by Cari Hunter
Shaking her head, the girl lowered her arms a fraction, her mouth still covered as she answered. “Just. Little.”
“What’s your name?” Sanne set an open palm on her own chest. “I’m Sanne. Sanne Jensen.”
The girl pulled the jacket tighter, her bare feet scuffing the floor as she tried to cover her legs. Blood was trickling from a split in her bottom lip, and a deep purple bruise had narrowed her left eye to a slit. She was fifteen years old at the most. She winced as she took too deep a breath. “Grieta,” she whispered.
Sanne managed to smile, tempering her urge to go back next door and kick the shit out of Grieta’s assailant.
Grieta reached out to her with a shaking hand. “Police?”
“Yes, police.” Sanne closed her fingers around Grieta’s and activated her comms. “Boss, we’re clear far room, middle floor. I need medical assistance for one female vic, approximately fifteen years of age, conscious and breathing, multiple minor injuries.”
There was a slight delay before Eleanor responded. “Roger that,” she said, her tone too tight to give anything away. “If she’s mobile, bring her to the ground-floor living room. Medics are en route.”
“Wilco.” The formal exchange restored Sanne’s composure. She released her mike and squeezed Grieta’s hand. “How about I find you some clothes?”
Evidently understanding some if not all of the question, Grieta nodded. Still huddled in the corner, she watched Sanne move to the door.
“Fourteen,” she said, using her palm to mimic Sanne’s earlier gesture. “Not fifteen, fourteen.”
*
Sanne’s feet felt weird against the clammy leather of her boots. Unable to find any shoes for Grieta, she’d offered her own socks, sliding them onto icy toes as Grieta fumbled with cardigan buttons. In the time it had taken Grieta to dress, the raid seemed to have run its course. Floorboards were still creaking, but the traffic over the comms had subsided, and the only other noise reaching the bathroom was the sound of a woman weeping.
“Ready?” Sanne asked.
“Yes,” Grieta said. She had kept hold of Sanne’s jacket, pulling it over her cardigan and zipping it all the way up. It obviously hurt her to move; she bit her swollen lip as she crawled from beneath the sink and allowed Sanne to help her stand. She shrank back when Sanne opened the door.
“He’s not here, Grieta. He’s gone.” Sanne stepped aside to reveal the empty room. She watched Grieta’s eyes flicker from the bed to the table and finally to the corridor.
“I can go?” Disbelief underscored Grieta’s question, as if she still expected to have the rug pulled from under her. She began to cry when Sanne nodded, big rolling tears that she fisted away until Sanne gave her a wad of toilet paper. Blood streaked the tissue as she blew her nose.
“It’s all right,” Sanne said. “Come with me.”
The corridor and stairs were deserted, the doors busted on each room they passed, letting loose a foetid smell of sex and inadequate plumbing. Walking stiffly by Sanne’s side, Grieta bowed her head and stared at the floor. If Sanne’s jacket had come with a hood, she would undoubtedly have raised it. Eleanor met them at the foot of the stairs, her hair falling from its tie, and her coat askew.
“She’s our fifth,” she said to Sanne in an undertone as she guided them to the living room. “The eldest is twenty-two. Paramedics are waiting, and the TAU are shipping out with the arrests.”
“Bashir?” Sanne asked.
“He went in the first van. There were seven arrests in total, and a mass of paperwork and computer files confiscated.” Eleanor’s reply lacked inflection, a coping mechanism Sanne could relate to. Later, Eleanor might show satisfaction or relief or even sorrow, but not while the job remained unfinished. She stopped at a frosted glass door with white paint flecking from its frame. The hallway had widened, and two ugly chenille sofas sat either side of an irony-free welcome mat. Floorboards were visible through holes in the carpet, but Sanne supposed no one visited the property for its ambience.
A paramedic answered Eleanor’s knock, and Grieta’s face brightened when she glanced into the room. A young woman cried out, meeting Grieta halfway and wrapping her in an ambulance blanket.
“She was asking for her sister,” the paramedic said. “I think she might’ve found her.”
Not wanting to embarrass herself, Sanne ignored the lump in her throat and turned away from the reunion. She started to shiver as the draught whistling down the hall dried the sweat on her shirt. “What now, boss?”
“Do you want a medic to clean your face?” Eleanor asked.
“Huh?” Sanne touched her cheek, finding three crusted lines of blood that stung when she pressed them. “No, they’re just scratches,” she said, unsure how they had occurred.
“Right, then,” Eleanor said, apparently deciding not to pull rank. “SOCO are taking the bedrooms, GMP are taking the arrests, and the vics are going to St. Mary’s in Manchester.”
Sanne folded her arms, not appreciating being thrown out of the loop. “And EDSOP?”
“DI Parry has given us first crack at the office. Nelson and Mike are in there trying to sort whatever may have relevance to our case, with a view to leaving the rest for Manchester’s MST or SOET.”
“Do they need a hand?” She craved the distraction of a mindless task, and sifting through a pile of paperwork sounded ideal.
Eleanor seemed to have no difficulty reading between the lines. “I think they’d appreciate that.”
*
No one had bothered to proofread the brochure. Its grammar and spelling left much to be desired, and the ink had faded and smudged in places. The photographs were held in plastic sleeves, easy to switch or update. It was a job done on the cheap: why waste money on niceties if you were the only supplier able to meet the demands of your particular niche customer?
If Sanne tilted the images a certain way, her light caught occasional fingerprints, sometimes one on each edge of a photograph as if someone had taken it out to examine it in detail. These she set apart for SOCO. Using the names pencilled on the backs, she crosschecked the rest against an inventory found on the brothel’s computer, categorising them by country of origin and then subcategorising by age: Bulgaria 22, 23; Latvia 14, 18, 21; Pakistan 16, 20, 22; Poland 17, 21; Romania 16, 17, 18. Multiple images of the five young women currently undergoing treatment at St. Mary’s specialist sexual assault unit occupied pride of place in the most recent brochure. Preliminary statements obtained at the hospital by a SOET officer had confirmed that none of those women had ever been held in the barn at Nab Hey.
Sanne withdrew the final picture of a blank-faced Pakistani girl and held it beneath her desk lamp. She looked without seeing, her focus on the periphery and not on the explicit central pose. On the other side of the desk, Nelson swore and banged something down, his choice of epithet so out of character that Sanne stopped what she was doing, her light and the photo frozen inches apart.
“Nelson?”
“What?” he snapped, throwing all his emphasis on the “t.” His fingers were so clenched that she wondered whether his nails had drawn blood.
“Hey,” she said softly. “If you want me to take that one instead, pass it over here.” She dreaded to think what he’d found, but he obviously wasn’t coping with it. That he pushed it between their computers without arguing set even more alarm bells ringing.
“Sorry, San. I didn’t mean to bite your head off.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I just want to go home and see my girls.”
“So go,” she said. “I won’t be long either, and I think we’re the last ones standing, apart from the boss. I can get these off to SOCO or finish scanning them into the case file.”
He deliberated for a moment but then logged off and picked up his bag. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said, pausing at her desk and kissing the top of her head. “Thank you.”
“Give my love to Abeni and the terrible twosome,” she said. “Drive safe.”
> “You too.”
She listened to him leave, waiting out the tread of his boots across the carpet and the rattle of his locker. When the lift pinged and began its descent, she switched off her lamp and retrieved the stapled A4 sheets from the side of her monitor. The itemised tariff ran to two pages, price in the right-hand column, description of specialities in the left. It was clear that the proprietors of Cheviot Road prided themselves on their “No Boundaries” ethos; if the client could pay, then his requests—however extreme—would be fulfilled.
She reached the midpoint of the second page before she had to stop reading. The water she gulped down was lukewarm and made her feel even worse, her fingers sliding around in her sweaty gloves and threatening to lose their grip on the glass. A piece of chewing gum fished from the depths of her pocket settled her nausea, however, allowing her to scan in the last of the photographs and enter the tariff into the evidence log.
Eleanor’s office stood in darkness as Sanne carried the box of paperwork down to Evidence. Having already collected her bag and slung on a spare sweater in lieu of her coat, she didn’t return to the fourth floor. Her Landie started on the third attempt, coughing its disgust at the late hour, but she forced herself to turn toward Sheffield instead of home. The roads were quiet, the corridors of the hospital even more so, and the blare of the ITU security buzzer felt like a drill bit punching into the headache that was building over her left temple.
She walked to her dad’s room without drawing the attention of the doctor at the main desk, and ducked inside, glad to be out of sight. No one was sitting vigil by her dad’s bed. Two empty chairs were positioned in expectation of visitors, and a handmade “Get Well Soon, Granddad” card suggested Keeley had made an effort of sorts, but those were the only signs that anyone knew he was here. Sanne perched on the farther chair and tried to establish whether anything had changed. Although the blood transfusion was missing, the drips and feeds seemed the same, and the vent was continuing to give fourteen breaths a minute. A new growth of beard marked the days since his admission, and the smell of sanitising alcohol had replaced that of stale cider. Even bed-bathed and clothed in a hospital gown, the cleanest she’d seen him in years, her dad still stank of alcohol.
“Hello there. Are you John’s daughter?”
Sanne’s head flew up, and a check of the clock told her she’d dozed off for ten of the thirty minutes she’d allotted for her visit. Seeing her confusion, the nurse dropped a bag of saline on the storage unit and squeezed her shoulder in misplaced understanding.
“You must be exhausted, love. It’s been a stressful few days, hasn’t it?”
“Yes, it has,” Sanne said, not lying, just not on the same page as the nurse.
“But hopefully we’ve turned a corner now.” The nurse patted Sanne’s dad on the forearm.
“What corner?” Sanne leaned forward, scrutinising the monitors again, searching for clues but seeing nothing she could make sense of. Her throat closed as if to prevent her next question. “Is he getting better?”
“Well, he’s got a long way to go, but the doctor was really pleased with his last bloods and might try lifting the sedation tomorrow morning.”
“Lifting the sedation,” Sanne repeated, too numb to give the phrase meaning.
“Yes, love.” The nurse pulled a sympathetic face, clearly pegging Sanne as an imbecile. “If everything goes to plan, we’ll be able to wake your dad up.”
*
The arc of headlights across the living room wall sent Meg into the hallway. She stood at the bottom of the stairs, giving Sanne a chance to let herself in, but Sanne fell back on old habits and knocked.
“Jesus Christ,” Meg hissed as she opened the door. “Get in here.”
The phone call should have been warning enough. Sanne hadn’t said much, merely asking where Meg was and whether it would be okay to call round so late. She’d sounded hollowed out, as if every aspect of her personality had been beaten into submission. Meg hadn’t been prepared for her to look that way as well, though, and she could only begin to guess what might have caused it.
“Are you hurt?” She touched Sanne’s cheek, avoiding three fresh gouges and checking for fever. Although Sanne never had much colour in winter, she was ghostly even by her standards.
“No, I’m okay.” Sanne laid her hand on top of Meg’s. “I’m knackered, that’s all.”
“Mm-hm.” Meg walked her into the living room and sat her in front of the fire. “What happened to your coat?”
Sanne shook her head, sending a tear flying onto the upholstery. Her eyes were swollen and bloodshot, but she didn’t seem aware that she was crying. “I don’t think you want to know.”
“San.” Meg didn’t continue until Sanne looked at her. “If it’ll help, tell me.” Reluctant to pressure her into a decision, she switched her focus to the fire, poking a log into place as Sanne deliberated. They had always confided in each other, using each other as sounding boards or simply as an ear to rant into, but perhaps that had been helped by the distance of a non-relationship; perhaps Sanne would now start worrying about offending her sensibilities. Meg returned the poker to its spot and was about to reassure Sanne that she really didn’t have many sensibilities, when Sanne began to speak.
“We raided a suspected brothel in Manchester.” She wiped her face and righted her posture. “We arrested a bloke in one of the rooms, and I gave my coat to the fourteen-year-old Latvian girl he’d just raped and beaten. He’d had to pay extra to leave marks on her—almost five hundred pounds—because that’d put her out of commission until she healed. He was a fucking accountant, Meg, and he picked this child from a catalogue as if he was shopping in Argos.”
“Did he do this, too?” Meg’s finger fell just shy of the scratches.
“Yes, but I kicked him in the nuts, so he came off worse.”
They smiled at the same time, and Sanne closed her eyes as Meg stroked her cheek.
“He had children of his own, still in school,” she said. “What’s their life going to be like now?”
“Awful,” Meg said, “for a while at least, but they’ll get support and counselling, and their dad won’t be able to hurt them or anyone else.”
“That’s true. That’s good.” Sanne’s head bobbed in agreement.
Assuming that covered the worst of it, Meg was about to offer supper when Sanne threw a final spanner in the works.
“I went to see my dad tonight,” she said. Exhaustion deadened her voice, but she persevered. “The nurse told me that he’s getting better. That they want to wake him up.”
Meg’s stomach did a sick little lurch. The longer John had remained in the ITU, the more confident she had become that something—infection, a rebleed, multi-organ failure—would finish him off. She wondered briefly whether Sanne’s tenacity came from him, but she’d be damned if she’d give him the credit.
“Try not to worry, love,” she said. “You’ve got enough on your plate as it is.”
“I’m not worried, not really. Whatever happens, happens.”
Meg left the lie unchallenged and held out her hand. “Come on. Shower and bed for you, unless you want something to eat first.”
“I’m not hungry.” Sanne made the admission like a first-time criminal confronted by a jury of disappointed family members, and then yawned so widely that Meg heard her jaw crack. “I promise I’ll have breakfast. Eggs or porridge or something filling.”
“Eggy bread?” Meg suggested as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “Best of both worlds.”
“Fabulous. And you know how to cook that.”
“Oh, I’m getting up with you, am I?”
“I thought you might.” Sanne tripped on the bathroom threshold and stumbled to the toilet seat. “Six hours’ sleep is more than enough. It said so on the telly.”
“In that case, it’s a date.”
Six hours would have been plenty, but Sanne got up after just three, throwing the covers back and walking out of the bed
room. Woken by the cold, Meg heard her bypass the bathroom and go downstairs.
“Bloody hell, San.” Too befuddled to make sense of anything, she yanked on the quilt and then sat bolt upright. “Shit.” She threw on a sweater and slippers, straining for a clue as to Sanne’s whereabouts. She hadn’t heard either of the main doors unlock, so she tried the living room first, checking each corner before dragging the throw rug from the sofa and taking it into the kitchen.
“San?” She left the light off, grateful for the full moon that showed her Sanne sitting on the floor behind the table. “Thank you for not making me chase you outside,” she whispered, wrapping Sanne in the rug and sacrificing her own slippers to Sanne’s bare feet.
She had only seen Sanne sleepwalk once before, back in summer when her stress levels had been similarly high and she’d ended up at the bottom of the garden. That night it had been warm enough for Meg to take the time to coax Sanne inside, but the cold tiles weren’t doing either of them any favours, and the chatter of Sanne’s teeth forced Meg to lug her up. Pliable as a doll, Sanne followed Meg to the bedroom, her face expressionless as she lay down. Instinct seemed to kick in then; her eyes drifted shut and she nestled against Meg. Meg put an arm around her, ready to react should she decide to wander again, and tried not to think about the father of two who had used a brothel where he could rent children from catalogues.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“You weren’t kidding about the coffee, were you?” Eleanor took another sip from the polystyrene cup, reluctant to admit defeat.
Russ toasted her courage with his own brew. “Horrible, isn’t it? I’ve seen it make grown men weep.”
“What about the women?”
“They’re sensible and stick with tea.” He turned up the volume on a small monitor as its screen flickered into life. “We must be through the preliminaries, then.”
She pushed her coffee downwind and opened her notepad in its place. She’d never been inside the interview room at Longsight Police Station, but even on a dodgy live feed it bore a depressing resemblance to EDSOP’s. A warning light informed Parvez Bashir that his interview was being monitored remotely, and all that separated him from the two MST detectives was a plain metal table with its feet bolted to the floor.
