Night Angels

by Danuta Reah

  Lynne was aware of a feeling of reluctance as she shared her doubts about Nasim Rafiq. She could remember his sharp advice about passing the information on to Special Branch. ‘I don’t see that she’d put her son at risk,’ she said in the end. ‘She’s starting to listen to me, I think.’

  ‘You aren’t a social worker, Lynne.’ He was frowning slightly as he listened.

  ‘I’m not being a social worker.’ She could hear the annoyance in her voice and saw him register it. ‘But she can help me – I can help her. Quid pro quo.’

  She couldn’t tell from his face what he was thinking. He had his arm along the back of the settee, his fingers resting lightly on her shoulder. ‘When are you going back?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said.

  There was silence. They looked at each other, and each read the message in the other’s face. The mood of easy, relaxed pleasure was gone. They both needed to be alone. She looked at her watch and he was quick to pick up the cue. ‘I’d better go,’ he said. ‘It’ll be an early start tomorrow.’ He looked down at her, more uncertain than she’d seen him. ‘It’s been good tonight,’ he said after a moment. ‘I’ll see you soon, OK?’

  ‘OK.’ Lynne waited until his feet had clattered down the first flight, then she shut the door. She double-locked it and fastened the security chain, then she checked the windows to make sure that they were all bolted. Paranoia, she chided herself. But sometimes a little paranoia was a healthy thing.

  15

  Sheffield, Saturday morning

  The forecast had promised a clear day, fine but cold with snow on high ground. By nine, the clouds had rolled in and the bright sun of early morning became a sullen, frozen grey.

  Roz’s journey got off to a bad start. She had left the car out in the road the night before. She’d just parked, grabbed her bag, locked up and left it. And now she had a flat tyre, and her spare was flat as well. She’d changed the wheel a few weeks ago and had meant to get the spare fixed, but she hadn’t. Idiot! She looked closely at the wheel. It looked as though someone had driven a nail into it. Probably the lads from three doors up – amiable, loutish goons who would find a piece of minor vandalism like this the height of wit.

  She looked at her watch. It would take forever to get someone out here to fix it. She needed to take the spare in, get it repaired, bring it back, change the wheel…She had the perfect excuse not to go. All she had to do was pick up the phone. Jenny would be disappointed, but she would understand. Her mother-in-law’s face formed in her mind, the time she’d first come to see Nathan after his illness. She and Nathan’s father had been on holiday when Nathan first went into hospital. Roz had spent a week trying to find out where they were staying, and then Jenny and Ed had spent a frantic three days trying to get a flight home. By the time they got back, Nathan’s life was no longer in danger, but the son they had loved and been so proud of had changed beyond retrieval. Roz sometimes thought that Jenny blamed herself, believed that if she had been there for those crucial days, she might have held on to the unravelling skeins of Nathan’s mind.

  And then Nathan’s father, an apparently fit man of sixty-two, had died the following year. He had had a sudden and massive heart attack. Jenny Bishop had changed then. The bright, witty woman that Roz had met on her first nervous visit, became old. If her son had lost his past, Jenny had lost her future. All she had left was the faint hope – because nothing unknown is impossible – that Nathan might, one day, come back as he used to be. It was that unyielding hope that had driven Roz away.

  Now, she stopped as her hand was reaching for the phone. She had to go. It wasn’t just the response to Jenny’s appeal. She needed to make her own decisions, finally to let go of her marriage, to start her life again. She remembered Luke’s voice in the evening dimness: ‘People get ill, they grow old, they die. In the end, you have to move on.’

  She checked the train times. There was one she could catch that would get her there before midday. Depressed at the prospect of the journey, and dreading the day ahead, she set off for the bus stop, wondering if there might be something, a bus strike, a train strike, something that would give her a way out.

  She got to the station with minutes to spare. She pushed to the front of the queue, apologizing to the waiting line, and bought her ticket. Cash, she was short of cash. She paid with her Switch card and ran into the station, thankful that the train was leaving from the nearest platform and she didn’t have to run across the bridge. The train was waiting, a rickety two-carriage affair with hard bench seats. It was crowded, and Roz had to squash on to the end of a row of three people. The metal bar along the back of the seat dug into her. More people piled on. They were standing now.

  The train set off with a lurch, and Roz tried to switch her mind off. She was stuck on this vehicle for over an hour. She didn’t want to think about the day ahead, so she let her mind wander back to the evening before, to the figure she had seen briefly through the glass doors, and the belief she’d had that there was someone following her down on the paternoster. And Marcus Holbrook. She’d forgotten about him in all the panic. Why hadn’t he turned up?

  She closed her eyes as the train shook and rattled its way through the countryside, stopping at all the small stations between Sheffield and Lincoln. As they pulled into her station, she picked up her coat, reflecting that she hadn’t really dressed for the weather. She’d been planning to drive, and her lightweight shoes and shower-proof jacket had been chosen more with comfort in mind than protection from the weather.

  She checked her watch. Just gone twelve. The train was on time. She felt a growing reluctance to move, a temptation that was getting stronger and stronger to turn around and take the next train back. She had managed to cope for the past two years without any contact with Nathan. She might have felt guilty, but it was a guilt she could cope with. So why was she planning to put herself through what could only be the worst kind of ordeal?

  Because her unresolved attachment to Nathan had ruined whatever she might have had with Luke. It didn’t matter if that was a friendship – about the best friendship she had ever had – or if it could have been something more. Because of Nathan, because of her fear of any more involvement, she had backed off, pushed him away for reasons that, then, he hadn’t been able to understand. Now they were barely friends, just colleagues. Not even that any more, and she missed him.

  She knew Lincoln. She had come here often enough with Nathan in the days when they had no chance of affording a car. She could catch a bus at the top of the main road. It would take about twenty minutes to get to Jenny Bishop’s. That would give her enough time to think, to decide what she wanted to do, what she wanted the outcome of today’s visit to be.

  As the bus meandered through the town, she was reminded of how attractive it was. It was quiet, old, lacking the frenetic bustle of Sheffield. The bus dropped her at the corner of Garden Road, the street where Nathan had been born and had grown up. ‘I’m so grateful that Ed and I didn’t sell it when Nathan left home,’ Jenny had said more than once in her phone calls to Roz, in the earlier days when she had thought that Roz might come back. ‘It’s somewhere Nathan can recognize.’

  And now she could see the house. She remembered her first visit to this neat semi with its small front garden, a lawn surrounded by narrow beds. The wall round the garden was low, with a wrought-iron gate. It had been spring when Nathan had brought her here for the first time. ‘Stop looking so nervous,’ he’d said as they walked up the road together.

  ‘What if they don’t like me?’ To Roz, the road reminded her of the places where some of her school friends lived, the friends whose mothers had careful voices and who watched with narrow-eyed judgement for Roz to display signs of ill-breeding.

  ‘What if they don’t?’ Nathan had said cheerfully, dismissing her fears.

  The house looked smaller than it had been in her memory, and shabbier as though it had been left just a bit too long without paint and filler, without the gutters renew
ed, without the constant work and attention of maintaining a house. There was someone standing by the door, as there had been in her mind picture, standing looking – not down the road, but at something in the garden. She watched him as she walked up the road, intrigued by the intensity of his concentration. He was tall, heavy. His face was puffy, his hair thinning on top. He didn’t notice her until she arrived at the gate. The sound of the hinges made him look up.

  He smiled at her then, and as the laughter lines round his eyes creased, past and present came together and this rather overweight, rather unkempt stranger became Nathan. She felt as though someone had punched her in the stomach. She stopped and stared, waiting for a moment for recognition to dawn on his face.

  ‘Nathan,’ she said.

  He looked puzzled. ‘Are you looking for Mum? She’s around.’

  ‘How are you, Nathan?’ He looked uneasy, a young man trying to think of a polite way to tell one of his mother’s friends he had no idea who she was. Roz said quickly, ‘Don’t worry. We’ve…you don’t know me.’ And that was true. In his mind, he was about eighteen. He’d never met Roz, and now, he never would. That future had gone forever. His body looked older – there was a heaviness about him and a clumsiness to his movements that had been there since his illness. But his face looked oddly young, despite the thinning hair and the deepening of the lines round his eyes.

  His face cleared. ‘I’ll call Mum,’ he said. ‘Come in.’ He turned to lead the way into the house, and his eyes became transfixed on what he had been watching before. Roz looked over his shoulder. A spider was spinning a web between the shrub and the wall, and his eyes were focused and intent.

  They watched it in silence for a while. ‘It’s beautiful,’ Roz said.

  He looked round. ‘Sorry,’ he said, his smile friendly. ‘I didn’t see you. Are you looking for Mum? She’s around.’

  Roz’s smile felt frozen on her face. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘She’s expecting me. I’ll find her. Don’t let me disturb you.’

  He gave her his cheerful grin, and just for a moment, her husband looked out of a stranger’s eyes at her. ‘It’s no trouble,’ he said.

  As they stepped through the door, she heard feet on the stairs and Jenny Bishop came hurrying down. Her face was tense with hope. ‘Roz! I’d almost given you up!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Roz said. ‘The car broke down. I came on the train.’

  Nathan was staring at his mother. ‘Mum, are you all right? You look…’

  She forced a smile. ‘I’m fine, Nathan.’ Her eyes went to Roz, who shook her head gently. Jenny Bishop’s face collapsed. ‘Come and sit down. I’ll make tea.’ Her voice was flat.

  Roz found herself alone with Nathan. She didn’t know what to say to him. She looked round the room, noticing what she’d been vaguely aware of in the hallway. There were no mirrors. She remembered a mirror over the mantelpiece, but it had been replaced by a picture. Feeling as though she was talking to a stranger, an adolescent son of a friend, she heard herself saying in tones of bright encouragement, ‘What are you doing these days, Nathan?’ She wanted to stop this pointless attempt at social chitchat, but the words just came out of her mouth in a nervous flood.

  He looked puzzled. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’ And for a moment his face looked sad.

  Hull, Saturday

  For the first time, the advice centre had clients. There were three people, two men and a woman standing at the counter. Nasim Rafiq was at the counter talking quickly in a language that Lynne didn’t recognize, and jotting information down as one of the men spoke to her. Lynne caught her eye as she came through the door. Rafiq looked quickly at the door, then nodded at one of the chairs. Wait.

  Lynne was aware of eyes on her, but as she looked, the eyes were directed down to the floor. The discussion at the counter went on, rapid and staccato in Lynne’s ears. Then the group left, unsmiling, clutching leaflets and some papers that Rafiq had been writing on. They didn’t look at Lynne, but kept their eyes down as they went past. Lynne was alone with Nasim Rafiq. ‘You’re busy this afternoon, Mrs Rafiq,’ she said.

  ‘Small bit busy.’ Rafiq made a dismissive gesture and indicated to Lynne that they should go through to the other room. Lynne followed her behind the counter, and Rafiq retreated behind the fortress of her cramped desk.

  Lynne had gone over the questions she wanted to ask in her mind, and had decided that Rafiq was more likely to respond to a direct approach. She smiled and said, ‘Mrs Rafiq, I hope I won’t have to keep you long, but I need some more information.’ The other woman said nothing, just waited. ‘When I was here the other day, I asked you about a young woman, Anna Krleza. I wanted to know if you had seen her. You never answered my question.’

  Rafiq sat quietly, a faint line between her eyebrows. ‘Many people,’ she said after a moment’s thought. ‘Sometimes, they come once, twice? Names…?’ She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. How can I remember them all? But she still hadn’t answered the question.

  ‘Mrs Rafiq, do you remember Anna Krleza?’

  ‘I do not remember.’ The words were spoken with leaden certainty.

  Lynne had had a strong feeling that the woman might prevaricate, but that she would not actually lie. That firm response had surprised her. Maybe Rafiq didn’t know Krleza. Maybe it had been Pearse who had had all the contact, Pearse who used his contacts with the hotels for the homeless to find work for people without papers. As she thought about it, her eyes took in the room again, the desk, the shelves with boxes of leaflets, the phone, the list of addresses and numbers on the wall.

  She stood up and moved closer to the list. It was typed under headings: Doctors, Clinics, Landlords, Support Groups, Benefits. But there were numbers written on the list as well, just scribbled at the edges, under no specific headings. And there was a number there she recognized, written in a scribbled italic script, unlike the neat, careful writing of Nasim Rafiq. She checked it in her notebook to confirm. It was the number of the Blenheim Hotel.

  She turned to Rafiq, who was watching her with puzzled incomprehension. Lynne thought. Rafiq hadn’t written that number, and probably did very little phoning, given her limited English. ‘Whose writing is this?’ she said.

  Rafiq looked worried. ‘Matthew Pearse,’ she said after a moment. ‘He write numbers. Sometime.’

  Pearse. The sooner they talked to Matthew Pearse again, the better. ‘When is he here again, Mrs Rafiq?’ she said.

  Rafiq twisted her hands in the fringe of her scarf. ‘Tonight,’ she said. ‘Late.’

  ‘And where is he now?’ Lynne wondered if it would be worth Farnham’s while putting out a call.

  Rafiq shook her head. She didn’t know. Lynne decided to up the pressure. ‘Mrs Rafiq, I recognize that you are doing important work here.’ She gestured to the door to indicate that she had seen the people waiting, and had seen the signs of poverty and need. ‘But you have to operate within the law.’ Rafiq made no response. ‘I think Anna Krleza came to this centre, Mrs Rafiq. It would have been about six months ago. I want to know if she has been here since then, if she has been here recently.’ The other woman maintained her silence, but she was listening to what Lynne had to say. ‘Mrs Rafiq –’ Lynne made eye contact to make sure she had Rafiq’s undivided attention – ‘I’m investigating a murder.’ She let the word hang there in the silence. ‘I don’t know what’s going on here. But if there is something you aren’t telling me, you could end up in serious trouble.’ She could see the tension in the other woman and pushed a bit more. ‘That could affect your son, Mrs Rafiq.’

  ‘It…’ Rafiq began, then stopped. Lynne thought she saw fear in her eyes.

  ‘I can help you,’ Lynne said. ‘If you help me, I can help you.’ She watched the uncertainty flicker across the other woman’s face as she weighed up Lynne’s words.

  ‘Six month…’ Rafiq gestured. ‘I am not here.’ I wasn’t here six months ago. Lynne thought fast. Rafiq knew some
thing, she was sure of that. Lynne could bring major pressure to bear, take her in, subject her to a formal interview, but if Rafiq was on the fringes of anything dubious, then the consequences for her would be catastrophic. If Lynne could persuade the woman to trust her, then she would get the information she needed, and protect Rafiq from the consequences. And Rafiq would make a useful contact. She gambled. ‘Think about it, Mrs Rafiq. If you tell me what you know – it may be very little – but if you tell me, I will help you, I promise. Think about it.’ She looked into Rafiq’s eyes and let the silence build. ‘You can contact me here.’ She gave Rafiq her card and stood up. ‘If I don’t hear from you, I’ll be back. I need to talk to Anna Krleza.’

  She phoned Farnham on her way back to the car. He needed to know about Matthew Pearse.

  Lincoln, Saturday afternoon

  Roz spent the afternoon with Nathan and his mother. Nathan wandered restlessly, everything he started to do forgotten almost before he had conceived the intention. Each time he came back into the room, he asked who Roz was, what she was doing there. Each time his eyes fell on his mother, he expressed anxiety at her appearance. To him, Jenny Bishop had aged ten years or more overnight. Once, Jenny tried showing him the photographs that Roz had brought. He recognized himself – those pictures represented the way he thought he still looked – but he was unhappy and frightened by them. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said. ‘I didn’t do that.’ If there is truth in sight…And his eyes looked lost and afraid, for a moment, until the thread was broken again.

  Then Jenny put a tape in the cassette player, Beethoven’s violin concerto. The music filled the room. And as she watched, something happened. Nathan’s rather aimless wandering stopped. His attention focused on the music. As the violin climbed away from the orchestra and tumbled down a melody line, he caught Roz’s eye and smiled in shared appreciation. For a moment, she thought she had seen recognition. He was caught in the music, in its past, its now and its developing patterns. It was like the way he had watched the spider, rapt and attentive. She looked at Jenny. The tension in her mother-in-law’s face increased.