by Sarah Flint
Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a lighter and two candles taken from her cake: one for each of them.
‘You’d have been thirty on your next birthday, Jamie,’ she whispered, switching off the torch and lighting the candles, before sitting down and placing the two tiny glowing flames in the soil at the base of his grave. ‘Fancy that! We’ll celebrate that properly in a few months’ time.’
Casper turned a circle before sitting down next to her, the flickering of the candles dancing in his eyes. They sat watching on until the candles were finally extinguished by an icy breath of wind and the clearing was plunged into darkness. The image of the tiny baby girl shimmered into Charlie’s mind, her life snuffed out before it started.
‘At least we had some time together, Jamie.’ She stood up as her mobile phone vibrated in her pocket. Angie’s name flashed on and off the screen. She pressed the loudspeaker, listening as the line clicked in.
‘Sorry to bother you at this time of night, mate, but I’ve got the address you were after. The place is being run by a Russian geezer, called Dimitri, who likes his girls young. Dirty bastard. Brings them in from across the Channel or recruits from nearby. You got a pen and I’ll give you the venue?’
Charlie pressed the notebook icon on her phone and jotted down the address as Angie gave it. There was still nothing as yet to say it was linked to the baby’s body, but it was a good enough lead. If they went in, they could compare DNA from any girl found in the brothel with the blood sample on the baby’s head. It would be easy to confirm or eliminate the venue.
‘I’ve got the Yard to break out this intel’ and had them running some more checks on the location. There’re a few other bits and pieces coming up. Should be enough for you to get a warrant, early doors.’ She stopped talking and Charlie could hear a plaintive cry coming through the speaker. ‘Fuck it. Think I’ve woken me boy up now, talking too loud. Gotta go, mate, it’ll be carnage here otherwise. I’ll try and get you more as I hear it.’
The line clicked off before Charlie could call out her thanks, but she couldn’t help smiling. Angie was one of a kind, and her partnership with Von in the DSU always yielded results. What Von said in twenty words, Angie said in two and then cut you off before you could reply.
She keyed in Hunter’s number and relayed the info’. If they were quick they could get a warrant application typed up, signed by the Magistrates and ready for action by nine the next morning. Tomorrow they would be entering the brothel at the start of their day. Hopefully, they’d catch the Russian guy, Dimitri, bagging up the takings at the end of his.
Chapter 6
Tatjana was dead.
Dimitri swore under his breath. The little bitch had fucked everything up. He stared down at the girl’s body, still now, her skin perfectly white except for the dirty red patches of infection that stained her arms and legs. The bruise on her midriff was a dark purple, the shape of his boot accentuated in the colour of the contusion.
The younger girl had gone now. He had to tread carefully with her. She was not yet fully on board. She still needed more persuasion; a little more cash and attention. Dimitri had dropped her back to the children’s home in Norbury promising to take Tatjana to hospital on his return… but it had been too late. By the time he had climbed the stairs to the top room, she was lifeless. All that remained was the smell of infection; the odours left by her lack of cleanliness, the stench of sickness.
That issue would be easily removed though. It was no worse than the smell of sex. A few deodorisers, some scented candles, fresh linen, nothing that he couldn’t handle.
Tatjana would be more difficult. Now he had to get rid of her too, just as he’d disposed of her troublesome unborn brat, but unlike the baby, she couldn’t be hidden in a bag and tossed away with the rubbish. Her disposal would take more planning. He glanced down the stairs at the minder he’d employed to guard his girls. Albertas would provide cover. No one dared argue with him. At the end of each night, Albertas had his pick of the girls, and while he was receiving his just rewards, those not chosen were locked away.
Tonight, nothing would change. The girls would be shut in their rooms and no one would see him carry Tatjana’s dead body away. If any of them asked where she was, well, he would just tell them he’d taken her to the hospital… and if she never returned, so what? They’d just have to assume he’d replaced her with a healthier successor. They would never know any different because they were never allowed out.
But they’d all have to move on. He couldn’t risk her being found and somehow traced back to the address. He swore again. How dare the bitch spoil all his plans!
Grabbing her body roughly, he pulled her down on to the rug, wrapping her round and round within the thick fur. He had some old plastic sheeting in the back of his van. By the time he was finished no one would find her, but even if they did, they would never find him.
He pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, slipping one between his lips and drawing hard as the lighter gave it heat. Blowing the smoke out into the foetid air, he grinned. No one actually knew his true identity anyway.
*
The sound of Albertas’ grunts stirred Dimitri into action. Albertas had chosen Hanna, the older, slimmer female who had questioned his treatment of Tatjana earlier. Albertas often chose her. She was the most striking and also the most experienced; two traits that paid well. She knew what to do and she did it expertly. More to the point, she played the games that Albertas liked to play. It was a trade-off. She fucked him as he desired and he gave her the best protection. Albertas took no shit. If the client didn’t step straight into line, he’d leave with a bloody nose, or worse and never return.
The volume of his minder’s groans was reaching a climax. It was time to get going. Muffled noises resonated from the other rooms, the sound of music being played, a DVD switched on, the distinct Romanian dialect of one of his newer arrivals, bunked up with one of the others. None had smartphones. None had contact with the outside world. They heard only what their customers told them, in a language that they didn’t fully understand. It wouldn’t do for any of his girls to get ideas. They needed to be kept in line.
They understood though. He knew their families.
Hoisting Tatjana up on to his shoulder, he staggered momentarily at the door. Although she was only slight, her body still weighed heavily wrapped in the rug. The stairs were narrow and by the time he’d reached the bottom, Dimitri was wet with sweat. He navigated his way through the kitchen and opened the back door, looking out to where he’d reversed his van earlier, as close as was possible to the rear exit prepared and ready. The doors were open, a tarpaulin spread out across its floor, the rope to bind it looped to one side. All around him was quiet. The area was residential and nothing much stirred between the hours of midnight and five, even less so during the winter months when curtains were drawn and windows kept tightly shut. He glanced around before lifting Tatjana’s body down off his shoulders and sliding it into the base of the van.
The clouds were low, blotting out any remaining light from the last quarter of the waning crescent moon. It wouldn’t be full again until early January. For a second, he stared skywards. He liked the moon; it reminded him of Russia, his home country, where the miles and miles of open plains and woodland allowed each waxing or waning phase of the moon to be seen in unobstructed splendour.
But this wasn’t Russia. It was London and he had a job to do.
Quietly, he locked the kitchen door behind him, before closing the rear of the van. The last preparations before dumping the body would be made nearer the scene, away from any prying eyes. A small, derelict railway outhouse on the track nearby was perfect. Inaccessible, other than through a broken fence and an arduous walk along the railway line – only the most hardened graffiti artist ever ventured there. He had scoped it out himself because he liked to find places to hide things. People, drugs, documents, firearms… sometimes they needed to be kept far away from even the remotest po
ssibility of discovery. Sometimes things had to disappear altogether.
He turned the ignition and held his breath as the diesel engine chugged into life. Hopefully nobody would be disturbed by the noise. He had further business to attend to when he returned.
Pressing the accelerator carefully, he eased the van out along the rear access road and smiled grimly to himself. Nobody would find Tatjana’s body where he was heading, or at least not for a while.
Chapter 7
Redz pressed herself further back against the interior of the car door and prayed to the God she’d known as a child, seeking to distance herself from The Punter’s relentless fists. But her God wasn’t listening… and Razor, her pimp, was nowhere to be seen. Only The Punter could hear her pleas and he was revelling in every second of his assault. Another blow came into her stomach, forcing its contents up into her throat. Redz swallowed hard, feeling her rib cage creak under the pressure as he unleashed another punch, slightly higher this time, his mouth turned up in an ugly grin as he snarled aloud with pleasure.
She was trapped; her hair, the feature from which her street name derived, spread thickly against the glass of the window. Long, thick and a deep shade of glossy auburn, her ‘crowning glory’, so beloved by her father in her childhood, was now scraped back in a messy ponytail, held in place with a filthy elastic band. Her heart-shaped face appeared far older than her nineteen years, her skin displaying the sores, deep furrows and livid scars synonymous with a life shackled to hard drugs and the violence of prostitution.
Another blow came in, this time lower, forcing her guts to contract. Her breath bulleted up through her windpipe and out in a high-pitched guttural shriek. She sucked in another lungful of air, before spitting it out in angry terror, inwardly furious for allowing herself to be drawn into this situation. The sight of ‘The Punter in the long black leather coat’, perfectly described by her mates, should have prevented her mistake, but the lure of money for crack cocaine had taken precedence over her safety, drowning out the warning bells in her head.
She screamed again, this time louder and more urgently.
‘Shut your mouth, you fucking bitch!’ the man snarled. ‘You’re not leaving until I get what I want.’
He grabbed her by her hair, wrenching her head against the back of the seat, and clamped his mouth around her lips, the pressure of his weight blocking her airway.
Redz reacted instinctively, biting down hard on to the fleshy part of his lower lip.
The man also reacted instinctively. A fist exploded into her ribs, the impact crushing her lungs and sending her breath blasting upwards in a burst of energy that forced her teeth apart.
She screamed again, loudly and frenetically, the noise seeming to reverberate around the cramped interior before dissolving into the upholstery.
‘I told you to shut your fucking mouth,’ The Punter growled again, twisting her hair around his hand and jerking her head about. A pause and then she was rocketing forward, her neck powerless to stop the force from behind.
Her face slammed into the dashboard and she felt the resistance in her nose give way. Blood spurted from the open wound and an agonising pain filled her head.
She tried to scream again, but no sound came out.
Everything was in slow motion now. The sound of her bones cracking, the movement of her head catapulted backwards and forwards, her blood spraying into the air in front of her in a fine mist, her neck feeble, her body growing limp.
Then all of a sudden he stopped.
The only noise she could hear was The Punter’s laboured breath and a low gurgling sound coming from between her ears.
Dreamily, she viewed her own body lying motionless against the seat and watched as the man leant towards her. He was stroking her hair; feeling it, examining it, playing with it. The door next to her opened; the interior light came on and the cold air roared in.
Then she was falling. Out on to the hard, icy pavement, her feet still trapped in the car. She heard the engine splutter into life and the car moved forward, freeing her legs from within. Through the haze she vaguely registered the sight and sound of the car, its tyres screeching on the tarmac as it hurriedly turned and departed, clipping a wheelie bin and sending its filthy contents out across the alleyway, before disappearing from her sight towards the road and away. The last thing she remembered before the darkness closed in was her laboured breath, throwing a cloud of wet humidity up into the air.
*
Maria Simpson sighed heavily. Unable to sleep in her freezing bedroom, she’d returned to the warmth of her electric fire in the lounge and was sitting in an armchair with a woollen blanket wrapped around her legs watching a repeat of that afternoon’s quiz show. She often found it hard to sleep these days. Now, at almost one a.m., and fifteen minutes into the programme, the screaming had started.
Not for the first time, she cursed the position of her flat. One side looked out on to the busy, thronging Streatham Hill with its shops and late-night eateries; the other looked down on the seedier side of life. A potholed driveway snaked along the rear, with rows of dark garages ominous and threatening. Some stood upright and intact, their contents protected by heavy padlocks. Others lay voicelessly open, watching as the underbelly of society stumbled in blindly to service their needs. Over the years, she’d watched the area grow, develop, change and ultimately self-destruct. This was where the stolen cars were dumped, stripped and left to rust. It was where the drug addicts shot up in the disused garages and the prostitutes came with their punters.
Maria heaved herself up from the chair and shuffled towards the window, intuitively knowing to which side of the flat she was needed. The screaming, which had become more intense for a few minutes, had almost stopped now, but she’d promised herself a long time ago that she would never ignore it, as most of the other residents in the block seemed to be able to do. Humanity dictated that to close her ears to a cry for help and do nothing was wrong.
As she reached the window, the screaming stopped completely and she saw a small dark car standing at an angle below. Although its lights were off, her attention was drawn to the position in which it was parked. As she looked towards it, she saw the passenger door open, the interior light come on and a shape fall out on to the pavement. She squinted to see better, but the dirt on the outside of her sixth-floor window made it difficult to distinguish details accurately. As she watched, the car moved away with the passenger door still open and she realised that the shape was a person. Its legs lay outstretched into a square of lamplight shining down between the angled silhouettes of the overhanging garage roofs. She heard the sound of a car door slam. The interior light in the car was extinguished and the vehicle moved rapidly away. Before the light was snuffed out, Maria could just make out the shape of a large, well-built man in the driving seat, facing in her direction. A glint of metal on his right hand gripped on to the steering wheel caught her eye before he turned the car and disappeared.
She looked at the prone figure and saw it was a female with bare legs and knee-length boots. The girl lay still momentarily, before slowly moving up into a sitting position against the wall, her legs pulled up towards her body.
Maria moved back across the room to the table where her telephone stood and carefully pressed the emergency number, waiting impatiently for the operator to go through a seemingly endless list of questions.
‘Ambulance and police, please,’ she said eventually. ‘A girl’s been attacked and she looks in a bad way. Send someone quickly.’
After giving the relevant details to the operator she replaced the handset and shuffled back carefully to the window, wondering whether it was the same young girl who normally worked this patch.
Finding a tear in the curtains, she looked out again, her eyes adjusting slowly to the dim light of the alleyway below. The figure was still there by the wall, but she’d slumped sideways, with her head facing the concrete. There was no movement and a dark pool of what appeared to be blood glistened on the
ground beneath her forehead.
Hurry up, hurry up! Maria murmured to herself, willing the ambulance to arrive quicker. Why was it taking so long?
As she calculated the lengthening time on her watch, she heard the sound of sirens getting closer. The sight of the police car, with lights blazing, swinging into the driveway elicited a weary sigh of relief from Maria. As the blue lights snaked eerily around the garage area, the old woman relaxed, moving back to her armchair and the abandoned quiz show.
Plumping the cushions up, she eased herself down into its well-worn comfort, glad to hand the responsibility for the girl’s well-being to someone else. She wrapped the blanket around her legs and stretched her feet towards the electric fire, sighing with relief. Duty done.
*
Razor swore silently as he pulled off the main road towards their agreed meeting place and checked his fake Rolex. Where was Redz, the bitch? She was supposed to be here now.
He frowned, glimpsing his own reflection in the rear-view mirror, his face set in its usual menacing scowl, his shaven black head and scarred forehead glistening with beads of sweat. A scar ran from the edge of his right eye down over pitted cheeks towards his mouth, a reminder of time served inside some of the hardest prisons in London.
He rubbed the back of his hand across his stubbly chin, his fingers retrieving the small bundle of tightly-wrapped drugs from his mouth and tucking them down inside his trousers under his ballsack, safe from the prying hands of cops should he be stopped. Business with DK, his dealer, had been conducted swiftly and silently, cash for crack exchanged proficiently and with no fuss. No other pleasantries were required.
