Strange Affair (38 page)

“Perhaps I am wrong then. I don’t know. All I know about Carmen is what she told me. She got pregnant, so he sent her to me. I suppose the only unusual thing is that Carmen had decided to have the baby. She’s a devout Catholic and she refused to have a termination.”

“That’s permitted?”

“In some circumstances,” said Dr. Lukas. “It would depend on the loss of income. Carmen is one of the special girls, blessed with good looks and a fine figure. She is also a very intelligent girl and she speaks English very well. She was never a street prostitute, more what you would term a call girl.”

“So how is he going to make up for his loss of income?”

“I can only guess,” said Dr. Lukas. “There are some men who like to have sex with pregnant women and are willing to pay extra for it. That way she would have fewer customers but make as much, or more, money.”

Annie’s stomach turned. She could understand why Dr. Lukas wasn’t eating. She’d lost her appetite as well. “And the baby?”

“Adoption. She spoke about the way they were taking care of her and feeding her well for a Mr. Garrett, who I assume is paying good money for Carmen’s baby.”

“Will you tell me the pimp’s name?”

“His real name is Hadeon Mazuryk. He calls himself Harry. His nickname is ‘Happy Harry’ because he looks eternally sad. He is not, of course, it’s just a freak of physiognomy.”

“Do you know where he keeps the girls?”

Dr. Lukas nodded. “There’s a house near King’s Cross. I went there once. An emergency. You must be careful, though.”

“Why?”

“He has a gun. I’ve seen it.”

Banks had raided Roy’s wardrobe again for suitable attire. He didn’t think he would get far in the Albion Club wearing jeans and a casual shirt. Trousers were a problem. Roy’s didn’t fit him and he had brought only one pair of trousers, which didn’t match any of Roy’s jackets. In the end he just had to hope the
place was poorly lit so that black and navy blue didn’t look too bad together.

The man on the door, looking rather like a cross between a butler and a bouncer, asked him for his membership. Banks flashed his warrant card.

“Police? I hope there’s no trouble, sir?” he said.

“None at all,” said Banks. “Just a few questions and I’ll be out of your hair.”

“Questions?”

“Yes. Were you on duty here last Friday?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you remember Roy Banks arriving with Gareth Lambert?”

“Such a tragedy about Mr. Banks. The perfect gentleman. Who could do such a thing?”

“Who indeed? But did you see them arrive?”

“Yes. It would have been about ten o’clock.”

“And were you here when they left?”

“They didn’t leave together. Mr. Banks left first, at about twelve-thirty and Mr. Lambert stayed much later. Perhaps three o’clock, something like that.”

So Lambert was telling the truth about that much, at least. “Did they leave alone?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know where Mr. Banks went after he left?”

“Mr. Banks didn’t say. He just bade me goodnight as usual.”

“You didn’t call a minicab for him?”

“There are always plenty of taxis on the Strand, and there’s a taxi rank at Charing Cross.”

“Right,” said Banks. “Okay to go inside?”

“Please try not to upset the members.”

“I only want to talk to the staff.”

“Very well.”

Banks was surprised when he got inside the club. The door opened into a spacious, low-ceilinged bar, and where he had been expecting dark wainscoting, chandeliers and waiters in burgundy bum-freezers, he found tubular fittings, halogen lighting and waitresses in pinstripe suits, in trousers rather than skirts. Fan-shaped splashes of colour from well-hidden lights decorated the walls in shades of blue, pink, green, red and orange. The chrome tables were high, with matching, leather-topped stools. This definitely wasn’t one of those old gentleman’s clubs where the right sort of people stay over when they are down in the city for the weekend; it was primarily an upmarket casino with bar and restaurant facilities, the sort of place you might have found James Bond fifty years ago. Now it played host to a hip, young crowd of stockbrokers, investment bankers and the occasional old smuggler like Gareth Lambert.

As it turned out, the dress code was also a lot more relaxed than Banks had expected – he had never been to a club before and he still thought in terms of Lord Peter Wimsey and Bertie Wooster – and he was surprised to see that not everyone was wearing a tie or a suit. Business casual was in. The place wasn’t very busy, but a few people sat around drinking and chatting, and a group of Japanese businessmen had the one large table by the far wall, where they were entertaining some expensive-looking women. Most of the people in the place seemed to be in their thirties, which made Roy and Lambert slightly older than the average member. Nobody paid Banks any undue attention. There was no music.

Banks took one of the stools at the bar and ordered a bottle of Stella. The price was every bit as outrageous as he had expected. The bartender was a woman in her late twenties, by
the look of her, about the same age as Corinne and Jennifer. She had very fine short hair dyed pink and blond. She smiled at Banks when she took his order. She had a nice smile, dimples too.

Banks showed her his card. “Do you work here every night?” he asked.

“Most nights,” she said, scrutinizing the card more closely than the doorman had. “Yorkshire? What brings you down here?”

“Cases can take you all over the place,” Banks said. “People move around a lot more than they used to.”

“You can say that again.”

“Actually, I’m making a few inquiries about Roy Banks. I understand he was a member.”

“Poor Mr. Banks,” she said. “He was a real sweetheart.”

“You knew him?”

“Not really ‘knew.’ I mean, not outside of work. But we talked here occasionally. You tend to do that, in this job. He always had time for the bar staff, not like some of our more stuck-up members.”

“Did he sit at the bar and tell you his troubles?”

She laughed. “Oh, no. That only happens in films.”

“What’s your name, by the way?”

“Maria.”

“Pleased to meet you, Maria.”

“What relation are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your name’s Banks, too. I saw it on that card. Are you his brother?”

“Yes,” Banks said.

“You must be gutted.”

“I am. But I’m also trying to find out what happened. Did you talk to him last Friday?”

“Yes. He and Mr. Lambert were sitting at that table just over there.” She pointed to a discreet corner table. “Mr. Banks always made a point of coming over and saying hello and asking me how I was doing. And he always made sure he left a decent tip.”

“Did he have anything to say that night?”

A waitress appeared asking for drinks. Maria excused herself for a moment and filled the order with graceful efficiency. “What was it you wanted to know?” she asked when she came back.

“Just if Roy had said anything out of the ordinary to you.”

“No. Nothing. Not that I remember.”

“Did he seem upset or annoyed?”

“Not at first. A bit preoccupied maybe.”

“Later?”

“After he’d been talking to Mr. Lambert for a while he seemed to be getting uncomfortable, if you know what I mean. I don’t know how to describe it, but you could sort of feel the tension, even from over here.”

“Others noticed?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I’ve always been very sensitive to the vibes people give off.”

“And these were bad?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Were they arguing?”

“No. They never raised their voices or anything like that. It was just a sort of tense negotiation.”

Lambert had told Banks that Roy had been pressing him for contacts in the arms business, but Banks didn’t believe that. “What happened next?”

“After he used the telephone, Mr. Banks went through to the casino and I didn’t see him again.”

“Mr. Lambert?”

“He sat by himself for a while, then he went into the casino, too.”

“You say Roy used the telephone?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“There’s a public telephone in the corridor by the toilets,” she said. “Down there.” She pointed directly across the room. Banks turned and saw the phone on the wall. From where Lambert had been sitting, he couldn’t possibly have seen Roy make the call. “Not a lot of people use it because everyone’s got a mobile these days, haven’t they, but he must have forgotten his or the battery was dead or something.”

Banks thought of the mobile sitting on Roy’s kitchen table. “Was it a long phone call?”

“No. Just two or three minutes.”

“How long had he been here when he made it?”

“Not long. Maybe half an hour or so, a bit longer.”

That must have been the call he made to Jennifer, Banks thought, sending her up to Yorkshire. “And how did he seem after that?”

“Like I said, he went into the casino. He didn’t say goodbye, though, and that’s not like him.”

“Did Mr. Lambert make any phone calls?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Could he have done?”

“Oh, yes. I mean, he went to the toilet. He could have used his mobile there, if he had one with him. But I didn’t see him make any calls, that’s all I meant.”

“Thanks very much, Maria,” said Banks. “You’ve been a great help.”

“I have?”

Banks made sure to leave her a decent tip and wandered out on to the Strand. He glanced about him to see if there was anyone watching for him, but if there was, he didn’t notice. According to the doorman and Maria, Roy had left the club around half past twelve. There were plenty of taxis passing by, Banks could see. So what had Roy done? Got in a taxi? Or had someone offered him a lift? It couldn’t have been Lambert, because he was still in the casino. So who?

17

T
he sun was up by the time the operation had been approved by the brass in SO
₁₉
, the Metropolitan Force Firearms Unit at Scotland Yard, and the team had been assembled and briefed. Annie and Brooke gathered with the specialist firearms officers outside the house near King’s Cross, in the narrow streets around Wharfdale Road. The house was part of a terrace, and the SO
₁₉
team leader had acquired a set of plans. Young girls had been seen by neighbours coming and going, sometimes with men, at all hours. There were eight officers in the team, all wearing protective headgear and body armour and carrying Glock handguns and Heckler and Koch MP5 carbines. Each man had been told what section of the house he was to secure. Three more men watched the back of the house.

It was an eerie sight, Annie thought, and there was something slightly unreal about it. One or two onlookers had gathered at the streetcorners, held back by the uniformed officers stationed there. It was a humid morning and a light mist hung in the air. There was little traffic in the immediate area but Annie could hear horns and engines in the distance. Another day in the big city was beginning.

In a way, Annie wished that Banks had been granted permission to attend; she would have liked him by her side. But these operations were strictly regulated and there was no way they were letting Roy Banks’s brother be a part of it. She had talked to him on the phone late the previous evening, and he had told her about his visit to the Albion Club. In exchange, Annie had told him what Dr. Lukas told her about the late girls and Carmen Petri.

On the pre-arranged signal, the SO
₁₉
team battered down the front door and stormed into the house. Annie and Brooke, unarmed, had instructions to wait outside until the place was secured, then they would be allowed in to question any witnesses or suspects. Brooke was unusually quiet. Annie felt herself tense up as she heard sounds from inside the house, shouts, commands, a woman’s scream, something thudding on the floor.

But there were no shots, and she took that as a good sign.

She had no idea how long it took, but eventually the team leader emerged and told them the house was secured. There had been one guard armed with a baseball bat and three other men, none of them armed. The rest of the occupants were young women. They had best take a look for themselves, he told them, shaking his head in disbelief.

Annie and Brooke went inside. It was a shabby place, in poor repair, with old wallpaper stained and peeling off in places, no stair carpet and only dirty linoleum on the ground floor. The smells of stale sex and cigarette smoke permeated the air. Little light got in through the windows, so the officers had turned on all the lights they could find, mostly bare bulbs, and they hardly flattered the scene, just gave it an extra harsh edge.

The seven girls were all in a small room upstairs. Probably more lived there, Annie guessed, but they would be out
working the streets around King’s Cross. No matter what the time of day, business never stopped. The area had had a bad reputation for years, and Annie remembered how the girls were once called Maggie’s Children because they came down on the trains from the north when all the jobs disappeared up there. These days they might be known as Putin’s Children, Iliescu’s or Terzic’s.

The SO
₁₉
officers searched the place as Annie and Brooke went over to the girls. The sparsely furnished room smelled of sweat and cheap perfume and the girls were all dressed in skimpy clothing, tight hot pants, micro skirts, thigh-highs, see-through tops, and their faces were garish with lipstick and eye makeup. Some of them looked high; none looked much older than fifteen. Beyond the fear in their expressions Annie could see only resignation and despair. This was truly the generation of lost girls Dr. Lukas had described, she thought. Christ, she wanted to take them home and scrub the makeup off and feed them a decent meal. Most of them were skinny, and some had sores on their lips. Several of them were smoking and that added to the cloying atmosphere of the room.

Other rooms in the house were equipped with beds and wash basins, but this seemed to be a general sitting room. The four men the SO
₁₉
team had found had all been handcuffed and bundled out into the van. The girls had been checked for weapons as a matter of routine, then left alone, a guard on the door.

“Ma’am?” One of the team stood at the door and beckoned to Annie. “I think you should see this.”

He led Annie to a room no bigger than a cupboard. Inside was a young girl, naked but for the thin sheet another officer was wrapping around her. She was painfully thin and blood
crusted the cleft between her nose and upper lip. She was alive, but her eyes looked dead. The only other thing in the room was a bucket, its stench abominable.

“Get an ambulance,” Annie said. She helped the girl to her feet, keeping the sheet wrapped around her and slowly took her back to the others. One of the girls ran forward and took the newcomer in her arms, mumbling endearments, and helped her sit in an armchair, perching on the arm beside her.

“Can you speak English?” Annie asked.

The girl nodded. “A little.”

“What happened to her?”

“She’s new,” the girl told her, in heavily accented English, still stroking her friend’s hair. “She would not do what they tell her so they lock her up and beat her. She has not eaten for three days.”

Brooke was trying to talk to the other girls but it didn’t appear they spoke English. Whatever the reason, they all seemed afraid of him and no one would say a word. Most of them wouldn’t even look at him. Annie thought she understood why. She took him aside. “Look, Dave,” she said, seeing his crestfallen expression. “It’s not your fault, but they don’t know you’re a decent man. They don’t know any decent blokes. It might be best if you went down and questioned the men.”

Brooke nodded. “You’ll be okay?”

“I’ll manage,” said Annie. She touched him gently on the shoulder and he left.

“What will happen to us?” asked the girl on the chair arm, who seemed to have taken charge. She had dark hair down to her shoulders, thin arms and a pale complexion.

It was a good question and Annie wasn’t sure she knew the answer. The object of the raid had been to take Happy Harry Mazuryk and, with any luck, find Carmen Petri. Annie didn’t
know if Harry had been one of the four men arrested, though from what she had seen in passing, none of them matched his description.

“You’ll all be taken good care of,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Veronika.”

“Right, Veronika. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“I can’t tell you anything. He will kill me.”

“No, he won’t,” said Annie. “We’ll put him in jail.”

“You don’t understand.
He
wasn’t here, only his stupid guard. Those other men are here for…” She made an obscene gesture with her hips.

“Where is Hadeon Mazuryk?”

She flinched at the sound of his name. “I don’t know.”

“Okay,” said Annie. “What about Carmen? Do you know Carmen Petri?” She looked around at the frightened girls. “Is she here?”

They all shook their heads. One started crying. Annie turned back to Veronika. “Do you know Carmen?”

Veronika nodded.

“Where is she?”

“She is not here. Carmen is one of the special girls.”

“What do you mean?”

“She is very beautiful. She speaks very good English. She does not have to go out to the street. Men come to her. Pay more.”

This was what Annie had heard from Dr. Lukas. Still she wondered whether Carmen had been killed. “Do you know where she is, Veronika? I really need to talk to her.”

Veronika turned to the girl in the sheet and stroked her hair again, then she looked back at Annie, her face stern. “There is
another house,” she said. “I have talked to Carmen. She has told me. She is there.”

Banks didn’t regret too much being barred from the King’s Cross raid. He had been on such operations before and generally found the paramilitary elements quite tedious. He did, however, want to know the results, which was why he was sitting anxiously at the kitchen table early with his morning coffee and newspaper, mobile beside him at the ready.

He was still puzzling over what had happened between Roy and Lambert at the Albion Club that Friday, and the best he could come up with was that Lambert had proposed something Roy didn’t approve of and became worried he’d give the game away. Their friendship went back to university days and they had got up to all sorts of things together. They had been out of touch for a long time, though, and Lambert probably didn’t know that Roy had redrawn his moral lines.

If Lambert wanted Roy to come in on importing abducted teenage girls for the sex trade, as Annie suggested was happening, then Roy would probably have balked at that, Banks thought. If he had been ignorant of the true way in which the girls were forced into prostitution, as Dr. Lukas had told Annie she was, then he would have found out via Jennifer, who had talked with Carmen Petri and learned something of the truth on the Monday of the week she died. The timing was important here. Roy might have been on the verge of getting involved when he found out the truth after Carmen told Jennifer, and Lambert spent the next few days trying to convince him it was okay. Then something else must have tipped the balance, something Roy found out on the day he disappeared.

Banks guessed that when Roy left the bar for the casino, Lambert went into the toilet and phoned someone – maybe Max Broda – and told him the situation was critical. After that, Broda took control and had a car ready to pick Roy up outside the club and take him to the abandoned factory in Battersea. Ponytail and his crony must also have been working for Broda, and they had been assigned to watch Jennifer and keep an eye on her movements. Banks could imagine the mobile conversations back and forth between the Mondeo, following Jennifer, and the factory, where Roy had been taken, culminating in the order to kill her. Perhaps Roy had also intended to head up to Banks’s cottage when he realized things had gone too far, but he hadn’t had the chance. They’d got to him first.

As Banks thought about it all, a number of things came together in his mind, the way it sometimes happened when he felt most lost. Annie had told him that Dr. Lukas had said the baby was being adopted by a “Mr. Garrett.” He remembered Dieter Ganz saying “Gareth” with his slight accent yesterday, and imagined that the men Carmen Petri had heard saying it also had accents, as she no doubt did herself. In Ganz’s case, it had come out sounding like “Garrett” and that was exactly what Dr. Lukas had said, that the men were taking good care of Carmen and her baby for “Mr. Garrett.”

Was that it, then, the new thing that Roy had discovered? Was Lambert himself adopting Carmen’s baby, buying it, and was that why it was so important for him to stop Roy blowing the whistle? There was one way to find out, one person he could ask.

Banks went up to Roy’s office, where he thought he had seen an atlas. He pulled it down and found that Quainton was in Buckinghamshire, not too far from Aylesbury. It was a nice
day for a drive in the country, he thought, and it would be interesting to meet the elusive Mrs. Lambert. He grabbed his jacket and his mobile and set off for the car.