Which meant there was one less headache for him. He was still thinking about the bodies. About the fuck-up. About Jim Towers. It had been stupid, killing him. But it would have been a lot more stupid to have let him live, all cosied up to the police, with the knowledge he had. Towers had been up to something – maybe he just had a bad conscience, but he could have been planning blackmail. Like in gambling, you had to balance your risks. A small one against a larger one.
He turned and looked at the girls. The one on the left, Anca, she was nice. Her companion, Nusha, had a harder face, her nose was a little big. But both of them were young, seventeen, eighteen maximum. They were OK, they would do fine. He wouldn’t kick either of them out of bed.
And he didn’t intend to.
*
Cosmescu turned the privacy key and the lift ascended non-stop from the underground car park of his apartment block, behind the Metropole Hotel. The two girls stood with him, with their cheap luggage, in silence.
Then Anca asked, ‘When do we start work?’
‘You start now,’ he said.
She raised a finger. ‘We go to the bar?’
He looked at her sparkly necklace. Smelled her sweet perfume, and her companion’s, which was even sweeter. He stared down her neckline. Good tits. Her friend had even better ones, which made up for her face. He pulled out a packet of cigarettes, knowing that almost certainly they would both smoke. He was right. Each accepted one.
Before he had a chance to click his lighter – his timing, as ever, perfect – the lift stopped and the doors opened.
Now they would be focusing on their unlit cigarettes more than anything else. Keeping them tantalized, he stepped forward into his apartment, then held the door until they had pulled their suitcases, containing their life’s possessions, clear.
As they walked along the carpeted landing, he showed each her room. Single rooms. Divide and rule. That strategy always worked. Then he went into Anca’s room and picked up her plastic handbag.
‘Hey!’ she said.
Ignoring her, he removed her passport and then all the cash from her purse.
‘What you do?’ she demanded angrily.
He produced his lighter and finally lit her cigarette. ‘You know how much money you owe? How many thousands, for your journey and your passport? When you have repaid my boss, then you may have your passport.’
He went out and repeated the scenario with Nusha.
*
A few minutes later, the two girls walked sullenly into the large, modern living room. It had fine views of the Palace Pier and the blackened remains of the West Pier, the Marina, over to the east, and far out across the English Channel.
Cosmescu was sure they would never have seen anything like this place in their lives. He knew the kind of background they would have come from. And that Marlene would have cleaned them up, in preparation for their new lives.
All the girls that came here were debt-bonded, which meant they had signed up in Romania to an impossibly large loan – although they never actually saw the cash – agreeing to work off in England their one-way passage to what they thought was freedom. They would start here in Brighton. If they settled into their work, fine. But the vigilant Brighton and Hove police, along with care workers, visited the local brothels from time to time, talking to the girls, trying to find ones that were there against their will.
If either of these looked as if she might start giving out signals that she wanted help from the police, he would move her away from Brighton and up to a brothel in London, where less interest would be taken in her, by anyone.
‘We go to the bar tonight?’ Anca said.
‘Take your clothes off,’ he said. ‘Both of you.’
The two girls looked at each other in surprise. ‘Clothes?’
‘I want to see you naked.’
‘We – we did not come to be strippers,’ Nusha said.
‘You are not strippers,’ he said. ‘You are here to pleasure men with your bodies.’
‘No! That’s not the deal!’ Anca protested.
‘You know how much it cost to bring you here?’ he said harshly. ‘You want to go home? I will take you to the airport tomorrow. But Mr Bojin will not be pleased to see you. He will want his money back. Or would you rather I call the police? In this country false passports is a bad offence.’
Both girls fell silent.
‘So tell me, which do you want? Shall I phone Mr Bojin now?’
Anca shook her head, looking terrified suddenly. Nusha bowed hers, looking ashen.
‘OK.’ He pulled his mobile phone from his pocket and stabbed a button on the dial pad. ‘I call the police.’
‘No!’ Anca shouted. ‘No police!’
He put the phone back in his pocket. ‘So, take your clothes off. I will teach you how to pleasure a man in this country.’
Staring sullenly at the black carpet, as dark as the void of their new lives, both girls began to undress.
52
On the flat screen high on the wall, a short distance in front of her desk, Lynn read the words in large gold letters: COLLECTOR BONUSES TOP TEN.
Below was a list of names. The top was currently Andy O’Connor, on a rival team, the Silver Sharks. The screen informed her that Andy had collected a total of £9,987 in cash this week, so far. His accumulated bonus, if he maintained this position, was £871.
God, how she could do with that!
She looked enviously at the other nine names beneath his. The bottom was her friend and team-mate Katie Beale, at £3,337.
Lynn was way off the scale. But one sizeable client had just agreed to a plan. He would make a lump sum payment of £500 and a regular £50 a month, to pay off a MasterCard debt of £4,769. But that £500 – assuming it did come in – would only bring her weekly total to £1,650. Leaving her with an almost impossibly long way to go.
But perhaps she could stay late tonight and catch up on her hours. Luke had come over to see Caitlin after they’d got back from the hospital this morning, so at least she would have company. But she did not want to be away from her for too long.
Suddenly an email pinged on to her screen. It was from Liv Thomas, her team manager, asking her to have another try with one of her least favourite clients.
Lynn groaned inwardly. A golden rule of the company was that you never actually met with your
clients
, as they were called. Nor did you ever tell them anything about yourself. But she always had a mental picture in her head of everyone she spoke to. And the image she had in her head of Reg Okuma was of a cross between Robert Mugabe and Hannibal Lecter.
He had run up a bill of £37,870 on a personal loan from the Bradford Credit Bank, putting him up among the largest debtors on their client list – the highest topping out at a whopping £48,906.
A few weeks ago she had given up on ever recovering a penny from Okuma, and had passed his debt over to the litigation department. On the other hand, she thought, if she did get a result, then it could be fantastic and would propel her into contention for this week’s bonus.
She dialled his number.
It was answered by his deep, resonant voice on the first ring.
‘Mr Okuma?’ she said.
‘Well, this sounds like my good friend Lynn Beckett from Denarii, if I am not mistaken.’
‘That’s right, Mr Okuma,’ she said.
‘And what can I do for you on this fine day?’
It may be fine inside your head, Lynn thought, but it’s pissing with rain inside my head and outside my window. Following her long-used training script, she said, ‘I thought it might be a good idea to discuss a new approach to your debt, so that we can avoid all that messy litigation business.’
His voice exuded confidence and oily charm. ‘You are thinking of my welfare, Lynn, would that be right?’
‘I’m thinking of your future,’ she said.
‘I’m thinking of your naked body,’ he replied.
‘I wouldn’t think about that too hard, if I were you.’
‘Just thinking about you makes me hard.’
Lynn was silent for a moment, cursing for falling into that one. ‘I’d like to suggest a payment plan for you. What exactly do you think you could afford to pay off on either a weekly or a monthly basis?’
‘Why don’t we meet, you and I? Have a little tête-à-tête?’
‘If you would like to meet someone from the company I can arrange that.’
‘I have a great dick, you know? I’d like to show it to you.’
‘I will certainly tell my colleagues.’
‘Are they as pretty as you?’
The words sent a shiver rippling through her.
‘Do your colleagues have long brown hair? Do they have a daughter who needs a liver transplant?’
Lynn cut the call off in terror. How the hell did he know?
Moments later her mobile rang. She answered it instantly, spitting out the word, ‘Yes?’ convinced it was Reg Okuma, who had somehow got hold of her private number.
But it was Caitlin. She sounded terrible.
53
There were occasions when Ian Tilling missed his life in the British police force. Plenty of moments too when he missed England, despite the painful memories it held for him. Particularly on those days when the numbing cold of the Bucharest winter froze every bone in his fifty-eight-year-old body. And on those days when the chaotic bleakness of his surroundings here in the suburban sector 6, and the bureaucracy and corruption and callousness of his adopted country, dragged his spirits down.
Whenever he felt low, his mind went back to the terrible evening, seventeen years ago, when two of his colleagues came to his house in Kent and told him that his son, John, had died in a motorcycle accident.
But he had an instant fix for coping with that pain. He would get up from his desk in the ramshackle office, filled with donated furniture, which he shared with three young female social workers, and take a walk around the hostel he had created as a sanctuary for fifty of this cruel city’s homeless. And see the smiles on his residents’ faces.
He decided to do just that, now.
When Ceauşescu had come to power in 1965, he had a skewed plan to turn Romania into the greatest industrial nation in Europe. To achieve that he needed to increase, dramatically, the size of the population in order to create his workforce. One of his first acts of legislation was to make it compulsory for all girls, from the age of fourteen, to have a pregnancy test once a month. If they fell pregnant they were forbidden to abort.
The result, within a few years, was an explosion in the size of families, and the offspring became known as the Children of the Decree. Many of these children were handed to government care institutions and brought up in vast, soulless dormitories, where they were brutally maltreated and abused. Many of them escaped and took to a life on the streets. A huge number of them were now living rough in Bucharest, either in shanties built along the network of communal steam pipes that criss-crossed the suburbs, or in holes in the roads, beneath them. Tributaries of these pipes fed every apartment block in the city with their central heating, which was switched on in autumn and off in spring.
After the tragedy of John’s death led to the collapse of Tilling’s marriage, he had found it impossible to concentrate on his police work. He quit the force, moved into a flat and spent his days drinking himself into oblivion and endlessly watching television. One evening he saw a documentary on the plight of Romanian street kids and it had a profound effect on him. He realized that maybe he could do something different with his life. Nothing would bring John back, but perhaps he could help other kids who’d never had any of the opportunities in life that John, and most other kids in England, had. The next morning he phoned the Romanian embassy.
He remembered the first government home for children he had visited when he arrived in the country. He walked into a dormitory in which fifty handicapped children aged from nine to twelve lay in caged cots, staring blankly ahead of them or at the ceiling. They had no toys at all. No books. Nothing to occupy them.
He had gone straight out and bought several sackfuls of toys and handed a toy to each child. To his astonishment, there was no reaction from any of them. They stared at the toys blankly, and he realized in that moment that they did not know what to do with them. Not because they were mentally retarded, but because they had never been given toys before in their lives and did not know how to play with them. No one had ever taught any of these kids anything. Not even how to play with a fucking doll.
And he became determined, then and there, that he would do something for those kids.
Originally, he had figured on spending a few months out in Romania. He never thought he would still be here, seventeen years later, happily married to a Romanian woman, Cristina, and more content than he had ever been in his entire life.
Tilling looked tough and fit, despite carrying more than a few excess pounds around his midriff and he walked, exuding pent-up energy, with a copper’s strut. His face was craggy and lived in, with a toothbrush moustache and topped with close-cropped grey hair. Making few concessions to the weather, he was dressed today in a blue open-neck shirt, baggy fawn trousers and old brown brogues.
He stepped out into the hallway and smiled at a group of new arrivals from a care organization who were seated on the battered armchairs and sofas. Four dark-skinned Roma kids, a boy of eight in shell-suit bottoms and a sparkly T-shirt, a youth of fourteen in a baggy top and black tracksuit trousers that were too short for him, and two girls, a long-haired twelve-year-old in a mismatched jogging suit and a girl of fifteen in jeans and a holed cardigan. Each of them held a helium-filled party balloon, which they raised in celebration.
They were all from one family who could not cope and had placed them into an institution that they had run away from two years ago. They had been living on the streets since and now had the smiles on their faces he had seen so many times before, and which broke his heart each time. The smiles of desperate human beings who could not quite believe that their luck had changed.