‘So not just money?’
‘I don’t think so. But I’m just joining the mental dots here.’
‘You think that’s what’s happened to Irma? That she’s been used to blackmail someone?’
‘If it is, I don’t want to think about what they’d do to her when her usefulness was over,’ Peter said. ‘The name didn’t mean anything to Maria though.’
‘Did she tell you how they got her out of Russia?’
‘She did. A Church trip, arranged by One World.’
‘So they travelled on legit passports? They should be in the system somewhere then.’
‘None of the girls had their passports. The church kept them.’
‘Only girls?’ she interrupted.
‘That’s what she said. And none of them had passports before the trip was planned. One World sorted everything out for them. She heard mention of some going to Germany, she guessed the others were going elsewhere. One thing I did catch, but it may just be me jumping at shadows, the guard seemed to get a little jumpy when she mentioned One World.’
‘You didn’t get to speak to her alone?’
‘Most of the time, yes. It was just bad luck. He came in with coffee just as she mentioned them.’
‘You want me to run his name through the system?’
‘Honestly, not sure I see the point. It doesn’t matter if he’s supped from the poisoned teat. It’s not him sending her away. And unless he’s delivering her gift-wrapped to The Shepherd himself, then the only thing that it’s going to achieve is drawing attention to the fact we found her.’
‘So what now?’
‘I’m going to check into a hotel. I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours, and quite honestly, I’m fucked. I’ll catch a plane back to Tallinn later. I want to be on site for Frankie. I just have this shitty feeling something bad’s going to happen and I’m going to be nowhere near. And yes, before you say anything, I know that’s guilt over Mitch and nothing to do with Frankie, but I can’t help the way I feel.’
‘No. I get it. I’ll be happier with you there, too. She seems to be bedded in. She’ll reach out if she needs us.’
Peter killed the call and slipped the old phone back into his pocket.
He saw the taxi approach from some distance away. It slowed to a stop beside him.
‘Ash?’ the driver asked out of a rolled-down window.
‘Only after someone sets fire to me.’
‘Funny man. Where to?’
‘A good, cheap hotel.’
‘A really funny man.’
‘Do your best.’
A few minutes later he was on his way to a small soundproofed room with a view of the second runway and silent behemoths thundering along the tarmac towards the sky. He wasn’t bothered about booking a flight. First, sleep, after that everything else.
It felt like a wasted trip.
Just about everything Maria Bartok had told him he already knew, or could have guessed, with the exception of the whole Church trip thing at the beginning. That was his win here. And it was precious little. But a win was a win. Wasn’t that how it worked?
FORTY-FIVE
Ash woke from a dream, covered in a sheen of sweat.
The details were lost in a fog of panic and confusion, but one part of it was fever-fresh in his mind because he’d lived through it time and time again: he had been back in that church, strung up on the crucifix while the flames surged up all around him. The searing heat was incredible. It burned and blistered his bare skin.
In this version of hell someone had come to save him, but it wasn’t the Vatican man Donatti. No, he knew the face of his saviour. It was his old friend and partner, Mitch Greer. The gunshot had cut across the roar of the flames. He could see the bullet. It flew in slow motion. He’d tried to warn Mitch, to scream, but the only sound that emerged from his dream-mouth was the mad cackle of flames. He couldn’t stop it. Not in the dream. Not in real life. Peter watched him fall. The blood pooled around, but like acid it bubbled and curled back toward Mitch’s corpse, eating away his face until there was nothing there, not even bone. There was no saving either of them.
Peter leaned forward, sweating and gasping for breath that he just couldn’t catch.
Panic gripped him.
For a moment he had no idea where he was; the contours of the dark room were utterly strange to him. The darkness felt wrong, too. Too dark. Too absolute.
He realized then it was the blackout blind he’d pulled down to shut out the daylight. There was a dim crack of light coming in around the blind. He had no idea whether it was the same day, or if he’d slept through.
A check of his phone showed that it was almost ten. The chink of sunlight meant it had to be morning.
He had one missed call.
He checked the log. It was an unknown number. He’d missed the call by three minutes, meaning it had somehow been subsumed into his dream, probably as the cackle of flames from his screaming mouth. There was a voicemail waiting.
He turned on the bedside light and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes before he listened to the message.
In an instant he was wide awake.
‘Mr Ash? This is Maria Bartok. I don’t have very long. I don’t know if I will get the chance to call you again. I’ve just seen something on the news that I thought you should know about. There was a girl in the camp called Cristiana, a pretty girl with blonde hair and very blue eyes. She wasn’t Russian. Romanian maybe, but I could be wrong. I don’t think I ever knew her last name. I’ve just seen her on television with a German politician. I think he was trying to keep the cameras away from her, but I’m sure that it was her. It was her eyes that convinced me. I don’t know if that helps, but I hope you find the girl you are looking for. Maybe Cristiana will be able to tell you something?’ There was a hesitation. A long lull. He thought she’d hung up but the silence just went on until she said, ‘I’ll have this phone with me, unless someone takes it. If you hear about any of the other girls … please tell me they are safe. I have to go now.’
She didn’t say goodbye.
The line went dead and the automated voicemail voice told him the date and time of the call he’d just listened to.
Peter tried to call her straight back but her phone went straight to voicemail.
‘Maria, if you ever hear this, I just wanted to say thank you. I’m going to try and bring these girls home. You have my word.’
It took him a moment of reaching about to find the remote control on the nightstand. He hit the red button to wake up the wall-mounted screen and flicked through each of the channels until he discovered an English-language news station. He didn’t recognize the logo in the top corner.
If this was the right channel the story had already moved on. This one was focused on some devastating climate-change news and an old clip where the American President claimed he had better instincts for science than some of the world’s best minds because they were agenda-driven and he just had a big science brain. This kind of dumbing-down and the whole Gove bullshit about how we didn’t need experts was sending the world back to an age of unreason. It was crazy. Years of advances and understanding willingly cast aside because we didn’t want to feel inferior to experts in their field. Maybe the world really had gone to hell when they switched on the Large Hadron Collider after all?
The beauty of the twenty-four-hour news cycle was that there wasn’t enough stuff happening to fill it, so the story was always going to cycle around again, even if he had to wait an hour for the new round to begin.
There was a little capsule coffee machine on the desk instead of a good old-fashioned kettle. He filled the water tank and looked on the capsule case for the strongest hit of caffeine, then dropped back onto the bed to watch reports about last night’s Champions League games, full of the usual last-minute heroics and failures that seemed to beset English teams abroad. The Spurs result was just depressing.
A special feature on the trial of a Catholic priest came on, and
he saw his old friend Ernesto Donatti promising that the Vatican would get to the truth, that their thoughts were with the victims in these tragic circumstances, and that the paedophile priest would be removed from all duties while the investigation was underway, though of course he avoided those actual words. Donatti was good on screen. He was natural, said the right things with the right kind of gravitas that you believed it might actually be different this time. And maybe it would be, because the very last thing he promised was a root-and-branch investigation into the clergy with the new Pope’s determination to root out all sickness from the Church.
‘Good luck with that,’ Peter told the screen a little bitterly, remembering all too vividly those few flashes of nightmare that were hung over from his torture at the hands of Stefan Karius.
He figured he’d got enough time to take a shower while the financial report was on.
He held off on booking the flight back over to Estonia.
Call it instinct. Years on the job. Call it a hunch. Superstition. Call it whatever the fuck you wanted, there was nothing to be gained by doing anything until he knew what Maria Bartok had seen.
If there was another girl who’d come through the compound and made it all the way to her final destination, building that kompromat against someone powerful enough to be considered day-time news then maybe there were answers after all.
It took another twenty minutes before the item was repeated, by which time he’d showered and dressed and was on his second capsule coffee trying to wake himself up.
It was one of those who’s-dating-who fluff pieces.
‘Gerhart Schnieder, the rising star of German politics, and hotly tipped to take up the mantle of Chancellor in the coming elections, was seen leaving a top Berlin nightspot last night in the company of a mystery blonde who most definitely wasn’t the forty-two-year-old father of three’s wife. Schnieder was spotted by eagle-eyed locals coming out of the infamous Berghain nightclub. So who is this mystery woman? Has Schnieder been stepping out? What’s the story, morning glory?’ the presenter said, obviously enjoying the whiff of scandal far too much.
Peter Ash couldn’t help but wonder what kind of man took delight in the collapse of a family. But that was us, wasn’t it, we build them up, we put our trust and faith in them, and then we delight in knocking them down, thinking that’ll teach them for getting ideas above their station. We’re fucked. Royally. ‘We apologise for the rather poor quality of the clip, which was captured on a cell phone by a fellow partygoer.’
Peter leaned forward, even though the screen was as big as the wall. Schnieder had grown to prominence in recent years on the back of a tidal wave of nationalist fervour. He was very much the people’s choice: charming, charismatic, good-looking. His face had graced the front pages of Europe’s newspapers. He was very much Germany’s answer to France’s Emmanuel Macron. But his real popularity had come through social media and an understanding of the power of the modern media.
But it was the girl at his side Peter Ash was fascinated by: Cristiana.
He watched Schnieder’s body language as he tried to hide the girl behind him as soon as he realized he was being filmed.
First instinct, that was because he was trying to protect her from the inevitable scrutiny of the world. Second, more thoughtful assumption, was shame. He was hiding her to protect himself. There was no valour in it. He was embarrassed by the girl at his side.
Peter struggled with ageing people sometimes, especially as the kids these days seemed to be in such a rush to become adults, but there was something about Cristiana. An innocence of youth that was deceptive. For all the make-up and poise she could just as easily have been sixteen as twenty-six.
And that disturbed him.
The next image on the screen was of Schnieder with a woman closer to his own age, elegant, strong. She had a young daughter on her hip. They stood on the steps of what Ash assumed was their family home.
The dutiful wife standing by her man. The reminder of the family they had together held in her arms.
At least that was what it was meant to look like.
It wasn’t hard to see the cracks in the veneer.
Reaching for his phone, he called through to Division.
‘Law, I need you to scrub some footage from this morning, the nightclub thing with Gerhart Schnieder. It’s the girl I’m interested in. I need a name. Anything you can find on her.’
‘I didn’t have you pegged as a Hello! reader, Pete.’
‘Funny girl. Maria Bartok rang me this morning. I was asleep. She left a voicemail. She’d been waiting for her transport when she saw a clip on the news and recognized one of the girls from the compound.’
‘The girl with Schnieder.’
‘The girl with Schnieder. I’m guessing it’s not going to be hard to find. She called her Cristiana. No last name. Maybe Romanian. Definitely not Russian. I need you to work your magic, Law.’
‘We’ve got good facial-recognition software, so it’s possible, but no promises. And if I track her down, are you coming to Berlin?’
‘What do you reckon?’
‘I’d say you were right before, go back to Tallinn. Be close to Frankie in case she needs you. The girl could just as easily be a wild-goose chase. Sit tight. I’ll see what I can find out. Go and have some lunch.’
‘I haven’t had breakfast yet.’
‘It’s nearly twelve. Go. Eat. I’ll call you in an hour.’
‘I’m going to. I just figured this was a conversation for four walls only. Because if it’s not just about One World, if it’s about a high-ranking German politician, a man who could become one of the most important people in Europe, and they’re developing kompromat on him, fuck, Law. I don’t want to think about the damage stuff like this could do if it played out in a worst-case scenario.’
‘And we’d thought this was only about girls being trafficked into the West as sex-workers.’
‘I really don’t like these people,’ Peter said. ‘Because on the one side they’re trying to blackmail him, meaning he’s the kind of man we need more of in the world, but is weak and they’re going to use him, or on the other, they’re rewarding him for some service to their cult. And what sort of person wants a kid as a reward?’
FORTY-SIX
It was barely light when Frankie woke.
It was impossible to tell the time beyond broad strokes like morning, day, evening, and night.
She listened for sounds of movement from the other rooms before she got out of bed. The old tracksuit and trainers that Elsa had left were on the chair beside her bed. Gathering them into her arms, Frankie slipped out of the room and padded barefoot to the bathroom to wash and dress, then went outside.
The air was cold. The morning sun hadn’t risen high enough to penetrate the canopy of evergreens that covered much of the camp.
The cabins had been built under the natural shelter, meaning little of the sky was clear. It went both ways. If she could see little of the sky from down here, it was going to be hard to see much of the buildings from the air. The right kind of colouration would make it virtually impossible unless it was being looked for actively.
The Shepherd had chosen his bolthole well.
Frankie stretched, leaning against the cabin wall to work her muscles and loosen them up before she set off in an easy lope. She’d barely covered fifty metres before a voice yelled for her to stop.
There was real anger in the shout.
Frankie slowed and turned, her hands raised like she was surrendering.
She saw a young man in a One World tracksuit.
He carried a rifle. It wasn’t pointed at her, but that wasn’t a particularly comforting distinction.
She stood very still.
‘Where do you think you are going?’ he said, closing the distance between her.
‘For a run. Elsa said it would be OK.’
‘Elsa doesn’t have the authority to say that.’
‘She lent me her old tracksuit
and a pair of trainers.’
‘Do you have trouble understanding English? I told you Elsa does not have the authority. Now, go back to your room. I will deal with Elsa later. Your name?’
She almost got it wrong. After a beat she said, ‘Ceska.’
‘Well, Ceska, let this be a lesson to you. If you had come to me to ask permission to run this morning, I might have told you that it was all right. But I can’t have you running around in the woods on your own. For your own safety. It’s hunting season out there. It’s not just that you might fall, or how much trouble we’d have finding you if you had an accident, there are people out there hunting bears and stag right now. Without the right fluorescents you could get shot.’
‘I wasn’t going into the woods, I just wanted to stretch my legs. Along the road and back. I’m just feeling a little cooped up, you know?’
He thought about it for a second. ‘Go on then,’ he said, like he was grudgingly doing her the biggest favour he could. ‘The track is pretty straight so I’ll be able to see you all the way from here. It’s more than 10k to the crossroads, that’s a long way there and back, so don’t go getting any ideas.’ A smile had found its way onto his face, like he was enjoying his own beneficence.
‘Thank you,’ she said. She picked a spot out in the distance. ‘Just to that cluster of trees and back,’ she pointed. Shouldn’t be more than half an hour.
He nodded.
She didn’t wait in case he changed his mind. She set off at a steady pace, jogging across the hard-packed dirt towards the track that led out of the compound.
She could feel his eyes on her.
She didn’t look back.
She stretched her legs, savouring the cold bite of the air in her lungs. It was the first time she’d found the opportunity to run in a week. Normally she ran every day. It didn’t take her long to hit a steady rhythm. It was good to be free with her thoughts. But she needed to be smart. She was being watched. And she’d supposedly been living rough for weeks if not months. There was no way a street rat was going to be able to just run and run, even if she could, so after a while Frankie slowed up and half-walked a stretch, then bent over, resting her hands on her knees as if struggling to breathe.
The Black Shepherd Page 20