The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) (3 page)

‘It’s OK,’ McLean said, hoping to fend off the panic with a familiar face and voice. ‘You’re in hospital. You’ve been unconscious.’

Emma slowly rolled over, her head too heavy for the wasted muscles in her neck to control. She squinted against the light, even though it was muted in the ward, and it took her a while to focus on him. Even longer for her to speak. He’d hoped for a smile, but was rewarded only with a frown. Her voice, when it finally came, was cracked and dry. The words as terrible as they were inevitable.

‘Who are you?’

4

‘We’ve got sixteen girls who between them seem to speak about eight words of English, a Dutch captain screaming blue murder, Leith Ports chewing my ear off about a freighter that was meant to leave at dawn, and you go running off just because of a phone call. Jesus Christ, Tony. No bloody wonder Dagwood wanted shot of you. Five hours you’ve been gone. What took so bloody long?’

Jo Dexter stood in the middle of the main room housing the Sexual Crimes Unit, arms folded across her front. She looked as if she’d been waiting for McLean to come home, like an errant child. Any moment now she was going to start tapping her foot.

‘It’s Emma. She’s woken up. I had to be there. Sorry.’

‘Shit. There you go again. I can’t even give you a proper bollocking, can I?’ The DCI slumped back against an unused desk, dropped her hands to her sides. The room was almost empty, just a couple of PCs on the back shift manning the hotline phones and pretending they weren’t playing Words with Friends on the vice squad special computers; the ones that weren’t blocked from the worst of the internet. ‘How is she?’

‘It’s … complicated.’ McLean pictured the scene in his mind. That face he had watched for almost two months now, suddenly come back to life only to be covered with
confusion and fear. ‘She doesn’t remember anything. Well, apart from her name.’

‘You need time?’ McLean could see that Dexter really didn’t want him to say yes. Like everyone else, they were permanently short-staffed. That was why he was here, after all.

‘No. She’s going to be in the hospital a while yet. Think I’d rather throw myself into the job right now. Otherwise I’m just going to fret.’

‘Fine. Well, you and DS Buchanan can make a start on processing these girls then. We can’t keep them in the cells much longer. Immigration’ll be here soon, and I’d like to find out who put them on that ship before they get here.’

‘Why were they taking you onto that boat? Where were you going?’

McLean sat at the table in interview room one, the nice one where they put people who were ‘helping the police with their enquiries’ rather than the more skanky holes where the low-lifes were questioned. Opposite him, the young woman stared at her hands, folded in her lap. Her long blonde hair had a natural curl to it that was almost hidden by the layers of grease and grime. Her face was thinner than a supermodel’s, sharp cheek bones poking out through skin the colour of curdled milk. Her eyes were sunken pits, the traces of bruising yellowing them like some weird attempt at alternative make-up. He was fairly sure she understood everything he was saying, but like all her companions from the van, she was playing the silent act.

‘Were you trying to get home, was that it?’

She looked up at him then, fixed him with a stare from her grey-blue eyes that left no doubt as to just how much of an idiot she thought him. Still she didn’t speak, scratching at the inside of her left elbow with the long fingernails of her right hand. The track marks were easy to see, but old.

‘Look, I know you speak English. I know you’ve been working as a prostitute somewhere in the city. I know that probably wasn’t your idea. You thought you were coming here to get a job cleaning, or maybe working in an office. But the men who brought you here had other ideas, didn’t they.’

Alongside him, Detective Sergeant Buchanan shifted in his seat impatiently. McLean tried to suppress a grimace, but something must have shown on his face. The girl looked straight at him, flicked her eyes across to the other detective and back again, then raised both eyebrows. It was the briefest of interactions, but it was the most he’d got out of any of them so far. Eight down, seven still to go.

‘You couldn’t get us some coffee could you, Sergeant?’ McLean voiced it as a question but even the dumbest of officers should have realized that it was a command. Buchanan opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it again with an echoing pop. He dragged his chair backwards as he stood, the noise setting McLean’s teeth on edge. Ambled slowly to the door and paused before opening it.

‘Black, no sugar for me.’ McLean tried not to flick his head in a gesture of dismissal, but he might have failed a little.

Buchanan left the door open. Whether on purpose or because he lacked the basic motor skills to close it, McLean didn’t want to guess. He got up, closed it, and sat back down again. The young woman said nothing, but her eyes followed him all the time. Only when he was back in his seat did she finally speak.

‘You’re not like the others. I’ve not seen you before.’

Her voice surprised him. He had assumed she was from Eastern Europe, but she spoke with a Midlands accent.

‘I’m on secondment. Filling in while they decide who gets to be promoted.’

‘You must have fucked up pretty badly to get sent here. What did you do?’

What did I do? My job. Only it was bloody Dagwood who got made up to acting superintendent when we broke open that cannabis operation, and he didn’t want anyone around pissing on his chips. McLean kept silent, studied the young woman’s face for a moment, trying to see past the Slavic features that had made him jump to such an erroneous conclusion earlier on.

‘The other girls. They from England too?’

‘Nah. Most of em’s Poles, Romanians, think I might’ve heard some Russian spoke too. Don’t really know them that well. We only got picked up a couple days ago.’

‘Picked up?’

‘There an echo in here?’ The young woman pushed back her greasy hair, scratched at the side of her nose, sniffed. For an awful moment McLean thought she was going to spit on the floor, but she swallowed instead. He wasn’t sure which was worse.

‘There were sixteen of you in that van, being loaded onto a ship bound for Rotterdam. Normally we have to deal with people coming the other way. I’m curious as to why you were being trafficked out of the country.’

‘You not even going to ask my name?’

‘Would you tell it me if I did?’

‘It’s Magda. And yeah, I know that’s Polish. My grampa came over in the war and never went back.’

‘So what’s the score then, Magda? Why were you being sent overseas?’

‘Cos I speak Polish, probably. Cos of the way I look. Mebbe they thought I was like all the others. Mebbe I tried to tell them and got a smack in the face for my trouble. Mebbe they didn’t care who I was. Long as they get the numbers.’

‘Numbers for what, though? Where were they taking you?’

Magda gave him an odd, quizzical look, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing.

‘You know I’m a whore, don’t you? You know what that is, y’know, apart from the whole sex for cash thing?’

McLean didn’t answer. He wasn’t quite sure he could.

‘Means I’m a piece of meat, dunnit. Owned and traded. I get passed from one pimp to the next and I don’t get any say in that. Who’m I gonna complain to anyway, the filth? Ha, that’s a laugh. You lot either don’t give a fuck or just want a free one. I got no rights, no protection. Just a habit needs feeding and only one way to feed it. So when Malky says I’m going with Ivan now, I don’t argue. Cos what’s the fucking point, eh?’

‘You don’t know where they were taking you.’

‘Top marks for the inspector.’ Magda clapped her hands together in mock applause. For a moment something like the ghost of a smile spread across her face, and then the door clicked open. DS Buchanan appeared, arse first, carrying two mugs of coffee. By the time he’d turned around and placed the mugs on the table, Magda’s face was blank, eyes down, staring at the hands folded in her lap, fingers worrying at the scars of track marks on her inner arms. It was almost as if the whole conversation had been no more than a dream.

‘Thanks. Not having one yourself?’ McLean picked up the mug with black coffee in it, nudging the other one carefully across the table to Magda. Buchanan opened his mouth, looked at the two mugs, then shut it again. He pulled out his chair and sat down heavily.

‘You don’t know where they were taking you.’ McLean tried to pick up the threads of the conversation, even though he knew he was in for a struggle. ‘But you know who took you. Who’s Malky, Magda? Who’s Ivan?’

Buchanan looked sideways at McLean as he spoke the young woman’s name, a quizzical eyebrow raised. McLean wondered if he could find some other way to send the sergeant away. He was clearly not helping.

‘Malky’d be Malky Jennings. Typical lowlife scumbag runs a dozen hookers out of Restalrig.’

Maybe helping a bit. ‘Go on,’ McLean said.

‘He’s small beer. We usually let him get away with a caution if he pushes too far. Known quantity, if you get my meaning. We lock him up and who knows what’ll float up to take his place. He has his uses.’ Meaning he was someone’s informant. Or supplier.

‘And Ivan?’ McLean directed his question at Buchanan, but looked at Magda. He couldn’t catch her eye though; she was finding her lap increasingly fascinating, those marks on her inner arm more itchy by the minute.

‘Ivan, I haven’t a fucking clue.’

‘Magda, who’s Ivan?’ McLean let the question hang in the silence that followed, just watching the young woman across the table. She kept her gaze down for long seconds, the only sound the scrit, scrit, scrit of her fingernails on the flesh of her inner arm. She’d be breaking through soon, adding to the scars already there. Perhaps finally realizing what she was doing, she stopped, raised her head and fixed him with a stare through her lank blonde ringlets. There was something more than anger and defiance in that stare. There was fear. And then the quickest of flicks across to the detective sergeant and back. Then she dropped her head and said no more.

‘Tell me about Malky Jennings.’

McLean leaned against the wall by the whiteboard in the SCU main office, looking out over a cluster of empty desks. The blinds were drawn on the windows at the far side of the room, slants of sunlight painting stripes onto the grubby carpet tiles. This wasn’t a place people generally liked to spend much time in; you never knew what new degradation or atrocity was going to appear next.

‘Not much to tell, really. Scumbag just about sums it up.’ DS Buchanan lounged in the one good chair in the office, feet up on his desk. Observing the small team at the SCU in the few days since he’d arrived, McLean recognized the Alpha Dog, or, perhaps more accurately, the
frustrated Beta Dog, lording it over the junior ranks but never quite having the nerve to challenge for the top spot. He was an old-school copper, which in the case of Grumpy Bob was a good thing; less so with Buchanan. Where DS Laird affected an air of laziness but got the work done, Buchanan was the kind of policeman who always seemed busy, but was actually doing bugger all.

‘We got a file on him?’

‘Should have.’ Buchanan made a show of taking his feet off the desk, pulled his keyboard towards him and started tapping away. McLean pushed himself off the wall and came around to see what appeared on the screen.

‘Malcolm Jeffrey Jennings.’ Buchanan poked a greasy finger at the glass. ‘Thirty-six years old. Lives in one of the tower blocks down Lochend way. He’s got form for drugs, but strictly small time. Mostly he runs prostitutes in that area. Nasty little shit. Violent, but he’s bright enough not to hit them in the face. Prefers a baseball bat to the ribs, way I hear it.’

McLean peered at the image on the screen. A thin, ratty-faced man peered back. Narrow, long nose, broken sometime long ago. Hair in lank, greasy straggles down to his shoulders. Eyes set just that little bit too close together, giving his face a permanent angry frown. Deep bags under them suggesting some form of habit, barely under control.

‘And we tolerate this why?’

Buchanan sighed, clicked the cursor on a series of thumbnail images taken by a surveillance team. The first showed Malky Jennings walking along a street with a woman beside him. McLean hadn’t noticed in the mug
shot, but Jennings liked to dress flamboyantly. Not necessarily with any sense of style, but the purple velvet smoking jacket and ruff-necked shirt were certainly noticeable.

‘Malky’s a known quantity. We keep an eye on him, haul him in if he gets too far out of line. But there’s no point locking him up. He’s not the problem.’

McLean scanned the top of the list of convictions and cautions. ‘He looks like a big problem to me.’

Buchanan snorted. ‘You’re new here, so you wouldn’t understand.’

‘No, I don’t. Explain it to me.’

‘OK then.’ Buchanan put on his best school teacher voice. ‘Malky Jennings is a scumbag, but one whose behaviour we can predict, possibly even control to a certain extent. Lock him up and someone else moves in on the territory. Someone we don’t know anything about, maybe. Someone trying to make a name for themselves, establish their place. That means violence and disruption, and that makes the Chief Constable unhappy. So we leave Malky Jennings well alone.’