The Slaughter Man (15 page)

‘This is Paula,’ Ginger said, and I saw that she had some kind of Asian symbol tattooed on her wrist.

‘Tell me about the child you saw,’ I said.

‘He was at a house on The Bishops Avenue,’ she said.

I took a breath.

The Bishops Avenue was known as Billionaires’ Row. Running between Highgate and Hampstead, and acting as the border between Highgate Golf Course and Hampstead Golf Course, The Bishops Avenue was famous for two things – some of the most expensive houses in the world and some of the most tasteless architecture, which tended towards the Saudi Arabian vision of beauty and splendour.

There was a lot of foreign money on The Bishops Avenue. In fact, it might have all been foreign money.

‘Address?’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ Paula said.

I felt my mouth tighten.

‘I don’t care what your name is,’ I said. ‘I don’t care what you’ve done. And I don’t care about your visa status. All I care about is the child. But if you lie to me then I will suddenly start caring about all of these things. Do you understand?’

‘I don’t know the address! Please – I don’t know the address. It was one of those big houses on The Bishops Avenue. A party. A man took me there. A man I met in the West End.’

She named a lap-dancing club.

‘What were you doing there?’

‘Working.’

‘OK,’ I said. I nodded at Ginger. ‘And how do you two know each other?’

‘Paula was briefly employed on a freelance basis by Sampaguita,’ Ginger said. ‘But it didn’t work out.’

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Because she’s got a tattoo?’

Ginger shook her head. ‘Sometimes I overlook the odd tattoo.’

‘I thought you might,’ I said. ‘So why’d you kick her out?’

‘Too young,’ Ginger said.

I stared at her for a moment then turned back to Paula.

‘What’s the man’s name? The man who took you there?’

‘Fat Roy,’ she said. ‘Can we make sure—’

‘I’m not going to let anyone hurt you,’ I said. ‘Not this Fat Roy guy or anybody else. Tell me about the party.’

‘He drove me up there from the West End. There were men. Older men. And girls and boys. Younger than me. A lot younger.’

I took a breath.

‘Children?’ I said.

‘Yes, children,’ she said.

‘You see the boy?’

‘They kept him out of sight. In a room. They called it the VIP room. I heard him crying.’

‘Were the men filming?’

‘They were using their phones to film. Does that count?’

‘That counts.’

‘I wasn’t there long. They sent me away. Some men – they told Fat Roy they didn’t want me there. They gave me £200 and kicked me out. I went to see Ginger. I knew it was wrong.’

My phone vibrated. A message from Wren. DONE, it said. They were all out of the hospital and ready to roll.

I turned to Ginger’s girl.

‘Why did they kick you out, Paula?’ I said.

‘I’m too old,’ she said.

PC Billy Greene had sent me an old mugshot of known offender Fat Roy from when he had gone down for trespass with intent to commit a sexual offence.

The man gawping at me on my phone was a chubby twenty-year-old with an Eighties mullet and a baggy white Frankie Says No War T-shirt. But the Fat Roy now disappearing into the toilet in the crowded Shoreditch pub was a morbidly obese man of unknowable age, his head shaved bald and his one nod to fashion a small gold ring through the side of his nose.

Or maybe the head wasn’t shaved.

Loss of body hair is just one side effect of chemical castration.

The others are an increase in body fat, a decrease in bone density and, weirdest of all, a discoloration of the lips. I had clocked that Fat Roy looked as though he was wearing a particularly garish lip-gloss. It wasn’t a great look. Chemical castration does things to a man.

None of them are good.

But the judges like chemical castration. And the parole boards like chemical castration. And all the great and the good want to believe that chemical castration really does stop the sickness. Reduce sex drive, lower testosterone and kill the compulsion to hurt the vulnerable and the weak and the very young. If a known offender agrees to be chemically castrated, they usually give him back his lousy life.

Not that they literally castrate anyone. They just give them drugs. MPA in America, cyproterone acetate over here. That’s meant to do the trick and make all the cruel dreams go away.

They don’t literally cut their nuts off. More’s the pity.

I got up and followed Fat Roy into the toilet.

He was washing his hands.

‘Any parties tonight, Fat Roy?’

A quick glance, the lizard tongue flicking out to touch those purple lips.

‘I don’t know you,’ he said. It wasn’t a question.

‘I’m the guy who’s looking for a party,’ I said.

He took his time drying his hands. A big man, not rushing, and this was far from the first time that he had been cornered by the hand soap. He was still not looking at me. But he was thinking about it. Wondering if he would have to put me down before he walked out of there.

‘I’m looking for the party on The Bishops Avenue,’ I said, and I saw him flinch. ‘Billionaires’ Row. And you’re going to take me there.’

Now he looked at me. And at the warrant card that I was holding in my left hand. Keeping my favoured hand free in case he tried to do a bunk or went for my throat.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not taking you anywhere. Take me in, if you like. Knock me about while resisting arrest if you want. But I’m not taking you to The Bishops Avenue tonight or any other night.’

‘Is the boy there?’ I said.

He did not reply. Instead, he leaned over the sink, scrubbing his hands, rubbing at something that would never come off.

I saw that he was scared. His hands were shaking. But it wasn’t me that he was scared of.

There was a messenger’s satchel over his shoulder. I indicated it with a nod.

‘I bet if I looked on your laptop I’d find some nasty stuff,’ I said. ‘If I got one of my clever tech mates to dig deep enough. Get past all the layers of encryption that hide your grubby little secrets.’

The judges might believe that chemical castration can change a man’s heart.

But not me.

I don’t believe it for a second.

Fat Roy tugged self-consciously at the shoulder strap. The gold ring in his nose glittered in the harsh light. The door opened and a half-cut City boy staggered in, singing a popular tune.

‘Not now,’ I said. And after taking a moment to think about it, the drunk City boy went away.

‘You’re more frightened of them than you are of me,’ I said. And that wasn’t a question either.

The tongue lapped quickly on the purple lips.

‘Did you ever see what a very small amount of sulphuric acid does to someone’s face, officer?’ he asked me.

I nodded. ‘Once or twice.’

‘Well,’ he said.

‘Is that how they keep the party polite? Burning faces? Or threatening to burn faces?’

‘You have no idea. This is not some bunch of losers sharing images on the Dark Web. This is the hard core. These are the extremists. They’ll burn your face off with one hand and pass the Play Gel with the other.’

‘Still a bunch of losers,’ I said. ‘A bunch of grown men torturing little children. Biggest bunch of losers on the planet. Bradley Wood is up there, isn’t he? They’ve got him at the private party on The Bishops Avenue.’ Then I was right in his face. ‘
Haven’t they?
’

He backed off, maintaining the space between us, keeping me out of range. He was a man who understood violence.

‘I never saw the boy,’ he said. ‘I never touched him.’

‘But he’s there, isn’t he?’

He nodded briefly, hanging his head.

Then he held out his wrists, waiting to be cuffed, the lizard tongue wetting purple lips.

‘But I still can’t take you there,’ he said. ‘You’re just some ten-a-penny tough guy and they’re killers.
They burn faces
. Go ahead. Beat the shit out of me. But why should I be scared of you?’

I almost smiled.

‘Because I have a daughter,’ I said, starting towards him.

Fat Roy came out of the pub ahead of me, half a roll of kitchen towel pressed to his face.

I gave him a little push in the back and said, ‘The old silver BMW X5,’ and he stumbled towards the car.

In the passenger seat, Whitestone was buzzing down the window.

‘Fat Roy here doesn’t know the address,’ I said. ‘But he’s going to show us the house. Aren’t you, Fat Roy?’

‘Yes,’ he said, the words muffled behind the layers of kitchen towel, and hoarse with shock.

‘And you’ve seen Bradley Wood?’ Whitestone asked him.

Fat Roy shook his head, not looking at us.

‘I only heard him,’ he said. ‘That’s the truth.’

‘What did you hear?’ Whitestone said.

He took a breath. He would not meet our eyes.

‘I heard him crying,’ he said.

Wren got out of the car so that Fat Roy could get in between her and Gane and I climbed into the driver’s seat.

‘You’ll want hats and bats for this one,’ Gane said to Whitestone, his phone already in his hand. ‘And you’ll want SFOs.’

He meant Specialist Firearms Officers from CO19, Scotland Yard’s specialist firearms unit.

Whitestone nodded.

‘But we’re not waiting for anyone,’ she said. ‘We’ll see them in The Bishops Avenue. Edie, call in our exact location when we get there. Let’s go, Wolfe.’

I hit a switch on the dashboard.

The siren howled and two blue lights began to flash inside the BMW’s grille.

As I pulled into traffic I tossed something from the window. A small gold ring that still pierced a bloody clump of white flesh. The nose ring shone for a moment in the Shoreditch street lamps and then it was lost to the gutter.

We lit up the night.

The Bishops Avenue.

I drove slowly down that tree-lined avenue of rich men’s dreams, grille lights off and siren silenced now, past sprawling mansions where no expense had been spared and no taste exercised.

The big houses of The Bishops Avenue were set well back from the road, on the far side of electrified fences and high walls and security gates that bristled with CCTV, but they were so massive that they were still clearly visible.

The Bishops Avenue was unlike anywhere else in London. It made you believe that planning permission had never been invented. There were spirals and turrets and towers on houses that looked as though they had been built by Walt Disney on bad acid. This was where the Arab oil money ran to back in the day when Saddam Hussein was on the march. It showed.

There were acres of golf courses on either side of The Bishops Avenue and the houses sat in the surrounding darkness like islands of impossible privilege. From the street you could see the lights of crystal chandeliers twinkling prettily in the distance. Then the security lights on the gates blazed on to acknowledge our passing, blinding us, and hiding the lives inside. I could see endless luxury but nothing that was human, nothing that was living, nothing that was worth having.

‘This is it,’ Fat Roy said.

I stopped the car. We were at the far end of The Bishops Avenue, where the opulence starts wearing thin, just before it hits the main road that separates it from East Finchley.

I could see only tall iron gates, set into a brick wall topped with ancient razor wire and, just visible at the end of a long sweeping drive, the huge house in total darkness. It looked as though nobody had lived there for years.

‘What’s this place?’ Whitestone said.

‘It’s one of the wrecks,’ Fat Roy said. ‘There’s maybe twenty of them on The Bishops Avenue. All derelict. Most of them are owned by Middle Eastern gentlemen. The Saudi Royal Family has got a collection. They let them fall to bits and they’re still worth another ten million every year.’

And I saw in the moonlight that the grand house was in ruins. There were metal grilles over the windows but vandals had still managed to smash them all. The great walls were seared with cracks and covered with ivy. I squinted into the blackness. The roof appeared to have a hole the size of a car.

‘And they use this place for their parties?’ I said.

Fat Roy nodded.

‘I don’t see any lights,’ I said.

‘They’re on the far side,’ Fat Roy said. ‘Away from the street.’ He dabbed at his nose. The kitchen towel was sopping wet with blood that was pitch-black in the moonlight. ‘Nobody can see them if they stay over there. They use the rooms at the back.’ A pause. ‘There are plenty of rooms to choose from.’

‘Where’s the boy?’ I said.

He didn’t look at me. ‘They were keeping him in a room on the first floor.’

‘When?’

‘Week ago. A bit less.’

‘How do you get past this gate?’ I said.

‘Code key. Changes once a month. There’s a panel on the side there, see it?’ He told me the six digits. ‘Can I go now?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re coming with us.’

‘Leave him in the car,’ Whitestone said.

‘In the boot?’ I said.

‘Jesus Christ!’ said Fat Roy.

‘The back seat will do,’ Whitestone said. ‘Lock him in.’

We got out of the car and left Fat Roy inside. As I locked the doors I saw total loathing in his eyes. Then his gaze slid away, and he dabbed again at his nose. We stood outside the iron gates as Wren called in our location to CO19.

‘They’re coming up the Holloway Road,’ she said. ‘Maybe ten minutes away.’

‘Are we waiting for them?’ Gane said.

‘We can’t wait,’ Whitestone said. ‘Not with the boy inside.’

There was a sign on the gates.

AMBASSADORIAL RESIDENCE FOR SALE ON BEHALF OF THE RECEIVERS

I tapped in the code key and the gates clicked. We went through, the only sound our footsteps treading lightly on the gravel drive. The ruined house rose before us. Now I saw cars parked on the lawn on one side of the house, not visible from the road. One of them was a large van with blacked-out windows. There were lights on in the rooms at the back. As we got closer, I could hear voices, low music. There was a swimming pool containing nothing but dead leaves.

‘Burglar’s route?’ Whitestone said.