by Matt Johnson
I accepted the offer of a brew and asked about the woman who had been brought in.
‘She’s being looked after in the rape suite. The Super called in the Domestic Violence team to help you talk to her.’
‘Does she need a translator?’ I asked.
‘No, she’s as English as you or me apparently, sir.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Your Superintendent? Could you ask him to give me a few minutes while I take a leak?’
‘Sure. But it’s not a ‘him’ sir, it’s a ‘her’.’
A figure appeared in the doorway, just behind the PC. I caught a glimpse of bright red hair, a uniform, and then the faint scent of a vaguely familiar perfume.
‘Hello, Robert.’
I knew the voice instantly. Wendy Russell.
Chapter 84
In many ways, policing can be a small world, so bumping in to old colleagues wasn’t unusual. But this was a treat; I knew Wendy well from when we had been on the same intake at Hendon Training School.
‘Well look who it isn’t,’ Wendy said, returning my smile.
She turned on her heel and suggested we started in her office.
‘Since when were you in CID, Finlay?’ she asked, as we climbed a set of stairs. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it was your type of work.’
‘Long story,’ I said. ‘I left Royalty Protection a few weeks ago and then this job came up. It was too good to turn down. What about you? How have you been? I would have thought you would be a Chief Constable by now?’
‘I’m fine. And it’s a long story for me as well, mostly to do with quality of life. When I came here it was supposed to be a stepping stone. I found I liked it and decided to stay.’
As we reached the upper landing, Wendy explained that London had been in touch with instructions to keep the slave girl safe until one of their officers would arrive to debrief her. The girl was being looked after in the rape examination suite and any food or drink was brought in to her from the police canteen. There was a PC posted with her at all times and another guarding the outside of the door. Nobody was allowed in to see her without official sanction. Given the nature of the information that the girl claimed to possess, I thought they seemed sensible safeguards.
Wendy was her usual businesslike self. At the second floor, a young woman in a dark-blue suit was waiting for us. Wendy introduced her as DS Fleming and then walked through the open door into her office. Wendy sat down, rearranged some papers on the desk and then indicated that Fleming and I should use the seating opposite her.
‘So, how did this girl come to our notice?’ I asked.
‘She was picked up on the motorway,’ said Fleming.
‘Hitchhiking?’
‘Not exactly,’ Wendy said. ‘Have you ever noticed those traffic cars that park up and watch the cars going by?’
‘Don’t we all,’ I said. ‘Everyone slows down as soon as they see them.’
‘Well, picture the scene. Middle of the night, two slightly bored traffic cops, engine running to keep themselves warm, watching the occasional car go by. One of them is paying attention, checking speeds, when a Mercedes goes past travelling just below the speed limit.’
‘And something happened?’
‘The PC doing the checks watches the tail lights as they disappear into the distance and notices they are flashing, as if they were faulty.’
‘So they stop the car?’
‘Not at first … the PC noticed a pattern to the flashing. Three short flashes, three long, three short.’
‘Morse code, S.O.S,’ I said.
‘Exactly. The girl they had slung in the boot had the presence of mind to signal for help by working the tail light wiring loose and then tapping it on and off like a flash light. When the traffic crew attempted a stop, the two men ran off into the darkness and were lost before backup could arrive.’
‘Good effort by the girl. They found her locked in the boot, I assume?’
‘She was,’ said Fleming as she opened a small folder on her lap.
‘Have you had a chance to interview her?’ I asked.
‘We have,’ replied Wendy. ‘After the two men decamped from the car, the night-duty CID spoke to her. To start with we thought it was an abduction, with the two men holding her prisoner in the boot of the car. It was only when we were able to get her to talk about the sex trafficking and she said she knew about a WPC who had been kept with her that we decided to call your guys. Since then she has been treated as a sex-crime victim. DS Fleming leads our local team.’
I explained that I had been given only the briefest of details from DCI Bowler. Wendy handed over to DS Fleming to take me through what they knew.
The girl’s name was Mollie Donoghue. She was a thirty-year-old former waitress from Swindon. Fleming outlined in detail how the girl had been tricked into becoming a sex worker by a drug dealer. Since her abduction, she said she had been kept in some kind of dungeon.
Mollie had described how her normal day was spent making sex videos or providing entertainment for her guards. The DS went on to relate how, rather unusually, Mollie would sometimes be taken from her cell with other girls to burn books on a huge bonfire.
To both Fleming and Wendy, this seemed an unusual combination. But I remembered the words of DS Young, the HOLMES Office Manager in London. To the detective, coincidence is a clue. This time, it led me to one conclusion. The Cristeas – slave traffickers and publishers. It was them.
Mollie had gone on to explain that a girl escaped. Shortly afterwards, a new leader arrived at the dungeon. He brought some other men with him and they went out looking for the missing girl. Mollie had no idea where or how they had found her, but the girl looked bruised and scratched when she came back. It was Mollie’s guess that she had been sleeping rough.
The next day, the guards had woken them early. There was an execution. The captured girl had been shot in front of all the women being held. It appeared to have been a lesson to the others on what would happen if they also tried to escape. It was the first time such an event had occurred and the only occasion that Mollie had seen all the others. She had counted nearly thirty women.
I asked if Mollie had been able to learn any names of either her fellow slaves or the guards. I had the names that Bowler had given to me, written down. Fleming reported several girls’ first names but nothing for the guards.
‘Did my DCI send over the pictures of our murder suspects?’ I asked.
‘Yes, they arrived a couple of hours ago,’ replied Wendy. ‘The two traffic cops were on nights and asleep but both were happy to come in and take a look. No luck, I’m afraid. They both said it was too dark to be certain.’
I turned to Fleming. ‘What about Mollie. Have you shown them to her?’
‘Not yet, no,’ she answered.
‘OK. We’ll do that when we speak to her. Did she manage to tell you anything about the WPC?’
‘Yes. When the girl was killed, the leader had a new woman brought in to watch. Mollie knew she was a recent arrival as she was the only one wearing her own clothes. The rest of them are either kept naked or given old clothing if the men decide they like them.’
‘So how did Mollie work out the new arrival might be a policewoman?’ I asked.
‘She was in half-blues. Uniform trousers and boots, white shirt under a light jacket. Mollie has had many dealings with police officers and she recognised the uniform … and there was something said to her, the policewoman, I mean.’
‘What was that?’
‘The leader, he said something about her killing one of his men and that he was going to make sure she paid for it.’
For a few moments, I kept my counsel. Outside of the ‘need to know’ channels, nobody had been told of Lynn’s involvement in the shooting of the escaping gangster. Fleming’s summary of what Mollie said told me that there was no mistake. The abduction of Lynn Wainwright was connected to that shooting.
I decided to be open with what I knew. ‘That fits. The missing
officer was involved in an incident a couple of days ago where she shot and killed an armed suspect. Did Mollie manage to tell us where she is being held?’
‘No, only that it is within about a couple of hours of where she was found on the M5 motorway. She couldn’t be very specific.’
It wasn’t good news. A car travelling for an hour or two could mean a search radius of hundreds of square miles. It was no wonder Bowler hadn’t been in a rush to send a search team in.
‘Did you get a description of the place, any clues at all?’ I asked.
‘She said it was some kind of factory,’ Fleming said, ‘with underground vaults and cells. A large redbrick building with a central courtyard that meant they couldn’t be seen from the outside. Old bricks, small windows, slate roof with lots of broken slates lying about where they had been blown off by the wind … and it was surrounded by trees.’
‘Sounds a bit like an old Victorian place,’ said Wendy. ‘Maybe an old stately home or a hospital? Perhaps, like Mollie said, an old workhouse or factory?’
‘Any ideas?’ I asked.
‘This is rural Gloucester, sir,’ said Fleming. ‘We’re surrounded by woodland and old buildings.’
‘Do you have a map anywhere?’
‘Give me a couple of minutes.’
Fleming left the office, leaving me and Wendy alone. ‘Mollie seems a lot more helpful than I might have expected.’ I said.
‘Considering she’s been held as a slave for the last few months, you mean?’ Wendy answered.
‘Exactly. I would have thought she’d be more traumatised … less able to remember things.’
‘You’d be surprised, Finlay. I’ve seen women like Mollie before. The euphoria of rescue from awful situations of abuse can be wonderful for them. The adrenalin flows and they think it’s all over. It’s only afterwards, when they settle down, that the realisation of what they’ve been through starts to really hit home.’
‘So, her desire to co-operate may be only temporary?’
‘You’d better believe it. It’s one of the reasons so many victims of abuse change their minds about giving evidence and withdraw their statements. While Mollie is on a high and in our care, she’ll be fine. As soon as she returns home to her former life, who knows what other influences will come to bear.’
Fleming re-appeared holding a map which she laid out on the desk. There was a circle drawn on it. She explained it was an estimate to indicate the possible distance the Mercedes could have covered before it was abandoned on the M5. It was a huge area, and included part of Wales.
I asked about forensics. The car had been searched, but nothing useful had been found. It was now sitting in a lockup at the back of the police station, where it would be examined by a CSI investigator the following day. Local CSI people only worked Sundays for murders, it seemed.
Briefing complete, we headed off to the interview suite.
Chapter 85
It was only when I got to speak to Mollie myself that a fuller picture of Lynn’s predicament really hit me.
As the custody officer opened the door to the rape suite and I saw Mollie for the first time, I immediately knew she was a druggie. The tight skin and blank eyes were an indication, and then I saw her rubbing her arm, her injection site was itching. It made sense. I had read the briefing notes that Nina Brasov had passed around the office, so I was aware of the methods used by the traffickers to ensure the compliance of their enslaved workers.
We sat down around a circular coffee table, on comfy chairs which, I guessed, were designed to help victims feel at home. Fleming first introduced her Superintendent and then me.
‘You’re from the Met?’ said Mollie. ‘My … even the big boys are interested in what I have to say now then.’
Ignoring the jibe, I explained that I was curious as to why she thought one of her fellow prisoners was a policewoman.
‘Know she is … seen the uniform,’ she replied, a hint of a sneer in her tone.
‘OK … perhaps it would help me if you explained a bit about the place where this happened? That OK with you?’
She gave me a mock salute. ‘You’re the boss.’
The detail in Mollie’s description didn’t make for easy listening. Housed in a cold, damp building full of leaks and drafts, the girls spent almost all of their time in the dark, locked away in cells.
Normally, the guards only disturbed the women at night for one of their group-sex sessions. Fuelled by lust and alcohol, they would decide which girls were to be the subjects of their attentions by drawing playing cards. Mollie was the ten of spades. In the first weeks following her capture, she had been pulled from the pack on every occasion the men decided to play. Then her popularity waned as new girls arrived. In the last month, her door had remained unopened.
At times, the men left the cell corridors unguarded. The girls would call to each other from behind their doors, ask questions and compare stories. All of them seemed to be from the UK, which Mollie said she thought odd, considering the guards were all foreigners. Some of the girls were runaways, but not all. Others had been lured away from good homes using social media sites and chat rooms. Their stories were startlingly similar. Using the internet, they were seduced by the attentions of a boy who professed to be interested in them. From what Mollie had managed to learn, there seemed to be just three young men who snared the girls, but they were very active.
Some of the slaves did extra work at the factory on the daytime production line. They would pack books into boxes. A few worked in the yard where their job was to burn spoiled books on a huge bonfire. In the evenings, they were taught to dance. The taller girls learned to use the pole and, each week, a woman came down from the city to teach them how to make money from punters in nightclubs. Some of the girls resisted, but not for long.
Within a day of arrival, each girl would receive her first injection of heroin. Mollie estimated, within a week, all new girls were addicted. After that, they were under control. They wouldn’t try to escape, they would be compliant and they would not fight off the attentions of the men. They were trapped. The policewoman, she was certain, would meet the same fate.
Mollie said she’d listened at the inside of her own locked door as they had taken the cop from her cell. She had sworn and cursed like a possessed demon as the guards had dragged her to the table where they administered the first heroin injection. From the sounds and grunts of the men, the poor girl had dished out a few kicks as they struggled to keep her under control. I imagined the scene – Lynn fighting like her very life depended on it, which quite possibly it did. She wouldn’t have made it easy for them. Inevitably though, they had overpowered her.
‘They gave her the queen of hearts,’ Mollie said, interrupting my thoughts. ‘So she’ll soon be doing the groups. I hate cops, don’t get me wrong. But that’s no fate for any woman.’
She explained how the men would make them promises and suggest, if they were good, a warmer place of work awaited them in the city. At least once a month, a van would arrive, always in the evening, and always after they had been fed. Two or three girls would be taken at a time.
The guards told those remaining that the departed were headed for a new, exciting life, where they would earn well, enjoy freedom and be able to set themselves up for life. A few of the girls fell for it, but not many, and not Mollie. But all went willingly. From the factory there was no escape. From the city, there might be.
Mollie explained how she’d guessed she was being moved on as soon as she heard the unexpected slide of the bolt to her cell door. She estimated it had been about three or four in the morning.
‘How many men were in the Mercedes with you?’ I asked.
‘Two. One of them was the Russian who shot the girl who escaped.’
‘Shot the girl?’
‘Like I told this lot earlier.’ Mollie glanced at Fleming and Wendy. ‘She got away somehow. They caught her and made an example of her.’
‘Yes, they did tell me. It m
ust have been very frightening, designed to scare the rest of you, probably. And the man that shot her was a Russian?’
‘Something like that, yes. All those people sound like Russians to me, even when they were talking in French.’
‘They spoke in French?’
‘Not all the time, but it sounded like they could all speak it.’
‘And these two guys put you in the boot of the Merc?’
‘They put cable ties around my wrists and ankles first. I didn’t make it easy for ‘em.’
‘How long were you in the car … I mean when it was on the move? We’re trying to work out how far you might have travelled.’
‘I’m not sure. There was a smell of petrol and I think I must have passed out. When I woke up we were on what sounded like a motorway. I could see the wires to the lights so I thought, hey, what have I got to lose? I pulled the brake light wire off and started tapping out the SOS signal.’
‘That was clever,’ said Wendy. ‘One of our patrol cars saw it.’
‘I know. They told me that straight after releasing me. Like I told them, I learned a few things in school, you know.’
I continued to make notes as I asked Mollie about the guards, what weapons did they carry, how old were they, how many of them? Everything I could possibly think of that would be useful. She was certain, only one of the guards, the leader, had a weapon. She was also certain that she had never seen a gun before the morning of the execution. The others used their fists and a fire hose to keep the women under control.
As we continued to talk, I covered every aspect of Mollie’s incarceration I could think of. We talked building layout, smells, impressions, as well as what she had seen and heard.
I was also curious about the girl who’d escaped only to be recaptured and then killed. I asked Mollie why she hadn’t gone to the police.
‘Are you kidding me?’ Mollie replied. ‘Some of this lot are in on it.’ She nodded her head towards Wendy and DS Fleming.