‘Is this your house?’ Anna asked.

  He stared at her and then went to pick up a red bus; he stood with it in his hands.

  ‘Oh, that’s a bus. Did you go on a bus?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know where this house is?’

  He stared at the house he had built and then angrily kicked it apart, stamping on the bricks. He put the bus down and started to crawl around, running it up and down the worn carpet.

  ‘Did you go with Joseph? Leave the house with Joseph?’

  It was so frustrating and, at the same time, so emotionally draining; the child was so tense, so far out of reach, and yet so close to answering. His lips moved as if he was saying something, then he went and sat in a corner, holding the bus and refusing to even look at Anna. She stood up and stared at the carers.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. Then: ‘I think I should go.’

  Alison joined her; she could tell that Anna was upset. ‘It takes a long time. If we do have any breakthrough with him, we’ll contact you. You did actually get him to interact with you, which is more than we have been able to do.’

  ‘It’s heartbreaking,’ Anna said, turning to look at the boy huddled in the corner with the bus.

  ‘Yes. We have tried to get his grandmother here; she has promised twice and not turned up, which is even worse. I don’t think she wants any involvement, to be honest. We obviously didn’t tell the children she was due to come. We’ve learned never to make promises.’

  ‘What will eventually happen to him and his sister?’

  ‘We are waiting on suitable foster carers, but they will have to be very special.’

  ‘Will they be able to stay together?’

  ‘I can’t say. It will be a big decision for whoever takes him on; his little sister is doing very well, but she is still mute.’

  They walked to the door, speaking softly so that he wouldn’t hear. ‘But she was not sexually abused?’

  ‘She was not penetrated, but she was used for oral sex. We use dolls and play games; well, you must know how we work.’

  ‘Dear God…’ Anna closed her eyes, near to tears. Everything in her wanted to say, ‘Let me take them, let me care for them!’ In practical terms, it was ridiculous to even contemplate, but she felt so angry and emotional; she felt she needed to help these two defenceless children. She knew that numerous foster families felt the same way, but few were trained to deal with such traumatized children; even sadder was the fact that siblings sometimes had to be separated.

  Anna was shaking Alison’s hand when the younger carer who had been in the nursery room with them hurried out.

  ‘Alison, can you come in quickly?’ she said.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘He was using the crayons and began scrawling all over the wall. I told him to give me the crayon and then he started to urinate in the corner of the room. I went over to him, not to admonish him, but to take him into the toilets, and—’

  Alison turned and hurried away. Anna hesitated, but then followed. The door was ajar. The little boy was screaming, kicking and fighting; then suddenly, as if all the fight had been sucked out of him, he ran into Alison’s arms, weeping. She sat rocking him back and forth.

  ‘It’s all right, no one is going to hurt you. You’re safe, shush now, there’s a good boy.’

  Anna jumped; the young girl had come to stand behind her.

  ‘Thank God–at last.’ She shut the door.

  ‘I don’t understand. What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s crying, letting Alison hold him; it means we’ve broken through.’

  ‘You mean you’ll be able to talk to him?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  The door opened again. Alison asked for some orange juice and biscuits, and a clean pair of pants. She looked almost with irritation at Anna.

  ‘No, you can’t see him,’ she said. ‘Please don’t even ask.’

  Vernon sat with his head in his hands, his elbows resting on the table. He looked in bad shape. Langton sat opposite him, Lewis to his right. Vernon had been talking for over an hour, and he was shaking. Langton checked his watch. It was almost four. He picked up his clipboard and jotted down a note.

  Lewis glanced down. Langton had scrawled: He’s still holding back.

  ‘What’s going to happen to me?’

  Langton said they would get a duty solicitor in but, until they had pressed further charges, he would remain at the station.

  ‘But I done nothing.’

  ‘You withheld vital information, Vernon. If you had disclosed what you knew—’

  ‘But I had nothin’ to do with it, I swear before God. All I was doing was protecting myself. This isn’t right. I could have told you where the house was, but you know I’d be dead meat.’

  ‘You declined to have a solicitor present at the start of this interview: that is correct, isn’t it?’

  Vernon looked at the tape recorder and then at Langton. ‘But we was gonna make a deal, you said to me.’

  ‘I know what I said, Vernon, and the deal is you will continue this interview and make a formal statement.’

  ‘I don’t want a fucking lawyer.’

  ‘That’s your decision.’ Langton stood up. ‘If there is anything else you want to talk to me about, now is the time, because if you think you have a hope in hell of staying in a cushy open prison, you’ve got another big think coming.’

  ‘You can’t do this to me.’

  Langton smiled, and said softly, ‘You want to bet?’ Then he turned to Mike Lewis. ‘Arrange for him to be taken down to the holding cell.’

  ‘Ah, don’t put me back down there,’ Vernon bleated.

  ‘It’ll be a lot cushier than where you’ll end up.’

  ‘In a box, you bastard! That’s what’ll happen to me!’

  Lewis hesitated, then got up. He was confused as to whether Langton meant what he had said, and watched for a signal, but Langton had his back to him, looking down at his clipboard. Lewis walked out.

  Langton looked at the tape. ‘For the benefit of the tape, DI Mike Lewis has just left the interview room; time is four-fifteen p.m.’

  He switched it off and suddenly picked up the clipboard; he swiped it fast across Vernon’s face. Vernon gasped and sat back. Langton placed it back down in front of him as if nothing had happened.

  ‘You have two minutes, Vernon.’

  As Vernon gawped at him, Langton brought up the toe of his shoe and kicked him in the groin so hard that the man reeled back in his chair, clutching at his balls in agony.

  ‘One minute,’ Langton said, never taking his eyes off the sweating, frightened man. ‘Talk, Vernon, fucking start talking to me. Tell me about Clinton Camorra.’

  Vernon squeezed his eyes closed. ‘It was all that prick Murphy’s fault; he tried to blackmail him.’

  Langton walked into the incident room, taut with anger. Anna had just returned to the station and was at her desk.

  ‘We leave for the house in Peckham in five minutes,’ he snapped, and slammed his office door.

  Lewis came in; she asked what was happening.

  ‘Vernon’s down in the holding cell; bastard has been lying from the get go. It’s taken bloody hours, but—’

  Before he could finish, Langton bellowed for him to join him in his office.

  Lewis had never seen him quite so angry.

  ‘It’s been staring at us in the face, but we concentrated so hard on the bloody illegal immigrants. Camorra used the poor bastards to bring in drugs as well as themselves! The women and kids too, all of them were mules; they not only paid the son of a bitch to get them into the country, they also swallowed condoms full of heroin. He’s been concentrating on the poor–thousands of homeless in North Uganda, Somalia and Jamaica–making promises to care for their families. Joseph Sickert was one of the mules, brought in five years ago. He worked for Camorra and was sent to Gail’s to look for Arthur Murphy because Murphy, on the run for Irene Phelps’s murder, had threatened to talk unless Camorra got him out of the country.’

  In the patrol car, Langton continued to fit the jigsaw pieces together.

  ‘Camorra has a virtual army tied to him, afraid of him. He has used mules to open bank accounts in Christ knows how many names, but his bulk fortune is in cash. A control freak, he lost it when he murdered Carly Ann North; we know how he manipulated his henchmen, the Krasiniqe brothers and Rashid Burry. But now comes the twist: Sickert. Sent to track down Murphy via Gail, he starts to have a relationship with her, and when Murphy is arrested, he refuses to go back. Rashid Burry is sent to warn him and sees all her kids; he mentions that they would be useful to Camorra and that Sickert would get paid for bringing them to him.’

  Langton rubbed his knee, grimacing with the pain. ‘White kids, worth a lot of money; but by now, Sickert is involved with Gail and even cares for them. He’s also sick. Whether or not he killed Gail’s husband, we don’t know, but he makes the big mistake of asking for Rashid Burry to help him get medication.’

  Langton shook his head. ‘This is now supposition, but maybe Sickert wanted out–who knows. But whatever went on at the piggery, I don’t think he was involved in the murders. What he did do was take off with the two kids.’ He turned to Anna. ‘You get anything from them?’

  ‘No. The little boy is still very traumatized, and the little girl hasn’t spoken yet. Both have been sexually abused.’

  Langton sighed. ‘Maybe I’m wrong; maybe he did take them to Camorra. We know the white Range Rover was at the piggery.’

  The car drew up outside the Peckham house. Patrol cars, forensic vans and SOCO teams were all still there.

  ‘That scum Vernon, he knew this place. We could have got here sooner.’ Langton slammed the car door shut and headed into the house. Anna and Lewis followed.

  Brandon led them through the house, pointing out what had been taken for evidence; then they went into the cellar.

  Langton stood looking around. No one spoke. After spending half an hour there, they left and drove back to the station in silence. The horrors that had taken place in the house sickened them all.

  ‘It was well cleaned out,’ Lewis said, when they were back in the incident room.

  Langton sighed, closing his eyes. ‘Camorra’s had enough time–he could be anywhere, using Christ knows how many different names and passports. He’s got rid of anyone that could finger him, and with the amount of money he’s got stashed, we might have lost him for good.’

  Chapter Twenty

  The forensic lab had been hard at work for over a week. They had more than six different DNA samples from the bloodied altar; there could have been many more, but the stone had been scrubbed with disinfectant. They had also succeeded in matching the roll of black bin-bags, not only to those wrapped around Rashid Burry’s body, but also the dead child in the canal: yet another murder linked to Camorra. They tested semen stains on the sheets taken from the bedrooms for DNA. Two matched the samples taken from Carly Ann after her rape and murder: one belonged to Idris Krasiniqe, the other was not on any records, nor was the third fingerprint taken from the Range Rover.

  The team had all this incriminating evidence against Camorra, but still no clue as to his whereabouts. The charred documents revealed hundreds of figures, but there were no bank accounts in Camorra’s name and the local bank in Peckham had no customers who answered to his description. The drug squad had been given his details: every day, mules and possible illegal immigrants were being arrested at the airports, so they were to work with the murder team on anyone who could be connected to the case. The fact that airports were so hot on security could also mean that Camorra might have gone to ground somewhere in the UK.

  Staring down into the room from the packed incident board were the photos of the dead, red lines linking one to the other. It felt as if the jigsaw would never be completed.

  Langton was in a permanent cold anger. His frustration often boiled over and he was edgy and aggressive with the team. Sickert’s post-mortem results arrived, confirming that he died of organ failure and chronic heart disease. The sickle cell disease had destroyed him. Anna looked up at Sickert’s picture on the board. Her eyes were drawn to the photo of the child found in the canal. As a thought, she fetched the Sickert file. The small square photograph of the woman and two children, cracked through being folded and refolded, was kept in a plastic cover.

  She picked it up and went in to see Langton. ‘I don’t know if this will do anything for us, but the children in the photograph–one is a boy, the same age as the child found in the canal.’

  Langton looked up.

  ‘Now we have the DNA of Sickert,’ Anna went on, ‘I just wondered if, you know, we were looking for a reason for Sickert to protect the two children.’

  ‘He didn’t, did he though?’

  ‘He did take them to that nursery. What if Camorra had brought Sickert’s children over too? It would be a motive for him to—’

  ‘Go ahead, test it, but it won’t give us much; just another sickening fucking link!’

  Anna walked out to set the wheels in motion for the tests even though, as Langton had said, if the child proved to be related to Joseph Sickert, it brought them no closer to finding Camorra.

  Just as Anna put the phone down, it rang again. It was Alison from the Child Protection Unit.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you that we have made a lot of progress with Keith,’ she said. ‘We have also found a foster carer who is prepared to take both children. She’s been spending time with them here, getting to know them, and will be taking the children at the end of the week.’

  ‘Could I come in and talk to Keith?’

  ‘Yes, that is why I am calling. However, I don’t have to remind you how precarious his recovery is. I can’t allow him to be questioned too long and, if it is too emotional for him to deal with, then you will have to wait.’

  Anna felt the hairs on the back of her arms standing up as she replaced the receiver. She then returned to Langton’s office and gave him the update.

  He sighed. ‘Okay, do you want anyone with you?’

  ‘I think I should go it alone; he has met me before.’

  ‘Good luck then.’ And he went back to his reports.

  Langton was going over the statements of Eamon Krasiniqe’s cellmate, Courtney Ransford. They still did not have the identity of the person who had visited Ransford. He had steadfastly refused to give any information, bar the fact he did not know the man who came to visit, and the death of Eamon had made no difference. Langton called in Harry; he told him to take Brandon and have another try.

  ‘He has maintained that he did not know the bloke and was surprised that he had a visitor. He has also denied that he was passed any of this poison. Can we put some more pressure on him? He’s awaiting trial as a category A prisoner for helping Krasiniqe kill Murphy: let’s call that a twelve-to twenty-year sentence. Add to that a few more years when we charge him with fucking poisoning him, he could be a very long time behind bars.’

  Harry shook his head. ‘I dunno, these bastards–he doesn’t seem to give a shit. But why should he? He’s got three meals a day, gym, TV, bloody computer train—’

  ‘Just go, Harry,’ Langton snapped.

  Alison met Anna in the reception, and said that Keith was in the play area. This was a larger room than the one she had first seen him in. A big open space, it had lots of toys and, in one corner, a games console. She couldn’t believe the change. Keith was standing by the machine, playing with another small boy; they were shrieking and shouting.

  ‘Keith, do you want to come and sit and talk to Anna?’

  Keith continued to play, then jumped up and down, clapping his hands; he had obviously won! He turned to look at Anna, his eyes bright and his cheeks pink with all the excitement.

  ‘This lady is a police officer,’ Alison said. ‘She’s brought you something very special.’

  ‘What?’ he asked, like any normal inquisitive child.

  Anna sat a small low table. Alison drew up a chair for Keith to sit on, but he hovered.

  ‘What have you got?’ he repeated.

  Anna took out a very authentic-looking black plastic wallet. ‘It’s a detective’s badge, Keith, like a real policeman’s. A plain clothes one though, not a policeman in uniform. I have a proper notebook and a pencil as well, for you to write down notes.’

  Keith sat down. He fingered the badge and then opened the notebook.

  ‘That’s for when you question a suspect. You have to always make notes, so you don’t forget anything.’

  ‘Have you got handcuffs?’

  ‘Well, I can get you some, but we have to sort of test you, you know, to be a detective. I need to know if you could make an arrest.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Do you know what that means–to arrest someone?’

  ‘Yes, put bad men away.’

  ‘Correct–that is exactly what I meant. You question them, and it’s called evidence, and you write it down in your book. Then you arrest them if they are bad.’

  ‘Put handcuffs on them?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right! Do you think you would make a good detective?’

  ‘Yes, I got a badge!’

  ‘Yes, that is yours.’

  ‘Can I go in a police car?’

  ‘Oh, that depends. I will have to ask you some questions and then, if you can answer them, you’ll get your handcuffs and a ride in the car.’

  ‘Can I have a gun?’

  ‘No, detectives don’t have guns, they’re only for the special squad.’ Anna was on tenterhooks; it was going so well. She told him to open his notebook, ready to write down information. ‘Do you know any bad men?’ she asked.

  He gave her a strange look, and she wondered if she had gone in too quickly.

  ‘Or, can you tell me about the last house you were in? Or a house you think may have bad people inside?’