Death in a Far Country (10 page)

‘Where do you come from?’ Laura asked quietly, hardly believing that what the girl was saying was possible in Europe in the twenty-first century.

‘Albania,’ Elena said. ‘And now I Albanian whore. That is what they tell me, men who bring me here. I am whore. Go back, my brothers kill me. Or men kill my mother.’

‘Do you believe that?’ Joyce asked sharply. Elena looked at her with contempt.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It is the truth. They say no good run away. I stay with them and they look after me. I can never go home. But I run anyway. I not stay more with these men and other men who come all day and all night and the things they do. It too bad there. If I stay I die. I get sick now. So I choose die my way. When I climb to the top of there…’ She nodded briefly at the block of flats where she had taken refuge. ‘I go there to jump.’

Laura glanced at Joyce, feeling close to despair herself.

‘Can you let Elena stay another night?’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll do a bit of research, see if I can find somewhere safe for her to stay, some sort of women’s shelter, maybe. We can’t sort this out ourselves. We need some help. She needs somewhere safe, she needs a doctor, she probably needs a lawyer, and she should certainly talk to the police eventually to see if they can
track these bastards down.’

Joyce nodded bleakly, her face full of pain, and Laura thought that nothing in her grandmother’s experience could have prepared her for this.

‘See what you can do, love,’ Joyce said without hesitation. ‘She’ll be fine here for another night. I’ll take care of her.’

Elena looked at the two women intently for a moment.

‘Not go home,’ she said, her voice pleading now. ‘Never go home.’

Laura hugged her briefly.

‘You’ll be safe now,’ she said, wondering desperately how she could possibly deliver on that promise.

And as her grandmother came to the door with her she put a hand on her arm.

‘You realise what we’re doing is probably illegal?’ Laura said.

Joyce smiled grimly. ‘Happen it is,’ she said. ‘But it looks like the lesser of two evils to me. See what you can sort out for the poor lass, pet, and then we’ll think about the legal niceties. I’d not want a suicide on my conscience, nor would you, because that’s how it’ll end if we’re not right careful. She’s right at the end of her tether, you can tell that just looking at her.’

Laura nodded and closed the front door gently behind her. Once in the car she buried her face in her hands for a moment, overwhelmed by the anger she felt at what Elena had said. In her job, she thought, she should be used to witnessing the inhumanity some human beings were capable of, but the depravity of men who could kidnap children – and Elena was even now little more than a child – and transport them
across continents to sell them into the sort of slavery the girl had suffered, filled her with impotent rage. Eventually she swallowed down her emotions and drove slowly back to the office where, still simmering, she began to trawl the Internet to discover what she could about the rights of women who had been trafficked into the country for sex.

What she discovered was not encouraging. Outside London there seemed to be little help available for girls and women in Elena’s situation, and even in the capital sanctuary was hard to find. In the end she rang an organisation that offered a small number of beds for women who had escaped the clutches of traffickers, and explained Elena’s situation to a sympathetic official. But cold comfort was about all that she could offer.

‘There’s no money for this sort of thing,’ the woman said. ‘We could fill our beds twenty times over. Does the girl have her passport?’

‘From what she says, I doubt she ever had a passport,’ Laura said. ‘She was kidnapped on her way to school, for God’s sake.’

‘But she says she’s from Albania? Which adds to the problem, of course, because it’s not in the European Union, so her immigration status will be automatically deemed illegal. I think the first thing to do, if you can, is find an interpreter, so that she can tell you in more detail what happened. You’re lucky she can speak English at all. Many can’t. Some make a break for it not even knowing what country they’re in. But in her case deportation is a real threat.’

‘Yes, I know that, and I’m sure all this legal stuff is very important, but what I really need right now is to find her
somewhere safe to stay. We can sort the rest out when she’s had time to see a doctor and build up her strength a bit. You don’t seem to understand – she’s in a desperate state.’

‘You say your grandmother can’t keep her?’

‘She’s only got the one bedroom,’ Laura said defensively, guessing what would come next.

‘And you’re not able to give her a bed yourself?’

Laura swallowed hard, thinking of Thackeray’s likely reaction if she brought even an abused illegal immigrant back to their flat. That was a moral dilemma she did not dare present him with.

‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s not possible.’

‘Hang on a minute,’ the charity officer said. ‘The churches are involved in this work as well. It’s just possible I can find you someone in Yorkshire who could help.’

There was a silence broken only by the rustling of paperwork at the other end of the phone, before the woman spoke again.

‘Try Father Aiden Moran at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Arnedale. Arnedale is near you, isn’t it?’ Laura froze for a second.

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s not very far. There’s no one else nearer, in Bradfield itself?’

‘I don’t think this has been much of a problem in your area so far. That’s the only contact I have.’

‘Right,’ Laura said. ‘I’ll talk to him and see whether he can help. Thanks.’

‘Good luck,’ the woman said. ‘Get in touch if you need any more advice, won’t you? We’ll do our best to help.’

She sat and stared at her phone for a long time. Why, she
wondered, did it have to be someone at the Sacred Heart in Arnedale, where, as far as she knew, Frank Rafferty was still the parish priest, a man who was as close to Thackeray’s father as anyone in this world and one whose discretion she could not trust and on whose loyalty she personally could certainly not rely.

‘Damn and blast,’ she muttered under her breath, aware that Tony Holloway was watching her curiously from across the newsroom. ‘I think that’s a no-go area. Somehow I’m going to have to crack this one myself.’

DCI Thackeray tapped on Superintendent Longley’s office door early the next day. He knew the Super was booked for another session with the inquiry team at County HQ later in the morning, but wanted to catch him for a briefing on the murder case before he left Bradfield. Longley was already at his desk, in full uniform, looking as grim as Thackeray had expected he might.

‘Sit down, Michael,’ he said, his expression abstracted. ‘Any developments overnight?’

Thackeray shook his head.

‘I’ve just had a briefing with the murder team, for what it’s worth, which isn’t much. We’ve had very little response to the television pictures.’ The artist’s impression of the dead girl had been broadcast the previous evening on both of the local TV news programmes and the detectives on the end of the phone lines the previous evening had nursed hopes of a breakthrough, which had not materialised.

‘One woman thought she knew her but when we showed her pictures of other black girls this morning she got completely confused. Turned out she thought it was a young woman who works in Marks and Spencers and who’s safe and well at home in Eckersley.’

‘And that’s all?’

‘That’s all. We’ve found her shoes but no handbag, though it seems inconceivable that a girl dressed like that for a night on the town wouldn’t have carried some sort of bag, however small. She’d need some money with her at the very least. To all intents and purposes she seems to have dropped into Bradfield from another planet.’

‘Aye, well, let’s not get too carried away,’ Longley said drily. ‘What about the forensics? Anything new there?’

‘Nothing more from Amos Atherton yet. They’re running various tests, including DNA. Somewhere, of course, there’s a man who fathered her baby, but he’ll remain as mysterious as the girl herself unless we get some positive ID.’

‘So it’s running into the sand?’

‘We’ve several lines of inquiry I still want to pursue. I’m not convinced that no one in the minority community knows her, African, Caribbean, whatever. But it’s not looking like an easy one to crack so far.’

‘I’ll have to leave it in your hands, Michael,’ Longley said wearily. ‘I’m tied up at County again today.’

‘How’s that going, sir?’ Thackeray asked cautiously. It had taken a DCI with a troubled career history and a superintendent with very definite ideas about how he liked his division run a long time to come to terms with each other, Thackeray thought, but he would be unhappy now to see Longley leave the service prematurely because of a case in which no one had covered themselves in glory.

‘How the hell should I know how it’s going?’ Longley said. ‘They give very little away. And I’ve no idea what the bloody spooks have been saying, or Val Ridley, for that matter, if
she’s given evidence. I don’t even know that. She’s out of our control now she’s resigned, any road. She could be putting the knife right between my shoulder blades right now for all I know.’

‘You think they’ve seen her already?’

‘How the hell would I know,’ Longley snapped again. ‘They tell you bugger all. Just go through a long list of questions. Why did I do this, why did I do that, what were my priorities, what was the budget, what was the staffing…?’ He hesitated, his face flushed. ‘After this little lot, I’m not even sure I want to carry on any longer, Michael, and that’s the truth. I’ve had it up to here.’ He drew an angry finger across his throat where the flesh bulged over his uniform collar and grimaced. ‘Is it worth the aggro, I ask you?’

‘I’m a bit worried they’ll ask me about my trip to Ireland,’ Thackeray said quietly, suddenly back in a windswept Atlantic seaside resort in winter where he had faced a man as unapologetically ruthless as he had ever met before. He shivered slightly and forced his attention back to Longley’s totally unexpected response.

‘What trip to Ireland?’ Longley asked. ‘You were on holiday, weren’t you? Who knows where you went?’

‘You haven’t told them?’

‘I knew nothing about your holiday plans, Michael. Nothing at all.’

‘And the information I picked up there?’

‘Information received,’ Longley said. ‘Anonymous information received.’

‘Right,’ Thackeray said with a faint smile. ‘I’d better tell Laura that.’

‘You do that and you’ll be fine. There’s no reason why both of us should suffer for that bloody case. A lot of the blame for what went wrong rests somewhere else entirely and I’ll make bloody sure the inquiry knows that, don’t you worry. If you and your young woman are careful about what you tell the beggars, you’ll be fine.’ Longley glanced at his watch. ‘I’d best be off,’ he said. ‘I know they’re looking for a bloody scapegoat so I suppose I’d better give them one. If I end up on the golf course a few years before I expected I don’t suppose there’ll be many tears shed.’

Thackeray watched Longley march down the corridor to the stairs at a brisk military pace before he made his own way back to the incident room next to the main CID office, his head whirling. He might not shed tears for Jack Longley, but he would certainly regret his going, he thought. His replacement as a boss could be much worse.

The incident room was almost deserted as most of the detectives had set about fulfilling the tasks they had been allocated at the briefing earlier, but Sergeant Kevin Mower was still at his desk, his head close to his computer screen and a slight frown on his face. He glanced up as Thackeray approached and gave a wry grin.

‘I’ve got some info on “disappeared” asylum seekers from immigration but there’s no one I’ve found yet who fits our victim’s profile. If she’s as young as we think she is, she may have come here as part of a family group, of course.’

‘In which case why haven’t her family reported her missing?’

‘Because if they’re illegals they’ll be too frightened?’ Mower said, his tone matter-of-fact.

‘I suppose there’s a whole constituency out there living
without any contact with the law, however much they need it,’ Thackeray said.

‘That’s about it, guv,’ Mower said. ‘You know that. There’s a whole underground economy based on something very close to slavery. The only time it surfaces is when something goes catastrophically wrong, like with the Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay. So maybe that’s what we’re dealing with here. And we may never find out who the victim is because no one who knows her will come anywhere near us.’

‘We know someone knows her,’ Thackeray said. ‘Not least the girl Karen Wilson saw her with before she died. Has nothing turned up on the CCTV tapes from the town centre? There’s a good chance they’ll have picked up the two of them somewhere.’

‘Do you know how many hours’ worth of CCTV there is to look at for one evening, guv?’ Mower asked mildly. ‘We’ve got two people still ploughing through it.’

‘Good,’ Thackeray said. He glanced round the office but its only other occupants both had telephones glued to their ears. He dropped his voice all the same.

‘D’you know where Val Ridley is, Kevin?’ he asked.

‘I’ve got her mobile number,’ Mower said with obvious reluctance. ‘Do you want to talk to her?’ Thackeray shook his head.

‘I just wondered if she’d been to County to talk to the inquiry yet. It wouldn’t do for me to contact her, but maybe you could find out?’ Mower nodded imperceptibly.

‘I’ll see what I can do, guv,’ he said. ‘Strictly off the record.’

When Thackeray had gone back to his own office, Mower went downstairs and out of the building and stood on a
windy corner of the town hall square watching the passers-by blindly for a moment before he pulled out his mobile. For a long time he thought he was going to be switched to voicemail for the fourth time, but eventually Val Ridley’s familiar voice responded, though the tone was not particularly friendly.

‘Why are you hassling me like this, Kevin?’ she asked. ‘I got your messages but what I do or don’t do is really nothing to do with you any more.’

‘Look, I know how angry you are about what happened, Val, but I just want you to think about who you’re going to damage in all this,’ Mower said.

‘I know exactly who you’re trying to protect, Kevin,’ Val said sharply. ‘But I’m not sure he deserves all this heart on the sleeve loyalty. And I’m bloody sure his girlfriend doesn’t.’

‘I think she was taken for a ride in a particularly nasty way,’ Mower said carefully. ‘Listen, Val, please. You have a point about the child. That was unforgivable. But the rest was more cock-up than conspiracy, believe me. I just want to be sure you don’t take the innocent down with the guilty on this crusade of yours, that’s all.’

‘Right,’ Val said, though Mower could detect no conviction in her voice.

‘Are you in Bradfield? Can we get together for a drink?’

‘No and no,’ Val said. ‘They don’t want to see me until next week, as it goes, so for the moment I’m staying well out of the way.’

‘Let me buy you a meal when you get back?’

‘Leave it, Kevin,’ Val said sharply. ‘This is something I have to work out for myself.’

‘Fine,’ Mower said. ‘But remember what I’ve said, won’t
you. Please?’ But she rang off without offering any reply to that and Mower stood for a moment, letting the wind swirl around him, before switching his own phone off and giving a shrug. He had tried, he thought, and he could not think of anything more he could do.

Laura put her phone down and glanced at her watch. It was four-thirty and the newsroom was beginning to fall silent as reporters packed up after a day that had begun for most of them at eight. Her chances of finding what she was looking for were becoming slimmer, she thought. Academics, on the whole, did not seem to work late into the afternoon. She had spent the last half-hour calling around the language departments of all the local universities and colleges on the off-chance of discovering someone who could speak Albanian, so far without success. All this, she thought wryly, to avoid asking the one person who could probably supply the answer to her problem off the top of his head: the priest in Arnedale.

But by now she was getting to the bottom of her list of possible language departments, and her prospects of success seemed to be dwindling. She had been kept on hold by the department at one of the Leeds universities for several minutes now and was on the point of hanging up when someone she had not heard before came on the line. The voice was male and gruff, with a local accent, but when he offered a name it was certainly not a native one.

‘You want someone who can speak Albanian?’ the stranger asked.

‘I do,’ Laura said, glancing around the now almost deserted office to make sure she was not being overheard. ‘I’ve met a
young Albanian girl who speaks almost no English and I need someone to translate for her. Is that something you could do?’

‘My name is Ibramovic. I’m Bosnian myself, speak Serbo-Croat. But I did have a lot of contact with the Albanian speakers in Kosovo years ago before I came over here, before all the trouble, when Yugoslavia was still Yugoslavia. I’m a bit rusty, but I could probably help. What’s it all about?’

‘Well, that’s what I’m trying to find out,’ Laura said evasively. ‘She has problems but she speaks so little English we can’t really work out what they are. Could I bring her over to see you, do you think?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ the voice said. ‘When exactly?’

‘I’ve got a day off tomorrow,’ Laura said. ‘Could you fit us in tomorrow morning some time?’ There was a rustle of papers at the other end of the phone.

‘About eleven? Do you know your way?’ Ibramovic asked. The appointment made, Laura cleared her desk and was pulling on her jacket when her phone rang again.

‘Laura? It’s Jenna, Jenna Heywood. I hoped I’d catch you. I wondered if you fancied a drink after work?’

Laura hesitated, surprised by the invitation.

‘I was going to see my grandmother before I went home…’

‘I won’t keep you long,’ Jenna said, and Laura thought she heard a slight break in her usually confident voice. ‘I’m at my new flat, right in town. If you just popped in on your way I’d be really grateful for your advice.’

‘I’ll be there in ten minutes,’ Laura said, taking down the address of an apartment in one of the newly converted warehouses close to the canal. This, she thought, was too good an opportunity to miss, although she knew how furious
another interview with Jenna would make Tony Holloway. Ten minutes later she had parked her car outside The Woolcomber building, the name and the towering stone walls by now the only reminder of its industrial past, and took the lift from the marble foyer to the top floor where Jenna was waiting for her at the door of one of the two penthouse apartments.

‘This is very nice,’ Laura said as she glanced around the stylish open-plan living room with its tall windows giving a vast view across the town, where lights were just beginning to flicker into life like scattered jewels, and a glimpse beyond of the dark, looming Pennine hills silhouetted against a stormy western sky.

‘I’m only renting it,’ Jenna said. ‘I couldn’t stand living with my mother again after all this time. But I’m not sure about putting down roots here again just yet.’

‘You’re very cautious,’ Laura said.

‘I had…have a life in London,’ Jenna said. ‘I’m not convinced yet I’ve got one here.’ She half-turned towards the well-stocked drinks cabinet as if to hide her expression. ‘What will you have?’ she asked.

‘A vodka and tonic, please,’ Laura said. ‘Light on the vodka, I’m driving.’

Drinks in hand, Jenna waved Laura into a seat close to the window, and sat herself in silence for a moment sipping her own drink and gazing out at the quickly falling dusk outside.

‘I’m not at all certain I should be talking to you,’ she said eventually. ‘But to be perfectly honest I don’t know anyone else up here I could talk to. Can I trust you to keep what I say strictly off the record? For the moment, anyway? I promise
that when there’s something to print you’ll be the first to know.’

‘That sounds reasonable,’ Laura said. ‘Though it won’t please Tony Holloway.’

‘I don’t trust Tony Holloway,’ Jenna said with some asperity. ‘I think he’s in the pocket of the old guard at United.’