by Stav Sherez
‘Good work,’ Carrigan replied, examining the lining and the rip, his fingers running along the stitching, a frown creasing his forehead. ‘So what are we waiting for?’
She looked down at his jacket and said, ‘You.’
36
Carrigan stepped back as one of the uniforms swung the enforcer and splintered the door open, the sound strangely muted in the chill air. The front hallway of the house on Hatherley Crescent was gloomy and dilapidated, the paint chipped and cracked, the carpet peeling and measled with stains but four brand new CCTV cameras were mounted at regular intervals along the ceiling.
There were three doors on the ground floor, indistinguishable from each other, another hallway branching off and a wide staircase leading to the upper levels. Carrigan studied the surveillance cameras and saw that they were all angled towards the staircase. He looked down at the carpet, noting it was far more worn leading up to the stairs. He heard something move, a faint whirring susurration and he snapped his head up and looked at the cameras. They were no longer pointing towards the stairs. They were all pointing at him.
They rushed the stairs, the uniforms following, all pretence of stealth discarded. The stairs ended in a solid wooden door. Just as he got there, Carrigan heard the lock being engaged on the other side. He gestured behind him and one of uniforms shuffled past and swung the ram in a long deliberate arc. The door was no match for the enforcer, the wood and metal shearing away like tissue paper.
Two men were standing on the other side of the door. Neither one of them was Viktor.
One had a shaved head, a drunken sleepy grin on his face, and his fly was undone. The other man was wiry and sinewed as an old piece of leather, with a widow’s peak that dipped towards his nose. Both men had their arms up high in the air. The only other person in the room was a middle-aged woman sitting behind a desk and staring at a computer screen.
Carrigan was momentarily disoriented. Had they somehow got the wrong house? It looked more like a dentist’s waiting room than a stash-house. There was calm pastel wallpaper and dimmer lights, potted plants and deep couches. A variety of pillows and coloured throws had been added to soften the atmosphere. Framed reproductions of Manet and Picasso prints hung on the walls. The uniforms were all looking at each other, their confusion transmitted in raised eyebrows and puzzled frowns.
Carrigan turned and saw the man with the widow’s peak studying him with a mild amusement, as if he’d bumped into an old friend after many years in some unexpected circumstance. The man’s top row of teeth were capped in silver and looked like shiny bullets lined up in a magazine. He was looking at Geneva with an easy familiarity and smiling.
‘Where’s the other man?’ Carrigan said. ‘Viktor? Where the fuck is he?’
The two men stared at him as if they didn’t understand English.
Two of the uniforms came running up the stairs. The sergeant looked tired and confused and angry. He told Carrigan they’d searched the basement and ground floor but there was no sign of Viktor.
‘Did you find any drugs?’
The man shook his head.
‘Upstairs it is then,’ Carrigan said, addressing the uniforms. ‘You find anything that looks like drugs, don’t touch it, radio me or DS Miller immediately. And make sure no one gets anywhere near a toilet. We don’t want the evidence flushed away.’ He waited until he was sure they’d understood and started up the stairs. The smell of cheap perfume and bleach made his sinuses swell as he reached the second-floor landing. There were three doors to either side of him and a staircase leading up to another floor. Carrigan told one of the uniforms to watch the stairs, then pointed to the door on his left.
They stormed into the room and stopped, and almost walked straight back out again.
The room was small and narrow with a single bed up against one wall and an armchair against the other. Loud shrill pop music screamed and wailed from a small radio. A woman was kneeling in front of the bed. A man was sitting on the mattress, head flung back and eyes squeezed shut, still wearing his suit jacket, trousers bunched around his ankles. There was a stack of neatly folded towels on the edge of the bed and a box of tissues. The girl continued for a few seconds then stopped abruptly, turning her head and finally noticing the policemen. She blinked twice and gulped and scampered on hands and knees to the far corner of the room.
The other two rooms on the floor and most of the rooms on the floor above were also occupied. The men were surprised, then indignant, quickly turning solicitous and sorry when they realised what was happening. The girls cowered and whimpered, seemingly more scared by the police than anything which had occurred within the room.
‘Something’s seriously wrong here.’ Geneva stood next to him. He hadn’t heard her come up and the sound of her voice made him jump.
‘I know,’ Carrigan scanned the long dark corridor. ‘We haven’t found any drugs yet . . .’
‘That’s not what I mean.’
Carrigan took the last door on the third floor by himself as the uniforms led the women and their pale-faced clients down to the waiting patrol cars.
He knocked but there was no answer so he tried the doorknob. On first glance he thought the room was empty and was about to turn back when he saw a slight ripple disturbing the sheets. A young girl with short black hair slowly unfurled from the blankets, rubbing sleep out of her eyes with tiny hands and stifling a yawn. She looked about thirteen. There was a grey raggedy Snoopy under her pillow and she clutched it tightly with her outstretched hand. She managed a faint smile then cast her eyes down to her feet and began unbuttoning her pyjamas. Carrigan told her to stop, repeating it softly when he saw the look of confusion and panic spreading across the girl’s face.
‘You not like me?’ she said, looking up, her eyes small pleading things.
‘Please, stop that.’ He took a couple of steps back to give her some space and then he saw her pouting her lips, jutting out her chest, and he turned away and slammed the door behind him. He told Geneva to call in social services then saw the uniformed sergeant coming down the attic stairs.
‘Your man’s not up there but I think you’d better take a look,’ he said, a dark rage boiling in his eyes. He was gripping his truncheon so tightly it looked like the skin on his knuckles was about to pop and Carrigan couldn’t help but like him a little bit more for that.
‘He’s got to be somewhere,’ Carrigan said. ‘He can’t have just disappeared. Find him.’
The officer nodded sombrely and Carrigan climbed the last set of stairs alone.
The door at the top had two five-inch deadbolts affixed to it. The metal looked worn and flaked and well used. Carrigan slid the bolts back slowly, his hands shaking. There could be nothing good behind a door which locked from the outside.
The attic had been converted into the girls’ sleeping quarters. There were seven mattresses dotted across the bare wood floor and a cracked sink in the far corner. Next to it stood a portable toilet, the kind you would find on building sites or at music festivals. The smell was the same too, mulchy and rotten, hanging flat in the stale air. The mattresses were old and thin, overlaid with a patchwork of stains and bereft of sheets. The pillows still held the shape of their occupants’ heads and the blankets were worn and frayed. There were two skylights but both had been panelled over with thick planks of wood, the nails hammered in tight against the windowframes. The room smelled of bad bone-shaking nightmares and four-in-the-morning agonies and he tried not to breathe the thick air, tried not to notice the stuffed rabbits and plastic Madonnas standing guard next to each mattress, the rolls of band-aids and lubricants.
DC Jennings came up behind him and took one look at the room. ‘Oh my God,’ he said, his face turning red and bright and his eyes blinking rapidly. ‘We’ve been through the whole house,’ he continued, getting his breath back, ‘and no sign of Viktor anywhere.’
‘What do you mean no sign of him?’ Carrigan turned so quickly that Jennings had to take a step back. ‘He
can’t have just disappeared, can he?’
Jennings looked down at his shoes. ‘I’m afraid that’s what it looks like, sir.’
Carrigan sighed and tried to control his breathing. ‘Fuck! How can that happen?’
‘But we did find the drugs,’ Jennings said, his voice rising in pitch.
‘How much?’
‘Maybe four or five ounces, all bagged in individual wraps, quite a haul.’
Jennings seemed pleased but Carrigan wasn’t. ‘That’s not what we’re looking for,’ he snapped. ‘There should be much more. Unbagged. There should be scales and cash. I want you to go through everything, especially the office, any computers, hard drives. They’re going to say fuck all unless we have something on them we can use.’ He watched as Jennings walked slowly down the stairs, his body folded in on itself as if all the air had been punched out of it.
Carrigan closed his eyes, took a deep breath then snapped on a pair of gloves and started searching the makeshift bedroom.
At least seven women had spent their nights here. The mattresses were crowded together in one part of the room as if the proximity would allow them some kind of protection against their keepers, or maybe it was just warmer that way. There were no heating appliances in the attic, the breath emerging from his mouth in thick foggy clumps.
The girls had tried to make it home with what little they could scavenge and it gave even the most quotidian of objects a sense of pathos. He tried to imagine the lives these girls had led, the constant dread and physical pain, the any-time-of-day call to go downstairs and do whatever some man who paid his money wanted them to do. They would close their eyes and think of the fields back home just before Christmas, their parents hunched over the stove, the pet dog they’d left behind. Then, when it was over, they’d fake one of a million fake smiles and silently trudge to the bathroom, rinse themselves, and go back to this drab and dusty room to drown themselves in their pillows.
37
The detainees from the raid were already sequestered in separate interview rooms when Carrigan got back to the station, their details being checked by constables and the attendant analysts recently brought into the case. Carrigan had gone through the interview strategy with his team earlier, his voice curiously detached. They all knew him well enough to know it was better to keep quiet when he got like this.
They’d watched the surveillance tapes until their eyeballs ached. There was no doubt it was Viktor who’d entered the premises a few minutes before the raid. The house had been searched top to bottom but no trace of Viktor had been found nor any way he could have escaped. Carrigan couldn’t fucking believe it – the one man who had a definite link to the case had somehow managed to disappear right before their eyes.
They didn’t have an Albanian translator but they didn’t need one as the two bouncers didn’t say a word between them. The first man spent the whole interview shaking his head genially and throwing his arms up in the air. The second man, the one with the widow’s peak, was different.
Carrigan and Karlson sat opposite him in interview room number two. He was in his early thirties, his skin puckered and pitted with old acne scars. He smelled of lamb and wood-smoke.
‘Where is he?’ Carrigan sent the photo of Viktor spinning across the table.
The man could have been deaf for all the reaction he showed. His absolute stillness was unnerving. He leaned back in his chair and didn’t answer any of their questions. His top row of silver teeth gleamed like spent shell casings in the stark white light of the interview room.
‘We know he went inside. We saw him. Did he take the drugs with him?’
The man kept smiling, his eyes fixed on Carrigan’s. They’d been in the room for forty-five minutes and he’d barely blinked. Carrigan could feel a drop of sweat making its way down his spine. It was no wonder the girls had been so terrified.
Carrigan took out the photos nestled in the green file beside him. The first was of the convent before the fire. He slid it across the desk. The man looked down at it as if it were a scrap of litter, then back up, his expression unchanged. ‘The nuns warned you not to sell drugs in that alleyway, right? But you didn’t listen and you didn’t like them telling you how to run your business. You made several visits and, when they refused to stop, you burned down the convent and got rid of your little problem for the price of a box of matches.’
There was no reaction. If he looked closely, Carrigan could see his own reflection, fuzzy and upside down, in the man’s gleaming wall of teeth. ‘We know Duka was involved. We have Viktor on tape, visiting the convent.’ He took out Emily’s photo and flicked it across the table. ‘What do you know about her?’
The man picked up the photo, looked at it, then crushed it in his hand, sending the crumpled ball spinning back across the table.
The woman was sitting by herself in a separate interview room. They’d left her there for the last hour and a half so that she could take stock of her situation. It was a general rule that the longer someone sat in an interview room by themselves the more compliant they became. They stared at the walls, at the constantly buzzing video camera, at their own faces in the one-way mirror. Expectation was often worse than reality.
Carrigan entered, followed by DC Singh. ‘Do you understand why you’re here?’ he said, taking his seat.
The woman was wearing a lace top and short leather skirt. Her hair was in a tight, intricate bun that looked glazed. Her lipstick was smeared and her nails clattered rhythmically on the table.
‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ she said, sounding almost as if she meant it.
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Carrigan replied. ‘You were caught in a house that was being used as a brothel. The girls, at least a couple of them, are underage. It’s obvious you were the manager, madame, whatever.’ He paused and watched as her face twitched and reacted, this last piece of information sinking in. ‘Now, maybe we can’t prove the rest. Maybe your bodyguards don’t say anything, probably the girls will deny it all. But you were still found in an house with underage girls and that’s a very serious offence here.’
The woman kept drumming her nails on the surface of the table. Under the harsh glare of the lights you could see the wrinkles and hard years etched on her face, all the small and not-so-small things she’d had to do to survive. Carrigan suspected she’d been a trafficked girl herself, working the endless night shift until she got too old, her skin too loose, her body wasted, and then instead of selling her off to someone else, they turned her into procurer and jailer. He rested his head in his hands, appalled by this cruel and logical cycle.
‘I told you, I know nothing, now why you keep me here?’
‘That might work if we hadn’t found a thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girl on the premises.’ He took out the photos and laid them flat on the table. ‘This man assaulted a police officer. He’s also wanted in connection with a murder and arson we’re investigating,’ Carrigan said, seeing the slight flicker of dread pass through the woman’s eyes as she glanced at the photo of Viktor.
‘He was sent by Duka to burn down the Sisters of Suffering convent last week, wasn’t he?’ He saw something in the woman’s expression shift. ‘I know you wouldn’t have had anything to do with the murder of ten nuns but maybe you overheard something. Tell me what you know and I’ll make the charges go away.’
The woman looked down at her hands, the skin folded and wrinkled like topography. ‘There’s nothing you can threaten me with that they won’t deliver a hundred times over.’
‘We can protect you,’ Carrigan insisted, sensing a tiny crack in her wall. ‘We can have you moved to a different city, give you a different name, you’ll be untraceable and you’ll be free.’ It was his best shot. It was all she understood and all he could offer her.
But the madame only laughed that thin derisive wheeze again, empty of any human referent. ‘You can protect me?’ she said. ‘You think so? Well, answer me this, detective, can you protect my son? My ten-year-old s
on who I haven’t seen for three years?’
Carrigan was suddenly confused. He saw a spark in the woman’s eyes that had previously been absent, a slight awakening from the torpor and crushed fatalism of a few minutes before. ‘Son?’
‘You think you know how this works but you know nothing,’ she replied. ‘Can you protect my son? Can you? My son who’s being held by these men back home? You think I do this for fun? For money? The longer you hold me here the more likely it is they will do something to my son, so please, I do not know anything, I do not see anything, either lock me up or let me go before they think I have talked to you.’ She looked him directly in the eyes, her last and everything in that naked glare.
*
Brothels in Bayswater were nothing new. The area had always been a conveniently located carnal playground, a pocket of anonymity and licence snuggled deep inside the heart of the city; a place where Victorian gentlemen had frequented the lavender-scented parlours of Porchester Terrace, returning soldiers had celebrated their survival in dusty Praed Street walk-ups, and where Rachman had ruled over a vast empire of sex and cold-water flats. The oil boom sheiks of the 1970s and wayward minor Gulf royals had gentrified the business at the same time as introducing a new undercurrent of medieval slavery and micro-audited profit margins. The break-up of the former Soviet Union had turned it into a finely tuned production line. Every building in the city had a story to tell and it was seldom a happy one.
Geneva sat at her computer, reading up about this, trying to control the rage racing through her. The girls they’d taken in had ranged from thirteen to seventeen years old. They were scared and broken. They whimpered and cried in the van on the way to the station. They’d been raped daily for as long as they could remember. And the men who’d made sure they did their job, who knew where to place a fist so that the bruise wouldn’t spoil a customer’s pleasure – those men were sitting in the room behind her.
