Strange Affair

by Peter Robinson

  On the prearranged signal, the SO19 team battered down the front door and stormed into the house. Annie and Brooke, unarmed, had instructions to wait outside until the place was secured, then they would be allowed in to question any witnesses or suspects. Brooke was unusually quiet. Annie felt herself tense up as she heard sounds from inside the house—shouts, commands, a woman’s scream, something thudding on the floor.

  But there were no shots, and she took that as a good sign.

  She had no idea how long it took, but eventually the team leader emerged and told them the house was secured. There had been one guard armed with a baseball bat and three other men, none of them armed. The rest of the occupants were young women. They had best take a look for themselves, he told them, shaking his head in disbelief.

  Annie and Brooke went inside. It was a shabby place, in poor repair, with old wallpaper stained and peeling off in places, no stair carpet and only dirty linoleum on the ground floor. The smells of stale sex and cigarette smoke permeated the air. Little light got in through the windows, so the officers had turned on all the lights they could find, mostly bare bulbs, and they hardly flattered the scene, just gave it an extra harsh edge.

  The seven girls were all in a small room upstairs. Probably more lived there, Annie guessed, but they would be out working the streets around King’s Cross. No matter what the time of day, business never stopped. The area had had a bad reputation for years, and Annie remembered how the girls were once called Maggie’s Children because they came down on the trains from the north when all the jobs disappeared up there. These days they might be known as Putin’s Children, Iliescu’s or Terzic’s.

  The SO19 officers searched the place as Annie and Brooke went over to the girls. The sparsely furnished room smelled of sweat and cheap perfume and the girls were all dressed in skimpy clothing—tight hot pants, micro skirts, thigh-highs, see-through tops—and their faces were garish with lipstick and eye makeup. Some of them looked high; none looked much older than fifteen. Beyond the fear in their expressions Annie could see only resignation and despair. This was truly the generation of lost girls Dr. Lukas had described, she thought. Christ, she wanted to take them home and scrub the makeup off and feed them a decent meal. Most of them were skinny, and some had sores on their lips. Several of them were smoking and that added to the cloying atmosphere of the room.

  Other rooms in the house were equipped with beds and washbasins, but this seemed to be a general sitting room. The four men the SO19 team had found had all been handcuffed and bundled out into the van. The girls had been checked for weapons as a matter of routine, then left alone, a guard on the door.

  “Ma’am?” One of the team stood at the door and beckoned to Annie. “I think you should see this.”

  He led Annie to a room no bigger than a cupboard. Inside was a young girl, naked but for the thin sheet another officer was wrapping around her. She was painfully thin and blood crusted the cleft between her nose and upper lip. She was alive, but her eyes looked dead. The only other thing in the room was a bucket, its stench abominable.

  “Get an ambulance,” Annie said. She helped the girl to her feet, keeping the sheet wrapped around her, and slowly took her back to the others. One of the girls ran forward and took the newcomer in her arms, mumbling endearments, and helped her sit in an armchair, perching on the arm beside her.

  “Can you speak English?” Annie asked.

  The girl nodded. “A little.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She’s new,” the girl told her in heavily accented English, still stroking her friend’s hair. “She would not do what they tell her so they lock her up and beat her. She has not eaten for three days.”

  Brooke was trying to talk to the other girls, but it didn’t appear they spoke English. Whatever the reason, they all seemed afraid of him and no one would say a word. Most of them wouldn’t even look at him. Annie thought she understood why. She took him aside. “Look, Dave,” she said, seeing his crestfallen expression. “It’s not your fault, but they don’t know you’re a decent man. They don’t know any decent blokes. It might be best if you went down and questioned the men.”

  Pale, Brooke nodded. “You’ll be okay?”

  “I’ll manage,” said Annie. She touched him gently on the shoulder and he left.

  “What will happen to us?” asked the girl on the chair arm, who seemed to have taken charge. She had dark hair down to her shoulders, thin arms and a pale complexion.

  It was a good question and Annie wasn’t sure she knew the answer. The object of the raid had been to take Happy Harry Mazuryk and, with any luck, find Carmen Petri. Annie didn’t know if Harry had been one of the four men arrested, though from what she had seen in passing, none of them matched his description.

  “You’ll all be taken good care of,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  “Veronika.”

  “Right, Veronika. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “I can’t tell you anything. He will kill me.”

  “No, he won’t,” said Annie. “We’ll put him in jail.”

  “You don’t understand. He wasn’t here, only his stupid guard. Those other men are here for…” She made an obscene gesture with her hips.

  “Where is Hadeon Mazuryk?”

  She flinched at the sound of his name. “I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” said Annie. “What about Carmen? Do you know Carmen Petri?” She looked around at the frightened girls. “Is she here?”

  They all shook their heads. One started crying. Annie turned back to Veronika. “Do you know Carmen?”

  Veronika nodded.

  “Where is she?”

  “She is not here. Carmen is one of the special girls.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She is very beautiful. She speaks very good English. She does not have to go out to the street. Men come to her. Pay more.”

  This was what Annie had heard from Dr. Lukas. Still she wondered whether Carmen had been killed. “Do you know where she is, Veronika? I really need to talk to her.”

  Veronika turned to the girl in the sheet and stroked her hair again, then she looked back at Annie, her face stern. “There is another house,” she said. “I have talked to Carmen. She has told me. She is there.”

  Banks didn’t regret too much being barred from the King’s Cross raid. He had been on such operations before and generally found the paramilitary elements quite tedious. He did, however, want to know the results, which was why he was sitting anxiously at the kitchen table early with his morning coffee and newspaper, mobile beside him at the ready.

  He was still puzzling over what had happened between Roy and Lambert at the Albion Club that Friday, and the best he could come up with was that Lambert had proposed something Roy didn’t approve of and became worried he’d give the game away. Their friendship went back to university days and they had got up to all sorts of things together. They had been out of touch for a long time, though, and Lambert probably didn’t know that Roy had redrawn his moral lines.

  If Lambert wanted Roy to come in on importing abducted teenage girls for the sex trade, as Annie suggested was happening, then Roy would probably have balked at that, Banks thought. If he had been ignorant of the true way in which the girls were forced into prostitution, as Dr. Lukas had told Annie she was, then he would have found out via Jennifer, who had talked with Carmen Petri and learned something of the truth on the Monday of the week she died. The timing was important here. Roy might have been on the verge of getting involved when he found out the truth after Carmen told Jennifer, and Lambert spent the next few days trying to convince him it was okay. Then something else must have tipped the balance, something Roy found out on the day he disappeared.

  Banks guessed that when Roy left the bar for the casino, Lambert went into the toilet and phoned someone—maybe Max Broda—and told him the situation was critical. After that, Broda took control and had a car ready to pick Roy up outside
the club and take him to the abandoned factory in Battersea. Ponytail and his crony must also have been working for Broda, and they had been assigned to watch Jennifer and keep an eye on her movements. Banks could imagine the mobile conversations back and forth between the Mondeo, following Jennifer, and the factory, where Roy had been taken, culminating in the order to kill her. Perhaps Roy had also intended to head up to Banks’s cottage when he realized things had gone too far, but he hadn’t had the chance. They’d got to him first.

  As Banks thought about it all, a number of things came together in his mind, the way it sometimes happened when he felt most lost. Annie had told him that Dr. Lukas had said the baby was going to be adopted by a “Mr. Garrett.” He remembered Dieter Ganz saying “Gareth” with his slight accent yesterday, and imagined that the men Carmen Petri had heard saying it also had accents, as she no doubt did herself. In Ganz’s case, it had come out sounding like “Garrett” and that was exactly what Dr. Lukas had said, that the men were taking good care of Carmen and her baby for “Mr. Garrett.”

  Was that it, then, the new thing that Roy had discovered? Was Lambert himself adopting Carmen’s baby, buying it, and was that why it was so important for him to stop Roy from blowing the whistle? There was one way to find out, one person he could ask.

  Banks went up to Roy’s office, where he thought he had seen an atlas. He pulled it down and found that Quainton was in Buckinghamshire, not too far from Aylesbury. It was a nice day for a drive in the country, he thought, and it would be interesting to meet the elusive Mrs. Lambert. He grabbed his jacket and his mobile and set off for the car.

  The second house was about a mile away, in Islington, but light-years away in comfort. It was a detached house with a small garden, the curtains all shut tight against the morning light. If the SO19 team leader hadn’t verified that it belonged to Mr. Hadeon Mazuryk, Annie would have thought it the home of a perfectly normal family with a couple of kids, a dog and a people carrier.

  The team had had to move fast, before Mazuryk found out about the King’s Cross raid, and the SO19 team had reassembled in the van for a quick briefing. The layout of the house was similar to many others in the area, including the house one of the men lived in, and between them the officers were able to sketch out a likely floor plan. Then they quietly evacuated the houses on either side and sealed off the street at both ends.

  Annie sat across the street in the car with DI Brooke, who had got nowhere talking to the men at King’s Cross, and watched. She could hear faint music from one of the downstairs rooms, a bass line of some pop song she didn’t recognize. Then she heard a man cough and someone laugh.

  “You’re very quiet, Dave,” she said, turning to Brooke, who was staring down the street.

  “I was warned off,” he said, without looking at her.

  “What?”

  “I was warned off, Annie.” Now he looked her in eye and she could see his self-disgust. “Orders from the top. Gareth Lambert’s part of an international investigation. If the police swarmed over him, all the major players would disappear into the woodwork for years. That’s what I was told. If I valued my promotion…well, I think you can fill in the rest. Oliver Drummond and William Gilmore seemed likely leads.”

  “I’m sorry, Dave,” Annie said, feeling embarrassed for him. “You were only following orders.”

  He gave her an ironic glance. “Isn’t that what the Germans said?”

  “This is different. What else could you do?”

  Brooke shrugged. “I don’t know. I just don’t like the feeling, that’s all. I doubt they’d warn off your pal Banks so easily.”

  Annie smiled. “DCI Banks is a law unto himself,” she said. “Partly because he doesn’t feel he has anything to lose. It’s not necessarily a position to envy.” She gestured to the SO19 officers in the street. “Anyway, for better or for worse we’re getting some action now.”

  Brooke nodded. “It’s gone too far. Even the brass couldn’t justify leaving vulnerable underage girls in captivity like that for one night longer than they had to. Besides, we still don’t know if or how Lambert is connected. Maybe it’s something completely different.”

  “Whatever it is, we’ll find out soon,” said Annie. “They’re going in.”

  Half the men went around the back and the rest prepared to enter through the front door. Annie held her breath as one of them slammed the battering ram and the wood splintered, then they were in. She heard similar sounds from the back.

  This time, in addition to the shouting and screaming, Annie heard shots. So did the neighbors farther down the street, who soon appeared at windows and in doorways, only to be kept at bay by the uniformed officers deployed on crowd duties. After an agonizing period of silence, the team leader stepped out and waved Annie and Brooke inside.

  “Everybody all right?” Annie asked.

  “We are,” he said. “Eddie took one on the chest but the body armor worked fine. He’s feeling a bit sore, that’s all. Look, we’re waiting for the ambulance and for the brass to get here. You know what it’s like whenever shots are fired. Forms in triplicate. Questions. You feel more like a criminal than a copper.”

  Annie and Brooke followed the grumbling team leader into the front room. Four men had been sitting around playing cards at a folding table. Two of them were handcuffed and two of them were slumped against the wall with holes in their chests, covered in dark bibs of blood. Blood had also sprayed on the walls and carpeting. Annie felt a bit sick. She hadn’t seen many gunshot victims before and hadn’t been prepared for the smell of the exploded ammunition mingled with that of fresh blood in the room.

  One of the dead men resembled the description she had heard of Hadeon “Happy Harry” Mazuryk, and the other one had a bodybuilder’s physique, long greasy hair tied back in a ponytail and a thick gold chain around his neck. One of the bullets must have severed the chain because it snaked in one long piece down his bloody chest.

  Annie didn’t recognize the other two men. Both were looking sullen, handcuffed and guarded by SO19 officers with their Heckler and Kochs at the ready. One of the men might have been the driver of the Mondeo, but all the descriptions she had of him were vague. The more she looked at the other one, the more he seemed familiar: the spiky hair, goatee beard. Then she remembered: the photograph Banks had shown her, the one his brother apparently took just days before he died. This was the man who had been sitting with Gareth Lambert at an outdoor café. Now there was a connection, whatever it meant.

  An ambulance arrived and men filled the room. Annie and Brooke followed one of the officers upstairs. There were three bedrooms, all of them occupied by beautiful young girls, who were more than a little unnerved by the shooting. SO19 officers dealt with the other two and Brooke hung back as Annie entered the room and walked over to the pregnant girl, who was lying on the bed looking frightened.

  “Carmen?” she said. “Carmen Petri?”

  The girl nodded, seeming surprised that Annie knew her name. She looked a little older than the girls in the King’s Cross house, perhaps as old as nineteen or twenty, and she wore much less makeup. It was difficult to tell what her figure had been like because she was about six months pregnant, but she had a beautiful face: full lips with a Bardot pout, a perfectly proportioned nose, flawless complexion—apart from a beauty spot by the side of her mouth—and deep dark blue eyes damp with tears. Annie couldn’t read her expression and guessed that Carmen was a girl who had become adept at hiding her feelings and thoughts for the purposes of self-preservation.

  “What happened?” Carmen asked.

  “I’ll explain it all later,” Annie said. “I’m happy to meet you at last. I’m Annie Cabot. Will you answer some questions?”

  “Where’s Hadeon?”

  “Dead.”

  “Good. And Artyom?”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Big man. Ponytail.”

  “He’s dead, too.”

  “That is also good,” she said, shifting o
n the bed slightly. Annie could see an expression of discomfort cross her features as she moved. Probably the baby kicking.

  “What happened to you?” Annie asked. “How did you get here?”

  “Is a long story,” she said. “And a long time ago. I was taken from street when I was a young girl.”

  “How young?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “By who?”

  She shrugged. “A man.”

  “Where?”

  “A village near Craiova, in Romania. You will not have heard of it.”

  “You went to see Dr. Lukas at the Berger-Lennox Centre?”

  “Yes. She was good to me.” Carmen reached for a cigarette. “She wanted me to stop smoking, but I tell her a girl must have one vice. I don’t drink and I don’t take drugs.” Her English was remarkably good, Annie thought, and she could see what Veronika meant about her being beautiful. There was a sophistication about her beyond her years, and Carmen had the kind of class you don’t usually associate with people in her profession.

  Annie wondered how on earth she could stand the life without some form of escape, but what did she know? And what could she presume to know about someone who had been through what Carmen had been through.

  “Do you remember Jennifer Clewes?”

  “Yes. She works with Dr. Lukas.”

  “She’s dead, too, Carmen. Someone killed her.”

  Carmen looked alarmed. “Why?”

  “We don’t know. We think it might have to do with something you told her. Jennifer and her boyfriend seemed to know something about what was going on here. Did you say anything to her when you were talking last week?”

  Carmen looked down at her swollen belly. “The doctor think we do this because we want to,” she said. “I tell her she does not know how bad things are, that none of us are here because we want. I tell Jennifer, too. Some stories of what happen to girls. I should not have said that. But I think I was feeling brave because they were treating me well, different from the others.”