Wilderness (Arbogast trilogy)

by Campbell Hart

  “Did you beat your wife Mr Clark?”

  “—Hang on that’s a bit strong. I lashed out at her. She had a black eye and left for a friend’s house in Glasgow. I haven’t seen her since. I’ve been waiting and waiting and now this,” he gestured behind him, “I know I was wrong but this is unbelievable. I can’t believe she would steal a child though if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “I didn’t even suggest that Mr Clark. Let’s just keep calm.”

  DS Reid’s report came as quite a revelation to the group. Rosalind Ying knew of course, but to many in the team it sounded like a promising lead. DS Reid explained, “On the face of it seems as if Mary Clark might have the motive to abduct a child. She knew Stevie from when he was a boy but denies they’ve kept in touch. I’m no psychologist but this wouldn’t be the first time that someone complaining of child abuse turned out to be an abuser themselves.”

  “A female child abuser,” Arbogast said, “would be very unusual.”

  “Agreed,” Rosalind said, “but not impossible, and we must keep an open mind. We will need to keep Mary in hospital for as long as possible. If she recovers fast enough we may be forced to arrest her to give us more time to pick through this one. Her story is full of holes and her husband seems to be a problem too. The bastard’s lucky he wasn’t reported for assault.”

  Everyone nodded. A huge amount of time was spent by the force dealing with domestic abuse and warring couples. It was never pretty but had become part of their day-to-day lives.

  “Our other lead is the information we got from Mary Clark. How reliable this is we don’t know but it seems the mother might be working as a lap dancer in the Glasgow area – forcibly if the story is to be believed. I need to know who owns this business. It goes without saying that means a trip to the Companies Register. Also we need to double check the women’s identity – this Hanom Kocack – we’ll be trying to find the husband. Onur Kocack is apparently working on a wind farm through a Home Office sponsored scheme so he should be easy enough to find. And in the meantime DI Arbogast has an interesting assignment relating to the mother. Arbogast over to you...”

  The possibility of human trafficking in the case posed several very real problems for Arbogast. Firstly everyone he was trying to track down did not exist, not legally anyway. There were no pay slips, national insurance contributions or health records – nothing that would point to where they could be found. Over the years there had been many warnings of the dangers of people being smuggled into the country but so far no-one had been caught, which made him think it might not be such a big problem after all. Arbogast phoned his old CID pal Richard Evans.

  “Hey Rich, how’s it going?” Arbogast said. He could hear a sigh at the other end of the line.

  “What is it this time?” Both men had worked together as rookies in Glasgow CID in what felt like a lifetime ago. In 2001 Rich had moved into the then newly formed Scottish Drug Enforcement Agency. At that time it was all about sending a public message that drugs were being taken off the streets, although in reality they were only chipping away at the corners. Time had seen the agency expand and it now had responsibility for certain serious crimes and border protection in partnership with the UK agency, SOCA. In short Rich’s stock had risen and he was among the more influential frontline police in Scotland.

  “Rich you’ll be aware of the coach case I’m on?”

  “The Snow Paedo you mean? You’ve been doing yourself proud there so far.”

  “Don’t be a dick,” Arbogast said, “there’s still a kid missing. I have information on this case which ties into the Devil May Care club.”

  “The titty bar?”

  “So eloquently put but yes. I think the child’s mother may – and this is only a ‘may’ – may have been smuggled into Scotland from Turkey. Do you have anything on the club? Who runs it? I’d owe you one.”

  “Ah behold the sight of the lesser crawling Arbogast – a sight so rarely seen in these parts. Well as it happens we have been keeping tabs on Devil May Care. It’s part of the Madoch Group – do you know it?”

  “I’ve had dealings with Mister Madoch in the past.”

  “These days he’s Mister Teflon. His business appears to be a legitimate company, but in reality he’s tied into so much shit that it’s only a matter of time before we get something on him. John Madoch started out carving up his rivals with kitchen knives but he got wise fast and he’s built up a pretty impressive empire. Madoch has a sizeable holding in the Moorland Wind farm out at Eaglesham. He’s also been putting up speculative office developments in the financial zone, not to mention a couple of city centre hotels – you might know them – the Cooperage and the Gold Star?” Arbogast didn’t know them, “but the thing is all the cash comes from drug running and prostitution. Madoch is as bent as they come but he has good people and we just can’t trace his money. His only nod in the direction of dodgy these days, on paper anyway, is his chain of lap dancing bars. He has six – one in every Scottish city. We think he brings in girls from Eastern Europe and rotates them round the clubs a couple of weeks at a time. So far we haven’t been able to catch him out.”

  “Have none of the girls been able to help?”

  Rich snorted down the phone like a bridled horse. “We’ve tried John but they’re scared stiff. They all say the same thing, that they’re well paid and thankful for their jobs. If they say there’s no problem it leaves us with a headache and we’ve no evidence to suggest they’re here illegally. Politically it’s a bit sensitive as no-one wants to admit the trafficking issue is alive and well. We just keep saying we’re doing well policing the borders and everyone’s happy.”

  “Except the girls,” Arbogast said, “Look Rich thanks for your time. I’m going to try and make contact with this woman, if she even exists, I just wanted to pick your brains and check I wasn’t stepping on a live investigation?”

  “Not so that you’d notice but if you get anything on Madoch I’d appreciate being kept in the loop.”

  Arbogast spent the rest of the afternoon going through case work and arranging a timeline of events as they had them so far. Then when he had paid a visit to the communications team to check for an update on press interest he left for Glasgow. It was going to be another late night.

  Hanom Kocack was worried. Things had not gone as planned and she had heard nothing about her daughter. She had trusted the woman from the refuge, Mary Clark, so what had gone wrong? She hadn’t made the rendezvous and now she didn’t know what to do. Hanom had stolen a mobile phone from one of the men in the club the next night and tried to phone Mary. More often than not, the men were so drunk you could slap them on the face and they’d still pay up. But the line was dead. No answer. So what was happening? She knew her husband was here somewhere. In this foreign city, he was here somewhere, so why hadn’t he got in touch? Something must be wrong. They had planned for this and nothing could go wrong – that’s what they’d said. Tonight she had to keep on doing this disgusting job. Thrusting herself on those drunken slobs, with their erections rubbing against her thighs, trying to touch her, wanting her. The first night she had been sick, she didn’t know how much longer she could keep going. The girls she stayed with kept changing and they never spoke. There were fourteen of them living in a large damp room in a tall building. They each had a mattress and sleeping bag but that was all. They allowed them out at night for half an hour but they were told not to disappear, not to speak to anyone or their families would pay the price. Poor Kovan. Where was she now – dead maybe or left to rot somewhere. Oh god no, please not that, please let my baby be OK.

  Arbogast parked a couple of blocks away from Devil May Care. There was a good chance the car would get broken into but it was a chance he was willing to take. Across the road from the nightclub was a gap site. The building had been a well known department store in its day but had burned down about 35 years ago and had never been redeveloped. This part of town remained quite unfashionable despite the fact it wa
s only two minutes walk from the city’s main shopping precincts. He waited at a safe enough distance so that he would not be seen by the bouncers on the door. The girls arrived in a mini bus at 10:00pm. They all wore long coats so he assumed they were already ‘dressed’ for the night. ‘It’s another way of keeping them on the leash,’ Rich had said once. He thought the girls were coming in from Eastern Europe. Arbogast saw one girl who he thought fitted the bill. She looked familiar. The club opened at 10:30 and was open until 3:00. It was midweek and he wondered how busy the club would get. People drifted in and out until he spotted his chance. A large stag party of around 25 boozed up blokes turned up ready for their titillation. It had obviously been an all day session but the management had let them all in all the same after a quick grilling. ‘There is nothing as stupid than a drunken man with a cash card,’ Arbogast thought as he filed in behind them, an anonymous friend.

  “It’s the business this eh,” he said pretending to be one of the lads, “Best part of the night mate best part of the night. It’s just a shame you can’t take them home but you never know eh?” It made Arbogast ashamed of himself. He had been here himself barely able to stand just the other day and he’d been just the same, thinking he owned the girls, that he could paw them. Inside he bought himself a drink and sat down. He was wearing a suit jacket, a striped white shirt, and jeans. He couldn’t see his target yet and would have to bide his time. He paid a girl for a dance and was back at his table in a few minutes. This endeared him to the crowd with the stag saying to him, “You don’t mess about you dirty bastard – It’s my stag you know. It’s supposed to be me first.” Apparently he thought he was with him. And then he saw her and rather than waste any more time he made his approach. Arbogast had to admit this was a good looking woman. Tonight she was wearing all white lingerie – she looked like something out of a 1980s porn film, which appealed to his baser instincts. She looked at him with fuck off eyes and said “Shall I dance for you?” She took him by the hand and they left the bar and into the corridor which led to the parlour. He couldn’t remember having seen that before. She stopped and turned to face him.

  “You were in here the other night. I remember now –

  you tried to touch me, to feel me. You’re supposed to be barred. In fact I think it’s time you left – wait here.”

  This was his moment, “Hanom?” he said. He knew from her reaction that she was the one he was looking for, “I can’t speak for long but I’m with the police. A girl has disappeared and I’ve been told you might be the mother?”

  Hanom moved back a step “Who are you. Is this some kind of joke?”

  “No joke – I’ve spoken to Mary.”

  “We cannot speak here there are cameras,” she said looking around to see if they had been noticed, “Speak to me while I dance, but quietly.” She took him to a cubicle that was enclosed on the left and right with a red velvet partition. There was no door and at the back of room sat a security guard. If it was the same security man from the other night he didn’t seem to recognise Arbogast. When he sat with his back against the wall Hanom straddled him with her legs on either side of him, knees down on the seat. As she writhed over him he had to struggle to focus his attention.

  “I have a police mobile in my jacket pocket. I will leave the jacket here so take the phone. That way we’ll be able to talk and I’ll be able to find you – we can trace your movements but only if the handset is on.” Hanom was still dancing and Arbogast coughed to try and hide his embarrassment.

  Hanom was following every word now, “Where is my daughter? What has happened to Mary Clark?” she was bent over Arbogast now and had taken off her bra.

  Arbogast tried to look turned on, for appearances sake, although under the circumstances this was no great feat. “She’s OK,” he said, “but in hospital. She says she doesn’t know what happened but I think she knows more. Will you help me?”

  She stood up and smiled at him, bending over to kiss on the cheek, “I have no choice – please get me out.” He paid her the money and left as the stags partied on. Everyone was too busy to notice Hanom going back into the corridor and taking the phone from the inside of the black suit jacket which had been dumped on the floor.

  11

  February 18th 2010

  He met her at the Adelphi at 2:53. He was smoking a cigarette and she tried to disguise herself with a large brimmed hat with a dark band around it and a long overcoat. She asked for a light but she only wanted to see his tie. A man with a hat and cane was watching. He looked a bit like an aged Charlie Chaplin but they hadn’t seen him, yet. They hailed a cab and left. They didn’t notice the man with the cane stub out his cigarette and follow on behind. Two others watched him leave too, but that was another story. In the cab they talked about this and that, about a man called Reardon and another called Jake but they were skirting around the issue. ‘Right at the next corner,’ he said. He hadn’t told her where they were going and she wanted to know. ‘The Green Cat,’ on Saughton Street he said. She thought he wouldn’t like it there but he said that was only when he wasn’t expected. The green neon sign outside meant they had arrived and as they entered the car left. He took her arm and led her to a table but they didn’t see what the mirror saw: a limping man, with a Charlie Chaplin cane. The piano jingled on but no-one really listened. As they ordered they should have seen the cane, the lunging limp and the man who was taking his hat off but they were still making small talk, no time for the outside world. The piano played on. She hadn’t eaten all day so she ordered a glass of milk – hot, while he wanted a steak sandwich, rare, and a glass of beer. She hadn’t looked at the menu. And still they didn’t see him. He was looking now, looking all around. He had come for a reason but they didn’t know what it was yet, although we did. He asked about money but she didn’t know. Charlie Chaplin left the bar; his back was aching, too much for one day but it hadn’t ended yet, not for them. He’d found them and soon he would bring the others back... the Killers.

  It was 3:00am. Arbogast smiled as he watched The Killers, a Film Noir from 1946 starring Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. It was Lancaster’s first movie. He loved this scene most of all. It was subtle for its time. If you watched the main characters and their small talk you would miss the bigger picture. It all happened in the background. ‘It’s all in the background,’ he thought, ‘what’s happening in this case that I can’t see – the connection that’s missing? Where’s my limping man, my missing link?’ Arbogast swirled the ice in his glass and hoped that Hanom Kocack would soon be able to fill in some of the blanks. It had been three hours since he had left the club and he suspected would not be able to phone until it was safe. He had been brought onto the case as ‘the expert’ from Major Crime. He snorted at the thought of it. If you could call finding a missing child after he’d died an accomplishment then he was definitely the best man for the job. He didn’t want to live through that again. He remembered having to tell the mother her son was dead and how she had pounded his chest ‘you said you’d find him,’ she screamed, ‘you promised you’d find him.’ He would never forget that. All the family had been there that day and every one of them had looked at him in that one moment in a mixture of disbelief and hatred. He knew it wasn’t his fault, knew they were all caught up in the moment but she was right – he had promised to find the boy and he supposed that he had, although what use was a corpse to a loving mother? What was worse was that the ‘Cat Sack’ killer was never found – all in all a resounding success. Arbogast still hadn’t been formally introduced to the Major Crime unit but they obviously had faith in him. The rank and file hated Major Crime which had formerly been Serious Crime but was changed in one of the regular departmental reorganisations, which in reality amounted to nothing more than a smoke and mirrors reshuffle which was supposed to point to progress. He knew from his time in CID that some of the constables didn’t like the ‘big guns’ as they called them. They saw only an elite group that they weren’t part of, people doing the glamou
r work, but that wasn’t the case at all. The truth was that they were the best in their field. The unit worked across the Strathclyde Force area, with officers parachuted into investigations which best suited their experience. Regional CID teams were usually glad of the help and that had certainly been true this time. But was he overreaching with this ruse with Hanom? What if she didn’t phone and he never heard from her again? The Killers had ended now and he saw on the late night news that a CCTV picture of the missing child had eventually been found. ‘Thank god for that,’ he thought, ‘it’s taken three days to get that out of the system.’ The picture wasn’t great quality and wasn’t in continuous video capture, rather the stop-start time lapse shots you sometimes see on TV during cases like these. There was Mary, hand in hand with the girl. Kovan had no luggage, no bags but was clutching something in her hand. The sequence showed footage from three separate cameras and followed their journey from outside the bus station through to the departure board and then onto the coach that would end up stalled and stranded in the worst blizzard in 50 years. The TV announcer said the Police had asked for anyone with information to come forward. They had had a good response the first time round but it was good to keep this in the public’s eye. Arbogast hoped it would do some good. He waited until about 4:00, but it was clear the call wasn’t going to come. He woke up later that morning, still fully dressed in yesterday’s clothes, and immediately left the house.

  Arbogast thought the investigation was going well. That is to say everyone was busy all the time even if they had yet to make that major breakthrough. The public appeal had helped fill in some of the blanks and they were fairly certain now that Mary Clark had at least been telling the truth about her movements. Witnesses had seen them leave the train and make their way to the bus station. More than sixty people had got in touch to say they’d been on the bus although only about a dozen could remember seeing the pair on board. They hadn’t appeared to be talking much on the bus but Arbogast didn’t think that unusual. How much English is a 5 year old from Turkey likely to know? Rosalind Ying had also identified the van the child had been smuggled into the country from CCTV footage taken at Hull. The border control people said it was far from an exact science and that this must have been one that ‘slipped through the net’. Just that day, they had explained, they had found a container in a cargo ship with five dead Afghan nationals onboard. They’d suffocated and probably paid thousands for the privilege. Back in Lanarkshire the team still hadn’t tracked down ‘Hot Gossip’ who wasn’t at her home address but they agreed they would need to warn her off and set an example. Arbogast hadn’t ruled out that she could be involved in the case but that information would follow in time. They had now interviewed everyone at Dales Travel and one common theme had emerged: although people had been wary of having Stevie Davidson on the staff, they had all said ‘he’d been alright.’ It seemed Stevie had gathered his colleagues together and told them about his past and that it was something that was not going to happen again. Most had respected his honesty but it seemed that Jean Jessop had been bad mouthing him for years, waiting for something to trip him up. Jean had been identified as Hot Gossip and Arbogast knew that they would find her eventually. Meanwhile the door-to-door enquiries continued and more and more paperwork found its way back the HOLMES team who were busy logging and cross referencing data from across the country, searching for correlations on anything that might spur them forward – but so far no joy. This was the grind, the real police work. People think of crime and punishment, but success is determined mainly through hard work and a little bit of luck. Arbogast looked at his phone for the 25th time that morning but still had nothing from Hanom. At the morning briefing he updated the team on the evening’s work and they all hoped now it had been the right thing to do. Later, sat in the canteen with an undersized cup of powdered machine coffee, Arbogast looked out at the ice and snow, “and the piano played on,” he said to himself, “just tell me what’s in the fucking background please – I can’t see for looking.”