The Reckoning Read online

  ‘I’m not sure we’d get away with calling them angry, either. Five Individuals with Different but Equally Valid Opinions.’

  ‘That sounds about right.’ I leaned back in my chair to look up at him. He was unusually tidy in a dark suit. ‘What are you doing here so late?’

  ‘Cleaning up a mess.’

  ‘What kind of mess?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you another time.’

  Too many people around, I presumed. Someone had cocked up and it had fallen to Rob to sort it out. DC Rob Langton was that sort of police officer, diplomatic when he needed to be, clever without needing to shout about it, tough enough when that was called for. The mess – whatever it was – wouldn’t harm his career. He had the useful knack of walking away from disastrous situations with his reputation not only intact, but enhanced. I wished I had some of his skill and more of his luck.

  ‘What’s this?’ He was looking at the stack of files on my desk.

  ‘My latest dream job.’ I lowered my voice. ‘Have you had any dealings with Derwent?’

  ‘No. What’s he like?’

  ‘I’ll tell you another time,’ I said, echoing him deliberately.

  ‘I’ll look forward to it.’ He started to walk towards his own desk but stopped and turned back, leaning down so no one could overhear. ‘Since we have so much to say to one another, do you want to get something to eat later?’

  ‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’

  ‘I’m suggesting we have dinner, Maeve. I haven’t seen much of you for a couple of months but I presume you still eat.’

  ‘There’s no need to be sarcastic.’ I started reorganising the things on my desk so I didn’t have to look at him. ‘It’s just that it’s late and I don’t know when I’m going to be free.’ And, as you’ve reminded me, I’ve been avoiding you for two months for a reason.

  ‘I’ll wait.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘I know.’

  Impasse. ‘Look, I can’t go out anyway. Dec is coming over with the last of my stuff.’

  ‘The poor bugger. He spends his life shifting boxes of your belongings from house to house. How long did you stay in the last place? Six weeks?’

  ‘Nine. And if you’re trying to imply I have commitment issues, think again,’ I said, unruffled. ‘I only moved because the plumbing went disastrously wrong. I liked that flat until raw sewage started bubbling up through the bath drain.’

  ‘That would tend to change your mind about a place. Still, seems hard on your brother to have to do this every couple of months.’

  ‘Declan doesn’t mind. Well, strictly speaking he does, but Mum makes him do it anyway.’

  ‘How is your mum?’

  ‘How long have you got?’

  ‘All evening.’ It was neatly done, I acknowledged. Rob pressed home his advantage. ‘We don’t have to go out. We can eat at yours.’

  ‘I’m not cooking.’

  ‘No, you are not.’ He shuddered. ‘Never again.’

  ‘I never said I was good at it.’ I had only once cooked a meal for Rob. Vegetable lasagne. The sauce was watery, the vegetables unrecognisable slime. The pasta had the consistency of roofing felt. The cheese had blackened in the oven and set like tarmac. We had abandoned the attempt at eating it halfway through – in favour of doing something that I was good at, I recalled, at roughly the same time that Rob remembered too. A slow smile lit up his face and I couldn’t help laughing at him, because however much I wished we had kept things between us simple and professional, there had been times when the complications were so worthwhile.

  ‘Anyway, so we’re clear on who’s doing what, you’re supplying the venue. I’ll sort out the food.’

  ‘I’m not altogether sure that the venue has adequate facilities, by which I mean I don’t know if I’ve got plates. Or cutlery, if it comes to that.’

  ‘Then we can have sandwiches.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t wait to hear what excuse you come up with next.’

  ‘For the record, I still don’t think it’s a good idea.’

  ‘Just because you can’t trust yourself to be alone with me.’

  ‘I am quite capable of resisting your charms.’

  ‘Prove it.’

  ‘Nine o’clock. Dec should have been and gone by then.’ I blushed when I heard how that sounded. ‘Not because I want us to be alone. Just because I don’t want him to tell Mum about you.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘You are not going to be able to believe how much I can resist you, by the way. You’re invited for food. That means you eat and leave.’

  ‘I expected nothing more.’

  ‘Right. Well. I’ll see you at nine.’

  ‘On the dot.’ He walked away and I looked around the office with a carefully contrived neutral expression on my face, checking that no one had noticed the little scene. The only person who was looking in our direction was Liv Bowen, the newest detective on the team and the only other female. She blew her fringe out of her eyes and gave me a meaningless smile, which I returned.

  Somehow, I hadn’t got around to having a conversation with DC Bowen yet. She was quite beautiful, with flawless skin and a delicate oval face. She wore her hair long, but kept it knotted at the nape of her neck. She had a dancer’s body, graceful but strong, and looked like anything but a police officer. If I struggled to be taken seriously, it had to be ten times worse for her. She had come to the team from an intelligence job in Special Branch, and there was plenty of speculation about whether she’d be able to cope with the work on a serious crimes squad that specialised in murder. There were also, I happened to know, more than a few rumours about her private life. I could guess the team had said much the same about me when I joined, but I didn’t know the details and I would never make the mistake of asking. My height would have made it hard for me to fade into the background even if I’d wanted to, but I tried not to draw too much attention to myself. I wore shapeless suits to work and rarely bothered with more than the bare minimum of make-up. Liv Bowen didn’t seem to wear any make-up at all, but then she didn’t need it. And she didn’t need my support if she was going to make her way in Godley’s team, I told myself.

  As I was thinking that, she stood up and went over to where Rob was sitting, showing him a piece of paper. As she leaned over him she said something that made him laugh. I swallowed. They were working together on whatever case Rob was dealing with; they had to talk, whether I liked it or not. And I did not like it, I admitted to myself. I did not like it at all.

  The door to Godley’s office opened and the three senior officers filed out, followed by Bryce who was looking even more gloomy than usual. The superintendent stayed at his desk, writing something on a sheet of paper. That in itself was unusual; I couldn’t recall the last time he had let a visitor to his room make their own way to the door. His manners were impeccable, as a rule, and I wondered what had made him forget himself to the extent that he didn’t bother making an effort with the three men who had the most potential to influence his career.

  ‘Give him five minutes and then we’ll go in, okay?’ Derwent, leaning over the back of my seat, hot breath in my ear as he spoke. I resisted the urge to push back my chair at speed, settling for imagining the impact, the choking cough from behind me, the inspector lying on the floor, clutching his bits, moaning softly … which reminded me of Barry Palmer. Amusement seeped away, leaving shame and a little irritation in its place. But then, I couldn’t be good all the time. And I would be using up my quota of goodness – and more – during my evening with Rob. It wasn’t going to be easy to be on my best behaviour.

  Rob’s back was turned to me and while I was waiting to be summoned, I allowed myself the luxury of a minute spent studying the line of his shoulders, the fingers of one hand drumming a rhythm on his thigh as he worked, the neat shape of his dark head. What had been between us before Christmas hadn’t disappeared in the grey light of January, when I had called a halt. The fe
elings were still there, if I chose to indulge them.

  But I would be strong. Head over heart. I had made the right decision and there was no going back. I shifted in my chair, suddenly fidgety, and forced myself to look away. In doing so, I met Liv Bowen’s gaze again. This time, I was the one who tried a smile, and earned a long, cool look in return that made the colour rise in my cheeks.

  ‘We’re up.’ Derwent headed into Godley’s office without waiting for me and I scrambled to collect my papers and follow him. The DI was making a habit of leaving me behind.

  I stepped into Godley’s office in time to hear him snap, ‘Just make it quick, all right? I’ve got to go.’

  Derwent nodded, looking unruffled, but I had never heard the superintendent speak that way before and I was glad that Derwent took the lead, explaining where we were with the investigation. The boss listened with his head turned slightly away and his eyes focused on the floor. When Derwent had finished, Godley looked up.

  ‘So what’s your gut instinct on this one, Josh? Are there going to be more bodies?’

  ‘I’d assume so. Without knowing what our killer wants we can’t be sure why he’s killing but I don’t see any reason for him to stop at two. If it’s someone who fancies themselves as a vigilante, cleaning up the streets, he’s got a way to go before he gets rid of every known child abuser in South London. The same goes if it’s someone who gets a kick out of killing paedos – maybe an ex-con who wanted to deal with them inside but couldn’t get close enough.’

  ‘Were Barry Palmer and Ivan Tremlett ever in custody in the same prison?’

  I could answer that one. ‘No. Tremlett did his time on Sheppey.’ It was a small, somewhat bleak island connected to the Kent coast by bridge – the perfect place to site three prisons, according to the powers-that-be. ‘Palmer was bounced around the place a bit. He didn’t have family so he was easy to shift to another prison when the facility he was in got overcrowded. He spent a fair bit of his sentence in the Midlands, a chunk of it in Yorkshire and the last bit in Portsmouth.’

  ‘Difficult to find out if anyone had been in prison with both men,’ Godley commented.

  ‘Impossible, I’d have said. Not with the way Palmer was shuffled around over his sentence. You’d have to get a list of everyone that was in Tremlett’s prison over the course of his time in custody and find out where else they’d been, and where they are now, and even then you’d never prove they’d actually met the victims.’ Derwent shook his head. ‘I’m as much a fan of hard work as you are, but I don’t think we’ll find the killer that way.’

  ‘Well, what can we rule out? Is he doing this for fun?’

  ‘No.’ The two men looked at me, waiting for me to justify what I’d said. My ‘no’ had been instinctive and unequivocal and I took a second to organise my thoughts. An idea was beginning to develop from the confusion of facts swirling in my brain. ‘The violence in these two murders is extreme, but it’s focused. The men have injuries consistent with being interrogated – their autopsy reports read like an Amnesty International briefing document on torture. I think our killer wants to know something, very badly, and he didn’t find it out from Barry Palmer. He might have heard more from Tremlett, but then again he might not – we won’t know for a day or two at least.’

  ‘Until we find another body, I presume.’ Godley’s expression was grim.

  Derwent shook his head. ‘No torture manual that I’ve ever read includes cutting off someone’s wedding tackle. He would have been useless for information after that, I’d bet. Unconscious from pain, probably.’

  ‘Yeah, I don’t actually think that was part of the torture,’ I said tentatively.

  ‘Do you think the killer is sadistic?’ Godley asked.

  ‘No. Although I do think he’s getting a certain satisfaction from the violence, I don’t see it as a sexual kink. I think it’s punishment. He’s tailoring it to fit their crimes.’ I flipped through the autopsy reports. ‘Ivan Tremlett’s eyes were gouged out. At first, I thought that was because he needed them to work, so blinding him was the physical equivalent of smashing his computers – a fairly drastic final step, but relating to his life now rather than what he did. But then I started to think about his crime. He was a watcher, not a doer. He downloaded images of other people abusing kids – as far as we know, he didn’t abuse any himself. He liked to look at children being molested because it excited him, and he was punished for that.’

  ‘And Barry Palmer?’

  ‘The girls alleged that his assaults on them had begun with fondling, then escalated to full sex. They were quite specific about what was done to them, although they did change their stories on some of the details like places and times. The killer seems to have known the details of their testimony because he cut off the parts of Barry Palmer that touched the girls, according to their evidence.’ I held up my hands, forefinger and middle finger extended on the right, forefinger on the left. ‘These fingers are mentioned specifically in their statements.’

  ‘But for him to know that, he has to have access to the police files.’ There was a short silence after the superintendent had spoken. The implications of that were not appealing. I was fairly sure that everyone in the room had already thought of the possibility that we could be hunting a police officer. There were enough of them who had lost faith in the criminal justice system. There would only need to be one who’d decided to do something about it. And all they would need was a strong stomach. It was Derwent, in the end, who put it into words.

  ‘So our killer’s got access to the information we’ve got. He’s got someone on the inside. Or the killer himself is on the inside. He’s a copper or maybe a civilian clerical worker. A prison officer who lives locally. A probation officer who is fed up with looking after that sort of client.’

  ‘He’d need access to the CRIS reports to get the kind of details Maeve mentioned – the specific allegations that were made against Palmer, for example. That’s got to narrow it down.’ CRIS was the snappy acronym for the Met’s Crime Reporting and Incident System, the online archive for crimes committed in the Metropolitan area.

  ‘That would cover police officers and some civilian workers. But don’t forget, the killer doesn’t have to be one of us. He just has to have access to someone who can search those files,’ Derwent pointed out.

  Godley looked at Derwent and for the first time since I’d walked into the room he seemed fully engaged with the task at hand. ‘Right. Get on to IT. I want to find out who has requested the file on Barry Palmer since it was created. Ivan Tremlett committed his crime in Kent so the details would be with the local police there, not on CRIS.’

  ‘But in Tremlett’s case, all the killer needed to know was what he was convicted for. There were no live victims to give evidence because he was just downloading images someone else had created,’ I pointed out. ‘He could have got the information he needed from the sex-offenders’ register. If he has access to CRIS, he must be able to look at the register, or someone else is doing it on his behalf.’

  ‘Or he’s relying on local knowledge. It could be someone in one of the police stations in the borough. They’d need to know about paedophiles on their patch, just to keep an eye on them. They’d be aware of Ivan Tremlett’s past.’ Derwent dug in his pocket for chewing gum, offering it around before popping two tablets of it into his mouth. I could smell the mint from where I was sitting on the other side of the room.

  Godley turned to me. ‘Maeve, have a look at the register and see who else is on it. Then we can start thinking about how to warn likely targets.’

  ‘Do you really want to draw this to the public’s attention?’ Derwent asked. ‘We’ll cause a panic. Not because people will be worried about a killer working in their community, but because people will realise they’re living cheek by jowl with paedos. We’ll have mob justice running riot. Innocent people will be targeted and we’ll have a nightmare on our hands. And the local force will be inundated with pointless requests for inf
ormation now that the Sarah’s Law campaigners have got it to apply to this area.’

  ‘If you are referring to the Child Sex Offender Disclosure Scheme, it’s only available to parents of children who come into regular contact with specific individuals. Interested parties won’t be able to use it for a blanket search of the area and the local force should be able to reject most of the requests, if they are indeed pointless,’ Godley said stiffly.

  Derwent looked disgusted. ‘Don’t tell me you think the scheme is a good idea. It’s a classic example of wishful thinking. Inviting members of the public to point the finger at random people, on the off-chance they might hit a child molester. If it was that easy to pick out paedophiles, we could just round them up and put them all on an island that has a limited supply of fresh water and a healthy population of visiting sharks.’

  ‘The scheme has its limitations, yes. But it makes people feel safer and it may help protect some children.’ Godley was back to looking tired. He took a second to rub his eyes before he went on. ‘We do need to control the flow of information on this case, not least because of the possible public reaction. That’s why we’re going to target individuals who need to be protected. We’ll encourage them to leave the area temporarily so that we don’t have to worry about protecting them. Anyway, there’s a limit to how much we can do. No borough commander is going to lend me people to sit around waiting for a paedophile to be attacked. It would be a waste of manpower and seriously unpopular if it ever came out in the media. Besides, I doubt the potential victims would welcome the attention. The warnings will have to be kept confidential or we’ll run the risk of identifying these people as convicted sex offenders, and I want you two to handle it because there’s a good chance the leak is local to the borough. We don’t want the killer being tipped off about what we’re doing.’

  Derwent stood up and went over to the vast map of London that hung on one wall of Godley’s office. ‘We’re going to need to establish what area we’re covering. We’ve currently got two locations roughly a mile apart. We need a third to get some idea of the killer’s territory. These two murders … the fact that they’re so close together geographically might not mean anything at all except that he knew where to find the victims.’