China Roses

by Jo Bannister

  He tried again. There didn’t seem to be anything else he could do. ‘I know I let you down. It wasn’t from choice.’

  ‘You were otherwise engaged,’ said Hazel, measuring each word and clipping it off precisely.

  Ash nodded miserably. ‘But please don’t imagine—’

  ‘Imagine?’ This time the echo bounced back from cliffs of flint. ‘Gabriel, I don’t need to imagine anything! I saw her. I saw you together.’

  Shock, horror and guilt crashed through Ash’s expression like an avalanche. He’d come here expecting an emotional confrontation and to have the moral shit kicked out of him. This he had not expected. Completely wrong-footed, he floundered to make any kind of intelligent response.

  Hazel thought he was groping for a lie. He’d never been any good at lying: it didn’t surprise her that, caught out in an infidelity that had less to do with sex than with honour, this was the best he could do. ‘Please don’t bother to deny it,’ she said wearily, ‘that would demean us both. Go home, Gabriel. There’s nothing useful you can do here. I need to sleep. There are things I have to do tomorrow.’ She turned and went back upstairs. The sound of her bedroom door closing was like a full stop.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gabriel,’ murmured Pete Byrfield, ‘I did try to warn you. Give the dust time to settle. Talk to her again in a few days.’

  Ash was turning into Highfield Road before the irony struck him, that a man whose brother had just been murdered felt sorry for him.

  TWENTY

  Dave Gorman looked up at the knock on his door, called, ‘Come in,’ then looked up again, startled, as the door opened. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you today.’

  Hazel shrugged. ‘I gave Pete his breakfast, saw him off, stared at the wall for a bit, tried to think of anything productive I could be doing anywhere but here, failed, so here I am. Use me.’

  ‘All right,’ he said after a moment. ‘This isn’t the only case we have to deal with. I need someone with advanced IT skills to—’

  She didn’t let him finish. ‘This is the case I want to work. Don’t worry, Chief, I’m not going to go girly on you. I lost a friend. He wasn’t an especially close friend, but he was a friend and I want to know who killed him. I want to help find who killed him.’

  Gorman leaned back in his chair, considering her. ‘It’s not a good idea. You must be – what’s the expression? – emotionally compromised.’

  ‘Not to the point that I can’t do my job. Maybe I was yesterday. Yesterday I thought it was my fault. Around three o’clock this morning, though, I realised his brother was right. You too. David would have sold his soul for the chance to take these people down. If he hadn’t got it by reading my e-mails, he’d have found another way. Maybe I should have been more careful with the laptop. But in the long run, it wouldn’t have made any difference. He was set on a path that didn’t go anywhere good.’

  ‘What about Gabriel?’

  ‘What about Gabriel?’ A hard edge barred her tone.

  ‘Hazel, it doesn’t take a mind-reader to see that you’re angry with him. I’m not saying you haven’t every right. But I can’t risk you losing your temper at the wrong time, in the wrong place or with the wrong person. Can you promise that you won’t?’

  ‘I can do better than that,’ said Hazel tersely. ‘I can promise you I won’t lose my temper at the right time, in the right place and with the right person. I’m not angry any more, just … disappointed. He came round last night. He said you called him.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Nothing that made things any better. But then, I didn’t give him much of a chance to. Also about three o’clock this morning, I began to think maybe that was a bit unfair. If he’s in a relationship with someone, his first duty isn’t to me.’

  ‘But it wasn’t her – whoever she is – who put her life and career on the line to keep him out of the kind of hospital where the doors lock on the outside!’

  Hazel managed a little smile at that. ‘I know. But he’s already repaid that favour. He’s pulled me out of some holes too. Some big, black holes. In all honesty, I’m not sure he owes me anything any more.’

  ‘I didn’t realise we were supposed to keep count,’ said Gorman hotly. He seemed more indignant on Hazel’s behalf than Hazel was. ‘Keeping a tally of favours done and received, and settling up at the end. I thought the definition of friendship was that you didn’t keep count.’

  ‘I suppose friendships are like everything else,’ Hazel said sadly. ‘They grow, they flourish, then they wither and die. Nothing is for ever. We’re fooling ourselves if we think it is. Anyway.’ She made an effort to move on. ‘It wouldn’t have changed anything, you know. David was dead before I missed him. Nothing Gabriel did or didn’t do – nothing I did or didn’t do – would have saved him.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Gorman. ‘But we wouldn’t be having this conversation if Gabriel had stepped up to the plate. Maybe he couldn’t have been much use to Sperrin, but he could have been some use to you.’

  ‘I’ll get over it,’ promised Hazel, and Gorman believed her. ‘In the meantime, what can I do?’

  Gorman cleared his throat. ‘As I was saying, I need someone to—’

  ‘No, Chief,’ she interrupted him quietly. ‘What can I do that needs doing? That’ll help get justice for David, and Rose, and God knows how many other victims we don’t even know about. It’s Saturday morning and I’m supposed to be off duty: there’s only one reason I’m here. Only one case I’m working on.’

  The file was open on the desk in front of him. The murder wall was at the far end of the big CID room adjoining his office, visible through the glass wall unless he closed the blinds. There were places to go and people to see, but the one thing DCI Gorman knew for sure was that he didn’t want Hazel seeing them. Not yet. She thought she was fit to work, but he needed to be sure before she left Meadowvale.

  He took out the autopsy photographs. Not all of them: the ones that showed the scratches etched into Sperrin’s right leg. ‘We need to figure out what he was trying to tell us when he did this. He thought it would make sense to us. He thought that, when we found his body, these marks would tell us who his killers were or how to find them. That took a cool head. He knew what he was doing. They’re sketchy because of the conditions he was working under, but he believed we could figure it out. So figure it out.’

  ‘I spent half of yesterday trying to figure it out,’ complained Hazel. ‘If it isn’t a Chinese character, and it isn’t a bunch of flowers, I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘He didn’t stick a nail in his leg to leave us a message that couldn’t be deciphered.’

  Hazel reminded herself that being a detective was something she’d wanted very much, and that apparently insoluble puzzles came with the territory. She took the photographs. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen them. Still there was something disturbing about a photograph of a dead man’s leg, when you’d known that man most of your life.

  ‘I’ll give it another shot,’ she said.

  Sometimes life gives you lemons, and sometimes it gives you lemonade. And sometimes you don’t know which was which until later.

  This time Constable Budgen had actually finished his shift and was on his way home when the accident occurred more or less in front of him. He could have pulled his hat down over his eyes and walked crab-wise, and if he’d claimed to have seen nothing he would probably have been believed. But though no one had ever accused Wayne Budgen of ruthless ambition, he did take his job seriously and he tried to do it well. He sighed, put his breakfast on the mental back-burner, and went to sort out the snarl-up. Saturday morning in Norbold wasn’t like Saturday morning on Oxford Street, but a modest gridlock had been achieved and tempers were already fraying.

  The facts were easy enough to establish. An eight-year-old girl walking to gym class with her mother, her younger brother and their dog had let the lead slip from her fingers, and had chased the animal into the traffic before her horrified mot
her could grab her. The big white 4x4 she ran in front of managed to stop but the delivery van travelling behind it didn’t, and it shunted the car into the child. The little girl ended up sitting in the road, clutching her leg and screaming. The dog ended up back on the pavement, looking innocent.

  Budgen thought the damage amounted to no more than cuts and bruises, but he called for an ambulance in case the child’s leg was broken. She was making too much noise to have sustained any other injuries. He then checked that no one in the 4x4 was hurt – the driver, a woman in her mid-thirties, said she was fine, and so were the three children on the back seat – and finally the delivery van, where the driver was mopping his bloody nose with a handkerchief that was none too clean before he started.

  ‘No warning, nuffink – she just stopped! Stopped dead. Of course I hit her: anyone would have. Have you seen my bumper? What’s my boss going to say?’

  ‘If she hadn’t stopped dead, that little girl would probably be on her way to the morgue,’ said Budgen mildly. ‘Your boss is going to say that his bumper is a small price to pay. And you should have been wearing your seat-belt.’

  ‘I want her prosecuted,’ insisted the driver. ‘Her in front. Stopping dead like that! I fink she’s broken my nose.’

  ‘You may not want to go that route,’ suggested Constable Budgen. ‘The law requires you to keep enough distance between you and the vehicle in front that you can stop in an emergency. She managed to stop when the child ran out. You should have been able to stop too.’

  ‘Look,’ said the delivery driver, demonstrating. ‘It shouldn’t wiggle like that. It never used to wiggle like that.’

  Budgen took down the relevant details, and cleared a path for the ambulance, and went to wave the 4x4 on. Afterwards, he never quite knew what stopped him. He had no issues with the driver: she’d done well in difficult circumstances. But there was something not quite right. The way she looked at him. The way the eldest child didn’t. In fact, now he came to look again, she wasn’t actually a child at all …

  He asked the driver to lower the back window. She hesitated. Budgen looked at her until she did. He leaned down and spoke to the young woman in the centre seat. ‘Are you all right, miss?’

  There was a long pause before she looked up, looked straight at him. ‘No, sir,’ she murmured; then, louder, ‘No, I am not all right. I am an illegal alien, and I wish to be sent home.’

  Her name was Soo Yen, she was from Shanghai, and she’d been in the country for four months. She’d been promised a work permit and a job as a nanny. Her family had found the equivalent of £5,000 to pay for these and her travel expenses. Her family were not wealthy, but they had some savings, and they’d borrowed from relatives and friends. They thought they were buying her a start in life. She was nineteen.

  The travel arrangements were rudimentary, the journey long and arduous, and the work permit was never forthcoming. But she thought, at first, she’d got the job she’d been promised. There was a nice house in Whitley Vale, a pretty village a few miles from Norbold, and there were two children to take care of. But the work was more for a skivvy than a nanny, and the wages – what was left of them after various unspecified dockings – went to the people who brought her here. She was told she would be paid directly when the shortfall in her travel expenses had been covered. She did not believe there had been a shortfall.

  When she asked about the work permit, her employers expressed astonishment that she thought she qualified for one. They explained that she was an illegal immigrant, and if detected she would be sent to a detention centre which she would probably never leave.

  The children had televisions in their bedrooms. Soo Yen was not allowed to watch television. But just occasionally, when the family were all busy elsewhere and she was cleaning upstairs, she would turn one on very quietly and try to make sense of the world she found herself in. And gradually it became clear to her that it was not as she had been told. She came to believe that people sent to immigrant detention centres did not all leave in zip-up bags. Sometimes they left on aeroplanes.

  Still, it was a gamble. Her life in Whitley Vale was wearisome but not intolerable, and she was afraid of making her situation worse. For four months she did what she was told, and didn’t make trouble, and stayed out of the way when there were callers to the house, and only went outside when one of the couple employing her was there to supervise; and quite possibly she would never have got up the desperate courage necessary to entrust herself to the British authorities. Except that a little girl on her way to gym class let slip her dog’s lead, and a British policeman heard – over the child’s screams – a silent cry for help.

  ‘If she’s been here for four months, she didn’t travel with Rose.’ Hazel swallowed her disappointment.

  ‘No,’ agreed DCI Gorman. ‘But she may have come the same way, been brought in by the same people. Surely to God we haven’t got multiple gangs of human traffickers working the area?’

  ‘Was she able to tell you anything about them?’

  ‘I haven’t spoken to her yet,’ said Gorman. ‘I let Emma Friend do the first interview. I thought it might be less intimidating for her. I think she was half-expecting to be sent to some kind of a gulag.’

  ‘Where did you put her up?’

  The DCI looked embarrassed. ‘Mark Lassiter’s mum runs a nice little boarding house. We took a room there for her. Well, it was that or a cell downstairs. And I don’t think she poses much of a danger to anyone.’

  ‘What about the couple she was working for?’

  ‘Them I would happily put in a cell,’ growled Gorman. ‘Only his legal representative, who wanted me to know he was a personal friend of a permanent secretary at the Home Office, wouldn’t let me. Insisted it was far from clear that his clients had committed an offence – that they were the victims of the traffickers’ lies as much as the girl was. All they’d done was offer work to a foreign national on the basis of documents which appeared to be legitimate. They’re not experts in spotting forgeries: he owns a hardware emporium and she organises the flower-arranging rota for the local church. What are they supposed to know about human trafficking?’

  ‘You believed them?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t believe them,’ snorted the DCI. ‘They got exactly what they paid for: cheap labour that couldn’t give notice and take a better job somewhere else. But what I know and what I can prove aren’t always the same thing.’

  ‘Well, if their brief’s a personal friend of a permanent secretary at the Home Office …’ said Hazel slyly.

  ‘That will make me try harder,’ admitted Gorman, ‘but it’s still going to be uphill work. Anyway, it’s the traffickers we want most. I’m going over to Lassiter’s mum’s place now, see if Soo Yen can help with that.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  He shook his head. ‘The girl will need a familiar face, and that’s Emma. You exercise your brain cells on those marks. Sperrin left us a message. Figure out what it was.’ He stood up, opened the glass door and glanced around the big CID room. ‘Anyone know where Friend is?’

  DC Lassiter looked up from his desk. ‘What for?’

  Gorman glared at him. ‘Because I want to know, you cheeky beggar.’

  Lassiter flushed, and enunciated clearly, ‘Watford. She’s in Watford, Chief. The seminar on ATM raids. You sent her.’

  ‘That’s not till Monday.’

  ‘It is Monday, Chief.’

  ‘Is it?’ Gorman did some calculations that involved touching his fingertips to his thumbs, then nodded. ‘I knew that.’ Over his shoulder he said, ‘You’d better come after all, Hazel. I don’t want the girl thinking I’m going to rough her up.’

  Lassiter kept his eyes studiously on his work, and Hazel considered the strip-lighting on the ceiling. The only member of CID who thought people found the DCI intimidating was Gorman himself.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Mrs Lassiter showed them to her sitting room and called Soo Yen downstairs. ‘I’ll be i
n the kitchen if any of you want anything.’ She left the door ajar.

  Sitting opposite her, Hazel could see why Wayne Budgen had initially mistaken her for a child. She was no bigger than an adolescent, and had a habit of sitting with her knees together and her elbows tucked in, as if acutely aware of how much space she was allowed to occupy. Her eyes were lowered under the sweep of dark fringe.

  Gorman began. ‘Detective Constable Friend couldn’t be here today. This is Detective Constable Hazel Best, and I’m Detective Chief Inspector Gorman.’ The girl made a tiny nod of acknowledgement. ‘I’m told you speak really good English. But if you’d prefer to have an interpreter, I’ll arrange for one.’

  Soo Yen raised her gaze briefly from his toe-caps to his face. ‘Thank you. That will not be necessary.’

  ‘How should we address you?’ asked Hazel.

  ‘My name is Soo Yen. Miss Soo is appropriate.’

  ‘You gave your details to DC Friend during your first interview,’ said Gorman, ‘and we’re trying to contact your parents. It may take a day or two. Don’t think we’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Soo Yen again.

  ‘I know you’ve had a difficult time, and you want to get home as soon as possible. We’ll do all we can to facilitate that. Er – to make it happen.’

  ‘I understand facilitate,’ murmured the girl.

  Gorman gave a wry smile. ‘You speak better English than most of the kids at the local comprehensive. But while we’re getting it organised, any information you can give us about how you came to England and what happened to you here would be enormously useful to us. We think the people who brought you here were responsible for other shipments’ – he winced, but couldn’t think of a better word – ‘including one two weeks ago which resulted in two murders. We need to stop them. Can you help us?’

  ‘I can try,’ nodded Soo Yen, quietly eager.

  Emma Friend had written up her account of how she was recruited in Shanghai and transported to England. Gorman had studied it carefully, and given Hazel a synopsis on the way over. He let Soo Yen tell the story again, to get her comfortable with talking to them, before he started asking questions.