by LJ Ross
Her second thought was that he was frightened.
Of her?
She tried to speak, but the words came out as a rasping, painful whisper.
“Hel’,” she said, softly. “You hel’ me?”
The boy hugged his arms around himself and shuffled his feet, feeling uneasy.
“Pleez,” she added, with difficulty. The pain is so bad. Please, help me. Help me find my daughter.
He swallowed, and ran agitated fingers over his head, casting quick glances back towards the tunnel. She barely had time to wonder what lay beyond it, when a disembodied voice filtered through the layers of stone.
A voice she recognised immediately.
Gaz.
Horror, fear, loathing…it all must have shown on her face, and she was suddenly galvanised, fighting the pain in her body in an effort to scramble off the altar of soil and seek out some other means of escape.
The boy watched her for a moment, immobilised by indecision, before rushing forward with his arms outstretched.
She shrank away, bracing herself for a blow of some kind, but it never came.
“Don’t—don’t move,” he whispered. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
She didn’t understand the words, but the tone was remarkably gentle.
“I’ll—I don’t know what to do…” Ollie trailed off, panicking again. “Just—just stay there.”
She searched his face, and did not trust it.
He turned to go, then surprised himself again with an act of kindness.
“Here,” he whispered, holding out a half-melted bar of chocolate he had in his pocket. “Go on, take it.”
When she didn’t, he left it within reach and then hurried away, already knowing that he had crossed the invisible line Mick had warned him about.
Loyalty, he’d said. Loyalty above all else.
And yet, he couldn’t forget the look on the woman’s face; couldn’t erase the new and uncomfortable feeling niggling his gut, worming its way into his heart.
Pity.
* * *
“Oi, bloody deaf lugs? Didn’t you hear me callin’ yer?”
“Sorry, Da, it goes back quite far in there,” Ollie muttered, as he squeezed himself back through the entrance of the tunnel to land on the sand with an ignominious thud.
Gaz watched him heave himself upward and start brushing himself down.
“Well? Anythin’?”
Ollie kept his eyes averted, and made a show of re-tying the shoelaces on his trainers.
“Nah, nothin’,” he said.
“You’re sure you looked all the way in?”
He nodded, and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “D’you think we should carry on?”
Gaz eyed him closely, then shrugged. “I divn’t nah what Mick thinks we’re goin’ to find round here,” he said, and whistled for the dog to come to heel. “There’s no sign of her, which means she’s probably dead in a ditch somewhere, or she’s hitched herself to somebody’s wagon. Either way, it’s never gonna come back to us. She doesn’t know any names, any addresses—nothin’.”
Ollie remained silent.
“Howay,” Gaz said, with a jerk of his head. “I’m gaggin’ for a pint, and the light’s almost gone now, anyway.”
Ollie realised that the sun had dipped low in the sky while he was inside the cave, and thought of the woman lying there in the darkness, without even the scrap of light trickling through the sink hole above her head.
Terrifying.
“What’ll Mick say?” he asked, working hard to keep the wobble from his voice.
Gaz shrugged again. “He’ll chalk it up to wastage, and put the loss down to unforeseen circumstances,” he said, with breath-taking logic. “Fancy some chips?”
Ollie felt his stomach roll, but gave a weak nod.
As they re-traced their steps along the beach, he told himself not to look back. He’d lied to his father—he didn’t fully understand why—and there was no choice now but to carry on. Any small, tell-tale sign would be enough to expose him, and the consequences would be dire—not only for himself, but possibly his whole family.
His mind raced as he thought of how to backtrack.
The most obvious thing to do would be to tell his father the truth, but there would be untold retribution, and he’d be out on his ear.
Or…
He could leave her there. Pretend he’d never seen her, never spoken to her.
Never helped her.
Nobody would be any the wiser, because there was little chance that she’d be able to drag herself out of the cave without help from someone—and who would possibly find her?
The odds were stacked against her, and against him, now.
It was every man, or woman, for themselves.
CHAPTER 12
Achara stared at the wall with eyes that burned.
Tears had been shed until her body was wrung out, and could produce no more. It had been a few hours since her last forcible injection, and she was shivering beneath the thin blanket in her cot, identical to those occupied by seventeen other women who lay curled up in rows. A large, industrial heater had been set up beside the door on the far side of the room, and some of the women had gathered around it, blocking any heat from circulating to the rest of them.
She didn’t care.
All she cared about was that her mother, the only person she’d ever loved in the world, was now gone. Drowned or left to die of exposure, she didn’t know, but either was a harrowing, miserable way to die, in a foreign land far from everything and everyone she’d ever known.
And now, she, Achara, was utterly and completely alone.
Another shiver racked her body, and she clasped her arms around her legs, focusing hard on the grimy wall. It was clear that she wasn’t the first person to have lain in that very spot—not only because she could smell the last incumbent’s sweat and other bodily fluids on the blanket and stained mattress, but because they’d left a message for her on the wall, written with a shard of pebble or glass picked up from the remnants littering the warehouse floor.
Unfortunately, the message was written in a language she didn’t understand.
She liked to think it was a message of hope, or a poem from the person’s homeland, and began to construct a tale of how they’d escaped the confines of that terrible place to be rescued by a kind stranger. Not all English people were like Pos’man and his gang; she had to believe there were some…some who would help.
Just then, she heard the rattle of a key turning in the heavy lock on the outer door and knew that they’d come to administer the next dose. Her skin was crawling with need and she sobbed her frustration, hating the new and powerful addiction flooding her mind, hating them all for the disease they’d spread through her veins where none had existed before.
“On your beds!” Noddy barked at the small group gathered by the heater.
They were beginning to learn the ritual, by now, and the women stumbled back to their cots without argument, too weary and too afraid to fight.
“That’s better,” he said, while the other one they called Caloom entered with several large brown paper bags. “Look, Callum’s brought you a bit of dinner. You lot feelin’ hungry, eh?”
Noddy grabbed one woman’s face in a hard grip, squeezing her cheeks until it hurt.
“How about a bit o’ sausage, darlin’?”
The woman might not have understood the words, but she understood his meaning well enough, and tried to scuttle as far away from him as possible.
“Like that, is it?” he sneered, and made a grab for her again, this time armed with a syringe.
Achara watched him from across the room, dreading her turn and yet craving it, at the same time. When the two men finally reached her, she kept her head bowed, trying to appear subservient.
But, they didn’t reach for her ankle, straight away.
“Here, Noddy, I think we’ve found our winner,” Callum said, eyeing up the girl’s face and figure. “
I’ll bet you fifty quid he’ll pick this one.”
“Piss off, man,” Noddy said, and gave her a thorough assessment himself. “Anyone can see she’s the best of the bunch. Course he’s gonna pick her.”
Achara listened to their fast stream of words and wished she knew what they meant.
“She’s hangin’ already—look at her,” Callum said. “Must’ve given her too much, yesterday.”
Noddy shrugged, and began loading up the next syringe.
“She won’t put up a fight then, will she?”
When Achara sank back against the bed a few minutes later, her body euphoric, they dropped a lukewarm burger by her feet.
“D’you think he’d know the difference?”
“What d’you mean?” Callum asked, keeping a beady eye on the rest of them. “Know what?”
“Nothin’,” Noddy said, watching the rise and fall of her chest. “Listen, I don’t mind takin’ the night shift, later.”
“Cheers, mate,” Callum said, and moved off to the next bed.
Through the foggy high, Achara felt Noddy’s fingertip trail over her leg and wanted to kick out, to break every bone in his hand, but she was so sleepy…
As the world slipped away, she thought again of the kind stranger in her daydream and wondered if such a person might exist, or whether they were nothing more than a fairy tale.
* * *
Ryan faced the assembly who had gathered for a late afternoon briefing, shortly after five o’clock. Outside, the sun had set, and the conference room was illuminated by a series of garish white strip lights which seemed to bounce off their sun-starved, winter skin. An unpalatable odour of pine-scented cleaning detergent lingered on the air, but they hardly noticed, their minds being otherwise occupied with the even less salubrious matter of murder.
“All right, settle down,” he said, in clipped tones.
Ryan waited for the stragglers to take their seats and nodded towards Chief Constable Morrison, who dipped inside at the last moment to observe from the corner of the room. He’d grown used to it, by now, and respected her for taking the time to familiarise herself with the active cases on her beat, albeit she no longer played any active role in investigating them. Morrison’s world was one of politics and policies, diplomacy and game-playing. Though she did it with integrity, hers was not a job he envied and, he dared say, the same was true in the reverse.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said, when the rustles had died down. “Hopefully, you’ll already be aware of the incident reported to us this morning at Marsden Bay, and it’s seen extensive coverage in the local press—but, for those of you who haven’t, let me bring you up to speed.”
He turned to a long whiteboard on the wall behind him, upon which had been written, ‘OPERATION SHORELINE’ in bold capitals, alongside a number of blown-up photographs and scribbled notes. He indicated the first image, which was of the wrecked boat, taken by Faulkner’s team that morning.
“Control received a report from a local photographer by the name of Jill Price at around seven-thirty,” Ryan said, and began to roll up his shirtsleeves as he replayed the timeline of events in his mind. “She’d been down there to catch the sunrise and take some pictures, when she stumbled across the wreckage of what we now know to be a fishing trawler, of around twenty metres in length.”
He moved onto the sleeve of his other arm and, from her position on the front row, Yates found her eyes drawn reluctantly to the action and to his forearms. Never more conscious of Jack seated beside her, she dragged her eyes away and fixed her attention on the murder wall, feeling all kinds of guilt.
Ryan continued with his summary, blissfully ignorant about having been the unwitting source of any turmoil.
“At the same time, our witness also discovered the body of a young woman,” he said, and his voice softened a fraction in deference to her loss. “I haven’t posted an image of how she was found, but you can find a series of photographs taken by Forensics in Appendix B of your packs.”
There were one or two shuffles of paper, followed by soft murmurs of regret.
“Yes,” Ryan nodded. “She died badly, and her body was exposed for hours prior to discovery.”
He let the significance of that hit home.
“We’ve been unable to identify the woman from any existing police or DNA records but, given her ethnicity and the circumstances surrounding her death, we’re taking a punt and liaising with international colleagues to see if anyone has been reported missing overseas,” he continued.
“No update on that yet, boss,” Phillips chimed in.
Ryan nodded.
“Let me know when you hear from them. In the meantime, the body has been transferred to our pathologist at the RVI,” he said, referring to the Royal Victoria Infirmary, which was the largest hospital in the area and served as the base for their Senior Police Pathologist, Doctor Jeffrey Pinter. “I’ve requested an express turnaround, so I’m hoping to receive an initial report tomorrow morning. At a glance, we can already see there were lacerations on the woman’s wrists and other contusion marks on her body, so we’ll wait to see what Pinter can tell us about their origin and post-mortem interval but, taking into account all known data, we’re treating this woman’s death as suspicious.”
He paused to hitch a hip on the side of a desk at the front of the room, and reached for a mug of cold coffee, deciding it was better than nothing.
“As for the trawler, we haven’t been able to identify its origin and it bears no markings of any kind,” Ryan said. “The Coastguard and Marine Services have both confirmed they received no signals to indicate the vessel was in distress, and they have no record of its movements, owing to the fact its Automatic Identification System was, most likely, disabled.”
There were a few murmurs around the room.
“I’ve taken statements from the Harbour Masters at North Shields and South Shields,” MacKenzie said. “They’ve both confirmed they have no record of any boat matching its description having requested to dock, and they don’t recognise the vessel.”
Ryan nodded.
“Faulkner’s team are combing the trawler as we speak,” he said. “It’ll take them several days to work through the damage to try to salvage anything of use to us, but they’ve already been able to confirm one thing.”
He reached for a cardboard folder, and pulled out a clear evidence bag, inside of which rested the broken remains of a pair of rusted metal handcuffs.
“There were several of these found attached to the walls of the boat’s hold,” Ryan said, in a flat voice. “A similar pair has been forwarded to the pathologist for comparison purposes, to see if these are likely to be the source of the marks we found on the woman’s wrists, but I think we can draw a safe conclusion that they were. We can also deduce that there may have been several people in that trawler, last night.”
He let them fall back onto the desk with a meaningful thud, to illustrate that these were no fluffy toys but hard tools of restraint.
“Joining all the dots, our working theory is that our unidentified woman was a victim of trafficking—”
“Not an illegal immigrant?” one of the team piped up.
Ryan shook his head.
“When you have people travelling in the full knowledge of the risks they’ll be taking, there’s no need to restrain them,” he said, simply. “Whereas, when you’re moving people against their will, or in a manner they weren’t expecting, they’re much more of a flight risk.”
He stuck his hands in his pockets, and thought of the storm which had raged the previous evening. It had rattled the windows of the nice, secure home he shared with Anna and Emma, howling through the sleepy valley to waken its sleeping inhabitants, but none of them had truly known fear; not as that poor woman must have known, in her final hours before the sea claimed her.
It was a sobering thought.
“We’ve already spoken with colleagues in Vice, Drugs, SOC and Fraud,” he said, thinking of his meeting ea
rlier that day. “They’ll ask around, but there were no leads that might connect our investigation with any active cases they’re working on, at the moment. As far as they’re concerned, any of the leading gangs could have been responsible; they’ve all got the resources and the connections to run that kind of operation.”
Ryan paused, thinking of how to frame his next point.
“The fact is, the main thrust of resources in SOC and Drugs are being spent trying to combat County Lines,” he said. “It’s a worthy pursuit, when you consider how far-reaching its effects can be, and how many lives can be ruined. But it doesn’t leave much in the way of time or money to spend on surveillance or effective investigation into people trafficking in our neck of the woods.”
He cast his eye around the room, compelling them to listen.
“I propose we give our colleagues a helping hand,” he said, with a small smile. “Our investigation into this woman’s death may, or may not, lead us to uncover much broader connections with vice, fraud or serious and organised crime—everything is connected in some way or another, and we will, of course, be co-operative in sharing any relevant intelligence with other divisions, when appropriate.”
There were nods around the room.
“It goes without saying that co-operation cuts both ways,” he was careful to add. “Colleagues in Vice have already facilitated a meeting with one of their contacts who might prove helpful to us.”
He turned to MacKenzie.
“Mac? Tomorrow morning, we have a meeting set up with the woman we discussed earlier, who was trafficked into this country for the purposes of sex work, but managed to get out. She may have some very useful insights.”
She nodded, and Ryan turned back to the others.
“What I need you to understand is that we’ve stumbled across something we were never intended to see, never intended to know about,” he said. “It’s a tiny crack in the doorway to another world, a seething underbelly of organised crime we’re trying constantly to bust open. As you all know, that’s easier said than done, and it’ll be a lifetime’s endeavour.”
He paused, and surprised them all by smiling broadly.
