‘You’ve heard the rumours?’
‘I’ve been so preoccupied, I’ve barely glanced at the papers,’ she lied.
‘It was a teenage boy. They don’t know where he’s from, but there’s speculation that he was killed for his organs. Some kind of trafficking ring.’
Lynn shrugged. ‘Horrible. But that doesn’t have anything to do with our situation with Caitlin, does it?’
His worried expression unsettled her further. ‘There were two other bodies found subsequently. All missing their internal organs.’
He spooned some more froth into his mouth, leaving a ring of white foam, dusted with cocoa powder, around his top lip. A few years ago, she would have leaned forward with a napkin and wiped it.
‘What are you saying, Mal?’
‘You want to buy a liver for Caitlin. Do you know where it’s going to come from?’
‘Yes, someone killed in an accident abroad somewhere. Most likely a car or motorcycle accident, Frau Hartmann said.’
He looked down at his sandwich, lifted the top piece of bread and squeezed mustard across the meat and gherkin from a plastic bottle. ‘You can be sure that liver’s kosher?’
‘You know what, Mal,’ she said, with rising irritation at his attitude, ‘so long as it is a match and healthy, I don’t actually care where it comes from. I care about saving my daughter’s life. Sorry,’ she corrected herself, looking at him pointedly, ‘our daughter’s life.’
He put the mustard dispenser down and laid the bread back across the pink beef. Then he picked the sandwich up, opened his jaws, sizing up where to take the first bite, then put it back down on the plate, as if he had suddenly lost his appetite.
‘Shit,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘I know you have other priorities, Mal.’
He shook his head again. ‘Two hundred and fifty-two thousand pounds?’
‘Yes. Well, it’s down to two hundred and twenty-seven thousand since an hour ago. My mother has got twenty-five thousand life savings in a building society account she’s letting me have.’
‘That’s decent. But two hundred and twenty-seven thousand. That’s an impossible sum!’
‘I’m a debt collector. I hear that line twenty times a day. That’s what almost every single one of my clients tells me, Impossible. Impossible. You know what? No sum is impossible, it’s just a question of attitude. There’s always a way. I haven’t come here to listen to you telling me you are going to let Caitlin die because we can’t find a lousy two hundred and fifty-two thousand pounds. I want you to help me find it.’
‘Even if we did find it, what guarantees do we have – you know – that this woman will deliver? That it will work? That we aren’t faced with this same situation in six months’ time?’
‘None,’ she said baldly.
He stared at her in silence.
‘There’s only one guarantee I can give you, Mal. That if I – we – don’t find this money, Caitlin will be dead by Christmas – or soon after.’
His big shoulders went limp suddenly. ‘I have some savings,’ he said. ‘I’ve got just over fifty thousand – I increased my mortgage a couple of years ago, to free up some cash to pay for an extension. But we had planning problems.’ He was about to add that Jane would go nuts if he gave it to Lynn, but he kept quiet about that. ‘I can let you have that if it helps.’
Lynn leapt across the table, almost knocking their drinks over, and kissed him clumsily on the cheek.
Only one hundred and seventy-five thousand to go! she thought.
70
The fine architectural heritage of the city of Brighton and Hove had long been one of its major attractions, to residents and visitors alike. Although it had been blighted in parts by functional, drab modern buildings, anyone turning a corner in its sprawling downtown and mid-town areas would find themselves in a street, or a twitten, of Georgian, Victorian or Edwardian terraced houses or villas, some in fine condition, others less so.
Silwood Road was a typical such gem that had seen better times. Visitors with an eye for architecture, heading south to the seafront from the bland shopping precinct of Western Road, might choose Silwood Road, then stop and stare, but it wasn’t so much from a sense of visual joy, as shock that such a perfect row of canopied Victorian terraced houses could be in such shabby company.
Shrouded by a forest of estate agency letting signs, it remained steadfastly a downmarket area, not helped by the fact that in recent years it had become part of the city’s discreet red-light district.
At five o’clock in the afternoon, and already pitch dark outside, Bella Moy said to Nick Nicholl, who was driving, ‘Pull over anywhere you can.’
The DC pulled the unmarked grey Ford Focus estate into a parking bay beneath a Resident’s Parking sign and switched off the engine.
‘Ever been to a brothel before?’ she asked.
House of Babes was going to be their first call.
Blushing, he replied, ‘No, I haven’t actually.’
‘They have a unique smell,’ she said.
‘What kind of smell?’
‘You’ll see what I mean. You could blindfold me and I’d know I was in a brothel.’
They climbed out of the car and walked a short distance down the street in the blustery wind, the DC carrying his notebook. Then he followed Bella to the front door of one of the houses and stood, beneath the silent eye of a surveillance camera, patiently waiting as she rang the bell. Bella was dressed in a brown trouser suit that looked one size too big for her and clumsy black shoes.
‘Hello?’ A chirpy woman’s voice, with a Yorkshire accent, came through the intercom.
‘Detective Sergeant Moy and DC Nicholl from Sussex CID.’
There was a sharp rasp from the entryphone buzzer, then a loud click. Bella pushed the door open and Nick followed her in, nostrils twitching, but all that greeted him was a reek of cigarette smoke and takeaway food.
The dingy hallway was lit with a low-wattage red bulb. There was badly worn pink wall-to-wall carpeting and the walls were papered in a magenta flock. On a plasma screen on the wall, a black woman was giving oral sex to a tattooed, muscular white man who had a penis bigger than Nick Nicholl could have ever thought possible.
Then a woman appeared. She was short, in her mid-fifties, dressed in shell-suit trousers and wearing a blouse that revealed an acreage of cleavage. Her face, beneath a fringe of long brown hair, must have been pretty when she was younger and ten stone slimmer, Nick Nicholl thought.
‘DS Moy!’ she said in a little-girl voice. ‘Nice to see you. Always good to see you!’
‘Good evening, Joey. This is my colleague, DC Nick Nicholl,’ Bella replied curtly, a little harshly, Nick thought.
‘Nice to meet you, DC Nicholl,’ she said deferentially. ‘Nice name, Nick. I got a son called Nick, you know!’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Right.’
She led them through into a reception area that surprised Nick. He had been expecting to see, from images in books and films, a gilded, mirrored, velour-draped parlour. Instead he was in a tip of a room, with two battered sofas, a cluttered desk on which sat a steaming, opened pot-noodle carton with a plastic fork sticking out of it, an array of grimy-looking mugs and several unemptied ashtrays, overflowing with butts. An old phone sat on the desk, alongside an elderly-looking fax machine. On the wall above he saw a price list.
‘Can I offer either of you a drink? Coffee, tea, Coca-Cola?’ She sat back down, glanced at her pot-noodle meal, but left it steaming, half eaten.
‘No, we’re fine,’ Bella said stiffly, to Nicholl’s relief as he stared again at the grimy mugs.
There was an unwritten understanding between the city’s brothels and the police that, provided those running them did not use under-age or trafficked girls, they were left alone – subject to them allowing random, unannounced inspections from police officers. Most brothel owners and managers, including this woman, respected this, but Bella had learned never to let a
nyone confuse tolerance with friendship.
She showed the woman, Joey, the three e-fit photographs.
‘Have you seen any of these people before?’
She studied the picture of the dead girl closely, then each of the two boys and shook her head.
‘No, never.’
‘How many girls do you have here this evening?’ Bella asked.
‘Five at the moment.’
‘Any new ones?’
‘Yes, two new arrivals from Europe. A girl called Anca and one called Nusha.’
‘Where are they from?’
‘Romania,’ she said, adding, ‘Bucharest,’ as if trying to show her willingness to be helpful.
‘Are they – um – free?’ said Bella, delicately.
‘I’ve seen their ID,’ the madame said anxiously. ‘Anca’s nineteen, Nusha’s twenty.’
There was a sharp, rasping ring. The woman’s eyes went up to a wall-mounted television monitor. On the poor-quality colour screen they could see a balding, bug-eyed man in a suit and tie.
She winked at the two police officers and said, a tad awkwardly, ‘One of my regulars. Would you like to see them separately or together?’
‘Separately,’ Bella said.
She ushered them hastily down the hall and through a doorway into a small room.
‘I’ll go and fetch them.’
She closed the door. And now Nick Nicholl noticed the smell Bella meant. There was a sharp, hygienic tang of disinfectant, mixed with a potent, cheap-smelling, musky scent. He stared in shock at the small, pink-painted room they were in. There was a double bed with a leopard-skin-patterned bedspread and a folded white towel, a television monitor on which a pornographic film was playing, a bedside table with some toiletries and a roll of lavatory paper on it, a wide mirror on the wall and a pile of erotic DVDs.
‘This is so tacky,’ he said.
Bella shrugged. ‘Normal. See what I mean about the smell?’
He nodded, breathing it in, slowly, again.
A few moments later the door opened again and Joey showed in a pretty girl, with long dark hair, dressed in a flimsy, pink see-through nightdress over dark underwear. She looked sullen and nervous.
‘This is Anca – I’ll be back!’ the madame mouthed, closing the door.
‘Hello, Anca,’ Bella said. ‘Take a seat.’ She indicated the bed.
The girl sat down, her eyes darting between them. She was holding a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, as if they were stage props.
‘We are police officers, Anca,’ Bella said. ‘Do you speak English?’
She shook her head. ‘Little.’
‘OK, we are not here to cause you trouble, do you understand?’
Anca stared blankly.
‘We just want to make sure you are all right. Are you happy to be here?’
Anca had been well briefed. She had been told by Cosmescu that the police might ask questions. And she had been warned of the consequences of saying anything negative.
‘Yes, is good here,’ she replied in a guttural accent.
‘Are you sure about that? Do you want to be here?’
‘Want, yes.’
Bella shot a glance at her colleague, who appeared to not know where to put himself.
‘You just came over from Romania? Is that right?’
‘Romania. Me.’
Bella showed her the three e-fits, then watched her face closely.
‘Do you recognize any of these?’
The Romanian girl looked at them, with no glimmer of a reaction, then shook her head. ‘No.’
She appeared, to Bella, to be telling the truth.
‘OK, what I want to know is who brought you here.’
Anca shook her head and delivered a line that Cosmescu had drummed into her. ‘No understand.’
Patiently, and very slowly, gesticulating with sign language, Bella asked her, ‘Who brought you here?’
The girl shook her head blankly.
Nick suddenly flipped through the pages of his notebook for some moments, then stopped. Reading out aloud, slowly, in Romanian, he asked, ‘You have a contact here in England?’
Anca looked startled to hear her native language, however badly pronounced it was.
Bella looked equally astonished – and had no idea what he had said.
The girl shook her head.
Nick turned a page and looked at his notes. Then, harshly, he read out in Romanian, ‘If you are lying we will know. And we will send you back to Romania. Tell me the truth now!’
Startled, and looking scared, the girl said, ‘Vlad. His name.’
‘Vlad, what?’
‘Coz, er Cozma, Cozemec?’
‘Cosmescu?’ Bella suggested.
The girl was silent for some moments, looking at her with scared eyes. Then she nodded.
*
Twenty minutes later, after having interviewed both girls, they got back into the car.
Bella said, ‘Do you mind telling me what that was all about?’
‘I checked with the UKHTC.’
‘The what?’
‘The United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre. I wanted to establish where the girls were most likely to have come from. Romania was high on the list. And Romania was our brief.’
‘So you learned fluent Romanian in an afternoon?’
‘No, just the phrases I thought I might need.’
Bella grinned. ‘I’m impressed.’
‘Not as impressed as my wife will be – not – when she finds out where I spent my afternoon.’
‘Don’t all men visit brothels?’ she said.
‘No,’ he said, fervently and indignantly. ‘Actually, no.’
‘You’ve really never been to one before?’
‘No, Bella,’ he said snarkily. ‘I really haven’t. Sorry to disappoint you.’
‘I’m not disappointed. It’s good to know there are some decent guys out there. I just don’t seem to be able to find one.’
‘Maybe that’s because my wife found the only one!’ he said.
Bella looked at him, at his thin, elongated, grinning face in the glare of the street light. ‘Then she’s a lucky woman.’
‘I’m the lucky one. What about you? You’re an attractive lady. You must have tons of opportunities.’
‘No, I’ve had tons of disappointments. And you know what? I’m actually content being on my own. I look after my mum, and when I’m not looking after her, I’m free. I like that feeling.’
‘I love my kid,’ he said. ‘It’s an incredible feeling. You can’t describe it.’
‘I should think you’ll be a great father, Nick.’
He smiled again. ‘I would like to be.’ Then he shrugged. ‘Can you imagine what kind of father Anca had? Or the other girl, Nusha?’
‘No.’
‘For life for them in a crummy Brighton brothel to be better than whatever they left behind, I find that incredible.’
‘I find it incredible that you bothered to learn their language, Nick. I’m blown away by that.’
‘I didn’t learn their language. Just a few phrases. Enough so that we could get through to them.’
She looked down at her notes. ‘Vlad Cosmescu.’
‘Vlad the Impaler.’
‘Vlad who?’
‘He was the Transylvanian emperor that Dracula was based on. A charmer who used to impale his enemies on a spike up their rectums.’
‘Too much information, Nick,’ she said, wincing.
‘You’re a police officer, Bella. We can never have too much information.’
She smiled, then said, ‘Vlad Cosmescu.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘By name. He’s a pimp. Was active a few years ago when I was on brothels. He’s a kind of gatekeeper for Romanian, Albanian and other eastern European contraband. Drugs, pirated videos, cigarettes, you name it. He’s been a Person of Interest for the drugs teams for years, but I heard he always managed to keep out of trouble himself
. Interesting that he’s still around.’ She made a note on her pad, then said breezily, ‘Right! One down. There are only about twenty-eight more brothels in Brighton to cover before we’re done. How’s your stamina?’
With a baby needing feeding every few hours, around the clock, probably a lot better than my libido at this point, he thought.
‘My stamina? Terrific!’
71
It was just gone seven in Bucharest and Ian Tilling had promised Cristina that he would be home early tonight. It was their tenth wedding anniversary and for a rare treat they had booked a table at their favourite restaurant, for a feast of traditional Romanian food.
He had developed a liking for the heavy, meat-based diet of his adopted country. All except for two specialities, cold brain and cubes of lard, which Cristina loved, but he still could not stomach, and doubted he ever would.
He looked up at the useless clock hooked to the huge noticeboard on the wall in front of his desk. time is money was printed on the face, but there were no numerals, making it easy to be an hour out either way. Pinned next to it was a splayed-out woman’s fan, which had been there for so long he couldn’t remember who had put it up, or why. Below it, sandwiched between several government pamphlets for the homeless, was a sheet of paper bearing his favourite quotation, from Mahatma Gandhi: First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.
That summed up his seventeen years in this strange but beautiful city, in this strange but beautiful country. He was winning. Step, by step, by step. Little victories. Kids and sometimes adults saved from the streets, and housed here in Casa Ioana. Before he left, he would do his rounds of the little dormitory rooms, as he did every night. He planned to take with him the photographs of the three teenagers Norman Potting had sent him, to see if any of the faces jogged someone’s memory. It had been good to hear from that old bugger. Really good to feel involved in a British police inquiry once more. So good, he was determined to deliver what he could.
As he stood up, the door opened and Andreea came in, with a smile on her face.
‘Do you have a moment, Mr Ian?’ the social worker asked.