Night Angels

by Danuta Reah

  She heard footsteps and the door opened behind her. She jumped up, spinning round, and Nasim was there, a reproving frown on her face, a steaming cup in her hand. ‘Tea,’ she said in her hard, abrupt voice, and pressed the warm cup into Anna’s hands. ‘Drink.’

  It was another cup of the thick, milky tea, hot and sweet, and Anna felt it warming her, felt her energy start to return as she drank. She looked at the other woman who was watching her, unsmiling. Nasim nodded as Anna drained the cup, then she pushed a bundle into her hands. Anna looked. There was a towel, and there were blue jeans, socks, a T-shirt and a jersey, all worn and faded, but all clean. Nasim watched her for a moment then indicated that Anna should follow her. She led her down a corridor and out of a back door into a yard. The yard was dark, the high walls of the adjacent buildings blocking out the sky. The crumbling asphalt was spongy with moss and a fern grew out of the wall above her. Across the yard, there was a small outhouse and Nasim produced a key and unlocked it, gesturing to Anna to go in.

  Inside, there was a toilet and a small basin. The walls were whitewashed brick and the floor concrete. It smelt faintly of disinfectant. Ignoring the cold, Anna stripped off her clothes and washed herself, using her T-shirt as a sponge. She couldn’t do anything about her hair, but, as she pulled on the clothes Nasim had given her, she felt clean for the first time in days. The brief surge of energy from the sweet tea was fading now, and a lassitude and weariness was starting to weigh her down. She wanted to sleep again, to sleep and sleep and maybe not wake up but stay in the world of dreams – if the dreams could be about her mother, about Krisha, about her friends, about the farm…

  The water dripped into the basin, the smell of smoke drifted into the air, the translucence of a shower curtain with something behind it, and Krisha’s doll on the floor, crushed by a passing foot. A wave of giddiness and nausea washed over her and she clutched the edge of the basin, waiting for it to pass. The smell of disinfectant was stronger now, and she went back into the yard, leaning against the wall of the outhouse, breathing in the cold air until the sickness passed. She opened her eyes and saw Nasim gesturing abruptly to her from the door. She recognized the impatience. It reminded her of her mother: Come in out of the cold! Come in out of the rain! Anna, you will make yourself ill! Nasim looked at her, frowning, and touched a hand to her face. The hand felt cold. Nasim made a tutting noise, and led Anna back into the room where she had spent the night. The fire was lit, and there was a plate of triangular pastries on the arm of the settee.

  Anna sat down and, under Nasim’s dictatorial eye, began to eat the small, spicy parcels. Her stomach had been ravenous for the sweet tea, but now her appetite seemed to have faded, and the nausea was coming back. She ate two of the pastries, sipping water to help them down. Nasim seemed to understand and her rather severe face relaxed after Anna had finished her second. ‘Rest,’ she said.

  It was all Anna wanted to do, but she had to make some plans. She didn’t know where to go, didn’t know if the watcher had managed to follow her to the welfare centre, didn’t know if Angel lurked in the streets outside, waiting for the darkness to come back. ‘Matthew…?’ she said to Nasim. Matthew might know what to do.

  Nasim shook her head and tapped her watch. ‘Later,’ she said. There was the ting of a bell, the sound of the front door opening. Nasim looked at Anna and put her fingers to her lips. ‘Rest,’ she mouthed, and disappeared through the door to the office. There was nothing that Anna could do. The waves of fatigue were overcoming her, and she wrapped herself in the blanket, cold still in spite of the fire, and lay down on the settee.

  There were no customers at the Welfare Advice Centre when Lynne pushed open the door. She went straight round the counter and into the office at the back, where Nasim Rafiq was coming round the desk in response to the bell, an expression on her face that Lynne was unable to identify before it settled into a polite blank. The door at the back of the room that led to the small kitchen was open. Lynne could see a cup and a small pan on the worktop. In the office, the old manual typewriter was pulled out and had a sheet of paper wound into the carriage. There was a book open face-down on the desk. Lynne, who had become an expert at reading from just about any angle, read the title Intermediate Business English, BEC 2. She smiled at Rafiq. ‘Quiet again,’ she said.

  Rafiq went over to the other door, and pulled it shut. ‘Draught,’ she explained. Lynne nodded. The office was cold. She didn’t think that closing a door would make a lot of difference. Rafiq sat down in front of the typewriter. Lynne pulled a chair up to the desk and sat opposite her. After a moment, Rafiq said, ‘Is mostly quiet, but sometimes is busy.’

  Lynne wanted this woman’s co-operation. She had a feeling that this place, ramshackle and unregulated as it seemed to be, would be a useful contact point for immigrants who were in trouble and the people who might help them. The grapevine would spread the word. Katya had come here. The women she was looking for might come here. If that was the case, how much did Pearse and Rafiq know? Would they co-operate? She had to tread carefully. She wanted to break the ice, get under the woman’s wary guard, but the impassive face watching her showed no signs of relaxing. Though Rafiq’s spoken English was not very fluent, Lynne was pretty sure that her understanding was good. ‘Could I talk to you?’ she said.

  Rafiq frowned slightly. Puzzlement. She gave a slight shrug. What do you think we are doing?

  ‘Mrs Rafiq,’ Lynne began again, ‘I just need to check a few things with you.’

  Rafiq’s face remained impassive. She waited for Lynne to tell her what she wanted. Lynne picked up the book. It was exam preparation for various kinds of business English – letter-writing, memos, reports. ‘Are you studying English?’ she said.

  Rafiq nodded at this obvious question. ‘I…For here,’ she explained. ‘And later, maybe, work.’

  Lynne wasn’t sure of Rafiq’s status. ‘Where are you from, Mrs Rafiq?’ She said. ‘How long have you been here?’

  In response, the other woman took her handbag out of the desk drawer and pulled her passport out. A card came out with it and fluttered to the floor. Lynne picked it up, and took the passport the other woman was holding out to her. This wasn’t what Lynne had meant, but she was happy at the opportunity to get more information about this woman. She looked at it, noting that Rafiq had leave to stay as a visiting relative. She was travelling with her son, and Lynne looked at the photograph of the chubby-faced child. ‘How old is your little boy?’ she asked. She looked at the picture again and said, ‘He’s beautiful.’

  Rafiq’s blank face thawed for a moment into a smile of genuine warmth. ‘Javid,’ she said. ‘He is six. He is…school, now.’

  ‘Where does your husband work, Mrs Rafiq?’ Lynne said.

  ‘At university,’ Rafiq said. ‘Is engineer. Is teach.’ She went on to explain in her limited English that her husband had been working in this country for a year, and had a contract for another three. She had been here for six months, having waited to make sure her husband was settled, and to get her paperwork sorted out.

  Lynne looked at the card that had fallen out of Rafiq’s bag. It was an appointment card for the local children’s hospital, a private appointment made out for Javid Rafiq. Lynne gave it back to her and said, ‘Is your son ill? I hope it’s nothing serious.’

  Rafiq looked at her in silence for a moment, as if she was weighing up her answer. She explained with some reluctance that her son had problems with his sight. Lynne couldn’t be sure because of her limited English, but it sounded as though the child’s optic nerve was affected, and without treatment he would go blind. That was the reason her husband had come to an English university to work. ‘Treatment is better here,’ Rafiq said. ‘We pay,’ she added defensively.

  Lynne said, ‘I’m sorry about your son. I hope his treatment is successful.’ She smiled reassuringly at the other woman. There was silence for a moment, then Lynne moved on to the real reason for her visit. She took the photograph of Katya
out of her bag, and put it on the desk in sight of both of them as she talked.

  She explained about the women she was trying to contact, about the kinds of operations she was afraid were going on in the area, the dangers that the women were exposed to, isolated as they were from even the meagre protection the law gave to prostitutes. Rafiq listened impassively, and Lynne couldn’t tell how much of what she was saying the other woman understood. At the end she picked up the photograph. ‘This woman,’ she said. ‘She came to you. There may have been others. I can help them.’

  Rafiq looked at the photograph for a moment, running her fingers over the paper as if she was touching the woman. She sighed. ‘Is bad,’ she said. She looked at Lynne for a long moment. ‘Welfare,’ she said. She reached to the shelf behind her and pulled out a handful of leaflets. ‘For mother, baby.’ She gestured at the list tacked to the wall behind her. ‘Houses, doctors, clinic, benefit. Welfare. Not…’ Her hand made circular motions over the photo. Lynne understood. Rafiq was telling her that this was a welfare centre, not a place where desperate prostitutes came for help. And if her son’s future depended so much on her staying here at least for a while, why would she jeopardize it by doing something illegal, no matter how strongly she felt about the plight of the refugees? But in that case, what had made Katya come here?

  She saw Rafiq look past her, at something behind her, and turned round to see Matthew Pearse standing there. His sudden presence made her jump. He was immediately apologetic, his confusion making the speech impediment she’d noticed before more pronounced. ‘It’s all right, Mr Pearse,’ she said in the end. ‘I was so busy talking to Mrs Rafiq I didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘It’s these shoes,’ he said, his stammer abating. ‘My landlord persuaded me to buy some trainers. He’s right. They’re very comfortable, but no one can hear me coming.’

  ‘Now you’re here,’ she said, ‘I can ask you both. I’m looking for a woman who went missing just a few days ago. She’s a possible witness to a serious crime.’ She paused and looked at them. Nasim’s face was expressionless. Pearse had a faint line between his brows. ‘She’s young, about twenty. Five foot two with dark hair.’ They were still watching her. ‘Her name’s Krleza. Anna Krleza.’

  Rafiq picked up the photo of Katya. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘This woman, that woman. Why?’ Why are you asking us?

  Her face was hard to read. Lynne couldn’t tell if she had reacted to the name or not. Pearse’s face retained its faintly troubled expression. ‘Mr Pearse?’ Lynne said. He shook his head. She told him what she had told Rafiq and he heard her out in silence. ‘They’re in a double bind, these women, aren’t they?’ he said, when she had finished. His stammer made him sound diffident and uncertain, but his dark eyes were direct as he watched her. He had suspected that Katya had been working as a prostitute, she remembered. She recalled the expression on his face when he said, ‘I thought I’d persuaded her to come back’ – a resigned sadness.

  ‘How do you mean, Mr Pearse?’

  ‘I mean that they are the victims of a crime – a very serious crime – but if they go to the police, they will be treated as criminals themselves.’ His mouth moved silently for a moment. ‘I mean,’ he managed, seeing that Lynne was about to speak, ‘they will be locked up. And deported. Eventually.’

  It seemed more a request for information than a political statement, and Lynne responded to it as such. ‘That’s beyond my control, Mr Pearse,’ she said. ‘But they would be dealt with sympathetically.’ She was aware of Rafiq watching her intently.

  ‘Maybe for some of them, that’s a worse option than what is happening to them now. But I heard what Nasim was saying to you…’ Pearse’s mouth reached for the words. He looked down at his hands and she could see him make a conscious effort to relax. After a moment, he could speak again. ‘We are what we say we are. A welfare centre. Most of our clients – belong to immigrant groups – but not all. What they do have in common – is poverty and – an inability to understand – how the system works. I admit we don’t question – the right of people to be here, but – if they are using the welfare system, the hospitals – the doctors, the schools, then I assume – that someone is doing that checking. We don’t have the time – or the skills.’ His speech sounded halting as he struggled to control his stammer.

  ‘So why did she come to you? The woman you took to the hospital? What brought her here?’

  ‘Maybe someone told her – that we don’t ask questions,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’

  It was a long shot, but Lynne showed him the photograph of Gemma Wishart. ‘I don’t recognize her,’ he said. ‘Is she one of these girls?’

  ‘She’s a murder victim, Mr Pearse.’

  His hand hovered over the photograph for a moment, then he touched his forehead and an expression of pain crossed his face. ‘Poor child,’ he said.

  Sheffield, Wednesday afternoon

  Roz spent the afternoon poring over Gemma’s report and the transcript she had found in the laptop carrying case. Gemma had made a written version of the tape, underlining and highlighting the sections she wanted to look at closely. Next to those sections were phonetic symbols showing the pronunciation, with scribbled notes for the final report. Roz went through the report, matching the notes with Gemma’s findings. Everything seemed to be accounted for, apart from the queried lines and that mysterious reference to cats.

  The queried lines were all places where the woman’s English failed and she spoke in Russian. Roz had very little Russian, but Gemma had supplied translations. The woman on the tape was answering questions, which Gemma had not bothered to transcribe, so Roz had to try and reconstruct the prompt to work out what the woman might be saying. She didn’t have the tape – Gemma’s copy had not turned up when she and Luke searched her room – and she didn’t have a good reason to ask DI Jordan for another copy. She looked at line 204 of the transcript: I…Ba-yi-n-sal…I stay…I…friend. There was no translation next to the Russian phrase – maybe it just meant ‘I stay’ or ‘I will stay’. The lines before and after suggested that someone was asking the woman what she planned to do: I got place and I go. Roz couldn’t see any reason for Gemma’s query. Line 127, Gemma had marked as indecipherable, but had written jugun in the middle of the line. Line 25 Gemma had again marked as indecipherable with the queried word di at the end of the line.

  She tapped her pen against her teeth as she thought. That was something that always infuriated Luke. ‘Christ, Bishop!’ he used to say. ‘Are you trying to drive me insane or what?’ She was thinking about Luke in the past tense. Her brief success at distracting herself was shattered as the events of yesterday came crowding back. She checked her watch. It was three o’clock. Maybe she should try and track down Marcus Holbrook, find out what this archive was, whether Gemma had managed to get access to it, and, if so, what she had been looking for. Maybe she could find someone who would translate the bits of the transcript Gemma had queried. She copied the lines out carefully then tucked the transcript in her briefcase.

  The department she wanted was ten minutes’ walk away from the Arts Tower, in one of the old red-brick houses that typified the area and that the university had slowly and inexorably overtaken. It was on what must once have been a quiet cul-de-sac, but was now choked up with parked cars and students walking three and four abreast, blocking the pavement and spilling out into the road.

  The Department of European Studies was halfway up on her left. A group of students was on the steps outside, smoking. Despite the cold, they wore light tops, T-shirts, the garb of summer, their possessions slung in rucksacks on their backs, relaxed and confident. Roz remembered her own teenage insecurities and wondered if she had managed to project the same air of self-assurance in her student days. As she walked towards the door, the group shuffled round. Roz felt a stab of irritation, and walked square through the middle, rather than sidling through the narrow space they opened up. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. And then, mildly, ‘Thank you,’ as t
hey closed ranks in silence behind her. She heard conversation and laughter start up again as she pushed through the door.

  She was in a small entrance hall, stairs to her left, and a notice board facing her. She looked round. A door on her right said OFFICE, and to her left, almost obscured by the stairs, was a sign – INQUIRIES. She hesitated for a moment, then went to the office. She knocked and went in. The room was empty, apart from a young man who was leafing through some papers at one of the desks. He looked up at her and smiled guiltily. ‘Oops,’ he said, and moved hastily to the other side of the desk. ‘Elizabeth just nipped out.’ Then he looked at her again. ‘Rosalind,’ he said.

  ‘Roz,’ she said automatically. Only Nathan called her Rosalind. Then recognition dawned. It was the young man from Joanna’s party, the high-flier, what was his name? Steve…? Sean. ‘Sean,’ she said.

  He looked pleased that she’d remembered. ‘I didn’t know…’ he began, as Roz said, ‘I thought you…’

  They both laughed, breaking the ice, and he gestured to Roz to go on. ‘I thought you were in Martin Lomax’s department,’ Roz said.

  ‘Oh, I am. I’m just helping out here.’ He came round the desk towards her. ‘Elizabeth’s gone to the copier,’ he said. ‘I’m just checking on some student marks. Which,’ he added, ‘I shouldn’t be doing.’ He gave her a conspiratorial smile. He had that easy confidence that Roz always associated with wealth and private education, which made him seem older that he probably was.

  Roz remembered his attention in her at the party. It had been flattering then, but she didn’t want to encourage it. ‘I’m looking for Professor Holbrook,’ she said briskly.