reply.
Annette remained kneeling on her bed, hands clasped together, clutching a key-ring with a picture of the lead singer of her favourite pop group on it.
She carried it everywhere, for luck.
Now she gripped it like some kind of rosary.
Downstairs she could still hear the shouting and swearing.
She continued gazing out of the window.
Even when she heard footsteps coming up the stairs.
Some rose meekly, shocked.
Some wanted to fight back.
Some tried.
Tempers frayed like old rope, stretched and finally snapped.
There were tears, screams, curses but no arrests.
And there was anger.
Fear.
By 6.00 a.m. that morning, it looked as if the entire might of the Metropolitan Police Force had invaded Hackney.
By 7.00 a.m. it was all over.
Catherine Reed heard the voice and thought it was part of her dream. Only when she felt the hand on her shoulder did she stir, sitting up quickly, almost knocking the mug of tea from Phillip Cross’s hand as he stood over her.
‘Morning’ said Cross, grinning.
Cath looked at him and blinked myopically, then she too smiled and reached for the mug, burning her fingers. She hissed and set the tea down on the bedside table.
‘What time is it?’ she asked, flopping back against the headboard.
‘Half seven,’ he told her.
She ran two hands through her long, dark hair and groaned.
‘What day is it?’ she murmured, smiling. ‘Where am I? Who am I?’
Cross chuckled.
‘I’m going to have a shower’ he said, glancing at her naked breasts.
She watched as he walked from the bedroom, her gaze fixed on his naked backside.
‘Thanks for the tea’ she called, smiling as he turned. ‘And for everything else.’ She looked at his groin and raised her eyebrows. ‘I must have been good, to get tea in bed.’
‘Not bad’ he said, grinning.
She threw a pillow in his direction, listening as he made his way towards the bathroom. A moment later she heard the hiss of the shower.
Cath picked up the remote control from the bedside table and pressed the standby switch. The small portable TV fixed to a bracket on the bedroom wall sputtered into life.
She flicked channels.
A cartoon on one channel.
Some self-important so-called celebrity enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame on another.
More cartoons.
An overdressed woman plugging her new book, whining on in a grating Anglo-American accent.
Nice to know some things never changed, thought Cath, and the mediocrity of breakfast TV was certainly one of life’s constants.
She jabbed the buttons again, checked Ceefax and Teletext for the headlines, then ran through the channels once again.
This time she found some news.
Picking up her mug of tea she lay there listening to a report on the latest famine in Africa.
Some things never changed.
She glanced around the room and saw her clothes were scattered around the floor, left in untidy heaps along with Cross’s. She chuckled to herself when she saw his underpants hanging on the back of a chair opposite.
From the bathroom she could still hear the sound of the shower and she was about to call to the photographer to hurry up, when her attention was caught by something on the television.
The camera was showing a street in London. The caption beneath the reporter said Hackney.
Cath turned up the sound, annoyed with herself that she hadn’t heard the beginning of the report.
‘… haven’t released an official statement yet, but it’s thought that up to fifty or sixty officers and members of Hackney Social Services carried out the dawn raids.’
Cath sat forward.
‘More than twenty houses were raided and, as far as we know, something like fifteen or sixteen children were taken by the Social Services. Again, we have no official word as yet, but it appears that police are investigating a possible child pornography ring.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ murmured Cath.
She slid across the bed, picking up the phone from the other bedside table.
With one eye still on the screen she jabbed out a number and waited.
Fifty-one
The room was twenty feet square and, to Talbot, it appeared that every single inch of floor space was covered by large, brown cardboard boxes. Each one about three feet deep and two feet wide.
There were yellow labels attached to each one with a name and address written in marker pen.
At one end of the room, a couple of uniformed officers were searching through
the boxes; another, seated at a desk, was scribbling down the nature of the contents as his companions inspected every object they removed, looking at it closely before returning it.
All three men wore transparent rubber gloves.
Detective Inspector Gordon Macpherson lit up a cigarette and offered the packet to Talbot who shook his head.
‘I’ve given up,’ he said, quietly, his eyes fixed on the array of boxes.
Macpherson nodded and pushed the pack inside his jacket before running a hand through his thin blond hair.
He was three years older than Talbot; a slightly overweight, red-cheeked man whose features were almost boyish. His eyes darted constantly back and forth as if he were watching some invisible tennis match: a habit all the more disconcerting when Talbot looked him directly in the face.
However, at the moment, the younger man was concerned only with the boxes filling the room of the police station in Theobald’s Road.
‘How many kids?’ he said, finally.
‘Seventeen,’ Macpherson told him. ‘All aged from three to sixteen.’
‘How come you’ve got the stuff here, Mac? Because you’re closest?’
Macpherson nodded.
‘Someone from the Yard’s coming to fetch it. We’re just doing the spade work.
Inventory and boxing it up. They want to know what came from each house.’ He looked at Talbot and smiled.
‘I thought that’s what you were here for, Jim,’ the older man said. ‘To collect it.’
Talbot shook his head.
‘Where are the kids now?’ he wanted to know.
‘Hackney Social Services have got them, interviewing them.’
‘Who tipped you off about what was going on?’
‘We don’t actually know anything is going on yet, Jim. It’s a precautionary measure. Social Services requested it.’
