Blood Money (31 page)

‘Sure.’ Hanging up the phone Mariner felt overwhelmingly exhausted. Upstairs, he went into the room that until recently they’d shared. Lying down on Anna’s side of the bed he found that it still smelled lightly of her. Her scent made him hard and the pain in his chest returned. He could-n’t believe that she would never again lie here beside him and that in such a short space of time she’d so completely moved on. But he had to accept that Anna wanted something different from life. She wanted what Becky and Mark had, and what apparently he couldn’t give her.

He wondered about Becky and Mark. Adopting a child from abroad was dressed up as some great philanthropic gesture, but they were essentially doing it because they wanted to. Was it really in the interests of the child or simply some warped kind of fashion statement? What did Marcella Turner call it? The children-as-accessories culture. On one level what they were doing seemed not so very different from what Alecsander Lucca and Goran Zjalic were involved in. It was what the world had come to; human beings shipped around and traded like commodities. Still, at least Becky and Mark’s child might stand more of a chance than Sonja’s baby. Mariner was still thinking about Sonja’s baby when he awoke very early the following morning.

He left it until a respectable time then drove back to his house. Letting himself in he was pleased to find Katarina up and about, in the kitchen making tea. ‘You want some?’ she asked.

But Mariner declined. ‘I want you to tell me about your friend Sonja,’ he said. ‘Did she leave her baby behind when she came to this country?’

‘No, she have her baby here, in England.’

‘The baby was a surprise? She didn’t know she was pregnant? ’ Mariner hazarded, thinking back to what Lorelei had told him.

‘Oh no.’ Katarina waggled her head and smiled. ‘She want her baby.’

‘Like Nadia.’

‘Yes.’

It was at that point that Mariner saw the faintest spark of light at the end of a very long tunnel. Christ they’d been through all this before with Valenka but didn’t think to ask if there were any others. ‘What happened to Sonja’s baby?’ he asked.

‘They take it to, um, the house,’ Katarina groped for the right words, ‘the house for children have no mother no father.’

‘An orphanage,’ Mariner said.

‘Or-phan-age.’ She hadn’t come across that word before.

‘Who’s they?’ Mariner asked. ‘Who took Sonja’s baby?’

But Katarina didn’t know. ‘Sonja tell me when we come to your police station.’

It took all Mariner’s willpower to stop himself from hugging her. Now all he needed to do was run it by Knox and Glover to establish if he was anywhere near the truth.

He was prevented from doing this by Delrose, who met him on his way in to Granville Lane. ‘There’s an official from the Albanian Embassy here with a Mr Troshani,’ she said. ‘They seem to think that you’re expecting them?’

Christ, that was quick. ‘Oh God,’ Mariner sighed, out loud. ‘Now I have to break it to a man that his daughter was a sex worker and that she and her bastard child are now dead.’ He flashed Delrose a humourless smile. ‘This job doesn’t get any easier, does it? Is Charlie Glover in yet?’

‘I saw him come in about ten minutes ago.’

Armed with the photograph of Nadia, Mariner went down to the informal interview room where Mr Troshani and his interpreter had been taken and plied with coffee. Even sitting down Mariner could see that Troshani was a big man, with his daughter’s dark, intense eyes. About fifty, his hair silver-stranded at the temples, the suit he was wearing strained at the seams. His expression was bleak, and Mariner couldn’t begin to imagine what he must be feeling.

Introducing himself, Mariner gave Troshani the silver crucifix they had retrieved from his daughter’s neck, and the photograph that Valenka had given them. Troshani stared at the picture, touching the faces of Nadia and then her baby as if doing so might bring them back to life. Head bowed, he confirmed with a wordless nod that this was his daughter pinching his nose between finger and thumb to stem any tears. He spoke to the embassy interpreter.

‘He wants to know what happened,’ the interpreter translated.

It was the question Mariner had been dreading. ‘Some of the detail—’ he hesitated, and gave the interpreter what he hoped was a meaningful look.

‘He wants to know everything,’ came the reply.

As best he could Mariner went on to describe the gruesome discovery last Christmas, piecing it together with what they thought had happened to Nadia based on what her friend Valenka had so recently told them. When he had finished, Troshani sat in silence, no longer even trying to control his weeping.

‘Does he know how she came to this country?’ Mariner asked, knowing that the story would be similar to the others.

‘She had an offer of work,’ the interpreter told him when Troshani had spoken. ‘I encouraged her to come. I thought it would be a better life for her. She sent a letter saying what a good life she had here.’ Troshani went through his pockets, producing a crumpled and dirty envelope. ‘She told us she was going to have a baby and that she would be coming home. And now she will be coming home in a wooden casket.’ Finally his shoulders gave way and he sobbed. ‘She was my child and I should have taken care of her.’

Before Troshani left, Mariner summoned Charlie Glover. ‘This is the man who was responsible for tracking down Nadia’s killer, and for identifying her,’ Mariner told Troshani. ‘If it hadn’t been for him, we may never have known.’ As Mariner had expected, it was a moving encounter.

 

Afterwards, Mariner felt drained, his earlier momentum lost. He went back up to CID where Knox was working at his desk. The sergeant followed him into his office. ‘You’re looking rough,’ he remarked.

‘Yeah, didn’t get much sleep,’ said Mariner flopping into the seat behind his desk.

‘Oh yeah?’ Knox raised a suggestive eyebrow. ‘Anything to do with Anna?’

‘What? No. Anna and me, it’s over.’ Mariner watched the shock register on Knox’s face.

‘Jesus, when did that happen?’

‘That’s what I keep asking myself.’

‘Anything to do with the Welsh medic?’

‘You should be a detective.’

‘Nah. Hours are crap and the pay’s not much better.’

‘You heard that Christie’s stuff turned up at Zjalic’s house,’ Mariner said, not wishing to dwell on his own problems.

‘Charlie told me. What the hell’s going on?’

‘I think I might know.’

Knox pulled up a chair. ‘Cough it up then.’

‘I talked to Katarina last night. She told me about her friend Sonja.’

‘I interviewed Sonja,’ said Knox, the memory of it forcing a grimace. ‘She couldn’t wait to get home to her kid.’

‘That’s right, and I’ll bet you assumed the same thing I did; that Sonja left her child behind to come and work here.’

‘I suppose I did.’

‘But that’s not what happened,’ Mariner enlightened him. ‘Sonja had her baby here, while she was working at the house on Foundry Road, in exactly the same way that Nadia did.’

‘So we’ve got a coincidence,’ said Knox, not getting it.

‘But don’t you think that’s weird?’ Mariner continued. ‘I mean, as a one-off you could just about understand it, but on two occasions a pimp allows a girl to go ahead with her pregnancy? The normal thing would be an enforced termination. ’

Knox thought it through for a moment. ‘Except, apart from a few weeks when they can’t work, it’s no skin off his nose, is it? Maybe it was simpler to go with the flow.’

‘A knocking shop is no place for a baby though. According to Katarina, Sonja’s baby was taken to an orphanage, and Nadia’s baby was meant to have been sent back to her family. And that woman we met at Zjalic’s house could have been a courier, taking the baby back to Eastern Europe.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘I can’t square it,’ said Mariner. ‘I keep asking myself, why bother? Shipping off these babies is all unnecessary trouble and expense for Zjalic to go to. I mean, he’s not under any obligation to these girls, it’s not that kind of relationship, so why go to all that trouble, paying for a return flight to wherever for the courier, and lose several working weeks out of the girls, to boot? A man like Goran Zjalic is only interested in one thing, money. And I can think of a much more profitable way of disposing of a couple of surplus babies in this country.’

‘Which is—?’

‘To sell them.’

‘Which would be illegal,’ Knox pointed out.

Mariner’s laugh was bitter with contempt. ‘Oh yes, and if what we know about Zjalic is true then we all know how much he likes to stay on the right side of the law, don’t we? I’m not saying he’s set up a market stall in the Bullring. He’d dress it up as something much more respectable, like private adoption. But the end result is the same.’

‘But if a couple wants to adopt they’d surely go down the social services route.’

‘And it’s a long and complicated process,’ said Mariner. ‘Then what about the couples who are deemed unsuitable, or too old to adopt in this country, or the couples who specifically want a newborn baby? There’s a shortage over here. Couples are encouraged to adopt older children. One of the reasons that adoption from abroad has become so fashionable is because of the lack of babies over here, but even that’s becoming harder.’

‘You think people would be prepared to break the law?’

‘If what you read in the papers is true, there are people out there who are prepared to do anything to have a baby. And they may not even realise that they’re doing anything illegal. Zjalic is a smart and resourceful man. He’d make it sound legit. And it would be lucrative. What could you charge for a baby? Twenty thousand, fifty thousand? This could be far more profitable than prostitution.’

Knox was beginning to come round. ‘Christ, no wonder these two girls weren’t encouraged to have terminations.’

‘No, instead they were sold some line about their babies being sent home to their families or to an orphanage, when in reality they are sold on to couples who are desperate for a child. The girls wouldn’t be any the wiser. Realistically they wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of tracing their child if they ever succeeded in getting away from Zjalic in the first place.’

‘But Nadia’s baby wasn’t sold. We know what happened to him.’

‘But what’s the other thing we know about him? He had a cleft palate.’

‘He was damaged goods,’ said Knox. ‘So he couldn’t be sold.’

‘Perhaps Nadia realised that, feared for his future and refused to give him up, or perhaps the child died first and Nadia found out. We’ll never know.’

‘But where the hell does Christie come into all this? What was her stuff doing in Zjalic’s house?’

‘The last time Christie had those things with her was the night she was killed, so we have to conclude that someone who has access to Wilmott Road was involved with her murder, which in turn implicates Zjalic. She said she had something to tell you, and perhaps this was it. Christie somehow had found out about what Zjalic was doing. It would make sense of why she’d been on the Internet looking at overseas adoption. She might have been checking out if what Zjalic was doing was legal.’

This was a step too far for Tony Knox. ‘But how would she have found out about it in the first place? As far as we’re aware she didn’t even know Goran Zjalic.’ He’d identified the missing link.

‘It’s something to do with Foundry Road, I’m sure that’s the connection,’ said Mariner. ‘I wouldn’t mind betting that the staff at Jack and the Beanstalk sometimes have to cover at Little Beans, so Christie must have worked there from time to time.’

‘That still doesn’t mean she knew anything about Zjalic. If she saw him in the street she wouldn’t know who he was or what he did.’

‘Unless Zjalic approached her.’

‘But for what?’

‘Christie worked in a nursery, looking after children. Perhaps Zjalic needed someone to help him out while he was holding the babies at Wilmott Road. Nadia and Sonja’s babies are the ones we know about, but there may have been others. Christie was a bright girl. When she saw the set-up she sussed what was going on and established through her Internet research that the operation was illegal. She might even have tried to blackmail Zjalic.’

‘She was playing with fire if she did.’

‘It gives us a compelling motive for murder. When Zjalic wouldn’t cooperate, Christie decided to report it to you. You said she had a conscience. Then when you didn’t show up on Saturday night it occurred to her that she could make money from the intelligence in a different way and phoned Jez Barclay. Maybe she was going to anyway. She’d already told her nan that she would have enough money to buy a flat and she’d either get it through blackmail or the TV company, or both.’

But Knox still wasn’t convinced. ‘If Zjalic is as powerful as we think he is, I still don’t think he’d be the kind of character to just walk up to a kid like Christie in the street and let her in on something as big as that. It’s far too risky.’

‘I don’t think he had to. Once she was in she could easily have worked it out for herself.’ But they were grabbing at speculative straws and they both knew it.

‘And at the other end of it, how does Zjalic make contact with couples who want to buy a baby?’ Knox asked.

It was the bit that Mariner hadn’t thought through, but suddenly it came to him. He scrabbled around on the desk until he came up with the orange flyer. Reading it again it made perfect sense. ‘Take another look at this,’ he said handing it to Knox. ‘We made the assumption that it offers further fertility treatment, but the wording says nothing about “treatment”. All it says is:
new hope for infertile couples
. What greater hope could there be than the offer of a baby?’

‘Go on.’ Knox was still dubious.

‘This is the other end of the operation. Couples get these flyers, ring the number and Zjalic offers them a baby. Christie, it seems, wanted a baby, so the flyer’s how Christie got involved. She found it or was given it, called the number and was offered a baby. The first step of that is some kind of bogus “clinic” appointment, which would explain the entry on her calendar. Until she kept the appointment she wouldn’t have known what this offer was. She might even have got as far as meeting with Zjalic, then perhaps she recognised him from Foundry Road and realised what he was up to.’