The Black Shepherd

by Steven Savile

  ‘OK, so he’s a poster boy for One World by the sounds of things.’

  ‘Even if that’s the case, you know this is outside of your remit, don’t you? This is a murder in my country. A capital crime. The victim is Estonian. The man we have in custody is Estonian, and the officer you suspect of being corrupt is Estonian. I don’t know how involved you can be in this.’

  Which was true.

  ‘Which is why we’re talking.’

  ‘And there was me thinking you wanted me for my body.’

  ‘Stir the pot.’

  ‘I’m not following?’

  ‘Rattle Kask.’

  ‘You want me to deliberately try and draw him into making a mistake?’

  ‘Assuming he’s the bad guy here, yep.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘All you need to do is ask a question. It’ll get back to him.’

  ‘What sort of question?’

  He prefaced his plan carefully. ‘You’re a good cop. A good cop is going to want to make sure any conviction is safe. This is murder we’re talking about. One flatmate disappears, another winds up murdered, and he’s point man on both? What’s that saying: “God doesn’t play dice with the universe?” A decent lawyer is going to have a field day with the level of coincidence here. So, a good cop asks: how did they get so lucky? A dog walker called in to say they saw a yellow car. What time was the call logged? Where was the call logged from? Caller’s identity? You know the sort of stuff. Look for what’s not there as much as what is.’

  ‘Hold on,’ she said.

  He stopped talking, waiting for her to explain.

  She didn’t.

  As he leaned forward a little, about to ask, Mirjam Rebane shook her head.

  ‘Coincidences,’ she said finally.

  ‘That’s what I’ve been saying,’ Peter said.

  She shook her head. ‘No. Coincidences,’ she said again.

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘The dog walker.’

  ‘The one who called the report of the car in?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘It’s what’s not there, right?’

  ‘More often than not,’ Peter agreed.

  ‘I need to check something before I say it out loud. Give me a minute.’

  ‘Go for it.’

  She left him at the table disappearing outside for closer to ten minutes before she returned.

  She wasn’t smiling as she slipped back into her seat.

  ‘I called in a couple of favours. Got a friend to send me a transcript of the emergency call. Easier than me translating Estonian for you.’ She put the transcript on the table and turned it so Peter could read it.

  ‘There’s a body. I was walking. I didn’t realize what it was at first. My dog wouldn’t leave it alone. Then I saw the arm and I realized …’

  ‘Can I take your name, please, sir?’

  ‘I don’t … She’s on the wasteground. She’s dead. It’s a she. I’ve never seen a body … I … I saw a car.’

  ‘What kind of car?’

  ‘A Volvo. Not a new one. An old model. It was rusty. Yellow.’

  ‘Can you give me your location, sir?’

  ‘It’s the wasteland on the edge of the industrial estate out beyond the ring road. The far side of the railway line. I have to go. Find. Her. Please. She’s alone out there. Please.’

  ‘Can I have your name, please, sir?’

  ‘I left my mother on her own.’

  It wasn’t much.

  ‘I’m not seeing whatever you are,’ Peter admitted.

  ‘I have to go. I left my mother on her own,’ Mirjam said.

  Peter nodded.

  She handed him a second sheet. It was a situation report. A detailed situation report. Including the time officers arrived on the scene, and the time the one witness, Sten Christof Semjonov, had been released, nearly three hours later.

  Semjonov’s statement was attached.

  ‘What isn’t there?’ Mirjam asked as he pushed the transcript back towards her.

  ‘He doesn’t mention calling it in,’ Peter said.

  ‘He doesn’t mention calling it in, but he’s thorough about everything else. Meticulous detail, really. An ideal witness. He reports seeing Kask’s car, and waving him over. And then he talks about the two cops arriving on the scene and the moment when the first uniformed officer is so wound up he nearly shoots Kask. There’s no gap in the testimony where he leaves Kask with the body and walks across to call it in, and he doesn’t once say he called it in and then returned to Annja’s body to wait. He specifically claims he saw Kask standing by his car and called him over, while Kask claims he was responding to the dispatcher’s call. Now maybe he forgot to mention he placed a call …’

  ‘Maybe,’ Peter said, entertaining reasonable doubt.

  ‘But that’s not the kicker,’ Mirjam said. She brought another image front and centre on the screen and passed the phone back to Peter. ‘This is.’

  He read the name on the death certificate: Mari-Liis Semjonov.

  ‘His mother wasn’t there waiting for him. She died seventeen years ago. What’s not there? Two different dog walkers found the same corpse and the first one walked off after they called it in? Or Kask’s lying.’

  ‘You ever talk to Kask?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Did you hear the logged call?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And did it sound like his voice?’

  ‘It sounded eerily like his voice,’ Mirjam told him.

  ‘Sometimes I hate being right,’ Peter said.

  ‘No you don’t.’

  ‘No I don’t,’ he agreed. ‘Will he be able to tell you’ve accessed this stuff?’

  ‘We’ll find out soon enough.’

  ‘Well, I did ask you to rattle his cage.’

  ‘Consider it rattled.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  The black limo returned for Frankie much sooner than she’d expected. There was no sign of John this time. The driver was alone.

  ‘Ceska? John sent me to pick you up,’ he said. ‘He’ll join us out at the compound.’

  Frankie looked to Tasha. The other woman nodded as if to say, sure, this is how it’s supposed to be. ‘Tomas will take care of you, don’t worry.’

  ‘OK, I’ll just grab my things.’

  ‘It’s fine. You won’t need any of that stuff,’ Tomas assured her.

  Frankie shook her head. ‘They’re my things …’

  She didn’t care about the change of clothes, her sleeping bag, or even her rucksack. The only thing she did care about was the burner phone at the bottom of it. That was her lifeline.

  ‘Trust me, you won’t need it. We’ve got everything you need out at the compound. Tasha will look after your stuff for you.’

  ‘It’ll be right here waiting for you when you get back, promise,’ Tasha said.

  ‘You don’t understand, it’s my stuff … the only stuff I have in the world that’s mine.’ She shook her head. She wasn’t getting into that car without her rucksack. Even without the phone, this determination to cling onto her few possessions felt genuine.

  The man shrugged, gave a sigh, and said, ‘Suit yourself,’ as he made a show of looking at his watch. ‘But we don’t want to be late.’

  Nodding, Frankie hurried to the van to stuff her sleeping bag into her pack, wishing she had a couple of seconds to send a message to Peter to let him know they were moving out. She just had to trust that Laura was monitoring her tracker.

  By the time she returned to the car the boot was already open for her to drop her things into. Tomas stood beside the car. He looked thoroughly unimpressed by her treasures as he slammed the boot closed.

  ‘In you get,’ he said, opening the rear passenger-side door.

  ‘Can’t I sit in the front?’

  ‘Just do as you’re told, eh?’ He didn’t move aside, so she slid onto the back seat.

  It wa
s only when he closed the door with little more than a click that she realized the tint on the windows was so dark she couldn’t see out, and that there was a glass divider between the rear and the front of the car. She reached over to try the handle, but it didn’t open. The child locks were in place, meaning she was essentially being held captive in the luxury car. She straightened up as Tomas got into the driver’s seat.

  Without being able to see out, she was quickly going to lose any sense of direction, making it hard to guess where Tomas was taking her, or how far they’d travelled. It wasn’t ideal.

  ‘If you lift the armrest next to you,’ Tomas said, his voice coming through a small speaker built into the fascia beneath the glass divider, ‘you’ll find bottled water and sandwiches if you get hungry. Settle back and enjoy the ride. If you want music there’s a stereo system built into the speaker; no radio, but it’s hooked up to Spotify and I’ve got some decent playlists sorted.’

  ‘How long will it take us to get to the compound?’

  ‘A couple of hours, depending on traffic. Kick back, relax.’

  There was a silence then as the speaker disconnected and she was left alone. In the back of a limo, no one can hear you scream, she thought, the thought coming alive with Peter Ash’s voice inside her mind. His bad sense of humour was rubbing off on her.

  She found the touchscreen beneath the grille and brought it to life with the heat of her fingertip, and searched through the playlists for one with songs she recognized. It wasn’t that she was eager to hear the tunes, she needed them as a way to mark the time.

  She felt the car pull away and settled back in for the ride. She was more comfortable than she’d been in days. And bone-deep tired. It wasn’t a good combination. She promised herself she was only closing her eyes, that she was going to listen to the songs and commit them to memory.

  THIRTY

  Frankie was on the move.

  Laura chewed on her bottom lip as she watched the signal move across one of her monitors. The refresh rate was moving a lot faster than walking pace. She’d been waiting for this to happen. As plans went, it went. She wasn’t happy with it, but she’d always known Frankie was going to take that shot. It didn’t matter if she had backup in place or not. That wasn’t who she was. Hell, it was in her name. She was a hunter. A lone wolf.

  Laura sent a short text to Peter Ash. All it said was: ‘She’s on the move.’

  She got a reply back seconds later that simply said, ‘OK.’

  Peter was on a hunt of his own. She’d known he would do it properly when she’d sent him over there armed with an excuse. The reason her research for his cover story had been so good was because it was real. There were dozens of girls a year being moved through the Baltic States to feed the demand for sex-workers in Europe. She’d known from the moment she’d chosen the cover story that Peter was going to dive right in. She was gambling he’d chase the truth right to one of those pimp circles, or whatever they called those houses where the girls were basically held hostage, and save a few lives in the process, because that was who he was.

  What she hadn’t expected was the seeming overlap with One World, which was a whole different level of disturbing.

  Her crawler churned out a steady stream of results, most of them useless. It was just too big a data set, meaning too big a result pool. And once she’d collated everything and dug through the results there was still zero to guarantee there’d be anything even remotely usable. It didn’t mean her logic was flawed, either. You couldn’t find what wasn’t there to be found. It was pretty much that simple. Crossing the Iron Curtain, no matter how many years it was since it had supposedly come down, posed no end of problems for data mining.

  She looked out across the Operations Room. There were twenty-seven other teams in here, all of them working their own cases, sharing resources and pooling knowledge. Over a hundred people were assigned to Division now. It wasn’t like it had been in River House. She could walk across the floor to where Etienne Reynard was hunched over his terminal and ask him for a favour even if France wasn’t involved. That pooling of resources, the idea they were stronger together, was new.

  She liked it.

  Even so, she did kind of miss the broom cupboard back in London. There were a lot of memories tied to that place. And ghosts. Or ghost. One. Mitch. He’d never been here, there was no link to him in this glass-and-steel custom-built monstrosity. She kept a photo of the three of them on her desk. Peter hadn’t commented on it when he’d seen it.

  She went to get herself a decent cup of coffee, and smiled to Zanya and Anoninia, the Polish team. They were the odd ones out in Division. Most field teams were male–female, or male–male partnerships being run by someone like her. Poland brought two women to the table, and they had a clearance rate that shamed most of the boys. Sem Dekker was at the machine, struggling with one of the little foil capsules which appeared to be jammed in the machine.

  ‘If you’ve broken it I will kill you,’ Laura said, coming up beside him.

  ‘It’s all good,’ he assured her.

  The sheer amount of coffee grounds across his fingertips suggested otherwise.

  ‘Out of the way, pretty boy,’ Laura said, and set about getting the damaged capsule out of the machine.

  It took her a couple of seconds.

  Sem just shook his head.

  ‘Hey, this is my element,’ she said, and skipped ahead of him in the line to brew up first.

  All around them the Operations Room was a Babel of languages; so many different sounds they all blurred together into one incredible fusion where words ceased to be.

  It was enough to drive her out of her mind when she was trying to concentrate, but at times like this she rather enjoyed the sheer multicultural cross-section the open-plan Operations Room offered.

  It did however make her feel incredibly isolated at times, and ignorant, given so many of the people in this place spoke three, four, and five languages fluently.

  Even Peter managed to mangle some high-school French.

  She was, she thought, quite possibly the only person here who was monolingual.

  She returned to her desk, coffee in hand.

  The red dot marking Frankie’s route had made progress through the grid of streets that carved up the Old Town of Tallinn. Unlike the portable devices Frankie and Peter carried, she was able to see the snail trail of Frankie’s route going all the way back to the docklands. She could also switch the dates and look back at her various routes over the last few days if necessary.

  The signal weaved its way through the streets, turning left and right, but always heading in the same general direction.

  Laura switched the view to overhead satellite and zoomed out for a moment until she picked out the wasteground where Annja Rosen’s body had been discovered.

  The car was heading in the same general direction, which did nothing to set her mind at rest.

  After the outer ring of the ring road, beyond the industrial estate and the wasteland, was a significant amount of forest that was as yet untouched by the forest fire. It did, however, offer the flames a direct route into the heart of the city if the wind should turn before the firefighters had it under control.

  She had to assume the compound was hidden away in there somewhere.

  It wouldn’t be too far from civilization; that made transportation an issue. The further from the docks and the routes out of the country the more room there was for things to go wrong.

  That was one of the more unexpected things her research into trafficking had turned up. Facilitators. Those landlords in and around the key checkpoints – or chokepoints as the trafficker’s lingo termed them. They might be geographic or trans-regional, crossing from water to land, a bridge, a port, or other points of egress where customs and immigration agents came into play. Where the trafficked girls flowed they turned a blind eye for regular cash. The thought process is simple: what they didn’t see didn’t hurt them. Which is a long way from not hurting
anyone, but money trumped some stranger’s pain.

  She could try to use satellite imaging to locate any hot spots, but it was a stretch given the whole country was basically burning. The compound wouldn’t use mains electricity, it’d be off the grid, meaning generators. Was she looking for a significantly sized clearing, or had the compound been built among the trees, retaining the cover that the canopy provided? She had so many questions and nothing in the answer column. Realistically, all she could do for the time being was watch Frankie’s flashing red signal on the monitor and wait.

  And she hated waiting.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Peter Ash left Mirjam with plenty to think about. More, in truth, than he wanted to. There was something happening. He wasn’t ready for that. He needed to be all about the dead girls, not thinking about how much he enjoyed her company. That way lay madness.

  So, now they had an idea what they were dealing with, and that was at the very least a corrupt cop, which meant Mirjam taking things through official channels risked tipping Kask off. But not taking the hunt through the proper process risked a lot more.

  Sometimes he hated his job.

  On the list of shit things in his life, a corrupt cop was right up there with the shittiest of the shit.

  But they had to rattle him.

  They couldn’t let Kask just go through the next few days complacent and content that he’d got away with murder. These were key hours. These were where he was likely to trip up, especially if he thought he was under suspicion. But how to do that without tipping off the higher-ups given they thought they had the right man in custody?

  Through that fringe Church of his.

  It was One World.

  It had to be.

  But they needed to get proof of that. Part of him half-hoped that particular rock remained unturned, if they were part of a bigger conspiracy to commit crime. In truth, he didn’t know much about One World beyond the usual gossip he’d heard about the stuff with their missionaries out amongst the Big Issue sellers in Covent Garden trying to spread the word of The Shepherd. He didn’t have a clue what they actually believed in.