A Line to Kill

Hawthorne took his time before replying. We were standing on the very edge of the beach, with the rocks behind us and nobody else in sight. It was still early and the great stretch of sand looked wild and unwelcoming. With the wind tugging at the seaweed and the steel-coloured waves rolling in relentlessly, this was not a beach for deckchairs and pedalos. A seagull hovered overhead. The sun was behind the clouds.

‘I will tell you about Abbott,’ he said. ‘But only if you never ask me again. All right? It makes me sick even to talk about him.’

‘He was a paedophile.’

Hawthorne nodded slowly. There was a terrible bleakness in his eyes. ‘He was more than that,’ he began. ‘Mr Derek bloody Abbott. He wasn’t some barrow boy selling dirty DVDs off the back of a lorry. And he wasn’t weird and bearded, downloading stuff off the net and sharing it with his friends. He was a businessman. He was respectable.’

Hawthorne made that last word sound the exact opposite.

‘He started out as a teacher, but when that didn’t work for him he moved into classified advertising and by the end of his twenties he was advertising manager for a big group of leisure magazines. Sailing, horse-riding and – as it happened – naturism. From there it was a small step to founding his own company, Free for All. Their first big success was a listings magazine given away outside tube stations. He was ahead of his time. I’ll say that for him.

‘Listings didn’t pay, so he moved into lifestyle and celebrity and from there it wasn’t such a huge step into porn. This was the early nineties, Tony. We hadn’t quite arrived at the day when you could get it all at the touch of a computer keyboard, so Abbott’s girlies often came folded in the middle with staples running down their chest. And it was all legal. Bored Housewives. Ladies of Leisure. My Secret Fantasies. The sort of stuff you’d find on the top shelf of any corner newsagent.

‘But Abbott moved with the times. Come the millennium, he had his own satellite TV station: the Adult Channel. At the same time, all his publications had moved online, of course. And in the middle of it all, inside this great spider’s web of filth, there was one website that was only available to a very select group of subscribers. The title didn’t give very much away either, even though it described exactly what it was offering. It was called Asia Minor.’

‘Child pornography.’

‘Kids from Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, mainly. And it was in a different league to the rest of his stuff. He’d be looking at a twenty-year sentence for supplying and distributing hard-core pornography with young children. So here’s the question you might like to ask yourself. Why would a man who was making millions out of legal porn, as well as all his other business interests, want to risk the whole thing on a single website that hardly even paid for itself? By the time it was closed down, it only had a few hundred subscribers, dirty old men paying twenty quid a month. Why was he doing it? That’s what the Paedophile and Child Pornography Unit who were running the investigation wanted to know, and in the end they found out. Derek Abbott, the CEO of Free for All, was getting access to the models. That was his little perk. Some of those kids were eleven and twelve years old, and Asia Minor was giving him a constant, fresh supply.’

He took out a cigarette and lit it with cupped hands.

‘When Derek Abbott was arrested in London, he didn’t care. I still remember the day he came in, sitting there with this look on his face like he was the lord of the manor who’d accidentally wandered into the servants’ quarters. The police weren’t going to get anywhere near him, not in a hundred years! He knew from the start that he’d set up his business in a way that made him untouchable and he’d brought in a team of lawyers who didn’t care who he was or what he’d done so long as they got their retainers. He’d pay his way out of trouble no matter how much it cost – and that’s exactly what happened. No-one could connect him to Asia Minor. His own staff had been paid off or intimidated. None of the witnesses, the kids he’d abused, came forward. He’d cocked his nose at us from the very start and he was right.’

‘But he went to prison.’

‘Yeah. In the end, he made one mistake – a bit like Al Capone and his tax returns. It would almost be funny except that it wasn’t. You see, he had to keep souvenirs. He couldn’t resist it. He was a subscriber to his own channel and the vice team managed to crack into a private account on one of his computers and they found a cache of about five hundred images. They arrested him a second time and brought him in for further questioning, and that was when he had his accident on the stairs. And it was an accident, Tony.’ Hawthorne jabbed a finger in my direction. ‘Never say otherwise.’

‘How many years did he spend in prison?’ I asked.