The Ninth Step - John Milton #8 (John Milton Thrillers) Read online

  “This was a while ago. There was a Tory MP who was arrested for outraging public decency on Hampstead Heath.”

  “Don’t recall it,” he said.

  “Open-and-shut case. They had witnesses who were ready to testify that they’d seen this man having sex with another man, what happened, everything. Then, the day of the trial, the case collapses. The witness spontaneously changes his mind. Doesn’t remember being there, doesn’t recognise the man, doesn’t know anything at all. I covered it for the Sun. I got friendly with the detective who was running the case. But as soon as the case collapsed, he stopped returning my calls. Wouldn’t speak to me. I didn’t give up. Found him in a pub one night, drinking on his own, and I asked him what was going on. He told me to stop pestering him, said he wouldn’t speak to me and, when I kept at him, he got up and left. Two days after that, he killed himself. Threw himself off a multi-storey car park. And it wasn’t as if he had any reason to do it. He’d just had twins. Whole life to look forward to.”

  “And you kept looking into it?”

  “I was pretty green then, but even I could tell that there was a reason for what had happened. The case just dropped out of the papers. No one would cover it—everyone was afraid of getting sued. My editor knew I was still keen, told me to drop it. I said I would, but I didn’t. I kept at it. I tried to find the witness, but he disappeared. Just vanished. And then I found him six months later. He’d died of a heart attack. It was a strange one: everyone said how fit he was, running marathons, keeping himself in shape, still young, too. But whatever. Shit happens, right? That’s what I said. Shit happens.” She said it with a sarcastic twist of her mouth.

  “Shit happens,” Milton agreed.

  “In the end, I ran out of fresh places to look. I had a million questions, but no one I could ask. So I mothballed it, found another story and got on with my life.”

  Milton watched her as she spoke. She was animated, nervous, and she punctuated her sentences with little stabs of her fingers. He thought he could see fear in her, but she was hiding it behind an irrepressible energy.

  “So time passed without me really thinking about it. I got the sack from the paper and started writing for websites. And then someone emailed me. Out of the blue. Anonymous address. He said I could call him David although that wasn’t his real name. He said he’d read my old stuff, that he had a lot of information about the case and would I be interested? I said yes, of course I would, I’d look at anything he had. I got another email the next day. It was long, stream of consciousness stuff. It said that there was a flat in Watson Square in Pimlico and that thirty years ago, in the eighties, it was used as a brothel by some very high-end people. This place is a mile from Westminster. I went and had a look. Big place. Expensive. I went through the Land Registry details. More than a hundred MPs have apartments there. A dozen Lords. It’s got an amazing history. Oswald Mosley was arrested there in the thirties. Princess Anne lived there. Churchill’s daughter was evicted after throwing gin bottles out the window. You wouldn’t believe some of the stories.”

  “And this particular story?”

  “David said there were parties there every week, and the guests were politicians, civil servants, military, senior government types. And they had young kids there. Girls and boys. David said that he had been taken there several times over the course of a couple of years. He was in a boys’ home in Jersey. He said that they were very organised, that they sent boys over on the ferry and then had minibuses pick them up from the port to drive them to the parties, then they drove them back again. He went into a lot of detail. Very credible detail. He said that they were made to drink whiskey until they were drunk, they were forced to dress up in women’s lingerie, and then they were raped.”

  “I don’t understand—why did he email you?”

  “Because he’d read my old stories. He said the defendant in the case that got dropped, the man on Hampstead Heath—David said that he was one of the men who raped him at Watson Square.”

  Milton nodded, suddenly getting the distinct feeling that he was standing on the edge of a precipice and, if he wanted to step back, he should do it now. The more he found out, the harder that was going to be.

  But he didn’t want to step back.

  “And then?” he said.

  “And then nothing. I thought this guy, whoever he was, he must have lost his bottle, but then I got another email. More detail. Some of what he told me was sickening. He said he was raped over a bathtub while his head was held under the water. Another time he said he was ordered to punch another boy in the face, but he refused. He got a beating for that. He said that one of the men at the parties had medical training—they called him the Doctor—and he would treat the boys after they had been roughed up. He sent another email the next day and said that he knew of at least two boys who had been killed there.”

  Milton said nothing.

  “You can imagine how I’m feeling now. The Hampstead Heath story was big enough, but this had the potential to be enormous. I told him I was treating his claims very seriously and that if he wanted to take it to the next step, we had to meet. I didn’t think he’d follow through with it, but he did. He told me to name the place. I said I’d be under Waterloo Bridge last Saturday at five and he turned up.”

  “And this was Eddie.”

  “Yes. Eddie. We were there for three hours. I went through the story again, point by point, and he backed everything up. Everything. He was completely credible. I don’t have any doubt in my mind that what he told me was true. The only thing he wouldn’t do was go on the record. He said he had to think about that. I said he could have as long as he wanted, but that I thought his story needed to be told because these men need to be punished. And then he called me two days before he died. He said he’d do it, that he’d go through the story all again, and I could film him. We agreed to meet. Piccadilly Circus. I arranged for a cameraman to come, too, booked a hotel room where we could film it, but Eddie never turned up. And then I found out why. Gassed himself in his cab. Hours before he was going to give me the story. What are the odds of that?”

  “You think that’s suspicious.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think there are some questions that need to be answered.”

  She laughed. “He was killed, John. I’ve got no doubt about it.”

  “By who?”

  “Someone who doesn’t want the story to come out.”

  “The MP?”

  “Maybe.”

  “His name is Leo Isaacs, isn’t it?” Milton said.

  “Yes. Did Eddie mention him to you?”

  Milton nodded. “He told me a little. Not as much as he told you. How confident are you that this stacks up?”

  “Very confident.”

  “Can you prove any of it?”

  She shook her head. “That’s the problem. All I’ve been able to find out are rumours and innuendo. Enough for me to print that something was going on there, but not enough to name names. A story like this, John, as big as this could be, you have to be watertight. The website I write for loves this kind of shit, but the editor won’t run anything unless he’s sure it stacks up—the risks of getting sued are too big.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “There is no next,” she said. “Back to square one.”

  #

  THEY STEPPED out into the car park together.

  “There was one other thing,” Milton said.

  “What’s that?”

  “When Eddie came to see me, there was something else on his mind. Something about his family.”

  Milton saw a flicker of recognition pass across her face.

  “Did he say what it was?” she asked with a caution that was a little too obvious.

  Milton cast his mind back and tried to remember what Eddie had told him. “He said he had problems with them. Do you know what he meant?”

  No,” she said. But she took a moment too long to answer, and her eyes darted away
from his face as she spoke.

  “Olivia,” Milton said, “what was it? What did he mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Milton knew that she was lying.

  They shook hands, and she told him that he should contact her if he found out anything that might be of interest. Milton said that he would, although he didn’t anticipate seeing her again. As he slipped into his car, he reached into his pocket and ran his finger along the edge of her card. No, he didn’t think that he would see her again, but he would keep the card for now. He had no way of predicting how this was going to turn out, and maybe he would need an ally. He pushed it back into his pocket.

  He put the key in the ignition and twisted it, realising that he had already started to plot his next move. He had allowed her to walk him up to the edge and her story had tipped him over. Something had happened to Eddie. Had he killed himself? Maybe. But Milton didn’t think so. He wasn’t a betting man—compulsive behaviours were unhealthy for a man with his weaknesses—but if he had been, he would have staked a generous amount that there was more to what had happened than the sad, pathetic ending of a life.

  Eddie had come to him for his help.

  Milton was going to find out what had happened to him.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  ALEX HICKS was parked up in Russell Square, watching the comings and goings around the taximan’s shelter. He had taken the family car. He knew that John Milton had seen his Range Rover and he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. The Ford Mondeo was aging. It had a dented bumper after a driver who had been looking at his phone had rear-ended his wife as she was driving home from the supermarket. It hadn’t been washed for weeks, and the inside was littered with the bright plastic toys that occasionally distracted his boys enough to keep them occupied during the journeys to and from the nursery. Hicks was parked between two similar cars, close enough to the shelter that he could observe it, but not so close that it would be obvious that he was watching it. Hicks knew enough about John Milton to know that he had to be very, very careful.

  In truth, he wasn’t sure why he was here. The general certainly hadn’t sent him. He still hadn’t decided one way or another what he was going to do. But he had been unable to sleep following the night that had led to the death of Eddie Fabian, and he knew that it was his guilt and shame that had been keeping him awake. He knew that he had to do something to pull himself out of the mess that he had engineered for himself. The motives for his involvement with the general were irrelevant. The cancer was a useful excuse for the abandonment of his morals, but the planned murder of Eddie Fabian had been the moment that he had known that it would never be enough. The fact that Fabian had been killed by someone else did not absolve him of his shame. The fact remained: they would have killed him. He had been given the order, and he would have been expected to pull the trigger.

  Hicks was there for an hour before he saw Milton. Black cabs came and went, the brightness of the shelter’s interior briefly visible in the gloom of the square as the door opened and closed. It was cold and wet, and the drivers hurried inside and back to their vehicles, with newspapers serving as makeshift umbrellas to shelter them from the rain. Hicks watched as Milton arrived. He approached on the other side of the square, stepping out between two parked cars and crossing the road. He didn’t hurry; he seemed oblivious to the rain. Hicks was too far away to get a good look at him, and he was silhouetted by the light that fell down from a streetlamp, but he knew from his bearing and his posture that it was the same man that he had seen the last time he was here, and at the church. The man he had recognised from years before.

  John Milton.

  Number One.

  He waited longer. A woman, who he guessed must have been working the earlier shift, eventually left and stepped into a car that had arrived to collect her. There were three cabs parked alongside the shelter, and Hicks waited for another ten minutes until all three of them had been driven away.

  He got out of the car, shut and locked the door, and jogged across the street.

  #

  MILTON TOOK the opportunity to clear away the dirty plates and mugs and wipe the tables down. He was tired, and there were hours to go before he would be finished for the night. He listened to the news on Radio 4 and was thinking about changing the channel to 6 Music when the door opened and someone came inside.

  Milton was halfway to the kitchen and laden down. “Just a minute.”

  “Milton?”

  The man said it and stopped. Milton paused, frowning. He hadn’t used his real name for anything ever since he had returned to London. He put the plates in the sink and turned. It was the man he had seen at the funeral. One of the two men who had been watching from the Range Rover.

  Milton put the plates on the counter. There was a knife on the chopping board. Milton rested his fingertips against the handle. “Who are you?”

  “Hicks.”

  Milton paused.

  “Alex Hicks. I was in the Regiment. Do you remember, sir?”

  Milton felt a coldness, a prickling on the back of his neck. The name was familiar. And he had known that he had recognised the man.

  “They recruited me to Group Fifteen, sir. Three years ago. You were Number One. You tested me.”

  “I tested a lot of people.”

  “You said I wasn’t suitable. They sent me back to the army.”

  Milton had been drinking heavily then. He had held it together during operations, but he had cut loose between them, and his recollections of those years were cloudy and marked with regular blackouts. But he did remember Hicks. The soldier had been young and keen, but there had been a streak of empathy that ran right through the middle of him. He was a superb soldier—anyone who was recruited to the Group was the best of the best—but there was a fundamental quality of decency that Milton had detected immediately. It was that which had disqualified him. It might have been possible to scrub it out of him, to turn him into the next cold-hearted assassin to serve in the Group. But perhaps the quality would prove to be stubborn and difficult to remove, and perhaps it would lead to a moment of hesitation when delay might mean death. Those were good reasons for rejection, certainly, but Milton remembered something else about his reaction, too. There was something in Hicks that he had once thought that he himself had possessed: decency. Milton had been reluctant to try to scrub that virtue away, and he had sent Hicks back to the Regiment rather than try.

  “I don’t do that any more,” Milton said.

  Hicks glanced around the shelter. “I can see that.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “It was, sir.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Call you what?”

  “Sir. Don’t call me sir. This isn’t the army. And,” he repeated, “I don’t do that any more.”

  “Sorry. Old habits.”

  Milton watched him warily, picking up another dirty plate from the table. “What do you want?”

  “It’s about Eddie Fabian.”

  Milton looked at Hicks and saw that he was nervous. Milton left his fingers on the handle of the knife, his index finger tracing across the raised rivets. “What about him?”

  “I saw you. With Eddie, in here. The night he died. I want to talk to you about it.”

  Milton left the knife on the chopping board. He went to the door and locked it, flipping over the OPEN sign so that it now read CLOSED.

  “Sit down,” Milton said, indicating one of the empty benches.

  Hicks did as he was told; Milton stayed on his feet.

  “Have you been watching me?” Milton asked.

  “Just tonight.”

  “Why are you here?”

  Hicks shook his head. “Because of what happened to Eddie. He didn’t top himself. None of what they’re saying about it is true.”

  “So you better tell me.”

  Hicks put his hands in the middle of the table and started to clasp and unclasp them. Milton didn’t think he was
aware that he was doing it; he was so nervous that he was unaware of the impression he was making.

  “How much did Eddie tell you?” Hicks asked.

  “About?”

  “The things that happened to him when he was a boy.”

  “Enough. Is it true?”

  Hicks nodded. “Yes.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He told you about Leo Isaacs? The MP?”

  “He mentioned him.”

  “There was a story a while ago. He got into trouble with another man on Hampstead Heath.”

  “I know,” Milton said. “I read about it. The case collapsed. The witness changed his story.”

  “That’s right,” Hicks said. “Right before the trial. Why would someone do something like that?”

  “Nerves?”

  Hicks shook his head. “No, not that. Why would the witness end up dead not six months after the trial collapsed? He was fit and well and he just dropped dead. Funny, right?”

  “You’re going to tell me what happened?”

  “Leo Isaacs has been protected. The court case wasn’t even the worst thing that was suppressed. What Isaacs did with Eddie and the other boys, all the other men who were implicated, they’ve all been protected. Rape. Abuse. Murder. Those men have been looked after.”

  “By who?”

  Hicks didn’t answer. Instead, he stared down at the table and clasped his hands so tight that they went white.

  “Hicks?”

  “This isn’t easy. He’s… the man doing it… he’s frightening, Milton. I don’t care about myself, but I have kids. Two boys. My wife is sick. They need me. If he knew I was here—if he knew that I was going to grass him up—he’d kill them, kill my wife, and he’d make me watch him do it. I’m not kidding. He’s bad news.”

  “Who, Hicks? Who is?”

  Hicks swallowed, his grimace suggesting that his throat was dry. Milton got up and fetched him a glass of water from the kitchen. He was finding the whole experience unsettling. Hicks might have been bounced out of the Group, but he had been nominated for selection. That meant that he was a hard man, a special forces soldier who would have killed before, and probably more than once. Yet here he was, sitting before him with the blood leeched out of his face, a nervous wreck.