China Roses

by Jo Bannister

  It wasn’t a big gun. Actually, in his digger-bucket hand it looked a bit wimpy. But you don’t need to be a weapons expert to know that guns small enough to hide in a woman’s handbag are still big enough to kill. There was every likelihood that this one had already killed twice, and that it was nestled wimpily in Bill King’s hand at the time. Everyone except King froze.

  King was backing towards the car blocking his exit. He knew better than to attempt a getaway in his lorry, a vehicle that would have been visible from space. ‘Keys in the ignition, are they, Chief?’ he asked conversationally.

  Gorman had his hand to his face, blood dripping between his fingers. The bleak scene of steel units and cracked tarmac and scrubby wasteland was lit for him by a coruscation of tiny stars, but his mind was coming up to speed. He was thinking: Don’t try it. Please, Hazel, don’t even try it. Get out of the car and back away. We’ll get him later. You know what he’s capable of …

  But that was the point. She did know what he was capable of. She was grieving for her friend, she was anxious for any member of the public who got in his way, but most of all she was angry: filled to the gills with a fury she had never suspected herself capable of. In all probability, the girl they called Rose had died for standing up to this man. David Sperrin had died pursuing him. Now Hazel had seen King decimate a team of Meadowvale’s finest. Getting out of Gorman’s car and backing away might have been much the most sensible thing she could do, but she was damned if she was going to do it.

  She started the car, floored the accelerator and banged out the clutch in the space of three hot seconds, and she drove straight at the man with the gun.

  Bill King had a momentary dilemma. He had enough bullets for everyone but he couldn’t fire in diametrically opposite directions. The six policemen had more or less disentangled themselves, and four or five of them were probably capable of posing a threat by now. But the car was closer, and faster, it represented his best chance of escape, and only the woman behind the wheel stood between him and freedom. He fired the gun at the windscreen. He didn’t want to risk hitting anything important.

  Braking now would be fatal. Hazel threw herself sidelong across the front seats, kicked down hard on the accelerator and hoped to break William King into a million pieces before he could get off a second shot. But from down here on the upholstery she could no longer see out: she just hoped her colleagues would have the wit to keep out of the way if she missed King and headed for the lorry instead.

  She didn’t miss him. There was a satisfyingly solid impact, a gratifying yell, and a metallic rattle that she desperately hoped was the gun bouncing off the bonnet of Gorman’s car and disappearing from the equation. She eased back on the throttle, but the car was still travelling when the offside wing hit the side of the shed with a scream of tortured metal. Momentum rolled her off the seats and down among the pedals: if King was still on his feet, and particularly if he was still armed, there was nothing she could do to protect herself now. All she could do was hamper his escape, if escape was still foremost in his mind. She pulled the keys from the ignition and hurled them through the window into the scrubby grass that began where the cracked tarmac ended.

  For an indeterminate amount of time, which was probably around ten seconds but felt much longer, she didn’t move. No one came to kill her; no one came to help. If Gorman had seen what she’d done to his car, horror must have rendered him speechless.

  Finally the passenger door opened and Tom Presley was reaching strong hands to pull her from her refuge. She gasped, ‘Is he …?’

  ‘Dead? No,’ said Presley judiciously. ‘Rendered incapable of presenting any further threat? – oh yeah.’

  William King was not only still alive, he was still conscious. Both his legs were broken where the car had hit him, and he was sitting on the ground with his back against the shed, eyes shut, rocking gently and moaning.

  Gorman stumbled up, still nursing his nose. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Hazel; and if it wasn’t entirely true, it was true enough for now.

  ‘Good.’ He glanced at the car without comment. Then he turned to King. ‘William King,’ he said sonorously. ‘You are under arrest on suspicion of the murder …’

  Please, thought Hazel silently, please don’t call her China Rose, don’t immortalise it on a charge sheet. She hated it, you know she hated it – it’s one of the few things we know about her …

  ‘… Of a female, name currently unknown, at Myrton in Bedfordshire on the eighteenth of November,’ continued Gorman, blithely unaware both of the silent prayer and the relief that it had been answered. ‘And of the murder of David Sperrin in Coventry, West Midlands, on the night of the twenty-seventh/twenty-eighth November; and the attempted murder of various members of Meadowvale Police in the arse-end of nowhere on whatever the hell today’s date is. You do not have to say anything. You have the right to lie there and whimper while I organise an ambulance. One of the old-fashioned ones, that bounces as it goes over the potholes.’

  Most of those involved spent the rest of the day in and around Norbold Infirmary. William King woke from surgery to the cheery countenances of his police guard. Dave Gorman got his nose pushed back into a fair approximation of its former shape. Wayne Budgen and a couple of the others had cuts and abrasions they wouldn’t normally have bothered about, except that they needed a record of them for the book they were going to throw at King. Of course, a man facing two murder charges isn’t unduly worried about bruises on a policeman’s elbow.

  And Gorman was in no particular hurry to begin the process of charging him. He knew what King’s response would be, the only one his brief could possibly recommend: the classic no-comment interview. He had nothing to gain by co-operating, could only make things worse for himself.

  The same did not apply to his wingman. Ryan Purbright was younger, he hadn’t been doing this as long, he’d never entirely understood the risks that came with the handsome pay-out, and the prospect of years behind bars terrified him. When Gorman – conducting the interview himself though he should probably have been at home with a bottle of co-codamol – gave him the least glimpse of an opportunity, he almost wet himself in his haste to put clear blue water between his role in these events and that of his boss. He was eager to tell all he knew.

  And he knew everything. He’d been there when Rose Doe died.

  He’d been driving the van. Bill King had brought the lorry in from Europe, and Purbright had met him halfway up the motorway. When they had deliveries to make out in the sticks, the van was a lot handier, if Bill’s missus wasn’t using it.

  Bill was napping in the seat beside him when they delivered their last load of cheap labour to the vegetable packer near Myrton. Purbright had been there three times before and knew the way. Bill woke up long enough to complete the business, and they drove off leaving two young men and a sturdy girl, each with a rucksack of their belongings, standing puzzled and apprehensive in the middle of the yard.

  After that there had been some trouble. One of the girls in the back was complaining that the terms of the contract were not being met. She said the sturdy girl had believed she was coming to agricultural college in England. She was a farmer’s daughter: she hadn’t crossed half the world in order to pick cabbages. There were plenty of cabbages to pick at home.

  ‘She spoke English, then,’ said Gorman.

  Yes, said Purbright, she spoke great English – you’d hardly have known she was foreign.

  ‘What was her name?’

  But Purbright didn’t know. He’d never known any of their names; never wanted to know anything about them.

  King was getting more and more irritated, and finally he told Purbright to pull the van over while he sorted this out. He went round the back of the van and opened the door, and lifted the girl out bodily, her legs bumping over the grille that at other times supported his wife’s flower buckets.

  He read her the Riot Act. She was a long way from home now, t
here was nobody here to help her – if she gave him any more trouble he’d leave her here, in the middle of nowhere. Then either she’d starve or the police would find her, and it was a toss-up which would be worst.

  She refused to be intimidated. She was an educated woman, she said; she knew better than to believe his threats. ‘In spite of what it says on your van’ – she shook an angry finger at it – ‘I am not a China Rose. I am a Vietnamese citizen, and I can walk into an embassy in any of the world’s great cities and they will look after me.’

  ‘Here?’ King looked around him. Apart from a finger of rock in an adjacent field, and the sound of a tractor ploughing half a mile away, there was nothing and nobody. ‘Have you any idea how far you are from the nearest Vietnamese embassy? Or which way it is? Of course you haven’t. You’re in my country now, and nobody here gives a toss about what you want. So get back in the van, and shut your mouth, and do what you’re told. You came here for a job, and we’ve a job lined up for you. We’ll be there in another hour or so.’

  And what kind of a job was she to expect, she wondered. If the agricultural college turned out to be a cabbage farm, what could she expect who’d been promised employment as a nanny in the household of a prominent businessman?

  At which Bill King gave a world-weary sigh. Did she not understand yet? This was how the world worked. All right, it wasn’t what she’d hoped for – how many people’s lives were? You couldn’t change the world: the best you could do was change your expectations. She was young and pretty: the men would be good to her. She just had to do what she was told and keep her mouth shut, and when she’d made enough money to go home she could tell her family anything she wanted. She could tell them she’d been a nanny if that’s what they wanted to hear.

  At that point Purbright became aware that someone was standing in the field, beside the big stone, watching them. ‘I told Bill, and he went to chuck the girl back in the van. But she got away from him, started running towards the gate, shouting for help. The guy hurdled that gate like an Olympic bloody athlete, and the girl pretty well ran into his arms.’

  Only then did Purbright realise that King had a gun. Gorman pressed him on that: he insisted it was the truth. He’d never seen a gun before that day, in the big man’s possession, in the lorry or in the van. Maybe he always carried it but kept it out of sight, maybe he’d only just acquired it: Purbright didn’t know.

  He also didn’t know if the shot he fired was aimed at the girl or the man. It could have been either, they were so close by then. It might even have been a warning shot that went astray. But it took the girl in the back and hurled her into the man’s arms.

  For two or three stunned seconds nothing more happened. Then the girl slid to the ground, King raised the gun again, and the man took to his heels, heading down the road. ‘Bill told me to run him down. He belted after him on foot. He’s not fast, Bill, but he was pretty determined – if he’d caught the guy, I wouldn’t have given much for his chances.

  ‘I got past him and blocked the road with the van. With Bill coming up like a herd of buffalo, I reckoned he’d nowhere left to go. And damn me, that’s exactly where he went. Over the bridge, onto the railway line, just as a train was coming.

  ‘I didn’t want to look but Bill made me. There was nothing to see. I didn’t suppose there would be, not after a train had gone over him. No one could survive that. But you can’t call it murder. We didn’t push him.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It was the early hours of Thursday morning before DCI Gorman got back to his office. All Meadowvale was quiet: even chucking-out time hadn’t produced more than a token amount of disorder, and the CID offices upstairs should have been empty.

  Hazel had waited for him. He found her asleep at her desk, fair head cradled on her arms.

  ‘Oi, Rip Van Winkle,’ he said, nudging her. ‘Go home. We’ll talk tomorrow. Well – later today.’

  She knuckled the sleep out of her eyes. ‘I’m all right. I wanted to know what you found out.’

  So he told her. Her eyes filled at one point, but it may have been weariness.

  When he’d said everything he intended to for now, Hazel said sadly, ‘So David died for nothing.’

  Gorman frowned, then winced as his nose objected. ‘How do you figure that?’

  ‘Because he couldn’t remember what happened, he was always afraid he hadn’t done right by that girl. That he’d been too scared to help her. Everything he did afterwards was to make amends. To prove – to himself, or maybe to her – that he wasn’t a coward. And there was no need. He did everything that anyone could have done.’

  ‘He certainly impressed the hell out of Ryan Purbright.’

  ‘Did you get what you needed from him? Tell me they’re not going to get off on a technicality.’

  ‘They’re not going to get off on a technicality,’ promised Gorman. ‘We haven’t got everything yet, but we’ve got enough. Purbright gives us King. King’s a tougher nut, but it’s hard to keep saying nothing when you’re looking at a life sentence. I think he’ll talk in the end. Maybe he’ll give us enough to cap the pipeline once and for all.

  ‘And the other thing you’ll be glad to hear is, we’ve had a response from Hanoi. They’ve looked at the results from the’ – he couldn’t remember the name of the test – ‘tooth thingy and reckon Rose probably came from the Da Nang area. They’ve asked Da Nang police to make inquiries. In a few days we should have her name to put on the charge sheet. And be able to tell her parents why she hasn’t phoned home.’

  Both of which were important. Hazel wished she could feel happier about them. ‘What about the others – those who travelled with Soo Yen and those who travelled with Rose? Will you be able to find them?’

  Gorman nodded. ‘With any luck. Purbright helped deliver most of them: he’s making out a list of where. Plus, when we go through King’s stuff, there’ll be documents we can use. Ledgers. He must have kept a record of where he’d taken the kids because he was drawing their wages.’

  ‘What about the woman?’ asked Hazel. ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed. Did Purbright tell you who she is?’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Dave Gorman softly. ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed. I know who she is now, I know where she is, and as soon as I’ve had a bit of shut-eye I’m going to arrest her.’

  Weary as she was, Hazel felt her heart beat high at the prospect. ‘Not now? Won’t she make a run for it when she hears we’ve got King?’

  ‘If she hears. If we do this right, the first she’ll know that she’s in trouble will be when we tell her. But even if she figures it out, I don’t think running will be her strategy of choice. I think she’ll sit tight and brazen it out – invite us to prove she was involved. Even when she realises Purbright’s made a statement, she’ll think it’s his word against hers. And he’s nobody’s idea of a star witness.’

  ‘She doesn’t know about Soo Yen?’

  ‘No.’ Something resembling a smile spread across Gorman’s tired and battered face. ‘She doesn’t.’

  ‘Still,’ said Hazel uneasily, ‘it’s a gamble. You could be wrong. She might think dropping everything and running before we knock on her door is her least worst option.’

  ‘I could be wrong,’ agreed Gorman with a yawn. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time. Which is why I’m having her watched. If she makes a move, we’ll pull her in.’

  All Hazel’s instincts were to get the loose ends tied up, all those involved into custody, and figure out later who did what and how to prove it. But she deferred to Gorman’s greater experience. ‘And if she doesn’t?’

  ‘I’ve always felt six o’clock is the correct time for a dawn raid.’ He looked at his watch, screwing his eyes to focus. ‘Four hours from now I’ll have had a bit of sleep, and a change of clothes, and coffee, and won’t feel as if I’ve got bricks in my head. Or not as many bricks. Whereas she either won’t know what’s coming, or will have spent all night worrying and be feeling like a zombie.’

  He pic
ked up his coat and headed for the door. But then he paused. ‘You can come, if you like. On the dawn raid. Before you clear your desk.’

  She stared at him, uncomprehending. ‘Chief, I’m sorry about your car, but people were about to start dying …’

  He eyed her quizzically. ‘You think this is about my car? You think I’m angry because you scratched my paintwork? Is that the only reason you can think of why I might be angry with you?’

  ‘I can’t think of any reason why you might be angry with me,’ Hazel insisted vehemently.

  ‘OK,’ said Dave Gorman. ‘Then that’s something else we can talk about in the morning.’

  At ten to six, Hazel – coming up the back stairs at Meadowvale – met Gorman coming down them. She turned and followed him back to the car park.

  She knew – none better – that his own car was out of commission, assumed he’d borrowed one. Checked out one of the area cars, perhaps, or persuaded Sergeant Murchison to lend him his. But Gorman walked past them all, heading for the street.

  ‘Are we taking my car then, Chief?’

  The DCI gave her a smile, or a leer, or possibly a scowl: it was hard to be sure for the bruises that had spread, deepened and acquired a personality of their own overnight. ‘I thought we’d walk.’

  So William King’s associate, the woman he and Purbright had half-jokingly referred to as She Who Must Be Obeyed, was here in Norbold. Not just in Norbold but in downtown Norbold: Dave Gorman never walked anywhere that wheels could take him.

  They turned two street corners in quick succession. Hazel began to speculate about where he was taking her.

  ‘Just the two of us, Chief? Will that be enough? Only you probably shouldn’t get involved in any more scraps for a while. Give the nose a chance to heal.’

  He looked her up and down. ‘You’re pretty fit. If any scrapping’s called for, you can do it.’