The Depths

by Catriona King

  “That’s not all, chief. Galvet’s saying he and others took lots of kids across Europe, both sexes, all four years and under, and he’s going to give us everything he can remember on them. We’re just starting that now-”

  Mary jumped in. “He commented how pretty they all were.”

  “They’re all pretty at that age.”

  Ryan interceded.

  “I don’t know, it did sound like he was making a point, chief, like how attractive they were was important. He was also adamant that the children weren’t to be harmed or touched; they were taken only for money, that’s what he said. Whatever that means.”

  Mary jumped in again. “But the Westbury girl was the only one Galvet said he saw so much effort taken with. The rest were snatched but with her they watched and waited. He said this Brad was obsessed with her.”

  It underlined their grudge theory.

  Suddenly Craig’s suspicious side kicked in. “Why’s Galvet giving us all this when he must know that we’ll lock him away forever?”

  Ryan sighed. “He knows that, but he says prison’s not such a bad place to die as long as we give him enough cigs to smoke. He’s not a well man. Wheezing, coughing and skinny as hell, with lumps of fat around his eyes and he says fat inside too. He’s had two heart attacks already so I just think he’s hoping that the third does the trick.”

  Liam had been listening silently but now he said, “Xanthelasma.”

  “Bless you.”

  “Very witty, but it wasn’t a sneeze. That’s what they call fat round the eyes. One of my brothers has it. It’s a sign of high cholesterol.”

  They were back to melting into blobs of fat again.

  Ryan understood. “That would explain Galvet’s crack about cheese. Anyway, will we go ahead with the array, chief?”

  “Yes. Get an ID on this Brad and as soon as you have it notify me, then keep going on the children’s names Davy sent through and this Taylor. This is amazing work, both of you.”

  The sergeant sounded a warning note. “It’ll cost you a lot of cigs, and I doubt that’ll be Galvet’s only demand by the end.”

  “Whatever it costs it’ll be a small price to find those children.”

  Craig cut the call and fell back in his chair, astonished at what they’d just heard. He waited for his deputy to say something and Liam didn’t disappoint.

  After several “Bloody hell”s the D.C.I. made a rational contribution.

  “I think we should defer Casey’s interview till they call us back with that ID, boss. That way we can face her with proof of Blaine Westbury’s involvement.”

  Craig nodded. “You’re right. We need to be better armed before we question her. Go and tell your mate we’re pushing her interview back an hour, will you. I need to think.”

  After a moment of that he dialled Andy’s number. The D.C.I. left his interview with Arthur Norris to take the call.

  “Yes, chief?”

  “What’s happening with Norris?”

  “Not much. I really think he believes this is all something to do with pollution, I don’t think he’s got a clue about anything else. When we faced him with Róisín Casey’s name he admitted that her bank financed the mortgage business he runs in Belfast and that he’s acted as an agent for her at times. Mainly to do with the quarry, although the whole Rio Reynolds’ thing shows he does gofer work too. But beyond that…”

  “What has he said specifically about her role in the quarry?”

  “That she’s one of the owners, so she must have been hiding her name behind that front company Davy found. The quarry itself was just a plain old goldmine that ran out of gold, and the protests were just legitimate local anger against the planned excavation.”

  “And Stuart Kincaid’s death?”

  “Norris still seems to believe it was just a shocking local murder. He doesn’t appear to have a clue beyond that.”

  Craig tossed up on updating the D.C.I. about the other things they’d discovered and decided against it just then.

  “OK, Andy. Try to get the names of the partners in the quarry if Norris has them and call me back.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Dublin. We’ll be interviewing Casey in an hour, so call back before then if you can. But don’t tell Norris we’ve got her in custody. Oh, and casually ask him if he knows anyone called Brad or Taylor, will you.”

  When a puzzled, “Grand…” came back Craig ended the call.

  He made another one to his secretary. “Alice. I need you to do a little job for me.”

  The PA wasn’t quite sure if she liked the sound of that and he heard it in her hesitant, “Right...”

  Nicky would have said, “Hell, yeh.”

  “It’s all above board, trust me, Alice.”

  “Then go ahead, sir. Where are you now by the way?”

  “Garda Headquarters in Dublin. Right, I need you to contact the PA of Róisín Casey, Vice President at The Atlantic Way Merchant Bank in Dublin Docklands. Davy will have the extension number. Confirm Casey’s movements from the twenty-ninth of August twenty-fifteen for about a week, and tell her that we can get a Garda warrant if we need to. We’re pretty sure Casey was in Rome then but I want independent confirmation.”

  He might be pushing it on the warrant, but relationships between the two forces were good.

  “I need to know exactly where Casey was then. Call me back ASAP.”

  Just then another number appeared on his phone and he was surprised to see that it was his sister Lucia’s. She rarely contacted him at work so he knew that he’d better take the call.

  “OK, thanks, Alice, I have to go.”

  He swopped to his second line. “Luce, what’s up? I really can’t talk, I’m busy.”

  Lucia Craig smiled to herself, knowing that she was about to deliver a bombshell. She’d had to vie with several other people to be the one to drop it but she’d really wanted to hear the shock and panic in her normally cool brother’s voice.

  “I’ll be quick then. Katy’s gone into labour and we’re leaving for the hospital. Bye.”

  Craig gripped his phone hard.

  “What? No, don’t go! You can’t!”

  “But you said you were busy, big bro. So, ciao.”

  She sat in silence for a few seconds enjoying his terror, then felt guilty and spoke again.

  “OK, look, we just thought you should know, well, all except Mum who thinks this is women’s business that you should have no part in, and Katy who didn’t want you bothered at work. I don’t know what you did to deserve that woman, Marc, honestly. She’s a saint. I’d be screaming for attention. Anyway, everything’s fine and Katy says it could be eight to eighteen hours before the baby appears, first labour and all that, so there’s no rush to get back.”

  Craig felt cold sweat start to drip down his back. The baby was too early.

  “She can’t be in labour! The baby’s not due for another ten days.”

  “Okey dokey then. I’ll just tell it to stay in there, will I? Because you said so.”

  Just then Liam reappeared and was taken aback by the pallor on his boss’ face. Craig held out the phone weakly to him and Lucia explained things again, finally ending the call with, “Katy’s fine, the baby’s fine, it’s all fine and we don’t need him here, so just calm him the hell down, will you, Liam.”

  The D.C.I. had other ideas. “We’ll come back up the road now.”

  “Don’t you dare! And that just came straight from Katy shouting across the room at me. She’s got enough people here fussing over her without Marc pacing the floor and winding her up. Now goodbye.”

  As she cut the call Liam slumped into a seat. “You’re not wanted, but are we heading home anyway?”

  Craig gave a heartfelt sigh. “I really want to but I know I won’t get any thanks for it. Katy told me months ago that she really didn’t want me at the birth; although she said she’d cope with it if I insisted. Even that was said very grudgingly.”

  “Are you
insisting?”

  Craig gazed at him despairingly. “I’d like to be there for her but I really think she meant it when she said that I would just make her more stressed. Maybe it’s a doctor thing. She said she doesn’t actually want anyone there. She’d prefer to deliver by herself in a small room and just appear with a smiling bundle.”

  Liam’s weary snort came from the shattered illusions of a father of two. “You’ll be lucky. They don’t smile for weeks. Danni wouldn’t have me there either, she said I’d just panic. As if.”

  Craig furrowed his forehead. “I wonder if it’s a healthcare thing? Because she’s a nurse and Katy’s a doctor? The way we wouldn’t want them there at a crime scene.”

  Liam roared with laughter. “Comparing the birth of your child to a crime scene! Talk about putting your foot in it! For God’s sake don’t let the missus hear you saying that.”

  “That’s not what I meant! You know-”

  Craig was rescued by his phone ringing again and he was relieved to see that this time the call was about work.

  “Yes, Ryan. You have the ID?”

  The sergeant sounded stunned. “Galvet picked out Blaine Westbury first pop! Called him Brad too. Then he said that he’d handed loads of kids over to him and that he was the boss of everything, although there are others at the top too. But you’re not going to believe how many kids Galvet’s claiming to have taken, boss. I can hardly…” he swallowed hard. “He said he took fifteen between twenty-ten and fifteen alone and about the same number after that. All young. And there’s worse. Galvet says he’s not the only one this Brad paid to take kids…”

  They hadn’t even scraped the surface with the children on Davy’s list.

  “… but he says he’ll only give us the names of the other middle men if he gets a few more luxuries in his final years.”

  What was an advantage for if not to be pressed?

  Craig allowed himself a few seconds of imagining Galvet being guillotined and the thought calmed him enough to focus on the task ahead.

  “Like what?”

  “He doesn’t want to be sent back to France. As he said, ‘they will not be so nice to me I think.’ He also wants weekly conversation classes with someone French so he can speak his native language, some books to read and some sunshine in the summer. He’s accepted that he’s never getting out. Actually, he doesn’t want to.”

  Craig felt sick to his stomach at the idea of giving the man anything; he was walking filth. But…how many children were they talking about and where had they all gone? How many families like the Westburys had been broken over the years?

  He tried to think how he’d feel if he was a parent with no idea where their child was and knew they had to give those families peace if they could, even if it meant bargaining with a pervert like Galvet.

  “Yes. Tell him yes to everything, Ryan.”

  The French government might fight to transfer the paedophile but they could deal with that if it happened; by the time any extradition process was complete they should have all the information they needed and Galvet might already be dead.

  “Get those names, Ryan, and get the list to Davy as soon as you can.”

  He met his deputy’s eyes in disgust and cut the call feeling tainted, but they had to get the bastards who’d organised everything, and hopefully with Galvet’s information and one final thing from Alice they would have both Róisín Casey and Blaine Westbury boxed in.

  ****

  Róisín Casey’s Riverside Apartment. Dublin 2.

  Blaine Westbury hated doing things in a rush; planning was his forte and he was a virtuoso at it, despite his parents’ certainty that he’d had no talent at anything much. Perfect plans and their meticulously timed delivery, with every risk predicted and fail-safes and contingencies in place were something he and Róisín had always had in common, that and their love of money of course. Her for her lifestyle, him for his card games and high stakes trips to Vegas; they certainly had lived the high life together over the years.

  He opened the boot of his, deliberately anonymous but high performance in case he had to run, beige Mercedes and dropped in the bag that contained everything he needed for his future. Then, with a final look at the River Liffey and the apartment building that he’d called home on and off for over a decade, he pulled out on to City Quay and headed over the Talbot Memorial Bridge towards the port. From there it was through the port tunnel and he would hit the airport in an hour, and if that had really been the end of it he would have been home and dry and the police could have spent the rest of their naturals chasing his smoke.

  But there was the inconvenient matter of the Garda having lifted his girlfriend and, had he but known it, the even stickier issue of the north’s best detective squad being on his tail, brought there by his own carelessness over Stuart Kincaid’s death.

  Unaware of that, Westbury drove with the window down and his mind racing as fast as the air outside was rushing past him, thinking of the past and the future and then the past again, and believing in his heart that his only mistake had been arranging for his own niece’s abduction, but he just hadn’t been able to resist the delicious spectacle of his big brother in distress.

  Edgar the big brother, the perfect son and heir, held up to him all his bloody life as the person he fell short of. Good, clean, kind and following his parents into the hotel business, whereas he’d been worthless, dishonest, lazy and would never amount to anything.

  He found himself shouting aloud as he sped through the tunnel. “Whose fault was that then, Mum and Dad?”

  Tell a child that he’s a failure and he’ll become one, tell him he’s dishonest and maybe that’s what he’ll learn to be. OK, maybe he had stumbled a lot, but the helping hand he’d had a right to expect from his only brother had never been there to pull him to his feet. Still…he wished he’d never seen Bella at his folks’ funeral and decided to snatch her; he should have left her alone, not on moral but on common sense grounds. Her abduction was too close to home for comfort and had to be why the cops were on his tail. He’d just never expected Nicola’s sodding twin brother to make the link and begin to snoop.

  He emerged from the port tunnel into the daylight again and put his foot down hard, raking up through the car’s gears hard and shifting his thoughts from the past to the future again. He would start again in South America and Róisín would follow if she could. Their buyer networks and infrastructure were still intact there so there was no reason why the future couldn’t be even more profitable than the past for them. And if Róisín didn’t follow, well, there’d be plenty of new girlfriends where he was going. He just had to hold his nerve and board a plane to get there, and in a few hours time he would.

  As he pulled off at the exit for Dublin Airport, intending to park and wait in his car until the last possible minute before his flight, Blaine Westbury had no idea just how many people were trying to find him, assisted by one of his own grubby gang.

  ****

  The C.C.U.

  Craig’s small office was a hive of activity. Cate Pine was peering over the shoulder of her analyst as she worked at Craig’s computer, and Ash was working in parallel on his laptop with Emrys Lomax looking over his. Davy entered the room at intervals to update his junior on what more was needed and left again with various scribbled notes in his hand.

  By seven p.m. Craig knew that the woman who’d accompanied Bella Westbury from Rome to Boston in twenty-fifteen had definitely been Róisín Casey, Casey’s PA confirming she’d flown into that same airport just two days before and hadn’t returned to her work at the bank for a week. Between that information and the match on her passport photo they now had Casey linked directly to the abduction of Bella, and Blaine Westbury linked to far more than that.

  Davy checked his PC again for updates on the airport surveillance, and when he saw nothing he entered Craig’s office yet again, just in time to see the joint effort of two exceptional analysts come to fruition and the cryptocurrency icon on Derek
Morrow’s desktop finally spring to life.

  A series of flashing screens and rabbit-hole 3D effects that would have looked at home in The Matrix ended in both Ash’s and his opposite number’s computers going dark, making the hackers gasp and exchange a panicked look. If the currency site had crashed that could mean it was protected by file wiping software, and despite all of their hard work everything would be lost.

  The room was deathly quiet for what felt like minutes, with all eyes trained unblinkingly on the computer screens and no-one daring to breathe, then, after first a small boot-up circle appearing and then the analysts’ screens gradually brightening, the soft, round face of a small child appeared.

  It was followed by another and another and another, until the screen was filled with children’s photographs arranged in rows. Side by side head and shoulder images, all staring blankly at an invisible camera without a single smile. Every possible ethnicity of girls and boys; all young, all bewildered looking, their faces scrubbed, their hair neatly combed and their clothes pristine.

  The two detectives in the room gawped at each other but the analysts didn’t dare lift their eyes from the images, fearful that at any moment they might disappear.

  The person brave enough to break the silence was Emrys Lomax.

  “We need to click on one of them.”

  Davy was more cautious. “Ash? What do you think? W…Will it wipe?”

  “I don’t think so. Do you two?”

  Cate Pine’s analyst shook her head immediately, and slowly Davy concurred, adding a caveat.

  “Take a screenshot first, just in case they disappear.”

  They took several: on phones, Craig’s PC, a laptop and two smart-pads, as well as printing out a sheaf of them, until finally ten minutes later they were ready to proceed.

  This time Cate Pine took charge.

  “Choose one to click on.”

  Just then Ash pointed to a square near the bottom of the screen, looking stunned. “That’s Bella Westbury! Derek Morrow was in on her kidnap!”