The Reckoning (9 page)

The door to Godley’s office opened and the three senior officers filed out, followed by Bryce who was looking even more gloomy than usual. The superintendent stayed at his desk, writing something on a sheet of paper. That in itself was unusual; I couldn’t recall the last time he had let a visitor to his room make their own way to the door. His manners were impeccable, as a rule, and I wondered what had made him forget himself to the extent that he didn’t bother making an effort with the three men who had the most potential to influence his career.

‘Give him five minutes and then we’ll go in, okay?’ Derwent, leaning over the back of my seat, hot breath in my ear as he spoke. I resisted the urge to push back my chair at speed, settling for imagining the impact, the choking cough from behind me, the inspector lying on the floor, clutching his bits, moaning softly … which reminded me of Barry Palmer. Amusement seeped away, leaving shame and a little irritation in its place. But then, I couldn’t be good all the time. And I would be using up my quota of goodness – and more – during my evening with Rob. It wasn’t going to be easy to be on my best behaviour.

Rob’s back was turned to me and while I was waiting to be summoned, I allowed myself the luxury of a minute spent studying the line of his shoulders, the fingers of one hand drumming a rhythm on his thigh as he worked, the neat shape of his dark head. What had been between us before Christmas hadn’t disappeared in the grey light of January, when I had called a halt. The feelings were still there, if I chose to indulge them.

But I would be strong. Head over heart. I had made the right decision and there was no going back. I shifted in my chair, suddenly fidgety, and forced myself to look away. In doing so, I met Liv Bowen’s gaze again. This time, I was the one who tried a smile, and earned a long, cool look in return that made the colour rise in my cheeks.

‘We’re up.’ Derwent headed into Godley’s office without waiting for me and I scrambled to collect my papers and follow him. The DI was making a habit of leaving me behind.

I stepped into Godley’s office in time to hear him snap, ‘Just make it quick, all right? I’ve got to go.’

Derwent nodded, looking unruffled, but I had never heard the superintendent speak that way before and I was glad that Derwent took the lead, explaining where we were with the investigation. The boss listened with his head turned slightly away and his eyes focused on the floor. When Derwent had finished, Godley looked up.

‘So what’s your gut instinct on this one, Josh? Are there going to be more bodies?’

‘I’d assume so. Without knowing what our killer wants we can’t be sure why he’s killing but I don’t see any reason for him to stop at two. If it’s someone who fancies themselves as a vigilante, cleaning up the streets, he’s got a way to go before he gets rid of every known child abuser in South London. The same goes if it’s someone who gets a kick out of killing paedos – maybe an ex-con who wanted to deal with them inside but couldn’t get close enough.’

‘Were Barry Palmer and Ivan Tremlett ever in custody in the same prison?’

I could answer that one. ‘No. Tremlett did his time on Sheppey.’ It was a small, somewhat bleak island connected to the Kent coast by bridge – the perfect place to site three prisons, according to the powers-that-be. ‘Palmer was bounced around the place a bit. He didn’t have family so he was easy to shift to another prison when the facility he was in got overcrowded. He spent a fair bit of his sentence in the Midlands, a chunk of it in Yorkshire and the last bit in Portsmouth.’

‘Difficult to find out if anyone had been in prison with both men,’ Godley commented.

‘Impossible, I’d have said. Not with the way Palmer was shuffled around over his sentence. You’d have to get a list of everyone that was in Tremlett’s prison over the course of his time in custody and find out where else they’d been, and where they are now, and even then you’d never prove they’d actually met the victims.’ Derwent shook his head. ‘I’m as much a fan of hard work as you are, but I don’t think we’ll find the killer that way.’

‘Well, what can we rule out? Is he doing this for fun?’

‘No.’ The two men looked at me, waiting for me to justify what I’d said. My ‘no’ had been instinctive and unequivocal and I took a second to organise my thoughts. An idea was beginning to develop from the confusion of facts swirling in my brain. ‘The violence in these two murders is extreme, but it’s focused. The men have injuries consistent with being interrogated – their autopsy reports read like an Amnesty International briefing document on torture. I think our killer wants to know something, very badly, and he didn’t find it out from Barry Palmer. He might have heard more from Tremlett, but then again he might not – we won’t know for a day or two at least.’

‘Until we find another body, I presume.’ Godley’s expression was grim.

Derwent shook his head. ‘No torture manual that I’ve ever read includes cutting off someone’s wedding tackle. He would have been useless for information after that, I’d bet. Unconscious from pain, probably.’

‘Yeah, I don’t actually think that was part of the torture,’ I said tentatively.

‘Do you think the killer is sadistic?’ Godley asked.

‘No. Although I do think he’s getting a certain satisfaction from the violence, I don’t see it as a sexual kink. I think it’s punishment. He’s tailoring it to fit their crimes.’ I flipped through the autopsy reports. ‘Ivan Tremlett’s eyes were gouged out. At first, I thought that was because he needed them to work, so blinding him was the physical equivalent of smashing his computers – a fairly drastic final step, but relating to his life now rather than what he did. But then I started to think about his crime. He was a watcher, not a doer. He downloaded images of other people abusing kids – as far as we know, he didn’t abuse any himself. He liked to look at children being molested because it excited him, and he was punished for that.’

‘And Barry Palmer?’

‘The girls alleged that his assaults on them had begun with fondling, then escalated to full sex. They were quite specific about what was done to them, although they did change their stories on some of the details like places and times. The killer seems to have known the details of their testimony because he cut off the parts of Barry Palmer that touched the girls, according to their evidence.’ I held up my hands, forefinger and middle finger extended on the right, forefinger on the left. ‘These fingers are mentioned specifically in their statements.’

‘But for him to know that, he has to have access to the police files.’ There was a short silence after the superintendent had spoken. The implications of that were not appealing. I was fairly sure that everyone in the room had already thought of the possibility that we could be hunting a police officer. There were enough of them who had lost faith in the criminal justice system. There would only need to be one who’d decided to do something about it. And all they would need was a strong stomach. It was Derwent, in the end, who put it into words.

‘So our killer’s got access to the information we’ve got. He’s got someone on the inside. Or the killer himself is on the inside. He’s a copper or maybe a civilian clerical worker. A prison officer who lives locally. A probation officer who is fed up with looking after that sort of client.’

‘He’d need access to the CRIS reports to get the kind of details Maeve mentioned – the specific allegations that were made against Palmer, for example. That’s got to narrow it down.’ CRIS was the snappy acronym for the Met’s Crime Reporting and Incident System, the online archive for crimes committed in the Metropolitan area.

‘That would cover police officers and some civilian workers. But don’t forget, the killer doesn’t have to be one of us. He just has to have access to someone who can search those files,’ Derwent pointed out.

Godley looked at Derwent and for the first time since I’d walked into the room he seemed fully engaged with the task at hand. ‘Right. Get on to IT. I want to find out who has requested the file on Barry Palmer since it was created. Ivan Tremlett committed his crime in Kent so the details would be with the local police there, not on CRIS.’

‘But in Tremlett’s case, all the killer needed to know was what he was convicted for. There were no live victims to give evidence because he was just downloading images someone else had created,’ I pointed out. ‘He could have got the information he needed from the sex-offenders’ register. If he has access to CRIS, he must be able to look at the register, or someone else is doing it on his behalf.’

‘Or he’s relying on local knowledge. It could be someone in one of the police stations in the borough. They’d need to know about paedophiles on their patch, just to keep an eye on them. They’d be aware of Ivan Tremlett’s past.’ Derwent dug in his pocket for chewing gum, offering it around before popping two tablets of it into his mouth. I could smell the mint from where I was sitting on the other side of the room.

Godley turned to me. ‘Maeve, have a look at the register and see who else is on it. Then we can start thinking about how to warn likely targets.’

‘Do you really want to draw this to the public’s attention?’ Derwent asked. ‘We’ll cause a panic. Not because people will be worried about a killer working in their community, but because people will realise they’re living cheek by jowl with paedos. We’ll have mob justice running riot. Innocent people will be targeted and we’ll have a nightmare on our hands. And the local force will be inundated with pointless requests for information now that the Sarah’s Law campaigners have got it to apply to this area.’

‘If you are referring to the Child Sex Offender Disclosure Scheme, it’s only available to parents of children who come into regular contact with specific individuals. Interested parties won’t be able to use it for a blanket search of the area and the local force should be able to reject most of the requests, if they are indeed pointless,’ Godley said stiffly.

Derwent looked disgusted. ‘Don’t tell me you think the scheme is a good idea. It’s a classic example of wishful thinking. Inviting members of the public to point the finger at random people, on the off-chance they might hit a child molester. If it was that easy to pick out paedophiles, we could just round them up and put them all on an island that has a limited supply of fresh water and a healthy population of visiting sharks.’

‘The scheme has its limitations, yes. But it makes people feel safer and it may help protect some children.’ Godley was back to looking tired. He took a second to rub his eyes before he went on. ‘We do need to control the flow of information on this case, not least because of the possible public reaction. That’s why we’re going to target individuals who need to be protected. We’ll encourage them to leave the area temporarily so that we don’t have to worry about protecting them. Anyway, there’s a limit to how much we can do. No borough commander is going to lend me people to sit around waiting for a paedophile to be attacked. It would be a waste of manpower and seriously unpopular if it ever came out in the media. Besides, I doubt the potential victims would welcome the attention. The warnings will have to be kept confidential or we’ll run the risk of identifying these people as convicted sex offenders, and I want you two to handle it because there’s a good chance the leak is local to the borough. We don’t want the killer being tipped off about what we’re doing.’

Derwent stood up and went over to the vast map of London that hung on one wall of Godley’s office. ‘We’re going to need to establish what area we’re covering. We’ve currently got two locations roughly a mile apart. We need a third to get some idea of the killer’s territory. These two murders … the fact that they’re so close together geographically might not mean anything at all except that he knew where to find the victims.’

Godley winced. ‘I don’t like waiting for another death, Josh. I don’t want to feel that someone died because we didn’t act quickly enough.’

‘We don’t have a lot of choice. We can’t call in help from the locals because we don’t trust them. The potential victims don’t want us to find them either. They just want to be invisible. And that’s not going to assist us. We’re looking in the same places as the killer, lifting the same rocks to see what creepy-crawlies scurry away when the light hits them. The only difference is that we don’t want to squash them when we find them.’

‘Picturesque.’ Godley’s face twisted into a smile, almost against his will.

I cleared my throat, feeling slightly awkward at interrupting their love-in. ‘We need to find out why the killer chose to start with Palmer and Tremlett, too. Their crimes were very different and they didn’t have much else in common. If we can get a handle on why he picked them, we might be able to work out who’s next.’

‘Good. I like that. Something else to keep in mind.’

‘That’ll be a lot easier if we get another victim,’ Derwent said, grinning widely as he chomped on his gum. Godley frowned.

‘Get on with it, Josh, all right? Stop trying to provoke a reaction and get out of my office.’ But there was no heat in his voice; he sounded amused, not irritated.

The DI went over to the door and held it open for me. ‘Come on. Let the boss get on with his evening.’

Godley put out a hand. ‘No. Wait. I want a word with you, Maeve.’ He looked up. ‘Thanks, Josh. You can head home. We’ll talk tomorrow.’

Derwent nodded, his face expressionless, and shut the door behind him. The superintendent and I watched him walk across the office, grab his coat as he passed his desk, and swing out through the double-doors at the end of the room without breaking his stride.

‘How are you finding it?’

I looked at Godley, unsure how to answer him. ‘The case? It’s not easy. But it’s okay.’

‘It’s a bad case. I know you’ll do a good job, though. You’re thorough, and that’s what this one needs. I wanted you to work on it because I think you’ll complement DI Derwent’s strengths.’

I nodded, trying to hide the doubt I was feeling. Godley narrowed his eyes.

‘You’re not convinced about him, are you? He’s not easy to get to know. But he’s decent. I worked with him a few years ago when he was just a DC. When the opening came up in the team after Tom left, he was the first person who came to mind. Keith Bryce was the second. I managed to persuade the bosses to let me have both.’