Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [88]
Part Two
1
‘I’ve got something for you.’
‘About time too.’
‘These things don’t just happen overnight. It’s not the way it works.’
The guy at the other end of the phone – a clerk at SOCA, the Serious Organized Crime Agency – was getting a little weary of Zoë and the way she kept pressing him for an answer. It was Monday and in the last four days she’d called at least twice a day to find out if he had any results for the search she’d requested on a pornographer from London, nicknamed London Tarn.
‘Maybe not overnight, but within the next year isn’t too much to expect, is it?’
‘There’s no need to be sarcastic.’
‘Well, if you weren’t so fucking slow I wouldn’t have to be,’ she wanted to say, but she pressed her lips together, tapped her finger on the desk and kept her control. London Tarn had been the manager of the Bristol club she’d worked in – the only person from that time who’d known her real name. She’d never thought she’d hear of him again – she thought he had disappeared abroad, but no. Apparently all these years she’d been living on borrowed time, because he’d been in the UK all the while, somewhere in this area, and if he ever had any cause to be called into the nick and heard the name Zoë Benedict attached to the title ‘Detective Inspector’ – she’d be screwed, so screwed. That was the thing about the past. You never really appreciated its power until it was too late.
She swung the chair back and forth impatiently. At least her energy was back. Finding him was helping her not to think about Ben. ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘Fair dos. Thank you for what you’ve done. How’s it going to come to me?’
‘Email. It should be on your system now. Unless your web-master is being a jobsworth.’
She tapped in her password and scanned her inbox. It was there – an email loaded with attachments. ‘Yup – I’ve got it.’
‘There are some pieces missing. If they’ve got form you’ll get a mug shot – but some haven’t been convicted and we’re building intelligence packages on them, so on those the photos might be missing. Do you want me to take you through what’s there?’
‘Sure – I mean …’ She put her tongue between her teeth and began scrolling down the list of attachments. SOCA gathered information from an array of agencies: the old Vice and Street Offences squads, Serious Crime groups across the country, Customs and Excise, Trading Standards, even the Department of Work and Pensions. Sometimes the files they sent looked like ancient computer MS DOS printouts. She found one that looked promising and clicked on it. A list of names reeled down the screen. ‘It looks like a hell of a lot. Are there really that many pornographers in this country?’
‘I’ve narrowed it down for you best I could. I couldn’t find the name London Town anywhere.’
‘No – that was probably just a nickname he picked up out here.’
‘But you wanted me to look at Londoners, right?’
‘Londoners who came out to the west in the nineties.’
‘Well, as you can see there were lots. And a few I thought you might want to look at closely. There’s a Franc Kaminski. Made a fortune from an online porn site called Myrichdaddy. Serious Crime have been after him for years – the website’s got a portal to a newsgroup that’s basically a kiddie-porn site.’
‘Franc Kaminski? Polish?’
‘Maybe his parents. But he’s a Londoner.’
‘Kaminski?’ She tapped her teeth thoughtfully with her pen. ‘I don’t know. When did he come out west?’
‘1998.’
‘Nope. It’s not him. This guy arrived in 1993. And child porn sounds wrong.’
‘OK. Scratch him, and the next two – they’re definitely child porn. Look at Mike Beckton. He was there some time in the early eighties, hard to be specific. He’s in the slammer at the moment. There’s a photo.’
‘Yup – I can see that. It’s not him. And this guy under him?’ She was looking at a picture of a Middle Eastern guy. ‘Halim something or other, can’t pronounce it, that