Blood Money

by Collett, Chris

  Late that afternoon, Mariner fetched Katarina and her meagre belongings and took her to his house. He’d made sure that the fire was lit and that it was warm, and he had put some basic food in the fridge. She moved tentatively from room to room looking and touching. Out of the secure setting of the hostel she seemed jumpy, again prompting Mariner to wonder if he’d done the right thing.

  ‘You’ll be okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ But she hugged herself uncertainly. ‘It’s a big house. You have to go?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her face fell a little. ‘No. Wait a minute.’ He went into the hall to phone Anna. If she was going to be difficult he didn’t want Katarina to overhear. He needn’t have worried. The phone rang and rang until eventually the answering service kicked in. Mariner didn’t leave a message.

  ‘You have a woman?’ Katarina deduced when he went back into the living room. When Mariner hesitated she drew her own conclusion, raising a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Or man?’

  Mariner laughed. ‘A woman, but it’s complicated.’ Not to mention finished.

  ‘Com-pli-cated.’ Her brow furrowed as she tested out the long and unfamiliar word.

  ‘Mixed up.’

  She nodded, understanding.

  ‘So we’ll go out for dinner,’ Mariner declared.

  ‘We go out?’

  ‘To a pub, a restaurant.’

  Her eyes filled with alarm. ‘People they will look at me.’

  ‘Yes they will,’ agreed Mariner. ‘You’re a pretty girl.’

  ‘But they look at me and you—’

  Mariner knew what she was getting at. ‘Yes, and they’ll think you’re my daughter,’ he said, reasonably. ‘No one will know what’s happened to you. You’re just any other teenage girl out for dinner. Aren’t you hungry? Wouldn’t you like a steak, pizza, ice cream?’

  That seemed to do it, and a smile brightened up her face again. ‘Yes, I like that very much.’

  ‘I’ll go and change.’

  ‘Change?’

  ‘Change my clothes.’

  Her face dropped again and she looked down at the jeans and T-shirt, the same ones she’d been wearing since Mariner had last interviewed her. ‘I have only these clothes.’

  ‘It’s fine. We’ll take you shopping soon for more clothes.’

  ‘You go shopping with me?’

  That made him laugh again. ‘Not me. I’m very bad at shopping.’ But he felt sure that Millie would be glad to help out.

  ‘I have no money,’ she pointed out.

  ‘I’ve got money. You can pay me back.’ Almost imperceptibly she stiffened, eye contact snatched away, and she flushed a deep red, but it took Mariner several seconds to fathom her reaction. Then it hit him like a sledge hammer. ‘Not like that,’ he said, quickly. ‘Never like that.’

  At that she seemed to shrink a little, such a fragile self-worth. ‘You think I’m a bad person.’ She spoke in a whisper.

  ‘No.’ Mariner was firm. ‘You’re a sweet girl who has had some bad things happen to you, and my job is to keep you safe. You can pay me back when you have work and you have money.’ It took several seconds but she relaxed again, forced a smile. Christ this was going to be a minefield.

  Wearing his oldest, scruffiest jeans to show solidarity, Mariner took her to the Coach and Horses, a mid-range pub where he knew they wouldn’t stand out. She devoured a twelve ounce steak that would have challenged his appetite. They used the whole experience to extend her vocabulary, Mariner naming some of the things she was less familiar with, while she introduced Mariner to some basic Albanian, though languages had never been his forte. It must have looked as if they were filming for the Open University. Mariner hammed it up to make her laugh, but towards the end of the meal she went quiet.

  ‘Penny for them,’ said Mariner, carelessly. Then, short of the voiceover translation, he added, ‘It’s an English saying, “a penny for your thoughts”. It means: what are you thinking about?’

  ‘I think about my friends, the girls from the house.’ She looked around her. ‘This is so nice.’ Her eyes glistened. ‘I think they don’t have such a nice time.’

  ‘What will they do when they go home?’ They must have talked about it when they were at the Daffodil Project.

  ‘They look for work.’ Mariner’s heart turned leaden. He didn’t like to ask what kind of work. ‘My friend Sonja, she go back to her little girl.’

  ‘She has a child?’

  Katarina smiled, but her eyes had filled up. ‘She is very excited to see her.’

  But then what? Mariner wanted to ask. What future for Sonja and her daughter? It was one of several moments through the evening when Mariner wanted to reach out and touch Katarina to reassure her, but after what she’d been through it was the last thing he could do.

  After dropping off Katarina and taking her through the security routine, Mariner drove back to Anna’s house, but she wasn’t there. In the lounge and the bedroom he noticed that some of her clothes and personal things had gone. Propped on the kitchen table was an envelope. Mariner opened it.

  New job starts tomorrow so staying overnight with Becky and Mark. Out celebrating tonight, but give me a call after 10.30pm.

  Anna xxx

  So that was it. Their four-year relationship ended with the most cursory of notes. Mariner picked up the phone and dialled. Becky answered, but they didn’t linger on small talk and she put Anna on straightaway.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi. So you’ve moved out then.’

  ‘I’ve started to.’ Her tone was bright and pragmatic. ‘I’ll only be staying with Becky short-term though. They’re going to need my room.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘They’ve been approved to adopt a baby from China. It’s what we’ve been celebrating - along with my job of course. Fantastic news, isn’t it?’

  ‘The best,’ said Mariner without enthusiasm. ‘So where will you stay?’

  ‘Well obviously I’ll be on the lookout for somewhere—’

  ‘Heron’s Nest?’

  ‘Hm, I think not. But in the meantime Gareth has a spare room I can crash in.’ Her words tumbled out as if she hoped he might not hear them.

  ‘Good old Doctor Gareth,’ said Mariner, instantly rubbishing the spare room fairytale.

  She ignored his sarcasm. ‘I’ll be exchanging contracts on the house next Wednesday, so I’ve ordered a removal van for the following Friday and will be handing over the keys and moving out the rest of my stuff, so you’ll need to—’

  ‘Sure.’ Hanging up the phone Mariner felt overwhelmingly exhausted. Upstairs, he went into the room that until recently they’d shared. Lying down on Anna’s side of the bed he found that it still smelled lightly of her. Her scent made him hard and the pain in his chest returned. He could-n’t believe that she would never again lie here beside him and that in such a short space of time she’d so completely moved on. But he had to accept that Anna wanted something different from life. She wanted what Becky and Mark had, and what apparently he couldn’t give her.

  He wondered about Becky and Mark. Adopting a child from abroad was dressed up as some great philanthropic gesture, but they were essentially doing it because they wanted to. Was it really in the interests of the child or simply some warped kind of fashion statement? What did Marcella Turner call it? The children-as-accessories culture. On one level what they were doing seemed not so very different from what Alecsander Lucca and Goran Zjalic were involved in. It was what the world had come to; human beings shipped around and traded like commodities. Still, at least Becky and Mark’s child might stand more of a chance than Sonja’s baby. Mariner was still thinking about Sonja’s baby when he awoke very early the following morning.

  He left it until a respectable time then drove back to his house. Letting himself in he was pleased to find Katarina up and about, in the kitchen making tea. ‘You want some?’ she asked.

  But Mariner declined. ‘I want you to tell me about your friend Sonja,’ he said. ‘Did s
he leave her baby behind when she came to this country?’

  ‘No, she have her baby here, in England.’

  ‘The baby was a surprise? She didn’t know she was pregnant? ’ Mariner hazarded, thinking back to what Lorelei had told him.

  ‘Oh no.’ Katarina waggled her head and smiled. ‘She want her baby.’

  ‘Like Nadia.’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was at that point that Mariner saw the faintest spark of light at the end of a very long tunnel. Christ they’d been through all this before with Valenka but didn’t think to ask if there were any others. ‘What happened to Sonja’s baby?’ he asked.

  ‘They take it to, um, the house,’ Katarina groped for the right words, ‘the house for children have no mother no father.’

  ‘An orphanage,’ Mariner said.

  ‘Or-phan-age.’ She hadn’t come across that word before.

  ‘Who’s they?’ Mariner asked. ‘Who took Sonja’s baby?’

  But Katarina didn’t know. ‘Sonja tell me when we come to your police station.’

  It took all Mariner’s willpower to stop himself from hugging her. Now all he needed to do was run it by Knox and Glover to establish if he was anywhere near the truth.

  He was prevented from doing this by Delrose, who met him on his way in to Granville Lane. ‘There’s an official from the Albanian Embassy here with a Mr Troshani,’ she said. ‘They seem to think that you’re expecting them?’

  Christ, that was quick. ‘Oh God,’ Mariner sighed, out loud. ‘Now I have to break it to a man that his daughter was a sex worker and that she and her bastard child are now dead.’ He flashed Delrose a humourless smile. ‘This job doesn’t get any easier, does it? Is Charlie Glover in yet?’

  ‘I saw him come in about ten minutes ago.’

  Armed with the photograph of Nadia, Mariner went down to the informal interview room where Mr Troshani and his interpreter had been taken and plied with coffee. Even sitting down Mariner could see that Troshani was a big man, with his daughter’s dark, intense eyes. About fifty, his hair silver-stranded at the temples, the suit he was wearing strained at the seams. His expression was bleak, and Mariner couldn’t begin to imagine what he must be feeling.

  Introducing himself, Mariner gave Troshani the silver crucifix they had retrieved from his daughter’s neck, and the photograph that Valenka had given them. Troshani stared at the picture, touching the faces of Nadia and then her baby as if doing so might bring them back to life. Head bowed, he confirmed with a wordless nod that this was his daughter pinching his nose between finger and thumb to stem any tears. He spoke to the embassy interpreter.

  ‘He wants to know what happened,’ the interpreter translated.

  It was the question Mariner had been dreading. ‘Some of the detail—’ he hesitated, and gave the interpreter what he hoped was a meaningful look.

  ‘He wants to know everything,’ came the reply.

  As best he could Mariner went on to describe the gruesome discovery last Christmas, piecing it together with what they thought had happened to Nadia based on what her friend Valenka had so recently told them. When he had finished, Troshani sat in silence, no longer even trying to control his weeping.

  ‘Does he know how she came to this country?’ Mariner asked, knowing that the story would be similar to the others.

  ‘She had an offer of work,’ the interpreter told him when Troshani had spoken. ‘I encouraged her to come. I thought it would be a better life for her. She sent a letter saying what a good life she had here.’ Troshani went through his pockets, producing a crumpled and dirty envelope. ‘She told us she was going to have a baby and that she would be coming home. And now she will be coming home in a wooden casket.’ Finally his shoulders gave way and he sobbed. ‘She was my child and I should have taken care of her.’

  Before Troshani left, Mariner summoned Charlie Glover. ‘This is the man who was responsible for tracking down Nadia’s killer, and for identifying her,’ Mariner told Troshani. ‘If it hadn’t been for him, we may never have known.’ As Mariner had expected, it was a moving encounter.

  Afterwards, Mariner felt drained, his earlier momentum lost. He went back up to CID where Knox was working at his desk. The sergeant followed him into his office. ‘You’re looking rough,’ he remarked.

  ‘Yeah, didn’t get much sleep,’ said Mariner flopping into the seat behind his desk.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Knox raised a suggestive eyebrow. ‘Anything to do with Anna?’

  ‘What? No. Anna and me, it’s over.’ Mariner watched the shock register on Knox’s face.

  ‘Jesus, when did that happen?’

  ‘That’s what I keep asking myself.’

  ‘Anything to do with the Welsh medic?’

  ‘You should be a detective.’

  ‘Nah. Hours are crap and the pay’s not much better.’

  ‘You heard that Christie’s stuff turned up at Zjalic’s house,’ Mariner said, not wishing to dwell on his own problems.

  ‘Charlie told me. What the hell’s going on?’

  ‘I think I might know.’

  Knox pulled up a chair. ‘Cough it up then.’

  ‘I talked to Katarina last night. She told me about her friend Sonja.’

  ‘I interviewed Sonja,’ said Knox, the memory of it forcing a grimace. ‘She couldn’t wait to get home to her kid.’

  ‘That’s right, and I’ll bet you assumed the same thing I did; that Sonja left her child behind to come and work here.’

  ‘I suppose I did.’

  ‘But that’s not what happened,’ Mariner enlightened him. ‘Sonja had her baby here, while she was working at the house on Foundry Road, in exactly the same way that Nadia did.’

  ‘So we’ve got a coincidence,’ said Knox, not getting it.

  ‘But don’t you think that’s weird?’ Mariner continued. ‘I mean, as a one-off you could just about understand it, but on two occasions a pimp allows a girl to go ahead with her pregnancy? The normal thing would be an enforced termination. ’

  Knox thought it through for a moment. ‘Except, apart from a few weeks when they can’t work, it’s no skin off his nose, is it? Maybe it was simpler to go with the flow.’

  ‘A knocking shop is no place for a baby though. According to Katarina, Sonja’s baby was taken to an orphanage, and Nadia’s baby was meant to have been sent back to her family. And that woman we met at Zjalic’s house could have been a courier, taking the baby back to Eastern Europe.’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘I can’t square it,’ said Mariner. ‘I keep asking myself, why bother? Shipping off these babies is all unnecessary trouble and expense for Zjalic to go to. I mean, he’s not under any obligation to these girls, it’s not that kind of relationship, so why go to all that trouble, paying for a return flight to wherever for the courier, and lose several working weeks out of the girls, to boot? A man like Goran Zjalic is only interested in one thing, money. And I can think of a much more profitable way of disposing of a couple of surplus babies in this country.’

  ‘Which is—?’

  ‘To sell them.’

  ‘Which would be illegal,’ Knox pointed out.

  Mariner’s laugh was bitter with contempt. ‘Oh yes, and if what we know about Zjalic is true then we all know how much he likes to stay on the right side of the law, don’t we? I’m not saying he’s set up a market stall in the Bullring. He’d dress it up as something much more respectable, like private adoption. But the end result is the same.’

  ‘But if a couple wants to adopt they’d surely go down the social services route.’

  ‘And it’s a long and complicated process,’ said Mariner. ‘Then what about the couples who are deemed unsuitable, or too old to adopt in this country, or the couples who specifically want a newborn baby? There’s a shortage over here. Couples are encouraged to adopt older children. One of the reasons that adoption from abroad has become so fashionable is because of the lack of babies over here, but even that�
�s becoming harder.’

  ‘You think people would be prepared to break the law?’

  ‘If what you read in the papers is true, there are people out there who are prepared to do anything to have a baby. And they may not even realise that they’re doing anything illegal. Zjalic is a smart and resourceful man. He’d make it sound legit. And it would be lucrative. What could you charge for a baby? Twenty thousand, fifty thousand? This could be far more profitable than prostitution.’

  Knox was beginning to come round. ‘Christ, no wonder these two girls weren’t encouraged to have terminations.’

  ‘No, instead they were sold some line about their babies being sent home to their families or to an orphanage, when in reality they are sold on to couples who are desperate for a child. The girls wouldn’t be any the wiser. Realistically they wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of tracing their child if they ever succeeded in getting away from Zjalic in the first place.’

  ‘But Nadia’s baby wasn’t sold. We know what happened to him.’

  ‘But what’s the other thing we know about him? He had a cleft palate.’

  ‘He was damaged goods,’ said Knox. ‘So he couldn’t be sold.’

  ‘Perhaps Nadia realised that, feared for his future and refused to give him up, or perhaps the child died first and Nadia found out. We’ll never know.’

  ‘But where the hell does Christie come into all this? What was her stuff doing in Zjalic’s house?’

  ‘The last time Christie had those things with her was the night she was killed, so we have to conclude that someone who has access to Wilmott Road was involved with her murder, which in turn implicates Zjalic. She said she had something to tell you, and perhaps this was it. Christie somehow had found out about what Zjalic was doing. It would make sense of why she’d been on the Internet looking at overseas adoption. She might have been checking out if what Zjalic was doing was legal.’

  This was a step too far for Tony Knox. ‘But how would she have found out about it in the first place? As far as we’re aware she didn’t even know Goran Zjalic.’ He’d identified the missing link.