Girls on Film: (DI Angus Henderson 7)

by Iain Cameron

  ‘No, I’m on a course of antibiotics after a suspect cut me with a rusty knife. Anyway, I don’t mind drinking any non-alcoholic drink they can offer. I’ve done it often enough.’

  Neal’s old DI in Manchester was suspicious of anyone who didn’t drink, and gauged an officer’s ability to carry out work, how reliable they would be and those who would have his back, on their capacity for booze. As a result, he was surrounded with a cadre of large fat men who could sink four pints of beer at lunchtime and not fall asleep in the afternoon. Those who were slim, a non-drinker or a woman, and God-help anyone who was gay, didn’t get a look in.

  The door opened and to her relief Scanlon was wearing a stylish Berghaus jacket, as many of the young Turks in his line of work around her old manor would swan around in tasteless tracksuits and ‘look at me’ yellow and orange jackets.

  The Battle of Trafalgar had a narrow frontage but like the Doctor’s Tardis, it felt spacious inside, perhaps the paucity of early evening drinkers adding to the effect. They took a seat at the back, beside a door leading outside to a beer garden. Its position, shielded by the pub itself and the houses opposite, she imagined would turn into a suntrap in summer, evidenced by the tables and the number of shrubs growing against the wall. Neal walked to the bar for drinks.

  She was renting a flat in Lower Rock Gardens in Brighton while trying to decide where to live. She liked Brighton and wanted to stay there. This was a change of heart, as at one time, she believed she would never leave Manchester. However, unlike the seaside resorts she knew on the Yorkshire coast, such as Bridlington and Scarborough, the refuge of the elderly and dodgy retired businessmen, Brighton felt like a vibrant town on the one hand, and a young, lively holiday resort on the other. Although she realised her opinion might change once she’d experienced the crowds who, she’d been told, descended here in their thousands in the summer and on bank holidays, clogging roads, filling pubs and making any journey along pavements exasperating.

  She returned to the table with the drinks: double whisky and water for Scanlon, a gin and tonic for her and a Diet Coke for Sunderam. She sat down.

  ‘Cheers,’ the druggie said lifting his glass. She noticed a slight tremble in his hand, more likely the result of a bender the night before than any fear he had of the two detectives sitting opposite. She didn’t think Scanlon was wary of being seen talking to two cops, as Neal was a new face in town and Sunderam looked too young to be a cop.

  ‘I needed that,’ he said, depositing a half-empty glass on the table with a thump.

  ‘Nick, we’re investigating the murder of Liam McKinney.’

  She looked at his face and it registered some movement. He knew McKinney, so any subsequent attempt to deny it would be met with stoic resistance from her.

  ‘You know who he is?’ she asked, testing the water.

  ‘Maybe I’ve heard the name, you know, but nothing more. I don’t move in those circles anymore.’

  He reached for his glass but Neal’s hand snaked out and grabbed his wrist. ‘Don’t fuck with us, Nick. We know you work for Chris Hooper, but that’s not why we’re here. Liam McKinney worked for Charlie McQueen, rivals of Hooper and I know you guys talk. Give us a flavour of what you’ve been yakking about.’

  She removed her hand and he lifted his glass, this time sipping it like a whisky connoisseur. ‘You folks are only investigating Liam McKinney’s murder?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Nothing more?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘You’re not interested in Chris Hooper or any of his stuff?’

  She shook her head.

  Scanlon smiled for the first time and she saw the yellow and rotting teeth of a regular user. The people who succeeded in the drugs business were those who didn’t slip their mitts into the merchandise. Doing so not only cost them money, consuming product they could sell, but chances were they would be out of their heads when they did their dealing and it could lead to mistakes.

  They could also be careless with their stash, the main dealers in essence had access to an unlimited supply of gear. With such temptation lying around, it was easy for a sloppy addict to inject an overdose, imbibe too pure a product or do something foolish like steal money or make deals with rivals. People like that were usually found floating in a river or with a bullet in their head, just like Liam McKinney.

  ‘It’s not good to speak ill of the dead,’ Scanlon said, the wisp of a grin on his face, ‘but if I’m being honest, McKinney was an aggressive Irish shite. He bullied the guys working for him and beat up addicts who messed him around or owed him money. He threatened me with a knife once when he found me talking to one of his dealers. I was only saved from being slashed or stabbed when one of my mates turned up.’

  ‘Did McKinney fall out with McQueen?’

  Scanlon lifted his empty whisky glass and waggled it from side to side.

  ‘I’ll buy you another when you answer my question,’ Neal said.

  ‘Fair enough.’ He put the glass down and stared at the wall for a few moments. ‘As I said, McKinney was an aggressive little toad and always carried a knife. It didn’t take much for him to produce it, you know what I’m saying?’

  She nodded. ‘Carry on.’

  ‘He used his knife on somebody, a friend of McQueen’s by all accounts, and Charlie didn’t like it. The rest is history, as they say.’

  ‘Who’s this friend?’

  ‘You’re asking a different question. How about that drink?’

  She went to the bar again, but only for Scanlon’s drink, as she didn’t want any more and Sunderam had barely touched his.

  She put the glass down and retook her seat. ‘It’s the last you’re getting from us, so this time I want some answers.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he said lifting the glass to his lips.

  ‘I’ll ask you the same question I asked before. Who did McKinney use his knife on?’

  ‘I don’t know his name, some guy McQueen was friendly with is all I know.’

  ‘I was conned into buying you that drink, I thought you knew his name. You’re not holding out on us, Nick, are you?’

  ‘Me? No way. It’s all I heard.’

  ‘My, it was worth waiting for. What about his killers? Who killed him?’

  ‘I’m told they brought in an out-of-town crew. Two shooters came down to Brighton from London.’

  ‘Their names?’

  He shook his head.

  The detectives left the Battle of Trafalgar five minutes later and walked back to the pool car.

  ‘I’m not sure we learned much from him,’ Deepak Sunderam said. ‘I think his head’s too screwed up with dope.’

  ‘You’re right there, but I think we can put some meat on the bones. We didn’t know why McKinney was killed, but if we believe what Scanlon told us, we do now. We also didn’t know who killed him and, again if we trust Scanlon, we sort of do now.’

  ‘Trouble is, we don’t know how reliable his recollection is.’

  ‘I think the whisky oiled his brain and he told us all he knew. I agree it’s only the word of one man but cases like this are jigsaws. It’s not often we’re given the outer edges so we can see the scale and extent of the investigation, but random pieces scattered across the middle. Our job is to continue to collect as many of them as it takes to make a picture we recognise.’

  ‘Very allegorical. I like it.’

  ‘It’s funny though, we start off looking at the stabbing of a Newhaven businessman, done by a mugger he says, and days later, we find a drug dealer murdered for knifing a friend of Charlie McQueen. Am I making connections where there aren’t any, or is Ted Mathieson the key to this whole case?’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Henderson walked away from the Interview Suite, DS Walters alongside him. The naming of the second murder victim, Elena Iliesc, lifted his mood and that of everyone else working on the investigation.

  Searching through the photographs at Longhurst Studios might have been considered by s
ome a mind-numbing exercise, but the work yielded the pictures of their latest victim, allowing them to make the connection between her and Cindy Longhurst. They now believed both victims were in some way connected to human trafficking.

  If Rebecca Gregson at the National Crime Agency couldn’t share the information she had with him, Henderson had to develop some of his own. What he needed was a name, or several names, of the main traffickers in the Sussex area; in particular, those operating close to the geographic areas where the bodies were found.

  Unlike the drugs business where the names of the key players were often known to the police, human traffickers were secretive and unfamiliar. The ‘goods’ they traded couldn’t be concealed so easily as a kilo of heroin, and discovering the place where the victims were housed or working would give the game away.

  These last few days, they’d interviewed several workers from human trafficking charities, government-funded agencies and those involved in Sussex Police, in a bid to try and understand the situation in the region. It felt like opening a Pandora’s box of crime. He had no idea how much was going on and originally believed it to be limited to the vegetable fields of East Anglia and large textile companies in the Midlands and Yorkshire. In the Sussex area, he now knew, human slaves were suspected of being involved in such activities as cannabis cultivation, office cleaning, car washing and prostitution.

  Many of the women the charity workers assisted were from Vietnam and China, but one told them the story of a Hungarian girl who’d been kidnapped on her way home from work. Like Elena, she had also come from a poor background and lived in a rural area. She’d been taken to the UK in a minibus, her head full of threats made by the kidnappers if she opened her mouth and her body woozy from some drug slipped into her drink as they approached the border crossing.

  She’d been kept in a house the charity worker believed to be near the seafront in Brighton and forced to satisfy the sexual needs of between ten to fifteen men per day. One night, when the guard drank himself into a stupor, she stole the keys to the front door, manned and locked 24/7 except when admitting a punter. When she opened the door, she was surprised to find the brothel didn’t empty of the twelve girls in the large town house. Many were too frightened of what the gang would do to their families back home.

  ‘Some of the stories we heard in there,’ Walters said, jerking her thumb in the direction of the Interview Suite, ‘would take your breath away.’

  ‘The more I deal with evil,’ Henderson said, ‘the more I believe there is a breed of men, as it’s predominately men, who can set all feelings of empathy and sympathy for their victims aside in the pursuit of money and power.’

  ‘Do you think they’re born evil and behave so for most of the time?’

  ‘Whether they’re born or made is debated endlessly in psychology circles, but as to how they behave, I think some of them can turn it off and on. In some of the cases we’ve looked at, the guys involved were married with kids. Did they fake it and pretend to love their wives and children, while at the same time offering no sympathy whatsoever for the women they’d locked up and were abusing in their brothels?’

  ‘We’ll never find out until we grab some of those animals ourselves.’

  They stopped outside Henderson’s office. ‘I’d like an update this afternoon about the database search for information on Elena.’

  ‘No problem, I’ll talk to our Indexers.’

  ‘Let’s see what we’ve got at,’ he looked at his watch, ‘four. Okay?’

  ‘Will do, catch you later.’

  After the last interview, Henderson had planned to walk over to the staff restaurant and buy a late lunch. Like Walters, having heard what a charity worker had to say about the conditions in one brothel, it not only took his breath away, but his appetite too.

  He sat down but before starting work on anything new his phone rang.

  ‘Henderson.’

  ‘Ted Mathieson here. Do you know what your fucking detectives are doing? Upsetting all my bloody staff, is what.’

  ‘Whoa, hold on a minute, Ted. Where are you?’

  ‘At work in Newhaven. Why?’

  ‘When did you get out of hospital?’

  ‘Tuesday.’

  ‘What are you doing in there at work? You should be convalescing. Stab wounds like yours take weeks to heal.’

  ‘How can I convalesce with so much going on here?’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve got people who can handle it for you.’

  ‘I thought so too until I saw this.’

  ‘Going back to your opening statement, something about my detectives.’

  ‘About half an hour ago, two of your detectives, Neal and Young, came in here and started asking questions about drug shipments and the murder of Liam McKinney, two things I know bugger all about.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They accused me of orchestrating McKinney’s death in retaliation for him stabbing me. I don’t know where they got the information from, a drug dealer so they say, but it was a bloody mugger who stabbed me. I don’t know who Liam McKinney is, and I had nothing to do with his murder.’

  ‘In the hospital it sounded like you wanted to take revenge on your attacker. Perhaps Liam McKinney is that man.’

  ‘Yeah, if you put two and two together and make five. I told you at the hospital, it was just a figure of speech. I had no intention of seeking revenge on anyone and I don’t know if this dead guy is the person who attacked me or not. How could I attack someone I don’t know?’

  Henderson could hear that the injury Mathieson suffered had not softened his crusty exterior, and knew he would not budge from his exaggerated pleas of innocence. Instead, he asked, ‘Where are the detectives now?’

  ‘This is the problem. They said they wanted to take a look around and I thought what’s the harm, but they’re upsetting the boys down in the loading bay and keeping them off their work.’

  ‘I’ll call Detective Sergeant Neal, and if she hasn’t a good reason for doing what she’s doing, I’ll instruct her to come back to the office. How does that sound?’

  ‘You do that and– agh!’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I moved a bit too fast in my seat and this bloody wound gave me a jolt. I’m fine. Okay, so you’ll move them out. Job done. I would say now, ‘Be seeing you’ but I hope I bloody won’t.’

  After putting the phone down to Mathieson, Henderson called Neal.

  ‘Are you still at Mathieson’s?’

  ‘Yes sir, I am. I have reason to suspect Ted Mathieson is complicit in the importation of Class A drugs.’

  ‘What evidence do you have?’

  ‘The statement given to myself and DC Sunderam by a Brighton drug dealer, Nick Scanlon.’

  ‘I’ve read the statement, Vicky, and it says nothing about Ted Mathieson. It’s also common practice when we obtain the word of a nark, we try and obtain some corroboration of their story and then apply for a search warrant. You’ve gone stomping in there with your boots and all guns blazing. I’d be more inclined to overlook your cavalier approach if you’d discovered anything new, but the absence of a phone call into this office suggests otherwise.’

  ‘Everything looks normal with the exception of a locked strong box in the loading bay for which Ted Mathieson has the only key. I’m sure it’s where he keeps the drugs. If I could just get the key to open it and–’

  ‘It’s not going to happen without more evidence and a search warrant. I want you and whoever’s with you to terminate what you’re doing and return to the office at once.’

  ‘But, sir–’

  ‘No buts, DS Neal. You don’t have grounds for what you’re doing and you’re upsetting Ted Mathieson, who, as far as we know, is guilty of possessing nothing more than a bad temper. Back here. Now.’

  Henderson dropped the handset into its cradle, resisting the temptation to slam it down. On listening to Mathieson, he believed he’d given DS Neal too much rope and the impetuous sergeant h
ad choked on it. On thinking through the incident, he realised it was a mistake often made by more experienced officers. When their enthusiasm for nabbing a seemingly obvious criminal encouraged them to ignore the policies and procedures designed to protect the innocent.

  It was an error of judgement nevertheless, and he would reprimand her for it. This didn’t mean Ted Mathieson would be left alone since Henderson didn’t believe the company business owner had been mugged at Devil’s Dyke. A mugger would have taken something, like his phone or car, and the stabbing would only happen if the victim had attacked his assailant.

  Henderson noticed Mathieson’s phone when he first went to see him, a crack in the screen and the distinctive blue and white Brighton and Hove Albion bumper. He still had the same phone when the DI went to see him at the Belvedere Hospital.

  In DS Neal’s interview with Nick Scanlon, he said he believed Charlie McQueen was behind the murder of Liam McKinney because the Irishman had stabbed an acquaintance of his. It was too much of a coincidence to ignore. The DI believed it was McKinney who met and stuck a knife into Ted Mathieson at Devil’s Dyke.

  His supposition still didn’t explain what was going on between Mathieson and McQueen’s organisation, but if it was Mathieson’s stabbing that got McKinney killed, it had to be something big and important. Scanlon told DS Neal that McKinney had become something of a loose cannon, a view corroborated by DI Hobbs, but in Henderson’s view this didn’t sound like sufficient justification for the action he took.

  Mathieson owned a fleet of lorries which criss-crossed East and West Europe every day. The business card found at McQueen’s house and Scanlon’s statement connected Mathieson to Charlie McQueen, but did this mean Mathieson was importing drugs or was he simply a user of McQueen’s products? Mathieson also had connections to Cindy Longhurst.

  He was about to pick up the phone and talk to Hobbs again when DC Sally Graham walked in carrying her laptop.

  ‘Can I interrupt, sir?’

  ‘You can. What’s on your mind?’