China Roses

by Jo Bannister

  As they walked the empty streets, and Gorman made no reference to his comment of the previous night, Hazel began to wonder if it had been some kind of a joke. Not a very funny one, at least not to her, but could he have been having a laugh at her expense? Was he waiting for the perfect moment to hit her with the punchline? She’d always thought of him as having an uncomplicated sense of humour, the slipping-on-banana-skins, falling-down-manholes variety beloved of schoolboys of all ages; but perhaps he was growing subtle with age. In any event, she wasn’t going to raise the subject if he didn’t.

  They turned another corner, and Hazel stopped dead. ‘You are kidding me!’

  Gorman shook his head. ‘Nope.’

  ‘Mrs Kiang? She Who Must Be Obeyed?’

  ‘You said it. It’s a nickname men use for their wives. Bill King’s wife is Mrs Kiang.’

  ‘But she’s tiny! And ancient!’

  ‘Size isn’t everything. And I don’t think she’s as old as you think. King’s fifty-three. I doubt he married a woman old enough to be his mother.’

  ‘You think Mrs Kiang was the brains behind the operation, and her husband was the brawn? But … but …’ She was trying to think of some reason that made it impossible. And actually, there wasn’t one. The fact that Hazel had been buying flowers from her at intervals for three years didn’t mean she couldn’t have a profitable sideline in human trafficking.

  ‘But it was Mrs Kiang who gave me all the background. Who told me how the girls were tricked and exploited.’

  ‘Well, she’d know, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘Bill King put his wife in the frame?’

  ‘No. Ryan Purbright did.’

  ‘He could have lied.’

  ‘Of course he could. But what would it gain him? It wouldn’t earn him any Brownie points with us if we couldn’t make it stick, and it would make an enemy of Bill King. The only thing that would make Purbright grass on the Kings is the belief that we could put both of them away where they couldn’t hurt him.’

  As she recovered enough from the shock to think about it, Hazel saw how it could make sense. King had the HGV and legitimate reason to drive it all over Europe. Perhaps his wife had contacts in the Far East. She was an intelligent woman: if she could run one successful business, she could run another. And the van – the van that David Sperrin had seen, the van that had left its mark on his flesh and on Rose Doe’s – was hers. Had she found a way to make money without getting up in the middle of the night to attend flower markets?

  She wasn’t attending one this morning. Of course, her van was at Meadowvale, being combed for evidence. Perhaps she’d thought she’d enjoy an unaccustomed lie-in.

  There was a car parked across the road from China Roses. Emma Friend raised a hand and an interrogative eyebrow as they passed. Gorman shook his head. ‘I’ll shout if we need you.’

  Hazel rang the bell beside the shop door. When no one came, Gorman raised his voice at the upstairs windows. ‘Mrs Kiang, it’s the police. Will you come down and open up, please.’

  Finally there was movement inside, and Mrs Kiang opened the door in a flowered kimono. Hazel did a quick reassessment. She was still tiny, but she wasn’t ancient. She might have been her husband’s age. Like the Widow Twanky accent, she had deliberately cultivated a persona no one would associate with vicious criminality.

  It occurred to Hazel, just a little too late, that the woman could have been armed. Her husband had carried a gun: if his wife was also his partner, it was possible she would have one too. She kept a close eye on Mrs Kiang’s hands. When she went to fold them into her sleeves Hazel said sharply, ‘Please keep your hands where I can see them, Mrs Kiang.’

  In the end Mrs Kiang behaved with more style than either Bill King or Ryan Purbright. She knew that the game was up, wouldn’t stoop to tears, or lies, or anything as undignified as a wrestling match with a couple of police officers. ‘You think I’ve got a gun?’ she sneered. ‘Didn’t you search my whole house yesterday? Did you find a gun?’

  ‘No, we didn’t,’ admitted Gorman. ‘But Bill had one.’

  ‘Where is he? Why isn’t he answering his phone?’

  Gorman scowled. ‘How would you know? I’ve got your phone.’

  The woman rolled her eyes in disgust. ‘You’ve got one of my phones. Is Bill all right?’

  ‘He’s in hospital with two broken legs. He’ll mend. But he won’t be coming home when he has. We caught him in the act, Mrs Kiang. He had six illegals in the back of his lorry, and he tried to shoot his way out when we went to arrest him. Between them’ – it was the smallest of white lies – ‘him and his partner put you squarely in the frame.’

  ‘Not my Bill,’ said Mrs Kiang stoutly. It was the only point in the course of her arrest that she showed any emotion. ‘There’s nothing you could offer him would make him sell me out. That Ryan, he’d spill his guts if someone spoke harshly to him. He always was as wet as a Wigan weekend. I told Bill, you want to get rid of him – he’s weak, he’ll let you down. But he was easy to pay. Damned amateurs! You know what it is? You can’t get the staff any more.’

  Hazel, who’d known her for years, had to ask her first name before they could arrest her. It was Iris.

  Sergeant Murchison sent the area car to collect her. DC Friend went home for some overdue sleep. Gorman declined the offer of a lift back to Meadowvale, indicating that he and Hazel would walk. And talk.

  ‘What I said yesterday – no, earlier this morning,’ he began.

  ‘I’ve been hoping it was a joke,’ Hazel said, watching him warily.

  ‘It wasn’t. Hazel, if I can’t trust you, I can’t use you. People have gone out on a limb for you, more than once. I have; Superintendent Maybourne has. We did it because we thought you were worth taking a gamble on. I always knew you could blow your last chance. I never expected you to short-change us.’

  Hazel stopped dead, staring at him incredulously. ‘How in God’s name do you think I’ve done that?’

  ‘You knew that Cathy Ash was in Norbold, and you didn’t tell me. You put Gabriel’s interests ahead of your duty as a police officer. That’s not something I can tolerate.’

  ‘Cathy?’ exclaimed Hazel. ‘She’s here?’

  ‘She was here for three days, and she was gone before I heard about it. And I don’t care how much loyalty you owe to Gabriel Ash, you owe us more. You should have told me. You know we have a warrant out for her. You had no right to keep that information to yourself.’

  ‘But … I didn’t know!’ insisted Hazel desperately. ‘What makes you think I knew? Cathy was here? Are you sure? Why?’

  Gorman was frowning again. He’d thought he knew what had happened: that, caught between a rock and a hard place, she’d followed her heart and not her head. That the history she had with Ash had ultimately counted for more than the commitment she owed to her job and her colleagues. It would have been understandable, but it would have ended her career.

  The vehemence of her denial took him by surprise. He would have found it quite hard not to believe her, except that he had his information from an impeccable source.

  ‘Who told you this?’ demanded Hazel, caution thrown to the wind. Gorman might be her boss, but he wouldn’t be much longer if she couldn’t convince him of his error. ‘I have a right to know. It’s a malicious lie, and I want to know who told you.’

  ‘Gabriel did,’ said Dave Gorman.

  They divided the list between them. Between the addresses supplied by Ryan Purbright, and those which figured in the notebook found in the cab of William King’s lorry, there were more victims to be located, and more co-conspirators to be questioned, than anyone at Meadowvale would have believed. Only now did they begin to comprehend the extent of the trade which had taken place almost under their noses, unseen and unsuspected.

  In truth, there was no overwhelming need for haste. Migrants who had spent months in indentured servitude would probably have been happy enough to wait another day for their release. But the wh
ole of Meadowvale, not just CID, wanted to find them as quickly as possible, inform them of their change of circumstance, and start the wheels in motion that would get them first to safety and then back home.

  Sergeant Murchison returned to the boutique hotel in Whitley Vale where he had taken Mrs Murchison for their anniversary dinner, and came away with two frightened Korean girls who did the cleaning and the laundry and ate what the paying guests left.

  DC Lassiter visited a millinery workshop. Among the candy-floss clouds of tulle and reels of trimmings were six women, aged between nineteen and sixty-two. Three of them claimed not to know that the other three were receiving no wages, only a box of groceries once a week, and were sleeping in the stockroom.

  DS Presley found two fifteen-year-old boys washing cars within spitting distance of one of Norbold’s main thoroughfares. They were there from seven in the morning until nine at night. They got fifteen minutes for lunch, and shared a hamburger, the cost of which was deducted from their wages. So was board and lodging – they occupied an unheated shed behind the car wash – and the cost of protective clothing. Their waterproof jackets had ceased to be waterproof months before, and they had two rubber gloves between them. As best they could figure it, they owed their employer a little over £200.

  DCI Gorman pulled rank and paid Perfumed Nights a visit himself. The bordello occupied a three-storey red-brick house twenty minutes up the Coventry road, convenient for both town and city and only five minutes from the motorway. He thought about taking Hazel but decided against. The temptation to take out her fury on the proprietors might have proved too strong. Instead he took DC Friend, up and running again after two hours’ sleep and a shower.

  Perfumed Nights wasn’t the only name the brothel went by. When Gorman took possession of the books, he also found entries under Eastern Promise, Russian Dolls, Birds of Paradise – and China Roses.

  Somewhat disappointingly, the desk was manned by a plump middle-aged woman from Kidderminster called Celine Cassidy, who recognised Gorman for what he was before he had a chance to show his warrant card. ‘Our turn, is it?’ she said sourly. ‘What, no real crime going on this week?’

  ‘Actually, yes,’ he said. ‘Right here. Somebody called you three nights ago. Late – around eleven.’

  ‘That’s possible,’ allowed Mrs Cassidy.

  ‘A man called David Sperrin.’

  ‘Sperrin? Sperrin …’ She appeared to be thinking but then shook her head. ‘I don’t remember anyone of that name. A lot of John Smiths. Could he have given us a false name? People do, you know.’

  ‘Maybe,’ allowed Gorman. ‘You’ll remember him, though. He’s the one who ended up dead.’

  That got Mrs Cassidy’s attention. She gave him a hard stare. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘He called your number. Your China Roses number. He found you via the website. But instead of getting down to business, he started asking questions about the girls. Where they were from, how they got here. You didn’t want to deal with him, so you called Bill King, who took him away in his wife’s flower van. Next day we found him shot in the head in an industrial unit outside Coventry.’

  The stare hardly wavered, but now Gorman could see round the edges to the fear behind it. He thought some of this was news to Mrs Cassidy. Well, some of it might not have been accurate – he was surmising a little, filling in the gaps between what he knew with what he thought must have happened – but it was close enough that she knew how much trouble she was in. ‘I don’t know anything about anybody getting shot.’

  ‘But you called Bill King. What did you think he was going to do?’

  ‘I didn’t think he was going to shoot him!’ As soon as the words were out, Celine Cassidy knew she’d incriminated herself. Gorman saw the knowledge slide through her face like the final curtain of a three-act tragedy. She drew an unsteady breath and continued. ‘I thought he might … you know … rough him up a little. We get trouble-makers from time to time. Every establishment like ours does. It’s no use calling you people: either you don’t come, or you arrest us! So we need someone to call. We call Bill. He can’t always come in person – he travels a lot, you know? – but he can put the fear of God into someone over the phone.’

  ‘But this night he turned up in person?’

  The woman nodded. So far as Gorman could judge, she wasn’t even trying to keep anything from him. ‘I hardly had time to put the phone down. He was already in the area, see. Smelled lovely, he did, from all the flowers. He said he’d give the punter a lift back to Norbold. Well, I didn’t believe that, and I don’t think the punter did either. But I didn’t know he’d got a gun! I didn’t. They drove off, and I never heard any more.’

  ‘You called him a trouble-maker. This punter. What kind of trouble was he making?’

  ‘Asking questions, like you said. Mainly about some Vietnamese girl. We don’t have a Vietnamese girl – haven’t had one for months. I told him that. He said that was because she hadn’t got this far. I couldn’t make out what he was on about. I said we had plenty of other girls, nice girls, from China and Korea and one from Thailand, but he just got more and more angry. So I called Bill. He took the punter outside, and that was the last I saw of him. I haven’t seen Bill since, either,’ she added in a slightly puzzled tone.

  ‘Were you expecting to see him?’ asked DC Friend. Her face was set, her tone rigidly controlled. ‘Had he another consignment for you?’

  Now Mrs Cassidy’s expression closed down. ‘Don’t know what you mean, dear.’

  Gorman spelled it out for her. ‘These nice girls from China and Korea and the one from Thailand: I want to see them. I want to see them all, and I want to see them now.’

  They emerged from different parts of the building, in various states of dress and undress, reluctant and worried, eyes downcast, slim fingers clasped together. There were seven of them. The oldest was about twenty-two, the youngest might have been sixteen with a following wind. Not one could produce a passport, or visa, or work permit, or a rent book for accommodation, or evidence of a bank account where her wages were being paid.

  Gorman nudged Emma Friend. ‘You’re on.’

  Friend had been a police officer for seven years; she could still do her job even when she wanted to cry. She smiled at them and said, very slowly and clearly, ‘We’re not here to hurt you. We want to help you. You don’t have to work here any longer. We’ll look after you until we can send you home. Is that all right?’

  The silence that followed went on so long that she began to wonder if any of them spoke English. She and Gorman exchanged a helpless glance.

  Then one of the girls stepped forward. She was wearing what the purveyors of such things call a play-suit, her long dark hair falling in a sheet over her shoulders, and she looked about as playful as a whipping-boy. But she drew herself up to her full five-foot-nothing in front of Mrs Cassidy, and spat in her face.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Rambles With Books had only just opened, and the only customer was Miss Hornblower. And Miss Hornblower left when she saw Hazel’s expression.

  Ash looked round from dusting his shelves, surprised to see her. Even when she wasn’t working, she wasn’t usually here much before tea-break. ‘Hazel? Is everything all right?’

  ‘Gabriel, nothing’s all right!’ she cried. He couldn’t tell if she was more angry or distraught, but he could hear both in her voice. ‘You told my boss that I withheld material information about the whereabouts of a murderer!’

  Ash’s deep-set eyes saucered. ‘No, I didn’t. Whoever told you that?’

  ‘Dave Gorman. Are you calling him a liar?’

  For a moment Ash was dumbfounded. He didn’t for a minute think that Gorman had lied to her, or that Hazel was lying to him. He could make no sense of it. ‘Hazel, I don’t understand. Who are we talking about? You know who killed David? Then tell me, because I don’t.’

  Then, from total unfeigned incomprehension, he took a single step into complete a
nd awful understanding. The blood drained from his face so fast that he gripped a chair for support. ‘Oh dear God, I was right. I thought I was imagining it. I thought she’d hurt me so many different ways that now I suspected her of everything. But she was involved with the traffickers. She Who Must Be Obeyed.’ He swallowed hard. ‘She killed David? Had him killed? Are you sure? How do you know?’

  It was Hazel’s turn to be mystified. ‘Who are you talking about?’

  ‘Well – Cathy.’ As if it was self-evident.

  ‘So am I!’ shouted Hazel. ‘Gabriel, you told Dave Gorman she’d been staying in your house and I knew about it! He was ready to sack me!’

  ‘Hazel – you did know about it. You saw us together. You said so.’

  She was shaking with fury and exasperation. ‘I saw two silhouettes at the bedroom window. I didn’t know it was Cathy! How in hell was I supposed to guess it was Cathy?’

  ‘Things you said,’ he murmured miserably. He couldn’t now remember exactly what they were, but he’d believed at the time – he’d believed until right now – that Hazel had recognised the figure she’d seen. It had been a misunderstanding; but the kind of misunderstanding that ruins lives. ‘I thought you knew.’

  ‘I’d have known if you’d told me!’

  He tried to explain. ‘I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want to put you in the position of knowing, and having to either tell Dave and let me down, or not tell him and let him down. She turned up without a word of warning, she was there for three days, I never really knew why although she talked about a business deal gone sour, and then I told her she had to leave.

  ‘At that time I had no reason to suspect she had anything to do with David and the case you were working. It was only afterwards – only when you and I were talking, and you said there was a woman high up in the organisation – that the pieces fell into place.’

  His head rocked back and he stared blindly at the ceiling, where odd patches of old soot had shown through, staining the new paint. Then he looked at Hazel again. His cheeks were drawn, his eyes despairing. ‘Did you find her? Do you have her in custody? Does Dave want me down at Meadowvale too?’