Death Row - Mark Pearson [110]
Sally shivered again and reflected on how fast things were moving now. Both literally and metaphorically. She just hoped that they weren’t too late. They finally had their man: she just hoped that Delaney would get them there in time – and in one piece – to save the missing boy, who had been away from his home for four days now. The statistics weren’t good.
She looked down at the invoice that Mrs Blaylock had given her. Dated from the summer of 1995 when this had all begun. But then she realised it had all begun earlier, like everything does. The perpetual cycle of paedophilia and abuse seeding itself through generation after generation after generation. Like cancer, Delaney had said, and he was right. She crumpled the paper in her hand again as Delaney swerved violently again to avoid an oncoming minibus.
A short while previously Mrs Blaylock had been puzzled to see Detective Inspector Jack Delaney and DC Sally Cartwright standing on her front doorstep once more.
‘Can I help you?’ she had asked.
‘When we here earlier you said something to your son, Mrs Blaylock.’
‘Yes …?’
‘About your husband being a proper publican.’
‘He was. Not like that layabout waste of space who’s run the place into rack and ruin. That pub was supposed to be my pension.’
‘So he no doubt kept proper records?’
‘Of course he did. He never fell foul of the law. Any of them.’
It was a shame the same couldn’t be said about her brother, Sally couldn’t help thinking as the woman led them into the house. Sally willed her hand off the side passenger strap and stared ahead, not wanting to give her boss the faintest idea of how absolutely terrified she was. Thick blobs of moisture fell onto the windscreen. Not quite hail, not quite snow, not quite rain. Fat splashes of sleet, she supposed, and felt the knot tighten in her stomach once more as Delaney blinked, leaning forward and trying to see before flicking on the windscreen wipers and not slowing the car down at all.
Sally shivered a little again, and not just from the cold. She was dreading what they would find at Bill Thompson’s house down on the Thames estuary, and remembering what they had seen in his place near Carlton Row.
The small child’s bedroom which looked like it hadn’t been touched since the mid-1950s. A wardrobe with a young boy’s clothes in it. Pictures from annuals pasted on the wall. A bedraggled teddy bear sitting on a small wooden chair. The whole room covered with dust.
And the other bedroom. Strewn with an older man’s clothes. A chest of drawers full of pictures of children. Obscene pictures that had brought tears to Sally’s young eyes, eyes that had already seen far too much suffering visited on children in her few years with the police. Pictures that had brought tears to Delaney’s eyes, too. Tears that he wasn’t ashamed to show.
And in the other freezer, next to the shickle-filled one. Frozen in a single clear block of ice. A Catholic priest, his eyes closed, his hands by his sides. Like some bizarre religious relic. Father Fitzpatrick, the fifth member of Peter Garnier’s group. Sally couldn’t understand how these people found each other out and made their associations. She only knew that they did. And for every paedophile ring that the Met or the international police forces busted, more would spring up around the world. Like fungal growth.
But most of those in this particular ring were either dead or dying and that left only one. Bill Thompson. The fisherman. The crab and lobster dealer. The fragment of shell found in Maureen Gallagher’s ear made perfect sense now. Even if how she’d become involved in it all didn’t. Sally understood why