‘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 anyone 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.
‘Sure.’
‘I went to see Ileana, in Sector Four.’
Ileana was a former social worker at Casa Ioana who now worked in a placement centre in that sector, called Merlin.
‘And what did she say?’
‘She has agreed to help us, but she’s worried about being caught out. Her centre has been told not to talk to any outsider – and that includes even us.’
‘Why?’
‘The government is upset, apparently, about the bad press abroad on Romanian orphanages. There is a ban on visitors and on all photography. I had to meet her in a café. But she told me that one of the street kids has heard a rumour going around that if you are lucky, you can get a job in England, with an apartment. There is a smart woman you have to go and see.’
‘Can we talk to this kid? Do we have her name?’
‘Her name is Raluca. She is working as a prostitute at the Gara de Nord. She’s fifteen. I don’t know if she has a pimp. Ileana is willing to come with us. We could go tonight.’
‘Tonight, no, I can’t. How about tomorrow?’
‘I will ask her.’
Tilling thanked her, then fired off a quick email to Norman Potting, updating him on his progress today. Then he balled his fists and drummed them on his desk.
Yes!
he thought. Oh yes! He was back in the saddle! He’d loved his days as a police officer and being involved now felt so damn good!
72
Lynn sat at her Harrier Hornets work station, aware it was eight at night, working through her call list, trying to make up for the time she had lost earlier today at home and then seeing Mal.
Her mother had been at the house earlier, then Luke had come over, so Caitlin had company – and, more crucially, someone to keep an eye on her. Even moronic Luke was capable of that.
Few of her colleagues were still at work. Barring a couple of stragglers, the Silver Sharks, Leaping Leopards and Denarii Demons work stations were all deserted. The COLLECTED BONUS POT sign was now reading
£1,150
. No way she was going to get near it this week, the way things were progressing.
And her heart was not in it. She stared up at the photograph of Caitlin that was pinned to the red partition wall. Thinking.
One hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds would determine whether Caitlin lived or died. It was a huge sum and yet a tiny sum at the same time. That kind of money, and much more, passed through these offices every week.
A dark thought entered her mind. She dispelled it, but it returned, like the determined knock of a double-glazing salesman: People regularly stole money from their employers.