by LJ Ross
They were also equipped with radios, so they checked their frequencies and Ryan stepped away again to allow them to make their way down.
“How will we get her out, if there is a body down there?” Lowerson wondered, keeping his voice low.
“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” Ryan said, preferring to remain hopeful of a positive outcome. “There might be nothing there, at all.”
As it happened, he was almost right.
The radio crackled into life, and soon enough they heard Ginny’s voice reporting what she could see within the chasm of rock.
“No signs of life,” she said. “There’s nobody down here, Detective Chief Inspector.”
Ryan frowned.
“Nothing at all?”
“Well, nothing except a wrapper,” Ginny said.
“What kind of wrapper?”
“Looks to be a chocolate bar—Twix,” she added. “It’s discarded on the floor. Can’t see anything else.”
“Bag it up, please,” Ryan said, before ending the exchange.
After a couple of minutes, they saw the ropes move again, signalling that the team were making their return journey.
“Could be kids,” Yates remarked. “If the cave is usually accessible from the beachside, kids might play in there.”
Ryan nodded.
“It’s the most likely solution,” he said.
And yet…
“All the same, we’ll test the wrapper for prints and DNA,” he said. “It’s a hell of a coincidence that two calls were made within a fifteen-minute period.”
“It might be the wrong place,” Lowerson said. “It was a good bet, but we might have the wrong cave.”
Ryan looked out across the sea, which glimmered like molten silver as occasional shards of light broke through the heavy clouds.
“Take a team and check every entrance again from the beach—the tide’s starting to go out,” he said. “It’s time and money, but, if there’s a life at stake, I want to be sure we haven’t missed anything.”
The others nodded, and made no complaint.
“I’ll see you back at HQ at…” He paused to check his watch, and made a couple of swift calculations. “Four-thirty.”
He paused to thank the mountaineering team for their time, before striding off along the cliffside, a tall, lone figure against the rugged landscape.
* * *
“The lads said you wanted to have a word?”
Gaz found Mick in the dormitory, checking on the woman who’d overdosed.
“How’s she doin’?” asked.
Not because he cared about her welfare, but because he wanted to know if he needed to start making plans for disposal.
“She’ll be all right by tonight,” Mick said, throwing a blanket back over her shivering body. “I want them all cleaned up and looking presentable, by nine.”
Gaz drew out a rollie and began licking the paper.
“Comin’ over, is he?”
“Aye,” Mick said. “Where’s the lad, today?”
“Still asleep,” Gaz told him. “Said he’d been on one, last night.”
Mick gave his friend a lazy smile, and wondered just how much young Ollie had done, the night before.
“Howay, let’s take a walk.”
Gaz read something behind his friend’s eyes, but didn’t worry, too much. He hadn’t done anything wrong, so there was no need to.
Or so he thought.
The two men made their way back out into the courtyard and, after a quick check of the road beyond, let themselves out of the main gates, pausing only to whistle to the dog who was hunkered beneath the remains of an old car. It lolloped across the tarmac and Mick clipped a leash onto its collar, and they began making their way down towards the river.
It was by no means an Arcadian scene; the skyline was peppered with poor housing and dingy, high-rise flats, and there was little in the way of greenery. When they reached the river, it brought forth no idealised notions of The Wind in the Willows, its murky depths having concealed too many sins ever to inspire such purity.
The river path was empty when they arrived, so Mick unleashed the dog and let it snuffle around the reeds, nosing its way into the mess from other animals left to rot in the matted grass on either side.
“What’s on your mind, Mick?”
Gaz lit up another rollie and waited.
“The police were sniffin’ around The Leas,” Mick said, and turned to face him with flat, emotionless eyes. “They sent a climber down one of the sink holes.”
Gaz shrugged.
“There’s always been loads of sink holes, around there,” he said. “It’s got nowt to do with us—”
“I don’t know about that, Gaz. I really don’t know about that.”
There was a tone to Mick’s voice he’d heard before, and the first stirrings of fear began to take root in his belly.
“How d’you mean?”
“Why would CID turn up to check over a sink hole, Gaz?” Mick asked him, very softly. “Why would they send Ryan?”
Gaz frowned. “DCI Ryan?”
“Aye, you know the one.”
Gaz nodded, and took another drag of his cigarette. “I couldn’t tell you, Mick. If they’re lookin’ down there, they’re wastin’ their time, because as God’s my witness, we checked every cave. I’m tellin’ you, Mick, we’re clear.”
“See, you’re still not followin’ me, Gaz, so let me spell this out for you. Whether they find the woman or not? That isn’t my main concern.”
Gaz shook his head, struggling to understand.
“If it isn’t about the woman—”
“It’s about loyalty, Gaz,” Mick said, and his voice was like a slap. "I want to know how they know another one might be missing, in the first place. I want to know why they thought another one might be down there.”
Gaz began to sweat. “I—how, man, Mick, it was pro’ly just them bein’ thorough. Coverin’ the bases, y’nah?”
Mick turned and walked a few more steps, and Gaz hurried to keep pace.
“I thought about that,” he continued, sagely. “I really did think about that, and you might be right.”
Gaz let out a long breath.
“On the other hand, this niggle, it just won’t go away,” Mick said softly, and turned to his friend again. “Was it you, Gaz, who checked every cave, or was it the boy?”
In the seconds it took for him to formulate a reply, every possible permutation passed through Gaz’s brain like lightning. If he replied that he’d been the one to check all the caves personally, then, if anything went wrong, the buck would stop with him. But, if he told Mick that Ollie had been the one to check at least half of the caves, he’d be throwing his son under the bus.
Well, he’d never been much of a father, anyhow.
“Nah, Mick, it was me and the lad, half and half,” he said, and it happened to be the truth. “He didn’t rush it, mind. Took his time lookin’.”
Mick’s lips twisted. “Where was he, last night?”
Gaz couldn’t say, considering he’d been absent until the early hours.
“At home,” he answered, and hoped it was true. “All night, Mick, I’m sure of it. You can check the burners and anythin’ else you need to. I swear to you, Mick, he knows what’s best for him.”
When the other man said nothing, he tried again.
“I’ll go and have a word with him now, Mick. I’ll go straight home and have it out of him, one way or the other. You can rely on me.”
Mick nodded, magnanimously.
“Okay, Gaz. Okay. Don’t worry about this, all right, mate? We’ll sort this out.”
“Th—thanks, Mick. He’s a good lad—”
“Course he is, mate.”
“I’ll go back now—”
Mick put a firm hand on his shoulder.
“Tell you what, I’ll come with you,” he said, genially. “Been a while, hasn’t it? Maybe Keeley can throw a bit of ham and eggs on for
us, eh?”
Just like old times, he thought.
CHAPTER 23
At four o’clock, Ryan’s team—minus Phillips—reconvened for a briefing at Northumbria Police Headquarters. Although many of Ryan’s staff were no longer on shift, or worked regular weekdays rather than antisocial weekend hours, he was amused to note that at least one of them had found the time to take care of important matters on Valentine’s Day, such as pinning up a compromising image of DS Phillips on the staff noticeboard, dressed in a tiny pink tutu and little else—taken some time ago on the man’s belated stag party following his wedding in Italy. Some of the department had felt it was a sin not to have given Frank Phillips an appropriate send-off prior to him tying the knot, and had made plans accordingly upon his return from honeymoon.
Beneath the image, somebody had circled his face with a large red heart and written the following:
ROSES ARE RED,
VIOLETS ARE BLUE,
PHILLIPS LOVES STOTTIES
AND SO DO YOU!
Chuckling, Ryan let himself into one of the smaller conference rooms to find the others waiting for him.
“Sorry I’m a couple of minutes late,” he said. “I stopped off to pick up some sustenance.”
He set a tray of fresh coffees on the table.
“Lifesaver,” Lowerson muttered, helping himself to a cup and warming his hands around the cardboard holder. “It was cold on the beach, earlier.”
“Did you find anything?” Ryan wondered.
But Jack shook his head.
“Nothing we didn’t see the first time around,” he said. “We did manage to find the cave belonging to that new sink hole, where they found that chocolate wrapper.”
“And?”
“It’s a pretty narrow entrance,” Yates chimed in, once she’d settled herself in the chair beside Lowerson. “You’d have to be a slim adult, or a kid, to get through it.”
Ryan considered that.
“Judging by the fact our female victim hadn’t eaten in over twelve hours, and had been at the mercy of her captors for approximately six days, it may be safe to assume that any other female victim would have suffered the same treatment,” he said. “It’s unlikely any of them would fall into an ‘overweight’ category, so it’s possible a woman could have found her way inside that cave.”
He took a chug of coffee, and let the liquid warm his cockles.
“On the other hand, it’s far more likely to have been kids,” he was forced to admit. “Do we have any leads on that anonymous call, from last night?”
“Some good news on that front,” MacKenzie replied. “We’ve traced the call to a phone box in Cowgate.”
She reeled off its registration number, and street address.
“I know that area,” Yates said, with a note of sadness. “It’s been declining for years, and needs more investment. It’s overrun with drugs and petty crime.”
She’d cut her teeth working the beat around that neighbourhood, which had been an eye-opener.
“Worse than petty,” MacKenzie remarked. “It’s home to a few people already on our radar—in fact, there’s a couple of families I can think of, straight off the bat, who wouldn’t blink twice at being involved in something like this.”
Ryan nodded, the same thought having crossed his own mind.
“There’s the Finnegans, for one,” he said. “And the Dobsons. But, neither of those were mentioned by DCI Chambers, yesterday, as being on their current watch list.”
“The Donnellys used to live round there,” MacKenzie added. “I’m going back a few years, mind.”
“I don’t remember them,” Ryan said.
“No, it might have been a couple of years before your time,” she said. “Frank would know.”
Ryan nodded, and made a note to ask Phillips about it, later.
“The area might be a hot bed, but that doesn’t help us to narrow things down, unfortunately,” he said. “Let’s start by seeing if there’s any CCTV—I won’t hold my breath.”
“I’ll check it out,” Lowerson offered.
“Let’s get a list of last known addresses for any ‘notable’ families within a radius of that phone box, while we’re at it, alongside known addresses of any of our informants, if we have that information,” Ryan said. “Let’s keep in mind that, if anyone affiliated with one or more of these families placed that call, they were putting themselves in danger by doing so. We’ve got a potential informant, so let’s tread carefully and afford them the same protections we would any other covert source.”
There were nods around the room.
“Did we get a trace on the call placed to National Heritage?” he asked.
“Not yet,” MacKenzie said. “But the similarities are striking.”
“Agreed,” Ryan said. “If it had only been the one call referencing Spottee’s, perhaps we’d have written it off, by now, as the supervisor did in the Control Room. But, two calls, within the same time frame? It’s too much of a coincidence for my liking—”
“And there’s no such thing,” the other three intoned, with broad grins.
Ryan stuck his hands in his pockets.
“I should write you all up for insubordination,” he chuckled, before growing serious again. “The fact remains that, if we assume the caller was genuine, they believed there to be a woman trapped inside a cave somewhere along that stretch of coastline. We’ve searched all of them, and the one we found today seems as likely an option as the next. That being the case, we have to ask ourselves: where did the woman go?”
“If—and I say if—she was ever there, and if she was affiliated with the wreckage, yesterday, it’s possible the same gang who transported her to the UK came back and found her after the anonymous call was made, but before we checked the cave, this afternoon,” MacKenzie said.
Ryan considered the timings.
“What time did the tide go out, last night?” he asked, of nobody in particular.
Yates ran a quick search.
“Shortly after three a.m.,” she replied.
“Which means that whoever planned to recover the woman had a window from then until daylight to get her out without being seen,” Ryan surmised. “The darkness would have been enough cover.”
“I’ll get onto the pub at the Grotto, and see if they managed to capture anything on their CCTV,” MacKenzie said. “We could put a call out for any passing dashcam footage, or see if the cameras on the cliff road picked anything up.”
Ryan nodded.
“You do that,” he said. “There’s no way they could have gone in over the cliffside at that hour, and in those conditions, so it had to have been done via the beach tunnel, if it was done at all.”
MacKenzie made a swift note to put those calls through.
“Whilst we’re on the subject, has there been any update on the CCTV from yesterday?”
Lowerson shook his head.
“We canvassed all the local businesses and I’ve been in touch with the Council for any road footage,” he said. “The main camera at the junction which covers the car park and the slip road down to the beach has been vandalised, and the Grotto covers its main entrance and the elevator, which came up blank. There’s nothing on the beach.”
Ryan ran a hand through his hair, keeping a sharp eye on the time.
He had a date to keep, later.
“All right,” he said. “That one’s always a long shot. Keep digging around the Cowgate connection and see what it throws up, but dig quietly. What about the shipping side? Do we have any details about usual trafficking routes?”
“I had a look into that, and I’ve spoken with colleagues in SOC,” Yates said. “The problem is, because victims of trafficking are brought in globally, there’s an infinite number of routes they can take before they reach the UK. That being said, people coming in from West Africa often fly by cheap airline routes, under false identities, whereas people coming from the Far East tend to go overland via Russia or Bolivia. It’s chea
per.”
“Their business model is based on standard economic principles,” Ryan said. “It doesn’t surprise me that they’d want to keep their overheads low.”
Yates nodded.
“There’s general agreement that most who come overland tend to converge in Belgium, or the Netherlands,” she said. “That would make sense, when you consider the route that trawler was taking.”
“Have we heard from the port authority in Amsterdam?”
“It took a while to get hold of anyone and, when I did, all they could tell me was that every vessel moving in and out of port was accounted for,” Lowerson said, with a measure of disbelief. “Nothing to see there, according to the Dutch.”
“I’ll talk to Morrison about escalating this further up the chain,” Ryan told him. “We need to pull strings, if we want to start requesting sight of footage and records.”
He turned to MacKenzie.
“What could Faulkner tell you about the trawler?” he asked. “I don’t suppose he happened to find a handy wallet with a name and address listed?”
She smiled, but shook her head.
“Chance’d be a fine thing,” she said. “He found twenty-odd sets of manacles, most of them still attached to the hold of the boat. There were a few loose shoes, a couple of jackets and other unidentified personal items which he’s going through, now. He’ll let us know if there’s any DNA match, but he says that’d be a stroke of luck, since they were so badly saturated in the water. He doesn’t expect much in the way of usable evidence, there. As for the rest, they’ve gone through the entire boat with a fine-toothed comb but, given the sheer volume of samples, we won’t get any swift answers.”
Ryan had expected as much, but there’d been no harm in hoping.
“Understood,” he said, crisply, and then changed direction. “Mel, Jack? To bring you both up to date, Mac and I attended a meeting with that woman who was formerly the victim of trafficking, but now helps to run a women’s refuge.”
“How’d it go?” Jack asked.
“It was illuminating,” Ryan said, thinking back to the woman who’d called herself Niki. “She suggested we check out a club called Voyeur, down by the station—apparently, they’re known to offer ‘special’ services of the kind usually supplied through trafficked labour or prostitution.”
