Night Angels

by Danuta Reah

  A few hours. That would be now. No one had come to tell her. The call button had been clipped on to the pillow close to her hand. She didn’t need that – she wasn’t seriously hurt. She sat up and picked up the dressing gown that was lying across the bottom of the bed. It was white towelling, thick and soft. And she was wearing a silky nightshirt. These weren’t hers. Roz didn’t wear expensive nightclothes. She didn’t usually wear anything. A T-shirt if it was cold. And she had an old, faded dressing gown that was at least two weeks on the wrong side of a wash. Joanna. Joanna must have brought them in for her.

  She went along to the nurse’s station. She felt the drag of dread in her stomach and part of her wanted to go back to bed, ask for a pill, sleep a bit longer. Until she asked, Luke was alive. Hurt, damaged – but still alive. Once she asked, she might have to accept, to start accepting, that she would never see him again, never talk with him again, never touch him again, never lie beside him in the night. The pain in her throat was so bad it was difficult to speak, to get the question out as the nurse stood up, alarmed by Roz’s sudden appearance in the small hours of the night. ‘Luke?’ Roz said. ‘Luke Hagan?’

  She expected to have to explain and wait while phone calls went back and forth. If the news was good, they would have come and told her. They would leave her sleeping if the news were bad, give her a few hours less grief to bear. The nurse had to repeat what she was saying before Roz could take it in. ‘He’s back from theatre,’ the nurse said. ‘He’s stable.’

  Luke had never been stable in his life. ‘Where is he?’ she said. There was no point in asking about the future. No one could give her an answer now. ‘Where is he?’ she said again. The nurse told her he was in the high-dependency unit, was expected to stay there at least until the morning. ‘I have to go and see him,’ Roz said.

  The nurse demurred, but eventually she phoned through, and Roz found herself being wheeled through corridors and into a lift.

  ‘I can walk,’ she said.

  ‘Second-class ride’s better than a first-class walk, love,’ the porter said cheerfully. ‘Don’t knock it.’ The corridors were long and dark, the walls and the floor scuffed with the passage of many people, people who were not apparent now, in the small hours, the time when babies were born and sick people died.

  The lights in the high-dependency unit were dim. Each bed contained an immobile figure, each bed was surrounded by equipment, lights, drip-stands, the paraphernalia of the hospital front line. She could hear the hiss of ventilators, and for a moment she was back beside Nathan’s bed, listening to the ventilator breathe for him, and she wanted to run away. Luke was on a bed to one side of the unit. He was breathing by himself. ‘That’s good,’ the nurse said. The green line of the monitor ran its monotonous course across the screen. Part of his head was covered by a dressing. They hadn’t shaved off all his hair. She could see dark curls, matted with blood and dirt, to one side of the bandage. One eye was swollen shut. One side of his face was an almost featureless mass of bruises, the black swelling running into and distorting his mouth.

  ‘He looks bad,’ the nurse went on, ‘but most of that is superficial swelling and bruising.’ She’d introduced herself as Liz, and was apparently caring for Luke tonight. She looked very young to Roz, but also very calm and very efficient. ‘He’s doing as well as can be expected,’ she said in response to Roz’s query. In her mouth it didn’t seem like a cliché, but a genuine assessment of the situation.

  ‘Luke,’ she said. Her throat felt thick and she had to swallow hard.

  ‘He can probably hear you,’ Liz said. ‘But he won’t be able to respond. Talk to him. It’ll help.’ She pulled up a padded chair by the bed. ‘Use this,’ she said. ‘I don’t think Luke will be using it tonight.’

  Roz took his hand and leant over the bed, resting her arms on the pillow beside his head. She began to talk. She said very little about the night. She just said, ‘I’m safe. He didn’t hurt me.’ Which was true enough. She told him about Joanna’s nightshirt and dressing gown. ‘They’ve got seriously expensive labels in,’ she told him. ‘I’m wearing a designer dressing gown.’ She talked to him about her ideas for a holiday, a place some friends had told her about in the Pyrenees that had been her promised treat to herself when the next stage in the project was over. ‘We could go together,’ she said. ‘If you could face two weeks of seclusion. Good wine, good food, wonderful walks…’ If he would ever be able to walk again. She told him about Joanna’s executive corridor, a joke she’d never shared with him before. The monitor’s beep…beep was the only thing that told her he was still alive.

  Liz leant over and shone her torch into his eyes, quick and away, quick and away, checking his vital signs. Déjà vu. Roz could remember when they did that for Nathan, when they said, ‘The coma’s lifting, he’s coming round,’ and the sudden relief in their tones had made her realize, then, how ominous his continued lack of consciousness had been. But Nathan had never come back from that dark place, not the Nathan she knew. Luke!

  The airless atmosphere made her head ache and her throat felt dry and sore. She was so tired, and she felt cold and tingling and remote with the shock. It was replaying in her head like a video on an endless loop, over and over: the road disappearing under her wheels as she headed back to Sheffield, but now there was a sense of dread as the car went relentlessly on through the mist, then the engine cutting out, the bike pulling to a halt, the relief that Luke had come to meet her, the blow in the night and the hands and the voice. She shuddered and Luke stirred and made a sound.

  She jerked awake, and the nurse was there again, checking. She gave Roz a reassuring smile, and then looked more closely. ‘You should go back to your bed,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not leaving him,’ Roz said. ‘Not yet.’ She drank some water, and then she talked to him about the things they used to do – would do again. ‘Do you remember,’ she said, ‘those trips to Leeds? That time we went to the jazz festival?’ That memory was painful, because though they had shared a night she didn’t want to forget, it had also marked the beginning of their estrangement. ‘I didn’t understand, then,’ she said. He lay still on the bed, his face white around the bruising, his eyes sunken in his head. She thought she could see a bluish tinge round his lips, and felt cold deep inside, in a place the warmth of the hospital couldn’t reach. She told him about her plans for her next book. ‘It’s so boring,’ she said. ‘Maybe you’ll wake up just to shut me up.’ She ran her hand lightly over his hair, barely touching him for fear of hurting him, then she told him that she loved him because she realized that she did. She must have fallen asleep, because she woke up suddenly and it was daylight outside and Luke’s good eye was half open, looking at her. ‘What the fuck was I drinking last night?’ he muttered, and closed it again.

  Hull, Tuesday morning

  The records faxed through from various universities gave Farnham more information about Sean Lewis. He was twenty-five with a PhD in Informatics. He was on a temporary contract, and his current professor expressed some puzzlement as to why he’d taken a fairly low-key research post. Up to this point, his profile didn’t look too remarkable – an able and talented young man who lacked direction. But with further digging, the picture looked a bit different. He had a small flat in an expensive block, way beyond the reach of a research assistant, and his bank account and financial records suggested that until a few months ago, he had been deeply in debt.

  Though he’d been academically successful, graduating with a first from Oxford, his history rang alarm bells to anyone who could see the whole picture. He had had an indecent assault complaint made against him while he was still an undergraduate. The charge had been dismissed when the woman, an itinerant with convictions for soliciting, failed to appear in court. For reasons that were unclear in the records, he had not been offered a post-graduate research place at the university, though he had gone to MIT with excellent academic references.

  He’d left MIT under a similar cloud.
A fellow student had accused him of date rape, and though the charge was dismissed, the Institute did not offer him further employment when he had completed his doctorate.

  An examination of Roz Bishop’s car showed that the ignition had been simply but cleverly sabotaged. An electronic circuit consisting of a timer and a switch had been hooked on to a wire in the ignition. When the ignition was switched on, the timer started. After a delay, the timer operated the switch, short-circuited the ignition and killed the engine. ‘Look,’ the engineer explained to Farnham. ‘You just attach it to the wire. Next time the ignition is turned on, the timer starts, and after a set time, bam, the engine cuts out. Take the whole lot off after, and no one’s going to notice a thing. You don’t even have to strip the insulation with these connectors.’

  ‘So how long has she been driving round with this in her system?’ Farnham said.

  ‘It must have been put in today, before she started driving back. You wouldn’t want to leave it for long. It’s very simple. Once the timer starts, it won’t reset,’ the engineer said. ‘The car’ll break down somewhere on the way. If you time it right, it’ll be somewhere quiet.’

  And with the run back over the Snake Pass, the chances of that happening were high, Farnham reflected. Lewis had taken very few risks. He’d followed her back from Manchester, and erased the message she’d left for Luke Hagan, just in case anyone found Hagan sooner than he’d expected. Farnham wondered what they would have made of it if Hagan’s bike had been back in the lock-up with forensic evidence linking it to Roz Bishop’s death, and Hagan dead on the floor beside it. Hypothetical. He made a note to ask the forensic team to look at Gemma Wishart’s car again, to see if the ignition wires showed evidence of anything having been attached to them.

  Interpol had responded to Lynne’s query about Oksana Ilbekov. She had told her friends that she had been offered a place at Manchester University for a term’s study and had left Novosibirsk in December. She took the train to Ekaterinburg, a twenty-four hour journey, and had caught the train to Moscow the following evening to pick up her flight to London. She never boarded the plane, and there was no record of her arrival in Moscow.

  Manchester University had no record of her. She had, apparently, never applied there and never been offered a place, though the university did, like all UK universities, take exchange students. The search for Oksana had centred on Moscow, but the assumption among the authorities had been that hers was a voluntary disappearance.

  The extent of Marcus Holbrook’s involvement was hard to ascertain. Lynne spent time on Tuesday in Sheffield tracking down Holbrook’s connections. He had lived in a small house close to the Mayfield Valley on the west side of Sheffield. It was an expensive residential area, but not beyond the reach of a retired professor, and Holbrook had bought the house some years ago. It had the slightly shabby look of a place that was lived in but not noticed, as though Holbrook’s real life went on somewhere else. A search of his finances revealed money in several UK bank accounts, and documents for offshore accounts as well.

  Lynne looked through some of the statements. For the past five years, there had been regular deposits that looked like a salary or a pension, with occasional, irregular additions. There was nothing there that looked out of place. Then, just under a year ago, shortly after Sean Lewis had come to the university, he started paying in larger amounts. There was travel documentation, letters, letterheads – all stuff that someone in Holbrook’s line might be expected to have – but useful, very useful, for someone who wanted to start bringing people into the country illegally.

  His desk contained lists of contacts at universities in England and in Europe. One of those contacts was Stefan Nowicki at Novosibirsk, but the two men had a known academic link. The records of Holbrook’s phone calls revealed that he had made several phone calls around the time of Oksana’s death to a private number in Novosibirsk, which proved to be Nowicki’s when Lynne traced it.

  Matthew Pearse had spent Tuesday night in custody, but he seemed calm and unruffled when Lynne and Farnham faced him again in the interview room. Lynne thought about the comfortless bedsit they had searched, and wondered how much worse a cell would have seemed.

  The warehouse basement had already provided some useful findings, and the forensic experts were still working. The chamber where Anna Krleza had been imprisoned was an old cold store built into the wall. It had been modified by the addition of thick insulation and padding until its capacity was reduced to a coffin-sized space, an air-tight trap to anyone who was shut inside. Anna Krleza was not the first person to have been shut in there.

  The pathologist had supported this conclusion when Farnham went back to him about ‘Katya’s’ death. ‘It’s not an easy thing to identify with certainty,’ he said. ‘Asphyxial deaths where there is no physical trauma are notoriously difficult – the circumstances of the recovery of the body are a major factor in making that diagnosis.’

  The story Pearse told them was slightly different from the one that Lynne had got from Michael Balit. He had had a relationship in his teens with a girl who lived locally and she had become pregnant. ‘I wanted her to marry me,’ he said, ‘but she…I could understand it. Even then, I was…’ He gestured at himself. ‘She left her daughter, our daughter, with her parents. They didn’t know I was the father, but I kept up contact, all the time I was training, and after, as much as I could.’

  Years later, Pearse had got the chance and had come back to the area as a priest. His daughter was now sixteen. ‘A member of my flock. I was responsible for her, and she had no idea who I was. Lisa.’ He looked sad as he spoke the name. He had been shocked by what he found. The home his daughter lived in with her grandparents was strict and unloving, and she was mixing with the wrong crowd, getting involved in drugs, promiscuous sex, all the baggage of troubled adolescence. ‘I tried to help her,’ he said. And she had been drawn to the man who had befriended her. ‘Her grandparents gave her a home,’ he said, ‘but they never really gave her any love. I loved her.’ He realized then how much he had missed her, and how much he had damaged her by leaving. ‘It was unforgivable,’ he said. ‘I have never forgiven myself.’ Lynne remembered the photograph in his room, the young girl dressed in white.

  ‘You have a picture of her,’ she said, and he smiled, but his face was sad.

  ‘Her Confirmation,’ he said. ‘That was before…’ Lisa had killed herself. She had been in the early stages of pregnancy. The father was unknown. ‘The coroner said it was an accidental overdose,’ Pearse said. ‘They do say that. If they can. To spare the family. But I knew.’ His face was white. ‘The sin of despair. The unforgivable sin. She died in despair, and I have read the scriptures and my books and I can’t find one thing that offers me the comfort that she found forgiveness. She will suffer that despair for all eternity.’ He sighed. ‘That was when I left the priesthood. That was when I knew my ministry was on the streets.’

  ‘And then…I met her down on the old docks. A year ago. She can’t have been more than seventeen,’ he said. She had been a street prostitute. ‘I used to see her. I would talk to her sometimes. Her English was poor. She thought she was coming over here to work as a dancer, she told me.’ He shook his head. ‘The people who brought her here, they threw her out when the heroin took hold. It’s hard for those girls once the drugs have got them. They can’t go to hospitals or rehabilitation. And she was terrified of going back. She told me she wanted to change, wanted to leave the streets, get off drugs. But she went back. She wasn’t strong enough.’ He looked at Lynne. He barely seemed aware of Farnham. ‘I shut her in. I thought I was saving her from the drugs. She was dead when I came back. And I knew then that I had saved her. Gemma.’ He said it softly.

  ‘She wasn’t called Gemma,’ Lynne said. ‘We don’t know her name.’ We don’t know her at all. She thought about the girl, young and alone on the streets of a strange country, then killed, her body dumped and swept away with the flotsam, unknown and forgotten. And the gi
rl found on the beach at Ravenscar, the only record of her existence a cadaver in the morgue, no name, no face – just a number. And the question that had haunted Lynne ever since Pearse had begun his confession: Were there others, lost in the sea somewhere? And then there was Oksana.

  ‘Oksana,’ she said. Pearse nodded. ‘She was seen near the bridge that night.’

  ‘I took Nasim home that way,’ he said. ‘I pretended that the car had broken down. It was a cold night. She walked to the phone box to call the AA.’ He grimaced. ‘I told her my back was too bad to walk far. I had the coat I’d lent to Oksana in the car. Nasim didn’t know about that. So I gave her the coat to wear while she walked to and from the phone.’ Lynne remembered the witness statements: a woman in a red coat walking by the side of the road. And the extra detail in the other statement: the woman’s dark hair and the heavy metal buttons on the coat. Of course. One had seen Nasim walking towards the phone box, the other would have seen her walking back.

  Pearse was talking again. ‘I couldn’t risk anyone coming and checking at the centre. Too many people depend on us. After I had left Nasim, I went on to the bridge and left the coat there. Were you thinking of ghosts, Inspector? Of the unhappy departed? That’s all superstition, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why the faces?’ Lynne asked suddenly. ‘Why did you destroy their faces?’

  He looked surprised. ‘For their families,’ he said. ‘Their families wouldn’t want to know. It was best if their families never knew.’