Border Angels (3 page)

“I want to know what happened next,” he said.

“Why does something have to happen next?” asked Irwin.

Daly regarded the younger detective. Was it his imagination or had they been arguing since they had met at the burned car? Irwin’s tone was even, unwavering, but behind it, he detected a subtle form of tension. An undercurrent. Irwin’s opposition to Daly’s working style had been honed to a fine edge ever since headquarters had transferred him to Special Branch a year previously.

“This is where a young woman’s journey started,” said Daly. “Her lack of footwear suggests she was in a very vulnerable position. We should find out where she came from.”

They walked back up the lane to the abandoned farmhouse. The doors and broken windows were wide open, but inside a stale odor hung in the air. Daly sniffed. It was the smell of imprisonment. In the front room, a velvet curtain wafted in the breeze. Behind it, a row of threadbare dressing gowns hung from hooks on the wall. Irwin’s eyes flitted about in his head. A faint glow of excitement colored his cheeks. He appeared to be taking a secret glee in the investigation.

“So this is the brothel?” asked Daly.

“We believe so. Welcome to a forensic technician’s worst nightmare. Just think of all the deposited bodily fluids.”

“Tainted evidence, indeed,” said Daly, stamping his feet to keep warm.

They walked through a side door into a tiny bedroom where there was just enough space for some unimaginative sex on a narrow mattress.

“We found a stash of condoms and sex aids,” said Irwin, proud of being thorough. “Also, quite a lot of cash and jewelry. Gifts, I suppose, from gentlemen callers. You should see the amount of tire tracks in the front yard. The place must have been heaving on weekend nights.”

“What do you make of it?” asked Daly.

“Well,” replied Irwin, “there’s half a dozen dressing gowns on the wall. Six girls at £50 a session. I’d say this place was a crock of gold.”

“What happened to the women?”

Irwin shrugged. “One of the officers thought he saw a shadow move in one of the outbuildings.”

They looked out through the window. The sky darkened behind a row of sheds and a lorry container. Some of the buildings were half demolished, others filled with rusting machinery.
A place like this should be teeming with shadows,
thought Daly.

“Let’s have a look,” he said.

On the way out, a mobile phone on the coffee table began to ring. Daly picked it up.

The caller’s voice was dry and uncertain.

“Is that Club Paradise?” he asked.

“No.”

“Club Tropical?”

“No.”

“What about Heavenly Delights?”

The caller rattled through several more names as if they were keys to unlock the gates of paradise, but the farmhouse brothel failed miserably to live up to any of the exotic titles. It was more like Daly’s worst nightmare of hell. He supposed that was the whole point: prostitution advertised under fancy names in the backs of Sunday newspapers to give punters the necessary emotional distance.

“This is a brothel,” Daly told the caller. “Run by criminals.”

“Who’s this? Where’s the guy in charge?”

“He isn’t able to speak anymore. He’s dead.”

The caller hung up quickly. Daly placed the phone in an evidence bag. Forensics would go through the numbers later.

He led the way outside. At the gate to the yard he fumbled to release the frozen latch, then heaved himself over. As he approached the sheds, the snow suddenly turned a sickly green and he felt himself sink. He clambered sideways to solid ground.

“Slurry tank!” he shouted at Irwin. “Watch you don’t drown in cow shit.”

Twigs and mud, dislodged by a crow from its nest, slid sharply down a tin roof. The noise startled the detectives into an exchange of glances.

Daly swung his body carefully into the first outbuilding. The effect in the darkness was like immersing oneself into a pool of dung and animal sweat. He heard a wet snort of breath and tensed, as his eyes grew accustomed to the poor light. Before him were the manure-caked buttocks of a cow, huddling against a pile of hay bales for warmth. He lifted his boots out of the deep muck and stepped back into the farmyard. Irwin stood at the gate and grinned. Daly continued the search. The other sheds were filled with the detritus of many decades of failed farming enterprises, chicken coops, hay balers, feeding troughs, potato sacks, and a dusty pile of turf, but no signs of life.

Daly walked up to the back of the lopsided lorry container and pulled down the shutter. This time he found himself staring at the baffled faces of a group of young women. Daly inhaled a suffocating breath of stale food, cosmetics, and alcohol and felt a sense of relief. His mute suspicion of something shadowy and sinister hanging over the farmhouse had been confirmed. He had found the source of that uneasiness. For a moment, no one spoke. The eyes of one of the women swam fiercely with tears or the cold.
They’re like goods ready to be sold from the back of a lorry,
thought Daly.

“Where are you from?” asked Irwin, joining him from behind.

The women huddled together with the forlorn air of schoolgirls on an excursion that had gone disastrously wrong. They did not appear to understand Irwin’s question. Their faces had a closed-down look.

Then one of the women stepped forward. “We are from Croatia. Albania. Serbia.”

“What are your names?” Irwin turned to Daly. “Some of them don’t look old enough to have a driving license.”

“Their pimps take away their IDs, if they ever had any in the first place,” said a voice behind the detectives. Brooke had returned. “It deprives trafficked women of their ability to travel and strips them of any legal status.”

There was enough mess in the lorry container for a dozen people. Magazines and clothes lay strewn with makeup containers and empty vodka bottles. A gas stove flared dimly in the corner. Brooke appeared calmer in this female territory, even though it lay in disarray. She walked over to the women and offered them chewing gum. She spoke to them in halting German.

“These women are hungry,” she announced. “They’ve been hiding here since the accident.”

Irwin studied Brooke for a moment and then forced his eyes away, not wanting to recognize the young woman as a legitimate part of the team.

“They did everything their pimp said,” said Brooke. “He could have twisted them around barbed wire if he wanted to.”

The women walked out of the container, their puffy eyes blinking, clutching each other as they made their way through the wet snow.

“Men!” said Brooke.

“Men,” repeated Daly.
Letting the side down again,
he thought, but he had enough personal faults to brood over without taking on a few more for the team. He pulled the collar of his coat up around his neck, feeling the cold wind of female anger.

“How could anyone come out here and take advantage of these poor girls?” she asked. “Look at how miserable they are.”

Daly stared at them. Although they were barely out of their teens, their faces had given up any softness, turned sharp around the chin and cheekbones. Their eyes shone with an unstable light. One or two of them wore short skirts, their legs smooth but discolored with bruising and the cold. Daly’s eyes flicked away. There was such a gulf between him and these frightened women.

“I’m wondering the same thing,” said Daly. He shrugged his shoulders. “But that’s the sex industry for you.”

Constable Brooke could not help spilling her disgust. “I don’t understand why a man would drive all the way to this godforsaken place to give money to violent criminals. It’s not an industry. It’s a horrible experiment in human cruelty.”

She glared at Daly.

“Don’t ask me to explain why men come to places like this,” he said. Even though his voice was quiet, he felt his words punch the cold air. He looked away. Branches of sloe berries hung their frozen heads along the hedgerows. The call of a pigeon wobbled from somewhere deep within the frozen thorns.

Brooke was right, thought Daly; the farmhouse was a sinister place, but then this was border country. For prostitution to flourish, it had to be a furtive business operated by dangerous criminals, like smuggling or terrorism. So different from the cities, where sex was at the other end of the continuum, advertised in glossy magazines and neon strips, a highly visible industry, sold as part of the nighttime economy. In border country, sex came clothed in shadows and stank of drunkenness and farmyard smells.

“Ask them about the girl who was with the pimp,” suggested Daly.

One of the women came forward. She had understood his request. “Her name is Lena Novak. She told us she would come back and rescue us after she found her . . .” She struggled to find the right phrase. “Her knight with shining armor.”

Irwin snorted. “She was a prostitute with no shoes, not a fairy-tale Cinderella.”

Daly spoke slowly to the women, emphasizing his words. “You are rescued. You’ll never have to come back here, we can promise you that. No one can harm you now.”

“Yes, they can,” replied the woman. “It doesn’t matter where we go. They know our families back home. We still owe them money.”

The women huddled closer together with worried expressions that suggested their troubles were multiplying by the moment. Daly surveyed them, the run-down house, the lane with the burned car and the mysterious footprints, and tried to discern if anything resembling a pattern or story was beginning to emerge. Not much. At least not yet, anyway. Only a single, wispy strand. A runaway prostitute in search of her knight in shining armor.

One theme constantly cropped up in the investigation team’s first meeting, and that was the lack of a tangible trail of evidence. It was as if the clues the scene of crime officers had gathered at the burned car and abandoned farmhouse spoke a different language, one the detectives had yet to decipher. Normally in such a local setting, the path left by the killers would practically glow before their eyes.

Daly tried several times to bring a sense of firmness and clarity to the investigation, to define its shape and direction, but he struggled on each occasion.

“The women we found in the lorry container, did anyone else get the feeling they were holding something back?” he asked.

“I think they were suspicious of us,” suggested Brooke.

“No. There was something else.”

“What?” asked Irwin.

“I don’t know. It’s just an instinct. Something in their collective spirit. It was there. I just couldn’t pick up on it at the time.”

“They’re still under police protection. We can question them anytime we wish,” said Irwin.

Daly grunted. “Perhaps I’m adding to it after the event, and what I felt was really nothing.”

He went on to argue that in the absence of any positive leads, the footprints in the snow offered the only promising direction for the investigation to follow.

“After all,” he said, “this is a missing person case as well as a murder. Lena Novak might not have family or friends searching for her, she may even be an illegal immigrant, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore her plight.”

However, a cursory search of the river and forests had revealed no trace of her.

“We don’t have the manpower to launch a full-scale search,” complained Irwin.

“The river marks the border with the Republic,” said Daly. “As such, the Garda should be involved.” He asked Ciara O’Neill to take responsibility for liaising with Monaghan Garda station. “We have to work without making any assumptions, but it’s clear to me that this woman is the key to finding out how the pimp Kriich died,” he added.

“The problem is where to start looking,” said Irwin.

O’Neill spoke up. “One of the women told me they believed Lena was dead. That night the women raided her drawers and a suitcase. They fought over whatever clothes she had left behind.”

“Perhaps this is more your territory, Susie,” said Daly. “Where do you think Ms. Novak might have gone?”

“If we assume she is still alive, then she’s a stranger lost in one of the most dangerous parts of the country,” she replied. “The only people she can turn to are her captors. Her only other contacts are the trafficked women and their clients. We don’t even know if she can speak English.”

The room was silent. The investigation was only a day old but already a mood of pessimism had descended upon the team of detectives. Most of them anticipated further trouble. This was not going to be a routine investigation into the sordid little death of a pimp. The barefooted girl had run away from a dangerous world of international criminals, one governed by the powerful forces of sex and money. Perhaps she had been captured or, worse still, killed, if she had not already succumbed to the freezing cold.

“We’ve searched the neighboring farms and outbuildings and drawn a blank,” said Irwin. “No one heard or saw anything, apart from a report of an accident between a car and a jackknifed lorry not far from the brothel.”

Daly nodded. The law-abiding residents of South Armagh did not like talking about brothels and trafficked women. They did not want to think that sort of thing happened on their doorsteps.

“We should give special attention to this accident and the drivers involved,” he said.

“There was no official report given to the police,” replied Irwin.

“Perhaps the drivers just exchanged insurance details and agreed to sort it out between themselves,” suggested O’Neill.

“Lorries speed on that road to make the early morning ferry from Newry,” said Daly. He asked O’Neill to check with the local haulage companies to see whether any of their drivers had reported an accident.

The discussion turned to finding a motive for Kriich’s murder.

“Maybe there was a feud, or fighting over a woman. Perhaps the pimp had bad-mouthed someone,” suggested O’Neill.

“No doubt he would have had enemies, but would they have had reason to murder him, and in this way?” asked Daly.

“Our only sources of information are the women in the farmhouse and the men who visited them,” said Irwin.

Brooke read the notes she had accumulated from her interviews with the women. There was little on Lena Novak. None of them could give an explanation as to why her bare footprints were beside Kriich’s car. Their stories followed the same pattern. They all mentioned a man called Jozef Mikolajek and described how he had persuaded or lured them from the villages and farms of Croatia and Albania.

“What information do we have on Mikolajek?”

“There have been some inquiries over his involvement in credit card fraud and the manufacture of false passports,” said Brooke, “but we haven’t got close to arresting him. He’s registered legally as the manager of an agency that supplies cleaning staff and care assistants. They bring over Croatian women and employ them to clean houses and offices, and work in nursing homes.”

“I want you to find this man and give his business dealings a thorough examination,” Daly told Detectives Brian Harland and Declan Robertson. “Run one of his vacuum cleaners over him and his paperwork, an industrial one if necessary.”

The effort to trace the men who had used the brothel on the night of the murder had also yielded no results. Daly assigned two additional officers to concentrate on this.

“We need to find the clients, especially the regular visitors,” said Daly. “Get a list of all the numbers that rang the farmhouse. These men will want to disappear off the face of the earth but we must locate them. And get them to talk. Threaten them with criminal charges, if necessary.”

“We’ll be met by a wall of silence.”

“Then we’ll have to break through it.”

“There’s one question we haven’t asked,” said O’Neill. “How did Lena Novak escape this trap that had been set for Kriich? She must have been there when the blaze started. How did she survive?”

The officers stared at each other, blank-faced. No one had any theories. The meeting broke up and the officers filed away to their separate tasks.

In the following days, the weather got colder, and Daly employed as many officers as he could in the search for the missing woman. Wasn’t that the whole point of police work, he said to his chief, when he resisted requests for more personnel—to create a circle of security, a protective chain around the frightened and vulnerable? Daly hoped that his team would reach out to and connect with Lena, and bring her back to safety, but there were too many absent links and missing hands in the chain, and their search proved fruitless. The missing woman’s trail simply disappeared like a ghost’s into the darkness of a deep river.

It was a month before the first clues about her whereabouts surfaced.