Vanishing Point Read online

  As it did all of them.

  As Brady observed them all he was keenly aware that no one was speaking. The air was tense.

  DC Kenny and DC Daniels sat motionless. Both averting their eyes from Brady’s penetrating gaze.

  As were DS Harvey and DC Kodovesky.

  Even Conrad was studying his hands.

  Brady knew that their minds were elsewhere.

  The critical condition of Simone Henderson was affecting everyone. That, and the fact that, given a choice they would all rather be working on finding her attacker. Not stuck here, forced to deal with another brutal crime investigation. As it was, whether it due to unspoken loyalty to Brady or a deep, intrinsic dislike of DI Adamson, this was Brady’s investigative team. Demoralised and preoccupied.

  Brady unintentionally caught Claudia’s eye. She was the only one looking straight at him. And if he wasn’t mistaken, she looked worried. Worried about him.

  Maybe it was the open cuts to his cheek and above his eyebrow that had got to her. But Brady seriously doubted that. He was certain it would be connected to her earlier meeting with DCI Gates. Brady knew that Gates wouldn’t take the incident at the hospital with Frank Henderson lightly. Especially since both Frank Henderson and Adamson had made a formal complaint against him.

  Brady rubbed the coarse dark stubble on his chin as he thought about the job at hand.

  ‘Harvey, Kodovesky. You two have the details on the victim who we now know has been identified as the missing sixteen-year-old girl, Melissa Ryecroft. How about you update us?’

  ‘Right,’ began Harvey as he stood up and walked over to the whiteboard.

  Harvey cleared his throat and looked around his colleagues.

  Brady waited. He knew what was coming next.

  Harvey pointed to the photographs of the decapitated head that Ainsworth had sent through.

  ‘Wolfe has confirmed that the decapitated head left in DI Brady’s car does in fact belong to the victim, who we now know has been positively identified as Melissa Ryecroft, a local girl.’

  Around the table there were a few murmurs at the gruesome sight of the victim’s head.

  ‘As you can see, Melissa Ryecroft was partially strangled and then a captive bolt pistol was placed in the centre of her forehead and fired,’ stated Harvey. ‘In between that … well … you can all see what they did to her after she was dead. Presumably, this was to make it difficult to identify the victim.’

  Brady looked at the rigid faces around the room. The only one whose expression never altered was Kodovesky. She sat expressionless, not allowing the photographic carnage on the whiteboard to penetrate.

  ‘For those of you who aren’t familiar with captive bolt pistols, they’re a device used for stunning animals prior to slaughter. Also known as a cattle gun.’

  Harvey had everyone transfixed.

  This was a new kind of crime. Or at least that’s what Brady thought. But the inquisitive look on Claudia’s face told him this was something she’d already come across in her sex trafficking work.

  ‘The point of it is to stun the animal into unconsciousness, enabling the slaughter house to hang it up and slit its throat, so it bleeds to death.’

  Claudia nodded.

  She then tucked a long, stray red curl behind her ear before politely interrupting.

  ‘I’ve come across this before but I never thought I’d see a case of it being used on a victim here in the North East. Let alone Whitley Bay. Having said that, this isn’t as atypical as you might think. It’s becoming a growing trend amongst a certain clientele in the sex slavery business.’

  Brady looked at her questioningly.

  She held his gaze for a second too long before turning back to the room.

  ‘However, the use of penetrating captive bolts, which if I’m right is exactly what has been used on the victim, Melissa Ryecroft, has been discontinued in commercial situations in order to minimise the risk of transmission of disease. Sometimes it causes the brain tissue to actually go into the bloodstream of the animal, contaminating other tissue with bovine spongiform encephalopathy,’ Claudia explained. Realising she had lost them, she added, ‘To you and me, that’s BSE, otherwise more commonly known as mad cow disease.’

  Harvey looked at her with candid surprise.

  Conrad didn’t.

  It was clear to Brady that Claudia and Conrad had already discussed the case while he had been busy in his office.

  ‘Claudia’s right. The captive bolt pistol used on the victim …’ Harvey paused as he directed them to the hole in the centre of the victim’s head ‘… is a stunner. It uses a pointed bolt propelled by a blank cartridge. The bolt penetrates the skull of the animal, or in the case here, the victim’s head. It enters the cranium and damages the cerebrum and part of the cerebellum. The damage to the brain tissue here was catastrophic.’

  He stopped and cleared his throat, disgusted with the thought of what had been done to the victim.

  ‘She would have lost consciousness pretty much immediately, as it destroyed the brain matter in her skull. But crucially, and this is the point of the captive bolt pistol, it left her brain stem intact.’

  ‘But she’s dead, right? So what does it matter if the brain stem’s intact?’ asked Daniels as he looked from Harvey to his partner Kenny.

  Kenny shrugged.

  ‘Don’t look at me, mate. Biology was never my strong point!’ Kenny pointed out.

  ‘Is that why you don’t know your arse from your elbow?’ quizzed Daniels, giving him a wry smile.

  ‘If you two bloody paid attention then you might learn something, you boneheads!’ commented Harvey.

  Kenny and Daniels refrained from saying something.

  Brady dismissed what on the surface appeared to be insensitive camaraderie, aware that this was the men’s way of dealing with the horror of what had happened to the victim.

  ‘That’s precisely why it’s been used on the victim. It had the same effect as it does on cattle. Leaving the brain stem intact allows the heart to continue beating, so the animal bleeds to death.’

  Claudia looked across at Kenny and Daniels, clearly unimpressed with their cavalier attitude.

  ‘You want to know the reason a captive bolt stunner was used on this sixteen-year-old girl?’ Claudia questioned as she stared at them.

  ‘To kill her?’ bluntly answered Daniels as Kenny nudged him under the table.

  ‘The whole point is that she dies two minutes later. During that time she gets fucked. Mind you, given what I’ve heard about you two, that’s probably a minute and half longer than you’d need,’ Claudia said pointedly, as her eyes flashed emerald green.

  Claudia’s eyes could change from a tranquil bluish-green to a passionate emerald green in a split second. Brady recognised the sign, unlike Kenny and Daniels. And was more than relieved it was them on the receiving end.

  Brady sat forward.

  He caught Claudia’s eye. It was enough.

  He then shot Kenny and Daniels a look which told them they deserved as much for fucking around.

  ‘Tom, did Wolfe’s autopsy report show the victim to have been raped and sodomised in the leadup to her death?’ Brady asked, backing up Claudia’s statement.

  Harvey nodded, not wanting to get caught in the firing line.

  ‘That’s one word for it,’ he said uncomfortably, as he caught Brady’s eye.

  Harvey knew Claudia of old. Both in a professional capacity when she had worked as the Duty Solicitor at the station, but also in a personal role, when she had been married to Brady. And something Kenny and Daniels didn’t know but were about to find out, was that Claudia didn’t suffer fools gladly.

  Claudia looked at Harvey and then turned to Daniels and Kenny, not finished with them yet.

  ‘While her body contorts and convulses, while she lies there unconscious with half her brain tissue blown away, men will pay a great deal of money to have the ultimate fuck. The ultimate fuck being … fucking a woman and m
aking it the very last thing she’ll ever feel.’

  In one sentence she wiped the boyish smirks off Daniels and Kenny’s faces.

  Nobody said a word.

  Harvey dropped his gaze to the floor, clearly finding the reality of how the victim had died distasteful.

  The atmosphere in the room was tense and suffocating.

  Every man in the room wished they were anywhere else at this precise moment than sitting here with the glaring evidence of the level of depravity some men would reach to get their kicks.

  Men were bastards. Brady couldn’t dispute it. The evidence was plastered in front of them on the whiteboard.

  Brady looked at Kenny and Daniels who were squirming with discomfort at having made light of the situation. And then at Harvey and Conrad.

  But these men weren’t the bastards here, Brady reminded himself.

  And Claudia knew that. As did Kodovesky.

  These were the men who would spend thankless, sleepless hours hunting down and apprehending the sick bastards who gave mankind a bad name.

  Harvey was the first to break the awkward silence.

  ‘The cartridge used had 3 grains – that’s about 190mg of gunpowder, giving the velocity of the bolt 55 metres per second.’

  Claudia nodded at Harvey. She then looked at the rest of the team.

  ‘What is frightening here is that this penchant for paying for sex with a girl while she’s dying is a growing phenomenon,’ Claudia explained.

  She looked up at the countless, brutal images of the victim, deliberating for a moment.

  ‘What we’re dealing with is a new breed of sex crime,’ concluded Claudia.

  No one said a word. Not even Brady.

  All of them were lost in the horror of what was before them.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  ‘You might be wondering why I’m here, apart from to make you feel like shit,’ Claudia said, looking directly at Kenny and Daniels.

  She then shot them a wry smile.

  Her objective hadn’t been to alienate or humiliate them, it had been simply to wake them up to the seriousness of the situation.

  ‘This is what I do,’ she said, with a note of sadness as she cast her eyes up at the photographs of the victim laid bare and naked for all to see.

  ‘I deal in shit like that,’ she said, trying to keep her voice level. ‘My job is to find these women – sometimes girls as young as eleven – before it’s too late. Before they end up on your desk either as missing persons or, at worst, murder victims. I’m here because I can help you find the men who did this to her. I help you and you help me by catching the perpetrators and making sure they never do this to another girl again.’

  Claudia turned and stared at the team, clearly worried.

  ‘Because I guarantee, she isn’t the first. And unless you apprehend the group of men responsible, she won’t be the last.’

  Brady shot her a questioning look.

  ‘Can you expand?’

  ‘My team, which I co-head with DCI Davidson, have spent the last few months trying to get information on an international, elitist group who call themselves “The Nietzschean Brotherhood”. We initially got intelligence from Scotland Yard about this group when we first set up the sex trafficking unit in Newcastle.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of them,’ Brady replied.

  From the puzzled looks on the faces around the table, he wasn’t the only one who hadn’t heard of the Nietzschean Brotherhood. However, Brady had heard of Friedrich Nietzsche, a nineteenth-century German philosopher. And he presumed the name of the group was no coincidence, given the Nietzschean Brotherhood’s quest for the ultimate power – to take another person’s life while climaxing.

  ‘I wouldn’t expect you to have heard of them,’ Claudia began. ‘They are a covert organisation who are the most difficult group we’ve ever come across to infiltrate. SOCA set up a unit twelve months ago to break into this group without much success.

  ‘Firstly, they communicate through encrypted chat rooms and websites. Secondly, these men are wealthy. They can buy whatever they want, including a girl’s life. Our informant has said that a year’s membership costs £100,000. Now that’s membership only. That doesn’t buy you the girl of your choice. What they do have is an exquisite catalogue of girls ranging from ten to twenty-five years old. Whatever creed or nationality you want, they deal in it. And from the evidence on the victim here,’ Claudia pointed to Melissa Ryecroft’s severed head, ‘I’d say the Nietzschean Brotherhood is spreading out from London.’

  ‘How do you know it’s not just some kind of copycat killing then?’ interrupted Harvey.

  ‘We don’t know for certain. But from the way she’s been sadistically raped and sodomised by a group of men, I’d say it’s in keeping with previous murders. Especially the use of the captive bolt pistol.’

  She looked around the room. It was uncomfortably silent.

  ‘The Nietzschean Brothers have their own unique take on life. As I’m sure you can guess by their name, we presume they have been inspired by the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose idea of the “superman” is what this brotherhood appears to be emulating. Nietzsche wanted to challenge the ingrained values of society, especially the Church’s indoctrination of ideas about good and evil, believing they hamper human potential. The rejection of God could give us “superman” – a man who would trust his own sense of good and evil and not some Christian doctrine. In 1900 Nietzsche declared the death of God, leading to outright nihilism …’ Claudia paused, realising that she had lost her audience.

  Brady gave her a look which told her to move it along.

  ‘Nihilism is the belief that nothing has any inherent importance and that life lacks purpose. If God is dead, then nothing remains to which man can cling and orient himself by. He can effectively do what he wants as long as he doesn’t get caught.’

  Brady noted that Claudia had lost Kenny and Daniels five minutes ago.

  ‘That’s all very interesting, I’m sure,’ interrupted Brady. ‘But what has a group of nihilistic blokes got to do with this investigation?’ he asked.

  ‘Everything,’ answered Claudia.

  ‘Go on,’ said Brady, intrigued by the conviction in her voice.

  But he was already starting to do the maths himself.

  The platinum signet rings that he’d seen the Eastern European men wearing had the letter ‘N’ as the emblem.

  The note left in Brady’s car alongside the victim’s severed head had been signed with the ‘N’ emblem, matching the freeze-framed, digitally enhanced image of the ring’s emblem that Jed had sent him.

  He then thought of the ‘N’ branded on Simone Henderson’s left breast.

  Had Simone come across something to do with the Nietzschean Brotherhood? Is that what had brought up to the North East?

  He wanted to run some of these ideas past Claudia to see what she thought. Also, given that Simone Henderson’s investigation was off-limits for him, he’d have to tread carefully.

  ‘Well …’ began Claudia. ‘Two things.’

  She stood up and walked over to the whiteboard.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she asked Brady.

  ‘Be my guest,’ he replied, noting that she didn’t give him much choice.

  Brady nodded at Harvey to step down.

  Harvey shot a questioning look at Brady. As did Kodovesky.

  Brady discreetly gestured for them to let Claudia talk.

  Claudia looked at the whiteboard which was also a smart board.

  Brady watched as she touched icons at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, bringing up multiple images of the branding found on Melissa Ryecroft’s body.

  ‘As you can see here, the two letters “MD” positioned below the scorpion are roughly three inches in diameter. This branding exists in the livestock trade of course, but also in the sex slavery world. It’s about ownership, as I’m sure you have realised.’

  She paused as she uploaded new
photographs of other female victims onto the whiteboard.

  ‘These ten female sex victims you can see here have all been branded with the same mark as your murder victim,’ Claudia pointed out. ‘I’ve seen these letters “MD” and the scorpion marking on five victims from the South as well as ten allegedly trafficked girls brought to the North East and made to work in the sex trade. We carried out a raid on the Dock pub down by the quayside in Newcastle. The seedier end, not the refurbished part.’

  Brady nodded. He knew exactly where it was – had been dragged down that way a couple of times by the lads. It wasn’t a savoury place. It was down the dark end by the Tyne Bridge where hookers stood about in doorways tabbing or injecting, depending on their habit. And once they’d had their fix, they would be ducking and peering as the cars slowly drove down. Money for their next fix their only concern.

  Claudia continued. ‘The place was raided because we’d had reports that the lap dancing girls there were offering an extensive range of sexual services in a couple of the back rooms. That, and they were being held against their will. One of the punters had become concerned when one of the girls disappeared. His favourite girl. She told him her name was Edita Aginatas and that she was from a Lithuanian village. He couldn’t remember the name of the village, only that it began with “R”. He started asking too many questions about where she’d gone and ended up badly beaten on his way home from the pub one night. Reckoned it was one of the men in charge of the girls: had an Eastern European accent like them. Punter reported the attack, which is why we went in. But by the time we got there we found that the girls had been moved.’

  She turned and looked at the room, her face expressionless.

  ‘We presume that when the punter kicked up a fuss about the missing girl, they got nervous and relocated the group. It happens.’

  Brady noticed a hint of regret in her voice.

  Regret that they hadn’t got there sooner.

  ‘That wasn’t that long ago. Last Saturday night to be precise,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘But the information we got from the punter is that all ten girls were branded with this identical mark. So I’d suggest that the victim you have here, Melissa Ryecroft, was either bought or lured by the men that ran the operation at the Dock pub and are presumably running it at some other premises.’