The Subcomisar sat behind his desk, dressed in black trousers, a white shirt with braided epaulettes, and a slack green tie. He busied himself for a moment, lighting a fresh cigarette from the stub of the previous one, which he then crushed out, ineffectually, in a huge overflowing crystal ashtray. Several screwed-up balls of paper, which had clearly missed the waste bin, littered the floor around the desk.
Constantinescu was forty-five years old, short and wiry, with a gaunt face, jet-black hair and piercing dark eyes with dark, heavy rings beneath them. Ian Tilling had got to know him when the officer had started to visit Casa Ioana on a regular basis.
‘So my friend, Mr Ian Tilling, Member of the British Empire for services to the homeless of Romania!’ Constantinescu said, through a fresh cloud of noxiously sweet blue smoke. ‘Yes? You have met your queen, no?’
‘Yes, when I got my gong.’
‘Gong?’
‘Slang,’ Tilling said. ‘It’s English slang for a medal.’
Constantinescu’s eyes widened. ‘Gong!’ he said. ‘Gong! Very good. Maybe we should drink! To celebrate?’
‘It was a few months ago.’
The police officer reached under his desk and produced a bottle of Famous Grouse whisky and two shot glasses. He filled them both with a clear liquid and handed one to Tilling.
‘
Spaga
!’ he said, indicating shamelessly that he had been given the whisky as a bribe. ‘Good whisky, yes? Special?’
Tilling did not want to disillusion him that it was a basic blended whisky. ‘Special!’ he agreed.
‘To your –
gong
!’
Reluctantly, but understanding the protocol, Ian Tilling drained his glass, the alcohol hitting him almost instantly on his empty stomach, sending his head reeling.
The police officer set his empty glass down. ‘So, how can I help my
important
friend? All the more important now that Romania and England are partners in the EU together!’
Ian Tilling placed the three sets of fingerprints, the three e-fit photographs and the close-up of a primitive tattoo of the name
Rares
on the man’s desk.
Looking at them, Constantinescu suddenly asked, ‘And how, by the way, are all your pretty girls working for you?’
‘Yep, they are fine.’
‘And the beautiful Andreea, she is still working with you?’
‘Yes, but she’s getting married in a month’s time.’
His face fell. ‘Ah.’ He raised his head, looking disappointed.
The Subcomisar occasionally popped into Casa Ioana on some pretext or another. But Tilling always knew the real reason was to chat up the girls – the man was an inveterate womanizer, and every time he came, he tried, unsuccessfully, to hassle one or other of them for a date. But being good diplomats, they were always polite to him, always leaving a faint window of hope open, just to keep him onside for the hostel.
Trying to steer the meeting on to business, Ian Tilling pointed at the E-Fit and fingerprint sets, then explained their provenance. The Romanian was distracted twice by internal calls, and once by what was a clearly personal call from his current squeeze, on his mobile.
‘Rares,’ he said, when Tilling had finished. ‘Romanian, sure. Interpol have the fingerprints?’
‘Would you do me a favour and run them yourself? It will be quicker.’
‘OK.’
‘And could you get copies of these photos of the three kids circulated to your other police stations in Bucharest?’
Constantinescu lit his third cigarette since the meeting had started and then had a bout of coughing. When he finished, he poured himself another slug of whisky and offered the bottle to Tilling, who declined.
‘Sure, no problem.’
He burst again into a series of deep, racking coughs, then, when he had finished, he slipped the photographs and fingerprints into a large brown envelope and, to Tilling’s dismay, slid them into a drawer in his desk.
From long experience dealing with the man, Tilling knew he had a habit of forgetting things very quickly. He sometimes suspected that once something entered that drawer it never came out again. But at least Constantinescu was a man who actually did care about the plight of the city’s street kids – even if his motivation was to try and bed the women who looked after them.
And hey, better safe in that drawer than lying, screwed up, amid those other balls of paper littering the floor in front of his desk.
In seventeen years of battling the authorities in this country, Ian Tilling had learned to be grateful for small mercies.
69
Mal Beckett never found it easy talking to his ex-wife, and sitting opposite her now, in the quiet café on Church Road, despite the new shared bond of their daughter’s plight, he felt as awkward as ever.
The problem went back to the early days of their separation, when he had left her for his then mistress – and now wife – Jane. Out of guilt, and concerned for her mental stability, he had made a point of seeing Lynn every few months for lunch. And she would always begin with the same question,
Are you happy?
It left him in a
damned-if-you-do
and
damned-if-you-don’t
situation. If he told her that yes, he was happy, he sensed that would make her even more miserable. So during those first meetings he would reply that no, he was not happy. Whereupon Lynn would immediately relay this to her friends. With Brighton being both a big city and a tiny village at the same time, word would rapidly get back to Jane that he was not happy being with her.
So he had learned to parry the question by replying with a very neutral,
I’m OK
. But now, as he spooned the creamy froth from his cappuccino into his mouth and stared across the plastic table, he realized they had both outgrown this game. He felt genuinely sorry for Lynn, still being alone, and was shocked by how much weight she had lost since they had last seen each other, a couple of months ago.
Lynn never found it easy seeing Mal either. Looking across at him, dressed in a faded blue sweatshirt, with a chunky anorak slung over his seat back, she saw he was ageing well; if anything, he was getting even better-looking, more rugged and manly with every passing year. If he asked her to come back to him, she would have done so in a blink. That was not going to happen, but God, how she needed him!
‘Thanks for making the time, Mal,’ she said.
He glanced at his watch. ‘Of course. I need to be away at one sharp to catch the afternoon tide.’
She smiled wistfully, and without any malice said, ‘Gosh, how many times did I hear you say that over the years. Off to catch the tide.’
Their eyes met, in a moment of genuine tenderness between them.
‘Maybe I should have that on my gravestone,’ he said.
‘Wouldn’t that be a bit difficult? I thought you were going to be buried at sea?’
He laughed. ‘Yeah, that was…’
Then he suddenly halted in mid-sentence. She would not be impressed to know that Jane had talked him out of that. Lynn had tried to do the same herself, unsuccessfully, for all the years of their married life.
It was quiet in the café. Just past midday, the lunchtime rush had not yet started. They waited for a moment as the waitress brought them over their food, a doorstep of a hot corned beef sandwich for Mal and a small tuna salad for Lynn.
‘Two hundred and fifty-two thousand pounds?’ he said.
Lynn nodded.
‘You know we pulled up a dead body – caught in the drag head – the one that is in all the papers right now?’
‘I read about it,’ she said. ‘That must have been a shock for you.’
‘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.