A DCI Anna Tate Crime Thriller

Three uniformed officers in hi-vis jackets were standing beyond the crime scene tape that was stretched across the entrance.

Anna pulled up behind one of the patrol cars and climbed out of her Toyota. At once her nostrils were assaulted by the acrid smell of smoke and noxious fumes.

She paused on the pavement to look up at the building and assess the damage that had been done to it. The two-storey structure had clearly never been an architectural landmark. It was square and bland, with a painted brick facade and a pitched tiled roof that had been partly destroyed by the fire. The front double doors had been forced open, no doubt to allow the firefighters to get inside.

Anna was no stranger to Camberwell and she had a vague recollection of having visited the pub some years ago before it closed down. It was unlikely to have been a social visit, so she had probably come here on police business back when the area was a crime hot spot. It still was to some extent, with drug dealing a serious problem along with knife attacks. But in that respect it was no worse than most other parts of London.

She showed her warrant card to the uniforms and one of them went to get her a paper suit and shoe covers from the forensics van. As she slipped them on she was told that two detectives were already inside the pub along with crime scene investigators and the pathologist.

Anna ducked under the tape and trudged across the forecourt. As she approached the building, two figures wearing pale blue forensic suits stepped out through the doorway. She didn’t recognise them until they removed their face masks and lowered their hoods. Detective Inspector Max Walker and Detective Constable Megan Sweeny.

‘We saw you arrive, guv,’ Walker said. ‘Welcome back to duty. Did you have much trouble getting here?’

Anna shook her head. ‘There was a pitched battle going on in Kennington, but I managed to avoid it.’

‘You were lucky then. And so were we. Soon after we left headquarters a mob of rioters turned up outside and I just heard that it’s getting nasty there.’

‘Well I was expecting things to be a lot worse here,’ Anna said.

A muscle flexed in Walker’s jaw as he wiped a hand across the fine film of sweat that had gathered on his bald head.

‘They’ve moved on to Peckham,’ he said. ‘A few hours ago it was pretty bad here apparently. A group of about a hundred crazies tore along Camberwell New Road and spread out into neighbouring streets to cause havoc. Some stopped off at this place and a petrol bomb was lobbed through an upstairs window. So far we haven’t found any witnesses who saw who actually did it, and I’m not sure we’re going to. It took only minutes for the fire to spread, but most of the damage was to the roof and first floor. The brigade was quick off the mark and got here before the whole lot collapsed into the cellar. By then the rioters had cleared off.’

‘If it had there’s a good chance the boy’s body would never have been found,’ Sweeny added.

Anna could tell from the pained look on the detective’s face that she’d been affected by what she had encountered inside the building. But having joined MIT just over three months ago, at the age of thirty-five, Sweeny still sometimes struggled to cope with the harsh realities of the job. Anna was the first to admit that it did take some getting used to.

‘I gather the pathologist is here already,’ she said.

Walker nodded. ‘It’s Gayle Western. She arrived about half an hour ago. She’s already made arrangements for the body to be removed after you’ve seen it in situ.’

‘Then let’s get to it. Are you sure it’s Jacob Rossi?’

‘One hundred per cent. He’s wearing the school uniform Jacob had on when he disappeared on Monday. And there’s a name tag sewn into the inside of his blazer.’

DC Sweeny stayed outside so that she could make some calls, and Walker led the way into the building, warning Anna to tread carefully because it was structurally unsafe. ‘Just so you know we’ve had to ignore the advice from the fire brigade, which was not to come in here until they’ve carried out a full risk assessment,’ Walker said. ‘They’ve got so much on their plate with the riots that it could be days or even weeks before they get around to it.’

‘We’ll just have to do what has to be done as quickly as we can,’ Anna said.

The interior was a total mess, with wet, charred rubble everywhere. Part of the ceiling had collapsed and above it light shone through the damaged roof, revealing clouds of ash and smoke swirling in the air.

Walker stopped in the middle of what would have been one of the pub’s bars. He pointed to a crime scene investigator who was examining an open door at the rear of the building that hadn’t been touched by the fire.

‘There are two doors and five ground-floor windows that look out onto a small car park round the back,’ he said. ‘They’re all still intact because the fire didn’t reach them. So we’re able to see that the lock on one of the doors is broken and the boarding has been removed from two of the windows, along with the glass. It’s my guess that whoever brought the boy here gained access through one of them.’

‘So why wasn’t the building more secure?’ Anna asked.

Walker shrugged. ‘That’s a question for the estate agents who’ve got a for-sale sign out front. They’re bound to say that they thought they’d done enough to keep people out. But you and I both know that vandals and homeless people are breaking into derelict buildings all over London every day.’

‘That’s true,’ Anna said. ‘So where is the cellar?’

‘We’re standing on top of it.’ Walker gestured towards an interior door to their left that stood open. ‘That leads to the stairs. It was closed when the brigade entered the building after they’d put the blaze out. But there’s extensive damage to the floorboards next to it and the cellar was filled with smoke. The fire officers who went down there reckon it was so thick they didn’t spot the boy’s body until one of them almost tripped over it.’

Anna could feel the blood pounding in her ears as she followed Walker down the rickety stairs into the cellar. It was much larger than she’d expected it to be, stretching almost the entire length of the building. There was no electricity, but natural light came from above through the damaged ceiling.

A lead weight formed in Anna’s chest as she took in the scene. At one end of the room the parts of the ceiling that had come down were piled up on the soaked floor. There were no windows and the bare brick walls were festooned with fixtures that had once been attached to beer kegs.

Four forensic officers were present, and one of them was the pathologist, Gayle Western. She was crouched down next to a grey, inflatable mattress on which lay the body of the dead boy.

Anna experienced a cold shiver as she stepped forward and confronted a scene that she knew would haunt her forever.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Chloe loved reading, so she had no problem wading through the magazine article that ran to four whole pages.

It mostly repeated what had already appeared in newspapers and on the television during the past month. But there were more details and more photographs. She found it odd the way the writer kept switching between the names Alice and Chloe, and she wondered if readers would find it confusing.

The photos were all in colour and each of them provoked a different reaction. There was only one that she hadn’t seen before and it was of Sophie on her wedding day. The man she married was standing next to her with a wide grin on his face.

Bruno Perez looked very different back then. He was slim, handsome and smartly dressed in a grey suit with a yellow flower in one lapel. Nothing like the brutal monster who Chloe saw for the first time eleven years later when he turned up at her father’s bar in Spain.

He was the man they were running from when they fled to England, the man who went on to murder her dad and then force Sophie to take her own life. The man her mother and everyone else described as a violent psychopath.

Chloe’s eyes settled on another photo and this one caused the breath to freeze in her throat. It was of a tall, ugly building and below it were the words:

It was from the roof of this warehouse in Deptford, South London, that Sophie Cameron and her estranged husband, Bruno Perez, fell to their deaths as Detective Anna Tate and her daughter Chloe looked on.

Four weeks had passed since that night, but to Chloe it still seemed like only yesterday. Every time she closed her eyes, she recalled every horrific second of what happened on that roof as well as the events that led up to it.

It began that morning when she and Sophie were getting ready to go on holiday to Spain, the first time they’d been back there since leaving three years ago.

Chloe didn’t know at the time that Sophie planned for them to stay and never to return, fearing that Bruno had found out where they lived in Shoreditch and was planning to do them harm.

After Chloe had packed her suitcase, she pleaded with Sophie to let her go and see one of her friends who lived close by, just a brief visit before they were due to leave for the airport. Against her better judgement, Sophie allowed her to go. But it proved to be a costly mistake because Perez was waiting outside in a van.

He snatched Chloe off the street and then phoned Sophie to tell her what he’d done. Chloe was in the room when he made the call and she could still hear his violent words, as though it had happened only hours ago:

‘You should know that before I arrived at your place today my intention was to abduct you and then make you wish you had never been born. But catching hold of Alice allows me to take your punishment to a whole new level and to make sure your suffering is not short-lived … Alice will be my guest for a couple of days and I’m going to have some fun with her. I even plan to share her with a couple of the guys who work for me … I’ll send you photos and maybe even a video.’

Perez then threatened to kill Chloe if Sophie went to the police. Sophie knew she couldn’t take the risk so she did the next best thing – which was to enlist the help of the woman she had only just discovered was Chloe’s real mother – Detective Anna Tate.

Before describing what happened next, the article took readers back ten years to when it all began, and Chloe read it with tears streaming down her cheeks …

Anna had only recently divorced her husband Matthew following an affair he had. They shared custody of two-year-old Chloe, although the girl resided with her mother.

Matthew started begging Anna to take him back and when she refused he abducted their daughter after sending Anna a note that read:

You won’t let us be a family again because I made a stupid mistake. So I’m starting my life afresh with my lovely daughter … Don’t bother trying to find us because you never will.

Matthew acquired fake passports in the names of James and Alice Miller and moved to Spain where within weeks he met an English ex-pat named Sophie Cameron, who was working in a restaurant. He told her he was a widower and that his wife, Alice’s mother, had died of cancer.

But Sophie also lied to him by saying that she was single when in fact she was married to a man who was in prison for a vicious assault on another man. His name was Bruno Perez.

Sophie and the man she knew as James fell in love and spent the next seven years together, during which they did not find out the truth about each other.

Sophie acted as Alice’s adoptive mother even though she and James never married. The three of them were a happy family in all but name.

Then three years ago Bruno Perez was released from prison and the life they’d created for themselves came to an abrupt end.

Perez, who was part of a crime family operating in Spain and the UK, set out to punish Sophie because she had refused to provide him with an alibi that would have kept him out of prison. Instead, she saw his conviction as a way to escape an abusive relationship at the hands of a violent control freak.

With the help of his family and various contacts inside the Spanish police, Perez tracked Sophie down to Puerto de Mazarron on Spain’s Costa Calida, where she, James and Alice were living. He turned up there and made threats against Sophie, forcing her to confess to James that she hadn’t been honest about her past.

James forgave her and they decided it would be too dangerous to stay in Spain, so they fled to England and rented a house in Southampton.

However, Perez traced them again after only a few weeks. James was returning home from the town centre when he spotted Perez following him. He decided to confront the man, but first he phoned Sophie and told her to flee the house with Alice and wait for him to call her.

But he never did call because he was stabbed to death in a park. Sophie chose not to tell the police that Perez was the killer because she knew they would never be able to prove it. She also didn’t want to take the chance of losing Alice after the authorities discovered that Sophie wasn’t her real mother.

So she moved with Alice to London, rented a flat in Shoreditch, and worked as a cleaner for three years.

Meanwhile, Anna knew nothing about any of this until just over a month ago when she found out purely by chance that her ex-husband was dead and that their daughter was last seen three years earlier leaving a house in Southampton with a mystery woman …

Chloe paused to wipe the tears from her face with a tissue. Her heart started beating rapidly as though it was about to explode in her chest. She blew her nose into a fresh tissue and turned to the fourth and final page of the article.

The top half contained two photographs – one was of her as a two-year-old and the other was the age progression image that was supposed to show what she looked like now. Even Chloe had to admit that the forensic artist had done a good job. The resemblance was striking.

Underneath the photos the story continued:

It was a twist of fate that ended Detective Anna Tate’s ten-year-long search for her daughter.

She was heading up the investigation into the abduction of nine children from a nursery school in South London and the murder of one of their teachers.

Anna appeared on television news bulletins and among those who saw her was a man named Paul Russell, who was dying of cancer in a hospice.

He got in touch with her just days before he passed away and told her that he used to be a master forger and he had produced the fake passports for Anna’s ex-husband that enabled him to take their daughter to Spain. He also revealed that the pair had moved back to the UK three years ago. He knew because he had been approached to provide them with more fake documents.

Anna hired a private detective who picked up the thread and the mystery started to unravel. Police in Southampton confirmed that a man named James Miller had been murdered in a city centre park three years ago and that he’d been living with a child and a woman who disappeared after he was killed.

Anna then told this story to the Evening Standard newspaper, which ran it over two nights.

Sophie Cameron happened to read it, and that was when she discovered that the man she had known as James Miller had been living a lie and that his ex-wife was still alive.

A heartbroken Sophie realised that the net was closing in and made arrangements to flee the country with Chloe. But Bruno Perez suddenly appeared on the scene again and kidnapped the girl. He took her to one of the warehouses owned by his family, and Anna’s police colleagues traced him there.

Before they could arrest him he took Chloe to the roof and held her hostage while demanding that Sophie come to him.

In an interview with this magazine, Anna described what happened – how Perez held on to Chloe and threatened to jump off with her unless Sophie took her place.

Chloe’s adoptive mother agreed to do so without a moment’s hesitation. She then told Chloe that Perez was the man who had murdered her father and that Detective Anna Tate was her birth mother.

Sophie Cameron then took matters into her own hands. Rather than wait for Perez to pull her over the edge, she pushed him backwards and they both plunged to their deaths.

Chloe broke down then and sobs racked her body as that awful scene was replayed in her head. Tears flowed and she felt the muscles knotting painfully in her stomach.

It was a full minute before she got a grip and managed to stop crying. She inhaled a deep breath and decided to go and clean herself up before Tom arrived.

But as she rose from the sofa a noise outside seized her attention.

She stepped over to the front window and pulled back the curtain. To her horror she saw a group of young men with their faces covered marching along the middle of the road. Some were punching the air with their fists while others were holding up placards. On one of them, Chloe saw the words: Kill all cops.

CHAPTER NINE

The boy was lying on his back on the inflatable mattress with his head resting on a single pillow. His eyes were closed, his mouth open, and his lips were red and badly cracked.

He was chained to the brick wall, his wrists shackled by a pair of leather manacles with mini padlocks attached.

There was no way he could have done anything to escape the fire since the chain was only about five feet long.

Gayle Western, the forensic pathologist, stood up and turned to Anna. She spoke through her forensic face mask, her voice tense and clipped.

‘This is beyond barbaric,’ she said. ‘The poor lad didn’t stand a chance.’

‘How long has he been dead?’ Anna asked.

‘Only a matter of hours. And it seems obvious to me that death was due to smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning. Tell-tale signs include the colour of his skin and the state of his lips. During the post-mortem I expect to find damage to his upper airways and respiratory tract.’

The boy was wearing a blue shirt drenched in water, and grey trousers. Next to him on the floor was an uncovered quilt and a pair of black scuffed shoes, along with several empty plastic water bottles and food wrappings.

Walker drew Anna’s attention to a small polyester holdall between the mattress and the wall.

‘It’s filled with sweets, sandwiches and various drinks,’ he said. ‘It suggests to me that whoever abducted him had planned to keep him here for a while.’

Walker then pointed to something else that Anna hadn’t yet noticed. It was a portable camping toilet with a steel frame and a plastic seat over a disposable bag.

‘Seems like his captor – or captors – thought of everything,’ he said. ‘The bag’s half-filled with urine.’

‘So if the boy has been here since Monday it must have been emptied on a fairly regular basis,’ Anna said. ‘It means that the perp or perps might have been caught on nearby CCTV cameras.’

Walker nodded. ‘We’ve thought of that and I’ve already asked for a trawl to be carried out. But we shouldn’t expect results soon. Most local uniforms are dealing with trouble elsewhere.’

‘Of course they are,’ Anna said.

‘In any case, there aren’t many cameras in the immediate area and some have been vandalised by the rioters.’

Surveillance cameras had proved enormously effective during the 2011 riots and were instrumental in bringing many offenders to justice. It stood to reason that they’d become prime targets during subsequent periods of civil unrest.

Anna knew that it was just one of a number of problems that would in all likelihood hinder her investigation. The sheer scale of what was happening on the streets would swamp the Met’s resource structure, slow down communication lines, and make it difficult for officers to move freely, and safely, across the capital.

‘The boy’s blazer was hanging from a nail over there,’ Walker said, with a flick of his head towards the opposite wall. ‘It’s already been bagged up. There were no personal belongings in the pockets, but his parents have said that he was carrying a mobile phone and a wallet when he went missing. There’s no sign of them or his school rucksack.’

‘Do we know what kind of wallet it is?’

‘Just one of those folded Velcro types that kids like, and it had his name on it. He supposedly carried his front door key around in it along with loose change and some sweets.’

Anna stepped closer to the body and crouched down beside it. As she did so she felt tears push hard against her eyes. She had attended a great many ghastly crime scenes since joining the force, but this was one of the most unusual. An icy chill slid down her back as she took in the marks on his wrists where he’d try to free himself from the cuffs. The sight of his emaciated, tear-stained face caused the heat to rise in her chest.

A wave of fury rattled through her at the thought of how much the lad would have suffered. And not just when the smoke drifted down into the cellar and started robbing him of oxygen.

There seemed little doubt that he had been here since Monday when he disappeared, chained up for four days and nights and terrified beyond belief. The questions surged through Anna’s mind.

Had he spent the nights in total darkness?

Had he been physically or sexually assaulted?

Was this the work of one evil monster or several?

What was the motive?

Was he a victim of human trafficking or had the intention been to seek a ransom from his parents?

Anna stood up and said to Gayle, ‘Can you tell if he’s sustained any injuries to his body?’

Gayle shook her head. ‘His face and hands are unharmed as you can see. I’ve checked beneath his shirt and there are no cuts or bruises on his torso, but I haven’t removed his trousers. I won’t know for sure what he went through until he’s in the lab.’

Anna dragged her eyes back to the boy and tried to bring to mind the photo of Jacob Rossi that she’d seen on the news. But when that failed, she took out her phone and googled his name. In the picture his family had shared with the media Jacob was in his school uniform and grinning at the camera. He had short, dark hair and a thin face with high cheekbones. It struck Anna that he was the image of his famous father.

‘Before we break the news to his parents, I want to talk to whoever has been leading the investigation into his disappearance,’ she said.

‘It’s a DI Joe Benning who’s based over in Bromley,’ Walker told her. ‘Control have already been in touch with him and he’s on his way here now.’

‘Good. In the meantime, we mustn’t allow the press to get wind of the fact that it’s a small boy who died here.’

‘One of the calls DC Sweeny is now making is to the media liaison department,’ Walker said. ‘She’s briefing them on what we’ve found and asking them to ensure the fire brigade keep schtum.’

Anna asked Gayle how quickly she’d be able to perform the post-mortem.

Gayle shrugged. ‘I really can’t say for certain. Everything is up in the air because of the riots. I have no idea how many bodies we’ll have on our hands by tomorrow morning. But I promise I will try and prioritise this one.’

Anna knew that she could depend on Gayle to do her best. The pair had worked cases together for some years, and had become firm friends as well as colleagues. They knew they could count on each other to pull out all the stops when it mattered.