Nod.
“Good. Then let’s start.” Jane shifts in her seat. If I’m interviewing, she’s supposed to be note taking, and I’ve just ruled that out. I’m outside procedure here, not in a bad way, but in a way that makes Jane uncomfortable. She’s rolling with it, though. Good for her. Her notebook is on her lap, but it’s lying idle for now.
Time for my first question.
“Did you know Janet Mancini?”
Nod.
“And little April perhaps?”
Nod. Sideways nod, with a hint of no.
“All right. You didn’t particularly know April, but you knew her by sight. Were you there on the night of her murder?”
Shake.
“No, didn’t think you were, but it’s one of those things we have to ask. My boss would go nuts if I didn’t ask it.”
Smile.
My hand is still on her arm. I’m not going to move it if she doesn’t.
“Now I’m going to ask you if you know various other people. Some of them you will have heard of. Others you won’t. Others maybe or maybe not. We’ll see. Okay?”
I get started.
I begin with names that I’ve got partly from Bryony Williams and partly from police records. East European girls with an involvement in prostitution. I’m betting that Ioana knows a good half of them, and she does. More than. More than half. She’s getting comfortable with the nod-shake thing, which is my main reason for asking.
“Okay. We’re doing brilliantly. Now some other names. You won’t know so many of these. Conway Lloyd.”
Puzzlement. Shake.
“Rhys Vaughan.”
Shake.
“Brian Penry.”
Shake.
“Tony Leonard.”
Shake, but not a very confident one.
“He sells drugs. About Jane’s height maybe. Dark hair. Receding hairline. You know, bald.”
I mime bald, to help with Ioana’s comprehension. She smiles—crookedly, because the right side of her face isn’t doing anything much but causing her pain, but a smile’s still a smile. It’s accompanied by a mini-nod, indicating “sort of.”
“He’s not the one we need to worry about, though, is he?”
Shake. A very definite one. Tony Leonard owes Ioana Balcescu a box of chocolates, I’d say.
“How about Karol Sikorsky?”
Fear. No nod. No shake.
“Was it him that did all this?” I indicate her damaged body.
A very slow shake.
“Okay. It was one of his friends. Part of his group anyway. That’s right, isn’t it? Just shake your head if I’m wrong.”
No nod.
No shake.
But her eyes are telling me yes. One of Sikorsky’s accomplices. Again, I exchange glances with Jane. She’s reading it the same way.
I say, really carefully, “Ioana, we think that Karol Sikorsky may be a very bad man. We want to catch him and lock him up. But we need you to help us. I think Karol Sikorsky is part of a group of men who brings girls like you over from Romania and countries around there to Cardiff and South Wales. They probably tell you how lovely your life is going to be here, then you find it isn’t, but you can’t get away. Am I right so far?”
A nod. A good-quality, courtroom-ready nod.
“Good. Thank you. Now I think that same group of men gets violent. Those men need to be in prison, and we want to put them there. So will you do this for me? If you know that Sikorsky is responsible for killing Stacey Edwards, then please say yes. I don’t mean that he necessarily killed her himself, but that he had something to do with it. That he was closely involved. If those things are true, please say Yes.”
No nod.
No shake.
A frozen silence, bigger than the sky, emptier than the ocean.
I let the silence expand for as long as I can keep it going, before nudging one last time. Now or never.
“If you help us, we can catch him. We can stop him hurting you. We can stop him hurting anyone. Ioana, was Karol Sikorsky responsible for the murder of Stacey Edwards?”
“Yes.”
“And for the murders of Janet and April Mancini?”
“Yes.”
“And for injuring you?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe because you knew about him and what he did? Maybe they beat you this badly as a way to warn you to keep silent?”
“Yes.”
It’s hardly even correct to describe her answers as words. She moved her lips. Her eyes said yes. I didn’t even know at the time—and I don’t think Jane did either—whether any actual sound crept out into the room. It didn’t matter. A silent yes works as well as a loud one. I notice that Jane has made notes of my last four questions and Ioana’s answers. She wants evidence that can be produced in court. Notes made “contemporaneously” with the interview. The kind of evidence from which a prosecution is formed. But I’m also conscious of my promise to Ioana.
“My colleague Jane here has just made notes. Not of the whole interview, just this very last bit. We need that, because we want to arrest Sikorsky and put him in prison. For the rest of his life, I hope. Certainly until he’s a very old man. But I promised you we wouldn’t take notes. If you want us to tear up the notes Jane just made, we will. You just need to ask us to. You need to say it out loud.”
A second goes by. Two seconds. Five seconds.
Good enough for me. Good enough for Jane. On our side of things, the police side, the side that is always thinking about how something will play in court, there’s a huge sense of relief, but I know that Ioana is feeling the exact opposite. She’s scared that she’s just signed her own death warrant, and maybe she has. In the country she was born in, the police are not to be trusted. The same is true here. Ioana doesn’t have to worry that we’re in the pay of the mob. She doesn’t have to worry about corruption and criminality and violence. But she has to rely on our discretion, and a clumsy public statement or a snippet of gossip overheard in a pub could be enough to bring the retribution she fears. If we were seen entering her house, that, too, might be enough to kill her.
For a few seconds, I have the feeling that, by answering as she has done, Ioana was choosing to end her own life. To end it bravely, selflessly—but still to end it, to quit the endless battle.
Feeling uncomfortable, I wind up, as Jane is silently urging.
“Good. Thank you. Now I’ll ask one last big question before we finish. Can you give me any other names? Friends of Sikorsky? The ones he gets to do his dirty work? Maybe the men who came here yesterday? If you can give me any names at all, then we can arrest them. We’ll arrest them, then send them to jail for a very long time. That’s what we want to do. We want to protect you and people like you. Do you understand?”
A nod, but a frightened one. She doesn’t want to tell us. She’s not going to tell us anyway. Ioana’s cooperation is pretty much at an end, I’d say. From her face, I can see that Jane thinks the same.
“Can you excuse us a moment, Ioana? I just need to chat with my colleague a moment. You stay lying there. Just say if you want anything.”
Jane and I go out into the hall, where we talk in a rapid-fire hum. I tell Jane about the extent of Ioana’s injuries, which Jane had guessed at but not personally witnessed. Jane is worried about whether the evidence we’ve just collected will survive in a courtroom. It’s marginal, that’s for sure. Any defense lawyer would rip into it, accusing us of applying unfair pressure to the witness, breaching procedure in not noting down every transaction that took place. That’s fair enough. If I were a defense lawyer, I’d do the same.
On the other hand, as I point out to Jane and as she knows full well, our choices were to act as we did or collect no serviceable evidence at all. We agree that, as soon as we step outside the house, we’ll independently make our own notes of the interview, sign them, then compare them. We’ll hope our two accounts will be identical, near enough.
The other big issue is how much more we can expect to achieve from continuing. The rule book says we should be asking a whole slew of further questions. Ms. Balcescu, will you please tell us when you last saw Janet Mancini? Describe for us your contacts with Karol Sikorsky. Are you aware, Ms. Balcescu, that this is a murder inquiry and withholding evidence may constitute an offense? That, pretty much, was how we conducted the last couple of interviews, and they came up with a big, fat, rosy nothing.
“Shall I step in there, one on one, and see if she tells me anything?” I ask Jane. “If we catch the bastards, then we can probably coax her into making a statement. If I were her, I wouldn’t say a thing as long as they’re still out there. For now, I’m guessing that we’ll do better by going softly, softly.”
Jane thinks. She’s stressed by this situation, I realize. It bothers her that she’s flying out of radio contact with the rule book. I’m not stressed. I feel more comfortable here. It’s the radio contact which stresses me.
Jane nods. “Okay. I’ll see if we can get a doctor over, though really she needs to go to hospital.”
I’m relieved. I wanted time alone with Ioana but didn’t want to force the issue.
Back inside the room, I sit down again by Ioana. She looks at me—with wide, dark, south European eyes, her best feature—and I gaze back at her. Neither of us says anything. She doesn’t need a doctor or a couple of intrusive coppers. She needs a time machine. She needs to go back to the age of eight or nine, or earlier. Back to being a newborn. She needs different parents, a different upbringing, a different past. She needs to be on a completely different planet in a completely different life. No matter which way you read the signs on this one, she’s riding hard for an unhappy ending.
Through the wall, we can hear Jane on the phone to the office, asking for a doctor to pay a visit. That’s how we do things on Planet Normal. It’s not how things have ever happened in Ioana’s world.
“You’ve done well,” I tell her. “That’s Jane sorting out a doctor for you. He’ll be here soon.”
“Thank you.”
“You can trust him. It’s safe to let him in.”
“Okay.”
“Is there anything more you can tell me about Karol Sikorsky? Where he lives? Who his friends are? Anything at all?”
She shakes her head and looks away from me. I decide not to push it any further. Instead I show her my card and write my mobile number on the back.
“This is me. My name’s Fiona. You can call me any time at all. If you feel up to telling me more—maybe about the men who beat you up—then call me. Okay? I’ll put it here.”
I thrust the card under the sofa cushion, so she knows where it is but it’s out of sight of any prying eyes. I don’t want Sikorsky’s thugs to find it, for Ioana’s sake and mine.
“I’d better go now,” I tell her. “Do you want anything from the kitchen before I go?”
“No, thank you. I’m okay.”
“Do you want to watch the telly? Here. I’ll put it here.” I sort out the TV and remote control. I don’t think her English is good enough to make much sense of the TV, but then again, I’ve hardly heard her say anything at all. I squat down next to her and hold her hand.
“You’ve done really well. You’ve been very brave. You’ve helped a lot of people.” Even to my ears, it sounds as though I’m not expecting her to survive, and maybe I’m not. But she grips my hand and smiles. Her life probably hasn’t been full of people telling her she’s done well.
Then, I don’t know what possesses me, but I ask, “Ioana, can I ask you one last question? Have you ever heard of a man called Brendan Rattigan—?”
I’m not sure what I was expecting when I asked that question. I haven’t really believed that Rattigan was alive. I’m pretty darn sure that Penry and Rattigan were up to something, and something with a connection to the Lohan murders. But I think I asked the question because I wanted to know how that damn debit card ended up in Janet Mancini’s squat. Idle curiosity. Something to say.
But that just shows why you have to ask.
Ioana tries to pull herself upright. Those cracked ribs stop her, and she cries out in pain. Jane’s done with her phone call and pops the door open to see what’s going on. The door interrupts anything that Ioana might have been about to say. So she says nothing. Her forte throughout this interview. But the expression on her face is shock and fear and distress.
Jane and I gape at each other.
“Can you tell me anything about Brendan Rattigan, Ioana? Anything at all?”
Bad interview technique. Too nonspecific. Too open-ended. All I get is Ioana’s staring eyes and a long, swinging headshake. I don’t know if that’s no she won’t say, or no he isn’t dead. It seems like both to me. In any case, the moment passes and Ioana’s back in her own world, remote and uncommunicative.
We say our goodbyes and leave.
The Butetown street seems like a different planet. A bit grubby, but normal. A place where women aren’t beaten into a pulp and terrified into silence. The clouds that had bothered me before are still there, but now they feel ordinary and comforting.
“What on earth happened in there?” Jane asks.
I don’t tell her. Or rather I lie. Ioana sat up. She hurt herself. She’s upset. She’s frightened.
Jane makes no comment. Just says that we’d better write up our interview notes as soon as we get back to the car. A return to the rule book. A nondescript Cardiff street. Planet Normal.
25
We’d planned two more interviews that day but postpone them. It seems more important to deal with the Balcescu one. We drive a couple of blocks away, down to the railway station, just to be out of sight of Balcescu’s house, then write up our notes sitting side by side in Jane’s car, where the loudest sound is of our pens moving over the paper. Jane has another hair loose on her shoulder and I want to pick it off for her, but I want to do that only because I want her to turn to me with a smile, and I want that only because what I saw in Balcescu’s house frightened me and made me anxious for comfort. Probably best not to try to get that by soliciting a cuddle from a superior officer, however. I’ve got good intuitions about these things. It wouldn’t work out.
I finish my notes before Jane finishes hers She looks sideways at me, and I realize that she finds me intimidating too. Not my clothes sense, obviously, or my social skills. But I’m very comfortable with words. I can zoom through things like writing notes or summarizing documents in half the time it takes most of my colleagues. I feel slightly weird that I’m intimidated by Jane while she’s intimidated by me. These things should cancel each other out, no?