Night Angels

Lynne Jordan was after contraband – but not the usual alcohol, tobacco and drugs that made their way past the barriers intended to prevent their import. The contraband she was looking for was more tragic and far more problematic. Social and political upheavals have their cost. The naïve optimism of the West may celebrate the death of an ‘evil empire’ but the East has a clearer view. A curse. May you live in interesting times. The communities of Eastern Europe were being torn apart by the forces of change that brought wealth, corruption, poverty, war and death in their wake. The contraband that Lynne was looking for was some of the human flotsam from that upheaval.

Lynne’s job was to monitor her patch for women who had been brought into the country illegally, or who were overstaying their visas, and working as prostitutes. It had been a problem in London, in Manchester, in Glasgow – women brought to the country and then prostituted to endless numbers of men six, seven days a week.

The trade was spreading. Escort agencies around the country now offered ‘a selection of international girls’. The women were effectively kept in debt bondage. A woman’s travel documents, if she had any, were confiscated. From her earnings – only a fraction of the price the pimp charged for her services – she had to pay the charge for being brought into the UK, and had to pay high prices for accommodation and expenses. They tended to be kept in flats, enslaved by debt and fear, not allowed out without a minder. They were young, some of them were very young – a team in the north of England had found eleven-year-old girls on one of the premises they raided – and most of them were too frightened of the British authorities to seek help even if they could escape. Hull presented Lynne with an interesting problem. It was a large city, a major port, but it didn’t have an immigrant community as such, in which the women could hide or be hidden. Or it hadn’t until the dispersal programmes had started to move asylum seekers out of the crowded centres of the south-east and to dump them on to the stretched provision of the northern cities: Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle, Hull.

The support organizations that had been hastily set up were either circumspect or hostile in response to Lynne’s queries. ‘Not my responsibility,’ Michael Balit, the Volunteer Co-ordinator who worked with the council and some of the refugee organizations, told her. ‘I don’t have time to spend looking for exotic dancers or nannies trying to boost their income.’ He caught Lynne’s eye. ‘Look, prostitutes can take care of themselves. It’s a police matter. Your business. Let me know what’s going on. Keep me informed. I’ll pass on anything relevant that comes my way. Now, if you’ll excuse me…’

The woman had been very young. She had been found in the old docks area in a distressed state, and had been brought to the casualty department of the Infirmary by one of the workers from a refugee support group. The hospital had called the police, but the woman’s English was limited and she was in shock so very little of her story was clear. Lynne had listened to the tape an astute officer had thought to make while they were talking to her at the hospital. Though she had seemed willing and eager to talk to them, something had frightened her, and she had run away. One of the officers, a young woman herself, had said to Lynne, ‘She was OK with us. With me. But she seemed a bit…’ she made a gesture at her head to indicate mental confusion. ‘She kept talking about cats. The medic who examined her said he thought she might have been raped, so we were going softly, softly. But she was in distress, so I went to get the nurse again, and when I got back, she’d gone.’ The officer described the woman as – almost – oriental, with the rounded face and high cheekbones of the east. Her hair was raven black, and under the blue of death her skin was sallow. The security cameras had picked her up leaving the hospital alone. She had paused at the entrance, looking round, allowing the camera to catch her picture, hunched into the coat the support worker had given her when he drove her to the hospital. That was the last they had seen of her until her body had been found by a walker, in the mud of the estuary in a frenzy of ravenous gulls.

And the gulls and the tearing tides had done their work. The woman’s face was gone. All that was left of her was the battered body, the raven black hair, the coat, its Christmas red an ominous and incongruous marker of the last place she had stood, abandoned on the bridge – and the interview. The Senior Investigating Officer on the case, Roy Farnham, had sent it through to Lynne with a request for any information that she might have to help him. ‘We don’t even know, yet, if we’re dealing with a murder,’ he’d told Lynne when she spoke to him. The post-mortem findings had been inconclusive, the cause of death undetermined, but the dead woman had been in the early stages of pregnancy.

The little Lynne knew about the dead woman was assumption. Her nationality – she spoke Russian – and, possibly, her name. She said twice on the tape something that sounded like ‘Katya’, but the tape quality was poor. The material on the tape suggested that she had been working as a prostitute, but so far Lynne had found nothing that would give her any more information on the woman.

Unless her inquiry on the tape came to anything. A couple of months ago, she’d attended a seminar on developments in analytical techniques – these seminars were held regularly, and Lynne found it useful to keep up to date with what technological tools were available to help her. She’d remembered the seminar as soon as the Katya tape came into her hands. A woman from one of the South Yorkshire universities was touting for trade. She had talked about the ways in which apparently incomprehensible tapes could be cleaned of background noise and restored, the ways in which the actual machine a tape had been recorded on could be identified, and – here Lynne had paid close attention – how the nationality of a speaker could be determined by the way they spoke English. The woman had been talking in particular about establishing the regional and national origins of asylum seekers, but Lynne could see immediate applications to her own work.

The woman hadn’t particularly impressed her at first. She’d seemed a bit intimidated by the scepticism of the officers present, a scepticism that was honed on long experience of botch-ups, courtroom fiascos and ‘experts’ who flatly contradicted each other using identical material. But Lynne had rather warmed to her when she was recounting the success they’d had in convicting an obscene phone caller from a message he’d been unwise enough to leave on an answer-phone. ‘And you tracked him down from that?’ one of the group had asked.

‘Oh no,’ the woman had replied. ‘We helped to convict him on that. I think it was the phone number he left that tracked him down.’ She’d looked up from her notes at that point, and her eyes had glinted with laughter. Lynne had made a note of her name – Wishart, Gemma Wishart. She’d sent the Katya tape to her as soon as she’d got it from Farnham with high hopes that at least they could find out where the woman came from.

Which reminded her, the report was supposed to be in today. She checked the post in her in-tray but there was no sign of it. She phoned Wishart’s direct line, but she got a secretary who told her that Wishart wasn’t available. Lynne identified herself and asked about the report. ‘I’ll see if I can find someone to talk to you,’ the secretary said, her voice sounding uncertain, and left Lynne to drum her fingers on hold before someone finally took her call.

‘This is Dr Bishop,’ a voice said. ‘I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I’m a colleague of Gemma Wishart’s.’ She started talking about a car breakdown and Lynne had to cut her off. ‘I’m sorry,’ the Bishop woman said again. ‘We’ve been held up by Gemma’s – Dr Wishart’s – absence. I can give you the details of the report now, if you want.’ Lynne made notes as the other woman spoke. Katya, according to Wishart’s report, was from East Siberia.

‘How certain is she?’ Lynne’s geography was rusty, but she had a feeling that ‘East Siberia’ covered an area that was considerably larger than the British Isles. ‘Can she be more specific?’ If they could pinpoint the area more closely, they might be able to identify Katya, assuming her family or friends had reported her missing.

‘You’ll need to talk to Gemma if you have any specific queries, but…’ There was the sound of pages turning. ‘She says, “The accent is consistent with the area of north-east Siberia.”’ She rattled out some technical detail about vowels and devoicing and intonation. Lynne made minimal responses as she thought about it. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to go with the information. She thanked the woman, cutting her off in the middle of something about acoustic profiles, and rang off on the promise that the full report would be in the post that day.

She put the Katya file to one side. She could think about it again when the report came through – Monday now, probably. It was irritating. Academics tended to operate on a different timescale from other people.

It was nearly a month since ‘Katya’s’ death. There was very little chance of getting a line on the woman’s real identity. When the pathologist’s final report came through, her death might be formally recognized as a suicide, and she and her unborn child would lie in an unmarked grave in a foreign country. Some corner of a foreign field that is forever…where? In the absence of any obvious cause of death, in the absence of any identification, there was very little that the investigating officers could do.

Sheffield, Friday evening

It was dark by the time Roz got home. She lived on the east side of the city, away from the expensive residential suburbs. Pitsmoor had trees and quiet roads, rows of terraces and big, detached houses. Burngreave Cemetery, the small park and a recreation ground provided green spaces among the shops and houses and roads. But the area was run-down. Shop fronts were boarded up. Low property values meant that landlords left their rentals to decay. As the streets became more unkempt, graffiti started to appear on walls and bus stops. The signs of regeneration struggling in the city centre had made no impact here.

Pitsmoor suited her with its varied and varying community. And she had fallen in love with the house from the moment she saw it. She loved the square bays of the double front, the high hedge of privet and bramble and rambling roses, the stone lions that guarded the steps, the wide entrance hall and wooden stairway, the huge, flagged kitchen with the old range, the labyrinth of conservatory and outhouses that led from the back of the house to the double garage that reminded her that Pitsmoor had once been a place where the wealthy, or moderately wealthy, of the city lived. She even found the house next door an asset; a house like the one she lived in, but one that had stood empty for too long and had been vandalized into dereliction.

Everyone had said Roz was crazy when she bought the house. She’d been in Sheffield for three months, and knew she was going to stay for a while. ‘Not Pitsmoor!’ they’d said, and ‘Wait until you’ve had a chance to look round.’ But the house had reminded Roz of the house where she had lived with Nathan, and Pitsmoor had reminded her, just a bit, of the place she had left. She was happy.

She stood at her back door now, looking at the derelict house. A tree was growing out of the oriel window, and fringes of ivy and dead grasses hung over the eaves. On summer evenings, she could sit in the yard and watch the pigeons flying in and out of the holes in the roof where the slates had been removed by weather, time and local children. She shivered. It was getting cold. The moon was nearly risen now, and she had things to do. She went back inside.

She put bread under the grill to toast, and opened some beans. She wasn’t in a mood to cook. She ate a spoonful of beans out of the tin while she was waiting, leaning against the side of the cooker, her eye on the bread to catch it in that moment of transition from pale brown to charcoal. She wondered if Gemma was going to phone her, or if she should try and make contact herself. She remembered the tape that Gemma had been working on. The recorded voice had sounded emotionless, probably because the woman was concentrating hard on finding the right words. But she knew…Shit! The toast! She turned off the gas. The toast was just about retrievable. She tipped the beans into a pan and put it on the hob, dumped a plate on the table and took the toast over to the sink to scrape off the burnt bits.

She sat at the kitchen table to eat, staring at the window that had become a square of darkness. Friday night, and here she was alone in her house, eating tepid beans on toast, planning an evening’s work, and happy, contented, to be doing that. It seemed such a short time ago that she had been a student, and Friday night would have meant clubbing, hitting the town with her friends, going to parties, having fun. Maybe she’d tried to recapture that time with Luke.

Then there had been her time with Nathan. Friday night still meant the weekend, still meant special times, but it was time that they wanted to spend together or sometimes with friends…And then there had been the isolation of his illness. Their friends had tried, but a lot of them had disembarked. They hadn’t been able to cope, and in the end, nor had she. She twisted her wedding ring round her finger. ‘You find out who your true friends are,’ her mother had said philosophically.

And now, she was a successful research academic, well on her way up the ladder, and Friday night was just another evening – an evening without the immediate demands of the next day’s work, so one that could be used to catch up with longer term projects. Her book, for example; unimaginatively titled An Introduction to Forensic Phonology. She picked a couple of stray beans off her plate. She could try and get that tricky fifth chapter sorted out. She licked the tomato sauce off her fingers, washed her plate and the pan and left them to drain, then collected her briefcase and went into the downstairs room where she usually worked.

Privet pressed against the bay window, shutting out the light. The room was cool and cavernous, a huge mirror illuminating its shadows. The mirror had been left in the house by the previous owner. It was old, the gilt chipped, the glass slightly distorted and marked. The reflected room looked drowned, softened in the dim light. Roz stood at the far end of the table and saw her face a white blur in the shadows. Her gold-rimmed spectacles reflected the light and obscured her eyes. She took them off. She didn’t really need them. She untied her hair, and let it fall round her shoulders. The imperfections in the glass made the light waver like a candle flame, made her reflection look as though she was swimming through deep water, pale face and fair hair floating in the brown shadows. Rosalind. If there be truth in sight, you are my Rosalind. Nathan used to say that to her, Mozart on the tiny cassette player that was all they could afford, the gas fire combating the draughts from the ill-fitting windows and rattling doors of their flat. You are my Rosalind.

Work, she had work to do. She turned on the desk light, its pool of illumination dispelling the shadows in the mirror. She had brought one of the laptops from work, more powerful than her own machine. She wanted to try out some new software that Luke had recommended, as well as work on the book. She switched the machine on, and sorted through her disks while she waited for it to boot up. She realized, as she looked at the files on the machine, that this wasn’t the laptop she usually brought home, it was the new one, the one that Gemma had been using. She’d thought that Gemma had taken it to Manchester. She must have taken the older one. Maybe she hadn’t wanted the responsibility of the more expensive machine. Roz tried to imagine what Joanna would say if it got stolen or damaged, and decided that Gemma had made the right decision. That made her uneasy about the security in her own house. Break-ins were not unusual in Pitsmoor. They weren’t unusual anywhere these days. Gemma had lost her sound system just a couple of weeks ago when her flat had been burgled. Roz decided she’d lock the laptop in the cellar head before she went to bed.

Gemma. Ever since her conversation with Luke…Gemma should have been in touch at some time during the day, or she should have phoned this evening to let someone know she was safely back. Joanna would want to know how the Manchester meeting had gone. Maybe Gemma had been in touch with Joanna, bearded Gren-del – Luke’s occasional name for her – in her lair. Roz wondered if she should phone. But Joanna was going out this evening; she’d mentioned it to Roz on her way out. ‘Must rush. I’m going to the concert tonight.’ Joanna probably wouldn’t welcome the intrusion, especially not if she’d already been reminded about Gemma’s delinquency by a phone call.

Luke. Luke would have heard. She tried his number, but she got the answering machine. He must be out. She held the phone against her ear, thinking. Then she tried Gemma’s number, without much hope. Nothing. She was seeing Joanna tomorrow evening. She’d find out then. She pushed the problem out of her mind, and turned to the computer. Gradually, the work absorbed her, and the problem of Gemma retreated to the back of her mind. The hours passed, unnoticed, as she sat there in the dark, in the pool of yellow light, the words scrolling up and up the screen.

Hull, Saturday, 9.00 a.m.

Lynne Jordan sat in Roy Farnham’s office, wondering if she was pissed off at the delay, or pleased that she had actually been called in. On the whole, she decided that she was pleased. There had been no overt hostility to her arrival. It was more that a lack of interest meant that things she should be notified of, things that were clearly or possibly within her area of responsibility were just not passed on to her. Michael Balit’s attitude was not uncommon. Prostitutes were prostitutes, the argument seemed to go. Sometimes they got killed. Illegal immigrants were illegal immigrants. Sometimes they got killed as well. Lynne could remember a conversation at a dinner party, where the wife of a colleague had held forth with indignation about a young man who had tried to smuggle himself into the country riding on the roof of a Eurostar and had electrocuted himself. ‘He’s occupying a bed in intensive care,’ the woman, a nurse, had said. ‘Someone else could be using that bed. It makes me so angry.’ Lynne had wondered what, exactly, the woman thought should have been done with the injured man, but didn’t ask. The answer would probably have depressed her.

Farnham was afraid they had a prostitute killer on their patch, a street cleaner, or a man who wanted to kill women and found that prostitutes made the easiest prey. And if the previous two were illegal immigrants, women in the situation that Lynne was just starting to monitor, how much easier would they have been to catch and kill? ‘How many have there been?’ she said.

‘That’s the problem,’ Farnham said. ‘Until this one – it’s inconclusive. There’s the woman from the estuary, the one you’re trying to identify…’ Katya, Lynne supplied mentally, ‘…and there was something up the coast at Ravenscar.’ Lynne listened as he ran through the details. The body of a woman had been found just over two months earlier on the shingle below the plummeting cliffs of Ravenscar in the incoming tide. Lynne looked at the report and the photographs. The woman had been small, five foot three, and thin. She had a tattoo on her left wrist, a spider in a web that formed a lacy bracelet round a wrist that should have been chubby with disappearing puppy fat, and she had needle marks on her arms and on her thighs – the tattoos of the heroin user. The pathologist had put her age at around seventeen. Her body had been washed clean by the sea, leaving her with weed tangled in her hair and round her legs. She had been battered by the pounding tides. Her skull had been shattered, leaving the face distorted, the mouth smashed. It was still possible to map young features on to the wreckage that remained, which was more disturbing than if it had been smashed to a pulp. She had been found early one Sunday morning by a walker who had made his way down the precipitous path to watch the sea.

There was no identification, but the dental work suggested she was Russian. ‘Russian, no record of her arrival. They think she was working as a prostitute. That’s too many parallels,’ Farnham said. ‘Have you heard anything on the street?’

Lynne hadn’t. ‘I’ll ask around,’ she said.

‘The women usually know something about what’s going on,’ he said. ‘And you’re looking for an identification on the Humber Estuary woman? Any progress?’

‘I’m trying to narrow down her place of origin,’ Lynne said. ‘She might have been reported missing.’ She explained about the tape and Gemma Wishart’s now overdue report.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Keep me posted.’ He looked down for a moment. ‘We might have another one,’ he said. He told her about the woman found in the hotel the previous day. Another faceless woman. ‘But we’ve got a cause of death. This one was strangled. We got the call around midday Friday.’

‘Do you know when she was killed?’ You, not we. Lynne was always careful with her language. She wasn’t on the murder team, she didn’t want anyone to think she was poaching on their turf.

‘Thursday night some time.’

‘And they didn’t find her until lunch-time? How come?’

Farnham shook his head. ‘It’s a mess,’ he conceded. ‘The manager, a woman called Celia Fry, went on a hunt for a missing cleaner. According to Fry, they were short-staffed Friday morning. The cleaner started doing the rooms. Later on, Fry comes down to find her because the upstairs rooms aren’t done, and she finds the vacuum in the middle of the passage and the linen basket out, and no sign of the cleaner. She’s a bit pissed off about this and she starts looking round, and that’s when she finds the Sleeping Beauty in the bathtub.’

‘And the cleaner?’

‘No sign of her. That’s where I thought you might be able to help us.’ He looked across at her. ‘There’s nothing on the books for her and the manager is trying to pretend she doesn’t exist. Casual worker, student, stuff like that. I think she’s wishing she’d kept her mouth shut in the first place.’

‘You think she might be someone who’s working illegally?’ Cleaning was a largely unregulated area. ‘I’ll need more information.’

‘I told her to expect full checks on all the systems and all the accounting within the next week. Did wonders for her memory.’ He grinned, and checked through the folder. ‘Name of Anna Krleza. Age about twenty. Five foot two, three. Shoulder-length dark hair. According to Fry, she’s only been working in the hotel for a week or two. She was supposed to be bringing in her national insurance and P45 any day. Fry says she was getting suspicious about the delay.’ He raised a sceptical eyebrow at Lynne. ‘I’m looking for her. But you’re the one with the contacts.’ He pulled another file across his desk. ‘Do you know anything about a firm called Angel Escorts?’

‘You think she was killed by a client?’ He didn’t respond, but waited for her to answer his question. ‘I don’t know any escort firm called Angel, not operating around this area. But a lot of the agencies operate online these days. Basically, they claim to act as contacts agents – the girls give their details and the agency passes them on to clients.’ She shrugged. The sex-for-sale sites on the internet were blatantly brokering prostitution, but they were hard to track down, the ones who operated from cyber-space, and the ones that had a more terrestrial reality kept themselves within the law by careful wording, or sufficiently within it not to attract scarce police resources.

‘Mm.’ He was noncommittal.

Lynne pushed. ‘Why do you think she was on the game?’ she said.

‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘But I think she might have been. The Blenheim’s a bit of a giveaway. And she was wearing some specialist gear – one of those corset things, laced. Bondage stuff. And the room wasn’t booked out to a woman. It was a man, single booking, made that evening by phone. A sales rep, apparently.’ He checked his notes again. ‘Name of Rafael. That’s with an “f”, not a “ph”.’ He read the question in Lynne’s face. ‘No luck yet. He scribbled something in the hotel register. We’ve got someone looking at it, but I don’t think it says anything. The phone number doesn’t exist, and he didn’t give a car registration. He booked in as normal, paid his bill – they do that if they want to get off first thing – and that’s all anyone saw of him.’ He rubbed between his eyebrows with his thumb and index finger. ‘Anyway, the name – Angel Escorts, Rafael…’ He looked at Lynne. ‘There’s an archangel called Rafael.’ Lynne knew. She was surprised that he did. ‘Client’s joke or killer’s joke? Or are they the same person?’ He frowned. ‘We found this card.’ He pushed it across to Lynne. She looked at it. International women. That was why Farnham thought she might know it. She kept her eyes on the card, letting her mind wander over the possibilities as she listened to him. No address. No URL. Just a phone number.