The Body Dealer (A DI Erica Swift Thriller Book 5)

by M K Farrar

  Beyond the dirty windows and the ragged net curtains, the sun started to rise. Linh had no idea what time it was, but around her, the other women and children began to stir.

  Her head felt thick with tiredness, her eyes sore and scratchy. She’d thought she’d eventually get used to this kind of exhaustion, but right now it weighed on her.

  Heavy footsteps thumped down the hallway towards the room.

  The man who’d driven them here the previous night pushed open the door.

  “Wakey-wakey,” he yelled and thumped on the wall several times with his fist. “Time to rise and shine.”

  Groans and words of protest rose all around her as the women roused themselves and shook their children awake.

  Linh had already been awake, but Chau was still sound.

  “It’s time to wake up now,” she said softly into her daughter’s ear.

  It was amazing how Chau could sleep, no matter what. Linh envied her daughter that departure from reality.

  Chau’s silky dark hair rested over her cheek, and Linh brushed it away. The girl twisted her face into the mattress.

  “Come on now. We don’t want to be late for our first day.”

  The man waited while the women dressed themselves and took it in turns in the bathroom. No one had any luxuries like makeup, or even deodorant or toothpaste, and aware of the number of people all needing to share one bathroom, the women were quick, nipping in and out to let the next person in.

  Linh and Chau took their place in the queue and gradually edged their way forwards. They eventually reached the front, and they went into the bathroom together. The room stank of urine, and black mould covered every surface. A thick limescale coated the inside of the toilet.

  Still, it was a working bathroom and they’d been forced to use far worse. Linh let Chau go first, while she stood by the closed door, making sure no one else came in. There was no lock, so someone could have pushed in if they wanted, but Linh got the sense that all the women felt they were in the same boat. No, it wasn’t the women here Linh worried about. It was the men.

  When Chau had finished, Linh swapped places with her. She made sure to be quick, not wanting Chau to have to deal with someone banging on the door, demanding that they hurry up.

  They left the bathroom and went back to the room. Though they had nothing of any value, Linh still hid their bags under the mattresses, away from peeping eyes when they weren’t around. The other women had gathered in a line at the doorway, and the man was handing out paper bags to each of them as they filed out of the door and headed down the stairs.

  Linh took her place in line with Chau and waited her turn. She reached the man, but he frowned at her.

  “Not you. You need to wait here.”

  She remembered her English. “Why?”

  “You’ll join them later.”

  “What’s happening, Má?” Chau asked.

  Linh hustled her daughter back into the bedroom. “I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because we’re new. We probably need to be given some training or something.”

  Chau nodded, apparently happy with that explanation, but worry wormed inside Linh. She didn’t like being separated from the other women—there was safety in numbers—but what could she do?

  They both sat back on the mattress and waited.

  Outside, doors slammed followed by the start of an engine. Was that the van taking the other women to work? In the distance came sirens, together with the steady hum of traffic. It was so noisy here—noisier even than Ho Chi Minh City, which she had visited as a girl. Sirens of emergency vehicles had seemed to go on all night, and large planes crossed the sky overhead, and there always seemed to be someone outside, talking or shouting or laughing. Didn’t these people ever sleep?

  Movement came at the doorway, and Linh scrambled to her feet. A man she hadn’t seen before entered. He was smartly dressed in suit trousers and a buttoned shirt that was open at the neck. In his hand was a black bag, and she flicked her gaze towards it suspiciously.

  “Good morning,” he said in her language, startling her.

  “You speak Vietnamese?” she asked.

  “Very badly.” He placed his thumb and forefinger so they were only millimetres apart. “But I try to learn a little of all languages. It is important to be able to communicate. Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes, of course. I have been trying to learn English, so I can integrate myself better here. I hope my daughter,” she gestured to where Chau was still sitting on the mattress, “will one day be fluent.”

  “That’s a good plan. Now, please, take a seat.”

  This Western man seemed pleasant enough. He was tall and attractive and well-dressed. He spoke kindly to her, as though she was an equal, even though she felt drastically inferior. She was someone of no importance to anyone here, except for her daughter. But she was someone of importance to her family back home who were relying on her. Her sister’s husband may take years to recover from his accident, if he were to recover at all, and in the meantime, they still needed to feed their children and put a roof over their heads. Her sister was working, of course, but her income was in no way large enough to support them all.

  Sometimes, she needed to remind herself that she was brave. She’d made an incredible journey to England for the sake of her family, and had almost died doing so. A mother and daughter travelling alone was open to countless dangers, but she’d still done it. And she hadn’t done it for herself. She’d never wanted to leave her home. But she’d not been able to sit by while her nieces and nephews starved, and she’d known Chau would have a different, brighter future in the United Kingdom.

  The man set his bag down on a nearby table and opened it. He put his hand in and withdrew several items, including what looked like a tourniquet and a couple of needles still in their protective plastic covers, and some empty tubes with paper stickers on the front that could be written on.

  The sight of the items alarmed her.

  “Wait. What are those for?”

  “We need to take a sample of blood from each new arrival,” he explained. “It’s important that we check you’re not carrying any diseases that you might pass on to the other workers.”

  “We’re healthy, I promise. You don’t need to do that.”

  “There’s no point in discussing it. If you want to work, you must give a blood sample first. That’s how it’s done here.”

  Linh hesitated, unsure what to do. It was just a small amount of blood, and it wasn’t as though it would hurt. Just prick and a scrape, that was all. They didn’t really have any choice. She needed to be able to work in order to one day set a life up for her and her daughter. They’d come all this way and had almost died. What was a few drops of blood?

  He shrugged and went to put the items back in the bag. “Of course, if you’d rather not give the sample, you are free to leave and sort out your accommodation and job on your own, but I have to warn you that very few people in this city would be willing to just give a room to an illegal immigrant, and you would most likely end up on the street. I see you have your daughter with you. How old is she?”

  Linh bristled at the question. “She’s thirteen.”

  “A pretty young girl like that on the streets would be a very bad idea. The men you’d be sharing the streets with wouldn’t care about her age, if you understand what I’m trying to say.”

  She understood exactly, and it made her blood run cold. It was possibly her biggest fear, if she didn’t include dying.

  “Okay,” she said in her careful, heavily accented English. “I go first.”

  She sensed Chau staring up at her in confusion, and so she threw her daughter a smile that she knew did not reach her eyes. “It will be all right, Chau. This is how they do things here. We must do what we can to fit in.”

  Her daughter smiled in return, but it wasn’t a real smile.

  Linh pulled up her sleeve and offered her arm to the man.

  He came over, bringing the equipment with him
, and knelt in front of her. He wrapped the tourniquet around her arm, just above the inside of her elbow. Then he attached the head of the needle to what had looked like a sample tube, but she now saw was part of a syringe.

  Linh twisted her face away, pressing it into her shoulder so she didn’t have to watch the needle going in or her blood being taken from her body. She was thirty-three years old; she should be braver about needles.

  Slender fingers touched hers, and she looked up to see Chau had taken her hand and was giving it a squeeze.

  Then it was over, and the man—was he a doctor?—was placing a small cotton square over the puncture mark and securing it with a plaster.

  “There, all done.”

  She immediately focused her attention on her daughter. It was Chau’s turn.

  “Má?”

  “It will be all right, Chau. This is what we must do to work here. It doesn’t hurt.”

  Chau pressed her lips together and nodded. Linh’s heart swelled with love for her daughter. She was so well-behaved. After everything she had been through, the girl still obeyed her without question. She only hoped she wasn’t leading her down the wrong path.

  Chau moved forward, tugging up her own sleeve and holding out her arm.

  Linh was relieved to see he at least used a fresh needle from the packet. He was acting like a professional and seemed to know what he was doing. She was probably worrying unnecessarily, though that was hardly surprising, considering the circumstances.

  He repeated the process with the tourniquet and slid the needle into Chau’s young skin.

  Tears filled her daughter’s dark eyes, and Linh found her own eyes welling in sympathy. “It’ll be over in seconds,” she reassured her. “No harm done.”

  Sure enough, it was.

  “There, easy, wasn’t it?” he said, capping the syringes with some kind of blue rubber, and then patching up the puncture wound.

  Now both mother and daughter had matching plasters across their inner arms.

  “Will we go to work now?” Linh asked, pulling down her sleeve.

  “No, you’ll stay here for today. We need to check on your results.”

  “Tomorrow, then?”

  She was anxious to get to work. She still owed them money and needed to earn if she was ever to set up a proper life for her and her daughter.

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  The man packed up his things and left, leaving them to spend the rest of the day alone in the room.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “I’ve found Bradley Webster,” Shawn announced.

  Erica had been back in the office less than an hour and still didn’t feel as though she’d properly woken up yet.

  “Where?”

  “Working on a construction site in Canary Wharf.”

  “Are you going to pick him up?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’m going there now.”

  “Take uniformed backup with you. I don’t want a repeat of yesterday.”

  He tipped a salute to his forehead. “Yes, boss,” and then threw her a wink.

  He knew she hated it when he called her that—she most definitely saw them as equal colleagues, despite her recent, albeit temporary, promotion.

  Dental records had come in from Jade Wang, so she sent them over to Lucy Kim for comparison to those of their Jane Doe. Nothing concerning came back on the licence plate of the van they’d seen over at the gym either. It was registered to a Patrick Cross, but he wasn’t a member of the gym, and there was nothing on him that made her think he had anything to do with the burned body.

  A couple of hours flew by with Erica neck deep in paperwork, and then Rudd arrived at her door.

  “Sorry to interrupt, boss, but I thought you’d want to know Turner has got Bradley Webster in interview room three.”

  Erica put her computer to sleep and got to her feet. “Thanks for letting me know.”

  Rudd nodded and returned to her desk, while Erica made her way to join the interview. She wanted to know why the son of a bitch almost got Shawn killed.

  She knocked on the door of the interview room and then stepped inside.

  “Ah, here’s our lead investigator,” Shawn said, smiling as she entered. “Bradley Webster, I’m sure you recognise DCI Swift from yesterday.”

  “Hello, Mr Webster,” Erica said. “I’d say it was good to see you again, but since I only saw the back of you when you were so busy running away from us, that wouldn’t be true.”

  The young man crossed his arms. “I dunno what this is all about, but I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “You ran away from two police officers,” Turner said. “Shall we start there?”

  “I didn’t know you were police officers. You weren’t in uniform. You could have been anyone.”

  “Do you make a habit of running away from random people then, Mr Webster?” Erica asked.

  He shrugged. “Maybe. If I think they might be after me.”

  “And why would someone be after you?” Erica interrupted herself. “Actually, hold that thought. Let’s do this properly.” She took a seat at the table. “DI Swift, accompanied by DS Turner, in interview room three. For the sake of the recording, can you please state your name and date of birth.”

  His gaze darted between her and Shawn, but he muttered his answer to her question. “Bradley Webster, eleventh of the fifth, nineteen-ninety-six.”

  “And your address?”

  “I don’t have a current one.”

  “Are you employed?”

  “I guess you could call it employed, though it’s a zero hours’ contract and the money is shit.”

  Good enough to afford a gym membership, though, she noted.

  “And what is it you do for this zero hours’ contract?”

  Webster jerked his chin towards Shawn. “He already knows this. It’s where they picked me up from. I do a bit of labouring. Nothing technical. Just mixing concrete and laying bricks, that kind of thing.”

  “And who is that for?”

  “JP Constructions.”

  Erica made a note of it, planning on checking his story with the company.

  “Do you want to tell me why you ran away from us back at the gym?”

  He was sulky-looking, lower lip sticking out. “Not really.”

  “There’s only one reason people run from the police, and that’s because they’ve done something wrong and have a guilty conscience.”

  “Like I said before, I didn’t even know you were police.”

  “So why did you run?”

  “I just left out the back way, that’s all. I only started to run ’cause you were chasing me.”

  “You know that’s not what happened.” She kept her calm. “We were there, remember?”

  “If someone chases you, you run.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Shawn commented. “I’d stand there and ask what they wanted.”

  His gaze flicked to Shawn. “Yeah, well, you’re not me, are you?”

  Thank God for that.

  Erica continued. “You made a comment before about someone being after you. Who is after you, Mr Webster?”

  He glanced away. “No one. It’s just an expression, innit.”

  She pursed her lower lip and shook her head. “Not an expression I’ve come across before.”

  He sneered. “I guess we run around in different circles.”

  Erica changed tactics. “Where were you at seven a.m. on the morning of the twenty-eighth—that’s two days ago?”

  “I dunno. Asleep, probably.”

  “And at what address were you sleeping?” she checked.

  “Like I said before, I don’t have an address right now. I’m couch-surfing.”

  “You must have been sleeping somewhere.”

  He pursed his lips. “Just on a mate’s sofa.”

  Erica was determined to keep him on his toes. “Do you ever drive a white van?”

  “No, I don’t drive. I lost my license for speeding.”

  Erica p
icked up a pen and twirled it between her fingers. “That doesn’t mean you’ve stuck to the ban.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a reformed person now, aren’t I?”

  A pillar of the community, she bet.

  “So, you said you were sleeping on the sofa of a friend on Wednesday morning. Can your friend confirm that?”

  “I mean, he was sleeping as well, and I got up and went to work before he got up, but I guess he can.”

  “I’ll need his name and address,” she said, sliding a notepad and the pen she’d been holding towards him.

  Webster scribbled it down and pushed the pad back to her. She glanced at it briefly to make sure he hadn’t written down a load of crap and then handed it to Shawn.

  “What time did you wake up at?” she asked.

  “Just after seven. I start work at eight, so I need to leave the house early.”

  “What route do you take to get to work?”

  “It varies depending on where I’m needed. They move me around construction sites week to week.” He slumped back in his chair and folded his arms. “Look, what’s this about, really? It’s not just about me running the other day, is it?”

  Erica picked the pen back up. “We were at the boxing gym investigating the death of a young woman on Wednesday morning.”

  His mouth dropped open. “What the fuck? I didn’t have anything to do with some woman dying.”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  “You think because I ran, I maybe killed someone?”

  “Or you know something about the person who did.”

  “What does the gym have to do with it anyway?”

  She reached down to her bag and took out the print-offs that DC Howard had given to her. “For the benefit of the tape, DI Swift is showing photographs of the missing women to Bradley Webster.” She pushed them towards Webster. “Do you recognise any of these women?”

  He at least had the decency to look at them properly and then he shook his head. “No, I don’t know them.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Erica tapped the photograph of Jade Wang. “Take another look at this one.”

  He frowned down at it. “Is this the woman who was killed?”