Up Close and Personal

by Alan Fisher

  “He wasn’t interest in me. He was interested in what I could provide”.

  Jack thought for a few seconds, the horror of the realisation sinking into his brain.

  “Not the children from under your care at the home” he said.

  “I had no choice. He insisted that a selection of girls be prepared and be available to be brought to the club. Every month I was to select six girls for the evening and take them with me to the club”.

  Tears started to appear on Christine Bell’s pale cheeks; Jack chose to ignore them

  “For the love of God, how old were these girls?”

  “Between 14 and 16” she whispered, softly but clearly”.

  “And you agreed with this? It’s unbelievable” said Jack, now fighting to control his increasing temper.

  “What choice did I have?” sobbed Christine.

  “You could have said no” shouted Jack as he stood up.

  Jack was angry and the tension in the room was thick and dark. He stepped away from the table and started pacing backwards and forwards, fighting to regain his composure.

  “Perhaps Chief Inspector” said Michael Golightly in a calming voice, “we should all take a five minute break”.

  Jack stopped pacing and walked across the recording device.

  “Interview suspended, 7.49am”.

  He switched off the device and quickly left the room.

  Chapter 55

  Jack went out into the car park, struggling to maintain his objectivity in the face of what he’d just discovered. Matters were becoming clearer, and he felt closer to understanding exactly what had happened but that didn’t stop the sickness that he felt in his stomach.

  He paced backwards and forwards, taking deep breaths as he watched the sun rise over the trees and fields of the countryside that surrounded headquarters.

  After a few minutes a familiar car entered the car park and Jack watched Oliver climb out of his car and head towards him. He looked surprised to find Jack wandering about in the car park so early in the morning gloom.

  “Morning sir. Are you all right, you look a little shaken” said Oliver as he approached Jack.

  “I’m ok Oliver. Just taking a few minutes to get some fresh air”.

  “What’s happened sir? How long have you been here?”

  “Since 5.30 this morning. I’ve got Christine Bell in the interview room, been talking to her for half an hour but needed a breather. I’ll explain everything later. Go and get yourself sorted and brief the rest of the team when they come in that we may have to move fast when I’m done. I expect to have some names to track down, and quickly too”.

  “What about DS Glover sir, shouldn’t he do any briefing?”

  “Not today. Look, I have to get back in. Just do as I ask will you”.

  Oliver watched Jack head back to the building. He’d never seen Jack in such a state before and his mind couldn’t even begin to imagine what it was about the interview with Christine Bell that was causing Jack so much anxiety. The shortness in the delivery of the instruction to Oliver was something he hadn’t experienced before, and it left him concerned and slightly confused.

  But he did as he’d been instructed and went indoors to await the rest of the team arriving. What exactly he was going to brief them on, he had no idea. Jack hadn’t been too forthcoming with information other than to say that they would have to move fast when he was done. And what was going on with DS Glover? The questions just kept on coming.

  Debbie was first to arrive and, not unusually, she sensed something was in the air.

  “Morning Oliver” she said as she entered the office, “What’s going on?”

  “Morning. I’m not really sure. I met the Chief in the car park this morning and he’s asked me to brief the team when everyone gets in”.

  “About what”.

  “Well that’s the thing; he never really said. He was pacing backwards and forwards across the car park, must have been just before 8. He was taking deep breaths and seemed really anxious”.

  “Is he ill?”

  “No, I don’t think so. It must have something to do with him interviewing Mrs Bell”.

  “She’s here? Why didn’t you say?”

  “Sorry, yes she’s here. Not sure how, the Chief didn’t say, but he said he was taking a break from the interview and just told me to brief the team”.

  “Not DS Glover?”

  “Apparently not”.

  The conversation was interrupted by a telephone ringing which Debbie went to answer. Oliver went in search of liquid refreshment and waited for the rest of the team to arrive.

  It was almost 9am when Robbie Wainwright arrived, the last of the team to do so. Even he could sense something wasn’t as it should be because when he entered the room, he immediately apologised.

  “Sorry I’m late guys, accident on the northbound carriage of the A1, the traffics horrendous”.

  “No worries” said Oliver. “if you’d all like to pay attention, the Chief has asked me to give a short briefing although I haven’t got much to tell you”.

  They all turned their chairs around to face Oliver, who remained standing by his desk rather than stand by the incident board.

  “Where’s DS Glover this morning?” asked Paul.

  “I don’t know” said Oliver honestly.

  “Has he been sacked?” asked Robbie.

  “I don’t know that either, hardly likely though. Look, I don’t know much, but here’s what I’ve been told. Christine Bell was arrested or detained or somehow managed to get here sometime overnight or in the early hours. I don’t know the details; all I know is that the Chief has been here since 5.30 this morning. When I bumped into him in the car park just before 8, he said he was taking a break after having interviewed her for half an hour, and he looked anxious, uncomfortable, stressed. I’m not sure how to describe it, but it wasn’t a good look. He told me to brief you all that when he’s finished with her, we would have to be ready to move fast. So I suggest we all clear our desks of whatever it was that we were planning to do and wait for instructions.

  “Is she the murderer then?” asked Paul.

  “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t have thought so”.

  “Perhaps she knows who the murderer is” said Robbie.

  “Perhaps, but we could speculate all day long as to what she may or may not know. Let’s just be ready shall we”.

  “Are you going to do all the briefings from now on” asked Paul.

  “No. Look, this isn’t really a briefing. I just happened to be the first one to arrive this morning and bump into the Chief. I’m passing on a message really, nothing more” said Oliver, showing signs of growing impatience.

  The rest of the team picked up on Oliver’s signals and asked no more questions, busying themselves instead with preparing for what was to come next.

  It was another hour before Jack finally arrived back in the main office, and he looked tired rather than enthused. Although everyone appeared to look busy, Jack knew that they were all waiting to hear what he had to say, and he wasted no time bothering to return to his own office. Instead he stopped by the incident board, put down his brown file and cup of coffee on the table and spoke.

  “Ok, listen up everyone. We’ve a lot of work to do and precious little time. I’ve just spent the best part of three hours interviewing Christine Bell and what I am about to tell you will not make pleasant listening. But I’m sure now about the sequence of events leading up to the start of these murders, and I have a list of potential suspects and possible future targets. Our job now is to protect the targets and narrow down the suspects until we have the killer under arrest”.

  He stopped briefly to take a sip of coffee; no-one spoke or moved.

  “This whole episode started back in the 90’s, the time when this photograph was taken” he said, pointing to the key picture from the Lamplight club. “As you know we identified the woman in the picture as Christine Grey, later to become Christine Bell. She wa
s the manager of a Children’s Care home near Durham City before moving to become Andrew McMillan’s secretary at Conservative Party offices when the home closed. When I found out about the venue in the photo from an ex-bouncer at the club, he told me that Mrs Bell, as she is now known, was there for the “entertainment” and that I should use my imagination as to what that meant. I made a critical mistake then, because I imagined that she may have been perhaps a stripper or maybe even a prostitute, I could not have been more wrong. Andrew McMillan somehow found out that Christine Bell was embezzling funds from the Council when a major extension was being built at the home she was running. Instead of reporting this to the police or even to the Council, McMillan used this information to blackmail Bell into going to the private gatherings at the Lamplight club, not because McMillan wanted her to entertain his friends, but for reasons so much worse. He blackmailed her into providing young girls from the Children’s home for the sexual gratification of his friends at the club. Once a month she would take a selection of six girls along to the club, and these girls I’m afraid to tell you, were aged between 14 and 16 at the time. The girls were taken to a separate room where they were plied with alcohol and made ready. At approximately 9pm each evening, the girls were paraded in front of these men. McMillan would take the deck of cards and deal them out one at a time to each of the men present, including himself. The first man to be dealt a Jack won the prize, not my words, of choosing a girl to have sex with in the prepared bedroom along the corridor. I know all of you will feel as sickened and disgusted as I do about this, but this is the truth of the matter. The girls had no idea who these men were, and Mrs Bell later discovered that the men were all referred to as Jack by the girls because of the manner in which the men decided who the winner of their sordid game would be. The men were given nicknames, such as the Jack of Diamonds, because they didn’t know who they were. McMillan wore a lot of jewellery so became the Jack of Diamonds; Van der Klerk owned the club so became the Jack of Clubs. I guess they would talk afterwards, and all know who was who by the use of these nicknames. I can’t begin to imagine what these girls must have gone through or the psychological effect it must have had on them. But I can imagine that at least one of them might have started to cultivate feelings of revenge at that time. Why it has taken so long to begin to exact this revenge is unknown at the moment, perhaps it has taken this long to find out the true identities of these men. But I think we can be certain that our main suspect is likely to be one of these girls. My guess is that some sort of pact may have been made between the girls, that if any one of them took their revenge, they would make sure all the girls knew about it by leaving the appropriate playing card on the victim. That way the girls would be sure to know who had been killed. Mrs Bell has given me their names and we need to track down their current whereabouts. But we must also bear in mind that there are potential other targets out there. Despite what you may think of these men, and I doubt it will be any worse than what I think of them, they should be protected until they can be brought to justice for what they did to these girls. I know that may stick in the throat a bit but that’s the job. So we have to track down their whereabouts as well. All of this has to be done as soon as possible. We don’t yet know who the killer is or when they will next strike, but we can be sure that they will. I have ten names we need to find, six girls and the last four men. You will have noted that Alan and Kevin are not here, they have returned to their stations. DS Glover is in Durham today and will be immediately returning to C Division. That leaves just the five of us to do this. Cole and I will track down the four men, taking two each. The rest of you will track down the whereabouts of the six girls, that’s obviously two each. Be clear people, these girls will now be in their late thirties or early forties; and it’s possible they may have changed their surnames at least once in the last twenty years. And I only want to know where I can find them. I do not want anyone going out to see them, not yet anyway. I’ll pass out the names in a minute, does anyone have any questions?”

  The room was silent, taking in the enormity of the information they’d been given. After a few seconds, it was Debbie who spoke.

  “We could do with someone here to co-ordinate things in case we need to go out sir. Any chance of getting someone in?”

  ”I can do better than that Debbie” said Jack and a familiar face appeared in the doorway.

  “Morning everyone” said DS Colin Davis as he hobbled through the doorway on his metal crutches. “Will I do?"

  Chapter 56

  Jack handed out the names to each member of the team and went straight into his office without another word being said.

  The team, deflected briefly from the revelations of Jack’s briefing, surrounded Colin Davis with a variety of comments such as “great to have you back sarge” and “we’ve missed having you around sarge”.

  He accepted the kind words with grace before moving slowly, one clump at a time, towards Jack’s office.

  “Ok, enough already. I can’t do a lot of running about at the minute, but I can sit at my desk, I can talk, and I can operate a computer. I’ve been listening to the briefing and my stomach turns just at the thought of what went on back then. But we’ve all got jobs to do, so let’s crack on. We can at least find these girls so that, at some point, they can know that justice is coming for what they suffered. Oliver, with me in Jack’s office”.

  He struggled through the door into Jack’s office and Oliver followed slowly behind and automatically closed the door. Oliver pulled out his chair but instead of sitting, offered it to Colin.

  “Thanks” said Colin, “good manners they teach down in Oxford”.

  “You’re welcome sir, good to have you back” said Oliver, standing at the end of Jack’s desk.

  “Nasty business this Jack. It was bad enough before these latest revelations but Jesus, none of us expected this” said Colin.

  Oliver looked quizzically at Colin.

  “Don’t look at me like that Oliver, I’ve been off work not off my trolley. Jack’s been keeping me up to speed with what’s been going on knowing there was a good chance I’d come back in the middle of it all. I had to hit the ground running”.

  Oliver looked at Colin and then his crutches leaning against the side of Jack’s desk.

  “Metaphorically speaking” said Colin. “And you picked your way through all this lot Oliver, great work again I have to say. Spot on too”.

  “Not quite sir, I didn’t see this coming either. All I knew for certain was that the killings were extremely personal, and that the killer needed to send a message out. I didn’t know why, what the message was, or for whom it was intended. I guess we all know now. One of these girls wanted everyone to know that the men who committed these terrible crimes were being dealt the hand of justice rather than a playing card. I know it’s wrong sir, but it’s hard not to have some element of sympathy”.

  “I agree” said Jack. “But we have to put that to one side for the moment, justice is dealt out by the courts, not the victim. Now we’ve got to track down the remaining four men and I’ve decided we should be the ones to do that Oliver rather than anyone else, because it isn’t as simple as what you might think”.

  “I understand sir. Because on the one hand we need to find them and make sure they are safe. Yet on the other hand, these men are criminals and are likely to be arrested at some stage and charged with a number of offences relating to that time at the Lamplight club. If we tell them why they may be in danger, they will realise how much we know about what happened. So how do we ensure their safety without the possibility that any of these four men will decide to disappear, perhaps abroad”.

  “All right, I should have said not as simple as other people might think. Any ideas on how we handle this?” said Jack.

  “Why wait to arrest them Jack? It’s going to happen anyway; they’d be safer in our custody” offered Colin.

  “I thought of that Colin, for sure. But I only have the word of Christine Bell, and
I hardly think that would be sufficient to justify an arrest at this time. Later perhaps, when we talk to the girls, we’ll have more. But for the moment, we’ve not nearly enough. And if we did arrest them, and don’t find the killer soon, they would have to be released and we’d have shown our hand”.

  “There’s an added problem sir” said Oliver, who’d been thinking about a possible resolution. “But I think that perhaps that problem might in fact provide the solution, yes I think so” he said more slowly.

  “I’m listening” said Jack.

  “We know the pattern the killer has followed so far. McMillan received a text from Tanya Golding’s phone, he thought he was meeting her at the hotel. Straightforward enough. Then the killer uses McMillan’s phone to send a message to Justice Robertson, probably saying something like they need to meet because he’d heard that someone is sniffing around asking questions about the Lamplight club. The news about any deaths isn’t out yet so he’s not suspicious. The killer then uses Robertson’s phone and uses the same tactics to message Van der Klerk. At the time, only McMillan’s death is public so there is nothing to connect his murder to the Lamplight club, McMillan could have been murdered for any number of reasons, so again, Van der Klerk isn’t suspicious. But both McMillan’s and Robertson’s deaths are public knowledge now. Van der Klerk’s is not, so a message from Van der Klerk may well be sent to the next victim.

  “Yes, I see the pattern Oliver” said Jack, “but won’t the next victim connect the two deaths to the Lamplight club, if they haven’t already, Mrs Bell did”.

  “Mrs Bell made the connection because of the playing cards sir. She knew of their relevance, the other men will not. So it’s a fair assumption that they will look on the deaths as just coincidental, I doubt they will even consider that it may be connected to something that happened all those years ago”.