Simon Kernick - Ultimatum

‘Where can we find him?’

‘He runs a brothel in an old warehouse near King’s Cross, or at least he did when I was dealing with him eighteen months ago. It’s on a place called Canal Street, about halfway down on the left if you’re heading north, and I think the name of the building is Mill House, although I couldn’t say for sure. I don’t know where he actually lives, but he’s known to the authorities under the name I’ve given you. He ran over a cyclist once, while driving without insurance or an MOT, and put the guy in hospital for six weeks with a fractured spine. It turned out that Brozi shouldn’t even have been in the country because he’d had his asylum application and two appeals turned down already. Even then they couldn’t get rid of him because, before the case got to court, he married a girl with a British passport and got her up the duff. Then he got his legal-aid-funded lawyers to say that separating him from his wife and child breached his right to a family life under the Human Rights Act. Hence, he’s still here.’ Fox couldn’t resist a cold smile. ‘It’s a great country we live in, isn’t it?’

Tina didn’t react as she wrote down the details, even though hearing stories about the weakness of the justice system and the vagaries of the Human Rights Act annoyed her as much as anyone.

‘I always made it my business to find out as much as I could about the people I did business with,’ continued Fox, ‘just in case it ever came in useful. Like now. Don’t waste what I know, Miss Boyd. Because if I die, my secrets go with me. And I have secrets that’ll make your hair stand on end.’

Tina replaced the notebook and got to her feet too. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ she told him, making no effort to shake hands.

‘You know, I admire you,’ said Fox, looking her up and down. ‘You might have caused us a lot of problems at the Stanhope, but I can’t help thinking that in other circumstances, we might have got on.’

‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ said Tina, turning away and signalling for the guard to let her out.

11.08

There are no noble causes.

When I left the army, after twelve years’ service, I decided to become a cop. I’m still not entirely sure why. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. After my last tour of Helmand Province, I was sick of the military, and the way we were being hung out to dry out there. I wanted to try something different, something that didn’t involve sitting in an office all day or losing my legs to an IED, and being a cop seemed like it might be an interesting alternative.

It wasn’t.

I did three years in the Met, and I did a good job, no question. I put up with a lot of shit from the scum out there on the streets — and I tell you, there are one hell of a lot of them, people who know every last one of their rights, and think the world owes them a living. They didn’t have an ounce of respect, or fear, for the law or the uniform. The Human Rights Act put paid to all that. To them, we were just a joke. But I learned to turn the other cheek and get on with the job. I filled out all the pointless forms, followed the thousands of pedantic little rules, took the diversity courses, watched the senior officers fiddling the crime figures so they met their targets — never actually doing much in the way of fighting crime, but knowing that at the end of the day I was earning OK money and supporting my wife and daughter.

To alleviate the boredom, I applied to join CO19, the Met’s specialized firearms unit, and got in on the first attempt. And although I knew the chances of getting any real action were slim, I remember thinking that life was looking up for me.

Which was, of course, the moment it all went wrong.

It was just over a year ago, and I was part of a team who raided a shitheap of a property in Hackney where a couple of small-time crack dealers lived. We’d heard they kept a gun on the premises that was supposedly for protection — one they’d used in a mugging the previous year where some kid had got shot — as well as a pitbull. So we went in armed and mob-handed. We broke down the door, shot the dog — which was a pity because he had nothing to do with anything — then stormed through the place making a lot of noise, like you do when you’re an armed cop.

It was a real mess in there. There were overflowing rubbish bags and old takeaway cartons wherever you looked, dog shit on the floor, and an army of cockroaches lording it in the kitchen among all the grime-encrusted dishes. The whole house stank like the lions’ enclosure at a zoo. But that’s often par for the course in those types of places. As a cop, you learn fast that it’s not just the law that the criminal classes have no respect for. Most of the time they don’t respect themselves either.

I was one of the first upstairs, and that’s where I found her. She was fifteen years old, a runaway from a local care home, and she was tied to a stinking mattress in the back bedroom, semi-conscious and out of her head on God knows what. She was stark naked, with friction burns round her ankles and wrists where she’d struggled to break free. I had no idea how long she’d been there for, but she’d peed and crapped herself, and when the doctor examined her afterwards he said she was massively dehydrated, so it must have been a fair while. They’d been using her for sex. Just fucking her and, from what we could work out, charging other men to fuck her. Apparently she owed them money for dope, hadn’t paid up, and this was her punishment. They got her wrecked, then held her prisoner. Threatened to burn her alive if she ever told anyone.

Most right-thinking members of the public have no idea this kind of thing goes on, often only within walking distance from their front doors. But it does. It’s happening all the time.

We never knew how many men had raped her. These days, thanks to CSI and all those other programmes, the bastards are all forensically aware, so they used condoms and made sure they didn’t leave any of them behind for us to find. The girl herself wasn’t sure. She’d been too wrecked to know what was going on most of the time, but she’d suffered some pretty major injuries, so we knew it was a good few of them, and they hadn’t been gentle.

The problem was, when we raided the place only one of the two dealers was there. He was a cocky little sod, name of Alfonse Webber. Only eighteen and already a career criminal. He said he didn’t know anything about the girl, and blamed his friend, the other dealer. But when we tracked down the other dealer, he denied everything as well. We tried to get the girl to talk but she was scared stiff; all she wanted was to be left alone. And you couldn’t blame her. She had to live round there.

So that was that. What could we do? To top it all, we only found a few rocks of crack in there, and no gun. Webber went to court and got a suspended sentence. He claimed the gear was for his own use, and that he didn’t have a clue how the girl had got herself tied up in the bedroom. The judge didn’t believe him — at least I hope he didn’t; sometimes it’s hard to tell. But the prisons are full, and there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him of anything major. So he got a suspended sentence, and walked.

To be honest, what happened with Webber was no worse than a dozen other incidents I’d had to deal with, but the thing was, it acted like the culmination of all those other incidents. I’d had enough. When he came strutting out of the court with his lawyer, the little bastard saw me and laughed — this braying, mocking noise like a donkey. Even now, I remember perfectly the rage that went through me. It was so intense it actually made me start shaking. Then he started bragging in this ridiculous street patois about how the Feds would always be too stupid to get one over him — that sort of thing. His lawyer, this nerdy little bald guy with glasses, tried to get him to stop, and the cop I was with, well, he could see the effect it was having on me, so he put a hand on my shoulder and told me just to ignore it.