Page 35

THIRTY-FOUR

By the time they had driven Emily back to the safe house in Edgware, Tanner had already received a message from Greg Hobbs at the DFU. The text of a message Alex Brightwell had posted to Emily in the usual place, sent within a few minutes of the operation being wound up at Whittington Park.

You must think I’m an idiot, Emily. Did you really think I didn’t know what you were up to, and do you honestly believe you’re SAFE?

Tanner waited until Emily was in the bathroom and she could hear the shower running before showing Thorne.

‘He was watching us.’ Thorne began pacing the room; just a few strides between one bare wall and another. ‘Watching us and laughing.’

‘He obviously knew what was going on before we even got there,’ Tanner said. ‘When he was paying that pisshead to deliver his drawing.’

‘Right, which begs an obvious question.’

‘The same question we had when this started.’ Tanner sat back on the oatmeal sofa and kicked her shoes off. ‘How he knew about the Cresswell operation. How he knew exactly where Chris Tully was going to be that night.’

‘Yeah, well we know he’s got the capability to find some stuff out,’ Thorne said. ‘He told Emily, right? Specialist computer programs and databases, whatever.’

‘This is more than him just doing his homework or having a fancy scanner. It’s starting to look like someone’s feeding him information.’

It was the same conclusion Thorne was fast coming to. ‘Which begs an even harder question,’ he said. ‘We know he’s not a copper, but he must be getting intel from police sources, surely? I can’t see any other explanation for him being so far ahead of the game. I mean, unless I’m missing something.’

Tanner shook her head.

‘If it’s a copper who’s giving him this stuff, a member of civilian staff maybe . . . what possible reason have they got? Why the hell are they helping someone who’s killing other police officers?’

Tanner was clearly struggling to come up with an answer every bit as much as Thorne was. She said nothing for half a minute, then looked across at him. ‘If we’re right about this, we should have a good look at the list of officers who’ve got access to this place.’

‘We should come up with our own list,’ Thorne said. ‘And make it a very short one.’ He was still puzzling it over, trying to process this horrifying new idea in any way that might make sense. ‘Blackmail, maybe?’

‘It’s a thought.’

‘If Brightwell was able to find out about Tully, maybe he’d already found another copper with something serious to hide.

’ The more Thorne considered it, the more it seemed like a decent explanation.

Like the only explanation. ‘Only instead of killing them, he’s forcing them to provide the intelligence he needs to kill others by threatening to expose them if they don’t.

So they tell him about Tully working the Cresswell op.

About Emily coming to us and about tonight. ’

‘It’s got to be someone close to home,’ Tanner said. ‘Because there can’t be too many people who had access to all that intel—’ She stopped when she heard the shower shutting off and turned to look towards the bathroom door.

Thorne lowered his voice. ‘We should take this to Russell first thing tomorrow. See if he can come up with the names of everyone who had access.’

‘OK.’

Thorne reached for his leather jacket. ‘I’m going to head off.’

‘I think I’ll stay here for a bit.’

‘What are you going to do about food?’

‘We’ll get something delivered.’ Tanner saw the question in Thorne’s face. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get a lift home.’

‘Call me later.’ Thorne pulled his jacket on. ‘Nic . . . ?’

Tanner was still waiting for the bathroom door to open, for Emily Mead to emerge. ‘I think she could do with some company.’

Emily came into the living room a few minutes after Thorne had left. She was wearing joggers and a T-shirt under a well-worn dressing gown and rubbing at her wet hair with a towel.

‘Warmed up a bit?’ Tanner asked.

Emily nodded and sat down.

‘You hungry?’

If the officer who’d been stationed outside the building resented being treated as a glorified Deliveroo driver, he showed no sign of it.

When Tanner went down to collect the food, he said he hoped they enjoyed their dinner.

He said it was a shame that the operation at Whittington Park hadn’t panned out and asked if Emily was going to be all right.

‘We’ll see,’ Tanner said.

Twenty minutes later, with the remains of a Chinese on the table between them, Emily said, ‘What happens now, then?’

‘To you, nothing,’ Tanner said. ‘You stay where you are.’

‘Oh, great.’

‘Look, it’s not ideal, I get that, but we know who he is now, so it’s only a matter of time.’

‘You think?’

‘Definitely. He makes one little slip and we’ve got him.’

‘Or maybe that nerdy bloke in the wheelchair can do something magic with that special bag of his.’

‘I wouldn’t put it past him,’ Tanner said.

‘Fair enough.’ Emily lifted her feet on to the sofa. ‘It’s boring as anything, but at least I’m safe stuck in here.’

Tanner said nothing. There was little point in sowing seeds of doubt or scaring the woman without good reason, so she had no intention of sharing the message Alex Brightwell had sent a couple of hours earlier.

‘It’s not like he’s Spiderman, is it?’ Emily managed the first smile since they’d brought her back. ‘And there’s no windows for him to get through even if he was.’

For half an hour or so, Emily talked about her family – a mum with MS and a father she hadn’t seen for several years – and about an ex-boyfriend who’d cheated on her with a girl who worked in Aldi, then come crawling back a few months later saying he’d made a terrible mistake.

‘He was fit, too, as it goes,’ Emily said. ‘But I’m not stupid.’

She talked about a few of the jobs she’d had and subsequently lost – receptionist, nursery assistant, telemarketer – and the drug habit that had been the reason more often than not.

‘I’ve been clean for a while,’ she said.

‘I’m not going to make out like it’s been easy .

. . so this is good, when you think about it.

It’s not as if I’m likely to relapse in here.

Not unless the bloke who delivered my spring rolls does a sideline in skunk and Fentanyl. ’

‘You’re doing brilliantly,’ Tanner said. ‘Everything you’ve been through, and what you’re doing now, you should be proud of yourself.’

Emily cried after that, but not too much, and said nothing for a while.

Tanner was thinking that she should probably be getting home, when Emily looked across at her.

‘It was actually the second time he’d been in my flat,’ she said quietly. ‘Callaghan.’

‘OK . . . ’

‘Him and another copper had been round a few months before when I’d been burgled. Again . Ground floor flat in south London, yeah?’

Tanner just nodded, but she was thinking that these days you could count yourself very fortunate indeed if officers even bothered to attend following reports of a burglary.

Thinking that in becoming known to Adam Callaghan in such circumstances, Emily Mead had been both lucky and horribly unlucky at the same time.

‘That night, he just said he was passing. Said even though he wasn’t on duty, he’d decided to pop in and see how I was doing, and I thought that was nice of him. Thoughtful.’

Tanner said nothing, sensing it would be better not to interrupt.

‘So, I asked him in for tea.’ She shook her head.

‘I fucking asked him in . . . and it was OK at first. We just sat in the kitchen and nattered about this and that, how there wasn’t any progress on my burglary, but it wasn’t like I was expecting any, not really, because the police have got other things to do, right? ’

Other things . . .

Tanner looked at the remembered horror that was already starting to etch itself across Emily Mead’s face and it was impossible not to think about what some of those other things were.

‘Then I’m thinking that he’s on his way out, which is when he asks if he can have a quick look round. Check my security or whatever. It wasn’t a big flat, so it didn’t take long . . . the windows in the kitchen which he told me needed better locks, the back door, all that.

‘Then we go into my bedroom . . .

‘And when I turn round, he’s standing between me and the door, and I need to sit down because I’m feeling a bit woozy and that’s when I knew he’d slipped something into my tea.

Roofies or whatever, like the girls get jabbed with in clubs.

Easy enough for someone like him to get hold of that stuff, I would have thought.

I knew one hundred per cent he’d done it, but it didn’t much matter because suddenly I could hardly stand up and when he pushed me down on the bed, I couldn’t do anything about it.

I knew exactly what was happening . . . what was going to happen, but I couldn’t do anything to stop it.

’ She swallowed hard and leaned forward, desperate.

‘I couldn’t do anything, I swear. I couldn’t move. ’

Tanner stretched out a hand. ‘It’s OK, Emily. You don’t have to—’

‘He wasn’t in any great hurry.’ She was staring straight ahead, the muscles working in her jaw.

‘Took his time, you know? His hands were all over the place and when he’d done what he wanted with them, he started to do all the other stuff.

My jeans came off and my underwear and then he was just .

. . on me. On me for a bit, then turning me over and pushing me down and doing it everywhere. ’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Tanner said.

‘That’s when I heard the other man.’

‘ What? ’

‘I remember really clearly thinking that he’d left the front door open when he came in. While I was lying there and he was doing what he wanted I was thinking: He didn’t close the door behind him . He’d left it open so this other bloke could come in.’

‘There were two of them?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You were raped by Adam Callaghan and another man?’

Emily shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut for a few seconds. ‘No, it was just Callaghan doing it, but there was another man in the room. Callaghan had his hands on my neck, but I couldn’t have raised my head to look anyway, the state I was in, but I heard him. I heard him clear as anything.’

‘What was he saying, this other man?’

‘Just . . . egging Callaghan on, you know? Telling him to try different stuff because I was obviously loving it.’

Tanner said nothing, because there was nothing she could say.

The tears had come again, but Emily just sniffed and wiped them away, as though now they were no more than an inconvenience.

‘I think that’s why I never said anything – why I didn’t go to the police.

Not just because Callaghan was police, but because I never did anything to fight back.

I mean, obviously I couldn’t, but you know what some people are going to think.

It’s stupid, because later on I realised that they could have found the drug he’d used on me, tested my blood or whatever, but it was too late by then. ’

‘You didn’t do anything wrong,’ Tanner said. ‘Or even unusual. Five out of every six women who get raped don’t report it and of the rapes that are reported, only two per cent result in charges.’

Emily nodded and half-smiled, took a few deep breaths.

‘So yeah, obviously I hated Adam Callaghan for what he’d done to me.

I’d lie awake wishing he was dead, even though I never wanted it to actually happen and certainly not the way it did.

I’d take all sorts, anything I could get my hands on so I wouldn’t have to remember how much it hurt.

‘I started to cope with it all a bit better eventually and maybe now that he is dead, it’ll get even easier.

‘Because I’d like to sleep, I really would . . .

‘But however many drugs I’ve taken or how much therapy I’ve shelled out for, I’ve never been able to stop thinking about that other man’s voice.

I can still hear it, every word he said.

Gentle, almost. Half-whispered. It’s the first thing I think about every day and it’s the last thing going round my head at night.

‘The voice of that man who was watching Adam Callaghan rape me and telling him what to do.’