The Lost

Wilkes stared down broodingly at his beer, the broad forehead furrowing.

‘With hindsight, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. But at the time... Anyway, that became the routine. Gav would drop me off in a pub while he went to meet her somewhere they’d prearranged, then he’d pick me up afterwards and brief me on what she’d said.’

Gavin obviously hadn’t wanted Wilkes getting in the way. ‘Did he tell you he was sleeping with her or did you guess?’

‘Well, Gav being Gav, I guessed.’ Wilkes didn’t meet Jonah’s eyes. ‘But I didn’t see the harm. I mean, Salim was giving us good stuff. Names, times and places, bits of information she’d overheard. All low-level but it was gold compared to what we’d been getting before. Suddenly Gav was the blue-eyed boy. Didn’t do me any harm, either, if I’m honest.’

What about Salim? This time Jonah kept the thought to himself. ‘So what went wrong?’

Wilkes’s face clouded. ‘He got too close. I thought he was just getting his leg over, I didn’t think it was serious. But he started acting distracted, like his mind was somewhere else. He was on a short fuse as well, and I mean short. He was under a shitload of pressure, so no one thought much of it at first. Then someone on the team made a crack about Salim, and Gav lost it. He’d have taken the poor bastard’s head off if I hadn’t pulled him away. After that it was obvious he’d got it bad. He started pushing to bring Salim out, saying she’d done enough. Trouble was, she was doing too good a job. After all the kicking and screaming the brass did, now we were starting to get information they didn’t want to turn off the tap. Just a bit longer, they said. Another couple of months and then she’d be pulled out.’

Wilkes drained the can and crumpled it, letting it drop to the carpet.

‘And then we lost contact with her. No phone calls, no messages, nothing. We’d had the flat she was living in under surveillance but suddenly there was no activity there either. Knowing the sort of bastards we were dealing with, that wasn’t good. Gav was beside himself. I was worried if we didn’t do something soon he’d go in there on his own.’

Jonah stiffened at that, thinking about the warehouse.

‘Did he?’

‘He didn’t have to.’

The flat was raided at dawn. The operation had been meticulously set up and planned so as to give as little warning as possible. The front door was broken in and armed officers surged in first, shouting warnings as they went from room to room.

But the flat was empty. It had been cleaned out, leaving behind bare mattresses on the beds and the bathroom stripped of any sign of human habitation. Eliana Salim and the other young women, as well as their guards, were nowhere to be seen.

‘The whole place stank of bleach,’ Wilkes said. ‘Every surface had been wiped down, all the drawers and cupboards emptied. I thought, thank fuck, because I’d been expecting to find a body and blood everywhere. It was starting to look like they’d just upped sticks and taken Salim and the other girls somewhere else. Gav was going spare, and I was about to say we should get out and leave it to forensics. Then there was this shout from the kitchen.’

Jonah waited while Wilkes reached down and picked up another can from beside the recliner. He opened it and drank half straight off.

‘There were people standing around the fridge, just staring inside. I can remember looking in and wondering what all the fuss was about, because there was just this white dinner plate with a lump of bloody offal on it. Then I realised what it was. The evil bastards must have found out Salim was an informer. So they’d cut out her tongue and left it for us to find.’

‘Jesus...’ Jonah had known it would be bad, but he was still shocked.

‘We found the rest of her in the bins behind the house,’ Wilkes continued, after another drink. ‘They’d dismembered her and wrapped the body parts in cling film. Put them in plastic bags and dumped them, like they were rubbish. Fucking animals. I tell you, I’ve seen some things in my time but never anything like that. She must have been killed a few days before and rats had... well, Salim’s fingerprints or DNA weren’t on the database, so the only way we could identify her was by her head.’

‘God, Gavin had to...?’ Even though there was no excusing what he’d done, Jonah wouldn’t have wished that on him. But Wilkes shook his head.

‘Christ, no, I couldn’t let him do that. I’d been her handler as well, so I volunteered. Gav was in a bad enough state as it was without that. I thought he’d get sacked or reprimanded at least, but that would have caused too much of a fuss. No one wanted to draw attention to a fuck-up like that, and Salim didn’t have any family here to cause trouble. So they swept it under the rug and Gav was put on paid leave for a few weeks. He came back when things had quietened down, but he wasn’t the same.’