Fallen Angel (13 page)

DI Collins and DS Woods had arrived at the incident room shortly before midday, having spent the morning at New Scotland Yard briefing DCS Higgins about the latest developments on the case.

As they walked towards their desks, they passed DC Cooper, who was staring intently at the small TV in front of her. The previous evening she had travelled to the area close to where Daniel Eliot had been snatched in order to look for more cameras with a view of the street where the white van had followed Daniel and Sammy. After walking for what felt like several miles, she had found two, one attached to a builder's yard, the other on the forecourt of a tyre shop.

Both timing systems were out, as was usually the case with civilian CCTV. And she had been scanning the footage all morning.

‘Have you cracked the case yet?' asked Woods with a cheeky grin.

‘Piss off. Why can't you do this for once?'

Collins came over to join them, having overheard the conversation. ‘Because he's a DS and you're a DC,' she said. ‘Anyway you need the experience,' she said, smiling.

‘What did Higgins have to say, guv?'

‘Not a lot. We gave him everything we've got. We really need to focus on the van. How are you doing?'

‘Nothing so far on the camera from the builder's yard. I've got one more tape to go, then I'll move on to the tyre shop.'

‘Okay. Woods, why don't you use your charms to see if you can get another TV from Drabble and help out?'

Cooper allowed a tiny smile to cross her lips.

‘I could get two TVs, guv,' said Woods, ‘then you could have one as well.'

‘Nice try,' replied Collins. ‘I'm off to Guy's. Matthews is ready with her full report.'

The traffic was slow as Collins headed back from Guy's, and Radio
2
was playing ‘Romeo and Juliet' by Dire Straits. She let the music clear her mind. Soon, though, it ended, and the discussion returned. The topic of the day was an obvious choice considering the story dominating the headlines: the death of Daniel Eliot.

‘So we're back with retired police detective Guy Redgrove, and on Line 1 we have Julie from Brixton.'

Julie's voice was grating and shrill. ‘If this government did what they always say they're going to do and put more police on the streets, things like this wouldn't happen.'

The smooth voice of the radio DJ interrupted. ‘We're told, of course, that police numbers are increasing. Do you see any evidence of this?'

Julie snorted. ‘My girl goes to school less than half a mile from where we live, and I have to take her there and pick her upto stop the drug dealers who hang around near by from getting anywhere near her.'

The DJ adopted a note of polished incredulity. ‘So, let me get this right, Julie. You're telling me that you're aware
of drug dealers operating outside your daughter's school, and the police are doing nothing about it? Guy Redgrove, what do you say to that?'

‘Well, clearly it's difficult for me to comment on something without having all the facts,' Redgrove began. ‘But what I will say is this. The police rely heavily on intelligence, and that intelligence often comes from members of the public. If you're having a problem with drug dealers in your neighbourhood, you need to report it. Have you reported it, Julie?'

Julie gasped. ‘Are you mad? I have to live there. I have to walk past those streets every day. You know what would happen to me if they thought I was a grass? What you need to do is put some more police officers outside the school to stop it –'

‘But surely that won't do the situation much good,' said the DJ, cutting in on her. ‘Because the dealers would simply go round the corner and the kids would know where to find them.'

Of course they do, thought Collins to herself. And if you put police round the corner, they'd just find somewhere else to do their business.

The DJ brought the conversation to a close. ‘Thank you for phoning in, Julie. We're discussing child safety and the tragic death of Daniel Eliot. Could it have been prevented? Could the police have done more? Is London still a safe place for our children? We want to hear your views. More after the one o' clock news.'

There was a musical jingle, and then a new voice took over. ‘The news at one. Police are appealing for witnesses in connection with the murder of eight-year-old Daniel Eliot,
who was found dead on Friday night after disappearing from near his home on Wednesday afternoon. In particular, they would like to speak to the driver of a white van seen acting suspiciously in the Selsdon area of Croydon between
3
and
4
p.m. last Wednesday. At the weekend, Detective Inspector Stacey Collins, the officer in charge of the murder investigation, conceded that the police were currently without any leads.'

Collins couldn't help thinking that those carefully chosen words might come back to haunt her.

The remaining news was the usual babble of politics and weather, after which the phone-ins continued; Collins only vaguely listened to the stream of half-formed opinions and unreliable facts that were shared and transmitted across the airwaves. The traffic, which never usually worried her, was starting to put her on edge. She wanted to get back to work. Collins was becoming convinced that the van could be the breakthrough they'd been waiting for.

‘Our next caller', the DJ announced in a voice that matched the subject matter in hand, ‘is James from Camberwell. Good morning, James.'

There was an unusual silence, the sort of dead air time that brought embarrassment to announcer and listener alike.

‘James from Camberwell,' the announcer repeated after a few seconds. ‘Are you there, James?'

Very slowly the caller spoke, and the sound of his voice forced Collins to swerve the car to the side of the road and screech to a halt. The car behind her beeped its horn furiously, but Collins barely heard it. She was too busy listening to the radio.

Too busy listening to the voice that she knew.

Unemotional. Monotone. Dead. And all at once familiar from the videos and the recordings of the telephone calls.

‘I killed Daniel Eliot,' the caller said solemnly. ‘He was a good little boy. Quiet. But I had no choice. By the disobedience of one man, many were made sinners.'

The DJ clearly thought it was a prank caller. ‘Okay, James, that's enough. I don't think our listeners find it very funny to make jokes about –'

‘I have another boy.'

‘Are you saying you've kidnapped another boy?'

‘If you insist on interrupting me again,' he stated, ‘I will hang up. And make no mistake – you'll want to hear what I have to say.'

The DJ started to stutter a feeble objection, but the caller simply spoke over him. ‘I killed Daniel because the police were trying to trap me. They didn't believe that I would carry out my threat.' He paused and drew a deep breath that was amplified by the telephone receiver. ‘Because of this, I have obtained another child. He is eight years old, and he lives in the village of Kingswood in Surrey. If he is to be returned safely, I will require a ransom of
£
3 million to be paid forty-eight hours from now. Details of the delivery will be supplied to the police at a moment of my choosing. If my instructions are not followed, you may rest assured that he will meet the same fate as Daniel.'

There was a short silence interrupted by a vague hiss in the background, and suddenly the unmistakable sound of a child's voice, muffled and distant, crying for his mum. Then the phone went dead.

Collins sat rigid for a few moments, hardly believing what she had just heard. Then, as if suddenly shaken out of a dream, she grabbed the portable police siren from below her seat, thrust it out of the open window on to the roof of the car and, with the siren's screams filling her ears, pushed her way into the traffic.

It was finally starting to make sense. The real reason the kidnapper had killed Daniel Eliot, the real reason he had not even attempted to collect the ransom, the real reason why the amount being demanded was so small and the drop-off had been arranged for such an unlikely location – all of it was suddenly crystal clear.

He had been building up his bargaining power.

The kidnapper wanted to demonstrate to both the police and the parents of his next victim that he was deadly serious.

Less than twenty-four hours earlier the world's media had captured DCI Blackwell telling them that the Metropolitan Police would never put a price on the life of a child. Now that claim was about to be put to the test. Under the circumstances, how could the police do anything other than stump up the full amount?

This was bad. This was as bad as it could possibly get.

It seemed to take for ever from the end of the phone-in for Collins to get back to the incident room, and her mind was a maelstrom every inch of the way. As she battled against the traffic, she found herself shouting obscenities at cars that were in her way. It wasn't road-rage – just rage.

How the hell could she find a missing child in two days? She had already seen what his abductor was capable
of. She had seen what he liked to do. She crashed her fist down on to the horn as a blue van got in her way.

Blackwell's initial perception had been wrong, oh so wrong. The untraceable emails, the use of an anonymous van, the piggybacked ISP – it all pointed to someone who had spent months, maybe even years, planning this crime. He had fooled them all. He had made them look like idiots.

Time was running out.

She had to get back to the office. And fast.

When Michael Dawney woke up, he thought for a terrifying moment that he had gone blind. Even though his eyes were wide open, there was nothing but pitch black – a heavy, suffocating black that was darker than anything he had ever known.

He didn't know where he was or who had brought him here. He didn't know if it was still light outside, though the hunger pangs in his stomach told him that a meal of some kind was long overdue. He was thirsty too.

The last thing Michael remembered was rushing into the woods after the dog. He found him, his leg broken, at the foot of a large tree. As he headed back home with the dog in his arms, he felt his head being held back and all around him going dark, the way it does when a cloud crosses in front of the sun.

As his eyes began to adjust to the lack of light, he was able to make out his surroundings. The walls were bare, plastered but not painted. There were only a few items of furniture: a filthy mattress, a small bucket in one corner, a single chair and a cold metal table. Everywhere smelled of damp and decay.

Michael shivered with fear. His young mind was groggy, but he was too young to understand that he had not only been kidnapped but also drugged. He tried to move, to reach out and make some sense of his surroundings, but
his arms refused to function. It took a few more seconds of foggy thoughts and confusion for him to realize that he had been tied up.

His body rubbed painfully against the hard concrete floor as he tried to move and look around.

There was a metallic ‘clink' in a distant corner, followed by the sound of a bolt being drawn back. Then the door opened, and the room was filled with a light from outside so bright and painful that Michael was forced to close his eyes.

The initial burst of brightness had burned itself into his retina, and when he opened his eyes again his vision was blurred and confused. Then heavy footsteps began to sound across the floor towards him.

‘Please,' Michael gasped. ‘Please …'

The voice that replied was gruff and uncompromising. There was no room here for negotiation. ‘Shut up.'

It was a lesson he chose not to heed. ‘Please,' he said again, ‘please help me.'

Two large strong hands grabbed him painfully by his wrists and lifted him up to a standing position. The pain was intense, the shock of it enough to make him open his eyes again. He found himself staring into the face of his attacker.

The man was clean-shaven and what little hair he had was cut short. He was tall and wore a blue-and-white-striped kitchen apron over his pristine white shirt, which accentuated his pot belly. The shirt was open at the collar, and Michael could see a line of mottled skin snaking its way down from the back of his right ear and round to the top of his chest and beyond. The scars looked painful and
raw, but what Michael could not tear his gaze away from were the man's eyes: they were dead, cold and emotionless.

One burly arm held him out, the other smacked him across the face with an open palm, knocking him back down to the floor. A trickle of blood began to seep out of his nose. ‘Shut up,' the voice said again.

Michael lay on the floor, tears in his eyes, but too scared to cry. The man made to hit him again, but the boy lurched back with fear, only to find his shoulder slipping into a sticky patch on the ground. He looked over and saw at once that the patch was made up of partly congealed blood. For a moment he was confused. The blood coming out of his own nose was still fresh, and in any case there had not been enough of it to gather on the floor.

Then, with a growing sense of horror, Michael realized that the blood was not his own. He wasn't the first person to have been brought to this room.

Collins sat in a corner office of the incident room along with Woods, Cooper, Drabble and other members of the team, all listening intently to a digital recording of the Radio 2 show that the BBC had sent over immediately after the kidnapper's call.

‘Could it be a hoax?' asked Cooper.

‘Unlikely. Missing Persons have already confirmed that the parents of a boy named Michael Dawney from Kingswood filed a report just after ten,' said Collins grimly. ‘Besides, he quoted from the line of Scripture that was at the scene of the crime. That was a holdback. Few people outside this room know about it.'

‘There's the voice as well,' said Woods. ‘To my ear it sounds like the bloke from the videos. Khan ran it through some Internet voice-recognition program. It's going up to the lab for a proper analysis, but I think it's safe to say that it's our man.'

Collins nodded and looked around the room: every face was serious and lined with concentration.

‘Initial thoughts?'

‘He's increased the ransom by a factor of more than a hundred,' observed Drabble. ‘And we suspect that he always intended to kill Daniel. To force our hand – to make it clear that, if this second ransom isn't paid, we know what to expect.'

‘My thoughts exactly,' said Collins. ‘By killing the first child, he's just trying to increase his chances of having the larger ransom paid.'

Cooper shook her head slowly. ‘But that's not going to happen. There's no way in the world the Commissioner is going to authorize the release of £3 million. Any kind of cooperation is against the rules.'

‘Jesus,' gasped Woods. ‘He's an eight-year-old kid, and we know what this monster's capable of. Isn't it time to just forget about the rule book, pay the bastard the money he wants and make sure the poor kid lives to see another birthday?'

‘For what it's worth, Woods,' Collins replied, ‘I agree. But it's over our heads, and you know as well as I do that there's no way the Commissioner would agree to it. It's political now, and there's no politician in the land that would agree to giving in to this kind of stuff, even if they get a dead body at the end of it. If they paid, it would open the floodgates.'

‘So what do we want to do?' asked Cooper.

‘The call went through to the radio station just after 1 p.m. He gave a deadline of two days for the ransom to be paid. That takes us up to Wednesday at 1 p.m.'

The room was filled with a sense of urgency and adrenalin as the task ahead of the team became clear.

‘Where do you want us to start?'

‘Get on to the station, Tony. He must have given the show a telephone number – they always phone their callers back – so find out what it was and where the call was made from.'

‘Knowing this guy's form,' said Drabble, ‘it's going to be a pay-as-you-go mobile. Untraceable.'

‘I agree,' said Collins. ‘But if we can track the signal we might be able to get an idea of where he was calling from. That might narrow down the area where we want to start our enquiries.'

‘Cooper –'

‘Let me guess. CCTV from the Dawney household.'

‘You got it. Get on to Missing Persons and find out everything they have on the case. Let's get as much footage from the area close to the site where Michael went missing as we can. There's every chance he used the same vehicle.'

Everyone set about their tasks as Collins opened the door of the meeting room, only to find DCS Higgins standing directly in front of her.

‘I was just about to call you, sir,' she said. ‘I take it you know all about the phone call to the radio station?'

‘Of course,' he replied. Higgins looked a little hesitant. ‘Collins, I need to have a quick word with you. In private.'

The pair made their way back into the meeting room, and Higgins gestured for Collins to sit down.

‘What is it, sir?'

‘Listen, Collins. I know this is a tough case, but –'

‘Sir, if it's about what I said at the press conference, then I apologize. I played what I thought was the best strategy at the time. I really don't think anything I did has changed the kidnapper's actions one bit …'

He held up his hand to silence her. ‘We're all very emotionally involved in this case, especially now that
another child has been taken by the same man. But you have to understand that what was a murder case has now become another live kidnap.'

‘I don't follow you, sir.'

‘SCD7 are taking over the investigation. DCI Blackwell is going to be running the show from now on.'

‘For how long? Until he fucks it up again? Until Michael Dawney is dead and I have to pick up the pieces?'

‘You're out of line, Collins. You know the way this works. I don't want you to make a move without Blackwell's say-so. We all need to be one team on this. I need to know that you're on board, that you can work with and not against him. Can you do that?'

There was a long pause, then Collins sighed helplessly. ‘Yes, sir.'

‘Good. DCI Blackwell will be here to brief your team in a couple of hours.'

Collins stood up. ‘If it's all the same with you, sir, I'd like to see Blackwell now.'

‘You can't. Blackwell's not here right now.'

‘Where the hell is he?'

Higgins looked at Collins as if what he was about to say was screamingly obvious. ‘I told you, he's running the investigation. He's on his way to see the parents.'