by Nick Oldham
He swore.
‘Yeah,’ Rik said, knowing Henry had worked it out. At the front of the trailer was a construction that looked similar to a garden shed, but quite narrow and small and made of steel. ‘It’s for garden storage … You can buy similar ones in any big garden centre or DIY store,’ Rik explained.
Henry nodded.
‘It’s bolted to the front end of the trailer so it can’t move … c’mon.’ He touched Henry’s shoulder, and they walked down the trailer, past the lighting rig. The two CSIs stood back, allowing them to see inside the small construction.
Henry’s heart froze as he looked into the mini-shed. He could see the solid bolts that fixed it to the trailer, and the pair of manacles – two metal rings joined by a chain – secured to the roof of the shed, hanging down. He swallowed something very vile.
‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ he whispered, but not with any degree of pride. ‘It’s barbaric.’
‘Yeah,’ Rik said, equally quietly. ‘I checked after you called me, with North Yorkshire Police first. The two missing girls you gave me the names of …’
‘Rebecca Merryweather and Grace Greenwood.’ Henry remembered the names.
‘Bartle was interviewed and eliminated from both enquiries.’
‘Shit.’
‘I’ve identified another eight missing girls, not just from North Yorkshire, but from all over the country, with the common denominator being farmers’ auction markets.’ Rik swallowed. ‘There may be more, and some, not all, disappeared on dates close to when Bartle had been arrested.’
‘When he howled at the moon.’
‘Something like that.’
‘When he couldn’t control himself.’
‘Maybe,’ Rik said, ‘but it looks like he’s actually out of control now.’
Henry nodded. ‘He kidnaps them and keeps them manacled in this tool shed thing like animals, brings them back here, surrounded by pigs or sheep or whatever, and then what?’ He turned his face slowly, pulled off his mask and looked at Rik, the artificial light cast by the rig catching the contours of his face, the shadow, the light, in an eerily demonic way.
Rik led Henry through the abattoir itself, through to the cold storage room where not many hours before Henry had been hanging upside down, contemplating a violent death.
Rik was saying, ‘Looks like Bartle has been putting horse meat back into the food chain and selling it on to unscrupulous burger manufacturers.’ He pointed out the carcases of four horses, including the one that had licked Henry’s face so gruesomely. ‘Still possible to do, especially for someone like Bartle, a sole trader operating under the radar. The food health inspectors don’t have the resources to keep a lid on it all.’
Henry grunted. ‘He might have been putting other products into the food chain, from what he told me.’
‘Such as?’
‘Human beings,’ he said, finding his mind was beginning to fester with self-recrimination.
‘That’s yet to be established,’ Rik said. ‘He might just have been trying to scare the shit out of you.’
‘He succeeded,’ Henry admitted.
‘There’s a very long way to go with this,’ Rik said.
Henry was becoming more and more furious with himself the more he learned about Bartle and Overwall, quickly coming to the conclusion that maybe Ellison had been right. Maybe his head had been so far up his arse that he’d believed he was operating as normal and, because of that, not doing the routine things he should have done. He stopped between two sides of beef and said, ‘How the fuck did I miss him, Rik? I searched this place.’
‘Because he’s a sneaky, deceitful and careful operator – like most psychopaths – and he was in cahoots with Overwall, too, the straight man of the duo, the one without any funny lines.’
‘The taxis,’ Henry said. ‘That’s why I got smacked on the head, because Bartle pulled up in a taxi …’
‘Seems he did some driving for Overwall.’
‘And he was using exactly the same taxi …’
‘Yep,’ Rik confirmed.
It had been the taxi, the Skoda Octavia, that had stopped Henry in his tracks as he had been leaving Overwall’s place. If it hadn’t been on the forecourt, he would have jumped in his own car, gone straight back to Kendleton and reported that, as obnoxious as he was, Overwall denied having picked up Emma that afternoon, saying she wasn’t at the prearranged pickup point. It would have been virtually impossible to disprove. The focus of the investigation would then have shifted to Lancaster.
Not that a parked-up taxi would normally have stopped Henry, even if it was the same colour and model as the one he had just looked through inside the unit. It wasn’t unusual for a taxi firm to buy the same make and model of car because it was like a recognizable brand. In Overwall’s case, white Skodas with the same logo.
What stopped Henry was the registration plate. First he noticed it was an 05 registered vehicle, 2005. Even then it might not have clicked, except he then realized that the number plates were exactly the same. Each car displayed the same number, and in a ferocious churning of his mind, it slotted into place for Henry.
On the night Laura Marshall went missing after her visit to the Swan’s Neck, Spencer Bartle had been taken into Lancaster by Overwall. Henry had the taxi that Overwall presented to him given a thorough going over by a forensic team, and there had been absolutely nothing in it linking Bartle to the disappearance. Not a tiny piece of glass from the police car window, which would have matched the glass found on the Swan’s Neck car park. Nor any blood or hair that could have been matched to Laura Marshall. The car that Overwall said he had taken Bartle to Lancaster in was clean.
Because it was not the car.
Overwall was running two vehicles with the same registration number, and one thing Henry had not checked in his ‘thorough’ search of the vehicle was the Vehicle Identification Number, the VIN.
Overwall was running cloned vehicles, thereby saving a small fortune on tax and insurance by simply declaring he was just running one, effectively doubling his income. It was a common enough scam amongst disreputable transport firms, big and small.
Overwall and Bartle had tricked him and, because his head was where it was, he had fallen for it. He hadn’t been concentrating.
Henry had also seen an iPhone in the rear footwell, which turned out to belong to Emma, and which Bartle had knocked out of her hand as she’d texted her mum and asked for help.
Henry and Rik faced each other.
‘Still trying to put this together,’ Henry mused. ‘He must have attacked her on the car park behind the pub, then driven off with her in the police car … done whatever … then got Overwall to take him somewhere to dispose of his clothing – because we never found any evidence of anything on any of Bartle’s clothing. Overwall then got into the second taxi and took him to Lancaster.’ Henry’s reasoning was slightly fuzzy, but his hypothesis seemed sound to him. ‘Overwall presented me with the clean car and got away with it because he knew there would never be any chance of him cleaning up the first car, because that’s impossible … I’ll bet, even now, if you get a team on those cars, you’ll find some trace in one of them. Be worth doing, even if it’s been valeted.’
‘But where is the cop car?’
Henry allowed himself a slight grin. ‘I asked Laura that just now, because it was bugging me, and Bartle half-alluded to it just before he was going to cut me up. How does a car disappear? We checked all the scrap yards and regular car dumping grounds – nothing. Because it’s closer to home than you might imagine. It’s out back.’ Henry pointed. ‘Follow me.’
He and Rik threaded their way through the rows of hanging meat to the door at the far end of the cold room: the one through which Bartle had dragged the chained-up young women to display them proudly to Henry. They emerged into a concrete yard with large units built on three sides, including the one they had just stepped out from. Henry turned to the open side with Rik in tow and walked to the
edge, up to a four-foot high fence that surrounded a circular concrete structure, about a hundred feet across and sunk deep into the ground like a huge pudding bowl. A putrid, awful smell wafted from it.
‘That stinks,’ Rik said, glad he was wearing a face mask.
‘Slurry pit,’ Henry said, ‘containing animal waste, water from washing down the abattoir and other unusable stuff, which eventually breaks down into fertilizer.’
‘Eh?’ Rik was still puzzled.
‘It’s a hole, bigger and deeper than a swimming pool, and it’s full of shit, a lethal place if you fall into it, or inhale some of the gases that come off it. And that’s where you’ll find the police car.’
‘You reckon?’
‘Bartle virtually said so, and Laura thinks so too.’
‘Don’t fancy that.’
‘There’ll be other stuff in it, too,’ Henry predicted bleakly, but did not elaborate. He meant bodies, but unless they had been put in there recently, they would just be part of the slurry itself now. ‘Great job for the underwater search unit.’
‘I’ll get on with it … Now then, follow me,’ Rik said.
He took Henry into the unit opposite the abattoir, which was a huge garage filled with a selection of farm vehicles and equipment. They went all the way through this to a door at the far end and out through this into another, smaller yard, beyond which was a large field bordered by woodland.
A police traffic van with a portable lighting rig on its roof was parked by the gate to this field, and the light from the floodlight rig swathed the first ten metres of the field.
‘He went to a lot of trouble, and to be honest, if he hadn’t brought out the girls to show to you, we might still be none the wiser,’ Rik said, gesturing across the field. Henry could see nothing, other than a JCB digger tucked away in one corner. His eyes roved until he gave up. ‘OK, what am I looking for?’
‘Bartle’s harem.’
Henry looked across the field again, then said, ‘Stop teasing me.’
‘Follow me.’ He led Henry into the field.
Rik peeled back a rectangle of turf, maybe three feet by four feet, and several inches thick – but it was not real grass; it was artificial turf that blended with the real grass surrounding it.
‘If you park a tractor or a trailer over this, you’d never know,’ Rik said, ‘especially if real grass and muck is thrown over it to hide it.’ Rik finished and stood back to reveal a trap door underneath the false grass, which was bolted shut.
He slid the bolt back, slid his fingers under a handle flush with the door and raised it on its hinges. It opened easily.
Henry remained silent as he looked down into the black hole, seeing a set of metal ladders similar to those used to gain access to lofts. They led down to whatever was there. It was like looking into a storm drain.
Rik said, ‘You can climb down the steps and close the trap door over your head, so anyone who happened to be walking by would just see something that looked like a manhole cover. Not that anyone walks by here. Nobody comes by here. When you come back up, you just cover it with the artificial turf and, to all intents, it’s just part of the field again.’
Henry really, really, really did not want to descend into the hell down there that his imagination was now painting vividly for him. He swallowed, found he could hardly breathe.
‘An underground lair,’ Rik said.
‘I’m not sure I’m up for this,’ Henry said.
‘You just scammed your way past the chief constable,’ Rik pointed out.
Henry nodded. ‘Show me.’
Rik began to back down the ladder into the darkness. Henry watched him disappear, then as he looked into the hole a light came on, with Rik standing at the foot of the ladder, looking up. He beckoned Henry to follow.
Henry turned and placed his right foot on the ladder and lowered himself down. When he stepped off to look, he saw this was not just a hole he was in, but the inside of a corrugated steel container, the type usually found on a lorry trailer or a cargo ship. The lighting was poor, and there was a lot of shadow. There was a terrible stench of rotting flesh.
‘Yeah, it’s a container, and it’s been buried underground,’ Rik said, confirming Henry’s analysis.
It was easily big enough for a tall man to stand inside without having to stoop. Henry guessed it was about eight and a half feet high, maybe twenty feet long and about eight feet wide.
‘This is the first of three, all interconnected,’ Rik said. ‘Probably dug out with the JCB up top.’ Rik turned on his torch and led Henry to the end of the container, where a panel had been cut out of the metal to form a door, leading into the next one along. Rik stopped here, then shone his torch on the side of the container and held the beam on a chain that had been screwed into the side, about halfway up the wall, on the end of which was a pair of manacles.
‘It’s medieval,’ Henry said.
A dirty, torn blanket was spread on the floor.
‘I think this is where Emma was held,’ Rik said.
Henry stared at the chains, imagining. ‘He takes them from the streets and brings them here,’ he said. It was a statement and a question combined. ‘An underground prison, a torture chamber. This took some planning.’
‘Two more of these, with air vents in the roofs but disguised from above … It gets worse,’ Rik said bleakly. ‘There’s a body in the furthest one along. Not sure, but it could be Grace Greenwood … Half rotted away. It’s no wonder you didn’t find all this, Henry.’
‘But I should have done. I should have done my job and saved people’s lives, Rik.’ He paused, then decided abruptly, ‘I’ve seen enough, seen enough for a lifetime.’ He looked into Rik’s eyes, but was disgusted with himself. ‘Over to you, mate. I know I’ve been a shit with you about it, but you are the man for the job.’
‘Thanks, Henry … that means a lot.’
NINETEEN
Jake dawdled patiently in the Land Rover, waiting for Henry’s return. At least, he was trying to appear to be patient, but he was on pins because all he wanted to do now was get home and hug his daughter and his family for a very long time, shed tears of relief, probably, and count his blessings. And get out of his dirty clothes.
Whilst waiting he had chatted to several people, detectives and CSIs, and although they were cagey about the whole scenario, coupled with his involvement so far and the knowledge he had pulled together, Jake began to realize just how fortunate he and his family had been.
Bartle was clearly a cunning, dangerous sexual predator and murderer. It seemed as if he had reached a point where his urges were beyond any sort of control, hence his opportunistic abductions of Laura Marshall and Emma. He had gone beyond planning offences and taking his victims from further afield. Now he was operating close to home.
But just because Bartle was committing offences on his own doorstep and taking more chances, it did not necessarily mean he would get caught. He had spent a great deal of time and effort burying containers in the ground and camouflaging their existence, so he could very easily have lied his way out of the situation again, and Emma, quite possibly, would never have been seen again.
Jake shuddered at the thought. The prospect of never seeing his daughter again terrified him beyond belief.
His thoughts then turned to Henry. On the whole, Jake was pretty ambivalent as far as detectives were concerned; he could take or leave them and had no desire to be one. He had known ‘of’ Henry – the force had so few SIOs, and because they handled major investigations they were bound to be known – but he had never really met him before the Wayne Oxford operation.
Something about Henry had impressed him, even from that first briefing. Possibly because Henry led from the front. And then, subsequently, because he had shown an interest in Jake on a personal level when he did not have to. Henry owed Jake nothing, really, but had been there for him.
It was only now as he waited for Henry’s return from the crime scene that he actually realized
that the constabulary’s loss, caused by Henry’s retirement and the shameful, ignominious manner in which it had been brought about, was huge. OK, life would go on, the force would continue to operate, but it would be poorer for Henry’s absence.
He sat tapping the steering wheel, wishing the heating system was better.
Henry appeared at the door of the slaughterhouse, walked to the rear of the CSI van and removed his forensic suit, handing it to one of the investigators. He trudged tiredly back to the Land Rover and climbed in next to Jake.
‘Sorted?’ Jake asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Not nice?’
‘Awful,’ Henry said and looked squarely at Jake. ‘Time to get back to our loved ones, matey.’
‘My thoughts exactly.’
Henry drew his seat belt across his chest and locked it into place, tilted his head back and sighed.
Jake reversed away, swung around and headed back to Kendleton, off the industrial estate, which looked ordinary and safe but housed horrible secrets that would be fully revealed in the days, weeks to come.
The short journey was done in silence, each man consumed by his own thoughts.
Eventually, Jake stopped outside the Tawny Owl. ‘Thanks again, Henry. I owe you one.’
‘No, you don’t, Jake … That said, you can come down and buy me a pint in the very near future and we’ll call it quits.’
‘Done.’ Jake reached across, and they shook hands. Henry stepped out of the car and watched Jake drive away, before turning to walk to the pub entrance, but stopped and patted his pockets and looked back over his shoulder at the disappearing rear lights of the police car.
‘Bugger,’ he exclaimed.
Jake pulled on to the driveway next to Anna’s car, put on the handbrake, switched off and put the Land Rover into first, not trusting the brake. He climbed out and locked it before walking up to the front door of his house.
The lights were all on, all the curtains drawn, making him stop for another moment of reflection.
It could easily have been so different. His foolishness and infidelity had almost destroyed his family, the people he cared most about in his life.