Night Angels

by Danuta Reah

  In the event, it was two hours before she and Roy were sitting at a table in the small Italian restaurant they’d been to before.

  ‘All we know so far is that she comes from Siberia.’ Roy Farnham poured more wine into Lynne’s glass. ‘And she ends up dead in the Humber. Anything else?’

  ‘Not much, yet.’ Lynne ran through the information she’d managed to get. ‘But now I’ve got a better idea of where she comes from, there’s more chance that I’ll get a name.’

  ‘And then what?’ Roy said.

  The waiter put a basket of bread on the table between them. ‘Are you ready to order?’ he said. They’d arrived at the restaurant much later than they’d intended. First, Lynne had got held up with a late query, then Roy had become entangled with a problem in his team. At least they both understood when this kind of thing happened.

  Lynne looked at the menu. She’d spent the day making decisions. She didn’t want to make any more. ‘I’ll just have pizza,’ she said. Roy nodded agreement, and the waiter went away. Lynne was ravenous and buttered a bread roll. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, her voice a bit muffled. ‘It’ll mean someone can tell her family. She was young – nineteen? Twenty? I know where she was on that last day up to the time she left the hospital.’ She told him about the Welfare Advice Centre, about Nasim Rafiq and Matthew Pearse.

  ‘What about them?’ he said.

  She went over Pearse’s story about taking Katya to the hospital. ‘He didn’t see who she left with, but he got the impression she didn’t leave alone,’ she said. ‘Then he went back to the centre. But there’s something about the Rafiq woman. It might be that she doesn’t like the police, it could be as simple as that. But she isn’t happy when I’m there.’

  Roy frowned. ‘What do they do there? At this centre?’ he said.

  Lynne shrugged. ‘They seem a fairly haphazard bit of voluntary support. Michael Balit – he’s the Volunteer Co-ordinator – indicated that they were set up in a hurry when the dispersal scheme started. That place used to be a furniture store, and, to be honest, that’s more or less what it looks like. I want to find out more. Something made Katya go there. It could be the kind of set-up that I’m looking for. But at the moment, they won’t give me the time of day.’

  Roy looked at her. ‘That’s something for Special Branch, Lynne, if they’re involved in anything dodgy.’

  Lynne was irritated. They were moving on to her territory now. ‘I don’t think that they are,’ she said. ‘But I think they might be a useful contact point. I’m not pulling Special Branch in on something as vague as that.’ She wasn’t pulling Special Branch in at all until she knew exactly what was going on there.

  ‘Have you looked them up?’ Roy topped Lynne’s glass up again. He wasn’t drinking much himself.

  ‘I couldn’t find anything. There’s no record for Pearse, and Rafiq is legit. Her husband’s here at the university. He’s an engineer, and they’ve applied for a long-term stay. No reason why they shouldn’t get it. But it’s odd.’ She told him about the Rafiqs’ child, the little boy who was their main reason for coming here, the threat to his sight and the treatment. ‘I can’t see her putting her son at risk. Or her husband’s work. And she must know the consequences of getting involved with anything dodgy.’ Talking about it made her realize how much time she’d spent trying to track down Katya’s last hours. ‘Anything on Angel Escorts?’

  He shook his head. ‘The site’s vanished. It was posted by an anonymous link – it’s easy if you know what you’re doing. We can’t get a trace on it.’

  ‘Luke Hagan knows what he’s doing.’ The site would be somewhere else now, under a different name. Among the multitude of escort sites, it was unlikely they would track it down. Their pizzas arrived then and they broke off their conversation as the waiter waved around pepper grinders and salad dressing. Then they were alone again. Lynne brought him up to date on her latest findings. ‘The Siberian woman – Katya – the pathologist thinks she drowned. He’s probably right. I’d just like it to be more conclusive. It’s too much of a coincidence – Gemma Wishart doing that work and ending up dead herself.’

  Roy wasn’t convinced. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘We’ve got some similarities – but I can’t ignore the differences. The problem is, the first two bodies just don’t give us the information – were they raped like Wishart? The evidence is gone. And Wishart was strangled.’ Whereas no one knew for certain – yet – how Katya and the Ravenscar woman had died. ‘Is Wishart a copycat killing? What was there in her report to get her killed? What would be the point? You could just get someone else to do it.’

  He was right. All Gemma Wishart had done was give them a closer estimate of where Katya came from. Put together with other things they had, it might lead to an identification. Killing Wishart wouldn’t have stopped that. But someone had erased her files. ‘The woman I’ve been talking to, Roz Bishop, says that Wishart still had work to do on the report.’

  Roy Farnham nodded. ‘I’ve talked to the people over there. Some of Wishart’s files turned up. She was looking for something, but no one seems to know what. I’ve got someone else checking the tape, but it’s a long shot. His name’s Greenhough, he’s at York.’ Lynne felt aware of her peripheral role, the fact that she was not part of the team working on this case. ‘I’ve told him to copy you in,’ he added, and she wondered if anything had shown on her face. ‘There’s very little to go on at the moment,’ he said. ‘The boyfriend had a motive, he had the opportunity – he’s got no alibi – but there’s nothing we’ve found that puts him there. Yet,’ he added. ‘We’ve got a murder scene now. And we’ve got a witness. That’s what I wanted to tell you.’

  He described the car half-hidden under the rocks in Derbyshire’s Peak District.

  ‘And that’s where she was killed?’ Lynne thought about the narrow, winding road over the Pennines, one she’d used often enough herself when she’d lived in Sheffield.

  He shrugged. ‘Looks like it. The blood is Wishart’s. She was almost certainly killed in or near that car – she bled when she was inside it and she was still bleeding when she was dragged out. And the engine is dead. Something seems to have shorted the ignition, so it couldn’t have been moved far.’

  Lynne looked at him. ‘What about the witness?’

  ‘We’ve got someone in Glossop who saw Wishart’s car – or a car just like hers. He says he saw it parked in the square at around seven-thirty. There are phone boxes there. He said he thought the driver was using the phone.’

  Lynne thought about it. ‘She stopped in Glossop to make a phone call?’ And then a bit later made another from her mobile, ten minutes’ drive outside Glossop.

  Farnham shook his head. ‘I don’t know. The guy said he thought she was using the phone box, but he wasn’t certain. What is interesting is that the records for the phone boxes show that someone called Luke Hagan’s number at seven thirty-one.’

  ‘So Wishart phoned Luke Hagan once from a Glossop call box and once from the top of the Snake?’ Lynne thought about it.

  ‘Assuming both those calls were made by Wishart,’ Farnham said.

  ‘What was the weather like?’ Lynne was looking for a reason to use a phone box rather than stay in the security of a car and use a mobile.

  ‘Pissing it down.’ Farnham waited for a moment to see if she had anything else to say, then went on: ‘We wondered if the battery was low on the phone, so she used the phone box on impulse – maybe just to give Hagan an ETA, or to let him know she wouldn’t be back that night. Then the car breaks down – we know something went wrong with the ignition – so she phones Hagan for help.’

  ‘Only there was no message. Or so he says.’ It didn’t make sense. ‘If my phone was running out of juice and I broke down on the Snake in winter, I’d phone the AA before I started phoning my boyfriend. Especially if I knew he wasn’t in.’

  Farnham had clearly thought about that, because he nodded and went on, ‘Someone made that call. Wi
shart might have done it – or someone else did.’

  Someone else would almost certainly be the killer. ‘Why phone Hagan?’ Reporting in on a job well done, Lynne wondered. Gemma Wishart killed by her jealous boyfriend, or by her vengeful pimp.

  Farnham guessed what she was thinking. ‘Three dead prostitutes. Did they share a pimp? I need Angel Escorts, Lynne.’ The heavily laden slice of pizza he was holding started sagging under its own weight, and he opted for the simple solution of cramming it into his mouth. ‘Sorry,’ he said, his voice muffled. After a moment, he went on, ‘And there’s still the missing cleaner from the hotel.’

  ‘I’m looking,’ Lynne said. ‘But it takes time.’ She rubbed her hand across her forehead. She was getting tired.

  ‘OK,’ he said. He picked up the wine bottle.

  Lynne put her hand over her glass. ‘I’m ahead of you,’ she said.

  ‘I’m driving,’ he pointed out. Lynne had taken her car home first and they’d come in his. He smiled at her and his eyes were warm. ‘I’m not trying for drunk,’ he said. ‘Maybe just a bit incautious.’ He put the bottle down and became business-like again. ‘It might be worth having another go at the hotel, the manager. Her name’s Fry.’

  13

  Hull, Friday morning

  Lynne Jordan could sense pieces of the case fitting into place around her – but they still didn’t give her enough of the pattern to form a picture. Lynne was sure that Nasim Rafiq knew more than she was saying. Angel Escorts. Selling women online. Could there conceivably be a link between the ramshackle advice centre and the escort agency? Pearse and Rafiq looked as unlikely a pair of traffickers as she had ever seen. She remembered Farnham’s comment of the night before, and felt a moment of unease.

  She had the feeling that she’d made a stupid mistake early on in an investigation, and had missed – and now lost – vital information. She’d found the Angel website, she’d found the dead woman there and she’d made the identification. But she had let herself get sidetracked by Farnham’s investigation, and once it occurred to her to go back to the website, it was gone. All she had were the pictures of ‘Jemima’, Gemma Wishart. But the rest of the site would have yielded valuable information. Wishart may have been English, but some of the other women on the site were not, and these were women Lynne needed to track down. She’d let herself get distracted by the Wishart case – and neglected her own work.

  She thought through what she might have missed. A route to the person who put the site online? Probably not. An anonymous posting was hard to trace. But the site existed to be contacted. A porn site was one thing, but an escort site was no use if men couldn’t then contact the agency and hire one of their women. The phone numbers? Would those have been useful? Or would they have changed all the phones when they realized what had happened to Jemima? If she’d had the numbers, she could have got approximate locations on the phones – and if the phones were still being used…According to Farnham, the cell phone on the Angel Escorts card, the one that had been used to phone Luke Hagan’s number, was resolutely silent.

  All she had were the Jemima pictures, which were more use to Farnham than to her. She opened the file containing the pictures and looked at them again. The innocent, wind-blown picture of a young woman in jeans and T-shirt smiling at the camera. Then the other ones – the mischievous smile above the drawn-up knees: a revealing picture, but with an unexpected charm. Then the bondage photographs, one of Gemma Wishart standing with her wrists tied above her head, her body pulled tight, so that her pointed toes just touched the ground. Her eyes looked directly out of the screen, challenging and inviting. And the final photograph. To Lynne, it looked dark, the chiaroscuro obscuring rather than revealing, more sinister than enticing. Was that because she had seen the other picture: Gemma Wishart lying dead in the bath in an obscene parody of this photograph? She looked at the pictures and felt a sense of frustration. There was so much they could tell her if she just had a little more information. Luke Hagan had been the photographer, but Farnham didn’t think he was involved with Angel Escorts. His life style and his activities didn’t fit the profile of someone who was running a prostitution business. She looked at the pictures for any possible detail that had been missed, a piece of paper, a notebook, a letter on which Wishart would conveniently have written Luke Hagan killed me. She ran her mouse pointer over the pictures as she thought, tracing the lines and curves of the figure.

  It was like a crude joke. As the cursor moved across the dark shadow of pubic hair on the reclining figure, it became a pointing hand, and the words Step inside and get to know me better appeared on the screen. A link. There was a hyperlink on the page to something or somewhere else. Another website? Another page on this site? If it was another page, had she downloaded it when she downloaded the pictures? She held her breath as she clicked on the link, and breathed again as she watched more pictures form.

  This was a series of small pictures that followed the standard system of soft porn in which a bit more was revealed with each picture until the images became crudely anatomical. Here, the lighting was harsh and Wishart was standing or using a chair to position herself. These photographs lacked the subtlety of the others and seemed more designed to expose and objectify. Lynne wondered if Luke Hagan had taken these. They showed no sense of personal involvement between the model and the photographer – which had been there, she could see, in the earlier pictures.

  She was seeing Farnham later, that evening at her flat, but this couldn’t wait. She picked up the phone, and five minutes later he was in her office looking at the pictures on the screen. He raised his eyebrows and checked it himself, running the mouse pointer across the photograph. Step inside and get to know me better.

  ‘It’s a bit sick,’ he said, after a moment. He frowned and looked more closely at the pictures that appeared when the link was activated. He zoomed in on the face, and then on the torso, his eyes narrowed in thought. ‘I’m not sure…’ he said. He enlarged one of the photographs to fill the screen. It was a crudely anatomical shot with ‘Jemima’ lying back on a rug, touching herself and smiling in a detached way at the camera. ‘Look,’ he said. He took the screen back to the study in dark and light that was the linking picture, one of the pictures that Luke Hagan admitted to having taken. Lynne looked. He went back to the other picture. And back again.

  She could see it now. ‘It isn’t the same woman,’ she said. In both pictures, the woman was reclining. In the first one, even though her hands were pulled tight above her head, her breasts fell sideways under their own weight. In the smaller photograph, though her body changed slightly under the different pull of gravity, her breasts pointed upwards, as though they were in some way extra to her body, like an adolescent boy’s drawing. Implants. Gemma Wishart had not had breast implants. The face in the smaller photographs was Gemma Wish-art’s, but the body was not.

  They looked at each other. ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Farnham said.

  ‘She wanted to get her pictures up quickly?’ Lynne suggested. ‘Used some that were available and had them doctored?’

  ‘It’d be quicker and easier to take her own pictures,’ he said. ‘Anyway, why are they there? If they are there, why hide them?’ That had puzzled Lynne as well. The crudely explicit photographs were not untypical of the many porn sites that proliferated on the web, but they didn’t match the shots she remembered for the Angel website. Those were more glamour shots – plenty of tit and bum, she conceded, but more designed to whet the appetite of the browser: You can only see so much. Some people can see everything, do everything. Just give us a call…And she’d let that website vanish.

  ‘What do you think?’ she said.

  ‘Anderson thinks this website’s a fake,’ he said. ‘Or these pictures are. I’m beginning to come round to that idea. We’ve looked into Gemma Wishart’s background and there’s nothing, nothing, that supports this escort thing. No one knows anything, there’s no money tucked away, no time unaccounted for – or not
enough. There’s just this.’

  Lynne remembered that the Jemima pictures had struck her as anomalous from the word go. The first photograph wasn’t a glamour shot at all. She remembered Des Stanwell’s description: ‘a posh student type’. The other shots were darker than the erotic glamour she remembered from the rest of the site. She wondered how easy it would be to tamper with an existing website. ‘I think the site was genuine,’ she said. ‘One of my contacts, one of the prostitutes, seemed to recognize the name. And the rest of the site was different from the Jemima pages. I think Angel Escorts exists.’

  His face was thoughtful. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘We’ve got one or two lines to follow still.’ They’d been to the address Celia Fry had given them for Anna Krleza. ‘No one there, of course,’ he said. ‘But someone had been – her stuff was packed. It looked as though she’d left in a hurry. We got this, though.’ He showed her a photograph. Lynne looked at it. It was the head and shoulders of a young woman with a pale face, dark hair and dark eyes.

  ‘It looks like a passport photo,’ she said.

  Farnham smiled without humour. ‘It is,’ he said. ‘There was a young man in one of the rooms downstairs. He said that he’d been looking after her valuables, as she hadn’t been back for a while. He said there’d been an intruder, Monday night. He’d been up the fire escape to have a look, frightened whoever it was away.’

  But he hadn’t called the police. ‘Anna Krleza has a passport?’

  ‘Made out in the name of Sheila Lovell. It would have rung bells the first time it was checked – whoever did it doctored a stolen passport.’ Farnham shrugged. Someone was helping people to get fake passports, someone was helping them find jobs. ‘OK.’ He gave her his quick smile. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  Sheffield, Friday morning

  It was raining as Roz drove to work; heavy persistent rain from an unbroken grey sky. The air was cold, and the wind that always blew around the Arts Tower turned her umbrella inside out and whipped the rain against her face and hair. She shook the water off as she stood in the shelter of the entrance. Dave, the porter, greeted her with a grimace. ‘Lovely day for it, isn’t it?’