Crime (38 page)

— Once they found my weakness –

— Aw aye? Lennox spits in threat. — And what weakness is that?

Chet looks sadly at him. — It’s not what you think. I swear to
you
I never touched Tianna or any other child, nor did I make them do anything. He says it so emphatically that Lennox can see he is disgusted at the thought. — I didn’t make
anybody
do anything. I just liked to watch, not with the kids obviously, I knew nothing about that. Please believe me! he pleads.

— Go on.

— Pamela had gone, Lennox, and I was lonely. This was to be our retirement paradise; I’d worked and saved and invested carefully all my life so that we could have this dream together. We lived it for about eighteen months till she got sick and she was dead five months later. I was at a low when I met Robyn and Tianna.

Lennox raises his eyebrows.

— There was nothing between Robyn and me. She made it clear that she wasn’t interested, and to be truthful, neither was I. But through her I met Johnnie and Lance. I knew they were lowlife, especially Johnnie, his head twists towards the bow, — and that they would do what they do. It was just women at first. All I ever did was let them use the boat, and watch the odd tape they made. But they’re devious sons of bitches; they shot the stuff in a way that everybody would know it was being filmed on my boat. They knew this was my life and that I’d be finished here if it came out.

— So you got in so deep you felt you had to carry on, Lennox says. This was commonplace. People being blackmailed often capitulated, thinking they could buy time, but usually ended up compounding the problem by compromising themselves even more.

— Yes, Chet moans, — I would never
do
anything. I would never betray my Pamela’s memory. I was just so lonely and fed up. I only watched a couple of times! He looks at Lennox in appeal.

That’s the problem. Too many people like to watch
. — When did you learn they were paedos, rather than just stag lads making gonzo porn?

Chet swallows a mouthful of malt. — I knew it was going to lead somewhere bad, but I had no conception that they’d involve
children
. Then, when I saw a tape they’d done with a young girl, that was the last straw for me. I started making copies of the ones they kept here, for evidence. I was going to bring the animals down before they got their hands on Tianna. She’s my granddaughter’s friend, Lennox!

Lennox’s index finger shoots up and caresses the knot of twisted bone at the side of his nose. — I think you were too late.

— What? Chet gasps, his face falling south.

— Where are the tapes?

— I have them here. Chet feverishly glances back to the stateroom.

— Anything else?

— Oh yes, he says, — I’ve got a list of names. Of those monsters and their intended victims. I got on to their website. Johnnie was sloppy. He started coming here with six-packs of beer, lording it up. Demanding I took him out fishing. He’d sit downstairs and watch the tapes, or go on to the website. I encouraged him, waited till he was drunk and left the window open on his computer. It’s all coded, of course. They have their own language; everything’s couched in business jargon. It’s all ‘sales’, ‘marketing’ and ‘closing the deal’. But what they’re really talking about is entrapment. He springs to his feet. — If that bastard has done anything to that child …

— Aye, Lennox agrees, but rises and grabs Chet by his wrist. — Later, he’s going nowhere.

Lennox thinks back to the Club Deuce and Club Myopia and the guy he’d told to take a hike. Starry had obviously taken him for a nonce and tried to set him up with Robyn. — I get the picture. He taps the glass on the table. — I’ll need a copy of these lists as evidence.

— I’ve plenty of that, Lennox, Chet says, heading through to the stateroom. Lennox follows, watching Chet produce some keys, open a locked cupboard and extract a box full of disks. There’s a printout with a list of names; another has dates of events. Lennox looks them over. They are presented like sales conference documents, denoting task forces of ‘agents’, ‘potential customers’ and ‘leads’. One of the ‘local sales managers’ that stands out from a list is: VINCENT MARVIN WEBBER III, MOBILE, AL.

Then he sees a listing for: JAMES ‘TIGER’ CLEMSON, JACKSONVILLE, FLA.

And: JUAN CASTILIANO, MIAMI, FLA.

— There’s nothing for Lance Dearing. He’d be too smart to have his own name on record, Lennox says, noting a training session scheduled for tonight at the hotel where Johnnie had said Lance would be.

— Yes. With Dearing being a cop I knew I’d be crucified unless I had hard evidence. That’s why I was building up a dossier, Chet says eagerly, the IRS investigator in him now to the fore. — With his police connections, who could I trust?

— Aye, Lennox admits, — sometimes it’s hard to know who you can trust.

But there are urgent issues to consider. Chet explains that they’re stuck on a sandbank, and that to get off, they must enlist Johnnie’s assistance. They head up to the bow and retie his arms in front of him, then free his legs. He starts to kick out in panic when Lennox gestures at him to climb down into the water. — No way! he shrieks. — No way! You’re gonna drown me!

— We
should
fucking drown you, Chet snarls.

— I don’t wanna die!

— Fuck it, Lennox says, and he removes his socks, trainers and flannels and heads down the ladder into the waters of the Gulf. The shock of cold almost takes his breath away. He looks down to his underpants and braces himself, and is relieved to feel his feet touch the silty bottom a few inches before the water level reaches his groin. — Right, you, he shouts up to Johnnie, — get your fuckin arse down here!

Johnnie, with Chet’s heavy-handed assistance, reluctantly follows. Chet climbs back up the boat as Lennox and Johnnie take hold of the ropes, pulling at the vessel on either side of the stern. As the cold fuses through him, Lennox feels his strength draining. His left arm throbs; his right hand is useless. Nothing is happening; the boat seems stuck fast. Johnnie’s querulous, self-pitying Spanish soliloquies grate on his jagged nerves. — Shut the fuck up or we’ll leave you right here, he threatens. Johnnie sees that he isn’t joking, and redoubles his exertions.

With no previous indication that it was going to happen, the boat mischievously slips free of the sandbank and starts to drift past them. They drop the ropes and watch the vessel slide across the broken shards of moonlight blinking on the cold, mauve surface of the water. Then the engines roar into life and Lennox feels his heart sink as the vessel imperiously chugs away. He sees Johnnie standing waist-deep about twelve feet away, and both men instinctively look for the ropes, but they’ve gone into the dark water, out of sight and reach. Chet has left them on this bank, stranded until the tides changed and they drowned. He isn’t a strong swimmer and he doubts he’ll be able make the shore, especially with the condition of his arm. Johnnie has no chance unless he can be untied. Lennox’s neck swivels, his gaze frantically seeking the lights of other boats, then helicopters above. But there’s nothing through the murky darkness besides the tired moon and the dim and distant illuminations of Bologna.

He catches Johnnie’s eye, just in time to be ridiculed by the kinship of fear that flashes between them. Then he sees the boat is circling back towards them. His heartbeat steadies as he ascertains that Chet’s only manoeuvring the craft away from the sandbank into deeper water before dropping anchor. — Come on, he shouts, and they splash across the cold, tired yards through the thin sea and scramble aboard. Chet grudgingly hauls Johnnie on, and they secure him in the downstairs back bedroom. Lennox dries off and pulls on his trousers and shoes before they get under way.

He sits up at the helm with Chet. He’s very cold, in spite of the cagoule Chet’s given him. It’s almost pitch dark at sea now, and he can hear nothing beyond the engine of the boat. But Lennox is distracted; there’s something he needs to do.

Down in the stateroom he removes the box of tapes, fast-forwarding through them. Johnnie is among several men featured having sex with various women in standard home-made porn flicks, shot on two cameras and edited between mid-shot and close-up. The locations seem to vary but the boat features widely, the stateroom and the upper deck sharing prominence. In one he sees Robyn’s face, spaced, yet intense as Johnnie fucks her from
behind
. But the next one features a Latina girl, who looks around twelve or thirteen years old. She performs fellatio on two men, one of whom is Johnnie.

Then Lennox sees a dirty black rucksack lying by the bed. He picks it up and looks inside. Some personal effects identify the owner as Juan Castiliano. Then he pulls out a drum holding several digital videodiscs. All have names and dates inscribed on them by Magic Marker. Flipping through them, Lennox’s soul refrigerates as he sees: Tianna Hinton.

He inserts it and presses play, but switches off after just seconds of seeing Tianna, naked, in a heavy-eyed stupor, sweating on the bed where he now sits. Coming into shot and bearing down on her with lecherous menace is Police Officer Lance Dearing.

But the pictures clicking into blackness only spark up another set in his head. Horsburgh’s dreadful show: he’d had to watch it in full. In the age of digital video, everything was recorded; sins more than triumphs, on phones and cameras, to be exhibited to the world online. Why would sex criminals, of all people, be immune to that narcissism? Murderers were the biggest divas: the Raskolnikov tendency heightened by accessible recording technology and the confessional culture. The criminal, the artist, the citizen, all driven by the compelling need to have their deeds recorded, to get a slice of digital immortality. And Horsburgh had his audience, when a frozen-faced Gillman had turned to Lennox, nodded and switched on that tape.

Horsburgh’s video, in the rented Berwickshire cottage, had been poorly made. One mid-shot from a camera on tripod at two figures on a bed, the smaller one secured there, bound at the wrists and ankles to the iron bed frame. Mostly you just saw his body, thrusting on top of her, but then he’d turn his cold, cruel face and look into the camera, popping his eyes and licking his lips in a sickening theatrical caricature. At first only the horrendous mantra of terrorised disbelief informed you that the child was still alive. Her cries were less a plea for him to stop his relentless assault, and more an attempt to stoically deny what was happening to her. Then she’d started to whimper: — It’s sair, you’re hurting me, I want my ma, I want my ma …

It was unbearable to witness, but he had to stay put. Struggling to breathe, he stared at the brand plate of the monitor just below the bottom of the screen, trying to turn down the sound in his head, to concentrate on incidents beheld from the Wheatfield Stand at Tynecastle Stadium, to think of what the outcome of recent uninspiring results would have been had George Burley stayed in the manager’s chair …

Then Confectioner had slapped Britney’s face and forced her to focus, shouting, — Look at me! Fucking look at me, before twisting her head to the camera, compelling Lennox to gaze into the doomed child’s terrorised eyes, — Look at the camera! Let them see who’s doing this to you!

Gillman’s finger jabbed the air. — That ring he’s wearing. That’s how he tore the bairn’s vagina, right? It’s aw been swabbed, right? Was it Eddie Atherton did that? He missed quite a bit in that Conningsburgh case, mind.

It was as if Gillman was seeing on-screen the highlights of the dull football game Lennox had been trying to picture in his mind’s eye.

And now Britney is Tianna and he can’t look. But he has to look. He can’t
not
look. He presses play again.

It’s different. Horsburgh is Dearing. It’s well shot; there is even a soft elevator-music soundtrack. The pan pipes. He thinks about the car ride.
That music is kinda creepin me out
. Dearing’s smiling face, his benign concentration. Like he was
making love
. The girl, the stunned, sleepy child, made vacant and toylike by drugs; it
was
Tianna he was doing this to. Gap-toothed wee Tianna with her sheep’s bag and her baseball cards, and his hands grip the quilt on the bed and he feels the tears on his face he could never show when he’d watched the Confectioner video. But then a fingertip to his dry skin reveals them as phantom.

Lennox stops the machine. Rage grips his throat like a vice. He feels something in his chest going in and out of spasm. He rises unsteadily, removing the DVD, looking at the simple unmarked silver disc, seemingly so innocuous. Over the buzz of the engines, he can hear shouting coming from the other bedroom. This cuts out abruptly when its source sees Ray Lennox in the doorway. —
Carry
on, please. I actually want you to keep shouting, he says to Juan Castiliano. — To just say one more fucking word. Cause that’s all it would take for me to cut your fuckin heid off, and his cold, murderous black eyes hold the paedophile, who shrinks back in fear.

Bologna draws close as Lennox appears on the bridge behind Chet. The marina, as they pull ashore and tie up the boat, is almost deserted though the Lobster bar is still open. They go back to the stateroom, where Lennox shows Chet in fast-forward a selection of Johnnie’s discs, though not the Tianna one, which he’s kept. There are three other young girls: from their soon-to-be-removed clothes they look poor, mostly, he suspects, Central American immigrants.

Chet is dazed and zombie-like as he carries the box of tapes into the Volkswagen. They drive for two blocks, stopping at a building announced by a backlit white-and-blue sign as the Bologna Police Department.

— You made me drive to an Internet café when you had all those facilities on board, Lennox said.

— It’s very expensive at sea. Johnnie was bleeding me dry.

— Any Scottish blood?

Chet bends his mouth a little as Lennox’s fingers drum at the box on his lap. — Take all this into the station. Tell them the lot. How you got to know Robyn. How Lance and Johnnie were blackmailing you. Take them to the boat; they’ll ID Johnnie from some of the videos. A good cop’ll break him down in seconds.