Mark Pearson - Death Row

She looked out of the window and remembered her childhood trips to the coast. They had travelled in the pitch dark sometimes. That was because her dad had always wanted to leave at the crack of dawn — sometime before it, in fact. Her mother refused to go on the motorway and so they had had to take the longer route and he always wanted to get going early when there ware no cars on the roads. There was plenty of traffic today, though. Plenty of it. And Delaney was zigzagging through it like a metham-phetamine-fuelled maniac in a demolition derby.

Sally shivered again and reflected on how fast things were moving now. Both literally and metaphorically. She just hoped that they weren’t too late. They finally had their man: she just hoped that Delaney would get them there in time — and in one piece — to save the missing boy, who had been away from his home for four days now. The statistics weren’t good.

She looked down at the invoice that Mrs Blaylock had given her. Dated from the summer of 1995 when this had all begun. But then she realised it had all begun earlier, like everything does. The perpetual cycle of paedophilia and abuse seeding itself through generation after generation after generation. Like cancer, Delaney had said, and he was right. She crumpled the paper in her hand again as Delaney swerved violently again to avoid an oncoming minibus.

A short while previously Mrs Blaylock had been puzzled to see Detective Inspector Jack Delaney and DC Sally Cartwright standing on her front doorstep once more.

‘Can I help you?’ she had asked.

‘When we here earlier you said something to your son, Mrs Blaylock.’

‘Yes …?’

‘About your husband being a proper publican.’

‘He was. Not like that layabout waste of space who’s run the place into rack and ruin. That pub was supposed to be my pension.’

‘So he no doubt kept proper records?’

‘Of course he did. He never fell foul of the law. Any of them.’

It was a shame the same couldn’t be said about her brother, Sally couldn’t help thinking as the woman led them into the house. Sally willed her hand off the side passenger strap and stared ahead, not wanting to give her boss the faintest idea of how absolutely terrified she was. Thick blobs of moisture fell onto the windscreen. Not quite hail, not quite snow, not quite rain. Fat splashes of sleet, she supposed, and felt the knot tighten in her stomach once more as Delaney blinked, leaning forward and trying to see before flicking on the windscreen wipers and not slowing the car down at all.

Sally shivered a little again, and not just from the cold. She was dreading what they would find at Bill Thompson’s house down on the Thames estuary, and remembering what they had seen in his place near Carlton Row.

The small child’s bedroom which looked like it hadn’t been touched since the mid-1950s. A wardrobe with a young boy’s clothes in it. Pictures from annuals pasted on the wall. A bedraggled teddy bear sitting on a small wooden chair. The whole room covered with dust.

And the other bedroom. Strewn with an older man’s clothes. A chest of drawers full of pictures of children. Obscene pictures that had brought tears to Sally’s young eyes, eyes that had already seen far too much suffering visited on children in her few years with the police. Pictures that had brought tears to Delaney’s eyes, too. Tears that he wasn’t ashamed to show.

And in the other freezer, next to the shickle-filled one. Frozen in a single clear block of ice. A Catholic priest, his eyes closed, his hands by his sides. Like some bizarre religious relic. Father Fitzpatrick, the fifth member of Peter Garnier’s group. Sally couldn’t understand how these people found each other out and made their associations. She only knew that they did. And for every paedophile ring that the Met or the international police forces busted, more would spring up around the world. Like fungal growth.

But most of those in this particular ring were either dead or dying and that left only one. Bill Thompson. The fisherman. The crab and lobster dealer. The fragment of shell found in Maureen Gallagher’s ear made perfect sense now. Even if how she’d become involved in it all didn’t. Sally understood why the severed head had been put on the altar at Saint Botolph’s: it was indicating the identity of the priest at the time of the murdered children’s capture. Father Fitzpatrick, who would never harm a child again and whom she fervently hoped was even now burning in hell. Sally understood that but she didn’t understand why Maureen Gallagher had been killed. Maybe it had just been bad luck. The wrong place at the wrong time. Like Samuel Ramirez and Alice Peters.

Sally turned to Delaney, who was still gripping the steering wheel as if it might come off the column into his hands. ‘Sir-’ she said but that was all as Delaney snapped back at her.

‘Not now, Sally.’

She nodded and took out her mobile, hitting the speed dial. ‘Hello, sergeant,’ she said as the phone was answered and then she frowned, covering for Delaney. ‘I’m not sure where we are and the inspector’s a bit busy right now. He just asked me to see if you could chase up Crimint. Did we get any results back on Maureen Gallagher? Has she been in the system at any time?’ Sally nodded again. ‘Just text back if the signal’s out of range,’ she said as Delaney entered a tunnel and the phone, true to her prediction, cut straight out.

Sally closed her eyes as the blinding flash of another pair of headlamps swept over them, a screaming horn held down for long seconds as they passed. And she kept her eyes pretty much closed for the rest of the journey, which thankfully wasn’t for long. It was probably the quickest journey in terms of speed that she had ever made in a car, but it absolutely felt like the longest.

She whispered a little prayer silently in her head, over and over again. ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; should I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’

*

Voices were singing in Bill Thompson’s head.

The man on the radio walking in a rainstorm, trying to wash the pain and hurt away. Failing. He was remembering the smell of the shickle, ripe in his throat, the sharp cuts in his knees as he was forced to kneel on the slivers of lobster and crab shell.

His uncle singing along to the music. Grunting. Drowning out the sound of Bill’s own screams, the tears running down his face, marking him. He looked across at the small window again, fifty-six years later, stained so green with algae that hardly any light filtered through and the bottom of the ocean that he was in was now as dark and as cold as the deepest sea on earth.

He looked down at his twitching right hand, arching it so that the sinews stood out like cord and made the blood vessels move below the translucent skin like thin blue slugs. His fingers curled inward, making his hand a crab once more.

The year of Our Lord 2010.

He moved his head weakly to one side, looking up at the figure above him, his right eye wet with tears, his left blind, unfocused. He tried to work the muscles in his lips and managed a ‘please’. Or what passed for it. But he couldn’t manage the words don’t shoot .

But Jack Delaney was perfectly capable of speech.

‘He’s right, Gloria,’ said Delaney. ‘Put down the gun.’

And the girl in the boot spun round to point the shaking gun that she held in her small, perfectly formed hand at her rescuer from thirteen years earlier.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

*

Bennett had parked his car further up the beach. He walked across the sand carefully. The sky overhead was dark with rain and the visibility was poor. He was dressed in a black overcoat with a Black Watch cap on his head. If somebody had been standing twenty yards away they probably wouldn’t have seen him coming. Which was just as Bennett liked it. Moving unseen. Coming up on people unexpectedly. It was what he was trained for after all. It was what he was good at.