‘You’ll have to buy a new suit.’
Boyd gave me a puzzled look. ‘Sorry?’
‘Super wants us to attend the next neighbourhood watch meeting.’
‘What good is that going to do?’
I shrugged. ‘You know how it is. The residents of Rodium Crescent call the shots.’
‘But it’s not like we have nothing else to do.’
‘Wing Commander Bates complained that I was rude and inconsiderate.’
‘Did you tell the Super about the whisky bottle?’
I nodded.
‘And did you tell the Super that the wife was pissed?’
I nodded again, vigorously, to emphasise the point.
‘Apparently Bates knows one of the ACCs as well as Judge Patricks. Super’s been on the telephone all morning.’
I shuffled papers around on my desk before glancing at my watch, realising that I was late for my appointment with Dagmara. Boyd had spoken to Alvine Dix on the telephone who’d told him that her report – she’d told Boyd to emphasise the word ‘preliminary’ – would be emailed later that day. I was half-listening and half-thinking about my meeting with Dagmara and her jet-black hair and pearl-like eyes. Boyd cleared his throat and succeeded in cutting short the scenarios developing in my mind.
‘Do you want to meet the family?’
‘Who?’
‘Leon’s family. They should be arriving later.’
I mumbled an acknowledgment. I glanced at my watch again, picked up the mobile telephone and composed a text to Dagmara.
‘If I’m back in time, I’ll see them.’
I could see Boyd beginning to form a question in his mind and, before he had the chance to take it any further, I put the mobile phone down and gave him a quick stare. ‘I’ll go and see Dagmara. I want you to get that report prepared for the ACC.’
I could see his enthusiasm deflate and he left my office tightening and straightening his tie as he did so. I finished the text to Dagmara, found my car keys in my desk drawer, and headed down towards the car park.
It took me longer than I expected to thread my way through the afternoon traffic towards one of the industrial estates on the west of the city. Eventually, I drew up alongside the offices of the anonymous-sounding agency where she worked.
I stood in the empty reception listening to a telephone ringing incessantly in an office down a hallway. A door leading off reception had been propped open with a wooden wedge. I pressed a button on the desk and within a minute I heard a door open down the hallway.
‘Can I help?’ asked the man who appeared.
‘Dagmara is expecting me.’
He nodded and turned back on his heels. ‘I’ll take you through.’
I followed him into a corridor lined with photographs of smiling politicians, men in grey suits and women with severe haircuts and cheesy grins.
‘Sorry we haven’t got a receptionist. It’s the cutbacks. We’re just hanging on by the skin of our teeth.’
There was a sense of impending closure hanging around the place. I could imagine that an agency promoting welfare, education and business opportunities for various minority groups would have been high on the list for cutbacks. I was surprised that some politician had not yet called for its complete abolition. I could see their line – British taxpayers support foreign jobs. It would be a brave politician prepared to justify spending money on this agency.
‘She’s in there.’ The man pointed at one of the doors further down the corridor.
I knocked and Dagmara called out a welcome. Her office was narrow with a window looking out over a paved area. Her desk had been pushed against the wall and I sat on a chair in the middle of the room.
‘Mr Personality, your colleague,’ I offered.
She gave a half-hearted smile. ‘How can people work when they know their jobs might be gone next week?’
When she looked at me her eyes seemed to light up and she gave me a full smile.
‘How can I help, John?’
The accent could have melted ice cream and I felt myself hesitating. ‘How well did you know Leon?’
She blinked quickly, but kept the eye contact direct.
‘Quite well. He was friends with Michal and we all share Howick Street. We were both – all of us – from Warsaw.’
‘We found a restaurant receipt with Leon’s possessions.’ I saw the uncertainty in her eyes. ‘We went to the restaurant. The waitress there was helpful. She gave a very good description of the person with Leon.’
Dagmara moved in her chair, waiting for me to continue.
‘What did you talk about?’ I asked.
She turned her head away.
‘Lots of things. Many different things.’
‘Such as?’
‘Work. And about going back home. And how he wanted to leave Cardiff.’
‘Was he unhappy?’
‘For sure.’
‘Why?’
She pulled her hair back behind her ear and then she crossed and uncrossed her legs. I leant forward in the chair and intertwined my fingers.
‘Dagmara, why didn’t you tell me this before?’
Then she gave me a frightened look.
‘Were you and Leon…?’
She didn’t let me finish the question.
‘No, no, never. I couldn’t… just friends.’
A part of me felt relieved, pleased even. I couldn’t help but feel that Dagmara deserved better than a cheap bed-sit in Splott.
‘How often did you socialise?’
‘No, it was nothing regular.’
‘Come on Dagmara, I’m trying to find who killed Michal and Leon. The day before Leon was killed you were with him in a restaurant. You want me to read the statement from the waitress?’
She shook her head.
‘And when you saw the men outside the house, you knew who they were. So tell me – what’s the connection?’
She fidgeted with some biros on the desk.
‘Who are they, Dagmara? I need to know.’
‘Did you know where Leon and Michal worked?’
‘Tell me about the men first.’
She bowed her head. She paused as she spoke and I saw the fear in her eyes as she described the big man with a close haircut and enormous shoulders.
‘Do you know him?’
Her eyes met mine.
‘Is it Lech Balinski?’
She nodded then gave a hard stare until her jaw twitched. ‘Evil man.’
‘And the second?’
This time the fear had subsided – her voice confident as she described Janek’s features.
‘Michal and Leon work for him,’ she said slowly.
‘You mean Frankie Prince?’
She nodded. ‘It was good money. At start it didn’t matter to Michal or Leon what was going on.’
‘You mean with the work in the brothels?’
‘They were just paid to move the girls around. They do nothing else.’
‘How old were the girls?’
She looked away. ‘At first they did not know a thing.’
‘Come on Dagmara. They were underage, weren’t they? Just kids.’
‘They both needed the money. It was cash and then they thought they could stop but—’
‘It never did. Have you got any addresses?’
She shook her head. ‘Michal never tell me.’
She was trying too hard to keep eye contact, but she was shifting uncomfortably in her seat.
‘So what happened? What changed things?’
Dagmara hesitated. ‘Leon wanted to tell the police. He fell in love with one of the girls. He was sick of doing work for them.’
‘What was the name of the girl?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s not much help.’
‘I know she was in touch with Anna Best.’
‘Who the hell is Anna Best?’
‘Leon told me her name. She works for Amnesty.’
I drew both hands throug
h my hair and let out an exasperated breath. At least I could put Lech Balinski at 14 Howick Street on the night of Leon’s death. Now I had to find an anonymous call girl who knew the corpse in the mortuary and I had to deal with a do-gooder, all to make progress. And I still had to find the mysterious Lech and find out how he fitted into the jigsaw that seemed to gather more pieces at every step.
* * *
I got back to Queen Street late in the afternoon and Boyd looked relieved to see me as he told me about the family waiting downstairs.
‘The mother and father are pretty cut up. There was a brother and an uncle but they left. The brother couldn’t hack it – he was a bit simple – so the uncle took him back to their hotel.’
‘Have they made the identification?’
‘Yes.’
All we had to do was express condolences to people we had never met and didn’t know and hope they could tell us something about the life of their son. The job never made it any easier and I often found myself wondering whether I could ever truly express grief and offer condolences when the time came for one of my family to die. I could remember my grandfather dying when I was young, but it was years ago and he was very old. Nobody seemed to be surprised and from what I remember he was happy. So I didn’t feel sad. My father cried at the funeral and my mother held his arm tightly.
‘Is there an interpreter?’
Boyd nodded. ‘Same woman as before.’
Maybe she was good at condolences.
We straightened our ties and then took the stairs down to a conference room near the main entrance.
Leon’s father looked worn out and his wife, a large rotund woman with straight grey hair that hadn’t seen a decent hairdresser for years, had hollow eyes and dark shadows on her cheeks. I sat down and said how sorry we were at their sad loss.
Boyd kept up a frantic pace, scribbling down the replies as the interpreter gave the answers to my questions. The part where they talked about his time in the Polish Special Forces didn’t come as a surprise. We got the details of his school and university and army career and his first girlfriend and the time he was sick all over the carpet and the time he drowned the cat in the water butt and his father thrashed him.
Leon’s mother fumbled through a battered bag lying on her lap, found an envelope that she handed to Veronika and spoke a couple of sentences of Polish.
‘Apparently he sent this photograph home,’ Veronika said. ‘He wanted his mother to see that he was making friends.’
She handed me the envelope and inside was a snap of Leon and Michal and Dagmara smiling broadly.
‘Does she know anything about this?’
More translation and then the reply before Veronika shook her head.
‘Did he have a bank account?’ I asked.
I waited for the reply.
‘Yes. Of course. He was a good boy and he send money back home.’
‘Are there bank statements?’ I asked.
Another silence.
‘How much money is in the accounts?’
‘They do not know,’ the interpreter said.
There was a dull ache behind my forehead once we’d finished and I rubbed my temple in the hope it would disappear. Boyd was yawning as we walked back up to the Incident Room.
‘Tired?’ I said.
‘I’m knackered.’ But before he could begin a detailed explanation of his nocturnal activities we reached the Incident Room and saw the friendly face of Alvine Dix.
‘Where have you been?’ She sounded annoyed.
‘Playing ten-pin bowling – where do you think?’
‘All right, no need to get the hump.’
‘Expressing our condolences and yours too, of course. Collectively on behalf of Southern Division of Wales Police Service, to another family from Poland.’
She forced a brief smirk. ‘That’s why I’m here.’
I nodded towards my office and once inside she sat down and pulled two plastic evidence pouches from the folder tucked under her arm.
‘We found these sewn neatly into the hem of one of Leon’s jackets.’
I leant over and examined the contents. The first bag had a SIM card for a mobile phone and the second a key. It must have opened a small door judging by its size and weight but behind it there had to be something very important.
Chapter 16
Boyd sat on the chair in my room, staring at the pile of papers he had dumped on my desk, the product of many hours of research, judging from the studious look on his face. He looked alert and fresh, presumably the result of a night’s uninterrupted sleep.
‘Where did you get the name from?’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Boyd, the name Boyd. Bit unusual. I was just wondering where it came from. Family tradition?’
‘My mother’s American,’ he said, as though that explained everything.
‘Really.’
‘She was a student in Cardiff when she met my father. Then she went back to the States but, you know, true love and all that, and she came back. She works for the council doing management work in the social services department.’
‘Do you go to the States often?’
‘Been a few times when I was younger.’
‘So Boyd’s an American name?’
‘I suppose so, boss. Never thought about it much.’
I couldn’t remember how Jackie and I chose Dean as a name. She probably decided when I was working or in the pub.
‘We can put Lech and Janek in Howick Street on the night Leon was killed,’ I said.
‘Good. Is it—’
‘Enough to arrest him? Don’t think so. Not when he’s connected to Frankie Prince.’
Boyd looked at his papers and the studious look came back.
‘Alvine sent me the list of mobile telephone numbers on Leon’s SIM card. It’s going to take us hundreds of man hours to go through them all,’ Boyd said.
‘And we might have another list from Michal’s mobile.’
I knew that we didn’t have hundreds of man hours to spare: only the grind of police work. I was deciding on how to divide the work between Woods and Lawson when the telephone rang.
‘The lockers at the Royal House Hotel have been ransacked.’ Cornock’s voice had a sharp edge.
‘When…?’
‘This morning. There’s a CSI team on its way. John, are you any nearer to identifying what they’re looking for?’
I drew breath for a moment, not wanting to admit too quickly that I was struggling, that I was waiting to see Dagmara again, hoping that Terry might come up with some intelligence and blocking out the reality that we still had a tongue-less body to find.
* * *
The staff room at the Royal House Hotel was a maze of separate rooms divided into various sections, each with a bench and some lockers screwed to the walls. I stepped over piles of clothes and magazines, discarded in the frantic search of the lockers. Doors had been prised open, their locks bent and buckled.
Alvine stood by the entrance door, arms crossed, a frown creasing her forehead.
‘Do you have any idea what they’re looking for?’
‘No. But it must be important.’
‘Then you’d better find it before they do.’
‘Anything?’
‘This place is a mess. And the realistic prospect is that there will be no DNA or fingerprints or anything else that will be of any interest. But who am I to say? I just do the forensics. It’s for clever people like you to find out what’s happening and why.’
Looking into the locker room I wasn’t feeling very clever and I was getting angrier all the time.
‘Inspector Marco.’
I turned and saw the personnel manager with the list of all the current and past employees.
‘Thanks,’ I said, and left.
Outside the main entrance, I found the battered packet of cigarettes in my jacket pocket and took a long drag as I walked over to my car at the far end of the car park.
I called Boyd and when he answered I gave him a summary before warning him to get Woods and Lawson ready for a long day and a long night.
I finished the cigarette and threw the butt-end into a fancy-looking hedge that lined the car park. My mobile rang as I searched for my car keys.
‘We’ve had a report of another hotel break-in,’ said the voice from Area Control.
Once I’d got the details I sat in the car, thinking that things had to get better. Isn’t there a saying that things will likely get worse before they get better?
And then they did.
* * *
By the end of the day I’d stood in the locker rooms of another five hotels, each with anxious staff, teams of CSIs painstakingly working through each pile of discarded clothes. Exhaustion hit me at about ten, when I stopped talking to Boyd mid-sentence and my body seemed to shut down. In the old days it would have been an excuse for a pint and a whisky. It was gone midnight when I got home; the flat was quiet and my mind was spinning, making sleep impossible. I clicked the television on and found an episode of Top Gear. I listened to Clarkson’s voice in the background while pouring orange juice into a glass and putting a slice of bread into the toaster. I slumped into a chair.
Clarkson looked into the camera, pulled his face into an odd shape – an improvement really – and said something that made the audience laugh. I looked at the screen but my mind couldn’t relax. I chewed on a mouthful of toast.
I woke an hour later; my drink had fallen, leaving a dark stain on the carpet and the toast was lying, butter side down, on the floor. The television was running a programme on the solar system. I staggered off to bed but when the alarm woke me in the morning a flash of panic went through my mind as I couldn’t figure out which day it was.
I looked at the clothes hanging in my wardrobe before glancing through the window and deciding that the heavy clouds and the cooling September days justified a jacket. On the drive into town, I turned up the volume of the CD player and listened to Elvis singing ‘Suspicious Minds’. I was still humming the tune as I walked into the Incident Room.
‘You all right, boss?’ Boyd said.
‘Suspicious Minds.’
Boyd gave a puzzled look.
‘Number one for Elvis in 1969.’
I wandered over to the kitchen and flicked the ageing kettle into life. My mobile beeped just as the kettle boiled. I pressed the handset to my ear with one hand and poured the boiling water into the cup with the other. I pushed the teabag down to the bottom and watched the water change colour.
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