My Hands Are Tied (DCI Morton Book 7) by Sean Campbell

Author:Sean Campbell [Campbell, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Partners in Crime
Published: 2020-10-31T22:00:00+00:00

TIME WEIGHED HEAVILY on Rafferty. She found herself pacing the ward that Saturday evening unable to think of anywhere else to go, and unwilling to return to Morton empty-handed just yet.

The boys had found nothing on their CCTV search so far, and the woman matched no known police databases. Trying to track Claudia’s past was just as difficult. She was a ghost who had no friends anywhere in the world. She’d grown up in the system, bounced from home to home, and had somehow landed at Terra Farm shortly after her eighteenth birthday. She had no public social media accounts of any kind. No Facebook account, no Pinterest, no Instagram, and no TikTok. What kind of young person hid from the entire internet?

For a while, Rafferty had hoped that the alleged kidnapper was one of the cultists. As she understood it, there weren’t many former members whom Claudia could have made contact with. Understandably, the members of the Collective were an insular bunch who practised what they called exclusion, which in reality meant the absolute and uncompromising ostracism of former members. Rafferty and Sarah had chatted about that on Friday evening via WhatsApp. Morton’s wife was studying psychology part-time at Birkbeck, and one of her lectures had been on how cults use “in groups” and “out groups” to make members feel special. She’d said it was called “othering”, and that by creating a distance between the cult and the real world, it bound the cult closer together.

The theory fit. The Collective, now that it was under Lorenzo’s leadership, operated under a series of arbitrary rules that served only to reinforce that Lorenzo’s word was law. As the cultists themselves said, they had to obey anyone of higher priority without question or delay. Members weren’t allowed to leave Terra Farm unless on Collective business, women were pressured into agreeing to seclusion whenever they were on their period, and marriages were used as an opportunity for members to pledge themselves to the cult rather than to each other. Each of the rules seemed to be borrowed from religions and cults past and present, and then renamed as if Lorenzo had invented it all.

Giacomo would have recognised that if he were still lucid. He was a textbook case of late-stage dementia, and what a fall it had been. Back in the day, he had enjoyed a burgeoning reputation as a Z-list celebrity psychiatrist, often appearing on popular radio. That reputation had rapidly become ancient history as the man succumbed to the vicissitudes of age. It was hard to reconcile the angry, gibbering, drooling wreck in the northern-most bungalow with the idea of a charismatic, handsome young psychiatrist with the raw magnetism to convince others that he ought to be their rightful leader.

What the founder had done might not have risen to the level of illegality – the cultists were, by and large, mentally competent adults who could make their own decisions – but the whole set-up bore marked similarities to the gaslighting techniques

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