The Rock: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 18)

by LJ Ross

  Ryan listened with a heavy heart, thinking of how often his team had been called out to bear witness to children and young adults having lost their lives through drug abuse. It was a vicious cycle, and one that never seemed to end but, as Anna had observed, he was not one to give up on the fight, nor the people.

  He would never give up.

  “Gettin’ harder to trace the money, too,” Farooqi observed. “The kingpins use kids as go-betweens, and get them to do the dirty work so the dealers don’t even have to handle any cash. Then, they find somebody vulnerable, move themselves in, and do their business from there, so they don’t have to use their own address.”

  Cuckooing was a growing trend, and one that was very hard to root out, since the victims were often disabled or otherwise incapacitated, living in fear at the mercy of ruthless men and women who cared about nothing and nobody except their bottom line.

  “As far as we can tell, there are four major gangs operating across Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, and Durham,” Chambers continued. “Three of them are home-grown, family-based operations, and the fourth has Russian links which we’re trying to unravel at the moment.”

  He went on to list the names of the families, all of whom were well-known to the police.

  “What about trafficking?” Ryan pressed. “Which one of them would have the logistics and set-up to run that side of things?”

  “Any one of them,” Chambers said. “I’d put my money on the Russians, though. They’d have more established international connections. The problem we have is that, even when we manage to bust ’em, none of them will talk and there’s zero paper trail. It’s a slick, complex operation, which makes it bloody hard for us to trace the source or be able to predict when they’re planning to bring in their next boatload.”

  “From our side of the fence, we don’t see a lot of new faces,” DCI Wentworth said. “When they traffic women into the country for sex work, they don’t parade them on the streets; they hide them away at undisclosed addresses, with a minder keeping an eye on them, at all times. We’ve had undercover officers working on-and-off for months now, posing as punters trying to get a lead on where some of the addresses might be. We’ve managed a couple of busts, but they’ve been low-level and nobody would give up the names of who was behind it all.”

  “What kind of scale are we talking about, here?” Ryan asked.

  “Hard to say,” Wentworth told him. “These guys run national operations, so it’s not just a case of manning the ports in our neck of the woods. We’d have to stop every single van, people carrier and car entering the district from other parts of the UK or Ireland, which is completely impossible. They blend in, and it happens right under our bloody noses.”

  Ryan ran a frustrated hand through his hair.

  “What about your informants?” he asked. “Haven’t they heard rumbles?”

  “I’m sure they have,” Wentworth said. “But they don’t tell us about it. Listen, mate, it’s hard enough to develop trust with people who’ve built up a lifetime’s worth of hate for the authorities. They know, as well as we do, that these people would kill them, if word got around that they’d turned grass.”

  He paused, as if considering whether to tell them something else.

  “Look,” he said, leaning forward. “There’s a particular shelter I know of, run by former sex-workers, for sex workers and their children. The woman who runs it was trafficked to the UK when she was a teenager, but became an informant for three years before she was discovered. Luckily for her, and for us, she managed to kill her assailant before he killed her, but she’s got a long scar here, as a memento.”

  He traced a finger along his right cheek.

  “I can’t give you the location,” he said. “I don’t even know where it is, myself. But I’ll speak to her, and see if she’ll agree to talk to you. Or, maybe, DI MacKenzie.”

  Denise nodded, understanding that these things could be easier coming from another woman.

  “She has new women coming into her care all the time, so it’s possible one of them might know something.”

  Ryan thanked him, and the other men, for their time.

  “Take a bit of friendly advice, Ryan, and don’t beat yourself up over this one,” Gross said, as they were leaving. “It’s sad and all that, but, if there were others on that boat, they’re probably down in London or Birmingham, by now. You could spend months tryin’ to chase down some small-time operation, using up all your resource budget in the process. Put it down to experience and focus on the bigger picture—that’s my advice, son.”

  “That’s the fundamental difference between us,” Ryan said, once the door clicked shut behind them. “Every life matters to me, regardless of how long it takes.”

  He turned away to look out of the window, across the car park and beyond, to the rooftops of the city. Last night’s storm had washed away the clouds, leaving bright blue skies in its wake. Pigeons cooed on the window ledge, and he could see women with buggies walking along the road towards the supermarket, chatting to one another. It was all so normal and wholesome, he thought, but under that same sky, there were people suffering all manner of degradations, behind closed doors.

  Sad, and all that, Gross had said.

  Unacceptable, Ryan would say, and made a mental note to refresh his team’s training on the identification and reporting of potential victims of human trafficking and modern slavery. If there were victims walking amongst them cleaning cars, filing nails, caring for children and homes without pay, dignity or other basic human rights, he wanted to know about it.

  “We can only do our best, lad,” Phillips said, reading his friend’s mind with ease.

  “Maybe it’s time we raised the bar a bit higher,” Ryan said, and his eyes strayed to one of the coffee mugs sitting on the table, which featured the bold, red, white and blue of the Union Jack. “We’re responsible for building the kind of country and the kind of society we want for ourselves and our children. The day I stop striving for better will be the day they bury me six feet under.”

  It was a matter of pride.

  “You know your problem?” Phillips said, gently. “You expect too much from people. Not everybody’s a high-flyer, like you.”

  Ryan’s lips twisted, and he downed the rest of his coffee in one gulp.

  “I don’t expect anything from anybody else that I don’t also expect of myself,” he said, fairly. “Besides, don’t tell me you don’t always give the job one hundred per cent, Frank—same goes for you, Mac. Every last one of us brings our best effort, even if we’re having a bad day or haven’t slept well, or whatever the hell it might be.”

  “Aye, but we’re like the A-Team, us lot. You can’t judge everybody by our exceptional standards,” Phillips said, a bit smugly.

  “You’re not getting a pay rise,” Ryan told him.

  “Well, it was worth a try.”

  Ryan and MacKenzie laughed.

  “Come on, Mr T,” Ryan said. “We’ve got work to do.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Gaz and Ollie timed it perfectly to arrive at Marsden shortly after four o’clock. Mick had been right about the police having re-opened the beach to the public; the tides waited for no man, and the forensics team had been hard pressed to complete their work before the sea rolled in to sweep away whatever trace evidence there might once have been. Meanwhile, the crowds who had gathered at the top of the cliffs that morning had now returned to swarm the beach like vultures, presumably hoping to find another body washed up against the rock, or something equally macabre. As it happened, Gaz wouldn’t have minded if one of them found another body—it would save him and the kid wasting their afternoon scouring the shoreline.

  She’d been trouble from the start, that one.

  It was funny how you got to know them, over the years. Gaz could categorize a woman in less than a minute, and not just the ones he brought in off the boat, either. Lasses he met in bars and clubs, ones who served his food at the local café, even the
kid’s schoolteacher, that one time he’d been forced to go along and listen to her harp on about how his kid wasn’t applying himself and how his attendance was too low. Women all had their common traits, and nationality didn’t matter so much as the nature of the beast.

  In many ways, he mused, they were a lot like dogs—only less obedient.

  Break their arm, then give them a shot of heroin or a few pills to ease the pain, and they’d love you for it. Leave them to sweat for a while, to get a taste for the good stuff and learn to miss it, then give them a little more so they’d become desperate, reliant, and, most importantly, compliant. It wasn’t nuclear science so much as basic training.

  He hadn’t wanted his wife to be like that, of course. A man wanted a different kind of woman to share his name, or else, why bother? It wasn’t drugs that had ruined Keeley, but drink.

  She couldn’t go half an hour without a drink.

  Of course, she blamed him for that but, the truth was, he never forced a bottle down her gob. She did that, all on her own, after that first fight. The wisp of a memory played at the back of his mind, of his fist connecting with her jaw, but then it frittered away to be replaced with the more palatable narrative he’d created since then, which absolved him of any blame.

  Marrying her had been a mistake, but at least she’d given him Ollie. A man needed a son he could mould in his own image. As for company, he was never short of a woman, and he could always help himself to the merchandise, if he was really desperate.

  “Here, have you lost it, yet?” he asked, suddenly.

  Ollie was confused.

  “Lost what, Da?”

  “You know bloody well, what. You’re sixteen. You must have had your leg over, by now.”

  Ollie’s pale skin turned a slow shade of puce, and he scrambled for something to say.

  “Yeah, loads of times,” he muttered.

  Gaz wasn’t fooled.

  “You better not be bloody gay,” he told him.

  “I like girls,” Ollie muttered, defensively. They just didn’t like him.

  “That’s all right then,” Gaz said, with some relief. “We’ll sort you out.”

  Ollie couldn’t find the words to tell him that he didn’t want any so-called ‘help’ in that department, so he fell back on bravado.

  “The girls at school are all stuck up,” he said, and thought of Molly, a girl he’d liked for two years and for whom he’d written out a Valentine’s card.

  “They’ll be the ones after you, when you’ve got a bit of money in your back pocket,” Gaz said, with a sneer. “They’re all the same.”

  Not Molly, Ollie wanted to say, but held his tongue.

  “That’s another rule to remember, son,” Gaz continued. “No matter how much you think they’re the dog’s bollocks, you don’t ever tell a woman about our business. I don’t care if she’s got the biggest pair on her you’ve ever seen—you keep your trap shut. Got it?”

  Yeah, Ollie thought. He got it.

  * * *

  When they reached the bottom of the stairs, they found the beach swarming with people. It was as though nothing had ever happened; there was no sign of the wreck, nor any way of knowing a woman had once lain dead in the sand. The sun was shining brightly and, though the air remained chilly, it was nothing in comparison with the freezing conditions they’d experienced during the early hours of that same morning.

  “What are we lookin’ for, Da?”

  “Hidin’ places,” Gaz muttered, and let the dog roam off its lead, causing other dog-walkers to give them a wide berth.

  Ollie tugged on the door of a beach shed at the base of the grotto, but found it locked.

  “Da? Why did Mick land the boat here?”

  “Best he could do,” Gaz muttered. “He was aimin’ for Roker.”

  “Were you scared?”

  Gaz was taken aback. “Bugger off.”

  “I just mean when the boat hit the rock. Wasn’t it scary?”

  Gaz thought of the women’s screams in the darkness and the crashing of the sea.

  “No,” he barked. “Now, shut up and get to work.”

  Ollie didn’t ask any more idle questions and they carried on walking in a southerly direction towards Souter, tracing the line of the cliffs as they made their way along the beach, past the rock and the grotto. It took more than half an hour to cover the ground while they made a careful check of every inlet for any sign of their lost cargo, dipping into the natural caves using their phones as torches to check the darkest corners, but finding nothing. Eventually, as they neared the pier, they spotted another cave entrance, this time only half the height of a man.

  “You’ll have to go in,” Gaz said. “I can’t fit in there.”

  Ollie broke into an immediate sweat at the thought of being confined in a small, dark space.

  “D’ you really think she would have walked this far?”

  Gaz thought back to the woman he remembered who, even at short acquaintance, had been one he’d categorised as a fighter.

  “If it’s the one I’m thinkin’ of, then, yeah, she would. Get in and check, because we’re not goin’ back until you have.”

  “What—what if I get trapped in there?”

  “Stop bein’ a bloody pussy and get inside!” Gaz thundered.

  Ollie obeyed, squeezing himself through the small opening into a short, dank tunnel. The darkness was suffocating, and he began to breathe in short gulps as his heart raced in his chest. Spots danced in front of his eyes and he felt himself losing control, pins and needles pricking his fingers as he gripped the cold rock. He began to shake, fighting the overwhelming urge to belly back out into the sunlight, where he knew his father would give him an earful.

  “Well?” Gaz shouted. “Can you see owt in there?”

  Ollie blinked the sweat from his eyes and squinted through the gloom. The tunnel was narrow, but seemed to widen further ahead into a small cave, its walls illuminated by thin shafts of light.

  Light?

  Though it could never be said that Ollie was the sharpest tool in the box, he had sufficient wherewithal to know that it was unusual for there to be light in an underground cave.

  “I—I dunno, I’m goin’ in a bit further to have a better look!” he called back.

  He inched his way through the tunnel, feeling the rock digging into the soft flesh of his arms and legs, until his fingers met with something that was neither sand, sea, nor rock.

  It was soil.

  Ollie lifted his hand to stare at it dumbly, wondering how soil had found its way down there, then fumbled for his phone torch to shine it around the cave. Emerging from the tunnel, he was able to stand, and in his haste to scramble upward, immediately bumped his head. Rubbing it with one hand, Ollie shuffled forward, kicking tufts of soil and grass out of his path until he found he could go no further, his passage blocked by a small mound of earth. It was illuminated by weak shafts of light, and he tipped his head upward to find a hole in the cavernous ceiling, thirty feet above. It appeared small from his vantage point, but could have been two or three metres in diameter, half-obscured by the ragged edges of turf which still clung to its edges.

  Sink hole.

  There were several scattered along the clifftop, cordoned off by fencing and signs that warned of the danger to pedestrians. The ground was liable to crumble at any time, as this one obviously had—sometime recently, it seemed.

  The significance of his own observation didn’t register fully, and Ollie was about to make his way back through the tunnel when the light of his torch skipped over something shiny and gold, winking at him through the semi-darkness. Like a magpie, he was drawn to it, and his fingers made a greedy grab for the thin gold bracelet that was half-buried in the soil.

  His disappointment in finding it made of inexpensive plated gold was nothing to compare with his horror at finding the bracelet still attached to its wearer, whose skin was so caked in dirt as to be camouflaged against the soil.

  He let o
ut a strangled cry and skidded backward, banging his head again.

  “How, man! What’s takin’ yer so long?”

  Ollie opened his mouth to call back to his father, but the words died in his throat. It might have been the pitiful sight of the woman’s thin body lying twisted amid the mound of collapsed earth which stopped him from raising the alarm, or the thought of what his father and the others might do to her, once they knew she’d been found.

  But it wasn’t.

  It was the possibility that the woman was already dead, and unable to cry out or alert any passers-by, which gave him pause. He’d seen many things in his young life but, so far, Ollie had never witnessed a dead body, particularly not at close quarters. One of the effects of having experienced the myriad of childhood traumas his parents had inflicted upon him was that he found it extremely difficult to feel any empathy for his fellow human beings; he simply couldn’t drum up the emotion, his brain not having developed in the same way as other children. Consequently, once he’d recovered from the initial shock of finding her there, the sight of the woman’s body became more of a curiosity to him, little more than a jumble of flesh and bone.

  He moved forward to get a better look at it, rubbing dust from his eyes with dirty fingers, until he stood directly above the woman’s inert form. She was clad in the simple jeans and motif sweatshirt she’d travelled in, bearing the logo of a famous sports brand. Every inch of her was covered in a layer of cracked mud, the soil having solidified against her wet skin the previous night.

  Cocking his head to one side, Ollie stared at her for a minute or two, and found himself pleasantly surprised.

  She didn’t even look dead.

  She might have been sleeping.

  “Ollie!”

  “Comin’, Da!” he turned away to bellow.

  When he turned back, he found himself staring into a pair of unblinking brown eyes.

  * * *

  Lawana stared at the boy while her mind floated slowly back to consciousness.

  Her first thought was that he bore a passing resemblance to a young Buddha, with his rounded cheeks, shaven head and rolls of fleshy skin which strained against the t-shirt he wore.