Death in a Far Country (12 page)

She sat at traffic lights waiting to take the turn off the main Leeds road towards Bradfield wondering what to do with the rest of her day off. She glanced across the valley towards her home town, dominated by the massive bulk of Earnshaw’s mill, now being redeveloped as luxury apartments, and wondered just where the ‘massage parlour’ that Elena said she had been forced to work in was situated amongst that grey expanse of narrow Victorian streets and more modern estates. You could hide a dozen illegal operations inside Earnshaw’s, she thought, or even in the still standing remnants of The Heights on the hills beyond. But it was much more likely to be concealed behind some relatively harmless shop-front close to the city centre.

And then there were the more up-market assignations Elena had described, when she and other girls had been dressed up by a woman who had supervised their toilet before putting them in a car with a couple of minders who had taken them to what the girl guessed was a hotel, with carpeted corridors and big rooms with huge TVs and beds larger and softer than she had even dreamt could possibly exist. The men there had been younger, she had said, young and good-looking enough to have wives and girlfriends, she thought, but still not averse to forcing themselves on the girls they paid for, sometimes alone, and sometimes three or four of them at a time, wallowing in sex until they and she were exhausted, and they would send
for her minder to take her away again, back to the prison house where all she could do was curl into a wretched ball and try to sleep and forget until someone decided to use and abuse her again.

Feeling sick and almost frantic with outrage, Laura went home and phoned Joyce to make sure she was safe.

‘They seem to have given up, the so-called immigration men,’ Joyce said.

‘Did you make a note of what they looked like? We’ll end up telling someone official about all this. We’ll have to. And it’ll be best if we don’t forget anything.’

‘She’s going to need a lawyer, that lass,’ Joyce said.

‘Yes, she is. I’ll keep on pestering the charity in London to see what they can do to help. In the meantime she’s safe where she is, and she can get her strength back before she has to face any more questions.’

‘Your policeman won’t be best pleased if he finds out what you’re doing,’ Joyce said. As a long-time enthusiast for demos and picket-lines in her younger days, Joyce had always been ambivalent about Laura’s relationship with Thackeray.

‘I know,’ Laura said. ‘But I can’t bear the thought of her being arrested and flung into some awful immigration detention place. Not after what she’s been through. If there’s no official way of giving her some time and space we’ll have to do it the unofficial way.’

‘You’re a good lass,’ Joyce said.

But Laura knew she was skating on very thin ice, and she sat for a moment wondering if she could talk Ted Grant into allowing her to spend some time investigating prostitution in Bradfield, on the off-chance that she could find out more
about who might be exploiting girls like Elena. But before she could give any more thought to her next move, the phone rang and she was surprised to hear her father at the other end, with a querulous note in his voice.

‘I’m in a right quandary here,’ he said peremptorily. ‘I thought you’d keep me in touch with what’s going on at United.’

‘I’m not sure what
is
going on at United,’ Laura said. ‘Though since we last spoke I have talked to Jenna Heywood and I know someone’s trying pretty hard to get rid of her. And they don’t seem to be too fussy about the methods they use either.’

‘Well, what’s all this about selling their best player, the black lad, what’s his name?’ Jack Ackroyd insisted.

‘Okigbo. Where did you hear about that?’ Laura asked, surprised.

‘There was a little snippet in the
Mail
this morning, round-up of the bottom divisions, sort of thing. We get it a day late down here, so it’s not today’s news. Surely your sports people know about it.’

‘I’ve had a day off today and haven’t seen this afternoon’s paper,’ Laura said, glancing at the copy of the
Gazette
she had bought on the way home and flicking over to the back page where, sure enough, Tony Holloway had indulged in three columns of speculation about the future of United’s star player.

‘Jenna Heywood will be furious,’ Laura said. ‘She certainly doesn’t want to lose him.’

‘I tried to speak to Les Hardcastle on the phone but he’s very elusive. I wanted to know what he’d give me for my shares.’

‘If you want the club to survive I wouldn’t sell them to
Les,’ Laura said. ‘But Jenna might buy them. She needs a two thirds majority to get her rescue plan off the ground and she’s not got it yet. You could do a crafty deal there.’ She smiled to herself, knowing that crafty deals were what her father still enjoyed best.

‘Oh aye?’ Jack Ackroyd said. ‘She’ll be paying over the odds then, will she?’

‘So will Les Hardcastle and his cronies, I expect,’ Laura said. ‘They want to get hold of more than a third so they can stymie Jenna’s plans.’

‘An auction then?’ Jack said and Laura could imagine the gleam in his eyes.

‘Something like that,’ she said.

‘Well, I’ll tell you what you can do for me, love. Try and contact Les for me, would you? It’s costing me a fortune from here. Ask him to ring me. I want a quiet word. And try to find out from your sports editor just what’s going on with this black lad and the manager, what’s his name? He’s an Eytie, isn’t he? Does he want him to go, or is it all going on over his head? I need a bit of background on this one, pet. Can you do that for me?’

Laura smiled to herself.

‘You’re an old rogue, Dad,’ she said.

‘Aye, well, to tell you the truth it gets a bit bloody boring out here, just your mum and me and the golf course. There’s not much excitement. She sends her love, by the way, and wants to know when you’re coming out.’

‘Before Christmas, maybe,’ Laura said, thinking that a break might be what she and Thackeray needed to sort themselves out. ‘I’ll see if I can catch up with Hardcastle for
you, but I don’t reckon he’ll tell me much. The last thing I did was a fairly sympathetic interview with Jenna Heywood, so I reckon that will put me firmly in her camp as far as the old guard are concerned.’

‘Aye, well, see what you can do.’ And Jack rang off abruptly, no doubt after calculating the cost of his call, Laura thought wryly. Her father had made a fortune by counting the pennies and she did not reckon that he was going to stop now. And he would undoubtedly sell his shares to the highest bidder with not a shred of sentimentality, even if it meant the closure of the football club he had once professed to support. In many ways Jack was more in tune with twenty-first century Britain than she was herself, and in a totally different world from his mother, who would still storm a few barricades in pursuit of what she believed was right if only her arthritic knees would let her.

Thackeray came home soon after seven, more appreciative than usual of the meal Laura had cooked and apparently more relaxed.

‘A good day?’ Laura asked.

‘Better than some recently,’ he said. ‘We’ve had a bit of a breakthrough in this murder case at last. We’ve got some CCTV footage of the dead girl in the town centre the night she was killed, which gives us a better estimate of the time of death. The only witness who saw her was pretty vague about the time, but she was filmed at half past midnight alive and well in Kirkgate, hurrying in the direction of the canal. It also gives us a much better description of the second girl. We’ll be able to circulate the footage and maybe find out who she was.’

‘The second girl?’ Laura asked.

‘Of course, you weren’t at work today. We’ve already released it to the Press. The dead girl had someone with her, a white girl, quite young, not wearing a coat though it was a chilly night. We’ve put out an appeal for her to come forward. It’ll be in the
Gazette
somewhere tomorrow.’

Laura suddenly felt very cold. There could be little doubt, she thought, that the second girl must be Elena, although she had carefully avoided mentioning that she had not been alone when she ran away. By tomorrow one of those smudged images of the two of them would be released to the world. She had always known that Elena would have to face the police at some point, but the point was obviously much more imminent than she had hoped or expected. She swallowed hard and thought fast. She would have to contact Ibramovic tomorrow morning and ask him to break the news gently to Elena. For the moment, she would say nothing and let the child rest.

‘How many brothels do you reckon there are in Bradfield,’ she asked brightly. Thackeray looked slightly startled.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘I told you. I’m trying to get Ted to let me do something on these charities that help girls trafficked into prostitution.’

‘I’d stick to the charities, if I were you,’ Thackeray said, his eyes anxious. ‘You don’t want to go poking around the sex trade, here or anywhere else. There’s some very unpleasant characters involved.’

‘I’m sure there are,’ Laura said, hoping the acknowledgement did not sound too heartfelt.

‘I don’t want you dressing up as a tart again,’ Thackeray said.

Laura grinned, recalling one of Ted Grant’s more outrageous
enterprises which had involved her doing just that and ending up in a police cell for her pains, to Thackeray’s intense embarrassment.

‘I’m older and wiser now,’ she said. But as she cleared away the dishes, she wondered if that were strictly true. Her rash adoption of Elena, she thought, might turn out to be as ill-advised as her pretended soliciting had turned out to be years earlier. Whatever happened, she was somehow going to have to explain just why she and Joyce had failed to report the girl to the authorities as soon as they found her. And that, she thought, was not going to be a conversation she was going to enjoy.

The sergeant on the front desk at Bradfield’s main police station gazed in open admiration as the two young women draped themselves over his desk, long blonde hair curling seductively over their expensive jackets, which were unbuttoned just enough to reveal the skinny tops and ample cleavage beneath.

‘Can I help you, ladies?’ he asked with unconcealed fervour, and all three of them were well aware of how his imagination was suggesting very interesting ways of achieving that objective. Both women smiled, but faintly, as if his open-mouthed admiration was too boring to attract more than a moment’s attention. The older of the two tapped slightly imperiously on the counter top with long puce fingernails, the same shade as her liberal lip-gloss, and offered as much of a frown as her artificially smoothed brow would allow.

‘It’s that girl, innit?’ she asked, her accent more Essex than local. ‘The girl in the canal. We think we saw her, didn’t we? And the other one. The one you’re looking for in the paper.’

The Sergeant swallowed hard and straightened up from his position leaning across the counter like an eager Labrador. Whatever he had expected from the two visitors, it was not this, and his hormones went into a rapid retreat.

‘I’ll tell CID,’ he mumbled reaching for the internal phone.
‘Can you take a seat and someone will be down to see you.’

Within five minutes the two young women had flounced into seats across an interview room table from DCI Michael Thackeray and Sergeant Kevin Mower and had introduced themselves, confirming Thackeray’s immediate impression that he had seen both of them somewhere before. The older of the two, in her mid-thirties, he guessed, and by far the more confident, had clearly appointed herself spokeswoman for the pair, and even before she spoke for the first time Thackeray had half-recognised her as the person who had escorted the younger woman, weeping and distraught, from the Bradfield United party Laura had taken him to the previous weekend.

‘I’m Jolene Peters. My husband, for my sins, is Bradfield United’s first-choice goalie, and this is Katrina Jones. She’s engaged to Lee Towers, who plays midfield.’

‘I remember you,’ Thackeray said, to the evident surprise of the women and the Sergeant. Kevin Mower’s reaction to the unexpected visitors had been much the same as the desk sergeant’s, although he was wily enough to keep his expression, if not his roving eyes, firmly under control.

‘We’ve not met.’ Thackeray went on. ‘But I saw you both at the party after United’s draw with Chelsea. You seemed to be having some trouble with Lee that night, Katrina, as I recall.’

Katrina flushed faintly under her make-up and glanced at the diamond ring that still sparkled on her left hand. The drink throwing episode hadn’t led to a ring throwing sequel yet, Thackeray deduced, although he supposed there was still plenty of time for that.

‘Yeah, well, that’s partly what this is all about,’ Jolene said.
‘Bloody men.’

‘I don’t think…’ Thackeray began, but Jolene interrupted him quickly.

‘We saw them two girls,’ she said quickly. ‘The one who’s dead in the canal and her little friend. Little tart more like. We saw them with our blokes and some of the other players a couple of weeks before at the country club. And then again, after the Chelsea game. At least we think it were the same two that night. We didn’t get such a close look at them and it were dark in the car park. But I know for a fact that my Dave slept with one of them, he’s admitted it, and we think Lee did too, the little one. That’s what the row was about at the party. That’s why Katrina chucked her bubbly at Lee. He was just laughing at her, like he’d done something clever, wasn’t he? And now one of them’s dead, like, and we don’t know what the fuck to do, do we? But it wasn’t the black one our lads slept with. We reckon she went with OK, didn’t she? Like with like, like. So Dave reckons. She slept with Okigbo.’

Thackeray felt the surge of adrenaline that came with a breakthrough in a case, especially one as unexpected as this.

‘I think you’d better go back to the beginning,’ he said, more calmly than he felt. ‘Tell me exactly what happened and when.’

The two women, it appeared, had gone on a shopping trip to Leeds on a Saturday afternoon two weeks earlier, a day when United were playing away at Rochdale, just across the Pennine hills, and they had decided not to make the trip with the team. A little light pillaging at Harvey Nicks had been followed by more than a few drinks at a smart Leeds bar and the two had not got back to Jolene Peter’s home with their
loot until well after nine that evening, somewhat the worse for wear, only to find the house dark and empty, with no sign that the first-choice goalie had even been home to feed the two hungry Dobermans as agreed.

Drunk, hungry and somewhat miffed, Jolene had tipped dog-food into bowls with ill-grace and then rung around some of the other team wives to discover that most of the men had repaired to the West Royd country club to celebrate an unexpected win over a normally stronger team.

‘So you went to find the men at the club?’ Mower prompted, as Jolene temporarily ran out of steam.

‘Course we did, if they were having a party,’ Jolene said, as if dealing with a backward child. ‘I had this new dress, didn’t I? Prada?’ She glanced at the men as if expecting them to be impressed.

‘And I had this new handbag, gorgeous, and a sexy new top, though in the end I don’t think Lee even noticed,’ Katrina said.

Mower glanced sardonically at Thackeray, who looked bemused by this turn in the conversation.

‘So you went up to the country club?’ he said sharply.

‘In our new gear,’ Katrina said.

‘We got a cab, didn’t we? I was a bit pissed by then,’ Jolene said. ‘Can’t be too careful, can you, Inspector?’

‘And what happened when you got there?’ Mower broke in, worrying for his boss’s blood pressure.

‘They were all there, weren’t they? Most of the lads and a few of the wives. No one had effing bothered to contact us though. Bastards. Anyway, when someone had bought us drinks, we began to wonder where Dave and Lee had got to.
They weren’t in evidence anywhere and some of the other lads were giving us funny looks, like they were trying to distract us. So we began to wonder what was up.’

‘OK wasn’t around either,’ Katrina said. ‘And that were a bit funny because he loves to party, that lad.
And
he’d scored the winning goal, apparently. But he were nowhere to be seen.’

Jolene and Katrina exchanged a quick glance, as if to confirm that what came next was really what they wanted the police to know. But Katrina did not hesitate.

‘There’s some rooms upstairs, for people to stop over the night, like,’ she said, her face pinched and waspish with emotion. ‘If they lose it, and can’t get home. They must have taken the girls up there. That’s why I were so furious at the second party. Someone made a joke about it and Lee gave me such a cheeky bloody look, so I threw my champagne at him. It turned out later that those bloody girls had been there again that night, too, though because me and Jolene were there, our lads kept away from them.’ She twisted her engagement ring around her finger and Mower wondered if she was going to take it off there and then.

‘You saw the girls clearly, at the first party?’ Thackeray asked, and both women nodded.

‘You could positively identify them?’ And they nodded again.

‘It were them two, I’m sure it were. Or two very similar. The first time, after the Rochdale game, we went looking for our blokes and the two lasses came scuttling out, a black lass and a skinny white girl. Looked half starved. Someone must have rung upstairs and tipped Dave and Lee off,’ Katrina said.
‘We saw them going out to the car park, looking right scared, and then the three lads came back.’

‘Looking like cats who’d stolen the cream,’ Jolene said. ‘Bastards.’

‘Of course they said nowt had happened, but we knew it had,’ Katrina said. ‘One of my mates said it’s an open secret. If anyone wants a woman, it’s arranged for them. And then we saw them again at the Chelsea party. Two girls were just leaving as we arrived, legging it across the car park again wi’a couple of big blokes, and Lee and Dave didn’t know where to look. That’s why we were so fed up that night, an’ all. When someone started joking about it, I just lost it.’

‘And it was the same two girls?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t swear it were t’ same two,’ Jolene said. ‘It were a bit dark to see much. But it were two young girls so we thought they must be t’same.’

Thackeray thought it better not to tell the women that there was no way it could have been the same girls, as one of them by that time was already dead and the other had disappeared. The fact that they had been so quickly replaced and the footballers evidently content with the new arrangement would only fuel their fury.

‘Do you know who does the arranging if these girls turn up?’ Thackeray asked, stony-faced now.

‘Minelli, of course.’ Jolene’s face was hard as she spoke the name of a man she obviously hated. ‘Minelli controls everything about the players. Even their sex lives.’

‘So he’s a pimp?’ The word dropped into the conversation like the crack of a whip.

‘When it suits him. Other times he’s telling them to lay off
sex at home before a big game,’ Jolene said, passing on advice from the team manager that obviously rankled. ‘Thinks he’s some sort of God, that man. You wouldn’t believe it.’

Thackeray took a deep breath. To say that he had disliked Minelli on sight would be an understatement, he thought, although he knew this was an instant reaction to the Italian’s too close proximity to Laura. But he knew that he was walking on thin ice here, and might be too ready to believe the women’s vindictive and quite possibly fanciful allegations about United’s boss. He must watch his objectivity, he thought. That morning he had received his own summons to an interview with the inquiry team at County HQ, scheduled for the following week, and he was only too aware of how searching their questions would be about his abandonment of procedure when Laura had been in danger. He knew that making a habit of unpredictability would be fatal to his career within a very short time.

‘Has anyone you’ve spoken to suggested where these girls come from?’ Thackeray asked as neutrally as he could manage, but both women shook their heads at that.

‘She was foreign, the white girl, someone said,’ Jolene said. ‘But the other one, the black bitch. She spoke English all right. Someone said she and OK were getting on just fine.’

‘Did you see Paolo Minelli with them at all?’ But both women shook their heads at that.

‘And did he seem to be involved in getting them off the premises when you two turned up? On either occasion? Did he hustle them out to the car park or anything like that.’ But again they shook their heads.

‘They were with two other blokes the second time,’ Jolene
said. ‘They were heading to a car on t’far side of the car park. By the time we got inside the lads were all present and correct but they looked a bit shifty. The first time we got a better look because they passed us in t’corridor when we went upstairs. After that there was a bit of mayhem, wasn’t there? Hardly surprising. Then after we’d seen them again, running off when we arrived for the Chelsea party, it all kicked off again.’ And in spite of pressing on with their questions, that was about as much as Thackeray and Mower could elicit in the way of eyewitness evidence about what had gone on the night of the celebration parties.

When the women had gone, having checked and signed their statements, Thackeray called Mower into his office and waved him into a chair.

‘Well, we’ll have to check all that out,’ he said. ‘We know it can’t have been the dead girl they saw the second time because her body had already been found. So it looks as though there’s a regular supplier of a number of girls no doubt as and when they’re called for.’ He glanced away, his face bleak.

‘I’ll come with you to interview Minelli,’ he said. ‘We’re going to be about as popular as a couple of suicide bombers once it gets out we’re investigating Bradfield United. And it will get out. You can be sure of that, once we start working our way through the players.’

‘A pity it’s happened when they’re on a winning roll,’ Mower said. ‘The fans’ll think we’re going to damage their chances in the Cup.’

‘Never mind the bloody Cup,’ Thackeray said with unusual vehemence. ‘There’s a girl dead and another one missing. We’re talking life and death here.’

‘That’s what the fans think too, guv,’ Mower said, with a crooked grin. ‘You don’t talk proportion with football fans in a situation like this.’

‘Then it’s time they grew up,’ Thackeray snapped. ‘That’s a game, this is a murder, and by the looks of it a whole lot more viciousness as well.’

‘Can we believe anything those two bimbos said?’ Mower asked. ‘They obviously hate Minelli.’

‘We can’t necessarily believe anything they said without corroboration,’ Thackeray said sharply. ‘So that’s our next step. We’ll talk to Minelli now, straight away, and then work our way through the players, starting with Okigbo, who told me to my face he’d never seen the victim before. It sounds to me it’s quite possible he was lying, and he may not be the only one if all these girls were on the game. The town’s probably full of men who know them and won’t want to admit it.’

‘Right, guv,’ Mower said equably.

‘And there’s something else that may be significant,’ Thackeray said. ‘When I went to the United party with Laura I was surprised to see our old friend Steve Stone there, living it up with the best of them. His sister’s Minelli’s girlfriend, apparently. It may be an innocent connection, or it may not. Stone’s not come to our attention again, since the last time, as far as I know, but we know what he was into back then, even though the Crown Prosecution Service wouldn’t have it. If Minelli’s procuring girls he may be using Stone’s services to source them.’

‘Whoa, guv,’ Mower said, looking alarmed. ‘That’s jumping a few guns, isn’t it? I know you weren’t best pleased when the CPS threw the case out, but he does have legitimate businesses. We gave him a fright back then. But we’ll need
something rock solid to take Stone on again.’