“What? No, no, we didn’t murder anyone. We didn’t kidnap her. It was just a bit of fun. Payback for what she done.”
“What did she do?”
Kroger stops himself. He’s said too much.
“Payback for what?” Drury asks again.
“Nothing. I mean, she was a prick-tease, you know. She was asking for trouble.”
“So you raped her?”
“Will you stop saying that?” Kroger looks at me for understanding and reacts angrily. “And you can stop staring at me.” He folds his arms. “I want a lawyer.”
“That’s your prerogative, Toby.”
“I’m not answering any more questions.”
“Fine. Have it your way. I am charging you with the imprisonment and sexual assault of Natasha McBain. You don’t have to say anything, but anything you do say will be taken down and can be used as evidence against you…”
Kroger tries to speak, but Drury drowns him out.
“You had your chance, Toby. Go back to the cells and come up with a better story. Be more creative. Amnesia maybe. Insanity. You’re going down for this. The Professor here has a daughter that age. That’s why he’s looking at you like that. He can see inside that festering little brain of yours. He knows you get off watching rape pornography.
“Imagine what it’s going to be like in prison-hundreds of blokes staring at you, wanting to cut your balls off for raping a minor. That makes you a kiddy fiddler, a pedo, a molester. They’ll be waiting for you, Toby.”
Kroger’s head is shaking from side to side. “I didn’t touch her, I tell you. I just took the footage. Nobody raped her.”
Drury leans closer. “You keep thinking that someone is going to save you. That this is all going to blow over. You’re wrong. You had your chance and you blew it. Your mate Craig Gould is downstairs and he’s going to sing like Amy Winehouse. He’ll cut a deal. Name names.”
Drury gets to his feet. I haven’t moved.
“I walk out that door and you spend the next twelve years inside.”
He doesn’t take more than three paces.
“OK, OK, sit down,” says Kroger, sniveling. “Nobody raped her, OK, but I’ll tell you what happened.”
Drury takes a seat. “Where was the film taken?”
“The changing rooms at Bingham Leisure Center.”
“What about Piper Hadley?”
“She was outside. We tied her up.”
“Where is she now?”
Kroger frowns. Shrugs. He raises his eyebrows, not understanding the question. The penny drops.
“We didn’t take them girls. We let ’em go.”
“Where?”
“At the swimming pool.” He makes it sound obvious. “We didn’t take them, I promise you.” He looks up at me again. “It’s the truth. Honest.”
“What did you do?”
“We roughed Tash up a little. Made her dance. Then we put her in the shower and cleaned her up, but that’s all. She was fine.”
“Fine?”
“You know what I mean.”
Drury tosses a pad onto the table.
“I want the names. Every last one of them.”
When it was over, I helped Tash put on her clothes and washed the blood from beneath her nose. She moved in slow motion, hurting in places I could never understand. There were red welts on her thighs and stomach, back and arms. Bruises coming.
They had warned us what would happen if we told anyone. There were photographs, they said, footage of Tash naked. They would upload it on the Internet and post the pictures on Facebook.
Then they told us to count to a thousand, so that’s what I did. I counted to a thousand and then I counted to two thousand.
Tash didn’t say anything. She could have been asleep.
Then I heard her voice, quiet and unsure. “Piper?” she said. “I want to leave now.”
I thought she meant go home, but she meant run away.
“I have five hundred pounds. How much can you get?”
I didn’t say right away.
“Don’t worry. I have enough.”
“We should tell the police.”
“No.”
“But you’re hurt.”
“I don’t feel anything.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
She made it sound as though someone had turned off a switch in her body and she couldn’t be hurt any more.
“What about Emily?”
“You go to her house. Tell her that we’ll meet her tomorrow morning, first thing. She doesn’t have to come, but I’m not changing my mind.”
My stomach twisted and coiled like a snake inside me. Tash looked at me as though I were made of glass and she could see right through me.
“I know you’re scared,” she said. “So am I.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say that would change things. In her mind, Tash was already running. She wanted me to catch up with her. It’s what I do, I told myself. I’m a runner.
39
A n hour before first light on Christmas Eve, armed response teams gather at Abingdon Police Station. Seven addresses have been identified. Five more suspects are being sought. I’m barely awake when these men are dragged from warm beds, handcuffed in front of their families and bundled into police cars.
Theo Loach arrives at the station with his shoulders back and head up, shunning the offer of a coat to cover his head. His gunmetal hair is trimmed tight to his scalp and the only sign of disruption to his normal routine is the stubble on his chin.
Reuben Loach, Callum’s older brother, has a cyclist’s ropy build and trim black hair that clings to his skull like a helmet. He doesn’t stop talking, insisting there’s been a mistake.
Callum’s uncle, Thomas Rastani, is a fifty-year-old insurance salesman with a wife and three children. Overweight and sweating in the cold, he hammers on his cell door, pleading to speak to his wife.
Scott Everett is another of Callum’s friends. In his twenties, with a foppish fringe and eyes the color of pea soup, he crouches beneath the blanket as though hoping it might make him invisible. Within minutes his father has arrived, politeness personified, but dropping the name of the barrister he’s hiring.
The last suspect seems to have no obvious links to Aiden Foster or Callum Loach. Nelson Stokes, the former school caretaker, doesn’t seem surprised by his arrest. He knows the drill-when to duck his head, when to cover it, when to keep quiet.
The men are brought in separately. Fingerprinted. Photographed. Read their rights.
By 9:00 a.m. the mood at the station is a festive one. There is a sense of expectation-a major case about to be cracked, the suspects in custody, the truth only hours away, or days. Phone records will link each suspect to the scene of the attack and to each other. They will deny everything initially, until one of them breaks ranks and tries to cut a deal. Then they’ll turn on each other like guests on Jerry Springer.
I watch the early interviews, hoping for some sign that sets one of these men apart. Each of them is guilty of sexual assault and conspiracy and false imprisonment. They held her against her will. They cut off her clothes. They made her dance. They ignored her pleas. I don’t know if they raped her or penetrated her, but one of these men is likely to have kidnapped the girls. Who among them is the collector?
According to Toby Kroger’s statement, Theo Loach came up with the plan to punish Natasha. Aiden Foster had gone to prison for crippling Callum, but Natasha was equally culpable in Theo’s eyes. She caused the fight. She provided the drugs. She walked free. His sense of outrage only grew when he saw her flaunting herself, flirting with boys, turning heads, walking on two legs. Someone should teach her a lesson. Show her that actions have consequences.
He recruited the others with the help of Kroger and Gould, organizing a meeting at a pub in Abingdon.
“We were only supposed to scare her,” Kroger said. “Theo talked about using acid on her face or tattooing something on her back, but we didn’t want no part of that. So we agreed we were going to shave off her hair. Nelson said that’s what they did to women in the war who fraternized with the enemy, you know, the Germans.”