by Andrew Lowe
Shaun’s gaze shifted to the window. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘No. I don’t expect he wanted you to know.’
A noise in the street below. Fletcher moved to the window. ‘They’re here.’
Shaun raised his head. ‘We expecting visitors?’
Dale opened the desk drawer. ‘I want to thank you, Shaun. For all the effort. It’s been mostly effective. You’ve certainly given us momentum, and I did promise you a reward. It’s such a shame you couldn’t resist rewarding yourself first.’
A crashing noise from outside, at street level.
‘How do you mean?’
Dale took out a boxy black handgun with a long cylindrical attachment at the end of the barrel.
Shaun eyed it. ‘What’s that for?’
Dale looked up, surprised. ‘Shooting people. It’s a Glock G17. Semi-automatic.’ He wobbled the gun in his hand. ‘Nine millimetre. Short recoil. Favoured by law enforcement agencies the world over. This is a silenced version. Bit of a faff, because you have to replace the barrel before you fit the suppressor. Shoots the same ammo, though.’ He released the magazine and let it fall into his hand. ‘Three bullets left in the clip.’ He slotted it back in, smiled. ‘Plenty.’
Fletcher pushed away from the window. He moved around Shaun and opened the door, looked out along the corridor. He listened for a while, closed the door. ‘AFOs.’
Dale cocked the weapon. ‘You’ve been stealing from me. You’ve compromised a key location, and God only knows what you’ve been feeding our good friend, Detective Sawyer.’
A shout from the floor below. ‘Armed police!’
Shaun took a step forward; Dale held up the gun, pointing it at his head. He was suddenly pale, wide-eyed. He held his hands out in front, palms up. ‘Dale. For fuck’s sake. I’ve said nothing. And… it’s just a bit of pocket money. I fucked up, yeah? You’ll get it back. Double.’
Dale smiled and squeezed the trigger. The gunshot was no more than a loud ‘click’. There was a wet crack, as the bullet thudded into Shaun’s forehead. He dropped to the floor, in an awkward heap.
Fletcher stepped around him and held out a hand to Dale, beckoning with his fingers.
Dale gave him the gun. ‘We reset. Move again when things have died down. Go and clean up.’
55
Sawyer woke to the buzzing of the burner phone on his bedside table. He reached over and connected the call, from Max Reeves.
‘Morning. Now, I’ve always wanted to do this. Turn on the TV. BBC News.’
Sawyer sighed. ‘I’m still in bed. Give me the gist.’
‘Raid on Dale’s place in Manchester last night.’
Sawyer hopped out of bed and hurried into the sitting room. ‘What happened?’ He squatted down and fiddled with the TV. No terrestrial, so he had to navigate to the live section of iPlayer.
‘Looks like they brought him in.’
Sawyer caught Reeves’ pause. ‘What?’
‘I’m not hearing good things.’
‘…shots were heard in the vicinity of the top floor here.’ A female reporter spoke into camera. She turned and waved a hand towards a three-storey building on the corner of a busy street. The pavement had been cordoned off, and two officers in high-viz jackets stood by the main doors, as detectives and FSIs entered and exited. A sign above the door showed icons of a number eight Pool ball and a console joypad, beneath the word PLAYERS, rendered in joined-up, right-leaning script.
‘We understand that the club owner was on the premises at the time, and has been taken into custody.’
The picture cut to reveal a brightly lit breakfast TV studio, with the reporter’s live feed relayed on an inset screen. A male presenter nodded. ‘Are there any reports of injuries, Caroline?’
‘We’re hearing from police that there has been a casualty, yes. But this is a developing story, and the circumstances aren’t yet clear.’
Sawyer pitched back onto the sofa. ‘Did you get my message across?’
Reeves bristled. ‘Yes, I did. And since I’m not the Chief Constable, there wasn’t a lot more I could do.’
‘Caroline, we’re just going over to Pendleton Police Station in Greater Manchester, where I believe the club owner’s legal representative is making a statement.’
The image shifted to the front of a redbrick building with blue window frames. A scrum of reporters surrounded an elegant, middle-aged man in an expensive suit. Dale stood behind him, head down.
The man fitted a pair of dark-rimmed spectacles to his face and addressed the crowd. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have a short statement to read on behalf of my client, Mr Strickland, who has now been released on bail, pending inquiry.’
Reeves snorted. ‘That can’t have been cheap.’
‘My client is shocked and appalled at the heavy-handed actions of Greater Manchester Police, and he will be aggressively contesting any charges which may arise from this morning’s intrusion onto his property. He is a hard-working entrepreneur who has been building up a legitimate business since his release from prison, several months ago. Not only has this illegal police action compromised my client’s business, but it has resulted in the tragic death of one of his most trusted employees, Mr Shaun Christopher Brooks.’
Sawyer closed his eyes. ‘Fuck.’
‘Mr Strickland acknowledges that he has made mistakes in the past, but this does not entitle the police to hound him in this way. He has already been the subject of unwarranted harassment from a detective who is now himself under suspicion of criminal activity.’
Sawyer sighed. ‘We almost had him. He’ll milk this hard. And he’ll freeze everything and regroup, be more careful.’
‘He must have been expecting the raid,’ said Reeves.
The phone buzzed.
‘I’ll call you back, Max.’
Text message from Dean Logan.
Another paedo down. Near Lud’s Church. Convicted SO. Recently released.
Sawyer gathered his thoughts. Was Shaun’s death his fault? Had he been seen with him at the Fairfield club? If Dale was planning to cover his tracks and counterattack, who else might be in the firing line? He remembered their recent conversation about Sun Tzu and The Art of War.
‘Avoid what is strong and strike at what is weak.’
He scrambled into his clothes, threw some water on his face, and stepped out onto the porch.
The familiar tobacco smell lingered outside. Pungent, fresh.
He looked down. The micro listening device had been placed in the centre of the doorstep.
56
Sawyer sped down to Buxton and drove through the town centre, skirting the edge of Pavilion Gardens. He turned into the estate of social housing, and his stomach dropped at the sight of an ambulance parked outside the flat block with the trap house.
A small crowd had gathered on the pavement opposite, by the bus stop. Sawyer parked up and approached the group. Mostly teenagers: surly boys in sportswear with raised hoods; a couple of pale, worried-looking girls.
‘What happened?’
One of the boys looked over his shoulder. ‘Some guy OD’d.’
Another one shook his head. ‘Bet they’ve taken his gear, too. It’s not like he needs it now.’
Robbie.
A squad car entered the road from the other side and parked by the ambulance. Sawyer turned and ducked back into the Corsa.
Lud’s Church was the local name for a natural ravine, not far from Maggie’s home near the Roaches. It was an imposing, eighteen-metre-deep crack in the gritstone, opened by a landslip and coated top to bottom in pea-green moss.
Sawyer followed a walking track through the sparse woodland of Back Forest, and slowed as he reached the top of the ridge. The Scientific Services Unit van was parked off an adjoining road, surrounded by officers and FSIs. An outer cordon had been set up at the top of the worn rock steps that led down to the base of the chasm.
One of the FSIs wore a turquoise Tyvek suit, in contrast to
the white coveralls of her charges. She looked over in Sawyer’s direction and stumbled towards him, down a steep, gritty slope.
At the bottom, she flipped back her hood. ‘Detective Inspector Sawyer. How in the actual fuck does a suspended officer get so close to a major investigation while the scene is still open? Or is that not something I want in my head?’ Principal SOCO Sally O’Callaghan was tall, mid-fifties, with cropped peroxide hair. She was high born but earthbound; a newsreader with a sailor’s tongue.
Sawyer dug his hands into his jacket pockets. ‘Just felt the call. The lure of pagan worship.’
Sally smiled. ‘Ah! That’s a common myth about this place. No Satanists round these parts. It was mainly Christians who worshipped here, in the fifteenth century. They had to do their God-bothering in private because of state persecution. Where better than a big fuck-off hole in the ground like this?’
‘You should campaign for a change in the tourist signs. “Lud’s Church” is mysterious, but you’d get more footfall for “Big Fuck-Off Hole In The Ground.”’
‘Well. It’s a major tit pain, scurrying up and down here. Why can’t this character leave his mess in easily accessible areas?’
Sawyer peered down past the cordon officer. The cascading moss sparkled with condensation. ‘Another nonce?’ Sally looked at him in surprise. ‘Channelling DC Moran.’
She sighed. ‘I’m not at liberty to discuss that, but yes. Apparently so. I’m sick of sneaking around, second-guessing who’s supposed to know what.’
He waved a hand at the van, and personnel. ‘Lot of effort for the lowest tier on the victim scale.’
‘Remind me of the entries on this list?’
Sawyer angled his head. ‘Top to bottom, I’d say child, pregnant woman, woman, man, middle-aged man, paedophile, Piers Morgan.’
She barked a laugh. ‘No tears for paedos.’
‘It’s a sexuality. Wired in. Socially judged as transgressive.’
‘Well. We don’t live by Ancient Roman values any more, Jake.’
He nodded. ‘Or Victorian. Did you know that in Victorian times, children had a low status? Because of the high rate of infant mortality. That’s why they were sent out to workhouses, stuck up chimneys. Now, it’s the other way round. We nurture them, save them. We value their innocence, vilify those who don’t.’
Sally frowned. ‘It’s called progress. We don’t see children as fair game for sexual exploitation any more.’ She looked back up at the van. ‘Shepherd thinks the killings and abductions are linked.’
Sawyer smiled. ‘I agree. I have an idea about who might be doing this, or at least funding it. But I think someone is abducting children as a response to the paedophiles being killed. The guy down there. We might not value him too highly, but he could be the signal for another child to be taken. This is all theatre. Our real problem is to find whoever is abducting the children.’
‘Abducting and killing the children.’
Sawyer stepped towards her. ‘Sally. What does Drummond have from Holly Chilton’s body? He must have been able to do some work now, following the body thaw.’
Sally stared past him, to the chasm. ‘Nothing unusual in her system. A bit undernourished.’
‘No traces? DNA?’
She shook her head. ‘A few fibres. Generic. Wool.’
‘Colour?’
She seemed to catch herself, but then her shoulders slumped, resigned. ‘Yellow.’
57
Sawyer jinked his ship through the shower of glowing bullets. A phalanx of support craft materialised from the sides of the screen and discharged a kaleidoscopic barrage of hot-pink laser fire. He slipped in between the bolts, holding his position until the screen cleared and he could slip across and blast the enemies.
His thumbs twitched and rolled across the PlayStation controller, conducting the action with an efficient grace. Nothing unnecessary, nothing extraneous.
Inside, his mind whirled. He thought of Robbie Carling, Shaun Brooks. Would they still be alive without his actions? He recalled a previous session with Alex, where she had questioned his faulty fear response, and wondered if it clouded his judgement, put others in danger.
He played on, in a daze, as the weak daylight drained away, shrouding him.
A little later in the day than his previous viewing, he opened his laptop and logged in to the micro camera viewer, switching the image to full screen. His father was a meticulous man; ritual and repetition had been part of his coping strategy in the wake of his wife’s murder. In the centre of an unfathomable chaos, he found a sense of order, by focusing only on the things he could control: honing his patterns, refining his routines. The same things at the same time in the same place.
And there he was: at the same time in the same place, moving from his studio into the adjoining outbuilding, turning on the light. The flicker from the small, high window; the shadow passing over it.
Sawyer minimised the app window and opened a web browser. He searched for the Sheffield art festival Harold had mentioned on his last visit. He’d said he was exhibiting and taking part in a panel discussion on analogue versus digital media. The event began tomorrow, and ran over three days. He found Harold’s entry on the artist listings page, and checked the timings on the panel discussion, which recurred each day from 5pm to 6pm.
He closed the laptop and sat there in the dark for a while, basking in the nothingness. He called Maggie—it went straight to voicemail—then tried Walker, who answered immediately.
‘Sir.’
‘Can you talk?’
‘One second.’ Movement, a door closing. ‘I’ve been checking out the HOLDEN82 thing. A total blank. No links to relevant convictions or crossbow sales. Tried narrowing it down to 1982 births. Still nothing.’
‘I’m ahead of you. I found an article from an old PC gaming magazine, about the family of a local tech entrepreneur, Isaac Briggs. His son Harrison wrote some shareware games in the nineties. He called the company Raysoft, and used the symbol as the logo.’
Walker typed something on a keyboard: slow and noisy. ‘So, do you know what the symbol is all about?’
‘I know where it came from. Briggs’s sister, Samantha, drew the image. Samantha was murdered by a paedophile, Sidney Black, in 1992. She was ten years old.’
‘Born in 1982.’ More typing from Walker. ‘So, what about the Holden part?’
‘Still fuzzy on that. But if Briggs is funding the reverse grooming of paedophiles and the “82” is a reference to Samantha, then maybe the “HOLDEN” is a link to whoever’s doing the killings.’
A moment of silence from Walker. ‘Could it be Briggs himself?’
‘It doesn’t feel right. In the pictures from the magazine, he looks like he’d struggle to squash a fly, let alone kill another human being.’
‘Might have filled out by now. And all but one of the killings are hands-off.’
Sawyer pressed on. ‘It’s more likely that he’s using the MEETUPZ network to select victims for somebody else. This Holden figure? Or maybe that’s a red herring.’ He got up off the sofa and grabbed his jacket. ‘Either way, we’re nowhere on the child abductions. But if they’re linked to the killings, then stopping them might buy us some time with the children.’
‘Shall I track down this Briggs?’
‘Not yet. Do some digging. We need to find out more before we have any grounds to arrest or risk alerting him with an interview. The symbol on the crossbow bolts might still be nothing to do with him directly.’
Walker coughed. ‘And how are you, sir?’
Sawyer paused at the front door. ‘Me?’
‘Yes. How are you feeling?’
‘Festive.’
58
Hartington Christmas Market was an annual community festival with all the standard trimmings: craft and food shops, traditional game stalls, brass band in the village square, Santa tent. Despite the small scale, it was always popular and well organised, and Sawyer had vague memories of being brought a
long as a young child.
The Christmas lights were up by the time he arrived, casting the stone-built houses in an amber glow. He shuffled through the crowds, past the pop-up stalls and LED window displays: animated reindeer, grinning snowmen, twinkling trees. Stewards funnelled the stragglers behind a rope cordon, set up for the centrepiece: a grand parade, where children from local schools snaked through the surrounding streets and into the square, brandishing custom-designed paper lanterns. If Sawyer’s father had been there, he would be lecturing him on the religious significance of all this light: as a metaphor for Christ’s love, a symbol of hope at the darkest time of the year. For most, though, the spiritual gave way to the practical: the market was a decorative top-up for local businesses before the out-of-season hibernation.
Sawyer bought a paper cup of mulled wine and took a sip. It was cloying, medicinal, and he abandoned the cup to a bin at the earliest opportunity. He reached the square, and the crowds thinned out as people jostled at the street corners, securing viewing spots for the imminent parade.
Live music from the Charles Cotton Hotel clashed with the brass band, and Sawyer ducked into a busy café, where the noise was muted to the babble and shouts from passers-by. He ordered coffee, and hitched up on a tall bar stool facing the window and looking out onto the street. He took out his phone and swiped through the recent images: a few shots from his day out with Eva, Fletcher at the Castleton café, screenshots from the PC Gaming feature, the eye symbol from the crossbow bolt. If his theory was correct, then the score was uneven: three dead paedophiles, two missing children. If he were the abductor, and he wanted to take a third child, as quickly and as recklessly as he had taken Mia, he would see the market as a prime opportunity.
The stabbing of the third man, Abbott, bothered him. The anger. He had missed his shot with the second victim, but finished him with a distance weapon: a spade. With Abbott, there was no evidence that the crossbow had missed, and yet the killer had still attacked him with a knife, in the back, and the back of the head. Still not connecting eye to eye, but closer. More intimate. As if he was lashing out. An impotent rage. Frustration at lack of control, at losing control. But of what?
