by J. S. Law
“Where did this happen, William?”
He sobbed but didn’t answer.
“William,” said Dan. “I want you to tell me where you did these things. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he said, his dry sobs disrupting the word, making it seem like many more syllables than it was.
“Where did you take the girls? Where did she go watch you?”
He said nothing for a moment, just cried into his pillow.
Marcus turned to walk toward the door and Knight spun toward them, sitting up for the first time.
“No!” he said. “It was Defiance. She watched me in Defiance. I swear it.”
Dan frowned and looked at Marcus.
“That’s a ship, isn’t it?” Marcus asked.
“It is, but it wouldn’t even have been built at that time.”
Marcus turned back toward the door.
“No,” said Knight. “Listen.” He fell out of the bed onto his hands and knees and crawled toward Dan. “Help me and I’ll tell you anything. I’ll tell you everything.”
“Don’t move any closer,” warned Marcus.
Dan looked down at Knight, the bones of his shoulders jutting out of his skin. She could now see a word she couldn’t make out seared onto his forehead in a pattern that looked as though it was made from small round cigarette burns.
“Please,” he begged. “Please don’t leave me here.”
“Here’s the only deal on offer,” said Marcus. “Answer the question, and on the way out, I tell the Keeper to take a few days off. Don’t, and I’ll tell him you said he was a fat, lazy, useless prick.”
Knight rolled onto his side and lay motionless on the floor.
“Your choice,” said Dan, the words sticking in her dry throat.
“It was Defiance,” said Knight, quietly. “Not the ship—the gun emplacement, up at the armories on Portsdown Hill. That’s where we used to go. That’s where we took them.”
PART TWO
35
Sarah Cox—Late January (on the day of the disappearance)
The pencil strokes weren’t quite working today.
Sarah looked down at the sketch and screwed up her face. She tried to capture Natasha’s expression, just as it was on the screen where she had it frozen in time.
Black had his uses, had done well in this case, almost cupping Natasha’s breast as he reached past her.
Moore’s face was perfect. A mixture of surprise and shock, a half smile almost, that moment when she felt so uncomfortable she wasn’t sure whether she needed to laugh or be outraged, but there was fear there, too, not much, maybe more like discomfort in her perfect features. It was a face mixed with so many emotions and such confusion that it was difficult to draw accurately.
Cox stopped and flicked back through her pad.
There were many better drawings there, ones that captured what she wanted them to. Not just the pain, but the point when it mixed with fear and ecstasy, a sensory overload.
She looked at one drawing, her favorite.
In it, Natasha’s perfect, tiny little frame was completely exposed, she was on all fours and William was behind her, waiting to break her in for the first time, though the little slut had fucked that up for them all. The anticipation she’d captured in both of their faces made Cox’s tummy tingle, like brushing hands with your first crush, like the first time she’d watched William do what he did best, what he’d never do to her because she was too big and ungainly to interest him.
She brushed her finger over William’s penis. She’d drawn it too big, always did, and it threw off the scale of the drawing.
There was a knock at her door, but no one ever entered a female’s cabin without waiting, one of the benefits of being a girl. She was expecting Moore for their meeting, loved to see her fresh and in the flesh, so she could compare her to the captured images in her mind.
Cox flipped the page to the drawing of a bat she’d been working on for weeks, and then pushed the lid of her laptop down flat. She stood up, took a moment to calm herself, and walked to the door.
“Tash, hey,” she said, smiling broadly, noticing that one collar of Moore’s shirt was off center, allowing a clear view of her fine, pale collarbone as it pushed out against the pale, delicate skin. “Come in.”
Natasha smiled, only a turn at the corner of her mouth, really, more concerned than happy, and Cox wondered what nonsense the silly little cow would want to whine about now.
Cox watched Natasha move past her, noticed how her trousers caught her hips and bum as she walked, imagined how William’s face would have been when he’d driven himself inside her and made her scream.
Natasha sat down on the couch, rested her hands on her thighs, and looked up.
Cox sat down at her desk.
“So how have things been?”
“Not great, ma’am, if I’m honest.”
“You should always be honest, Tash.”
“Well, it’s PO Black,” said Moore, and Cox died inside a little bit; what had that fucking moron done now?
“Okay, tell me, what’s he done? I did speak to him a little while ago. I thought we’d reached the bottom of it all.”
“No, ma’am, I mean, Sarah, it’s gotten worse if anything. I found a small camera in the stores office today. He’s been videotaping me, and I think he’s been deliberately touching me to catch it on video, too.”
Cox was silent, the smile dropped from her face, as indeed it should at this moment in this conversation, not least because she’d told Black to take the bloody camera away for a few weeks until things settled down.
“Are you sure? That’s a really serious allegation.”
“I know,” said Natasha.
Cox watched her carefully, Moore wasn’t crying, didn’t even look like she might. This wasn’t good.
“Let me deal with this straightaway,” said Cox. “I’ll get PO Black up here and we’ll find out exactly what’s going on.”
“Well, ma’am, there’s more. He did take a load of pictures of me, too, and he sent them to my former fiancé saying I was sleeping around, which I wasn’t. He was intercepting my e-mails, had set up a forwarding function so they all went to him as well as me. That’s how he knew the e-mail address to use.”
“How could he know your e-mail address?”
“I let him use my log-on once, when his wasn’t working.”
Cox shook her head and sighed.
“That’s serious, Natasha, a breach of the Ship’s Security Standing Orders, but look, let’s sort out what we can and see if we can’t keep that quiet.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Natasha, still not crying, her eyes narrow. “But I think he also followed me at the last stop and taped me having sex with LPT Coker. I think it was him that started all the rumors about me and shared them round the ship.”
“Well, this is serious,” said Cox, watching Natasha closely, “very serious, and I’ll deal with it as such.”
“Thank you, ma’am, but I really want to go and see Commander Ward about it, today, right now.”
Cox smiled and shook her head.
“Natasha, that’s not how it works. The commanding officer might not even be on board at the moment, we’re not long back, and he’s busy. Also, I’m the ship’s legal adviser, and I’ll need to do some investigation before I can escalate it. That, and given your breach of security, which I’m keen to keep out of this, means it’s going to take a few days at least. And, I hate to do this, but I want you to make sure you don’t discuss these allegations with anyone else during that time, in case it damages the case we’ll build. I’m not even sure we should do a full statement here—perhaps doing one at my home might be better, where we can talk freely.”
Natasha was silent, thoughtful, but she was still not fucking crying.
“Thank you, ma’am,” she said, nodding and standing up. “I appreciate you always watching out for me.”
“Of course,” said Cox, also standing up and moving towa
rd the door.
“Actually,” said Natasha, “I just had a thought. Chief Pollack said he was with PO Black after the fight in the club in Naples. He said they had a few beers together and walked back together. So it couldn’t have been PO Black who followed me and spread the rumors.”
Cox stopped in front of the door and turned, pushing it shut with her foot.
“Indeed,” she said, her eyes meeting Natasha’s.
“He was also with Chief Pollack in Rio, so that couldn’t have been him, either.”
In an instant Cox moved from suspicion to certainty: Moore knew.
Black had likely broken and told her.
How could someone so big and powerful be so stupid and weak? He’d had potential, but it didn’t matter, the little blond darling clearly had more to say, a prepared speech.
“So if it wasn’t PO Black,” Natasha was saying, watching Cox carefully, “then who?”
“You should have gone straight to Commander Ward, Natasha,” said Cox.
“I will, but I wanted to pay you the courtesy you never paid me. I wanted to tell you to your face that I’m going to ruin your life.”
Cox stepped forward and then stopped.
Natasha not only didn’t look frightened, she smiled at the gesture.
“Gary,” said Moore, as though she were calling a pet dog.
The door opened and Gary Black filled it as he moved into the room.
“You’re done,” said Natasha.
Now Cox smiled.
“Silly girl,” she said. “Close the door, Gary.”
He did as Cox said.
Natasha turned to look at him.
“Gary?” Natasha whispered, and Cox watched as the little girl’s face flushed when she saw Gary say nothing, just stand at the door watching her, one hand deep inside his pocket, massaging his groin.
“I have copies of Gary’s pictures of you, Tash,” said Cox, smiling. “He’s a big fan. He particularly likes the videos of you that he took in the showers.”
“Gary?” said Natasha again, but Cox could hear that her voice had lost its confidence.
She smiled and looked at Natasha.
“Ah, there they are, the tears have arrived,” said Cox, as she saw Natasha’s eyes fill up as the fear hit her.
She looked at Gary.
“Don’t damage her too bad,” he said.
Cox nodded, knew that Black’s fantasies were about perfect bodies, smaller and weaker than his.
“Okay,” she agreed, and swung hard at Natasha, catching her on the temple and watching her stagger back against the bulkhead.
Cox watched her slump, then reached down for her work boot, steel-toe-capped, sitting beneath her desk, and she swung at Natasha again, and again, three times more, until the small girl collapsed unconscious to the floor and lay still.
She was out of breath when she stood up, dropping the boot to the floor and turning to Gary.
“You did well to get her up here,” said Cox.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” he said. “What are we going to do now?”
She stepped forward and touched his cheek.
“Go to the stores and get some masking tape, zip-ties, rags, and your kit bag. Also get some of that chemical cleaner. Bring it all up here now and we’ll get this sorted out.”
“What?” he said. “We need to get rid of her, it’s me they’ll come for.”
She slapped him, hard, leaving her hand on his cheek and rubbing it gently against his warm, red skin.
“I’ll look after you. We’ll buy some time first, report her missing on Monday. By then she’ll be long gone. I’ll take her somewhere for a while until it all calms down, they’ll look at you, but we know that, and if you do as I say, and we stick together, we’ll be fine. Within the month you can do anything you like with her, anything at all, as many times as you want. I’ll even let you keep some of the pictures and sketches for when she’s gone. Now go and get the stuff we need and let’s get her off the ship and into your car as quickly as possible.”
“They’ll find out,” he said, quietly.
“No, they won’t. Not if they have a better option.”
36
Wednesday, February 4 (early hours)
Dan almost stumbled from the house, doing all she could to resist clawing at the walls. Her skin was covered in sweat and her mind was churning so that she was worried she’d cease to function, cease to be able to reason at all.
“I need to get back, Marcus. I need to get back really soon.”
Marcus nodded, but then his eyes shot away to the stairs and Dan turned to look.
Jimmy Nash stepped out of the shadow of the stairwell to meet her.
“Dan,” he said, reaching for her hand and shaking it. “Thanks for coming.”
“Did I have a choice?” asked Dan.
Jimmy looked quickly at Marcus, his face becoming hard. “Of course you ’ad a choice,” he said, “wasn’t that made clear?”
“It was,” said Dan, now unsure why she’d said that at all. “I’m sorry.”
Jimmy smiled.
“Good. So I listened to what you said today, about them girls. Bad times. I thought about it a lot.”
He looked away from her, reached into a pocket, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
“Smoke?” he asked.
Dan shook her head.
“Good choice. I don’t much, either, these days, but the late nights sometimes make me partake.”
He lit the cigarette and dropped the pack back into his coat pocket. Then he inhaled, drew the smoke deep into his lungs, and stepped away from Dan, blowing it away from her into the stairwell.
“You left me with a dilemma, Dan,” he said, looking back at her as he took another drag and exhaled it through his nostrils. “You left me with an opportunity to help you and maybe help those girls, the ones like my Victoria, but everything in life comes at a risk. Do you understand?”
“I think I do,” said Dan. “But I wasn’t interested in anything else apart from finding out what he knows about the girls.”
“You ‘wasn’t interested,’” said Jimmy. “But that’s changed now, has it?”
Dan didn’t speak, but nor did she look away.
Marcus had disappeared into the background and she could no longer feel him on the landing with them, though she didn’t want to look.
“What’s happening in there can’t be allowed to happen to anyone,” said Dan. “It doesn’t make anything right, it just makes even more wrongs.”
Jimmy tossed his cigarette, only half smoked, into the stairwell and stepped toward Dan.
“Do you know what? My little girl hasn’t had a boyfriend since she was fifteen. I often thought that’s what I’d want, that any lad would have to be out of his fucking mind to try it with my daughter, but she’s in her twenties now, never had a fella, doesn’t go out, lost almost all her friends, because they’re all living normal lives. They’re all out partying, pissing it up, shagging boys that their dads’ll never know about. Doing all the things young girls are supposed to do. My little girl doesn’t, though, because of him.”
Jimmy pointed to the door.
“So you tell me why he shouldn’t suffer like she does. Tell me why that’s wrong.”
“Because you can’t make up your own laws, Jimmy. It just doesn’t work that way.”
He laughed and then seemed to listen as the sound vibrated and echoed around the stairwell, bouncing back at them as it disappeared into the shadows.
“And yet here I have,” he said, smiling again.
“You have for now,” said Dan.
“And what if I offered a room at my inn to your friend Chris Hamilton?” said Jimmy. “Would it still be wrong?”
“Yes,” said Dan. “It would.”
Jimmy smirked at her and Dan saw something in his look, deep in his eyes, a flicker of danger, a flicker of what she saw when she looked into Hamilton’s eyes.
“You know, you’ve just seen
what I can do, what I can have done. I didn’t just do it to help you with your case, Danielle, though it’s always nice to help the law, but I did it to show you exactly what I can do. Imagine what I might do to a young lad who went on the run with too much knowledge about things he should be quiet about.”
“Ryan?” said Dan, now thinking about the other rooms she’d passed as she headed to see William Knight. There were others, at least two on the left-hand side of the corridor, both locked and bolted just like Knight’s room.
“Imagine what I’d do if someone kept poking around into my affairs. Imagine where they might end up, and for how long. Imagine where their family might end up. That flat in there, maybe others like it, they’re no places for a pregnant woman.”
Dan stepped forward and swung a punch at Jimmy’s jaw.
Marcus seemed to materialize from nowhere, firmly grabbing her before the punch could land and pulling her arm back down to her side.
“Don’t, Dan,” he whispered into her ear, holding her tight as she fought against him.
“You’ve been warned, Danny,” said Jimmy, still smiling. “I’ve given you a gift, and now I’m giving you a warning. Understand?”
Throughout it all, he hadn’t even flinched, the smile not dropping from his face for even a second.
Dan spat at him, watching it land beneath his right eye.
Jimmy drew in a deep breath but left the spit where it was.
“You’re honest. I like that. You could do well in my organization, though I’m reliably informed that you wouldn’t be well suited from a moral standpoint.”
He grinned and shook his head.
“But I think you’ve got my message. I don’t think we’ll see each other again, or hear about each other’s activities.”
“We’ll see,” said Dan.
He laughed and pulled a handkerchief from his inside pocket to wipe his face.
“Say hello to your dad for me, won’t you? If it weren’t for him, you wouldn’t be walking out of here.”
Dan’s heart seemed to seize as he said the words. She felt hollow, weak.
“Fuck you,” she said, at a loss for anything else to say.
She watched him as he headed up the stairs and back into the shadows. But he stopped and turned back again.
