The Autumn Tree (DI Bliss Book 8)

by Tony J. Forder

  ‘Am I wrong, or is this a complete waste of time?’ Chandler asked as they walked back out to the car. ‘I mean traipsing around to visit them. You could have asked about the card when you called them.’

  Bliss acknowledged her observation with a slight dip of his head. ‘I could have. But I wanted to see the cards for myself. Any of the girls might have lied to me for one reason or another.’

  ***

  They were early for their final interview, so Bliss called ahead. Lsenko asked him to give her half an hour; he suspected she was entertaining a client. It took them less than ten minutes to reach her flat in Hampton Vale, close to the Moorhen pub. Bliss parked the pool car a little way up the road so they could covertly observe the entrance to her property. Nobody emerged while they sat there.

  ‘Unless she threw her punter out of the door the moment she put down her phone, I guess she wasn’t busy after all,’ Chandler said. There was no judgement in her voice.

  The pair got out of the car, walked up to the door, and rang the bell. A buzzer sounded, the lock shot open with a loud thunk, and they let themselves in.

  Marta Lsenko was by far the most striking of the women they had rescued. Same high cheekbones as her friend Yeva, but where Savchuk had an athlete’s build, Lsenko was all soft curves. She wore a pink leisure suit that was more tasteful than it sounded. Damp hair hung in thick strands over her broad shoulders. Bliss’s eyes were drawn to her eyebrows, which were so arched she looked to be in a permanent state of shock.

  Within two minutes, their host had also produced her card. She leaned down to hug Bliss before showing it to him. ‘You gave me this life,’ she said. ‘You and Penny. I won’t ever forget you.’

  A dark cloud entered the room to squat over Bliss’s head. Was this what he had rescued her for? To endure the same indentured slavery she would have been forced into under Lewis Drake? He wondered if the agency Lsenko worked for was part of that man’s organisation. How ironic that would be.

  The woman was open about what she did for a living and why. She had worked as a prostitute back home in Ukraine from the age of fourteen. As with all organised crime gangs, the one that ran her in the town of Donetsk was harsh with its girls, often brutal. But she had a wild streak her masters were unable to contain, and they had sold her on, a chattel to be haggled over. There she had lived in a single room that functioned as her entire home. A life of squalor and unhappiness. Here, Lsenko told them, she had a whole apartment to herself, and only ever saw the men who controlled her very existence when it came to handing over their cut of any cash she received. Provided she earned them twelve hundred pounds per week, whatever she made above that figure was hers to keep. Given her obvious allure, Bliss imagined she was a popular girl all round.

  ‘Show me your dead girl’s picture,’ she said at one point. ‘I check out competition, look at how I am able to improve my own advertising. If you think she did what I do to make a living, I might recognise her.’

  Bliss immediately picked up on what she had said. ‘Your own… Marta, please tell me you don’t run your own business on the side.’

  She gave a coy smile. ‘I would not tell you this. It is illegal.’

  ‘You might be surprised. The law is a bit muddy regarding the services you offer.’

  ‘It is? Then this is good, no?’

  ‘No. What I mean is, if the people who employ you to escort for them and them alone get to hear of it, they will make you suffer. They’ll hurt you. Not so badly that you can’t work for them, but they will hurt you. And they have long memories, Marta. You must be more careful.’

  Lsenko regarded him as if his concerns were unwarranted. ‘I want to have nice things. I have good clothes, I drive and have nice car. I can’t do all this with what I make from escort agency.’

  ‘So you run your own ads. Online?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. How else?’

  Bliss nodded. How else indeed, in this increasingly digital age. He took a breath. ‘Marta, I can’t tell you what to do or what not to do. It’s none of my business. But the world you live in is a dangerous one, and you will make it more so by working for yourself on the side. My advice: stop it. And stop it now.’

  While they had been talking, Chandler had taken out her phone. Earlier in the day, Bliss had sent her the crime scene photos via WhatsApp, and now she edged forward in her seat to show Lsenko the screen. She had selected the least intrusive shot, one that clearly revealed their victim’s features in the best light possible.

  After studying it for at least ten seconds, Lsenko nodded her head and jabbed the screen with one of her perfectly manicured fingernails. ‘I do not know her name, but I do recognise her face. She is not with my agency. She work for another that supplies escorts here in Peterborough, but also in Cambridge and Huntingdon.’

  Bliss felt the heavy thump of a dead weight striking his heart like a clapper on a bell. Just when he’d least expected progress, it seemed they had a breakthrough. ‘Do you remember which agency?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. But is easy to find.’

  ‘You definitely don’t remember her name, though?’

  ‘I never knew her name. Not her real name.’ She picked up her own mobile, which had been sitting on the arm of her chair. Her thumbs flashed on it for a couple of seconds. Then she nodded to herself and handed the phone to Bliss. ‘See, here. With my agency I am Rebecca, not Marta.’

  The online page she showed him contained four photographs in addition to her assumed name. In the first she wore a full-length evening gown, looking both striking and elegant. In the second she reclined on a sofa, wearing black nightwear that left little to the imagination. In the third she wore white lingerie while lying across the foot of a bed. In the final shot she was standing upright and completely naked, turned side-on to the camera while looking back over her shoulder.

  Bliss handed the phone back to Lsenko, who smiled sweetly at him. ‘Here I am Marta, you see. There I am Rebecca. On your girl’s site, she is Honey.’

  Five

  Upon arriving back at Thorpe Wood, Bliss asked Chandler to update the rest of the team before joining him in the Sex Crimes unit. Officially, the division no longer existed and worked under the banner of the Sexual Offence Investigation Unit. Unofficially, while the squad ran investigations ranging from sexual abuse to rape, it also provided intelligence support for the NCA in connection to local prostitution rings.

  Bliss and the squad leader, DI Angie Burton, had once enjoyed a brief fling. It had ended amicably and they remained friends as well as colleagues. He knew her experience would be useful in finding a way through the sleaze and grime he was set to encounter in tracking down the woman they currently knew as Honey.

  Burton was sitting at the far end of the room talking with two members of her team when Bliss entered. He stood, waiting to catch her eye, before taking a seat at the closest free desk with a computer terminal. He didn’t bother trying to access any relevant sites, as he knew his network credentials were invalid on this equipment. Given the graphic nature of the material this team often had to analyse, the system was locked down tight with every keystroke monitored, to protect the user as much as the service.

  A couple of minutes later, Burton came to sit down beside him. She had the kind of face you could hopefully still describe as being pretty without getting a rap over the knuckles for it. Her smile was warm and genuine, if a little weary. ‘And how are you doing these days, Jimmy?’ she asked. ‘Playing by the rules, I hope.’

  ‘Don’t I always?’

  They both laughed.

  ‘How is it you don’t seem to age?’ he asked her. ‘Do you have a painting of yourself tucked away in an attic?’

  ‘Oh, I age. Believe me. I can’t sit or stand without farting these days.’

  ‘Well, something is working for you. On the outside, at least.’

  ‘That’s my healthy lifestyle. I’ve kicked out all the bad stuff. Besides, you’re not looking too shabby yourself, Jimmy.
What’s your secret?’

  ‘I enjoy all the bad stuff.’

  Burton shook her head at him. ‘Always the contrarian. So, what can I do for you?’

  Bliss laid it out for her. ‘I’m working a murder. Young woman strangled to death in Cambridge. There’s a good chance she was an escort. Probably working for an agency covering the whole county.’

  ‘Off the books as well?’

  ‘Most likely, yes. Though I’m not quite sure how that works.’

  Burton had Bliss shift over so that she could sit in front of the widescreen monitor and keyboard. After logging on, she opened up a browser and navigated to Google. ‘You can search for escorts here and it will give you a whole range of options. The most common results come back for Vivastreet, Adultwork, UKescorts, Ukadultzone, and Friday-ad. More sites are springing up all the time, but these few usually cover all the main agencies and independents. All of them will include adverts for agency escorts. Do you have a name?’

  ‘Honey.’

  ‘How sweet. If your victim is known as Honey on her agency website, chances are she won’t be using the same name as an independent. Let’s find her first, after which we can expand and dig into her a bit more.’

  Burton’s fingers flashed over the keyboard. On the first site she quickly navigated her way to the Cambridgeshire area. ‘What colour hair does your victim have?’ she asked.

  ‘Dark brown, maybe even black.’

  ‘Okay. On here she’ll be classified as brunette. Slender frame?’

  ‘Yes. She was petite.’

  ‘Okay. I can include that as a sub-category. Let’s search there first. Do you have her photo on you? Only there’s a possibility we’ll encounter more than one girl using that same name on different sites.’

  Bliss dug out his phone and accessed his crime scene photos. Burton looked through them, then back up at him. ‘This is what you call playing by the rules, is it?’

  He waved the rebuke away as she tapped at the keys once more. ‘It doesn’t go against policy. It’s not the taking of photos we have problems with – it’s how they’re used afterwards.’

  Her first search threw up twenty-three results. She glanced at him. ‘If she’s multi-agency she may go by a different name again, so stop me scrolling if you spot her.’

  Twice he asked her to pause. Two of the girls looked a lot like his victim, but they were both far more busty.

  ‘You got twenty-three hits for slim brunettes?’ he said. ‘That’s depressing.’

  Burton nodded. ‘It’s big business. A lot of money to be made. Even the independents charge around eighty per hour. Imagine what the agency rate is.’

  The fourth site they visited gave up Bliss’s victim. Burton clicked on the young woman’s photo, which took them to her profile page. On the wide screen the images were sharp and detailed. Bliss held his phone close to the largest of them, comparing the two.

  ‘It’s her,’ Burton said.

  Bliss agreed.

  A more revealing array of photographs was available, but Bliss noticed none of them showed her fully naked. He asked Burton about that.

  ‘These agencies are allowed to exist because they claim to be selling escort-only services. Nothing illegal about that. They’re careful not to include any shots we might be able to use to argue against that claim. So a woman in lingerie is fine, because for some reason a businessman visiting the city and wanting a date for the night needs to know what she looks like in her underwear. But one nip-slip and we could be all over them. It’s the indies who reveal all.’

  Bliss was about to ask more when the unit door opened and Chandler entered the room. She was closely followed by Glen Ashton, and the NCA man did not look at all happy. He zoned in on Bliss and stood with both hands on his hips, legs spread wide.

  ‘Is this what you call inter-agency cooperation?’ Ashton said. He jabbed out a finger. ‘You struck a deal. That deal is the only reason you have this case, and I’m part of that deal, whether you like it or not. Am I making myself clear, Sergeant?’

  Bliss took the steam out of it by pausing before he responded. ‘As it happens, you’re in danger of making a bit of a berk of yourself, Glen,’ he said in a neutral tone. ‘When you enter someone else’s squad room and you’ve never met them before, it’s customary to introduce yourself first before you start barking at people.’

  He let it go there, allowing a chagrined Ashton to shake hands with Burton. The two exchanged names and greetings.

  When things were just awkward enough, Bliss continued. ‘Before you so rudely interrupted, we were making some progress in identifying our victim. If you want to play nice, drop the Superman pose, pull out a chair and watch in admiration along with me and Pen as DI Burton here weaves her magic spell over the internet.’

  Ashton remained on his feet, but narrowed his stance and allowed his hands to fall by his sides. Chandler pulled out a nearby chair for herself. Burton was busy with something, but Bliss was lost trying to follow her.

  ‘What are you doing now?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve copied Honey’s photos, which I’m feeding into a little piece of software we have. What this will do is send out a request across the net, searching for exact matches of the same image. If we’re lucky, we’ll get some hits for sites on which she appears as an independent.’

  Burton knew her stuff. Less than five minutes later, she had produced an extensive list of links to other websites. ‘Many of these will be doubled or even tripled up, because the site may feature the same image two or three times. But I mentioned both Vivastreet and Friday-ad, and she appears on both. Let’s check them out first.’

  The first proved to be the most useful. On Vivastreet their victim called herself Bunny and the profile listed her as an independent. In addition to an array of more explicit photographs and video clips requiring a paid subscription, the details given revealed two things of note: the area in which she lived, and a mobile phone number. This arrangement, Burton revealed, was standard. If you were a potential client, you’d select the service you wanted, and for how long. Then you called the number from your own phone – only mobile numbers were accepted. At that point you arranged a date and time, and would be given the full address.

  Bliss was interested in the area – the Woodston district of Peterborough. Their victim being based in the city gave him additional leverage in respect of keeping the case local. He was storing her contact number in his work phone when he noticed something in her bio.

  ‘It says there she’s new to the area. If that’s true, I don’t understand how she came to have my business card on her.’

  ‘Don’t be fooled by that,’ Burton told him, swivelling in her chair to face him. ‘To us that’s a major red flag; it tells me this is not a truly independent advert. Also, there’s a good chance it means this woman was trafficked. They get moved around the country every few months, which is why they are listed as being new to the area. You see an awful lot of those ads on these sites. Also, the ones who say they’ve recently returned to the area throw up the same red flag. It means they’re on a cycle, moving from place to place.’

  The information chimed with Bliss’s thoughts so far. Without any further discussion, he dialled the number on the page. It rang five times before voicemail cut in. The outgoing message was impersonal: a generic provider asking the caller to leave their name and number. On the off-chance, Bliss did so.

  ‘We never found her phone,’ he explained. ‘Somebody might hear it and think I’m a genuine caller.’

  Burton shrugged. ‘It’s worth a shot. If you like, I can trawl through this lot to see if I can find a genuinely independent page for her. If you’re thinking of contacting the agency and requesting her details, forget about it. Obtaining her information through legal means will take months, if you get it at all. Depends on who owns and runs the agency.’

  ‘See if you can find me a local one, will you, please?’

  ‘There will be one. There always is a local outle
t, even for an organised crime operation. They like to have close control over their properties, girls, and clients.’

  ‘This is where I could be of some genuine use,’ Ashton said. The anger he’d carried into the room with him had dissipated now that a familiar task was at hand. ‘I’ll run a check through our own database as soon as I know who to look for. We might even have this victim in our records somewhere. If I could have one of the images, I’ll send it through to my office and have someone run it by facial recognition.’

  Burton agreed to send him the best facial shot, and he gave her his ERSOU e-mail address.

  Chandler, who until this point had merely been observing, leaned forward and pointed at the screen. ‘If this girl has been trafficked, we must assume she is being watched closely. I noticed the fake independent page said she does in-house calls only. To me that suggests they don’t trust her enough to meet up with clients in their own homes or at hotels. So why are they okay with putting her out as an escort?’

  ‘Escort clients are more closely vetted,’ Burton told them. ‘Plus, whatever the girls offer their clients is written off as purely a physical act between two consenting adults, and of no interest to the agency. You can see from her dodgy independent profile that she’s clear about what’s on offer, and with clients simply calling in to make arrangements, the people controlling her want to make sure she doesn’t stray. When these same girls take on truly independent profiles, you can usually spot them because they pixelate their faces and expose more of their bodies.’

  Bliss was nodding, taking it all in. ‘If you come across a completely indie page for her, let me know what her mobile number is on there.’

  ‘Why, what are you thinking?’

  ‘I reckon the number I have is a corporate one. They monitor her voicemail messages and either make the arrangements themselves or tell her which ones she can and can’t accept. If she has her own profile somewhere, I’m willing to bet it’s her own phone she uses.’

  They left Burton to it. Bliss trusted her work ethic enough to know that she wouldn’t take a break away from the job in hand until she had visited every link relating to their victim. Angie was not only a great cop with wonderful instincts; she also cared.