The girl spoke again, the urgency in her voice increasing.
‘A daughter. She’s in an orphanage in Tirana. She wants to go and find her.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ breathed Knox, looking at the kid in front of them. ‘Now I’ve heard it all.’
Walking into the interview suite with PC Jamilla Khatoon, Mariner recognised Katarina as the girl he had escorted from the top floor of the house on Foundry Road. He’d never have believed she was nineteen but, in the safety of the police station, she seemed to have lost a little of the timidity. She clasped a beaker of tea between cupped hands. The room made an attempt at cosy, with comfortable chairs and soft furnishings, along with the audio and video recording equipment of a standard interview room, but she looked far from at home.
‘You speak English,’ Mariner said.
Katarina nodded.
‘I just want to ask you some questions. If there’s anything you don’t understand or anything you don’t want to talk about, then you can tell me. Okay?’
She nodded again, and Mariner hoped for the sake of the recording equipment that she would eventually find her voice.
‘How did you come to England, to Birmingham?’
Katarina took a sip from the cup and cleared her throat. ‘I work as a waitress in a bar in Tirana where my family is. A man heard me talk in English to some American customers.’ She spoke in a listless monotone, concentrating hard on the words. ‘He says that my English is very good, that he can get me a job as a translator and to teach our language in England. He says there’s a big want for good translators and that I look nice and he can get me a good job in Brussels or in London, for good money. He says he work for the government.’
‘Doing what?’
She lifted her shoulders. ‘I don’t know. I tell him I have no money, but he said I can travel in his car and he will arrange the papers and the travel documents and I can pay him back when I have a job. He tells me about the life I can have, with my own apartment and my own car. He says I must think about it and he will come back to the bar in a few days.’
‘Did he tell you his name?’
‘I only know “Petya”. I talk about it with my family and my father and he think it will be a great chance for me to have a good job. When Petya comes back to the restaurant I say I will go. I have to meet him at a place in the city early in the morning, five o’clock. I am surprised because he has good clothes but his car is old and dirty. But I think it’s okay because there are two girls also waiting.’
‘Did you know these other girls?’
‘No. They are going to get a job with rich families, to look after the children. Petya take our passports for making them safe. He drive us to the border and a hotel where he says we will stay tonight. Two more men came and then Petya says that he must go back to Tirana on important government business and his friends will take us on the rest of the way to London.’ She stopped for a moment and sipped her tea.
‘You’re doing really well,’ Mariner said, sensing that the worst was to come.
Katarina took a deep breath. ‘That night one of the men come in to my room and make me have sex with him. I don’t want it and I tried to fight him but he’s very strong. Afterwards he lock the door. We stay in the hotel maybe three days, with the door locked. Sometimes a man comes, brings a little bit of food, some water, sometimes have sex or hit me.’ Her voice had dropped to a whisper.
‘Petya’s friends?’
She nodded.
Mariner had heard of the process before, called ‘seasoning’, in other words, beating and raping the resistance out of the girls. He hated making her relive this, but they needed the evidence. ‘Do you want to stop?’ he asked. ‘We can take a break?’
She shook her head but sipped again from her tea. Mariner couldn’t help but notice the tremor in her hand.
‘I know this is hard,’ he said, ‘but can you describe any of the men?’
‘They have black hair.’
‘All of them?’
‘Yes. But one of them have very short.’
‘Like my hair?’
She looked briefly then away. ‘More short, and he tall man, thin man.’ She measured out tall and thin with her hands. ‘He don’t have sex with me, but he bring food.’
‘Were the other men tall, too?’
‘Not so much.’
‘They were short?’
‘A little bit, and one is a bit fat and one more bit fat.’ She gestured a generous gut. ‘They don’t shave and I think they don’t wash very much. They smell like beer.’ She grimaced with distaste, then a light sparked behind her eyes as she remembered something else. ‘The fat man he have a picture.’ She stroked her skinny forearm.
‘A tattoo?’ Mariner confirmed. ‘A picture on his arm?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you remember what the picture was?’ But she didn’t.
‘Sometimes I ask them about the job as translator but they laugh at me. They say I have a different job now. They have paid good money for me and I will work for them to pay it back.’ She stopped abruptly. ‘I have to pee now.’
‘Of course.’ They took a short break, during which Mariner went and stood outside in the fresh breeze, perhaps hoping that it might cleanse him.
Five minutes later they were back in the interview room. ‘You said you were at the hotel for three days,’ Mariner prompted gently. ‘What happened then?’
‘They get me up very early and we leave the hotel. It’s dark. We drive in the car again to Paris. We go to another hotel. We stay, I don’t know, two, maybe three weeks and many men come to have sex every night. They give us money. The fat man take it for his money. Then in the morning another man come, tall man. We go on the train to London then drive in a car to Birmingham and we come to the house where you find me.’
‘The other girls were with you?’
She shook her head. ‘They stay in Paris. I don’t know what happens to them.’
She spoke numbly, devoid of emotion, but the air in the room was thick with suppressed anger as Mariner and Jamilla Khatoon listened.
‘And since you came to Birmingham?’
She shrugged. ‘I do my job. I stay in the same house and the door is lock on my room except when I can go to the bathroom, or get food or when the men come.’
‘How many clients?’
She sighed.
‘Maybe fifteen, twenty each day.’ She was beyond caring.
‘And they pay you?’
‘Stanislav take the money to pay my debts. I can’t talk to the men and I must pretend I can’t speak English.’
Mariner placed two photographs on the table. ‘This is Stanislav?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the other man?’
She shook her head.
‘Do you know any of these?’ Mariner placed the other photographs in front of her.
On the third one, a swarthy man with slicked back hair, her eyes widened in surprise.
‘You know him?’
‘This is Petya.’
‘He’s the man who offered you work?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well done, Katarina.’ Crunch time. ‘Katarina, we want to put Stanislav and Petya and other men like them in prison, so that they can’t do to any other girls what they have done to you. But to do that we need someone to tell the courts what they have done. Can you do that for us? Can you tell the court what you have told us?’
‘I don’t know. I think they will be very.’
‘We can look after you. And if you tell your story, they’ll be put in prison for a very long time and won’t be able to hurt you. We really need this, Katarina. You’re a good, strong witness.’ They’d talk about defence cross-examinations later, much later, when she was physically stronger and would be more resilient.
‘Maybe. I try.’
‘Thank you.’
By four o’clock all the girls had been extensively interviewed, and they could do no more. It had been a harrowing da
y. Mariner should have felt elated, but instead he felt depressed, and sensed that others were feeling the same way. Tony Knox summed up the mood. ‘The girl we talked to is fourteen,’ he said, in disgust.
‘That’s only a year older than our Molly,’ said Glover.
‘And she’s been working here for about a year, twenty blokes a day, protected and unprotected. She’s a mess physically and psychologically.’ Knox looked emotionally drained.
‘Makes you feel guilty to be going home to your family,’ said Glover.
But Mariner was satisfied that they had a good case to make. Of the eight, Katarina was going to make the most reliable witness. Even throughout the day she seemed to have grown in strength, her shoulders had loosened a little, the eye contact becoming more frequent. The other girls seemed to look up to her.
‘What will happen to them?’ he asked Lorelei, as he watched them piling into the minibus to go to the hostel.
‘Tonight?’
‘Long term.’
‘After you’ve finished with them most of them will be sent to an immigration centre, and then back home.’
‘Well that’s something.’
‘Is it?’
Mariner should have asked her what she meant, but he didn’t want to hear the answer.
Instead he retreated to his office to write up his notes. He wanted to leave the case tidy for DCI Sharp in his absence, but he found it impossible to concentrate. Images conjured up by Katarina’s account of her ordeal kept creeping into his head. She was just a kid, some of the other girls even younger. It was far too much for them to have gone through in their young lives and he couldn’t begin to imagine the impact of their experiences. He felt tainted by it. Life as a country copper had to be preferable to this. When his phone rang he was glad of the distraction. It was DCI Sharp. ‘Can you spare a few minutes, Tom?’
Mariner crossed the outer office and knocked on the gaffer’s door. Going in, he recognised her visitor from the back of his head, a thinning crown of dark hair flecked with white flakes of dandruff. Councillor Derek Cahill was a regular crusader for the Daily Mail, an oily little man who saw the current climate of interagency cooperation as an opportunity to give the police as much grief as possible about what he called the ‘moral decline’ of the city. Since DCI Sharp had been appointed these drop-in meetings had become a regular occurrence, and it crossed Mariner’s mind, not for the first time, that Cahill had a crush on the gaffer. After all, she was a stunningly attractive woman.
‘You know DI Mariner?’ Sharp asked Cahill as the two men came face to face.
Cahill managed a thin smile. ‘We’ve met before.’
‘The councillor came in to express his concern at the rise of prostitution in our area,’ Sharp said, smoothly. ‘I thought it might reassure him to know about the effectiveness of operation Ocean Blue today, and since you were on the ground when it happened, I thought you could help us out, Tom.’
‘Of course, ma’am.’ Mariner turned to Cahill. ‘We’re very aware of this as a growing problem, Councillor. Which is why, at dawn today, we raided a number of premises in the city suspected to be brothels. We brought in a number of girls and not nearly enough papers for each of them. Most of them are from various places in Eastern Europe. Girls without identities. I don’t have the official figures yet of course, those arrested are still being processed, but I can tell you that in the region of fifty women were brought in from across the city.’ In truth Mariner had no idea how many it was, though he was pretty sure that fifty was a generous over-estimate. But he was doing what DCI Sharp had called him in to do - get this irritating little man out of her office.
‘Yes, well it’s a start,’ Cahill conceded. ‘Though we all know that in a few weeks those girls will have simply been replaced by more.’
‘Oh, we don’t kid ourselves,’ Mariner agreed. ‘We might have broken this wave but we’re a long way off stemming the tide.’ We’ll continue to be vigilant.’
‘I’m glad to hear that you’re not being complacent.’ Cahill was stymied. He’d chosen the wrong day to come in with his usual rant about how little was being done.
‘You can depend on it,’ said Mariner trying not to smirk. He looked up at DCI Sharp, engaged in a similar struggle. ‘Is that all, ma’am?’
‘Thank you for your input, Inspector.’
‘Glad to be of help.’
Minutes later, Mariner watched from his desk as Sharp strode across the main office seeing Cahill out of the building, the little weasel almost having to break into a trot to keep up with her. The DCI cut an imposing figure and today, as always, was impeccably dressed. Mariner’s phone rang again.
Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck winked down at her from the windows as Emma O’Brien walked across the car park to the entrance of the double fronted Victorian villa, glowing with the prospect of her baby daughter’s smile only moments away. She felt exhausted, the discipline of remaining mentally focused for a whole day an unfamiliar one. She’d got through the lecture, that was the most she could say, and if she learned nothing else from today, she had certainly confirmed what she’d always known deep down; that in no way was she ready to consider going back to regular work yet.
Peter was going to be disappointed. With two households to support he was stretched about as far as he could be, so they could really use another income. Emma had an inkling that he was hoping that today might have given her an appetite for what she was missing. But in fact it had done quite the reverse. What was the point of having a baby if Emma wasn’t going to spend time with her? And right now, that was what she wanted more than anything else in the world. Even she had been unprepared for what a wrench it had been, to have to leave Jessica today. The arrangement had been fine. The crèche had been convenient and the staff seemed competent and kind. It just wouldn’t happen again, not for a very long time.
And now with the week over, she and Peter had nothing planned for the next two days except spending quality time together as a family. She pressed the buzzer and the nursery intercom crackled, as a tinny voice asked her for identification. ‘Jessica Klinnemann’s mummy,’ she said.
A pause. ‘Could you repeat that please?’
‘Jessica Klinnemann’s mummy,’ Emma yelled into the tiny speaker as the traffic on the busy road behind her roared by. It had been the same frustrating routine first thing this morning too.
‘Push the door,’ instructed the voice, at last. Emma pushed open the heavy spring-hinged door and a warm smell of cooked vegetables hit her nostrils as she walked into a bright yellow vestibule, the thigh-high coat hooks crowded with tiny jackets and coats slung over with Postman Pat and Bob the Builder bags. A notice board above displayed photographs of a dozen young women.
The office off to her left was empty and there was no one else around, so Emma walked across the hallway to the room where she’d dropped off her daughter five hours earlier. She levered down the high door handle and went in. She was confronted by a war zone. Two infants lay in bouncing chairs and both were grizzling, while a tape of nursery rhymes provided a tuneful counterpoint. The girl who had been stooping over one of the babies turned, her freckled face flushed and damp with perspiration, fine red hair escaping from her pony tail and harassment written all over her face. She managed a brief smile. ‘Hi.’
‘Hi, I’m Jessica’s mum,’ she said to the girl. ‘How’s she been?’
The girl stared at her as if she’d just requested half a pound of sausages. ‘You’re Jessica’s mummy?’ she said, uncertainly.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ Scanning the row of crying babies Emma noticed that Jessica wasn’t among them. ‘Is she being changed?’
As she spoke, a second young woman appeared from the bathroom carrying a dark-eyed baby on her hip. The two young women exchanged a look, momentarily disconcerted and a rumble of fear began deep inside Emma O’Brien.
‘None of these is Jessica,’ she said, the feeling gaining in power and rising up through her chest. ‘Where is
she?’
The girl frowned, not comprehending. ‘I don’t understand. The other babies have gone. These are the only children left.’
The rumble welled and broke to the surface and in an uncontrollable reflex reaction, Emma O’Brien let rip a terrible scream.
Chapter Two
Mariner picked up his ringing phone.
‘Hi, again.’
Mariner smiled. ‘Hello.’ It was the third time Anna had called inside the last half an hour. The attention to detail this week in Herefordshire was getting was worthy of a military campaign.
‘Sorry. I thought we should take something smart to wear in the evening. Shall I pack your blue striped shirt?’
Did he own a blue striped shirt? ‘All right. Whatever you think.’
‘And you’re sure you won’t be late? It would be nice to get there in time to have a relaxed—’
‘I’m just about to leave,’ he reassured her. She’d needed a lot of that recently, understandably he supposed. At least planning this holiday had given her something else to focus on. He was looking forward to it, sort of. They certainly needed the break, what with the kind of hours Mariner had been working and the hassle of getting their houses on the market, and fielding the stream of people looking round. Disappointing though that putting his own house up for sale hadn’t yielded the same positive outcome as Anna’s.
As Mariner replaced the receiver, DCI Sharp put her head round the door, briefcase in hand and coat slung over her arm. ‘Thanks for earlier.’ She was referring to Councillor Cahill. ‘It should keep him off our backs for a couple of weeks.’
‘My pleasure, ma’am. Good to give him one less excuse for complaining about us. He’s a nasty piece of work.’
‘So I understand. I’ve never had the full story on him. You must tell me sometime.’ She glanced over Mariner’s tidy desk. ‘How did the interviews go?’
Mariner summarised the day’s events. ‘Katarina in particular looks like a solid witness.’
‘That’s a great result. You’re on a week’s leave now, aren’t you?’
Blood Money Page 2