China Roses

by Jo Bannister

  ‘Not this time,’ he said carefully. ‘Are you all right? You sound … worried. Where are you?’

  ‘I am worried,’ she answered tersely. ‘Gabriel, I need your help. I’m sorry to trouble you when’ – how to put it? – ‘you have other things on your mind, but I really need to see you. I’m at Railway Street. Can you come right away?’

  ‘Hazel, I can’t,’ he demurred. ‘I’m just’ – how to put this? – ‘in the middle of something. I’m going to be out of town for the rest of the day.’

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Hazel had never made a habit of begging; but then, she’d never had to. She had made a habit of being there, whenever Ash needed her, whatever he needed her for, when it was convenient and also when it most assuredly was not. He had no right to refuse her now, regardless of what she wanted, and they both knew it.

  ‘This is really important,’ she said eventually. ‘I think David’s in danger. He’s gone off on his own, following up a lead that might go nowhere but might take him to the people who murdered Rose Doe. And Dave Gorman’s doing what he can, but everything takes time and before he can trace the brothel’s phone it’s going to be in the bottom of a waste bin somewhere.’

  She became aware she wasn’t making much sense and tried again. ‘He’s been missing since last night. David. I found some kind of on-line brothel called China Roses. He got their number while my back was turned, and I think he went out straight away, and he hasn’t been back since and I haven’t heard from him and he isn’t answering his phone. I looked for the website again but it’s vanished.’

  Between the rose garden and the lake Ash stood frozen, a monument to indecision. He knew what he should do. He knew what he wanted to do. He didn’t think he could do it. ‘If Dave’s dealing with it, I don’t know what more you and I could do …’

  As if she’d been there beside him, he heard Patience’s voice in his head: You could be there with her. For all the times that she was there for you.

  ‘I thought maybe … Oh, I don’t know what I thought,’ exclaimed Hazel, and it was impossible to know if her impatience was for herself or Ash. ‘You’re the smart one – I thought you’d come up with an idea.’

  ‘Sorry,’ mumbled Ash.

  ‘If I can’t think of anything better, I’m just going to drive round looking for him. Looking for China Roses. Trawling the red light districts. Here – well, that won’t take very long – and Coventry, and if there’s still no sign of David I’ll go on to Birmingham. I’ve OK’d it with the chief. I think he’d have OK’d anything that would get me out of the office for a bit. Will you come with me?’

  It cost him blood to say it, but say it he did. ‘Hazel, I really am sorry but I can’t. I have to be somewhere else. It’s not something I can put off.’

  From the quality of her silence, he thought he’d managed to surprise her. That she’d believed that when push came to shove he’d do as she asked rather than refuse her. He knew she’d counted on him. She had every right to; he had no right to let her down.

  And because he knew he was behaving badly, and his conscience was pricking him in consequence, he did what guilty people do: he tried to justify himself by putting the other party in the wrong. ‘Anyway, you’re never going to spot him by driving round blindly. You have a number for these people? Then wait till Dave traces the phone. As soon as he has a location, he’ll be straight in there and hauling David out, whether he wants to come or not.’

  ‘But I need to be doing something!’

  ‘I’m not sure there’s anything you can usefully do, or I could help with. David will be fine. The brothel you found has probably nothing to do with what happened to him, it’s just a coincidence that they’re using a name that seems to mean something to him. It’s not as if he’s been able to tell us why. China Roses? – it could mean anything. This brothel, the flower shop in Windham Lane, heaven knows how many other businesses, or something quite different. If he hasn’t found what he’s looking for, he’ll turn up again any time now.’

  ‘That’s what Dave Gorman said,’ growled Hazel. ‘I didn’t think he was right, and I don’t think you are. What if it isn’t a coincidence? What if David’s found his way to the people who killed Rose?’

  But Ash had no answer. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said a third time. ‘I can’t help. And I don’t think you can either. Hazel, I have to go. I’ll call you when I get back. With luck he’ll have turned up by then. But if he hasn’t, we’ll go out and look for him. All right?’

  ‘Not really, no,’ she said quietly, ending the call.

  Ash stood another minute beside the lake, oblivious to its winter charms, feeling sick to his soul. He felt like someone who’d been entrusted with a treasure, something rare and beautiful and fragile, and he’d dropped it. No, not even dropped it because, however careless and unfortunate, that would have been an accident. He’d done something worse: he’d made the conscious choice to let it fall. He’d chosen the needs of a woman who’d almost destroyed him over those of the one who’d dragged him back from the abyss. He couldn’t imagine how he would ever explain that to Hazel. He didn’t understand it himself.

  He pulled himself together and walked on through the park to the car-hire depot; and the girl behind the desk wondered if the big bear-like man with the slight habitual stoop and the polite, diffident manner knew there were tears on his cheeks.

  Whether DCI Gorman wanted her in the office or not, Hazel returned to Meadowvale. She had nowhere else to go.

  There was a brief bustle of activity while the necessary formalities were met, then DS Presley joined DCI Gorman and Melvin Green the computer geek in Gorman’s office, and closed the door. The office fell quiet. Knowing this was personal, no one wanted to bother Hazel.

  After ten minutes Dave Gorman emerged. He went out to the corridor to kick some coffee out of the vending machine, returning with two unpleasant cardboard mugs. He pulled a spare chair up to Hazel’s desk. ‘Get that inside you while I tell you what’s happening. We’re running a trace on the phone number in the e-mail, and another on Sperrin’s phone. That’s the one I’m pinning my hopes on. If Sperrin has it with him, we’ll be able to triangulate his location. If he’s still in Norbold we’ll go and pick him up, you and me. If he isn’t, I’ll have the closest unit do the honours. Try not to worry. There’s no reason to suppose he’s made any more progress at finding these people than we have.’

  ‘Then why hasn’t he come home?’ she demanded fretfully.

  Gorman shrugged. ‘Pride? He doesn’t want to admit that he’s drawn a blank? You know the guy better than any of us – you tell me.’

  ‘I don’t think he drew a blank,’ said Hazel in a small voice. ‘And that’s my fault. For doing what you’ve told me, time and again, not to do – trying to sing the solo when my place is in the chorus.’

  Gorman gave a wry grin. He had told her that. He hadn’t thought she was listening.

  ‘And as if that wasn’t enough,’ she continued, determined to drink the cup of guilt to the dregs, ‘I was stupid enough to let him see what I was doing. To go out and leave him alone with the laptop. Of course he read the e-mail when it came in. Of course he acted on it. I knew how much this meant to him. He blamed himself for not saving Rose. If I’d been thinking with more than half a brain I could have kept him safe. And I didn’t.’

  ‘You couldn’t guess he’d have an attack of the vigilantes.’

  She refused to be comforted. ‘Yes, I could. It’s typical of the man. I’ve known him, on and off, since I was a child. He was always an arrogant sod who knew he was smarter than the people around him and thought that meant that most people were stupid. Who was he going to ask for help? You? Me? When he’s so much smarter than the pair of us put together? He’d think he was quite capable of doing what we couldn’t and finding out if the people behind that ad were the same ones he’d seen at Myrton.’

  ‘But what then?’ asked Gorman, puzzled. ‘How did he think the situation was going to end
well? He’s not exactly fighting fit.’

  ‘It wouldn’t make any difference if he was: he’s outnumbered, and they have guns, and we know they’re willing to use them. I don’t know what he had in mind. Maybe he meant to call us in as soon as he was sure, only something – someone – stopped him. Or maybe he didn’t know himself what he was going to do.’

  ‘Clever men don’t walk into the enemy’s camp without some sort of a plan,’ Gorman pointed out.

  ‘He was so angry, I don’t think he was thinking straight.’ Hazel struggled to put into words what she was only now coming to understand herself. ‘In his head, it was history repeating itself. His brother’s death, and Rose’s death. He was too young to deal with the first so he put it out of his mind entirely, but that meant he never got the chance to make his peace with it. To feel the remorse, and recognise how little of it was appropriate, and forgive himself.

  ‘So when a desperate girl ran to him for help, and now he was a grown man, and in spite of that the result was the same – Jamie died, and Rose died too – I think the guilt overwhelmed him. Every fragment of memory that he got back, every bit he was able to add to the picture, only made matters worse. Faced with the chance to confront these people, he was never going to wait until I got home and took over. He didn’t want us – the police – to get justice for Rose: he wanted to avenge her himself. It was the only way he could make his peace with history.’

  Gorman still thought they could be dealing with a black comedy rather than a tragedy. ‘I know you think Sperrin’s in danger. But we don’t know that yet. This could all still be a coincidence. In which case, when he went to meet his China Rose for the night, he’d find a hooker and her pimp, and nothing else. No connection at all to people trafficking.’

  ‘Then he’d have come home,’ Hazel said simply. ‘If he could have called us, he’d have called; if he could have left, he’d have left. Someone stopped him.’

  Gorman watched her, his square, frankly ugly face creased with concern. He knew she was hurting. He didn’t know how to comfort her. ‘Gabriel should be here.’

  ‘Gabriel’s busy.’

  Two words, unremarkable in themselves, which in that context were enough to send the DCI’s thick eyebrows racing up towards his low-slung hairline. A few comments he might have made he thought better of and didn’t say out loud. She was his friend as well as his colleague: he didn’t need to make what was already a bad day worse.

  The door of his office banged open and Tom Presley was at his elbow. ‘No luck with the China Roses number, but we’ve got a location for Sperrin’s phone. Just this side of Coventry.’

  Gorman was already calling Coventry police. ‘Give me the map reference.’ He explained the situation in as few words as he could, passed on the location. ‘We’ll be with you as soon as we can.’

  As the three of them hurried down to his car, he said to Presley, ‘Moving or stationary?’

  Presley gave him a significant look. ‘Stationary.’

  They might have thought they were being discreet, but Hazel knew exactly what they were thinking. A moving target meant the phone was still being carried. ‘He could have dropped it,’ she said. ‘Or maybe they’ve locked him up somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, that’s probably the answer,’ said Tom Presley without inflection.

  The first thing Ash did with his newly hired car was drive to his solicitor’s office.

  Jim Boyne had been the family’s solicitor when Ash’s mother was alive. He knew more about Ash’s background – where he’d worked, who for, why he stopped – than Ash actually realised; and he knew when to ask questions and when to hand over a sealed envelope without comment.

  Ash wanted confirmation of one point. ‘I get this signed, and the divorce will go through? No sitting on our hands for five years in case she turns up to defend it?’

  Boyne nodded soberly. ‘That would be my expectation. The Proposed Arrangements for Children form is the important one. If she’ll sign that, the rest is not much more than a formality.’

  ‘And I have sole custody?’

  ‘That’s what you asked for, that’s what I drew up. In the circumstances, with your wife’ – he searched for a tactful term – ‘unlikely to return to this country of her own volition, it seems the only practical arrangement. Er …’

  Ash raised one eyebrow in a gesture which acknowledged the other man’s curiosity without encouraging it.

  A lifetime of not asking questions he didn’t want to know the answers to was no help to Jim Boyne now. Professional curiosity was just too strong. ‘The county court was unable to locate your wife to serve this petition on her. How did you?’

  Deadpan, Ash said, ‘I got lucky, Mr Boyne.’

  What the solicitor thought of that was plain in his face even if he didn’t voice it. He debated with himself a moment longer. ‘Mr Ash, you’re not going to do anything … rash … are you?’ He meant, illegal.

  Ash fixed him with a deep, dark eye. ‘Mr Boyne, have you ever known me to do anything rash?’

  The solicitor heaved a mental sigh of relief. He could honestly say that he had not. What he didn’t know, including what he knew he didn’t know and a few things that he didn’t know if he knew or not, was neither here nor there.

  The sat-nav took them almost all the way into Coventry, but then drew them aside into an urban desert of depots and small industrial units, a blasted heath of concrete yards and steel sheds and almost no people. Gorman was driving, Presley acting as navigator. Hazel had the back seat to herself. Anxiety crowding her on every side made it feel cramped.

  They saw the police cars before the sat-nav told them they’d arrived. They were drawn up in front of a steel shed indistinguishable from a dozen others, with no sign on the gate and no name over the door. There were no external windows. Both gate and door had been secured by padlocks, which someone had sheared with bolt-cutters.

  Closest to the door, half masked by the police vehicles, was an ambulance.

  Gorman and his sergeant got out of the car. But as Hazel went to join them, Gorman shook his head. ‘You stay here.’

  Objections rose as far as her tongue – references to equal opportunities, assurances that she could deal professionally with whatever they found – but no further. She subsided onto the seat without a word. If it was good news, it could wait; if it was bad news, it would always come too soon. She watched the two men walk quickly across the wind-scoured concrete and disappear into the shed.

  She thought: This isn’t a brothel. It isn’t even a cheap brothel. By the time he got here, he knew what he was dealing with, and so did they. Everyone’s cards were face-up. By the time he got here, getting laid was no longer an option.

  She thought: The first thing they would do, the very first thing, would be to take his phone off him. But if this was a place that was important to them, they wouldn’t just have put it on a desk and forgotten about it – they’d know as well as we do we could trace it. They’d have destroyed it, and then taken the pieces away to be sure.

  She thought: Maybe he got rid of it before they searched him. Maybe he dropped it behind a radiator in a split-second when no one was looking. That would explain the signal not moving. Of course, it meant that neither Sperrin nor his captors might still be here. Even so, knowing they’d used this shed had to be worth something. Coventry’s answer to Sergeant Wilson might turn up some forensics to work on …

  Dave Gorman was coming back towards the car. His head was down, the gritty wind whipping at his thick hair. He never wore hats, Hazel thought inconsequentially; he never even brought out a scarf until February.

  He opened the driver’s door and got in. After a moment he half turned in his seat, looking at Hazel over his left shoulder.

  She said, ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gorman.

  EIGHTEEN

  Sperrin hadn’t dropped his phone behind a radiator. He’d posted it through a crack in an old fifty-gallon oil drum stand
ing empty just inside the door. It had been an act of desperation. He’d known he would never get the chance to call for help, had accepted that the phone’s only utility now was to pinpoint the place where his quest, and his story, had come to an end.

  The officers from Coventry who’d responded to Gorman’s summons had found the phone first. But it hadn’t taken them much longer to find the body. No very serious attempt had been made to hide it, only a few cardboard boxes stamped with the name of a well-known purveyor of tinned goods had been tumbled over it as a shield from casual eyes. David Sperrin had been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in, not long enough for it to wear off.

  DCI Gorman had someone stay with Hazel while he returned to the shed. He found DS Presley keeping vigil over the body while the local FME finished her initial assessment.

  ‘Shot?’ asked Gorman, only to confirm the evidence of his own eyes.

  ‘One bullet, back of the head. Not a fight – an execution.’

  ‘Any other injuries?’

  The doctor nodded. ‘A lot. Mostly about a week old.’

  ‘Those I know about,’ said Gorman. ‘I’m interested in the last twelve hours or so.’

  ‘Let me get him back to my place and have a proper look. I’ll call you. Or you can come, if you like.’

  Gorman thought quickly. ‘Tom, you stay with him. Call me as soon as you have any information. I’m going to take Hazel home.’ He turned to the senior investigating officer from Coventry. ‘We’ll need to work this together. He was part of an ongoing investigation in Norbold. He was my only witness to a murder.’

  The DI nodded. ‘We’ll co-operate any way we can.’

  For most of the drive back to Norbold, Hazel was silent, sunk in grief and reflection. Once she looked up and said, ‘I need to call his brother.’

  Gorman shook his head. ‘I’ll deal with it. Someone will go out from his nearest station. He shouldn’t have to hear that over the phone.’