20 - A Rush of Blood

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘And was that negotiation carried out by you, or was a third party involved, possibly a man called Valdas Gerulaitis, Zaliukas’s cousin?’

  ‘I’ve got no knowledge of that. All I know is that in each case I was contacted by the seller, who said that he was now willing to deal.’

  ‘Were you aware that one of these places, in Polwarth, caught fire, and another, in Lauriston, was flooded out, not long before the sales happened?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  McGurk smiled. ‘Neither were we, to be honest, until I asked a few questions of my colleagues in fire and rescue earlier on today. Did you know that another initially reluctant seller, a guy called Kenny Bass, was the victim of a hit and run accident not long before you and he came to terms?’

  ‘I’ve no knowledge of any of that stuff. Look,’ he protested, ‘Tomas ran his pubs and clubs like clockwork, but as far as I know he kept his hands well off the other places.’

  ‘What do you know about Gerulaitis?’

  ‘Nothing!’ He hesitated. ‘Well, I know he was Tomas’s cousin, and I know that when Tomas went to Uruguay to set up the company, he took him with him for . . . well, for company.’

  ‘Were you there too?’ Haddock asked.

  ‘No. That wasn’t necessary; I made all the arrangements through an agent.’

  ‘Since yesterday, have you had any instructions about the running of these businesses?’

  Green shrugged. ‘Who’s to give me instructions? Regine, I suppose, but that’s hardly going to be at the top of her to-do list right now.’

  ‘Not necessarily Mrs Zaliukas,’ said McGurk.

  The lawyer’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean by that?’ he challenged. ‘Who else would Tomas have left his piece of the company to?’

  ‘I’m not free to tell you that, but I do know that it isn’t her, or their children. All I will say is that while you might have been able to maintain your innocence before, you might find it more difficult from now on.’

  Twenty-eight

  ‘I preferred the old Royal,’ Alice Cowan volunteered, as she tucked the parking slip into her pocket.

  ‘Before my time in Edinburgh,’ Montell reminded her. ‘What sort of a building was it?’

  ‘You mean “is”; it’s still there. It’s being redeveloped. Victorian. Ancient. Something like Gormenghast, if you know your Mervyn Peake. It was a shambles of a place, a nightmare to get about, with its own resident cockroach population that they could never quite eradicate, big old-fashioned wards with little or no privacy, just about everything a hospital shouldn’t be . . . and yet people loved it, and they associated with it in a way they never will with this new place.’

  ‘Parking must have been a nightmare.’

  ‘Not as bad as you’d think, and not as expensive as it is here either.’

  ‘Claim it on expenses.’

  She gave him one of her rare, warm smiles; sometimes he thought they were rationed to a set number per day, or even per week. As he looked at her, he found himself wondering whether she smiled in bed, and resolved to find out. ‘Too damn right,’ she said, knocking him off his guard for a second.

  ‘Where is the girl?’ he asked, snapping himself back to the professional present.

  ‘Ward two zero seven. General medicine, second floor.’

  ‘You seem to know your way around.’

  ‘A cousin of mine was in here last year, in the same ward.’ Alice led the way into the building, and straight in until they came to the main stairway. ‘Over there,’ she said, when they reached the second level.

  ‘Where do we find her?’ Montell muttered.

  ‘Dunno.’ She paused then pointed towards a young woman PC, in uniform, who stood at the entrance to the ward. ‘But she might give us a clue. Hiya, Kylie,’ she greeted her, as they approached.

  The girl looked round, startled. ‘Alice,’ she exclaimed. ‘Are you here for the kid?’

  Cowan nodded, then glanced sideways at her companion. ‘Yes. Do you know Griff Montell? Griff, PC Kylie Knight.’

  ‘How do,’ she said, as she shook hands with the burly South African, thinking, no, but I’d like to. ‘I’m glad to see the pair of you. I’m bored out my scone just standing here. Waste of time, too. The lassie isn’t going anywhere. She’s just glad they’re feeding her. Has she been charged with anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What? Not even possession? Then what the . . .’ pause, ‘. . . am I doing here?’

  ‘We think she’s a victim of a sex crime. The story we have is that she was found in the street. We thought she might have escaped from somewhere. You were here in case somebody came after her.’

  ‘Well, nobody did,’ Knight replied, still a little reproachful. ‘Can I go, now the CID posse’s arrived?’

  ‘Humour us, Kylie,’ said Montell. ‘Look after our horses while we interview her, then we’ll know if we still need cover here. Where is she, anyway?’

  Knight half-turned, indicating a door behind her. ‘She’s in that side room. The interpreter arrived about five minutes ago; she’s in the nurses’ station with the charge nurse. Ah,’ pause, ‘she’s seen you.’

  The detectives looked into the ward, to see a male, blue-clad nurse approaching, followed by a small woman, in a dark trouser suit. ‘I’m Russell Cairns,’ the man announced, ‘and this is Mrs McStay, from university.’

  ‘Lyudmila McStay,’ the interpreter added, in explanation. ‘I acquired the surname ten years ago.’

  ‘DCs Cowan and Montell,’ the former replied. ‘We were called yesterday when our girl was brought into the surgery. How is she now?’ she asked Cairns.

  ‘She’s OK for you to talk to. We want to keep her for at least another day, though, to let the drug clear her system. We’ve identified it as GHB, for sure.’

  ‘So have we,’ Montell told him. ‘Our lab’s also working on other samples.’

  Cairns winced. ‘I won’t ask. We’ve also tested for the whole range of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV; happily she’s come up clear, so far, but it’ll take weeks for us to be absolutely certain. Come on, let’s look in on her.’ He led the way past PC Knight and into the small side room. The window looked south, letting the weak afternoon sunshine brighten the scene. The girl the detectives had last seen the day before lay on the only bed in the ward, propped up on cushions with an empty plate on her lap, a bag of sugar sweets on her side table, and a can of Irn Bru in her hand. Her hair had been washed and brushed, and some colour had come back to her cheeks, making her look even younger and far prettier than before. She smiled at the nurse as he stepped up to her, but when she looked beyond him, at Cowan and Montell, it was without the faintest flicker of recognition.

  Mrs McStay went to the foot of the bed. ‘We’ve already had a chat,’ she told the officers, ‘but only to establish that her name is Anna Romanova, and that she’s fifteen years old.’

  ‘Fifteen?’ Cowan hissed.

  ‘That’s what she told me, and I don’t doubt it.’

  ‘Does she know why we’re here?’

  ‘No, and it’s pretty obvious she doesn’t even know who you are.’

  ‘Then tell her please.’

  They listened as the interpreter spoke to her, in her own language. Halfway though, a frown appeared on her face, and by the time she was finished it had turned to a look of pure fear, reflected by the tone of her voice, unmistakable to them, even in an alien tongue.

  ‘She says have you come to send her back?’

  ‘Tell her, if you can,’ Montell replied, ‘that we’ve come to look after her. Her best interests are all we’re interested in. Ask her where she’s from.’

  As Mrs McStay explained what he had said, Anna seemed to calm down, but the frown remained. When she replied, a conversation developed, and continued for some time.

  ‘I’ve made her understand,’ the translator told them when it was over, ‘that you two are on her side, that you’re not going to put her in prison.
I’ve anticipated some of your questions, and established a little more. Anna is Russian, but only ethnically. She says that she is from Estonia . . . that’s quite believable; a quarter of the population are of Russian descent . . . that she was born there, and so were her parents. They were killed in a train accident when she was eight; there was nobody to look after her, other than her grandmother, her father’s mother, who was too old to take her on, so she wound up in an orphanage called St Olaf’s, run by the Russian Orthodox church . . . although from what she says, it wasn’t very Christian in its practices. She also speaks Estonian, by the way, but it’s been very much her second language all her life.’

  ‘That’s all good,’ Cowan declared. ‘We can check that out. Estonia’s in the European Union; it means she isn’t an illegal. She can be taken into care here, and maybe even fostered, if she doesn’t want to go back to her orphanage.’

  ‘Stay objective, Alice,’ Montell murmured. ‘There’s other issues here. Ask her how she got here, Mrs McStay.’

  The woman sat on the bed beside Anna and took her hand as she spoke, and as she listened to what the girl had to say. When she was finished she looked up at the officers. ‘She says that she and her friends Ivana and Nadia, two other girls from the orphanage, one her own age, the other a year younger, were approached in the street in Tallin by a man. She says that he was friendly; he bought them ice cream, and asked them where they were from. They told him, and then he asked them if they were happy there. When all three said that they were not, he asked them if they would like to go on an adventure with him. He said that his business was to find girls to work in big houses in Britain, for wages beyond their dreams and for a life like a movie star. Naturally enough, the girls all said yes. Why would they not, poor little things, after years of being treated like Cinderellas by bloody awful nuns. So they met the man next day in the same place; he collected them in a big van, Anna says, with no windows but with lots of seats, for it wasn’t just them, there were six others, ethnic Estonian girls.’

  ‘Orphans too?’

  ‘I don’t think so; she said they were a year or two older than her and her friends and they were . . . these aren’t the words she used, but it’s what she meant . . . more worldly.’

  ‘When did this happen?’ Cowan asked.

  ‘At the end of October, so she’s been here for about three months.’

  ‘And where did they go?’

  ‘She doesn’t know. All she knows is that they drove for a long time, until they came, as she says, to a place where they could hear lots of seagulls. There, all nine girls were put into what she described as a big shed.’

  ‘A big shed,’ Montell repeated. ‘Could that have been a freight container?’

  Mrs McStay nodded agreement. ‘I think it must have been. The man told them,’ she went on, ‘that the next part had to be secret, and that they had to stay there. He said that it wouldn’t be long; gave them plenty of food and water, and lamps that worked on batteries, then they were closed in. There was noise, she says, they were lifted and then driven again; then . . . and this is the way she put it . . . it got bumpy. One of the girls was very sick. From what she told me next, they were only at sea for one night. A couple of the other girls had watches, so they knew what time it was, at least what time it was where they had come from.’

  ‘And when they docked?’

  ‘That’s as far as we’d got.’

  ‘Let’s pause for a bit,’ said Russell Cairns. ‘She’s getting anxious.’ He pointed to the plate on the Anna’s lap, and she nodded vigorously. ‘She’s also as hungry as a rugby pack; I’ll get her some more sandwiches.’

  As they waited, the detectives and the interpreter stood by the window, leaving Anna sipping at her Irn Bru, and smiling occasionally in their direction, as if she was finally beginning to believe that she was safe. ‘We need to know everything she can tell us,’ Montell murmured to Mrs McStay. ‘How she got to Edinburgh, and an idea of how long it took. That might give us a clue to where they were brought in.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cowan confirmed, ‘and more than that. From what she says we’ve got eight other kids out there, possibly being subjected to the same sort of abuse she has. We need to trace them too, fast, and we need to find the scumbag who’s behind it all. I really want to meet him.’

  ‘Me too,’ her colleague growled, as the charge nurse came back into the room.

  ‘Prawn mayonnaise,’ he announced. ‘That’s all we’ve got left.’

  Mrs McStay translated for Anna, who managed to nod, shrug and grin at the same time, making it as clear as if she had spoken that she had no idea what prawns were but did not care, as long as they were edible.

  They waited until she was finished, before the interpreter went back to the bed and resumed her questioning. At first the girl answered quickly, and freely, until her face seemed to darken, and her eyes twisted with pain as she spoke, as if that had come back with the memory of what she was describing. Then, suddenly, from out of nowhere, she put her hand to her mouth and giggled.

  Lyudmila McStay was grim-faced as she turned back towards the detectives. ‘I think she’s told me all she has to tell now. They were driven off the ferry, she said; the truck went into a park, and they were let out.’

  ‘To avoid any search by customs, I suppose,’ Cowan murmured.

  ‘That’s not something she would know, is it? All she says is that they were transferred into another closed van by the man from Tallin and another man, a fat man, and driven again, for three hours, she says, until they stopped. Again, she knows the time from the older girl with the watch.’

  ‘Three hours,’ Montell mused. ‘What does that tell us?’

  ‘Depends on where they stopped, doesn’t it?’ Cowan pointed out. ‘If it was Edinburgh, then it tells us they landed at Newcastle.’

  ‘And sailed from?’

  ‘Almost certainly Holland; from what she’s saying she was on a roll-on, roll-off ferry, a passenger vessel. All the other routes to Newcastle are freight only, where they’d have been lifted off by a crane.’

  ‘How come you know so much?’

  Alice winked at him. ‘I was in Special Branch, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Where did they stop, Mrs McStay?’ Montell asked. ‘Does she have any idea?’

  ‘Not a clue. But from what she says . . . She told me that when they stopped, and the van was opened, they were in a place beside a wood. She says there were caravans, but they were all empty. Over the tops of the trees they could see a line of huge windmills.’

  ‘Windmills? Soutra, perhaps?’

  She thought about it for a few seconds. ‘Yes, that’s a possibility, I would say. When they got out, there were cars waiting for them, four, with drivers. The man from Tallin . . . that was the last time she saw him . . . told them that these people would take them to the houses where they would be working, that they would be given clothes there and fed. Anna and her two friends from the orphanage all went in the same car, with a man whose name was Linas, a big rough fellow, she says, with his hair cut like a German; I think she means that he had a crew cut. The other two girls were dropped off on the way, and she and this Linas man ended up at a place in the city, near the sea, she said. He took her into a basement flat, by her description, with lots of rooms. It was hot even though it had been cold outside, and there were several women about. One of them gave her new clothes to wear, and she dyed her hair, making it fair from dark. But she didn’t stay there. Linas took her upstairs to another house, the flat above, where it was just the two of them. He gave her some food . . . pizza, she remembers . . . and something to drink that made her feel dizzy. Then he told her to take her clothes off, and . . .’ Mrs McStay drew in a deep breath, then let it go. Garlic bread for lunch, Montell thought. ‘. . . he raped her. The poor little kid,’ she whispered to them, as if Anna could have understood her had she heard. ‘She didn’t know what was happening to her, and I don’t think she does yet. She simply talks about him “doing the thing
”, not just him, but other men who came to the house. She doesn’t appear to have been beaten, ever, or threatened, not that she can recall. She was simply kept drugged and used. But she’s very vague about it. She says that all her memories of that time are hidden in a mist. I hope it never clears.’ She looked at Alice Cowan. ‘Is that all?’ she asked. ‘For I don’t think I can take any more of this.’

  ‘How did she get out? It would be useful to know that . . . and the name, of course.’

  The interpreter took the girl’s hand once more, and spoke to her, softly. Her replies seemed to the onlookers to be hesitant, but finally she nodded and was finished.

  ‘All she can remember,’ said Mrs McStay, ‘is of another man coming to the house, and looking into her bedroom. But this man didn’t “do the thing” with her. Instead there was shouting, and noise; these are very confused recollections, you understand. Then she was outside, with the man, she thinks, but isn’t sure, although she does remember that it was very cold. After that she was in another house, as she puts it, with more people, kind people and then, finally, she was here. She likes it here, she says.’ There was another pause, during which the woman’s eyes seemed to mist over. ‘She wants to know, though, when is she going to work in the big house, like Uncle V promised.’

  ‘Uncle V?’ said Montell.

  ‘That was what the man in Tallin told them to call him. But one of the other girls, one of the older ones, had another name for him. That was why Anna giggled earlier. She called him the Snowman, because his shoulders were covered in white flecks from his hair, covered in dandruff.’

  Twenty-nine

  ‘Let me get this straight, kid,’ said Bob Skinner slowly, into his mobile. ‘You are now running Lietuvos Leisure and Lietuvos Developments. Is that what you’ve just told me?’

  ‘That’s how it is. Regine Zaliukas and her children own both companies now, or will when probate’s completed on the will. She’s executor of the estate, and as such she has the power to appoint an administrator to run them on its behalf. And she’s appointed me. I thought she was kidding at first, but she wasn’t.’