Adrian Magson - No Help For The Dying

Nikki nodded. ‘Then you’ll know that there’s a point where they’re easy to get at. Where they’ll do anything to get away — except go back home.’

‘Yes.’

Nikki shrugged. ‘I’ve been in this business for a long time, Riley, so I’m the last person to think there’s a conspiracy behind every story. If I thought that, I’d go mental. But with this one.’ She shook her head.

‘Go on.’

‘Well, I asked some questions about the Church of Flowing Light. I got a mixed reception.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, a couple of my contacts said the Church has a reputation among kids for helping out. Food where needed, blankets, that sort of thing. Even somewhere to stay if the kids are clean of drugs. They’re pretty much into the God thing, too, but they don’t shove it down anyone’s throat.’

Riley could feel a but coming, loud and clear.

‘One of my colleagues said he’d heard something else. An outreach worker in Kennington reported them for assaulting a kid one night. She was doing her rounds among a group of homeless ex-servicemen and walked in on two men holding this kid down on a piece of waste ground. She asked what they were doing and they said the kid had attacked them, probably after a bad drug reaction, so they’d had to subdue him. She thought something didn’t look right, so she got the kid out of there and took him to hospital. It was lucky she did.’

‘What was wrong with him?’

‘What shocked the medics was that he had signs of severe scalding on the inside of his mouth and throat, and fresh bruising around the lips and nose area. There was also a large amount of bruising on his chest, like somebody had been kneeling on him.’

‘So he’d been in a fight. It happens.’

‘Not this one. They said the injuries were consistent with someone pouring hot liquid down his throat, then holding him down so he couldn’t spit it out.’

‘Christ. What did the victim say?’

‘Not much. He was able to communicate that it was a disagreement over a squat which got out of hand. He discharged himself the next day and disappeared.’

Riley digested the idea for a moment. The thought that someone could actually try to kill someone by drowning them in scalding water was appalling, if unlikely. Then Nikki dashed that notion.

‘I had a trawl through the files, looking for anything similar. There was another one. It was the boy they found dead the other morning off Piccadilly.’

‘This last one?’

‘Yes. I’ve only got some brief notes, but the preliminary examination concluded that he died due to choking on his own vomit. It’s not unknown for heavy drug users or drunks, especially if they’ve also picked up respiratory problems. Their system just can’t cope and they don’t have the strength to resist it, especially after a big hit.’

‘But this one?’

‘He had no history of heavy drink or drugs use, and no signs of injecting. In fact, he hadn’t been on the streets more than a month. What they did find was an area of bruising on the upper chest, and what might have been finger marks around the nose and mouth. But that’s not what killed him.’

‘So what did?’

‘Suffocation. More bluntly, according to a mate in the police, he drowned in hot tomato soup.’

Nikki referred again to her notepad. ‘It set me going through the files for details of some of the other cases of dead street kids. These are the easy ones, in reverse date order, starting with two weeks ago. Peter Casey, 17; father an industrialist, manufacturing electronics, primarily for use in radar systems. Paulette Devington, 16; father a scientist and director of a research facility, at the time working on a big project for the Royal Navy. James Van de Meuve, 16; parents on the board of a Dutch-owned engineering firm, specialising in submersibles for deep-sea salvage but building what is thought to be a drone tractor for the navy. And then I looked up the one you mentioned, which goes back even further: Nicholas Friedman, 17…’

‘…father a lawyer with the MOD,’ Riley finished off.

Nikki nodded. ‘There were quite a few more, though; the survivors. Most of them didn’t make the news — they simply went back home and got on with their lives.’

‘How many?’ Riley was beginning to feel the heat of excitement under her skin, pulsing away like a drum. ‘Dead ones and survivors?’

‘Roughly? I haven’t covered all of them. Once I got the idea I just went for the obvious ones.’

‘As many as you have.’

‘Twenty, approximately. Covering both groups.’

They sat and stared at each other for a while, and Riley found herself wondering where Nikki bought her jewellery. It was an idle thought prompted by the fact that a part of her didn’t want to speculate on what had been happening. All those kids. The parents. The loss. The pain.

‘There’s a clincher,’ Nikki said finally.

‘What?’

‘With only two exceptions, who turned out to be groupies, all of the survivors were tracked down and sent home by the Church of Flowing Light. I must be blind — I just never saw the significance.’

Riley decided to play devil’s advocate, although she felt reluctant. But objectivity at this stage was necessary if she didn’t want to make mistakes. ‘Fair enough. But don’t forget it’s what they do: they track down missing kids.’

‘Sure. But what are the odds of all those parents knowing that? The Church of Flowing Light is hardly Ghostbusters . I’ve been reporting on this stuff for a while, but I only heard of them through colleagues. Not once have I ever picked up on the grapevine that the place to call when your kid goes missing is The Church of Flowing Light. In fact, I’d be surprised if more than a couple of the parents involved had stepped inside any kind of church in decades. They’d more likely go to the Salvation Army.’

‘So the Church must have approached the parents.’

‘I would think so. What I don’t know is how the Church would know about them.’

Riley said nothing. A good question. There were the inevitable posters people put up, and even enquiries on the street were apt to spread quickly among its inhabitants, which is probably where the Church picked up most of its information about potential targets.

Nikki flapped the notes with her fingertips. ‘And looking at this list, we’re talking about one hell of a success rate. Do you know how few missing kids get traced and returned even by experts? It’s so small it doesn’t even show up. Most is down to coincidence, the kids’ desire to get back home to mummy or a chance sighting by someone who calls in and gets the parents or the police to make a pick-up. But there’s something else.’ She sounded excited and Riley let her continue. ‘Most of these kids came from wealthy homes. Nearly all of them, in fact. I’m not a statistician, but the likelihood of this number of runaways coming from good backgrounds, all showing up on the radar in connection with the same organisation is pretty low. In fact, it wouldn’t happen, not unless Debretts started running a tracing organisation for runaway Guys, Sarahs and Deborahs.’

Riley had a pretty good idea. It was where the soup vans came in.

‘What about money changing hands when the runaways were returned?’

Nikki blinked. ‘You mean a bounty?’

‘You’ve got a charity group relying on donations who track down missing kids and return them to the fold. Most of the parents are frantic with grief and fearing the worst. Nearly all of them have money and position. With maybe one or two exceptions, they’d do almost anything to get their kids back in one piece. And most of them would hope to do it as quietly as possible, to avoid any scandal. I doubt the Church does this for fun.’