Fragile Minds Page 0,39
a group of stroppy teenagers to Silver. ‘The Bolshoi?’
‘Which teacher?’
‘The nut-job one who is proving not to be who she said she was. Lethbridge who is not Lethbridge.’
‘Right. So find her. The girl Stuart.’
‘We’re trying, guv – if she’s still alive. I’m pretty sure she’s not though, or she’d have come forward by now. We have at least seven unidentified dead still and we’re sifting through DNA matches. Good news is,’ he tried desperately to talk it up, ‘we have tracked the courier. Polish lad called Lev Kowal. He was bringing a costume delivery from the Parliament Hill area, he says.’
‘Does it check out?’
‘He delivered it to a girl fitting Anita Stuart’s description. We’re checking the other end.’
‘Thank fuck someone’s off the list. And burqa-girl? Please tell me you’re a bit fucking nearer her? She’s got to be our number one, yeah?’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Silver carefully. ‘This “Purity” claim could be more sinister than it first appeared. Kenton’s checking out something called the Purity Alliance now. They have links to an underground movement called Daughters of Light, who apparently believe we are corrupting the earth, and they’re certainly not benign. Well, obviously, or they’d not be making claims to mass murder. Radicalised hippies, it seems.’
‘I don’t care if they’re fucking Hitler fucking Youth,’ Malloy howled. ‘Just get me some hard fucking evidence, Joe. I’m doing my pieces here.’
That much was obvious.
‘Yes, guv,’ Silver said quietly. ‘We are doing our best.’
‘Well your best, DCI Silver, your best at this precise moment,’ Malloy’s voice had gone dangerously quiet, ‘ain’t good enough.’
Kenton brought Silver an ice-cold diet Coke and a mass of clippings about various groups who were linked to the far-left organisation the Empathy Society and the more recently formed Purity Alliance. They’d been around since the early 1970s but had never got up to any more mischief than a few road-blocks outside various vivisection factories, a demonstration that had turned nasty on the Salisbury plains when developers had cut down a small wood to build a supermarket, and a homemade bomb of sorts set off on the Cornish shores to protest against trawlers ruining the seabed. Why they would suddenly blow fourteen people up in central London remained a moot point, but finally Explosives had come back with confirmation that it was a suicide bomb.
‘Can’t see it, can you, boss,’ Kenton shook her head as they sifted through the cuttings. ‘Not this little lot.’
Silver reached over for a cutting about a guy who had formed a splinter group. BENEVOLENT SOCIETY SPLITS: NICE GONE NASTY? read the headline. It talked of how the leaders of the Empathy Society had fallen out over ethics and one member, known as the Archangel, had led a small group of dissidents away from the main group to set up on their own. He was also linked to the splinter group Daughters of Light. The article about the Empathy Society, written in 1998, read:
‘Born in America, literature graduate and sometime sociology lecturer Michael Watson’s prime concerns included the growth of narcissistic individualism and the damage it was doing to today’s society as a whole.’
It also talked of a beautiful girlfriend who had left her aristocratic family to follow Watson to the ends of the earth, apparently.
‘To the despair of her family, heiress Rosalind Lamont acts as Watson’s number two, recruiting the youth of today: students, the disaffected and those with money to burn for the cause. As yet the group have done no particular harm, but ex-member Robert Norman recently spoke out against them. “They are zealots and they despise anyone who does not agree with their creed, although their creed is undoubtedly extremely confused. They are clever with their brain-washing techniques: they make you believe you are acting in the interest of the world, they persuade you your family is bad and keep you from seeing them. Thank God I realised in the end that they are simply power-crazed.”’
A small photo of Michael Watson showed him to be dark, dreadlocked and heavily bearded. There was a blurred photo of a teenage Lamont in a school lacrosse team, but it was so tiny her face was a mere smudge. It was not much to go on.
Silver tossed the cutting down again onto the pile they were assembling. ‘Never heard of them. Have you?’
Kenton shook her head. ‘Can’t say I have, guv. Classic disaffected middle-classes with too much time on their hands, if you ask me.’
Craven arrived as they were rifling through the rest.
‘Fucking stupid hippies,’ he spat,