this grown-up version of Reggie. A very antagonistic version, it had to be said. It turned out he owed her money and he did have a vague recollection, hooked up from the seabed of memory, of borrowing money from her shortly after Tessa, his evil fake wife, had drained his bank account. It was only after he had signed an IOU in her notebook that Reggie relented. A little. ‘It’s good to see you, Mr B.’
‘Good to see you too, Reggie.’
Most of the witnesses in the room weren’t in a state to have actually witnessed anything and only Jackson and Reggie were able to give anything approaching a coherent version of events, and even then there were some confusing loopholes in both their accounts.
Jackson had good witness credentials – ex-military police, ex-Cambridgeshire Constabulary, currently working as a private investigator. He had been present, he said, when Stephen Mellors arrived at Silver Birches armed with a baseball bat. Vincent Ives had brought the gun to the scene with the apparent intention of protecting the girls who had been trafficked. ‘Armed siege’ was a slight exaggeration. Vincent Ives’s motives, Jackson maintained, had been for the greater good – wasn’t that the standard by which everyone should be judged? Unfortunately Ives had dropped the gun and it had been picked up by Andrew Bragg, who proceeded to shoot Stephen Mellors, albeit in self-defence, when he tried to attack him with the baseball bat. This sequence of events didn’t entirely satisfy the police (Where was the gun? Where was the baseball bat? Big question marks), but it satisfied Jackson. Bad people were punished, people with good intentions weren’t crucified. And girls who took justice into their own hands weren’t penalized when they had already suffered more than anyone should. Killing in self-defence was one thing, but shooting someone in the back, not once but twice, was unlikely to be ignored by the Crown Prosecution Service.
Andrew Bragg had already been wounded before they arrived, he testified, but had no memory of the event. He was rushed from the scene by ambulance to the hospital, where he underwent an emergency splenectomy and a transfusion of several pints of blood. ‘Not as bad as it looked,’ the surgeon said when he came out of the operating theatre. The patient remembered nothing about what had happened, not even who had shot him.
‘You should write crime novels,’ Reggie said to Jackson. ‘You’ve got a real talent for fiction.’
By the time the Armed Response Unit had arrived, Stephen Mellors had already been dispatched to the great necropolis in the sky and both Vincent Ives and the gun had disappeared.
It was at the bottom of the sea now, thrown off the end of the pier at Whitby during high tide, everyone’s fingerprints washed away for good. Jackson’s, Vince Ives’s and those of the girl who shot Stephen Mellors. After she had killed him, Jackson gently prised the gun out of her hand and quietly pocketed it. Nadja. Nadja Wilk and her sister, Katja. They came from Gdansk, where they had worked in a hotel. Real people with real lives, not just ciphers for the tabloid newspapers. Foreign sex workers released from House of Horrors in police raid. And Girls trafficked into prostitution involved in violent shoot-out. And so on. The news’ afterburn went on for a long time. The triumvirate – Tommy, Andy and Steve – had been the top dogs in a trafficking network, a web, the strands of which reached far and wide. Untangling it took some time. It was too late for most of the girls they had brought over, already long disappeared into places where no torch was bright enough to find them. But the seven in the room in Silver Birches were rescued and all went home eventually. Taking their harrowing statements took a long time. Jasmine flew home on the same plane as the coffin of her friend Maria.
Perhaps they would recover, perhaps they wouldn’t, but at least they were given that chance, and the person who had given them that chance was Vince Ives, so Jackson reckoned he ought to be allowed to avoid the gallows of the media and the courts.
‘Do the right thing here, Andy,’ he had said to Bragg as he knelt by his side, listening to the approaching sirens growing louder. And to make his point he pressed his thumb into Andy Bragg’s gunshot wound. Ignoring his shrieking, Jackson said, ‘You don’t remember anything that happened. Complete amnesia. Okay?’
‘Or?’ Bragg