He stepped in closer. Close enough that she could smell his odour and feel the heat from his body. She looked down, lacking the energy or spirit to lift her head.
‘You’re going out on the dark web, Kell. There’s no limit on there. Nothing you can’t do and people pay the big money to see it. So there you are! You’ve finally made the big time!’ He snorted again then he stepped back and addressed the back of the room. ‘Remember what we talked about, lads. Take what you want and be rough doing it? Oh and try and wind her up a bit, first — see if she’s got some fight left. It’s good for the show!’
Kelly didn’t hear any response. She looked back to the monitor where Libby had started to shed some of her clothes. Freddie leaned forward to speak softly.
‘You’re a broken whore, but I know you’ve a little bit of fight left. Our viewers will appreciate that.’
He nodded at Benny who suddenly burst to life. He leaned into the laptop. The top half of the monitor that had been showing images of her in the room went black. He fidgeted with the keyboard, his grin still in place, his eyes darting over the screen. Finally he straightened up and nodded.
‘All set.’ Freddie said. ‘The dark web’s a bit different, Kell, a bit riskier. You don’t want to be beaming your stuff out to the weirdos for too long, you never know who’s trying to find out who you are. So we have a twenty-minute window. Now that isn’t long, not for you and your two co-stars, but don’t worry . . . they should be able to make the most of it!’
Freddie paced to the rear of the room. He stopped by the door.
‘Every day you will work in a different place, so keep your phone on. If you don’t want to come back, don’t. But then it’s all on Libby. I’ll be watching.’ Freddie stepped out. Benny gave her one last leer and followed him. He patted one of the men on the chest as he passed.
Kelly couldn’t manage any response. Her body still sagged. All the energy, all the life, all the fight had left it. There was nothing more she could do. She had no contact with Libby and no idea where she might be. It was hopeless.
She turned back to the screen where Libby’s tiny form shook in a nervous dance. The two screens covering her room were back on. She could see herself from two angles, still and silent. From the raised camera she could see the two men were moving towards her now. Their faces and outlines blurred as more hot tears plunged down her cheek. She heard the distant sound of the front door being pulled shut.
She closed her eyes to the sound of the lock being bolted.
Chapter 26
‘What did you think?’ Maddie put the coffees down. It was their regular place and their preferred table. She had hurried along a young lad who looked like he might have been considering packing up his laptop to leave. The table was right at the back but with a good view down the middle. She always liked to see who was coming in.
‘You feel better now you’ve met him?’ Harry said.
Maddie still fussed over her drink. ‘Not really. Terrible aftershave.’
‘Aftershave?’
‘Freddie Rickman. He smelt like a week-old wine bottle. Too sickly for me.’
‘Is that a key part of his character?’
‘It can tell you a lot.’
‘He didn’t tell us much else.’
‘I don’t like him, Harry.’
‘Which isn’t a crime unfortunately.’
‘It isn’t. Dig enough around a man like that, though, and it’s only a matter of time before the crimes show up.’
‘You might be right.’
‘There’s a but coming . . .’
‘You know my thoughts. That meeting needed to move us along. It didn’t.’
‘You said I had twenty-four hours. By my reckoning I still have a lot of that left.’
‘He only came in here to find out what you know, which is very little.’
‘I didn’t tell him all that we know. And the fact he turned up at all and with his brief means we have him rattled.’
‘Maybe we did.’
‘So what are you saying? That I should just leave it there? Give it up?’
‘Give what up?’
Maddie went to say something but it left her. She tried again but only managed the start of a word.
‘And there you are. You still can’t answer that question, why you are spending your time pursuing this man.’
‘I just want answers.’
‘There’s a whole police force out there looking for answers to questions. Some are looking at who nicked a Mars bar from the local shop . . . others are specifically assigned robberies or domestic burglaries. We have our work. This isn’t for us, not anymore. I think now is the time to hand this over to CID.’
‘This is hardly the theft of a Mars bar, Harry. Two people died. We still can’t rule out foul play.’
‘You just needed to prove that any offences were committed by the persons involved only — with no one outstanding. I think you’ve done that.’
‘Who was the murderer?’
Harry’s face wore an expression that she had come to recognise as a warning — that she should back away. She wasn’t going to today.
‘If it wasn’t an accident,’ Harry said, ‘if there was a murderer then you have done a very thorough job of building a clear picture of our suspects. Holly Maguire was a known sex worker with previous for suicide attempts, drug and alcohol abuse and mental health issues. The taxi driver has a clean record, a young family and was making positive plans. He’d no history of mental health issues or suicidal tendencies. So we could write this up right now if we wanted to. Holly forced that car over the cliff. I don’t know why and we may never. Maybe she couldn’t jump? If that were true then using a car would make sense — it does the hard bit for you. She doesn’t have a car so a taxi was the only option? But you seem to have this refusal to believe what your investigation is pointing directly at.’
‘What about the backpack? The messages?’
‘Messages? Photos and addresses of where she took clients, a list of clients who may have treated sex workers badly and a tentative link to how Freddie Rickman bought out a business five years ago. It’s a passing shot maybe? Holly didn’t want to go without having her final say. You didn’t like Freddie Rickman after five minutes in a room with him, so it’s not difficult to see how someone who worked for him would dislike him too.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Perhaps? What else is there?’
‘Something more. Her girlfriend, the woman who appeared on the top of the cliff — what she said to the informant . . . that stuff about how she was supposed to come and see us, that she has something she needs to tell us about Holly — about Freddie maybe.’
‘Maybe? But she hasn’t, has she?’
‘And what about this Marlie? She’s missing from the brothel. The girls saw her leave with someone we know to be a close associate of Freddie’s.’
‘We don’t actually know who she left with. We have a nickname and no description and no likelihood of a statement.’
‘Okay. But a missing person with foul play suspected — that’s Major Crime territory right there!’
‘She’s missing, is she? Reported? On our system and with the witnesses giving full support and information?’
‘You know that won’t happen.’
Harry sighed. ‘Nothing’s happened until it’s reported. We have to work like that. We can’t just go chasing down everything that piques our interest. There are other jobs, other case files that need work done on them. Pass this over to CID. Rhiannon can run it, maybe. I know you two have a bond. She’ll keep you well informed.’
Maddie swigged her drink. It was too hot but it was effective at stopping her first response. She used the moment to think again. Harry always came from a place of logic, of black and white, and she was struggling to argue with that. All she really had was a gut feeling. But it was strong, here, stronger even since she had met Rickman.
‘The list of ugly mugs. I gave it to Mitch. All the
names had hits. Some show as associated with Rickman, either directly or indirectly. Some of them are taxi drivers . . . some are linked to enforcement work for Rickman when he was peddling drugs — assuming he’s stopped doing that, of course.’
‘Okay?’ Harry said. His tone gruffer, his patience wearing thin. He was not a man who liked to be challenged on the same subject for long.
‘I’m just thinking out loud, Harry. I can’t argue with you, but there are lines of enquiry still. His website . . . I want to have a look at that.’
‘Hand it over, Maddie. That’s me meeting you in the middle. And speak to CID — don’t go straight to Rhiannon. You’ll need to speak with the guv’nor in there and you’ll need to sell it. They’re just as busy as we are — busier even.’
‘And if I can’t? Sell it, I mean?’
‘Then I think that tells you what you need to know.’
* * *
When Maddie returned to her desk, she was glad she found an instant excuse to leave it again. It was a mess of property and paperwork and unlocking her screen showed a number of unread emails and a to-do list that had been unchanged for days. The excuse was stuck to her keyboard in the form of a handwritten post-it note. It said simply:
See me.
Rob.
She knew it to be from Rob Ford. She had sent him a scanned copy of one of the pages from Holly’s address book. To her it was two jumbled up lines of letters, numbers and symbols but one of them started ‘HTTP’ and, even with her limited knowledge of the connected world she knew that to be a website. She snatched the note and took it with her.
Rob Ford was one of the Forensic Media Technicians. His was a role that was becoming more and more essential in modern policing. He had a talent for finding information about people of interest from their social media presence or records held with any number of public domain databases, most of which Maddie hadn’t even known existed. Even more important than his knowledge was his ability to present this in a format that would be accepted as evidence. This was a far more difficult task than Maddie had first realised but he had been able to explain it in a way that made sense.
‘Effectively, Maddie, the internet is never still. It changes every second of every day. Picture the sea and imagine you see someone drop a cup of water into it down at Langthorne beach. Tomorrow, if you were to check again it could be almost anywhere in the world, separated into a million droplets and you would have no way of proving it had ever been where you saw it, let alone who tipped it in.’
It made sense to her. The internet was just like the ocean, constantly moving and changing, and utterly terrifying.
‘Hey, Rob. I got your note.’ She held it up to prove her point.
Rob looked up from his monitor. Due to the nature of the work they did and the things they had to view, the windows were constantly covered. This was despite them being on the fourth floor. The door also had a combination lock on it for when they were working on sensitive material. Today it was wide open. The working environment was oppressive, not only dark and stuffy but cluttered and noisy. There was a large number of laptops, computer towers and monitors dotted around, some with their innards hanging out. A large flat screen TV on a wall silently played the game show Countdown and it seemed to be the main source of light for the room. Rob’s desk had a small lamp that was angled to point down at what looked like his main keyboard among several.
‘So I see. I should thank you, that was one of the more interesting tasks I’ve been given recently.’
‘Interesting?’
‘Sure. A couple of free strip shows on company time? I’ve had worse days.’
‘Strip shows?’
‘Yup.’ Rob clicked a mouse on his desk and looked up. The large television changed to mirror a computer desktop. Maddie watched the cursor chase across it as he moved the mouse to bring up the force’s internet home page. From here he copied over the first of the links she had sent him. The screen changed instantly to divert to a website. It was instantly obvious what sort of site it was.
‘Okay then.’ Maddie had her daybook. She opened it up to the last page, to where Freddie Rickman had written KAMGIRLS.COM in his oversized writing. It matched with what was written up on the screen. It was misspelt so the K could be fashioned to look like a pair of legs in tights. ‘It’s all very classy, I see.’
‘It is indeed. And for just fifteen pounds a month you can get yourself access to the members’ lounge. I love the way they’ve called it a lounge. Sounds exclusive.’
‘And what do you get in this lounge?’
‘It’s a little unclear. Most of the pages are in Russian. You’d need it translated properly but it seems that a member can take advantage of regular live shows as well as watch an archive of older ones. The site caters for a lot of tastes.’
‘Tastes?’
‘Yeah, there are a lot of categories. You can choose to watch singles, couples — a group, I think but that wasn’t clear — and any combination of male and female, male and male . . . You get the point. I didn’t click around too much. I can’t be seen to be having too much fun.’
‘No, I don’t blame you. It’s pretty much as he said anyway. Can you tell me anything about the background? He said someone else was hosting it and he just provides the feeds. I didn’t want to come across as an idiot, but I can’t say I know too much about what that means.’
‘Okay. So, yeah, from what is publicly available, this site is registered and hosted in Russia. You can take that with a pinch of salt, however. I can set up a site now and register it just about anywhere in the world from this chair. Means nothing. Porn sites that are making good money will usually claim to be operating from the country that has the best tax conditions, or sometimes the country that has the right attitude towards those sort of sites, if you know what I mean.’
‘You mean licensing?’
‘There’s no licensing for porn. There are the usual laws around age of the model, etc. but there’s no other regulation. Not for your common site anyway.’
‘Jesus!’
‘I know. It’s terrifying, really. It’s easy money, too, from what I can see. I suggest your friend will have a simple webcam set up with a secured Skype connection that will have been provided by whoever hosts this site. That will provide the member access to the feed and both ends will get traffic information.’
‘Traffic information?’
‘How many men you have holding their dicks at any one time.’
‘Thanks. A little too much information.’
‘That will be how your man gets paid.’
‘So the more punters, the more money.’
‘Simple as that.’
‘And the other? You said there might be two sites listed on there?’
‘Yeah, I was right, too. That wasn’t quite so exciting for me but potentially it is more exciting for you.’ Rob was clicking again. He copied over the second jumble of text she had sent.
‘It is a web address, then?’ It didn’t look like it to Maddie.
‘It is but for the dark web. They look very different because they don’t have to follow the rules that are in place for search engines. Here we are.’
Maddie’s attention was back on the flat screen. ‘UKamgirls’ she read out. ‘Suddenly the misspelling makes more sense.’ This time the word was in a simple, flat font. There was no accompanying graphics or half-naked females designed to tempt you in. just the word and then an underlined word underneath that said ENTER.
‘So it’s the same thing, just on the dark web?’
Rob shrugged. ‘The same theme for sure but the content will be more specialist, it has to be.’
‘Specialist?’
‘Why bother otherwise? If you have a viable porn site on www, why bother doing it again in a far more difficult place? Taking payment on the dark web is far from simple, people only do it if it’s really worth it.’
‘So what do you mean by specialist?’
‘Something that doesn�
��t have to abide by the law. You’re talking underage, bestiality, forced . . . the nasty categories basically. There will be stuff neither of us have the imagination for, even.’
‘Jesus . . . and assuming it’s the same concept we’re talking about, someone beaming this out live and for entertainment purposes?’ Maddie shuddered at the thought.
‘Exactly. I can’t tell you much more, though — we’ve hit the standard dark web brick wall.’ Rob clicked on ENTER. The screen changed, now there was a small box in the middle with words next to it: Host passcode.
‘Passcode?’ Maddie said.
‘Yeah. I’ve seen it a lot with indecent images of children cases. Someone will upload their whole collection to the dark web and then they give out their passcode in forums to other users, people they think they can trust, usually someone who has shared images with them first.’
‘And without that passcode?’
‘Even with that passcode there are likely to be other layers and checks. Then you’re going to need some sort of digital currency. In summary, we ain’t getting in.’
‘Even you!’ Maddie smiled and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Thanks though, that helps massively.’
He Knows Your Secrets Page 22
