The Slaughter Man (18 page)

They got up to leave. Scarlet Bush, the chief crime reporter of the
Daily Post
, was on her feet.

‘Charlotte! Charlotte!’

She instinctively turned to the sound of her name. The cameras clicked with excitement.

The MLO was holding up her hands.

‘We’re not taking questions!’

Scarlet Bush ignored her.

‘Charlotte, what would you say to the people who have taken Bradley?’

There was silence in the room. Even the cameras were still as Charlotte stared at the reporter and then beyond her, to something only she could see.

‘Please,’ Charlotte said. ‘I would say – please.’

Her brother had her by the arm. He appeared to be trying to get her to move away. But she did not move and for the first time I saw the steel in her.

‘I would say –
please don’t hurt him
,’ she said. ‘I would say – whoever you are – whatever you have done – please see that Bradley is just a little boy who never hurt anyone and who does not deserve to be hurt …’

She lowered her head. Nil Gatling’s face was a mask. He was no longer trying to pull her away.

‘I would say – please let Bradley come home.’

Then the press conference was over and DCS Swire came up to MIR-1 to explain to us why that was never going to happen.

‘You’ve been in the wars,’ DCS Swire said, coming into MIR-1. ‘Let me have a look at you, Pat.’

DCS Swire inspected the burn on Whitestone’s neck. A layer of skin about the size of a saucer had been scorched away behind her left ear, and the raw angry pink mark would be there for the rest of her life. Swire hugged her and Whitestone winced with what looked like a combination of embarrassment and physical pain.

Wren and I exchanged a look. We had never seen DCS Swire hug anyone before. Wren grinned nervously, as if she might be next in line for a hug.

Whitestone’s arms hung awkwardly by her side but after a while she gently patted Swire’s back, as if at once thanking her and telling her – enough.

Swire stepped back.

‘How’s DI Gane?’ she said, staring hard.

‘It’s not great,’ Whitestone said.

Swire nodded grimly. She was a cold, controlled woman, not easy to like. But I thought I saw for the first time how much she cared about every one of us.

‘And how are you doing, Pat?’ she said.

Whitestone pulled a face, and I saw her fight to control her emotions. She did not say that she should have waited – for more backup, for the hats and bats, for the guns. But DCS Swire knew that’s exactly what she was thinking.

‘You made the right call, Pat,’ she said quietly.

Whitestone swallowed hard, and tried for a smile that would not come.

‘Did I?’ she said, a glint of tears behind her glasses, which she removed, angrily wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, looking half-blind and easy to hurt until she had jammed her spectacles back on. She sniffed once and blinked at DCS Swire, waiting for the rest of it, her face expressionless.

‘There could have been greater loss of life if you had waited,’ Swire told her. ‘There could have been more than one dead child. You did the right thing. But maybe if you had waited you wouldn’t have got so knocked about.’

‘Knocked about,’ Whitestone said flatly.

We were all masters of understatement. But
knocked about
didn’t quite say it this time. Not with Gane in the hospital.

DCS Swire nodded. She wasn’t giving Whitestone a line to comfort her. This was what she believed. Whitestone had made the right call and we had done our job.

‘We’ll take good care of DI Gane,’ Swire said. ‘That’s what we do. We take care of our own. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Swire turned to look at the rest of us.

‘You smashed one of biggest paedophile rings in northern Europe. A lot of evil men are going away for a very long time. And a lot of children have been saved.’

I thought of Michael McCarthy. I knew I would always think of Michael McCarthy.

‘You all understand our priority now?’ Swire said.

‘Find the boy,’ Whitestone said. ‘Find Bradley Wood.’

Swire shook her head.

‘The boy is dead,’ she said quietly.

We let it sink in.

‘
What?
’ Wren said.

‘Bradley Wood must be dead by now,’ DCS Swire said. ‘He’s gone and he’s never coming back. Maybe he’s within a mile of his home in Highgate. Maybe he’s in a river or a skip or a sewer out in the wilds of Essex.
But how can he possibly be alive?
What conceivable scenario encourages us to believe that child is still alive?’

We were silent.

Because it was true.

It was impossible to see how Bradley Wood’s life could have been spared.

Charlotte and her brother might want to believe that Bradley was being taken care of by someone kind. Perhaps they had to believe it because it was the only way they could stay sane. Perhaps holding onto that belief was the only way that they could snatch a couple of hours of sleep every night.

But it didn’t happen in the real world.

In the real world children were taken for sex and then they were disposed of.

Or children were taken to shut them up and then they were disposed of.

They were never stolen to be given a happy, loving home. The people who are desperate to love a child do not steal somebody else’s’ child. That is a straw that desperate families cling to. And I understood why.

I would have clung to that straw myself.

‘Bradley is never coming home,’ DCS Swire said. ‘Bradley Wood is gone. If he was lucky, it was over quickly. And if we’re lucky, we’ll find a body to give to the family. But let’s not kid ourselves. There are no happy endings for children that are lost for this long. So just nail the perp. Just get Peter Nawkins. Dead or alive, it makes no odds to me. Just get the bastard so we can shut this circus down.’

So we drove out to Oak Hill Farm.

And we tore that place apart.

The thousand faces of Mary Wood smiled down on the single bed of Peter Nawkins.

A SOCO on a stepladder photographed the shrine on the caravan’s ceiling while another SOCO filmed it. As they finished their work, the photographs started to slowly come down, and were carefully placed in evidence bags. All those smiling faces captured forever behind cellophane and a file number.

Sean Nawkins stared up at the shrine with a sick look on his face.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he muttered to himself, in the tone of a man who believes the truth at last.

‘And you’re telling me that you didn’t know this was here?’ I said.

He kept looking at the pictures of Mary.

‘How would I know?’ he said.

‘You never came in this room?’

‘He was my brother, not my wife.’

‘But you’ve lied about everything else,’ I said. ‘You didn’t tell us you’d done work for the Woods. You didn’t tell us that your brother was at The Garden. You didn’t tell us that your brother had met Mary Wood.
Look at me
.’

He tore his eyes from the shrine. And for the first time I saw something like resignation in his eyes.

All around us a Specialist Search Team were removing the panels from the caravan walls, pulling up the floorboards, removing light fixtures. Whitestone and Wren crouched in a corner of the crowded caravan, watching the SST unscrew an electrical socket.

‘I was trying to protect him, that’s all.’ Nawkins said quietly.

‘You were perverting the course of justice,’ I said.

He snorted, the old defiance coming back. ‘At worst I’m a reluctant witness.’

‘Reluctant witness? What are you – a lawyer now? Your firm did work for the family!’

‘Months ago! Six months before … it happened.’

I took half a step closer to him. With the SOCOs and the Specialist Search Team and what was left of our MIT, Peter Nawkins’ little bedroom was fast resembling the Black Hole of Calcutta.

‘You – and your brother – met the Wood family and withheld that information from our murder investigation,’ I said.

‘We met her once!’ he protested. ‘And only her.
Not
the father.
Not
the children. Just the mother. Mrs Wood. Mary. On a very hot day in August. She brought us lemonade. And most of them don’t. These rich London types.’ His eyes clouded with resentment that was old and deep. ‘They would give a dog a drink before they’d give it to a gang of men.’

In my mind I saw them on the drive, the crew of men, sweaty and shirtless over the boiling black tarmac, and Mary Wood coming out with a tray of lemonade, and Peter Nawkins looking up and staring at her as if she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.

‘Did your brother Peter interact with Mrs Wood?’

‘No,’ he said, then shook his head, as if he was finally anxious to hold nothing back. ‘She held the tray while Peter took a glass of home-made lemonade. He thanked her. She smiled at him.’

I waited.

‘That’s it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did your brother ever mention her?’

‘We never saw her again. He never mentioned her. A woman – some housekeeper – collected the glasses later.’

‘How were you paid?’

‘Cash. In an envelope Mr Wood left for us. All fifties. The housekeeper gave it to me on the last day.’

‘Did you see the child? Bradley Wood?’ I took a photograph from my wallet and showed it to him. A passport-sized photograph of a smiling little boy. Sean Nawkins did not look at it. He stared past my shoulder.

‘I’ve seen it already,’ he said.

‘Look at it again,’ I said. ‘I’m asking politely.’

He looked at it, his mouth twisting.

‘The little boy was with her,’ he said. ‘What can I tell you? That’s it. Just a little boy with his mother as she gave a drink to a gang of men.’

He hung his head.

‘Have a look at this, Max,’ Whitestone said.

The electrical sockets were all off the wall and scattered across the floor. The SST had found something behind one of them. There was a matchbox and a set of keys on the latex-gloved palms of DC Wren. I picked up the matchbox and turned it in my own latex-gloved hand. Red words on a white background.

The Full English Holloway Road, Holloway Road, N7 ‘Good’ food. ‘Healthy’ too
.

‘Come over here,’ I told Sean Nawkins, and I held out my hand to him as he crossed the wreck of the caravan.

‘You know this gaff?’ I said. ‘The Full English on the Holloway Road? Where’s that? Around Highbury Corner?’

Nawkins looked as though he was going to throw up.

‘The Full English is at the other end of the Holloway Road,’ he said.

‘Around Archway?’

‘Yes.’

‘You could walk to it from The Garden, then?’

He nodded.

‘And you did,’ I said. It wasn’t a question.

‘We would stop there on our way to the job,’ Nawkins said.

I opened the matchbox. Inside there were four figures scribbled in biro. I showed them to Whitestone and Wren.

1 0 1 0

‘One thousand and ten?’ Wren said.

‘Ten-ten,’ I said.

‘When was Mary Wood’s birthday?’ Whitestone asked.

Wren consulted her phone. Tapped a few keys, waited a few seconds. Then she had it.

‘Tenth October,’ she said. ‘So it’s a birthday.’

‘It’s more than that,’ I said. ‘What do most people choose for a secret code? Their birthday. Get Tactical Support to try the burglar alarm in The Garden. I bet ten-ten still works.’

‘Then this was how he gained entry,’ Whitestone said. ‘He knew the code – guessed it or was told it or most likely saw someone using it – and he had a stolen set of keys.’

I held out my hand and Wren gave me the keys. They weighed almost nothing in my hand. One for the door and one for its deadlock. I looked at them more closely. They were shiny and new. Hardly a scratch on them.

‘He probably borrowed a set for a few hours and duplicated them,’ I said. ‘These don’t look stolen. They look like they’re brand-new copies.’

‘Were the men using the toilet in the house?’ Whitestone said. ‘It’s not uncommon for these big house to have some kind of Portaloo for the workers. But if that wasn’t the case in The Garden …’

We looked up and saw Nawkins slipping out of the caravan. I followed him. A thin blue line of uniformed coppers encircled the outside perimeter of Oak Hill Farm, keeping back a crowd of locals.

Echo Nawkins paraded inside the camp, a pack of dogs barking furiously around her, as she exchanged furious abuse with the locals beyond the fence.

‘I’ve seen this before,’ Nawkins said, more to himself than me. ‘I know what happens next. They always hate us. But then something happens. Some kind of spark that sets it all off. And suddenly people start dying.’

I knew he was thinking of his dead wife, burned alive in a caravan on the other side of the city.

‘You have to get my brother soon,’ he said. ‘If you don’t get him soon, they’re going to torch this place.’

‘Then you better hope we find him,’ I said.

From the middle of the mob beyond the fence, someone chucked a brick. It shattered in the middle of Echo’s pack of dogs and sent them into a frenzy of barking. Echo gave the crowd the finger and screamed a torrent of abuse. Then she picked up what remained of the brick and threw it back. The brick was answered with bottles.

And I watch a shower of broken glass spray across the boots of the young uniformed coppers who stood where they always stand.

Right in the middle.

I stopped at the hospital on my way home.

Even though it was nearly midnight, Gane’s mother was there.

‘Mrs Gane? I’m DC Wolfe. I worked with your son.’

The elderly West Indian lady adjusted her hat and carefully stood up. Then she took my hands and smiled. She had dressed in her best clothes to sit by the side of her son’s bedside in the Homerton. There were screens pulled around his bed. I thought I could hear him breathing behind them.

‘His friend,’ she said, the accent still more Trinidad than London after a lifetime in the country. ‘You were his friend at work. His
good
friend.’

I smiled and nodded and had no words.