Read Online Desperate Measures: A Mystery by Jo Bannister - Free Book Online Page A

PASSWORD as his password, he’s not suddenly going to use a quadratic equation to lock his vault.”
    Hazel thought about it. Children’s names, pets’ names, birthdays—most people used one or another of them, but Saturday wouldn’t have known that sort of information about Charles Armitage. So … “DROWSSAP?” she asked faintly.
    Saturday grinned. “Tragic, innit?”
    All this was a little beside the point, except as evidence that the rest of it, the important stuff, was not a figment of the boy’s imagination. “All right. So you got into his vault, and it was full of pictures. We’re not talking family snaps here, are we?”
    “Jesus, I hope not!”
    And they weren’t talking about Mr. Armitage’s mistress, either. Saturday might have spent an inordinate amount of time studying pictures like that, but he wouldn’t have involved Hazel if that was all he’d found. He’d found something that even someone with a street kid’s flexible morality felt he had to do something about.
    “Children? Saturday—were they pictures of children?”
    He wasn’t grinning now. He nodded and looked away.
    “Children being abused?” Again the nod. “Sexually?”
    “Yes!” he shot back, angry and embarrassed. “All right? Little kids, some of them. And girls pretending to be all grown-up, except they’re clutching a teddy bear in their free hand. It isn’t right, Hazel. Not when they’re that little. I don’t want to be a prude, but … that’s not right.”
    “No, it isn’t.” It never occurred to Hazel to doubt the truth of what he was telling her. She knew he was perfectly capable of lying, cheating, and stealing, but she didn’t think he was lying about this. It was too serious—a thing even Saturday regarded as beyond the pale. “How many pictures did you see?”
    He shrugged. “A fraction of what was there.”
    Child protection is a specialist field, online child protection even more so, but Hazel had covered the basics in training and—with her IT background—seen more of it than most probationers. More than enough, though if she returned to policing she would undoubtedly see more. She understood now why the boy had been so determined to pass a valuable piece of equipment on to the police. It had been a good and brave thing he’d done, when much the easiest thing would have been to drop the thing in the canal.
    Because it was a police matter. The children could be half a world away, possibly beyond any help Hazel could hope to send them, but the men fueling the trade—and they were mainly, though not exclusively, men—were everywhere. They were in England; they were in Norbold. They were in nice houses like the ones in Highfield Road and in modest flats like hers. They had jobs and friends and workmates, and most of them had families, and hardly any of those people knew about their little hobby, or would have believed if they were told. They were someone to have a drink with, to play darts with, to have around for a meal. They were the men who didn’t mind dating a girl with kids. Sometimes they were the husband and father who was happy to keep coaching the junior swimmers, though his own kids had now left home.
    They were that nice professional gent in the architect’s office who’d pick your kids up from school if you were running late.
    “Saturday, we have to take this to Meadowvale. To DI Gorman.”
    The boy’s eyes flared, afraid. “No way!”
    “We have to. It’s too serious to ignore.”
    “I didn’t ignore it. I gave the laptop to you.”
    “I thought it was just lost property! I didn’t know it was evidence of a crime!”
    They were shouting at each other, enough to draw curious glances. Hazel lowered her voice. “It never occurred to me that you wanted me to pick it apart. When we saw the drawings and realized where it had come from, we thought it was just a matter of getting it back to him. I’m sorry, Saturday, but we need to see DI Gorman right away.”
    “You tell