‘Then, listen.’ Speaking felt like the most enormous effort to Janice. Exhausting. But she knew where she had to go next. ‘There’s a way to sort this out, but I don’t believe your unit will do it. So I’m going to do it instead. And I’ll need your help.’
The corner of Nick’s mouth twitched. ‘Help,’ she said noncommittally. ‘I see.’
‘I need you to find some contact details for me. I want you to do some phoning. Will you? Will you help?’
63
‘My son is not a nonce. He’s a bad boy, a very bad boy, but he’s not a fucking nonce.’
It was nearly midnight. The lights were still on in the MCIU building. Still the clatter of keyboards in distant offices, the noise of phones ringing. Turner and Caffery sat in the meeting room at the end of one of the corridors on the second floor, the blinds drawn, the fluorescent tubes on. Caffery was fiddling with a paperclip. Three cups of coffee sat on the table, and Peter Moon was seated at the other side of the desk on a swivel chair, dressed in a diamond-design jumper and saggy blue sweatpants. He’d agreed to talk on condition they released him from the cell overnight. He didn’t want to talk under caution, didn’t want a lawyer present, but he’d been thinking about it all night and now he wanted to set the record straight. Caffery let him do it. He didn’t plan to let the guy off. He planned to bang him up again the moment he’d coughed.
‘Not a nonce.’ Caffery looked at him dully. ‘Then why have you been covering for him?’
‘The cars. His problem is with cars – he’s like a little kid with them. He’s nicked scores of them. It’s like he can’t help himself.’
‘We found most of them in his lock-up.’
‘That’s why he got a job here.’ Peter looked thin and defeated. Embarrassed. Here was a man whose only legacy to the world was two sons, one of whom would die at home in bed before he was thirty, and the other in prison. An A4 blow-up of Ted was pinned to the whiteboard on the wall. It had been taken from the police-staff pass. Ted stared down into the room with his blank dead eyes, his shoulders hunched slightly forward, his forehead lowered. Peter Moon, Caffery noticed, avoided looking at it. ‘He’s stolen so many he thought you were on to him. Thought if he worked here he could – I dunno – get into your computers. Change the records or whatever.’ He put his hands in the air. ‘God knows what ideas he had – that he was some computer genius or something.’
‘He went into our system – but to find out what we knew about his stolen cars?’ Caffery looked at Turner. ‘Does that sound right to you? That he was looking for stolen cars?’
Turner shook his head. ‘No, Boss. Doesn’t sound right to me. To me it sounds more like he was doing it to find the places we’d housed that family. The one he’s targeted. And the traffic-surveillance cameras.’
‘Yes – those traffic cameras. Amazing how he avoided them.’
‘Amazing,’ Turner agreed.
‘See, Mr Moon, your son’s kidnapped four children now. Two he hasn’t given back. He’s got good reason to want to stay ahead of us.’
‘No, no, no . I swear on the heads of all the saints, he’s not a nonce. My son is not a nonce.’
‘He killed a thirteen-year-old girl.’
‘Not for nonce reasons.’
On the desk there was a single sheet covered with Caffery’s handwriting – the scribbled notes he’d made of a phone conversation earlier this evening. After the post-mortem on Sharon Macy’s remains, Caffery’d had a brief informal call from the pathologist. The man wasn’t going to say anything official, that would be in the report later, but he could give him a few things on the QT. Sharon Macy’s body was so decomposed that no one could be 100 per cent sure of anything, but if he’d been a betting man he’d say she had been killed either by the blunt-force trauma to the back of the skull or by blood loss from the enormous gash in her throat. There was evidence she’d struggled: one of her fingers was broken on the right hand, but when it came to evidence of sexual assault the pathologist had drawn a blank. The clothing wasn’t disturbed and her body hadn’t been displayed in a sexual way.
‘I know,’ Caffery said now. ‘I know he’s not a nonce.’
Peter Moon blinked. ‘You what?’
‘I said I know he’s not a paedo. The fact he’s taken girls? All under the age of thirteen? It’s a red herring. Coincidence. They could just as well been boys. Or teenagers. Or babies.’
Caffery shook a set of copied photographs out of an envelope, stood and began very carefully taping them to the whiteboard, one by one, lined up under Ted Moon’s picture. Caffery had got one of the DCs to print out little tags with all the relevant information he could think of: name, age, appearance, socioeconomic class, job, background, etc. He stuck the tags beneath the faces. ‘You’re here because your son has got a list of victims. A whole catalogue of people he’s got something against. But it’s not the kids he hates, it’s the parents. Lorna and Damien Graham. Neil and Simone Blunt. Rose and Jonathan Bradley. Janice and Cory Costello.’
‘Who the fuck are they?’
‘Your son’s victims.’
Peter Moon stared at the pictures for a long time. ‘You’re honestly saying my boy’s supposed to have attacked these people?’
‘In a manner of speaking. What he’s done with the children he abducted, God knows. I’ve given up hoping. But I can’t see him worrying much about their human rights, because they’re incidental. Dispensable. He knows the facts of life: hurt the young and you may as well kill the parents. And that’s what he wants. All these people.’ Caffery sat down, waved a hand at the photos. ‘They’re the ones who mean something to your son. They’re the ones we’re looking at now. Ever heard of victimology?’
‘No.’
‘You should watch more TV, Mr Moon. Sometimes we investigate crime by studying the people it’s happening to. Usually it’s to learn who our perpetrator is. In this case we don’t need to know who’s doing it, we know that already, in this case we need to know why he’s choosing the people he is, and we need to do that because he’s going to do it again. And soon. Something – something – in your son’s head is telling him he has to do it again. Look at these faces, Mr Moon. Look at their names. What do they mean to your son? This guy on the left is Neil Blunt. Neil works for the Citizens Advice Bureau. When I was with him this evening he said he knew he’d pissed people off now and then, and he’s had a couple of threats from clients at work. Has Ted had any dealings with the CAB?’
‘My wife went to the CAB when we had the fire. But that was eleven years ago.’
‘What about since he’s been out of the slammer?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘He works as a handyman. But when we went to check out his references they were all faked. So what experience did he have as a general builder?’
‘He’s good. Really good. He can turn his hand to any—’
‘I didn’t ask you how good he is. I asked you what experience he had.’
‘None. That I know of.’
‘Never did any work over in Mere? All the way down near Wincanton? Gillingham? A nice place. Family house. Name Costello. That’s them at the bottom.’
‘Costello? It doesn’t ring a bell. I swear it doesn’t.’
‘Look at the man on the left.’
‘The black geezer?’
‘He works in a car showroom in Cribbs Causeway – BMW. Does that ring any bells? With Ted’s fondness for cars?’
‘No.’
‘His name’s Damien Graham.’
Moon stared at the photo, shook his head. He pointed to Jonathan Bradley’s face. ‘Him.’
‘Yes?’
‘Vicar bloke.’
‘You knew him?’