car?’ he said calmly.
Her look said it all.
‘Why?’ asked Brady.
There was a heavy, pregnant silence in the room.
‘Can we discuss this in private?’ Claudia replied.
Brady frowned. This was obviously what she had wanted to talk about earlier.
He looked from Claudia to Conrad.
Conrad dropped his eyes.
He obviously knew what it was that Claudia was holding back.
Brady cursed under his breath, feeling very much left out of the loop. But it was his own fault. He had chosen not to listen to her. She had tried to tell him and he had insisted on starting the briefing regardless.
‘Look, Jack, this organisation is not to be messed with … These are powerful men who so far have eluded justice.’
Brady didn’t say a word.
Instead he looked at the brutal images of Melissa Ryecroft’s tortured body.
He then looked back at Claudia.
‘I don’t give a damn how rich or powerful this group is, no one has the right to rape, sodomise and torture a young girl,’ Brady said, his expression darkening as his voice slipped into a thick Geordie accent. ‘And I for one will not be threatened or scared away by anyone. So you tell your informant, whoever he is, that they can go fuck themselves.’
Claudia looked at Brady, her eyes burning a vivid emerald green.
‘Highly commendable, I’m sure, Jack,’ she said after some deliberation. ‘As for our informant …’ Claudia turned back to the whiteboard and brought up a new image.
A slender, tall, bleached-blonde-haired girl was unceremoniously laid out on an autopsy slab.
Brady looked at her. Her spiky, short punkish hair was discoloured a dirty rust colour: blood. The damage was as brutal as Melissa Ryecroft’s, if not worse. Apart from not having a hole through her head. Her body was covered in what appeared to be cigarette burns. But he wasn’t sure. He then caught sight of the autopsy photographs of the victim’s genitalia; damning evidence that she had been brutally gang-raped.
Brady turned away, sickened to his core.
‘Katya is her name. That’s the only detail we have. That and she said she was Russian. We tried tracing her with what few details we had, but nothing …’ She pointed at the murder victim. ‘Unless you’re psychic it would be difficult to talk to her,’ Claudia said, as she looked at Brady.
‘She was a nineteen-year-old Russian girl. Beautiful, model material. Brought over to London by a sex trafficker and bought by two men in the Brotherhood. She lived long enough to tell the Met officers who got there what we now know … The hotel she’d been taken to was in the West End of London. Old school money. A fellow guest had heard screams coming from the hotel room and had thought that she was some high-class hooker. He’d evidently seen her being led in by two well-dressed men. Heard her accent and knew that she was Russian. Room got raided and there she was tortured and bleeding to death on the bed. The two men torturing her had received a warning from someone that there had been a complaint made to the hotel staff and that the police were being called. They left before they had the opportunity to put the captive bolt pistol to her head. You see, Katya told us that one of the men had pulled out what looked like a black pistol and had put it to her head saying, and I quote: “This will be the best and last fuck of your life.”’
Claudia paused for a moment. ‘From her description the weapon put to her head matches a captive bolt pistol.’
She brought up a photograph.
To Brady’s eye it looked like a black hand pistol, but the end of the barrel was thicker, chunkier.
‘Forensics found DNA evidence on her body and in the room. Hair samples, fingerprints … but they don’t match with anything we have on the database. We’ve cross-referenced the DNA evidence with agencies in Europe and America. Nothing …’ Claudia’s voice trailed off. ‘But the victim did say that the man who pulled out the pistol was right-handed and on his hand he was wearing a platinum signet ring on the third finger.’
This jarred with Brady.
‘What about security camera footage?’ asked Brady, keen to see what these men looked like.
‘The hotel doesn’t have surveillance cameras. Guests don’t like it. Their attitude is they pay too much money to be spied on. And no one remembers the men coming in with the Russian girl. And, all transactions were paid in advance online by a stolen credit card. So no trail. The only eyewitness we had was the guest next door who reported the screams.’
She looked Brady straight in the eye, anticipating his next question. ‘He was found dead the following morning. Two weeks ago to be precise. Gunshot wound to the head. Armed robbery, held up at gunpoint a street away from the hotel, coincidentally before the police got a statement from him. Too coincidental if you ask me.’
Brady absorbed the enormity of what had just been said. They were just an under-funded, under-staffed murder team in a small seaside resort. This wasn’t a major European capital and yet here they were, dealing with what effectively could be an international criminal organisation.
‘Have you shared the details of Melissa Ryecroft’s murder with SOCA?’
Claudia shook her head.
‘Not yet.’
Brady breathed a sigh of relief. The last thing he wanted was them coming here to take over his investigation. He needed time to figure this out. More so for Nick’s sake.
‘Thanks, you’ve given us some invaluable information there,’ replied Brady.
Claudia looked at him, not quite able to gauge his comment.
Brady looked around the room. The atmosphere serious, the faces grim.
They were all thinking what Brady was thinking.
Had Simone Henderson been targeted by this group? It seemed likely given the mark left on her left breast.
And was Brady their next target?
Brady thought back to Frank Henderson’s words when he attacked him in the ICU. That Simone had come back up to the North East because of Brady. What if they thought that she had talked to Brady before they got to her? And crucially, what exactly did Simone know about the Nietzschean Brotherhood?
‘Alright,’ said Brady clearing his throat.
He poured himself a glass of water and took a much-needed gulp.
This was the last place he wanted to be right now. He needed to have a word with Claudia; in his office. He needed whatever the other information was that Claudia couldn’t share with the team.
The investigation had changed. It was much bigger than a murdered girl. This was connected to Simone Henderson and …
Brady couldn’t think straight.
He realised he had to wind up the briefing as quickly as possible. There was too much at stake. He didn’t even know if he was still going to be in charge of the Ryecroft investigation given the fact it could now be connected to Adamson’s case. Add to that, it now seemed that Brady was being targeted.
He looked around the room.
‘This is what we know. The victim, Melissa Ryecroft was a sixteen-year-old student who attended King’s School, a private school in Tynemouth. She was in the lower sixth, studying four A Levels …’ Brady’s voice momentarily trailed off.
He realised that what she had been studying was pointless now.
He took a deep breath before continuing. ‘We know that last November she went to Budapest on holiday with her friends for her sixteenth birthday. There, we are led to believe, she met a twenty-eight-year-old man known only as “Marijuis” to us. Her parents asked her to stop communicating with the man but it seems that she
