Rose yawned. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘It was dark.’
‘Not that dark.’
Merrett stood up. ‘Anyway, we’ve got more than enough to start the interview. Want to watch it?’ He grinned. ‘It’s your chance to see the master in action.’
‘All right.’ Rose felt her stomach rumbling but she wasn’t hungry. She looked regretfully at her Venti Latte and grabbed a notebook from her desk. ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’
After reheating her coffee in the office kitchen microwave, Rose walked into the small dark room and nodded at the technician sitting behind a small editing desk, who was recording the proceedings in interview room number 2 next door. From behind the 6mm acrylic two-way mirror, Rose could watch the interview unobserved. Merrett was sitting at a table, head down, scribbling in a notebook. Next to him was a laptop. He was facing a fat, pasty-faced woman with dark rings under her eyes. She wore a navy-blue cardigan over a white T-shirt, and had a thin gold chain round her neck. Her long dark hair was badly dyed, with grey showing at the roots. It looked like she was in her mid to late forties, but Rose guessed that she could be considerably younger.
The woman sat forward in her chair, playing nervously with her hands. ‘Can I have a smoke?’
Merrett finished what he was writing and looked up. ‘No.’ He pointed at the
The woman thought about that for a moment, while Merrett waited patiently. Rose could see from the look on his face that he was in no particular hurry.
‘Sandra,’ the woman said finally. ‘Sandra Scott.’
‘And, Sandra, you can confirm that you have declined the offer of a lawyer?’ Merrett said it softly but clearly, like it was a matter of no interest to him whatsoever.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
Next door, the technician let out a small chuckle. ‘You really know how to find them,’ he remarked.
Saying nothing, Rose took a sip of her coffee and winced. After ninety seconds in the microwave, it was still too hot to drink. Jesus, woman, she thought to herself, how difficult is it to get yourself a cup of coffee at the right temperature?
On the other side of the mirror, Merrett moved quickly through his remaining preliminaries. ‘Your address is 135 Howard Road, E14 6XJ?’
‘You know it is,’ the woman said quietly. ‘That’s where you arrested me.’
‘I’ll take that as a ‘‘yes’’.’ Merrett dropped his pen on the desk and leaned back in his chair, eyeing the woman carefully. ‘Do you understand who we are?’
She frowned. ‘You’re the police.’
‘We are the people who got the police to arrest you,’ Merrett said, leaning forward. ‘This is CEOP.’
Sandra Scott looked at him blankly.
‘The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. Ever heard of it?’
She shook her head.
‘We protect kids from evil adults like you. We are the people who will be sending you to prison for many, many years.’
Rose smiled. Merrett liked to lay it on thick with suspects, sometimes. He joked that it was considerably less satisfying than smacking the shit out of them, but it generated less paperwork.
Scott let her eyes fall to the table. ‘I did nothing!’ she whined.
‘Oh, yes?’ Merrett hit a button on the laptop and a video started playing on the screen.
Not again, thought Rose, finally giving up on her coffee and dumping the cup in the bin.
Sandra Scott watched the images retrieved from the security camera inside the London Eye capsule while Merrett doodled on his pad. Rose closed her eyes, but those images were still playing on the inside of her eyelids. The man in the expensive suit; the tired and sullen-looking girl kneeling on the bench in the middle of the pod; the man grabbing the child by the hair; the man grinning for the camera. .
Scott watched the clip with dead eyes. Rose got the impression that she had clearly seen it before. After about five minutes, Merrett paused the video. ‘Well?’
The woman folded her arms and gave him a look intended to suggest defiance. ‘That’s nothing to do with me.’
Merrett paused, for effect, and then started laughing. ‘Sandra, for fuck’s sake — we found a dozen copies of this video burned onto DVDs in your flat. We have your emails sending it to your sick friends.’
Scott harrumphed vaguely but said nothing.
‘You work in the security room at the London Eye,’ Merrett continued, ‘and we know that, after making these copies, you erased the original recording. You are therefore an accessory to child rape. A fucking sex-offender. It’s jail for you.’
Don’t overdo it, Simon, Rose thought. So far, all they had was this video. She wasn’t at all sure what they would be able to end up charging Sandra Scott with.
‘You are going to jail for a very long time,’ Merrett repeated. ‘Maybe for the rest of your shitty little life.’
Scott thought about that for a while. ‘What do I get if I help you?’
Merrett made a face like the thought had never crossed his mind. ‘That depends. .’
For the first time, Rose thought she saw a spark of life in the woman’s eyes, as she tried to calculate the odds. ‘What do you want?’
‘Who is the man in the video?’
‘Dunno.’
‘What about the kid?’
‘Dunno.’
Merrett closed his notebook and placed the pen behind his ear. ‘Well, then, Sandra, you are fucked. You are
Sandra Scott spread her hands out on the table. ‘But I do know
‘And what might that be?’ Not rushing to take the bait, Merrett unplugged the laptop and stuck it under his arm.
Scott grinned nervously. ‘I know when they’ll be coming back.’
TWELVE
On the third floor of Charing Cross police station, Joe Szyszkowski sat at his desk munching a bacon roll, making sure the brown sauce dripped on to the carpet, rather than on his jeans. He chewed slowly, while putting off writing up a report on the mugging of a Chinese tourist outside the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, a report that he should have completed the day before. There was no real hurry. The clean-up rate for that type of crime was so low that the Home Office kept the numbers to themselves; in the official Recorded Crime Statistics they were included under the catch-all of ‘robbery’. The Metropolitan Police definition of mugging or ‘street crime’ was a combination of theft or attempted theft (or robbery) from the person plus assault against the person. The unlucky tourist had been hit over the head with a rolled-up newspaper and relieved of the?100 in his wallet. Sadder and wiser, he should be back in Shanghai by now; meanwhile the money itself would have immediately been spent on booze or dope; and the case was closed as far as everyone apart from the statisticians were concerned. There was no way that the sergeant was going to waste his day looking through dozens of different CCTV images in a futile attempt to identify the perpetrator. The report was a purely bureaucratic requirement — which somehow made it harder work.
Sticking the last of the roll in his mouth, Joe wiped his hands and mouth on a napkin and dropped it in the cardboard box that he used as a bin. All the waste bins in the station had been removed as part of an initiative to encourage recycling. Inspector Carlyle had responded by bringing in a couple of empty boxes from a nearby off- licence the next day — the cleaners still emptied them and everyone remained happy. Glancing over at the empty
