Cold Courage

by Pekka Hiltunen

  Gerrish still believed that it happened at a construction site though. The perpetrator had shovelled most of the body onto a plastic tarpaulin, which he then lifted into the boot of the Volvo.

  ‘He probably covered his tracks by spraying down the road with water or maybe by laying down more asphalt. If we could open up all the roads at those sixteen sites, somewhere we would find blood and other evidence. I’m almost sure of that. But we can’t get the permission or resources we would need for such an extensive investigation of only one murder. Not even in a case like this.’

  The police had assumed that CCTV would have recorded the dropping off of the white Volvo, since the City was one of the most closely watched parts of the country. But the police were out of luck. If the car had been a few metres closer to the bus stop, it would have been within the field of vision of a camera. As it turned out, there was no surveillance footage of the drop-off, and determining who the driver had been, based on the other images of the street, was impossible.

  Detective Gerrish seemed to have warmed to her, so Lia quickly continued her questioning.

  ‘And the nationality? How did you decide that?’

  ‘Luck,’ Gerrish said.

  Nothing about the body or the car had revealed her identity. As it turned out though, the woman had been in relatively good health. In the blood tests, the tissues, the bones and the hair there were no indications of disease or long-term drug use. The killer had chosen what would be left of the woman. Nothing identifiable, just scraps of clothing and such like, and one commonplace gold earring.

  Finally the results from the dental analysis had come in. The forensic dentist had reported that the woman had several fillings. Some of them contained a material which, according to the international registries, was only produced in the Soviet Union and only in the early 1980s. The material had fallen out of use because of high production costs, but the final batches had been sold to Latvia, where its use continued into the 1990s.

  Of the fillings in the woman’s mouth, some had been done around that time. The forensic dentist could not remember any comparable case in which the use of the dental filling material of a body’s teeth could be dated so exactly. It was a result of the rarity of the material, the mothballing of the factory that made it and the recorded sale of the remaining stores.

  ‘How do you know the woman didn’t just happen to get that filling material by chance? What if she was a traveller who visited Latvia and had a dental emergency?’

  ‘Good question,’ Gerrish said.

  Of course they had studied all the teeth they found, discovering other filling materials used in Latvia at various times. DNA analysis also supported the result: current analytic techniques were able to narrow down possible areas of origin, and the woman’s DNA pointed to the Baltic States.

  ‘Do you have any suspicions about the perpetrator? Have you done some sort of analysis of him?’ Lia asked.

  Gerrish glanced at Lia pointedly, and she realised she had gone too far.

  ‘Of course we’ve profiled him, but I can’t talk about that.’

  Lia saw that her time was up, and Gerrish’s willingness to help was waning.

  ‘Doesn’t the nationality help move you forward? Latvia is a small country,’ she said.

  ‘No missing person reports have been in filed anywhere in Britain for a Latvian woman of that age. We’ve contacted the authorities in Riga, but the woman doesn’t match anyone missing there either.’

  The British immigration database contained relatively few Latvian women in their forties, and the police had begun going down the list. But that was a slow process.

  ‘Most likely she was an unregistered immigrant, and there are certainly more of those than legal ones. But by definition we don’t have any information about them. Most of them are prostitutes.’

  The woman had been wearing a considerable amount of make-up, Gerrish mentioned. The make-up itself was no help in establishing an ID, because the brands were standard mass-market ones.

  ‘The amount of make-up fits the Latvian background. And of course it also lines up with the guess that she may have been a prostitute.’

  Gerrish snapped out of his thoughts and glanced at his watch. ‘Now you’ve got all you’re going to get. S-3.’

  Lia looked at him questioningly.

  ‘S-3?’

  ‘Security 3,’ Gerrish said.

  They categorised information on a sliding scale of secrecy. S-5 was what they told anyone.

  ‘S-3 is what I tell trustworthy reporters. Everything I’ve told you is something I can tell the news media at this stage. But we only talk about things at this level with serious journalists we collaborate with on a regular basis. And you can imagine why none of them have been coming around asking lately. If we can’t solve the crime, they aren’t interested.’

  ‘And the car?’ Lia said, trying to keep the conversation going.

  ‘Leads nowhere,’ Gerrish said impatiently.

  Stolen in Kensington the night preceding the discovery of the body, the car had only confirmed that the act was premeditated. It bore no fingerprints included in the police database. The owner, a lady approaching seventy, was so shocked about the use of her car in committing the crime that she had been forced to move in with her daughter for the time being. Thieves stole dozens of cars in London each day, some of which they used in committing other crimes, so the stolen car suggested the involvement of organised crime, but this was not conclusive by any means.

  Standing, Lia thanked DCI Gerrish for the information and his time. On a side table, she noticed three transparent, tightly sealed plastic bags in amongst the stacks of papers. In them were dirty pieces of paper and shreds of fabric, as well as some small bits of metal.

  ‘Are those her things?’ Lia asked.

  Hesitating for a moment first, Gerrish rose from his chair and moved the plastic bags so Lia could see them better.

  ‘This is everything that was left of her besides the body,’ he said. ‘These are strictly S-2. But you’ve heard most of it, so I imagine it’s all the same if you see these.’

  Lia didn’t dare to touch the bags, but stooped to get a closer look at the contents. In the bags she saw shreds of clothing and a handkerchief, all of which were stained dark with blood. There was a small key, a heart-shaped necklace pendant and some sort of plastic bits. After a moment, Lia realised that the fragments of plastic were parts of a comb. Among them were some teeth and faux mother-of-pearl from the handle, which featured a simple, white-flowered pattern. Daisies, Lia guessed.

  ‘The key hasn’t been any help identifying her. Nor has any of the rest of it. The crazy thing is we can’t even be sure this stuff belonged to the woman. Maybe the perpetrator just shovelled a key off the street that somebody else had dropped,’ Gerrish said.

  ‘What sorts of things get stamped S-1?’ Lia asked as she left.

  ‘That I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Naturally, information or suspicions about who killed her. And the body, of course?’

  Gerrish smiled dryly.

  ‘Do you have much S-1 about this case?’ Lia asked.

  ‘What S-1?’

  16

  Lia had learnt too much from DCI Gerrish to review it all over the phone with Mari. She had to wait until the end of the day when she could get to the Studio in person.

  Mari listened carefully, asking questions from time to time. Had Gerrish said what colour nail varnish the woman wore? Had he commented on how expensive the make-up was?

  ‘No, I didn’t think to ask,’ Lia said.

  ‘If he didn’t mention anything, then it probably wasn’t significant. They do good work. They get more information out of tiny details than you might think. And it’s great that he told you all that.’

  ‘I was a little surprised. I could have been some crazy lady who was just going to put it all on her blog.’

  ‘Well, for whatever reason he decided to make an exception for you. They develop a good feel fo
r human nature, and he seems to have put you in the same category as a serious reporter.’

  The amount of time that had passed since the murder had probably also influenced his decision, Mari guessed.

  ‘Had you gone in with your questions in May, they would have ignored you. But now you made them curious: why would someone come round asking about this body after so many months? Right now Gerrish is searching their databases to see what your name brings up.’

  ‘Fortunately he won’t find anything in particular. At least I hope not.’

  Now that Lia had heard as-yet unpublished details about the case, she took the Holborn Circus murder even more personally. In a strange way she felt as though she were party to it.

  ‘Have you thought of anything we could do?’ she asked.

  ‘The police are investigating all Latvian women registered in the country, so of course that leaves the unregistered immigrants,’ Mari said. ‘But you can imagine what a nightmare that is. Women sneaking or being brought secretly into the country, most of them prostitutes. London must have the most, but surely they live in other cities as well. I would guess that most of them live in hiding, especially if they work for brothels or pimps.’

  ‘Sounds pretty impossible.’

  The woman was likely to have lived in the Greater London area, Mari suggested. That was only an assumption, but they had to start somewhere. How could they trace a Latvian woman living below the radar? By doing the things that she had done.

  ‘But a Latvian living in England wouldn’t necessarily do anything specifically linked to her homeland. I don’t think I do anything specifically Finnish here,’ Lia said.

  ‘This is all conjecture,’ Mari replied. ‘But it may be that Latvian culture is more important to them here than Finnishness is to you.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Free Latvia was a young country. In the tiny Baltic States, culture had been the glue that held the nations together through hundreds of years of oppression. A Latvian living in London might very well try to find ways to recreate her homeland, if only for a moment, in the foods she ate or the celebrations she attended.

  ‘Perhaps she missed the flavours of home or used to go out to places where other Balts or even Russians gather.’

  That sounded logical, Lia agreed.

  ‘If she was here working illegally, she probably didn’t go to any of the Slavic restaurants in London, since they’re so expensive,’ Mari continued. ‘But she might have visited the stores that sell Eastern European food. Or the bars where Eastern European prostitutes work or Balts spend their free time.’

  ‘Should we go looking for Latvian prostitutes?’

  ‘No, we shouldn’t,’ Mari said. ‘This is your thing, and if you want to move forward with it, you can do it on your own. I have to concentrate on Arthur Fried.’

  Lia fell silent, thinking.

  ‘So what I need to find out is where there are food shops and nightclubs like that.’

  ‘Well, actually, I think Maggie could do that much more quickly,’ Mari said.

  Lia considered whether to take offence – she did work at a magazine, the whole point of which was gathering information – but then decided she could not afford to indulge her vanity.

  ‘You continue with the Arthur Fried news stories. You’re definitely the best person for that. I think there’s still hope that might turn something up,’ Mari said.

  She’s moving me like a pawn on a chessboard. And I actually like it.

  The rest of the night Lia spent at Level reading what felt like an endless stream of articles about Arthur Fried.

  From midnight onwards, reading required serious effort. Her eyes began to ache. Because her stomach could no longer handle it, she changed from drinking coffee to tea and eventually to just water. Her brain came up with three categories into which she placed the articles she read: Routine, Pointless and Absurd. Routine stories just reported events. Pointless stories gave Lia nothing. In the Absurd stories, the reporter allowed Fried and his party to sound off without bothering to check the facts.

  Lia was reading a short piece in a local paper called the Lincolnshire Echo. She hadn’t been able to find any connection to Fried in the story, and had begun to think that it had probably popped up in her archive search by mistake. So, Pointless.

  But something made her return to it. ‘Wave of bankruptcy sweeps away six businesses,’ the headline proclaimed. After reading for a moment, Lia realised why her search had hit this article: Fried was the founder of two of the companies in question. Lia had included the names of his businesses in her list of search terms, even though Fried had founded them long ago.

  Gordion Ltd and Fellowship Ltd had been located in Lincoln. According to the paper, the Lincolnshire Chamber of Commerce had noted with concern that liquidations of small and medium-sized businesses had been on the increase, the evidence being the six companies mentioned in the article.

  Information on the bankruptcies had not appeared in any of the other articles about Arthur Fried. As a party leader, Fried was obliged by law to disclose publicly his financial connections, and Gordion and Fellowship Ltd appeared in those reports year after year.

  Lia dug out the pile of papers she had received from Mari containing all the basic information they had collected about Fried. They were still there: as recently as the previous year, Fried had declared his ownership of both companies.

  Lia didn’t know what the bankruptcy notice in the Lincolnshire Echo meant in practice. Obviously the bankruptcies meant some sort of legal complications she did not understand, and she was too tired to sort it out that night. But on the Tube on her way home, the feeling came to Lia that a small tear in the carefully woven fabric of the Arthur Fried Story had just formed before her eyes.

  Is this how Mari feels when she’s researching her jobs? As if information gives her a hold over a person?

  First thing in the morning, Lia told Mari over the phone about her discovery.

  ‘Really? Both went out of business?’

  How could that be possible? Mari wondered. She had read the information Fried gave to Companies House, and no mention existed there about any bankruptcies or even suspension of the companies’ activities. Both businesses still existed online: they had websites, clients, continuity.

  Lia had to concentrate on her own daytime work, but Mari was more than keen to continue digging herself.

  ‘Thank you, Lia,’ she said.

  That evening they met at the Studio. Mari’s face indicated that it had been a good day.

  ‘Your find is a real bombshell,’ she said.

  From the amount of printed pages scattered on the desk, Lia saw that Mari had found plenty of information on the topic. Mari and Rico had been working on it all day.

  ‘Sit down and have some wine,’ Mari said and then began her account of events.

  Years earlier, Arthur Fried had founded two businesses, Gordion Ltd and Fellowship Ltd. According to the official register, Gordion’s lines of business were property sales and communications and Fellowship’s were business consulting, travel services and logistics.

  ‘Excellent choices. That basically covers everything under the sun,’ Mari said.

  The listed places of business were both Lincoln, and a later entry in the records disclosed a new injection of equity capital and added Anna Belle Fried as a principal shareholder.

  ‘That was around the time they got married.’

  The county employment register revealed that Gordion Ltd listed sixteen employees and Fellowship Ltd nine. On this basis, they had also received county business subsidies. During the early years, the companies had delivered to the authorities annual reports and accounts which showed the firms were successful. In one year, Gordion had even made a profit of some quarter of a million pounds.

  ‘But then, as you discovered in the Lincolnshire Echo, they notified the county authorities that the companies were entering bankruptcy. Just like that.’

  No one had ever repor
ted the bankruptcies to Companies House. And Fried had had an important reason for that: when he reported in Lincoln that the businesses had failed, he didn’t need to return his business subsidies or pay some of the council tax the companies owed. Businesses experiencing insolvency were exempt unless the failure was deemed the result of dishonesty or negligence.

  ‘One year later the story picks up again.’

  Lia heard from Mari’s tone that she was enjoying the narrative and the work of uncovering it.

  Gordion Ltd and Fellowship Ltd had moved to London. This came from the Greater London official register whom the companies had needed to notify about their employees and activities.

  ‘They were essentially the same firms. They just had some new staff and new offices.’

  ‘So they never actually stopped doing business,’ Lia said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘How can that happen? That’s supposed to be impossible.’

  ‘We don’t know all the details yet, but we don’t have to. We only have to know that he did it and it was illegal. The police can sort out the rest.’

  Mari had a hunch about how Fried had made it work. Fried had probably fooled the Lincoln officials by simply claiming that he had filed all the proper declarations. Perhaps he paid someone off so fewer questions would be asked. Of course the national registers were supposed to receive information directly from the counties, but the bankruptcy process was often so complicated that years could go by before information travelled from one office to another, and sometimes they never passed it along at all. Since the businesses claimed to be entering liquidation voluntarily and there was no angry mob of creditors clamouring for payment, there would have been no need for an official liquidator to review the books. Apparently no media outlet beyond the Lincolnshire Echo had ever publicised the bankruptcies.

  ‘And because the article didn’t mention that they were Fried’s businesses, he has never been publicly connected to their problems.’