“Is that the report you stole from my case?” he asked, nodding at the folder I’d placed next to my drink. He looked at me, waiting.
“No, that was delivered to you at the hospital earlier. I didn’t really understand it, I just wanted to confirm it wasn’t Mr Badem’s medical records.” From the folder I pulled out the theatre system printout that Chris had emailed me. His expression didn’t change as he glanced at the sheet in my hand.
“Mr Badem’s medical notes were never in the briefcase,” I said to him. “You lied to him so he would find her and the briefcase when I wouldn’t hand her over.” I turned to Badem. “I checked at the hospital: your notes have been in the medical records library since your operation.”
He looked at Bill. “In clinic you sat there and told me they were missing, that she’d taken them,” he said. Bill grinned boyishly and half-shrugged as if it would be enough to get rid of the accusation. Badem stared at him but Bill was looking at me, as was Kristina, who was kneading Misha with one hand and her husband’s hand with the other.
I passed the operation sheet to Badem as I addressed Bill. “And why did you tell Mr Badem that you carried out his operation?” I said. Badem read the sheet as Bill pulled his hand from Kristina’s clasp.
“Because I did,” he said, his voice flat.
“No, you didn’t,” Badem said, softly. He handed Bill the operation sheet but he refused to take it.
“Those things aren’t accurate,” he said. Kristina reached over for it but Bill ripped it from Badem’s hand and threw it to the floor.
“You wanted to create a bond,” I said to him. “Because you wanted Mr Badem to feel beholden to you.”
“But why?” Badem asked him. “Because you wanted Aurora back? Because she’d seen you having an affair with a colleague?” Bill refused to meet Badem’s eyes.
“No, there was no affair with a colleague,” I said.
Badem frowned, his bushy eyebrows almost covering his eyes, then turned to Kristina as he hoicked his thumb at me. “You told me yesterday that this guy was blackmailing Bill, threatening to go public with his affair, which is why you needed Aurora gone.” She was frozen, unable to speak.
“What?” I said, understanding what she’d done. “No, I was blackmailing Kristina, not Bill.” I took out the sheet of photos showing Kristina in flagrante with the crime prosecution lawyer and put them on the table. Both Badem and Bill leant forward. Kristina went pale, staring at me like it could kill me. Bill looked away and picked up the other glass of raki.
“So the maid knew about this?” Badem asked, tapping the photos. “That’s why Kristina wanted her gone?” he said, but there was a change in his voice, like things were slotting into place.
“No, maybe that’s what you thought when Kristina lied to you yesterday, but I think you had a suspicion today why she desperately wanted Aurora gone, right? You didn’t kidnap me, torture me and terrorise an innocent woman because of an affair the person you thought was your surgeon was supposedly having. That’s over the top, even for you.” I pulled the printouts from the Argus website from the folder and laid them out, Bogdana’s smiling face on top. “I’m guessing you saw the newspaper today, started to worry, and felt exposed, especially when you learnt from Leonard that I had Aurora.” They were all staring at Bogdana’s picture.
“I tried to call her today to ask about it,” Badem said, as if she wasn’t here.
“I’m guessing you sourced Bogdana for Kristina’s salon, which is why you were worried.”
He and Kristina exchanged a look. If I wasn’t careful they were going to close ranks.
“Aurora saw Bogdana here at the house the night before she was found dead,” I said. That got his attention. “That’s why they wanted her gone. The irony is that Aurora didn’t realise the significance of what she’d seen until she saw the newspaper this morning.”
“Rubbish – she was never here,” Kristina said.
“Really? That’s the best you can come up with? You had people here for dinner, you think nobody saw her?” I asked.
“You’ve told the police all this?” Badem asked me.
I nodded. “As has Aurora – she’s with them now, so it’s no longer containable.”
Badem nodded. Bill looked like he was about to vomit.
“Was that Bogdana’s real function?” I asked Badem. “To provide sex to people like Bill?”
“No!” he shouted, slapping his hand on the table. “I do not provide that sort of service.”
I was going to make a jibe about nominating him for most principled people-trafficker of the year award, but my better judgement prevailed.
“There’s something else,” I said. “A pearl was found on the dead girl, in her clothing I imagine. There are some pearls in the briefcase Galbraith wanted to recover.”
“I don’t understand,” Badem said.
“Aurora found one in his study, but I don’t know how the other ended up on the body. All I know is that Bill had something to do with it.”
Badem stood up with surprising agility and looked down at Bill. “Why do English men in positions of authority prefer young girls?”
“It wasn’t like that,” Bill said, sounding like he was in a stupor.
“Be quiet, Bill,” Kristina said, her voice shrill.
“I didn’t touch her,” Bill shouted. “Not like that. I just wanted to… to see what Mother’s pearls looked like on her since you wouldn’t wear them.”
Kristina spat something in Russian. “Really? You’re blaming me?” she asked, incredulous.
“But Bogdana also refused to wear them, didn’t she?” I said, pressing him. “Didn’t she?” I urged Bill. “She wouldn’t wear them for you and that made you angry.”
Bill shook his head. “You’re wrong. She did. I thought she’d look nice in them. She was so perfectly innocent. I didn’t want to hurt her. I just wanted her to look nice for me. To see them on her bare neck and shoulders. That’s how they look their best, on a bare torso.”
Badem slapped Bill hard across the face. His drink went flying, as did Misha, who darted to the stairs.
“You pervert; she was a child!” Badem screamed. I stood up.
“Did you kill her?” I shouted. Kristina put her hands to her husband’s mouth. Badem slapped them away. Bill was blubbing, snot bubbling at his nose.
“It was an accident…”
Kristina looked at me, her hands clenched. “What do you want from us? Money?” I saw a glimmer of hope in Bill’s teary eyes, and even Badem studied me with interest.
It was him I addressed. “Remember what you told me when we first met, sitting in your car?”
He shook his head.
“You wittered on about honour and how there should be consequences to actions. Remember that? Or did that only apply to the Auroras and Bogdanas of this world?”
I took out the mobile phone, relieved to see that it was still on a call.
“Did you get all that?” I asked Stubbing.
For a heart-stopping few seconds there was silence at the other end.
“Yes, we’re at the gate.”
52
AURORA DISAPPEARED INTO SANDRA’S EMBRACE OUTSIDE HER house. I took her small case to the car.
“Passport?” I asked a teary Aurora. She showed it to me.
“Ticket?” She patted her breast pocket.
“Money?” She patted the front pocket of her trousers. We got in the car.
“Call me when she’s through passport control,” Sandra said. She waved us off.
The drive to the airport was mostly in silence. I was exhausted, not having slept, but I wasn’t going to delegate this job to anyone else.
“How long since you’ve seen your family?” I managed to ask.
“Three years,” she said, then silence.
We reached the airport car park with plenty of time to spare. I wheeled her case into the terminal and we checked in. On a whim we popped into a mobile phone shop and I bought a p
re-charged phone. I got the shop to put in a prepaid SIM card then I rang my number with it so it was in the phone. I gave it to Aurora, saying, “Call me when you are through passport control.” She seemed to perk up at this idea. I walked her to the departures barrier, beyond which only travellers can go.
We stood there for a minute grinning stupidly at each other until I decided enough was enough.
“You better go, Aurora.”
She quickly put her arms round me, pinning my arms to my torso, her head resting on my chest.
“Thank you, George,” she said. “I call you soon.”
I watched her disappear behind the barrier. I checked my phone was on and wandered round, devoured a burger, then, having had enough of the holidaying hordes, made my way to the car park thinking that I might as well wait in the car.
My phone rang as I was checking the integrity of my home-made duct-tape-and-plastic hatchback cover. I got inside the car.
“Aurora?”
“No problem from passport control. I am on the plane,” she said.
I could feel the tension rush from my shoulders, like releasing the top on a bottle of fizzy water. I started to laugh, and then I was bloody crying.
“You OK, Mr George?” She was still there.
“I’m OK. No, I’m happy.”
With no way for me to check that the plane had actually taken off I headed back to Cambridge where I sent (with Jason’s help) an anonymous email to Linda, complete with the scanned copy of the audit report and Chris’s contact details. Then I went home and soaked my shoulder in the bath, then lay on the bed, looking up at the cracked bedroom ceiling trying to get some sleep but my shoulder was too painful, even with painkillers. Then Linda rang. I took her call on the bed.
“Did you send me that report?” she asked.
“What report?”
“I thought it might be you. This Chris guy seems to know you.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about, but I hope it’s useful, whatever it is.”
“You’ll see, probably the day after tomorrow.”
“In the Argus?”
“No, think bigger. Think sleazy national.” She couldn’t hide the excitement in her voice.
“How are you doing?” I asked. “After yesterday.”
“I’m OK; I’m in London to do the story. I’ll probably stay on here. I think I need to be alone for a while.”
“Gone off men?”
“You could say that.”
“Can’t think why.”
She laughed, and it was good to hear.
“I had a good time,” I told her. “Up until yesterday that is. But you did good; you probably saved me from being horribly disfigured.”
“Well there’s that. Will you be OK, Georgie?”
“I’ll be fine.”
* * *
The next day in the office I received an email from an unidentified email address. The subject was “from Aurora”. There was no text in the body of the email, just an attached photo – a selfie showing Aurora cheek to cheek with a jaundiced-looking bandana-wearing girl in a hospital bed. From the identical smiles I deduced the girl was Aurora’s daughter. Aurora’s smile, her whole face, was relaxed and unselfconscious, like I’d never seen it before.
Stubbing came to the office around midday. She came in without knocking and sat opposite. I took my feet off the desk.
“What’s with the sling?” she asked.
“Have a seat,” I said, but she ignored my tone. “Occupational hazard.” I’d spent the morning waiting to have it x-rayed and bandaged up.
“Thought you might like some closure,” she said.
“It’s all I’m ever looking for.” She pulled a face.
“Bill Galbraith’s been charged with manslaughter,” she said.
“Not homicide?”
She shook her head. “Not enough evidence for that.”
“Did he tell you what happened to Bogdana?”
“Well, his version of it. She came into his study after the dinner party and saw the pearls which happened to be on the desk.”
“So far so dodgy,” I said.
“It gets worse. Aurora had gone to her room—”
“He locked her in.”
“That’s what she says, yes, he says not. Anyway, according to him Bogdana asked if she could try them on. He said yes then asked if she’d take her shirt off so he could see what they looked like against her skin.”
“He actually told you this?” I asked, astonished.
“Privileged men like him truly believe that they are entitled to whatever they want. He thought it was a reasonable request. Still does, which is why he’s happy to admit it.”
She told me how he’d said Bogdana was reluctant and that he’d jokingly insisted, trying to undo her shirt. She panicked and tried to remove the pearls while he tried to calm her down and undo them at the hasp – there was a struggle and they broke in the process. She slipped and hit her head on the corner of the glass desk.
“Her head wound is consistent with the corner of that desk,” Stubbing said. “Forensics found minute traces of blood on it which will probably turn out to be hers.”
“You’d think he’d have cleaned up properly. He’s a surgeon after all.”
“Even intelligent people screw up under stress.”
“So, basically he’s claiming it was an accident.”
“Yep. Bogdana wasn’t sexually assaulted. Her shirt was pulled open but defence will argue that it happened during their struggle for the pearls.”
“But he tried to dispose of the body.”
“Yes, there is that. He says he panicked, thinking he’d never get a fair trial because of the media interest.”
“He used her car?”
“We did find a button from Bogdana’s shirt in the back of the Range Rover,” she said.
“A button, not a pearl,” I said, more to myself.
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing.”
“You’ll be pleased to know the antenna might prove useful after all,” she said.
“You think he moved her on his own? Did she help him?”
“She says not, he says not, her alibi says she was at his flat all night, so…”
“CCTV at the station?”
“Disabled, what with all the renovation going on there, but my suspicion is that she did help. I don’t think he would have faced it on his own.”
I agreed with her. His story was that once he’d realised Bogdana was dead he drove to the station in the Porsche, borrowed his wife’s car while she was visiting her lover, then took Bogdana’s body to Byron’s Pool. He then returned it to the train station and drove home.
“It doesn’t marry with what Aurora says she heard. She’d have heard the Porsche leave. Besides, he’d have to have known she’d be parked there all night.”
“He says he thought she was in London; she does park there a lot and that was her story.”
“I dunno, I mean—” She put her hand up.
“If I could stop you there, George. I think you can let it go now. I’m all over it.”
I laughed. “Sorry.”
She sighed and looked over my shoulder.
“What is it?” I asked.
“He’s managed to get bail, despite the manslaughter charge.”
“What the fuck?”
“He has patients booked in for surgery – comes under exceptional circumstances, so he’ll be out pending a psychiatric report to make sure he’s not suicidal. He was interviewed by a doc at lunchtime so I’m sure he’ll be released by the end of the day.”
“I’m hoping those exceptional circumstances will be voided very soon.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll have to read about it tomorrow like everyone else.”
“I guess that explains why Linda’s gone AWOL.” She stood up and I walked her to the door.
“What about Badem?” I asked.
“Ah, yes. Fenland polic
e tell me they found seven women at that farm. We found their passports at Badem’s house. I’ve put Immigration onto the beauty parlour – it’s not really my jurisdiction.”
“Please tell me Bill and Ben are indisposed.”
She snorted. “No worries there, they’ll be caught up in the system for a while.”
As will those poor women, I thought, as I closed the door behind Stubbing. I wondered whether we’d done them any favours? All I knew for certain was that we’d probably cut their families off from much-needed income. Aurora herself would be back in the Gulf or wherever as soon as her daughter had passed – as she’d said, she had no other choice.
* * *
Later that same evening, over drinks at the pub near the office, Maggie told me that her partner had decided to go and make house with someone twenty years younger.
“How boringly predictable,” I said. “How long were you together?”
“Long enough that it hurts.” We sipped our drinks.
“Sounds like an arsehole,” I said.
She smiled. “I was thinking that myself.”
We drained our glasses and I picked them up with one hand.
“One more?” She thought about it, then nodded.
“Can you manage?” I nodded and went to the bar. I didn’t really want to be striking something up with Maggie while she was in this state. And it wasn’t exactly as if I was ready myself. I took the drinks back to the table. She was going through her diary as I sat down. The painkillers I’d been given were prescription only and I probably shouldn’t have been taking them with booze.
“Sorry, just checking the rest of the week’s sessions,” she said.
“Are you free for a couple of hours this week, during the day?”
She looked down at her diary. “Tomorrow afternoon, actually. Why?”
“How do you feel about a trip to a crematorium?”
She pulled a face and laughed, unable to tell if I was pulling her leg.
“I have to pick up my father’s ashes,” I said, patting my sling. “And I can’t drive.”
“Can’t drive, George?” she asked, with a knowing, appealing smile.
“You’re right. I don’t want to go on my own.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Runaway Maid Page 26