China Roses

by Jo Bannister

  Qualified masseuses and expert practitioners in many physical therapies.

  Discretion guaranteed.

  She had not forgotten DCI Gorman’s injunction to concentrate on the domestic side while Tom Presley explored the market for imported totty. Hazel justified herself on the grounds that she was sitting on her own sofa in her own house, on her own time, using her own computer to surf the internet for background information. She couldn’t see how anyone could object to that, or how it could conceivably interfere with the detective sergeant’s inquiries.

  Also, the first point of contact was an e-mail address. Anyone can be anyone in an e-mail.

  Hazel amused herself by adopting the mindset of a twenty-three-year-old under-manager in a call centre, a bit of money in his pockets for the first time, moved from his parents’ house into a small flat on the fringes of trendy downtown Coventry, swapped his old banger for a hatchback with go-faster stripes, everything on the up except he’d suddenly realised that he had no friends. No girlfriend, and no male friends who could help him find one. So here he was, sitting on his white leather recliner, under his glitter-ball lampshade, trawling the internet in search of … Well, yes: an expert in many physical therapies.

  She acquired an e-mail address for him – HotRod seemed a likely enough tag – and carefully crafted his response. Mystic arts sounds cool. Could do with a massage. Me in Coventry – where you? Please send photo.

  She hesitated a moment, trying to work an Innit? in somewhere; then decided it was a cliché too far. If she wanted the recipient to believe in this call-centre under-manager as a potential client, she’d better not turn him into a caricature. The e-mail would do well enough as it was. She’d hit Send almost before she’d decided to.

  SIXTEEN

  ‘Well, that was stupid,’ said Cathy calmly. ‘You want me to go, so you destroy my access to someone who can take me somewhere else? You just don’t think things through, do you, Gabriel?’

  ‘I’ll call you a taxi,’ he said thickly.

  ‘To go where? You know I can’t take commercial flights. Anyone would think you wanted to see me arrested.’

  ‘How did you get here?’

  Incredulity made her laugh out loud. ‘I’m not telling you that! So you can call your little friend in the bowler hat? Whatever do you take me for?’

  ‘I don’t think you want me to answer that.’ Ash’s voice was low.

  For just a moment Cathy seemed to see herself in the mirror of his gaze and find the image not to her liking. But the moment passed and her old self-possession returned. ‘Idiot boy, you’ll have to help me now.’

  ‘Help you do what?’ He didn’t want to know. He couldn’t not ask.

  ‘Evade the long arm of the law,’ she replied theatrically, with a flourish of her hand. She had always had very eloquent hands, long and graceful. If you could ignore the blood on them.

  ‘Tell me what you want me to do.’

  She favoured him with a speculative half-smile while she considered. ‘First, you can give me your phone while I try my SIM in it.’ She bent and raked up the remains with her fingers. ‘No, wait – no point.’ When she extracted the little card from the plastic detritus it was cracked in half. ‘So, Plan B.’

  ‘Which is?’

  She was still watching him with that half-smile, weighing him up, wondering how far she could push him. ‘There’s a place where I can get help. Organise transport, make contact with my friends. I need taking there.’

  ‘I already said, I’ll get you a taxi.’

  She shook her head. The auburn hair danced on her shoulders. ‘Taxi drivers talk. They have their licences to consider, and if someone produces a warrant card and asks where they took a fare, they’ll remember and they’ll tell. You wouldn’t. Would you, Gabriel?’

  It wasn’t a rhetorical question: she waited for an answer. She wanted him to say it, to commit. She knew how hard he found it to break his word.

  ‘I don’t have a car,’ he said, which was accurate if disingenuous. He was prevaricating, and both of them knew it.

  ‘Well, do you know,’ said Cathy easily, ‘I don’t think that’s an insuperable problem. There are these places you can go to, and you show them your driving licence and give them some money, and they’ll rent you a car for a day or two.’

  ‘A day or two?’ He stared at her.

  ‘Actually, a few hours would be long enough. What do you think, Gabriel? Is it worth a bit of trouble to be rid of me?’ She had her head on one side, amusement dancing in her eyes.

  He gritted his teeth. ‘What about the divorce?’

  Cathy’s smile broadened. ‘Ah – so now we’re getting down to the small print. That’s a good sign. Do you have the papers?’

  They were with his solicitor. Ash silently cursed himself for not having them at his fingertips. ‘I can get them first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow. Well, clearly I can’t both leave your house tonight and sign your divorce petition tomorrow. Which matters most to you?’

  The Ash family, mother and son, had been good clients of Lucas, Lucas & Boyne for many years. Ash knew where Jim Boyne lived, and would have thrown stones at his bedroom window and made him fetch the papers from his office in the small hours of the morning, but for one thing. It was so uncharacteristic a way for Gabriel Ash to behave that Boyne would know exactly what it meant: that his client was in immediate contact with his wife. Client privilege would prevent him from reporting his suspicions, but Ash was ashamed of the position in which he found himself and didn’t want anyone knowing. He wanted to get Cathy away from Norbold without anyone knowing she’d ever been here. If it came to a straight choice, having his wife under his roof another night was marginally the more attractive option.

  ‘Very well,’ he said curtly. ‘I’ll hire a car in the morning, get the papers from the solicitor, and when you’ve signed them I’ll take you wherever it is you need to go. And that is the last we’ll see of one another. You do understand that? We’re not doing this again. You stay out of my life. And you stay out of the boys’ lives until they’re old enough to make their own choices. Agreed?’

  ‘If you like,’ said Cathy; but she said it with a lilt of ambivalence that entirely failed to reassure.

  It made no difference. Either Ash did as she asked or he didn’t. If he didn’t, he was stuck with her until either she chose to leave or he gave her up to the police. And if he did, he’d have to devise a credible explanation for how he got the divorce papers signed. Some cock-and-bull story about a friend bumping into Cathy in … in … somewhere Britain had no extradition treaty with … God, it would sound so feeble! And Ash had no talent for lying. He’d have to trust to the fact that Dave Gorman knew he had contacts in national security, and probably wouldn’t ask too many searching questions.

  ‘So where are we going?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow,’ said Cathy.

  ‘Is there anything to drink in the house?’

  ‘Hm?’ Hazel looked up vaguely from her screen. ‘Oh – yes. There should be something in the fridge.’

  Sperrin regarded her bitterly. ‘There’s a couple of bottles of shandy in the fridge.’ If he’d found a flask of virgin’s blood with an eyeball bobbing in it, he could hardly have sounded more disgusted. ‘I’m looking for something to drink.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re not supposed to drink alcohol after a head injury,’ she said primly; and then, relenting, ‘Oh all right, I’ll nip round to the off-licence. What do you want – beer?’

  ‘They say brandy’s medicinal,’ suggested Sperrin hopefully.

  ‘They do say that, don’t they?’ nodded Hazel. ‘And when it’s you going to the off-licence, you can buy as much brandy as you can afford. Since it’s me, you can have beer. One bottle of beer. And if it makes your brain leak out of your ear during the night, don’t wake me to complain about it.’

  She left her laptop on the coffee table, pulled on a coat, pocketed her purse and went o
ut. The off-licence was just round the corner: she didn’t take the car because it would be as quick to walk.

  In the event, it wasn’t the walk which took the time, or buying the beer, it was listening to the licensee’s complaints about supermarkets stealing his trade. She kept saying, ‘Joe, it isn’t a police matter, it’s the council that grants liquor licences,’ but he was not a man to be cut off in mid-tirade and he went on reiterating his grievance until she was reduced to backing out of the off-licence door with the bag containing her purchases held between them like a shield.

  So what should have taken five minutes actually took nearly twenty. She expected Sperrin to be waiting at the front door with the bottle-opener, was surprised and slightly annoyed to find he’d given up altogether and gone to bed. She took one of the beers herself and returned to her laptop; and only the possibility that she might be called out in the middle of the night stopped her from drinking Sperrin’s share as well.

  While she’d been out, her e-mail had been answered. Hazel almost didn’t notice, because the new HotRod account had unaccountably marked it as read; but as soon as she opened it she felt a thrill of anticipation. It was an invitation to do business, and a phone-number.

  Hazel Best had been a police officer for four years and if she’d ever expected the job to be easy, she didn’t any longer. She knew that the number would belong to a pay-as-you-go account with no name attached to it, the phone cheap enough to be dumped the moment it attracted the wrong kind of attention. But until then it could be traced by the GPS signal it exchanged with its service provider, so that its location could be determined even if its ownership could not.

  She toyed with the idea of calling Gorman at home. There would be procedural hoops to jump through, and a better chance of finding the phone while it was still in the hands of the advertisers if he started immediately. On the downside, it would mean explaining to him why she’d ignored his instruction to leave this aspect of the inquiry to DS Presley.

  On the whole, she decided the matter would wait until morning. She made a mug of chocolate and took it up to bed, murmuring ‘Good night’ at Sperrin’s bedroom door, softly in case he was already asleep. Perhaps he was, because there was no reply.

  She slept well and woke early, meaning to be at work by eight. Gorman was habitually at his desk by then, and she wanted to see him before the cares of the day fell on his head like an avalanche. She hoped he’d be impressed by what she’d done. But she knew she’d owe Tom Presley an apology.

  So she wasn’t surprised that David Sperrin failed to show his face at the breakfast table. In fact, the breakfast table was no more than a pot of strong coffee and a stack of toast, eaten on her knee in the living room while she checked the laptop for any more e-mails. There were none, not for her and not for Rod.

  She might have gone straight out then, and not expected to see Sperrin until lunchtime or later. She actually had her car keys in her hand when that sixth sense for something amiss, which good police officers develop and the best police officers are born with, jogged her elbow and pointed out the little anomalies that had added up all unnoticed. Sperrin turning in while she was out buying his beer; neither sight nor sound of him since; the e-mail on her open laptop that claimed to have been read already …

  She took the stairs two at a time, only to confirm what she already knew. David Sperrin wasn’t still asleep in her guest room. He hadn’t been asleep in her guest room. The bed hadn’t been slept in since – exasperated by his efforts to do it with one good hand – she’d made it for him the previous morning. He’d read the e-mail from China Roses, understood immediately why she was in communication with an on-line pimp, and gone out while she was listening to Joe Green’s diatribe against the supermarkets that were stealing his trade. And he hadn’t been back since.

  Meadowvale was three minutes away. She thought it would be as quick to explain to DCI Gorman in person as to phone him. She took the laptop to show him the results of HotRod’s enquiries.

  He heard her out in silence, wearing the expression he had honed for his dealings with Hazel: a mixture of irritation, mild incredulity and secret amusement. He loved her enthusiasm for the job; but he’d always known that one day she’d do something that would get them both fired.

  ‘So what you’re saying is,’ he summarised when she stopped to draw breath, ‘you want me to whistle up the Seventh Cavalry because your friend, who’s wandered off before, has wandered off again.’

  ‘It’s a bit more than that,’ complained Hazel, wondering how she might convey her sense of deep unease. ‘When he went AWOL from the hospital, he was still concussed, he was in a state of shock because of what had happened, almost the only memory he had of the event was of someone dying in his arms and he thought he might have killed her. There is no sense in which he was in his right mind.’

  ‘And he is now?’

  ‘Well – yes.’ She knew Gorman had noted her hesitation and tried to explain it. ‘I mean, the guy’s an archaeologist. He thinks it matters what happened in some bog thousands of years ago. Plus, he inherited all his family’s brains and none of its charm. So maybe he views the world from a slightly different perspective to you and me, or most people. That isn’t grounds enough to break out the station straitjacket. Maybe he’s a bit eccentric. He’s not crazy.’

  ‘He is unpredictable. Maybe he just decided to go home and forgot to mention it.’

  ‘At ten o’clock at night? When he’d just sent me out to buy beer? That’s not eccentric, that’s stupid! And the one thing David Sperrin is not is stupid.’

  Dave Gorman sniffed and considered the situation. ‘You think he saw that e-mail?’

  She nodded. ‘I thought it was odd at the time, that it was marked as read when I hadn’t opened it. I just thought it was a server error. This morning, when I realised he’d gone out instead of going to bed, it all fell into place.’

  ‘All right, let’s suppose that is what happened.’ Hazel could tell from his measured tone that she had failed to infect the DCI with her sense of alarm. ‘How would he react? Where do you imagine he went?’

  ‘I don’t know where he is,’ she exclaimed, ‘that’s why I’m so worried!’ She saw Gorman raise one bushy eyebrow at her and made an effort to be calm. ‘Sorry. I was gone maybe twenty minutes. The e-mail is timed at 21.52, just after I went out. Before I got back there was time for David to read it, phone the number, get his coat on and head out to whatever address he was given.’

  ‘Have you phoned the number?’

  She shook her head. ‘I tried David’s number but it went straight to voice-mail. I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to try the China Roses number or not. I wanted to talk to you first.’

  ‘So maybe you have learned something these last few months,’ said Gorman with a trace of a smile. ‘I’ll get a trace organised, then we’ll call and see if anybody answers. There’s a good chance they won’t. Whether or not there’s any connection to human trafficking, there’s enough money in prostitution for the pimps to treat their phones as disposable. They’re only the weak link in the chain if they hold onto them.’

  ‘We’ve still got the Land Rover,’ Hazel reminded him. ‘If the China Roses brothel was more than half a mile away, David probably took a taxi. I’ll phone round the cab firms, shall I?’

  Gorman nodded. ‘He won’t have been given an address, just a rendezvous. Someone would meet him with a car. But finding his cabbie might put us in the right general area. Give us some idea if we should be looking for him in Norbold, or Coventry, or somewhere else.’ There was a pause while he debated how much he should say. ‘Hazel, I still have my doubts about this. I think you’ve built an awful lot of theory on not very much foundation. The likeliest outcome is that it’ll prove to be just a brothel, nothing more, and the name’s a coincidence.

  ‘But I have to tell you, if Sperrin’s playing at amateur detectives, and it turns out China Roses is not just another brothel, he could be in trouble. We’ll try tri
angulating his phone as well, see if that’ll give us his location. In the meantime, wherever he’s gone, whoever he’s with, he’s out there on his own.’

  ‘If these are the same people, and if they realise who he is, they’ll kill him.’

  The DCI nodded sombrely. ‘Probably the best we can hope for right now is that I’m right and you’re wrong. There’s every chance, you know. I’m a detective chief inspector: it says so on my door. Hold onto that thought. If the China Roses On-Line Brothel has as much to do with the people who shot our girl as the China Roses Narrowboat Company does, then your friend will have spent an interesting night and will show up any time now with a lighter wallet and a faintly embarrassed smile on his face.’

  SEVENTEEN

  Ash phoned the car-hire office as soon as it opened. They offered to pick him up, but he didn’t want anyone to see Cathy, or hear her, or have any reason to guess at her presence in his house. He thought he was probably being neurotic – she had as good a reason to stay out of sight as he had to hide her – but the idea of someone coming to Highfield Road made him deeply anxious. He said he’d walk into town to collect the car.

  Oh good, said Patience, who’d been eavesdropping. Can I come?

  Ash shook his head regretfully. ‘If I turn up at a car-hire place with a dog in tow, I think I’m going to be walking home again.’

  That’s species-ist, said Patience, narrow-eyed, peering down her long nose at him.

  He was crossing the park when his phone rang. For the rest of his life he would regret answering it. He knew it was Hazel – not many people had the number – and if he hadn’t answered she’d have assumed he’d left it on his hall table again. But the insistent drilling was hard to ignore, and he fumbled through his pockets until he found the thing, and had pressed Receive before he’d wondered if he should.

  ‘Gabriel – thank God.’ The cool reserve with which they’d parted on his doorstep the day before had entirely gone. Apprehension laced her voice. ‘I thought you weren’t going to answer – that you’d left the phone on the hall table again.’