by Lee McGeorge
Latis shrugged. “People try it but eventually they either get lonely and try to rejoin the world, or they get complacent and slip up in some way but... what has this got to do with me?”
“I’m surprised Chief Lupescu didn’t tell you?”
“Lupescu never tells me anything.”
Noica looked at him curiously. His voice changed to more cautious tone. “Lupescu told me that you are a first class investigator. He also told me that you speak perfect English and have extensive experience liaising with Interpol and Europol and have worked with British police in the past. Is that true?”
“Yes, it’s true.”
“He also told me that for some time you’ve been working solely on analysis work and that you’re investigative research is very widely used and praised by police forces across Europe.”
“That’s true also... but did Chief Lupescu tell you why I do that work?”
Noica shook his head. “No, he did not.”
Corneliu felt himself break a little inside. The bastards. Getting rid of him. They’d tried so many times. “And let me guess,” he said. “I am coming to work with you in some way?”
“That was the plan,” Noica sounded unsure of himself. “In fact it’s all arranged, you’re now working under the auspices of the Departments of Health and the Prison Service.”
Latis shook his head and brought both hands to his face. He inhaled deeply then purged through his nose. He stared straight at Noica, shaking his head slowly. “Dr. Noica...”
“Lucian, please.”
“Dr. Noica. I’m a mess. I’m a screw-up. In fact, I’m a complete fucking disaster as a police officer.” Noica’s expression of quiet confidence dissolved into slack jawed shock. “I suffered from post traumatic stress disorder for a long time and although officially I’m over that, I still suffer from anxiety and depression. To put it in plain language I’m completely off the fucking rails with emotional problems and have been for quite a while... Now for some time, Chief Lupescu has been desperate to get me off the payroll. I’m the fifth wheel. I can’t work on active investigations because it’s felt I could jeopardize prosecutions. So for the last two years I’ve been doing paperwork, in an office. Now whilst it’s true that the work I’ve done has been of great benefit to foreign police forces, it’s all been paid for from Chief Lupescu’s budget. He’s had all of the cost and none of the glory and he’s been trying to palm me off onto other departments for more than a year.”
Noica pursed his lips. “I see.”
“I don’t know what you expect me to do.”
“What was the work, the research you did that was so valuable to other police forces?”
Corneliu rubbed his hands over his face and took a moment to recompose. “I uncovered and tracked networks.”
Noica shrugged and gestured for elaboration.
“Criminal networks. It started out with some Romanian country girls rescued from brothels in Holland and Scotland. They’d been lured overseas with the promise of work. They were illiterate, didn’t speak the language...”
“...easy prey,” Noica interjected.
“Exactly. I worked with Europol tracing back the route to find out how it happened, who did it, how the girls were transported, how it all worked. Most importantly I built up a picture of the money-go-round. Who got payments, where it went, when is the money cash and when is it electronic. All that stuff.”
“I see... If I can ask, Cornel... By the way, I am a psychiatric neurologist which is why I’m prying, but what caused the post traumatic stress?”
Latis shrunk in the chair a little. “Lots of girls, lots of abuse. I had to interview them and get their stories. People can do terrible things. I was listening to lots of these stories. It wears you down.”
“And did it just build up and overwhelm?”
“It was beyond overwhelming. Then we found four Romanian girls who were missing body parts. Kidneys, hearts, lungs. Lured overseas with the promise of work, forced into prostitution, fucked six ways from Sunday and when the police got close they were murdered for their organs.”
“Oh, my God. When did this happen. I’ve never heard of this.”
“It happened in Albania. A lot of it goes through that part of the world. There are a lot of ex-military from the wars, Bosnian, Serbian, they had power and resources and a lot of them slithered into the long grass after the fighting. They’re old men now, but in that part of the world they’re rich in a place with fifty percent unemployment amongst young men. They have a never ending resource of desperate young criminals, we have an never ending supply of attractive, naive girls, and Northern Europe has a never ending supply of money and lust.”
He was spitting the words when the door opened and the same woman who had shown him into the building arrived with a silver tray of fine tea-cups and a silver pot of coffee. Latis was thankful for the break. He didn’t want to talk about this but his head was swimming. Had he been kicked off the police force? Did he still have a job with them? Was this transfer to Noica permanent?
Noica poured the coffee as the woman left.
“Sugar? Hot milk?”
Hot milk, what kind of place was this. Noica lived in luxury here. Latis shook his head to turn down the adornments.
“Cornel...” Noica began. “I need your help and it’s something that is probably quite easy for you. The reason you were transferred here is I need someone who speaks English to liaise with the British police and find out the background of Paul McGovern.”
“I won’t be able to investigate overseas. You need to ask the British police for that.”
“This won’t be an investigation towards a prosecution. It’s more about finding out who he is. What is his background, who are his friends, what does he do for enjoyment, that sort of thing. We need to understand what kind of a person he is.”
“Why don’t you hire a local private detective in England?”
Noica made a small laugh. “I’m afraid I’ve already hired you.” Then more seriously, “Honestly though, this is something we want to handle internally.” Latis stared at him curiously. “It’s a Romanian problem,” Noica continued. “We want to handle it without bringing undue attention to the issue.”
The words seemed to hover in the air, ‘It’s a Romanian problem.’ What did that mean?
“Why is Paul McGovern so special?”
The question was direct. It made Noica smile. “That is the question, Cornel. That is the million dollar question.”
----- X -----
He could kill her now if he allowed himself.
Paul was hiding behind a newspaper at the back of a bistro at lunchtime. He had grown a thick fisherman’s beard that changed his look completely, but he still wanted the newspaper to cover his face.
Sitting by the front door of the Bistro, less than fifteen feet away, was Nisha Khumari with three of her friends.
Over the past month he’d watched her in secret nearly every day. It only took a few outings to learn the basic pattern of her movements. The other times were out of compulsion. He felt like a little boy with a crush on a girl, but rather than being in love, he wanted to destroy her. He had two knives under his coat to do the deed. He could kill her at any time, but for someone as special as this, her murder and horror would take time to prepare. It wasn’t enough to simply end her, he wanted to confront her and do so in an environment where he held absolute control.
He watched.
“I’m having the pasta carbonara... Have you had it? Oh, my God, it’s amazing. The cheese sauce is amazingly creamy. I’m sure it’s so fattening but I don’t care, it’s divine.”
Her voice.
Her fucking, cunt voice.
She’d come in with work colleagues wearing her beige mackintosh and the purple beret; the coat darker over the shoulders where the rain had soaked the fabric. She sat down and swished her hair.
“Why do I always attract loser men? Honestly, urghhh, I met this guy on Saturday and he felt li
ke, because he was buying Champagne by the bottle, that he could press up against me whilst we talked. I mean, the guy was rich and he was handsome, but O.M.G. he was creepy.”
Paul hid himself deeper behind the newspaper wishing he wasn’t so close. Her voice was grating. Her attitude was fickle and pathetic. He found it hard to contemplate that at one time he was too scared to talk to her, too in awe at her beauty and spirit to even contemplate that she would find him attractive. As he watched her now, all he could see was her ugliness. Her mean spirited character. Her flaws. Her egregious contempt for others.
“I went back and bought that Prada dress... I know, I know... it was so expensive, but I’m planning on being fabulous this weekend. Oh, my God, you should see the bikini I bought for the trip to Sharm. I look totally hot. I swear I’m going to make those Egyptian men drool. When I’m lounging by the pool, I’m going to wear that bikini and have the hotel waiters bring me drinks just so they can see what they can’t have.”
Paul couldn’t take it. He left with one hand scratching his eyebrow to cover himself as he passed her table. He looked a completely different person with the beard, but he still felt compelled to hide his face. She made him sick.
He jogged through the light rain, putting distance between them so he didn’t go back and stab her on impulse. He wanted to bleach his eyes and ears to wash away her foulness.
He wanted a drink.
He wandered into the first bar he saw, a dirty looking place that once inside he realised was a gay bar. He ordered a big shot of vodka. Drank it. He ordered a second.
Why should this girl torment him so much? Why was he following her? Why was he fantasising ways to hurt her? She was undesirable and as corrosive as acid, yet she was all he could think about. She consumed him. He knew it was creepy to stalk her, but it had a soothing effect. The aggressive outbursts and muscle contractions had become less frequent since he began watching her daily. It was as though the craziness within him needed a channel to escape. When he didn’t stalk her he found himself trapped in maladaptive daydreaming, fantasising about her as though she was in a movie running inside his head; but the make-believe nature of the movie drove him towards rage and anger until he trembled and suffered the pain of clenched muscles. She was torture. When she wasn’t there it caused genuine physical pain. When he saw her he wanted her dead. The only place of comfort was the middle ground, the time spent watching her from afar, the time spent rehearsing her death, or buying the hardware and tools that would cause her pain.
At the moment he was in what he termed decompression. The period where she had filled him to bursting point and he needed to allow the pressure to subside. He would ride it out. Emotionally he felt as though he was in the aftermath of an argument. The fight had ended, but his mind wouldn’t let it go.
He recalled the telephone conversation, which now noticeably varied in detail with every recollection.
“Hi, is that Nisha?” he had said whilst still filled with excitement and apprehension. “This is Paul McGovern... we met last night...”
Met last night? We’d drunkenly tried to fuck last night until you threw up, but I don’t mind, Nisha, because I want to be your doting boyfriend.
“...we met last night…”
“Oh, my God. You raped me!” her voice was hoarse, screeching. “I was drunk, you pig. Don’t you know that is rape? You took advantage of me and raped me!”
In the bar a man pushed past him, snapping him out of the daydream. The man smiled, Paul smiled back momentarily by reflex then went back to his drink. The decompression was incomplete. He went to lift his drink and found his right hand had formed into a fist and the muscles up to his shoulder were clenching. The drink was inches away yet totally ungraspable. No matter how much thought he gave it, his fingers couldn’t unclench and take the glass. His other hand was shaking but still had some mobility; he used his left hand to pry open the fingers of his right hand and press the palm to the bartop.
“Fuck Nisha,” he whispered with resignation. “This is your fucking fault. You make me so fucking angry I can’t even...” He grimaced as his fingers curled back into a fist.
When Nisha is dead, all this will be over. When she is gone there will be no need to struggle with my own muscles. When she is gone I won’t ever have to follow her, or have uncontrolled fantasies about her. It will be ended.
He would have some peace and mental clarity... when she was gone.
Paul left the bar for the toilet. It was at the bottom of a steep and narrow twisting staircase and it stunk. The walls were covered in gay sex graffiti. The toilet bowl had no seat, and the door had no lock. He positioned himself at the stretched urinal and began to piss, still feeling a trembling in his hands.
“Hi, how are you today?”
Paul looked both ways quickly, choking off the urination in shock. There was a man watching him. It was the same guy who had made eye contact upstairs, the man who had brushed past and smiled. He was about Paul’s age, mid twenties. He was tanned, groomed, smiling, friendly. He must have followed him down. Paul said nothing. He wanted to leave.
“Do you want some help with that?” the man asked tilting his eyes downwards.
There was something akin to a thunderclap in Paul’s head. He had hold of the gayboy by his hair and his clothing. He was swinging him around. He spun him off his feet and crashed his back into the urinal sending him skidding down the wall into the piss soaked gutter. He raised his foot and smashed his military boot into his face. Cartilage snapped under his foot, the bridge of the man’s nose caved in. Knives under the coat. His hands went for them instinctively, grabbed them, pulled them out.
Control...
The man coughed a wretched sound in a failed scream, his whole body laying lengthwise in a gutter of piss and sanitation bricks, his nose destroyed and gushing with thick dark blood, his hands raised to cover his face.
There was a moment to think... just a moment... a fraction of time.
The injured man stared at the knives and moaned a noise of pain and horror as his hands clamped to his face, covering his crushed nose. He hadn’t deserved this.
Paul backed away carefully. At the door he turned and moved quickly up the stairs, clipping the knives to the yoke as he went. He left the pub and dissolved into the crowds of lunchtime office workers. Within seconds he blended in and disappeared.
The attack was instinctive. Sudden. There was no warning to it. He was lightening fast but at least he’d controlled it. At least he hadn’t gone into one of the knife attack patterns he’d spent a month rehearsing. From somewhere, deep in the recesses of his mind, a tiny voice had spoken the word, ‘control’.
He’d listened to that voice. He’d heard it. The poor gayboy was unlucky to have stumbled onto Paul McGovern, he was unlucky to be assaulted like that; but he was lucky to be alive. He was damned lucky to be alive.
----- X -----
Paul’s new room felt like luxury. Using the credentials of Joseph Frady he’d rented a tiny bedsit and for the first time since Romania felt he could relax.
In the days after throwing Frady off a ladder and slitting his throat, he’d visited the boy’s bank to learn he owed a few hundred pounds in overdraft. Claiming to be Frady, Paul offered to put cash into the account and put it into positive balance. He wanted to change the pin number of the card but didn’t know any of the security questions. He spun a convincing yarn of how he had just gotten clean from a long drug addiction and couldn’t remember much. The fact that he was offering cash money to clear a debt seemed qualification enough. Within weeks of killing Joseph Frady he had his bank account, credentials and National Insurance number. By using those he obtained a duplicate birth certificate and after getting a doctors surgery to validate his photograph he applied for a passport. It arrived two days ago.
Stealing the identity had proved surprisingly easy.
As a precaution he’d rented a small lock-up space that contained a bag of emergency cash, clothing, and some
basic camping supplies in case he needed to run. He’d also dared to get a tattoo. It was simple, a plain single word in simple block letters from the crook of his elbow to his wrist. Sublimation.
With his beard, messy hair, grungy clothes and tattoo he looked nothing like Paul McGovern; but what worried him was the Joseph Frady identity was stolen and it meant there was always a risk that somebody would come looking for the real Frady. He needed a fresh identity built from scratch. He was working on it, but it would take time to complete. He’d found a boy named Alan Jay who had died when he was eight months old. Slowly but surely, Paul was crafting the paper trail as though Alan Jay hadn’t died. When it was complete, Paul McGovern, aka Joseph Frady, would become Alan Jay, he would move to another country and he would vanish forever.
His new life was coming together. The old life needed to disappear.
She had to die.
He had a special plan for Nisha and here in the bedsit he was putting the parts together.
A wisp of smoke rose from the circuit board as he tried to solder wire to a tiny spot on the electronics of a mobile phone. The slight tremor to his hand was making it awkward. It was an old style telephone, with buttons rather than a touch screen. He’d dismantled it, removed the rubber sheet of buttons and was trying to delicately fix two wires to the connections that pressed the receive button. The first wire was attached, the second was pissing him off.
He’d tried too many times and the board was looking burnt. He put the iron down and sat back on the sofa bed.
“Rest a moment,” he said to himself. “Rest. Calm. Quiet your mind.”
He took a few slow breaths then picked up the iron to try again and this time succeeded. He unplugged the iron and swapped it for a hot-glue gun and rested whilst waiting for it to warm up.
All of this was for Nisha. He was following plans from the internet and the project was simple enough to understand, but he wasn’t as good with his hands as he wanted to be. Dismantling and modifying electronics was a geek task unsuited to a wordsmith, but there was something refreshingly distracting about the job.
