A Quiet Death

by Cari Hunter

  “How were you to know?”

  His sensible question allayed some of Eleanor’s exasperation. She shook her head, grateful for a fresh point of view. “I suppose we weren’t, but we should at least have considered it a possibility.”

  “Unlikely age and ethnicity, El.” Russ exchanged one file for another. “Most of the female vics we’ve been seeing recently are brought in from Eastern Europe, Africa, China. Believe me, it’s a growing market. I sign on to a mile-high pile of new shit every morning.”

  “I can imagine.” She raised her coffee in appreciation. “Thank you for coming here to wade through some of mine.”

  *

  “Oi! Hold it, San!”

  Still half asleep, Sanne slapped a hand on the wrong button, prompting the lift doors to close on Fred’s desperate lunge. She hit the next button instead, and he limped in as the doors changed course.

  “What the devil happened to you?” she said, dodging his dramatic collapse against the far wall.

  “I put my bloody back out last night.” He mopped his sweaty brow with a handkerchief and then used it to blow his nose.

  “Salsa again? You need to give that up, mate. It’s bad for y—oh…” She trailed off as he turned cherry-red and shook his head. “Ah, right. Say no more.”

  He scuffed the floor with his boot like a lovelorn adolescent. “I think I’m falling for her, San. She makes me want to write poems and buy her teddies and stuff.”

  They squashed closer together as the lift stopped and three SOCO got on.

  “I’m very happy for you.” Sanne hugged Fred’s arm, wondering whether a wedding might be on the horizon. She’d missed out on his first three. “Would you like some ibuprofen?”

  “Yes, please, and the name of that fancy restaurant you took your doctor missus to.”

  She kept hold of his arm as they exited the lift. “Sine Qua Non,” she said.

  “Bless you.” He offered her his hanky.

  “That’s the restaurant, you pillock. It’s a little place in Hawdale.”

  “Italian?”

  “The name’s Latin, but it was all a bit fusion. Lovely, though.” She steered him to his desk and dropped two painkillers into his palm. “Keep moving or you’ll seize up.”

  He gave a filthy laugh. “Funny, that’s what Martha told me last night.”

  Sanne’s mouth dropped open. “I’m going to pretend I never heard that,” she said as he winked at her and knocked back the pills. She stuck her fingers in her ears and made a beeline for her desk in case he decided to embellish his tale. Once out of the danger zone, she raised a pre-emptive finger to cut off Nelson’s enquiry. “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

  “That bad?” Nelson looked beyond her, watching Fred adjust his chair.

  “Much worse. I may never recover.” She started her computer and logged on to the main case directory. As was customary at the weekend, it took an age for the system to process her request, and people were filing into the briefing room before the last icon appeared. Leaving everything running, she picked up her notebook. “How many are we expecting?” she asked Nelson.

  “I’m not sure. From the overtime register, SOET are coming on board, plus anyone else who wanted to work this weekend.”

  Uncertain of protocol, the uniformed officers parted to allow Sanne and Nelson through, only filling the gaps in the seating once EDSOP and the SOET detectives had found places. Eleanor entered the room five minutes early.

  “Good morning, everyone,” she said, cueing silence. “I’m going to keep this as concise as possible because we have a lot to get through and even more to be getting on with. The labs have pulled an all-nighter to analyse the samples obtained from the two barns, primarily the blood found on the mattresses, plus the blood and tissue from the barn wall. So far they’ve isolated four blood types, and all the samples have been gendered as female. DNA profiling is ongoing, and only that will give us a real idea of how many victims we could be dealing with. Obviously, we still need to confirm whether our victim from Greave was held at Nab Hey, but we are operating on that assumption.”

  She paused to change PowerPoint slides, selecting a shot of the mattresses in situ at the second barn. The sight of them, even without the accompanying smell or the darkness, was enough to make Sanne chew on her thumbnail.

  “Despite extensive searches, we have almost nothing from our perps,” Eleanor continued, once the murmurs had died down. “Two partial fingerprints were lifted from two separate condom wrappers, but neither belongs to anyone with a record, and there was no semen on the mattresses. A half-empty box of latex gloves, and the condom use, suggests that everyone who came into contact with the victims was well protected. Several fragments of tyre treads were noted in the yard, but the poor weather rendered them impossible to cast. However,” she smiled faintly, “it’s not all doom and gloom. SOCO have confirmed the make and model of the crash debris found on Old Road as a Toyota Previa minivan. Here you go.” She flicked to the relevant slide, her smile broadening at the ragged cheer that went up from her audience. “We’re going to focus on the M67 cameras, particularly where that motorway terminates just before Hawdale, and GMP are helping us out with the cameras around Manchester airport. Although the dates closest to the vic’s estimated time of death are our priority, the timeframe has necessarily been extended to account for the business at Nab Hey, so quite a few of you are going to be staring at a lot of blurry footage. Take regular breaks. I’d rather you nipped for a fag every half hour than fade out and miss something vital.”

  She stepped to the side and handed the remote to a man Sanne didn’t recognise.

  “This is DI Russell Parry from GMP’s Modern Slavery Team. While we’ll also have input from our own Sexual Offences and Exploitation Team, the MST was created purely to investigate cases of human trafficking.”

  “Thank you, DI Stanhope.” Parry gave Eleanor a formal nod, but the pause he’d left between her title and surname suggested he rarely used them. He selected his first slide and let it sit without commentary for a long moment.

  Sanne stared at the pieces of cloth and jewellery, the scrap of photograph, and the coin. Someone had brushed them almost clean and laid them out like the eccentric collection of a proud magpie. They reminded her of personal effects salvaged after some natural disaster, when everything else had been swept away and no one knew how many were lost. None of the material matched the clothing the dead girl had been wearing, but it was impossible to be sure when they had only found half her outfit.

  “We’re probably looking for a well-organised and well-connected group in conjunction with this crime,” Parry said. “Blood typing has identified at least four victims, and their ethnicity is as yet unknown. These items suggest seven, and that could be the tip of the iceberg. From victim testimony in previous cases, we know that trafficked women are lured to the UK by promises of education, employment, your basic better-life bullshit. These women are some of the most vulnerable you will ever encounter—poor, uneducated, desperate. Most don’t speak a word of English. Once across the border, the traffickers seize the victims’ passports, leaving them entirely dependent on the gang. The women are subsequently coerced into prostitution, domestic slavery, marriage, and in some cases pregnancy. The going rate for a trafficked victim is around three thousand pounds.”

  As Parry took a sip of water, Sanne scribbled the number down and underlined it, repulsed by the notion that she could buy another human’s freedom for less than two months of her wage. She quickly turned to a blank page when he began to speak again.

  “Given the various condom sizes recovered from the second barn, it would appear that multiple males visited this property. Perhaps—and I apologise for my choice of phrasing—the perps set up a ‘try before you buy’ agreement, or perhaps they were prostituting these women from the premises. Either scenario points toward an extremely bold operation and one that could have been ongoing for some time. They didn’t manage a thorough clean-up, but t
hey did supply disposable gloves and condoms, suggesting an awareness of basic forensics and perhaps a certain level of bravado, along the lines of ‘we’ve left this for you to find because we know you’ll get nothing from it.’”

  Nelson stopped writing and raised his hand. “Does that imply a gang with no priors?”

  “In all honesty, it’s difficult to say.” Parry clicked off the overhead. “These people don’t tend to come from squeaky-clean backgrounds; they’ve usually racked up a record by the time they’re well enough connected to pull off something of this magnitude. It’s more likely to mean our perps were just damn careful, while the men they were doing business with are the ones with no criminal history.”

  Sanne mulled that over, trying to imagine a regular bloke driving to an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of the Peaks to assault a woman for an agreed fee. It was prostitution amplified to a whole new degree, and it had taken place practically on her doorstep. She held her pen up. “Sir?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “How do the buyers find out about any of this? I mean, it’s not like the perps run an ad in the local paper.” She hesitated, suddenly unsure. “Is it?”

  “You’d be surprised, but no, most of the business is touted online. Forums, message boards, dating sites, social media—the usual suspects. I suspect any messages relating to Nab Hey will have been removed by now, but they were probably just a phone number and a keyword or code that wouldn’t mean anything to a layperson.”

  Eleanor returned to the front, a stack of papers in her arms. She gave them to the first available officer and indicated he should send them around the group. “Assignment sheets, forensics summary, and hard copies of a couple of case studies that DI Parry has also uploaded onto the system. If you have any further questions, please feel free to pick his brains. That’s what he’s here for.”

  “And for the coffee,” Parry added. “You have far better coffee here than we get in Manchester.”

  Sanne flipped through her handout until she found the day’s tasks. “You’re contacting the Burke family,” she told Nelson, who was still wrestling with the pages. “I’ve got local agents dealing with agricultural land sale, and then we’re both on CCTV and any follow-up house calls.”

  Nelson mimed hanging himself with his tie. “Something tells me this is going to be a very long day.”

  *

  Sanne added another sheep to the doodle she had started during her first phone call. Eight estate agents later, all of whom had placed her on hold, her sketch of Kinder Scout and its surrounding hills boasted a unicorn prancing beside a waterfall, along with a pair of winsome shepherdesses corralling an impressive variety of livestock.

  “Celine Dion,” she whispered to Nelson. “Makes a change from Ed-fucking-Sheeran.”

  “A change for the better?”

  She held the phone away from her ear as the ballad reached its crescendo. “No, just a change. Any joy with daughter number two?”

  He glanced at his notes. “Nope. She’s a new media consulting executive—whatever the heck that is—in Shoreditch, and she hasn’t been to Nab Hey or had any direct dealings with it since her dad died. Her main concern was whether our investigation would adversely affect its value.”

  Sanne drew an angry face on her sheep. “It’s good that she has her priorities straight,” she said, and then abandoned her doodle for her checklist as the agent returned to the line. “Oh, hello. Right, so you don’t keep any record of enquiries? No note of interested parties, on the off chance that something suitable comes up for them? And you can’t recall anyone asking about vacant or available farms in the last twelve months?” Her list rapidly filled with crosses as the agent equivocated. Passing client details to the police was apparently bad for business, because Sanne’s entire morning’s work had gleaned only three names, and one of those was a septuagenarian living in California. Although Nab Hey had never been on the market and consequently never sported a “for sale” sign, the gang who had utilised it must have heard about it from somewhere.

  “Okay, thank you for your time.” She hung up and rubbed a couple of her knuckles. The finger she’d once broken punching a murder suspect got stiff in damp weather, and rain was currently battering the office window.

  “Is that all of yours done?” Nelson asked.

  “All the ones on my list, at least.” Never having smoked, she awarded herself an e-mail break instead. “Did you see that Gobber Beswick has been charged with racially aggravated harassment and released on bail?”

  “No, I didn’t. What about the rest of them?”

  “Released without charge. Still, one out of four’s not bad.” She stood and stretched, ignoring Fred’s shout of “show off!” when she bent to touch her toes. Despite being shortened by an extra half hour in bed, her morning run had left a pleasant ache in her muscles and cleared the stuffiness of a late night from her head. It had also, as usual, left her famished. She rummaged through her desk drawer and found a cereal bar that was only a few weeks out of date.

  “These things don’t go off, do they?” She held it aloft for Nelson to see.

  “Naw, they’re hermetically sealed. It’ll last till the apocalypse.”

  “Good to know.” Chewing a passable concoction of oats and apricot, she opened the CCTV directory and signed for the first unallocated file: M67, Hawdale exit, February 21st. “Wish me luck, I’m going in,” she said, and pressed “play.”

  *

  Swinging on her chair, Sanne watched the Micra get into the wrong lane at the roundabout and cut up a taxi. If the footage had come with sound, brakes would have squealed and horns blared. The Micra moseyed around again at low speed and headed away from the motorway with a queue of cars behind it, none of which was a silver Toyota Previa.

  “Nelson, I’m bored.” Sanne underscored her whine by throwing a balled-up piece of tinfoil at his head. He caught it neatly and returned it with interest, skimming it off her shoulder and onto Fred’s desk.

  “Oi!” Fred yelled. “That nearly took my bleedin’ eye out.”

  “On the bright side, it’s taken your mind off your aches and pains,” Sanne called back, as the driver of a minibus tried to race an Audi and ended up embarrassing himself. She slapped her feet onto the floor. “This is useless! Shouldn’t we be out detecting or something?”

  “It’s the best lead we’ve got, San.” Nelson’s reasonable tone only aggravated her further. She knew he was right, but she wanted someone to share her frustration and slam stuff about with, not try to placate her. A soft “pfft” made her look down, and she smiled in spite of herself.

  “Perfect, thank you.” She grabbed the stress ball he had tossed in front of her and squeezed it hard, mashing its little face until the urge to smack something had passed.

  A fuzz of grey marked the end of her current tape. She closed the file and eased her grip on the ball, torn between going for a wee or making a brew. Hell, maybe she’d do both. For the past six hours and thirty-four minutes, tea and the toilet had been her only respites from the monotony, and the list of outstanding CCTV files didn’t seem to be getting any shorter.

  “Coffee?” she asked Nelson. When he held out his empty mug, she offered him the ball in exchange.

  “Better keep hold of it.” He pressed it back into her hand. “If nothing happens overnight, we’ll be at this again all day tomorrow.”

  Her groan was smothered by Fred’s excited yelp.

  “I got one!” He beckoned them over. “Just passing junction four.”

  Sanne crouched by his chair as he replayed the footage.

  “There!” He freeze-framed a shot of a Previa, its registration clear: BX07 6UF.

  She and Nelson shook their heads in unison. “Doesn’t work, mate,” she said. “Second letter has to start with a straight line.”

  “Huh?”

  On the other side of the desk, George sniggered.

  “Like an L or F or N, not a C or Z or X.” She wrote the letters in thick felt
pen as she spoke, because Fred didn’t seem to be catching on.

  He looked aghast. “Now you bloody tell me.”

  “It’s here in the briefing notes, you pillock.” George displayed the relevant page. “Right beside a photo of the partial plate.”

  “Ah, bollocks.” Fred threw his notes in the air, scattering them about his desk. The gesture dislodged the hot-water bottle from his back, and he grabbed at it. “Ouch!”

  Sanne offered him her hand and the stress ball. “Come and walk it off with me. We’ll nip downstairs and pretend we smoke.”

  “I thought I had the bastards,” he murmured, allowing her to lever him up. He wobbled when he stood, looking his age for the first time since she’d known him.

  “We’ll get them.” She added emphasis by tightening her grip on his hand, but she wished she believed what she was saying.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Meg sucked at the lolly her favourite porter had just given her and scrutinised the Majors whiteboard.

  “Let’s see. Three UTIs, two chest infections, three generally unwell, and oh, you are shitting me.” She pointed the lolly at the name in cubicle four. “I thought he was dead.”

  Liz sighed. “Sadly, rumours of his demise were greatly exaggerated.”

  “That explains why the department smells like mouldy cheese.” Worried about contaminating her lolly, Meg stuck it back in her mouth and grinned at Liz. “I was told to pick a nurse to work in Resus with me. For a small fee, the job is yours.”

  Liz checked her pocket. “I’ve got a quid and half a Curly Wurly.”

  “That’ll do.”

  At seven thirty on a Saturday night, the only available space in Resus was the shock room, its bed kept for cardiac arrests or similar dire emergencies. Meg headed for the central desk, where Asif sat writing on a chart.

  “Hey, what’ve you got for me?” she asked.