by Sibel Hodge
A farm in the middle of nowhere would have outbuildings and land and plenty of places to hide what they were doing. Hide the screams I’d heard on those video feeds. It had to be the place. ‘What about Connor?’
‘He’s Brett’s cousin. Some kind of computer geek. Jimmy told me he was working with Connor and Brett on something.’ He paused, sucked in another breath, stared into my eyes warily.
‘Keep talking. What kind of something?’
‘Jimmy said they needed an extra man for security.’
‘Security? On a farm?’
‘I don’t know, man! That’s what Jimmy said. He told me there was loads of dosh involved. He was gonna be set up.’
‘What was Brett inside for?’
‘He robbed some geezer and beat the shit out of him.’
‘Did Jimmy tell you about a red room?’
‘A what?’
It was obvious from the way his forehead pinched into a frown that he’d never heard about it before. ‘Did he tell you about kidnapping people?’
‘What the fuck? No way, man! Nothing like that. He didn’t tell me nothing else. Just he was doing some security work.’
‘OK, Rob. You’re going to phone Jimmy. Now. Tell him you’ve got some post for him that looks urgent and he should come and pick it up.’ If I could get Jimmy here, I was hoping he’d lead me back to the Parkers and their remote farm when he left again.
I pulled Rob upright, cut the plasticuffs with a heavy-duty penknife from my pocket and stepped back.
Rob slumped a little against the wall. His knees buckled for a second before he recovered. I pulled out the Glock and kept it on him as he walked the few steps towards the armchair.
He picked up his phone, his hand shaking as he scrolled through his address book. ‘W . . . what shall I say?’
‘Exactly what I just told you to.’
He hesitated for a moment, then pressed a button. He put the phone to his ear, avoiding my steady gaze. A second passed. Two. Three. Then Rob said, ‘All right, mate?’
His voice had a tremor to it. He sounded nervous. I just hoped it wasn’t a good line and Jimmy couldn’t tell.
‘Yeah, I . . . um . . . got a letter here for ya. Looks important. You wanna come and get it?’ Rob listened for a moment. Then looked at me with wild eyes. He shook his head with a worried expression. ‘I don’t wanna open it. It’s private.’ Silence again while Rob listened. ‘Nah. I don’t wanna do that. Can’t you come and get it?’ Rob gave me a panicked arm gesture that I took to mean What shall I do next? He listened some more. ‘Um . . . all right. I’ll open it.’
I nodded at Rob. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and I whispered in his ear, ‘Tell him it’s from his bank. They’re going to freeze his account unless he follows the steps in the letter to update his security info.’
‘Right. Um . . . it’s from your bank, man. They say they’re gonna freeze your . . . um . . . account. You gotta do some stuff in the letter. Update your . . . um . . . security.’ Rob listened again, his legs trembling now. ‘Can’t you—’ A pause while Jimmy cut in. ‘Yeah. OK. See ya.’ Rob turned to me, his whole body shaking now. ‘I tried. You saw me! But he says he’s busy. He’s gonna come and get it another day. I tried!’ Rob’s gaze drifted to the gun in my outstretched hand. ‘Don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.’
‘Give me his phone number.’
Rob held out his phone, displaying Jimmy’s number. I programmed it into my own, ready to pass it on to Lee. It would be a pay-as-you-go SIM card, but Lee could hopefully find cell-site or GPS data to locate where it was being used from.
‘If you tell Jimmy I was here asking questions, I’ll come back and kill you. If you mention I was here to anyone, I’ll come back and kill you. If I find out you’re involved, I’ll come back and kill you. You got that?’
‘Yeah. Yeah. Course. I ain’t gonna say nothing. And I ain’t done nothing. I promise.’ He held his palms up in surrender.
I left Rob there with a new wet patch spreading down the legs of his jogging bottoms.
As I walked back to the pick-up at the edge of the car park I saw a group of youths milling around it, looking inside the windows, probably working out if there was anything worth nicking.
There were four of them, all dressed in a uniform of low-slung jeans and hoodies. One spotty, one with greasy hair, one with a skinhead, and one with his ear pierced probably more times than he knew how to count up to.
‘Let’s jack it. Smash the window,’ Spotty said to Skinhead. ‘That stereo’s worth a fuckin’ fortune.’
‘What else he got in there?’ Pierced said. ‘Somethin’ in a bag.’
They were so intent on looking through the windows they didn’t hear me approach.
I got to within two metres of them and coughed.
They spun around. Three of them glanced at Skinhead, as if asking what to do next.
Skinhead took a step closer to me, eyes narrowed, a sneer on his face. ‘Give us ya fuckin’ money if you wanna get outta here in one piece.’
I looked him up and down. He was maybe eighteen. Stocky build. Probably weighed about eleven stone. A tattoo snaked up the side of his neck.
‘And who are you?’ I asked.
He scowled at me. ‘What? What the fuck it matter who I am! This is my ends, and I’m the manz that fuckin’ run it.’
‘Look, lads, I’m in a hurry. Get out of my way and I’ll get out of yours.’ I smiled, trying to be nice and polite about it. ‘Get off your arses and get a job if you want money, instead of trying to rob people.’
Skinhead clicked his teeth with his tongue, looking round at the others who’d gathered behind him, testosterone oozing off him. ‘Ooooh,’ he mocked. ‘Or what, Granddad? What you gonna do?’ He snorted and started laughing.
The others took that as their cue to laugh in support.
‘So, you’re the big, hard man here, are you?’ I raised an eyebrow.
‘You better watch. Don’t mess wiv me, man. Shut the fuck up and just give us ya money!’ Skinhead reached his right arm behind him, pulled out a gun tucked down the waistband of his jeans, and pointed it at me.
My Glock was in my pancake holster at my waist, hidden under my shirt. I seriously considered just whipping it out and shooting him straight away. A leg shot to disable him. Before he knew what had happened he would be on the deck. In agony. Bleeding. It would teach him a lesson. Put him out of action for a while and stop him terrorising the residents around here. But he was still just a kid, even though he had a deadly weapon in his hand. And I couldn’t shoot a kid.
The gun was a Baikal. Designed in Russia; originally used to fire tear gas pellets but now being modified en masse to fire real 9 mm bullets. Black. Compact. Cheap. Reliable. Accurate. Lightweight to fit comfortably in the palm of a teenager’s hand. No wonder it had become the new weapon of choice for gangs all over the UK. This one had a suppressor on the end.
Skinhead’s scowl was supposed to look menacing, but that didn’t stop his hand shaking slightly as he held the pistol out in front of him about ten inches away from my forehead.
‘You’re going to shoot me in front of all these potential witnesses?’ I pointed up and around to the tower blocks looming above us.
‘They ain’t gonna say nothing. Told ya, I run this yard, innit?’
‘Stupid,’ I said, shaking my head.
‘Yeah, you fuckin’ are stupid, dissin’ me! Now I’m the hard guy with the gun so gimme your fuckin’ money, old man,’ Skinhead snarled.
The others stood closer to each other behind him, shoulder to shoulder, his little gang of soldiers, watching with a feral excitement.
‘I didn’t mean me. I meant you,’ I said.
OK, I’d tried polite and it hadn’t worked.
I shot my left hand out, grabbed the barrel of the gun and twisted it across to the right and down, away from my body. At the same time my right hand punched him in the face. As he staggered backwards, shocked, disorientated
, my left hand still on the barrel, I cupped the underside of the pistol with my right hand, twisting it out of his grip before he landed on his arse on the ground.
One and a half seconds, maybe, in real time from start to finish.
He stared up at me, mouth hanging open, his jaw probably throbbing where my fist had connected with it. His three crew members took a few steps backwards, staring, mouths open. I guessed everyone else they’d pulled this on so far had just given in when threatened with a gun and handed over their belongings.
Greasy Hair turned and ran across the patch of grass towards one of the tower blocks. Pierced shouted, ‘This is on top!’ before doing the same. He was quickly followed by Spotty.
‘Just you and me, then.’ I smiled. ‘So how hard are you now?’
He still couldn’t quite let go of the sneer. ‘What? You gonna shoot me in front of all these witnesses?’ He threw my words back at me.
‘I’ve got a good feeling that no one would see a thing if it meant an end to you and your gang bullying them and stealing from them.’
He scrabbled backwards, using his hands and heels, until he hit the wall of the electric station and had nowhere else to go.
‘You don’t know the meaning of the word hard,’ I said. ‘Try living in a city being bombed by repeated airstrikes every day. Where you hear the screams of your friends and family as they’re blown apart right in front of your eyes. Where your parents are trapped in a collapsed building that’s just been hit, dying slowly because people can’t get to them under twenty storeys of rubble. Where your sister is raped and murdered. Where you’re tortured.’ I narrowed my eyes. ‘Try starving because the food and water has run out and no aid can get through because it’s too dangerous. Try breathing in dust and chemicals until your lungs crackle and burn and you can’t breathe. Try running over extreme terrain in horrendous weather conditions to get to a refugee camp. And then try living in tents with nothing but the ragged, torn clothes you’re wearing, packed in like sardines in the blistering heat.’ I leaned closer and he pressed himself against the wall, squeezing his eyes shut. ‘That’s hard. But you . . . You don’t know how lucky you really are. And you rock around here thinking you’re the toughest guy in the world but there’s always someone tougher than you. Look at me when I’m talking to you!’
His eyelids snapped open.
‘So you’re either going to die out here, playing soldier wannabes. Or kill someone else and take an innocent life with you. Or you can sort your life out. And you can give me all the shit you want about disadvantaged youth, living in poverty, learned behaviour, blah, blah, blah. But we all make choices. And if I come back here and find out you and your crew are still trying to control this estate, then next time, I’ll shoot you in the head. And I’ll bring my mates with me.’ I winked at him. ‘Got that? Or do you want me to repeat it?’
He nodded manically. ‘G . . . got it.’
‘Good.’ I got in the pick-up and watched Skinhead running away towards the same tower block his mates had disappeared inside.
THE DETECTIVE
Chapter 40
The sky was turning into a patch of reddy-grey dusk as I stood in the Jamesons’ rear garden. I pulled out my phone and tried to call Becky but there was no signal.
‘Shit,’ I muttered, walking further towards the woods at the end of the garden with the phone outstretched in front of me. I didn’t even get one bar. And I’d left my police radio in the office.
I locked up the house and walked up the long driveway between the rapeseed fields, which rustled in the breeze. When I hit the entrance to the country lane, I got two bars.
‘Where are you?’ Becky asked when she picked up.
‘At the Jamesons’ house. Can you do a background check on two of their neighbours for me? Connor Parker and also Emily Simms’s son, Roger.’ Roger was supposed to have been in Hong Kong for the last two weeks but he could’ve lied to me. Bill Graves’s background check hadn’t revealed anything suspicious before, but still, he was in Brighton at his sister’s so I could have a nose around the property while he was gone, just in case.
‘Sure. But why? Do you think they’re involved?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s worth checking out.’
‘I’ve been trying to call you for a while.’
‘There’s a patchy signal out here.’
‘Emma from SOCO tried to call you but she couldn’t get through so she called me. The results on the soil samples from the Jamesons’ lounge carpet have come back and there are traces of manure in it.’
‘Manure,’ I repeated. So Tracy had come from the direction of Simms Livery Stables.
‘The grey powder found on Tracy’s palm prints is concrete.’
‘Right.’
‘And something else. When they finished analysing the tread patterns of soil and manure from the lounge they found a few partial footprints.’
‘Footprints? Not shoe prints? As in, someone was barefoot?’
‘Exactly. Size five.’
‘That confirms it for me,’ I said, more to myself than Becky.
‘Confirms what?’
I thought about telling her my theory. In the past Becky had been my ally and confidante, even when I’d been on suspension. I knew she could keep a secret, but I didn’t want to chance anything getting back to Greene in case he put the kibosh on me digging further. Until I had proof, he’d just shoot me down in flames and have me pounding pavements doing pointless inquiries. ‘Nothing,’ I said and changed the subject. ‘How’s Ronnie getting on with the house-to-house?’
‘No results so far, I’m afraid.’
‘OK. I might be a while. I’m just going to poke about up here and see if I can find anything else. SOCO didn’t get to check the surrounding area because Greene was too worried about the budget. I’ll see you l—’ The call dropped out. I looked at my screen and the signal bars had disappeared.
I pocketed my phone and skirted around the side of the house that led to the back garden. I started at the patio and kept my head bent, looking at the ground as I walked through the fields towards the stables in the distance, eyes peeled for some kind of trace evidence that might help. The light was fading fast. I didn’t have long left and there was a lot of acreage to cover. You could be out here for weeks and not find any additional evidence the killer might’ve left behind.
Ten minutes later, I reached the post-and-rail fence that signalled the border where the Jamesons’ property met Simms Livery Stables. In the far distance, I could see several horses in the fields.
I shuddered. How fast could a horse gallop over to me? Pretty damn quick, I should think. I took a deep breath and climbed over the fence into the grassy field, sweat breaking out over my forehead.
I walked as quietly as I could so as not to disturb the four-legged fiends, until I came to the dusty path at the back of the Simms’s house and hopped over the fence that enclosed the field. I hadn’t seen any obvious signs of a break-in when I’d visited the house previously, but if someone had abducted Tracy on Tuesday night, then a perfect place to keep her would be inside an empty house. I approached the back door to the property. It was single-glazed, the wooden frame rotten in places, with an old-fashioned lock that would be easy to pick. But judging by the rot and woodworm, you could’ve just shouldered it and it would’ve opened easily.
I pulled the cuff of my shirt over my hand to avoid contamination and tried the handle. It was locked.
I looked inside the windows. No sign of life. I inspected the outside of the house, walking in a loop. I tried the front door but again, it was locked. No windows so far were insecure, either. I was debating whether to force an entry and see if Tracy Stevens was inside when my phone vibrated in my pocket, signalling a text message.
I pulled it out and stared at the screen; the signal bar was wavering on and off. I opened the text from Becky and read it:
Can’t get hold of you by phone so hoping this gets through. One of the sex workers Ron
nie talked to last night just called back. She’s remembered Tracy getting in a white van about 11 p.m. She didn’t get a licence plate no. None of the Jamesons’ neighbours are known to us.
I read the text again. Just to be sure.
White van. White van. White van.
Something clicked in my memory.
I still wasn’t sure about the why but I thought I knew the how, where and who now. I’d seen a white van on the satellite area map I’d put up on the board in the office. And it was too much of a coincidence not to be related.
I thought about the new barbed wire Connor Parker had been erecting above the walls when I’d arrived the day after the Jamesons had been shot, and I was certain then I knew where Tracy had been after she’d disappeared from London Road.
Parker hadn’t been putting up barbed wire to keep burglars out. He’d been doing it to keep people in.
THE VIGILANTE
Chapter 41
I dialled Lee and put the phone on loudspeaker as I drove away from Balham Place. After passing on every bit of intel that Rob had told me, I said, ‘I need you to try and trace Jimmy’s location from his phone.’ I rattled off his number.
‘Will do. And I’ll look into this farm of the Parkers. I was checking out Delaney’s known associates but nothing interesting flagged up so far.’
‘Delaney met Brett Parker when he was banged up, so it’s likely the police’s intel databases don’t show it. I’m heading down towards Welwyn. The place must be somewhere around that area. By the time I get there, hopefully you’ll have a target address.’ I hung up and dialled Corinne’s number.