Dark Game

by Rachel Lynch

  On the first landing, the officers pushed doors open but found only empty rooms, until they burst into one and came face to face with Marko Popovic. He was holding a pistol against the head of a badly beaten woman who could barely stand.

  ‘Back off!’ Marko shouted.

  The Specialist Firearms Officer held his semi-automatic carbine steady as his colleague gave Marko one warning.

  Downstairs, Kelly heard the splintering of wood, loud bangs and voices as the response team secured the house. She had no idea if Marko had escaped via the roof she’d seen when she was in the garden, and was long gone, or if he had been caught in time.

  An ambulance arrived and Kelly assessed her wounds. Her body ached all over and she shivered as she realised that it could have been much worse. Gabriela was escorted out of the house, and Kelly spotted Phillips in one of the cars. They were listening to the command exchange between the armed response and their seniors.

  She heard a shout and her gut turned over as she recognised the command to lower a weapon. So Marko isn’t giving up, she thought.

  ‘PUT YOUR WEAPON DOWN AND STEP AWAY FROM THE WOMAN!’

  A final request to shoot came over the radio and Kelly closed her eyes.

  ‘WE WILL SHOOT! PUT YOUR WEAPON DOWN, SIR!’

  A single deafening shot penetrated the night, followed by silence.

  ‘Property secure.’

  For Kelly and the medics, this was their signal to go in. She and Phillips entered and got to work on processing the site for their undoubted mountain of paperwork they’d have to write later. Kelly went upstairs and found Teresa Joliffe being attended to, next to the lifeless body of Marko Popovic.

  ‘He cocked his weapon, ma’am.’ She’d guessed as much.

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘I’m all right. I want to see if the girl is OK. There was another girl too, I don’t know where she went.’

  ‘I think we’ve got several girls downstairs, ma’am. They were in rear annexes.’ He fired various codes into his radio and carried on his duties. Kelly went back downstairs. ‘I think you should get checked out by the medics,’ Phillips said.

  Kelly knew her wrist was broken, and her ribs screamed in agony on her right side, but she was alive.

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Still need to get you checked out. Come on.’

  ‘Where’s the girl?’ Kelly asked.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one who was in the kitchen.’

  ‘In an ambulance, being checked over.’

  They found Gabriela being treated for shock.

  ‘Is she OK?’ Kelly asked a medic.

  ‘Shaken up. Superficial. She’ll be fine.’

  Phillips helped her climb into the ambulance and she lay on the other bed, opposite Gabriela. As she did so, she heard shouting outside and recognised Curtis’s voice. She was glad she hadn’t killed him; he’d suffer more in prison. She remembered Curtis standing over Gabriela and couldn’t understand why this aspect of the evening had been so important to Marko; was it just to screw with her head? He could have been long gone. She couldn’t comprehend it and didn’t think she ever would.

  ‘You need to go to the hospital,’ the medic said. Kelly began to shake, and he rooted around in a bag and pulled out a chocolate bar. ‘You’re in shock.’

  As Kelly devoured the bar, her injuries began to throb. Her cheekbone stung and every joint felt as though it was on fire. Tomorrow will be worse, she thought. Phillips backed away as the ambulance made its way along the private road and on to Penrith.

  Two hours later, she discharged herself from the Penrith and Lakes Hospital with her wrist bandaged, and went home for a shower. She’d have to go back for a cast when the swelling went down.

  Her mother bombarded her with questions.

  ‘Mum, I’m OK! I need to get back to the office.’

  ‘What? Are you crazy? It’s almost nine o’clock at night!’

  ‘You know the score. I’ve got reports to write and probably several irate senior detectives wanting answers to some tricky questions. It’s only a broken wrist. Don’t wait up.’

  At Eden House, her team was stunned to see her. They’d made excellent headway and Kelly listened as they brought her up to speed. No one mentioned the fact that she’d made the decision to actively enter the residence on her own. Phillips called it a dreadful coincidence: no one could have possibly known what was in there. Their suspect, Marko Popovic, could have been at any one of his many addresses, and the suspects had given multiple addresses in a direct attempt to confuse police.

  And that was how it was written up.

  Chapter 60

  In a house in Leyton, a man watched the news on TV as he stuffed pork chow mein into his mouth with chopsticks.

  ‘Seven people have now been detained by police and one is confirmed dead in one of the biggest raids in UK police history connected to people-trafficking,’ the reporter said. ‘The international community has praised Cumbria Constabulary for their handling of the case and for cracking a global money-laundering ring. Two senior cashiers and a manager of the Onchan Island Bank on the Isle of Man have been arrested and charged with money-laundering offences across several different countries. The government have launched an investigation into how the group managed to keep the operation going despite new anti-money-laundering legislation.’

  ‘Shh!’ the man hissed at his wife, who’d come in to collect his bowl. She looked at the TV and rolled her eyes. She didn’t understand a word of it. Until a picture of Marko Popovic came onto the screen. Then she stopped what she was doing, and covered her mouth with her hand. She pointed at the screen.

  The man said something in his native tongue and his wife left the room.

  He went back to watching the news.

  ‘If found guilty, the gang could face life imprisonment. It is not yet clear how many people the gang successfully trafficked, but the police have released this statement.’ The newsreader looked intently into the camera and a video was played. Nedzad watched carefully, amused that Marko Popovic had finally got what was coming to him. It looked as though someone was needed to take over where Marko had left off, but he’d have to wait for a while until the dust settled. He had contacts in Manchester and Liverpool who all thought Marko Popovic was an egotist who took too many risks.

  He and Jovana had finally made their way to London after he’d managed to get a message to her in the hospital. It hadn’t been hard: he’d worked out where she was and waited outside the nearest toilet window. She was distraught to leave the boy, but they had no choice. She’d cried all the way to London. She still cried every day.

  He’d get their son back, he’d promised her.

  On the TV, a senior uniformed policeman made a statement outside a large red building in Penrith. The cameras flashed.

  ‘The investigation has brought to light several criminal allegations, including illegal trading of persons aged as young as one year old. We urge the public to come forward with any information that might lead to the rescue of such persons, as we have evidence to suggest that the trade has been going on for some time. There are also allegations of five counts of homicide being investigated. Special helplines have been set up for the public to contact us.’

  The officer read out the numbers and other ways of getting in touch, and the information travelled across the bottom of the TV screen. The story would be on a loop for days, possibly weeks, while they investigated every angle of the alleged crimes.

  Journalists screamed questions, but the police officer turned and went back inside the building.

  Chapter 61

  Kelly rolled over and smiled. Her broken wrist was still in a cast. It ached constantly after being smashed in three places. Two operations later, it was expected to make a full recovery.

  The hotel was quiet and understated, but well run. She deserved a break. They had three whole days to themselves, and they walked, ate and drank, and chatted about stuff that did
n’t matter and stuff that did.

  She’d said goodbye to Gabriela for the final time in Penrith with the girl’s future uncertain, but last week she’d received a letter telling her that she was home in Lodz with her mother and brother.

  Kelly had wanted to arrange for her to come back to the UK to go to art college, but Gabriela said she’d never leave home again. Her drawings, however, had been fundamental to the inquiry and, so far, thirty-two more people had been found living in servitude at addresses across Cumbria. Colin Day’s laptop – the one Gabriela had hidden in her room – together with that used by Tom Day in prison had made the case watertight.

  ‘What shall we do today?’ Kelly asked.

  ‘Last night you said you wanted to climb a mountain; were you a little drunk?’ replied Johnny.

  ‘I can climb a mountain in a cast, and no, of course I wasn’t drunk. You’ll just have to carry more.’ She smiled at him.

  ‘Where shall we go?’

  ‘Skiddaw. It’s got to be Skiddaw on a day like this, and it involves no scrambling.’

  It was a cool November day, but the sky was bright blue and the view from the oldest mountain in the National Park would be spectacular.

  ‘Deal.’ He high-fived her good hand.

  ‘I think I’ll need help dressing,’ she said.

  Epilogue

  In Manchester, Carl Bradley smiled to himself. The scoop was complete and the Daily Telegraph had offered him a job. He’d been there when the extent of Colin Day’s business affairs was announced and used as an example by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, the non-profit making investigative platform for global organised crime. It was the biggest case in Western Europe for quite some time. Colin Day, Barry Crawley and Harry Chase had been trading in desperate illegal travellers, charging them ludicrous amounts and either selling them on or using them for prostitution or slavery. The cash was funnelled through the tanning salons, as well as taken by speedboat from Workington to Douglas and on to the Onchan Island Bank. From these legitimate sources, with placement complete, it was then invested in countless other schemes purely designed to deceive and head off any interest: a process known as layering. Afterwards, the now clean money was integrated back into the monetary system by trading in luxury items and paying wages. Tomb Day, the watertight shell created by the genius of Tom Day, was at the centre of the mind-bogglingly complex scheme, and he’d almost got away with it. It had taken five weeks to crack the firewall in his computer, but it was all there. Darren Beckett’s compliance in revealing the whereabouts of Anna Cork’s body saw his term reduced to nine years; he wouldn’t last one.

  Carl had been asked to cover the trials for his new employer. When the attention had died down a little, he’d turned his attention to Lottie Davis.

  The DNA on her body had been matched to that of a fifty-one-year-old banking director from London. He’d used Snapchat to arrange to meet a twelve-year-old in a hotel room for sex. When he’d gone to the rendezvous, he’d been greeted by officers from the Met, who had been trying to close a paedophile ring for months.

  After the years of waiting, the news was bittersweet.

  * * *

  It was Kelly who introduced them after Carl had covered the trafficking case. It was a thank you for his meddling that had turned out to be very useful in the end. But there was no way she would allow him to meet with Jenny alone He was still a journalist after a story, after all.

  The details of the case were harrowing, not least because the banker denied the charge and they had to go to trial, despite the concrete forensic evidence. Jenny had to sit and listen to lawyers argue that the integrity of any evidence found on such a decomposed body would not stand up in court. In the end, it was payments to Colin Day’s bank account that clinched the guilty verdict. He’d paid ten thousand pounds for the girl.

  Carl brought a photographer and she clicked away, catching Kelly and Jenny in an embrace: it was a scoop and would look great on the front page. A photograph of the portrait that hung in Jenny’s living room would also be used.

  After Carl left, the two women sat for a long time in silence. Closure was a funny word; it meant to stop, to finish, to shut, to cease or conclude, but that wasn’t the case at all. But at least Jenny now had a name and a story, a chain of events that she could use to explain what had happened, and that was something.

  Kelly had names too.

  But she had yet to get her peace of mind back.

  Acknowledgements

  I would firstly like to thank my agent, Peter Buckman, for his never-ending encouragement and faith; also Louise Cullen and the team at Canelo for their passion and meticulous attention to detail. For their fascinating insight, Harry Chapfield, Cumbria Constabulary (ret'd), Inspector Paul Redfearn, London Met Police, and DI Rob Burns, Beds Police. I want to thank the Lemons: you know who you are, I love you. And finally Mike, Tilly and Freddie for being neglected at odd times of the day; I couldn't have done this without you.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by Canelo

  Canelo Digital Publishing Limited

  57 Shepherds Lane

  Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU

  United Kingdom

  Copyright © Rachel Lynch, 2018

  The moral right of Rachel Lynch to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781788630153

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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