Baby Lies (Reissue)

by Chris Collett

  ‘So?’

  ‘She came here to be a translator. She’s a bright girl with skills and . . . experience. Can’t we do something to help find her a job or something? We do it for offenders, why not for a victim?’ He was being naïve, Mariner knew that. They couldn’t possibly help every victim of every crime. But Katarina had endured so much and in the long-run they were going to need her here.

  DCI Sharp must have agreed with him. ‘Talk to Millie,’ she said. ‘See if they can’t do something through the offender rehabilitation scheme.’

  Millie’s response was mixed. ‘We could probably get Katarina interpreting work through the Brasshouse centre, but accommodation will be more difficult. She’ll need somewhere to stay, an address.’

  Mariner had already covered that base, though he hesitated to say it. ‘She can stay at my place, in the flat upstairs.’

  ‘Is that wise?’

  ‘Probably not.’ But, as far as Mariner was concerned, it was the only humane thing to do.

  * * *

  Mariner and Glover had first interviewed Goran Zjalic at 158 Wilmott Road, Stirchley, at the address where he and Alecsander Lucca lived. When there was no response today to their banging on the door, Mariner ordered it broken down. They and two uniforms burst into an empty house, but one that had until lately been lived in. There was recently bought food in the kitchen cupboards.

  ‘We’re looking for anything that might link Zjalic to Ocean Blue or to Nadia,’ Mariner told them. He dispatched one of the uniforms to knock on doors and talk to the neighbours on either side.

  The house was as grubby and sparsely furnished as the last time they had been here, with fixtures and fittings that were more than second hand. Furniture was minimal, but in the small box room upstairs was a cot. ‘He had his sister living with him,’ Glover reminded Mariner about the young woman who had come in while they were talking, cradling a baby on her hip.

  ‘If that’s who she was,’ Mariner said. ‘From what we now know she could have been another Nadia. I mean, we don’t even know that the baby was hers—’ He stopped suddenly.

  ‘It could have been Nadia’s baby,’ said Glover, picking up Mariner’s train of thought. ‘We only know that Nadia and the child were killed at around the same.’

  ‘Nadia’s baby had a cleft lip and palate,’ Mariner reminded him. ‘I didn’t notice that about the child.’

  ‘It might have had a dummy in its mouth. That would have covered it up. The baby died of a crushed skull. Zjalic losing his temper when it cried too much?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Mariner had to concede. ‘But I don’t think this is Zjalic’s normal residence. Valenka called him “the big man” but I don’t think she was just talking about physical attributes. He’s higher up the food chain. He could afford somewhere much smarter than this.’

  The uniform returned. ‘The neighbours on one side recognised the description of Zjalic, but according to them he hasn’t been seen since around the time of Ocean Blue.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean he hasn’t been here,’ said Mariner. ‘Didn’t you notice the lack of post in the hall when we first came in? If Zjalic has really been off the scene for three weeks there would have been a stack of junk mail on the floor. Someone’s been in and moved it. It might not have been at the time of day when anyone would see him, but Zjalic has been back. We’d do well to put this place under surveillance. Anyone else seen here?’

  ‘They said there’s sometimes a young woman with a baby, but again, not in the last two or three weeks.’

  ‘It’s always the same woman?’

  ‘They seemed to think so.’

  ‘Nadia’s baby died at the end of last year, so maybe it really was Zjalic’s sister we met,’ said Glover.

  ‘Sir.’ As they were talking the second PC descended the stairs carrying a crumpled black bin liner, which he passed to Mariner. ‘I found it stuffed in the back of a wardrobe.’

  When Mariner opened up the neck of the bag, sitting inside were a white leather handbag with multiple pockets, a mobile phone and a blue and white striped canvas ballet shoe with a buckle trim. ‘What the hell is going on?’ Mariner said, staring at the items. ‘Where does Christie Walker come into this?’

  * * *

  A pit-stop at Phyllis Gates’ house verified that the bag belonged to her late granddaughter and all three items were retained for forensic examination — which Mariner hoped would provide some clue as to what they were doing in Goran Zjalic’s house.

  Late that afternoon Mariner fetched Katarina and her meagre belongings and took her to his house. He’d made sure that the fire was lit and that it was warm, and he had put some basic food in the fridge. She moved tentatively from room to room looking and touching. Out of the secure setting of the hostel she seemed jumpy again prompting Mariner to wonder if he’d done the right thing.

  ‘You’ll be okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ But she hugged herself uncertainly. ‘It’s a big house. You have to go?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her face fell a little. ‘No. Wait a minute.’ He went into the hall to phone Anna. If she was going to be difficult he didn’t want Katarina to overhear. He needn’t have worried. The phone rang and rang until eventually the answering service kicked in. Mariner didn’t leave a message.

  ‘You have a woman?’ Katarina deduced when he went back into the living room. When Mariner paused she drew her own conclusion, raising a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Or man?’

  Mariner laughed. ‘A woman, but it’s complicated.’ Not to mention finished.

  ‘Com-pli-cated.’ Her brow furrowed as she tested out the long and unfamiliar word.

  ‘Mixed up,’ Mariner helped her out with the nearest explanation he could come up with.

  She nodded, understanding.

  ‘So we’ll go out for dinner,’ Mariner declared.

  ‘We go out?’

  ‘To a pub, a restaurant.’

  Her eyes filled with alarm. ‘People they will look at me.’

  ‘Yes, they will,’ agreed Mariner. ‘You’re a pretty girl.’

  ‘But they look at me and you—’

  Mariner knew what she was getting at. ‘Yes, and they’ll think you’re my daughter,’ he said, reasonably. ‘No one will know what’s happened to you. You’re just like any other teenage girl out for dinner. Aren’t you hungry? Wouldn’t you like a pizza, ice cream. . . caviar?’

  That seemed to do it, and a smile brightened up her face again. ‘Yes, I like that very much.’

  ‘I’ll go and change.’

  ‘Change?’

  ‘Change my clothes.’

  Her face dropped again and she looked down at the jeans and T-shirt, the same ones she’d been wearing since Mariner had last interviewed her. ‘I have only these clothes.’

  ‘It’s fine. We’ll take you shopping soon for more clothes.’

  ‘You go shopping with me?’

  That made him laugh again. ‘Not me. I’m very bad at shopping.’ But he felt sure that Millie would be glad to help out.

  ‘I have no money,’ she pointed out.

  ‘I’ve got money. You can pay me back.’ Almost imperceptibly she stiffened, eye contact snatched away, and she flushed a deep red, but it took Mariner several seconds to fathom her reaction. Then it hit him like a sledge hammer. ‘Not like that,’ he said, quickly. ‘Never like that.’

  At that she seemed to shrink a little, such a fragile self-worth. ‘You think I’m a bad person.’ She spoke in a whisper.

  ‘No.’ Mariner was firm. ‘You’re a sweet girl who has had some bad things happen to her, and my job is to keep you safe. You can pay me back when you have work and you have money.’ It took several seconds but she relaxed again, forced a smile. Christ, this was going to be a minefield.

  Wearing his oldest, scruffiest jeans and trainers to show solidarity, Mariner took her to the Coach and Horses, a mid-range pub where he knew they wouldn’t stand out. She devoured a 12oz steak that would have challenged his appetite.
They used the whole experience to extend her vocabulary, Mariner naming some of the things she was less familiar with, while she introduced Mariner to some basic Albanian, though languages had never been his forte. It must have looked as if they were filming for the Open University. Mariner hammed it up to make her laugh, but towards the end of the meal she went quiet.

  ‘Penny for them,’ said Mariner, carelessly. Then, short of the voiceover translation he added, ‘It’s an English saying, “a penny for your thoughts.” It means: what are you thinking about?’

  ‘I think about my friends, the girls from the house.’ She looked around her. ‘This is so nice.’ Her eyes glistened. ‘I think they don’t have such a nice time.’

  ‘What will they do when they go home?’ They must have talked about it when they were at the Daffodil Project.’

  ‘They look for work.’ Mariner’s heart turned leaden. He didn’t like to ask what kind of work. ‘My friend Sonja, she go back to her little girl.’

  ‘She has a child?’

  Katarina smiled, but her eyes had filled up. ‘She is very excited to see her.’

  But then what? Mariner wanted to ask. What future for Sonja and her daughter? It was one of several moments through the evening when Mariner wanted to reach out and touch Katarina to reassure her, but after what she’d been through it was the last thing he could have done.

  After dropping off Katarina and taking her through the security routine, Mariner drove back to Anna’s house, but she wasn’t there. In the lounge and the bedroom he noticed that some of her clothes and personal things had gone. Propped on the kitchen table was an envelope. Mariner opened it.

  New job starts tomorrow so staying overnight with Becky and Mark. Out celebrating tonight, but give me a call after 10:30 p.m.

  Anna xxx

  So that was it. Their four-year relationship ended with the most cursory of notes. Mariner picked up the phone and dialled. Becky answered, but they didn’t linger on small talk and she put Anna on straight away.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi. So you’ve moved out then.’

  ‘I’ve started to.’ Her tone was bright and pragmatic. ‘I’ll only be staying with Becky short-term though. They’re going to need my room.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘They’ve been approved to adopt a baby from China. It’s what we’ve been celebrating — along with my job, of course. Fantastic news, isn’t it?’

  ‘The best,’ said Mariner without enthusiasm. ‘So where will you stay?’

  ‘Well, obviously, I’ll be on the lookout for somewhere—’

  ‘Heron’s Nest?’

  ‘Hm, I think not. But in the meantime Gareth has a spare room I can crash in.’ Her words tumbled out as if she hoped he might not hear them.

  ‘Good old Dr Gareth,’ said Mariner, instantly rubbishing the spare room fairytale.

  She ignored his sarcasm. ‘I’ll be exchanging contracts on the house next Wednesday, so I’ve ordered a removal van for the following Friday and will be handing over the keys and moving out the rest of my stuff, so you’ll need to—’

  ‘Sure.’ Hanging up the phone Mariner felt overwhelmingly exhausted. Upstairs, he went into the room that until recently they’d shared. Lying down on Anna’s side of the bed he found that it still smelled lightly of her. Her scent made him hard and the pain in his chest returned. He couldn’t believe that she would never again lie here beside him and that in such a short space of time she’d so completely moved on. He had to accept that Anna wanted something different from life. She wanted what Becky and Mark had, and what apparently he couldn’t give her.

  He wondered about Becky and Mark. Adopting a child from abroad was dressed up as some great philanthropic gesture, but they were essentially doing it because they wanted to. Was it really in the interests of the child or simply some warped kind of fashion statement? What did Marcella Turner call it? The children-as-accessories culture. On one level what they were doing seemed not so very different from what Alecsander Lucca and Goran Zjalic were involved in. It was what the world had come to; human beings shipped around and traded like any other merchandise. Still, at least Becky and Mark’s child might stand more of a chance than Sonja’s baby. Mariner was still thinking about Sonja’s baby when he awoke very early the following morning.

  He left it until a respectable time then drove back to his house. Letting himself in he was pleased to find Katarina up and about, in the kitchen making tea. ‘You want some?’ she asked.

  But Mariner declined. ‘I want you to tell me about your friend Sonja,’ he said. ‘Did she leave her baby behind when she came to this country?’

  ‘No, she have her baby here, in England.’

  ‘The baby was a surprise? She didn’t know she was pregnant?’ Mariner hazarded, thinking back to what Lorelei had told him.

  ‘Oh no,’ Katarina waggled her head and smiled. ‘She want her baby.’

  ‘Like Nadia.’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was at that point that Mariner saw the faintest spark of light at the end of a very long tunnel. Christ they’d been through all this before with Valenka but didn’t think to ask if there were any others. ‘What happened to Sonja’s baby?’ he asked.

  ‘They take it to, um, the house,’ she frowned as she groped for the right words, ‘the house for children have no mother, no father.’

  ‘An orphanage,’ Mariner said.

  ‘Or-phan-age.’ She hadn’t come across that word before.

  ‘Who’s they?’ Mariner asked. ‘Who took Sonja’s baby?’

  But Katarina didn’t know. ‘Sonja tell me when we come to your police station.’

  Even so, it took all Mariner’s willpower to stop himself from hugging her. Now all he needed to do was run it by Knox and Glover to establish if he was anywhere near the truth.

  He was prevented from doing this by Delrose, who met him on his way in to Granville Lane. ‘There’s an official from the Albanian Embassy here with a Mr Troshani,’ she said. ‘They seemed to think that you’re expecting them?’

  Christ, that was quick. ‘Oh God,’ Mariner sighed, out loud. ‘Now I have to break it to a man that his daughter was a sex worker and that she and her bastard child are now dead,’ he flashed Delrose a humourless smile. ‘This job doesn’t get any easier, does it? Is Charlie Glover in yet?’

  ‘I saw him come in about ten minutes ago.’

  Armed with the photograph of Nadia, Mariner went down to the informal interview room where Mr Troshani and his interpreter had been taken and plied with coffee. Even sitting down Mariner could see that Troshani was a big man, with his daughter’s dark, intense eyes. About fifty, his hair silver-stranded at the temples, the suit he was wearing had seen better days and was straining at the seams. His expression was bleak, but Mariner couldn’t begin to imagine what he must be feeling.

  Introducing himself, Mariner gave Troshani the silver crucifix they had retrieved from around his daughter’s neck, and the photograph that Valenka had given them. Troshani stared at the picture, touching the faces of Nadia and then her baby as if doing so might bring them back to life. Head bowed, he confirmed with a wordless nod that this was his daughter pinching his nose between finger and thumb to stem any tears. He spoke to the embassy interpreter.

  ‘He wants to know what happened,’ the interpreter translated.

  It was the question Mariner had been dreading. ‘Some of the detail—’ he hesitated, and gave the interpreter what he hoped was a meaningful look.

  ‘He wants to know everything,’ came the reply.

  As well as he could, Mariner went on to describe the gruesome discovery last Christmas, piecing it together with what they thought had happened to Nadia based on what her friend Valenka had told them so recently. When he had finished, Troshani sat in silence, no longer even trying to control his weeping.

  ‘Does he know how she came to this country?’ Mariner asked, knowing that the story would be similar to the others.

  ‘She had an
offer of work,’ the translator told him when Troshani had spoken. ‘I encouraged her to come. I thought it would be a better life for her. She sent a letter home telling us what a good life she had here.’ Troshani went through his pockets, producing a crumpled and dirty envelope. ‘She told us she was going to have a baby and that she would be coming home. And now she will be coming home in a wooden casket.’ Finally, his shoulders gave way and he sobbed. ‘She was my child and I should have taken care of her.’

  Before Troshani left, Mariner summoned Charlie Glover. ‘This is the man who was responsible for tracking down Nadia’s killer, and for identifying her,’ Mariner told Troshani. ‘If it hadn’t been for him, we may never have known.’ As Mariner had expected, it was an emotional meeting.

  Afterwards Mariner felt drained, his earlier momentum lost. He went back up to CID where Knox was working at his desk. The sergeant followed him into his office. ‘You’re looking rough,’ he remarked.

  ‘Yeah, didn’t get much sleep,’ said Mariner flopping into the seat behind his desk.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Knox raised a suggestive eyebrow. ‘Anything to do with Anna?’

  ‘What? No. Anna and me, it’s over.’ Mariner watched the shock register on Knox’s face.

  ‘Jesus, when did that happen?’

  ‘That’s what I keep asking myself.’

  ‘Anything to do with the Welsh medic?’

  ‘You should be a detective.’

  ‘Nah. Hours are crap and the pay’s not much better.’

  ‘You heard that Christie’s stuff turned up at Zjalic’s house,’ Mariner said, not wishing to dwell on his own problems.

  ‘Charlie told me. What the hell’s going on?’

  ‘I think I might know.’

  Knox pulled up a chair. ‘Cough it up then.’

  ‘I talked to Katarina last night. She told me about her friend Sonja.’

  ‘I interviewed Sonja,’ said Knox, the memory of it forcing a grimace. ‘She couldn’t wait to get home to her kid.’

  ‘That’s right, and I’ll bet you assumed the same thing I did; that Sonja left her child behind to come and work here.’