Lost River (19 page)

‘Your point is?’ said Cooper.

‘It used to take thousands of years to change the shape of a landscape like this. Now we can change it in a few minutes – with the help of a computer.’

‘What?’

‘Compare your photograph to the real thing.’

Cooper located the position that Nield had been standing by an oddly shaped outcrop of rock nearby. To the left of it on the bank was a stand of trees, and one of the ancient stumps with coins hammered into its cut surface. A money tree.

Then he held up the photo. The oddly shaped rock was there, just to the left of Nield. But the money tree wasn’t there. Behind Sean Deacon was a background of grassy bank, slightly blurred in the print. In fact, the closer he looked, the more blurred the grass seemed, as if it had melted.

He looked at Robert Nield, remembering his son’s digitally
enhanced photographs, the face superimposed on the limestone cliff. It would be perfectly possible for Alex to merge two images and tinker with the background to make them look like one. It was a trick performed all the time by the professionals.

And Alex had three days to come up with this. If he’d shown Cooper the image on his computer screen in higher definition, the line between the two halves might have been more obvious. But the low-quality print-out had been enough to fool him. He had only focused on the people, not the background – just as Alex had expected him to. He knew that Cooper would fail to see the pattern of the landscape.

‘I suppose you’ve guessed where I got this from, Mr Nield,’ said Cooper.

‘Yes. My son is very talented. I did tell you that.’

‘Yes, you did. But why would he deliberately try to get you into trouble?’

Robert Nield shrugged and raised his hands, as if appealing to the river and the spires of the Twelve Apostles.

‘Who knows why teenage boys do these things? Their minds are a mystery to me.’

‘Why are you still pursuing this, Ben?’ asked DI Hitchens when Cooper reported to him at West Street.

‘I’m convinced there was someone else there,’ said Cooper.

‘Someone nearby when Emily Nield drowned. Possibly Sean Deacon.’

‘The photograph was just a prank by the teenage son, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘And there’s no other evidence?’

‘None of the witnesses is specific about it, but if you read between the lines in their statements…’

As soon as he said that, he knew it was a mistake. The CPS didn’t read between the lines of a statement. Nor did a
judge and jury. They only read what was there, the words that had actually been said by a witness. No one read between the lines, except a police officer who’d become obsessed and was trying too hard to make a case out of nothing.

‘All right, you don’t need to tell me, sir,’ he said.

Hitchens looked relieved. ‘Thank God, Ben. I’m glad you see sense. We can’t have you going off the rails, can we? Not right now.’

‘No, sir. Not right now.’

Cooper tried a smile, and Hitchens rubbed his hands together, a sure sign that he thought the conversation was at an end.

‘Let it be then, eh? Leave the Nields in peace.’

In the CID room, Cooper tried to concentrate on something else. He’d remembered an old acquaintance who had been serving with the RAF Police until recently. Carol Parry was a local woman, who had often talked about applying to Derbyshire Constabulary for a job when she finished her time in the RAF. Derbyshire would have welcomed her with open arms – officers with her experience were vital to balance the number of new recruits who were filtering into the ranks.

But, in the end, Parry had met a man from Coventry and had applied to join West Midlands Police instead, so they could be together. She was a loss to Derbyshire. But she might still remember him.

He called her and chatted to her for a while before explaining what he wanted.

‘Okay, Ben, I’ll do some asking around. Details will be a bit hard to come by, you know – but I might get a general idea of what’s going on.’

‘That’s brilliant, Carol. I owe you one. Thanks a lot.’

Then Cooper turned his attention to the transcripts of the interviews with Michael Lowndes and his associate from the Devonshire Estate, who were now both under arrest.

Luke Irvine and Becky Hurst had done a good job with the interviews. But reading over the transcripts again, Cooper could see that there were some questions which had been leading. Irvine had almost put the answers into Lowndes’ mouth, so that he knew what he was expected to say. Awareness of that tendency in yourself came with experience.

For a moment, Cooper thought about the statements from witnesses in Dovedale. He realized that many of those individuals had been asked questions that could have influenced their subsequent memories. ‘Where were you when the girl fell into the water?’ ‘Did you see her bang her head on the stone?’ Anyone who’d been asked those questions would have no doubt that the girl had fallen, would believe that they’d actually seen the stone on which she hit her head. Careless phrasing during the interviews could have planted the images in their minds. It was called ‘verbal overshadowing’. It was a mistake to underestimate the power words had to affect the mind.

Cooper could still remember what it was like when he was a new, wet-behind-the-ears detective constable just learning the ropes. It didn’t seem all that long ago, really. But the years had passed quickly, and DC Luke Irvine was from a different generation.

His family were from West Yorkshire, some village between Huddersfield and Barns ley. Denby Dale? Wasn’t that the place they had giant pies? Irvine had once confided that his father used to work in the mining-equipment industry, but his job went when all the pits closed down. So he got a job at Rolls-Royce in Derby, and the family moved down to Derbyshire. He was only five at the time, so he didn’t remember much about Denby Dale, except for visits to his grandma. It sounded odd to Cooper. So many people seemed to be displaced. Was it all that unusual now to stay in the area where you grew up?

And Irvine had another quality that might come in useful. He was a bit of a computer geek in his spare time.

‘Well, you might call it geek language,’ said Irvine when Cooper showed him Alex Nield’s profile. ‘But some of this stuff is leetspeak.’

‘What?’

‘Leetspeak.’

‘Luke, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘You don’t know what leetspeak is?’

‘Not a clue. And I bet the Nields haven’t either.’

‘It’s a kind of cipher that you only come across on the internet. Originally, it began with users of the old bulletin board systems in the 1980s. If you had “elite” status, you could access special chat rooms, things like that. Elite became “leet”, you see.’

‘Right.’

‘They used these mis-spellings and ASCII characters to get round text filters, so they could discuss forbidden topics. They became a sort of code. Now, young kids use it to show off how knowledgeable they are. Everyone wants to be thought of as “leet”.’

‘So it would be used to show off, and to stop outsiders understanding what you’re saying?’

‘Yeah. And to mock newbies, of course.’

‘Noobs.’

‘That’s it.’

Irvine looked at the profile again.

‘Some of it is just text language, though. Like using “u” instead of “you”, or “n” instead of “and”.’

‘Those are the parts I can get,’ said Cooper.

He scrolled down to the sentence that had disturbed him most.

u were born wrong n u must die!!!!!

‘I’ve seen a lot worse than that,’ said Irvine. ‘They can get pretty nasty, these kids. The general rule is, the nastier they talk, the younger they are. How old is this kid?’

‘Thirteen.’

‘About right.’

‘So what about this one?’ said Cooper.

im s0 1337 taht i pwn ur @ss n00b!!!!

‘Okay, that’s easy,’ said Irvine. ‘A zero is used in place of an “o”. That’s an obvious one – so “n00b” instead of “noob”.’

‘Yes.’

‘Common mis-typings come into leet – so “taht” is deliberate, not a mistake. So is “pwn” which originally meant “own”, the “p” being next to the “o” on the keyboard. And the “@” symbol replaces an “a”.’

‘Okay so far,’ said Cooper.

Irvine looked up. ‘It feels strange just explaining this letter by letter. It’s not what you’re supposed to do with it. The idea is, you either understand it straight off, or you don’t. You’re either leet literate, or you’re not. There’s no in between.’

‘Well, I think I’m getting there,’ said Cooper. ‘Of course, “ur” is “your”, yes?’

‘Correct.’

‘But what’s this “1337”? What’s the significance of the number?’

‘Well, that’s leet,’ said Irvine.

‘I know, but –’

‘No, I mean “1337” is leetspeak for “leet”.’

‘Say that again.’

Irvine grinned. ‘The numbers stand for letters, Ben. The one is “1”, the three is “e”…’

‘…and the seven is a “t”.’

‘You got it: “1337” is “leet” in leetspeak.’

Cooper blew out a breath, as if he’d been working physically hard for the last few minutes.

‘It makes your brain hurt a bit.’

‘So the sentence reads…?’ asked Irvine.

‘I’m so leet that I own your ass, noob.’

‘w00t!!!!!’

‘What?’

‘That’s a leet expression.
w00t!!!!!
It’s an exclamation of joy, or success.’

‘You should use it with lots of exclamation marks, I imagine,’ said Cooper.

Irvine laughed. ‘Yes, I did.’

‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you, Luke?’

‘It’s good to get a chance to show off your talents.’

‘I’m so leet that I own your ass, noob.
A bit American, but I suppose we get the message.’

‘The kid probably copied a lot of this stuff from someone else’s profile, you know.’

‘Probably.’

‘Right down at the bottom, we’ve got
brb kk??
You see those a lot in messages – “brb” is “be right back”. You say “brb” when you’re ending a conversation. Sometimes you’re not coming back at all, it’s just a way of getting rid of someone you don’t want to talk to. And “kk??” is just “okay?”’

‘Some of it is just decoration, though,’ said Cooper. ‘The sword and the face.’

‘Yeah, just ASCII art.’

‘Art?’

‘That’s what they call it.’

‘These city names don’t mean anything to you, do they? Engine House, Dutchman, The Folly.’

Irvine shook his head. ‘Can’t help you there. They’re plain vanilla. Ordinary English. They must have particular meaning for the user.’

‘And is this just for decoration? It looks like something to do with money.’

Cooper pointed at the repeated characters.

£0$7

£0$7

£0$7

£0$7

£0$7 R1√32

‘No, that’s leet,’ said Irvine. ‘A slightly different use of the character set, but you would do that to confuse the issue.’

‘Successfully, in this case.’

‘You see, the pound sign stands for an “1”…’

‘Maybe,’ said Cooper, ‘you could translate the words, rather than doing it letter by letter.’

Irvine shrugged. ‘Okay. This is what it says.’

He drew a message pad towards him and wrote it out in big capital letters that could be understood even by the most ignorant noob.

Cooper ripped the paper from the pad and stared at it. It read:

LOST

LOST

LOST

LOST RIVER

The Indian restaurant was having a busy evening. Its windows were steamed up with hot breath and curry, the front was propped open to let a waft of curry drift out on to the pavement.

On a warm night like this, doors and windows would be standing open all over the city, everyone desperate to get a bit of cool air. Not many in Birmingham thought it worthwhile to install air conditioning. Well, some of the smart new office blocks down by Holloway Circus had it, perhaps. But not here in the streets of Handsworth. Here, everyone expected grey clouds and rain, even in the summer. Anything else took the entire city by surprise. Ironic really, that even the original generation of Asian migrants had forgotten the heat of the Indian subcontinent so thoroughly. Birmingham certainly got into your blood, didn’t it?

But those open doors and windows were also an invitation. Burglars everywhere wouldn’t believe their luck tonight.

Diane Fry saw a wino sheltering in the doorway of an offlicence. A ghetto blaster on wheels roared past, doing well over the speed limit for a city street. But you could never find a police officer when you needed one, could you?

Outside a bank, a woman was using the cash machine,
hunched over the hole in the wall while a friend stood cavey, eyes alert for skimmers or an opportunist mugger. Safe? Of course the city was safe – provided you were sensible, and took a few precautions.

Fry remembered her old bus route to college at Perry Barr. The number 51 or 16, she wasn’t sure. But she recalled with absolute clarity that the route had seemed to pass through all the scariest parts of the city. Aston, Handsworth, Lozells, Newtown. All the places she would have avoided in any other circumstances. Some of those streets she would never have walked down alone. She only viewed them from the top deck of the bus, surrounded by other passengers, eyes glued to the greasy windows as she stared at the people on the street, as if she were a visitor to a wildlife park, observing the big cats at a safe distance. Travelling home on the bus at night could be quite an adrenalin ride. Maybe that was why she’d always wanted to go back and do it again.

Vincent Bowskill was waiting for her in the entrance to an alley full of grey city council wheelie bins bursting with plastic bags. He was smoking a cigarette, his face washed sickly green by the restaurant sign. Through the plate-glass window, Fry glimpsed gold-embossed wallpaper, tables covered in plumcoloured cloth and sheets of glass, a few customers mopping up curry with their naan bread.

The streets were all yellow glare and deep shadow. A pair of black ghosts moving soundlessly between the streetlights turned out to be two women in black burqas, their eyes covered by concealing grilles. They wore the full Afghan chadri – the type some Pakistanis called a ‘shuttlecock burqa’. Purdah clothing.

Fry had passed a row of shuttered shops, barricaded against the possibility of riot or ram-raid. On the corner, there used to be bullet holes visible in the concrete wall, at the scene of another notorious shooting. But the wall itself had been pulled down now. One more re-development site.

In some parts of Handsworth, fear prowled the streets like more black ghosts. If you lived in a place like this, it was best to keep your head down, filter out the things you don’t want to see. Close your eyes, and the world looks better.

‘There are lots of serious gangs in Birmingham,’ said Vince. ‘Not just the Johnnies and the Burgers. Your lot ought to go after some of them Asian gangs – the Lynx, and the Panthers.’

‘Right.’

‘Oh, but I forgot. You won’t take on the Asians.’

‘It’s nothing to do with me any more.’

‘Oh, yeah. You got out, didn’t you? Left it all behind. Lucky you.’

‘The local gangs, Vince.’

‘They’re not all bad, you know. Those crews have been around the city for a while. There’s two hundred members in the Johnnies, and they’re not all out shooting innocents on the street. Some of them are safe.’

The Johnson Crew was widely accepted as being the more organized of the two main gangs, having made loose affiliations with the local Asian heroin gangs in Aston as well as with Jamaican-born Yardies, until the Jamaicans became increasingly marginalized in the city. Despite being numerically inferior, the Burger Bar Boys had taken advantage of their small, tight-knit community and were seen as the more ruthless.

The UniSeven Studio shootings were in retaliation for the murder of leading Burger Bar Boy Yohanne Martin, who died behind the wheel of his silver Mercedes in West Bromwich High Street.

And it wasn’t just a bunch of testosterone-charged youths proving their manhood and earning respect. Girls were being drawn into the nightmare now. The suspects charged with the shooting of Yohanne Martin were seventeen and eighteen – and both of them were female.

The gangs got their names from two caf´es in Handsworth
where black youths congregated in the late eighties and early nineties. The Burger Bar was on the Soho Road, while the Johnson café was in Heathfield Road. Legend had it that both gangs were originally friendly, but fell out over a bet on who won a game of
Streetfigbter
on the PlayStation. By the late nineties, their street fighting had moved off the computer screen and out on to the streets. And it was no longer a game.

The killings began in the last days of 1995 as the young men fought off Yardie gangsters, and then turned on each other in a bloody turf war. Betrayals, executions and tit-for-tat killings. Bodies on the streets of North Birmingham. Fry knew gangsters’ lives weren’t glamorous. They were full of fear and paranoia.

‘I want you to make contact with two men,’ said Fry. ‘Marcus Shepherd and Darren Barnes. They’re known on the street as S-Man and Doors.’

She could see by his expression that he knew them. Or had heard of them, at least. A spasm of fear passed across his face, before he forced his features back into that sullen mask.

‘Do you know which gang they’re in?’

He shifted uncomfortably. ‘Yeah, the m1 Crew. But I can’t do this. They’ll think I’m baiting them up.’

‘Setting them up for arrest?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But I’m not working with the police here, Vince. You don’t even need to tell them that I’m a police officer. I’m sure you can think of something to persuade them.’

‘I suppose.’

She watched him smoke his cigarette and think about it. Across the road, a drug dealer was operating openly, small plastic packages changing hands in full view. There would be lookouts at each end of the block, and a car arriving each day to distribute the drugs to the street dealers.

Being a civilian gave Fry an exhilarating sense of freedom. As a police officer, if she’d wanted Vince Bowskill to become
an informant, she would have had to do everything officially. There was no such thing as a detective running his own snouts any more, with their names known only to him. Those days were long gone, swept away in the desperation to clean up any suggestion of corruption or dodgy practices.

Now, she would have to make Vince sign a contract and leave all contact with him to a properly appointed handler. In documents, he would be a referred to as a CHIS – a Covert Human Intelligence Source.

Immediately, her brain began to churn with extracts from the code of practice relating to Section 71 of the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. According to the code, she would have to get authorization from a designated authorizing officer, who would provide authorization in writing. Using the standard application form, she would have to provide details of the purpose for which the source would be tasked, the grounds on which authorization was sought, the level of authority required, a summary of who would be affected, details of any confidential material that might be obtained. She would have to keep detailed records of every task, and be prepared to account for her actions to the Chief Surveillance Commissioner. She would have to carry out a risk assessment on the deployment of her source. A risk assessment, for goodness sake.

She was amazed that she could remember all this stuff. It was even more incredible that, right at this moment, she could forget the whole bloody thing.

‘So will you help, Vince?’ she said.

‘Yeah, okay. Well, it’s family, right?’

‘Right.’

Angie had taken on her own jobs. Diane wasn’t entirely sure why her sister was so keen to get involved, but she wasn’t in a position to turn down help. What she needed most was someone to talk to, a person she could open up to and bounce questions off.

Right now, the only person who came close to filling that role was Angie. She wouldn’t have been Diane’s first choice, but this was all she had. She was waiting when Diane got back to her hotel in Brindleyplace.

‘This first witness, Louise Jones,’ said Angie. ‘She doesn’t work for the publisher any more. She left them months ago. They don’t have a current address for her – but they say she moved away from Birmingham.’

‘If she was on witness protection, she wouldn’t be giving out her address,’ said Diane.

‘No.’

‘But it seems someone got to her, nonetheless. Everyone is out to put the knife in. It feels as though the whole world is against me.’

‘There are people on your side, Diane. They’re trying to help you.’

‘I don’t know who they are.’

‘Well, where do you think I got a copy of the case file from?’

‘I don’t know.’

Angie shook her head. ‘Gareth Blake. He rates you.’

‘He told me to clear off home. Almost in as many words.’

‘He had to say that in front of his sergeant.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Well, what about this other witness?’ said Angie. ‘Tanya Spiers. Where does she work again?’

‘Some place called the Rosebud Massage Parlour.’

‘A massage parlour? Oh, great. There are so many massage parlours in Birmingham it’s a miracle they haven’t caused a worldwide shortage of baby oil.’

Diane agreed. Oh, a few of them were genuine, of course. They administered a good, healthy pummelling to get the stress out. Not a bad idea, either. But the others…

She pictured a grimy flight of stairs and a dim bulb. The sweet smell of cannabis creeping under a door, unmasked by
the scent of incense and aromatic oils. An overweight dyed blonde in a low-cut lurex top and skin-tight leather. A fakefur rug and a price list on the back of the door. Sex and the City? Forget the glammed-up Hollywood version. The real thing was quite different.

She had no doubt that trafficked women still worked in the massage parlours of Lozells and Digbeth. Young girls fresh off the plane at Birmingham International, flight BA305 from Bucharest. They came believing they had a job in the hotel business, speaking little English and carrying even fewer possessions. And instead of going into a job, they were passed from hand to hand, deprived of their passports, beaten and intimidated by a succession of new ‘owners’ until they accepted their fate, became resigned to a grinding day-by-day degradation. And, of course, they were told over and over that the police couldn’t be trusted. So no one was going to come forward with information.

But there were lots of other places, officially licensed as massage parlours, where sensual massages and special services were openly advertised. These places were rarely raided, unless there was a problem. As long as the girls were called Chelsea and Holly, everyone turned a blind eye. And maybe Tanya, too.

Angie was leafing through a copy of Yellow Pages that she’d found in a drawer.

‘Yep, it’s listed.’

‘Nothing like being up front. I’ll phone them.’

‘And say what?’

‘I’ll think of something,’ said Diane.

But the woman who answered the phone said that Tanya didn’t work at the Rosebud any more. Another missing witness, like Louise Jones? If Diane had been a man, she guessed she would have been offered someone else’s services at this point, probably received the hard sell. But that didn’t happen.

‘Have you got Tanya’s home address, please?’

The woman sounded outraged. ‘No, I soddin’ haven’t.’

‘You must keep addresses on file. It’s one of the conditions of your licence.’

‘There was a moment’s silence. ‘You’re the police aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you say so? I always co-operate with your lot. Are you trying to catch me out, or something?’

‘If you could just give me Tanya’s address…?’

Angie had been listening with interest, and stood up when she’d finished the call.

‘Where, then?’

‘Off the Hagley Road.’

‘Naturally.’

At one time, prostitution in Birmingham used to be concentrated around Balsall Heath. A campaign by local residents and businesses had succeeded in driving most sex workers out of the area. But, of course, the problem just went somewhere else.

That somewhere else was the Edgbaston area, in several streets off the Hagley Road. It seemed to reach its peak near the Plough and Harrow. There were also reports of girls still operating around Speedwell Road, Hockley, and even in the Jewellery Quarter. Competition and a dependency on drugs had driven the going rate down to twenty pounds for a quickie in the back of a car. Surveys suggested that most people didn’t really mind the sex trade, as long as it went on behind closed doors, rather than on their street corner. The problems that residents had with prostitution were based on needles and condoms being left in places where they shouldn’t be, and vehicles driving aimlessly around looking for girls.

West Midlands Police now had active patrols in those areas and were taking a tougher line with the problem. Once happy to caution a driver for kerb crawling they were now arresting the offender and carting them off to the police station. A call
was then made to their home address to verify the person’s identity, and the police would press charges.

The police said they were acting in the interests of both the girls and local residents. Many of the sex workers were beaten up, abused by pimps, and addicted to drugs. Some had even been murdered. Many were under age. But there were plenty of massage parlours in Birmingham offering sexual services, and these were seldom raided unless problems occurred. The girls at a massage parlour were less likely to be abused, less likely to annoy the locals, and far less likely to be taking drugs.