Night Angels

by Danuta Reah

  But when she had talked to him, he had treated her as if she was the dangerous one.

  Sheffield, Sunday

  N Floor was deserted, the corridor lights turned low. Roz had a queasy flashback to Friday night as she stepped out of the lift. Luke was looking round him with a frown, as though he was revisiting a place that didn’t quite match his memories of it. Roz went to her room. The CD that Sean had given her just the other day, the archive, was in her desk drawer. ‘Computer room,’ Luke said.

  He barely reacted to the newly arranged furniture and the boxes of equipment that were in there awaiting Joanna’s new organization. ‘She doesn’t waste time,’ was all he said. He loaded the archive on to his computer, and began playing around with the program. ‘It’s not bad,’ he said after a few minutes, which was about as near as he ever came to praise of something he hadn’t written himself.

  Roz pulled up a chair and sat next to him, looking at the screen. ‘Gemma wanted something from that,’ Roz said, ‘and I don’t think Holbrook wanted her to have it.’ She’d told him about Holbrook, his abrupt unfriendliness, the way he’d tried to mislead her. ‘He was supposed to meet me here,’ she said. ‘He fixed this late meeting time and then he never turned up. There was someone here, though, in the section. It was odd…’

  ‘You’re being paranoid.’ But he took her hand. ‘I’ll ride shotgun for you, Bishop. If there’s anything here, we’ll get it sorted. Don’t worry.’ He kissed her palm and closed her fingers. Then he turned back to the screen. ‘Now, what are we looking for?’

  They searched the archive first for the items that Gemma had queried on the transcript. Jugun, the word that Holbrook had said was Russian and that Green-hough had said was not. There was nothing there. Then they tried the odd phrase Ba-yi-n-sal. A Russian colloquialism, according to Holbrook. Nothing of the sort, according to Greenhough. Again, there was nothing. In desperation, Roz tried cat and cats. Nothing. ‘If he didn’t want her to find it, he probably removed it,’ Luke said.

  ‘Can you check? Do your deleted data thing?’ Roz hadn’t really expected to find what they were looking for so quickly, but she felt frustrated anyway.

  Luke was jumping through the systems now, getting a grip on the way the archive worked. ‘It looks quite simple,’ he said. ‘It won’t do as much as the one we’re developing.’ He thought about her question. ‘Didn’t what’s-his-face tell you this was a new version or something?’

  ‘Sean. Well, he said it was a pilot version. He said Holbrook was still working on it.’ She tried to remember if Sean had said anything else.

  ‘OK,’ Luke said. ‘But that means if anything was deleted, it might have been deleted before this was put together. There’s no trace of any major changes on here.’

  ‘Couldn’t you look at the programming?’ she said.

  ‘Not without the source code. Anyway, that would take…Let’s see what it’ll do and what it won’t do. We might find something there.’

  They worked for an hour. Holbrook’s program was designed to give the researcher as much information as possible about the way in which Russian speakers used their language. It allowed you to ask questions about different pronunciations, about variations in dialects of Russian, about the drift of Americanisms into the language. But it gave them no indications of what Gemma might have been looking for. After an hour, they came to a stop. They’d tried the queried phrases from the transcript. Nothing. They’d tried looking for evidence of recent deletions from the archive. Nothing. They’d tried to look for anomalies in the way the program worked. Nothing.

  Luke rubbed his face. They were both tired. ‘What do you want to do?’ he said.

  Roz shook her head. She felt both apprehensive and weary. After what Luke had told her, she had a sense of time running out. How long would it be before the police found something they could use to connect Luke to Gemma’s death? She knew as well as anybody the fallibility of the justice system, the difficulty with which the errors of the law could be redressed. She had a sudden, almost farcical picture of a future, her husband trapped in the cage of his illness and her lover behind the physical bars of the prison gate. She realized that Luke had said something. ‘What?’

  ‘Coffee,’ he said. ‘I’ll sort us out some coffee. We’ll have to have it black, OK?’ She nodded absent-mindedly, staring at the monitor. Whatever Gemma had wanted was in there somewhere. There had to be a way to find it. She closed her eyes and let her mind drift. Jugun. Ba-yi-n-sal. What was it and what did it mean? What was the woman saying that was so important? One of their problems was that the program was designed to look for pronunciation. They didn’t know how the words or phrases were spoken. She was having to rely on Gemma’s transcript. If they didn’t know what the language was, they couldn’t work out how to pronounce it. If they couldn’t get the pronunciation right, they wouldn’t be able to find it on the archive.

  Her mind began to focus. Gemma must have known what it was to have written it down the way she did. Jugun might have been a guess – a shot at representing the pronunciation, though Gemma usually used phonetic script for words she didn’t recognize. They all did. But Ba-yi-n-sal. She had to have known what that was to have written it so precisely. So if she knew what it was, what language it was, what had she been looking for in Holbrook’s archive? That wouldn’t have given her a translation. Something was nagging in her mind now, something that was going to come clear, was going to…

  ‘Gemma wasn’t looking for a translation,’ she said. ‘And she knew what it was.’

  He stopped what he was doing and came across to her. ‘OK,’ he said slowly. ‘How do you work that out?’

  She explained her thinking. ‘And listen, Holbrook said that Gemma didn’t give him anything for his archive, but he’s been lying about everything else. So he’s probably lying about that. What if Gemma…’ Then she saw the flaw in her argument. ‘No, that wouldn’t work.’

  ‘Come on, Roz, I’m not a mind reader. What wouldn’t work?’ Luke pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her, listening.

  ‘I thought maybe she was looking for the tape she’d donated, but she could just go to her own originals. It’d be easier to find from there, anyway.’ But she still had the feeling it was on the tip of her tongue, the thing they were looking for.

  Luke shook his head. ‘You didn’t pay too much attention to what Gemma was doing,’ he said. ‘The break-in, remember? Someone helped themselves to her cassette player and all her music. They just scooped up the case with all her tapes in – including her old research tapes.’

  ‘No back-ups?’ Roz said.

  He shook his head. ‘She started backing everything up after that. That was why I knew there should have been back-ups in the department when her computer was wiped. That was why I went after Grey for a proper back-up system. No, she lost all her tapes. The stupid thing was, they wouldn’t even have wanted a load of tapes of Russian.’ Luke looked at her speculatively. ‘Or would they?’

  ‘So that must have been it. She wanted to check one of her tapes.’ Roz felt a moment of triumph, and then a sense of letdown as she realized that, without Gemma’s originals, this didn’t get them much further. She tapped her pen against her teeth as she thought.

  ‘Shit, Bishop.’ Luke took the pen out of her hand. ‘Drive me round the bend, why don’t you?’ He tossed the pen on to the desk. ‘So, where does it get us?’

  ‘If we can find out what it was,’ Roz said, ‘we might be able to work out why Gemma thought it was important.’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘I wish my Russian was better,’ she said. ‘It’s like driving blindfolded.’

  She racked her memory. She reached past Luke and typed in ‘Kat’. The program barely paused. Search item not found. ‘Shit.’ Luke looked at her in mild surprise. Roz rarely swore. ‘I though it might be the spelling,’ she said. ‘Whatever Gemma meant when she wrote “Cats” on the transcript. I don’t know how the other things are pronounced, but…’ She remembered her conversation with
Holbrook:

  How would a Russian speaker pronounce ‘cat’?

  In Russian? It’s something like korshka. Or kort, for a tomcat. It doesn’t sound a lot like the English.’

  I meant the English word.

  You’d get a pronunciation like kort, something like that…

  But Holbrook had told her lies. Greenhough hadn’t said that: You’d get something like an ‘e’ sound, something like ‘cet’.

  Now it was clear. ‘It’s been under our noses all the time,’ she said. ‘It’s on the transcript.’ She reached past him again, and typed in ‘Ket’. She pressed the ‘find’ button. And the program immediately responded, jumping to a page of information about minority languages in Russia. It was a short section halfway down a page:

  Ket or Yenisei-Ostyak is one of two surviving members of the Yeniseian family of languages, spoken by the Kets, a people indigenous to central Siberia. In the twentieth century, the Kets have come under the influence of the Russians, among others. Most Kets today speak Russian…

  The word ‘Ket’ had a link marked which Luke clicked and then on ‘play’. A woman’s voice began speaking, soft, young-sounding; and interspersed with this voice, in the role of interviewer, a second voice, Gemma’s voice, speaking quick, fluent Russian, far beyond the halting understanding that Roz had. She touched Luke’s hand. It felt cold. The interview became a conversation, the voices overlapping, moving from serious and reflective to quick, giggling exchanges. Two friends, chatting. The language spoken switched between Russian and English as the two competed to practise their language skills. They were talking, part of the time, about Ket, and the accent and the intonation of the second speaker changed as she switched into this third language. The English that the Russian woman spoke was rudimentary and halting, and most of the exchange seemed to be in Russian. It wasn’t a professional tape, nor part of Gemma’s research, but a rarity that Holbrook would not have been able to resist. A dying language, and Gemma had found a young woman who spoke the language and had interviewed her.

  ‘Ket,’ Roz said. ‘That was what Gemma gave to Holbrook. A tape of a bilingual Russian–Ket speaker. I still don’t understand what this has to do with it, but we’ve got to get it to the police.’ Luke looked at her for a moment, then nodded a quick, reluctant assent.

  Hull, Sunday

  Matthew Pearse rented a bedsit on the east side of the city, not far from the docks. The house was a small yellow-brick terrace next to a row of shops, a fish-and-chip shop, a dry cleaners, a pub. According to the landlord, Pearse had lived there for several years. ‘He’s a good tenant,’ the landlord said. ‘Pays his rent on time, keeps the place tidy, doesn’t give any trouble.’ He didn’t know anything about Pearse’s life.

  The room showed minimal signs of occupancy. It was sparsely furnished. The single bed was against the wall, away from the window. There was a small table next to it with a table lamp, one of those made from an empty bottle. Under the window was a gate-leg table and next to the door, a melamine wardrobe. Next to the wardrobe was a cupboard that looked as though it came from a set of kitchen units. Everything was clean and neat. The bed was made with nylon sheets and a grey blanket. There were no pictures, no ornaments, no personal touches, apart from a book on the bedside table.

  Pearse seemed to own very little. The wardrobe contained a clean shirt and trousers, ironed, on a hanger. There were socks and underpants in one drawer, one pair of each. The socks were darned. There was also a vest. One to wear and one in the wash, Lynne thought. The kitchen unit contained a cup, plate and bowl, and there was one set of cutlery in the drawer, along with a tin opener. There were some tins – beans, spaghetti, rice pudding, and a small sliced loaf, open, the wrapping carefully twisted to keep the remainder fresh. There was a half-used carton of milk. Farnham sniffed it and pulled a face. ‘It’s gone off,’ he said.

  The book by the bed, closed around a bookmark, was Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man. Tucked away between the pages at the back of the book was a photograph, a bit faded with white cracks running across the corner, as though someone held it often. It showed a girl dressed in white, with a white veil. She was holding a basket of flowers up at the camera and smiling. A wedding photograph? No, she was too young – fourteen, fifteen?

  Lynne went downstairs to the hallway leading to the front door. There was a table there where post was dumped for residents to collect. She looked through it. There were more names than there were rooms, and some of the letters looked as though they had been there for some time. In the pile were a couple of letters for Pearse – recent post, unopened and unread.

  It should have been evidence of a bleak life, this room with its almost complete absence of any personal record, of any personal life, but to Lynne it looked more like the room of someone whose personal life existed elsewhere, for whom the routines of eating and sleeping were tedious distractions from the things that were important. But from the point of view of an investigation, it told them nothing. Farnham left the search team with instructions to strip the place to the boards, and headed off for the advice centre that, they hoped, would reveal more.

  The advice centre, when they arrived, was closed, locked and silent. It was as Lynne remembered it from her quick exploration on her first visit. The boxes of leaflets stood on the shelves in the small office. The typewriter had a sheet of paper wound into it. Lynne pulled it out and looked at it. It was blank. The desk drawers were empty, apart from Nasim’s book: Intermediate Business English, BEC2. Lynne flicked through the pages, which were heavily annotated in Nasim’s ornate Arabic script, but there was nothing there. She went out into the yard, which was dank and sunless, sunk below the mass of the abandoned warehouse with its boarded-up doors and windows. She’d missed the entrance to the attic, which was half concealed behind a pile of boxes, on her earlier visit. Lynne knew that she hadn’t been conducting a search, but she was also aware that she’d allowed Nasim Rafiq’s apparent willingness to let her look round blunt her powers of observation. She’d been careless.

  The attic contained a small bed under a peeling skylight. The bed was made up and had been used recently. A dark, wavy hair lay on the pillow, which was indented where a head had lain. Lynne could guess who the recent occupant had been. She closed her eyes, trying to get a sense of Anna Krleza, but there was nothing, just the dry smell of old wallpaper, the sound of the sea birds that she heard from her own window, and the distant murmur of city traffic.

  Hull, Sunday morning

  Nasim Rafiq was a study in silence, her dark eyes watching Farnham as he explained the interview procedure to her, then moving to Lynne as her presence was explained. Lynne tried to read her expression, tried to send a message: Enough of the truth to help us, not enough to incriminate yourself! Rafiq seemed to have no problems understanding what Farnham was saying, cutting off his move towards the interpreter with an authoritative gesture. ‘Is no need,’ she said.

  Farnham took her through the early stages of the interview with routine questions he knew the answer to. How long she had been in the country, what her husband did, how long the family planned to stay. She was a teacher, she told them in a sudden burst of loquacity, and was planning to take the necessary qualifications to allow her to teach at an English school, but her English was not as good as it should be. She relied on the interpreter to explain parts of this to them. Then she fell silent. Lynne remembered the textbook on the desk, when she had talked to Rafiq at the centre, when Anna Krleza was almost certainly hidden away somewhere. She remembered the open door at the back of the office, and Rafiq walking over to close it, commenting on the non-existent draught. She wondered why the woman had taken the risks she had.

  ‘Tell me about the Welfare Advice Centre,’ Farnham said. ‘How long have you been working there?’

  She explained, again through the interpreter, that she worked as a volunteer and had been there for about five months. ‘It help my English,’ she added. ‘And…’ She stopped and spoke to
the interpreter.

  ‘The plan is to develop an advice, counselling and training centre there, for the asylum seekers they move up here,’ the interpreter said. ‘She speaks Pushtu – that’s what they speak in Afghanistan. That’s why they asked her to get involved.’

  Languages, Lynne thought. Katya’s stumbling English, Gemma Wishart’s expertise, the queries on Katya’s tape. And Nasim Rafiq, pulled into the complex web around this case by the language she spoke. Was it as simple as that? Farnham pushed the photograph of Anna Krleza across the table. Rafiq’s eyes turned away. He kept his hand on the photograph, not looking at it, looking at Rafiq in silence as though he was thinking something through. ‘Matthew Pearse,’ he said after a while. She didn’t react, but waited for him to ask his question. ‘You’ve worked with him for five months?’ She nodded. ‘Do you know where he is?’ He shot the question at her.

  ‘He…’ She began confidently, then frowned. ‘At centre?’ Farnham shook his head. ‘I do not know,’ she said. Farnham let the silence build for a minute before he spoke again. ‘Matthew Pearse – he’s a good man?’ She looked blankly at him. ‘He does a lot of good work?’

  She hadn’t expected this. She blinked. ‘He is very good man,’ she said. ‘He…’ She spread her hands out. Her English wasn’t up to explaining what she meant.