It took only minutes to establish that O’Neill’s mobile had been switched off, that he was not answering his home phone and he hadn’t spoken to anyone else on the team since the arrest had been made.
He was a popular and solidly reliable officer who was in a long-term relationship with one of the team’s civilian support staff, so the fact that his girlfriend had not heard from him either quickly ensured the attitude of the officers searching for their missing colleague rapidly moved from bemusement to serious concern.
A trawl round O’Neill’s friends and family showed no signs of depression, no dissatisfaction with any aspect of his life, no clue whatsoever that he was planning to run away and leave it all behind. It became increasingly clear that, if O’Neill was missing, it was not by his own choice. Clues were thin on the ground, but, leaving the members of the inquiry team aside, the obvious place to start seemed to be with the person who had seen him last.
By the time DI Carter sat down opposite his interviewee for the third time that evening, the case he had spent so long working on had moved to the back burner.
Jason Bevan bit his nails nervously as DI Carter entered the room. He knew he was in trouble. He knew the police had all the evidence they needed not just to put him away for a very long time but also to change his life for ever. His darkest secret was about to be exposed. His marriage, his relationships with his children, with his friends and with his work colleagues – it was all about to come to an end.
He had been caught red-handed, so to speak, and strategies like refusing to speak, lying through his teeth or trying to put the blame on the girl were all pointless. He was in it up to his neck and there was no way out. No way out of it at all. Or at least that’s what he thought, right until the moment that DI Carter sat down and offered him the possibility of a deal.
Carter pushed a copy of the transcripts of his last internet conversation as sportsfan52 across the desk towards him. ‘One of my men is missing. I think they may have met up with the person you were communicating with. I need you to tell me everything you know about shygirl351. And I mean absolutely everything.’
The two sessions of morning prayers that followed the arrest of Moorwood had been glum affairs, with everyone on the team staring at their shoes and worried about being singled out because they simply had nothing new to add. No one wanted to be blamed for stalling the operation, and Anderson’s mood had become darker and darker; he barely seemed to leave his office at all. A second 36-hour extension on the custody time limit had been obtained and Anderson was preparing the paperwork for another, acutely aware that, unless hard evidence of a link to the murders could be found, Moorwood was unlikely to be their man.
Difficult as it was to believe, Moorwood’s story appeared to be true. His connection to the case and the fact he had been stalking one of the victims shortly before he had been murdered were nothing more than coincidence.
Charged with drugs offences, various breaches of the peace and weapons violations, Moorwood had been remanded in custody to await his day in court and the team at MIT had gone back to the drawing board.
Just before lunch on Friday a sandy-haired man arrived and was shown into Anderson’s office. The pair remained there for almost an hour before emerging side by side, causing a hush to sweep across the incident room.
‘Okay, gather around everyone,’ said Anderson, pointing his open hand towards the man on his left. ‘We’ve had a development. A major development that, I’m afraid, may well prove that we’ve been chasing our own tails for the last few days. Now I know you’ve all been working extremely hard and I don’t want to take that away from you, but when you hear what I’m about to say you’re going to feel as if we’ve been sent back to square one.
‘This is Detective Inspector Michael Carter from the CEOP – Child Exploitation and Online Protection. I’m going to let him tell you what he’s just told me.’
Anderson perched on the edge of a nearby desk as Carter stepped forward. He slowly scanned the room, taking in the faces of the officers before he began to speak.
‘My unit has been involved in a series of long-term operations against paedophiles using the internet to groom victims. Our main tool is to use officers who hang around in online chatrooms using false identities that have been specially created with a view to attracting those involved in this kind of behaviour.
‘We recently moved in to arrest a man known as Jason Bevan who had been online using the alias sportsfan52. He engaged in conversation with one of our officers, who was pretending to be a fourteen-year-old girl. Bevan began to groom our officer and tried to arrange to meet but we quickly became aware that Bevan was also in touch with other youngsters on the net and that there was a huge danger he would attempt to meet up with one of them before he met up with our team.
‘We tried to bring forward our own meeting by making our responses to his messages more eager and offering him a mobile telephone number so that he would be able to send text messages or even call; however, this had the effect of making him extremely nervous and cautious. We feared that our operation may have been compromised.
‘Bevan was arrested yesterday and immediate examination of his computer showed that he had been in touch with a fourteen-year-old girl using the screen name shygirl351. A meeting had been arranged that very afternoon, so I sent one of my men along to meet with the potential victim and ensure that she was safe.
‘Detective Sergeant O’Neill never reported in after meeting up with shygirl351. He has now been missing for almost twenty hours and we’re all gravely concerned about his welfare. A more thorough analysis of Bevan’s computer, along with interviews with Bevan himself, has led me to believe that, far from being a genuine fourteen-year-old girl, shygirl351 is in fact an alias created by an adult male with a view to luring paedophiles out into the open.’
Woods cocked his head to one side. ‘Like a vigilante operation?’
‘Something along those lines.’ A murmur of nervous chatter spread throughout the members of the team. ‘When we looked back through the chat logs,’ Carter continued, ‘we realized the person was using the same techniques and methods that we do when our officers go undercover in order to make the potential paedophiles feel safe and comfortable. The irony is, whoever was behind this character managed to do a far better job than we did ourselves, and we’re supposed to be the experts.
‘That was when we started getting extremely worried. Our initial concern was that if O’Neill had been snatched by members of a vigilante gang, they may have acted before they realized he was a police officer, and not a paedophile. Or they may have discovered he was a police officer and realized that they couldn’t release him without exposing themselves.
‘But then when we entered details of what little intelligence we had into the HOLMES system, we became even more concerned. I’m aware that one of your lines of inquiry is following the notion that your triple killer has been targeting unconvicted sex offenders.
‘Although we have no hard evidence at this stage, our concern is that the person who snatched O’Neill, the person who engaged in conversation with Jason Bevan, may in fact be the person that your team are looking for.’
Collins felt a twitch in her stomach. Crimes involving fellow officers as victims were always hard to deal with. It was, for the most part, the random nature of the crimes that made them so difficult to handle. The beat bobby on a bicycle who knocks at a door to voice complaints from neighbours about the noise, only to be shot dead by a group of drug-crazed Yardies – there but for the grace of God they all went. It could have happened to any of them.