Wilson muttered something offensive. Pulled off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves.
It was Cox that struck gold first. The files had been mixed up a lot down the years, it was clear – documents put back in the wrong places, alphabetical order lazily ignored – but the system hadn’t broken down entirely; sure, the index cards were nothing more than vague hints, pointers in the right direction, but when Cox dug her way down to ‘Ha–Ho’, sure enough …
‘Bingo.’
Hampton Hall, Sutton Coldfield. The folder was labelled ‘1985’.
Before Wilson – looking up from his own box – could say anything, the constable poked his head around the door.
‘Another tea, guv?’
She shook her head.
‘Not for me, thanks, constable. But I’m sure my colleague here would love another cup.’
The PC gave a brief thumbs-up, and disappeared.
‘Thanks, guv,’ Wilson said sourly. ‘Come on, then. What’ve you found?’
Cox’s heart was already sinking as she thumbed open the thin manila folder.
‘Not,’ she said, ‘what I was hoping for.’
It was empty.
Alarm bells began ringing in her head.
Wilson reached over, took the folder from her. It was obvious that he, too, had the sense that this was no filing error.
‘Nothing at all? That seriously doesn’t add up.’
‘But look.’ She pointed. ‘Look at the creases, here, in the cardboard.’ Fine creases, running parallel to the folder’s spine. ‘This folder was full, bulging, at one point. So full the fucking folder got bent out of shape. And now nothing?’
Wilson was nodding.
‘Someone’s been here. Beaten us to it.’
‘Jesus.’ She snatched the folder back, slapped it down on the table.
‘Plan B?’
‘Radley.’ She was already tearing open the second cardboard box. ‘Anything on Radley. Everything on Radley.’
Wilson nodded grimly. He could play the part of the cynical hack as much as he liked, Cox thought; when it came down to it, Wilson cared about getting to the truth.
And he really, really hated being fucked with. They were as bad as each other.
After forty-five minutes they had a pile of papers a foot high. Wilson leaned wearily on the tabletop.
‘Shall we see what we’ve got?’
Cox let the folder she was leafing through fall back into the box. Shrugged.
‘Might as well.’ This was a fishing expedition, she knew, and nothing more; a sweep through an armful of files pulled at random from a ten-year archive was unlikely to blow the case wide open.
But everything new they found out about William Radley let in a little more light.
‘Crime report,’ Wilson muttered, flipping through the top file in the pile. ‘Domestic abuse, looks like. Signed off by one Sergeant Radley.’
‘Same here. Child neglect, this one.’ The file had been diligently filled out, neatly typed, thoroughly referenced; the work, as far as she could tell, of a conscientious young officer. But that wasn’t news. They already knew Radley had been a good copper.
‘Aaand another.’ Wilson made a mock-yawn as he leafed through another folder. ‘Stabbing. Ten-year-old boy, knifed his foster-dad! Christ. Must’ve been a little charmer, this young Colin Carter.’
Cox looked up sharply. Another link clicking into place? She didn’t dare hope.
‘Colin Carter?’
‘Uh-huh. Name ring a bell?’
‘Might do. Radley wrote up the case?’
‘Yep. Attended at the scene, too – got a light knife-wound in the arm for his trouble. The kid was bad news, obviously.’ Wilson turned the page. Stopped dead.
‘What?’
Wilson gave her a look. Then he read from the report: ‘The youth was subsequently transferred into the care of Hampton Hall for Underprivileged Children.’ Shook his head. ‘There it is. There’s your link.’
He tossed the report to Cox. She grabbed at it, flipped back to the first page. A child’s face, angular, dark-eyed, mistrustful, stared out at her in bleak grey and white.
A face she knew.
Colin Carter was a repeat sex-offender, pretty well known across the Met. Cox had interviewed him herself a year or two earlier – something to do with distributing child pornography, but they hadn’t been able to make it stick. Last she’d heard he was on parole in south London somewhere.
The boy in the police report – it was him. Carter was almost bald now, marked by teenage acne, overweight, wore glasses, was missing a tooth in his upper jaw – but the flat cheekbones were the same, the bulbous lower lip was the same, the look in the dark eyes was the same.
Swiftly she scanned the text of the report. The stabbing – non-fatal, though Radley reckoned the kid had been aiming to kill – took place at the foster parents’ home in the suburbs of Walsall. A scuffle, a kitchen-knife to the neck. Then, when Sergeant Radley comes in the door, he gets the same treatment: a medical officer’s photo in the file showed a curving wound up the inside of Radley’s right biceps.
Then off to HHUC with the little swine.
But that wasn’t the end of the report; there was an addendum, a typed statement appended to the file, presumably by Radley. It had been taken from a woman named Moira Yates – Colin Carter’s foster mum.
Colin was a difficult boy, Mrs Yates admitted. There was no denying that. He was withdrawn – always disappearing into himself, she said. But with the right care, with love and a nurturing home, she was sure he could get better – she was sure, she said, that Colin was a good lad, underneath.
It was a moving statement, human and empathetic, given the circumstances.
Then Cox reached the final paragraph. It chilled her to the bone.
We want to look after Colin, Mrs Yates had written. He is better off with us.
The typed black-ink characters lent the statement a strange formality, but in this passage Cox could hear, loud and clear, the voice of a deeply concerned woman – no, not just a woman, but a mother.
It is not right to send him back. Please, Mrs Yates had written, do not send him back to that place.
On the drive home – a long haul south through damp gloom and holiday traffic – Wilson seemed to feel the need to make small-talk. His way of restoring normality, Cox guessed. Hampton Hall had spooked him. Spooked her, too.
‘So – any plans for New Year’s? You and Aidan doing anything nice?’
She laughed humourlessly. Too knackered, after the day she’d had, to keep up the pretence.
‘We’re not as close as I might have made out, me and him,’ she said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘We’re not really together, Greg. To be honest, I doubt we ever will be. Matthew lives with Aidan, except for every other weekend, when I get to be a mum again.’ She looked across at Wilson with a self-deprecating smile. ‘So New Year’s? Half a bottle of cornershop plonk and an early night for me, I imagine.’
Wilson looked uncomfortable.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘It’s okay. It’ll get better, one way or another.’
‘I’m sorry if –’ He broke off, sniffed awkwardly, fidgeted with a button on his jacket. ‘I mean, I’m sorry, Kerry, if I, if we –’
She smiled. She had to smile.
‘Let it go, Greg,’ she said. ‘What happened between us had nothing to do with it. Believe it or not, you’re not quite the worst mistake I’ve ever made.’
‘Flattery will get you nowhere,’ Wilson grinned.
13
Twenty past three. She was late for her meeting with Serena McAvoy. Not on purpose, or not quite, anyway – somehow, she just hadn’t felt able to prioritize a self-serving conference with a mob of Met lawyers.
She hurried across the station car park. Guy in a suit was coming the other way, out of the security-controlled staff doors. Not a copper she knew, from thi
s distance. New CID recruit? She hadn’t heard anything about that.
As he came closer, though, she saw that she did know him – and that he wasn’t a copper.
‘Mr Harrington?’
The MoJ man, who’d been peering at his smartphone as he walked, looked up in surprise.
‘Mm?’ He blinked at her. ‘Ah, Inspector Cox.’
She looked at him curiously.
‘Wouldn’t expect to find you here, slumming it with us plods,’ she said.
Harrington smiled. In his left hand, Cox noticed, he held a Mercedes key-fob.
‘Just a flying visit,’ he said breezily. ‘Dropping off some paperwork in connection with the William Radley suicide. Making sure everything’s nice and tidy.’
Nicely stitched up, you mean.
She nodded, forced a smile, said she’d better be getting on …
Cox being half an hour late hadn’t done anything to improve McAvoy’s personality. She found the QC in a third-floor meeting room, a dark-suited young associate lawyer at her side, stacks of files and ring-binders on the desk in front of her.
Cox apologized for being late, took a seat. McAvoy, as if she hadn’t spoken, launched straight into her spiel.
‘My job,’ she said, fixing Cox with a look of lacquered professional indifference, ‘is to make sure that you say nothing at the inquiry that might embarrass the police service.’
‘Perish the thought.’
McAvoy didn’t respond to the sarcasm. ‘The inquiry will be looking to apportion blame, but they have no legal powers. We’d like to contain the scope of their conclusions.’
‘And avoid any civil suits in future,’ Cox added.
‘We don’t have long to prepare, inspector,’ said McAvoy. ‘I want you to pay close attention to what I’m about to tell you.’
Cox nodded.
‘I’m listening.’
‘One, be polite.’
Cox bit back a sarcastic reply: why thank you, Serena, that would never have occurred to me. The QC pressed on.
‘Two, answer every question you’re asked, but don’t say anything more than you have to. Don’t volunteer information. And three, don’t lose your temper.’ She paused. ‘Inspector, I do think you should be writing these down.’
Cox snorted.
‘I think I can remember three sentences, Ms McAvoy.’
McAvoy sighed. Crossed her arms on the desk.
‘Inspector, you must be aware that your manner can at times – like now, for instance – be … abrasive. I suppose it comes with the job – but it will not come across well at the inquiry if you respond with aggression to hostile questioning.’
Cox was taken aback.
‘How hostile will it be?’
‘Expect the worst.’ McAvoy lifted her eyebrows. ‘Baroness Kent might look like a kindly old sort, someone you’d bump into in Fortnum’s, but in the courtroom she’s a shark. Underestimate her at your peril.’
‘She does seem nice – as it happens, I ran into her the other day at lunch. I –’
McAvoy looked up sharply.
‘You spoke to her? What did you say?’
‘Nothing, nothing.’ Cox moved quickly to reassure the QC. The woman already thought she was disrespectful and rude – she didn’t want her thinking she was a bloody idiot, too. ‘Just pleasantries. Nothing about the case.’
McAvoy nodded doubtfully.
‘Okay.’ Looked down, sifted through her papers. ‘Now. Let’s go over the case – what the inquiry know, and what they’re going to ask you about.’
Cox nodded, ran a hand across her eyes. I don’t need to go over the case, she wanted to say. There’s nothing about that case I don’t remember.
And nothing about it I wouldn’t rather forget.
She only half-listened as McAvoy went through the key points.
DI Cox and DCI Naysmith had made the decision to release Warren Boyd from custody after questioning in relation to the whereabouts of a missing eight-year-old boy, Tomasz Lerna; Tomasz was later found dead in a lockup used by Boyd.
‘Now the Met’s line,’ McAvoy said, ‘is that the force did follow due diligence in respect of Warren Boyd’s release from custody.’
Cox nodded. ‘Our intelligence was that Boyd didn’t know where the child was. We had no good reason to doubt that.’
‘Even though you turned out to be wrong?’
‘We believed that Tomasz was in the hands of someone more – for want of a better word – senior than Boyd. Someone more deeply embedded in paedophile networks.’
‘But he wasn’t. Boyd had him.’
Cox hesitated.
‘According to the official version, yes. But there was evidence that Tomasz didn’t die in the lockup. According to the pathologist, there was a twelve-hour window – he could have died at any point within that period. What’s more,’ she pressed on, talking over McAvoy’s attempt to interrupt, ‘there’s a fair chance that the DNA samples that tied Boyd to the killing were the result of contamination in the lab.’
McAvoy was looking at her levelly.
‘So you don’t accept that you were wrong?’
‘I think there were – unexplained elements to the case. Boyd was a low-level abuser, an opportunist. He hadn’t the connections or the means – mental, physical, financial – to keep a victim like Tomasz on the move, and under wraps.’
‘So who did?’
The man in the mask. The image – the slitted eyes, the devil’s horns – rose up again in her mind.
She grimaced.
‘We don’t know.’
‘And Boyd disappeared, of course. Went on the run.’
‘Or someone got rid of him.’
The QC sighed, shook her head.
‘This sort of confrontational attitude will not wash with the inquiry panel,’ she said.
‘They won’t want to hear the truth?’
‘Your version of the truth, inspector, is not what the inquiry has been convened to hear.’
‘You mean it’s not what the Met wants me to tell them.’
‘We need you to take responsibility.’
‘Don’t you dare talk to me about responsibility,’ Cox snapped. Then she sighed, put her hand over her eyes. What had McAvoy said about her temper? ‘Sorry,’ she apologized shortly. ‘Long week.’
‘There’s no conspiracy here, Inspector Cox,’ McAvoy said. ‘Please try and remember that.’
‘So I’ve been told.’ Impatient, exasperated, she made to stand. ‘May I go now?’
‘Just one more thing.’ The QC made an officious sit-down gesture. Waited for Cox to make eye-contact. Then said: ‘Greg Wilson.’
Oh, hell.
‘What about him?’
McAvoy smiled knowingly.
‘We’ll do our best to prevent the inquiry from asking you about your personal life,’ she said. ‘It’s not relevant, and we believe it would be overstepping the bounds of the inquiry’s purview.’
‘Good.’
‘However … links between police and press are really under the microscope at the moment. That unpleasantness over phone-hacking, for instance, caused us a lot of awkwardness.’ She gave Cox a frank look. ‘So – is there anything we need to know? About you and Greg Wilson?’
Cox kept her poker-face in place. ‘Such as?’
‘For instance, are you in regular contact?’
Cox snorted. Define ‘regular’ …
‘No, of course not.’
NONCE.
The letters had been scrawled in spray-paint across the white garage door. Someone had done a half-hearted job of covering it up with grey paint. Hadn’t worked.
Two of the downstairs windows were boarded up with plywood. On the pebbledash wall by the barred front door there was a spatter of what looked like dogshit. The letterbox, too, was smeared with brown.
‘Nice place,’ murmured Wilson.
Cox had filled him in on the way. Colin Carter’s background, in and out of care homes as a ki
d, in and out of prison as an adult. Numerous child-porn offences – always distributing, copying, storing. Never anything direct, she added. ‘Does that make it okay?’ asked Greg, as they climbed out of the car.
‘No,’ said Cox. ‘But I don’t subscribe to the view that he should be strung up and castrated.’ She pointed to the picture someone had carved on his front door, showing a stick figure suffering just such a fate.
‘You think he’s behind Radley’s death?’
‘Who knows? But I doubt it.’
Wilson paused. ‘Should we – are we going to need backup?’
‘Nah. Carter’s not that type.’ She’d looked sidelong at him. ‘Besides, if he turns nasty, I’ve got you to protect me.’
It stung, she saw. Wilson wasn’t a small guy – he was maybe five-ten and decently built – he looked after himself, but she doubted he knew the first thing about self-defence. It was obvious to both of them that, if Colin Carter did kick off, it’d be Cox doing the protecting.
‘I’m not going to take a bullet for you, inspector,’ Wilson said. ‘Not even for old times’ sake.’
‘Have you ever been in a fight in your life?’
‘Kerry, I’m an investigative journalist. I don’t have fights. I just get beaten up.’
Cox took the lead as they approached Carter’s grim semi.
No answer to her knock.
‘Think he’s out?’
‘He doesn’t go out. Too risky. They know him round here.’ She knocked again. ‘He’ll have seen us coming. Might’ve recognized me.’ She made a bitter face. ‘He’ll be upstairs, deleting his hard drive.’
She kneeled, pulled her coat sleeve over her hand, and pushed open the letterbox.
‘Mr Carter? Detective Inspector Cox, CID. We know you’re in there.’
A smell from within of unwashed dishes and old cigarette smoke. She could see nothing but a stretch of worn red carpet. No sound.
‘Mr Carter, we need to speak to you.’
Still nothing.
‘If you don’t come to the door, Mr Carter, you’ll be found to be in violation of the terms of your parole and –’
She broke off, had to put out a hand to keep from falling, as with a mutter of impatience Greg Wilson nudged her aside. She watched in surprise as he bent double and, cupping a hand to his mouth, yelled: ‘What can you tell us about Hampton Hall, Colin?’
Twelve Deaths of Christmas Page 12
