Michael Robotham - Say You're sorry

“Are you OK?” asks Drury.

“I’m fine.”

“What were you thinking?”

“She went on her own.”

“Which is her problem. Not yours.”

Heavy boots are moving through Toby Kroger’s flat. A search is underway. Officers are opening drawers, cabinets and wardrobes, sliding hands beneath a mattress and a poster of a topless girl making love to a motorbike.

The flat reeks of bacon fat and old water. I watch from the hallway as covers are pulled off the unmade beds. DVD cases are opened and discarded.

The laptop is found in a drawer. Blinking. Asleep. Drury flips it open. The screensaver is a photograph of a heavy metal band. He double clicks the Apple icon in the top left corner of the screen and works his way to the main control panel. No password required.

Kroger has an inbox with 4,327 messages. His sent file contains 2,512.

Drury opens “Finder” and looks for a media file. A list appears, numbers instead of names. The thumbnails take longer to load. There are hundreds of video files, mostly porn clips and trailers.

“This computer is less than a year old,” says Drury. “The footage of Natasha was taken before then. Maybe he didn’t transfer the old files to the new machine.”

“He wouldn’t have deleted the Natasha footage,” I say.

“Why?”

“Look at the other clips he’s downloaded. Most of them are rape fantasies or women submitting to force. The Natasha footage will have special significance because he’ll feel a sense of ownership. Try searching for the earliest dates.”

Drury clicks on “View options” and ticks the box for “Date created.”

“He registered the computer in May. Look at how many files share that date?”

“He must have imported them from his previous computer,” says Drury, opening files. He watches several seconds of each clip. Pretty women with painted mouths, taken by force, penetrated, pretending. There is nothing erotic or titillating about the footage; instead, a mind-numbing banality, pain for the heartsick.

A new clip opens on screen. The poor-quality camerawork shows the floor and then a wall, before it focuses on a girl in a floral dress and messy hair being made to dance as wet towels flick at her legs and thighs. The music is coming from a mobile phone: Beyonce’s “Single Ladies.”

The men are sitting on wooden benches or standing. Balaclavas or handkerchiefs cover their faces. Natasha is begging them to let her go. One of them flicks a lit cigarette at her legs. She dances away. Exhausted. Slowing down.

“Give us a spin.”

She obeys.

“You can do better than that.”

“Faster!”

She turns faster. Her dress flies up, showing her underwear.

One of the men gropes Natasha’s breasts. She pushes him away. Another set of hands close around her waist, lifting her off the floor. Someone is reaching between her legs.

“No,” she pleads. “Please, let me go.”

“I thought you liked dancing.”

“I’ll dance, but don’t touch me.”

“Come on, shake that little tail.”

The footage stops and starts again. The angle is different. The towels are still whipping at Natasha’s thighs and stomach but now she’s naked.

There are six men visible on the video. A seventh is holding the camera.

“Yeah, give it to her!” says a voice.

“Show us how you move.”

A fist grabs her hair and jerks her head up.

“Don’t cry, missy. When this is over you’ll walk funny for a while, but you’ll still have two legs.”

A dream.

What I heard.

What I saw.

What I wish I could forget.

They must have followed us from the funfair, but I don’t know how they got inside the leisure center. Tash was trapped behind the wire, unable to get away.

I ran. I made it almost back to the main road where there were streetlights and houses, but I tripped over the bike rack, the same one as before. I thought my leg was broken. I hobbled towards the road.

A shadow moved on my right. His hands closed around my waist and his fingers covered my mouth, pressing against my nose. I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t tell him. I kicked and squirmed, but he held me tighter.

He carried me back to the leisure center. I thought I was going to suffocate. Instead, he put me down and tied my hands behind my back. I was sitting on the concrete outside the changing room.

I could hear music inside. They were laughing. Tash was begging them to let her go.

The man pulled my head up. He put a smooth stone in my mouth. “Don’t you swallow this or you’ll choke,” he said, as he pulled a piece of fabric between my teeth, tying it behind my head. Then he pulled up my shirt until it covered my face. I was embarrassed because he could see my bra.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” he said. “Your friend is being taught a lesson.”

I couldn’t see his face, but I smelled his sweat and the alcohol on his breath.

I heard voices inside. Music playing. Laughter.

“Swing those hips,” someone said.

“Show us how you move.”

“Lift your chin. I want to see your face.”

Toby Kroger sits with his legs splayed, fingers locked behind his head, endeavoring to look like a man who has never known a moment of doubt or hesitation. Internally, there is a dynamic at work. He’s scared. Bewildered by the speed of his arrest. Wondering what moment of catastrophic inattention had led to this abrupt change in his fortunes.

I have read his file. Unemployed, uneducated, he’s one of three children whose parents divorced when he was seven. His grandfather and father worked on the production line at the Morris Motor Company in Cowley until the downsizing of the eighties saw the workforce cut by 90 per cent.

Kroger was kicked out of school at fifteen and arrested twice before his seventeenth birthday. There were no factory jobs. The mines had closed and the manufacturers had moved offshore. The state paid him welfare and wondered why a kid like this would turn to crime, when the only “paid work” on offer was coming from the drug dealers and crime gangs on the estates. So they hired more police and built more prisons and hoped the underclass would shrink and die.

Drury is behind me in the observation room. “What’s your take on this guy?”

“He’ll stonewall you,” I say. “He isn’t fazed by police interviews because he’s been here before.”

“I’m a patient man.”

“That won’t be enough. You have to shake him up. Keep him off balance. I can help with that. Let me sit in.”

The DCI doesn’t dismiss the idea. “Make your case.”

“Right now Kroger doesn’t know why he’s been arrested, but he must suspect this has something to do with the photographs. People get nervous around psychologists. They think I’m going to mess with their heads or read their thoughts. It might be enough to unsettle him.”

Drury ponders this for a moment. Makes a decision. “Let’s do this.”

Kroger doesn’t look up as we enter. I take my chair and move it around to his side of the table. He looks at me sideways and then to Drury.

“What’s he doing here?”

“Professor O’Loughlin is a psychologist. He’s here to observe you.”

“Can he do that?”

“Relax, Toby.”

“But why is he here?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Kroger looks at me again. The clock ticks through half a minute.

“I want him to stop doing that,” he moans.

“Doing what?”

“Make him stop staring at me.”

Ignoring him, Drury opens a folder and shuffles pages. Kroger picks up his chair and moves it further away from mine, crossing his arms. Enclosed. Defensive.

Another minute passes.