Sophie Hannah - Hurting Distance

I am about to mention again the possibility of going to see you in hospital when she says, ‘Naomi.’ From her expression, I know that there’s another shock coming. I prepare myself for the impact. ‘I know where that house is,’ she says. ‘I’m going to get into my car and drive there now. The man who raped you will be there when I arrive. I’m going to get a confession out of him, even if it means tearing his fingernails out with pliers, one by one.’

I say nothing, fearing she may have gone mad.

‘I’ll drop you at the taxi rank,’ she says.

‘But how . . . what . . . ?’

She is walking towards your gate, towards the road. She will not stop to answer my questions.

‘Wait,’ I call after her, running to catch up. ‘I’m coming with you.’ I am standing where Juliet stood on Monday. Sergeant Zailer stands where I stood. The choreography is identical; the cast has changed.

‘That’d be unwise, from both our points of view,’ she says. ‘Your well-being and safety, my career.’

If I do this, if I go with her to the place, wherever it is, and see the man, then whatever happens, I will never have to think of myself as a coward again. ‘I don’t care,’ I tell her.

Charlie Zailer shrugs. ‘Neither do I,’ she says.

23

4/8/06

‘HAS EITHER OF you seen Charlie?’ Simon was anxious enough to call out to Sellers and Gibbs, in a louder voice than he’d normally think of using, while they were still some metres away.

‘We were just coming to find you.’ Sellers stopped by the drinks machine outside the canteen. He reached into his pocket for change.

‘Something’s up with her,’ said Gibbs. ‘No idea what. I was talking to her before—’

‘Did you tell her Robert Haworth’s real name?’

‘Yeah, I started telling her—’

‘Shit!’ Simon rubbed the bridge of his nose, thinking. This was a serious problem. How much should he tell Sellers and Gibbs? Laurel and fucking Hardy, he thought. But he had to tell them.

‘. . . I’d got as far as telling her Haworth was born Robert Angilley, and she just walked off,’ Gibbs was saying. ‘Out of the building, got in her car and off she went. She didn’t look good. What’s going on?’

‘I couldn’t find her, couldn’t find any of you,’ said Simon. ‘Her mobile’s switched off. She never does that—you know Charlie, she’s never out of touch, and she never goes off without telling me where. So I phoned her sister.’

‘And?’ said Sellers.

‘It’s not good. This holiday she cut short, Spain, it was supposed to be.’

‘Supposed to be?’ said Gibbs. As far as he knew, that was where the sarge had been, where she’d flown back from when the Robert Haworth case started to get more complicated.

‘The hotel was no good, so she and Olivia sacked it and booked a new place: Silver Brae Chalets in Scotland.’

Sellers looked up, spilling hot chocolate on his fingers. ‘Shit!’ he said. ‘Silver Brae Chalets? The same one that’s run by Robert Haworth’s brother? I just jotted down the name, ten minutes ago.’

‘Same one,’ said Simon grimly. ‘Olivia reckons Charlie and Graham Angilley are . . . involved in some kind of relationship.’

‘She can’t have been there more than a day!’

‘I know.’ Simon saw no need to tell Sellers and Gibbs the rest of what Olivia Zailer had told him: that Charlie had invented a fictional boyfriend called Graham to make Simon jealous, that when she’d met a real Graham she’d leaped at the chance of making her lie true. All that was too much for him to think about right now.

He stuck to the relevant facts. ‘Naomi Jenkins gave us the business card for Silver Brae Chalets by mistake when she came in on Monday to report Haworth missing. She thought she was handing over her own business card. Charlie still had it after she’d gone—she showed it to me, mentioned that they had some kind of special offer on. Obviously when the hotel in Spain turned out to be a dump, she thought of the chalets.’

‘Hang on,’ said Gibbs, holding out his hand for Sellers’ drink. Sellers sighed, but gave it to him. ‘So Naomi Jenkins had Haworth’s brother’s business card? Did Jenkins know Haworth’s real name, then? Had she met his family?’

‘She’s not answering her mobile either,’ said Simon. ‘But I don’t think so. She was desperate for us to look for Haworth, to find him as quickly as possible. If she’d known he had a brother—or that he’d changed his name, for that matter—she’d have told us when she came in on Monday. She gave us everything she could to help us find him.’

‘She must have known,’ said Sellers. ‘It can’t be a coincidence. What, she just happens to be carrying the business card of her lover’s brother, even though she doesn’t know that’s who he is? Bullshit!’

Simon was nodding. ‘It’s not a coincidence. Far from it. I’ve just looked at the Silver Brae Chalets website. Guess who designed it?’

‘No idea,’ said Sellers.

Gibbs was quicker off the mark. ‘Naomi Jenkins’ best mate’s a website designer, her lodger.’

‘Got it in one,’ said Simon. ‘Yvon Cotchin. She did the Silver Brae Chalets website. She also designed one for Naomi Jenkins, for her sundial business.’ He waited, expecting to see dawning awareness on their faces, but all he saw was bewilderment. They hadn’t got there yet. They weren’t conspiracy-minded in the way Simon was, that was why.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Robert Haworth raped Prue Kelvey. We know that, it’s been proved. We also know he didn’t do all the rapes. He didn’t rape Naomi Jenkins or Sandy Freeguard, but someone did, someone Haworth was very probably working with, since the MO was almost identical.’

‘You’re saying it’s the brother, Graham Angilley?’ asked Sellers. He still hadn’t got his drink back.

‘I fucking hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am. If Angilley’s the other rapist, that’d explain how he knew so much about Naomi Jenkins. There’s personal information about her on her website, as well as her address, which is the same as her business’s address. I’m sure that’s how he chose her as a victim: from a list of Yvon Cotchin’s previous clients. If Cotchin did Jenkins’ website before she did Angilley’s, she might well have told him to have a look at some others she’d designed, as a sort of reference.’

‘Fuck,’ said Sellers quietly.

‘Prue Kelvey and Sandy Freeguard—’ Gibbs began.

‘Sandy Freeguard’s a writer and has her own website, with personal information and photos, like Jenkins’. And the company Prue Kelvey worked for has an individual webpage for each member of staff, giving personal as well as professional information, and a photograph. That’s how Angilley and Haworth knew so much about them.’

‘Naomi Jenkins was raped before Kelvey and Freeguard,’ said Gibbs.

‘Exactly.’ Simon had followed the same deductive trail himself, minutes earlier. ‘She might have been the turning point for Angilley and Haworth. They’ve been selling tickets to live rapes since at least 2001. We know that from the date on survivor thirty-one’s story. However they selected their victims in the early days, I reckon it all changed when Angilley had the website done for the chalets. If Yvon Cotchin did tell him to look at some of her other work, including Naomi Jenkins’ site . . .’

‘Pretty big if,’ said Sellers. ‘What if the chalets’ site predated Jenkins’?’

‘I’ll check,’ said Simon. ‘But I don’t think it did. And that’s how Graham Angilley came to know about Naomi Jenkins. He must have realised that there were hundreds of other potential victims on the Internet, with their own websites. But he couldn’t only rape women Yvon Cotchin had designed sites for, could he? That’d be too obvious, too risky. So they branched out, he and Haworth—they started to look for any websites belonging to professional women . . .’