The Child (Kate Waters #2)(61)

Joe nodded and leaned forwards to show Soames he had his full attention.

“Oh dear,” he said.

“I became PNG after that,” he said, then noticing Joe’s blank look, added: “Persona non grata. No longer welcome. The party invites dried up and then time just passed . . .”

Soames grinned at Joe.

“I liked to party. And the girls were only too willing.”

“You must have had a great time,” Joe said and smiled. Boys together, Kate thought.

“Yes. Great. We had all the chat-up lines.” He leaned closer to Joe so Kate had to strain to hear. “And if they didn’t work, there were always our little helpers.” And he laughed. A coarse, nasty laugh.

“Little helpers?” Joe asked and Kate held her breath. A question too far.

“Just a turn of phrase,” Soames said quickly. But he winked at Joe.





FORTY-NINE


    Kate


FRIDAY, APRIL 13, 2012

When they finally emerged from Soames’s flat, Kate and Joe stood on the pavement like competitors at the end of a race and caught their breath.

“Oh my God. That was horrible,” Joe said.

“Welcome to my world,” Kate said. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

In the car, she sat for ten minutes, scribbling notes of the conversation. She hadn’t wanted to get her notebook out in the flat—she knew Soames would clam up if he realized his words were being written down.

She’d turned her recorder on in her handbag as soon as they went through the door but she wasn’t sure what would be on the tape. Everyone was moving around, in and out of rooms. Still, she might’ve got something. She’d check later.

Kate didn’t rely on recorders in the normal run of things. They were temperamental creatures, buttons got stuck, batteries ran out. On one excruciating occasion, she’d taped a whole interview and, playing it back, found she had an hour of hissing static.

She preferred the ancient art of shorthand—a skill regarded as laughingly analog by the online newbies. Kate had learned it, as a junior reporter, from a former Japanese POW. He was a tiny, chirpy man whose party trick was to walk into a room and do a flying kick to switch on the light. Isaac Pitman would’ve had a fit, but the ninja had got her through her hundred words a minute.

She and Joe had been in the flat for two and a half hours, but her memory had become trained to recall whole conversations. It was essential for the job but was also particularly useful at home during arguments with her sons. “You never forget anything, Mum,” Jake had said during one of their recent rows over his future. “You never let anything go.”

He was right, but Kate could remember things people said as if they were lit up in neon in her head.

And Soames had used some wonderful phrases, and in the margins of her notebook, she drew stars beside names and places dropped into the conversation.

We liked to party . . . We had all the chat-up lines. And if they didn’t work, there were always our little helpers, she wrote, adding, Drink? Drugs? Rohypnol?

Joe had also got his notebook out and was writing in it but with the same look of pained concentration as Kate’s sons when they used to do homework at the kitchen table. Steve did the maths and science duty, she did the spellings and essays. Teamwork.

“Get down everything you remember, Joe,” she said. “We’ll compare notes later.”

? ? ?

At the office, she opened the envelope and pulled out a handful of pictures. Included were the Polaroids she’d found wedged on top of the wardrobe.

The images were slightly faded, the photographic paper losing its definition over the decades, but the content suddenly came into focus. Naked limbs, scattered clothing, slack, unconscious faces.

She scooped them up quickly and took them into the ladies’ where she could look at them uninterrupted.

She went through them carefully, her hands trembling, scrutinizing the faces of the women and girls. They were all someone’s daughters, she thought. I’m glad I only have boys. How can you protect girls from harm? she thought.

They definitely look drugged, Kate thought as she examined the half-open, dead eyes in the photos.

“You look so young, you’re just a child,” she told one of the girls.

And there were glimpses of the perpetrator—a shoulder, a hand, the side of Soames’s face, recognizable. These were trophy photos. The kill recorded by the hunter.

Kate tried to see more, straining her eyes to see something in the picture that would tell the whole story, but there was just what was there. A small square of evidence, like a tile from a mosaic. She spread all the photos out on the marble floor.

Nina, the news desk secretary, found her, kneeling on the floor surrounded by the images, when she swept in for a quick pee.

“Bloody hell, Kate, I nearly fell over you. What are you doing? Is it the call to prayer or something?”

Nina delighted in being the least PC person in the office.

“Sorry, Nina. Wanted to look at these pictures without anyone rubbernecking. They’re a bit sensitive,” Kate said.

Nina crouched down beside her. “Bloody hell, my knees. What’s going on here?”

“You may well ask,” Kate said. “I think someone drugged and raped these women.”