by LJ Ross
“Hang on, I remember now,” Mel said, thinking back to an outing during her childhood. “There are all kinds of caves around that stretch—some of them go all the way back to Hylton Castle, apparently.”
“What d’ you make of it?” he asked.
“I think it’s too much of a coincidence that an anonymous call comes through about an injured woman along that stretch of coastline, so soon after what we found, yesterday. I think we need to call Ryan.”
She rose to clear their plates.
“Weren’t you going to ask me something?”
Jack gave her a rueful smile.
“It can wait,” he said.
* * *
If there was one thing Frank Phillips had learned over the years, it was that the way to a woman’s heart was through laughter. With that in mind, he tiptoed out of bed and borrowed Samantha’s stereo—thanking his lucky stars that she had stayed overnight with her friend, and would be none the wiser. He set it up on the landing outside the bedroom he and Denise shared, then went in search of The Full Monty Soundtrack: Music from the Motion Picture.
Already chuckling to himself, he slipped it into the ancient CD player but didn’t press ‘play’ just yet; first, he snuck off into the spare bedroom to retrieve the outfit he’d ordered online several weeks before. When he’d bought it, the sizing had been ambitious, but he was gratified to see that his fitness and weight loss efforts were obviously paying off, as the garment—though questionable—now fit him like a glove.
He grabbed the plastic truncheon to complete his ensemble, and prepared to give the performance of a lifetime.
He believed in miracles, and, after all, she was a sexy thang.
MacKenzie couldn’t say what she’d expected of Frank on Valentine’s Day. Every year, he thought up some new way to surprise her, but, she had to admit, this year he had outdone himself.
She’d never laughed, and loved, so much in her life.
Being treated to Frank’s personal rendition of a comedy striptease, complete with a Velcro and polyester police uniform that definitely didn’t conform to regulations, was something she would never forget. She got into the spirit of things, clapping and cheering as he shook his funky stuff, and was more than pleasantly surprised when the shirt came off to reveal a decidedly buff Detective Sergeant Phillips.
The Velcro might have got a bit stuck around the posterior, but it came off in the end.
Later, when he’d worn himself out with the dancing—and other exertions—she laughed again.
“Frank? You’re one in a million, you know that?”
“Aye, it’s often been said.”
“I wasn’t expecting that,” she told him.
“They never do,” he winked, and earned himself a jab in the ribs. “Besides, I wasn’t about to waste the first child-free morning we’ve had in a good long while.”
“Amen,” she said, with satisfaction.
“There was one other thing,” he said, and leaned across to retrieve a box from his bedside drawer, which he passed to her. “I heard that it’s sometimes customary for new mothers to receive an eternity ring, and, well, it doesn’t seem right, you not having one as well. You’ve been as much a mother to our Samantha as the poor lass who brought her into the world—maybe more so.”
Denise stared at the delicate run of diamonds set in a slim gold band.
“If you don’t like it—” he said, worriedly.
“I love it, Frank,” she said, quietly, at a loss for words.
“Here, let’s try it on for size,” he said, and slipped it onto her ring finger.
She looked down at the double bands and thought that they represented the two people she loved most in the world.
“I don’t need diamonds, Frank,” she said, because it was true. “And you shouldn’t go spending all your money on jewellery.”
“Can’t a man spoil his wife, sometimes?” he demanded.
She smiled, and leaned over to kiss him.
“Why don’t you restart the CD?” she whispered. “We’ve still got an hour before we need to collect Samantha…”
He turned to her with a pained expression.
“I’m many things, lass, but I’m not bleedin’ Superman. I’m gonna need a sausage and egg sarnie before we go for round two.”
CHAPTER 18
Having dispatched Lowerson and Yates to investigate Spottee’s Cave and its surrounds, Ryan and MacKenzie met shortly before ten o’clock in the café of a bookshop in the centre of Newcastle, while Phillips went off to collect Samantha from her friend’s house. Despite the day dawning brightly, the skies had begun to turn overcast, heralding the onset of another storm expected later that evening, and they were glad to be inside its warm surroundings.
“The weather’s been all over the place,” Mac said, and took a sip of her hot chocolate, smiling privately at her deliberate choice of beverage.
“The forecast is for storms over the next three to five days,” Ryan agreed, angling himself towards the door so that he could keep an eye out for their guest.
“How will we recognise her?” MacKenzie asked.
Ryan shook his head.
“Wentworth said she’d find us,” he replied. “Although, the scar on her cheek might be a clue. This seems an odd choice of location.”
“Perhaps the kind of people she hopes to avoid don’t tend to frequent bookshops,” MacKenzie said, casting her eye around the customers. “It’s good of her to meet us, at all.”
“Very,” he agreed, and wondered why she had.
There was no time to speculate further because, at that point, the waitress came across to ask if they’d like anything else.
Ryan was on the cusp of politely declining, and then did a double take.
“It’s you, isn’t it?”
Her scar was concealed by expert make-up, and her hair had been dyed a funky shade of pink. If he wasn’t mistaken, she wore coloured contact lenses, and her arms were covered in intricately designed tattoos which, he assumed, were as much an expression of creativity as a means to hide the other scars on her body, inflicted by some of the people she’d had the misfortune to know. She looked no more than twenty, but Ryan knew from his discussion with DCI Wentworth that she was closer to thirty.
They’d ordered their drinks from her at the counter, and never so much as guessed.
“I’ve got a ten-minute break, so we can talk, if you like.”
She took a seat beside them, angling herself towards the door, just as Ryan had.
“I didn’t want to meet you here,” she said. “But I couldn’t think of anywhere better. This is the last place any of them would come.”
“Too public?” MacKenzie enquired.
“No, too intelligent,” the woman replied. “The kind of people you’re looking for don’t waste their time reading.”
Her English was flawless, and Ryan could only admire how she held herself, after all she’d been through.
“Can I see your badges, please?”
They obliged, and waited while she scrutinised their warrant cards.
“I’ve been watching you both for the past five minutes,” she said. “I can see you haven’t brought anyone else with you.”
They nodded.
“That was the agreement,” Ryan said, and looked down at the badge on her shirt. “Is that your real name?”
She shook her head.
“No. I change my name, every six to twelve months, for safety. You can call me Niki, for now.”
“Thank you for agreeing to meet us,” Ryan said, keeping his voice low. “We understand that you run a centre for women who’ve recently left sex work, or who’ve been trafficked and have escaped their abusers. Is that right?”
She nodded.
“I work there, part-time, and here, or other places, on weekends,” she said. “I wanted to do something to help.”
“Who runs it with you?” Mac asked.
But the woman shook her head.
“I
can’t tell you that.”
MacKenzie nodded her understanding.
“We know you’re going out on a limb for us, Niki, but what we don’t understand is why.”
“The woman you found yesterday,” she said simply. “She was one of us.”
“We believe so,” Ryan said.
“Perhaps it was better for her,” Niki muttered. “She escaped a different kind of hell.”
It was one way of looking at things, Ryan thought.
“What we really want to know is who might have been responsible for bringing her over to this country,” he said.
She laughed.
“I only know faces,” she said. “And, after a while, they all look the same. In the brothels or the strip clubs, nobody gives a real name. Don’t you know that, sweetie? When they sent me there, they told me my name would be ‘Fuchsia’.”
She patted her hair.
“Just a little nod to the past.”
“Who sent you there?” MacKenzie asked.
“They called him ‘The Horse’, but he was no horse,” she said, with an ugly laugh. “Thomas Linekar was his real name.”
Ryan recognised the name as being part of a well-known crime family who had operated ten or more years ago, before the Moffa brothers had moved in and stolen their turf.
“The strip clubs are supposed to be regulated,” MacKenzie began to say, and the woman laughed again, without any mirth.
“Listen, white lady. There’s one rule for British girls, and another for everyone else,” she said, bitterly. “In the main bar, it’s all a cheap laugh. Drunk boys and men on stag dos, sometimes women, gathered around the main stage to get an eyeful and feel big about themselves. It’s just a laugh, right? Isn’t that what they always say? Where’s the harm?”
Ryan and MacKenzie didn’t bother to argue, because it was exactly what some people said.
“The British girls do private dances, and that’s it,” she continued. “They take their money and go home. They tell people it’s their choice, that they’re enlightened, and give speeches about female empowerment.”
She took a deep breath, letting the anger drain away.
“Maybe for them,” she said quietly. “But, not for everyone. There was a room, more than one room, behind a red curtain. It was another part of the club—members only—where ‘special’ clients were invited to go for ‘special’ treatments. They could have whatever they liked, if they paid the right price. We were made to form a line-up, and they’d pick whoever they liked the look of. Some nights, I tried to look bad, to avoid being picked, but they can always tell.”
“I’m sorry,” Ryan said, huskily.
She looked into his eyes, and thought he was sincere. All the same, he didn’t know the least of it, and probably never would. Like Gaz, she too could categorize people within a minute or two, especially men, and this one was a breed apart.
“You have a wife, Chief Inspector?”
“Yes.”
“She’s a lucky woman.”
Ryan said nothing, but was sorry for the life she had led, and angry with members of his own sex who had put that scar on her face and the deeper scars on her heart.
“How did you get away?” MacKenzie asked her.
“They use drugs to control you,” Niki explained. “From the very beginning, they try to make you dependent, so you learn to need them, even when you hate them. Then, they say you owe them money, so you have to pay it off. It’s a cycle, and you’re trapped.”
She took a long, quivering breath, and lifted her chin.
“I learned a lot from them, about business,” she said. “I became one of their best earners. It took years, but Linekar learned to trust me. That was his mistake. He fell asleep beside me, one night, and that was the chance I was waiting for.”
She remembered the feel of the knife entering his gut, and clasped her fingers together.
“Who runs things now?” he asked her.
She looked into his face and was almost tempted. She saw his conviction and wanted to trust it, but her life was at stake.
So, she told him all she could.
“It’s been a long time since I was in the game,” she said. “But some of the newer girls who come to us talk about a place called ‘Voyeur’—it’s where The All-American Diner used to be, down near the railway station. Apparently, it’s the place to go, if you want a certain kind of entertainment.”
It was a place that was already on their radar.
“Tell them Fuchsia sent you, and some of the girls might talk to you,” she added.
“Thank you,” MacKenzie murmured. “What if we have some more questions—”
“I don’t have anything else to tell you,” she said. “Good luck, Inspector.”
CHAPTER 19
Spottee’s Cave was tucked into a wide limestone ravine off the Roker coastline, four miles further south of Marsden. It was a scenic spot, a large Victorian park with bandstand having been built on either side of the ravine, spanned by a bridge. However, there were no injured women to be found; only the occasional dog-walker and the usual crowd of beach combers who cast curious glances at the man and woman who, even dressed in plain clothes, were obviously police.
“There’s nothing here,” Lowerson said, as they made their way back onto the beach.
“Maybe the caller said ‘Spottee’s’ because it was the nearest landmark,” Yates replied. “We should have a look at the other caves in the area.”
Lowerson looked north, towards Souter, and knew that Marsden lay beyond it.
“If this injured woman has anything to do with the wreck, it seems unlikely she’d have walked this far south, especially in the middle of a storm. You can’t walk all the way from Marsden to here via the beach, anyway—the tides wouldn’t allow it.”
“It could have been a prank call, after all,” Mel said.
“Maybe,” he agreed. “Perhaps our anonymous caller panicked and said the nearest thing they could think of.”
She nodded.
“It could be a genuine error,” she said. “They just got the name of the cave wrong.”
“Yeah, people often mix up the names and exact location of Spottee’s, unless they’re local,” Lowerson said. “The only reason I knew it was here is because I used to visit my grandparents in Seaham all the time when I was a kid, and that’s just around the corner.”
“I’ve asked Digital Forensics to trace the source of the call,” she said. “They know it came from a pay phone, but they’re looking into its exact location. It might help.”
“Good thinking.”
“The call has to have come from someone connected to the operation,” she thought aloud. “Anyone else would have reported having found her, in the usual way.”
He looked out across the water, and thought that there were worse places to be, on Valentine’s Day, than walking along the beach with the woman he loved—even when they were still on duty.
He reached for her hand, and tugged her close.
“Do you like kids?” he asked, and she gave him a startled look.
“Kids? Um, yes, I do. Why do you ask?”
“I’ve always wanted to have a family, some day. Nothing crazy, just the usual—you know, a nice house, couple of kids…”
“At least you’re not expecting a football team,” she joked.
“What about you?” he asked, seriously. “Is that something you’d want?”
She considered the question, which inevitably raised memories from her own childhood.
“I don’t know how good of a mother I’d make,” she said. “I’d like to think I’d do my best, but I’m not sure I’m ready for children, just yet. I need more time, just as a couple.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” he said, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “It was more of a general question.”
“I’m not against having kids,” she said, openly. “I just don’t agree with the institution of marriage.”
Lowerson tripped
over a pebble, then righted himself.
“You—you don’t agree with marriage?” Why hadn’t he known this before?
“It works for a lot of people—take Anna and Ryan, or Frank and Denise. But I’ve seen how other marriages can be, and it isn’t always pretty. Besides, if two people love each other, surely they don’t need a piece of paper to prove it, do they?”
He looked out across the water, trying to unscramble the thoughts in his head. He’d had it all mapped out: the ring, the proposal, the happily ever after. He’d imagined her in a big white dress, and himself in a smart tuxedo. He’d visualised them dancing to their favourite song and saying ‘I do’ in front of all their loved ones.
She didn’t want any of that, and it was a hard pill to swallow.
“Do you think it’s something you’d ever change your mind about?”
He hoped he didn’t sound too desperate.
“Well, I suppose, never say ‘never’, but I just can’t imagine it right now. I didn’t realise you were so traditional,” she added, with a frown.
“Yeah, I guess I’m an old-fashioned guy, despite the shiny suits,” he said, self-deprecatingly. “But, like you say, it doesn’t really matter, so long as we’re happy.”
“Jack, if it’s something you really want—”
“It has to come from both of us,” he interrupted. “Or it’s meaningless. Besides, as you say, who needs a piece of paper, eh?”
He nodded towards the next cave.
“I’ll dip inside this one,” he said, and was all business again.
* * *
The next stop on Ryan and MacKenzie’s list was the mortuary.
It was not everybody’s idea of an ideal Sunday morning excursion, particularly on what was supposed to be the most romantic day of the year, but any feelings of self-pity were easily overcome by remembering that there was at least one woman who no longer had the luxury of choosing where to spend her time—for, time had been snatched away from her.
“It never changes, does it?” MacKenzie remarked, as they made their way past the main entrance of the Royal Victoria Infirmary and towards the staff entrance that would lead them down into the bowels of the hospital.
Ryan looked around at the people coming and going: an eclectic mix of visiting relatives, recovering patients being wheeled out to waiting taxis and mini-buses for their journey home, and tired-looking clinical staff coming on or off shift.
