the towels – heaped it in a flowerbed on the west side of the house, poured paraffin on it and set it alight. When the fire had died and they’d dug the ashes into the soil, they spread more plastic in the boot of the Audi and loaded in the carrier bags. An eleventh, containing hair and larger pieces of bone that hadn’t been pulverized by the mixer, went into the well below the back passenger seats. The remains filled the car with a foul mixture of offal and faeces. Sally and Steve kept their coats on, the heater up high, the windows wide open.
Steve was from the countryside outside Taunton. He was a rambler – someone who had every Ordnance Survey map of the British Isles ordered neatly according to their code number on his bookshelves. He knew the border lands of Somerset, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire better than Sally did and he had a route already planned. It took in rivers and canals, forests where badgers foraged at night. It took in the Severn estuary – Steve waded out into the mud in the giant grey shadow of the decommissioned nuclear power plant at Berkeley. They stopped on the outskirts of villages and squeezed dollops through sewage grates in the road; they tramped across fields in the Mendips to press the contents of the last bag through the meshes that protected disused Roman mineshafts. Steve stood in the silent darkness, his ear close to the mesh, straining to hear the soft wet patter of the tissue hitting the sides of the shaft.
From time to time Sally turned and looked at his face as he drove, the glow of the dashboard lighting it. She watched his eyes on the road and a strange thought came to her – that for the first time in her life she’d done something as a partnership. An ugly, perverse, unthinkable thing, but it had been done by equals. Crazy though it all was, she decided it was the closest she’d ever been to anyone in her life.
He turned and caught her looking at him. He held her eyes, just for a second, and in that moment something passed between them. Something that made her stomach stir, as if an odd strength was gathering. Like the beginnings of excitement on a holiday, the desire to yell and dance. She opened the window and threw a handful of the shredded plastic into the slipstream, watched it in the wing-mirror, like confetti, lit red by the rear lights. It was so beautiful it could have belonged to a celebration. Funny, she thought, how everything in life was so deceptive.
Part Two
1
‘I’ve got something for you.’
‘About time too.’
‘These things don’t just happen overnight. It’s not the way it works.’
The guy at the other end of the phone – a clerk at SOCA, the Serious Organized Crime Agency – was getting a little weary of Zoe and the way she kept pressing him for an answer. It was Monday and in the last four days she’d called at least twice a day to find out if he had any results for the search she’d requested on a pornographer from London, nicknamed London Tarn.
‘Maybe not overnight, but within the next year isn’t too much to expect, is it?’
‘There’s no need to be sarcastic.’
‘Well, if you weren’t so fucking slow I wouldn’t have to be,’ she wanted to say, but she pressed her lips together, tapped her finger on the desk and kept her control. London Tarn had been the manager of the Bristol club she’d worked in – the only person from that time who’d known her real name. She’d never thought she’d hear of him again – she thought he had disappeared abroad, but no. Apparently all these years she’d been living on borrowed time, because he’d been in the UK all the while, somewhere in this area, and if he ever had any cause to be called into the nick and heard the name Zoe Benedict attached to the title ‘Detective Inspector’ – she’d be screwed, so screwed. That was the thing about the past. You never really appreciated its power until it was too late.
She swung the chair back and forth impatiently. At least her energy was back. Finding him was helping her not to think about Ben. ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘Fair dos. Thank you for what you’ve done. How’s it going to come to me?’
‘Email. It should be on your system now. Unless your web-master is being a jobsworth.’
She tapped in her password and scanned her inbox. It was there – an email loaded with attachments. ‘Yup – I’ve got it.’
‘There are some pieces missing. If they’ve got form you’ll get a mug shot – but some haven’t been convicted and we’re building intelligence packages on them, so on those the photos might be missing. Do you want me to take you through what’s there?’
‘Sure – I mean…’ She put her tongue between her teeth and began scrolling down the list of attachments. SOCA gathered information from an array of agencies: the old Vice and Street Offences squads, Serious Crime groups across the country, Customs and Excise, Trading Standards, even the Department of Work and Pensions. Sometimes the files they sent looked like ancient computer MS DOS printouts. She found one that looked promising and clicked on it. A list of names reeled down the screen. ‘It looks like a hell of a lot. Are there really that many pornographers in this country?’
‘I’ve narrowed it down for you best I could. I couldn’t find the name London Town anywhere.’
‘No – that was probably just a nickname he picked up out here.’
‘But you wanted me to look at Londoners, right?’
‘Londoners who came out to the west in the nineties.’
‘Well, as you can see there were lots. And a few I thought you might want to look at closely. There’s a Franc Kaminski. Made a fortune from an online porn site called Myrichdaddy. Serious Crime have been after him for years – the website’s got a portal to a newsgroup that’s basically a kiddie-porn site.’
‘Franc Kaminski? Polish?’
‘Maybe his parents. But he’s a Londoner.’
‘Kaminski?’ She tapped her teeth thoughtfully with her pen. ‘I don’t know. When did he come out west?’
‘1998.’
‘Nope. It’s not him. This guy arrived in 1993. And child porn sounds wrong.’
‘OK. Scratch him, and the next two – they’re definitely child porn. Look at Mike Beckton. He was there some time in the early eighties, hard to be specific. He’s in the slammer at the moment. There’s a photo.’
‘Yup – I can see that. It’s not him. And this guy under him?’ She was looking at a picture of a Middle Eastern guy. ‘Halim something or other, can’t pronounce it, that’s not him. The one I’m looking for is pretty much completely white bread. If he’s anything at all he might be Jewish.’
‘Right – that rules out some of these. Tell you what, keep scrolling down. There are four at the bottom who both came to Bristol from London. No photos but they’re all listed as IC ones – white.’
‘Yup. I see them. Jo Gordon-Catling? Doesn’t sound right – but I’d like to see him.’
‘I’ve just had his photo come through this morning. I’ll scan it when we get off the line and send it over to you. The last three photos are coming directly from your force targeting team. The case officer’s got your email address. He’ll send you photos later.’
She put her finger on the screen, looking at the last names. ‘Mark Rainer?’
‘Yup. They still haven’t nicked him but he’s wanted for importing porn that breached the Sexual Offences Act – S and M stuff and, of course, the law’s all changed on that. Richard Rose – he’s small-time, hasn’t been active for years; we think he’s gone straight, but might be worth a look. The last one’s the biggest hitter of the lot – got overseas connections. Military. In the late nineties he was using Special Boat Squadron guys to smuggle nasty stuff into the country – paying them a grand a pop to bring a launch in through Poole, used a mooring in one of those millionaire pads on Sandbanks. The Met’s Organized Crime Group has got him firmly on their radar, not to mention their e-crime unit – even the Specialist Investigations Directorate at the Inland Revenue have given him a good hiding. But this boy’s as slippery as a butcher’s you-know-what. They just can’t make it stick.’
‘OK. What’s his name?’
‘Goldrab.’
