‘Carl Hooper is the sort of man who likes to have an insurance policy in his back pocket, in case things don’t work out quite the way he planned.’ I looked around the conference room, seeing total concentration on all of their faces: Una Burt, Derwent, Liv, Pettifer, Pete Belcott who was still snuffling with his cold, a pale-faced Georgia and Colin Vale, our resident technical expert. ‘He was fully committed to doing exactly what was required of him by his bosses at the Chiron Club, but he was also concerned that if it ever came to light, he wasn’t going to take the fall. They didn’t pay him enough for that, apparently.’
‘I bet he got paid more than we do,’ Belcott said.
‘Oh, undoubtedly. But he worked hard for his money. He was in charge of creating situations where illegal behaviour could occur, and making sure it was recorded when it did. He taped a lot of it himself on his mobile phone and with a secret body-worn camera in his lapel, and he copied footage from other sources. According to him he didn’t personally blackmail anyone with the information he recorded but it would not shock me if he had a side hustle that he won’t admit, especially having watched what you’re about to see.
‘Now, he’s no Spielberg, but this is a rough cut of the events that took place at the Chiron Club two years ago, and at the after-party. The first part of the tape is footage from the club.’
I pressed play and Derwent hit the lights as the big TV on the wall flashed into life. The footage was amateurishly shaky but organised, starting with a long shot of the big, brass-mounted calendar in the hall showing it was the twenty-second of July. The recording cut out, to be replaced by a shot of three men huddled together, snorting coke off the back of their hands. The camera panned over their faces and then swung away to face the floor.
‘Do we know who they are?’ Burt asked.
‘I don’t recognise them,’ I said, ‘but I’m sure Hooper knows exactly who he was filming.’
The next few minutes consisted of jumpy, poorly filmed incidents – a fist fight, a man groping a waitress, another forcing his dining companion’s head down towards his crotch while she fought to free herself and the other men at the table roared. He had filmed Antoinette’s conversation with Peter Ashington and his companion through a doorway. They walked out of view, Peter turning to grin knowingly at the other man whose face was still hidden. I felt sick as I watched her disappear to her fate, knowing what awaited her.
‘That’s the girl who was raped in the cloakroom,’ I explained for the benefit of the others. ‘Here’s footage of Hooper getting the funds to pay her off. That’s one of the administrative staff at the club. We don’t know if she knew what the money was for, but as you can see, she doesn’t seem surprised to be asked for it.’
The angle was off, the woman appearing diagonally as she counted out the money, licking her finger to speed up the process. She looked bored, as if this was routine. Hooper filmed the stack of money disappearing into the envelope. Then a jump to Antoinette, her mascara smudged under her eyes, sobbing as a grey suit helped her into a car.
‘This all corroborates Antoinette’s story,’ I said. ‘If we want to charge Peter Ashington with rape, this is going to be useful.’
‘Why wouldn’t we charge him?’ Colin Vale asked.
‘I need Antoinette’s cooperation to take it further, and the CPS may not approve a charge if they feel there’s no chance of getting a conviction. He says she knew what was going to happen and pretended to put up a fight so they had the thrill of forcing her. She took the money afterwards, which helps his case. And he’s plausible. I actually think he believes that story even though I know Antoinette was telling me the truth. But who’s going to get the benefit of the doubt?’ I pulled a face. ‘I don’t know if I’d give evidence in her shoes. It wouldn’t be fun.’
‘It’s not meant to be fun. It might stop him from doing it to someone else,’ Derwent snapped. ‘Don’t you think she has a duty to other women to try and have him locked up?’
I looked at him in the half-light from the TV, surprised at his tone. ‘I think it’s up to her to decide what’s best for her recovery.’
‘What happens next?’ Una Burt asked.
‘Then we get some footage of Sir Marcus making his acceptance speech. Hooper filmed this properly, with his camera the right way up. Presumably no one minded him filming it.’
The screen filled with Sir Marcus bowing and laughing as he prepared to cut an enormous cake with a long sword. Two of the men grabbed one of the girls and bent her over so he could pretend to cut off her head. Then he drew up her skirt and smacked her bottom with the flat of the sword. A roar of approving laughter went up from the throng. When the men released her, she stumbled away, clearly upset.
‘Those bastards,’ Georgia said clearly. ‘I want to arrest all of them.’
‘This is the part where they were playing nice,’ I said. ‘It gets a lot worse later on.’
She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself, as if she was cold, though the conference room was stifling.
‘Right, the next part is in a car, on the way to the house in the country for the after-party. According to Hooper, the premises will have changed a lot since this was filmed. He said the house belonged to an elderly club member who had died. His family were planning to sell the place but they hadn’t done anything with it apart from emptying it out, so it was basically derelict. Since this party it’s been sold and completely refurbished to turn it into a luxury spa hotel, so everything you see here is gone and you can forget being able to recover anything forensically.’
I pressed play and we watched two young men in dinner jackets groping drunk, slack-jawed girls while they were squashed together in the back seat of a car. The pair on the right progressed to full sex, unnoticed by the other couple who were drinking and pawing one another. Hooper had filmed from the driver’s seat. As he put the phone down it caught the passenger for a split second. He was asleep with his head turned away from the camera. Light-brown hair, a neat ear, a square jaw: I thought it looked like Luke, and from the way Derwent shifted uneasily, he’d thought the same thing. No one else in the room appeared to have noticed, I thought, and was glad of it. He had been in Peru, I reminded myself.
He had said he was in Peru, and I’d accepted it based on some Facebook posts. I didn’t want to find out I’d been wrong. But he wasn’t a member of the Chiron Club; they’d never have let him go to their private parties. It was just a coincidence.
‘This is inside the house, is it?’ Burt asked and I forced myself to focus on answering her.
‘Yes. Hooper explained this to us. Basically, these are the people he recruited as the entertainment for the evening. This is backstage.’
Two model-like girls looked up and waved as one passed a joint to the other. They looked dazed. The taller of the two wore a dress that had slid off her shoulder so one small breast was exposed, though she seemed oblivious. A beautiful dark-skinned man practised capoeira moves as a breeze moved the curtains of the open window behind him. A young man wearing ripped jeans and nothing else threw the camera a grin then dropped to perform a few push-ups, clapping his hands between each one. The tattoo on his arm flexed as he moved. I paused the video for an instant.
‘This is the man who said he was Jonah Powell.’
The camera panned away from him, to a girl in a black dress who was winging her eyeliner with a steady hand. I paused it again.
‘And this is Iliana Ivanova, the girl who disappeared.’
‘Is that it?’
‘There were a few others who came down in the cars. Hooper told us this was an exclusive little event. They only had ten members here, and half of them left early to go somewhere else. The club were targeting one or two of the men who hadn’t blotted their copybooks yet. The kids they hired in for the night were told they would double their money if they managed to provoke any bad behaviour. That was a lot of money for them. It was a competition, fuelled by drugs that Hooper supplied.’
‘What kind of drugs?’ Belcott asked.
‘Ecstasy, for starters, and then GHB and mephedrine. It was designed to lower their inhibitions, along with the alcohol.’
‘Did it work?’
‘All too well,’ Derwent said. ‘This is Iliana dancing.’
She spun around and around on a terrace, her dress flying up as she laughed. One of the men, now without his dinner jacket, got up and caught her, then carried her away into the darkness.
‘Who was that?’ Burt said sharply.
‘Don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever happened to her in the garden didn’t kill her. You’ll see her again in a bit,’ I said. ‘This is Jonah again, in the pool.’
A naked man with dark curly hair and a beard ran into view, moving away from the camera. He was unrecognisable, no matter how much we’d played with slowing the images and trying to sharpen them. He leapt into the water. Jonah whooped, exultant, and gathered him into his arms, and the two of them kissed, hard. Jonah tangled his hands in the other man’s hair. They sank under the water, their bodies twisting, play-fighting like otters.
‘How much more of this is there?’ Colin asked.
‘Not much.’
‘I’m sorry, it’s just not my cup of tea,’ he said plaintively, and the room dissolved into laughter. I waited for everyone to calm down again.
‘I get the impression that Hooper left them to it for a while. Maybe he felt he was getting in the way. The next thing he filmed is inside the house.’ I let the video play: a rumpled bed, filmed from the doorway of an otherwise empty room. Jonah was getting up, clambering past the man who was asleep face-down. He paused to drop a kiss on one of the man’s buttocks, grinning at the camera again afterwards. He was naked but totally unselfconscious about it, a performer enjoying the attention.
‘Did you have fun?’ Hooper’s voice was quiet as if he didn’t want to risk waking the sleeping man.
‘Always. I’ll be feeling it tomorrow though. He was tougher than he looked. He was mean to me, Carl.’ Jonah stuck out his bottom lip, then picked up his jeans and took something out of the pocket. The tattoo on his arm moved as he did, the dragon swelling with breath as his bicep bulged.
‘What’s that?’ Hooper demanded.
‘A little something to help me come down.’ Jonah flashed his trademark wide smile and swallowed the pill he’d palmed. He turned away and his hand went up to his throat as if the pill hadn’t gone down properly.
‘Are you OK? Jonah?’
One minute he was standing there, his back to the camera, his muscles moving under his skin. The next he had fallen heavily to the floor where he clawed at his face, his mouth frothing.
‘He’s having a fit,’ a male voice said from behind Hooper. ‘Help him.’
‘That’s not a fit. That’s an overdose.’
On the floor, Jonah had started to jerk spasmodically. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling, staring. The froth slid out of his mouth and down his cheek.
‘Do something.’
‘I can’t. He’s fucked.’ Hooper sounded genuinely upset, and furious. I paused the film.
‘Right, I asked him about this. He said he had supplied the best quality drugs and he knew exactly what everyone had taken. He said Jonah arrived with this, without Hooper’s knowledge. He doesn’t know what it was but he thinks it was something that was cut with rat poison or something else toxic and that’s why Jonah reacted this way. We never got to test his body so we don’t know. It could have been the cumulative effects of all the other drugs he took reacting with whatever this was.’
‘This next bit is a proper horror show.’ Derwent turned away from the screen and I didn’t blame him. We had watched it twice together, which was twice too often.
On the screen, Jonah continued to spasm. He vomited foamy purple slime. Dark, reddish-brown liquid seeped out from between his legs.
‘What is that?’ Belcott demanded.
‘That would be the contents of his bowels.’
‘He’s dying,’ Georgia said.
‘And Hooper is still filming,’ I pointed out. ‘Which is good, in a way, because then we get this.’
A woman’s scream tore through the room and Hooper swung the camera around. A small grey-haired man stood swaying behind him in trousers and an undone white shirt: Sir Marcus Gley, barely recognisable as the suave gentleman who had tried to charm me. Beside him was Iliana, who wore black suede heels and lace knickers and nothing else. Her make-up was smudged under her eyes now. She screamed again.
‘Help him! You can’t just watch. You animals, you animals, you killed him. You killed him.’
Sir Marcus snarled, ‘Shut up, you stupid bitch. Will you shut up?’
She ignored him. ‘You killed him. You’re murderers. Murderers.’
‘Then I’ll make you shut up.’ He grabbed her by the neck, squeezing her throat. Her face went red, her eyes popping. She clawed at his hands but his grip tightened.
Hooper turned away to check on Jonah. He bent over him, swearing softly. The young man’s eyes were rolled back in his head and his chest was still. Hooper pressed his fingers into Jonah’s neck, searching for a pulse, then gave up.
‘He’s dead.’ He turned as Sir Marcus took his hands away from Iliana’s throat. She slid to the floor, lying at his feet in a clumsy tangle of limbs. The strings had snapped; the puppet was broken. Only the dead could manage to look so totally abandoned.
Silence hissed on the recording for a few seconds. Sir Marcus was rubbing his hand over his mouth again and again, staring down. Hooper spoke again.
‘You killed her.’
‘No, I didn’t.’ Sir Marcus looked up. ‘It was an accident. You saw.’
‘I … did.’ He sounded uncertain.
‘Oh, come off it, Hooper. Don’t pretend you care. She wasn’t worth much alive and she’s worth less dead. Make it go away.’
‘What?’
‘All of this.’ He waved at the room. ‘The boy. The girl. Make them disappear. You’ll get some kind of bonus for it, obviously.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Get my car.’ He started to button his shirt, his hands trembling. ‘This was supposed to be fun.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
‘Hell of a way to end an evening.’ He walked away, accidentally kicking one of Iliana’s shoes down the hall in front of him. I felt he would have liked to kick her too.
The screen went black and Derwent put the lights on again. I turned to face the others.
‘That’s the end of the film Hooper made. According to him, they staged the scene to make it look as if Jonah had drowned in the swimming pool because they wanted to guarantee that the man who slept with him would stay silent. Hooper thought that a dead body would shut him up more effectively than anything else, and it did seem to work. They’d already decided to dispose of both of the bodies in the crematorium though. They fished Jonah out of the pool once the guy had left, transported both corpses to the house in London, cut them up and took them to their friendly body disposal facility in Berkshire.’
‘Why didn’t they do that with Paige Hargreaves?’ Derwent asked.
I shrugged. ‘Maybe they couldn’t use the crematorium for some reason. The river is right in front of the club – it wouldn’t require a massive leap of imagination to dump her there.’
‘So we need to arrest Sir Marcus Gley,’ Una Burt said. ‘Wonderful.’
‘Not yet,’ Derwent said. ‘He’s well known and he doesn’t know we have this footage. He might run between now and when we’re ready to arrest him, but we can alert the border agencies in case he tries to hop on a plane. Before we bring him in I think we need to trace the other people who were at the party, ideally including the man who was in the swimming pool with Jonah and the kids who were paid to be there. Hooper couldn’t or wouldn’t ID the swimmer for us but we’ll get a name from one of the other members if we ask around. We need to talk to the crematorium and get their version of events, and then we need to make some arrests there too, for assisting an offender and unlawful disposal of a corpse. Anything we can think of, basically, to put pressure on them to talk. The bodies were cut up in the house on the Bishops Avenue so the crematorium staff could pretend they didn’t know they were burning human corpses, but the club paid ten grand each for the cremations. The staff at the crematorium must have known they were being paid to look the other way.’
‘We’ve tangled with the lawyers from the Chiron Club before,’ I said. ‘They’re not fun. We want to have all the facts before we arrest him. And we still need to process the Bishops Avenue house forensically, and talk to Bianca about what actually happened to her there before we found her.’
‘And go through the rest of the paperwork from the club and the safe at the house,’ Liv said. ‘That’ll take a week, minimum.’
‘Right,’ Burt said. ‘Well, now that Bianca has been found, this investigation no longer requires a fast-time response. Some of you have been working silly hours and you look half dead. It’s Saturday, and it’s a bank holiday weekend, in case you hadn’t noticed. Take some time off and come back on Tuesday with as much energy as you can all muster. Let’s aim to arrest Sir Marcus towards the end of next week. That should give us time to get organised.’
‘Thanks, boss,’ Derwent said, looking surprised and gratified.
‘You deserve it.’
I was startled at the wave of relief I felt at the thought of time off. It was so long since I’d slept properly, or eaten an actual meal. I could rest for two whole days. It was as good as a holiday.
‘But when you come back, I want you at your best. I want to lock that man up for a very long time,’ Una Burt said, waving a finger at the screen. ‘I want him ruined for what he did to that girl. And the rest of them. He needs to be dealt with and we’re going to do it properly.’