted leaned back in his chair, amazed. 'I get that these are just rumours, but if there is any truth in any of them it's no wonder there's not much progress in catching and bringing these people to justice.'
'I've saved the best to the last,' Steve told him, with the air of an illusionist about to produce the best trick of the evening to a packed audience. 'Ready?' he asked teasingly, then said, 'Ta-da!' as he clicked the link.
This time Ted said, 'Bloody hell!' staring at the picture on the screen of a minor royal. He was no royalist, so he could not begin to guess how far down the line of succession the man who appeared in front of them was. But not so far down that Ted didn't recognise him immediately. 'How high does this go?'
'I dread to think,' Steve replied. 'Bear in mind, as you said, this is all just rumour and speculation. But lately a lot of what started out as rumour has proved to be true. Jimmy Savile, for instance.'
'But I thought this one was married, with a child?
And why do they call him the Knave of Clubs?' Ted asked.
'The Knave or Jack is the lowest court card in a pack, so that's a reference to his lowly status amongst the royals,' Steve explained. 'Yes, married, with a child, but then that's not all that unusual for paedophiles, from what I've read. And the Clubs bit is a reference to his public image of a bit of a Jack-the-lad, night-life lover, party animal.'
'Steve, you have absolutely excelled yourself this time, fantastic piece of work, well done,' Ted told him. 'Let's just sit on this for now, until I can get my head around it. It's very big, if it's true, and is going to need some extremely careful handling. Thanks for all your hard work. Now I'd better go and equip some more kids with the means to defend themselves against this sort of stuff.'
Ted left Steve grinning from ear to ear, clearly pleased with himself. If he really got his skates on, he could still arrive at the sports centre in time for part of the junior club, then do the much-needed full judo session with the seniors.
When he got to the dojo, he was surprised to see Flip's foster mother, Mrs Atkinson, sitting on one of the benches watching the session. Trev was working the kids well. Ted went over to the mat and bowed before stepping onto it.
Flip saw him, stopped what he was doing and immediately rushed across, beaming. 'Ted! I was worried when you didn't come last week, I thought I'd done summat wrong and got you into trouble.'
Quietly, Ted reminded him of correct etiquette, not breaking off to talk during a training session, but added in a low voice, 'It's fine, Flip, nothing you did, I just had to work.'
Now Ted had joined him, Trev was able to up the pace a bit, using his partner to help him demonstrate more techniques. With encouragement from the juniors, they finished up with a little high-speed workout between them, Ted showing some of his lightning fast krav maga self-defence moves, which he knew the kids loved to see.
Once the session was over, while Ted and Trev were still out of breath from their display, Flip's foster mother came over to speak to them.