Fallen Angel (14 page)

DCI Colin Blackwell sat motionless in the centre of the spacious living room while his team waited outside. The house he was in could not have been more different from the one he had sat in a few days earlier while working on the Daniel Eliot case.

The room smelled incredible. A mix of hot coffee, fresh bread, fresh flowers and soft supple leather from a large living-room suite. It smelled like money.

He let his eyes wander over his surroundings. There was a state-of-the-art home entertainment system, complete with giant plasma TV. Heating, lighting and air conditioning were controlled from LCD panels built into the walls by each doorway.

It was all fitting for a man said to be at the cutting edge of British innovation. Blackwell had heard of Peter Dawney of course. Everyone had. In recent weeks he had become a regular face on television chat shows, talking about technology and his artificial intelligence program that could run your entire home.

Alice Dawney sat on a sofa at the other end of the room, her eyes red and puffy from crying. She had not said a word since Blackwell had arrived, and he knew from experience that she was in shock, terrified that Michael would suffer the same fate as Daniel Eliot.

Blackwell heard footsteps and turned to see Peter
Dawney standing at the doorway. The man who walked towards him had an elegant demeanour: tailored grey suit, light blue shirt with no tie, and scooped-back dark hair that was parted in the middle and starting to grey at the sides. Usually he looked distinguished and handsome; today, frightened and vulnerable.

He smiled weakly and sat down next to his wife, gently putting his arm round her as she continued to sob quietly.

‘Thank you for agreeing to see me, Mr and Mrs Dawney,' he began, ‘on what must be an extremely difficult day for you. I won't waste your time with trivia. Has the kidnapper made direct contact with you?'

Peter sighed deeply, leaned forward in his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. ‘No – the first we heard about it was when a friend called to tell us about the radio show. I've just got off the phone to the bank.'

‘How are you getting on?'

‘We're getting there. Not quickly enough for my liking, but we're getting there. My friends have been … incredible … agreeing to hand over thousands of pounds of their money. And we've had offers of help from all over the country. Such generosity. But still …'

Peter looked up and met Blackwell's gaze. The strain showed in his eyes, and he looked close to breaking point. ‘You have to understand, everything I have is tied up in the company. I've only ever drawn a relatively modest salary and put all the profits back into the business. Of the wealth I have, a lot of it is there only on paper. When it comes to turning it into hard cash, there are difficulties, especially on such a short timescale.'

‘How confident are you of raising the money?' asked Blackwell.

‘I didn't say it wasn't possible. After all, we are talking about the life of my son here. I just said it was going to be difficult. People see me on TV and assume I've got millions sitting in my bank account. It's not like that. The firm, like any technology company, soaks up money, and the new software is far from ready. My house is worth two million, but that just means I have a large mortgage. I'll get the money. Christ, I have to, but it's going to ruin me. I don't care. All I want is my son back.'

Blackwell nodded. ‘I understand that. And I want you to know that I have exactly the same priority. I won't lie to you. The money is important. We know this kidnapper, and we know that he won't accept anything less than the full amount. In every case of kidnap, the time when the money is handed over is the time when those responsible are most vulnerable. If we can put £3 million on the table, it gives us our best chance of drawing him out.'

‘But I can just hand over the money myself, can't I?

‘It's entirely your decision as to whether you want the police involved at this stage or not. Obviously we can't force you, but what makes this case unusual is that the announcement was made not to the parents but to the public as a whole through a radio programme. It means the kidnapper knows that the whole world is going to be watching everything he does. He hasn't said anything about not getting the police involved, so my advice would be to allow us to handle this.'

Peter snorted, a sound somewhere between a laugh and a groan. ‘You'll understand if I'm a little sceptical. Your
track record of late doesn't give me a lot of confidence.'

Blackwell shuffled uncomfortably in his seat. That one had hit close to home. ‘You're entitled to your opinion and believe me no one in the force feels the tragedy of the outcome of the Daniel Eliot case more than I do. But we firmly believe that the kidnapper always intended to kill Daniel in order to prove that he was a serious threat. He wanted to make sure there would be no question of trying to negotiate over a future ransom. But, at the same time, your son is the only leverage he has. If he wants the money, he absolutely has to keep Michael alive.'

The words seemed to breathe new life into Alice, whose face had been hidden in the nook of her husband's shoulder. She looked up, her face stained with tears. ‘Then you think Michael is okay?'

‘At this stage,' said Blackwell, choosing his words carefully. ‘Everything we know tells us that Michael is alive.'

Alice looked at her husband, her bottom lip quivering, then collapsed into his shoulder and began to cry once more. Peter gently stroked her back, comforting her.

‘If I say yes and let you come in and take over, what will happen?'

‘We'll bring in a couple of family liaison officers. They'll be your direct link to the investigation and keep you updated at all times. They'll also act as a buffer between you and the press or anybody else. They'd remain here on a permanent basis until … until Michael is recovered.'

‘Okay.'

‘On top of that there will be a technical team. They'll intercept any messages from the kidnapper in a bid to help us track him down. Everything we've learned so far
tells us that the kidnapper is working alone. This means that when he goes to collect the money, Michael will be alone. If we can find out where Michael is, that will be our opportunity to pick him up and capture the kidnapper without risk to your son.'

Blackwell looked away briefly, as if searching the room for an extra thought, then turned back to Peter. ‘I should let you know that standard Met policy in cases of this kind is not to pay the full amount of the ransom. Instead we would pay a portion and leave a note explaining to the kidnapper that the full amount is simply not available at the moment. The idea is to draw the kidnappers into a dialogue and give us more time to rescue the victim.'

‘Is that what you did with that other boy?'

‘Yes.'

‘I see. Do you perhaps think that the kidnapper somehow knew that and that's why he killed him? Do you think that's why he came after my Mikey?'

‘I'm sorry, there's really no way of knowing that.'

An uncomfortable silence settled on the room, only to be broken by a knock at the door. ‘Come in,' said Peter. All heads turned to see a smartly dressed woman in her thirties push the door open slightly and poke her head around it.

‘I'm sorry, Peter,' said the small round woman with an apologetic smile. ‘I really need you to sign these right now to authorize the release of the funds in the escrow account if you want to be sure of having them today.'

‘That's fine, Martha. Come right on in. Detective, this is my secretary, Martha Day. She's helping to coordinate getting the ransom money together.'

The woman smiled politely at the officer, then crouched down beside Peter and spread a few sheets of paper out on the coffee table in front of him, indicating with a brightly polished fingernail where he needed to sign.

Peter waited until Martha had left the room before he spoke again. ‘How close are you to actually finding Michael?'

Again Blackwell shuffled stiffly in his seat. ‘We have a number of lines of enquiry that we're pursuing. That's really all I can say at the moment. Though I can assure you, Mr Dawney, that all our resources will be going into finding your son.'

Peter stared hard at the man. ‘My wife and I need a few minutes to think about this. Would you mind waiting outside?'

As Blackwell left the room, Peter shut his eyes and thought back to the events of the previous four hours.

When he had first called 999 to report Mikey missing – Alice being in no state to do it herself – they had been rewarded with two local officers fifteen minutes later. But any thoughts that Mikey might simply have got lost or run away from home had been erased by the sick bastard making his ransom demand on that radio show.

Since then the house had been surrounded by police officers and squad cars. Suddenly the Dawneys were prisoners in their own home.

It was unreal – like a persistent nightmare that refused to allow him to wake up. By two o'clock they had replied to so many questions by concerned and polite police officers that Peter had begun to grow confused by his
own answers. What was there to say? When he had left the house that morning everything was normal. Now their world had been turned upside down. He found he could hardly bear to be in the same room as Alice, her raw despair too sharp a contrast to his calm, almost anaesthetized lack of emotion. He felt he should be crying too, howling in frustration, sorrow and despair. But for some reason he wasn't; he was just finding the information impossible to process. It simply couldn't be true. It couldn't be real. There had to be some sort of mistake.

It was almost as if whoever was doing this knew exactly how devastating a financial blow this would be. Everything he had worked for his whole life would be gone in an instant. His company, his home, his dignity. Some might say he could do it all over again. He had started out with nothing. But that was years ago. He was younger, without a family, more willing to take risks. Now he honestly didn't have the energy.

Damn. Peter wanted to slap himself. He shouldn't be thinking like that. Not while Mikey's life was at stake. All that mattered was his son.

And then the man from the Met's kidnap squad had arrived. He hadn't asked many questions at all. Just one, really: did he want them to handle the negotiations with the kidnapper?

Peter had taken an instant dislike to the man. He couldn't bear people who seemed unable to use their authority or make proper decisions, and Blackwell seemed just that type. When he had quizzed him about what the police were doing – actually doing, now – to find his son,
he found his vague replies and evasions to be infuriating.

The only good thing that had come out of the conversation was precisely how important it was for him to get hold of all the money. It was what he needed: something to divert his attention, to take his mind off the feeling of desperate helplessness that had come over him the minute he'd heard the news that Mikey was missing. Getting all the money really was the best way of getting his son back. Failure to come up with the full amount was not an option. There was no way he was going to let the police fuck it up, as they had with the other boy.

There was a picture of Mikey on the coffee table, taken on a glorious sandy beach when they were on holiday in America two years ago. He had grown up so much since then. Peter took the little silver frame in his hand, held it to his chest and bowed his head.

And, for the first time since his son's disappearance, he felt tears stream down his face, desperation crashing over him like the waves in the picture he held tightly against his chest.

As soon as he left the Dawneys' house, Blackwell was on the phone to Higgins back at the incident room. ‘Good news, sir,' he said.

‘What do you mean?' Higgins asked.

‘The parents are allowing us to take over the case, and they think they can raise the money.'

‘That's good, is it?'

Blackwell nodded enthusiastically before realizing this was useless when his boss was on the other end of a phone line. ‘I think so. We need to draw this guy out into
the open. If there's even a hint that anything less than the full amount is on offer, then I think we might be looking at the Daniel Eliot case all over again.'

‘It goes without saying', said Higgins, ‘that we have to avoid that at any cost.'

‘Absolutely. For that reason, I'd like to bring in a profiler.'

‘You think that's necessary? The clock is already ticking.'

‘Last time the guy ran rings around us. I think we need to be more prepared. The more we know, the better we'll be able to deal with whatever tricks he's going to pull in the next two days.'

‘I agree. Go ahead. Anyone in mind?'

‘I was thinking Michelle Rivers.'

‘Name rings a bell.'

‘She was the one West Midlands Police used on that serial rapist case. By all accounts her profile was spot on. Virtually led them right to him.'

‘Okay, bring her in. In the meantime, if we're going ahead with a full money-drop, then that's where our attention should be focused: setting up an effective perimeter and working out a foolproof way of making sure our man doesn't get away.'

‘I'll get right on it, sir.'

‘One more thing,' said Higgins.

‘Sir?'

‘What about Collins and her team? She has a lot to offer, just as you had when she took over your case.'

‘I'm happy to work with her if I have to, but I want her kept right out of the way.'

‘She's a good detective.'

‘Is she? You saw how she was at that press conference. I'm concerned that if she says the wrong thing it could push this guy over the edge. And Michael Dawney will be dead.'

Collins felt useless. The killer she had been hunting for the past three days had kidnapped another child and was on the verge of killing again, but because she was on the murder, rather than the kidnap, squad the only thing she could do was sit on her thumbs and wait for instructions from DCI Blackwell.

She knew the protocol only too well, for she had quoted it at Blackwell a few days before, but it still infuriated her. She needed a break, so headed off to a local pub with Woods for a liquid lunch.

She had never believed in the saying ‘When it rains, it pours', but lately she felt as if one thing after another was getting on top of her. The job, her daughter and Jack Stanley were pulling her down. She thought back to the way she had felt after her father had been attacked. It had been the driving force behind her decision to join the police. But lately it seemed that everything negative in her life was a direct result of her job.

‘You all right, guv? You seem miles away.'

Collins snapped herself out of her daydream. ‘What the fuck are we doing sitting here. We should be doing something, anything, to help find the killer. Instead we have to wait for that obnoxious prick Blackwell.'

‘What do you want us to do?'

‘Anything.'

‘Like what? Get a transvestite to give him a blowjob for his birthday?'

‘Knowing him, he'd like it too much.'

They both laughed. Collins stood up and drained her glass of Jack Daniel's and Coke. ‘I've had enough of this shit. Let's get back to the office.'

Rajid Khan sat quietly at his desk in the corner of the incident room, a pair of large noise-cancelling headphones clamped over his ears.

The top-left-hand corner of his screen showed a small window with a live feed from MTV, and it was the sound of The Editors playing their latest release that was blasting into his skull at full volume. Some people found it distracting, but, for Khan, a little background music was the perfect way to concentrate his thoughts on the task in hand.

The remainder of his screen was taken up with multicoloured boxes filled with streams of numbers, a mix of complex logarithms and mathematical formulae. Another, much larger video box showed the distant image of a white van passing down a main road in a three-second loop. Next to this was a smaller, static box that seemed to contain nothing but a pattern of random dots.

Twenty minutes earlier DC Cooper had made her way over to his desk with a serious look on her face. She had finally struck gold. The camera from the tyre shop had been fitted at an unusual angle in order to capture images of customers entering the forecourt. Because of this it had managed to capture a single fleeting picture of the white van's registration plate, though it was too blurry for
Cooper to read. She immediately passed it on to Khan, who had been eager to help.

He still had his issues about working for the police and felt certain that he always would, but this case had got to him – because of the callousness of the killer, the age of the child, and the complete and utter brutality of the crime.

The revelation that Daniel had been killed even before the deadline for the ransom money had disturbed him deeply, as had DI Collins's suspicions that the killer might strike again. Sometimes the law was an ass, and there were plenty of cases where Khan found himself siding with the supposed wrongdoers. This was not one of them. He wanted to catch the killer of Daniel Eliot every bit as much as the rest of the team.

He nearly jumped out of his skin when DI Collins tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Don't sneak up on people like that,' he gasped, clutching at his chest in mock agony with one hand while pulling off his headphones with the other.

‘You're too young for a heart attack,' she said, grinning. ‘What's that's shit coming out of your headphones?'

Khan smiled warmly. ‘For your information that is the sound of the best band in Britain.' Then he shook his head slowly. ‘Man, your daughter must be so embarrassed by you.'

Collins nodded towards the images on the screen. ‘How are you getting on?'

‘I'm getting there. It's not easy, but I'm making progress.'

‘Can't you just magnify the image?'

The way this process was portrayed on television always made Khan laugh. Invariably the scene would take place in an FBI lab. An agent would sit down with the office geek and call up a video, then ask for a tiny corner of the image to be magnified. A few strokes of the keys and up the picture would come, allowing the agent to read the suspect's name off his credit card or some such nonsense.

‘If only it was that simple,' said Khan. ‘Each pixel – they're the little dots the pictures are made out of – each one only holds a certain amount of information. You simply can't blow up a picture to show that kind of detail if the detail isn't there in the first place. All you get is a giant blur.'

‘So what are you doing?'

‘Well, one of Blackwell's people has taken a copy of the images to Scotland Yard, but I know I can do the job faster and better. At the moment the best image-clarification software in the world comes from NASA and was developed to sharpen up images of distant planets and stars using pattern-recognition algorithms. Luckily I've managed to acquire a copy of it.'

‘What do you mean “acquire”?'

Khan smiled, and Collins decided not to enquire any further.

She squinted slightly as she stared at the screen. It looked as though the software was working already. In the time she had been sitting there, the still image of the van was slowly but surely becoming clearer and clearer. Each time the three-second video played through, a new layer of pixels was added to the image. Collins could begin
to make out one of the letters from the number plate: an
E
.

‘How long before you're done?'

‘If I was at home right now using my computer, it would already be finished. Since I'm in here using Met Police gear, which is more state-of-the-ark than state-of-the-art, I'll be another twenty minutes.'

‘Okay. Let me know as soon as you've got something we can read.'

She was interrupted by the ringing of her mobile. The number was withheld, and she assumed it was Higgins or Blackwell calling from Scotland Yard.

‘Hello, Princess.' She paused and looked around guiltily, convinced that every pair of eyes in the room was staring at her.

‘What the hell do you want!' she hissed.

‘I've tried calling but you wouldn't answer. So I had to withhold my number. I'm getting the funny feeling that you don't want to talk to me any more, and that's not good for either of us.'

She made her way out of the station and headed for a quite side street near by. ‘What the fuck do you want?'

‘You know what I want.'

‘I can't do it. You know I can't be a part of anything like that. I can't have blood on my hands.'

Jack's voice suddenly became threatening. ‘If you don't, then there's going to be a war.'

‘What the fuck are you talking about?'

‘Because this guy is not only talking to the police, he's also talking to the Kosovans.'

Jack was talking about a rival gang that had tried on
several occasions in the past two years to take over two of his estates. ‘If I can't put a stop to it, there's gonna be blood on the streets.'

‘Don't you dare try to put blood on my hands,' she hissed into the mouthpiece. ‘You hear me? Don't you fucking dare.'

Stacey was suddenly aware of someone standing behind her. She turned to see Woods with an excited look on his face.

‘What is it?' she asked.

‘The kid's got the registration number of the van. I think we've got him.'