Her Cold Eyes

by Tony Black

  ‘Who told you I had any choice?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know how this works, Bob. In any line of policing that you show an aptitude for, you get promoted, except child trafficking – there you get your funding cut, suspended and ultimately booted out the door. And that’s if you play nice.’

  ‘What’s going on there, I mean, why do that?’

  ‘Because the tentacles reach all the way up, all the way to the very top of the pyramid.’

  Valentine put down his pint and watched the white foam descending inside the glass. Rickards was touching on just the points that had been occupying his own thoughts. ‘What did you find that upset them?’

  ‘Kids being pimped out, that would be the main thing. That’s hard enough to handle; you never get your mind around the six-year-old child prostitutes with scabies and cysts, or HIV.’ A strong undercurrent of resentment ran through his voice. ‘I’ve seen girls that age, on the game, passed around and addicted to class A drugs, servicing suited-up clients right under the noses of social services, who just do not want to know; that’s the killer – nobody wants to know.’

  ‘I’ve heard similar stories recently, from one of their own.’

  Rickards’ hard grey eyes wandered. ‘Jean Clark told me you’d called.’

  ‘I found her revelations difficult to take.’

  ‘You would, at first.’

  ‘Are you saying there’s worse to come?’

  ‘Jean comes from the care system, which is a paedophiles’ playground, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s who the care system’s covering for that you need to really worry about.’ A moment’s trepidation stalled his speech. ‘I need your assurance, Bob, that anything I tell you will remain confidential. Between you and me alone.’

  Rickards’ statement killed the conversation. The sound of late-afternoon traffic fell around them. A weak, amber-tinted sunlight forced its way through the window of the booth as they sat facing each other through the silence.

  Valentine tapped a blunt finger on the table. ‘I think you know that having my confidence goes without saying, Kev.’

  ‘We’re just two old-school coppers having a chat,’ he said, his voice brusque now. ‘But certain things have happened to me over the years that made me question everything.’

  ‘I understand. I’ve found myself questioning the very nature of reality since I took on this Abbie McGarvie case. I don’t know where I’d be without your old wingman.’

  ‘Ian Davis is a good bloke, he’s had it tough too.’

  ‘Do you mean his marriage?’

  Rickards stayed silent for a moment, then picked up his drink. He seemed to be choosing his response carefully. ‘I can’t speak for anyone else but I can speak for what happened to me when I got too close to Abbie McGarvie’s abusers.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘My boss brought me in, told me to close the door, and warned me that if I didn’t drop the case it was over for me.’

  ‘What was over?’

  ‘Everything. He threatened to break me, suspension, gross misconduct, sacking. None of it worked. I called in HR and do you know what happened? He repeated the lot, right in front of the HR chief. Nothing scared him, except me upsetting paedophiles in suits. Eventually, I went to corruption command and that’s where it got interesting, that’s when the real threats started.’

  ‘Real threats?’

  ‘I’d worked under my boss for more than seventeen years, he’d been to my daughter’s wedding, and do you know what that bastard did? He threatened to have my little granddaughter taken into care. She was three years old, Bob, could you imagine how I took that? I’ve seen first hand what happens to kids in care. I wasn’t going to let that happen.’

  Valentine watched the emotion welling in Rickards’ eyes and gave him a moment to compose himself. When enough time had passed for the DCI to continue his questioning he spoke again. ‘These paedophiles in suits, who are they?’

  ‘They’re a death cult.’ He swallowed, and tried to divert his gaze. ‘Psychopaths, a coven of evil. Does it matter what we call them? We all know who they are, they’re the ones we see every day, everywhere.’

  ‘Everywhere?’

  ‘They rule us, Bob. They’re the ones with all the power and they recruit from their own. Think about this, why wouldn’t they? They want psychopaths whose lineage has deleted the very parts of the mind that you and I hold most precious, most dear – the love we have for our children, and by extension our wider family, our fellow man.’

  ‘Wait a minute, you’re saying they prey on their own?’

  ‘They kill the empathy in their young by trauma control, that’s what the abuse is, a means of passing power and the means of maintaining it from one generation to another.’

  ‘But the other children,’ Valentine said, understanding, ‘the ones on the street and in the care system, that just makes them fodder for these rituals.’

  ‘Blood sacrifices are all part of it, the goal is to induct their own into their occult ways. They want our future rulers to have no empathy so that they can act cruelly without thought or conscience. At the top of our society, you need to understand, is a complete inversion of everything. Good is bad, ugly is beauty, pain is pleasure. Their genetics have deleted empathy for their fellow man, and their occult religion has created a system of cruelty that’s utterly unimaginable to the likes of you and me.’

  Valentine ran his fingers through his hair, grabbing a bunch at the base of his skull. His temples had started to throb, a low persistent pulsing echoing in his eardrums. He slumped back in his chair and tried to take in the information that Rickards had just dispensed, but it didn’t seem to register. His world was listing, all previously held beliefs swaying with the dark depths of a murky new reality.

  ‘I see this strikes a chord,’ said Rickards. ‘Of course it does, you’re a thinking man, Bob, but most don’t want to believe. Most want to hide, to turn on the telly and take that false reality as the gospel. Even when they know, when they sense that something isn’t right, that our world is awash with injustice and evil, they’d sooner believe all the propaganda that we’ve never had it so good. There’s whole industries dedicated to dumbing us down and numbing our senses to all of this. It takes a strong soul to rebel against the programming.’

  ‘I don’t have a choice any more. I have a young girl lying on a mortuary slab to consider.’

  ‘Think about this, then: just look at the world today and you know what I’m saying makes sense. Think about how nothing seems right, how everything is upside down, how the people we’re supposed to look up to simply repulse us. Look at our world, the endless wars, the state of the country we call home, the depravity and degeneracy that’s being pushed twenty-four seven. Trust your gut, Bob; you know it’s telling you that something’s up. Think about the way those in charge whitewash everything that contradicts their hellish narrative and ask yourself who is really behind the curtain?’

  ‘I know what you’re saying makes sense, it’s just that I really don’t want to believe it.’

  ‘You need to break free of the programming. There’s no sense in this world, everything is mad but you have to become mad too to understand the problems we’re facing. If you don’t face up to that, there’s no hope.’ Rickards reached forward and put his hands, palms down, on the table. ‘Everyone is against us; you have to come to terms with that fact right now. These people don’t even want us to have the possibility to think like this, and they will do anything they can to stop it. What was it Orwell said? The image of the future is a boot stamping on a human face for ever. No, it’s much worse than that. Think about what you’ve already seen and imagine how it might become. They hate us, they hate our children, and they would sacrifice all of us for what they believe. This is nothing less than the very definition of evil.’

  24

  At the pier-end sat a small lighthouse. It was disused, had long since stopped emitting any light.
Over the years the exterior of the lighthouse had been left to deteriorate, the white paint, now flaking, replaced with sprayed-on graffiti slogans. At its extreme point, facing the sea and adjacent to the harbour mouth of the port of Ayr, the lighthouse still held a prominent position, but it was a sad and fallen symbol. It was possible to buy postcards of the landmark, pictured in better days, but nobody in the town regarded the lighthouse as anything other than a remnant of lost glory. A sorry, sad image of decline and deracination.

  Valentine looked up at the thick swirls of concentric glass plates, where the magnified rays of light were once sent over the waves and rocks. He thought about the passage of time, about childhood. He’d once helped his daughter make a lighthouse for a school project, a pathetic cardboard and plasticine effort with a tiny torch bulb on top. He’d wired the rough model up to a battery and he smiled now to remember the look on Fiona’s face when she first saw the bulb light up. He felt another glow in his heart forming, just to recall the precious memory.

  ‘You’re miles away,’ said Rickards. ‘What’s on your mind?’

  Valentine smirked. ‘Would you believe, my own daughter?’

  ‘Yes, I would. It’s only natural. I went through the very same justification process. It’s alien to you to believe that there are people out there who will do these things. You think of your own family and how you feel about your daughters and you can’t imagine anyone ever feeling any differently towards their own offspring.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been going through. I’m struggling to understand that it’s possible to behave this way.’

  ‘Like I said, it’s natural. I felt like that. But, you have to get over it, Bob, you have to give yourself the freedom to believe that your outlook is only one way of seeing the world and there are others who don’t share that outlook. Their view is different, very different.’

  They set off round the base of the lighthouse, seeking the sheltered lee, out of the wind. The sound of the sea lapping at the rocks below was interspersed with the occasional spray of a larger breaker and, once in a while, a wave would breach the pier completely and splash loudly on the surface flags, calling attention to the sullen climate.

  ‘Run through how this works, then,’ said Valentine.

  ‘It’s a complex process, until you understand it, and then it becomes incredibly simplistic,’ Rickards told him. ‘The ultimate objective is to create something known as a control file.’

  ‘A control file?’

  ‘A blackmail file might be more apt. Think of a politician, in any country of the world, that a criminal cabal might seek to control, how would they go about achieving that end?’

  ‘You’ve already answered your question: blackmail, bribery.’

  ‘There’s those. But what if they don’t go for that, or what if it ceases to have the desired effect? That’s when a little more creativity is required. In the past, you might have noticed a disproportionate number of our politicians were homosexuals; that wasn’t a coincidence, it was because they were easy to blackmail back then. Today there’s a disproportionate number of paedophiles in power, because it’s the ultimate taboo, and the ultimate blackmailable transgression.’

  ‘You’re saying paedophiles are actually sought out and manoeuvred into positions of power because they are easy to blackmail?’

  ‘You must have heard of the dossier that was handed to the Tory government in 1984, and subsequently went missing.’

  ‘I saw it made the news cycle for quite some time.’

  ‘When a political paedophile scandal makes the news it tends to follow a familiar pattern of disinformation. The accusers are discredited and the perpetrators are excused, unless there’s a deceased paedophile who can be thrown under the bus to let the living ones carry on regardless.’

  ‘Sounds familiar.’

  ‘It’s an international issue, Bob. I’ve seen cases involving a former prime minister, a president of the United States and even a member of the royal family. I’ve also seen evidence that there’s been more than a hundred cases similar to the one in that dossier that have been scattered to the four winds.’

  ‘What have you seen in those files?’

  ‘You might call it a modus operandi. They locate a mark, an ambitious politician or diplomat they want to influence, and they target them. Sometimes it’s a simple honey trap, other times it’s a more complicated brownstoning set-up.’

  ‘Brownstoning?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Rickards said, ‘it’s a term they use. It involves exposing the mark to a hedonistic party lifestyle, getting them in bed with young women, or boys if that’s their thing, and gradually introducing younger and younger girls or boys until you have the mark in bed with a child. The event is filmed and there you have your control file. It’s documented evidence of wrongdoing used for the purpose of blackmail.’

  ‘And this is common practice?’

  ‘Bob, this is common practice at the milder end of the scale. Some of the information I’ve been exposed to would make this look like a mild misdemeanour. We’re talking about a Luciferian cabal who take their beliefs and practices very seriously. This is why we’re dealing with such high levels of secrecy; this is the reason for the shutdown of my investigation. Any one of these cases has the potential to fell giants. To be frank with you, Bob, and you must know this by now, there’s no way they’re going to let you get close to the truth.’

  ‘Going on what you’ve told me so far, I’m surprised I haven’t been pressured already.’

  ‘You haven’t got close enough yet. There’s only so much you can uncover in a week, but once you get close to that third rail, you’ll feel the heat. These occultists operate at the pinnacle of our society; it’s a criminal gang and how they draw in those outside the gang is through blackmail. Those that are brought in will display all the enthusiasms of the convert, because it’s in their interest to.

  ‘And those that don’t?’

  ‘They’re not given a choice. They either join and progress, or they die.’

  ‘Killed?’ Valentine asked, already knowing the answer.

  ‘Of course. This is standard operating practice in all criminal fraternities, you must know that.’

  ‘I’ve heard of drug gangs demanding new recruits carry out a murder to show their loyalty.’

  ‘The very same thing, though in this instance the recruits won’t be asked to tattoo a teardrop beneath their eye. This criminal gang guards its privacy fiercely; if they were exposed then the fallout would be felt in every area of our society.’

  A low gust, a westerly, blew around the base of the lighthouse, bringing a sandy effluvium whipping at Valentine’s shoes. For a moment he watched the miniature sandstorm swirling, until it finally settled in a sloping, granular buttress against the pier wall. A rusty Pepsi can was dislodged from its hiding place in the next burst of wind and started to rattle along the concrete path. The sound, sharp and jangling, was an outrage the detective couldn’t handle and he pointed back towards the town.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

  ‘It’s getting a bit blowy, I suppose.’

  The two men walked silently until the end of the pier, ducking the threat of the hovering gulls overhead. The darkening sky was descending, like a low smoke haze that threatened to engulf them completely. There would be a greyer, dimmer sequence of events to unfold in the heavens, thought Valentine, as he withdrew his gaze to the ground beneath him.

  ‘Tell me more,’ he said, bitterly.

  ‘What would you like to know?’

  ‘It’s hard to say that I’d like to know any of this really.’

  ‘I understand that, too.’

  ‘But given I still have unfettered access to this investigation, I need to be able to continue digging while I can.’

  ‘Has any of what I’ve told you rang any bells – with your investigation, I mean?’

  Valentine peered closely. ‘Some.’

  ‘I can get into specifics, make assessmen
ts, if you like. But, I’m not sure how you’d feel about exposing the actual case files of an ongoing investigation to a cop who’s been kicked off the force.’

  ‘This case has stretched my moral fibre to just about snapping point. I wouldn’t rule anything out, if I don’t get the result I want.’

  Rickards hesitated. ‘Well, the offer stands. But in the meantime, why don’t you just hit me with anything that’s causing you particular concern.’

  Valentine gathered his thoughts before he spoke. ‘There is something. It bothered me right from the start and I haven’t been able to come up with any explanation for it whatsoever. Even listening to you today, there’s nothing in what you’ve said that hints at reasoning for it.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘When we found the girl, Abbie, she was naked, all except for a pair of tennis shoes on her feet. The shoes had clearly been put on in the normal fashion – they were laced up, not rushed into, or just thrown on.’

  ‘This struck you as strange, right?’

  ‘Yes. Like, she’d been given a get-out, or a chance to escape by her attacker, but why would anyone do that? There’s no reason I can comprehend.’

  Rickards turned to the sky, and his face became conscience-stricken. There seemed to be a thought process forming in him, a conflicted set of emotions vying for prominence with each other. ‘This could be worse than I thought.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Valentine.

  ‘Some cases, like the ones I detailed to you earlier, are simple enough to untangle because they have a clear motive. But, this is different.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Bob, I don’t think you’re dealing with a straightforward case of occult abuse, or a control file blackmailing. I think you’re dealing with something bigger than that, if my understanding of what you’ve just told me is correct.’

  ‘And this is based on the tennis shoes?’

  ‘What you’ve described is a situation I’ve never actually come across before, but it’s something I’ve heard of. You won’t be aware of a phenomenon known as the most dangerous game.’