Authors: Anthony Quinn
Daly felt the color in his cheeks betray him.
“I didn’t come here to be interrogated,” he said.
“No. I didn’t think so.”
Daly got up to leave. A few more questions and all his inner demons would have emerged, hunched and gloating, at her shoulder. He decided that Martha Havel was dangerous company. She knew too much about the dark world of fantasies that filled the human mind. That was why men paid to be with her and kept coming back. She helped lead them into the traps they set for themselves.
She followed him out to the door.
“Will you come back?”
“What for?”
“To talk. To tell me what you find out about Lena?”
“Let’s wait and see.”
She shivered slightly, framed against the light of the kitchen. Daly’s last sight of the room was of the crimson slices of meat lying strewn across the table like a woman’s casually discarded garments.
Later, in his cottage, Daly put on the stove and made himself a cup of tea. He stared through the kitchen window at the twisted half mile of back lanes that led down to the edge of Lough Neagh. Waves rolled in from the north; not very menacing ones, but rough enough to chase even the pluckiest of fishermen back to their homes.
Fifteen minutes later, he had walked down to the empty shore. He felt the power of the wind as it whipped the waves higher and higher. He loitered for a while, watching the waves break on the stony shore. A dog from a nearby cottage gave out brief yelps above the wind.
He wondered if it was too late to save Lena. He felt divided from her by more than distance and the inevitable cultural barriers. There was also the dividing line between the sexes. She might as well have been on the other side of the world, or on some distant planet, he thought. He turned for home seeing a shower of rain advance from the west. Behind him, the waves jostled together in an uneasy lough.
It was the evening rush hour. Daylight dimmed and the lorries picked up speed. Bin bags and freshly laundered sheets drifted above the crashed Home Sweet Home van. As each lorry thundered by, the loose sheets pounced on each other with renewed energy before drifting back to earth and snagging on brambles and thorn trees. To the motorists speeding by, it looked as though the wind was conducting a frantic cleaning operation through the hedgerows.
A hundred yards along the road, a group of women huddled together in a bus stop shelter. Their clothes were torn, and some of them carried injuries. They looked up at the dazzle of lights from the approaching police cars as though their wait was finally over. Soon the traffic stopped and the roadside was alive with people, everyone active, everyone moving, paramedics, fire and police officers, and then, later, when they discovered the blood, the SOC officers, laying out their flickering lines of luminescent tape. The women remained glued to the bench. They stared at the labyrinth of police tape in confusion as though it had turned the crash scene into a complicated riddle, until they were eventually coaxed with the help of a translator along a path of concerned faces into the back of an ambulance.
Daly crossed the motorway and followed the trail of glass diamonds from the crashed van’s windshield along the verge and into the ditch. The person he was searching for was not among the huddle of women in the ambulance. The firefighters congregated around the van with their cutting tools, but there were no bodies in the badly damaged vehicle. He made his way round the van slowly. He walked along the windblown hedge, staring at the cleaning rags and dustsheets that had escaped from the back of the vehicle. Rain and hawthorn blossoms blew in his face. In the damp grass he found a human oddity, a blond wig cut in a bob. Dropping it into an evidence bag, he caught the whiff of cigarette smoke. A feeling of unease gathered in his stomach.
A traffic police officer talked him through the accident.
“The van was traveling west at about sixty miles per hour,” he explained. “Driving conditions were good and there were no hazards on the road. We believe another vehicle struck it on the side. Judging from the paint marks left on the van, it was colored black. The impact caused the driver to lose control of the vehicle. He swerved onto the grass verge; the vehicle flipped on its side and slid into the ditch, upending several small bushes. We found a pool of blood in the passenger seat and drag marks where someone had been pulled from the van. There’s a set of tire marks farther along the grass verge. We found the passengers sheltering in the bus stop. They say the driver of a dark-colored Jeep forced them off the road. The van driver was able to walk free and made off on foot, but the other passenger is unaccounted for; her name is Martha Havel.”
Daly raised a hand when he saw Irwin walking amid the emergency personnel. The Special Branch detective looked a little disoriented. Daly waited, watching for a change in his behavior after their heart-to-heart in the pub.
Irwin merely stared at the crashed van and said nothing, as though he had decided it was tactically best to give no comment. His eyes were withdrawn a little deeper into his skull, his face all lines and hollows in the fading light. What was the sharp expression hovering just below the customary one of barely suppressed boredom? Was it hurt or embarrassment? Daly wondered.
“You’re not still hungover, are you?” he asked as Irwin leaned against the side of a police car. Gone was his air of having seen it all before.
“No. But my love life isn’t in the best of health.”
“At least you still have one.”
Irwin stared at the crashed van with an evaluating frown.
“How can someone tell you that you’re not in love?”
“Who said that?”
“Poppy. She told me I wasn’t capable of knowing true love, but I told her it’s the most I’ve ever felt for anyone. I can’t imagine finding those feelings with anyone else.”
Daly looked away. He wanted to tell Irwin that you did not find love through other people. It had to be awoken from within.
“You know what?” said Irwin. “I’m tired of women.”
Daly was about to say he was tired of women, too, but he wasn’t sure if either of them understood what that really meant. Did it mean they were tired of love or tired of sex, or just weary of trying to make sense of their feelings and sharing them with another person?
The wind picked up, catching one of the dustsheets snagged in the hedge, beating it like a trapped wing. Irwin stared at it intensely as though it was some sort of signal. His eyes flicked over the van and the ambulance full of frightened women.
“More foreign nationals,” he said with a grunt. “What have we got? Drink-driving?”
“There are a few points of interest. The driver’s done a runner, and a passenger’s missing. A Croatian woman called Martha Havel.”
“It’s never simple, is it?”
Daly filled him in with what the traffic officer had told him.
“Do you think we’ll get the driver?” asked Irwin.
“Of course we’ll find him.”
“He’s probably fled across the border.”
“We’ll check the hospitals for any road casualties.”
They looked at each other. “Just a crazy piece of driving?” asked Irwin. “Or something more sinister?”
“The driver will point us in the right direction when we find him.”
They located the translator and got him to question the women in the ambulance. One of the women stood up and sat down again, mumbling in Croatian. There were fresh cuts on her face.
“What did she say?”
The translator shrugged. “She feels sick. She wants to vomit.”
“Ask them where Martha Havel is,” Daly persisted.
“They say she vanished off the roadside,” replied the translator after conversing with the women.
Daly felt a shiver pass through him. “How?” he asked.
The women grew edgy and started to argue with one another. The intensity of their voices changed, the words hurrying out, as though blown on by the wind.
“It was the driver who forced them off the road. He dragged her into his Jeep. He had a limp. She was bleeding and her hair fell off.”
Daly wanted to ask them more questions, but the women began to mumble fervently and raise their eyes to the ambulance roof.
The translator turned to Daly. “You won’t get any more sense out of them. The shock has robbed them of their reason.”
Some of the women began to weep.
Irwin intervened. “We’ll decide how useful what they say is. You’ve been sent here to translate, not to comment or be involved in any way in the investigation.”
“Of course,” said the translator. “I understand this is important. What else do you want me to ask them?”
Irwin turned to Daly. “At least he learns fast.”
“We need you to find out as much information as possible about the driver of the Jeep,” said Daly. “Take your time, if necessary.”
They left the translator with the women and went back to the van.
“Another kidnap,” said Daly. “First the attempted abduction of Lena Novak, then the women in the illegal bottling factory. And now Martha Havel. All of them Croatian. All of them linked to criminal activity.”
“Who would want to hurt a vanload of cleaners, let alone kidnap one of them?” asked Irwin. “It doesn’t add up.”
“You forget these women are treated as property,” replied Daly.
“You’re suggesting the motive is theft.”
“Possibly.”
“There must be something more to it than that,” said Irwin. “What if we can’t work it out?”
“We have to,” said Daly. “These people have been abducted with a specific aim in mind, for a specific reason.”
“They were kidnapped once before. From their homelands. Perhaps they’re being abducted and trafficked elsewhere.”
Daly stared at the crashed van and its mud-spattered sign.
Home sweet home,
he thought. Even misery became a kind of home, for people who expected no better. The wind rifled through the vehicle’s spilled contents, sending dustsheets and bin liners flapping through the branches of a thorn tree. He had the feeling he was still scurrying through the shadows of border country, chasing Lena Novak’s disappearing footsteps. The problem was he never knew exactly where he was going, blindly following a road that twisted and fell, pulled up by helping hands only for other hands to push him back down into darkness again.
The women in the houses next door to the Home Sweet Home Cleaning Company stepped out through their doors and stared up at the sky for a long time. The evening light was tinged with pink and blue. A look of surprise passed across their faces. A trail of smoke rising from one of the back gardens grew into a torrent of ash and sparks. Scraps of burning paper billowed over the slate roofs. Someone yelled and the women burst onto the street, jumping into the air, grabbing handfuls of smoldering ash.
Dark clouds advanced and broke, but it was not rain that fell. When Daly and Irwin arrived on the street, looking for the injured driver of the van, the sky was drizzling burned money. At the first sign of swirling police lights, the neighbors, some of whom had collected thousands of pounds’ worth in scorched notes, ran back into the houses, slamming their front doors.
Only the door of Home Sweet Home remained ajar. The two detectives walked quickly through the house and out the back.
A young Croatian man was doing laps of the garden with a wheelbarrow, ferrying heaps of paper from a metal shed to a blazing bonfire. He had stripped to his waist, revealing an athletic build. A bandage, wrapped around his head like a sweatband, had slipped over a swollen, bloody eye.
Burning paper and disintegrating ash filled the air, like bats fleeing a cave at dusk. One of the pieces swirled in front of Daly’s face. A glowing ember nibbled at the edge of the Queen’s face. It was a fifty-pound note.
When the Croatian looked up and saw the two detectives approaching, he froze, the wheelbarrow poised to tip another load onto the fire.
“That’s enough!” shouted Daly.
He did not refuse Daly’s request. His broad face was suffused with weariness. He stared at Daly. A sharp racking cough took hold of him.
“You’re injured. How can you run around a garden with a wheelbarrow?”
“I have to do what the boss says.” His eyes clouded over as another coughing fit overtook him.
“And then what are you going to do?”
“Run.” He swatted at a burning ember.
“Where?”
“Anywhere. You can’t stop me.” He tipped the contents of the barrow onto the fire. Another batch of notes left in a hurry, disintegrating into the spark-filled smoke.
“You need a doctor.”
The man scratched the bandage, blood soaking through to his fingertips. He swayed on his feet, surrounded by smoke and a circling wind of exhaustion. Then the light in his eyes went out, and he collapsed to the ground.
It took two days for the police to finish questioning the injured driver and the women employed by the Home Sweet Home Cleaning Company. Officers compiled a draft report of their findings, which ran to more than fifty pages. The essence of the report was that the cleaning company, as well as operating as a brothel, had been used as a clearing house for counterfeit notes.
Fearing that a police investigation into the crash would reveal the sordid extent of his activities, Mikolajek had ordered the injured driver to burn whatever counterfeit money was in the house and any other evidence that might link him to Home Sweet Home. However, Daly was confident that the outline of his criminal empire would still take shape before the courts and ensure that Mikolajek would be locked away for a lengthy sentence. They just had to apprehend him first.
As well as ferrying the cleaners back and forth from their place of work, the Home Sweet Home van had operated two daily shifts as a mobile brothel, an early and a late, usually with two women on board. The van traveled everywhere, from agricultural shows to horse races and nightclub parking lots on weekends. The average number of clients per girl was six a shift. The women charged £60 for half an hour, and Mikolajek’s “petrol money” cut was £40, the standard two-thirds. The average weekly turnover of the van and its various employments amounted to no less than £5,000.
Jozef Mikolajek knew how easy it was for police to shut up a brothel run from a house. From the back of a van was a different matter altogether. Police recovered several mobile phones from the vehicle. The scheme he had set up was simple to operate and easy to dodge police surveillance. The punter rang or texted one of a set of numbers that were advertised in the back of tabloid newspapers. “
Is Olga available today
” and “
hv u a J-lo on yr blk
” were two of the less obscene messages uncovered by police. The girls were then dispatched in the van with a description of the punter, to meet at a prearranged place. They were instructed to make the encounter look like a blind date and take him back to the van.
“Mikolajek must be shitting like a rabbit,” said Irwin after he had read the report.
“It doesn’t matter whether he flees the country or not, he’s finished,” said Daly.
“And Martha Havel, too, wherever she is.”
“She’s gone,” said Daly. “Like Lena Novak. And the other trafficked women. I’m beginning to doubt if we’ll ever find them.”