by Andrew Lowe
‘You got this Kelly’s address?’
Sawyer nodded. ‘I’ll send it to you. Use your wily ways. Find out where the car might be now. Ask anyone still living there.’ He blew on his coffee. ‘I mean, I’d do it myself. But I’m too famous now. Thanks to your colleagues in the fourth estate.’
‘I’m annoyed about your arrest story getting out, too. Didn’t come from me.’
‘I’m so sorry you didn’t get the opportunity to take the credit for something.’ Sawyer took another sip of coffee, drifted off for a second. ‘Careful with this car thing. The driver might have had something to do with Klein’s death, and setting me up.’
Logan raised his eyebrows. ‘I appreciate the concern.’
‘How was the press conference?’
‘Pretty desperate. They wheeled out Mia’s father. Looked like a fucking ghost. No sign of the mother. I don’t think they’ve got much. They put out the standard appeal for Mia’s safe return, took a few questions about the new dead guy, Abbott. I had another go about your case. Nothing. I know more than they do.’
‘About what?’
‘Mia.’ Logan snorted. ‘I have a source who claims he saw Mia with someone at the Christmas market, being pulled along quite roughly.’
‘Man? She was with her dad.’
Logan shook his head. ‘Woman. Older.’
51
The tall man walked down the hall and crouched by the two-seater sofa. He picked up the crossbow and pointed it down, resting it vertically on the floor. The older woman emerged from an adjoining corridor and stood behind the sofa, watching, as he primed the bow and flicked on the dry fire safety switch.
The man glanced over his shoulder. ‘Are they ready?’
‘We’ve been outside. Chilly, though. Nights are really drawing in. They’re eating now. Joshua has a bit of a cold.’
He nodded. ‘Have you got a permission slip from his parents? About paracetamol?’
The woman forced a laugh. ‘Are you going out again?’
The man pressed a button on a remote and the hall was flooded by the sound of simmering ambient guitar. He lowered the volume. ‘They need company.’ When the woman didn’t reply, he looked over his shoulder, searching her with his eyes. He put on his silver-rimmed glasses. ‘This is far greater than the sum of an individual parent’s grief.’ His voice was quiet, whispered: almost inaudible. ‘You know this. You’ve felt it.’
The woman frowned. ‘I’m not doubting anything. There’s just… A lot of risk.’
He took a bolt from a box on the sofa, and passed his skinny fingers over the eye symbol etched into the centre. ‘We need to step it up. This way is quicker.’ He dropped his head and winced, as if struck by a sudden pain. ‘What’s happening out there? After Holly?’
‘As you’d expect. Police press conference.’
He nodded. ‘Witnesses?’
‘No mention. Just an appeal for help.’
He loaded the bolt into the bow. ‘Yes. I am going out again tonight.’ He aimed the bow at the target on the easel. ‘I’ll be with the children in half an hour.’ He fired. The bolt thunked into the bullseye, just off centre.
The woman stepped forward and rested a hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘Love, how long?’
He stood up, primed the bow again. ‘How long for what?’
She closed her eyes, bracing. ‘When do we stop?’
The man dropped the bow onto the sofa and walked around to her. He leaned down, inches from her face, and bared his jagged teeth. ‘This is the start. We stop when we are finished. When we agreed.’
She opened her eyes. ‘Five?’
He nodded. ‘And then, the glory.’
52
Sawyer sat low in the Corsa, parked across the road, watching the Fairfield Players club. Ash emerged and sauntered up towards town, and Sawyer crawled the car behind at a safe distance.
Ash stopped to light a cigarette, then turned into Pavilion Gardens. Sawyer parked, and followed on foot. He drew his collar up around his neck and kept his eyes down, tracking Ash along a parallel side path.
At the other side of the park, Ash crossed the road and headed into a low grade estate of boxy flat blocks. He approached the main door of the largest building—five storeys—and swiped a card on a reader. He disappeared inside, cigarette still burning.
It was dusk, but only the top two floors of the block were lit. Sawyer waited. The second floor light came on. He sat on a bench at a bus stop across the road, watching the building.
A few minutes later, two skinny teenagers shambled down the path towards the main door, laughing and shoving each other. Sawyer crossed the road and reached the door just as they were entering. He fumbled in his pocket for show, and as he reached the door, the second of the teenagers held it open for him.
‘Cheers.’
The boy nodded, and caught up with his friend, who was waiting by the rusty doors of the building’s only lift. Sawyer turned away and started up the littered staircase. As he reached the first floor, he heard voices from above, getting closer. Ash, and maybe two others. He slipped through the windowed connecting door and waited in the first floor corridor as the group came down the stairs, shouting and swearing. He looked out of the window, down at the path. The main door slammed shut, and Ash and three other boys careered away, towards the park.
Sawyer took the stairs up to the second floor and its identical corridor: windows looking down on the courtyard, three flat doors on each side. He paced down to the end, listening at each door. Music and conversation from the first two flats, TV noise from the second two. At the end of the corridor, Sawyer’s nose wrinkled at the odour of weed.
He listened at the door of both flats. Kitchen noise from the first. Cutlery, a kettle boiling, a woman humming. The second was quiet, and he tapped at the door.
No answer. He took out the oblong black case and got to work on the lock with the kirby grips: twisting one pin into a kinked wrench to feel out the tension, using the other as a pick. The lock was an old Yale, and he had the door open in a couple of minutes.
Inside, the place reeked of smoke, and the sickly sweet tang of supermarket deodorant. The main living room was overrun with clutter: tea-streaked mugs, empty beer bottles, pizza boxes, drug paraphernalia. Sawyer crept through, listening for movement. At the far side of the room, through an ajar door, he could see the bottom end of a bed.
He put on a pair of latex gloves and sifted through the drug detritus. Needles, crumpled foil, a rubber tie-off hose, scorched spoons, candles.
A thud from the bedroom.
Sawyer backed away and ducked into a small side kitchen. He waited for a while, then emerged, and crossed to the bedroom, staying low and quiet.
He nudged open the door. A man in his twenties lay on the bed, fully clothed, mouth gagged with a strip of gaffer tape. His arms had been forced wide and his wrists tied to the headboard with thick rope, secured by multiple knots. He startled at the sight of Sawyer, and widened his eyes, bucking against the rope.
Sawyer raised a calming hand and looked around the room. A small portable TV sat on a dresser opposite the bed. The TV was off, but the remote lay near the pillows, within the man’s reach. Sawyer pinched the side of the gaffer tape and raised his eyebrows at the man, who nodded back. He ripped the tape off in a swift, single yank, and the man stifled a scream of pain.
Sawyer stepped around the bed. More drug paraphernalia on the floor. Empty cans, foil takeaway boxes. ‘It’s alright. I want to help. This your place?’
The man nodded, and tossed his long, greasy hair over his shoulder. ‘Yeah. It’s mine. I rent it.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Robbie Carling. They won’t let me go. Can you untie me, please?’
Sawyer pulled over a chair and sat down by the bed. ‘Who won’t let you go?’
Robbie looked around the room, avoiding Sawyer’s gaze. He was flushed, sweating. ‘They said it would be bad for me if I said anything. They said th
ey know my mum. She’s in hospital. It might be bad for her, too.’
‘Are they selling drugs from here, Robbie?’
He snapped his head round to face Sawyer. ‘Drugs? Can you… Please…’
‘Do you need a fix?’
Robbie nodded, eyes wide.
‘You’ve got to hold on for a while longer. I’m going to help you, but you’ve got to be strong. And you can’t say that I’ve been here. Can you promise me that?’
He grimaced, nodded again.
‘Sorry about this. We have to put things back the way they left them. Or they’ll be suspicious. Yes?’
Robbie closed his eyes, nodded again. Sawyer carefully reapplied the gaffer tape to his mouth and walked back into the sitting room, leaving the door ajar.
Shrill laughter from the courtyard below. He stood to the side of the main window and looked out, staying hidden. Ash and friends were heading back up the path, towards the flat block. Sawyer looked around the room, then up at the thin, pale-blue curtains. He took out the listening device, reached up to the metal rail, and snapped the magnetic plate into place, securing the small cube out of sight. He exited back into the corridor, closing the door behind him. At the staircase, he climbed the next flight up to the third floor, waited for the voices to pass below, then took the lift down.
Back at the car, he took out the burner and made a call. It connected immediately.
‘Sawyer. I was hoping you could stay out of trouble for a day at least.’
‘Not in my nature, Max. You need to get on to your Manchester vice boys. Keep them away from Strickland’s place up there for now. Whatever you need to do. Anonymous tip-off, whatever. I think he’s using a trap house in Buxton.’
‘County lines?’
‘Yeah. Recruiting local dealers through the clubs. I’ll get some more detail, then feed you an address. They’ve got to hold off for a while, though. If they go into his Manchester place now, they’ll alert him and the house here won’t be useful to them any more.’
53
Back at the cottage, Sawyer flopped onto the sofa with his phone and laptop. He tuned in to the listening device but heard only silence from the sitting room, and a distant TV, probably from the bedroom. Ash and his pals must have gone out again. He needed to be patient. If he could catch some loose talk, it might help him pinpoint where the drug supply had been hidden. Hopefully, he would be reinstated by then, and could trace everything back through the Players clubs, and rub Dale out of the picture.
He set up some music—an old Depeche Mode deep cuts playlist—and Googled ‘Raysoft’. He switched to the Images tab. The results showed mostly videogame screenshots: clearly older titles, with rudimentary graphics. Halfway down, he spotted the eye symbol: a basic sketch, identical to the image on the crossbow bolts.
He followed the link to a retro PC games website, where three Raysoft titles were available to download and play from inside an emulator program. He studied the accompanying images. One of the games, Wormhole, looked like a standard 3D space shooter. He installed the emulator, downloaded the ROM file, and ran the game.
Black screen. The eye image faded up: white outline, hand drawn. The word Raysoft scrolled up beneath the image. Music: melodramatic, strident. The screen cleared to reveal a large, pixelated title logo, rendered in orange and yellow: WORMHOLE. Across the bottom, in small type: CODE BY H. BRIGGS. Beneath, in smaller type: DEDICATED TO SAM.
The game was scrappy but compulsive. Blocky enemy ships emerged from a black starfield, forcing the player to move a small crosshair around and pick them off with flashing laser fire from gun barrels mounted in the four corners. Sawyer played for a while, then quit the emulator and returned to the Google home page.
He typed, ‘H. Briggs’, but the results were too random: a nineteenth-century tennis player, a US physicist, some ancient report on cost minimisation. He tried, ‘Holden Briggs’. Nothing jumped out. Then, ‘Sam Briggs’. This led to hundreds of results for a UK-born CrossFit athlete. He modified to, ‘Sam Briggs 1982’. This clarified that the athlete had been born in 1982, but there was no obvious connection to either the crossbow murders or the child abductions.
He advanced through the search results. His eye fell on a link at the bottom of page two.
Sidney Black: the tidy child killer.
The supporting copy contained the name, ‘Samantha Briggs’. Sawyer followed the link. It led to an article on a lurid website which had clearly set out to emulate Wikipedia, with entries dedicated to true crime cases. The content on Black was summarised at the top of the page, with a smudgy photo of a middle-aged man scowling into the camera.
Sidney Black (17th April 1937 – 12th December 1995) was a British convicted paedophile serving two life sentences for a string of rapes against young boys, and for the murder of three young girls: Rachel Hogan (8), Lydia May (10), and Samantha Briggs (10).
Black was notable for his penchant for abandoning his victims’ bodies naked, next to their neatly folded clothing and shoes. In the case of his third victim, Samantha Briggs, her decomposed body was found in undergrowth. She had been tied up, gagged, and her underwear had been placed beneath her head, suggesting sexual assault.
Black was apprehended in July 1993, but died in HMP Strangeways in December 1995, following an attack from two other inmates.
Sawyer searched around the Samantha Briggs case. Her body had been discovered at Hollingworth Lake near Rochdale, after being reported missing for four months. According to a cutting from the Daily Mirror at the time, her father, Isaac, was a wealthy ‘technology tycoon’ who had patented software to IBM. He had put up a hefty reward for Samantha’s return, but there had been no takers.
He dug deeper, typing, ‘Briggs Samantha Isaac Raysoft’. The top result was a 1999 article from PC Gaming magazine.
Raysoft: Bright Future, Dark Past
The link led to a site that archived old computer and videogame magazines. The PC Gaming feature was a double-page spread, which told of a new wave of ‘back bedroom coders’ making money by producing simple games that players could get for free and then choose to support with optional financial contributions. The tone warned of an unsustainable model, but with hindsight, it was a glimpse of the future.
The main thrust of the piece was the background of the Briggs family, and how they had coped following the death of Samantha, seven years earlier, and father Isaac, who had succumbed to a heart attack the previous year.
There were two accompanying photographs: a late teenage boy, posed at the keyboard of his PC. He was turned side-on to camera, struggling to hold an awkward smile. He was tall and thin and gawky: stonewashed jeans, silver-framed glasses, spindly fingers poised above the keyboard. The room around him was messy: consoles, TVs, piles of books, sci-fi movie posters and memorabilia. The caption read: HARRISON BRIGGS, BOY WONDER.
Harrison was interviewed in the piece. At one point, he explained how the company logo had come about.
‘It was when we were kids. Me and my sister Sam were in my room and she drew this brilliant little picture. It was an eye with a sun in the centre, with rays around it. I’ve always kept the picture and thought it would be a nice tribute to her memory if we used it as the logo.’
The second photograph was taken outside, on the front lawn of a handsome detached house. The sky behind the house was white, and the grass yellowed and patchy. The caption read: SOFTWARE HOUSE: Harrison Briggs, at home with mother Lynette.
The teenage boy stood at the edge of the lawn, with an older woman at his side. She had one arm around his waist and looked up at him, with a curious smile. The size difference was comical: he was tall and thin; she was short and rounded. The boy was buried beneath a khaki parka, furry hood almost concealing his face; she wore a brown duffel coat, black woollen hat and bright yellow gloves.
54
Dale Strickland leaned forward, both palms planted on the windowsill. He looked at his watch: 2:30am. Down below, the city glistened behind a steady d
rizzle, powered down for the night. He had retreated to his plush, carpeted top-floor office, away from the last-minute snooker players. It gave him extra distance from the street, and dirty work required clean surroundings.
Shaun Brooks entered, in signature black blazer and polo neck sweater. He balked at the sight of Austin Fletcher, poised in the far corner. ‘Boss. Is this about the other day, in Buxton?’
Dale didn’t turn. ‘I told you. Don’t call me Boss.’
Shaun glanced at Fletcher. No cigarette; eyes down, fixed on the mock Persian at Shaun’s feet. ‘Having a late one, then?’
Dale shrugged. ‘No rest for the wicked.’ He turned, and eased into his revolving chair.
Fletcher looked up. ‘Problems.’
Shaun checked Dale; his head was lowered, eyes fixed on the desk surface. Shaun moved closer and spoke to the bald patch on Dale’s scalp. ‘I count one problem.’ He nodded towards Fletcher. ‘We’ve got a fucking psycho on the loose, threatening people, when we’re trying to set things up without attracting attention.’
‘How’s the club down there? Can your associates keep it moving without you yet?’
Shaun brightened. ‘Clem’s pretty sharp, yeah. Ash can handle distribution, with a bit of micro management. I don’t need to be there to do that, though.’
‘And how is Mr Sawyer?’ Dale raised his eyes. ‘Has he been to see you again?’
‘He was fishing. I didn’t bite.’
Dale smiled. ‘He’s been to the club twice since then. The second time, he followed you. To the flat.’
