Cyberstrike by James Barrington (best memoirs of all time TXT) 📕

filmed himself raping all four of the girls and in one video he was clearly strangling his victim, although it wasn’t certain that he had killed her on that particular occasion.’

‘Shit,’ Rogers muttered.

‘Couldn’t have put it better myself. Of course, the media had been following the case and had been expecting to splurge all the gory details for the delectation of their readers. But suddenly there was no case and they were forbidden from identifying the accused man because in the eyes of the law he was innocent. So none of the families of the victims got their day in court or the satisfaction of seeing the man who’d killed their daughters and ruined their lives sent down for life without possibility of parole, which is what they’d been expecting. They got no kind of closure.

‘I was a lot younger then and perhaps a bit too idealistic, and I decided that really wasn’t right. It might have been the law, but it bore not even the most tenuous relationship to any kind of justice. A man who’d raped and killed four children and who’d been freed on a point of law, just a technicality, did not, in my opinion, deserve to walk the earth.’

‘You mean you killed him?’ Rogers asked.

‘No. But I had something that neither the media nor the families of the victims possessed. I had videos of the rapes, and I knew the perpetrator’s name and address because that information was freely available within the police force. So I put the two things together – copies of the videos and his identity – and sent them anonymously to the fathers of the dead girls, explaining what they were. Then I covered my traces to make sure there was no link between me, the videos and the families. And when, a little over a week later, the perpetrator vanished from his home, a house which was then set ablaze in an obvious arson attack, I pretended to be just as surprised as everybody else. His body was found in a ditch a week or so later. He’d been tied up, severely beaten and castrated – most probably with a saw – and left to bleed to death, and nobody shed so much as a single tear.’

‘But somebody rumbled you, I guess,’ Clark said.

‘That was inevitable. The chain of evidence was clear. I’d burned one copy of each of the videos and given that, with a statement, to the SIO, the senior investigating officer. Every subsequent copy of the video was properly recorded and there were no breaks in the chain, though that obviously didn’t mean some officer in the investigation couldn’t have burned an illegal copy and then duplicated it. But the obvious conclusion was that if the videos, the only pieces of evidence that unequivocally linked the perpetrator with the murders, had been leaked they could possibly, maybe even probably, have come from me.

‘As a matter of routine, when the perpetrator turned up dead members of the families of the four victims were questioned and one of them admitted to having been sent a copy of the video, though of course they denied having had anything to do with the man’s death. I was investigated by the police force that I worked for, but there was absolutely nothing that they could do. They had their suspicions, but there was no way to prove that I had done anything other than my job and I made certain that I had rock-solid alibis for the two weeks after I sent out the videos, so there was nothing to link me to the murder. Eventually the investigation was closed, and because of the job I had been doing and the security clearance that I held, the file was sealed.

‘And, just between the three of us, right here and right now, I think that even if they could somehow have proved that I had had something to do with those events, I doubt if it would ever have come to a prosecution. The British police don’t like stupid blinkered judges any more than anybody else does, and they particularly don’t like the idea of violent rapists and multiple murderers walking free.’

Morgan looked from Rogers to Clark and back again. That hadn’t sounded too bad to him, and it had the undoubted benefit of being true. Or more or less true.

‘So that’s why I have a sealed police record, but no conviction. I’ve had my security clearance since 2005, when I helped prevent a terrorist attack in London and got a new job. Are you happy with that?’

Rogers stood up and leaned across the table, extending his hand. ‘Welcome to the team, Ben. I’ve got a hell of a lot of respect for a guy who does what he knows is right, even if it’s wrong, if you see what I mean. I think pretty much anyone else in this building who found themselves in the position you were in would have done the same thing, or something pretty similar, like wasting the guy themselves. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the Bureau is hidebound by regulations governing everything from how often you can take a crap upwards, and they don’t exactly encourage free-thinking. Having you around, as a kind of free agent, might be really useful.’

‘Thanks. So what’s the plan with these four men?’

‘So far, we’ve just done passive surveillance, trying to keep eyes on these guys without them being aware of it, but it’s already obvious that they’re being careful. They’re using counter-surveillance techniques even though we’re fairly sure that our men haven’t been spotted.’

‘I can vouch for that,’ Clark said. ‘And they’re being really inventive. I followed one of the suspects into a department store and watched him walk into the male restroom, but I never saw him come out. Or rather, I watched him come out, but I didn’t realise it was him.’

‘You mean he put on a disguise?’ Morgan asked.

‘You could say that. These guys all have