Kevin Rickards was sitting in the furthest corner of the booth, bending a Tennent’s beer mat between his fingers and the tabletop as Valentine walked in. O’Briens bar was the last pub in the town with privacy booths, an appeasement to nostalgia on the part of the owners. When Valentine appeared in the doorway, Rickards nodded towards him and indicated the chair in front. Rickards had a calm air, and the look of a man who had learned to pick his fights well. His broad shoulders, perched on a broader chest, indicated a tensed stock of energy that probably hadn’t been given vent in some time. He looked formidable, or as Valentine was fond of saying in a strong Ayrshire lilt, not to be messed with.
‘Thanks for coming,’ said the DCI.
Rickards reclined in his chair, tipping his head so far back that it rested on the booth’s dark-panelled wall. He eyed the detective cautiously. ‘Save the gratitude till you’ve got something to thank me for.’
‘Can I begin the process with a pint?’
He nodded. ‘Make mine a heavy.’
As Valentine went to the bar he tried to recall if he’d ever met Rickards outside of the Tulliallan training academy. He couldn’t be sure, but he did remember many protracted poker matches in smoky dorms, with bawdy cracks and unedited, manly mockery. They were different times; today’s recruits were far more testosterone deprived. The detective was still holding the thought when he returned to the booth with their pints.
‘Makes a nice change to see a cop who isn’t a green tea drinker,’ said Valentine.
‘Ex-cop. But I get the point, there’s still a few of us around.’
Valentine immediately sensed a thawing. ‘You’ll remember Jim Prentice.’
‘Jim “the Gas”. How could I forget him?’
‘He showed me a picture in the paper today of one of our blokes, a uniform officer, in six-inch-high red heels. Apparently it was some PR stunt for the media unit. I honestly can’t tell whether they’re working for us or against us at this point.’
‘We must have the scrotes terrified – we’re not going to get too many collars chasing them in stilettos.’
Valentine laughed. ‘It does seem like the powers that be are more concerned with promoting a PC image than improving the clear-up rates.’
‘They’ve precisely no interest in clear-up rates, unless it fits their political agenda. They’ll tip millions into chasing people who post wrong-think on Facebook about one thousand four hundred girls being raped in Rotherham, but don’t dare suggest we actually go after bloody criminals. It’s too screwed up for words. I’m glad to be out of it to be honest.’
Valentine sipped his pint as Rickards continued towards a rant about the state of the police force and the betrayal of the communities it served. Law and order had already been sacrificed, it seemed, in favour of an anarcho-tyranny operated by a corrupted elite and a fawning political class who wanted nothing less than a complete collapse of the West. Which he predicted was coming, sooner than anyone dared to think.
‘Is that why you left, Kev?’ said Valentine.
‘Who told you I had any choice?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know how this works, Bob. In any line of policing that you show an aptitude for, you get promoted, except child trafficking – there you get your funding cut, suspended and ultimately booted out the door. And that’s if you play nice.’
‘What’s going on there, I mean, why do that?’
‘Because the tentacles reach all the way up, all the way to the very top of the pyramid.’
Valentine put down his pint and watched the white foam descending inside the glass. Rickards was touching on just the points that had been occupying his own thoughts. ‘What did you find that upset them?’
‘Kids being pimped out, that would be the main thing. That’s hard enough to handle; you never get your mind around the six-year-old child prostitutes with scabies and cysts, or HIV.’ A strong undercurrent of resentment ran through his voice. ‘I’ve seen girls that age, on the game, passed around and addicted to class A drugs, servicing suited-up clients right under the noses of social services, who just do not want to know; that’s the killer – nobody wants to know.’
‘I’ve heard similar stories recently, from one of their own.’
Rickards’ hard grey eyes wandered. ‘Jean Clark told me you’d called.’
‘I found her revelations difficult to take.’
‘You would, at first.’
‘Are you saying there’s worse to come?’
‘Jean comes from the care system, which is a paedophiles’ playground, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s who the care system’s covering for that you need to really worry about.’ A moment’s trepidation stalled his speech. ‘I need your assurance, Bob, that anything I tell you will remain confidential. Between you and me alone.’
Rickards’ statement killed the conversation. The sound of late-afternoon traffic fell around them. A weak, amber-tinted sunlight forced its way through the window of the booth as they sat facing each other through the silence.
Valentine tapped a blunt finger on the table. ‘I think you know that having my confidence goes without saying, Kev.’
‘We’re just two old-school coppers having a chat,’ he said, his voice brusque now. ‘But certain things have happened to me over the years that made me question everything.’
‘I understand. I’ve found myself questioning the very nature of reality since I took on this Abbie McGarvie case. I don’t know where I’d be without your old wingman.’
‘Ian Davis is a good bloke, he’s had it tough too.’
‘Do you mean his marriage?’
Rickards stayed silent for a moment, then picked up his drink. He seemed to be choosing his response carefully. ‘I can’t speak for anyone else but I can speak for what happened to me when I got too close to Abbie McGarvie’s abusers.’
‘Go on.’
‘My boss brought me in, told me to close the door, and warned me that if I didn’t drop the case it was over for me.’
‘What was over?’
‘Everything. He threatened to break me, suspension, gross misconduct, sacking. None of it worked. I called in HR and do you know what happened? He repeated the lot, right in front of the HR chief. Nothing scared him, except me upsetting paedophiles in suits. Eventually, I went to corruption command and that’s where it got interesting, that’s when the real threats started.’
‘Real threats?’
‘I’d worked under my boss for more than seventeen years, he’d been to my daughter’s wedding, and do you know what that bastard did? He threatened to have my little granddaughter taken into care. She was three years old, Bob, could you imagine how I took that? I’ve seen first hand what happens to kids in care. I wasn’t going to let that happen.’
Valentine watched the emotion welling in Rickards’ eyes and gave him a moment to compose himself. When enough time had passed for the DCI to continue his questioning he spoke again. ‘These paedophiles in suits, who are they?’
‘They’re a death cult.’ He swallowed, and tried to divert his gaze. ‘Psychopaths, a coven of evil. Does it matter what we call them? We all know who they are, they’re the ones we see every day, everywhere.’
‘Everywhere?’
‘They rule us, Bob. They’re the ones with all the power and they recruit from their own. Think about this, why wouldn’t they? They want psychopaths whose lineage has deleted the very parts of the mind that you and I hold most precious, most dear – the love we have for our children, and by extension our wider family, our fellow man.’
‘Wait a minute, you’re saying they prey on their own?’
‘They kill the empathy in their young by trauma control, that’s what the abuse is, a means of passing power and the means of maintaining it from one generation to another.’
‘But the other children,’ Valentine said, understanding, ‘the ones on the street and in the care system, that just makes them fodder for these rituals.’
‘Blood sacrifices are all part of it, the goal is to induct their own into their occult ways. They want our future rulers to have no empathy so that they can act cruelly without thought or conscience. At the top of our society, you need to understand, is a complete inversion of everything. Good is bad, ugly is beauty, pain is pleasure. Their genetics have deleted empathy for their fellow man, and their occult religion has created a system of cruelty that’s utterly unimaginable to the likes of you and me.’
Valentine ran his fingers through his hair, grabbing a bunch at the base of his skull. His temples had started to throb, a low persistent pulsing echoing in his eardrums. He slumped back in his chair and tried to take in the information that Rickards had just dispensed, but it didn’t seem to register. His world was listing, all previously held beliefs swaying with the dark depths of a murky new reality.
‘I see this strikes a chord,’ said Rickards. ‘Of course it does, you’re a thinking man, Bob, but most don’t want to believe. Most want to hide, to turn on the telly and take that false reality as the gospel. Even when they know, when they sense that something isn’t right, that our world is awash with injustice and evil, they’d sooner believe all the propaganda that we’ve never had it so good. There’s whole industries dedicated to dumbing us down and numbing our senses to all of this. It takes a strong soul to rebel against the programming.’
‘I don’t have a choice any more. I have a young girl lying on a mortuary slab to consider.’
‘Think about this, then: just look at the world today and you know what I’m saying makes sense. Think about how nothing seems right, how everything is upside down, how the people we’re supposed to look up to simply repulse us. Look at our world, the endless wars, the state of the country we call home, the depravity and degeneracy that’s being pushed twenty-four seven. Trust your gut, Bob; you know it’s telling you that something’s up. Think about the way those in charge whitewash everything that contradicts their hellish narrative and ask yourself who is really behind the curtain?’
‘I know what you’re saying makes sense, it’s just that I really don’t want to believe it.’
‘You need to break free of the programming. There’s no sense in this world, everything is mad but you have to become mad too to understand the problems we’re facing. If you don’t face up to that, there’s no hope.’ Rickards reached forward and put his hands, palms down, on the table. ‘Everyone is against us; you have to come to terms with that fact right now. These people don’t even want us to have the possibility to think like this, and they will do anything they can to stop it. What was it Orwell said? The image of the future is a boot stamping on a human face for ever. No, it’s much worse than that. Think about what you’ve already seen and imagine how it might become. They hate us, they hate our children, and they would sacrifice all of us for what they believe. This is nothing less than the very definition of evil.’