by Stav Sherez
They were alone in the incident room, everyone else gathering evidence or securing testimony but most of all trying to understand how all the clues they’d followed had led them to a fifteen-year-old boy. There’d been confusion, disbelief and stifled anger when they’d brought Hugo in. Everyone wide-eyed and pissed off as they’d watched their suspect and his mother being marched to an interview room.
‘We followed the evidence.’ Carrigan felt a swirl of emotions rattling through his chest. He tried to get comfortable on the chair. ‘This is where it led us.’
‘Then I suggest you review the evidence again.’
‘We have.’
‘Are you telling me a fifteen-year-old boy spiked two women, then abducted one and drove her away in a bloody van?’
‘No. But he—’
Branch tapped his pipe against the desk. ‘Then let him go before we’re up to our necks in lawsuits and more fucking internal investigations. Quinn’s probably laughing his head off right now, having heard you arrested a fifteen-year-old for our murder – laughing and working out how he’s going to use it against you.’
‘I didn’t arrest him. I asked him to come in so he could answer some questions. His mother agreed. I went by the book.’ Carrigan held his hand up before Branch could interrupt. ‘I know what you’re saying, I know how this looks, but I can’t let him go.’
‘He’s a minor, for God’s sake.’
Carrigan took a deep breath, trying to concentrate on the space behind Branch, the faces of Anna and Katrina silently reminding him why he was doing this. ‘A minor who was running 234 slaves on his computer, some of them as young as twelve. With all due respect, sir, children are not what they used to be.’
Branch sighed and took off his glasses. ‘Do you really think the boy has anything to do with these murders?’
‘He posted the Anna clips.’
‘It’s the Internet, Carrigan. Even I know he could have taken it from a million different sites and reposted it.’
‘I don’t think so. These clips aren’t on any other sites and the metadata tells us it’s very close to the source.’
‘But you admit he isn’t our killer?’
‘I don’t know. It’s complicated. We’re pursuing another line of investigation which might help us clear things up. The profile led us away from the facts. Hoffmann led us straight to the boy.’
‘You’re blaming him for this?’ Branch rocked his head from side to side as if trying to dislodge a particularly stubborn knot in his shoulder. ‘What exactly is going on between the two of you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Fine. Have it your own way. But keep in mind that all this time you’re chasing false leads, Patterson and his goons are collecting data on you, gathering information that will fuck you up in court.’
‘Do you think I don’t know that?’
‘And you still mean to interview the boy?’
Carrigan nodded. ‘He’s a teenager. He’ll be terrified. I’ll get what I need in no time.’
43
‘This is the wrong Coke. I can’t drink this.’
Carrigan looked at the can. ‘You asked for Diet Coke?’
Hugo held it up. ‘Does this say Diet Coke? No. It says Coke Zero. It’s a different colour. It’s a different drink. If I’d wanted Coke Zero, I would have asked for Coke Zero.’
This wasn’t their regular interview room. This room looked like a conference suite in an elegant but slightly down at heel airport hotel. It was the one they reserved for debriefing sensitive witnesses and sexual assault victims. It was where they told relatives they would never see their sons or daughters again. The carpet was deep and stifled every sound, a soft neutral grey like a bed of ash. Posters from bygone theatre productions dotted the walls. The chairs were upholstered and comfortable and not bolted to the floor.
Hugo Hart sat slouched on a chair, one leg draped across the armrest, playing with his phone. His mother kept telling him to put it away, then finally prised it from his hands and deposited it in her handbag. They shot each other looks long rehearsed, an entire history of disagreements, sulks and petty estrangements in a single glance. A social worker sat between them, long-legged and lost in a world of his own.
Carrigan looked over at Geneva and nodded. They’d developed a pattern to interviews. They could tell as soon as they met someone which of them should take the lead. The giveaway was always there, in the split-second hesitation of a handshake or the slant of a wayward eye. Carrigan activated the recorder. He was halfway through stating his name when Hugo interrupted.
‘You’ve got a camera there, right?’ The boy was pointing at the small black bauble in the top left-hand corner of the ceiling.
‘And another behind the glass.’ Carrigan gestured to the large mirror on the opposite side of the room.
‘Of course.’ Hugo brushed his fingers through his hair. It was a gesture meant to appear nonchalant and casual but it only had the opposite effect. ‘There’s always one more camera in any given room than you think there is.’
‘I like that,’ Carrigan said.
Hugo tried to mask his smile.
‘Where did you read it? A blog?’
‘A book, actually.’ Like most teenagers, Hugo was pitch perfect in that particular blend of confidence and sarcasm. His face was narrow and craggy, all planes and bones, the kind of face that would get him a lot of attention from girls in a couple of years but which only looked awkward and lopsided now. ‘You’re recording everything, right? Video and audio?’
Carrigan nodded.
‘I want copies. Before I leave. That’s my right, isn’t it? To make sure you don’t tamper with the tapes and make me say things I didn’t say.’
‘We don’t tamper with the tapes, Hugo.’ Carrigan took a sip of coffee. ‘You know why? We don’t need to. The people we bring into this room are the right people and, most of the time, they’re intelligent enough to realise they can’t lie to us and get away with it, so they tell us the truth.’
‘Detective Inspector!’ The social worker sprang forward. He was tall and twitchy, every knuckle and joint seemingly moving of their own accord, his eyes shot a deep red. ‘You can’t harass the boy, this isn’t your normal—’ He stopped and hacked his way through a coughing fit, his face blushing bright red.
‘You should think about investing in a vaporiser,’ Carrigan said, catching a strange look in Geneva’s eye as the social worker tried to reply, only to double over into another coughing fit.
‘I want you to know you’re simply here to answer a few questions,’ Carrigan told the boy. ‘We haven’t arrested or cautioned you – do you understand?’
‘You mean, I can walk out of here any time I want?’ He glanced over at his mother with a triumphant grin. She looked away.
‘You could,’ Carrigan replied, glad she was here. It would allow him to read the boy through her expressions. ‘But then you’d leave us no choice but to arrest you so we can ask you those same questions. Either way, we get our answers, but one way you get to go home tonight and the other, you don’t.’
Hugo placed both hands flat on the table and leaned forward. ‘What’s your IQ?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Mine’s 155.’
‘That means nothing to me.’ Carrigan checked his watch, hoping the social worker wouldn’t end the interview before he got what he wanted. He could see the man sneaking looks at him and writing furiously in his notebook.
‘It means I’m much cleverer than you or anybody in this room,’ Hugo said. ‘So you’re not going to beat me by playing word games or trying to trick me into saying something.’
‘You’re absolutely right.’ Carrigan was happy to see he’d managed to wipe the smirk off Hugo’s face. ‘It’s not going to be my brain or logic that’s going to nail you – it’ll be facts. No matter how clever you are, you can’t argue against facts.’
Hugo shifted in his seat. ‘What facts?’
Carrigan drained
his espresso and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. ‘Your computers are whispering all your secrets into our technicians’ ears at this very moment. So, enough. Your mother wants to go home, you want to go home and I want to go home, so let’s make it easier for ourselves and start by telling me what you know about the clips you posted on whatyoudontknowcanthurtyou.com.’
Hugo crossed his legs. ‘And what if I decide not to say anything?’
‘This isn’t a film and this isn’t America. You do not have the right to remain silent. Not here. So, the sooner we talk, the sooner you get out of this room.’
‘You just want me to say something so you can keep me here for good. You have no intention of letting me go.’
‘Hugo, for God’s sake!’ The boy’s mother was halfway out of her seat when Carrigan held his hand up.
‘Mrs Hart, please don’t interrupt.’ He looked over at the boy. Hugo was grinning. Carrigan rubbed his head. Spiky tendrils swarmed behind his eyes. His skull pounded in time with his pulse. He felt the strip of pills weighing down his pocket. ‘You need to tell us about the Anna clips, Hugo.’
‘Who?’
Carrigan slid over a series of screen shots, each bearing Anna’s face.
Hugo picked one up and carefully studied it. ‘She’s cute.’
Carrigan snatched the photo away. ‘She’s also dead, Hugo. This isn’t some computer game. Someone kidnapped her. They cut her throat and let her bleed to death. At this moment our most logical suspect is the person who filmed and uploaded these clips, and that’s you.’
‘Murder?’ Hugo glanced at his mother. ‘What are you talking about?’
Carrigan fanned the photos. ‘You posted these videos on the forum.’
‘You can’t prove that.’ As Hugo’s tone became more petulant, he sounded closer to his real age, callow and dismissive and slightly pissed off.
Carrigan sighed. ‘We already did, Hugo. How do we think we found you? You made these clips and you posted them on that forum to show everyone how clever you were. But that’s not all you did, is it? You trolled Anna on Twitter, sent her nasty photos, somehow rigged her computer to make those “voices” in the walls. Is that really how an intelligent boy like you gets his kicks?’
Hugo didn’t reply. He stared down at the table and remained mute throughout Carrigan’s further questioning.
They took a break. The social worker led Hugo to the canteen while Carrigan conferred with Geneva outside the interview room. Then, Hugo was back and Carrigan, having reached a dead end, tried a different tack.
‘You say you’re good with computers, right?’
The boy shook his head. ‘A lot of people are good with computers. I’m way better than that.’
‘I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up.’ Carrigan wrote something down in his notebook. He was trying to work out which buttons to press and which to avoid if he wanted the truth out of this boy, how far he could go and how far he should go. ‘How long have you been doing this?’
‘Doing what?’
‘Please stop playing games.’
‘I’m not playing games,’ Hugo replied. ‘You need to be more specific if you expect me to answer you. I could have said forty minutes, the this you refer to could easily have meant answering your questions. How am I supposed to know what’s in your head?’
Carrigan clenched his fist. If this were a normal interview he would turn to other strategies now, increase the pressure, but this was a boy, and his mother and social worker were watching, as was the constant eye of the camera. Carrigan took a deep breath. ‘How long have you been running slaves?’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Hugo, listen to me. I know you’re an intelligent boy, more so than most. So, just take a minute to think about your position. We’ve seized your computer and we know you had 234 slaves on tap at any hour of the day. We can even look and tell exactly when you logged on and to whom. Now, you could choose to insult me by telling me you downloaded the RAT program by accident, that you were trying to download a song and got this instead but I wouldn’t advise that course of action and, I think, if you consider it, you’ll realise it will only get you into deeper trouble.’
‘Detective Inspector. Please?’ The social worker said it more quietly this time, his voice trailing off on the last word.
Carrigan ignored him. ‘Can I ask you a personal question, Hugo?’
‘Sure. I guess.’
Carrigan took his time, studying his notebook and nodding to himself as if he’d just come to some important decision. ‘Is there something wrong with you, Hugo?’
‘What?’
‘Because you’re not a bad-looking kid,’ Carrigan continued. ‘You’re smart, you’ve told me yourself how smart you are and so I assume there’s something I’m not seeing because, otherwise, you’d be out in the real world with a flesh-and-blood girlfriend and not wasting your time glued to a computer screen. You should leave that to dirty old men.’
Hugo sat upright in the chair, a knotty tautness focusing his features. ‘Maybe I don’t want a girlfriend? Have you even considered that? Perhaps the world’s moved on, old man.’
‘You can tell yourself that, Hugo. You can even kid yourself into believing it but deep down you know you’re lying to yourself. We always do.’
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Oh, believe me, I do.’
‘It’s not like you think,’ Hugo said, all the sass and strut quickly draining out of him. ‘I was lonely. That’s all. I just wanted some company. It’s hard to find girls to talk to and, anyway, it’s easier to talk to people online. People lie when they know you’re watching them. They never tell the truth to your face. Online, you don’t have to be defined by how you look, how people choose to see you because you have red hair or zits or can’t pronounce a word properly. It’s more like your real self talking.’
‘There’s a big difference between Facebook and what you’ve been doing.’
‘You still don’t understand, do you? Facebook is too much like life – cliques and hierarchies and who you know. I didn’t want to be alone in the evenings. You don’t know what it’s like to be alone.’
‘Hugo, this is not the time or place.’
‘Mrs Hart, please. Let him speak or I’ll have to ask you to leave.’
Hugo turned to his mother with a smirk on his face. ‘They’re never there,’ he said, looking directly at her. ‘I get home from school and go straight to my room. Mum’s always on the phone, Dad’s never back from work in time, so I switch on my slaves. They keep me company while I do my homework. I can see them out the corner of my eye and, sometimes, it’s almost like they’re in the same room with me. Like they’re doing their homework or something and so am I.’
Hugo’s mother shook her head repeatedly. Geneva kept her jaw clamped shut. Carrigan scribbled down notes. ‘How did you go from watching them to Ratting them? That’s a big leap.’
Hugo shrugged and Carrigan realised that for a teenager it wasn’t.
‘You have to if you want to stay on the good boards. I got bored of the one I was on, it was just short clips – I wanted live feeds, real-time, but on those boards if you’re not posting original content they won’t let you join. I wanted more control. I wanted to be able to look into every corner of their lives and see if it resembled mine.’
‘And you worked out how to do it all by yourself?’
‘There was nothing to work out. The programs are everywhere. Just type in RAT tools and see how many results pop up. They’re a piece of shit, though. Very basic and unimaginative. I had to modify the code to get it working just right. I got a string of IP addresses off another forum member and started to actively trawl for women to add to my collection.’ Hugo’s eyes lit up and flashed a dark green. ‘It was different. I knew it immediately the first time I went into someone else’s computer. She was mine in a way the previous ones could never be.’
Geneva scraped her chair forwa
rd. She’d let Carrigan talk and he’d managed to wind Hugo up and get him to drop his defences but she couldn’t keep silent any longer. ‘And you never, not even once, felt a twinge of guilt at intruding into these girls’ privacy?’
Hugo shrugged. ‘Not really. It’s just images on a screen. There’s no harm in that.’
‘Try telling that to Anna Becker.’
‘Who?’
Geneva frowned. ‘The dead girl whose clips you posted to show everyone how clever you are. Where did you get those clips, Hugo?’
‘The net. I plugged into her laptop off Facebook.’ The boy scratched his jaw, a tell Geneva had picked up on midway through the interview.
‘That’s interesting, since Anna wasn’t on Facebook. How about I tell you what we know and see if it changes your mind? Because the person who made those videos of Anna, that’s not all he did. He also stalked and trolled her on Twitter. Unlike the videos, the trolling consisted of making threats against her and the law’s pretty clear on that. You’re what? Fifteen? That’s only three more years till they let you out.’
Hugo scratched his jaw again. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that if you really did make those videos like you said, then we have a problem, but I don’t think you did.’
Hugo’s eyes flicked from his mother to the social worker.
‘I looked at some of your other captures and they’re very different in style from the Anna sequence. I’ve seen your work. You like it when they’re naked. You edit out the boring bits.’ Geneva’s voice rang out across the table, a steely tremble underlying each word. ‘Tell us where you got them from, Hugo, and all this will be over.’
‘Okay, okay,’ Hugo replied, his voice drawn down to a whisper. ‘So they’re not my work. So what?’
