by Danuta Reah
Lynne showed her identification, and the woman immediately looked wary. ‘I’ll get the manager,’ she said at once.
Lynne shook her head. ‘I want to talk to you,’ she said. ‘It’s only a couple of things.’ She smiled reassuringly.
‘I wasn’t here,’ the woman said. ‘I told them before. I was off that day.’
‘That’s OK,’ Lynne said. ‘There’s just something I’d like to check with you.’ She got the woman to confirm the details of the Mr Rafael booking, made an additional note in her book and thanked her. Then she added casually, ‘You seem a bit short-staffed today.’
The woman raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘And doesn’t she let us know,’ she said, presumably in reference to Mrs Fry. ‘I told her, I’m not doing kitchen work. It’s her fault.’
‘Why’s that?’ Lynne was fastening her coat.
‘Well, she let them go, didn’t she. Cook’s going spare, but she wouldn’t listen.’
Lynne picked up her bag. ‘Maybe she wanted some that could speak English,’ she said.
The other woman nodded emphatically. ‘About time,’ she said. ‘Jabber, jabber, jabber. Couldn’t understand a word. Like that Anna,’ she said.
Lynne left the hotel for the second time. She was thinking. Celia Fry had employed more than one illegal immigrant, by the look of things. Farnham’s threat to look closely at the hotel’s employment practices had panicked Fry into getting rid of her off-the-books staff. Lynne could see the attraction of the immigrants for a low-budget hotel like the Blenheim. They’d be cheap labour, hard-working. And word would get round that there was work to be had.
Now she was thinking about the advice centre. Would they know about the Blenheim? Matthew Pearse seemed knowledgeable about the situations illegal immigrants found themselves in. Someone had sent Anna Krleza to the hotel. She thought back to her last visit, when she had asked Pearse and Rafiq if they knew Krleza. Nasim Rafiq had gone on the attack: ‘This woman, that woman. Why?’ But Pearse had never answered her question. He had moved obliquely into a discussion of the situation that such women found themselves in – victims of crime who were unable to approach the authorities because they would be treated as perpetrators. Fair game for the pimps and traffickers.
Lynne had questioned enough people in her years as a police officer to have some ideas about the way people behaved when they were telling the truth and when they were lying. People tended to evade or hedge rather than tell a direct untruth. Neither Nasim Rafiq nor Matthew Pearse had denied knowing Anna. The question was, did they know her present whereabouts? Lynne was aware of a tension between her own work and the work she was doing for Farnham. Farnham needed any information that Pearse might have, and he needed it soon. Lynne needed an ‘in’ to the world of the illegal immigrants, she needed a way to reach the women and to make them see that she could help them. And that would take time and patience. She would work on Nasim Rafiq, use Farnham’s interest as a means of putting pressure on the woman to talk to her. She checked her watch. She needed to pay another visit to the advice centre.
Sheffield, Friday evening
Roz was alone in the department. She’d become engrossed in disentangling some confusions in the system she and Luke had been working on, and it was after six before she realized. The cleaners had finished at six, the last people had left their rooms and silence had fallen on N Floor. She checked her watch. Six-fifteen. She could spend a bit of time having a look at Holbrook’s archive. Maybe she could butter up the old curmudgeon by complimenting him on his achievement. After browsing through it for a while, she was none the wiser about Gemma, but she was impressed by the ease with which the data could be searched. Sean Lewis clearly knew his stuff. She wanted to show it to Luke, to see if it gave him any ideas about their interview database – though what they were trying to do was a lot more complicated than what Holbrook and Lewis had done. She shut down the machine, put the CD away and checked her watch again. Six forty-five. The time had gone quickly. What had Holbrook said? ‘Don’t expect me much before six-thirty.’
She was tired. It had been a difficult day and she wanted to go home. She was driving across to her mother-in-law’s the following morning, and it was going to be another hard day. She did a quick calculation. She needed to leave her mail in the office before she went home. She’d go and do that, and by the time she got back, Holbrook would have arrived. If he wasn’t here by seven, then she wasn’t going to wait.
The corridor was dark. Only the emergency light was on. The caretakers must have thought the section was empty. She walked past the stairwell towards the lifts. The office was on the other side. She could hear the paternoster running on its endless belt. She unlocked the office door and left the small pile of envelopes for the caretakers to pick up and distribute through the internal post. She checked through the tray to see if anything had arrived after the clerical staff had left. There was nothing there.
She checked her bag to make sure she had her car keys and went back towards her room. In the dim light, the polished floor tiles reflected her movement, indistinct and wavering under her shadow. She looked along the corridor, past the lifts, back towards her own section. Something had caught her eye. She frowned, looking again. Holbrook? There was movement beyond the double doors, someone walking away from her down the corridor, a tall figure in a light-coloured garment, a coat or a mac. She felt a sense of déjà vu. What was it? She couldn’t remember. Whoever it was, it didn’t look like Holbrook. He was a small man.
But there shouldn’t be anyone else wandering round the section at this time in the evening. She hesitated for a moment then moved towards the swing doors, trying to see the figure more clearly, but whoever it was had disappeared through the second set of doors. There was a lot of valuable equipment in the offices, and in Luke’s room as well. Her room was just through the swing doors, the way the unknown visitor had gone. She turned back and walked quietly to the office and phoned campus security from there.
A cheerful voice greeted her and listened to what she had to say. ‘It may be nothing,’ Roz said doubtfully. She didn’t want to raise the alarm unnecessarily. ‘But we do have valuable equipment.’
‘There’ll be someone there in a minute, love,’ the cheerful voice said. ‘Don’t you fret.’
‘I’m not…’ she began, but realized he had hung up. She took a deep breath and went back out into the corridor, locking the door behind her. She was assessing the risk to the equipment. All the rooms should be locked. Joanna never left her room open. No one had been in Luke’s room apart from her, so that would be locked as well. The police had locked up Gemma’s room, which was empty anyway. Had she locked her own door? She was pretty sure she had, but a doubt began to creep into her mind.
The corridor ahead was dark and silent. She tried to convince herself that there was no one there, that she’d been imagining things. It had just been movement in the dark and her mind had done the rest. She walked past the lift hall and to the swing doors that led back to her section. The corridor was quiet and empty in the dim glow of the security light. She hesitated for a moment, then pushed the door open and listened. Nothing. She could see the closed doors along the corridor – Joanna’s room, her room: Joanna’s executive corridor. And round the corner, Gemma’s room, Luke’s room, the meeting room. She let the swing door shut behind her, a slight whisper and a squeak of the closing mechanism. She listened again. Nothing. Silence, and the faint hum of the light. The door to the stairwell was on her right. She stopped, indecisive. The corner was ahead of her, dark and silent. It was irresistible.
She knew there was no one there, but there was a tingling feeling between her shoulders and she could feel the hairs on her arms standing up. She took a step. Then another. She was nearly at the corner. Her keys were in her hand. Then there was a clunk and a clanging sound as the lift started up. She jumped, the keys dropping from her fingers and landing with a clatter on the floor. Her heart hammered with shock and she had to stop and cat
ch her breath. Idiot!
Then she thought she heard something moving on the corridor, moving away from her, towards the next ‘L’, towards the lifts – or was it just her imagination? She went round the corner and the empty corridor stretched away from her. Mechanically, she tested the doors. Joanna’s door. Locked. Her door…
It swung open under her hand. She looked round. The room was empty, the stand-by light on the monitor glowing in the dark. She pressed the light switch. The desk was as she’d left it, tomorrow’s work in a neat pile. The filing cabinet was closed and – she tested it – locked. She hesitated. Maybe she hadn’t locked the door. It was one of those automatic things that didn’t register. She must have left it, knowing she was coming back in a couple of minutes.
She heard the whisper of the double door, and footsteps in the corridor behind her. She spun round, and the cheerful voice of the caretaker said, ‘Got an intruder, Dr Bishop?’
Roz let out the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Probably not, but I’d like you to check these rooms.’ She told him what she’d seen.
‘Sounds like someone on their way to the stairs,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to it. Don’t you worry.’
Roz stood indecisively for a moment, then picked up her bag. ‘I’ll be off then. Thanks. Let me or Dr Grey know if you find anything.’
‘I will,’ he said.
‘Night.’ Roz headed for the paternoster. If the strange figure had gone down the stairs, then she was using the lifts. She stepped into the moving platform and sunk away from N floor. As she was carried down, there was a thump above her, as if someone had jumped into the following compartment. Someone else, coming down from N floor. But she hadn’t seen anyone else. You could see the people waiting to get into the next compartment as yours descended. Unless the person kept out of sight round the corner and made a leap for it as the platform dropped below floor-level.
And there wasn’t anyone else on N floor. There had been her, there had been the caretaker, and there had been…someone else. Someone else who was in the car above her, following her inexorably down to the empty entrance lobby and the deserted car park? She almost got out at the next floor, but the person above her would see her before she could move out of sight. She didn’t want to be alone, high up in the Arts Tower, with someone who moved with that silent, gliding step, surreptitiously but quickly along dark corridors, someone whose intention was unknown.
She kept hoping on each floor that there would be someone waiting to ride down, but each landing she passed was empty…G floor, empty…F floor, empty…E floor…Friday night, people went home early, evening classes didn’t run, the building was deserted. She took a deep breath and told herself to stop panicking. Whoever it was, he was leaving the building like she was. When she got to the ground floor, she would go straight to the porter’s lodge. One of the caretakers might be there, and if not, whoever was on duty wouldn’t be far away.
But she wanted to see the face of the person who was following her down. She didn’t want to go home, alone, with the memory of that tall, anonymous figure walking away from her down the corridor. She wanted to see a familiar face and know that her imagination had been running wild. She was at the mezzanine now, with the ground floor coming up. She stepped out of the paternoster and looked round. No sign of the caretaker. She was frozen by indecision, and the next car glided down.
It was empty.
14
Hull, Friday night
The kitchen smelt of wine and warm bread. Lynne did a last check, and smoothed back her hair as the door bell rang. She glanced in the mirror as she went to the intercom, and pressed the entry button once she had confirmed that her visitor was Roy, commendably punctual. She could hear his feet on the stairs and she opened the door as he came up the last flight. He brought the smell of winter into the flat. He didn’t say anything, just put his arms round her and lifted her off the ground as he kissed her. His jacket felt bulky against her. ‘I’ve been thinking about that all day,’ he said, when he released her. ‘No shop tonight,’ he added.
Lynne felt a bit breathless and light-headed. ‘We’ve got things we need to discuss,’ she said. He was looking down at her, a faint line appearing between his eyes. ‘But we’ve got plenty of time.’ She smiled and stepped back so that she was standing in the light from the open kitchen door. She saw his eyes widen slightly as she stretched her arms above her head, stood watching him with a half smile, letting him see what he had missed in the robustness of his first embrace. The way her dress clung to her and the translucence of the material in the light from the open kitchen door made it abundantly clear that she was wearing nothing underneath it. ‘“Been thinking about it all day,” he says,’ she taunted, ‘and he doesn’t even notice…’
He just looked at her, his face slightly flushed and his eyes getting darker, then he tossed his jacket on to a chair and came towards her. He put his hands round her waist, pushing her back against the wall to kiss her. For better or for worse, she reflected, she’d committed herself now. She kept her hands on her head, enjoying the way he touched her, unimpeded by her arms. It was a symbolic submission, and she liked the eroticism of the implied dominance. He knew what he was doing. He could read her signals, listen to the quickening of her breathing and the words she whispered to him, and by the time he picked her up and carried her into the bedroom, her dress was on the floor and she had forgotten about her day, was as focused on the moment as he was. And for the next hour neither of them thought about anything else.
It was after nine when Lynne next checked the time. She had drifted into a light sleep with her head on Roy’s shoulder, in that moment of absolute relaxation after good sex. She lay there for a while longer, enjoying the closeness. He had a solid, muscular body that she liked the feel of. She stretched, and he took it as a signal to stir, smiling easily at her. ‘That was worth waiting for,’ he said.
She met his eyes and smiled her agreement. It had been. ‘Do you want to eat?’ she said. She picked up her dressing gown that was draped over the back of a chair.
He grinned. ‘I don’t think I’ve got the strength for anything else.’
Lynne laughed and went to shower. Half an hour later, they were sitting close together at the table eating grilled tuna and drinking wine. ‘This is good,’ he said, topping up her glass.
He seemed to share her uncomplicated appreciation of the good things in life. Lynne could never understand why the food you ate should not be the best, why the place you lived should not be welcoming and comfortable, why the people you spent precious free time with should not be the people whose company you enjoyed. She thought about Steve McCarthy, who had seemed to see good food, good company, good wine – even good sex – not as the essentials that they were, but as things that took him away from the essentials, from the important things like work. And that reminded her of her hunt for Angel Escorts and for Anna Krleza, and the way her investigations into trafficked women and Roy’s into the murders kept tripping over the same threads.
As if on cue, Roy finished his wine and said, ‘OK then. What did you want to talk about?’
‘I’ll make coffee,’ she said. She wanted to move the evening on before they started talking about work.
Ten minutes later, they were sitting on the settee with coffee on the table in front of them. Lynne wanted to find out what else Farnham hadn’t told her. ‘You said that you were coming round to the idea that the website was a fake, right?’ He nodded, but didn’t say anything, waiting to see where she was going. ‘How long have you thought that?’
‘It’s come up at the briefings. The fact that there’s no evidence to support this idea that Gemma Wishart was doing – or even planning to do – escort work.’ He didn’t seem aware that he hadn’t kept her up to date with this.
‘You didn’t mention it,’ she said. ‘When we’ve discussed the case.’
He shrugged. ‘A lot of ideas get thrown around at a briefing, L
ynne. You know that. I wasn’t convinced until you showed me that link.’
‘And that makes the card a deliberate plant.’
He nodded again. ‘Along with the most fucked-up crime scene I’ve ever had to deal with. Yes. That’s our thinking. Someone’s playing games. Angel Escorts. Mr Rafael. Business cards dropped on the floor. Someone’s telling us something, and he’s making sure we listen.’
‘What about the phone calls?’
‘It’s hard to tell. I’ve got a watch on that number. If anyone uses that cell phone, we’ll know.’ He still wasn’t giving her much.
Someone had interfered with the scene. Someone had pointed a great big arrow at Angel Escorts – the name, the card. They had followed that arrow and found their dead woman, Jemima the call girl. Anyone would know that once they got that far, they would find out who ‘Jemima’ really was, though maybe not quite as quickly as they had actually done. Unless…Lynne began to feel the prickling sensation she felt when she was on surveillance, that two-o’clock-in-the-morning unease that suggested unseen eyes, malicious eyes, watching you. Unless the person who’d so helpfully pointed the way knew that she had seen Gemma Wish-art and would make the connection.
Women with their faces smashed, women who were working as prostitutes, patterns that made a picture neither of them wanted to see. ‘Why the faces?’ she said.
‘That could be his thing, or it could be to make it difficult to identify them.’ He’d thought about it. ‘Copycat or the same person? We don’t even know if the first two were murdered.’ Unanswered questions.
‘Have you followed up on the Blenheim?’ She’d phoned him with the information she’d got from Celia Fry. If he wasn’t going to tell her, she would have to ask.
‘We’re looking at it,’ he said. ‘Anything new about the advice centre?’