White Crocodile (25 page)

The
POLICE – DO NOT CROSS
tape was still in place, hanging limply between the trees. Despite the familiar hum of the cars on the M60, the twinkling of office lights from Sharston industrial estate where nine-to-fivers would now be tidying their desks, there was a denseness to Rose Hill woods this evening, a night world, folded into the daylit landscape of south Manchester.

Shivering, DI Wessex ducked under the tape. He didn’t have a clear idea of why he had come back to the crime scene; hadn’t challenged the niggle in his mind that had pulled him back here, with logic.

Forensics had combed every centimetre of the woodland around the girl’s body. They had found nothing. No broken twigs, no footsteps, no tyre tracks. No signs at all, in fact, to indicate that she or anyone else had run through these trees.

He had been happy to sit out the raid on the brothel. Happy to let DS Viles direct the vice boys. If he scaled a tree, he fancied he would see them now, lined up on the pavement outside the brothel on Cheetham Hill Road, kitted up and psyched up, ready with the steel tubular Enforcer to take down the door, an armed unit for back-up – just in case.

It was warmer this evening than it had been for the past couple of days, and he felt clammy in his wool coat and scarf. Pulling off the scarf, he wrapped it around his hand and tapped his padded fist against his forehead a couple of times. How the hell had the girl got here?

He ducked instinctively as an aeroplane roared overhead suddenly, its belly almost grazing the tops of the trees, its landing lights casting the wood around him in cold white light as it passed. Heading towards Manchester City Airport, just a few miles south.

It’s a very similar pathology to that we see in road traffic accident victims. Massive internal injuries.

He looked up through the branches as another aircraft rumbled towards the airport. This one was smaller, not a jetliner but a private turbo-prop plane, perhaps owned by one of the executives who had colonised Manchester for its cheaper labour and office space. Or by one of the drugs gangs who could slip unchallenged through a busy commercial airport like Manchester in their £1,000 designer suits, while the baggage handlers and customs officers they’d paid off expedited their packages’ flight past customs.

The skin is badly scratched all over . . . it’s wood – living trees – that made the scratches.

It was as if her body had been teleported from Cambodia, straight to this urban wood.

That’s your department, Sherlock.

A private plane.

Jesus. How the hell could he have been so stupid?

Alex wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but it wasn’t this. A dark, silent house. He knocked loudly and waited. The hum of voices and traffic from the street behind him was loud, but from inside there was nothing.

Stepping back, he surveyed the facade: a small, detached French colonial villa on a busy residential street near the centre of Battambang. Johnny liked the life, the fact that whatever the hour of the day or night there was always something going on in his neighbourhood. Alex remembered sitting in the garden with Johnny only a few weeks back, drinking whisky shots and discussing what the neighbours got up to at night. The gambling, the fucking, the drinking and the wife beating that Johnny witnessed in this microcosm of Battambang society.
Rear Window
from Hell, he called it.

But tonight the surrounding buildings were dark and quiet.

Pulling his collar up against the smattering of rain that had begun to fall, Alex walked down the side of the house, checking to see if any windows had been left unlocked: kitchen, dining room, Keav’s bedroom, a box room overlooking the side alley. He expected to see her sitting on the bed, reading or sewing
,
but though her light was on, the room was empty, her bed unslept-in. He reached the back garden. The doors and windows at the back of the house were also dark, the huge plate-glass doors which led into the sitting room shut and bolted by the looks of it. No way in, unless he smashed a window, which he didn’t want to do. Johnny’s call had given Alex an idea of the state he was in and the last thing he wanted was a bullet through the brain as a result of breaking and entering.

Stepping on to the patio, he pressed his face to the glass and looked into the sitting room. A woman lay on the floor, her head resting on a cushion. She could have been asleep, but there was something about the arrangement of her limbs that told Alex that he was too late to save Keav.

His gaze rose from the floor. What looked like a single black eye stared straight back at him. It took him a moment of squinting through the dark and rain to see Johnny’s face behind the eye, white and bloated and sick-looking. His eyes, washed-out blue shot with red, stared straight back at him, as if they’d seen a ghost. It took Alex a fraction of a second longer to realise that the black eye was the barrel of a pistol.

An avalanche of glass covered him as the bullet passed through the window. His chilled skin was slow to register the pain. Then the concrete slammed up to meet him.

The grounds of MCT House beyond the gate and the building itself looked, as she had expected, deserted. Glancing each way down the rain-drenched street to make sure that she was alone, she hauled herself over the gate and lowered herself silently on to the gravel drive.

The front door was unlocked. She hadn’t expected it to be.

When she stepped into the hall and locked the door behind her, she recognised the sounds and smells that met her. Those of an old, empty house, familiar this time: hot, dusty air; whispered creaks and groans magnified by the silence and by her own tension; the hollow echo of her footsteps on the wooden boards as she crossed to the stairs; the slide of the banister underneath her palm as she started to climb.

She tried MacSween’s office, but the door was locked. She knocked – couldn’t stop herself, though what the hell would she do if he opened it? – rested her ear against the rough wood and listened, but there was no sound from inside.

When she reached Jakkleson’s office, she switched on the desk lamp instead of the bare overhead bulb, so her presence would be less obvious to anyone outside. The weak cone of light illuminated a room as absurdly tidy as the first time she had seen it. The desk clear of documents, the notices on the board perfectly aligned, his family still smiling out from their silver frame, the vase of flowers, frangipani this time, drooping and sick.

Déjà vu.

Lowering herself gently into his chair, she flicked the on switch, waited for what felt like an eternity for the computer to boot up. The miniature egg timer emptied and refilled itself a couple of times before the ‘Danger!! Mines!!’ sign replaced it, casting a red glow in the darkened room.

Déjà vu.

A sudden shiver ran down her spine, a fleeting sense that someone was standing in the doorway behind her.
MacSween?
The doorway was empty, the dark landing beyond it quiet. Noiselessly, she breathed out, took a long draught of air back into her lungs, willing herself to relax. But she couldn’t shake the feeling. Pushing the chair back, she tiptoed to the door. The landing and stairs were empty, the hallway below also. The only sound was the computer’s operating system purring into the silence.

The little boy’s ribs hurt when he breathed, but he didn’t think that any of them were broken. They had hurt like that before, but the hurt was just bruising and it had gone away after a few days. His head throbbed at the back where the man had held his hair and smashed his head against the floor.

But he couldn’t cry. Was too scared to make a sound.

The hitting and the loneliness felt much worse than before because this time his mother had done nothing. He was used to her lolling on the sofa with her eyes half closed, mouth slack, but she would protest, a bit at least, when the men beat him too viciously. Would stumble over and pull on their arms, tell them to leave the kid alone. He was used to her taking him to the doctor, saying that he had been in a fight at school, or fallen down the stairs – different doctors, different reasons – and he would nod when the doctor questioned him, because he loved his mummy. Was desperate for her to love him back. Now, he knew, there would be no more doctors’ trips.

He began to cry, but then he stopped himself. He took a breath and held on to it, looking out through the cracked window pane to the darkness outside fading into flinty winter daylight, snow falling hard now, imagining that he could fly out through the window like a bird, go anywhere he wanted, disappear into the grey sky for ever. But his gaze was caught by the bloodstain on the windowsill, where the man had cracked his head too hard and it had bled. Now that he’d seen it, his mind just gave up and refused to imagine, refused to take him anywhere. It left him in his room with his pain and fear and loneliness.

And it was much worse this time because he had seen the look on his mother’s face and in her eyes, and he knew that she had gone. Gone somewhere she wasn’t coming back from.

‘Jesus fucking Christ, Johnny, it’s Alex.’

His face was pressed to the concrete and he was breathing in blood and rainwater. He dared not move a muscle, had no idea if Johnny could hear him. He knew he had been hit in the left side, had felt the searing heat of the bullet as it passed through his flesh. But the adrenalin had dampened his feeling and the pain was bearable.

Reaching down gingerly, he felt around his middle for the wound, yelped when his fingers found the hole. It was a flesh wound, bloody and painful, but he had been lucky. A centimetre to the right and he would be living with one less kidney.

‘It’s me – Alex,’ he yelled again. ‘Put the fucking gun down.’

Warily, he raised himself on to his elbows – no second bullet, no sound at all over the whoosh of rain – and scrambled backwards fast until he was shielded by the wall of the house. He climbed slowly to his feet, clenching his teeth against the pain, crossed himself – God knows why, because he didn’t believe in any fucking God any more – and tilted sideways, so he could scan the room out of one eye. He couldn’t see anything for a moment, only bulky outlines in the darkness, but gradually his vision adjusted and his gaze found Johnny. He was sitting, leaning back against the sofa, but tipped to one side, as if he had been propped into position by someone else, then, like a rag doll, had slid off centre.

‘Johnny.’

Alex slapped his hand up and down the wall inside the door, groping for the light switch. He found it, and harsh electric light flooded the room. Johnny remained motionless, head sunk into his chest. He was still holding the pistol, but it was sagging against the floor, the fingers gripping it loose, almost as if he had forgotten it was there. His other hand was lying in his lap, the towel bandaging it mottled with dried blood and pus.

Alex stepped inside the room. He passed by Keav’s body, and this close it was clear how she had died. A neat bullet hole in the centre of her forehead had turned her into a beautiful, alabaster Cyclops. He cursed himself for his stupidity. Could he have saved her if he had listened to Johnny’s plea for help earlier? Taken him back to the hospital and asked Dr Ung to give him drugs to calm his paranoia? He knew that the answer was probably yes, that he was almost as culpable for Keav’s death as Johnny was.

Dragging his gaze from her gelid features, he knelt in front of Johnny, wincing at the pain in his side, feeling a fresh gush of blood released by the movement.

‘Johnny.’

‘Alex. Mate.’

Johnny smiled and lifted his hand in a limp salute, let it fall. Alex glanced down. The muzzle of Johnny’s pistol was pointed straight at his groin. Slipping his hand to Johnny’s wrist, he twisted the pistol away from him. With his other hand he tried to uncurl Johnny’s fingers from the butt. Johnny flinched and jerked it savagely away.

‘NO! Need it!’ He raised his eyes to Alex’s. The whites were shot with red. ‘Need it . . . need to defend myself.’

‘You don’t need it. No one is going to hurt you.’

‘Hurt me?
Kill me
.’

‘No one is trying to kill you.’ Reaching out, he laid his hand over Johnny’s, on the pistol. Johnny’s eyes sparked with fury and he wrenched his arm away, but Alex held on.

‘Kill me,’ Johnny wailed.

Shaking his head, Alex uncurled Johnny’s fingers from the pistol: the index finger first, taking the tension in it against his own finger, releasing the pressure from the trigger.

‘Coming to kill me.’

‘Who?’ Alex asked. ‘Who is coming to kill you?’

Uncurling the last finger, he pulled the pistol from Johnny’s grasp, ejected the magazine and the cartridge from the chamber, and slid them across the room.

‘
Wh . . . white,’ Johnny muttered, groping after the pistol. ‘White Crocodile . . . trying to kill me.’

Alex met Johnny’s dull gaze and felt nothing beyond the throbbing pain in his side, and complete and utter exhaustion. He realised now how close to the edge he was. He looked at the sofa behind Johnny, wanted to curl up in those cushions, close his eyes and just shut down: no pain, nothing to resolve, no more fighting, no more dying.

‘White Crocodile wanted to kill me. Screwed up.’ Johnny made a strangled noise, deep in his throat. ‘Won’t screw . . . next time.’

Alex shook his head, but without conviction.

‘And I –’ Johnny started to choke; it sounded as if an obstruction in his throat was keeping him from catching his breath, ‘– deserved it.’

Alex’s gaze snapped back to Johnny’s face.

‘What the hell do you mean?’

Johnny cupped his hand over his bandaged stump. ‘It was a game,’ he whispered. ‘Playing. Playing with those dumb as fucking oxen women.’ His fingers turned white with the pressure of his grip. ‘Their fault, he said—’ Johnny gave a pathetic chuckle. ‘He said it was OK because their lives were shit anyway.’

‘What?’

Johnny let out a gasping sob. ‘Keav. I helped her, didn’t I?’

‘What did you just say?’

‘Keav.
Keav.
I helped her.’

‘Not Keav. You said something else. A man. Something about a man.’

‘A man?’

‘Yes. You said “he” – “he said it was OK because their lives were shit anyway.” Did you mean MacSween?’

‘MacSween?’ He looked wide-eyed, guileless as a baby.

‘
Johnny.
You said “he”—’

‘
I didn’t.
’
He shrank back against the sofa. ‘I didn’t kidnap anyone.’

Alex gritted his teeth.

‘Keav. I helped Keav, didn’t I? Didn’t I?’ Something had happened to Johnny’s face, like a curtain falling at the end of a play, bringing the action to a close. All expression was gone: mouth sagging and lifeless, blue eyes washed to nothing. ‘She hates me now, I know she does, but I helped her, didn’t I? She would have been a common whore if I hadn’t taken her in. I helped her, didn’t I?’

Alex felt jaded, angry, bone-deep exhausted and he knew he had lost it – that he wouldn’t get anywhere with Johnny tonight. ‘Yeah, you did. You helped her.’
You fucking prick.

‘I helped her. I know. I’m not so bad.’

His accent, thick Mancunian, was difficult to understand, interspersed with the manic crackle on the line.

‘You’re going to have to speak slowly, Detective Inspector. The line’s terrible.’

It had already taken five minutes of interruptions, of speaking over each other and of him twice threatening to put the phone down on this hoax call, for her to explain who she was and why she was calling. He was in the office, thankfully, and was able to Google ‘Mine Clearance Trust’ to check that it was a legitimate organisation and that she was who she said she was.

She glanced down at the fax in her hand. ‘Can you tell me more about the woman – Dien’s mother? Who she is? Where you met her?’

‘I went to a brothel.’ He sounded embarrassed. ‘Official, of course.’

‘Yes, of course.’ A pause. ‘And—’ she prompted.

‘This young Cambodian woman was working there. She couldn’t speak much English, but she showed me the photo of her little boy. Christ, he’s only four, just a baby.’ She heard him clear his throat; the tense dry cough of a machine gun. ‘Did you find him, love?’

‘Yes. He’s in an orphanage out here.’

‘Is he OK?’

She thought of Dien, curled up like a little dog on the grimy concrete floor, thinking, for that brief moment on waking, that he was still safe at home with his mother.

‘As OK as a kid in an orphanage out here can be.’

‘I see a lot of nasty stuff in my job, but I have to confess that that girl got to me. She really got to me.’ He paused and she could hear his terse, uneven breathing.

‘How did she wind up in a brothel in Manchester?’

‘We’re pretty sure that all the girls in the brothel and our murder victim were kidnapped and trafficked, though we need to interview them through interpreters to get a full picture. We think that our murder victim was in the process of being trafficked when she was killed. Tossed out of a private plane. We’ve known the drug-smuggling gangs have used them for years, shuttling between big European ports like Rotterdam and Manchester, bringing in heroin and cocaine. They have a ton of airport workers on the payroll. We arrest one and ten others crop up in their place.’ He gave a humourless laugh. ‘These gangs all diversify in time. Big business could learn a lot about diversification and developing new income streams from criminal gangs. I’m sure when I finally get to the bottom of this, I’ll find some of the familiar old drug-smuggling faces are involved in the trafficking of these women too.’ He paused. ‘We’ll probably never know why, but perhaps she became hysterical and fought with her traffickers. It finally occurred to me after listening to endless bloody planes roar over the patch of woodland she was found in. We’re following that line of enquiry at the moment. But it would really help me get justice for her if I could identify her.’

‘I’m sorry, and I know this sounds harsh, but there’s not much chance of that. Not without a better description. And even then you’d be very lucky to find her. It would take a lot of trawling around all the local villages with a photograph to have any chance.’

‘We don’t have a photograph.’ He didn’t elaborate. ‘What about a missing persons list?’

‘It’s not like that out here. They don’t keep track of missing persons. Too many people die of land-mine injuries, illness and poverty. They hold a funeral in their village, an open cremation in a field, and that’s it. No one keeps track.’

Beyond the line’s static crackle, Tess thought she heard the crunch of tyres on gravel.

‘Is there anything else, DI Wessex, before I go?’

He didn’t answer immediately. When finally he spoke, his tone was grave. ‘Look, love, I want you to listen to me. The people involved in human trafficking are entirely without morals or humanity. They enslave these women for money.
Just for money.
They beat them, rape them, mutilate them. Kill them if they step out of line. And these, as you know, are young,
young
girls. I appreciate your help, I really do, and if you find out who is running this trafficking operation from your end, you’ll be doing me a huge favour. But you must remember that these people won’t mind killing you, love, I promise that.’

‘I can’t stop now, but I’ll be careful.’

‘Wait, love, wait. There’s one more thing.’

‘Yes?’

At that moment, she noticed a change in the way the light fell on the landing outside Jakkleson’s office; a light had been switched on in the hallway downstairs.

‘DI Wessex—’

‘We went in a couple of hours ago, mob-handed.’ His voice was urgent. ‘Busted the place. We have fourteen women under our protection. But the woman I talked with originally – Dien’s mother – she wasn’t there. The brothel owner told us finally, after we exerted a bit of friendly pressure. He said that she’s dead. She killed herself.’ He made a bitter noise. ‘So that little boy of hers is now an orphan for real.’

Dr Ung was sheltering under a tree by the gate, waiting for them. Bathed for a moment in the Land Cruiser’s headlights, he looked tense and distracted. He was wearing his trademark suit trousers, shirt and tie, but the knot of the tie hung loose and the top few buttons of his shirt were undone revealing a pale, skinny chest. Shielding his eyes from the glare of the headlights with one hand, he lifted the other in a listless greeting. Alex parked by the hospital building and walked back to join him, clasping his hand and shaking it before he spoke.

‘Johnny’s stump is infected,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘He cut his hand a couple of days ago and that’s also badly infected.’ He paused, rubbed a hand over his eyes, avoiding meeting Dr Ung’s gaze. ‘And he’s, uh, he’s mentally bad, very bad.’

‘He shot you?’ Dr Ung indicated the bloodstain covering the side of Alex’s shirt.

Alex nodded. ‘It’s only a graze.’

‘I was afraid that he would degenerate further mentally, but not to that extent.’

‘It’s worse than that.’

‘What?’

‘He killed his housekeeper. Shot her in the head.’

Dr Ung’s face displayed several dramatic changes as he listened. ‘You must tell the police, obviously, though I am sure they will do very little. Deaths of Westerners’ housemaids hold little interest for them. An occupational hazard, I’m sure they would call it. I will operate again first thing tomorrow morning, on both his leg and his hand. He can stay here until he recovers enough, and then it will be up to the police what happens to him.’

Alex nodded.

‘Help me get him into the hospital, Alexander, then let me clean you up.’

‘I’m fine,’ Alex said, more aggressively than he had meant to.

They faced each other for a moment.

‘Well at least go home and bandage that wound yourself, then get some sleep. I will take care of Johnny now.’

Johnny was slumped in the passenger seat, eyes rolling back in his head. Alex grabbed him under the arms and, staggering under the dead weight, hauled him out. With Dr Ung grasping one arm and Alex the other, an orderly his legs, they managed to carry him into his old room. The blast of the fan seemed to revive him for a moment because he opened his eyes. When he realised where he was, he started to struggle.

‘No,’ he muttered.

Dr Ung held his arm. ‘It’s OK, Johnny. You’re safe here.’ Dr Ung indicated to the orderly to hold Johnny down on the bed while he slid a line into his arm.

Johnny cried out: ‘Alex, help—’

Ignoring him, Alex turned away. Walked over to the window and looked out into the dark courtyard.

‘Alex, help me—’

Rain was hissing against the mosquito mesh. He could hear something loose banging out in the street. Dr Ung’s voice was raised.

‘Ketamine.
Ketamine.
Aylow
.’ Now
.

The sound of Johnny struggling faded; his voice died down.

Alex felt as if he could stand here all night, just looking at nothing.

Dr Ung called his name, and he turned reluctantly from the window.

‘I have given him a drip to help hydrate him,’ Dr Ung said. ‘It contains mild ketamine – only mild – just to calm him and help him sleep. As I said, I will operate first thing tomorrow morning. Come tomorrow evening, if you have time, but not before, please. Some time to rest alone after the operation will do him good.’