by L M Krier
‘May I ask a personal question? Which of course you aren’t obliged to answer.’ When she nodded warily, he went on, ‘Will Abigail keep the baby?’
‘My husband says not. He wants to get rid of it.’
‘But isn’t that rather up to Abigail? After all, in law, she is an adult.’
‘But she isn’t an adult at all. Not really. Look at her, bless her. She doesn’t function at the same level of a normal adult. Never has, never will do.’
Ted tried to make his tone as neutral as he could as he said, ‘Yet she lives alone. Which is partly what I wanted to talk to you about. Are you familiar with the term cuckooing, Mrs Buller?’
She appeared to frown but her frozen face didn’t show a lot of movement. ‘I know about cuckoos. Everyone gets nostalgic about hearing the first one in spring. But they’re horrible birds really, aren’t they? They lay eggs in another bird’s nest. Then when their chicks hatch, they throw the other eggs out of the nest so they get all the food. They kill unborn babies. Murder them.’
Her voice broke and she stopped for a moment. Wordlessly, Ted got up to bring a cup of water from the dispenser, which he put in front of her. Then he spoke again.
‘Mrs Buller, it’s also a term which refers to a disturbing crime which is sadly on the increase. Groups, or gangs might be more appropriate, of people, often quite young, will target someone vulnerable. Pretend to befriend them. But then they take advantage of them in many different ways. They might move into their homes. Stash drugs and stolen goods there. They’ll get the person to buy them things. Food, drink, clothing. Clearly the more money their victim has, the better it is for them.’
‘Is that what’s been happening to Abi?’ Her expression was horrified. ‘When she told me she’d met some new friends, I was actually happy for her. She’s never found it easy to make friends.’
‘Who’s in charge of Abigail’s finances? Presumably she’s in receipt of various living allowances, but does she have any other source of income? I’m sorry about the personal questioning, but it really would help us to know all of this.’
She made a snorting sound. ‘Oh, Abigail has plenty of money. A large portion of it comes from the Bank of Guilty Father. He’s in charge of keeping an eye on her bank statements and her spending levels. Every month he moans and groans when he sees how much money she’s gone through. All I have to do to get him to shut up is suggest that if Abi isn’t managing on her own, she should come back and live with us. That does it every time. He just transfers some more money to put her account back in credit and says no more about it. Until he next checks up on her spending.’
Abigail shifted her position in her sleep, making a small murmuring sound as she did so. Her mother smiled again as she looked at her.
‘So to access her financial records, it’s your husband we would need to speak to?’
Her voice took on a much firmer tone. ‘You leave Frank to me. I’ll see that you have everything you need. We’ve clearly let our daughter down so very badly. I just hope it’s not too late to put things right.’
‘May I ask another personal question? You don’t have to answer ...’
She interrupted him. ‘Why doesn’t Abi live at home with us? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it? The simple answer is that Frank is ashamed of her. Of what she represents. As evidence that he got things totally wrong, due to his own ignorance. He’s not man enough to own up to his mistakes. And she was one of them.
‘Frank’s always jumped on bandwagons. To advance himself, socially and politically. The vaccination denial was one of his hobby-horses. “No need to pump our children full of all these chemicals. It’s just a scam by big pharma”. That’s what he kept saying. So he chose not to allow our precious only child to have the MMR vaccine. I wanted her to have it. It’s a mother’s role to protect her children.
‘He’s not an educated man. He started out as a jobbing builder. A very good, hard-working one, it has to be said. Then he made his money – a lot of money – in property development. But suddenly he knew more than doctors and scientists and everyone else.
‘Probably inevitably, Abi fell ill with the measles almost as soon as she started school. When she was very young and up to that time, perfectly normal in all respects.
‘She was so very ill. We thought she was going to die. The doctors said she very well might. But she survived, against all the odds. And here’s the result. She’d lost her hearing, her ability to speak properly, her understanding, just about everything.
‘So like I said, you just leave Frank to me. I’ll see that you get every single scrap of paperwork you need, before the end of today. And whatever happens to Abi in all of this mess, rest assured that she will be coming to live with me. Where I can keep an eye on her. Her and her baby.’
They were using the downstairs briefing room for the afternoon session. With extra officers joining them, it would give them more space in which to work.
Rob had got back from the post-mortem late morning with the news that the DNA results on their body from Heaton Mersey Bowl were a match for those on record for Kane Lomax. The section of tongue recovered from the park had also been confirmed as having come from Lomax. No great surprise to anyone, as he’d been the one in direct contact with the drugs supplier, the mysterious Big Man.
Priya Chowdhury was there. Her first time attending a briefing with them. She looked slightly less hostile, now she wasn’t on her own territory. She even gave Ted something of a smile.
Shortly before the briefing was due to start, the door opened and two strangers walked in. They could only have been the two officers from Drugs. Apart from the ID tags round their necks, they looked nothing like anyone’s idea of police officers.
One was male, very tall, and thin to the point of looking emaciated. He was scruffily dressed, with rings in one ear. He had tattoos on the sides of his neck, and on both hands, disappearing up the frayed and dirty cuffs of a washed-out denim shirt. There was a smell hovering about him of cheap rolling tobacco and something else. Ted found it familiar but in a whole different league to what he was used to.
The man was with a younger woman. Much shorter, slim rather than thin. The complete antithesis of her colleague. Everything about her was classy. From the expensively cut and highlighted hair down to the high-heeled boots with the bling logo, by way of an exquisitely tailored trouser suit.
The man looked round the room, saw Jim Baker looming at the front of the room with Ted and headed over to him.
‘Are you the gaffer? I’m Ian Bradley, from Drugs. This is Gina Shaw.’
‘Superintendent Jim Baker. I’m in overall charge, but DCI Ted Darling here is SIO. Thanks for joining us.’
‘We can’t give you long. As you might have gathered, we’ve come in from something else. But if we can help, we will.’
‘We’ll kick off with your input, in that case,’ Ted told the two of them. ‘Then we don’t need to keep you any longer than we have to.’
‘Right, first off,’ Bradley began, ‘I’ve had all the various reports sent through to you. But to sum up. The gear that was found at your crime scene was basically for two completely different target buyer profiles. There was plenty of the average stuff you can buy on a street corner in more places than you’d imagine. Better quality than some, so not the cheap end, but not highest quality. That’s the dealers’ bread and butter.
‘The other stuff, especially the coke, was very classy gear. High purity. Expensive to get hold of. Some of the best quality we've seen in a while, which is why we think this is someone new to the area, with a new supply chain. As such, it needs jumping on, fast, before it gets out of hand.
‘That’s where they make their serious money. And it’s certainly not sold on street corners. Which is where Gina comes in.’ He jerked a thumb towards his colleague.
‘You’ll find stuff of this price-tag in posh pubs and clubs, and at private parties. You’re all detectives. I’ll leave you to work out which of us two, me
or Gina, focuses on which market.’
‘It might be helpful, Ian, for those of us with not much Drugs experience, if you were to explain how the supply chain works. Do our young cuckoos have to buy the supply in from the dealer and then sell it on? Because that would presumably cost them a lot of money up front, so do we need to chase down where they’d be finding that sort of cash to lay out?’ Ted asked him.
Bradley shook his head. ‘They’re just go-betweens. The big dealers have been turning to the cuckoos more and more. If the dealers stash their own gear, they know there’s always a real risk of us finding it and it getting destroyed. They let the kids have supplies on trust and wait for the money to come back, of which the cuckoos take a very small cut. That way the gear gets stashed in places we wouldn’t be as likely to raid.
‘They’ll be watched, of course. There’ll be some heavies, in the background, keeping an eye on their investments. Ready to move in as and when necessary. The kids are kept in line with threats of violence. And by random displays of it, to prove it’s not just an empty threat.’
He turned and looked at the board, where all the available information to date was displayed. Including the photos of the body, now identified as Kane Lomax, hanging upside down from the tree at Heaton Mersey Bowl. Bradley tapped it with a dirty, nicotine-stained finger.
‘Like that. Showy. Unnecessarily so. A real “this is what happens to anyone who steps out of line” warning. How did he die?’
‘Tortured first. Finger ends burned with a blowtorch. The end of his tongue cut off while he was still just about alive. Then his neck was broken cleanly, manually, by someone who knew exactly what they were doing,’ Rob O’Connell gave him the broad outline of the morning’s PM findings.
Bradley was looking at the board again. At the security camera stills of the various named and unnamed members of the cuckooing gang.
‘They’re the visitors to the building who we suspect are our cuckoos,’ Ted told him. ‘We’ve been working with the concierge to rule out residents and any of their known regular visitors. These are what we’re left with so far.
Ted went to stand next to him to indicate photos as he spoke.
‘Two are now dead. Kane Lomax, the Body in the Bowl, and this one, Giorgio Mantone, known as Latte, who was found dead inside the flat. Of the others, we have one in a safe house, talking to us, but not enough to be of much use yet. Two are in custody and two are still in the wind. We’re concentrating on finding those two.’
‘Most of these aren’t going to be able to sell the high-end stuff. They’d stick out like a sore thumb in the right locations to sell it. It would be like me swapping places with Gina, without either of us changing our looks. This one, though,’ Bradley tapped the photo of the person believed to be Data a few times, his expression thoughtful. ‘He’s different to the others. He might be more the sort to mingle in high places. Who is he? Gina, have you see this lad before?’
She stepped closer for a look, then shook her head. ‘Impossible to tell from that. He wouldn’t be dressed or looking like that in places where I might have seen him. Is there any better footage?’
‘That’s as good as it gets, I’m afraid. And we don’t have an ID on him yet. All we know is that Abigail, the young lady whose flat they were using, calls him Data and thinks she’s in love with him. Film footage that our DC Ellis found online tells a completely different story, though. It seems they’ve been using her for online porn films, probably with Data as the warm-up act, or whatever you’d call it, although the faces are usually pixelated out. Two-tier porn. Some of the softer stuff is readily available. But it links through to much harder core stuff behind a paywall. Abigail features heavily in it. I gather disabled porn is now a thing.’
‘Certainly is,’ Bradley agreed. ‘Although it has much worse names on the street. But this is an interesting new angle. Gina, are you thinking what I’m thinking?’
‘I am. You’re right, it is getting to be a thing. You’re probably all too aware that some people will pay a lot for, shall we call it, unconventional sex. The rougher the better, and this added aspect could well be an extra incentive for some. I can see some well coked-up flash gits jumping at something like that.’
‘And that opens up other possibilities too. Extortion and blackmail, for one. They’ll be promised anonymity, told their faces won’t be shown. Then, lo and behold, footage emerges where they can be clearly identified, but it can all be covered up for a modest sum. Only it never is, and the demands keep increasing. Looks like you’ve landed the jackpot here, Ted, for your first foray into the murky world of Drugs,’ Bradley said.
‘You’re going to want to round up all your cuckoos as soon as possible, no doubt. But let me just say now that we wouldn’t want every single one of them pulled in before they can lead us to the source. We’d want at least one left loose.’
‘We’ve got some serious abuse going on ...’
Ted started to speak but Bradley cut him short. ‘But if we don’t cut off this supply chain, with shit like this on the market, we could be looking at any number of deaths.’
He looked across at Jim Baker as he said, ‘No point me and you playing case poker, Ted. It’s something our gaffers will need to argue over.
‘Now tell us about this famous blind dwarf of yours. I must admit us two thought you might be sampling the goods when we heard that story.’
‘Let me start with a question,’ Ted replied, addressing everyone. ‘And this isn’t a criticism. How do we know our person of short stature is blind?’
There was a brief silence, into which Ted went on. ‘Precisely. We don’t. Any of us could carry a white stick and wear dark glasses. It’s a perfect distraction technique and we all so nearly fell for it. So now can we please concentrate on the main thing about this character which would be much more difficult to fake. And that is their short stature.’
Chapter Nineteen
‘I thought I’d better wake you up before I go out. I know you’re not programmed for getting up on Saturdays. I’ve brought you some tea and toast,’ Ted told his partner, putting the tray down on the floor, then rearranging cats to make room for it on the bed.
Trev made a groaning sound and pulled the duvet up over his head. His voice was muffled as he said, ‘I’ve decided I don’t want to be an adult today.’
‘It’s a hard life, being a business tycoon.’
One arm appeared slowly, pushing the duvet back to reveal Trev’s tousled black curls and sleepy blue eyes. Ted lifted up the mug of tea and put it in his hand.
‘Are you going in again tomorrow, to keep on top of the books?’
Trev took a grateful swallow of the tea. ‘No, I’ve changed my mind. I’ve decided six days of being a grown-up is enough in one week. And I think the takings are pretty much okay for now. I’ll go in next Sunday, though, just to make sure.’
‘We’re still flat out, but at least we now know that both bodies belong to the same case. I’ll have to go in tomorrow morning, to keep on top of things. But if you’re not going to work tomorrow, I thought I could leave it to Jo in the afternoon and we could maybe go out somewhere. Take the bike up to the Peaks, perhaps? Whatever you fancy.’
Ted had put the tray up on the bed now and Trev took a bite out of the toast before he answered.
‘Is this going to be another of your broken promises, though? I’ll get all dressed up and ready to go, then you’ll either forget entirely or phone me up at the last minute full of excuses and promising to make it up to me.’
‘No, I’ll make sure Jo knows I’m off for a few hours. And before you ask, I’ve already told him the same for Monday, when you speak to Jono. I’m picking him up from the station to bring him here, and I’ll stay with you as long as it takes. I’ll even switch my mobile off, then you know I can’t get called away. I promised to support you if you agreed to testify, and I will do.
‘I’ve no idea what time I’ll finish tonight, but you decide where you want to go tomorrow an
d I’ll take you.’
Ted was first in the office. The phone in the main office rang early, before Mike, Virgil, or Sal, who was covering for Jezza, had arrived.
‘Serious Crime, DCI Darling.’
‘Morning sir, it’s PC Harris from the safe house, with Ronnie. I was hoping to speak to Maurice, please.’
‘He’s on a day off today, Cathy. Can I help?’
‘You really put the wind up Ronnie when you visited. She now wants to talk. She’s begging to talk. She says she’s thought of some things which would be useful. And she’s lowered her sights considerably from South America. Apparently she’s got family in Southampton and she’s happy to go there.’
‘She can’t go anywhere she has family or any other connections. She needs to understand that. If these drugs people are as bad as she thinks, that would be too easy for them. But we can find her somewhere to start out with a new identity. As long as she comes up with the goods.
‘Speaking of which, at some point someone is going to have to explain to her that for her new identity, she’ll really need to ditch the fake tans. Go back to whatever colour she is underneath. It’s too much of a trademark. Makes her too easy to spot. Perhaps you could start to float that idea past her. You’ll certainly do it more tactfully than I could.
‘Has she been kept away from the news? She still doesn’t know about the second body?’
‘CBeebies is stretching her, intellectually. She’s not interested in news or current affairs or anything. Mind you, she likes the old cop shows, especially the American ones, and she’s come up with her very own brilliant sting operation, as she calls it. Or so she thinks. To draw out the other cuckoos for us to round up and arrest.’
‘If she’d told us who they are we could have done that by now. But I’m prepared to come and listen to what she has to propose and see where we go from there. Certainly in the absence of much else to go on for now. Is she up and about yet?’
‘That’s an indicator of how rattled she is after your visit. She doesn’t usually surface until dinnertime but she was up bright and early, wanting to tell me all about her idea. I told her it was down to you for anything like that. She’s asked me at least a dozen times so far today to phone you.’