A door lay open to the kitchen where a bottle of vodka and a butchered meat carcass sat on top of a table smeared with blood. Someone had been tenderizing a hunk of beef. The sight of the tattered flesh sitting raw and uncovered looked almost obscene to Daly’s eyes.
She caught his stare. “Some of the men who visit work in the meat factories. Instead of roses or chocolates, they bring the girls steak.”
She led him into a tiny sitting room. There were only two armchairs in the room. She sat down and gestured to Daly to take the other. Before he could accept her hospitality, there was the small matter of the man lounging in the offered seat. Tattoos and scars of abuse covered his muscled arms. He stared at Daly. There was no warmth or hospitality in his gaze. Daly caught a sour whiff of alcohol and sweat and felt nauseously sober.
Martha spoke to the man in Croatian, her voice edgy. His mouth automatically turned down into what was doubtless a practiced sneer. He glared at Daly and trudged up the stairs, returning to sleep or whatever it was pimps did during their free time. Meanwhile, Martha had moved to the edge of her seat, closer to the door, closer to the phone.
She lit a cigarette and regarded Daly with a look that suggested defiance, or was it fear?
“So you’re the detective,” she said. Her face disappeared behind a cloud of smoke. Only her bright red lips remained visible.
“That’s right,” replied Daly.
The smoke cleared a little. She flicked some ash into a beer bottle. Her eyelids fluttered in the haze.
“Before I tell you about Lena, you can do me a favor.”
Daly leaned back in his chair. That there were goods to be bartered was a promising sign for their encounter.
“There’s a man causing me bother.”
“A client of yours.”
“Just the once, then I barred him. That’s the first thing you learn in my business. Watch out for the new ones. Especially the nervous types.” She regarded Daly closely. “They can be right fuckin’ trouble. A few nights ago he came by and smashed the front window.”
“How long has he been harassing you?”
“A couple of weeks. He painted those signs on the wall.”
“We have a new antiracism officer. I’ll get her to give you a ring.”
“Can’t you just lock him up? Or do they have to be out-and-out psychos and serial killers before you intervene?” She kept her voice light and even, but Daly could see that her teeth were on edge.
“When the antiracism officer interviews you, tell her you have no idea why this man is abusing you in this manner. Tell her you believe it’s racism, pure and simple. If he’s convicted, he’ll get a tough sentence.”
She nodded. Daly saw a bruise, dark and purple, on the side of her neck. She clamped her hand to the spot as if aware of his attention.
“Have you seen Lena Novak?”
“I see lots of girls like Lena. They come to me when they’re in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“They get into a fight with their boss. Or fall in love with the wrong man.”
Daly thought to himself that girls like Lena were already deep in trouble long before they came running to Martha for help.
“Usually they stay a while until they’re ready to go back,” she continued. “Lena was different.”
“How?”
“She had a plan. Few of the girls who come here have ever begun to plan. All they have is running on their minds. They don’t realize that escape is all about planning and money.”
“Do you help them out?”
She laughed. “In spite of what it says outside, this place isn’t home sweet home.” Her head lolled slightly but her blond hair remained fixed. It struck him that she was wearing a wig.
“What about Lena? What was her plan?”
“She didn’t tell me, but she had money. And knew how to get her hands on more.”
“Where did she go after calling here?”
“Some other place.”
“Where?”
“She had lots of places.”
“What do you mean?”
“She had more door keys than a jailer. Houses, apartments, turnkey developments, all part of Fowler’s property empire.”
“Do you have the addresses?”
“She didn’t tell me anything. She was too scared. Her boss is a man called Jozef Mikolajek. He’ll catch her sooner or later. His contacts are everywhere.”
“Everywhere? Including here?”
Martha chose not to answer the question. She inhaled and exhaled cigarette smoke.
“Perhaps Lena thought it was smarter not to stay with you,” continued Daly. “What sort of business relationship do you have with Mikolajek?”
She shrugged. “He lets me run this place in peace. For a fat fee, of course. After that, I have nothing to do with him. Ask anyone. Anyone who knows.”
“What about the women who work for you. Do they know?”
“You can try.”
“Meaning they won’t say anything.”
“You can always get a translator.”
Each of her answers was the verbal equivalent of stubbing out a cigarette with the heel of a boot.
“Why do you give a damn about Lena?” she asked. “She’s a prostitute. An illegal immigrant. She wouldn’t think twice about double-crossing you.”
“I’m under no illusions.”
Daly showed her a still from the CCTV footage taken at Lena’s flat. She flicked it with her fingernail.
“When was this taken?” she asked.
“A couple of days ago.”
“Maybe he’s business. Lena’s business.”
“This man and whoever he is working for is trying to track her down. He tried to kidnap her outside a café in Aughnacloy, but fortunately, she was able to give him the slip. Staff at the café said Lena was a frequent visitor. If she keeps hanging around her old haunts, he’ll find her again.”
Martha’s left knee began to jiggle as she spoke. Something was making her anxious.
“You’re probably right, but what alternative does she have? Where else can she go?”
Daly didn’t say anything, waiting for her tension to build.
“This man who’s following her. Is he Croatian?”
“No. Irish. He walks with a limp.”
She relaxed slightly. “Lena is more afraid of her compatriots than any Irishman. No matter how far she runs, Mikolajek and his friends can always hurt her family back in Croatia.”
“If you help me find her, I can arrest Mikolajek on the basis of her evidence. Put him behind bars. She’ll never have to worry about him again.”
“You’re telling me the truth? You’ll really arrest that pig Mikolajek?” She laughed. “He won’t let go of this. I’ve seen what he has done to other girls. No one crosses him and gets away with it.”
“Then you know that Lena is playing a very dangerous game. You must tell me where I can find her. Otherwise, I’ll have this place turned over by my officers and Special Branch. After that I’ll send in immigration, the tax man, and environmental health to mop up the dregs of whatever’s left of your business.”
Daly hunched forward and stared at her face, waiting for her mask to crack. Instead, a light switched on in her face. A light that made her ask the question that Daly had feared.
“Tell me one thing, Inspector. Are you here as part of an official police investigation?”
Daly said nothing. He rubbed the stubble on his face.
“Why haven’t you brought more officers and raided this place? All these phone calls you make. Like a lonely obsessive. Hardly the normal behavior of a detective in charge of a missing person case.”
Daly blinked. Perhaps the investigation had degenerated into an obsession.
She sat back w
ith a smile on her face. Like a woman being served an unexpected glass of champagne. “You’ve no authority to be here. You’re working on your own.”
Daly said nothing.
“And you’re trying to tell me,” she said, “that there’s nothing the least personal about your interest in Lena Novak?”
He considered his answer carefully. “She helps keep my detective skills sharp.” He felt like a man choosing the shortest piece of rope possible before passing it to a hangman.
“No doubt.”
She leaned forward and gazed at Daly. He noticed that several buttons of her blouse were undone. She looked as though she were about to share an intimate secret.
“I like Irishmen,” she said. “At least the ones who know what they want.”
“I’m here as a detective, nothing else.”
“But that’s not the whole truth. Your motives for coming here are a little bit more complicated than those of an honest policeman.”
She leaned back and took a long draw of her cigarette.
“I’m finally figuring you out. I should have seen it from the start. You’re like a crossword puzzle where every line spells out the phrase midlife crisis. Are you married?”
“Yes. I mean, no.” Daly hesitated. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“I understand that your love life is probably a mess.”
“That’s none of your business.” Daly did not like the direction the conversation was going in.
“It’s my business to make sure men don’t feel ashamed or embarrassed. And I can see I’ve made you uncomfortable. You’re dedicated to your work. That’s why you’ve come here looking for Lena. Every day you have to deal with lies and secrets, fear and violence. You’re sick of sweeping the streets of crime. Deep down all you want is a girl who’ll let you stop being yourself for a night.”
Daly closed his eyes for a moment. He looked back at her. She had the strange talent of sounding caring yet scornful.
“It’s one thing to go to a brothel and pay for a woman,” she said. “It’s another to be in love with a woman who is a fugitive. Forever out of your reach. What must that do for you? For your sense of psychological tension? To be constantly denied pleasure, does that make the attraction stronger or weaker?”
Daly felt the color in his cheeks betray him.
“I didn’t come here to be interrogated,” he said.
“No. I didn’t think so.”
Daly got up to leave. A few more questions and all his inner demons would have emerged, hunched and gloating, at her shoulder. He decided that Martha Havel was dangerous company. She knew too much about the dark world of fantasies that filled the human mind. That was why men paid to be with her and kept coming back. She helped lead them into the traps they set for themselves.
She followed him out to the door.
“Will you come back?”
“What for?”
“To talk. To tell me what you find out about Lena?”
“Let’s wait and see.”
She shivered slightly, framed against the light of the kitchen. Daly’s last sight of the room was of the crimson slices of meat lying strewn across the table like a woman’s casually discarded garments.
Later, in his cottage, Daly put on the stove and made himself a cup of tea. He stared through the kitchen window at the twisted half mile of back lanes that led down to the edge of Lough Neagh. Waves rolled in from the north; not very menacing ones, but rough enough to chase even the pluckiest of fishermen back to their homes.
Fifteen minutes later, he had walked down to the empty shore. He felt the power of the wind as it whipped the waves higher and higher. He loitered for a while, watching the waves break on the stony shore. A dog from a nearby cottage gave out brief yelps above the wind.
He wondered if it was too late to save Lena. He felt divided from her by more than distance and the inevitable cultural barriers. There was also the dividing line between the sexes. She might as well have been on the other side of the world, or on some distant planet, he thought. He turned for home seeing a shower of rain advance from the west. Behind him, the waves jostled together in an uneasy lough.
32
It was the evening rush hour. Daylight dimmed and the lorries picked up speed. Bin bags and freshly laundered sheets drifted above the crashed Home Sweet Home van. As each lorry thundered by, the loose sheets pounced on each other with renewed energy before drifting back to earth and snagging on brambles and thorn trees. To the motorists speeding by, it looked as though the wind was conducting a frantic cleaning operation through the hedgerows.
A hundred yards along the road, a group of women huddled together in a bus stop shelter. Their clothes were torn, and some of them carried injuries. They looked up at the dazzle of lights from the approaching police cars as though their wait was finally over. Soon the traffic stopped and the roadside was alive with people, everyone active, everyone moving, paramedics, fire and police officers, and then, later, when they discovered the blood, the SOC officers, laying out their flickering lines of luminescent tape. The women remained glued to the bench. They stared at the labyrinth of police tape in confusion as though it had turned the crash scene into a complicated riddle, until they were eventually coaxed with the help of a translator along a path of concerned faces into the back of an ambulance.
Daly crossed the motorway and followed the trail of glass diamonds from the crashed van’s windshield along the verge and into the ditch. The person he was searching for was not among the huddle of women in the ambulance. The firefighters congregated around the van with their cutting tools, but there were no bodies in the badly damaged vehicle. He made his way round the van slowly. He walked along the windblown hedge, staring at the cleaning rags and dustsheets that had escaped from the back of the vehicle. Rain and hawthorn blossoms blew in his face. In the damp grass he found a human oddity, a blond wig cut in a bob. Dropping it into an evidence bag, he caught the whiff of cigarette smoke. A feeling of unease gathered in his stomach.
A traffic police officer talked him through the accident.
“The van was traveling west at about sixty miles per hour,” he explained. “Driving conditions were good and there were no hazards on the road. We believe another vehicle struck it on the side. Judging from the paint marks left on the van, it was colored black. The impact caused the driver to lose control of the vehicle. He swerved onto the grass verge; the vehicle flipped on its side and slid into the ditch, upending several small bushes. We found a pool of blood in the passenger seat and drag marks where someone had been pulled from the van. There’s a set of tire marks farther along the grass verge. We found the passengers sheltering in the bus stop. They say the driver of a dark-colored Jeep forced them off the road. The van driver was able to walk free and made off on foot, but the other passenger is unaccounted for; her name is Martha Havel.”
Daly raised a hand when he saw Irwin walking amid the emergency personnel. The Special Branch detective looked a little disoriented. Daly waited, watching for a change in his behavior after their heart-to-heart in the pub.
Irwin merely stared at the crashed van and said nothing, as though he had decided it was tactically best to give no comment. His eyes were withdrawn a little deeper into his skull, his face all lines and hollows in the fading light. What was the sharp expression hovering just below the customary one of barely suppressed boredom? Was it hurt or embarrassment? Daly wondered.
“You’re not still hungover, are you?” he asked as Irwin leaned against the side of a police car. Gone was his air of having seen it all before.
“No. But my love life isn’t in the best of health.”
“At least you still have one.”
Irwin stared at the crashed van with an evaluating frown.
“How can someone tell you that you’re not in love?”
“Who said that?”
&nbs
p; “Poppy. She told me I wasn’t capable of knowing true love, but I told her it’s the most I’ve ever felt for anyone. I can’t imagine finding those feelings with anyone else.”
Daly looked away. He wanted to tell Irwin that you did not find love through other people. It had to be awoken from within.
“You know what?” said Irwin. “I’m tired of women.”
Daly was about to say he was tired of women, too, but he wasn’t sure if either of them understood what that really meant. Did it mean they were tired of love or tired of sex, or just weary of trying to make sense of their feelings and sharing them with another person?
The wind picked up, catching one of the dustsheets snagged in the hedge, beating it like a trapped wing. Irwin stared at it intensely as though it was some sort of signal. His eyes flicked over the van and the ambulance full of frightened women.
“More foreign nationals,” he said with a grunt. “What have we got? Drink-driving?”
“There are a few points of interest. The driver’s done a runner, and a passenger’s missing. A Croatian woman called Martha Havel.”
“It’s never simple, is it?”
Daly filled him in with what the traffic officer had told him.
“Do you think we’ll get the driver?” asked Irwin.
“Of course we’ll find him.”
“He’s probably fled across the border.”
“We’ll check the hospitals for any road casualties.”
They looked at each other. “Just a crazy piece of driving?” asked Irwin. “Or something more sinister?”
“The driver will point us in the right direction when we find him.”
They located the translator and got him to question the women in the ambulance. One of the women stood up and sat down again, mumbling in Croatian. There were fresh cuts on her face.
“What did she say?”
The translator shrugged. “She feels sick. She wants to vomit.”
“Ask them where Martha Havel is,” Daly persisted.
“They say she vanished off the roadside,” replied the translator after conversing with the women.
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