by Jane Casey
While I wavered on the doorstep, events were moving fast across the road. At a nod from Vickers, the small team of uniformed officers lined up outside the front door. The one at the front shouted, ‘Police! Open the door!’, and then, without waiting for a response, swung a red battering ram at the door. It bent and bowed under the assault as the policeman hit it repeatedly, aiming for the hinges. At last it gave way and the first policeman pulled back, allowing the men who had been waiting behind him to charge in, yelling ‘Police!’ at the tops of their voices.
I wandered back down the path towards my front gate, wrapping my arms around myself, shivering a little despite the bright sunshine. Vickers and Blake stood outside, waiting. From inside the house, there were sounds of running feet and shouted orders, of doors crashing open. Then there was a pause. Someone rattled at one of the windows at the front, pushing it open, and called, ‘We’re having a bit of trouble getting one of the doors open, Sarge.’
‘Give it some welly,’ Blake called back.
More banging ensued. I dithered, then made up my mind and set off with decision across the road, heading for Vickers.
‘Inspector, there’s something you should know,’ I said, coming up behind him. ‘Danny has a younger brother –’
As I spoke, there was a shout from inside the house. ‘Someone get an ambulance!’
‘Wait here,’ Vickers said, and sprinted for the door, following Blake. I stood there, shifting from foot to foot, watching the front of the house to see if there were any clues to what was wrong. If anything has happened to Paul … I thought, and couldn’t finish the sentence.
It seemed an eternity before the ambulance crew arrived and rushed past me, directed by one of the policemen who had come to the door at the sound of the siren. As they went in, Blake shouldered his way out past them and came straight for me.
‘You knew about the brother, did you? Could you identify him?’
‘What’s happened?’ I whispered, fear closing my throat. ‘He’s not …’
‘Dead? No. Not yet, anyway. What does he look like?’
I swallowed, thinking. ‘Dark hair, brown eyes. He’s twelve, but he looks older.’
‘Build?’ Blake asked impatiently.
‘He’s big. Well, he’s obese.’ I felt bad for saying it.
He sighed. ‘That sounds about right, then. Twelve? Jesus. How do you get yourself in that kind of state in twelve years? That takes real dedication.’
‘He’s had a lot to deal with,’ I snapped, feeling protective of him. ‘I don’t think he likes himself very much.’
‘That’s pretty obvious. He’s tried to kill himself.’
‘How?’ I managed to ask.
One of the uniformed men who happened to be passing took it upon himself to answer. ‘Hanged himself off the door. Poor fucker. No wonder we couldn’t open it.’ He looked at Blake. ‘Here, we worked out why it didn’t work. He only stretched the washing line, didn’t he? It was one of those plastic-coated ones, and the knot he tied in it slipped. He was too heavy for it, so the rope was too long and his feet ended up touching the ground. Too fat to swing. My God, I think I’ve seen everything.’
‘Is he going to be OK?’ I asked, hating the policeman for the casual way he was talking about Paul.
The man shrugged. ‘Maybe. They’re working on him. He was out cold when we found him.’
There was a series of bumps from inside the house, and Blake said, ‘They’re bringing him out.’
‘Keep your end up, mate,’ one of the paramedics said as they edged out through the front door. Two policemen were helping them with the stretcher. With Paul. His face was covered with an oxygen mask, but there was no mistaking the bulk of his stomach, or the mop of hair at the top of the stretcher. One plump hand lolled down lifelessly from under the blanket.
‘Make an effort,’ came from behind me, where the policeman who’d spoken to me was leaning against his car, grinning.
‘Give us a hand,’ said one of the stretcher-bearers.
‘With my back? Not on your life. Do myself a permanent injury.’
‘He’s not a joke,’ I said quite fiercely to Blake, wanting him to tell them to shut up. ‘He’s not an animal, or something. That’s a child on that stretcher.’
Blake ignored me and I squeezed my hands into fists, frustrated.
The ambulance crew had got the stretcher down onto the path and let the wheels down. They hurried past where I was standing. Up close, Paul looked terrible. His skin was blue-tinged, and I wondered how long he had been there – and how long he would have been there if the police hadn’t broken in. What had Danny been thinking to leave him like that?
Blake went after them and leaned into the ambulance once they’d transferred him. He came back to me looking grim, but what he said was reassuring.
‘They say he’s been talking to them. He’s coming and going at the moment. They think he’ll be OK but they’re not hanging around here.’
As he spoke, the ambulance took off, lights and siren going.
Blake turned back to me. ‘So you don’t know Danny, but you do know Paul.’
I winced at his tone of voice. ‘Not well. I just spoke to him once. Anyway, you didn’t ask me about Paul.’
‘I didn’t know about Paul,’ Blake said softly.
I shrugged. ‘I met him yesterday for the first time, OK? I went over there –’ I hesitated, then went on, explaining about why I had wanted to talk to Danny, explaining that I’d thought he could tell me about Charlie. ‘Paul’s a lovely kid. Sweet-natured. And don’t underestimate him because he’s fat. He’s very bright. He knows more about computers and technology than either of us, I bet.’ It was important to me that Blake should realise Paul was a human being, not just a blob.
Blake was looking at me expressionlessly. ‘So you’ve never been in the house before yesterday.’
‘No.’
‘You just took it into your head to find out what happened to your brother.’
I nodded. ‘I suppose this whole thing with Jenny just stirred it all up again. I found myself thinking about what happened to him and wondering about it. You don’t think about it usually – day to day. You just live with the consequences, most of the time.’
Blake looked past me and I turned to see Vickers shambling out of the house, looking even more grey and dispirited than usual. He held up something in his right hand, something silver with tassels, and more than ever I felt as if I was dreaming, because what he was holding made no sense at all.
‘That’s my bag!’
It was the bag I had been carrying three nights before – the bag I had lost to the mystery mugger. I went straight over to Vickers and reached out for it. He held it away from me, and I was aware of Blake coming up behind me.
‘That’s mine,’ I repeated. ‘Where did you get it?’
Vickers looked tired. ‘It was in the lounge, Sarah. Where you left it.’
I shook my head. ‘No. You don’t understand, I lost this bag. I mean, I didn’t lose it. It was taken.’
‘Not another story,’ Blake said. ‘There’s always an answer for everything, isn’t there?’
‘It’s the truth,’ I said with dignity, addressing Vickers only. ‘Someone mugged me on Tuesday night. They pushed me over and took my bag. That’s why I haven’t been using my car – I didn’t have the keys. You’ve seen me walking around; you just gave me a lift. Why wouldn’t I drive to the hospital if I could?’
Vickers unzipped it and peered inside. I was overcome with a massively inappropriate urge to giggle. There was something incongruous about the grey man in the grey suit rooting through a silver leather handbag as if it was his own.
‘No keys,’ he announced finally, and suddenly I didn’t feel like laughing any more.
‘What? They must be in there. Did you check the inside pocket?’
Vickers looked at me reproachfully. ‘I tried there first. It’s where my wife keeps her keys too.’
‘May
I check for myself?’
He handed the bag over without saying anything else and I riffled through it, uncomfortably aware that both men were watching me. I ran my hand through the little bits of paper and receipts that had accumulated at the bottom of my handbag, trawling for the keys. I found an eye pencil and a stick of lip balm, a biro that had long since ceased to work and some paper clips, but no keys, and not much else. In the end, I had to admit defeat. ‘OK, but the keys were in there when it was stolen. There were other things too – my diary, some pictures.’ I was trying to think what else I had lost.
‘Come on,’ Vickers said, and stood back. ‘Come and have a look yourself.’ Blake started forward, moving to intercept me. ‘Guv, forensics, we can’t –’
‘She’s admitted being in the house already,’ Vickers said mildly. ‘I don’t think forensics will prove anything one way or another. But we won’t let her touch anything, just in case.’
Blake bit his lip, but he didn’t say anything else. He moved back to allow me through.
I stepped past him into the hallway, and looked around.
Nothing had changed since the previous day except for the damage the police had done in breaking down the door. Flakes of paint littered the worn carpet where the door had thudded against the wall. I smelled again the sweaty-socks odour I had noticed before, and something else, something sharper than that. Fear.
Unlike before, the door to the living room was ajar. ‘Is this where you found the bag?’ I asked. ‘Can I go in and look for myself?’
‘Go ahead,’ Vickers said. ‘It won’t take you long.’
I understood what he meant as soon as I pushed open the door. The smell of bodies that pervaded the house was stronger in here, rancid, and I gagged a little, trying to breathe shallowly through my mouth. The room was dim, with cheap blinds pulled down over the front window. Until Vickers hit the switch by the door, the only light was the sunshine leaking in around the edges of the flimsy blinds. I blinked at the sudden harshness of the bare bulb in the ceiling, before taking in the squalor that it revealed.
The room was practically empty. A double bed covered in a stained, dirty fitted sheet had its head against the opposite wall. The headboard was covered in grubby pale-green velour and looked as if it dated from the seventies. On one side of the bed a box of tissues stood on the floor, used tissues littered around it. There was a little pile of well-thumbed magazines on the other side – pornography, I realised, repelled. A thin, lumpy duvet had been thrown across the foot of the bed and dragged on the floor, which was carpeted in dark brown acrylic pile that glinted in the light and squeaked a little under my feet. The walls were covered in off-cream paper with a raised pearlescent pattern in it, a prim and proper wallpaper at odds with the room it decorated. A long dirty mark on one wall suggested that at one time something large had stood there, maybe a sofa.
I turned to Vickers. ‘But this is a three-bedroom house. Why were they using this as a bedroom when there were only two of them living here?’
Vickers didn’t respond directly, but guided me further into the room, so I could see what the door had previously blocked from view. A small, battered bookcase was the only other piece of furniture in the room, if you didn’t count a video camera mounted on a tripod as furniture. I looked at the camera, puzzled, and turned to Vickers for an explanation. Instead, he pointed at the bookcase.
‘Your bag was there, on the bottom shelf. See anything else you recognise?’
I stepped gingerly across the carpet, not wanting to think about what might be living in it or when it might last have been vacuumed. A chill ran through me at the sight of what was on top of the bookcase.
‘Those are my pictures. They were in my bag.’
Someone had arranged them against the wall, propping them up. They were small pictures, passport-photo sized. It seemed wrong to see them there. The two detectives came and looked over my shoulder as I pointed at them in turn. ‘Charlie. Charlie and me. Dad and me. Mum and Dad.’
My diary was lying face down, splayed open, and I reached out to pick it up, tutting at the crumpled pages. Blake put out a hand to stop me. ‘Don’t touch anything yet,’ he said quietly.
‘OK, well, that’s my diary.’ I looked closer. ‘And that’s my pen – oh!’
‘What?’ Vickers asked quickly.
‘Well, it’s just strange, that’s all. I thought I’d lost it. It must have been in my bag all along.’
‘When did you lose it?’
‘Months ago. I looked for it everywhere. It was my dad’s.’ The pen was silver, with his initials engraved along the barrel and a distinctive crosshatched pattern chased in the metal. ‘I thought I’d lost it in school. I tore the place apart looking for it. I can’t believe it was in my bag all along.’
The policemen didn’t make any comment, and I scanned the rest of the shelves, looking through a miscellany of random things – a stone with a hole in it; a worn leather thong with three beads threaded on it; the skull of a tiny animal, maybe a shrew. There were odd coins and other bits of rubbish too. I looked through the mess methodically, trying to see what else was hidden there without touching anything. The end of the fob on my keyring was sticking out from behind a propped-up postcard from Scotland, and I pointed it out to Vickers, who edged the postcard away with the tip of his pen and nodded when he’d seen the keys for himself. On one of the lower shelves I spotted a hairclip that I knew I hadn’t seen for at least six weeks and a cheap bracelet I’d worn to school and taken off halfway through the day, annoyed by the rattle and drag of it as I wrote on the board. ‘I definitely last had this bracelet in school,’ I said, turning to Vickers. ‘There’s no way it was in my bag. I left it on my desk in my classroom. How the hell did it end up here?’
‘That’s what we’d like to know,’ Vickers said quietly. ‘There seem to be a lot of things belonging to you here, considering you haven’t been in contact with the inhabitants of this house until yesterday, by your own account.’
‘I can’t explain it,’ I said, totally confused. ‘I don’t get it. What is this room?’
Blake beckoned me over to the video camera and pointed to the viewfinder. ‘Don’t touch anything, but have a look through there and tell me what you see.’
‘It’s focused on the bed.’ As the words left my mouth, something clicked in my mind. ‘Oh … do you mean that they were making videos here? Home-made porn? How gross.’ I was suddenly glad I hadn’t been allowed to touch anything. ‘And Paul must have been here while they were making them. Poor kid. I hope Danny didn’t let him see anything.’ I looked at Vickers. ‘But why is all my stuff in here? What’s going on?’
He sighed. ‘Sarah, we’re going to have to assume that you were involved in this to some extent.’
‘What?’ I couldn’t believe what he’d just said. ‘I told you, my bag was stolen! These are my things but I didn’t leave them here – I don’t know how they got here.’
Blake had gone to the door, where he had been having a muttered conversation with one of the policemen who were searching the house. He turned back. ‘Sir, can I have a word?’
‘Don’t touch anything,’ Vickers reiterated forcefully, and waited until I nodded before following Blake out of the room. A uniformed officer came and stood in the doorway, watching me. He didn’t speak and I didn’t either. I just stood there and looked at the spare, bleak room, feeling ill.
When they finally came back, I said, ‘What’s going on?’
The two men looked even grimmer than they had before. Vickers leaned against the wall, looking like his legs were too weak to hold him up, and let Blake do the talking.
‘We’ve just been upstairs, where the officers have discovered a large amount of home-made child pornography. In one of the bedrooms upstairs, there’s an advanced set-up – computers, high-speed broadband, customised video software, stacks of DVDs.’ He pointed at the camera. ‘That thing records straight onto disc. They’d film down here, then go upstairs and upl
oad it onto a host site. These things are pretty hard to trace. The people who run them are good at faking IP addresses, hacking into other people’s computers to use their details, so it’s hard for us to track back and find out who’s putting this shit out there.’
‘But why?’ I was starting to shake.
‘Money,’ Blake said briefly. ‘There’s a lot of cash in this business. If you’re coming up with good product, you can charge what you like. The same videos and images get swapped around all the time. The paedos get sick of seeing the same old kids and the same old rape and torture. Plenty of punters out there willing to pay to see fresh child abuse. The good suppliers will create it to order. You can commission them to make your fantasy come true. If you pay enough, you can even get the child to scream your name. Makes you feel like you’re actually there, not just watching on your computer.’
I flinched, hating the brutal tone he was using.
‘This is a professional set-up.’ Blake waved a hand at the room. ‘There’s nothing here to identify where the filming is taking place. This room has been cleaned out – nothing personal appears on camera. There’s just the bed and a blank bit of wall. Nothing for the police to go on if we do find these videos or images on the net. This room could be anywhere, pretty much. All we can do is pick up the customers, the idiots who use their own credit cards to pay for it.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Here? In this house? In the middle of a quiet little suburban cul-de-sac?’
Vickers spoke then, his voice quiet and flat, unemotional. ‘These things can go on without anyone knowing. It’s amazing what people don’t see if they don’t know what they’re supposed to be looking for. Look at Fred and Rose West. No one on Cromwell Street had the least idea what the Wests were doing, because they couldn’t even imagine that people could be so evil. Good people don’t think of these things. Evil people can’t think of anything else.’
