Page 89 of Little Children

‘Look, I’ll take your number, and I appreciate you taking the time and trouble to come here. I think you mean well. Now I want to return the favour and tell you to be careful. Roy might seem like your mate, but he isn’t. It might seem like you’ve got him bang to rights, but you probably haven’t.

‘Whatever it is, there’s a reason he brought you here today, and it wasn’t for a blow job between interviews. There’s a bigger reason than that. Be careful.’

‘Okay, thanks,’ he said, giving her the card with his number.

He stepped out of the house, and the door closed behind him.

He stood for a moment, weighing Pippa’s words. They seemed melodramatic but also plausible.

He stepped off the pavement as a vehicle further down the stretch of road pulled out and sped away, giving him no time to see the make or model of the car.

Probably just a boy racer or someone in a rush, he told himself as he approached his car.

Trouble was that neither his brain nor his gut believed it.

Fifty-Six

Penn was true to his word, and a fresh pot of coffee had brewed by the time she got there.

A bribe in the form of a pack of donuts for Jack on the desk had secured Barney’s admission into the station.

‘I just can’t stop thinking about it,’ Penn said. ‘We’re talking about kids taken from their families and forced to fight.’

‘Or worse,’ Kim added, picturing Josh being used in the most barbaric way. ‘What do the numbers say?’ she went on, taking a seat opposite Penn with her cuppa.

‘Hard to get a clear picture based on all the forces, but by narrowing the age range to pre-teen, we’re looking at approximately thirty to fifty boys who go missing each year and are never seen again.’

‘Definitely enough for some kind of sick league, but how the hell would we find out?’

‘Gotta be on the dark web somewhere,’ Penn offered. ‘Any network needs a hub to communicate.’

‘But Cybercrime are crawling over that place. How have they not come across it?’

Penn shrugged. ‘We already know there are search engines that allow users to connect without fear of being tracked. We also know there are trading sites where people can purchase illegal goods and services.’

The idea of it always gave Kim the image of masked men parked up in dark, unsavoury areas with their car boots open. If only the dark web was no more sinister than folks selling stolen or counterfeit goods out the back of vans.

Even she had heard of sites like Silk Road, a kind of Amazon for drugs, fake drivers’ licences and countless other illegal products. Although shut down by the FBI in 2014, it had continued to raise its head in various forms over the years.

‘So, can we just search the dark web for anything to do with illegal child fighting?’ Kim asked, trying to picture it as a filthy Google.

‘Tried it,’ Penn said. ‘No joy. It’s either dressed up as something else, or we’re going to have to get more creative and go deeper to find where it’s hiding.’

‘What do you mean about being dressed up as something else?’

‘I mean it’s like buying something and it not being what you thought. I suppose it’s like wearing a mask. Like a place that’s advertising itself as a sweet shop in its store window, but when you get in there, they’re selling drugs. The site could be masquerading as something else, and we need a search engine that can go deeper into the code to give us what we want.’

Kim scratched her head. ‘Bloody hell, Penn, you’re losing me.’

‘It gets worse. If the hub of the league is hiding as something else, it may not only be on the shop front.’

‘Go on,’ Kim said after groaning loudly. Every sentence he uttered pushed them further away from finding these monsters.

Penn wasn’t put off as a soft snore came from Barney at her feet.

‘Okay, back to our sweet shop analogy. Let’s say we’re looking for the word cocaine in the IP address. We’re not gonna find it because the IP address is listed as Haribo, but we don’t believe it and we access the site anyway. And now we’re in, we can search for cocaine, right?’

‘Yeah,’ Kim agreed.