Julie wouldn’t have seen the pattern if it wasn’t for Alex talking about the locked-in kids.
He wouldn’t have even known to look, never mind where to look.
He had ringed two names in red: Annie Cho, and Bethany Laws.
He put the phone down, and picked up the pen, bouncing it on its point half a dozen times, thinking.
The girls had too many things in common for their lives—and deaths—not to be linked. Even if taken individually, the events around their deaths weren’t suspicious—strange, yes, but not suspicious—but collectively they should have been enough to raise more than just an eyebrow. Not least the fact that they’d all sleep-talked the same five words over and over: The Horned God is awake. Three of the girls who had been admitted to hospitals across Greater London as lock-ins in the last twenty-four hours had died in the last six, all seemingly of natural causes. Talking to their doctors, the general consensus was that their bodies had simply failed them. It was possible, of course, that whatever had caused them to shut down initially had taken too much out of them in the end, but for one thing, in two of the three hospitals nurses reported seeing a pair of disheveled youths milling around the wards in the time leading up to their deaths. Julie had emailed photographs of some of the missing children Tenaka had given him, and got a positive ID on Stephen Blackmoore and Rupert Brooke. In both cases, the witnesses were at pains to say that both boys appeared to have been sleeping rough for a long time and remarked upon their smell and that their faces were smeared with streaks of white chalk, like war paint.
Now he had a direct link between the disappearances and the locked-in kids, one he could file on a police report, even if he couldn’t say what had caused him to look for one in the first place. There were several more connections he could never file, like the fact that he believed Blackmoore and Brooke were agents of the thing that had come into this world because of what he and Josh and Damiola had done to Seth, and that they were removing the anchors that allowed them to cross over from Hell so that they couldn’t be banished. He bounced the ballpoint pen half a dozen times more, thinking back to that first call to the Rothery that had opened the door to this nightmare. He’d never hated Taff Carter more than he did now. If Taff had never taken Seth Lockwood’s bloody money, none of this stuff would have been happening to him.
Julie put the pen down and sank back into his chair.
He needed a drink. Not that drinking would help.
Ellie Taylor stopped at his desk and looked over his shoulder as she put a cup of black coffee on his desk.
“Thanks,” Julie said, without looking up.
“Three?”
He nodded. “And I got positive ID on Blackmoore and Brooke being seen inside two of the hospitals.”
“What the hell’s going on, Julie?”
“No idea,” he lied.
“You’ve seen the other reports coming in this morning? Dozens of isolated incidents of gangs of schoolkids attacking people in the streets of South London.”
He’d seen them.
“It’s getting ugly,” he agreed.
What he couldn’t say was what he feared the most: that this, too, was linked to Arawn’s return, and that the disaffected youth were being manipulated into fighting his battle for him. And that, in turn, was pretty much on Julie.
The coffee was still too hot to drink.
Tenaka appeared in the doorway. “Taylor, Gennaro,” he curled a finger in their direction, “the incident room, now.”
Julie left his coffee where it was and followed his chief inspector to the Major Incident Room that was being set up upstairs. An hour ago it had been a big empty space. Already, in the space of the half an hour since Julie had poked his head into the room, an array of computers, desks, chairs, and noticeboards had been installed, along with a large conference table where a map of the city had been laid out and locations were being marked in to match the incident reports coming in that morning. The left side of the incident board was taken up with faces; victims first: Oliver Underwood, Aisha Kahn, and Musa Dajani beneath them; then to the right, the row of missing kids: Charlie Mann and Penny Grainger, both current residents of Herla House, the ex-residents Stephen Blackmoore and Rupert Brooke; and last, the suspects column was filled with three pictures: Jamshid Kirmani, with a line linking him to Ollie Underwood and Aisha Kahn’s photographs, and Daniel Ash and Tom Summers, with a line linking them back to Musa Dajani’s photograph. All the details they knew: times, dates, locations, witness testimony, and such were linked to each case. Two words stood out: HERLA HOUSE.
One computer had been set up to monitor Twitter feeds for the relevant hashtags that had been trending since last night, looking for links to the reports of violence coming in this morning. Another monitored Facebook and a third Instagram. Correlations were being run against the Police National Computer, looking for cases of grievous and actual bodily harm linked to the owners of those accounts. It was all about trying to find the red thread that wound between them all; the one thing that tied the evidence together and proved it was all linked the way that Julie knew it was but wasn’t able to explain.
Stills from security camera footage had been taped to the incident board.
Julie hadn’t seen them before.
There were four in a line, and they showed Daniel Ash and Tom Summers dragging Musa Dajani out of the park. The angles weren’t good and the images weren’t clear. The CCTV cameras were from two locations. The first two captured the trio’s passage for a couple of blink-and-you-missed-them seconds from shops close to the park. They were hard to make out in any sort of detail because they were in darkness. The two remaining stills, close to the gates of Coldfall Wood were taken closer to dawn, with lightness creeping into the image. They showed the two boys walking away alone. Julie knew that out of camera shot Musa Dajani’s body had been strung up and crucified on the sign.
“What are you thinking?” Tenaka asked, behind him.
“The obvious motive here’s revenge for Underwood. It’s a racial thing. White kids hitting back at the Muslim, they lay in wait for Dajani after football practice, lure him away and kill him, tit for tat. I don’t think they give a crap about the girl at this point, she doesn’t fit their narrative, she brought it on herself, Ollie was just an innocent victim.”
“Agreed. And?”
“And the board’s not right.” He moved the photographs of Stephen Blackmoore and Rupert Brooke from the Missing column to the line of Suspects. “Or at least it’s only partially right. Blackmoore and Brooke aren’t victims.” Tenaka didn’t say anything, but several of the officers working the incident room looked up from what they were doing to follow the exchange. This was new information. “We’ve just had visual confirmation in the last few minutes that both boys were seen in wards at both Guys and Kings this morning. By itself, it’s noteworthy, the first two sightings of two of our missing kids, but two patients died within a few minutes of their sightings. And while it might be coincidental, I’m inclined to think it isn’t.”
“You think Blackmoore and Brooke killed them?”
Julie nodded. “Bear with me. Both patients had been admitted with a condition known as parasomnia.” Tenaka looked at him like he was speaking Swahili. “Locked-in syndrome, you know, a waking coma.”
“Jesus Christ,” Tenaka shook his head. “So you think Blackmoore and Brooke hunted out these locked-in cases? Talk me through it. How do you see it fitting in? Big picture.”
“It’s not my case to make,” Julie explained. “An emergency services dispatcher, Erin Chiedozie, noticed something weird was going on in London. In any given year there’s no more than a handful of cases across the whole country. She started looking for points of similarity, anything that might link them: a single point of contagion if it was viral, something like that.”
“Did she find anything?”
“She found a link, but I’m not sure it’s something we can act on.”
“Let me be the judge of that,” Tenaka told him.
Julie took his notebook from his pocket and made a show of thumbing through the pages until he reached his notes on the short conversation he’d had with Chiedozie even though he didn’t need to. The words were blazed on the back of his mind: “They all said the same thing; one line, that linked them all. ‘The Horned God is awake.’”
No one said anything.
“Like I said, it’s not exactly a tangible link.”
“Some kind of cult thing, maybe? Like the Scientologists?” Ellie asked.
Julie nodded. “Something like that, I guess.”
“So, they made some sort of pact? Drank poison like the Heaven’s Gate mob, expecting a UFO to take them away to a better afterlife? In this case one with horned devil gods? It’s no crazier than Xenu.”
Julie shrugged. There were worse connections they could draw.
“And Blackmoore and Brooke are tied into this?”
“It would explain the disappearances,” Ellie said, putting two and two together and making something a long way from four, but which had her excited. It was something that made sense. Something they could work with.
“Okay,” Tenaka mused, the side of his fist resting on his lips as he thought it through. “Maybe there’s an angle there. Some sort of doomsday cult in the city we’ve not heard about poisoning a bunch of kids, then sending their most devoted out to finish them off when the drugs didn’t do the job? Look into it, Ellie.”
“You should know that there were five cases of parasomnia reported in hospitals across London yesterday,” Julie said, letting that sink in before adding, “A third patient died at St. Thomas’s this morning. If there’s a link, if Blackmoore and Brooke are going after them, that means the other two are at risk. Twice might be a coincidence, but three times is a pattern.”
“Get onto the hospitals,” Tenaka agreed. “I want security on each ward. We’re not losing any more kids to this pair.” He looked back at the first face on the incident board.
“We’ve had a lot trouble on the Rothery this morning,” Ellie noted. “Sykes and Banks were caught up in it. There have been a number of reports of assault by gangs of schoolkids all along the south of the city and into the East End, too, all almost certainly originating from anger toward the murder of Ollie Underwood.”
“We need to put a lid on this.”
Julie didn’t need to be a mind reader to know his boss was thinking about the bad press that came with fighting on the streets. When you rose to the level George Tenaka had, you couldn’t help but become a political animal. It wasn’t about the police work. “Have we got any further chasing down Kirmani?”
“I’ve contacted his family in Watford and Bedford, but none of them have heard from the boy. We drew a blank with his friend up in Newcastle, too. If he ran in that way, he never made it.” Ellie said.
“So, what’s the thinking here? Blackmoore and Brooke caught up with him?” Tenaka asked, looking for the nice neat answer he could tie a bow around and present to the press conference in a couple of hours, telling the world not to worry: Yes things had got nasty there for a while, but we’re on top of it; no need to panic. Those were the key words: no need to panic.
“Right now I’m not thinking anything, sir,” Julie said. “Just going through what we know.”
“But you think it’s all linked?”
“I wouldn’t go so far.”
“Gut instinct, Gennaro?”
He looked down at his boss, “I’m worried they might be,” he said, which was absolutely true.
Tenaka nodded.
He didn’t say anything else for the longest time, looking straight out of the window across the rooftops of the city, lost in thought. When he finally came back, he nodded again. “Okay. Right. Yes. Taylor, I want you to head up the team here. Bring in whoever you think you need to get things done.”
“If you don’t mind me saying, sir,” Ellie said, “it might be a good idea to make ourselves seen out there. People tend to feel safer when they see a police presence. Double foot patrols in the Rothery, for one thing, making sure uniforms are a visible presence.”
Tenaka nodded, essentially ending the meeting.
He left.
Julie was halfway out of the door when a young PC, Nathan Mullins, called, “You should see this.”
“I’ll catch you up,” he told Ellie, and crossed the room.
Mullins was looking at a suicide sheet.
“What am I looking at?”
“A body fished out of the river this morning.” Four hundred people a year chose to end their lives in the Thames. Whatever their own personal tragedies, fishing a body out of the river was quite literally an everyday occurrence for the River Police. “I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but it came up during a connected search between the missing kids.”
That had his attention. “Explain?”
The officer brought up a police profile, meaning the deceased had a record—or had at least been the subject of an investigation. “The body’s been identified as James Bracken.”
Julie didn’t recognize the name.
“His day job was as warden of a children’s home, Herla House.”
“Tying him to the Grainger girl and Charlie Mann, right now, and historically to all of the kids up on the board apart from Kirmani and Kahn.” Given what had happened with Blackmoore and Brooke hunting down the locked-in kids, the obvious assumption was that one or more of those kids up there were part of Arawn’s army and that somehow Bracken’s death was tied into it. “And he’s in the PNC because?”
“Complaints of impropriety to Social Services. Five instances of historical abuse were investigated, two including allegations of sexual abuse against a minor in his care. Stephen Blackmoore. The complaints were dropped. Blackmoore was judged to be an unreliable witness even though there was plenty of circumstantial evidence, including witness testimony, but Bracken made a deal to give evidence against two of his coworkers that saw them put away for a long time, exposing the systematic abuse of kids in the care system.”
“And he was allowed to stay in the job?”
The officer nodded. “I guess everything was swept under the rug. The file was sealed. I can’t get at anything beyond that without a court order.” Which of course meant it wasn’t the end of it at all. “There’s nothing else on him in the system.” No way it could have played out like that, not after Yewtree, the Jimmy Savile scandal, and the horror stories of the Elm Guest House over by Barnes Common. Those records were sealed for a reason. Julie was well aware of the near constant rumors of a VIP pedophile ring at work in the city going all the way to the top. They all were, but there was never any evidence. It was just whispers. Shadows. High-level corruption in the corridors of power. The only reason a piece of shit like Bracken would be allowed to walk would be in the hopes of landing a bigger fish. Spyware in his computers, surveillance on the place, looking for the links between him and others of his predilection. And that being the case, there would be some very worried perverts in the city tonight as the news broke.
“Suicide seems like a confession to me,” Julie said, but men like James Bracken didn’t suddenly develop consciences or become wracked with guilt. Bracken had lived with his crimes for years. More importantly, in his mind he’d gotten away with them. That Bracken had taken it upon himself to end it all today of all days smacked of something else entirely. Penny and Charlie’s disappearances coupled with Bracken’s suicide felt like a settling of old scores, and wasn’t that exactly what Arawn’s return was all about? “Are we absolutely sure it’s suicide?”
“We’ll need it confirmed by the coroner’s report, but yes.”
“Okay, mark up the links on the incident board. I want you to get that file unlocked. I want to know exactly what’s in there. Oh, what a tangled fucking web…”