Night Angels

by Danuta Reah

  Sean Lewis was implicated in Gemma Wishart’s death by both the evidence of his own words to Roz Bishop, the circumstances of his arrest, and the forensic evidence that lined up, damningly, against him. His fingerprints matched those that had been taken from Gemma Wish-art’s flat after the break-in. He was a secretor whose blood group matched that of the man who had raped her. DNA tests would confirm or exclude his involvement. Farnham wasn’t offering odds. A search of his flat revealed newspaper cuttings, one about the Ravenscar woman, one about ‘Katya’, small, unimportant news stories about unknown dead women, taken from the local press, and a collection of pornography devoted to bondage and sado-masochism.

  Lewis indicated that he was prepared to talk to them. He insisted that he had been in Roz Bishop’s car at her invitation, that she had instigated their liaison and that she had introduced him to violent sex-and-bondage games. ‘It was a rapist-in-the-car fantasy,’ he said. The idea had been that he would come to meet her and they would play out the game before coming back to Sheffield. ‘She wanted it,’ he kept saying. ‘She was loving it right until you lot came along.’ It may have got a bit out of hand, he conceded eventually. He wasn’t familiar with this kind of thing. He’d tried to follow her guidance. That was why he had the pornography, he added, to try and please this older woman with the exotic tastes.

  He admitted that he had had sex with Gemma Wish-art the night she disappeared. It had been consensual sex. It may have been a bit rough – but that was the way she liked it. Those photographs proved that. They’d met up in Manchester by agreement, and then she’d left to drive, as far as he knew, back to Sheffield. He didn’t know anything about her death. He’d heard rumours that she’d been working as a prostitute, and he’d assumed that was how she had met her end. It was nothing to do with him.

  As Farnham laid the evidence in front of him, he began to show signs of tension for the first time. ‘You’re supposed to stop this!’ he burst out at his solicitor at one point.

  Wearily, the solicitor asked for a break, but Lewis interrupted him. ‘I don’t want a fucking break!’ he shouted. ‘I want to go home!’ He looked at Farnham. ‘You’re treating me like some kind of pervert, some kind of rapist!’

  He claimed to know nothing about trafficking. Holbrook might have cut a few corners bringing people over. ‘The law makes a market,’ he said. ‘It’s like drugs. If you make a market, someone will use it.’ He confirmed that Gemma had approached Holbrook about Oksana Ilbekov. ‘She gave him the tape and asked him if he could help this woman come across on one of his exchange schemes. Her parents were dead, she was some kind of Eskimo or something – up to her neck in reindeer shit. If Marcus was involved in anything dodgy, then she would have been perfect.’

  He looked at Farnham. ‘If she wanted to work as a prostitute, it was nothing to do with me! Gemma Wish-art told him about her and gave him the tape. Silly sod went ape about it. And he kept the tape. Stupid shit.’ When Farnham showed him the cutting about Katya’s death, the cutting that had been found among his possessions, he looked unsure for a moment, then shrugged. ‘She ran away. Holbrook was worried people might think…you know.’ When she had been found dead in the Humber Estuary, it had been a relief, until Gemma turned up asking questions. ‘I told Holbrook he ought to destroy that tape,’ Lewis told them. ‘Or Gemma could do her forensic linguistic thing – match the voices. I thought he’d got rid of it. Holbrook said he’d got it covered. But he needed some help.’

  He’d broken into Gemma’s flat and stolen her tapes along with her sound system to make it look as though the tapes were just a random casualty. He’d broken into Luke Hagan’s as well. He wasn’t able to account for that so easily. ‘It seemed right at the time,’ he said. He’d got the code for the answering machine in case it came in useful. It had seemed like a good idea to plant evidence that Gemma was working as an escort. ‘I put it everywhere I could think of,’ he said. ‘Just in case she tried to get Holbrook into trouble. Then no one would listen to her,’ he said.

  ‘Why plant evidence,’ Farnham said, ‘if she was working as a prostitute anyway? You just said she was,’ he added.

  Lewis looked sullen for a moment. ‘I wanted to make sure people would know,’ he said. ‘They don’t understand what women like Gemma are all about. I just wanted to make sure.’

  It would all have worked, he suggested, if Holbrook hadn’t kept the tape on the archive. He hadn’t known that, he said, until Roz Bishop had found it. ‘I was keeping an eye on things,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t plan for Holbrook being such a stupid shit. So that was that,’ he said. ‘It was business, pure and simple.’

  Farnham asked him about Angel Escorts. Lewis shook his head. ‘I made them up,’ he said. For the first time, he looked nervous, uncertain. ‘I just needed a name, you know? There’s no Angel Escorts.’ He looked round the room. ‘It was all business,’ he insisted.

  Hull, March

  It hadn’t been business for Sean Lewis, Lynne thought just over three weeks later, as she put together the paperwork to complete the final link between Katya, dead in the Humber Estuary, and Oksana, the young student gone missing in Ekaterinburg. It hadn’t been business at all. Gemma had certainly represented a danger to him. But if all he had wanted was Gemma dead, Lynne was certain he could have arranged it so that no police investigation, or no murder investigation, was ever involved. Suppose Gemma had simply vanished? Suppose she had died in a car accident, an unwitnessed hit and run? Suppose she had died of a drugs overdose? Lynne often wondered how many of the deaths that happened every day were unrecognized murders.

  The computer taken from his flat contained some interesting files, concealed from a casual observer. There was hard-core pornography, photographs devoted to the extremes of bondage and the infliction of humiliation and pain. There were also a series of doctored pictures of Gemma, put together in a narrative sequence, starting with the bondage picture of her on the bed with her arms pulled above her head, moving through the sequences of calculated sadism that the other images showed, and ending with the image of her body sprawled in the bath. There was the start of a similar sequence for Roz Bishop that began with a photograph of her sleeping – lying on a bed with her arms flung out, the sheet pulled away from her breasts – and moved on to a series of pictures of her on the same bed with Luke Hagan. Lynne wondered what Lewis had planned for the final picture.

  Matthew Pearse remained pleasant and co-operative. He was a model inmate at the remand centre, using his out-of-cell time to counsel other inmates and, on some occasions, staff. He told Farnham what he knew about Anna, about her fear of a man called ‘Angel’. Pearse told them about Anna’s belief that she had killed Angel’s friend, her flight to the advice centre and the help he’d given her. Someone else had come looking for Anna, he told them, a couple of weeks after he’d found her a place to live and work at the hotel. A young man, twenty-ish, fair. ‘He had a cut on his face,’ Pearse said. ‘Here.’ He gestured towards his eyebrow. ‘I didn’t know then about Anna’s troubles, but I didn’t tell him anything.’

  He had been concerned, he told them, when he had seen the man near the Blenheim a couple of weeks later. Pearse had kept a discreet eye on Anna, but as time went on and nothing happened, he decided that the man meant no harm and left it. ‘It was safer if I had no contact with Anna,’ he said. Farnham showed him a photograph of Sean Lewis. Pearse nodded. ‘That is the man,’ he said.

  Lynne remembered the dedication with which Sean Lewis had pointed the investigation towards the name Angel Escorts. He now claimed that the name was fictitious, but according to Pearse, Anna had run away from a man called Angel. If that had, somehow, been known to Lewis, then leaving Gemma’s body in the hotel where Anna worked, leaving the business card…perhaps calculating that Anna would recognize the name at once, and tell the police as soon as the body was reported. She might have been able to take them to Angel Escorts, and the police would break up an operation that, presumably, was in strong com
petition with the business that Holbrook and Lewis – no matter how much Lewis might deny it – were setting up together. But Anna’s terror of either Angel or the police had made her destroy the scene and run. Like so many of Lewis’ plans, it was over-clever, over-complicated and it had gone wrong.

  There was one thing that puzzled Lynne. Lewis had come looking for Anna months before Oksana died, long before Gemma would have been digging round in Hol-brook’s archive, dangerously near to identifying Oksana Ilbekov, and, therefore, the people who had kidnapped her. Why had he been looking for Anna? A puzzle. Lynne shelved it for later thought.

  Anna Krleza was a silent figure in the detention facility for illegal immigrants. Her status as a refugee was ambiguous. Her family had been traced to a village in Kosovo. Her father was Albanian and her mother was Roma. The family had vanished during the turbulence of the NATO action. No one knew, or no one would say, what had happened to them, but the house was a burnt-out ruin and the walls were daubed with graffiti about gypsies and witches. An argument was being conducted around her. The immigration authorities and the Home Office said she was exaggerating her condition so that she would be allowed to stay in a country she had, after all, entered illegally. She was Roma, and there was a massive surge in bogus asylum claims from gypsies who said they were being persecuted. Her family were probably fine – these people didn’t stay in one place. Anna Krleza should be repatriated.

  The Refugee Council said that Anna was a victim of crime, not a perpetrator, and as a result of the crimes committed against her needed treatment that would not be available to her if she was sent back.

  Farnham had gone to see Anna while she was still in the main hospital, undergoing tests to see if there was any unidentified damage that was causing her continuing silence. He had, with a doctor in attendance, showed her a photograph of Sean Lewis. For a moment, the pale, withdrawn face had flashed into terror, then the blank closeness had come back and she had not reacted again. Anna would go wherever she was told do go, do whatever she was asked to do, but her eyes were blank and dead. When Lynne looked at her mute face, she felt again the responsibility of the hours she had lost.

  Angel Escorts, now Lynne’s first priority, had vanished as if it had never existed.

  There was a knock on her door, and Roy Farnham came in looking a bit wary. Their contacts had been strictly professional since the Sunday he had pulled Nasim Rafiq in for questioning. ‘I’ve got some news,’ he said after a moment. Lynne waited. ‘Rafiq,’ he said. ‘They’re going to let it go, Immigration.’

  Lynne was surprised. ‘They aren’t going to charge her?’

  He shook his head. ‘She was acting under duress. She co-operated with the investigation in the end. She collected evidence and passed it on. The notes in the textbook,’ he added. ‘They found the guy who’s been doing the passports.’

  ‘But she’d been concealing evidence,’ Lynne said. ‘I didn’t think they’d budge.’

  Farnham shrugged. ‘Let’s say it’s politically expedient to show a human face just at the moment.’ He was referring to the backlash from the recent wave of racist attacks on the Afghan asylum seekers. ‘Pearse’s brief is going for unfit to plead. He’ll probably get it. And we’re no nearer clearing up Holbrook’s death. No forensics. One of them did it, and my money’s on Lewis, but pinning it on him…’ He looked discouraged.

  Lynne was inclined to believe Pearse’s denial. He had admitted the other killings without hesitation – though maybe Holbrook’s murder didn’t fit so easily into his philosophy of death and redemption. Lewis had seemed genuinely shocked when he heard about Holbrook’s death, and had asked for a break in the interview. He was being remanded in custody and, after that day, he had asked to be isolated from the other prisoners. ‘You’re treating me like a rapist,’ he said. ‘They might do something.’

  Farnham was looking uncharacteristically hesitant. ‘I know…’ he said. Then he stopped and began again. ‘Do you want to go for a drink tonight?’ he said. ‘Or sometime?’

  Lynne didn’t trust Farnham. He’d used her professionally, become her lover privately, and had ruthlessly kept those worlds completely separate. It was all ambivalences. Clearly, for him, the job came first. As it did for her. It was difficult. It was impossible. She didn’t trust him. But the sex had been amazing.

  ‘I can’t stand the town pubs,’ she said. ‘You owe me dinner.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. He smiled. ‘There’s a decent place just down the road from me. I’ll pick you up – eight?’

  ‘OK,’ she said. She met his eyes. ‘This time – definitely – no shop.’

  Hull, March

  Anna sat very still, very quiet. It was gone now, the pain in her hands and the ache and stiffness of bruises, the cold, light-headedness of her fever. And now, she found that she could sleep. Or if not sleep, at least not wake up, just let in a peripheral awareness of her surroundings, a chair, a bed, footsteps and voices – things that she didn’t have to worry about any more. She was walking in the forest. The trees were autumnal now. The leaves were a deep gold in the late summer sun. Anna knew these woods well, the paths that wound through the deep glades, the place where the stream trickled down over the rocks, the water spraying into a rainbow in the diffused light, the paths where she used to walk with her father, the paths where she used to take Krisha to play among the trees.

  There were paths in the forest she was learning to avoid, paths that led to the smell of burning, paths that led to the sound of water dripping in the silence. Sometimes the voices spoke to her, over and over again. Anna? Anna? I need you to tell me…

  Ms Krleza, you are not helping yourself by…Ms Krleza…? Again and again.

  But Anna had found a safe place, the only safe place, a place that no one could take her away from. She wasn’t coming back.

  23

  Shetland Islands, September

  It was a long journey, but Lynne had ten days and took it easy. The case was effectively over. Matthew Pearse’s plea of insanity had been accepted by the DPP. Sean Lewis was dead. He had hanged himself in his cell. He had given no indication of suicidal intent, and had left no note, but the circumstances seemed unequivocal. He had been found one morning hanging from his bed-frame. The cell door had been locked. Lynne had shared Farnham’s sense of frustration, of things unaccounted for, but the coroner’s verdict was clear.

  Lynne took the train to Aberdeen and the overnight ferry to Lerwick. In the morning, she was on the Shetland Islands, driving north to Toft to pick up the ferry to Yell. Yell was bleak, the centre desolate moorland, the shore rocky and barren. She pushed north and further north to Gutcher. There, she caught the ferry to Unst, her destination. She looked at the package on the seat beside her.

  It was incongruous, a carrier bag and a large plastic container – an urn, the undertaker had called it. It was industrial green with a black screw lid; a utilitarian receptacle for what came out of the crematorium furnace. Oksana’s people were poor. Her parents were dead. She had no close family. She had been, as Sean Lewis had said, perfect. Her ashes were to be disposed of where she had died.

  Lynne had undertaken to fulfil that request. Oksana had died in an underground tomb. She wouldn’t have wanted her ashes scattered in Matthew Pearse’s ‘church’ to mingle with the dust and the damp until the demolition squads moved in. Her body had been found in the Humber Estuary. Those polluted waters seemed a sad place to lie. But the North Sea – that was different. Lynne had looked at the map. If she went to the most northerly of the Shetland Islands, Unst, she could scatter Oksana’s ashes there. She had traced the seas beyond Shetland, the seas beyond the north. To the east was the Barents Sea, and east again was the Kara Sea. She was being quixotic, but she had a vision of Oksana’s ashes carried on the currents and drifting until they met the place where the waters of the Yenisei River joined the icy wastes of the Kara Sea, and Oksana’s journey would be over.

  She left the main road now, following the B road to t
he wide Voe of Burrafirth. She parked the car and lifted the heavy bag. She would have to walk from here. Ahead of her, she could see the cliff edge, and beyond it, the sea. The land was empty, and though the sky was blue and cloudless, the air was cold. There was a small building by the path ahead of her, low and stone-built, surrounded by a drystone wall. She wondered if it was an outbuilding, the remains of a croft, or maybe a warden’s cottage for the nature reserve of Herma Ness. But it looked too small, too bleak to be inhabited. As she got nearer, adjusting the awkward weight in her arms, she saw that there was someone standing in the doorway watching her.

  It was a woman. Something about her dress and her stance said old woman. Her head was covered in a heavy black shawl. Her face was brown and weathered, and her dark eyes watched Lynne impassively. Lynne took a breath to say, ‘Good afternoon,’ but before she could speak, a dog raced out of the door behind the woman and barked, its teeth bared, its ears laid back. Lynne looked at the dog. It was large, black, of indeterminate breed. It stood in the gateway on guard, barking and threatening to advance. She nodded politely to the woman, and walked past, keeping her pace steady, avoiding the eyes of the vigilant dog, but she was aware of the two of them watching her as she crossed the green heathland towards the clifftop and the distant sea.

  The cliffs of Herma Ness were sheer, and Lynne looked at the rocks hundreds of feet below, the sea blue and crumpled, flecks of white dancing across the surface as the water surged and fell against the cliff face. She knelt on the edge with the wind behind her and unscrewed the black lid of the urn. She tipped it slowly, and the fine grey ash fell in a stream. The wind caught it and scattered it through the air as it fell, dispersing it into a grey cloud and then invisibility. Lynne sat on the clifftop for a while, looking north at the endless sea where it merged with the sky in the misty distance.