by LJ Ross
“Well, Kieron,” he said. “I’m disappointed to find you here.”
“Detective Inspector, my client hasn’t been formally charged with any offence,” his solicitor began.
“No, but he will be,” Ryan said, cheerfully. “Presently, he is arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice, but we’ll add to the charge sheet, wherever necessary, don’t you worry.”
He turned to Chambers.
“You’re finished,” he said, succinctly, so there could be no misunderstanding. “Your semen was found at an address we understand to have been formerly used as a brothel, run by a man or women known by the street name, ‘The Dragon’. Are you The Dragon, Kieron?”
“No comment.”
“Ah, my favourite type of interview,” Ryan said, folding his arms across his chest. “We could go on all day with a ‘no comment’ interview, couldn’t we, DI MacKenzie?”
“I’ve got nowhere else to be,” she said, and it was true—Phillips was taking care of the school run.
“Can you tell us how your semen came to be found at that address, Kieron?”
“No comment.”
“It isn’t your registered home address, is it?”
“No comment.”
“In fact, the address was formerly registered to a man and woman by the name of Polly and Yannis Theodopoulos, both registered disabled. Do you know how their address came to be used for these nefarious purposes?”
“No comment,” Chambers said, defiantly.
“It’s funny, isn’t it DI MacKenzie, that, when we looked back over DCI Chambers’ work record, we found numerous instances of missed opportunities and avoidable errors,” Ryan said, rattling off names and dates. “Can you account for this unusual pattern, DCI Chambers?”
“Circumstantial,” he said. “All of those examples have entirely innocent explanations. This is a stitch-up.”
“What do any of these allegations have to do with the reason you’re holding my client?” Hepple demanded.
“I’ll tell you,” MacKenzie said, licking the tip of her thumb to turn a page. “In each of these cases, the target address was a suspected ‘cuckoo’ house, by which I mean a house registered to a vulnerable person or persons which has been taken over by criminals in order to conduct their business. In each case, the investigating team found the target house abandoned or otherwise cleared out, by the time they arrived. We have a list of these addresses, DCI Chambers, and will be instructing our Forensics team to re-examine them to the fullest. Is there anything you wish to tell us, before that examination takes place?”
He looked slightly less confident now, Ryan thought. Slightly less cocky.
“I ordered a full forensics sweep of those houses and flats, at the time,” he argued.
“Which is very strange, because we can’t find any record whatsoever of a report having been filed,” MacKenzie shot back. “Can you explain this?”
“N—no comment.”
“It’s all caving in around you,” Ryan said softly, and leaned forward to reinforce the point. “You know me, Kieron. You know I won’t let this drop until I’ve found everything there is to find.”
Chambers knew it, but told himself they’d never find the missing women. They were already across the sea to Ireland, by now.
“We found the women,” Ryan added, as though he’d read the man’s mind. “They’re safe, now, and the men who were transporting them to Belfast are also safe—behind bars, that is.”
Noddy and Callum would never talk, Chambers thought. They knew the consequences, if they did.
“We’ve got Gavin Nicholson, now,” Ryan said. “And we’ll be looking at his old school pal, Michael Donnelly. How long do you think they’ll hold their tongues, Kieron?”
The other man turned back and linked his hands behind his head.
“No comment,” he said, with finality.
Ryan looked at him, past the bravado and the lies, to the heart of the man, and realised something important.
He was frightened.
That could only mean one thing.
“You’re not The Dragon,” he said aloud, and pushed back from his chair to hurry back to the office.
CHAPTER 39
MacKenzie hurried to catch up with Ryan as he stormed back down the corridor towards his desk.
“Wh—what are you looking for?”
“It struck me last night, when we were at that club,” he muttered. “When I mentioned the name ‘Fuchsia’, the girl I was speaking to didn’t relax or grow more talkative—she ran off.”
MacKenzie tried to follow the dots.
“So—?”
Ryan looked up from the computer screen.
“She was frightened,” he explained. “That woman we met, Niki, wasn’t trying to help us out, she was using us to send a warning to those girls, and to anybody else thinking of talking to us.”
He picked up the phone, preparing to call their Digital Forensics department.
“I still don’t follow—”
“She was a decoy, Mac, nothing more. Who put us onto her?”
“Wentworth.”
“Yes,” he said, and paused to rap out some urgent instructions to his colleagues down the hall.
“What are you going to do?”
“If I’m right, then he’s behind this,” Ryan muttered, tapping a finger against the edge of his desk. “He has to be. Wentworth has the connections, and you said yourself, there haven’t been any major busts in Vice, lately, except the one we executed last night—which might have been one of his competitors, for all we know, so we helped the bastard out.”
Ryan’s jaw hardened.
“Digital Forensics are accessing his computer remotely, now. I want to know which files he’s brought up lately, especially regarding vulnerable persons,” he said. “I want to know whether Chambers has been feeding him that information.”
“You’re thinking he uses their addresses to set up mobile brothels?” MacKenzie said.
Ryan nodded.
“He gets the inside track on new addresses which register on the vulnerable list, then orchestrates the cuckoo operation himself, with a little help from his friends,” he said, with disgust. “The question is, where’s their current habitation?”
At that moment, a call came through from their colleagues in Scotland, which made Ryan smile from ear to ear.
“Call off the search,” he said. “One of the ones they picked up at Stranraer has caved, already. We’ve got three addresses.”
MacKenzie grinned.
“I’ve always liked the Scots,” she said. “Let’s move.”
* * *
Achara stared at herself, and then at the woman with the bright pink hair, who stood behind her.
“Very pretty,” the woman said, approvingly. “You’ll make him very happy.”
“I don’t like it,” she said softly, and tried to scrub away the garish make-up.
Fuchsia’s hand whipped out to grab her wrist in a hard grip.
“Now, you listen to me,” she snarled. “This can be a good life, if you don’t mess things up. Do as I tell you, and you’ll have a roof over your head and food in your belly. There are worse things, and worse places.”
She’d seen it, and lived it.
“You have no idea,” she said, bitterly. “You should be grateful.”
She snatched the mirror away from the girl’s hand and stuffed it back into her make-up bag. Then, she reached for several small, square packets, which she left on the bedside table.
“Use these, if he lets you,” she told her.
“What are they?” Achara asked.
Fuchsia muttered something unintelligible, and checked the time.
“Never mind,” she said. “He’ll be here any minute.”
She walked back to the girl and took her chin in a hard grip.
“If you play this right, you could be like me, one day,” she said. “I have a good life now, with nice clothes and more freedom. But
you have to give them what they want—you understand? It’ll go easier for you, that way.”
Achara pushed her hand away and moved back against the wall, crossing her arms across her breasts.
Fuchsia only shook her head, and told herself she’d done all she could with the girl.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said, before slamming out of the room.
A moment later, the key turned in the lock.
* * *
Ryan and MacKenzie tried the first two addresses they’d been given, taking a full complement of armed police with them, but to no avail. At each one, they found a flat or a house which had been recently evacuated, bearing the remnants of foodstuff and even milk in the fridge, which was still in date.
“Lawana says none of those women are Achara,” MacKenzie told him, having received a message back from the consultant at the hospital. “She’s our missing number eighteen.”
Ryan nodded, and looked up at the moon, which shone an eerie white light over the quiet streets.
“There’s one more address to try,” he said. “Wentworth isn’t at his home address, or at the office, either.”
“Oh, God.”
They hurried back to the car, and sped towards their last hope.
* * *
Achara heard his footsteps on the stairs, and the sound of Fuchsia’s tinkling voice, welcoming him back, as if he were a king, or a lord, and she little more than his chattel. She waited in the far corner of the room armed with the heel of her shoe, which was the only sharp thing she could find, and listened for the turn of the key in the lock.
When he appeared in the doorway, she gripped the shoe and held it out.
“There, now, Orchid,” he said in Thai, closing the door and locking it behind him. “I didn’t realise there was so much fight in you. You must get it from your mother.”
She frowned, wondering how he knew her mother.
“She’s dead now—or didn’t you know?” he said, lowering himself onto the edge of the bed, to remove his shoes and socks.
“What?” she whispered.
“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” he said, and began to undo his tie. “You need to look out for yourself, now.”
Dan Wentworth turned to look at the woman, who was little more than a girl, really, and smiled. “I can help you with that,” he said. “Like I’ve helped a lot of other girls.”
Her hands began to shake as he rose up and moved towards her.
“What are you going to do with that, hmm?”
In a flash, he snatched it from her, and threw it across the room. When Achara made a small sound of panic, his smile grew wider.
“Didn’t Fuchsia tell you?” he whispered. “I like it best when my girls put up a fight.”
* * *
There were lights in the windows of the small, terraced house in North Shields, and, to the outside world, it might have been any other family home in a respectable area of the city.
“You’re sure this is the address?” MacKenzie wondered, eyeing the other houses with their family cars and cosy lights.
“Positive,” Ryan said, and spoke swiftly into his radio. “The other car’s going around the back, to cover the rear exit.”
MacKenzie nodded.
“What’ll you do, if you find him here?” she asked suddenly.
Ryan turned to her with eyes that were flat and hard.
“When I find him there, you mean,” he said, and raised a finger towards a car parked further along the street. “That’s Wentworth’s BMW.”
She looked back at him, waiting for a response.
“The answer is, I’ll do whatever it takes,” Ryan told her.
“Good,” she replied. “Because I don’t have the strength to do what needs to be done, myself. Lowerson and Yates are making their way down, by the way.”
“More the merrier,” Ryan said, and slammed out of the car.
Their footsteps echoed across the cobbled Victorian street as they made their way to the front door, sounding a death knell to the man who was inside.
Ryan raised a hand to bang on the door and, a moment later, Fuchsia opened it, her smile already fixed in place to welcome her next visitor.
When she saw who it was, she tried to slam the door shut.
“Excuse us,” Ryan growled, barging his way inside.
The woman they’d known as Niki began to cry crocodile tears, trilling out a fast stream of Thai, telling tales of her own trauma, her own coercion.
“We’ll get to that, later,” Ryan said, and something in his voice must have warned her that now was, most definitely, not the time. “Where is she? Where is Achara?”
She raised a shaking finger towards the ceiling.
“Second door on the right,” she said, and sank back against the wall.
“You go,” MacKenzie told him. “I’ll watch her.”
Ryan nodded, and took the stairs two at a time, still believing that every second mattered.
He came to the door and didn’t hesitate, but planted his boot against the flimsy wood and kicked it wide open.
When he stepped into the room, a red mist descended.
Ryan saw a grown man, older than himself, pinning down a young woman half his size with one strong hand, while he struggled to divest himself of his remaining clothes. He saw nothing remotely bordering on consent; only fear, loathing, and desperate cries for help. He saw his wife, his daughter, his sister, his mother, his friends, and every other woman he’d never met nor was ever likely to.
Ryan made a low sound, deep in his throat, and grabbed Wentworth by the scruff of his neck, propelling the man off the bed with enough force to send him sprawling against the back of the wall, where he crashed into a chest of drawers.
“Up,” Ryan ground out, and came for him again, this time taking a fistful of hair and dragging him towards the door. “Your time is up.”
Wentworth swung out wildly, catching a glancing blow against Ryan’s arm, which bought him only seconds of time.
“You’re a disgrace to the uniform,” Ryan told him, as the man tried to crawl away along the landing. “The way out is this way.”
He grabbed the waistband of the man’s trousers in one hand, and his collar in another, and heaved him towards the stairs, sending him crashing halfway down.
MacKenzie watched from the hallway, and made no move to intervene.
“Show DCI Wentworth the door,” she said, and held it open for them.
“Thanks,” Ryan said, and planted his foot against the man’s backside so that he went crashing through the front door.
Lowerson and Yates were crossing the street when they saw Wentworth spill out of the doorway, and began rushing forward to prevent his escape, before realising that things were very much in hand.
“Should we—?” Yates wondered.
But Lowerson shook his head, knowing that Ryan was still in command of himself.
“He knows when to stop,” he said. “He’s teaching the bastard a lesson that’s long overdue.”
CHAPTER 40
All staff who were present on site at Northumbria Police Headquarters received word of an impending arrival, and promptly shut down their computers to turn out en masse. They lined the entrance foyer all the way down to the custody suite, waiting silently to greet the man who had sullied all that they worked to uphold each day. Then, as Ryan strongarmed him across the tarmac and inside the building, they turned their backs on Daniel Wentworth; one by one, he saw their heads turn away from him, their silent dismissal more painful than he could ever have imagined. If they saw his bloodied face, they thought it a small price to pay for all he had inflicted upon others, and all they had yet to discover.
After Ryan deposited him in a holding cell and made his way back, each of those people turned around again and began to clap, until the sound was a roar throughout the corridors. He didn’t stop to talk, but carried on walking, eager to reunite a mother with her daughter.
As he roun
ded the corridor, he was intercepted by the Chief Constable.
Ryan came to attention, clasping his hands behind his back.
“Ma’am.”
“A word, please, Ryan.”
He stepped into her office, where he found Lowerson and Yates already waiting for him, MacKenzie having excused herself to look after Achara and ensure she was taken directly to see her mother, at the hospital.
“I heard you brought in DCI Wentworth,” she said, leaning back against her desk. “Can you explain how he came by his injuries?”
Ryan opened his mouth, but Lowerson was quicker.
“I can, ma’am. When we arrived at the scene, we observed DCI Wentworth attempting to escape the target address via the front door,” he said. “Unfortunately, Wentworth seemed to trip down the stairs in his haste. DCI Ryan was on hand to intercept, and used reasonable force to prevent any flight risk.”
“Is that also your recollection, Yates?”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said, without hesitation.
She pushed back from the desk to approach Ryan, who hadn’t said a single word.
“It looks as though congratulations are in order,” she said, and held out her hand to shake his. When he took it, she turned it over and glanced pointedly at his torn knuckles, then back at his face.
“Good work,” she said. “Dismissed.”
* * *
Lawana thought it was a dream.
She saw Achara in the doorway and wondered if it was a mirage, but then the vision moved, running towards her with arms outstretched, crying tears of joy.
My baby, she thought. My baby girl.
She took the girl’s face in her hands and saw the bruising at her neck, saw the hurt hidden behind her eyes, and knew there would be a reckoning.
But she was alive.
They were both alive, and that was all that mattered. Wounds could mend, scars could heal, and so could hearts.
She looked across to the other woman who remained in the doorway, and smiled.
“Thank you,” she said, in careful English.
“Mai pen rai,” MacKenzie replied, in broken Thai. There was no need to thank her.
It was all part of the service.
* * *
“You’re tellin’ me I missed a good fight?”
