Trust Me

The door opened and DCI Burgone entered. Nasreen’s laughter turned into a cough. She stared at the ground, though she wanted nothing more than to look into his blue eyes. Freddie, Chips and Green were still laughing, but she could feel Saunders watching her.

‘Sorry I’m late.’ Burgone’s classic Queen’s English tone instantly restored order. As he was the governing officer, Freddie would have reported her discovery to Burgone before she spoke to Saunders. ‘Carry on, Pete.’ Burgone took the nearest chair, the one next to her. His amber scent beckoned her closer.

Don’t look. Act natural. Closing her eyes, Nasreen was back to that night: her hands in his thick dark hair, his hand cupping her chin, their lips meeting. She snapped her eyes open. It had been six months since she’d had a one-night stand with her boss. Six months since the rest of the team found out. Six months since she’d been lucky to hang on to her job.

Saunders cleared his throat. ‘Paul Robertson is our best shot of getting to the Rodriguez brothers, and ultimately it’s them who are running the Spice Road.’ He paused to pull another photo from his file. ‘Paul Robertson has a daughter, Amber Robertson, who disappeared at the same time as her father.’ A chill passed over Nasreen. Saunders added the photo of a young, dark-haired girl to the board. ‘She was fifteen when they went to ground.’ Amber smiled up from under a fashionable floppy hat, her voluptuous curves played for maximum impact in a cropped khaki T-shirt and tight black jeans. Cases involving teen girls always got under Nasreen’s skin, and she felt the familiar tightness form in her stomach.

‘Pretty lass,’ Chips said.

‘We think she’s the weakest link in the chain. Find her and we find her dad. Find him and we find the Rodriguez brothers.’ Saunders tapped the board. ‘Chips and Green are tied up finishing off Operation Kestrel right now, so I want you on this one, Cudmore.’

His words startled her. ‘Me?’ She leant forward, too eager, caught the glass of water on the table in front of her. Her hand shot out to steady it. She felt the blush rising up her cheeks. Burgone was right there.

‘Unless you’ve got better things to be doing with your time, Sergeant?’ Saunders said.

‘No, sir. Thank you, sir.’ She prayed Burgone was looking at the board.

Green gave her a smile – a congrats for being back in the game.

‘Get Freddie to help you with whatever she can get on Amber. I want her found.’ Saunders was gathering his papers together.

‘Wait, so there’s a missing fifteen-year-old girl – surely someone’s looking for her already?’ Freddie cut over the noise of scraping chairs.

‘She’s been on the Missing Persons list for a year, but they’re inundated.’ Saunders said. ‘They’ve done the normal checks, but until now she wasn’t high priority.’

Freddie blew air through her teeth. ‘Not high priority? But now we want to bang up her dad we’re interested?’

‘Now I’m interested,’ Saunders said.

‘I don’t know how you sleep at night.’ Freddie stared at him.

‘Like a baby, ta.’ He was always pleased to get a response.

Nasreen knew how busy Missing Persons were, and with the connections Paul Robertson had, it’d be all too easy for him and his daughter vanish. ‘What about the girl’s mother?’

‘Died when she was three,’ Saunders said. ‘RTA.’

‘Daughter of a dead mum and a drug-dealing dad, some kids get all the luck, don’t they?’ Freddie grimaced.

‘Freddie, can I have a word – in my office?’ Burgone had paused at the door.

Nasreen couldn’t help but stare as Freddie left the room with him. What was that about?

Nasreen had to stop this fixation with Burgone. Superintendent Prue Lewis’s disciplinary words played over in her mind: ‘I forbid my officers to have relationships with their colleagues because it ruins their careers. Especially the women. People will always assume you got to where you are because of who you slept with, Nasreen. You will have to work twice as hard to prove them wrong now.’ Nasreen couldn’t let her own mistakes stand in the way of doing the job she loved. She had to believe she was still of use. The tension in her stomach solidified into a hard, heavy millstone. The pretty fifteen-year-old Amber Robertson was Nasreen’s shot at redemption, if she could find her.

Freddie

Fifteen years old and on the run. It’d make a good film, but it was bleak in real life. Freddie wanted to look into Amber Robertson more; no one else seemed that bothered about the missing girl. She still didn’t get that about police: how could they just compartmentalise all this shit? She opened Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat on her phone. Would a fifteen-year-old really give those up as well as everything else? She herself wouldn’t, and she had nearly ten years on her.

‘I’ve just come from a meeting with the Superintendent,’ Burgone was saying.

She tapped in Amber Robertson and pressed search. A number of profile squares appeared on Facebook. One looked familiar: same girl, same hat. Freddie clicked.

Burgone was still talking and she’d tuned out: ‘And so you can see my problem,’ he finished. His face had a look of concern on it.

Her gut twisted. ‘Sorry, what did you say?’

He sighed. ‘I feared you might find it difficult to hear.’ His sharp navy-suited arms rested authoritatively on the table. His face solemn. ‘We’re having to make cutbacks. I’m sorry, Freddie, but I no longer have the budget for a full time Intelligence Analyst.’

What? ‘Is this a wind-up?’ Burgone had offered her this role when she was broke, and she’d been surprised to discover she loved it. Putting together the pieces of the puzzle. Making a difference. She’d found the link between the Spice Road website and the Tower Hamlets Massive. She could find Amber Robertson. And now he was going to take it away from her? Hell, no. ‘You approached me.’

‘And you’ve done a brilliant job,’ he said.

‘Do you know how late I stayed working on that Paul Robertson lead?’ She was up out of her chair now. Throwing an accusatory finger at him. Burgone’s eyebrows had reacted, but he’d kept the rest of him admirably still.

‘I appreciate you’re upset, Freddie.’

She thought of his privilege, his entitlement. What she’d done trying to scrape together enough for a bloody rental deposit. The fallout to the L word this morning. Had that been a mistake? Now was not the time to think about that. Burgone had probably never worried about money in his life. ‘I don’t think you do, mate.’

‘I will always be grateful for what you did for me and my family.’ Burgone looked uncomfortable whenever he mentioned how they first met: a tense investigation involving his sister.

‘I did what anyone would have done,’ she said, cutting him off. Did he really think she would try and hold it over him? ‘I don’t know how you were raised, but I was brought up to help people when they’re in trouble.’ She thought of the embarrassment in her mum’s eyes when she’d found out that her dad had pinched the money she’d been scraping together for Freddie. Gone in an optic. Literally pissed against a wall. The anger fizzled out. Burgone wasn’t the enemy.

‘I haven’t finished yet, Freddie. I’ve given it a lot of thought, and there is a way I can make it work with the budget. But it will require effort on your behalf.’

She slumped back into the chair. ‘I can’t work any more hours.’ The booze had gone months ago: too expensive, too risky. She often wondered what her dad would have been like if he’d been broke as a lad. If rent was as high as it was now. Would he have become an alcoholic sooner, or never succumbed in the first place? ‘Go on then, spill?’

‘I can afford to keep you on part-time as an Intelligence Analyst. But I also have funding for another different part-time role.’

‘That makes no sense,’ she said.

‘It’s down to how funding is allocated.’

‘Bloody government, screwing everything up as usual,’ she said.

Burgone had shifted his attention to a pile of papers on his desk, looking for the right form. ‘I have budget for a Civilian Investigator. They’re designed to relieve pressure on active officers, thus improving police effectiveness: it’s seen as a saving in the overall budget.’

‘What does it involve?’ Investigator sounded promising. She missed being out looking into leads. Not that she should ever have been meeting the public, she thought, smiling to herself, but there’d been special circumstances before.

‘Your role would include interviewing victims of burglary, assault and car crime. The training programme is three weeks long, and will include briefings on interrogation techniques, how to structure an interview, and a number of aspects of the law that are relevant.’ Burgone said. ‘Some of it you’ll know from your analytical training, and, er, previous experience.’ He handed over a printed worksheet. ‘And if I assign you to Detective Sergeant Cudmore for management, we may handle some of the training in-house.’

‘I could go out and interview suspects?’ she said.

‘Perhaps not that.’ He smiled. ‘But certainly supporting statements from witnesses and other interesting parties. If you complete the training and probationary period, as before.’

‘Will I get a business card?’ She’d always wanted one of them. Was jealous of Nas’s when she’d handed them over to people. It made her official. Real. She’d send one to her mum.

‘Well, yes. I guess it will be useful for you to have something with your contact details on to leave with interviewees,’ Burgone said.

‘Okay,’ Freddie said. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘There is one more thing: this is a slightly sensitive issue,’ he said.

Ah: the catch. Here it came.

‘This is a fairly new scheme within the force, and not everyone is a fan. Some officers have registered concerns over the limited training and accountability of civilian investigators – this won’t win you any friends, Freddie.’

She shrugged. ‘No worries. I haven’t got any anyway.’

He smiled. ‘Then I’ll make sure DS Cudmore has the relevant training criteria to cover. Hopefully you can run it alongside this Amber Robertson case. And we’ve had a bit of luck: another recruit has had to drop out of an existing training course, so we can get you over there today and get you started.’

‘Cool.’ She’d come back to the office after, to start work on finding Amber: that’d give the phone company time to get the records over.

‘And it should be quite fun for you,’ Burgone was saying.

Oh, yeah, I love sitting in a room being lectured to.

‘It’s being held at the Jubilee Station,’ he said.

‘What?’ Her mouth fell open.

He mistook her dismay as delight. ‘I know you worked with the officers there on your first case.’

Yeah, and I’d rather forget it. He handed her another printout: a list of the training details, the location, times and dates. She scanned the page for familiar names: balls.

‘This’ll be a great chance to catch up with them all. DCI Moast is leading the training – he said he couldn’t wait to see you again,’ Burgone said with a smile.

I bet he did. Spending time in an enclosed space with meathead Moast was not high on her to-do list. Crap. Now she’d have to face the music over this morning’s row too. She’d wanted things to cool off for a few days. Kip at a mate’s. Burgone looked as pleased as if he’d just paid off her student loan. Christ knows how many strings he’d pulled to get her onto this course so quickly. It wasn’t his fault he had no idea what he’d just done. She managed a weak smile. ‘Cheers.’

‘This is a great opportunity, Freddie,’ Burgone said. ‘And I know you’ll really make the most of it.’

She could already see the sarcastic grin on Moast’s Lego head.

Standing in the hallway, the Facebook account she’d opened earlier was still visible on her phone. There were photos of Amber grinning at the camera. This was it. Her account. Freddie watched video clips of her and her friends singing on the back of a bus, Amber’s eyes sparkling with mischief. There was a photo of Paul Robertson from behind, Amber holding an egg up so it was the same size as his bald head. The caption read: When your breakfast looks like your dad! Cracking! Freddie laughed. The sound snagged on her heart as she reached the last post. July 12 last year. The day before Amber and her father disappeared. The girl’s final words.

So many special people in my life. So sorry for any hurt I cause. Love you all. Forever. xxxx

Underneath tens of Amber’s friends had posted comments. Sad emojis. Broken heart photos. They started up a few weeks after the final post. As if enough time had passed that they could no longer hope for the best. Freddie scanned them quickly:

Come home soon!!!

Miss you foreva xxx

Thinking of you always xoxo

And a shiver passed over her, as she realised more than one person had posted the same message:

RIP Amber xxx

Why would they think Amber Robertson was dead?

A

He can feel the weight of her, her arms thin in his hands, her shoulders rolling, heavy. How can someone so fragile be so heavy? He had to hide her. This is his fault. He panicked. No one can know. He needs time to think. To fix this. He can still hear her screaming. He covers his ears. His heart is battering against his chest, like a dog on a chain going mental. Whoooof. Whoooof. Whoooof. Punching to get out. He feels like he’s turned inside out, that everything is backwards and he can’t quite grab hold of it. His hands are wet, slick. It’s her. She’s all over him. Blood. There is so much blood. This was supposed to be a laugh. Hot. Make him popular. This can’t be happening. It’s in his mouth. He can taste her. He gags. There’s a hair wrapped round his fingers. A long dark hair, stuck like when one catches you in a swimming pool. Cold and dark like pondweed. No, it’s cotton: a thread tying her to him. The dog in his chest is thrashing. Tearing him apart with its teeth from the inside. What has he done?

Kate

Kate hadn’t been able to sit still since she’d seen the video. Her laptop, black in power-save mode, was still at its abandoned angle on her dining table. Fifty-six years old, and she couldn’t bring herself to get any closer to the screen. Instead she’d focused on clearing up the mess on the kitchen floor. As she’d wiped up the sick and bile, she tried not to think of the girl’s pleading eyes. She forced herself to take another gulp of sugared tea. She’d changed, and put her soiled clothes in the washing machine.

She could still smell the acid of vomit, and leant over the sink to open the kitchen window. But the familiar square of garden, in which she grew sweet peas and strawberries, twisted and turned away from her. The electric streetlight played nasty tricks with the rows of houses that stretched away over Hackney. Somewhere out there was the girl. Terrified. Hurt. What if the boys knew she’d been watching? What if they’d made a note of her account? Could they find her? A shadow licked at the edge of her garden and she jumped. London, with its exotic blends, its languages, its music and food and dance, that dynamic that made it special, that had made it her home all her life, felt hostile. She was overlooked. An easy target. She let go of the window handle as if it had burned her. Instead she pulled the slim chain to unfurl the kitchen blind, small flecks of dust floating down onto her as she obliterated the city skyline she’d always loved.

She ran up the white-painted stairs to her bedroom, pulled the curtains up there too and fetched her perfume from the bathroom. She sprayed the scent in the kitchen, the tangerine and blackcurrant smell settling uneasily over the sour stench of sick. She would feel better when she knew they’d found the girl. Got her to hospital.

The doorbell buzzed and she jumped. It would be the police. It was a Friday night, presumably they were busy, it’d been just over an hour since she’d called 999. She slid the spyhole aside; the sight of a man made her heart rate spike. You can see the uniform, silly woman, you know it’s the police. Still, she put the chain across before opening the door.

‘Mrs Katherine Adiyiah? I’m PC Jones.’ The man drew the sounds of her surname out, unsure where the vowels sat. He held up his ID. He was young, with close-cropped dark hair, and shadows under his pale eyes. She wondered how long he’d been on duty.

‘Hang on,’ she said, releasing the chain. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘Good to see people being security conscious. Better to be safe than sorry, Mrs Adiyiah,’ PC Jones said.

It was an absurdly normal exchange. Words you might say about putting an extra hour on the meter for the car.

‘It’s Miss actually. But call me Kate. Please, come in?’ She had thought there might be two of them, but there was no one else outside. The street was empty, apart from a drained vodka bottle discarded three doors down. Laughter and voices carried over from the road behind: people walking home, or on to the next venue. The gentle pulse of bass mingled with the hum of night buses, taxis, cars and takeaway delivery drivers from the surrounding roads. A man appeared round the corner, his face nothing but a dark shadow under his hood. She shut the door quickly.

PC Jones was standing in the living room, looking at the bookshelves that lined the walls. His eyes snagged on the well-loved copies that were turned out to face the room: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, A Testament of Hope by Martin Luther King. There was something about his manner that felt oddly invasive.

‘Please, sit down?’ She indicated the wingback that was at one end of the dining table. Her home was small: this one room served as lounge, dining room and study, leading straight into the open-plan kitchen. A two-up, two-down. Plenty big enough for her.

He hitched up his trousers to sit on the creaking chair. Kate was on good terms with the PC who worked with her at school, and would have liked to see his familiar face. Having a strange man in her home was only compounding the sense of violation she’d felt watching the video. But that wasn’t PC Jones’s fault. She’d witnessed a horrific crime: she had a duty to report it. She had a duty to that poor girl. He didn’t look eager to get started. She forced a smile onto her face. ‘Can I get you some tea, or a coffee?’

‘Tea would be great, ta,’ he said. ‘Milk, one sugar. Any biscuits?’ He rested his palms on his spread knees, like a spoilt emperor, she thought, eager and greedy.

She nodded. It was nearly 3am. She was discombobulated by it all. She busied herself with pulling the tea things down from the cupboard. She put out a cup for herself too, adding two sugars. She was still jittery. It was the shock.

‘You told the call handler you believed you’d seen an assualt?’ PC Jones had followed her into the kitchen unnoticed. Her body jolted in reaction. The teabag box buckled in her hand. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you jump,’ he said, smiling.

She tried to smile back. Everything felt wrong.

She could see his distorted funhouse mirror reflection in the chrome kettle, looking at her. ‘Was it out the front of the house, or from upstairs, Miss Adiyiah?’

‘They didn’t tell you?’ The spoon was limp in her hand. ‘It was online. I saw it happen online.’

‘Online?’ His mouth turned down at the sides and she was struck by how much he resembled a fish. ‘How do you mean?’

‘I was on Periscope. I was watching a live stream video, of two boys and a girl. Well, I think it was two boys, one of them was holding the camera. There could have been more, I suppose, behind the camera.’ The thought horrified her. Who could sit by and watch that without intervening? She’d been unable to help. She wouldn’t wish that paralysing sensation of helplessness on anyone. Though if they had deliberately chosen not to act… that was worse.

‘Two boys and a girl?’ PC Jones had produced a notebook from his back pocket.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘One of the boys was…’ The word swelled and lodged in her throat. She coughed. ‘He raped her. And when she tried to stop him he attacked her. With a bottle.’

‘And you saw this online?’ PC Jones said.

‘Yes,’ she nodded. Saying the words out loud hadn’t lessened their power, but made the whole thing feel more vivid. As if she were watching it happen again. Here. In this room.

‘And where was this video shot?’

‘I don’t know. I just clicked on a feed for London. So it must be somewhere in the city. Someone must have heard something: there was a lot of…’ She wanted to say screaming, but couldn’t. ‘Noise.’

‘I see. And what were the names of these boys and the girl?’ PC Jones said.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘You don’t know?’ His eyebrow raised on one side, and she saw the doubt in his eyes.

‘I can tell you the name of the account. Here, I wrote it down.’ She passed him the torn rectangle of note paper. Metronome02. It was burned on her memory, like those heart symbols floating up the screen. People had liked it; that’s what she couldn’t understand. Had they not understood? The policeman took the paper, his fish head nodding. She glanced at the laptop. You must do this. You must help the girl. ‘I can show you the video.’

She walked past him before her nerve dropped. When she touched the mouse, the screen seemed to crack. The page or her eyes flickered, she couldn’t tell which. The screen was no longer linked to the feed; instead there was an error page: This user no longer exists.

‘It’s gone! They’ve deleted it.’ She clicked refresh. The same page appeared. ‘Oh God! Of course: because it’s evidence.’ She couldn’t stem the relief at not having to watch it again, or hear it. She thought of the screams. The panicked sound of the boy behind the camera. The gurgling.

‘So.’ PC Jones drew out the syllables of the word, twisting it in his fish mouth. ‘The video has vanished?’

‘You can see for yourself.’ She pointed at the screen. ‘They’ve deleted it.’

‘Right,’ he looked around the room, his eyes resting on Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? If it had been one of her pupils she would have marched across the room and turned the book around. Made them concentrate. But as she watched him blow air out in a dramatic sigh, she felt more than just anger at his ill manners, she felt unease. ‘So you’re saying that you saw a video…’

‘A live stream,’ she corrected.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘A live stream during which you believe you saw a sexual assault and a stabbing take place, but you don’t know where this took place, or who these people were?’

‘I don’t believe I saw it, I know I saw it,’ she said.

PC Jones grimaced. ‘Are you sure you couldn’t have misunderstood what you saw, Mrs Adiyiah?’

‘Yes.’ Heat rose in her cheeks.

‘Maybe it was a film, like a Hollywood one or something? They’re very realistic nowadays,’ he said, glancing at the vintage poster she had framed on her wall.

He was dismissing her. As if she were, what? A confused old woman? ‘I know the difference between a film and real life, thank you.’

He sniffed, taking in the perfume, and the vague sour stench that lingered in the flat. ‘Can I ask if you’ve been out at all tonight, Mrs Adiyiah?’

‘I don’t see how that’s relevant.’ She couldn’t believe he had the cheek to interrogate her.

‘Have you consumed any alcoholic beverages this evening?’ He looked at the glass of Shiraz next to the computer, where she’d left it.