SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS

by M. G. Cole

  There were currently three-hundred and sixty-two residents in the barracks, all of whom received meals, shelter and basic bathroom facilities. Originally, they had been segregated between men and women and families, but all were free to mix.

  Garrick eyed the security, which all seemed rather low key. Even though they were on Ministry of Defence land, the security at the gate – and the staff – were all private contractors. As they walked, Daniels explained people were free to come and go, emphasising that they were not prisoners. That comment was aimed more at Trisha.

  “Sorry, forgive me, but Trish and I have our differences.”

  “More often than not,” Trisha said with a cheery grin. “But sometimes even we can work together.”

  Daniels gave a tight smile. “I’ll be in my office when you finish.” With that, he left.

  Garrick’s image of a prison was further shattered when he saw groups of young men kicking a ball between them in a spirited 5-aside match, filled with howls of laughter and insults in a language he didn’t understand.

  “Kurdish,” Trisha said. “But we get people from everywhere.” She nodded towards a knot of men and women with darker faces. “From Mali and Mauritania.” Another group of men sat talking. A couple sat on chairs, engrossed in their mobile phones. “We have Syria, Iraq – anywhere there is persecution.”

  Garrick was struck by the relaxed atmosphere and smiling faces. Some looked across and waved at Trisha.

  “The press wants us to be afraid of them because, y’know, they’re not like us. They ignore the fact that these people have left everything behind to save their lives. Let’s go ask your questions.”

  She led them over to a smiling man who kissed her on both cheeks. He spoke with a slight accent as he beamed at Okon and Garrick.

  “Trisha, the warrior queen! Have you come with good news or…?”

  “Nothing on your asylum application yet. But we’re working hard on it.”

  “Of that I have no doubt.”

  “This is Karam, from Syria. He fled Aleppo when ISIS moved in, killing everybody. He and his brother smuggled his wife and children out. His brother was caught and executed.” Garrick saw the man’s smile waver as he desperately tried to keep it in place. “They made it into Europe via Italy. That’s when his son fell overboard on the packed boat they were crammed on. He drowned.”

  Okon gave a sharp inhalation. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Karam nodded and gestured across to a group of women playing some sort of game, while a couple of young children ran laughing as they chased one another.

  “I thank God I still have my wife and my daughter. Others here are not so fortunate.”

  Trisha nodded. “Despite their loss, they walked from Italy to Calais using their wits to survive. Then they risked it all again on a boat over the Channel. One of the busiest and most dangerous shipping passages in the world. They were picked up and brought here. That was three months ago.”

  “We only come for a peaceful life,” Karam said, glancing at his daughter once again. “Invisible borders should not deny any child the right to a better life. But because of this,” he rubbed his soft brown cheek, “people are afraid.”

  Garrick felt embarrassed. “People are always afraid of their jobs being taken. Most of them use race as an excuse.”

  Karam laughed. “Of course, we come to steal your jobs. What is it you do?”

  “These people are police officers. They would like to ask you a few questions.”

  Garrick had expected the man to tense and put up his guard the moment he heard the word ‘police’. Instead, he shrugged and nodded.

  “Of course. How may I assist?”

  “What is it you did in Syria?” Okon asked.

  “I was a heart surgeon.” Garrick blinked in surprise, prompting Karam to laugh once more. “I know. I can see everybody in Harley Street quivering that I will steal their jobs.” Mischievously, he added, “In fact, I have always fancied being a policeman. You better watch your step.” He broke into laughter and clapped at his joke.

  Garrick couldn’t help but be taken by the man’s upbeat spirit.

  “I’m afraid, our being here isn’t pleasant news. We need to know if you recognise these women?”

  He held up his phone and showed Karam the images. The Syrian shook his head and offered his hand for the phone. “I do not, but if I may?”

  Garrick handed him the phone and Karam walked back to the men he had been with. They spoke rapidly, and he handed the phone to the men before returning to Garrick. Garrick was uneasy as he watched the men pass his phone from person-to-person.

  “They were murdered,” Karan said bluntly.

  “I can’t say at this stage.”

  “I have been around so much death that you could only imagine. Even before the war, when I was training, I saw terrible things. You become numb to such horror.” He circled a finger to indicate the camp. “We are all different peoples here, different faiths, different beliefs, but we are all human. We all value life perhaps more than your people out there,” he gestured towards the gate. “That is because we have seen how fragile society and life can be.”

  Trisha gently squeezed his arm. “Karam has become my wise man. Everybody here are the lucky ones. Others that make to our shores aren’t so lucky.”

  “What happens to them?” Okon asked.

  “They join the ranks of the homeless. Just another face on the streets. They don’t know where to turn, who to ask for help. And still they are the lucky ones. The young girls are taken by people just as bad as the ones they’d fled from.”

  “You mean sex traffickers?” said Garrick, keeping one eye on his orbiting phone.

  “Yes. Imagine walking from Syria or Iraq, over three thousand miles. Several months without food, water or shelter. Forget disease, or abuse, or paying every penny you have to traffickers who pack you on a dangerously overcrowded boat to cross waters, even in storms. Then they finally make it to our shores. Their goal, after months of hardship. Only to be kidnapped by a Pakistani or Albanian gang and forced into prostitution.”

  A cold silence gripped them, finally broken by DS Okon.

  “Is that what you think happened to our girls?”

  Trisha nodded. “It’s the most likely result.”

  A young man with an infectious smile approached them and offered Karam the phone. He spoke in rapid Kurdish, shyly eying Okon.

  “He recognises this girl.” Karam pointed to the original victim Garrick had found on the Pilgrim’s Trail. “Galina, from Iran, he says.” The young man continued talking, Karam translating as he handed the phone back to Garrick. “They met in a camp in Calais. She was beautiful and friendly. They had even planned to get the same boat across, but that didn’t happen.”

  “And that was the last time he saw her?”

  “The last. Yes.”

  “How certain is he that this was the same girl?”

  After a brief back ad forth, in which the young man became increasingly embarrassed, Karam finally answered. “She had a birthmark here,” he tapped his left shoulder, and one on her backside. The younger man could no longer look at Okon. Karam shook his shoulder in a good-natured manner. “They are young…”

  “Nobody is judging you,” Okon assured him. A quick translation and the man smiled with relief. He spoke quickly and hurried away.

  “It’s Asr. Time to pray,” he added when he saw Garrick frown.

  A group of young men knelt towards Mecca and began to pray. Garrick noticed other groups doing the same, while others ignored them and continued chatting. Trisha toyed with her crucifix as she watched.

  “Not everybody is Muslim.” Karam pointed to the women. “There are many Christians. There are a few Zoroastrians. I had never heard of them,” he added with a low chuckle. “And some, like me, are lapsed believers.”

  Leaving the group to their prays, they thanked Karam and walked back to the car.

  “I hope that was of some use,” T
risha said.

  Garrick was lost in thought for a moment. His head was once again pounding. He hadn’t quite expected his first day back to be so intense.

  “You said DS Wilson had asked about the girl last year. Why didn’t our horny young friend recognise her then?”

  “People come and go. He may not have even been here then. The birthmarks, obviously they’re not on the picture. Is it the same girl?”

  Garrick confirmed that the physical description was exactly what he’d read on the police file. For what little use it was, they had a name and nationality. And he had a sinking feeling they also had a possible lead to exactly who the ‘message’ was aimed at, but he said no more until he dropped Trisha at her car. When they were back on the M20, he told Okon about his suspicions.

  “The sex trade?” she said. “Makes sense. Perhaps these are girls who got away, or tried to.”

  “Exactly. Being skinned while alive is a frightening message to send out to others who are thinking about doing a runner.” Even though it felt credible, there was still doubt nagging him. “Thing is that Galina was the first. Other than a news item about a body being found, there were no details released.”

  Okon picked up on this train of thoughts. “Then it’s hardly a message that the other girls would hear. Still, that could explain today’s victim.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If the first killing was warning, then none of the other girls, or the public, heard about it. So, another girl makes a bid for freedom, unaware there will be consequences. She is killed, except this time the body is left in a more prominent position where people will find it, rather than out in the hills.”

  “That is some fine reasoning, Chib.”

  “Chib?”

  “You don’t like being called Chib?”

  “What is wrong with Chibarameze, sir?”

  “Absolutely nothing. But I’m getting old and desperate need to save syllables. So Chib is okay?”

  “I’m fine with it, sir.” She clearly wasn’t.

  “We need to open up a line of enquiry in the local sex industry.”

  “I will do that.”

  Garrick felt awkward. “Are you sure you’ll be okay doing that?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re a young gir… woman,” he corrected himself.

  “This may startle you, but women have sex too.”

  Garrick wracked his memory. He wasn’t so sure. At least not in his experience. It had been far too long. He promised himself he’d check the message on Heartfelt when he got home. One day back, and he already needed a distraction.

  5

  After dropping Chib back at the station so that she could pick up her car, he retired home, deciding to visit Howard in his shop tomorrow to pick up the book. He hadn’t seen John since just after Christmas and was looking forward to seeing a friendly face.

  He showered then microwaved a chilli con carne ready meal from the freezer and sat in front of the television to watch back-to-back quiz shows on the BBC. Throughout Mastermind and Only Connect, he failed to get more than a handful of questions correct. That irritated him, as in the past he usually performed so well that he’d often thought about applying to be on the shows, but the inevitable stick he would get from his colleagues had put him off. Now he regretted that decision, more so because he was feeling as if he was plummeting down the cliff face of his prime. Chib had proved that today.

  He sighed. When his sister died, his focus died too, and he didn’t know how to recover from that.

  Garrick examined the promising-looking rock on his dining room table, the spiralling ridges of a seashell were just visible above the surface, promising more would be revealed inside the rock itself. He had already prepared it with a coating of acetic acid, but as therapeutic as he found the act of removing the excess rock matrix away in order to reveal the prize inside, it was a task he couldn’t do when fatigued.

  Instead, he headed to bed and scrolled through his emails as the radio news played in the background. His headache had receded when he’d returned home, but now it threatened to come back. He swore it was the dexamethasone his doctor had prescribed that was giving him the headaches in the first place. Even so, until his MRI scan, he couldn’t risk stopping them. It was critical that…

  No, he refused to think about his possible condition. Possibly, because, like all good detectives, his consultant needed more evidence to firm up a diagnosis.

  His eyelids were heavy as he logged onto the Heartfelt website and scrolled through the profiles that had hit him up. A nudge was nothing more than an indication that she like his profile - even with his appalling profile picture. He had stressed about putting on a younger one, but he couldn’t in good conscious lie, especially when a prospective date would see through it the moment they met. He was dismayed to realise he was wearing exactly the same clothes in his profile picture, that he’d worn all day.

  “I need a new wardrobe,” he muttered to himself.

  He needed new everything, but had become a creature of habit. The older he got, the more he feared change. Perhaps that’s what he should throw at his therapist tomorrow?

  With that, he fell into a deep sleep without having time to turn the light off, reply to his prospective date, or silence the radio.

  The next day brought a flurry of activity. Over a breakfast of two boiled eggs, some toast, orange juice and tea in a mug that was twice the size as standard, he had received an email about the initial autopsy report from their Jane Doe. She had been alive when the skin had been cut from her back, as had Galina. She’d bled out profusely but had drowned in the puddle long before that.

  Trauma to the back of her neck showed she had been struck from behind and fallen to her knees so hard she had shattered one kneecap, which had prevented her from standing. Bruising on the wrists could have come from restraining her hands, while more bruising on the top of the neck, just below the skull, came from the perpetrator holding her face down in the water. There had been no sign she was sexually abused. Her trainers and baggy jeans were covered in mud, much more than seemed right for a concrete retail park.

  Chib was already at the office and had prepared him a green tea as he walked through the door. He took it with a combination of thanks and suspicion. He wasn’t sure he wanted a DS who could read his mind. Just as annoyingly, she had asked one of the PCs on the team, a bubbly young Asian girl whose name he couldn’t remember, to prepare a file on human trafficking groups in the area. Whatever happened to the old days when he had to chase his DS with some good-natured banter?

  “The Nation Crime Agency has several operations in the county.” Chib sat opposite as he sipped his tea. Behind her, the evidence wall had a map of the area, with only two pins indicating where the bodies had been found, and pictures of both victims. Somebody had added ‘Galina’ with a Sharpie. “We’re still waiting for them to get back with details.”

  Garrick harrumphed. “We’ll be waiting all year. If the NCA has surveillance on them, then they will not let a little thing like a couple of murders give them away.” It was a harsh conclusion he had come to after several run-ins with surveillance operations. Their priority was always to agents undercover, so any information was painfully extracted and usually came too late.

  “There is an organized gang based in Dartford that has been known to ship young women in brothels in London. Run by this man.” On the computer she called up a surveillance picture of a squat fifty-something bloke, smoking as he climbed from a Mercedes. He had the flat face of a professional boxer who had taken a pounding his whole career. “Carl Sidorov.”

  “Russian?”

  “He’s lived here since he was twelve. Goes by the name Sid. Although he’s been quiet on that criminal front for the last two years. There is a Serbian group operating near Margate, but it’s suspected that they’re working with gangs in France to identify potential targets, but we don’t have much on them.”

  “Work the prostitution angle. T
hey were good-looking girls, but if they were being pimped to high-class johns, then they wouldn’t be wearing clothes nicked from a recycling bin.” He stared at the girls’ photographs, imagining what terrors they had fled from and what hopes they saw ahead of them.

  He stopped that train of thought immediately. Don’t get attached, he reminded himself. He signed and focused back on Chib.

  “So where do girls like that go for business?”

  “The streets?”

  “Since the internet, it’s not the cash-cow it once was. Lorry drivers. That’s where these girls would go. Get uniform to sweep through motorway service station footage.”

  “We already have the footage from the ChannelPorts Truck stop on the M20. PC Wilkes and Lord can start looking through that this afternoon as soon as they finish the house-to-house enquires.”

  Two officers. It spoke volumes of how under-funded the police were. Crime solving was slowly turning from a relentless deductive science to pure luck.

  “Check cameras at Maidstone Services. The Moto on the M2. In fact, every petrol station along there. And show their faces to the staff at Manson. We need to see if it was used any time when our victims were killed.”

  Manston Airport had been defunct since 2014, but had found a new lease of life as a spill-over parking area for lorries when there were problems at the ports. At times, thousands of vehicles could be kept in holding until they could cross back to the continent. With so many bored and horny drivers, a black market in prostitution thrived. Because the airport wasn’t always in use, the work was sporadic, coining the phrase pop-up sex workers who gathered there when needed.

  From yesterday’s bumpy start, Garrick was feeling more alert today as the old tendrils of excitement galvanised him for the case ahead. It also helped that a solid night’s sleep had vanquished the headaches. Most detectives felt like this at the start of a case. The multiple avenues of enquiry meant everybody was scrambling in different directions. Evidence had a shelf life before it degraded, vanished, or was destroyed. People’s memories faded and were often replaced with incorrect recollections, so statements needed to be taken as soon as possible. It gave the impression that much was being achieved.