The Reckoning (55 page)

‘I wonder what Derwent’s freak-out was about, when he saw Cheyenne’s body.’ She was fumbling in her bag for her keys.

‘Good luck finding out. He wouldn’t even tell us to save his job.’

‘One of these days he’ll let something slip.’ She slotted her key into the lock, but the door opened before she could turn it. She stepped back on top of me, more jumpy than she would admit. ‘Oh my God, Walter, you scared me.’

Her landlord was standing in the doorway, his face pained. ‘Maeve, I’ve got to ask you to leave.’

‘I was going to. I mean, I wanted to give you notice.’

‘You aren’t welcome in this house any more.’

‘Why not?’

He pushed the door open properly, and I could see a little group huddled on the bottom steps of the stairs. There was the lush nanny with a hulking, beardy boyfriend scowling behind her, and a good-looking man who had to be the actor.

‘Where’s the other one?’

Walter looked at me with something approaching disgust. ‘If you mean Chris, we don’t know.’

Maeve had walked into the hall and was staring through her front door, which was standing open. ‘What happened?’

‘We got raided, darling.’ Brody jumped off the step and went to join her. ‘They ripped your place apart. Do they not like you?’

I pushed past him to see what he was talking about. ‘Holy shit.’

The walls were riddled with holes, long tracks in the plasterwork where a wire had been followed, plotted and removed. Every item of furniture of any size had been dismantled and arranged neatly in a pile: the sofa was the principal casualty. Maeve’s personal belongings were stacked against one wall of the sitting room. I found myself thinking it would be handy for packing, but I managed not to say that. Maeve was moving through her flat slowly, dazedly. I shadowed her, wary of getting too close. Shock first, then anger; she was as predictable as Christmas.

The kitchen was a wreck, the doors hanging off the cupboards. The bathroom walls were perforated in several places, with tiles missing or cracked. The bedroom was the worst of all: in many places the walls were down to the bare lathes, and plaster dust lay thickly on all the surfaces.

Maeve finished her tour of inspection back in the hall, where Walter and the others were waiting. ‘Who did this?’

‘The police. They had a warrant to check the premises for surveillance equipment. They did the same thing in the other flats. I’m going to sue. And you’ve definitely lost your deposit.’

‘How is this my fault?’

‘They said someone had been watching you. They said they needed to check that your flat wasn’t bugged. Then they said they needed to check the other flats.’

‘What for?’

Walter shrugged. ‘They didn’t say.’

‘Did they do the same thing everywhere else?’

‘More or less.’ His face was pinched. ‘I tried to stop them.’

Maeve turned to me. ‘Belcott.’

‘Colin Vale was working on it too,’ I reminded her. ‘He must have thought this was necessary. He wouldn’t have let Belcott get away with this out of spite.’

‘Is he the tall one, with glasses?’ Szuszanna piped up. ‘He was nice. The other one, not so nice.’

Maeve had closed her eyes. ‘I can’t stand the thought of him poking through my stuff. It’s worse than being burgled.’

‘For me too,’ Szuszanna said crossly. ‘I watched.’

Maeve was too concerned with her own trauma to have much time to listen to Szuszanna. ‘I would have liked a bit of warning. A phone call would have been courteous. I might have wanted to be here – you never know. I can just see his smug little face. He must have loved it.’

I had moved away a little and was ringing Colin Vale’s mobile.

‘Hello?’

‘Colin, I’m at Kerrigan’s address.’
Please don’t ask me why
. ‘What happened?’

‘Cameras in the walls and items of furniture. The whole place was wired up – sound, pictures, everything. Upstairs too.’ He sounded harried. ‘We’ve traced the cables to the flat on the ground floor, the one opposite hers.’

I looked up; I was standing outside Chris’s door. ‘Did you get in?’

‘No. We needed the resident’s permission to search and we didn’t get it so I had to go off for a warrant. We think he left via the fire escape as soon as we started to knock through the walls in Maeve’s place.’

‘You didn’t get her permission before you searched her place, did you?’

There was a tiny pause. ‘She knew we were investigating. Belcott said we could take it as read.’

‘Did he indeed?’

‘She would have said yes.’

‘She might.’ There was little point in torturing him about it. ‘How are you doing on that warrant?’

‘I’m sorting it out right now.’ A tiny pause. ‘Is Maeve there?’

‘She won’t be for long.’

‘Good.’ He sounded infinitely relieved. ‘I don’t want to be there when she finds out about the cameras.’

I looked across to where she was arguing with Walter about her deposit. She was jabbing a long finger into his chest. Fierce was not the word.

Into the phone, I said, ‘Nor do I, mate. Nor do I.’

I was in no state of mind to be reasonable on Tuesday morning when I flung open the door to the office.

‘Where’s Belcott?’

He raised his hand from the far end of the room, where he was lurking behind his computer. ‘Ah, Kerrigan. We’ve been expecting you.’

‘Don’t try to be funny.’ I stalked the length of the office and stood beside his desk, my hands on my hips. ‘You have a lot of explaining to do.’

‘Why I am so very attractive to the opposite sex?’

I closed my eyes for a second and shuddered; it wasn’t entirely for effect.
The very idea
… ‘I was actually wondering why you didn’t tell me you were going to search my flat. I say search. I actually mean fuck it to oblivion.’

‘It was all necessary—’ he began.

‘I don’t believe you. It looked as if squatters had been living there for six months. How you did all that damage in one day, I can’t imagine.’

‘It was the best way to find what we were looking for.’

‘Which was?’

‘You have to have worked this out by now. I thought you were a shit-hot detective, Kerrigan.’ He smiled up at me maliciously. ‘Use your intuition.’

‘You took out wiring.’

‘And a whole lot more.’ He looked past me. ‘Hello, Rob. Didn’t you tell her?’

‘It’s nothing to do with me.’

I looked around to see Rob leaning up against a desk behind me, a neutral expression on his face. He had been quiet the night before, but I had put it down to exhaustion.

‘What didn’t you want to tell me? For fuck’s sake, Belcott, I am beyond tired of the twenty questions game. Talk. Now. Or your nostrils and this stapler are going to get to know one another a lot better.’ I picked it up and waved it under his nose menacingly.

He leaned out so he could see past me. ‘As a matter of interest, do you think she’s beautiful when she’s angry? Because I’d get your eyes tested if so, mate.’

‘Stop talking to Langton. Talk to me. This has nothing to do with him.’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’ As if he had tired of baiting me, Belcott sat up straight and nudged his mouse to bring his screen to life. ‘Okay. I know you think I set up the search of your flat to piss you off, but actually, we had good reason. The video your one-member fan club sent you was taken from a website that we traced yesterday. It’s called Zabolagee.com.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything to me.’

‘That’s actually the point. The founders came up with a name that wouldn’t bring them up in casual searches – it’s word-of-mouth personal recommendation only, and the site is members only.’

‘How did you find it?’

‘I’ve got a mate at CEOP who let us in on a few tricks for matching the file to the website,’ Colin Vale said, coming forward to stand beside Belcott, as if he felt he should be there to support him. Collective responsibility and all that, though Belcott would probably have left him to drown if the situation had been reversed. ‘We managed to get through into a few of their password-protected areas. And then the hosting company was persuaded to be helpful and gave us access to IP addresses for contributors.’

‘They were shitting themselves. Said they had no idea what was on there. I did say
most
of it was perfectly legal –I think that was when they started to throw information at us.’ Belcott sounded smug. He did have a way with words, if that way was to make you feel physically sick.

‘What was on there?’

‘The majority of what we could see was the standard stuff you’d expect on a BDSM website – that’s bondage, domination, sado-masochism,’ Belcott explained, seeing the frown on my face.

‘I’m not sure what I would expect. I don’t spend a lot of time on that sort of website.’

‘I’m not saying I do, but generally it’s your usual fake dungeon environment with submissives performing for their mistresses or masters. Pain, humiliation, obedience – that’s what gets them their jollies. Zabolagee is structured around levels of mastery, if you see what I mean. So at the entry level, you have the willing participants, consenting adults, a bit of light whipping.’ Belcott seemed far too fluent in talking about it. I was starting to understand why Colin Vale was looking so sick.

‘It goes all the way up to where your boys were, the top. That’s actual slavery, torture, rape. Snuff films too, it seems. We couldn’t get access to them but the techies are working on it.’

‘What did you see?’

‘Rape where the victim is obviously drugged or unconscious. Rape where the victim is conscious and resisting. Serious violence.’ Vale’s voice shook. ‘I found it tough, to be honest with you.’

‘The second level up is where the content isn’t too sick but the participants aren’t necessarily willing or aware. Cameras in shop changing rooms and gym locker rooms, spying on ladies in the nude without their knowledge. Up-skirt photography. Stalking an individual and taking pictures of them going about their business over a period of time ranging from hours to years.’ Belcott paused for effect. ‘That’s where we found the section devoted to you, Kerrigan. It was labelled with your first name.’

‘Well, that explains why Lee asked me how I spelled it.’ I was still trying to sound nonchalant even though it made me shudder to think of my stalker’s surveillance pictures being shared with his fellow perverts. ‘He must have come across it.’

‘I’m sure it was popular.’ Again, Belcott looked past me. ‘Wouldn’t have thought it of you, Rob. It was a real eye-opener when we started watching the film clips.’

I suddenly felt cold. ‘Film clips. From inside my flat.’

‘You and Langton going at it like bunnies. It was good of you to leave the lights on – that night-vision camera work gives me the creeps. It always reminds me of a nature documentary and that’s not what you want when you’re thinking about knocking one out.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Do you want to see? The site’s been pulled by the host company but I took the precaution of downloading the clips to my machine. I was thinking of raffling a look at them to raise money for the next Police Dependant’s Trust appeal.’ He turned the monitor around and showed me the files on his desktop. Each had a thumbnail picture and I could see enough to know that Belcott had seen far more than I would have wished. ‘Want to see more?’

‘You absolute fucker.’

‘I got them taken down. I’ve protected your honour, Kerrigan. You should be on your knees thanking me.’ His manner left me in no doubt about what I was supposed to be doing while I was down there to show him my gratitude and I took a step towards him, not really sure how much damage I could do in a room full of police trained in restraint techniques, but willing to have a go nonetheless.

‘All I need to do is click and everyone can see what I’ve seen. Gather round.’ He aimed that at everyone else in the team. ‘Roll up, roll up for the greatest show on earth, if you like watching a bit of old-fashioned shagging.’

‘That’s it. I am going to hurt you.’ I stepped around Belcott’s desk, the red mist preventing me from thinking about the consequences. I wanted to rip his head off.

Rob was too quick for me. He bent down and unplugged Belcott’s computer. ‘Plug it back in and regret it, Belcock. I’m having it wiped by IT under my supervision.’

Colin Vale was nodding enthusiastically. ‘That’s what I told him we should do.’

‘Spoilsports.’ Belcott grinned at me. ‘Never mind. I’ve got my memories.’

It would take buckets of bleach to make me feel clean again. I moved away from him, my fingers still twitching with the desire to do him some serious violence.

‘Did you trace the wiring to Chris Swain’s flat or did something else tip you off?’ Rob asked.

I had to give him credit for still being able to focus on the case; he was presumably as bothered as I was about the invasion of our privacy, and the ramifications which were only just beginning to sink in. Our relationship was common knowledge. Godley might have ignored the kiss he’d seen at the hospital if he was feeling kind, but when the entire squad knew about our relationship, he couldn’t exactly turn a blind eye. One of us would have to volunteer to bow out. I was listening to Colin Vale’s answer, but most of my brain was dealing with the realisation that I had run out of road.

‘We had our suspicions that someone at Maeve’s house was involved because the IP address for the person who posted the material came back to somewhere near there. We weren’t able to pinpoint it before we went to do the search.’ A nervous glance at Belcott. ‘We both felt it was more important to find out the level of intrusion into Maeve’s personal space and whether it was common to other flats in the same building.’

‘And?’

‘The flat above hers was also wired extensively, as was the top floor. It was clear that the wiring stemmed from the right ground-floor residence. Nothing was found in the flat directly above that – it’s the landlord’s, I believe.’

‘So he was spying on Szuszanna and Brody as well as me.’ I was still feeling nauseous. ‘I thought he was friends with Brody.’

‘Maybe Brody didn’t mind,’ Rob suggested. ‘Actors perform. Maybe he liked being watched.’