by Kate Simants
‘Well, nuts or not, we’d better get a statement pretty quick.’ Turning to one of the Tech Services civvies McCulloch said, ‘How long until we can get our hands on whatever’s on these drives?’
‘Couple of hours?’
‘Make it less.’ Then to Kit, ‘Bit more good news for you too, if you can call it that.’
‘Is there?’
‘You sent that laptop of Matthew Corsham’s over to the nerds, bit of data recovery?’
Kit frowned. ‘Yeah, but how do you know about—?’
‘It’s the content,’ Mae muttered, realizing what this meant. He caught McCulloch’s eye and she confirmed it with a sombre nod. ‘Gets referred straight up if it’s anything over three on the COPINE scale. What is it?’ he asked McCulloch, crossing his fingers for a low number. The scale, a typology of child pornography, went from level 1 for non-erotic images to level 10 for extreme sadism and bestiality.
‘Six, I’m afraid.’
‘Shit,’ he said under his breath. Then, blowing out his cheeks and preparing for the worse, ‘Better go and see, I suppose.’
Kit appeared at his door, loaded with sandwiches and crisps, at the same time that Mae was opening the message McCulloch had forwarded from the guy at Data Forensics.
‘Let me see,’ Kit said, twisting the monitor and scanning through the email before pulling a face, ‘“512-bit algorithm”,’ Kit read, slowly and through a mouthful of bread and protein. ‘“Unlocked and mounted.” The fuck’s that mean? Do you think he’s trying to get in my knickers?’
Mae snorted and called up the sender on Skype. The tech, a chubby dude going by the handle GuildOfThieves1987, did his best to put it into layman’s terms.
‘Basically, there were a large number of images on this machine,’ he said, his face moving jerkily on the screen. ‘We’re working on cataloguing them, but the good news is, whoever deleted all the files didn’t know what they were doing.’
‘In what way?’ Mae said.
‘OK well, all you do when you delete a file is remove the index data: the list in the folder that tells you where the file is. But the files themselves are still there.’
‘Really?’ Kit said, incredulous. ‘Bit scary.’ She tore open a sandwich box – ham and cheese – and handed Mae a half without taking her eyes from the screen.
Encouraged by her interest, 87 went on, ‘So with jpegs, the files themselves often get fragmented across the whole disk but what you have to do is find the bytecode—’
‘Excellent work,’ Mae interrupted. ‘Can you just skip to the part where you tell us what you found?’
‘Oh, OK,’ 87 said, trying not to look offended. ‘So, what’s interesting is that your material here has come from two distinct sources. I’m going to call them Cache 1 and Cache 2. Most of Cache 1 are, as you probably heard, pornographic images of kids. We’re going to be cross-reffing all of them against the CAID once we’ve scoured everything off the drive but the sample we’ve put through so far has come up with a lot of matches.’
Kit glanced at Mae.
‘Child Abuse Images Database,’ he explained. ‘If you’ve got an image that’s already got a lot of hits, it means it’s done the rounds already, so whoever you’ve found in possession of it is unlikely to have made it.’
‘Right,’ 87 said. ‘I’ll dispatch those over in a bit. But I think it’s the other ones you’re going to want to see first, Cache 2. Totally different deal: it’s a bundle with concurrent file numbers. It came to this machine encrypted, from another single source.’
‘Send them over,’ Mae said, then thanked him and cut the call. A minute later, 87 had sent an email with half a dozen files attached, with a promise of another batch shortly. Mae selected all six items and hit open.
There was a delay of a few seconds.
And then Kit was on her feet, coughing a mouthful of food into her hand, her chair crashing back onto the floor behind her.
‘Oh, Jesus. Oh, f-fucking hell,’ she stuttered.
Mae pulled a tissue from a box in his drawer and handed it to her. But he couldn’t move his eyes from the screen.
At the front of the newly opened documents, a photograph. The lower half of a female body – a girl’s body – hip to thigh. She was sitting, naked, with her legs apart. Stretching across the inside of her thighs was a swathe of knotty, bloodless scar tissue that reached to the left side of her labia. Slowly, Mae put the sandwich down and pushed it away.
‘She’s alive, right?’ Kit asked in a small, flat voice from the corner of the room. ‘She is alive, at least?’
Mae leaned forwards, zooming in tight to a section of undamaged skin on the lower thigh. The resolution was pretty good, and he could just make out what looked like the slight bumpiness of gooseflesh. ‘There. Response to cold. Yes, she’s alive.’
‘But-but what the hell is that, though? Is that burns?’
‘Don’t know.’ Apart from the scarring, the skin was olive-hued but livid. He minimized the image, and looked at the next, and the next. A small breast, disfigured with the same ridged, long-healed mutilation. Buttocks, shoulders, chest and throat, the back of a leg. Five images, all presumably of the same woman. Or girl: she was young, postpubescent, but not by much. Without getting a look at the face it was impossible to be sure if they were looking at pictures that could possibly have been consensual, or something far worse.
He waited for Kit to come back to the screen in her own time. When she did, there was stillness to her.
‘Don’t let it in.’ He said it softly, his eyes still on the screen.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, don’t let this,’ he indicated the image with a nod, ‘in. It’s not what people are, you have to just tell yourself that. If you let it in, it never gets out.’
‘People? No, that’s not—’ she started, but she took the mouse out of his hand and put two of the pictures side by side. One focusing on the throat, the other on the shoulder.
Kit touched a finger to the screen.
‘They’re the marks Cox talked about, in the book. It’s her,’ she said, tracing the unblemished centre of the throat. ‘It’s Ellie. But before she … before Jodie Arden disappeared.’
And Mae, lifting his hands from the keyboard as if the whole thing was burning, saw that she was right.
52.
Ellie
Her name was Bernadette. Bern. She’d lived here for a decade, just east, she said, in Hanworth. She was a PA in finance, no children, but had fostered for a while. Her husband Duncan had died young, a motorbike crash. And she’d spent a decade and a half looking for me.
‘So how did she do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘Disappear off the face of the planet.’ She fidgeted with the teaspoon as she spoke, glancing up at me only occasionally. ‘I mean, I looked everywhere. Tried everything. I even paid an investigator at one point, but he gave up after a week. She just vanished.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, almost truthfully. I knew Mum used a different name sometimes, especially after Jodie, just to keep our privacy, but I wasn’t aware she’d vanished – especially not from a family. But how she did it wasn’t the question: the thing I wanted to know now was why. Because even though she’d always said Siggy was the reason, that we kept moving to avoid the doctors and social services and everyone else who wouldn’t accept that I couldn’t be helped, I found myself questioning that now. A scrap of a session I’d had with Cox suddenly resurfaced like a beachball released from under water: something he’d said about what made people relocate repeatedly. He’d called it the push factor, I remembered then.
Sometimes people leave where they are, to get away from something dangerous.
I eyed the exit, shifting in my seat. If it was true – if Mum had left her entire family behind – surely she would have had a very good reason.
Bern stirred her coffee. ‘So what does she do now? For money.’
‘She’s a cleaner.’
&nb
sp; She laughed, then stopped. ‘You’re joking?’ I shook my head. ‘That can’t be right. She was a war reporter. She was fearless and-and brilliant. A cleaner?’
‘She is fearless and brilliant.’ I folded my arms. ‘Nothing’s changed.’
‘No, no, I didn’t mean that. I just don’t understand. Any of it.’ Everything she said was addressed to the cooling cappuccino in front of her. ‘I don’t understand what we could possibly have done for her to cut us off like that. Mum and Dad never got over it.’
‘Mum and— You’re talking about my grandparents?’
She glanced up, then away again, like she just couldn’t sustain eye contact with me. ‘They were so proud of her. Always telling people Chrissy this and Chrissy that, blah blah blah. I mean, it’s fine, I get it. She achieved so much. Then when they got a grandchild, to them she was just … well.’ She indicated an invisible level with the side of her hand, then raised it, way above her head. ‘I remember this time we had a walk on Hampstead Heath. People kept coming up to her. She’d started fronting her reports, so she was a known face. She only came home from whatever war it was when she was seriously showing with … when she was pregnant,’ she said, indicating her stomach. ‘Dad waved his stick at them in the end. Chris was mortified. We laughed about that for ages.’
All of which would have been lovely, except for the fact that I didn’t have grandparents. Not ones I’d ever met, anyway, because in the real version of this story they refused to talk to Mum after she became pregnant with me. They cut her off, and I hadn’t even met them. We didn’t talk about them.
But there had to be some truth in Bern’s version of events, because there were no two ways about it – every feature of her face said she was my mother’s sister.
‘So what happened?’ I asked. I wanted to hear the whole of her version of events before I challenged it. ‘How did we lose touch?’
She sipped her drink, took her time over it, wiped the corners of her mouth. Haltingly, in a voice roughened with cigarettes, she started to tell me.
‘There was a birthday party. Third birthday.’
‘Mine?’
The slightest nod. ‘Just a little gathering. Me and Duncan, Chrissy, and our mum and dad. I didn’t see Chrissy again for a few weeks after that. Tried calling a few times but no answer. So I went round, and there was another family there, moving in.’ A shrug, to signify the end of the story. ‘I never saw her again. She took my beautiful niece away, and it was like they’d never existed.’
‘So that’s it? You just, what, forgot about us?’
She shot me a look that started fierce but crumbled quickly into immense sadness. ‘I looked everywhere. Her old colleagues, friends we’d had at school, her doctor. Anyone who might know anything at all about where she’d gone. The police didn’t help. Made a few calls, then nothing. She’d talked about living abroad before, so as far as they were concerned it wasn’t out of character. She knew a lot of people in a lot of countries, she’d spent her life travelling. There was nothing worrying about her state of mind, anything like that, and there was the letter—’
‘What letter?’
She took a sip of her drink, set the cup back on the saucer without a sound. ‘Saying she was going on a trip. Just that, no details. It was hideous. Mum was distraught, she was already ill, getting worse and worse by then, and Dad was on his way out and … you know.’
‘No. Not really.’ I didn’t know anything about what she was telling me. A few hours ago, I’d never questioned the rock-solid fact that Mum was an only child. Bern’s hands were shaking, and her eyes were crowded with tears. I pulled a napkin from a jug on the table and handed it to her.
‘When you don’t have children of your own,’ she said, pressing the fabric to her eyes, ‘and you want them, desperately want them but you can’t have them …’
I fumbled for something to say. ‘I can’t imagine what that’s like,’ was all I could think of.
‘No. You can’t. I know my niece wasn’t my child, but I loved her so much. So much. I looked, everywhere, I spent every penny I had, and then I moved back in with my parents. Thirty-five years old, back in my old single bed.’ She lifted her cup, stared at it, didn’t drink, put it back down. ‘And years later – years of not knowing if I’d ever see my niece or my sister again, if they were dead or alive – I found Chrissy’s name mentioned in an article about that girl that disappeared. Jodie Arden. It took me weeks, but eventually it led me to Dr Cox. But his office wouldn’t give me a number no matter what I said. I’d missed her again. She’d been right there, and then …’ she made a pff! sound, and made a miniature firework with her hands, ‘gone. And now this.’
I didn’t understand. If she loved me so much, where was the joyful reunion? ‘But I’m here now.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t understand what you want.’
I glared at her. ‘You contacted me,’ I told her. ‘I came because you asked me to. I don’t want anything.’
‘Come on,’ she said gently. ‘Calm down.’
A woman on the table next to us threw a suspicious glance our way, muttering something to her friend.
Bern kept her eyes on me. ‘Do you really not know? It’s not your fault. But you’re not … not who I thought you’d be.’
‘No? OK. So, who exactly were you expecting?’
She didn’t answer me. ‘What did she tell you, my sister? About me?’ Then, like it had just occurred to her, she said, ‘Does she even know Mum and Dad are dead?’
There was no nice way to put it. ‘Nothing. I didn’t know you existed.’
She nodded slowly. ‘What about everyone else, the rest of your family? I mean, I know you don’t see Jim but—’
‘Jim who?’
‘Jim,’ she said again. ‘Your dad.’
‘My dad’s dead.’
She gave me a long, hooded look. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said eventually, but it was mechanical, like her mind was doing something else. Like she didn’t believe me. ‘When? What happened?’
I shook my head, bewildered. ‘Drugs. But it was before I was born.’ How did she not know that?
Her eyes fluttered shut.
‘What?’ I said, angry now. ‘What is it?’
She took a deep breath, trying to find a way of telling me something without upsetting me.
‘Look, I-I think I should talk to your mum.’
‘No. No, you’re talking to me.’
‘Ellie, please. I really need to talk to her.’
‘Do you know what?’ I said, suddenly running out of patience. ‘I don’t have time for this. This is bullshit.’ What was I even doing there, listening to this? I had to find Matt, and this was getting me precisely nowhere. I got clumsily to my feet and the chair half-toppled behind me before I caught it and shakily set it down. I went to retrieve the hoody I’d left hanging on the back, but she stopped me. Half standing, she reached out for my wrist.
‘OK, please,’ she said. ‘Sit. Please, look, we need to work out what’s … we need to talk about this.’
Her fingers were slim and pale and just like Mum’s, nothing like mine. Her thumb rubbed the back of my hand and I pulled it back, not because of the pain. I didn’t want to be soothed. She didn’t get to do that.
But I couldn’t leave without knowing what it was she knew. I stared at her for a moment before I did as I was told, heat rushing to my skin. She gave me a weak, sad smile before pulling her bag onto the table and unzipping an interior pocket. Brought out her phone, but didn’t look at it, didn’t turn it on.
‘Fine. OK.’ She took a deep breath, let it all out. ‘I don’t know what Christine has told you, but to be honest I suppose I’m not surprised. It was obvious they were having problems. Jim was—’ she looked away. ‘He was a very troubled man. Volatile.’
I wrapped my arms around myself, almost involuntary and Siggy flattened herself across my back, trying to make herself invisible, like she didn’t wan
t to hear. I didn’t want to hear.
‘He was a little older than her, and when they first got together – God, must have been ten years before you were born – she was still pretty young, still getting started in her career. She met him while she was working on a documentary after the war—’
‘The war? What war?’
‘The Falklands,’ she said, trying and failing to hide her incredulity that I didn’t already know this. She sighed, shaking her head. ‘It affected him really badly, even years later. He was in specialist units for quite a while. That’s how they met. Chrissy interviewed him about PTSD and it kind of went from there, they were—’
‘So what? He was a doctor? A psychiatrist?’
‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘Not a doctor.’ She drew her eyeline from mine and brought her phone to life. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she said, tapping something I couldn’t see on the screen, ‘he could be very sweet, very gentle, but sometimes he’d just flip, lose it completely. He’d get in trouble with the police, went to prison a few times. Couldn’t adjust after what he’d seen out there, what he’d been involved in.’
I looked at my hands. ‘Are you saying he was violent? With Mum?’ With me, I wanted to say.
‘Look, I don’t know,’ she said, cutting me off. ‘Chrissy never said so. What I do know was that he was devoted to his family. Properly devoted, he couldn’t bear being separated. Hated it.’
Obviously finding what she was looking for, she looked up. ‘There’s no easy way to say this but somewhere along the line, things have got … twisted.’ She looked me in the eye. ‘Jim’s not— they were just taking some time apart, and then Chrissy disappeared. He swore, just like I did, that he’d keep looking. Here,’ she said, and turned the phone around to show me. ‘This is him.’
I leaned in. It took a moment or two to register, to really see what I was looking at. She slid the phone over, carried on talking ‘This was taken maybe a couple of weeks before – wait – are you all right?’
I shrank, gripped my eyes shut. Black panic crowded behind my eyelids, but I couldn’t, I would not look at that picture. I pushed it away, covered my eyes.