by Danuta Reah
Hull, Monday
Anna put her bag down on the floor, keeping it carefully between her feet. She could feel the eyes of the cloakroom attendant on her. Should she say something to the woman to account for her dishevelled appearance, or should she just act as though nothing was wrong? Her heavily accented English tended to produce a hostile response. Get back to where you came from! She ran water over her hands, and squeezed liquid soap on to her handkerchief. She needed to clean herself up. She needed privacy. She needed a cubicle. There was a queue, and she shuffled forward, keeping her head down. No one would be looking for her here. No one would be looking for her at all. It was a coincidence, just an accident, just…
A cistern flushed, and she jumped. She could feel the sick coldness coming over her. If she passed out here, someone would call the police and then…Before anyone could move, she pushed ahead and went into the vacant cubicle, pushing past the woman who was coming out. She could hear a muttering behind her: ‘Excuse me! Who does…?’ ‘There’s a queue…!’ She bolted the door behind her and sank down on to the seat, her bag under her feet, and put her head down until the cold dizziness passed. She was tired. She was so tired. And she was hungry. Get away, get away, get away. But it wasn’t that easy. She didn’t know where to go. She had no money, she had no papers. She had, had to get the stuff from her room. She couldn’t leave it, not now, not after all the work and all the time and all the planning.
She felt as though her head was floating and the things she was hearing came from a distance. She had spent the last three nights walking around the city centre – Keep moving, keep moving – huddling herself up on park benches during the day; dozing off, feeling the treacherous warmth creeping through her, waking with a jerk as she began to slump off the seat. While she still had money in her purse, she had ridden on the buses, on the top deck because she didn’t want to be seen from the street, drifting into a doze as the true warmth began to bring the feeling back to her face and feet and hands, and jerking awake, aware, suddenly, that she was alone, and footsteps were coming up the stairs.
‘…in there? I said, Are you…’ She jolted upright in a wash of cold. The door was rattling. For a moment, she couldn’t understand what the voice was saying. She was shivering and she couldn’t control it. She took a deep breath. Calm, calm. ‘Fine,’ she said, relieved that her voice came out steady. ‘Just, a little sick. In my stomach.’
She could hear voices, footsteps. She couldn’t work out what they were saying. She wiped the damp, soapy rag over her face, rubbed hard until her face felt clean. She untied her scarf and pulled her hair firmly back, then she tied it again, tightly. There was no mirror in here. The action made her feel a little better. She picked up her bag, and opened the cubicle door. She could feel the eyes of the queuing women on her, and could see the cloakroom attendant watching her again. She managed a smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Just a little sick…’
The woman ignored her. Anna could hear the voices as the door closed behind her: ‘…back to where they…’ She was walking through the furniture department now, and there were mirrors on the walls, and free-standing mirrors, and mirrors on dressing tables and wardrobe doors. She could see a woman in a crumpled jacket and stained trousers with her hair jumbled up under a scarf, a bag bulging under her arm. She stopped and turned round. The woman was there behind her, and in front of her as she moved faster down the aisles, and the woman twisted and turned and followed her until she came up against some railings and there was nowhere to go.
‘Can I help you?’ The young man wore a suit. His mouth was pulled down and his nostrils flared slightly. Yes! Help me, Anna wanted to say, then she realized that he didn’t see her. She was just garbage, a nuisance, something to be disposed of. She could smell her clothes, a sour, unwashed smell. Suddenly, her eyes were full of tears, and she battled them down. He wasn’t looking at her now; he was looking round, looking for someone to help him.
‘I wanted the way out.’ Anna’s voice was just a whisper. He put his hand out to steer her in the right direction, then withdrew it. He pointed instead, and she saw that the top of the escalator was just opposite where she was standing; the rails were a balustrade protecting the top of the stairwell. She felt her way round the edge, afraid she might fall, not trusting her eyes to find the way for her. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.
He followed her, and watched her on to the escalator. She saw him talking to a man in a peaked cap with epaulettes on his shirt who followed her as she went down one, two, three floors, and there was the way out in front of her. The cap and the epaulettes made her legs shake as she walked until she reached the safety of the street.
She was going to have to go back to her room.
6
Hull, Monday
The Sleeping Beauty investigation intrigued Lynne. She had no intention of stepping on to ground that belonged to others, but Roy Farnham had invited her opinions and expertise, and now he was going to get them. She enjoyed the challenge. Her work was demanding, often stressful, frequently distressing, but, above all, it was interesting, and no matter how stressful the cases, she managed to keep herself, the essential Lynne, separated from the things she saw and the things she had to do. She sometimes thought that was her main skill as a police officer. Maybe it was the same skill that made a good concentration camp guard, she didn’t know.
She pulled the files out of her in-tray, and spread the contents across her desk. Two women: Katya, in the mud of the Humber Estuary, and the nameless woman on the rocks at Ravenscar. Was Farnham right in thinking that there might be a connection between these two deaths, and between these and the Sleeping Beauty?
She read through the reports, slowly and carefully, making notes as a point struck her. Everything pointed to Katya having committed suicide, but…She had been seen walking in the direction of the Humber Bridge a few hours after running away from the hospital. One sighting was inconclusive – a driver coming out of Hull on the A63 had seen ‘a woman in a red coat’ walking by the side of the road. But the other witness had given more detail. He’d mentioned the woman’s dark hair and the heavy metal buttons on the coat.
Her body had been found three days later. The pathologist had been inconclusive about the length of time she had been dead. He thought probably not more than forty-eight hours. ‘Water, mud, it makes it difficult, Inspector,’ he’d said when she had asked him if he could clarify the rather vague conclusions of his report. ‘A private guess?’ Lynne had asked, but he had refused to commit himself. The cause of death was also inconclusive. There was nothing to show that she had drowned, so the crucial question – had she been dead before she entered the water? – was unanswered.
‘They don’t realize,’ the pathologist had said, tiredly. ‘Jumping into water from a height, they might as well jump on to concrete.’ The head injuries were probably, but not conclusively, post-mortem. ‘You get post-mortem bleeding in head injuries when a body is in the water,’ he said. ‘And the gulls took the soft tissue. There wasn’t much to work on. I can’t be definitive in this case. Sorry. It’s possible we’re looking at vagal inhibition here – that she went into cardiac arrest as soon as she entered the water. The shock of cold water can do it.’ He shook his head again. ‘Let’s see what the lab tests show.’
Lynne looked through the next file, the anonymous woman who had been found at Ravenscar. As with Katya, the cause of this girl’s death was undetermined, but there was a bit more information here. She had probably died no more than fifteen hours before she was found, and circumstance suggested that she had probably died within a time period between early evening and midnight. The blow that had shattered the bones of her skull would probably have been fatal, but that blow had been post-mortem. Other, ante-mortem, injuries were not sufficiently severe to have caused death, the most recent being some bruising that had not broken the skin. The pathologist had speculated that they could be looking at an accidental death here, something that had happened in the cour
se of sex that had got a bit rough – a bondage game that had got out of hand, something like that.
Lynne looked at the laboratory reports. There was some alcohol in the woman’s bloodstream, but no other drugs. She had clearly been a user if the track marks were anything to go by, but she hadn’t used within the forty-eight hours preceding her death. She’d eaten shortly before she died – there was bread in her stomach.
She thought. Three women, possibly prostitutes, two of them dead from an unknown cause or causes, all anonymous, and all with severe damage to the face, sufficient to obliterate the features. All dumped in water – a good way to destroy forensic evidence – and all killed somewhere other than where their bodies had been found. She could understand Farnham’s concern, but she could also understand his circumspection. She had been involved in a high-profile investigation a couple of years before, where a man had been stalking and killing women in South Yorkshire. She knew it was easy to start crying ‘serial killer’ on the basis of very slight connections.
Farnham had given her a photocopy of the business card found on the floor of the hotel bedroom. Angel Escorts. It wasn’t an agency she had come across locally, which suggested that it wasn’t one of the places operating under the cover of a massage parlour or sauna. A lot of escort services were internet-based these days. If the Beauty had worked for one of these agencies, then her picture would be on their website. Lynne was equally sure that once they realized what had happened, she would vanish from the site as if she had never been there.
It might be too late already. The Beauty had died on Thursday night or Friday morning. It was now Monday – plenty of time for a website to be cleaned up or even removed completely. She logged on, checked her e-mail – all rubbish which she deleted without reading – and then started searching. There was an abundance of sites offering escorts. Some were subscription sites that you had to pay to enter. She ignored those for the moment. If Angel was a straightforward escort agency, then they presumably wouldn’t deter potential clients by charging them. They’d want them to browse.
‘Angel’ was a popular name. She found several listed. She made a note of contact numbers, and went on looking. She was hoping for a site with pictures, a site where you could hire a woman online; presumably, a local woman. None of the Angel Escorts she’d found mentioned the east coast. She narrowed her search to the local area. Now, the number of possible sites was much smaller. There were three she’d looked at already, and a site that said simply Escort Services Links. OK, she’d try that.
The screen went black – a porn site cliché. Then there was the warning that the site contained adult material. Lynne pressed the ‘enter’ button, and the name, Angel Escorts, appeared in pulsating red. Pictures began to form with strategically placed lettering to encourage the browser to go further into the site. A tiny picture of a woman fellating an anonymous penis. She’s young, free and willing! Another picture: a young face, fair hair, pigtails. Her blouse was open, exposing her breasts. Fresh teens! Lynne wondered what kinds of clients might greet a woman who had advertised on this site. 100% free live anal video feed! Lynne looked for the link to the escorts. Meet our girls. OK. She clicked on the button.
Ten small photographs of women appeared – Lily, Jasmine, Rose, Jemima, Suzy…The pictures provided links that allowed a customer to browse further and inspect the attractions of the merchandise. Four of the women were clearly eastern – Korean? Lynne wondered. Filipina? They looked seductively and submissively at the camera. Lynne clicked on a couple of the pictures to get an idea of how the site operated. The sequence of pictures for each woman was almost identical. Shots in skimpy clothes and underwear, standard nude shots, the general range typical of glamour photography. There was a brief text in which the woman expressed her willingness to be a warm and talented companion for an hour or a night. I am toned and flexible. Tell me your most secret fantasies and I will make them come true. She was reminded of girlie mags, but the difference between these and top-shelf magazines was that you could, should you choose, buy one of these women for a short time. A man could lift her down from the top shelf and play with her, though he’d need a good income to do it regularly. She wondered how much of the money the women actually managed to keep. She knew from the work she’d been doing recently that the men who bought these women had a taste for, or a yearning for, an elusive exotica, a dehumanized sex toy. They saw these women as fair game for their more…outlandish…tastes. But – Lily and Suzy and Rose…It was a pseudo-exotica. Fish and chips in Spain. Pie and peas in Tenerife.
The dead woman was Caucasian and white. There were four who fitted the bill. Their initial photographs were too small to give her the detail she wanted, so she checked through each one. The pictures appeared and vanished on the screen, a procession of exposed breasts, offered buttocks, pouting mouths. She paused on one, Jasmine, and then on another, Terri, who looked like possibilities, but in each case the build was wrong.
She moved on to the next one. Jemima. Jemima had dark brown hair and a slight build, like the Sleeping Beauty. Her initial picture had been a bit different, everyday, a woman in jeans and a tight T-shirt, smiling at the camera. The picture reminded Lynne of someone. She looked fresh and outdoors and innocent. But it made the contrast all the more effective. The other pictures of Jemima were unusual and striking. They were all nude shots, but the standard poses had become studies in light and shadow, the chiaroscuro creating a dramatic, almost sinister effect. There was one where ‘Jemima’ was looking into the lens with her knees tucked up under her chin. She could have been unaware of the extent she had exposed herself to the camera – the pose was almost casual – but the rather mischievous glint in her eye said otherwise. It was an engaging picture.
There was that sense of familiarity again. Lynne frowned, trying to pin it down, but it was elusive. She needed a clearer view of the woman’s face, something she could show to people who might know. She moved on to the next picture, and stopped. Here, Jemima lay on the same bed, on her back. Her legs were bent, the knees spread. Her hands were above her head, the wrists crossed. Lynne tried to magnify the top of the picture, but it was too dark. She couldn’t tell if the wrists were tied to the headboard, or if the woman was gripping it, but her arms looked taut. Her face looked relaxed and inviting. She was wearing a white basque and stockings.
Lynne took the crime-scene photograph out of the folder she’d brought back with her. The woman’s body was positioned with the hands tied above her head, wrists crossed. Her legs were drawn up, the knees pushed to either side of the narrow bath. The garment she was wearing, twisted and stained though it was, was a white basque. The hair, which was thick and glossy in the photograph, was dull and wet. The face was a smashed and bloody palimpsest. But the slim arms, the small breasts, the narrow waist, they were the same.
There was a knock on her door, and without waiting for a response from her, the person outside pushed the door open and came in. It was one of the men on Farnham’s team, one of his DCs, she couldn’t remember the name.
‘Don’t just walk in,’ she said briskly.
‘Sorry, ma’am.’ She saw him clock the computer screen. She could read his face. Nice work if you can get it. ‘DCI Farnham sent these across.’ The rest of the crime-scene photographs. So Roy Farnham was serious about working with her.
She indicated her in-tray. He put the files down and was about to go when she summoned him back and pointed at the screen. That sense of familiarity…she didn’t want to waste her energy on trying to remember, and then, weeks or months later, see a singer or a soap star with a passing resemblance to ‘Jemima’. ‘Who does that remind you of?’ she said. She could see him running several possible responses through his head. Probably a – what, twenty-year-old? – young man wasn’t the best person to ask, not with a picture like that. She sighed and moved the screen back to Jemima in her jeans and T-shirt.
Now, he was looking properly. He shook his head and looked at her expectantly. ‘No one,�
� he said, waiting for the answer.
‘OK. Thank you…’
‘Stanwell,’ he said. ‘Des Stanwell. Ma’am.’ He looked at the picture again. ‘She looks like some kind of posh student type, something like that. Not…You know.’
She knew. ‘Thank you, Des.’ She waited as he shut the door behind him. She needed prints of these pictures, but she wasn’t linked up to a colour printer. She started downloading the Jemima pages, drumming her fingers with impatience at the sluggish way the files came through. As she waited, she remembered that she hadn’t checked her post. She flicked through it, and noticed with annoyance that the promised report on the Katya tapes had still not arrived. She waited for the download to finish, and picked up the phone.
Sheffield, Monday, 8.30 a.m.
Low pressure settled over the city and Monday began for Roz in uniform dullness, the sky a still, opaque grey. She drove to work through the rush-hour queues, feeling a lethargy creeping into her spirit. Nathan had always hated days like this. ‘Why would anyone bother with getting up? Come on, Roz, phone in. Tell them you’re sick. Come back to bed.’ Why was she thinking about Nathan? As she edged her way into the lines of traffic, as she stopped and started in the queues, she tried to think of other things. The day ahead of her presented a range of distractions. Gemma. There were tutorials Gemma was supposed to run that would need covering or cancelling. There was her work programme. Roz would need to go through all of Gemma’s outstanding work and see where…Except that she couldn’t. All her files and all her back-ups were gone. And then there was Roz’s own work. She had to complete the next stage of the research proposals by the end of the week. She had a seminar at twelve. She had an appointment with the PhD student she was supervising who was her preferred candidate for one of the research posts Joanna was planning…And Gemma. She banged her fist against the steering wheel in frustration, jumping when the horn sounded. She smiled apology to the driver ahead, and made herself concentrate. She felt like turning the car round and heading back along the almost empty carriageway away from the city centre. Very constructive, Roz! Days like this happened. She just needed to prioritize.
