Death in a Far Country

by Patricia Hall

  ‘That sounds a bit harsh,’ Laura said. ‘But maybe not a lot.’ She recalled the weeping girlfriend tottering away from the celebration and wondered if she had forgiven her errant fiancé by now. ‘How about you?’ she asked. ‘Have you identified your murder victim yet?’

  Thackeray shook his head.

  ‘No. No one admits to knowing who she is. The only new development is that we’ve found her shoes. Someone saw her chuck them away and run off barefoot. We thought they were at the bottom of the canal, unfortunately, and have wasted a lot of time looking for them there. That will have dented the budget.’

  ‘Who was she running from?’ Laura asked, intrigued.

  ‘That we don’t know.’

  Laura thought of another girl who seemed to be running as well, but quickly pushed the recollection out of her mind. She had promised Joyce, against her better judgement, that she would tell no one about Elena’s existence until the girl had regained some strength and explained more clearly what had happened to her.

  ‘Do you think she might have been an illegal immigrant, this black girl?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s possible,’ Thackeray said. ‘It has crossed our minds. In which case people might be reluctant to identify her in case they expose themselves.’

  ‘They’d be deported?’

  ‘In theory. Unless they could persuade the immigration authorities it was too dangerous for them to go home. We’re going to have to get a bit tougher questioning the African community in Bradfield, I think. I feel sure this girl is African, even though no one admits to recognising her. Even your football hero, Okigbo, is worth a look. I get the distinct feeling that someone’s covering something up.’

  ‘If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were being a tad racist,’ Laura said.

  ‘I didn’t take to Okigbo’s friend Emanuel Asida, but that’s nothing to do with the colour of his skin.’

  ‘There’s a lot of people trafficking, isn’t there? What happens to girls who are smuggled in for the sex trade?’

  ‘They’re here just as illegally as someone who came here of their own free will,’ Thackeray said. ‘They may be allowed to stay while they give evidence in a criminal prosecution, but after that they’ll usually be sent back to wherever they came from. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Oh, I was just reading something about a charity that helps girls like that,’ Laura said. ‘I thought I might write something about it.’

  Thackeray seemed to lose interest and Laura saw him wince.

  ‘Have you taken your painkillers?’ she asked. He shook his head, his expression grim, and they both knew that it was more than paracetamol he needed to dull the pain he was feeling.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ Laura said with more confidence than she really felt, and he managed a faint smile.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said.

  Laura went into the editorial meeting next morning with a thumping headache, fit only to go through the motions of planning the day’s paper. She and Thackeray had spent a desultory evening watching television and she knew that his depression was unlikely to lift while the disciplinary inquiry hung over his head. She had called her grandmother on the way into work to be told that Joyce’s unexpected visitor was still sleeping soundly.

  ‘I gave her my bed and slept on the sofa,’ Joyce said, sounding as weary as Laura felt herself after a restless night.

  ‘You can’t go on doing that for long,’ Laura said sharply. Joyce’s arthritic knees would not be improved by such ad hoc sleeping arrangements. ‘I’ll come up at lunchtime and see if we can’t find somewhere safe for her to go.’

  ‘She’s fine here for a while,’ Joyce said. ‘Let her be.’ But Laura knew that the arrangement was not fine and determined to find some other refuge for Elena as soon as she could. Once she was in a place of safety, she thought, the legal implications of her situation could be safely explored.

  In spite of her abstraction, her attention was suddenly grabbed by angry voices at the other end of the editorial table. She looked up to see Ted Grant’s face flushed with rage and a determined scowl on the face of Tony Holloway, who appeared for once to be in a mood to defy the editor.

  ‘If you thought there was funny business going on when they bought Okigbo, why the hell didn’t we report it at the time?’ Grant demanded.

  ‘I couldn’t prove it,’ Tony said. ‘And you’d be the first to complain if they’d slapped a libel writ on us. It was just a rumour. You know what sport’s like these days. It’s more about money than the lads on the field. It’s one thing to be told that brown paper bags of cash are being passed around, something else to prove it. Although I reckon it’s a bit more sophisticated than brown paper bags these days. Deposits in off-shore bank account’s more like it.’

  ‘It’s your bloody job to prove it, any road,’ Grant said. ‘My God, in my day on the Globe you wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. Use your imagination man, get off your backside and do a bit of investigating. If it was old Sam Heywood shelling out to get the Nigerian lad here, we can’t libel him, can we? The beggar’s dead and buried. Find out what he was up to.’

  ‘It might not have been Sam,’ Tony said, his face sulky now.

  ‘So find out who it was, why don’t you? And find out who’s going to benefit if they sell Okigbo on. Follow the money, that’s what they say, isn’t it?’

  ‘Are they really looking to sell OK?’ Laura asked mildly. ‘It seems very odd when they’ve suddenly started attracting crowds again. What sort of investment is that?’

  Grant flicked a sharp glance at Laura before turning back to Tony.

  ‘That’s what you should be asking Jenna Heywood,’ Ted snapped. ‘There’s a good story buried in the woodwork at that club and you seem to be doing bugger all to winkle it out. On your bike, lad. Dig a bit of dirt for a change.’

  Laura watched Tony Holloway simmer in his seat for the rest of the meeting, which turned at that point to more routine matters, and she was not surprised when she felt him hovering over her when she got back to his desk.

  ‘Well, thanks for that bit of solidarity in there,’ Holloway said sarcastically. ‘I’d be really grateful, you know, if you’d keep your nose out of my patch.’

  ‘Fine,’ Laura said. ‘But it does all seem a bit odd, even to someone like me with a minimal interest in your beautiful game. If it was worth Sam Heywood shelling out illicit cash to get OK here, to help save the club presumably, why is someone now trying to sell him, which can only damage the club? It can’t be the same person, can it? This time it must be someone trying to undermine Jenna.’

  ‘Any fool can work that out,’ Tony said sourly. ‘The problem is finding out who’s done what and why. Investigate, Ted says, but when the hell can I find the time to do any investigation. I work a ten-hour day as it is, six days a week in the football season. The trouble with Ted is that he still thinks he’s got all the resources of a London tabloid to run this one-horse operation. It’s bloody stupid.’

  ‘Oh well, I’m sure someone else will annoy him before the day’s out and take the heat off you. You’ll have a big story anyway, won’t you, if OK goes? The fans will be furious.’

  ‘As if anyone cares about the fans,’ Tony said, turning away with a scowl.

  Laura logged off her computer at lunchtime, collected some sandwiches in the town centre, where she was surprised to see how quickly some of the local shops had decked their window displays with blue and gold United colours and supportive slogans for ‘the Lads’, and drove thoughtfully up the hill to The Heights to visit her grandmother again. Joyce opened the door to her looking anxious and Laura followed her into the living room where Elena was sitting on the sofa watching television with dull eyes that Laura guessed were seeing very little on the screen. She busied herself organising lunch for the three of them and then sat beside Elena, who began to sip listlessly at a mug of soup.

  ‘Are you feeling better?’ she asked the girl gently. But Elena merely shrugged.

 
‘She won’t try to talk,’ Joyce said, sounding tired and slightly exasperated. ‘I’ve got nothing out of her at all this morning.’

  ‘Elena,’ Laura said more firmly. ‘You understand you can’t stay here for long. My grandmother can’t keep you here. Do you understand that.’

  The girl shrugged again and a single tear slipped down her cheek.

  ‘You’ve been kidnapped and abused,’ Laura said firmly, hoping the girl’s grasp of English would cope with that. ‘We need to get you some help and find the men who did this to you. Then we’ll find some way to get you home to your family.’ Laura was still not sure how much Elena understood of what she was saying but she suddenly put down her mug and covered her face with her hands and began to sob convulsively.

  ‘Elena,’ Laura said, putting an arm round her shoulders. ‘We’re trying to help you. But you must talk to us. We can’t keep you here. And you need help to get home.’

  Elena shrugged Laura off and eventually the storm of tears burnt itself out and she turned frightened eyes to Joyce and then to Laura. She had evidently recognised the word home.

  ‘Not go home,’ she said. ‘Never go home.’

  ‘Your family must be frantic with worry,’ Joyce said. ‘Your mother and father will be desperate to know what happened to you. You must tell your mother and father where you are.’

  ‘No,’ Elena said, her voice dull. ‘Father, mother not to know. They kill me.’

  For a second Laura thought the girl was trying to make a joke and then she realised with a shudder that she was deadly serious. She met Elena’s eyes and saw only despair in them.

  ‘Brothers kill me,’ Elena said flatly and Laura believed her. ‘Me bad girl.’

  ‘Then you must get help here,’ she said. ‘You must talk to the police.’

  If anything Elena’s agitation only increased at that suggestion.

  ‘No talk,’ she said. ‘Man say girl run, girl talk to police, then mother be killed. Bad men everywhere, men here, men at home. Men know village, know where mother live. They find. And here, men everywhere. First I was in London. Then new man came. He bought me and brought me here.’

  ‘Where do you come from?’ Laura asked quietly, hardly believing that what the girl was saying was possible in Europe in the twenty-first century.

  ‘Albania,’ Elena said. ‘And now I Albanian whore. That is what they tell me, men who bring me here. I am whore. Go back, my brothers kill me. Or men kill my mother.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’ Joyce asked sharply. Elena looked at her with contempt.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It is the truth. They say no good run away. I stay with them and they look after me. I can never go home. But I run anyway. I not stay more with these men and other men who come all day and all night and the things they do. It too bad there. If I stay I die. I get sick now. So I choose die my way. When I climb to the top of there…’ She nodded briefly at the block of flats where she had taken refuge. ‘I go there to jump.’

  Laura glanced at Joyce, feeling close to despair herself.

  ‘Can you let Elena stay another night?’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll do a bit of research, see if I can find somewhere safe for her to stay, some sort of women’s shelter, maybe. We can’t sort this out ourselves. We need some help. She needs somewhere safe, she needs a doctor, she probably needs a lawyer, and she should certainly talk to the police eventually to see if they can track these bastards down.’

  Joyce nodded bleakly, her face full of pain, and Laura thought that nothing in her grandmother’s experience could have prepared her for this.

  ‘See what you can do, love,’ Joyce said without hesitation. ‘She’ll be fine here for another night. I’ll take care of her.’

  Elena looked at the two women intently for a moment.

  ‘Not go home,’ she said, her voice pleading now. ‘Never go home.’

  Laura hugged her briefly.

  ‘You’ll be safe now,’ she said, wondering desperately how she could possibly deliver on that promise.

  And as her grandmother came to the door with her she put a hand on her arm.

  ‘You realise what we’re doing is probably illegal?’ Laura said.

  Joyce smiled grimly. ‘Happen it is,’ she said. ‘But it looks like the lesser of two evils to me. See what you can sort out for the poor lass, pet, and then we’ll think about the legal niceties. I’d not want a suicide on my conscience, nor would you, because that’s how it’ll end if we’re not right careful. She’s right at the end of her tether, you can tell that just looking at her.’

  Laura nodded and closed the front door gently behind her. Once in the car she buried her face in her hands for a moment, overwhelmed by the anger she felt at what Elena had said. In her job, she thought, she should be used to witnessing the inhumanity some human beings were capable of, but the depravity of men who could kidnap children – and Elena was even now little more than a child – and transport them across continents to sell them into the sort of slavery the girl had suffered, filled her with impotent rage. Eventually she swallowed down her emotions and drove slowly back to the office where, still simmering, she began to trawl the Internet to discover what she could about the rights of women who had been trafficked into the country for sex.

  What she discovered was not encouraging. Outside London there seemed to be little help available for girls and women in Elena’s situation, and even in the capital sanctuary was hard to find. In the end she rang an organisation that offered a small number of beds for women who had escaped the clutches of traffickers, and explained Elena’s situation to a sympathetic official. But cold comfort was about all that she could offer.

  ‘There’s no money for this sort of thing,’ the woman said. ‘We could fill our beds twenty times over. Does the girl have her passport?’

  ‘From what she says, I doubt she ever had a passport,’ Laura said. ‘She was kidnapped on her way to school, for God’s sake.’

  ‘But she says she’s from Albania? Which adds to the problem, of course, because it’s not in the European Union, so her immigration status will be automatically deemed illegal. I think the first thing to do, if you can, is find an interpreter, so that she can tell you in more detail what happened. You’re lucky she can speak English at all. Many can’t. Some make a break for it not even knowing what country they’re in. But in her case deportation is a real threat.’

  ‘Yes, I know that, and I’m sure all this legal stuff is very important, but what I really need right now is to find her somewhere safe to stay. We can sort the rest out when she’s had time to see a doctor and build up her strength a bit. You don’t seem to understand – she’s in a desperate state.’

  ‘You say your grandmother can’t keep her?’

  ‘She’s only got the one bedroom,’ Laura said defensively, guessing what would come next.

  ‘And you’re not able to give her a bed yourself?’

  Laura swallowed hard, thinking of Thackeray’s likely reaction if she brought even an abused illegal immigrant back to their flat. That was a moral dilemma she did not dare present him with.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ the charity officer said. ‘The churches are involved in this work as well. It’s just possible I can find you someone in Yorkshire who could help.’

  There was a silence broken only by the rustling of paperwork at the other end of the phone, before the woman spoke again.

  ‘Try Father Aiden Moran at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Arnedale. Arnedale is near you, isn’t it?’ Laura froze for a second.

  ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s not very far. There’s no one else nearer, in Bradfield itself?’

  ‘I don’t think this has been much of a problem in your area so far. That’s the only contact I have.’

  ‘Right,’ Laura said. ‘I’ll talk to him and see whether he can help. Thanks.’

  ‘Good luck,’ the woman said. ‘Get in touch if you need any more ad
vice, won’t you? We’ll do our best to help.’

  She sat and stared at her phone for a long time. Why, she wondered, did it have to be someone at the Sacred Heart in Arnedale, where, as far as she knew, Frank Rafferty was still the parish priest, a man who was as close to Thackeray’s father as anyone in this world and one whose discretion she could not trust and on whose loyalty she personally could certainly not rely.

  ‘Damn and blast,’ she muttered under her breath, aware that Tony Holloway was watching her curiously from across the newsroom. ‘I think that’s a no-go area. Somehow I’m going to have to crack this one myself.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  DCI Thackeray tapped on Superintendent Longley’s office door early the next day. He knew the Super was booked for another session with the inquiry team at County HQ later in the morning, but wanted to catch him for a briefing on the murder case before he left Bradfield. Longley was already at his desk, in full uniform, looking as grim as Thackeray had expected he might.

  ‘Sit down, Michael,’ he said, his expression abstracted. ‘Any developments overnight?’

  Thackeray shook his head.

  ‘I’ve just had a briefing with the murder team, for what it’s worth, which isn’t much. We’ve had very little response to the television pictures.’ The artist’s impression of the dead girl had been broadcast the previous evening on both of the local TV news programmes and the detectives on the end of the phone lines the previous evening had nursed hopes of a breakthrough, which had not materialised.

  ‘One woman thought she knew her but when we showed her pictures of other black girls this morning she got completely confused. Turned out she thought it was a young woman who works in Marks and Spencers and who’s safe and well at home in Eckersley.’

  ‘And that’s all?’