The Eyewitness (14 page)

“Still on Bell's?” he asked. Duggan grunted and Solomon ordered a double whisky with ice, and a pint of lager.

“How did you know where I was?” asked Duggan.

“Couple of calls. How is it?”

“How do you think it is?” said Duggan bitterly.

“It's a lost-property office. I deal with morons who've left their mobiles in cabs, and I've another four years to go.”

Their drinks arrived. Solomon paid the barman.

“At least you're still in plain clothes.”

Duggan drained his glass and slammed it down on the bar.

“Are you stupid, Solomon? I changed in the office. I'll be in uniform until I retire. In an office with two old women who don't have a brain cell between them. And it's your fault. I'm amazed you've got the balls to show yourself in this city. There's a dozen cops, good cops, who'd like to see you in intensive care.”

Solomon waved for the barman to bring another whisky.

“I did the best I could, Colin. I walked away. Didn't say a thing.”

“Which was as good as putting your hands up for it.”

A fruit machine began to pay out and the old man playing it did a celebratory jig.

“I had two choices. I could have talked to GIB or quit. I quit. I didn't do a damn think wrong, yet I was the one who had to leave the job. How do you think I felt? I'd worked bloody hard for ten years and I had to walk away because you lot were rotten to the core.”

“We were good cops, Solomon.”

The old man began feeding coins back into the fruit machine. The second double whisky arrived and Duggan swirled it around in the glass, staring at the melting ice cubes.

“You had a third choice and you knew it. All you had to do was to stand shoulder to shoulder with us. They didn't have any proof.”

“You took bribes, Colin. You were in Montanaro's pocket you all were.”

“Fuck you,” said Duggan.

“GIB had nothing on us, not until you resigned.”

“I wasn't going to lie to them. And I wasn't going to be the one responsible for sending you down.”

“So you walked away and left us to deal with the shit,” said Duggan bitterly.

“What did you think would happen, Solomon? No smoke without fire, is what they said. They wanted us to resign, like you did. I tried to get out on medical grounds but they wouldn't have it. Instead they sent me to this shit-hole. There were fourteen good guys on the team, Solomon. Now six are in Traffic, two are in recruiting offices and one spends his days telling primary-school children not to talk to strangers. The rest quit. Are you proud of yourself?”

Solomon drank some lager.

“Why did you come back?” asked Duggan eventually.

“I'm looking for a girl.”

“Try a dating agency.”

“A particular girl. From Kosovo.”

“I heard you were in forensics now. Identifying bodies.” Duggan finished his whisky and nodded at the barman for another. He didn't order one for Solomon.

“I am.” Solomon took out a photocopy of the photograph of Nicole and handed it to Duggan.

“Her name's Nicole Shala. She's from a village near Pristina.” Solomon could see from the look on Duggan's face that he had no idea where Pristina was.

“It's the capital of Kosovo.”

“Yugoslavia?”

“Part of former Yugoslavia.”

Duggan studied the photograph.

“Pretty girl. Fifteen?”

“Sixteen in the picture. Nineteen now.”

“And what's your interest?”

“She was a witness to a mass killing.”

Duggan raised his eyebrows.

“You don't do things by half, do you?” He held out the picture, but Solomon didn't take it.

“I think she's working as a hooker in London.”

Duggan frowned.

“Haven't you been listening to a word I've said? I'm nothing to do with Vice. I'm in limbo until my thirty years are up and then I'm out.”

“You've got access to the police computer. Just run her name and date of birth.”

“Why the hell do you think I'd help you, Solomon?”

“This is important, Colin.”

“And my career isn't? You screwed me over. You screwed us all over.”

Duggan walked away and sat down at a table close to the gents'. He left the photograph on the bar.

Solomon picked it up and went to sit next to him.

“My life hasn't been a bed of roses. The easy way out would have been to spill my guts to GIB.”

“Yeah? There isn't a cop in the Met who'd have worked with you if you had.”

Solomon shook his head.

“You're wrong. Not the way the Met is now. It's not seat-of-the-pants policing any more. Everything has to be done by the book.”

“That's what you think, is it?” sneered Duggan.

“It's the same as it ever was it's just gone deeper underground. If it wasn't for you, everything would still be right as rain.”

“For you, maybe. But I couldn't live like that. I didn't join the police to take backhanders from the bad guys.”

“You think I did?”

Solomon stayed silent. He didn't want to argue with Duggan.

“I was a bloody good detective,” said Duggan bitterly.

“When I worked Vice there wasn't a single death on our patch that was Vice-related. Not one. Any girl got assaulted, we had it sorted, be it a pimp or punter. Robberies were at a minimum. We had the patch under control.”

“You were taking bribes.”

“You call it a bribe, I'd call it commission for helping things move smoothly.”

“Montanaro controlled half the girls in Soho.”

“Still does, just about,” said Duggan.

“But if he didn't run things, someone else would.”

“Better the devil you know, is that it?”

“The system worked. There was stability. Everyone knew where they stood. Now, no one knows what the hell's going on. That girl you're looking for, came in through Kosovo, right?”

“Bosnia. Yeah.”

“That's where most of the Soho girls are from now. Most of the brasses are Central European, and they're brought in by the Albanian Mafia. Do you think the Albanians are going to stay cosy with the Maltese? Of course they're not. There's going to be a blood bath. A turf war. Wouldn't have happened in my day. And you know why?”

Solomon sipped his lager.

“Because we had it under control,” said Duggan.

“If newcomers like the Albanians had moved in we'd have stamped on them, hard.”

“To protect Montanaro.”

“To protect the status quo,” hissed Duggan.

The fruit machine began to pay out again. The old man did another jig.

“Will you help me find this girl?” asked Solomon, holding out the photograph again.

“Why should I?” asked Duggan. He drained his glass. Solomon got up and walked back to the bar, leaving the photograph on the table in front of Duggan. When he got back with fresh drinks, the policeman was studying the picture.

“What did she see?” Duggan asked.

“Her family were killed. By Serbs, probably.”

“Probably?”

“All I've got is twenty-six corpses. Men, women and children.” He filled in the rest of the story.

“Jesus,” whispered Duggan softly.

“Why would they do that?”

“Racial hatred. You think we have problems in Brixton and Bradford, it's nothing to what went on out there. Forty thousand missing people across Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. We've got over ten thousand bodies to identify.”

“And they were all murdered?”

“The ones we've found so far? Most of them, yeah. There were some military casualties, but they were usually identified straight away. Civilians were butchered and dumped in mass graves. I'll give you an example. Serb soldiers took over a hospital in Vukovar in Croatia. Anyone who wasn't a Serb was marched out at gunpoint. Didn't matter how sick they were. They were taken to a farm on the outskirts of the city where they tortured them. They cut them with knives, stubbed out cigarettes on them, beat them up. Then they took them into a field in groups of ten and shot them. Two hundred and sixty people were killed. That was on the twentieth of November 1991. I remember the date because it was the first time I saw Parkes slipping you one of Montanaro's envelopes.”

Duggan flashed him a sarcastic smile.

“I'm just saying that you and I were going about our business and hundreds of men, women and children were being shot and thrown into mass graves,” said Solomon “And it's not on the other side of the world. It's less than a three-hour flight away. If it could happen there, it could happen anywhere. And it was still going on three years ago.” He gestured at the photograph of Nicole.

“Her family were killed in 1999. I was in the Balkans then, and we knew the Serbs were on the rampage. They were like animals. Shelling, looting, raping, murdering civilians. The whole world knew, and they just stood by and let it happen.”

“I don't think we really knew what was happening.”

“Bollocks. That's like the Germans saying they didn't know about the concentration camps where the Jews were being killed. The German people knew. And the world knew what was happening in the Balkans and didn't lift a finger to help.”

“We sent troops, didn't we?”

“Too little, too late. This is a chance to do something.”

“So, you're on a crusade.”

“I want whoever killed her family to get what they deserve. And the only way to do that is find her.”

“You think she was an eyewitness?”

“The only witness. And now she's on the run. Here in London.”

“What makes you think she's hooking?”

“She worked in a nightclub in Sarajevo.”

“Needle in a haystack,” Duggan said.

“I keep hearing that,” said Solomon. He slid a piece of paper across the table.

“That's her name and the details on her birth certificate.”

“You think she'd come here under her own name?”

“It's a possibility. Though she might be calling herself Amy.”

“So you want me to run her through the computer?”

“It'd be a start.”

“Waste of time,” said Duggan.

“Like I said, it's a start. Can you check with Immigration?”

Duggan glared at Solomon.

“I'm not your bloody manservant. I'll run a check through criminal records, but that's all. How do I reach you?”

Solomon gave him the number of the mobile he'd bought earlier in the day.

“What about dabs?” asked Duggan.

“She was never fingerprinted, as far as I know.”

“So, a name and a date of birth is all I've got.”

“And her photograph.”

Duggan sneered at Solomon.

“If you think I'm going to go looking through pictures of arrested hookers on the off-chance I come across her, you've another think coming. Besides, do you know what a small percentage of hookers are ever charged these days? The force has other priorities. So long as they stay off the streets and don't rip off their punters, they're pretty much left alone.”

“Just like the good old days, then?”

Duggan folded up the photocopy and shoved it inside his coat with the slip of paper Solomon had given him.

“I'll check to see if she's been arrested, and that's it. If I find anything, I'll call you.”

Solomon stood up and held out his hand, but Duggan stared at it as if it was a dead thing.

“Okay, have it your way,” Solomon said softly.

“I'm sorry for the way things worked out.”

“Yeah,” said Duggan, bitterly.

“Me too.”

Solomon went back to McLaren's flat, made himself beans on toast, then telephoned an old contact who worked as an immigration officer at Heathrow airport. Immigration officers had had no power to arrest when Solomon worked as a Vice officer, so police officers had had to accompany them whenever they went on raids. Solomon had met Diane Milne during his first year on Vice when immigration officers had wanted to arrest two dozen Chinese girls who were working in an illegal nightclub in Chinatown. He had ended up sitting next to her at a celebratory curry afterwards. He had spared no time in introducing her to Danny McLaren and the three had spent many drunken evenings together watching football on TV at McLaren's flat, downing cans of beer and moaning about their employers. Like McLaren, Diane had remained a firm friend after he'd left the force. One of the few.

Diane was tall, striking rather than pretty, with a lingerie model's figure that turned heads wherever she went, but she was happily married to a male nurse. When they'd met Solomon had also been married, so there had never been anything sexual about their relationship. She was overjoyed to hear from him and offered to cook him dinner that evening. Solomon told her he needed a favour and she agreed to run Nicole's details through the Immigration database, so long as he promised he wasn't pursuing her for personal reasons.

“Oh, come on, Diane,” he protested.

“As if.”

“I know what divorced men are like. One sniff of a language student and they're a-quiver.”

“It's work-related,” he said.

“Which is why it's coming through official channels, yeah?”

“I'll tell all when I see you,” he promised.

Diane and her husband lived in Clapham so Solomon caught the tube south of the river and walked to their terraced house. Sean Milne opened the front door and pumped Solomon's hand enthusiastically. He was a big man, a good two inches taller than Solomon's six feet.

Diane was in the kitchen, prodding pasta with a fork. She hugged him, and it was only when their stomachs touched that he realised she was pregnant.

“Oh, my God, why didn't you say anything?” asked Solomon.

“It's not yours!” she laughed.

“But aren't I going to be a godfather or something?”

“You're never here. Godfathers are responsible for moral upbringing and stuff.”

“It's an honorary title.”

“Not in this family it's not,” said Sean, opening a bottle of Frascati. He poured wine into three glasses and they toasted each other.

Later, as they tucked into spaghetti carbonara, Diane told Solomon that there had been no trace of a Nicole Shala entering the country. There had been several dozen girls with the first name of Amy but none from anywhere in the Balkans.

Solomon sighed. If she had used another name the chances of finding her were next to impossible, and Duggan was certain to draw a blank when he looked on the police computer.