A small crowd had gathered and I joined them. Two men came out of the fire exit at the side of the flank wall, one of them talking and tapping a leather folio while the other nodded. The latter took off the polythene bootees he had on over his shoes and dropped them to the ground. The man with the folio went back inside, while the other marched over to one of the cars and was driven away.
I scanned the crowd for someone who might speak English and spotted a man in his sixties, smartly dressed. I moved next to him.
‘Do you know what happened here?’
He turned to look at me, his face grave. ‘They came to close it down. But anyway it was closed. There were two girls inside, dead.’
He saw the shock on my face.
‘It is what to expect. This is a bad place.’
‘Do you know who they were? How old they were?’
‘How old? No.’
He moved away. The younger girls would be their prized assets, I told myself quickly. Why harm them? But Katarina was trouble, a liability – an English soldier had come looking for her and already he’d killed two of their number and injured two more. If the troll and his men were cutting their losses, cleaning up. . .
I could not leave here without knowing, could not face Anna without knowing. I circled the building, looking for a way in. I passed a rubbish bin and delved around inside, came up with a newspaper and a few bits of crumpled A4 paper. I smoothed them out, laid them over the newspaper and walked on.
The area behind the building was just a few square yards of unlit dirt bordered by a ten-foot-high wall, with a small block of flats beyond. I jogged round to the flats and down a side-alley to a backyard with a caretaker’s hut and a row of rubbish bins. I pushed one of them against the wall and climbed up. No one was guarding the rear of the building and the uniforms at the front had their backs to me. I swung over the wall and sauntered to the corner by the open fire exit. I straightened my clothes – my black rain jacket was just what the detectives had been wearing – and watched until I was sure no one was about to enter the building, then walked along the side wall, inspecting my scraps of paper and ticking off imaginary items with one finger. Reaching the fire exit, I put on the polythene bootees the detective had discarded and stepped through the door.
A man was walking towards me. A puzzled look came over his face. I reached down to adjust a bootee, then turned sideways to let him pass, readying myself to run. But he didn’t challenge me and I watched him turn out of sight beyond the fire exit.
I was in the narrow corridor along which I had followed the bony-chested woman twelve days ago. A plane of bright, blue-white light lay over the wall ahead. Voices. They were in the waiting area with the scented candles and towel cupboard. The voices got louder. I stepped into a room to my right. It was dark, but I made out the shape of the bed and the bedside table and the tin tray of condoms gleaming in the light from the corridor. I hid behind the door until the voices had passed. There was a camera above my head and I noticed that the cabling turned down and followed the corner before passing through a rough hole a few inches above the floor.
I stepped back into the corridor and found a low door with no handle, a few inches ajar. I pushed it open and ducked into a tiny room, barely four feet across, with a pair of monitors and a keyboard set on a table. I tapped the keyboard and the screens lit up. One of them showed a desktop strewn with icons representing the security cameras in the Vegas Lounge; the other, an empty room. The image shivered eerily in its frame. I went through the icons one by one – a parade of squalid grey rooms. I had five cameras still to check. . . I clicked the next and the screen filled with brilliant white light and swooping shadows, figures moving across the cold gaze of an arc lamp set on a tripod by the door. Behind them, glimpses of the bodies on the bed. Pudgy, white, awkwardly arranged, like a pair of discarded dolls.
I tapped at the zoom control and the camera jerked towards the nearest corpse. I saw hips, pubic hair, breasts – I had held Katarina against me and I knew this was not her. I panned over to the other. She was smaller, plump, with her knees drawn up so I couldn’t easily make her out. . . Then I saw her hair – a halo of pale yellow against the stark white of the sheet. Katarina was dark. It was not Katarina. I did not have to squint at her face to be sure, because I knew who it was: the sleepy-eyed girl from Syrna Street.
I killed the screen. I was aching with rage. A grinding, bone-shuddering kind of rage that made the walls of the tiny room vibrate. I kicked open the door and stepped into the corridor. The lights flickered as if they were about to fail. Beyond the fire exit, the world appeared as a painted screen patrolled by painted shapes from a dimension I did not inhabit but only saw from afar and pitied for the frail illusions of goodness and reason that sustained it. Animated uniforms, trees upset, dead neon. The little crowd of starers watched me, their faces wary and sad. I ducked under the tape and walked away. No one tried to stop me.
I took a bus back into the centre of town. The dark streets filed past – hopeless places, leading nowhere. The house on Syrna Street had been abandoned, the Vegas Lounge shut down. How long did we have? If you mean to kill to cover your traces, it’s the last thing you do before you go. Not days, hours. And my only two leads cold as lumps of clay in a winter field.
34
I got back to Eleni’s apartment just after eight and found them talking in the sitting room. Father Daniel was perched on the edge of the chair by the telephone, leaning stiffly away from his bruised innards. They were drinking brandy and soda. Eleni offered me a glass but I felt too agitated to drink. They switched to English. The priest was talking about Katarina. The woman who’d brought her in wouldn’t say where she’d found her, he told us, and refused to give her own name. It wasn’t uncommon for children to turn up like this.
‘Kosovo is falling apart,’ said Eleni. ‘Any day, you can be thrown out of your home by men who are drunk with how powerful they are. It makes them sick, so sick they think it is OK to kill people. And always it’s the children who suffer most, the innocent ones.’ She looked sorrowfully at Anna – and then immediately seemed to regret it and forced a smile of encouragement onto her face instead.
‘But that’s not what happened to Katya,’ Anna said. ‘She must have told you I was still alive?’
‘It’s the first thing they say when they arrive, always,’ said Father Daniel. ‘Their mothers and fathers are waiting for them and can they please go home? It breaks your heart to hear it, truly it does. But I was never able to track down any of their families. Not one.’
‘But I am sure you believed Katarina,’ said Eleni. ‘She is old enough, and a very sensible girl.’
‘So I did,’ he said. ‘I asked if I could telephone you, but she didn’t know your number – it was on her cellphone, which she had lost. You do not have a landline at your apartment, I think?’
‘We just used cellphones,’ said Anna unhappily.
‘She told me you worked at the university,’ said Father Daniel. ‘I called them and asked for a Mrs Corochai, but there was no one by that name.’
‘At the university, she uses her maiden name,’ said Eleni, her voice barely more than a whisper. ‘Galica. But Katya must have known—’
‘We never talked about it,’ said Anna. ‘I wanted her to be proud of being half Roma. I couldn’t keep the name myself, I was too angry with Franz. Anyway, I’d published a few articles under my maiden name. But I didn’t want Katya to wonder why she had a different name from me, so I just. . . I never. . .’ She covered her face with her hands.
‘I’m afraid I just assumed your name was Mrs Corochai,’ said Father Daniel. ‘I didn’t ask Katarina, and I didn’t like to tell her I couldn’t get hold of you. I promised I would write to you at the university, and that was a comfort to her. I notified the police in Pristina, but I heard nothing. That was to be expected – you have to leave a message and they never call back. They used to send an acknowledgement if you wrote to them, but they don’t even do th
at now. There must be so many lost children. . . Of course, I wrote to your home address, which Katarina gave me. But there was no answer. I suppose it never arrived?’
‘The post does not work any more,’ said Eleni. ‘Not for us Kosovars. It can take weeks for letters to get through. Anna has been in Paris, then she came straight here – as I suggested.’
‘Oh, dear Lord, I am sorry. It was a pattern I had become so familiar with, you see – the requests for help or information, the long wait, then disappointment, always disappointment. It was very hard on the poor things. It seemed cruel to allow hopes to linger.’
He shifted gingerly in his chair. Anna had not taken her hands from her face and the conversation was too painful to continue.
Eventually, Eleni turned to me and said: ‘You found nothing at Syrna Street? Nothing at all?’
I glanced at Father Daniel, hoping he might answer, but he wouldn’t meet my eye.
‘We didn’t have much time. I’ll go back and search it properly.’
‘I thought you would do that this afternoon?’
‘No. I. . . I just walked around a bit. To clear my head.’
‘To clear your head. How pleasant for you.’
I fumbled for a way of changing the subject and came up with the question I’d been meaning to ask Father Daniel: ‘You say you had UNHCR paperwork for children being transferred to Skopje. Did you have a set of documents for Katarina?’
‘He can’t have done,’ Eleni interrupted. ‘We were there today and they have no record of her, none at all.’
‘But I did,’ said Father Daniel. ‘The UNHCR provided transit papers for the children before they left. There was one for Katarina – she was due to go to Skopje anyway, a few days after she ran away, along with five other girls. Everything was stamped and signed in the usual way. I had no way of knowing—’
‘Who signed them?’
‘The same person as always – a case officer called Bryan Harley.’
Anna pulled her hands away from her face. ‘Harley? That was the man I told you about, Eleni. An English spy came to Rambouillet to talk to Colonel Adjani. They’d detained a UNHCR officer and had him locked up at his apartment – his name was Bryan Harley, I’m sure of it.’
‘Bryan Harley has been locked up?’ said Father Daniel, his face aghast. ‘It can’t be true. . . He dealt with all the children we sent to Skopje.’
‘The papers he gave to Father Daniel were false!’ said Eleni.
‘We don’t know that,’ I said quickly, though in truth I think we did. ‘Did they say why Harley was arrested?’
Anna shook her head.
‘Anna, I’m so terribly sorry,’ said Father Daniel, his head bowed and his voice no more than a whisper.
Anna turned away and we lapsed into silence again. Eleni poured out more brandy and this time I asked for a glass. A UNHCR case officer was providing fake documentation for children being trafficked – the word could not any longer be dodged – from Father Daniel’s refuge in Kosovo to 77 Syrna Street. I thought of the semi-circles of pink, greedy faces in the dim light of the Vegas Lounge and wondered if Bryan Harley had been one of them.
‘Why was Colonel Adjani being told about this?’ I asked, breaking the long silence.
‘He has a brother called Haclan,’ said Anna tonelessly, ‘a gangster who is also close to the KLA. The English spy told Colonel Adjani that the International Police Task Force were about to arrest Haclan. He said Haclan was discrediting the Kosovar cause and must shut down his operation and get out of Skopje.’
Haclan Adjani. The troll from Syrna Street had a name.
‘This English spy warned Haclan off?’ I asked. ‘So he could escape arrest? He actually did that?’
‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘I also heard that they tried to ban Colonel Adjani from attending the conference.’
She looked round at each of us in turn and the expression of shocked nobility on her face was deeply affecting. ‘This is what happened to Katya, isn’t it? They’re a gang of child traffickers. She was. . . I sat beside Colonel Adjani day after day at Rambouillet. I sat beside him and I didn’t know. . . All along his brother had my Katya. I sat beside him and. . . There was no way to connect them. It seemed like a different world. But it was the same world, just different ends of it.’
There was nothing more to say. The whole tragic and capricious narrative had now been set out (aside from some elements I still felt too ashamed to supply). Why dwell on the pitiless details? None of this would bring us closer to finding Katarina.
Eleni went off to cook supper – she had managed to find lake trout in the market, a great treat, she said, without any trace of conviction. Father Daniel asked if he might go to the bedroom to lie down.
‘Nothing’s really changed, Anna,’ I said, when we were alone. ‘We mustn’t give up.’
She rounded on me. ‘Give up? Why would I give up? You give up. You say you need to find Katarina to prove your innocence, but I don’t believe you. What are you even doing here? Eleni says you are a liar, and she’s right.’
I was ready for this – I’d been ready ever since I’d met her at the bus station – but still it was difficult to take. She stared at me and in her gaze I read the particular character of her suffering. She’d lost everything. She blamed herself. She felt useless, bewildered. Hope was draining away, and every revelation I dredged up took her closer to the point when hope would run out. And beyond hope? The unimaginable, the inescapable betrayal: reset the clock and start life without Katarina.
‘There are some things I can’t tell you. Things that make no difference.’
She looked at me, proud and bleak, and the anger left her eyes as quickly as it had possessed them.
‘Do you think I will judge you, James? Do you think I have any choice about whether to trust you?’
‘You can trust me, Anna. I swear you can.’
She sighed and leaned back in the sofa.
Eleni passed through and smoked a cigarette on the balcony. ‘Five minutes, then we can eat,’ she said on her way back. ‘I’ll tell Father Daniel.’
‘We have two clues we didn’t have before,’ I said to Anna. ‘I’ll find Bryan Harley first, then Haclan.’
‘Will you, James? I don’t think so. You are just one man.’
I asked her to describe the English agent who had come to Rambouillet to interview Colonel Adjani, and when she did so, I had a pretty good idea who he was.
‘Did he fiddle with a signet ring on his left hand?’
‘Yes. Do you know him?’
‘His name is Clive Silk – he’s an officer in British intelligence.’
‘Will he help us?’
‘I don’t think so. He’s the one who had me arrested.’
Clive Silk had seen the evidence against Bryan Harley, I realised, and probably interrogated him, too. That was how he’d made the connection between the refuge and Syrna Street. When I’d escaped from the safe house in Norfolk, it was no more than a simple precaution to alert the Order of St Hugh.
‘Come and eat the fish,’ said Eleni at the door.
Father Daniel was already seated at the little table in the kitchen, but when Eleni put a plate in front of him, the whole lake trout laid neatly across the centre and small piles of buttered carrots and potatoes either side, he stood up without speaking and walked slowly to the bathroom. A few seconds later, we heard him being sick.
‘The poor man is unwell,’ said Eleni, trying in vain not to look offended.
Anna went to see if he was OK and came back a few minutes later, having helped him return to bed. I was reminded of the poem I’d found at the front of his Book of Prayer. Torn scales, pink slime, a thousand drowning eyes. We ate in a silence broken only by nervous conversational gambits from Eleni that flapped into desultory inconsequence like bits of old newspaper blown along a pavement. The weather was unusually wet. Skopje was a much more interesting city than it might first appear, did I not think? The fish tasted more of mud t
han fish.
After clearing away, we went back to the sitting room and Anna turned on the TV. The ten o’clock news came on and fate lashed out again. An English UNHCR official by the name of Bryan Harley had been found hanged in his Skopje apartment.
35
I lay on the floor in the bedroom, with Father Daniel’s groans wallowing round the walls. It did not seem sensible to move him, so Anna and Eleni had decamped to the sitting room. When it became obvious that neither of us were asleep, I said: ‘You took a turn for the worse earlier – was it the fish?’
Peering at him through the gloom, I could just make out his mouth moving as if in speech. But he said nothing.
‘I thought maybe you were allergic?’
‘I don’t. . . no, not allergic. I just. . .’
‘Your father was a trawlerman in Lowestoft, right?’
‘How did you know that?’ he said, suddenly strident.
‘I looked it up in a newspaper archive.’
‘It’s a shock to find you’ve been prying into my private life. I don’t know by what right—’
‘I was trying to find out about Katarina, that’s all. I didn’t have much to go on.’
He sat up slowly and set his knee to jiggling up and down on the floor. The tension hummed off him like an electric charge.
‘Then you know about my father.’
‘Yes. It must have been traumatic for you.’
‘And for Ma. But my father was a brutal man. He tore us apart.’
‘The papers said neither of you were found. How did you end up with the Order of St Hugh?’
‘She left me there before she fled the country. The Order was based in Lowestoft at the time.’
‘So Father Wulfstan looked after you from the age of fourteen?’
‘How do you know that name?’
‘I dropped by their house in Northampton while I was on the run. Father Wulfstan gave me some of your clothes to wear, then called the police.’
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 23
