‘Will Fernley spent the first years of his sentence in a category A prison,’ the DCI said.
Serrailler had been with the officers from CEOP for well over an hour. He did not yet have any idea why.
‘He had a tough time, as you may imagine – all sex offenders do and paedophiles come off worst of all. He was transferred because it was thought the risk to him was unacceptably high and things have been somewhat better for him.’ She looked at Simon over the top of her bright-blue-framed spectacles. ‘I think the word to stress is “somewhat”. Whether it was partly or wholly out of fear that he might be attacked again, late last year he applied to be sent to Stitchford TC prison. His application was approved but he has had to wait until recently to be allocated a place. He’s been there for three weeks and gone through the admissions programme. That finished last Friday.’
‘How much do you know about TCs?’ Craig asked.
More coffee had been brought in, this time with biscuits, and Simon selected one as he looked across the table.
‘Only a little. TC stands for therapeutic community. Prisoners ask to be admitted – as you say Fernley did – and they undergo a rigorous year of therapy – or perhaps longer, I’m not sure – which is designed to make them address their crimes, to understand why they committed them, to try and face up to all that – and so maybe to change. I know the success rate at a TC like Grendon, for prisoners who complete the therapy and are later released after serving their time, is impressively high.’
‘In other words, it works. It does – sometimes. But TCs used to be much more about equipping and preparing prisoners for their new lives outside and a fresh start. Nowadays, it’s often lifers in for a year – and it can be up to eighteen months, by the way – for an intensive therapeutic programme. But they then go back into the mainstream prison system to finish serving their time. There’s much debate about the point of a TC for lifers. I have no opinion either way.’
‘Sex offenders would seem to be the best candidates for TC,’ Linda continued, ‘though the jury’s out on that too. A lot of psychiatrists – and prison and police officers come to that – feel they are incurable, untreatable, and that it’s just a case of damage limitation. I’m inclined to agree but only partly. I have known of successes.’
‘And what’s wrong with damage limitation?’ Simon said.
Neither of them replied.
Serrailler leaned back in his chair, arms folded. Waited.
‘So, Fernley is in Stitchford at the beginning of the programme,’ Linda said eventually. ‘We know that he committed offences against children going back some ten years, quite probably a lot more. We also know that he had – maybe still has – paedophile contacts across the country and abroad. We know that he was part of a paedophile ring based in and around Lafferton and we know he was involved with them in what we have called the Plimmer Group. They bought the building in Plimmer Road –’
‘Bought it?’
‘Yes – we’re sure they have some members with plenty of spare money – Fernley himself to name but one. They bought the house, via an agency, they left it untouched except for the cellar and its inner room and they used this for their filming over approximately three years.’
‘But Fernley’s home is in Devon.’
‘Yes. And some of the others will have come to Lafferton from all over England. They communicated remotely, via computer, but they met up in two or threes when they were making their films. Then they split again.’
Craig finished his coffee, pushed the cup and his open laptop away from him, and leaned on the table, looking directly across at Simon.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is the one thing we do not know and are determined to find out. That is what Will Fernley could tell us but never has – he’s stayed silent throughout, from his arrest until now. But we know he knows and if we could get information on at least the leaders of this ring, we will be a long way towards closing it down and laying hands on shoulders. He’s the key, no doubt of it.’
‘I’m not trying to teach my grandmother, but have you discovered nothing from a trawl through computer hard drives and so forth?’
‘Fernley had a laptop in his house but there was absolutely nothing of any interest to us on it. We ripped the house apart – his family home and his London house – found nothing. Whatever he had, he got rid of and we’ve accepted that we’ll never find it. We do sometimes come across links with other computers we’ve seized but that’s always a long shot and so far no joy at all. And we pick up an awful lot of laptops, as you may imagine.’
‘Fernley said nothing to his lawyer?’
‘Well, confidentiality and all that but we think not, nothing beyond what he had to tell him in connection with his own involvement in the cellar ring. And he stayed absolutely silent, or said “no comment” to every question, in every damned interview. He smiled nicely – he’s a decent-looking bloke and he’s got a very charming smile – but he didn’t say a dicky bird. We’ve got nothing. We’ve spent hundreds of man hours on these cases and he’s all we’ve got. Meanwhile, they’re out there, whoever they are and however many of them. They are continuing to abuse children and recruit members to their ring and spread porn. And we’ve got to take them down.’
He banged his fist hard on the table. His face was creased with anger.
‘I’m with you, of course I am, but where do I fit in? Presumably the cellar room is no longer used.’
‘On my patch?’
Craig shrugged. ‘No idea. We have to get Fernley to talk. Short of an accidental find – and of course they happen – he’s our only hope.’
‘So you need someone to get close, try and open him up. Who?’
‘You,’ Linda said.
‘Sounds good. I can take a couple of days, get a walk along the coastal path too. I know it well over there, though I’ve never been to Stitchford.’
Linda Warren and Lochie Craig glanced at one another.
‘Do you know much about it?’
‘Nothing beyond the name and that it’s fairly new.’
‘Stitchford was opened five years ago. It’s relatively small and it’s purely a therapeutic facility – no main prison. And it’s privately run. It was talked about for years, decades even, but there was never the money and a lot of people didn’t agree that it should exist at all, at least as an independent unit. In the end, though, a Home Secretary arrived who was very keen on privately run prisons and on the TC model in particular. There was an old wartime RAF base in the hinterland of north Norfolk which was disused and ripe for development. It was sold to a large private conglomerate who also run hospitals as well as two other special prisons and they built a shiny new set of buildings. They got an architect who had worked on the design of therapeutic communities in Holland and in Canada and he came up with an intergalactic complex. Sorry – I’m a bit of a cynic. Anyhow, there it is. It’s a class-A facility so the security is very tight and it’s a bit like Dartmoor – miles from anywhere and then just a few scattered villages. No dual carriageways or motorways for miles, no trains, one bus a millennium.’
‘Fine. I’m happy to drive over there.’ Serrailler was still baffled that it had taken a special visit to Lafferton by three officers to arrange it.
But Craig shook his head. ‘There would be no point in your arriving as yet another cop to give him a grilling. He’s never played ball before and he wouldn’t do it now. He’s never talked to anyone. Which is why you are being asked to do a covert op. You would become a prisoner, a sex offender who had served some time in a main prison and applied to do the intensive course at Stitchford. Two months max, then you’d be hastily transferred – i.e. spirited away in the middle of the night.’
‘Essentially,’ Linda said, ‘you would be a sex offender, you’d attend all the group therapy sessions and community meetings – be a prisoner among sixty others, living as a prisoner, working as one, the whole package.’
‘And trying to befriend Will Fernley – only him?
‘Yes, though you’d socialise and spend time with others – it would look odd if you didn’t. But Fernley is the one with a head full of names and all the info we need on the other members of his ring, where and how they’re operating – because we know they still are. They’re extremely clever, however – expert at hiding themselves and warning one another if there’s the slightest wind that anyone is on to them. They operate on such a closed system that even with all our technological resources we haven’t got into it.’
‘And this is the ring who filmed their child abuse at the cellar room in Plimmer Road?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wonder how many times you hear officers say it’s unbelievable – evil and sickening.’
‘Every day,’ Linda said. ‘But “evil”, “sickening”, “pornographic”, “abusive”, “horrifying”, are words you will learn not to use if you take this on. As of course are words like “scum”, “castrate”, “flog” …’
Serrailler leaned back again and closed his eyes. Behind them were images, swirling and expanding and receding.
They waited, not interrupting him, not pushing for an answer. But at last Craig said, ‘If you decide to say no, that’s it. We move on. This won’t be an easy one. You need to be 110 per cent certain and committed. It will scour you. It will challenge you emotionally and psychologically and it won’t be without risk, though obviously you would be as safe as it’s possible to make you.’
‘How many officers have you approached to date?’
‘None. You’re our first choice, Simon. You’ve done covert ops, you’ve been through the training process, you’ve been screened. You know the ropes. You’ve also been SIO on child abduction and murder cases. Above all, you’re the right match. You’re the man we think can get close to Fernley and extract the info we desperately need – if anyone can.’
Linda leaned forward and looked at Serrailler for a long moment. He read everything that she was about to say in her expression.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘understood.’
Understood, that the ring was as active as ever. Understood, that if they got even a snippet of genuine information they’d act on it and get results. Understood, that this sort of challenge was the real excitement of police work to him and when it came along, he was hungry for it. He felt as he did when a call for SIFT (Special Incident Flying Taskforce) came and he had to drop everything and go. The adrenalin had already started pumping through him.
‘We can give you twenty-four hours,’ Lochie Craig said.
‘I don’t need them,’ Simon said. ‘I’m in.’