by Peter James
‘We go to the bar tonight?’ Anca said.
‘Take your clothes off,’ he said. ‘Both of you.’
The two girls looked at each other in surprise. ‘Clothes?’
‘I want to see you naked.’
‘We – we did not come to be strippers,’ Nusha said.
‘You are not strippers,’ he said. ‘You are here to pleasure men with your bodies.’
‘No! That’s not the deal!’ Anca protested.
‘You know how much it cost to bring you here?’ he said harshly. ‘You want to go home? I will take you to the airport tomorrow. But Mr Bojin will not be pleased to see you. He will want his money back. Or would you rather I call the police? In this country false passports is a bad offence.’
Both girls fell silent.
‘So tell me, which do you want? Shall I phone Mr Bojin now?’
Anca shook her head, looking terrified suddenly. Nusha bowed hers, looking ashen.
‘OK.’ He pulled his mobile phone from his pocket and stabbed a button on the dial pad. ‘I call the police.’
‘No!’ Anca shouted. ‘No police!’
He put the phone back in his pocket. ‘So, take your clothes off. I will teach you how to pleasure a man in this country.’
Staring sullenly at the black carpet, as dark as the void of their new lives, both girls began to undress.
52
On the flat screen high on the wall, a short distance in front of her desk, Lynn read the words in large gold letters: COLLECTOR BONUSES TOP TEN.
Below was a list of names. The top was currently Andy O’Connor, on a rival team, the Silver Sharks. The screen informed her that Andy had collected a total of £9,987 in cash this week, so far. His accumulated bonus, if he maintained this position, was £871.
God, how she could do with that!
She looked enviously at the other nine names beneath his. The bottom was her friend and team-mate Katie Beale, at £3,337.
Lynn was way off the scale. But one sizeable client had just agreed to a plan. He would make a lump sum payment of £500 and a regular £50 a month, to pay off a MasterCard debt of £4,769. But that £500 – assuming it did come in – would only bring her weekly total to £1,650. Leaving her with an almost impossibly long way to go.
But perhaps she could stay late tonight and catch up on her hours. Luke had come over to see Caitlin after they’d got back from the hospital this morning, so at least she would have company. But she did not want to be away from her for too long.
Suddenly an email pinged on to her screen. It was from Liv Thomas, her team manager, asking her to have another try with one of her least favourite clients.
Lynn groaned inwardly. A golden rule of the company was that you never actually met with your clients, as they were called. Nor did you ever tell them anything about yourself. But she always had a mental picture in her head of everyone she spoke to. And the image she had in her head of Reg Okuma was of a cross between Robert Mugabe and Hannibal Lecter.
He had run up a bill of £37,870 on a personal loan from the Bradford Credit Bank, putting him up among the largest debtors on their client list – the highest topping out at a whopping £48,906.
A few weeks ago she had given up on ever recovering a penny from Okuma, and had passed his debt over to the litigation department. On the other hand, she thought, if she did get a result, then it could be fantastic and would propel her into contention for this week’s bonus.
She dialled his number.
It was answered by his deep, resonant voice on the first ring.
‘Mr Okuma?’ she said.
‘Well, this sounds like my good friend Lynn Beckett from Denarii, if I am not mistaken.’
‘That’s right, Mr Okuma,’ she said.
‘And what can I do for you on this fine day?’
It may be fine inside your head, Lynn thought, but it’s pissing with rain inside my head and outside my window. Following her long-used training script, she said, ‘I thought it might be a good idea to discuss a new approach to your debt, so that we can avoid all that messy litigation business.’
His voice exuded confidence and oily charm. ‘You are thinking of my welfare, Lynn, would that be right?’
‘I’m thinking of your future,’ she said.
‘I’m thinking of your naked body,’ he replied.
‘I wouldn’t think about that too hard, if I were you.’
‘Just thinking about you makes me hard.’
Lynn was silent for a moment, cursing for falling into that one. ‘I’d like to suggest a payment plan for you. What exactly do you think you could afford to pay off on either a weekly or a monthly basis?’
‘Why don’t we meet, you and I? Have a little tête-à-tête?’
‘If you would like to meet someone from the company I can arrange that.’
‘I have a great dick, you know? I’d like to show it to you.’
‘I will certainly tell my colleagues.’
‘Are they as pretty as you?’
The words sent a shiver rippling through her.
‘Do your colleagues have long brown hair? Do they have a daughter who needs a liver transplant?’
Lynn cut the call off in terror. How the hell did he know?
Moments later her mobile rang. She answered it instantly, spitting out the word, ‘Yes?’ convinced it was Reg Okuma, who had somehow got hold of her private number.
But it was Caitlin. She sounded terrible.
53
There were occasions when Ian Tilling missed his life in the British police force. Plenty of moments too when he missed England, despite the painful memories it held for him. Particularly on those days when the numbing cold of the Bucharest winter froze every bone in his fifty-eight-year-old body. And on those days when the chaotic bleakness of his surroundings here in the suburban sector 6, and the bureaucracy and corruption and callousness of his adopted country, dragged his spirits down.
Whenever he felt low, his mind went back to the terrible evening, seventeen years ago, when two of his colleagues came to his house in Kent and told him that his son, John, had died in a motorcycle accident.
But he had an instant fix for coping with that pain. He would get up from his desk in the ramshackle office, filled with donated furniture, which he shared with three young female social workers, and take a walk around the hostel he had created as a sanctuary for fifty of this cruel city’s homeless. And see the smiles on his residents’ faces.
He decided to do just that, now.
When Ceauşescu had come to power in 1965, he had a skewed plan to turn Romania into the greatest industrial nation in Europe. To achieve that he needed to increase, dramatically, the size of the population in order to create his workforce. One of his first acts of legislation was to make it compulsory for all girls, from the age of fourteen, to have a pregnancy test once a month. If they fell pregnant they were forbidden to abort.
The result, within a few years, was an explosion in the size of families, and the offspring became known as the Children of the Decree. Many of these children were handed to government care institutions and brought up in vast, soulless dormitories, where they were brutally maltreated and abused. Many of them escaped and took to a life on the streets. A huge number of them were now living rough in Bucharest, either in shanties built along the network of communal steam pipes that criss-crossed the suburbs, or in holes in the roads, beneath them. Tributaries of these pipes fed every apartment block in the city with their central heating, which was switched on in autumn and off in spring.
After the tragedy of John’s death led to the collapse of Tilling’s marriage, he had found it impossible to concentrate on his police work. He quit the force, moved into a flat and spent his days drinking himself into oblivion and endlessly watching television. One evening he saw a documentary on the plight of Romanian street kids and it had a profound effect on him. He realized that maybe he could do something different with his life. Nothing would bring John back, but
perhaps he could help other kids who’d never had any of the opportunities in life that John, and most other kids in England, had. The next morning he phoned the Romanian embassy.
He remembered the first government home for children he had visited when he arrived in the country. He walked into a dormitory in which fifty handicapped children aged from nine to twelve lay in caged cots, staring blankly ahead of them or at the ceiling. They had no toys at all. No books. Nothing to occupy them.
He had gone straight out and bought several sackfuls of toys and handed a toy to each child. To his astonishment, there was no reaction from any of them. They stared at the toys blankly, and he realized in that moment that they did not know what to do with them. Not because they were mentally retarded, but because they had never been given toys before in their lives and did not know how to play with them. No one had ever taught any of these kids anything. Not even how to play with a fucking doll.
And he became determined, then and there, that he would do something for those kids.
Originally, he had figured on spending a few months out in Romania. He never thought he would still be here, seventeen years later, happily married to a Romanian woman, Cristina, and more content than he had ever been in his entire life.
Tilling looked tough and fit, despite carrying more than a few excess pounds around his midriff and he walked, exuding pent-up energy, with a copper’s strut. His face was craggy and lived in, with a toothbrush moustache and topped with close-cropped grey hair. Making few concessions to the weather, he was dressed today in a blue open-neck shirt, baggy fawn trousers and old brown brogues.
He stepped out into the hallway and smiled at a group of new arrivals from a care organization who were seated on the battered armchairs and sofas. Four dark-skinned Roma kids, a boy of eight in shell-suit bottoms and a sparkly T-shirt, a youth of fourteen in a baggy top and black tracksuit trousers that were too short for him, and two girls, a long-haired twelve-year-old in a mismatched jogging suit and a girl of fifteen in jeans and a holed cardigan. Each of them held a helium-filled party balloon, which they raised in celebration.
They were all from one family who could not cope and had placed them into an institution that they had run away from two years ago. They had been living on the streets since and now had the smiles on their faces he had seen so many times before, and which broke his heart each time. The smiles of desperate human beings who could not quite believe that their luck had changed.
‘How are you doing? All OK?’ he said, in Romanian.
They beamed and jigged their colourful balloons. Tilling had no idea where the balloons had come from, but he knew one thing for sure. Apart from the clothes they stood up in, these were the only possessions they had in the world.
The residents of Casa Ioana ranged in age from a seven-week-old baby, with her fourteen-year-old mother, to an eighty-two-year-old woman who had been tricked out of her home and her life savings by one of the many monsters who exploited Romania’s ill-thought-out laws. There was no welfare for the homeless in this country – and few shelters. The old woman was lucky to be here, sharing a dormitory room with three other elderly inmates who had met the same fate.
‘Mr Ian?’
He turned at the voice of Andreea, one of the social workers, who had stepped out of his office behind him. A slim, pretty twenty-eight-year-old, who was getting married in the spring, Andreea had a deep warmth and compassion, and tireless energy. He liked her a lot.
‘Telephone call for you – from England.’
‘England?’ he said, a little surprised. He rarely heard from England these days, except from his mother, who lived in Brighton, and to whom he spoke every week.
‘It is a policeman. He says he is old friend?’ She said it as a question. ‘Nommun Patting.’
‘Nommun Patting?’ He frowned. Then suddenly his eyes lit up. ‘Norman Potting?’
She nodded.
He hurried back into his office.
54
Lynn cursed as she saw two flashes from the speed camera in her rear-view mirror. She always drove slowly past that sodding camera opposite Preston Park, but this afternoon it had gone completely out of her mind. She was concentrating on getting home to Caitlin as quickly as possible and on nothing else. Now she faced a fine to add to her financial woes, and another three points on her licence, but she carried on without slowing down, a steady fifty-five in the thirty limit, desperate to get to her child.
Five minutes later she pulled into her driveway, jumped out of her car, jammed her key in the front door and pushed it open. Luke was standing in the hall, limp hair slanted across one eye, wearing a baggy top and trousers that looked like they might have come from the rear of a pantomime horse. His mouth was open and he had an even more gormless expression than usual on his face, like a man on a railway platform watching the last train of the night disappearing and not sure what to do next. He raised his arms by way of a greeting to Lynn, then let them drop again.
‘Where is she?’ she said.
‘Oh – er – right – Caitlin?’ he said.
Who the fuck do you think? Boadicea? Cleopatra? Hillary Clinton? Then she saw her daughter, standing at the top of the stairs, in a dressing gown over her nightdress, swaying as if she were drunk.
Dumping her handbag on the floor, Lynn threw herself up the stairs just as Caitlin stepped out into space, missing the top stair altogether, and tumbled forwards. Somehow, Lynn caught her, grabbing her thin frame in one arm and the banister rail in the other, and, clinging for dear life, managed to stop herself plunging backwards.
She stared into Caitlin’s face, inches from her own, and saw her eyes roll. ‘Darling? Darling? Are you OK?’
Caitlin slurred an incomprehensible response.
Using all her strength, somehow Lynn managed to push her back and up on to the landing. Caitlin tottered against the wall. Luke followed them, stopping halfway up the stairs.
‘Have you been doing drugs?’ Lynn screamed at him.
‘No, no way, Lynn,’ Luke protested, the shock in his voice sounding genuine.
Slurring her words, Caitlin said, ‘I’m like – I’m – I’m like . . .’
Lynn steered her back into her room. Caitlin half sank, half fell backwards on her bed. Lynn sat down beside her and put an arm around her. ‘What is it, my darling? Tell me?’
Caitlin’s eyes rolled again.
Lynn thought, for one terrible moment, that she was dying.
‘If you’ve given her anything, Luke, I’ll kill you. I swear it. I’ll tear your fucking eyeballs out!’
‘I haven’t, I promise. Nothing. Nothing. I don’t do drugs. I wouldn’t, wouldn’t give her nothing.’
She put her nose to her daughter’s mouth to see if she could smell alcohol, but there was only a warm, faintly sour odour. ‘What’s the matter, darling?’
‘I just feel giddy. I’ve got the roundabouts. Where am I?’
‘You’re home, darling. You’re OK. You’re at home.’
Caitlin stared blankly around the room, without any recognition at all, as if she was in a totally unfamiliar place. Lynn followed her eyes as she stared at the dartboard with the purple boa hanging from it, then at the photograph of the rock star hunk, whose name Lynn had momentarily forgotten, as if she was looking at them for the first time.
‘I – I don’t know where I am,’ she said.
Lynn stood up, gripped by a terrible panic. ‘Luke, stay here with her for a moment.’ Then she ran downstairs, grabbed her handbag and went into the kitchen. She pulled her address book out of her bag, then dialled the mobile phone number of the Royal South London transplant coordinator.
Please God, be there.
To her relief, Shirley Linsell answered on the third ring. Lynn told her Caitlin’s symptoms.
‘It sounds like encephalopathy,’ she said. ‘Let me speak to a consultant and either I or he will get straight back to you.’
‘She’s in a really bad way,’ Lynn said. ‘Enc
ephalopathy? How do you spell that?’
The coordinator spelled it out. Then, promising to get back to her within minutes, hung up.
Lynn ran back up the stairs, holding the cordless phone. ‘Luke, can you look up “encephalopathy” on the Net?’ She spelled it out for him.
Luke sat down at Caitlin’s dressing table, opened her laptop and began clicking on the keypad.
Five minutes later, Shirley Linsell rang back. ‘You need to get Caitlin to move her bowels. Would you like to bring her back up here?’
‘Have you found a liver for her?’
There was a hesitation that Lynn did not like.
‘No, but I think it would be a good idea for her to come in.’
‘For how long?’
‘Until we’ve stabilized her.’
‘When will you have a liver?’
‘Well, as I said this morning, I cannot answer that. You could treat her at home for this.’
‘What do I have to do?’
‘Give her an enema. Usually with this condition, evacuating the bowel will regularize her.’
‘What kind of enema? Where do I get one?’
‘Any chemist.’
‘Terrific,’ Lynn said.
‘Why don’t you try that? Give it a few hours, then see how she is and call me. There is someone here all the time and she can come in at any hour.’
‘Yes,’ Lynn said. ‘Fine, I’ll do that.’
She hung up.
Caitlin was lying back on her bed, eyes opening and closing.
‘I think I’ve found what you’re looking for!’ Luke announced.
Lynn peered over his shoulder. His hair smelled unwashed.
Reading aloud off the webpage he said, ‘Encephalopathy is a neuropsychiatric syndrome which occurs in advanced liver disease. Symptoms are anything from slight confusion and drowsiness to change in personality and outright coma.’
‘How fucking great is that?’ Lynn said. Then she turned to Caitlin, whose eyes were now closed. Afraid, suddenly, that she might be slipping into a coma, she shook her. ‘Darling? Keep awake, darling.’