by Rachel Lynch
‘I didn’t tell them anything except that Darren came with a knife, I promise!’ It was a heartfelt and emotional plea, but not one that cut any ice with the three people with whom she was hitching a ride.
They sped out of Ambleside and headed into the country.
Chapter 49
Two divers from the Underwater and Confined Space Search Team readied themselves to submerge into one of Barrow’s many docks. Lockwood watched Kelly climb out of her car and walk towards him. They shook hands. The wind was bitter and they both wore long coats. The dock to be searched was a long-disused Victorian one, close to Channel Side and where the ex-girlfriend of Darren Beckett had seen him climbing into his car at an unsociable hour. The witness had never mentioned a second man, but Kelly already suspected Darren was lying.
Lockwood wrapped his scarf around his neck and they walked to the railings.
‘You didn’t have to come,’ Kelly said.
‘I can’t miss this; it’s on my patch.’
Kelly nodded. They watched as the two divers checked their equipment. Two more police personnel sat in a van parked close by, and the area had been sealed by uniforms. A small crowd had gathered. This was big news for the local community and several camera crews filmed from a distance. Lockwood had sent them as far back as he could, but it didn’t matter with modern lenses.
‘When I found out who Roza was, I had Beckett leaned on back at the station, and he cracked. She’s in here too.’
‘They know they’re looking for two,’ said Lockwood.
‘Thanks Craig. Part of me hopes they’re not in there.’
‘I know.’
* * *
The divers performed their final checks and were satisfied they had enough oxygen for the shallow dive at only 9.9 metres. They tested their helmet radios and spoke to one another clearly. It wasn’t the worst dive either man had faced; they could be called to search canals, sunken engine rooms, ponds, water-filled mines or septic tanks. Their most dangerous enemy was debris, and they both wore strong gloves. The water was murky and freezing and they wore Aqua Lung drysuits that would keep a layer of warm body-heated air between them and the inclement temperature of the dark water. They signalled they were ready and the men in the van charted their agreed grid pattern, bar air pressure and communications.
The divers got into the water clumsily, but as soon as they were in, the weightlessness enabled them to move freely and they began their descent. Looking for bodies was the most satisfying part of their job; should they find what they were looking for, it gave ultimate closure to the families and great fulfilment to the team. One of the men carried an underwater camera.
They descended to the bottom slowly and began searching in a grid formation, back and forth, turning over debris but making sure they didn’t disturb too much silt and sludge. Visibility was almost zero, so they had to use their hands and headlights, and progress was slow. Only the area two feet in front of each man was illuminated by torchlight.
Hundreds of years of debris covered the dock floor, and the divers worked their way over old glass jars, tyres, pottery, anchors and rope. One of the men spotted what looked like an old penny farthing bicycle and took a picture for his son with his underwater camera. After fifteen minutes, they had covered an area of only five square metres. The dock was tidal, so if there were bodies in there, they could have moved.
They carried on.
Amongst the mass of piping and jumbled shapes, they had to be vigilant. Bodies could be wrapped, dissected, disguised or decomposed. Their job was mostly a silent one, with the odd crackle of communication and the occasional joke when they found a condom or a clown mask.
The two men turned a corner on the grid and began a new ten-metre column. The silt was thick and they tugged items free of the clinging dirt to take a closer look or a photograph. Pieces of rolled-up carpet and other household items told the pair that the dock had been used as a dump site for many years until the development of the Channel Side for leisure purposes meant that tipping now carried a heavy penalty.
They peered into every vessel or piece of piping that looked as though it might be big enough to conceal a body or body part, then moved on to the next item. Their gloves hindered them, but it was better than immobile freezing fingers; it just took more time.
One of the divers stopped above a bulky article and rubbed off some gathered silt; it shone black and looked to him like bin bags had been secured with duct tape. He ripped a little hole; beneath was what appeared to be a coloured blanket. He continued ripping and ran his hand along it to see how long it was. It was tough, and resisted his prodding. It took four minutes for the silt to clear, and he called to his buddy to help him. A chain wrapped securely around the middle of the object disappeared into the silt. The divers cleared the area slowly and discovered an item poking up from the bed; it was perfectly round and looked like a gym weight. There was another one close by. The detective had said that the suspect had used weights to sink the bodies.
* * *
They had something. The radio barked into life and Kelly heard the exchange from where she was standing, close to the open door. She and Lockwood climbed into the van and looked at the screen, staring at the images streamed directly from the camera.
The divers connected an inflatable buoy to the item and awaited instruction; the buoy inflated and hit the surface, and a flurry of activity rippled through Channel Side. People pointed and filmed on mobile phones; some took selfies with the buoy in the background.
Lockwood nodded to the head of the unit, who asked for an update from the divers of their air pressure remaining: anything less than forty bar was a risk. They both had over that and so the dive carried on. Besides, the bodies might be close together. He then instructed for a tent to be erected close to the drop-off, where a member of forensics could perform an initial assessment without the press being able to see what was going on.
* * *
The two divers felt a renewed sense of purpose and willed away the cold that had begun to seep through the thick rubber. They couldn’t rush. But fifteen minutes later they agreed that it was time to ascend and give up for now. They’d only covered twenty square metres or so, but they’d found something worth investigating, and that was worth the painstaking process. They’d be back in the water in three hours, the length of break necessary for this depth and duration of dive.
As one of the divers went to rearrange his buoyancy, which would enable him to ascend, one of his fins struck an object. He hoped it hadn’t been sharp enough to pierce his suit. His foot throbbed, but he couldn’t feel a rush of cold water, so he was pretty sure he hadn’t done much damage. He looked down.
His colleague followed his gaze. Beneath them, a perfectly round object protruded from the silt. They checked their bar again and it was dangerously low; the exertion required to investigate the second find would take too much air. The diver made a split-second decision.
‘Requesting an old job, sir,’ he said into his radio.
‘Did he say old job?’ Kelly asked.
‘He did. It’s a good old fashioned mask and snorkel, he’s nearly out of air, so we need to get it down to him,’ said the head of unit. Kelly looked alarmed.
‘It’s risky in deep water, but he knows what he’s doing.’
He took charge and grabbed a mask and snorkel as requested. One man on the surface always had to wear a rig just in case, and it was his turn today. He checked his secondary demand valve; his colleague would need it.
‘I fancy a swim,’ he said.
He descended quickly and reached the divers in seven seconds. As one diver ascended safely, the other waited for his superior and he removed his own demand valve and sucked on the spare. He’d checked his equipment one last time and was down to about a minute of air remaining. They set to work quickly, clearing the silt away from the second find to reveal a package roughly the same size as the first, and also wrapped in black plastic. The chain was attached to the weigh
t and there was no doubt that whatever was inside had been disposed of by the same person. A second inflatable buoy was attached and their job was done. The head of unit passed the diver the snorkel and mask, who removed the secondary demand valve, allowing his boss to ascend. The remaining diver blew out of his nose before he too ascended.
When they broke the surface, they were grinning.
‘Good fucking day.’
‘Good fucking day,’ he agreed.
Chapter 50
Four teams were dispatched to four separate addresses supplied by Darren Beckett, who now lay coughing and sweating on a cot bed in a bare cell. With no drugs or alcohol, his demons punished him and his head was a maddening place to exist.
The first address was a warehouse in Penrith. Each team was followed by a forensics officer, but the uniforms went in first to secure the building. It was a damp and isolated place and there wasn’t much to see, except for long tubes of industrial plastic wrapping, the odd chair, and tea- and coffee-making facilities.
After the lights were dimmed, however, the luminol that the forensics officer had sprayed over the surfaces lit up like swarms of fireflies, indicating that a person or persons had lost a lot of blood in there. It looked like a phantom slaughterhouse that would delight children on the ghost train at the fair.
The second address was a flat on the outskirts of the town. This one was harder to secure; there were lots more places to hide in a residence and the officers approached the door cautiously. On the wall there was a peace sign sprayed in blue, and various scrawled phrases; one said Fly me to the moon, another No way back. A ladder was leant against a cement wall. The door had to be broken down, but it soon became clear that the place was deserted. It had been cleaned, but the protein in blood can’t be washed away, and the luminol showed blood spatter in the bathroom and two of the bedrooms.
The third address was a crumbling pile just outside Ambleside. It too was deserted. The kitchen was set up for the occasional visitor and the fridges were full of beer. It reminded officers of various dog-fighting set-ups that they’d seen, though the ring in the main room – chairs and tables placed around a roped-off area – would have been more secure if it was used for dog fights. The forensics officer picked over the place, removing microscopic fragments as well as clothes, rags, playing cards, beer bottles, ashtrays and a human tooth. The place would make a perfect training ground for apprentice forensic detectives, and the officer left with a full vehicle of items that would be laboriously processed in the coming weeks.
The final raid was on an address in Workington, where Darren said he’d driven on occasion with Curtis. Unmarked vans pulled up at three o’clock in the morning and officers jumped out armed with battering rams and body armour. The sound of splintering wood and shouts in the night startled the neighbours, and within minutes, the incident was caught on mobile phones and posted on YouTube. Officers found twenty-nine women in squalid conditions, attached to beds and delirious. Five arrests were made, including the junkie who slept in the corner of the kitchen. .
Back in Penrith, an incident room had been set up, and forces from all over Cumbria sent personnel to join in the mammoth task. The number-one priority was finding Marko Popovic. Merseyside police had provided an old photo of him.
In Barrow, the atmosphere inside the tent was tense as Kelly and Lockwood watched the two forensic examiners cut open the soaking items set before them on makeshift slabs. If they contained human remains, they’d be removed for full examination to the coroner’s office in Carlisle, fully intact. Each layer of rug, blanket and plastic wrapping contained its own micro-world that needed to be examined in sterile conditions to prevent contamination, but first they had to see what was in there.
The smell assaulted their senses first, and the two detectives covered their noses, but they still had to be sure. Confirmation came when one examiner located a hand, and then a scalp. Lockwood lowered his head. Darren Beckett, you fucking scumbag, he thought.
In Penrith, officers visited the home of Barry Crawley. This was one visit that Kelly had had to delegate. She wouldn’t have been able to look Barry in the eye as she asked him if he was a paedophile with a penchant for little girls.
Patricia Crawley made the officers a cup of tea, and they were shown into a makeshift bedroom in what was normally the lounge. A hospital bed was rigged up in the centre. Barry wanted to die at home. Two Macmillan nurses checked the syringe driver that delivered morphine to him on demand. He was desperately pale and looked small and fragile in the bed.
The officers took their time and tried not to overwhelm him. He stared at them and then glanced at his wife, suspecting what was coming. He closed his eyes, wondering just how much they knew.
‘Sir, one of your lorries was stopped at Crewe yesterday, and another one at Folkestone. Both were full of people trying to enter the country illegally. Two of your drivers have been arrested. We also have evidence that a trafficking organisation is being run through your company and those associated with Colin Day and Harry Chase.’
Barry struggled to breathe. Patricia was livid.
‘What on earth are you talking about? My husband can’t be subjected to this kind of interrogation. You can’t do this!’
The nurses kept their eyes down and left the room quietly.
‘I’m sorry, ma’am. We have to ask your husband some questions as owner of Crawley Haulage. It might be best if you wait outside.’
‘Barry?’
‘It’s all right, Pat. I know what they want. Go next door.’ His voice was raspy and weak.
In London, a search of the Home Office database showed that Gabriela Kaminski did not have a work permit, there was also no record of her having entered the country using her passport.
Chapter 51
‘Could I have a drink of water, please?’ Gabriela asked her captor. He was a strikingly large man who they called Curtis. She’d committed him to memory, noting every detail of his face, his hair, his clothing and jewellery, and his mannerisms. She did the same with the other one, who they called Marko. She had worked out that Marko was in charge. If she could get hold of a pen or a pencil, she could draw their faces perfectly. She might never get the chance.
Curtis wasn’t very bright, but he was exceptionally intimidating. He was English; she recognised the accent. She reckoned he was in his early twenties. The other man was called Sasha and he called Marko ‘Papa’. Gabriela could tell that Marko and Sasha were not English; they were from somewhere Slavic. Their voices rose and fell in a similar fashion and they had eyes that might have seen something terrible. Both reminded her of men who belonged to gangs back home, with their black clothes, dark eyes and chunky jewellery. She committed Marko’s rings to memory; anything that might help if she ever got out of here alive. She took in her surroundings. She’d noticed two young girls who’d each brought food and drinks for her captors, after which they’d disappeared into other rooms, neither making eye contact with Gabriela.
Curtis watched her. He shook his head.
‘Please, I am so thirsty. Please.’
He looked towards the kitchen, and to his gun. Gabriela could see him debating with himself. Eventually he made his mind up and disappeared for a minute or so, coming back with a cup. She took it gratefully and gulped the whole lot in one. She had no idea where she was or why, only that they suspected she’d talked to the policewoman. Every time they tried to catch her out, she denied it. She stuck to her story: that she’d identified Darren Beckett and that was it.
Now and again, Mrs Joliffe came into the room for a chair or a blanket. She never looked at Gabriela. Gabriela tried asking her why she was here, and what the men would do, but she never answered. Gabriela noted that she looked different: instead of her signature black wardrobe, she wore casual jeans; she tied back her hair and wore little make-up. It made her look like a different woman altogether. Perhaps that was the intention. Gabriela wondered if Mrs Joliffe was in trouble, because if she was, then her own cha
nces looked slim. To Gabriela, Mrs Joliffe looked as scared of the men as she felt, and that worried her.
Her heart raced and she couldn’t still her anxiety. Terror. That was what it was. Not being in control. Not being in charge. Not knowing what might happen next. Curtis looked at her with hungry eyes and she knew what it meant. Gabriela wasn’t hurt, but she was very afraid. She was miles away from her home, and no one knew where she was.
Marko came into the room, and the whole atmosphere changed. Curtis became more alert and stood taller. Gabriela prepared for attack. He knelt before her, smelling strongly of cologne, and held her chin with his hand. He was strong. Scarily strong. His eyes bored into hers and he grinned.
‘When should I let him have you, little Gabriela?’
Her breath quickened and tears came to her eyes. Marko had deep lines etched into his face and his grip was vicelike. She studied his rings, which were inches from her face; anything to not look into his eyes. The gold and diamond one looked expensive, but the other one didn’t, although it was the more distinctive of the two. It was made of a dull pewter metal and had black, purple and green squares of something, possibly enamel, set into it. He never took them off; they must mean something to him.
* * *
Marko noticed how much the girl was taking in, and he knew they shouldn’t keep her long. He yanked her chin upwards so she had to look at him. His options were fading fast. The lorries, Crawley, Beckett, the newspapers and that fucking infuriating detective. There was no way back. He couldn’t afford to take anyone with him. They had to split up. But if he was going to go down, he’d go down with a fight, and Gabriela was the perfect bait. She was innocent and pure and would fetch a great price if he could arrange it, but he doubted after the dust settled she’d still be saleable. He’d seen the way Curtis looked at her. It was always the same: the innocent ones, the young ones, the ones that were quiet and polite. Curtis was one sick motherfucker. Any moment, he could pounce, but Marko wouldn’t let him, not just yet. He let go of the girl’s chin and stood up, pacing the room.