by Conrad Jones
The PO’s escorting him back to the wing were cautiously quiet. They knew what the detectives had done and they knew what it meant. Life behind bars. They were experienced enough to know what that kind of news could do to a man, even a hardened ex-con like McGee. Men reacted in different ways to news like that. Some would implode and end up on suicide watch while others would blame the world for their plight and lash out at the nearest target. Others would explode mentally and physically, endangering themselves and anyone in the firing line. They had seen it all, dirty protests, self-harm, hanging, slashed wrists and throats, and violent attacks on officers and fellow prisoners. Prison life was always volatile but when men were given the news that they would probably never get out, extra care and attention had to applied.
They reached an intersection where the corridors split and ran to the other wings. A series of locked sterile areas separated them from C Wing. Charlie was in a world of his own, his thoughts jumbled and dark. He looked up and saw two PO’s escorting a prisoner onto the landings of C Wing. He recognised the bloated body, hunched shoulders and awkward gait. Brian looked like a frightened rabbit in the headlights of an oncoming truck. His eyes darted about nervously. Charlie smiled.
‘Hey, fat boy!’ he shouted. Brian jumped and looked through the bars. His face reddened when he saw Charlie. He seemed to sink in on himself as if he was deflating. ‘You’ve been telling lies about me, Brian.’ Charlie pointed a finger at him. ‘You’re not just a grass, you’re a fucking liar!’ Charlie lunged at the bars. ‘You cut Stuart’s throat with a spade, Brian. You did it and told them it was me!’ The PO’s on both sides guided the men away from each other. Brian began to cry; the trepidation and fear had pushed him over the edge. He wanted to see his mum. ‘You’re nearly dead, Brian!’ Charlie shouted as they dragged him away. ‘I’ll get to you. Just you see if I don’t. Watch your back, fat boy!’
‘Alright,’ Officer Clough said, through the bars on B Wing. ‘That’s enough, McGee!’
‘Fuck you,’ Charlie snarled.
‘Just calm down.’
Once Brian was out of sight, Charlie calmed down from boiling to simmering but the anger in him was intense. His stomach knotted again as he thought things over in his mind. The PO’s guided him through three sets of gates onto the landing at B Wing and walked him towards the stairs that climbed to the upper landing. The usual suspects shouted abuse but Charlie didn’t respond. He was in no mood for joisting. Their insults washed over him without consequence. There had been whispers on the landings earlier that the governor had drafted in more PO’s and that they would be taken off lockdown within the next few days. That would sort out the men from the boys. His tormentors were brave while they were safe behind locked doors. It would be different when the doors were opened and everyone was free to roam the landings. He would see how brave they were then. Anyone who fancied their chances would be welcome to try. Charlie didn’t care who came for him or how many. He felt like he was about to detonate.
‘We’re going up the far stairs, McGee,’ one of the PO’s said. ‘We don’t want the barmy Russian winding you up today.’
‘I’m just in the mood for that silly cunt,’ Charlie said, calmly. ‘Ripping his throat out might make me feel better.’
‘That’s why we’re going up the other stairwell.’
‘Hey, Charlie,’ a familiar voice shouted from somewhere to the right. He looked up to see Matt in his cell.
‘That’s where they have put you, eh?’ Charlie called back. ‘I wondered where you were.’
‘Have you listened to the radio today?’ Matt shouted.
‘No. I’ve been busy,’ Charlie said, sarcastically.
‘They arrested Viktor Karpov yesterday afternoon on a murder charge. They’ve sent him to Belmarsh.’ Matt banged on the door with a metal cup. ‘Did you hear that, you fucking retards?’ he shouted to all who could hear him. ‘Viktor Karpov is in the slammer! No one is paying out on his bullshit contracts!’ The news was passed on from cell to cell in a murmur. ‘Looks like you’re off the hook, Charlie!’
‘You’re a jammy bastard, McGee!’ someone called from above. ‘I was going to buy a new car with that money!’
‘Lucky fucker,’ another voice added.
‘Fucking hell,’ Charlie said, under his breath shaking his head. His thought process changed. The contract had gone, no longer hanging over him. If he was going to be inside for good then he needed to take control to survive.
CHAPTER 34
Alec and Will Naylor navigated their way down a farm track, nearly running over a gaggle of enthusiastic reporters on the way. They avoided any questions and hardly slowed down at all. A uniformed officer kept them a safe distance from the crime scene. Alec pulled up at the farmhouse and turned off the engine. Tall trees encircled the building, their bare branches swayed in the wind. It was a secluded spot with an eerie atmosphere around it. Crime scene tape flapped in the breeze. The outbuildings were windowless, the tile roof half finished. Scaffold covered the visible brickwork of the gable end. CSI officers milled about in white over suits and uniformed officers guarded the scene. The farmyard was a quagmire of mud and building materials. Alec opened the door and climbed out. Will followed suit and closed the door a bit too hard. It was one of Alec’s pet hates. Alec bit his lip, wanting to call him a clumsy twat but didn’t want to dent his confidence. If he corrective-coached him on how hard to close his vehicle door at this stage, their relationship would be doomed from the start.
‘It’s an ideal spot to keep your activities secret,’ Will said, looking around. ‘No one would hear you screaming out here.’
‘And the city is only a few miles away if you need another victim.’ Alec agreed. ‘Who is tracing the previous owners?’
‘Johnson.’
‘Google?’
‘That’s him. He’s like a rat up a drainpipe.’ Will grinned. ‘Google is compiling a list. If there’s anything to help us there, he’ll find it.’
‘I don’t think our man will be on that list,’ Alec said, thoughtfully.
‘You don’t?’
‘No.’ He didn’t expand on his thoughts. He wanted to see what had happened inside. They walked towards the farmhouse and exchanged greetings with the officers on the scene. A local CID officer met them at the door. Alec knew him as DS Metcalfe. ‘Afternoon, sergeant.’
‘Afternoon, sir,’ Metcalfe said. ‘Hello Will,’ he added, smiling. ‘I heard you were with MIT now. Well done, mate.’ They shook hands. Alec knew they had been on the force about the same length of time and figured they had been in uniform together. ‘Will and I were in uniform together,’ Metcalfe confirmed what he was thinking.
‘Small world, eh,’ Alec said, with a nod. ‘Run us through what we have we got so far.’
‘Come this way.’ Metcalfe turned and walked through the house to the kitchen. Plastic sheets covered the windows, and they flexed and flapped noisily in the wind. Metal supports held the wooden joists up where a supporting wall had been removed. The upper floors were exposed. Sawhorses and bags of cement were scattered about, making it like an assault course. They picked their way through the building site carefully. As they reached the kitchen, Metcalfe pointed to the wall of video cassettes. ‘The builders were disassembling the kitchen when this false wall toppled over revealing this. They would not have been on the shelves at Blockbusters, that’s for certain.’
‘Have they been looked at?’ Will asked.
‘CSI have looked at about half a dozen randomly. They’re all pornographic, bondage stuff. The victims are clearly being raped. There are a number of different men in them apparently but the victims are a mixture of girls and boys and all young, early teens and younger so far.’
‘Get them over to the tech lab. Run the men on the tapes against facial recognition. They’re old but you never know, we might get lucky,’ Alec said, looking from left to right, studying the labels. He counted over fifty different names, with multiple copies of each, ta
king the number of tapes into the hundreds. ‘This is a library,’ he said. ‘But a very dated one.’
‘I was thinking the same thing,’ Will said. ‘DVD’s came out in the late nineties, right?’
‘I had a VHS player up until two thousand and five,’ Metcalfe said. Alec looked at him surprised at the detailed memory. Metcalfe grinned. ‘The European cup final, Istanbul. The missus taped it for me because I was on nights.’
‘That makes these tapes obsolete ten to fifteen years ago,’ Alec said, making a note of some of the names in his mind. ‘It meant something to someone, that’s why they’re still here. They were proud of their collection.’ He walked along the rows of tapes. ‘Whoever set this up was selling these tapes commercially. They make the film, copy the ones which are selling well and label them up so it’s easy to find them. It looks like a well organised rape-porn factory from the nineties.’
‘My thoughts exactly. Have a look at this,’ Metcalfe said, heading through the doorway onto the stairs. Temporary lights had been brought in to illuminate the gloomy farmhouse. ‘The builders didn’t want to bother us because they knew that we would stop the job so they came down here and had a look for themselves.’ He gestured to the floor. ‘The operation became digital at some point. There are laptops, memory sticks, SD cards, everything you would need to sell your smut online.’
‘It would be simple to run once it was set up,’ Will said. ‘Especially if they transferred all the material on the tapes to disk.’
‘It would be but what you need to ask yourself is why is it still here?’ Alec said, looking at the mattress.
‘The stains on the mattress are human blood, several different types apparently. CSI are confident that they can separate the strains and crosscheck for anything in our database.’ Metcalfe paused to explain. ‘This room is where all the tapes that they have glanced at where filmed. The memory sticks too from what they have seen so far. All the victims were tethered to these anchor rings and assaulted on the mattress.’ He noticed Will wrinkle his nose at the smell. ‘It does hum a bit, doesn’t it?’
‘Just a touch,’ Will agreed.
Metcalfe took them across the room and pushed the door open, standing aside to allow them to see inside. Will and Alec looked at the victims and then looked at each other. The three victims stared back at them from empty eye sockets, their skeletal smiles almost mocking them. ‘CSI can’t see any obvious trauma that would have caused death. They said that they were emaciated and that they probably starved to death. One of them bit her tongue off.’ There was a long few seconds of silence. The girls would have suffered terribly while they were alive, their death an agonisingly long process.’
‘The cold hard facts are that this may look like it was run by Ted Bundy but it is, in fact, a money-making operation run by some very smart people,’ Alec said, looking around. ‘And the kind of people who do this, don’t just up and leave valuable assets like their products and equipment behind. They certainly wouldn’t have left these poor girls to starve to death. They were way too hard to come by to allow them to die like that.’ He looked at Will. Will looked confused. ‘This place is frozen in time. We’re looking for someone who left here in a hurry and never came back. We are looking for someone who either died suddenly or went to prison.’
‘That should narrow it down,’ Will said, impressed by Alec’s logic. ‘I’ll pass it on to Google.’
‘How long have they been dead?’ Alec asked.
‘Best guess at the moment is two to three years,’ Metcalfe said. ‘Obviously it could be more or less. The temperature down here would have kept them fresh longer.’
‘Get the team to look for missing teenage girls from the local area. Let’s say Merseyside, Cheshire, and North Wales. Go back the last four years to start with. Let’s run tests on all the cases that we already have DNA samples for. I don’t want to go asking parents for combs and brushes until we’ve exhausted the samples that we have already.’
‘I’ll call it in now.’
‘And another thing,’ Alec said, turning to Metcalfe. ‘Looking at how many names are on those tapes and how far back they go, we need to be searching the surrounding land for bodies. There are two decades of films there and that is a lot of victims. There’s no way they let the victims go.’
‘Do you want me to call in the dogs or the GPR unit.’
‘Ground penetrating radar and the dogs,’ Alec said. ‘Get everything that we’ve got on this. I’ll sign off the cost. There are a lot of tapes on that wall. There are only three bodies in there so where all the others?’
Will nodded and took a last look at the three girls. He couldn’t imagine being chained up in there and brought out only to be raped and then returned. It might have been a blessing that their captor left them to starve to death in the darkness. One thing he was sure of, someone needed to pay for it.
chapter 35
Jack Howarth was in agony. He had broken several bones in his leg when he hit the safety net. The pain killers that the prison doctor had administered hadn’t touched the pain. His right leg felt like it was on fire inside and his foot was facing in the wrong direction. He was dizzy with the pain and complaining loudly. The doctor said that he would have to be sedated and taken by ambulance to the Royal for a series of x-rays, explaining to the governor that he suspected a spiral fracture, which could lead to an amputation if it wasn’t operated on immediately. The prison hospital just didn’t have the specialist equipment to deal with severe injuries. The governor was annoyed but there was no alternative. Moving prisoners to and from hospital was expensive but Jack was inside for grooming so he was hardly a high security risk. He signed the transfer papers and an ambulance was called. Public sector guards from G4S would oversee the transfer, freeing up his PO’S.
Jack drifted off to the dark place in his mind where he always went to when he was in pain and frightened. He had found the place during the years of abuse he had suffered at the hands of a catholic priest at the orphanage where he was brought up. It was a place where he could switch off what was happening to his body. He could hide there in his mind while the torment continued to his physical being. It was also the place that he went to when he was abusing others. A place of no emotion. The walls and floors were as cold as ice, as cold as his evil heart. He had no empathy for their pain and no sympathy for their cries. Their tears and pleading did nothing to stop him hurting them.
No one had listened to him when he was crying for help while the priest buggered him. Everyone at the orphanage knew what he did. He knew that they could hear him begging for it to stop. The other boys pretended not to hear because if someone else was screaming and getting the priest’s special attention then he was leaving them alone. Others knew what he did too. The nuns, the social workers – they must have known. Those in charge were aware but they chose to brush it under the carpet. Nobody wanted the spotlight on the orphanage, the embarrassment would damage the church and stifle donations. There had been complaints for years but they were ignored. No one had helped Jack when he was suffering. That was just the way of the world. Bad people hurt vulnerable people and all the other people turned a blind eye because the reality is that no one gives a fuck really. I’m all right, Jack. He always chuckled when he said that to himself. I’m all right, Jack.
He had said that when they charged him with grooming and sent him down. Had they looked deeper into his background, they would have found much darker deeds. He had plunged the depths of depravity, assaulting, raping and eventually, he had escalated to killing too. That seemed to be the ultimate thrill. Listening to them when they knew that they were going to die was like adrenalin being pumped through his veins. Watching the life leave their body and the sparkle in their eyes fading away was orgasmic, literally. The police had been so proud of themselves, setting him up in a sting for grooming, that they hadn’t seen past that. They hadn’t asked what else he had done. They told the judge and jury that Jack had planned to meet the teenager for sex in hi
s campervan and that he travelled around the country in it trying to procure teenagers for sex.
They had it partly right but he had planned to do much worse than just have sex with her. He had planned to keep her for himself until he bored of her, then he would have either killed her or sold her on the black web as a sex slave to another pervert just like him or even worse. He took great comfort from the fact that there were worse than him out there. Much, much worse. His plans went far beyond what they had imagined. Sometimes he didn’t know that they were going to die until it was too late. He never knew which way it would go. That was part of the buzz. He had no boundaries. Society could not tolerate sex that ended with the death of one of the participants, especially when they hadn’t agreed to participate in the first place. Society would call him a monster. He didn’t think that he was a monster, he just got carried away sometimes. Society would never accept his needs, in fact, they would punish him for his sexuality. It didn’t seem fair to Jack. Some people are born heterosexual, some bisexual, others gay. They can’t change what or who attracts them and neither could he.
They got the travelling part wrong too. He did travel in his campervan but not all the time. When he did, he often followed travelling communities. Their children were very vulnerable and easy to steal. The police didn’t put half as much emphasis on missing travellers as they would for other members of society. They only did half the job when they arrested him. He thought that they would uncover his dirty, evil past and lock him up forever. If they had, they would have thrown away the key. They were too busy patting each other on the back to look beneath the surface. They hadn’t seen the need to delve into previous addresses in detail. He said that he had lived in his van for years and they had believed him. When they sentenced him to five years for grooming, he was delighted. He felt that he had gotten off lightly. I’m all right, Jack.
Voices brought him back to reality. They were talking about him. His injuries were severe, the pain was unbearable. He felt another injection being administered. A feeling of warmth spread through his veins. The pain faded and he drifted off like a helium filled balloon on the breeze. He felt the trolley being pushed, turned, reversed, and finally lifted. The wind touched his face for a few moments. He knew he was outside. Suddenly, the wind was gone and he heard doors being slammed. An engine started and sirens blared. The motion of the vehicle calmed him. He wasn’t sure if it was because it was taking him away from prison. Maybe that was a psychological lift. Or maybe it was the drugs in his bloodstream.