Cleaver Square

by Sean Campbell

  Morton waved a hand half-heartedly. 'Over here.'

  'For you. sir.' He handed Morton an envelope, and disappeared.

  Ayala looked over curiously. 'What have you got?'

  Morton tore open the envelope, not bothering to use a letter opener. He upended it, and two A4 pages fell out.

  'Analysis on the fibres found on Tina's body. Very odd. The fibres were all carpet,' Morton announced.

  'Carpet? Why'd they bother telling you about that?'

  'It's not just one kind of carpet. They found dozens of different samples.'

  Ayala screwed up his face as he fought to process what that meant. 'She was kept in a carpet shop?'

  'Don't be daft. You don't keep someone captive in the home ware and furnishings department at John Lewis. I'm thinking sound studio. You know, a home one. Carpet can be used as cheap soundproofing,' Morton said.

  'Which makes it ideal to keep someone in, if you need to keep them quiet,' Ayala said.

  'I'm not sure this is going to give us much to go on in terms of identifying Tina's abductor. If we could get a warrant, then we could search all properties owned by the Bakowskis... But that's a big ask. If we do get in, then we'll look for the carpet off cuts as solid circumstantial evidence. Ayala, get yourself down to a few big carpet stores. The forensic analysis showed twenty-two different carpet samples, so the shops might remember a bulk buyer of samples.'

  'You cannot be serious. Do you have any idea how many carpet shops there are in Greater London? The carpet could be from any one of them or a combination of them, or none at all if our perp bought online,' Ayala said.

  'It's a long shot, but we've got to try.'

  CHAPTER 41: DIGITAL DOCUMENTATION

  While Ayala went on a wild goose chase looking for carpets, Morton was free to do some old-fashioned detective work. Morton knew that Charlie was switched either immediately before joining the Lovejoy household or soon after.

  Poor Charlie had suffered extensively in his twelve short years. He'd lost his parents as a toddler, and then lost his adopted parents, the Grants, in a house fire shortly before Christmas. After that, he had been murdered by persons unknown.

  Charlie's impostor had taken over Charlie's identity around the time of his death, and had moved to the Lattimer residence in Charlie's place during early January. From that, Morton had a fairly firm timeline for the switchover. The body was found in the Marshes on January fifth, and had been in the ground for at least a few weeks, which meant that the real Charlie had been killed in early to mid December, right around the time that Charlie had moved into the custody of the Lovejoys.

  Morton decided to pay Children's Services a visit to investigate the children in the Lovejoys' care. Unfortunately, Children's Services was a fractured organisation, so Morton could not simply talk to one contact, but had to investigate with multiple authorities. Instead of being run as a national service, it was federated at the local authority level. They shared a common database, but every London local authority was run autonomously.

  Working on the principle that the most recent local authority to have dealt with Charlie would be most likely to yield evidence, Morton headed for the offices of the Lambeth Council department responsible for Children's Services.

  An eighties concrete monolith a few blocks south of Waterloo Station accommodated all of Lambeth Council's various departments. After bypassing security Morton was met by a winding labyrinth of narrow corridors. Third left, second right, straight ahead, Morton recalled the instructions from the front desk.

  Behind the clean front office, the landscape changed immediately. Filing cabinets appeared to have been flung along the corridors at random. Some were waist-high, others to Morton's chest. A harried secretary knelt nearby, vainly trying to stuff a thick brown folder into an already overstuffed drawer. If that filing cabinet were indicative of the rest, Morton calculated there to be upwards of a million pages locked away in the main corridor alone.

  He reached the correct office without hindrance, where a piece of paper was taped to the door with 'Looked After Children Service' written in bold red pen.

  At the first knock, a woman's voice invited him in. Inside the room, an elderly lady sat in a wheeled office chair facing away from the door, staring intently at an antique CRT monitor that dominated her desk.

  Morton cleared his throat, and the woman spun around on her chair.

  'Hi, I'm Detective Chief Inspector Morton. And you are...?'

  'Edith Faulkner-Wellington. How can I help you, officer?'

  'I hope so. I'm looking into the death of a child who was in your care–'

  'Which one?' Edith cut him off mid-sentence.

  Morton almost smiled. The old lady wasn't one for chat-chat. 'Charles Anthony Matthews,' he answered.

  'Hmm. It doesn't ring a bell. Let me check my notes.' Edith withdrew a ledger from the top drawer of a filing cabinet, a ledger which Morton soon realised was an index to her filing system.

  She pursed her lips as she scanned the ledger, running a bony finger down its length, 'Cabinet 22, third drawer. Come on then, young man.'

  Morton held the door aside with a grin, trying to remember the last time he'd been called 'young man'. She led him down the corridor, away from the way he had come in, until they reached a corner room which sported another handwritten sign labelling it as 'Document Repository A'.

  A thin layer of dust covered the top of most of the cabinets, but cabinet 22 was much cleaner, as if it saw more use than some of the others. After a moment's fishing inside the third drawer down, Edith pulled out a thin file.

  'Here we go, Charles Anthony Matthews. Born 23 April 2000 to Jacqueline and Eric Matthews. He went into care at three, and then lost his adoptive parents. Poor lad. Aha, here's how we got him. He's an ex-T.'

  'Ex-T?'

  'Ex-trauma. London has many small departments like mine, but children touched by severe trauma spend time with one of a very small pool of specialist foster homes. The Lovejoys, who Charlie spent a month with at the end of last year, deal with about a hundred such cases a year.'

  'So, how did he come to you?'

  'I'd have to check the digital file. This is just a summary sheet. Come on, back down the hall. Chop-chop!' Edith spun on her heel and led the way back to her office once more.

  By the time Edith's computer system had been booted up, Morton and Edith were already on first-name terms, and Morton learnt that Edith's late husband had been a policeman.

  'So that's when I said to him, "Barty, pull over!" and he says, "No, it's a jumper!" I don't know how he got into the police. I hope standards are higher these days.'

  'Edith, I'm sure Barty was a fine cop back in his day. He wouldn't have lasted 'til retirement if he wasn't,' Morton said.

  'True enough. It looks like your file has loaded. This look like the right young man?'

  On-screen, a picture of the faux-Charlie appeared, along with a copy of all the details from the print file.

  'Hmm, that's odd. Can you print that for me?'

  'Yep, but you'll have to collect the print yourself. They've gone and stuck all the printers up on the third floor. My back isn't going to make it up those sixty-six stairs without complaining.'

  'That's a deal. While you're in the file, can you see the case history?'

  She clicked twice, and then spoke again: 'It looks like he started off under the care of Harrow Council. Then he got shunted out to the Lovejoys, who in theory work for the London Borough of Havering Council. Romford is, of course, in Essex so I'm not sure how that is supposed to work but there you are. Then he came to us. He should have gone back to Harrow really, but they do get shunted around to suit what slack capacity we all have. No note as to why. I can dig deeper by looking at our financials; we pay the other councils a fee when they take our charges and vice versa, so we should have had a one-off transfer payment from Harrow Council. I'll have to talk to accounting about that, and it'll take time to match up the payment with the records. Sometime
s they used what we call offset accounting.'

  'What's that?'

  'Well, instead of us paying them, them paying us, us paying another council and it getting complicated, we just add up what we owe each council and what we're owed by them. Then we just pay the difference. It's easier than transferring money back and forth, but it makes it hard to track down the individual charges.'

  'Sounds pretty sensible. Last request, and then I'll let you get back to work,' Morton promised. 'Do you have a file on the Lovejoys, and their charges? Any sort of profile?'

  'Nope. The shared IT system only covers the children and the administrative details for the foster carers. If you want all of their info, you'd need to talk to their local authority. They're with Havering Council, so you'll need to call them.' Edith saw Morton's disappointment then added, 'Mary Bushey is in charge over there... If you want, I'll call her and get her to fax you through a copy of her files.'

  'That would be great.' Morton beamed. 'Thank you, Edith. One more very quick question. How do your social workers fit into the system when it's all split up over councils?'

  'They're hired by the councils. We hire them on zero-hours contracts, which gives us the freedom to use them when we need them.'

  'So it's possible one social worker might work for multiple councils?'

  'Absolutely. One council isn't likely to give them enough work to fill every week, so many will sign on with more than one. They tend to move around a bit as well.'

  'Edith, you've been very helpful.' The woman beamed at the compliment, clearly delighted to have had her usually drudgery interrupted.

  'Where was that printing room again?'

  'Third floor. Right opposite the stairwell. Can't miss it.'

  ***

  Xander had come up trumps, and supplied a thick dossier on the Bakowskis' allegedly legitimate property holdings which now occupied most of the main desk in the Incident Room, forcing Morton to perch his laptop on top of an upended cantilever file. Some parts of the file had been redacted with thick black marker drawn across the text, leaving behind only snippets.

  What was clear was the extent to which the Bakowskis had gone to hide their ownership of land. A myriad of trusts and foreign holding companies had been used, but ultimately the Bakowskis were the beneficiaries and shareholders. The sweet-wrapper layers applied by their lawyer needed peeling back, but with enough time it would be possible to uncover their declared holdings.

  The vast majority of properties were held by companies registered in the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands and Lichtenstein. Someone at the Serious Organised Crime Agency, possibly Xander Thompson himself, had helpfully added Post-it notes throughout the file. One indicated that it was common for companies to be formed in those jurisdictions to take advantage of generous tax incentives offered to companies. They were so-called hundred-dollar companies, with a nominal shareholding, but the Bakowskis didn't own the companies directly. The shares had been put into trusts which were then managed on behalf of the family, and that insulated the Bakowskis from personally appearing on public documents, such as the UK's Land Registry.

  As far as Morton could tell, the total value of the combined holdings was well into eight figures; the Bakowskis had more money than any man could ever earn honestly in one lifetime. He suspected the list he had so far was the tip of the iceberg, but if the Bakowskis were ever convicted of a crime that was used to fund the holdings, then the taxpayer would be in for a substantial windfall thanks to the Proceeds of Crime Act.

  'Hmm, that's odd,' Morton mused aloud.

  'What is?' Ayala asked, tearing his attention away from his own work.

  'These properties are all over the place. It's mostly in-demand properties; they've got houses all over the desirable parts of London.'

  'That makes sense. Those areas see the most capital appreciation.'

  'Right, but they've also got some big houses in areas like Brent, Hackney, Southwark, Tower Hamlets and Crystal Palace. If you're investing mega money in property like this, it doesn't make sense to buy big houses. The demand these days is for one- and two-bed flats. They make more, and they're easier to manage.'

  'If they're growing marijuana or dealing, then it'd be logical to have a base of operations nearby,' Ayala said.

  'Yeah, but these aren't small places used to stash drugs. They're too big for that. They could be running cannabis farms... though I reckon the Bakowskis are too smart to grow anything on their own property. Check it out anyway – have an infrared-equipped helicopter go over, and see if there's any extraneous heat being released.'

  Ayala jumped up and down excitedly, his eyes lighting up at the prospect. 'Awesome. I've always wanted to go in one of those.'

  ***

  'They've gone and sent me bloody zip files. How the heck do I get these open?' Morton pushed his laptop away, frustrated with the morass of emails from Mary Bushey at Havering Council. She'd sent dozens, each with a few attachments, totalling just under five megabytes in size.

  'Give it here, boss. You've got to decompress the files, then load them up into the reader software.' Ayala took the laptop, then swiftly clicked on Morton's screen, and an unzip prompt appeared. 'Here we go. It looks like we've got the files for all the kids that have stayed with the Lovejoys since 2006.'

  'Since 2006? Why then?' Morton asked.

  'I guess that's how far their records go back. So, what are we looking for?'

  'When I was at Lambeth Council, their records showed a picture of the fake Charlie. I need to know when that file got uploaded.'

  'I can do you one better than that, boss. The upload is easy – it was done by Mary Bushey in mid December, says so right here.' Ayala pointed to a timestamp in the file signature. 'But the clever bit is this...'

  A few more clicks, and a new screen appeared showing a cornucopia of data. 'This is called meta data. We know exactly when the photo was taken – the eighth of December. We also know it was taken with a digital SLR, quite a pricey model. It's got a geotag to it as well.'

  'So you know where it was taken?'

  'Yep, but in GPS co-ordinates. Let me translate that into real address data. Here we go, somewhere in Little Hatters Wood.'

  'That's got to be the Lovejoy residence. That ought to be enough to secure a warrant to search the premises.'

  CHAPTER 42: SEARCH AND SEIZURE

  'Mr and Mrs Lovejoy, step outside please.' Morton steeled himself for a violent reaction, but the couple simply grabbed their coats off the rack by the front door, then stepped out into the driveway.

  'What's going on?' a rosy-cheeked Mr Lovejoy asked.

  'We have a warrant to search the premises,' Morton handed him a copy. 'We'll require you to wait with one of my officers while we do so. Is there anyone else inside the house?'

  This time, Mrs Lovejoy replied, 'Of course there is! We've got six children staying with us.'

  Morton nodded at Ayala, who immediately went in search of the children. One by one they were brought out, swaddled in blankets and clutching video games and mobile phones. One of the search team would have to check that those exiting the house had not concealed evidence on their persons, but for Morton and Ayala the next step was to sweep the property.

  'C'mon, we'll start in the study. I'm sure I saw some filing cabinets and electronics in there,' Morton said.

  'Lead on, boss,' Ayala called over his shoulder as he recounted the children to make sure no one had been left inside. A group of uniformed offers stood by to ensure no one left during the search.

  In the study, Morton quickly found the Lovejoys' home computer, and a digital camera that appeared to be the same model that had taken the picture of Charlie on file with Children's Services. He turned the digital camera on, and turned it over to look at the LCD screen on the rear. He depressed a green play button, bringing up the photos stored on the camera's SD memory card. They displayed one at a time, in chronological order. Each picture showed a child stood against what Morton recognised as b
eing the wall to the study he now found himself in. He kept flicking back until a picture of the faux-Charlie appeared, dated for the eighth of December 2012.

  'Ayala, come look at this. We've got a picture of our fake Charlie,' Morton said.

  'Looks like the same one as we saw in Charlie's Children's Services profile. Same date too. I'll get forensics to check the metadata to confirm it's the same picture, but it looks like we've got our smoking gun.'

  'I wish,' Morton said wistfully, 'This is all circumstantial. All it shows is the substitution occurred on or before the eighth of December. I'm guessing on the eighth, but the forensic window could be out by a day or two earlier. It's not enough to get a conviction.'

  'No, but it's enough to bring the Lovejoys in for a chat.'

  'Definitely. Right, seize the lot. We'll comb through it later.'

  Morton left Ayala to oversee the evidence being logged, and headed outside to find the Lovejoys sitting on the back step of a police van, wrapped up in police blankets.

  'Mr Morton, what's going on?' Adrian Lovejoy asked.

  'Mr Lovejoy, Mrs Lovejoy, we have reason to believe that Charles Matthews was murdered on or around the time that a boy falsely bearing his name came into your custody. For that reason, I'd like you to come down to the station with me.'

  The Lovejoys exchanged startled glances. Mrs Lovejoy clapped her hands over her mouth, and her eyes went wide with apparent bewilderment. Adrian threw an arm around his wife protectively and said to Morton: 'Of course, of course. Whatever you need from us. As long as we can call our boss to get someone to look after the children while we're gone.'

  'One of my officers will take care of that. Can I please take any mobile phones you may be carrying? It's procedure,' Morton said in a tone he hoped came across as sympathetic. In reality, the phones were covered by Kiaran's search warrant, but there was no need to get the Lovejoys' hackles up yet.

  ***

  'This interview is being tape-recorded. It is being conducted at New Scotland Yard, Broadway, London. I'm Detective Chief Inspector David Morton of the Metropolitan Police. With me today are Detective Bertram Ayala, Adrian Lovejoy and Prudence Lovejoy of Little Hatters Wood. Mr and Mrs Lovejoy, could you confirm your dates of birth please?'