China Roses

by Jo Bannister

  Hazel was trying to get her head round it. ‘I suppose she was dead.’

  Gorman raised a bushy eyebrow. ‘She looked pretty dead to me. In fact, if she isn’t, she’s going to be seriously pissed about the autopsy.’

  Hazel glared at him. ‘I mean, I suppose David’s right when he says she died in his arms. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe that’s why they took her with them.’

  ‘She was shot in the back. They must have wanted her dead. If they’d found she wasn’t dead enough, they’d just have put another bullet in her. Dead or dying, they took her with them because they didn’t want anyone to know that she or they had ever been there.’

  ‘David knew.’

  ‘They’d just seen him jump off a railway bridge as a train went by. They must have assumed he wouldn’t be telling anyone what he saw, except possibly St Peter.’

  ‘So just as the train was heading towards Norbold, so the van was too? When it came to Clover Hill they spotted the dam; there was no one in the car park, so they drove down to the reservoir and dropped her in.’ She hesitated before adding timidly, ‘Dead or alive?’

  Gorman sniffed. ‘By then she was certainly dead. There was no water in her lungs.’

  Hazel felt a brief surge of relief. She’d been afraid she was going to have to tell Sperrin that, in running, he’d left the girl to her killers when she might still have been saved.

  Gorman was looking at her a shade oddly. She raised an interrogative eyebrow.

  ‘What I wanted to ask you,’ he said, ‘and what I didn’t want to ask you in front of Sperrin, was if you think we should trust him. I know he’s your friend, but that makes you a better judge than the rest of us, if you’re able to take a step back. Is he telling us everything? Everything he knows, everything he remembers. Or is he holding something back?’

  Hazel thought for a moment. ‘He is my friend – at least, I can’t think of a better word. In spite of which, if I thought he was lying to us, I’d have no problem telling you. Now, I seem to have left my crystal ball in my other jacket, but I don’t think he’s either lying or holding something back. I’ve watched these memories resurface, and they’ve hit him like a sledge-hammer every time. Or nearly every time: once or twice they’ve sneaked in under his guard, and he hasn’t even realised until someone pointed it out. It could be an act, but I don’t think it is. If you want my opinion, that’s it: that David’s telling us what he remembers when he remembers it.’

  ‘It’s just’ – Gorman gave an impatient grunt – ‘things should be beginning to make some sense by now. Some kind of pattern should be emerging. Instead of which, everything he says seems to add another layer of complexity. If he was trying to confuse us he could hardly do a better job.’ He stretched in his chair and rubbed the back of his wrist across his eyes. ‘Maybe I’m getting old.’ He was forty-one.

  Hazel gave a sympathetic grin. She was used to dealing with these male menopause moments: Ash had them too. Contrary to received wisdom, her male friends seemed to worry more about the passage of time than her female ones did. Perhaps because losing one’s fertility brought certain compensations, whereas losing one’s hair did not.

  ‘It will make sense,’ she promised. ‘Tomorrow or the next day you’ll be pinning some snippet of information to the murder board, and you’ll see that pattern staring out at you. It’s there now, we’re just not seeing it. But at some point, one bit of information or one comment or even one fleeting thought bumping into another inside someone’s head will tip the balance, and we’ll be on our way.

  ‘We’ve got a body now,’ she added. ‘At least we know that a crime was definitely committed. We also know that what David remembered was accurate. She was a foreigner, and she was shot in the back. When we get confirmation that she was from Vietnam, you’ll have all the reason you need to trust him.’

  She never knew what it was that set off the mental chain reaction. You never did know, any more than you could know which uranium atoms were the first to get up close and personal and start a chain reaction. Thinking about it afterwards, she wondered if it was the word Vietnam. To people older than either of them it meant an unnecessary war played out on tiny black-and-white TV screens; and then waves of refugees crowded onto inadequate boats. To people of Hazel’s generation, it meant thirty-nine people in search of a better life suffocating in the back of a lorry.

  Whatever the cue, the chemistry took over, and she watched almost as a bystander while her synapses juggled the pieces and found a few with straight edges and a couple of corners, and began to arrange them into the very beginnings of a picture. Stripped of all the weird imponderables, some of which might be explained by Sperrin’s injuries, those facts that could be asserted with a degree of confidence dictated the shape that picture had to take. The dead girl with the bullet in her back; the van which stopped in the quietest of rural lanes where the presence of a chance observer had been so unlikely; the effort made to remove every indication of the tragedy enacted there; even the fact that whoever took her away from Myrton had driven for an hour in order to hide her body in a reservoir rather than leaving her where she fell …

  ‘Chief,’ Hazel said uncertainly, ‘are we dealing with human trafficking here?’

  Gorman stared at her. ‘That’s a bit of a quantum leap, isn’t it? Because Sperrin says she’s Vietnamese? Even if he’s right, she could have been here for any number of perfectly legitimate reasons.’

  ‘Of course she could. But people going about their lawful business don’t get shot in the back on quiet country roads nearly as often as people living on the fringe of society.’ It was a generalisation but it was also true. Young men selling drugs in back alleys are far more likely to die violently than old ladies walking their dogs.

  At least he paid her the courtesy of considering it. As an experienced detective, he thought it was a big structure to erect on flimsy foundations, but if he’d learnt one thing about Hazel Best it was that her instincts were good. Not foolproof, but good. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Make your case.’

  She sifted around for her strongest piece of evidence. ‘They didn’t want her to be found. Not soon, and preferably not at all. They could have left her at Myrton. Or they could have dumped her as soon as they were out of the immediate area, in case someone hearing a gunshot came to investigate. It would have been much safer than driving for an hour with a dead girl as a passenger.

  ‘They didn’t want anyone to know that she’d died. So it wasn’t a punishment shooting, and it wasn’t gang related – if she’d been killed to make a point, they’d have wanted her found. They didn’t want anyone to know she was ever here. If David had hit that train just a bit harder, we’d have had no reason to connect her death with his, even when she turned up in the Clover Hill dam.’

  Hazel thought for a few moments before continuing. ‘She spoke English. More than just a few words – well enough to shout at someone who was threatening her. “I’m not Chinese, I’m from Vietnam.” As if someone was making an assumption that annoyed her, and she could only tell them so in English because, whoever the traffickers are, they’re from our end of the pipeline, not the Asia end.’

  Gorman was moved to defend his adopted town. ‘We don’t know they’re from Norbold …’

  ‘No, we don’t,’ agreed Hazel. ‘But I don’t suppose Norbold’s immune to what seems to be a growing trade. Or at least, one we’re increasingly aware of.’

  ‘Assuming you’re right,’ he growled. But his heart wasn’t in it.

  ‘Assuming I’m right,’ allowed Hazel. ‘Maybe I’m not – maybe Rose had some other reason for coming to England. She was young, she was clearly well-educated, she was attractive, she was healthy. And she travelled from her home to the far side of the world, which would be an expensive undertaking, which means she or someone close to her had disposable income. Why do people come here?’

  ‘For the sunshine and the endless golden beaches?’ hazarded Gorman. ‘Well, maybe not. They come as visitors, as
students, as refugees or economic migrants, or to work. Myrton’s a long way off the tourist trail. She could have been a student – that would explain her speaking the language. The international rules that apply to refugees make it quite hard for them to reach England. They’re required to seek refugee status in the first safe country they come to, so anyone coming through Europe should do that in Spain or Greece or Italy or – er – France.’ That was the furthest extent to which his grasp of geography could be stretched.

  ‘She doesn’t look as if she was fleeing from poverty. I know’ – Hazel fended off his objection with a raised hand – ‘appearances can be deceptive, but she seems to have enjoyed a certain standard of living. Maybe she thought she could improve her prospects, or maybe she wanted to see the world. If she was a student, shouldn’t someone have reported her missing by now? Tutors, halls of residence, fellow students – someone. I think she came here to work. She’d already learned the language, and she thought she was coming to the kind of job where it would improve her career prospects. Only when she got here, she found that someone had lied.’

  Gorman was following her argument closely now. He’d asked her to defend her theory and she was doing exactly that. ‘Well, that’s how these things work, isn’t it?’ he glowered. ‘The traffickers say there are jobs waiting for nannies and nurses and secretaries, only when it’s too late to turn back the girls find themselves offered a different kind of employment. Except it isn’t employment in the sense that they can take it or leave it: they’re in hock to the people smugglers for more than they or their families can repay any other way. There’s no way out. To all intents and purposes, it’s slavery.’

  ‘Chief – had they …?’

  He looked again in the file. ‘No. She was a virgin.’

  Whatever she’d already been through, this girl they could only refer to as Rose Doe, it hadn’t included selling her body five times nightly. Lovely Oriental girls for the discerning gentleman – fresh, modest and obedient; not argumentative like Western girls! Perhaps what had happened on that back road by the Myrton menhir was that she’d finally realised the kind of employment she was heading for.

  Hazel frowned. ‘Why Myrton? What were they doing that far off the beaten track? I can see why they’d avoid the motorways – cameras, patrols – but how the hell did they end up in rural Bedfordshire?’

  ‘An excellent question,’ conceded Gorman, ‘but nowhere near as pressing as the next one, which is, Why the hell were they heading for Norbold? We thought it was just the random coincidence of which train Sperrin jumped onto that got us involved. But if that girl was dumped in the Clover Hill dam, the people who killed her had some reason to be in this area. On my manor. And that makes me very unhappy indeed.’

  Hazel left Meadowvale with her head still buzzing with possibilities, and the need to talk them through with someone less directly involved than either Gorman or Sperrin. She turned, as she always did on these occasions, up the hill towards Highfield Road.

  It was dark, and no one saw her draw up at the kerb or climb the steep footpath to the front door. She had to ring the bell. Eventually, when she was on the point of ringing again, Ash opened it. Hazel had one foot on the doorstep, expecting him to usher her in, but he remained stubbornly in the half-open doorway. She looked at him in surprise, saw a guilty flush travel up his cheeks.

  ‘Er – this is a really bad time. The boys have got a … a friend over, and they’re bouncing off the walls. Can I give you a call in the morning?’

  Hazel stepped back, startled and hurt. ‘Sure. Call me tomorrow. Or not,’ she added pointedly. Head still buzzing, she returned to her car. She heard Ash’s door close before she could get in.

  She didn’t, because of the sound of her engine, hear it open again, or a quick step on the pavement. The first she knew was someone rapping on her window. It was Frankie Kelly.

  Hazel had never been close to the Ash boys’ nanny. Somehow the opportunity had never arisen. Invaluable a part of the household as she was, Frankie had never wished to be part of the family. She was Ash’s employee: his friends were not her friends. A professional to her fingertips, she had no difficulty drawing the line between those aspects of life at Highfield Road which were her province and those which were not. Hazel respected her choices and admired her skills; they were always happy to see one another but never aspired to a social relationship.

  This was different. Surprised as she had been to be denied entry to her friend’s house, Hazel was astonished to have his nanny come running down the path after her. To explain – to apologise? Could either be part of her duties?

  ‘Frankie? Were you looking for me? Do you want to get in the car?’

  Frankie shook her head. Her long dark hair was folded tightly in the nape of her neck. Controlled; professional. ‘I mustn’t be a moment. I don’t want to be missed. I just wanted to say …’

  But perhaps she didn’t know exactly what she wanted to say. Anxious and embarrassed, she ran out of words. Hazel could see her wrestling with her conscience that she was here at all.

  ‘What’s the matter, Frankie? What’s happened?’

  The small Filipino woman shook her head, almost in despair. ‘This isn’t my place. I just wanted to say … To say, Mr Ash needs to see you.’

  Which made nothing any clearer. ‘I’ve just seen him. He was busy. He said he’d call tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow? Yes. Talk to him tomorrow.’ Her head dipped. ‘Please.’ Then she was gone.

  TWELVE

  ‘Has she gone?’ asked Cathy Ash negligently. ‘Your persistent little friend?’ Hazel was both taller and more sturdy than Ash’s wife: Cathy called her that because she knew it annoyed him.

  ‘Of course she’s gone,’ said Ash shortly. ‘What did you think was going to happen? I’d invite her in for supper – a cosy threesome round the kitchen table?’

  ‘As you keep pointing out’ – he didn’t – ‘it’s your house.’ She smiled maliciously. ‘Any friend of yours is a friend of mine.’

  Ash stared at her in disbelief. ‘Cathy, Hazel is a police officer. There’s an Interpol alert out for you. If she had any reason to suspect you were here, you’d certainly be spending tonight in a cell, and I dare say I would as well.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think she’d do anything that would get you into trouble, Gabriel. She’s besotted with you.’

  ‘Now you’re being absurd,’ he frowned.

  Cathy laughed out loud. For the first time Ash noticed a kind of artifice about it, as if she knew that, in spite of everything, her laugh was still a potent weapon, at least against him. ‘You’re not telling me you hadn’t noticed? Dear God, she couldn’t make it clearer with a sign around her neck! If it came to a straight choice between you and the Queen’s Shilling – do they still give you that, do you know? – the Queen would get her shilling back.’

  ‘Don’t judge everyone by your own standards. Most people are more honest than you, and Hazel is more honest than most people. She’ll do her duty even when it hurts. I’ve seen her do it. And I’m not going to ask her to make that choice.’

  ‘Oh Gabriel,’ Cathy chuckled, ‘you’re such an innocent. Perhaps I should give you that divorce. It would be worth it to see what you’d do with your freedom. Would you really want to marry her? She’s – what? – fifteen years younger than you?’ She studied his face for a moment. ‘But I do believe you would.’

  ‘Sign the papers and find out.’ He didn’t think she’d do it, but he doubted he had anything to lose. She had always been a creature of impulse, mercurial – there was just a chance that she would do it merely to see how he’d react.

  ‘Maybe I will. But I want something in return.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me what.’

  ‘I need your help.’

  ‘What sort of help?’

  ‘Does it matter? If it means I leave here without my sons, and you get your divorce, is there any kind of help you wouldn’t give me?’

  It
was surprising to Ash that she still had the power to hurt him. He forced himself to ignore the pain, ignore the fear, and concentrate. Dealing with Cathy, he needed all his wits about him.

  ‘Actually, yes,’ he said. ‘I won’t bring the weight of the law crashing down on your head. Not because you don’t deserve it, but because I don’t want our children to have to deal with that. But Cathy, that is all the help you’re going to get from me. If you try to take the boys, I’ll fight you in the courts. I’ll spend every penny I have, and every penny I can borrow, fighting you. And I’ll win.’

  ‘That’s possible,’ allowed Cathy negligently. ‘But then, as you know, I don’t have to do my fighting in the courts.’

  He did know that. Once before he’d thought she’d sent men to take the boys by force. The fact that he’d been mistaken was no guarantee she wouldn’t do exactly that at some time in the future.

  ‘If it’s money you want,’ he said tersely, ‘I can find you some.’

  ‘How much money?’

  Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined anything so vulgar coming from her lips. It grieved him more than many of the much worse things that she’d done. ‘How much money will I give you to abandon your claim to our sons? Do you really want me to answer that question, Cathy?’

  She gave a derisive little snort. ‘This is no time to be coy, Gabriel. You want me to remove myself from your life, totally and permanently. Well, how much do you want it?’ She looked around her speculatively. ‘I imagine the house is paid off?’

  ‘You know it is.’ But in spite of all the evidence, Ash thought – he could not have explained why – that she was once again playing with his emotions. He wouldn’t have put it past her to put a price on her co-operation, but somehow this was not how the conversation would have gone. He knew her well enough, now, to know that his wife would never turn her nose up at any money coming from any source; but he didn’t think that was the reason she was here. What that reason was, he was at a loss to guess.