Authors: Michael Robotham
“Just like that?”
“Our security cameras took footage of him when he came to collect the money. Give me an email address, I’ll send you the grab.”
“What about the photographs of Natasha?”
“They were taken on a mobile. He gave us four stills, which seem to run in a sequence, possibly taken from a video. I’m sending the email now.”
Moments later the computer chimes. Drury has mail.
“Thank you for your co-operation, Mr. Porter.”
“Always a pleasure to assist, DCI.”
Drury hangs up and clicks on the inbox. The attachment opens in a new window; a video file. Loading. The security footage shows a man entering a revolving door and crossing a foyer. He’s wearing a hoodie pulled up over a baseball cap. Baggy jeans. Hands in his pockets. He talks to a receptionist and refuses to be photographed for a visitor’s pass. Instead, he waits in the foyer until a female journalist appears in a mid-length skirt. He studies her, checking out her calves. The exchange takes place. He turns for the door.
“There!” says Drury.
The footage pauses. The man who called himself John Smith has glanced up at the CCTV camera, revealing his face for just a fraction of a second.
“Shit!” says Drury, grabbing his coat from the back of his chair. He opens his door and yells across the incident room. “Blake, Casey, Middleton… with me.”
B
lackbird Leys is one of the largest council estates in Europe, dating back to the fifties when urban planners thought the way to solve inner-city deprivation was to move the inner poor from the tenements and rundown neighborhoods to greenfield sites on the fringes of town. Out of sight, out of mind.
Instead, this utopian idea produced a cement and breeze-block badlands, as bleak as anything Dickens described, full of drug dens, illegal factories, brothels, squats, second-hand car yards, chop-shops and convenience stores with metal grates over the windows.
This isn’t tourist Oxford or mortarboard-and-gown Oxford. It’s where the “townies” live—the cleaners, maids, factory workers, delivery drivers and tradesmen who keep the city running; as well as the employed and the unemployable, the working class and the underclass.
The local landmarks are twin towers: Windrush and Evenlode; fifteen-story monuments to function that would be improved immeasurably by a wrecking ball or twenty pounds of Semtex.
The service entrance of Windrush smells of disemboweled bin bags, disinfectant and cat piss. I watch as a dozen officers in body armor climb the stairs. Another four of them use the lift and look like astronauts on their way to the command module.
Toby Kroger lives on the seventh floor with his younger brother. Their neighbors have been quietly evacuated. The SWAT team is in position. The lead officer has a helmet camera providing a live feed. Drury stares at the screen, an earpiece in his right ear.
“Door’s opening. Someone’s on the move.”
“It’s the brother.”
A kid, barely seventeen, comes out of the flat carrying a black bin bag. He leaves the door open and walks to the rubbish chute. Three seconds and he’ll reach the stairwell where the officers are waiting.
“He’s going to clock them,” mutters Drury. And then into the radio, “Get ready to move.”
The brother dumps the bag and reaches behind his back. He could be scratching himself. He could be reaching for a gun.
“Go now!” says Drury, screaming into the radio. “Go! Go! Go!”
The camera bounces and shakes as the wearer runs along the corridor to the open door. There are flashes of helmets and weapons.
“POLICE! GET DOWN! ON THE GROUND! NOW!”
Officers pile into the flat one by one until I can’t imagine there’s any room inside. Kroger is shirtless, lying flat on the floor. Spread-eagled. The TV is on. Joysticks. Pizza boxes. Beer cans.
Moments later, Kroger emerges, half-carried, handcuffed, looking like he’s just stepped on the third rail. From elsewhere in the building a dog barks, a baby cries, someone yells for quiet.
The entire operation has taken two minutes, yet it feels like I’ve watched it in slow motion. Blackbird Leys is unchanged. I glance along the empty street and notice a man walking along the footpath carrying a plastic bag. He stops suddenly, taking in the scene before ducking sideways into an alley. Moments later I see him crossing open ground, moving quickly, whippet-like. It’s Craig Gould.
Drury has gone upstairs to search the flat. Karen Middleton has stayed behind, manning the radio. I signal to her silently. Pointing. Gould is cutting between two buildings, heading away from us. Putting both hands on the top of a wall, he heaves himself up, right leg over. Gone.
Middleton to Drury on the radio: “Boss, someone clocked the police cars and started running. He just jumped the south wall. I’m in pursuit.”
Holstering her radio, the sergeant is already moving across the parking area. A short solid woman, convex rather than concave, she runs with surprising speed. Climbing on the bonnet of a parked VW, she goes over the wall head first, swinging out of view.
I go after her, skirting the wall and taking a walkway between two rows of terraces. Ahead I can see businesses, shuttered shops and a garage forecourt. Where has she gone?
There is waste ground to my right, protected by a wire fence. I see a shape, a mound of rags, moving. I climb the fence, swinging one leg over, cold metal on my testicles, the other leg, dropping hard on the far side. DS Middleton is lying there, winded, moaning, a cut on her bottom lip.
I take her radio.
“Officer down, repeat, officer down.”
She takes it from me. “I can do this.”
There’s a building ahead. The windows shattered. Derelict. My eyes follow the fence to a break in the wire. Gould can’t be too far ahead of me. Ducking through the hole, I follow the lane past lock-ups and garages. There’s a footpath. Bollards. Pedestrians only.
Forty paces and I reach a cross-street. Cars are parked on either side, already white with frost, fluorescent. I look both ways, trying to find him. A car engine fires up and rumbles through an illegal muffler. Designer noise. Moments later a Ford Escort roars towards me, Gould at the wheel, a manic gleam in his eyes. I’m standing in the middle of the road. He swerves and touches the brakes too hard. The rear end of the Escort slides out and clips a parked four-wheel-drive. Gould tries to correct. The car fishtails, losing traction.
He hammers the brakes, locking the wheels in a cloud of burning rubber. Sliding sideways, the Escort crumples into a van, metal embracing metal.
SWAT officers appear with guns drawn. Crouching. Aiming. Gould struggles to get his hands in the air. He can’t hear their instructions over the double-bleat of half a dozen car alarms.
Drury arrives, his eyes like black gravel.
“Get him out. Secure the area.”
Karen Middleton is with the DCI, bruised but unhurt.
Gould is dragged free. Handcuffed. Bundled into a police car. An open palm raps against the metal roof sending the car on its way.
“Are you OK?” asks Drury.
“I’m fine.”
“What were you thinking?”
“She went on her own.”
“Which is her problem. Not yours.”
Heavy boots are moving through Toby Kroger’s flat. A search is underway. Officers are opening drawers, cabinets and wardrobes, sliding hands beneath a mattress and a poster of a topless girl making love to a motorbike.
The flat reeks of bacon fat and old water. I watch from the hallway as covers are pulled off the unmade beds. DVD cases are opened and discarded.
The laptop is found in a drawer. Blinking. Asleep. Drury flips it open. The screensaver is a photograph of a heavy metal band. He double clicks the Apple icon in the top left corner of the screen and works his way to the main control panel. No password required.
Kroger has an inbox with 4,327 messages. His sent file contains 2,512.
Drury opens “Finder” and looks for a media file. A list appears, numbers instead of names. The thumbnails take longer to load. There are hundreds of video files, mostly porn clips and trailers.
“This computer is less than a year old,” says Drury. “The footage of Natasha was taken before then. Maybe he didn’t transfer the old files to the new machine.”
“He wouldn’t have deleted the Natasha footage,” I say.
“Why?”
“Look at the other clips he’s downloaded. Most of them are rape fantasies or women submitting to force. The Natasha footage will have special significance because he’ll feel a sense of ownership. Try searching for the earliest dates.”
Drury clicks on “View options” and ticks the box for “Date created.”
“He registered the computer in May. Look at how many files share that date?”
“He must have imported them from his previous computer,” says Drury, opening files. He watches several seconds of each clip. Pretty women with painted mouths, taken by force, penetrated, pretending. There is nothing erotic or titillating about the footage; instead, a mind-numbing banality, pain for the heartsick.
A new clip opens on screen. The poor-quality camerawork shows the floor and then a wall, before it focuses on a girl in a floral dress and messy hair being made to dance as wet towels flick at her legs and thighs. The music is coming from a mobile phone: Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.”
The men are sitting on wooden benches or standing. Balaclavas or handkerchiefs cover their faces. Natasha is begging them to let her go. One of them flicks a lit cigarette at her legs. She dances away. Exhausted. Slowing down.
“Give us a spin.”
She obeys.
“You can do better than that.”
“Faster!”
She turns faster. Her dress flies up, showing her underwear.
One of the men gropes Natasha’s breasts. She pushes him away. Another set of hands close around her waist, lifting her off the floor. Someone is reaching between her legs.
“No,”
she pleads.
“Please, let me go.”
“I thought you liked dancing.”
“I’ll dance, but don’t touch me.”
“Come on, shake that little tail.”
The footage stops and starts again. The angle is different. The towels are still whipping at Natasha’s thighs and stomach but now she’s naked.
There are six men visible on the video. A seventh is holding the camera.
“Yeah, give it to her!”
says a voice.
“Show us how you move.”
A fist grabs her hair and jerks her head up.
“Don’t cry, missy. When this is over you’ll walk funny for a while, but you’ll still have two legs.”
A
dream.
What I heard.
What I saw.
What I wish I could forget.
They must have followed us from the funfair, but I don’t know how they got inside the leisure center. Tash was trapped behind the wire, unable to get away.
I ran. I made it almost back to the main road where there were streetlights and houses, but I tripped over the bike rack, the same one as before. I thought my leg was broken. I hobbled towards the road.
A shadow moved on my right. His hands closed around my waist and his fingers covered my mouth, pressing against my nose. I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t tell him. I kicked and squirmed, but he held me tighter.
He carried me back to the leisure center. I thought I was going to suffocate. Instead, he put me down and tied my hands behind my back. I was sitting on the concrete outside the changing room.
I could hear music inside. They were laughing. Tash was begging them to let her go.
The man pulled my head up. He put a smooth stone in my mouth. “Don’t you swallow this or you’ll choke,” he said, as he pulled a piece of fabric between my teeth, tying it behind my head. Then he pulled up my shirt until it covered my face. I was embarrassed because he could see my bra.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” he said. “Your friend is being taught a lesson.”
I couldn’t see his face, but I smelled his sweat and the alcohol on his breath.
I heard voices inside. Music playing. Laughter.
“Swing those hips,” someone said.
“Show us how you move.”
“Lift your chin. I want to see your face.”
T
oby Kroger sits with his legs splayed, fingers locked behind his head, endeavoring to look like a man who has never known a moment of doubt or hesitation. Internally, there is a dynamic at work. He’s scared. Bewildered by the speed of his arrest. Wondering what moment of catastrophic inattention had led to this abrupt change in his fortunes.
I have read his file. Unemployed, uneducated, he’s one of three children whose parents divorced when he was seven. His grandfather and father worked on the production line at the Morris Motor Company in Cowley until the downsizing of the eighties saw the workforce cut by 90 per cent.