Night Angels. Danuta Reah

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       4

       Hull, Friday

      The woman had been found three weeks ago in the mud of the Humber Estuary as the tide went out. The cause of her death wasn’t clear. There were marks of recent violence on her body, healing bruises that suggested she had been the victim of intermittent, casual abuse. Witnesses had seen her walking late at night near the bridge, her distinctive coat standing out in the frosty dark. People who plan to jump will often stand for a while contemplating the means of their oblivion. Detective Inspector Lynne Jordan wondered what had drawn the woman to the restless, surging Humber. But her interest wasn’t in the death of this woman, it was in her life.

      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.

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