by Sibel Hodge
You shouldn’t have kept it all a secret from me, Jamie. I would’ve understood. I would’ve loved you anyway. I would’ve been there at your side. I would’ve had your back.
I shut my laptop. I didn’t need to read it again. Jamie’s words were etched permanently in my brain. I would need to hide the flash drive somewhere, though. The people who’d searched the house had probably been looking for it, too.
I walked into the kitchen on jellied legs, poured myself a brandy, and dropped onto a chair. I sipped slowly, thinking, wondering what the hell to do next, a paralysing chill gripping me.
The sun set behind the blinds and rose the next morning, and still my mind churned.
So now I knew the truth. Or most of it. Part of me wanted to curl into a ball and weep, or sleep and never wake up again. Never have to think about the awfulness of it all. It would be so easy. I could get some sleeping tablets from my GP. I could join Jamie. I’d never have to spend the rest of my life without him. But…
The suffocating, brutal grief that overwhelmed me was replaced by something else.
Anger.
A seething, writhing anger that eclipsed everything else. They’d stolen his childhood, and now they’d stolen his life to shut him up. My beautiful Jamie. How dare they? How fucking dare they?
I ignored the little voice in my head telling me how dangerous this would be. Ignored it when it told me to let the past stay in the past. That I might be next to befall some freak accident or staged suicide. Because I wasn’t going to let them get away with it. I was going to finish what Jamie had started. I was going to expose them.
Somehow.
His death could not be for nothing.
I left the house, forgetting to put my coat on. As I walked along the street, my breath coiled around me in dragon-like vapour. I shivered and walked faster. And when I got to Veralamium Park, I sat on a bench overlooking the spires of St Albans Cathedral. I got the pay-as-you-go Nokia from my bag and turned it on. It was so old and basic, it had no Internet or GPS function. I didn’t even know who Mitchell was, but if Jamie had trusted him with this, then I had to as well, so I dialled the only person I could.
‘It’s Maya.’
‘You read it?’
‘Yes.’
‘So now you know.’
‘I want to blow the lid off this.’ My voice sounded hard as steel. ‘I want them to pay for what they did.’
‘Have you thought about what you’d be getting into? Who these people are? You already know what they’re capable of.’
‘I don’t care! I can’t live with this and not do anything. I think about all the lives they’ve ruined…how can I let them get away with that? What if they’re still at it with other boys? Still abusing them? Murdering them? Somehow, I’m going to expose them.’ I blew out a furious breath. ‘I’m so bloody angry, Mitchell. Angry and sickened and devastated and repulsed and…so many things I can’t even begin to name.’
‘Believe me, I know exactly how you feel.’ His voice was calm but had an undercurrent of something deadly in it.
‘Then you understand I have to do something about it.’
‘But how far are you prepared to go?’
I paused. I bit my lip.
‘If they find out that you know, they will shut you down.’
‘Or shut me up?’
‘Same thing. So…what are you prepared to do about it? Because if this comes out, there’s no going back.’
I knew what he was saying. The message in his words, his voice, was perfectly clear.
Was I prepared to die?
‘There may be a way to expose them without revealing who you are or what you know,’ Mitchell said before I could answer. ‘I think we should meet. I’m sure you have a lot of questions, and you can decide where to go from here.’
‘I do. When?’
‘Can you come to London today?’
‘Yes. Just tell me where and when and I’ll be there.’
‘How about Hyde Park? At noon? I’ll meet you at the Diana Memorial Fountain.’
‘Okay.’
‘And Maya, they’re assuming Jamie’s secret died with him, otherwise they would’ve killed you already. But be careful. Watch out for people following you. Don’t talk about this in the house. Don’t talk about it on the landline or your own mobile. Only use the pay-as-you-go to phone me. And don’t tell anyone else.’ He hung up.
I didn’t realise it was sleeting and I was bone-numbingly cold until I got back home. I hurriedly pulled on jeans, a thick black jumper, my black parka, and boots. I added a black beanie hat over my head and wore sunglasses so my face was obscured. Black for mourning. Now I had a purpose, I felt the strength lift me up, ignite in my stomach, and spread through every fibre of my body.
Watch out, you fuckers. I’m coming to get you.
Chapter 26
We sat on a bench in Hyde Park, probably looking like any regular couple out enjoying a rare sunny day in February.
Mitchell had a canvas backpack at his feet, which he nodded towards. ‘I thought this might take a while, so I packed us some lunch.’
The thought of food hadn’t even entered my head. A heavy nauseous sensation pressed against my stomach lining. I had so many questions they were tripping over themselves on my tongue.
‘Why you?’ I asked. ‘Why did Jamie come to you? Are you a private investigator or something?’
He stared out at a family who were playing bat and ball on the grass in the distance. ‘Several reasons. I met Jamie about a year ago at a squadron reunion in Hereford.’
‘The reunion Lee organised?’
‘Yes.’
‘You were in the same regiment?’
‘No. I started army life in the paras, but I spent most of my career down H, in Special Forces.’
‘SAS?’ My eyes widened.
‘Yeah, 22 SAS to be precise. I was an A Squadron man for most of it.’
‘I thought people who were in the SAS weren’t meant to advertise that fact.’
‘Well, normally I wouldn’t. Because of the nature of what I did, it’s obviously something I prefer to stay secret, but you’re not just anyone, are you? This isn’t exactly a normal situation.’
‘So is your name really Mitchell?’
He gave me a wry smile.
‘Or is it that if you tell me, you’ll have to kill me?’ I laughed, but it wasn’t funny. ‘Maybe you’ll have to get in the queue now.’
‘It doesn’t matter what my name is. You just need to know I’m the good guy.’
I studied him for a moment. His face was inscrutable. ‘I hope so.’ I glanced down at my hands. ‘Anyway, go on. You were saying how you met Jamie.’
‘Well, like I said, I didn’t cross paths with Jamie in the military. It was later, at the reunion. Jamie had worked with Lee in 299 Signal Squadron, then Lee was later recruited into 264 SAS Signal Squadron.’
‘He never really spoke about his days in the army. It was so long ago by the time I met him. I knew he occasionally met up with some of the guys he served with, but he never said much about them.’
‘Anyway, Jamie found out then that I’d…I’d lost my son.’ Mitchell’s jaw clenched. ‘His name was Alex. He was seven years old and…he disappeared one day. It was 1985, and I was serving in Northern Ireland. My wife, Jo, couldn’t contact me.’ He leant forward, his elbows on his thighs, staring into the distance, a hard undercurrent to his voice. ‘I didn’t hear about it for two days. By the time I got special leave and came back, the police had found Alex’s body.’
‘Oh my God. I’m so sorry.’ I reached out my hand to touch his, a gesture of sympathy, but unsure if that was the right thing to do, I let my hand just hover in the air.
He turned to look at me, his blue eyes full of pain, but with something else in there, too. Something fiery and dark.
I pulled my hand away.
‘The last time Jo saw Alex, he was leaving the house to go to our local park. It was only two street
s away. We lived in a nice neighbourhood. At that time, you didn’t think about…those kinds of people living near you. Alex was tortured. Raped. And murdered. Dumped in a quiet country lane like a piece of rubbish.’
My hands flew to my cheeks and rested there a moment as his words stung my skin. And then I did touch his hand. Squeezed it. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Mitchell glanced away and slid his hand from mine. ‘He was obviously killed by a paedophile. But the police had no leads. No witnesses came forward. Forensic evidence wasn’t advanced then. Alex had been washed and dressed in new clothes. Cheap trousers and a T-shirt you could buy in any Woolworth’s at the time.’ Mitchell delivered the lines calmly, in control, but there was a painful edge to his voice that was heartbreaking to hear. ‘They never found who did it. I got involved myself. I spent hours knocking on doors, asking people who lived near the park and the lane where he was found if they’d seen or heard anything. But…’ He pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Alex had just seemed to vanish. And when he came back to us, no one had seen a thing.
‘Things hadn’t been going well with Jo and me for a long time before that. Being a regiment wife, well, it takes its toll on relationships. We had Alex too young, and we were already at a strained point in our marriage, which was probably more my fault than hers. But even if we could’ve worked through our marital difficulties at the time, there was no way we were going to get through the murder of our child.’
I blinked back my own tears and cupped my hands around my mouth.
‘She blamed me for not being there when it happened. I blamed her for not looking after him. I blamed myself for being away. Not being there to protect him. With so much blame and guilt and anger and sadness going around, we had no way to recover us from that.’ He opened the backpack, took out a flask of tea, and handed me two plastic mugs. He poured steaming milky liquid into them and took one himself, then he sipped slowly before returning the flask to the hamper.
I pressed my cold hands around the warm mug.
‘She never got over it, obviously. Eventually, we divorced. I threw myself into work as a way to forget, which worked for a long time. But then I started thinking about what I was doing for a living. Some of the things I had to do.’
‘You mean…killing people?’
He took another sip. ‘I mean, did it make it right that I was doing it in the name of Queen and country?’ He shook his head bitterly. ‘I couldn’t justify it to myself anymore. All I kept seeing in my head was Alex. And I thought about the innocent casualties of war—the kids, the women, the civilians. I didn’t want to be a part of it any longer.
‘When I left the SAS, I went to work for a friend who’d set up a private military company.’
‘Private military? What does that mean?’
‘A private military company is very similar to government security, regular military, or the police. They carry out risk assessments for companies and provide VIP close protection, especially in hostile or high-risk territories. They do surveillance, due diligence, and other investigative work, train military or private security forces, test defence systems or government installations, and provide cyber security. And some of the more ruthless ones carry out a lot of other questionable things that would never be listed on a company’s website.
‘We were officially in Iraq to support the reconstruction initiative for the Big Boys, people like Recon5, which is what I wanted to do to feel like I was doing my part to bring some positive change to the country after all the destruction. But it didn’t turn out like that. My company was providing private security for Recon5, who’d won a major government contract to rebuild infrastructure and provide services for the military, but all they did was scam the taxpayers.
‘They were supposed to provide safe cleaning and cooking water for the troops, but it was all contaminated because they weren’t spending the money on the water treatment plants that they were charging the government for. So those soldiers who didn’t get a bullet would come home with pathogens in their blood that they didn’t even know about.
‘Then they were serving food to the troops only at certain times, instead of providing twenty-four-hour service, because it was cheaper. But that meant the enemy knew when the troops would be out of action and all congregated in the same place, so the mess halls got attacked. They were also overcharging the government for everything, even work already completed.
‘The tents they provided to the military were mouldy, and soldiers were getting ill, but the Recon5 executives were staying in plush five-star hotels in Kuwait and driving round in fifty-thousand-dollar cars they didn’t even need that they were leasing for two hundred fifty thousand dollars at a time.
‘They brought new construction vehicles but didn’t have any equipment to fix them when they went wrong because they couldn’t charge for it. They didn’t even have basic things like oil filters or spare tyres. What they’d do is set fire to a brand-new vehicle, which cost thousands, then bill the government and make more profit.’
‘That’s unbelievable!’ I gasped. ‘That’s bloody fraud.’
‘It’s only the half of it. The list goes on and on. It was the hugest fraud, sanctioned by the government and paid for by the taxpayers, and they got away with it. All they were concerned with was making profits. They didn’t give a shit about the soldiers on the ground or the Iraqi people.
‘I made a lot of money doing it. More than I’ll ever need. But what we did and the ethics of what Recon5 and the government were doing in Iraq affected me. I couldn’t morally justify it anymore, so I resigned from the company. Of course, once I stopped working and it all settled down, I had time to think again, and Alex invaded every thought. I wondered what the hell I was doing with my life. Why wasn’t I doing something to get those paedophiles off the street? Alex’s life had to stand for something. So I became a paedophile hunter.’
‘A what?’ My forehead scrunched up, the blood draining from my face, my eyes wary and unblinking. ‘You mean…you catch them and then…what? You kill them? You’re a vigilante?’
He took a deep breath. ‘No, I don’t kill them. I’d like to, but after my career, I swore there would be no more killing.’
‘So, what do you do, then?’
‘I catch paedophiles. Not the VIP kind Jamie was involved with—the powerful public figures linked to the heart of the Establishment and beyond. The people I hunt are online predators. You wouldn’t believe how many of them are out there.’
‘So…God, I don’t…this is a lot to take in. How do you…’ I trailed off, not knowing what to ask. Not knowing if I wanted to know. ‘Did Jamie want you to kill those…’ I couldn’t call them people. There was nothing about his abusers that made them human. They were inhumane. Evil. Sick. Psychopaths. ‘Did he want you to kill those bastards?’
He glanced at me. Looked away. ‘Like I said, I don’t do that anymore. And anyway, if he’d wanted to, he could’ve killed them himself. He had combat skills.’
I chewed on my lip, glancing at a young mum pushing a small boy in a pushchair around the lake. He was bundled up in a red anorak and a fleecy bobble hat, one hand holding a toffee apple, one pointing with excited glee at the swans gliding across the water. ‘But what if…what if you ever found out who’d murdered Alex? What would you do then?’
A flash of raw hatred flickered over his face, but he ignored the question. ‘This wasn’t about finding them and killing them,’ Mitchell went on. ‘Jamie wanted justice, not revenge. He wanted them exposed and convicted. He wanted the truth to come out. And he knew what I did now. He thought maybe I could help him with some contacts in the police who would see this through and not cover it up because of who was involved.’
I was consumed with an incandescent rage for what those men did to Jamie and the others, and I wondered briefly whether I could do it. Get hold of a gun, blow their brains out. Torture them. Run them over in the car. They had killed. Wasn’t killing them a form of justice, too? How hard would it be? Ho
w easy? Could I live with myself? Would I get caught? Did I care?
I shook the thoughts away. Of course I couldn’t kill anyone, no matter how much I fantasised about it.
‘So how do you catch them, then?’
‘I pretend to be a young girl or boy in chat rooms or on social media. Then I interact with the paedophiles online until they want to meet me. I record everything they say. Every stroke of their keyboard. All the disgusting, sick words. All the evidence of grooming. Then I hand everything over to the police and let them deal with it. It’s a crime to befriend a child on the net or other means with the intention of abusing them. There are also new orders prohibiting adults from engaging in behaviour like sexual conversations with children online.’
‘And the police actually use your evidence to convict them?’
Mitchell nodded. ‘Preserved evidence is permissible to use.’
I was stunned, momentarily lost for words.
‘Most of the time, they lie through their teeth when they’re caught, denying they knew they were talking to an underage boy or girl. Deny the disgusting suggestions, the photos they send, the grooming, why they want to meet. They make ridiculous denials, but the evidence is always there. I never initiate contact with them online. I wait for them to come to me. I’m not trying to entrap them. They manage to do that very well themselves.’
‘I can understand why you’re doing it, but why not let the police deal with it?’ As soon as the question was out of my mouth, I knew the answer. Some of the police were involved in it. I took a sip of tea, hoping the warm liquid would settle my stomach.
