Disobey

Alfie stayed silent. Chloe-Jane had been down in London for less than a couple of weeks but she’d latched onto Franny like a baby on a tit. He supposed he could understand. Understand how it was when you had nothing and no one around you to care whether you lived or died. He’d been lucky he supposed, at least he’d had his brother, Connor, when he’d been growing up. Chloe-Jane had no one. No one apart from him and Franny.

‘Listen, I appreciate you offering help and everything but …’

‘You better start talking! And quickly. I want to know everything, and don’t try to lie, Alfie. Don’t even think about it, because you’ll wish it was only Vaughn and the others you had to run from.’

As Alfie Jennings looked at Franny Doyle standing furiously at the end of his hospital bed, waiting for him to tell her what was going on, he thought about Chloe-Jane and what she had said. Perhaps having her help wasn’t so stupid after all. But now all they needed to do was come up with a plan …

14 (#ulink_7485f2a7-ab1e-5227-92fd-5062c7b77291)

The girl lay quivering naked on the rusting old bed. Track marks in her arms. The heat of the room made the three onlookers undo the top buttons on their overly starched shirts. In the darkened corner, Mr Lee sat silently, watching with simmering anger, as one of his new investments looked like they were going to pass out.

Over the years his involvement in the sex trade had grown, as the internet had; becoming more lucrative than extortion money, and certainly safer than drug money. He’d started off years ago in the heroin trade, and at one time in the Nineties the business had been booming. But over time, the government clampdowns and not having the financial ability to pay off the border patrols had crushed the trade, so Lee had begun to invest more and more in prostitution.

With the explosion of the internet and the massive demand in web pornography he’d been able to make more money than he ever did with drugs. At first, most of the images were still, but now everything was live streaming. He’d dealt with all ages, then realised underage pornography was where the real trade and money was. For a while, it had been easy to cover their tracks without ever worrying being caught, but as police technology had grown, so had the likelihood of being traced, especially if dealing in very young girls.

In a way, the police were onto a losing battle. The war against the world’s online pornography was something the governments would never win, but it didn’t stop them trying, especially when it came to cracking the gangs who dealt in kiddie porn. Not wanting to be traced or caught but still wanting to earn the sort of money the online porn industry brought in, Mr Lee decided to up the age of the girls.

And although most of the girls were runaways, handpicked from the streets, or groomed from care homes, he’d recruited girls who looked like they were over the age of consent; this way the online police generally left him alone. In the unlikely event they did ever bother trying to track him down, the constant re-routing of the proxy server and complex encrypted data stream enabled him to hide his identity and tracks, bypassing the surfing restrictions. By the time they did catch up, he had already moved his streaming to another server, only for the cat and mouse chase to start all over again.

What Mr Lee enjoyed so much about the live web porn was the ability to have the girls situated in any part of the world, in any part of a street, in any part of a home, which again gave him the sense of being untouchable. If there was a raid, Lee would be nowhere to be seen and it’d be the pimps, the fathers, the friends of the girls who’d be taken into custody, leaving him free to make his main source of income from web pornography instead of extortion.

The reason why Lee was present on this live stream shoot was to do with the way they were going to film the girls. Sex and sex alone had started to become too mainstream; every other person was filming their wives or girlfriends in their back bedrooms and as a consequence, he’d begun to lose money. And one thing Mr Lee hated was to lose money.

People had become desensitised to seeing straight sex, girls on girls or even anal sex. It’d become routine. An everyday occurrence to switch on the computer and see pop-ups of websites advertising sex. What wasn’t an everyday occurrence was the corner of the market he’d newly stepped into. The reason why Lee was sitting here now.

He’d been in the business long enough to know what the clients wanted and he was going to give it to them. They wanted to see pain, hurt and ultimately fear in the girl’s eyes. They wanted violence, living vicariously through the masked men who’d inflict the pain on the girls. Wishing they were the ones doing it, but knowing they couldn’t, they were willing to pay however much it cost to watch it and in their own way be a part of it. Having a girl with some glazed expression, disconnected to the pain and the torture inflicted on them, wasn’t what they wanted, which meant they’d take their tastes elsewhere. And there was no way he was going to sit by and let that happen.

‘I thought I told you to only give her a small amount of diazepam, not fill her up so she looks like some crack head. It’s bad enough we have to cover up her arms from all that shit she bangs up. When you do a close-up the on-liners need to see she’s feeling it, not anesthetised.’

Lin, who’d worked for Mr Lee for the past ten years, working his way up the ranks, spoke. ‘We only gave her two tablets, but it seems to have knocked her out. It’s probably the mix of drugs.’

Chang Lee narrowed his eyes

‘I don’t care what or why it happened, just do something about it. We’re going to start the live streaming in the next half an hour, and punters won’t want to pay for a girl who can’t join in on the action. I wanted you to take the edge off so it could last longer, not mess up the whole of the streaming.’

Mr Lee watched Lin shake the naked girl, whose head lolled back as he tried to wake her up. The pimp he’d purchased her from had reassured him she was clean and worked hard. So far there seemed to be no evidence of any of that.