by Alex Gray
Lorimer crept upstairs, unwilling to waken Maggie who was no doubt asleep, worn out with waiting for him to come home, but his place was mostly at HQ for now, coordinating the various strands of this operation.
He slipped into the upstairs lounge, a bright and airy room that overlooked the garden. There was much work to be done now, messages to write, calls to make and this email to answer.
It would be a good while before he saw his bed tonight, he thought with another sigh.
Molly was certain that it was night. Her body clock appeared to demand that she close her eyes and settle back against the high-backed chair but the strain on her arms made it too painful for sleep and she needed to stay awake in case an opportunity to escape presented itself.
The Slovakian girl was curled against the far wall, her jacket, a dark shape folded beneath her head. Molly’s vision seemed to be stronger now, her eyes adjusting to the blackness. Whatever drug she had been given had worn off and she felt more alert than she had been hours before.
The shape of the chair at her back was something that had begun to command her attention. She could feel the curve against her neck, the twin knobs on either side of her head, and knew from the way her wrists were tied that she was not actually secured to the wooden struts. If she leaned forward far enough it might be possible to raise her arms as high as she could and stand up, pulling herself free of the chair, though the danger of falling over and crashing down on the stone floor was a distinct possibility.
The lack of light actually helped in an odd way, Molly realised, as her sense of touch appeared to be heightened. She closed her eyes and felt the chair against her shoulders then pressed harder, learning the shape with her body.
She could do it.
The pain in her wrists and shoulder muscles almost made her cry out as she bent her elbows and began to ease her weight forwards.
It was important to keep her balance, not to let the chair tip over as she began to raise her wrists upwards, the plastic tags cutting deeper into her broken and bloody skin.
Molly felt her arms like wings of pain as she raised them higher and higher behind her back. Then, the world seemed to tilt and she gasped, fearing that she was about to fall.
With a sob she sat down once again.
She heard a faint moan from the girl on the floor, then, as though that tiny sound had given her some additional strength, she heaved her arms backwards as far as they would go. Now, if she could just stand up . . .
The chair teetered then fell backwards and Molly sprawled away from it onto the floor, hitting her head as she landed.
‘What . . . ?’ Juliana gave a cry.
‘Shh!’ Molly told her. ‘Stay still. Don’t move.’
The room was silent as Molly listened, darkness all around. Good. Nobody had heard that noise. There were no running feet coming to investigate.
She needed to have her hands in front of her again. Molly thought hard, visualising the contortions of pulling her tied wrists under her bottom and looping them over her feet. But, could she do it?
She sat upright, wriggling her backside, feeling the space between her wrists where the plastic ties had been fastened. If she could just push herself through that gap, make it bigger somehow? Her clothes were an extra layer that would impede the struggle to achieve this objective, Molly realised. There was only one thing for it.
‘Juliana,’ she whispered. ‘Come over here, I need your help,’ she hissed.
‘What can I do, Sasha?’
‘Pull off my trousers,’ Molly told her. ‘I’m going to try and get my hands free.’
There was a moment’s silence as the girl thought about this command.
Then, ‘I see . . . ’ Juliana whispered back and knelt to do as the older girl had asked.
Molly felt the chill of the stone floor against her panties as she wiggled free of the trousers; one less impediment to releasing her arms. Calling up a blessing for the genes that had given her a slender shape, she began to pull her wrists towards her hips, biting her lips to stop screaming as the plastic bit deeper into her flesh.
Her arms ached as she pulled and pulled. Then with one final thrust, she felt the backs of her legs. Panting to make her muscles relax, she rolled onto her back, pointed her toes and gave one last heave.
Something deep within the woman’s shoulders seemed to tear and she slipped sideways, unable to stifle the moan of pain.
‘Sasha, Sasha, are you all right?’
Molly felt the girl’s breath on her cheek as she lay beside her, hands now nestled on her lap.
‘I’m okay,’ she whispered. ‘But my shot-putting days are probably over,’ she joked.
‘Here, put them on again. It is cold,’ Juliana said, squatting at Molly’s feet, the trousers in her hands.
She let the girl ease her into the trousers, grateful for her help, her own arms trembling with pain and fatigue. Then, sitting side by side, Molly felt the soft touch of the girl’s fingers on her upper arms and closed her eyes as her muscles responded to the light massage. She would need some rest, Molly knew, but soon the next stage of her plan must be put into action. She ran her tongue across her teeth, feeling the healthy gums. In a few hours they would be bleeding and swollen, in a punishing effort to bite through the hard plastic. Yet she could see no other way to free them.
‘Who are you, Max?’ Solly murmured into his bushy beard. It was a puzzle that he wanted to solve, a puzzle with very few clues. Yet there were perhaps sufficient to make some progress. Now that they knew the man who sold women for sex was a British national, he could wander down certain pathways in his mind, seeking this elusive figure. Max was multilingual too. Did that imply a peripatetic lifestyle? Had he worked overseas? Been a languages graduate, perhaps? Or, and here, Solly stroked his chin thoughtfully, had he been in the forces? Like Michael Raynor? The link between Raynor and Guilford was a difficult one. But what if Guilford had more to do with this human trafficking than he was letting on? What if his wife’s sudden death had absolutely nothing to do with any nefarious business that had used the vehicles he hired?
The psychologist sat at the bay window in the darkness, oblivious to the city twinkling below him. Raynor had attacked Guilford, evidently meaning to kill him. Then he had calmly talked to Lorimer and walked out of the prison, never to be seen there again. Why? A man that had been commended for bravery had gone on to the prison service but then had brutally attacked an inmate.
Where had that happened? Solly lifted the notes on his lap and peered at the pages. One foot reached out and stepped on the light switch of the standard lamp, a halo of brightness enclosing him where he sat. Shuffling through the file, he came at last to the lines he had almost forgotten. Ah, he thought, nodding sagely. So was that where it all began? Too much of a coincidence, surely, to pull a man out of a burning building in the very village where Pavol Ferenc and his family had lived for generations. And the man? Well, a little more detective work was necessary to establish his identity. But, if Solomon Brightman’s deductions were correct, then that may well have been a fellow soldier, an officer perhaps, with a facility for languages. And who could tell what rewards had been promised as a result of saving that man’s life?
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
‘Max Warnock,’ Lorimer told the assembled team. ‘Major Warnock by the time he quit the army. Medical discharge after the accident in Slovakia.’
‘Do we have a police record for him?’ one of the DIs asked.
‘Nothing. Clean as a whistle. Which is a pity as something on file would have helped to identify him. Nevertheless, we now have this photograph.’ Lorimer turned to the screen behind him and flicked a switch on the overhead projector.
The image of a young man appeared, his thin face turned slightly at an angle to the camera, shadows cast against his temples, the sphenoid bone flat against his head as though his face had been chiselled out of stone. His eyes were staring at the camera, unsmiling, full lips slightly parted as though he wa
nted to speak.
‘This is Max Warnock as he was when he joined the army,’ Lorimer told them. ‘We have obtained a few pictures from the hospital where he was initially treated after the fire but there are no up-to-date images either for his British passport or driver’s licence.’ He tapped the edge of the screen. ‘This is the one he has used ever since the accident.’
‘What can you tell us about that?’ Solly asked from the back of the room. Several heads turned towards the psychologist as he waited patiently for Lorimer to proceed.
‘Happened in a brothel,’ Lorimer told him. ‘Several of the men had been in the habit of frequenting it and Warnock was one of them. We have no information about how the fire began or who else was involved, just the army’s own records of the incident and the victim’s medical notes.’
‘Was he taken back to the UK?’ someone asked.
‘Not initially. He was kept in a burns ward for several months then sent back home. Supposedly for plastic surgery,’ Lorimer said with a meaningful look at the men and women seated around the table.
‘So we have no idea what he really looks like now?’
The detective superintendent nodded his head. ‘Exactly. Max Warnock could look like any burns victim, depending on the level of treatment he had when he left Slovakia. And our intelligence suggests that he may have travelled to the US for facial reconstruction. His passport records show several lengthy spells across the pond.’
‘What made him turn into a people trafficker?’ one female DS asked aloud.
‘Whatever happened back in Slovakia changed not only Max Warnock’s appearance,’ Lorimer suggested, ‘but his outlook on life. Would you agree, Professor Brightman?’
Solly cleared his throat before he began. ‘I would like to know a lot more about the man he was before,’ he said. ‘But I do agree that something as traumatic as that life-changing event may well have affected his outlook. And,’ he added, ‘his behaviour.’
What Solly did not add was the thought that creating brothels in his own country and bringing young women and girls from the very place that had scarred him so badly might be a twisted form of revenge. And, if he could begin to build up a picture of this man’s personality, perhaps he might find a vulnerable area in his present life that could lead to his whereabouts.
‘We have had this breakthrough thanks to the vigilance of one of the detective constables from CID,’ Lorimer explained. ‘Some of you will remember DC Kirsty Wilson?’ He looked around, gratified to see several heads nodding.
‘She found that Michael Raynor and a man answering Warnock’s description had been occasional visitors to the Guilford home.’
A murmur broke out as the members of the team reacted to this news.
‘What is more interesting is that Raynor and Warnock came to see Dorothy Guilford. The cleaning woman who has known the family for decades recalls them being particular favourites of the dead woman,’ Lorimer continued.
‘That might explain Raynor’s attack on Peter Guilford,’ DCI Cameron chipped in.
‘Could be. But we have to find out more about Warnock,’ Lorimer insisted. ‘Mrs Daly has given a statement to the effect that they both spoke with English accents. But intelligence tells us Warnock was born in Scotland. We need more, and we need it fast. This is a highly dangerous individual who exploits women for his own gain.’ He looked around the room at each and every one of them. ‘I don’t need to tell you that with every hour that passes we have less chance of finding DS Newton and Juliana Ferenc alive.’
Molly lay in the girl’s arms, her teeth jarring with the effort of biting through the bonds that had held her fast. But now it was over, her hands and feet free, her whole body aching with the effort of straining down to her ankles, her mouth cut in several places as she had chewed the plastic ties like a dog.
Tears of relief trickled down her face, mingling with the blood, but Molly was now too exhausted to care, the gentle caress of the girl’s fingers on her hair soothing her agony.
‘We must take them by surprise,’ Molly told the girl. ‘But for now, I need to sleep. If anyone comes into the room they will have quite a shock when they see that we have disappeared,’ she said, trying not to smile.
The two women were seated side by side, next to the doorway, ready to flee the moment that it opened. Taking their captor by surprise was the only way, Molly had insisted. She would fell him with the chair then they would slam the door shut, hoping that the key had been left on the outside.
‘Then?’ Juliana asked, a tremble in her voice.
‘Then you will be safe with me,’ Molly told her, hoping that the confidence in her voice was enough to cover the inner fear that escape might be far more difficult than she had told the young girl.
It must be morning, Molly thought, blinking in the darkness. She had slept against the wall, her head and Juliana’s together for pillows and now every muscle seemed to protest as she took stock of what her body had endured a few hours earlier. There was definitely some damage to her shoulders and she would need anti-tetanus jabs, for sure, once they got out of this hell-hole. The wounds on her wrists were beginning to harden already, the body’s own defences quick to begin the healing process.
The scenario had been gone over again and again before the pair had fallen asleep at last. As soon as the door opened and their guard entered the room, Molly would hit him over the head with the chair, the sudden and unexpected attack giving them sufficient time to carry out their escape.
But, as the minutes became hours and the day wore on, Molly Newton began to wonder if they had been left there for good with no chance to carry out her plan.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The light had faded from the skies and, although the room was shrouded in inky shadows, the woman sat staring at the window, unmoving. A television set in one corner of the room displayed shifting scenes from the ten o’clock news but the remote was turned to mute as if Cynthia Drollinger craved silence but not solitude.
The buzzer sounding made her start and rise to her feet. In two strides she was across the lounge, hand stretched out to lift the security telephone.
‘Yes?’
Anyone observing the woman at that moment would have seen a change in her face; the mouth becoming smaller, the jaw tightening.
‘I need to talk to you about your friend, Peter,’ a man’s voice told her. There was a silence as she hesitated.
‘You’d better come up,’ she said at last, replacing the telephone and activating the entry switch.
For a moment Cynthia returned to her seat but rose again almost immediately, pacing up and down between the door to the hallway and the window that overlooked the landscaped gardens below, one finger placed between her teeth, the gesture of anxiety hidden for the moment from prying eyes.
When the doorbell rang a few minutes later, she all but ran along the hall and opened the door, admitting the man who stood on her threshold.
‘Come in, quick,’ she commanded, letting him enter before stepping out onto the balcony and looking one way and the other, lest her visitor had been noticed by anyone loitering around. But there was nobody on this summer’s night and she breathed a sigh of relief then closed the door behind them.
There was no sign of her visitor until Cynthia came back to the lounge and there he was, sitting in the chair she had recently vacated. For a moment she felt a spasm of annoyance at the stranger’s cavalier attitude but that disappeared the moment he turned his gaze to her.
‘Better sit down,’ Michael Raynor told her. ‘We’ve got a lot to discuss.’
It was nearly midnight when Cynthia Drollinger closed the door again and leaned against it, heart still thudding as she replayed the man’s words in her head. The big man had not introduced himself, never given a name, but perhaps that was just as well after what he had told her. Whoever he was he seemed to know a great deal about Peter, the van-hire business and about her own part in it. She’d shivered as he’d mentioned facts and figures:
this was a dangerous man who had sat talking to her. And yet she had hung on his every word.
They were going to set Peter free. And she was to be a crucial part of their plan.
*
‘Did she buy it?’
Raynor grinned at the man sitting next to him in the van, its tinted windows denying any passer-by the possibility of seeing who sat inside.
‘Course she did. She’s as desperate to get hold of him as we are,’ he chuckled. ‘Even better, she’s talked his nurse into phoning her the moment the screws come for him.’
‘Everything ready?’ his companion snapped.
‘Of course, sir.’ Raynor stiffened as though he were still in uniform taking orders from his superior officer. Then he grinned. It would be just like old times; weapons at the ready, nerves taut with anticipation, the smell of cordite in the cold night air.
‘And she’ll tell Guilford we’ll be coming for him?’
‘Yes,’ Raynor replied, then began to snigger. ‘Just doesn’t know what we intend to do with him once we’ve sprung him, though.’
The man beside him did not share his laughter. Perhaps those wasted facial muscles were no longer capable of responding to mirth. Or, more likely, the thought of what fate awaited Dorothy Guilford’s widower suited an expression that was both cold and grim.
‘Good news,’ the nurse told him as she bustled in with a trolley covered in the usual paraphernalia of items that Guilford had become used to: blood pressure kit, thermometer, that small plastic cup of pills. She bent towards him, fixing the cuff around his arm to take his latest blood pressure reading. ‘Looks like you’ll be leaving here in a day or so,’ she confided. ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’