Her Nightly Embrace Read online

  NINE

  Ken and Clive worked closely with Marcie on their part of the campaign, or “op,” as she liked to call it. Not all the names on their list were in London, so it involved driving up the motorways to reach them. The firm kept several cars for its investigators. The black BMWs were the official cars, as much to look impressive to clients as for their reliability. There was also a VW van for hauling things and people. The Ford and Vauxhall, exactly the same models that plainclothes police drove, were for jobs that we didn’t want to be caught doing. The license numbers used were either those registered to a distant relative of Roger’s who was long deceased or actual license numbers registered to cars in the Metropolitan Police Force. Yes, it was all highly illegal, but that never stopped Roger. The general MO of the firm was “whatever we can get away with.”

  Ken and Clive took the Vauxhall.

  “So what’s bothering you now?” asked Mark when we went up on the roof to have a spliff.

  “Ken and Clive visiting those trolls to give them a ‘talking-to,’ ” I said. “Should we worry about becoming accessories to what they might do to those people?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it. Ken and Clive never lose control.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “You forget that Ken and Clive used to be pretty decent coppers.”

  “I never asked about their time in the force. They don’t exactly invite questions.”

  “No, really, they used to be quite shit-hot as far as old-school, slightly sexist, slightly racist, but fair coppers went. They were bloody good detectives. They were thorough, diligent, never fitted up the wrong person.”

  By ‘old-school,’ it was probably safe to assume they used to beat up suspects to extract information and confessions. I have to admit I make Ken and Clive sound like a couple of meatheaded thugs, which was not true considering they were the ones who had trained me in investigative methods and procedures when Roger first hired me. They taught me what to look for when I entered a room, what kinds of behavior to look for in people, what to look for in what they said, how to read their body language, how to follow someone on foot or in a car without them cottoning on, how best to pick locks, what to say while undercover, the various techniques of face-to-face social engineering, how to carry myself to look absolutely convincing in any situation. They also taught me some basic fight and self-defense strategies, how and when to throw a proper punch—the type of punch that wasn’t about showing off, but to put the other bloke down long enough for you to get your point across or get away.

  “So what went wrong for them?” I asked. “It sounds like they actually liked being coppers.”

  “They just had to catch a case that did them in,” Mark said. “It was a dead little boy. Orphan, so nobody really cared. Kid was supposed to be part of a charity foundation that took care of kids in trouble. This one had been sexually abused repeatedly, then killed and dumped. Investigation kept getting stalled. Witnesses were thin on the ground. Lots of stonewalling. Ken and Clive wouldn’t let it go and eventually got a suspect: Lord Fowell-Treacle, Earl of Lowton, and sponsor of the charity.”

  “The one that went missing? I thought he did a runner, left the country because he was a suspect. I didn’t know Ken and Clive were the officers in charge of the investigation.”

  “Ken and Clive reckoned he was part of a pedophile ring that included politicians, tycoons, and members of the Establishment.”

  “Is this the same one that’s been in the news lately?”

  “Probably. You think it’s a big deal now, it was almost too unbearable to consider back in the nineties. And two lowly detective constables with a working theory and mountain of circumstantial evidence were not going to get far. The higher-ups started telling them they should drop it. Then Special Branch came in and asked for their notes and everything they had on it. The case was officially closed.”

  “So it was going to be covered up.”

  “They did cover it up. But Ken and Clive weren’t about to let it go. They just bided their time.”

  “Where is this going?”

  “This, my son, is where the tale enters the realm of pure speculation. It’s all supposition because there are no actual witnesses.”

  I saw Lord Vishnu standing behind Mark, by the balcony, listening intently to this tale. Lord Vishnu was all about the balance between Good and Evil, so of course he would take an interest. I had a sinking feeling the outcome of this story was going to be mostly Evil.

  “Let’s say you had an aristocrat who had been getting away with his depraved, wicked ways for ages, protected by his privilege and the foot soldiers of the Establishment at his disposal. A Big Bad Wolf in real life. Without evidence or the possibility of arrest, conventional justice was just not going to happen. Until someone decided to take the law into their own hands. They knew he didn’t travel around with bodyguards, so smug in his certainty that he was untouchable. Well, they were definitely going to touch him.

  “They watched him for weeks, months even, till they knew his routines. They knew his comings and goings, when he went to dinner at his clubs, which brothels he went to.”

  “Were they trying to catch him with a kid?”

  “It wasn’t about that anymore. They knew he did it. They didn’t feel the need to catch him at it. They waited for the right evening. The late night where he was alone in his car, driving out of London, on his way home to his estate, on the dark road where there were no CCTV cameras and it was near a forest. Imagine, if you will, the ending of a dark fairy tale.”

  Now Kali showed up, her skin all black, leaning on Lord Vishnu’s shoulder, her tongue licking her lips in anticipation.

  “Imagine our two gay huntsmen, pure of heart and full of hate, pulling over the evil lord on a lonely road in the dark of night, introducing themselves as policemen checking him for his alcohol levels. They got him to step out of his car to do a sobriety test. He’d had a couple of whiskies at his club. He would grumble as they led him away from the car and into the woods. There they would read him the charges against him, and after his protests, he would go from indignation to outrage to outright threats. The old ‘Do you know who I am? I’ll have your guts for garters!’ They would let him shout his fill until he spent all his strength and energy. Eventually it would dawn on him that he would not be leaving those woods, ever. There would be no negotiation, no mercy no matter how much he pleaded. Our intrepid huntsmen were determined to put an end to the rampage of this Big Bad Wolf. They would make sure he would be done, and he would never, ever be found. His remains would be buried deep in a pit, so deep a random dog could never dig them up. They even went back for his car, drove it into the forest. They spent weeks picking out a spot, one for the wolf and one for his car. They buried his car, as well. You could say the earth had swallowed him up, and everyone went on with their lives none the wiser. The two huntsmen awoke from this dream and went back to their lives in the city as policemen.”

  “That’s very pat, Mark, but—”

  “Ah, would that it ended there. There was a huge hubbub over the disappearance of Lord Fowell-Treacle, of course. Big search, manhunts, detectives and investigators sent abroad chasing leads and rumors, the biggest vanishing in Britain since Lord Lucan. Our huntsmen didn’t give a fuck, of course. Wasn’t their case. They went back to be DCs, chasing crooks and murderers.”

  “Yeah, I remember the Fowell-Treacle Disappearance. I was still in university at the time.”

  “So being coppers, our huntsmen knew all about forensics and how not to produce incriminating evidence, how to hide their tracks. They’d seen the crims they went after try it to varying degrees of success. They knew how to do it better. As you know, that’s what they taught us during training here in Golden Sentinels.”

  “So why didn’t they stay in the Met?”

  “Ah, well, what if their first was only that—their first? What if they got a taste for taking care of the murderers that would oth
erwise get away with it?”

  “Is any of this true?”

  “I told you, Ravi. All this is pure speculation. So to continue. The huntsmen start dabbling in this kind of cleaning every now and then. Never their own cases. They have alibis prepared beforehand. The flaw in their ongoing hobby is that they perhaps got a bit too good at it. The higher-ups start getting an inkling that they had extracurricular activities and start getting nervous. There was a common pattern to the disappearances. They were all pedophiles, some of them linked to the ring they started hearing about in the Fowell-Treacle case. That means the Establishment might start getting nervous about questions. Now the huntsmen’s bosses had two suspects but no evidence. What to do? Why, the simplest solution would be to sack them, of course.

  “How they did it was quite simple. Charge Ken and Clive with corruption and taking bribes. All it took was to plant some evidence in their lockers, cash and bags of cocaine from Evidence, and hey presto! You got two bent coppers on your manor! They called Ken and Clive in for a quiet chat. They could charge them and have a trial and send them to prison, or they could quietly resign, give up their pensions, join the world of us punters with no authority. Become someone else’s problems. Since Ken and Clive were not interested in prison, they took the sacking. And just in time for Roger to hear about them through his various grapevines and come a-knocking. They were his first investigators after he and Cheryl set up Golden Sentinels and found there was so much work that they needed more than just him doing the legwork.”

  “Mark, how do you know all this, anyway?”

  “Years ago, over drinks, of course. Most of it came from Roger. The rest from Ken and Clive. Of course, they weren’t going to own up to it. You don’t confess to anything if you can help it. They spoke of the night in the woods in the most removed and abstract language you can imagine. That way it became speculation and hearsay, useless as testimony in court.”

  I wondered if Ken and Clive were already lovers by then or if that had come later. Were they bound together by this or were they already attracted to each other, all under the noses of their colleagues, without ever coming out of the closet? No one would ever suspect Ken and Clive of being gay from looking at them. Besides, it was natural to assume Ken and Clive would smash their faces in if they called them poofs. That was how Ken and Clive liked it.

  Over Mark’s shoulder, I saw Lord Vishnu salute us and vanish. Kali laughed, danced a dervish, her many arms swinging as she spun and went on her way into the sky.

  “So don’t you worry about Ken and Clive dropping us into anything,” Mark said. “We’re well covered.”

  We finished off the spliff, and Mark ground it out with his foot before we went back down to our desks.

  TEN

  Sure enough, to nobody’s surprise, Ken and Clive put at least two of the trolls on their list in the hospital.

  They started small. The first one on their list was a university student who created the list that incited its members to gather as the flash mob that trashed Delia McCarthy’s standee and display table at the Waterstones on Piccadilly. They knocked on his door late one night and flashed the rather convincing warrant cards Benjamin had whipped up for them on this occasion. They introduced themselves as Smith and Jones from the Internet Harassment Squad of the Metropolitan Police Force, which didn’t really exist. They showed him printouts of the screencaps of the page where he invited people to gather and trash Delia’s books at the shop. They showed him a page of code that traced his DNS ID and ISP address, through which they easily got his name and address from his IP provider. The kid’s face went pale with each bit of evidence they presented. They knew just how to sound like authentic coppers. Then they smacked him about and smashed up his computer.

  “We don’t care if you have your term paper on it, or your music collection, or pictures of your girlfriend,” they said. “Welcome to Real Life Consequences to your actions, you little shit.”

  The second troll was a pudgy thirty-five-year-old furniture mover in Bristol. Ken and Clive drove all the way out there to put the scares into him, too. They knocked on his door just before dinner. His wife and kids were there. He flat-out denied it. Then they showed him and his wife the printouts from his social media account with the path back to his IP address. He was shocked when his wife came clean and said it was actually she who had sent the abusive comments at Delia McCarthy. Then she collapsed before they laid a finger on her. Turned out she was suffering from stress and mental illness. Her husband called an ambulance. Ken and Clive didn’t even soften. They just told her and her husband that if they see any more abuse coming from his account, they would be back to arrest them. That put the fear into them.

  The third one was a twentysomething chartered accountant who was perfectly normal, other than he got a kick out of sending threats to Delia McCarthy. He thought it was a laugh. Ken and Clive beat the shit out of him outside his local pub, broke his fingers, and gave him the “we know who you are, what you did, and where you live” warning.

  Marcie had insisted in knowing the details, and Ken and Clive actually agreed to tell her the details. She told them she didn’t want them to be the only ones to shoulder the responsibility, and somehow, they trusted her. Whatever history they had with her before I joined the firm, I guess it went deep. If any of us ever got arrested or interrogated, we could be individually leaned on or gamed into giving up the story. We were now in Occam’s razor territory.

  “One of the worse, most vicious, ones was number four, the twat in the wheelchair,” Clive said. “Stuff he was spouting at Ms. McCarthy, calling for her to be raped and chopped up, he was still sendin’ abuse at her when we knocked on his door. And he was still a right shit, didn’t change his personality when we rumbled him with the transcripts.”

  “You beat up a man in a wheelchair?”

  “He was playing abuser, so we treated him like any other abuser,” Ken said.

  “We tipped him out of his wheelchair, took the battery out, took the wheels apart, let him try to put it back together,” said Clive.

  “Then we smashed his computer, too.” Ken said.

  “Jesus!”

  “Relax. His caregiver would come over and find him the next morning.”

  Why was I the only one in the office who was appalled? Was everyone else that jaded?

  As they told us each encounter, I could feel the karma in the room draining down the pipe. Their rule of thumb was, the more savage the troll, the more savage their punishment on him—for it was usually a him but for the rare exemption of mentally ill women. They sussed out the one who posted Delia’s address and broke his ribs. I had the feeling Ken and Clive might have been content to just drive up and down the country beating the shit out of dickheads all the time.

  By the end of the week, the message was getting through, if the fear and panic online was anything to go by. Some of Ken and Clive’s victims posted on the message boards dedicated to slagging off Delia McCarthy that Rexton’s barmy army congregated in. They talked about mysterious phone calls that threatened to expose them to their mums and school (that was us). Their computers getting mysteriously hacked (again, us). Their getting forced to upload humiliating photos of them holding up the confessional signs. All this created a sense of escalation that culminated in the first reports of two Men in Black showing up on their doorsteps and presenting them with evidence of their harassment, sounding like coppers, and laying the hurt on them. They tried looking up the Internet Security Division and found it didn’t exist in any police force in the UK. That triggered the paranoid conspiracy theory talk, which was what we wanted.

  “The government is coming for us!” “FASCISM IS HERE!!!” “They’re going to disappear us! Please get a screengrab of this page to prove we said it here first!” “shit im fukin scared now” and so on.

  Of course Olivia would proceed to hack into the message board and cause those posts to “mysteriously” disappear, which only fanned the fear and paranoia.

/>   Then they started reporting Ken and Clive’s beatings.

  “How can they do this?” “Broke my ribs hurts to breath.” “fuckin hell they’re really coming for us!” “No one is safe!” “I can’t take this anymore.”

  There was no way we would get them all—there were over four hundred of them out there. We just needed to get enough of them, the loudest ones, the ones the rest trusted most, and the fear would spread throughout the ranks.

  And gradually, the members of the board began to drop away one by one. Olivia wrote a bot to track the hangers-on that would alert us if any of them did more than post the odd rant, and we would just go after them anew. All it would take was for Olivia to hack into their computers and own them from there.

  Marcie was waging war on behalf of her client.

  Delia McCarthy had unleashed hell.

  And hell was us.

  ELEVEN

  Compared to all this other stuff going on, what Julia did with Rexton was positively tranquil.

  As we were making calls in the office and Ken and Clive were gallivanting about the country terrorizing the trolls, Julia showed up on George Rexton’s doorstep in West London. She told him his publisher had sent her to help him with any admin work or stuff like picking up his shirts while he finished his novel.

  “I’m such a big fan,” she said. “Anything you need, just let me know.”

  It took her two days to become indispensable to him.

  It took him three days to become completely besotted with her.

  “I just giggle a lot with him,” Julia said. “He thinks I’m a bimbo, so he would never suspect me of anything.”

  Julia would drop in on Rexton once a day to check on him, and when he let her in, the tiny camera she was wearing on her broach would record the layout of his living room, including where his work desk and computer were. Olivia had already hacked into his computer and turned on its webcam so we could watch him all day. The feed was recorded on Olivia’s servers here at Golden Sentinels.