The Reckoning (28 page)

‘People like you don’t change – you just get better at hiding what you are. You probably got let out because of overcrowding.’

‘No.’

‘You’re not going to impress us, William, so don’t bother.’ Derwent paused. ‘Did you know Cheyenne Skinner?’

‘That’s what they wanted to know.’ Forgrave swallowed. ‘I’d never heard of her until yesterday.’

‘So you hadn’t been in touch with her? You hadn’t been emailing her?’

‘No. I don’t do that any more.’

‘Sure?’

‘I told them – I stopped. I grew out of it.’

‘Ever had a girlfriend? I mean, one that was old enough to be legal?’

‘I find it hard to meet women.’

‘You have to try in the first place.’ Derwent jerked a thumb in my direction. ‘You haven’t even glanced at my colleague since we’ve been here. Admittedly, I’ve seen her look better, but she’s not ugly.’

I could have
murdered
Derwent.

‘I’m not really in the mood for flirting.’ Forgrave raised a hand and gestured at his face.

‘Still, though. You have to admit it’s strange.’

‘Do I?’ He coughed a little, then closed his eyes. ‘Are you finished?’

‘For now.’ Derwent stood up. ‘Come on, Kerrigan.’

I didn’t bother to say goodbye to Forgrave; I just headed for the door, aware that Derwent hadn’t moved but not realising why until I turned around. He was watching Forgrave, who was watching me.

‘Yeah, you looked that time. I knew you would. But it’s too little, too late, I’m afraid.’ His voice was soft. ‘I can always spot a liar, William. We’ll find out who you’ve been emailing and what else you’ve been doing since you’ve been out of prison. Because you didn’t convince Mr Skinner that you were pure as the driven snow, and you haven’t convinced us. One way or another, you’re going to get your comeuppance.’

‘You won’t find anything.’

‘Think not?’ Derwent smiled. ‘Good luck with your recovery, Mr Forgrave. Try to think happy thoughts, won’t you.’

I wasn’t doing that well with the happy thoughts myself. I had enough self-control to wait until we were out of earshot of the officer who was guarding Forgrave before I ripped into Derwent.

‘How dare you?’

‘What?’

‘You asked me to come here. You told me you wanted me to help with the interview, and you didn’t even ask me if I had any questions for him.’

‘Yeah, that wasn’t the help I was looking for.’ He patted my shoulder. ‘Don’t feel bad, Kerrigan. You did your bit.’

‘You used me.’

‘Oh, spare me the feminist outrage.’ He pressed the button to call the lift. ‘I told you; you need to make the most of being young and relatively attractive. Use the tools at your disposal and don’t fucking whine about it.’

I folded my arms. ‘Like the way you use your legendary charm?’

‘Don’t start.’ He jerked his thumb in the direction of Forgrave’s room. ‘That guy reeks of wrong. I know he’s been up to something.’

‘He does seem on the dodgy side,’ I agreed reluctantly. ‘But I’m still angry.’

‘All right.’ The lift arrived and Derwent got in, putting a hand out to stop me from following. ‘Work it off on the stairs. I don’t want you bending my ear about it on the drive to the office. I’ll see you in the car park.’

I stepped back as the lift doors slid closed, speechless with rage. It would take a lot more than a few flights of stairs to make me calm down, but Derwent needn’t have worried about me complaining. Silence was what he wanted, so silence was what he got, all the way to work. And if he chose to characterise it as sulking – which he did – that was fine by me.

The briefing room was almost full already and there were still people filing in. I pushed through the crowd to find a place to perch, swerving away from a seat near Rob in favour of sitting beside Liv Bowen. Rob nodded to me amiably enough. No one looking at us would have thought we had been together the previous evening, which I suppose was the point. I decided not to spend too much time analysing it, and promptly began to do exactly that. It was almost a relief to be distracted by the scrutiny of my colleagues. Most of them seemed to be inordinately fascinated by my bruises. I had perfected a flinty glare to ward off the crass comments.

Liv, whom I would have expected to be more sensible than most, inspected my face as I sat down. ‘Come up lovely, hasn’t it?’

‘It’ll fade.’

‘No doubt.’ She tilted her head to one side, considering it. ‘Bruising sort of suits you.’

‘Oh, thanks a lot.’

At that moment Godley entered the room in the company of a middle-aged woman who had a distinctly no-nonsense air about her. She was wearing a black trouser suit that was a shade too tight and had a buff folder under one arm. Like a classroom full of badly behaved teenagers, we settled down to something approximating silence as the last of us shuffled in and sat down.

‘Everyone ready? Good.’ Godley stood at the front of the room, his hair gleaming silver under the harsh fluorescent lights that buzzed overhead. ‘This is DCI Marla Redmond from Brixton CID. She’s come to brief us about their ongoing investigation into the disappearance of a teenage girl on Saturday. Most of you will be aware that we have John Skinner in custody. The girl in question is his daughter.’

There was a low buzz of conversation during the couple of seconds it took DCI Redmond to swap places with Godley and gather her thoughts. She looked tense, her pale face free of make-up.

‘Right, we’re currently searching for Cheyenne Skinner, a fourteen-year-old girl from Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire.’ She flipped open her folder and took out a school photograph, a girl in a blazer and white shirt. She held it up to let everyone have a look, then gave it to Liv, indicating that she should pass it around. I studied it with interest when it came to me. The first things I noted were the girl’s arched, overplucked eyebrows and a lot of honey-blond hair that had been teased into tumbling curls for the photograph. Cheyenne had heavy-lidded eyes, a full mouth and a distinctly snub nose. The embroidered crest on her blazer read ‘Our Lady Queen of Heaven RC Girls School’, which had to be less strict than the secondary school I had attended. The nuns would never have allowed me to get away with a tenth of the mascara and lip-gloss that Cheyenne was wearing. You couldn’t truthfully have described the girl as pretty but there was something attractive about her, a gleam of spirit in the dark-rimmed eyes. She looked a lot older than fourteen, too.

‘We have no sightings of Cheyenne since Saturday evening when she left home to attend a pop-up nightclub held in a warehouse off Coldharbour Lane.’

‘A what?’ Colin Vale was looking baffled.

‘It’s a club set up for one night only in a building that’s basically derelict. They had lighting, a sound system and a bar of sorts, all run by generators. It was illegal – they didn’t have a drinks licence, which the organisers have admitted. But the warehouse is in an industrial area that’s not too close to any residences and no one complained about noise to us, so they weren’t found out until the girl disappeared.’

‘How did she know about it?’

‘She was invited by someone she’d met on the Internet. We don’t know who this person was, although we’ve made strenuous efforts to trace them, as you might imagine. The account they were using seems to have been shut down and Cheyenne didn’t keep much on her computer, probably because she was told not to. We only know about this individual from a message that Cheyenne forwarded to her friends to show off.’

I looked across the room to where Derwent was standing and caught his eye. I mouthed, ‘Forgrave?’

He shrugged, but he looked concerned.

‘Was she being groomed?’ Colin Vale asked.

‘Looks like it. I’ve sent the message to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre and they confirmed it had all the hallmarks they would look for. The tone is flirtatious – comments about her appearance, her choice of clothing and so forth. And the person, who went by the name of Kyle, asked her to be sure to keep their messages secret to make it more special.’

‘Manipulative,’ Derwent commented, glancing in my direction again. It was strikingly similar to what he had found out earlier about Forgrave’s crimes. If alarm bells hadn’t been ringing before, they definitely were now.

‘How do we know this person was the source of the invitation?’ Rob asked.

‘We’re going by what Cheyenne told her friends. She was extremely nervous at the prospect of going to the club, because she was going to meet “Kyle” for the first time. And we have a copy of the invitation because one of my officers thought to hit the reprint button on her printer. Luckily for us it was the last thing she printed.’ Marla allowed herself a small satisfied smile as she took a piece of paper out of her folder and held it out to Liv. I leaned over to look at it, seeing a pair of masked skulls at the top of the page.

‘What’s the logo?’

‘That’s the organisers, The Brothers Grim. They’ve done a few different events, they told me – flash mobs, pop-up shops and galleries. Very trendy. Very popular with the bright young things.’

I was reading the wording of the invitation. Dancing and debauchery, as Derwent had said. ‘It looks as if they were planning an orgy.’

DCI Redmond shrugged. ‘I think they would have chosen a more comfortable venue if that had been on the cards. Take it from me, the warehouse is exceptionally draughty.’

‘Okay, but this is definitely for adults, isn’t it? This isn’t aimed at teenagers.’

‘The organisers didn’t specifically say that those who attended had to be over eighteen. They didn’t need to, as they didn’t have a licence in the first place. They also didn’t place many controls on who attended. The invitation was passed on by word of mouth and they limited the numbers on the night, making sure that there weren’t more than two hundred people there at any one time. But by all accounts it was an older crowd – mid-twenties, mostly.’

‘Any chance of getting a list of those who attended?’ Colin again.

‘We’ve tried. We’ve been using social media to reach out to those who might have been there. We launched a Facebook appeal that’s had a fair bit of attention and we also got on Twitter. Considering the way the invitation was circulated, we thought the best way to contact those who attended was via the Internet.’

‘I haven’t seen anything about her in the conventional media,’ Belcott said.

DCI Redmond looked uneasily at Godley, who stood up. ‘A decision was taken – not by us, I might add – that this was an opportunity to put pressure on John Skinner to return to the UK.’

‘You used Cheyenne as bait. You went soft on the investigation so he would come back.’ I had been thinking it, but it was Liv who said it, and she sounded as disgusted as I felt.

‘That’s not the case. DCI Redmond has been working extremely hard to locate her. But there was a belief that if John Skinner was sufficiently worried about his daughter, he might return. Which was, in fact, what happened.’

‘And three men died before we worked out he was here.’ I didn’t bother to keep the bitterness out of my voice. I felt protective of my victims, even more so because of why they had died. I was glad that I didn’t have to add Forgrave to their number. I was quite comfortable with not caring for him in the least.

‘They were paedophiles, though,’ Belcott said. ‘Let’s not get too upset about it.’ I couldn’t look at him.

‘It wasn’t our choice.’ Godley’s voice was flat. End of discussion. I recalled the strain he had been under for the previous days and could accept that he hadn’t wanted to go that route. ‘Besides, the media would have focused on her father, not on Cheyenne. We didn’t want the complications that would have brought to the investigation.’

‘Are we sure that this online boyfriend isn’t a front for one of Skinner’s enemies?’ Rob asked. ‘Attacking his daughter would be the ideal way to get revenge on him, and I imagine there are a fair few people who would like the chance.’

‘That’s one of the reasons I’m glad this team is joining the investigation. We’re drowning in information and I don’t have time to work out what’s important.’ Marla Redmond smiled slightly. ‘You’re more familiar with Skinner than we are. We thought it would be worth having a look in the files to see who might be pissed off with him.’

‘It’d be easier to count the people who aren’t.’ Peter Belcott folded his arms and rested them on his belly, looking smug for no reason I could think, except that smugness was his default setting.

‘That’s why we need your help,’ the DCI said patiently. ‘You have a better chance of spotting the genuine enemies.’ She looked at Liv. ‘You’re right. Cheyenne was bait. But she’s also a missing teenager. And however streetwise she may be, she is still a child. With every minute that passes, we have less chance of finding her alive. Gayle Skinner is the wife of a known criminal and she enjoys the lifestyle that’s given her, but don’t think that means she doesn’t care about her daughter. I don’t want to have to go and tell her that we’ve found a body and I’m damned if I’m going to do less than my best to find Cheyenne, regardless of who her father is.’

I found myself liking Marla Redmond. She had clearly been fighting that particular battle for the past couple of days, and maybe that explained the strain on her face. I was sure that her priority was the girl, first and foremost.

‘What about if she’s just run away?’ Belcott was holding the picture. ‘She looks a lot older than fourteen and if she’s anything like her old man, I bet she’s a stubborn one.’

‘We’ve considered that too. However, we can’t see why she would need to. She lives with her mother in a nice big detached house on a quiet leafy street. According to Gayle, they got on very well, and according to me, she was allowed to get away with far too much. Gayle had no problem with letting her go into London overnight, for instance, although she did think Cheyenne was staying with a friend. Cheyenne and her mum do everything together, from shopping to visiting tanning salons, and I just can’t Cheyenne leaving home and not making any contact with her mother for almost a week.’

‘What’s she wearing around her neck?’ DS Bryce held up the photograph and pointed to a silver chain just visible under her shirt, weighted into a V by something that hung out of sight.