Baby Lies (Reissue)

by Chris Collett

  She nodded again, and Mariner hoped for the sake of the recording equipment that she would eventually find her voice.

  ‘How did you come to England, to Birmingham?’

  Katarina took a sip from the cup and cleared her throat. ‘I work as a waitress in a bar in Tirana where my family is,’ she began, her gaze fixed on a point just to the left of Mariner’s elbow. ‘A man heard me talk in English to some American customers. He says that my English is very good, that he can get me a job as a translator and to teach our language in England. He says there’s a big want for good translators and that I look nice and he can get me a good job in Brussels or in London, for good money. He says he work for the government.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  Her lip curled. ‘I don’t know. I tell him I have no money, but he said I can travel in his car and he will arrange the papers and the travel documents and I can pay him back when I have a job. He tells me about the kind of life I can have, with my own apartment and my own car. He says I must think about it and he will come back to the bar in a few days.’

  ‘Did he tell you his name?’

  ‘I only know Petya. I talk about it with my family and my father and he think it will be a great chance for me to have a good job. When Petya comes back to the restaurant I say I will go. I have to meet him at a place in the city early in the morning, five o’clock. I am surprised because he has good clothes but his car is old and dirty.’ Her eyes glazed over as she remembered. ‘But I think it’s okay because there are two girls also waiting.’

  ‘Did you know these other girls?’

  ‘No. They are going to get a job with rich families, to look after the children. Petya took our passports for making them safe. He drive us to the border and a hotel where he says we will stay tonight. Two more men came and then Petya says that he must go back to Tirana on important government business and his friends will take us on the rest of the way to London.’ She stopped for a moment and sipped her tea.

  ‘You’re doing really well,’ Mariner encouraged her.

  She took a deep breath. ‘That night one of the men come in to my room and make me have sex with him.’ Her lip trembled. ‘I don’t want it and I tried to fight him but he’s very strong. Afterwards he locked the door. We stay in the hotel maybe three days, with the door locked. Sometimes a man comes, brings a little bit of food, some water, sometimes have sex or hit me.’ The last words caught in her throat.

  ‘Petya’s friends?’

  She nodded.

  Mariner had heard of the process before, called ‘seasoning,’ in other words, beating the resistance out of the girls. He hated putting her through this, but they needed the evidence. ‘Do you want to stop?’ he asked. ‘We can take a break?’

  She shook her head but sipped again from her tea. Mariner couldn’t help but notice the tremor in her hand.

  ‘I know this is hard,’ he said, ‘but can you describe any of the men?’

  ‘They have black hair,’ she said, dully.

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes. But one of them have very short.’

  ‘Like my hair?’

  She managed a brief look into his face. ‘More short,’ she said. ‘And he tall man, thin man.’ She measured out tall and thin with her hands. ‘He don’t have sex with me, but he bring food.’

  ‘Were the other men tall, too?’

  ‘Not so much.’

  ‘They were short?’

  ‘A little bit, and one is a bit fat and one more bit fat.’ She gestured a generous gut. ‘They don’t shave and I think they don’t wash very much. They smell like beer.’ She grimaced with distaste, then a light sparked behind her eyes as she remembered something else. ‘The fat man, he have a picture.’ She stroked her skinny forearm.

  ‘A tattoo?’ Mariner confirmed. ‘A picture on his arm?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you remember what the picture was?’ But she didn’t.

  ‘Sometimes I ask them about the job as translator but they laugh at me. They say I have a different job now. They have paid good money for me and I will work for them to pay it back.’ She stopped abruptly and stood up. ‘I have to pee now.’

  ‘Of course.’ They took a short break, during which Mariner went and stood outside in the fresh breeze, perhaps hoping that it might somehow cleanse him.

  Ten minutes later they were back in the interview room. ‘So you were at the hotel for three days,’ Mariner prompted gently. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘They get me up very early and we leave the hotel. It’s dark. We drive in the car again to Paris and go to another hotel. We stay - I don’t know - two, maybe three weeks and many men come to have sex every night. They give us money, but the fat man take it for his money. Then another man come, tall man. We go on the train to London, and drive in a car to Birmingham. We come to the house where you find me.’ Finally her eyes met his.

  ‘The other girls were with you?’ Mariner asked.

  She shook her head. ‘They stay in Paris. I don’t know what happens to them.’

  She seemed numb, quite devoid of emotion, but the air in the room was thick with suppressed outrage as Mariner and Khatoon listened.

  ‘And since you came to Birmingham?’

  She sighed. ‘I do my job. I stay in the same house and the door is locked on my room except when I can go to the bathroom, or get food or when the men come.’

  ‘How many clients . . . men?’

  A shrug. ‘Maybe fifteen, twenty each day.’ She was beyond caring.

  ‘And they pay you?’

  ‘Stanislav take the money. I can’t talk to the men and I must pretend I can’t speak English.’

  Mariner placed two photographs on the table. ‘One of these is Stanislav?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the other man?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you know any of these faces?’ Mariner placed the other photographs in front of her.

  Her eyes fell on the third, a swarthy man with slicked back hair, and widened in surprise.

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘This is Petya.’

  ‘He’s the man who offered you work?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well done.’ Crunch time. ‘Katarina, we want to put Stanislav and Petya and men like them in prison, to stop them from hurting other young women. But to do that we need someone to tell the courts what they have done. Can you do that for us? Can you tell the court what you have told us today?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think they will be very angry.’

  ‘If you tell your story, they’ll be put in prison for a very long time and won’t be able to harm you. We really need your help, Katarina. You’re a good, strong witness.’ They’d talk about defence cross-examinations later, much later, when she was physically stronger and would be more resilient.

  ‘Okay. I try.’

  ‘Thank you.’ And if it hadn’t been so wildly inappropriate, he would have hugged her.

  * * *

  By four o’clock all the girls had been extensively questioned, and they could do no more. It had been a harrowing day. Mariner should have been feeling elated, but instead depression kicked in, and he sensed that the others were feeling the same way. Tony Knox summed up the mood. ‘The girl we talked to is fourteen,’ he said, in disgust.

  ‘That’s only a year older than our Molly,’ said Glover.

  ‘And she’s been working here for about a year, twenty blokes a day, protected and unprotected. She’s a mess — physically and psychologically.’ Knox looked emotionally drained.

  ‘Makes me feel guilty to be going home to my family,’ said Glover.

  But Mariner was satisfied that they were building a good case. Of the eight, Katarina was going to make the most reliable witness. Even throughout the day she seemed to have grown in strength, her shoulders had loosened a little, the eye contact becoming more frequent. The other girls seemed to look up to her.

  ‘What will happen to them
?’ he asked Lorelei, as he watched them piling into the minibus to go to the hostel.

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Long term.’

  ‘After you’ve finished with them, most of them will be sent to an immigration centre, and then back home,’ she said.

  ‘Well, that’s something.’

  ‘Is it?’

  Mariner should have asked her what she meant, but something told him he wouldn’t want to hear the answer.

  Instead he retreated to his office to write up his notes. He wanted to leave the case tidy for DCI Sharp in his absence, but he found it impossible to concentrate. Images conjured up by Katarina’s account of her ordeal kept creeping into his head. She was just a kid, some of the other girls even younger. It was far too much for them to have gone through in their young lives and he couldn’t begin to imagine the impact of their experiences. He felt tainted by it. Life as a country copper had to be preferable to this. When his phone rang he was glad of the distraction. It was DCI Sharp. ‘Can you spare a few minutes, Tom?’

  Mariner crossed the outer office and knocked on the gaffer’s door. Going in, he recognised her visitor from the back of his head, a thinning crown of dark hair flecked with white flakes of dandruff. Councillor Derek Cahill was a regular crusader for the Daily Mail, an oily little man who saw the current climate of interagency co-operation as an opportunity to give the police as much grief as possible about what he called the ‘moral decline’ of the city.

  ‘You know DI Mariner?’ Sharp asked him as the two men came face to face.

  Cahill managed a thin smile. ‘We’ve met before.’

  ‘The councillor came in to express his concern at the rise of prostitution in our area,’ Sharp said, smoothly. ‘I thought it might reassure him to know about the effectiveness of operation Ocean Blue today, and since you were on the ground when it happened, I thought you could help us out, Tom.’

  ‘Of course, ma’am.’ Mariner turned to Cahill. ‘We’re well aware of this as a growing problem, councillor. Which is why, at dawn today, we raided a number of premises in the city suspected to be brothels. We brought in a number of girls and not nearly enough papers for each of them. Most of them are from various places in Eastern Europe. Girls without identities. I don’t have the official figures yet, of course. Those arrested are still being processed, but I can tell you that in the region of seventy women were brought in from across the city.’ In truth Mariner had no idea how many it was, though he was pretty sure that seventy was a generous over-estimate. But he was doing what DCI Sharp had called him in to do – get this irritating little man out of her office.

  ‘Yes, well, it’s a start,’ Cahill conceded. ‘Though we all know that in a few weeks those girls will have simply been replaced by more.’

  ‘Oh, we don’t kid ourselves,’ Mariner agreed. ‘We might have broken this wave but we’re a long way off stemming the tide.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that you’re not being complacent.’ Cahill was stymied. He’d chosen the wrong day to come in with his usual rant about how little was being done.

  ‘You can depend on it,’ said Mariner trying not to smirk. He looked up at DCI Sharp, engaged in a similar struggle. ‘Is that all, ma’am?’

  ‘Thank you for your input, Inspector.’

  ‘Glad to be of help.’

  Minutes later Mariner watched from his desk as Sharp strode across the main office seeing Cahill out of the building. The DCI cut an imposing figure and today, as always, was impeccably dressed. The little weasel was almost having to break into a trot to keep up with her. Mariner’s phone rang again.

  * * *

  Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck winked down at Emma O’Brien from the windows as she walked across the car park to the entrance of the double-fronted Victorian villa, glowing with the prospect of her baby daughter’s smile only moments away. She felt exhausted, the discipline of remaining mentally focused for a whole day was an unfamiliar one. She’d got through the lecture, that was the most she could say, and if she’d learned nothing else from today, it had certainly confirmed what she’d already known deep down; that in no way was she ready to consider going back to regular work.

  Peter was going to be disappointed. With two households to support he was stretched about as far as he could be, so they could really use another income. Emma had an inkling that he was hoping today might have given her an appetite for what she was missing. In fact it had done quite the reverse. What was the point of having a baby if Emma wasn’t going to spend time with her? And right now, that was what she wanted more than anything else in the world. Even she had been unprepared for what a wrench it had been, to have to leave Jessica today. The arrangement had been fine. The crèche had been convenient and the staff seemed competent and kind. It just wouldn’t happen again, not for a very long time.

  And now with the week at an end, she and Peter had nothing planned for the next two days except spending quality time together as a family. She pressed the buzzer and the nursery intercom crackled, as a tinny voice asked her for identification. ‘Jessica Klinnemann’s mummy,’ she said.

  A pause. ‘Could you repeat that, please?’

  ‘Jessica Klinnemann’s mummy,’ Emma yelled into the tiny speaker as the traffic roared by on the busy road behind her. It had been the same frustrating palaver first thing this morning too.

  ‘Push the door,’ instructed the voice, at last. Emma pushed open the heavy spring-hinged door and the warm smell of cooked vegetables hit her nostrils as she walked into a bright yellow vestibule, the thigh-high coat hooks crowded with tiny jackets and coats slung over Postman Pat and Bob the Builder bags. A notice board above displayed photographs of a dozen young women in identical tunics.

  The office off to the left was empty and there was no one else around, so Emma crossed the hallway to the room where she’d dropped off her daughter five hours earlier. She levered down the high door handle and went in. She was confronted by chaos. Two infants lay in bouncing chairs and both were grizzling, while a tape of nursery rhymes provided a tuneful counterpoint. The girl who had been stooping over one of the babies turned, her freckled face flushed and damp with perspiration, fine red hair escaping from her ponytail and harassment written all over her face. She managed a brief smile. ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi, I’m Jessica’s mum,’ she said to the girl. ‘How’s she been?’

  The girl was looking at her as if she’d just requested half a pound of sausages. ‘You’re Jessica’s mummy?’ she said, uncertainly.

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Scanning the row of crying babies, Emma noticed that Jessica wasn’t among them. ‘Is she being changed?’

  As she spoke, a second young woman appeared from the bathroom carrying a dark-eyed baby on her hip. The two young women exchanged a look, momentarily disconcerted and a rumble of fear began deep inside Emma O’Brien.

  ‘None of these children is Jessica,’ she said, the sensation gathering momentum and rising up into her chest. ‘Where is she?’

  The girl frowned. ‘I don’t understand. The other babies have gone. These are the only children left.’

  The rumble welled and broke to the surface and in an uncontrollable reflex reaction, Emma O’Brien let rip an anguished howl.

  Chapter Two

  Mariner picked up his ringing phone.

  ‘Hi, again.’

  Mariner smiled. ‘Hello.’ It was the third time Anna had called inside the last half hour. The attention to detail this week in Herefordshire was getting was worthy of a military campaign.

  ‘Sorry. I thought we should take something smart to wear in the evening. Shall I pack your blue striped shirt?’

  Did he even own a blue striped shirt? ‘All right. Whatever you think.’

  ‘And you’re sure you won’t be late? It would be nice to get there in time to have a relaxed—’

  ‘I’m just about to leave,’ he reassured her. She’d needed a lot of that recently — understandably, he conceded. At least planning this holiday had
given her something else to focus on. He was looking forward to it, sort of. They certainly needed the break, what with the kind of hours Mariner had been working and the hassle of getting their houses on the market, and fielding the stream of people looking around. Disappointing though, that putting his own house up for sale hadn’t resulted in the same positive outcome as Anna’s.

  As Mariner replaced the receiver DCI Sharp put her head round the door, briefcase in hand and coat slung over her arm. ‘Thanks for earlier.’ She was referring to Councillor Cahill. ‘It should keep him off our backs for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘My pleasure, ma’am. Good to give him one less excuse for complaining about us. He’s a nasty piece of work.’

  ‘So I understand. I’ve never had the full story on him. You must tell me sometime.’ She glanced over Mariner’s tidy desk. ‘How did the interviews go?’

  Mariner reported back on the day’s events. ‘Katarina in particular looks like a solid witness.’

  ‘That’s a great result. You’re on a week’s leave now, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Well, you’ve earned it. Why don’t you get yourself off?’

  Out in the main office Mariner could see a few CID officers finishing up for the weekend, their pace unhurried. ‘What, and run the gauntlet of smart-arsed remarks from that lot out there about the boss leaving early?’

  ‘Hm. Remind me — what time did you start this morning?’

  ‘We all started early today.’

  ‘Okay then, yesterday? Probably while most of them were still wolfing down their eggs and bacon.’

  ‘Not Tony Knox,’ said Mariner. ‘You have to be up early these days to beat him into the office.’ Mariner could see his sergeant, his shaven pate bent forward in concentration, work currently a poor substitute for his non-existent social life. A passing phase, it had to be, but even so, Mariner made a mental note to ask him out for a drink when the next opportunity arose.

  ‘He’s the exception,’ Sharp persisted. ‘Go on, Tom. You have my permission.’

  Mariner caved. ‘Okay then, thank you, ma’am.’ They’d come a long way since their first meeting when her opening gambit had been to caution him against bending the rules. ‘You off too?’