79
It didn’t take long to come up with an address for Jesse Davids. He was recorded on our systems with a string of petty theft offences to his name.
“How does an offender go from theft to child abduction, rape and murder?” I asked the open office.
Harris rubbed his face. “I don’t know. It’s a big leap. Maybe he’s not in it alone. We seem to be up against that a lot.”
“I agree. What’s he doing with them once he has them then?”
“He’s taking the girls directly off the street after building some sort of relationship with them. That takes time. And he’s taking them away from close friends without anyone batting an eye. That takes trust. He’s putting a lot of effort into this, so he has to be getting something out of it. I’d imagine he’s getting a lot out of it. When he was stealing, it was to feed whatever habit he needed money for, but there’s a lot more risk with the girls, so the pay-off has to be considerably higher.” Aaron analysed the situation out loud and it made a lot of sense.
“You think he’s being paid?”
“Maybe. He could be providing the girls for the buyers. Trafficking young girls is a big market, there’s a lot to be made from it, especially when you get people like Benn and Howard who want the girls, but are afraid to make any moves themselves,” he continued.
“Well let’s go and find out.” I rose from my chair. “Let’s bring this piece of shit in and hope the girl is still with him.” I didn’t want to think about the consequences of her having been moved on already. It made my head hurt.
My nerves were on edge as we pushed through the front door of Jesse Davids’ flat. It was on the top floor of a three-storey complex. It was dirty and smelled worse than my kitchen bin after a few long shifts where I’d forgotten to empty it. It was dark and dingy. Davids was laid out on a sagging sofa, his eyes rolled deep into his head. I informed him why we were there and Harris and Rob searched the tiny three-room flat.
I reached down to Davids, impatient with the slurred response to my demands for him to stand. I grabbed his once white T-shirt by the neck and pulled hard. His head jerked wildly on his thin neck. “Get your fucking arse up. Where is she?”
He tried to focus, his face centimetres from mine spewed out an odour that made me sick. It infused my anger and frustration and I pushed my gripped fist into his shoulder harder, then pulled back towards me, making his head rock precariously on his shoulders. “I said, where is she?”
“Who?” he managed to slur in my general direction. He was high on something.
“The girl you’re keeping in a cage. Where?” I demanded.
“Ma’am.” Rob interjected waving a baggy in the air. “Smack. On the floor at the side of his bed. It’s an expensive habit to keep.”
“Yeah, and where’s he getting the money from?” I shot back as I pushed hard on Davids’ shoulder, letting go of his shirt as I did so. He fell into a heap on the sofa I had just pulled him up from. My frustrations cascaded down in a fury at him. He’d sell his grandmother to get a hit so I imagined children wouldn’t be too much of a leap for him.
“You mindless piece of shit. Where is she? You tell us where she is or I swear I will bring hell down on you, more than you can imagine,” I shouted, my face again too close to his rotten mouth. Rob backed away and returned to the bedroom where Harris was still going through Davids’ few material possessions.
Aaron stepped closer. “Hannah. Back up.” The three of us stood so close. “It won’t help. We’ll figure it out. Let’s take him in. Let him come down, then we can question him.”
I turned to face him, defeat pushing away at the anger. “It’s taking too long.”
“I know. It’s all we can do, though. Come on. We can tear this place apart and then talk to him when we get him back to custody.”
He was right. I looked down at the jumble of clothes and bones that was Davids and let out a sigh. Were we going to find the girl? We didn’t even know her name. A nameless child, held in a cage and we still had no idea where. “Bastard.” I hissed through clenched teeth. He never heard me. His mind was back wherever it was when we first entered.
80
She lifted her head as she strained to hear the noise again. The action pulled on her neck and she winced, putting her hand to the spot under her hairline and pressing down to ease the cramping pain. She tilted her head a little, lifting her ear higher. Every noise made her anxious. She had distinguished a few sounds as some level of normal, considering the circumstances, and others made her hyper aware and brought out the clawing animals inside her. This sound was giving her such a feeling now. It was unusual. Different to the sounds she had already categorised as normal. It was very quiet down here, so sound had to be close or particularly loud to travel to her, she had figured that much out. The silence she lived in could be deafening and invasive. She strained harder, she knew she had heard something.
Then it was there again. Her neck twitched more as she leaned in to listen. Her narrow fingers pushed in, pleading with the muscles to stop their complaint. She thought she heard voices. She never heard voices or conversations. The voices became raised. She shuffled backwards and put her head down. She didn’t understand. Why the shouting? Was it to do with her? She had done as she had been told. She hadn’t argued and after the first couple of times, she had learned to not complain. She may have cried, but even the tears had dried up, too scared to make an appearance. They angered him, made him hurt her more. Why the shouting? She pleaded in her head for it to stop.
81
We came away from the flat with Davids and a few items of property consisting of a mobile phone, the little bit of his expensive smack habit he had and some recordable DVDs. He didn’t possess a computer. We’d torn the place upside down looking for one but he just didn’t have one. Not there anyway. We’d searched his car, an old Ford Orion, parked in a covered area at the bottom of the flats reserved for residents. It was rusted with mismatched coloured doors and bodywork. We found nothing but empty bottles of alcopops, junk food wrappers and a couple of unpaid parking tickets. Harris contacted the control room and requested a forensic recovery of the vehicle.
It took several hours before Davids was fit to be interviewed, and my impatience to get to him pushed the local custody sergeant to his limit. Eventually he let us in before Davids was fit for interview. I didn’t care. I took the photograph of the girl into the interview room along with a hot tea for myself. We didn’t bother to offer Davids a drink. The custody sergeant would have looked after his needs. I had no interest.
He sat there with a coarse grey blanket around him. His feet looked ridiculous in a pair of too-large black elasticated pumps, provided by the custody sergeant because we’d seized his clothing and footwear for forensic examination. His skinny frame was barely able to sit upright in the chair. He was rattling, his body in need of another fix. I pushed him hard knowing he would want the interview to be finished. He wouldn’t be able to take sitting here, still, for very long.
“We know you took Isabelle Thomas, Jesse, we have a witness. What we want to know now is where is the other girl?”
He smirked. I straightened up in my chair. “Which one?” he asked.
Aaron spoke to counter my rising temper. “We want to know about the girl held in the dog cage. She looks to be about ten to twelve years of age and has shoulder-length brown hair. Where is she?” His tone was even and calm. I took a drink from my cup and silently thanked him.
“I don’t own no cage, man.”
“Do you recognise the description I gave you?” Aaron continued.
“Huh. Urm.” He shook in his blanket. “Maybe. I can’t remember. I don’t. When?”
I took the photograph from the folder and pushed it across the table towards him. He pulled the corners of the blanket closer under his chin and leaned over it to peer at the image. His eyelids dragged shut in his forward leaning position, then his body vibrated and he sat upright again. “I don’t remember who
she is.”
“But you remember her?” I asked. Hopeful.
“Yeah. Kind of. Alls I do is get the girls, drop ’em a bit of smack and pass them on. Whatever happens to them after that ain’t none of my doing.”
A chink of light appeared in my mind. “Who do you pass them on to, Jesse?”
“ I... er... dunno, some bloke. He pays me good. All I have to do is get the girls interested, give ’em a bit of sommat, then hand them over wherever he tells me and job’s done. I get paid.”
“How do you organise this with him?”
“By phone, he gave me a phone. I contact him with me phone.”
82
The Cambridgeshire Mobile Phone Investigations Unit was small and restrictive, like it had been a last minute thought. Three men and one woman were working in the enclosed space. Computers and other technical looking equipment filled the few available worktops, with adapters and chargers for every conceivable make of mobile phone hanging from hooks on the walls. Mobile phones were an ever-expanding area of business for police forces. As technology advanced, so did the crimes and the need for units just like this one.
We walked to the corner desk and Harris introduced me to Terry Black. Terry shook my hand then went back to what he was working on when we came in. We gave him a couple of minutes then I watched as he clicked save and closed down the window on his computer. “What can I help you with?” he asked as he swivelled back to face us.
Harris dropped a secured evidence bag containing Davids’ phone onto the desk in front of Black. “We want the listed number for the person registered under the name ‘Shallow Waters’.”
“Shallow Waters?” Terry laughed. “They think because they give themselves some fancy fake names, we’re not going to find them. Jerks.”
I watched as Terry did his thing, extricating the seized mobile phone from the evidence bag, photographing it then plugging it into a large computer to access the phone’s information. After a few minutes he handed me the number listed for Shallow Waters and told me the full report would be available within the hour.
I thanked him and offered a smile to Harris. We were another step closer.
As we were out of our force area I didn’t have access to any of the systems here so Harris completed another subscriber request, this time for the registered user of the phone number we had recovered. This would supply a result a lot quicker than the email address request would. Email addresses are notably more difficult and dependant on what part of the world the email provider was, the result could take more time.
We caught back up with Aaron, Rob, and the others in the incident room. I found myself a chair. It was then I realised how drained and exhausted I was and how this had been a growing feeling since the start of the investigation. I had let relationships slide. My father was upset at me, even if he didn’t say so. His good natured calls were always a reminder of the darkness within our family and his constant effort to pull it all together and right it.
I had neglected Ethan. I hadn’t the time to give him. I didn’t know how I felt about us. As a cop, having a relationship with a reporter is difficult, and it’s probably why I had shied away from making a conscious decision, one way or another. So I stuck my head in the sand. I knew I needed to talk to him, but it would have to wait until this investigation had been completed.
As my thoughts roamed I became aware of a ringing and jumped. Harris answered the phone on his desk. I listened to the one side of the conversation I could hear.
“Yes. Right. Okay. Thanks.”
I sat in my chair, picking at the corner of my eyes where make-up was starting to gather from constant eye rubbing.
Harris dropped the handset into its cradle, stood, stretched and waited a moment before meeting my eyes. “It’s a pay as you go number. We don’t have anything on this guy.”
83
Davids had been sat in his cell festering for how long, I didn’t care. The only clock I was running to now was the clock against the girl in the cage and I didn’t even know her name. My frustration level was rising. How the fuck could we be so close, and yet so far away? We had a phone number but the bastard had used a pay as you go phone and everything was up in the air again. I was raging and wanted to get Davids back into an interview room, but he was seriously rattling and was being seen by the force doctor in the custody suite surgery room.
I paced in front of the custody desk, which was raised so that offenders could not jump over and assault the custody staff. For fairly short stature officers, like myself, it caused another irritation as we were forced to raise ourselves on to our toes just to talk to the damn custody sergeant. I was starting to feel emotional and this wouldn’t be good. I needed to keep focussed. Not just for the girl, but to keep the respect of all officers, so the investigation could stay on track and she could be found sooner rather than later. There was an increasing chance she would end up on one of Jack’s tables.
“Drink, ma’am?”
“What?!” I spun and saw a petite female in uniform smiling at me. I looked back at the custody desk for signs of her being told to get the mad woman out of their hair, but no one was taking ownership. I looked again at the officer in front of me.
“Can I get you a drink? You look as though you could do with one,” she reiterated.
“Green tea?” I said, more to be obtuse than anything else.
“Coming right up.” She turned on her heel and out of a blue door to her right, before appearing a couple of minutes later with two mugs with actual handles, rather than polystyrene containers, which indeed, contained green tea.
“Thank you.” I took the chipped white mug from her and lifted it to my face. I inhaled. The smell of the tea smoothed away some of the irritation and brought with it my more level head. “Where did you get this from?” I asked.
“I bring it in. I like either this one or chamomile. You need something to unwind with after some shifts.” She had a real calm air to her as she held her own cup in her hands.
I slurped on the hot tea. “What’s your name?”
“Chris Maitland, ma’am. I’m on attachment to custody for a couple of weeks. You do see all sorts down here. And that’s not just the offenders they fetch in.”
Was this young probationer cheeky enough to be referring to me? At this moment in time I didn’t mind. She had put me on an even keel momentarily while we waited for the go ahead to take Davids back in to interview and the tea was going down well. “Custody does get some real interesting people through its gates.” At that point, I saw the force medical doctor exit her surgery with Davids. “And thanks for the tea, Chris. It was a perfectly timed pit stop.” I absently handed back my half-empty cup. Now we would find out if we could interview Davids again and if it would provide us with any more detail.
The custody sergeant turned to me. “Inspector.”
I straightened my fringe out and walked over.
“You’re good to go again.” He tapped at the keyboard in front of him. I waited. There was nothing else coming. His head was down, his pate shone through threads of hair still clinging for life atop his head, the fluorescent lighting easily picking out the bare patches like an old worn rug. His fingers worked rapidly as he input details I presumed belonged to Davids following the meeting with the doctor. I had no time for precious sergeants and do-good doctors right now.
Ten minutes later Aaron and I were, again, sat opposite Davids. He didn’t look good. I didn’t care.
“I told you everything, miss,” he snivelled. Miss. A word that instantly told me he’d done time in prison. The grey blanket was still wrapped around his shoulders. Shoulders that were shaking and shaking hard. I waited. Not a word. Nothing. Aaron tapped rhythmically. No words.
Davids’ knees bounced, the balls of his feet like small trampolines. There was nothing about him that was still. “You’ve got his number. I gave it you. It’s in me phone. Just look. You’ve got it. You took it off me. You have it.”
I waited ano
ther beat. Aaron tapped.
“Tell me about your meetings with him, Jesse,” I said.
His knees bounced harder.
“I dunno. Yunno. It were dark.”
I leaned forward. “Jesse, you either cooperate with this investigation or you don’t. If this girl we’re looking for dies before we find her, you’re looking at a lot more time inside than you can imagine right now.” I leaned back again, giving it room to sink in. Aaron turned and looked at me. He wasn’t going anywhere for a long time anyway. He was wrapped up in the murder of Isabelle. We couldn’t lie to him about evidence we had, but this wasn’t lying. He was too dumb to realise how much trouble he was in. His body seemed to relax, his forearms rested on the edge of the table, his head dropped forward. The shaking continued but I could practically see the cogs turning. I breathed in and held. The tapping continued. Just as I could hold my breath no more, Davids pulled himself up, his grey face looking more drained than I thought possible. His mouth pinched, lips cracking.
“I want me solicitor.”
84
I paced the incident room. Davids’ solicitor was going to take an age to arrive and we couldn’t say another word to him without the solicitor being there. He was with another client mid interview, at a station twenty miles away. No one else from the firm was available and Davids was insisting on having a named solicitor. Charlie Marr. I wanted to scream. He was hiding something. Stalling. And there was nothing we could do but wait. Meanwhile the clock kept ticking.
Aaron straightened his tie, though to me I couldn’t see that it needed it. “Hannah, think.”
“I am bloody thinking. What do you think I’m doing?!” I snapped back.
“Walking.”
I stopped. Harris looked at me from his desk. I think he expected some kind of explosion, but I had none to give. Aaron was right. I’d walked some of the energy out, now I needed to stop and think things through. I grabbed a chair from a desk and pulled it to where Aaron had parked himself.
The DI Hannah Robbins Series: Books 1 - 3 (Boxset) (Detective Hannah Robbins Crime Series) Page 20
