The Black Shepherd

by Steven Savile

  Kask reached inside his desk drawer and retrieved a packet of cigarettes and his lighter.

  He needed to make a call, but not where he could be overheard.

  Kask shook his cigarettes in the direction of his colleague who grimaced but showed he understood. Being a smoker gave him the opportunity for time alone without anyone thinking to question him.

  He headed back out into the street.

  The back door led into a parking area. There were half a dozen marked vehicles, a mixture of cars and vans, ready for use at a moment’s notice. No one else was getting their nicotine fix.

  Rather than making the call straight away, he lit a cigarette and took a couple of deep drags to calm his nerves before he fished the phone out of his pocket.

  Kask let the cigarette hang loose in his lips as he punched in the numbers, smoke wisping up across his face and stinging his eyes.

  The phone was answered on the third ring.

  ‘It’s Kask,’ he said, ignoring the fact that every phone had caller ID these days. ‘I think we’ve got a problem.’

  There was only silence.

  He felt the need to fill it.

  ‘That girl is back. The flatmate. I kept One World out of the statement we have on file from her, but there’s someone sniffing around from Eurocrimes Division. It might be something and nothing, but she’s been talking to the flatmate. I’ve got no idea if she named One World again or not. I couldn’t push it without looking like it was important.’

  Silence.

  ‘I don’t think they’ve met face to face.’

  ‘Then why are you telling me now?’

  Kask’s collar felt a little too tight around his throat. A bead of sweat formed on his forehead. He regretted making the call. All he was doing was drawing attention to his own fuck up.

  ‘I thought it was under control.’

  ‘And clearly you were wrong, or you wouldn’t be calling me now looking for me to deal with your mess. You disappoint me, Kask. I don’t like being disappointed. I suggest you deal with it and don’t bother me again until the problem has gone away.’ The call was ended before Kask could defend himself.

  He knew exactly what The Shepherd meant when he said deal with it.

  EIGHT

  Frankie woke to a chorus of brushes dragging across the paving stones as a street cleaner got too close to her doorway. The brushes swept up the debris, leaving a trail of damp pavement behind it, barely visible in the dull early light.

  The pre-dawn city was a strange beast. There were none of the late-night revellers and none of the early morning commuters, meaning for once in its day it was empty.

  Or at least near empty.

  There was always someone on the move, somewhere, even if it was just the street cleaners and the taxi drivers. Tallinn was no different to any other city in the civilized world.

  It might have been more than a week, but Frankie wasn’t used to sleeping in a piss-soaked doorway. It was soul-destroying. Dehumanizing. Every muscle in her body ached. But it went so much deeper than that. There was a chill in her bones.

  She glanced down the street, seeing other shapes in doorways beginning to stir.

  She thought about the woman from the night before. Tasha. She assumed it was an affectionate form of Natasha, or a Russian variant.

  Another rough-sleeper was on his feet, gathering up his meagre possessions. She watched him roll his sleeping bag and tie a frayed piece of rope round it to make it easier to carry. A small dog fussed around him, then ran ahead as he started along the road towards Frankie. The dog came up to her, slowing as it got to within patting distance, and paused to sniff her, its stub of a tail wagging furiously.

  ‘Come on, Tino,’ the man urged. He offered Frankie a brief smile. ‘The police will be around in half an hour or so to move everyone on. They can get pretty rough,’ he said, touching a fading bruise on his left cheek. ‘You might wanna be gone before they turn up.’

  She nodded. ‘Thanks for the warning.’

  ‘We’re going down to the docks. The holy rollers run a little kitchen down there. It’s worth a few minutes of their religious nonsense for a decent breakfast.’

  ‘Most important meal of the day,’ she said.

  ‘Only meal of the day more often than not,’ he said.

  ‘I spoke to someone last night.’

  ‘That’ll be Tasha,’ he said. ‘She never seems to stop, but she means well. And who’s going to say no to that hot coffee she always has? Not me. We can wait for you if you like?’

  ‘That’s OK, I’ll see you and this handsome little chap down there. Save a seat.’

  He nodded. ‘Tino’s got you covered. Come on, mate,’ he said to the dog, and together they walked off into the sunrise.

  Frankie glanced down the street. A couple of others were starting to move out. Like Tino and his master, they headed the same way, drawn by the lure of the free breakfast like moths to a flame. Tino kept turning back as he padded forward, craning his neck to see if she was following. Eventually he lost interest in her.

  Frankie slid out of her sleeping bag. She stood a little unsteadily as she stretched. It took her a couple of minutes longer than the others to pack her things away, but they’d had a lot more practice. By the time she moved out of her doorway the sky had grown brighter and the last of the homeless were making their way off the street. She was wrong, they weren’t moths to flames, they were rats being lured down to the water by some Pied Piper. The street cleaner made its way back down the path toward her.

  Given the tide of humanity moving toward the docks she didn’t think it’d be too difficult to find Tasha’s soup kitchen.

  The benefit of not being the first through the door was that it’d make her seem reluctant to accept charity. That was the kind of little detail that filled out a character and helped sell it. So she followed another homeless man – older than many of the others she’d seen – with his bed under his arm and a torn plastic carrier bag filled to overflowing with all of his worldly goods in the other hand. Frankie’s bag and sack were far from new, but they were both high quality. She couldn’t help but feel privileged, not least because she was doing this through choice, not necessity. It was humbling that in just those few possessions she carried with her, Frankie had so much more than the others who’d spent the night on the same street with her.

  The coins she had been given weighed heavily in her pocket.

  It took longer than she had expected to make it down the long winding road to the opening between towering warehouses and the small hole-in-the-wall joint where Tasha and a couple of other women were warming up porridge oats and ladling out bowls filled to the brim. They even sprinkled cinnamon on the top, just a little flourish that made it feel more than it really was. There were twice as many people in the queue waiting to be fed as there were inside, chatting over hot drinks.

  The skeletal limbs of the dockyard cranes towered over them.

  There was a camaraderie here, she realized. A sense of togetherness. She hadn’t expected that. Maybe it would disappear as they dispersed, each left to fend for themselves? Or maybe not, she thought, looking at what Tasha was creating here. She wasn’t just feeding people. She was creating a society.

  As Frankie neared the front of the line she got a decent look at the young women running things. She realized she’d made a mistake, it wasn’t Tasha handing out the bowls. Tasha was working out back and came through the swinging doors carrying another steaming vat of porridge. The women were so similar they could have passed for sisters: tall, slim, long blonde hair and sharp cheekbones and noses. It was a strong Slavic or Scandinavian look.

  It was like she’d stumbled upon Stepford’s soup kitchen.

  It gave her the creeps.

  NINE

  The plane was in the air for little more than two hours, but the journey took more than twice that thanks to the rigmarole involved in getting through the two airports.

  Pete had always assumed freedom of m
ovement would make a journey like this so much faster. And maybe it had, pre-bin Laden and Shoe Bombers, but the state of the world today meant full-body scans, little plastic bags for liquids, and struggling with belts and portable devices at the scanners. He was all for security. His entire life was based upon the notion of it. But the inconvenience still fucked him off a treat and it was only going to get worse if he had to join the Other Passports line, which never seemed to move out of its gradual glacial creep.

  Maybe Division could invest in fancy private jets. A Gulfstream or two for the field agents, their own pilots and cabin crew? He smiled at the thought, and realized he had a better shot at convincing the suits to invest in a Nespresso machine to feed Law’s addiction than he did of travelling anything but economy.

  Laura had booked him into a hotel and lined up a hire car.

  The hotel she’d chosen was close to the centre of the city, and for once it wasn’t the cheapest place on the block. He assumed she was thinking about the legwork. It was better to be slap bang in the centre of the action if he was going to be walking the streets at night. The decor was tired but clean, with a slightly old-worldy charm about it, and the woman on reception seemed genuinely delighted to check him in and tell him all about the sights her city had to offer. He watched her talk fluently to three different sets of guests in three different languages with the kind of ease that mocked the British school system. It never failed to amaze him just how relaxed and natural language skills were once you stepped off the island.

  She handed him his key – an actual honest to goodness key, brass, about the size of his hand, with a huge wooden fob with the room number embossed on it.

  His room – number 213 – looked out onto the busy street, which he’d been promised would be a little quieter at night. He wasn’t sure he believed the receptionist, but that was OK. It was why he was here.

  It was still early, but even so there was a steady flow of road and foot traffic, though nothing compared with the hustle and bustle outside his new Bonn apartment every night. That place was worse than his flat back in London. He tested the bed. The mattress was like a bed of nails.

  He fished out the phone Laura had given him and punched in the three-digit code. She knew him far too well. Just hitting 007 put a smile on his face. It took a few seconds to pick up the signal from Galileo and connect, then he saw the two red dots on the screen, like something out of an old Atari game. One was him, the other Frankie. It was as simple as that.

  It would have been nice if there was a proper map he could expand around her location to give himself a better idea of where she was, but that was beyond what the technology had to offer.

  He used an old-fashioned paper map instead.

  It took him a moment to orientate himself, then he realized Frankie was down in the docklands.

  She was a couple of miles from his hotel.

  He didn’t need to make contact.

  The last thing he wanted to do was draw attention to her.

  His plan was pretty basic, do some digging around while he waited for nightfall. Then he’d try to find her.

  That meant he had a whole day to fill, and despite the promised charms of the city, he had no great desire to spend it sightseeing.

  First thing on the agenda, act like an investigating officer – that meant developing the cover Law had established for him. And the only way he was going to do that was by making himself known to local law enforcement.

  He had the contact details for a female officer, Mirjam Rebane, who was dealing with the discovery of the body in the woods. She wasn’t in the same jurisdictional territory as any of the officers working Irma Lutz’s disappearance. That was a plus.

  He also had Annja Rosen’s contact details so he could verify her statement, but that could wait until tomorrow. He’d call later to make arrangements. Today was going to be all about the body in the woods.

  He’d seen the smoke and scorched earth from the plane. The fire was a hungry bastard. The damage was brutal. And it was still burning. From up there, it still looked like it was out of control, but the news reports promised that wasn’t the case. The sky was full of heavy smoke. He’d felt it in his lungs as he walked to the hotel; even though the air in the city itself looked fine it was obviously thick with smoke particles. What they needed was rain. A proper biblical flood to really drown the fire and reduce the risk of it picking up again.

  Rebane wasn’t surprised to receive his call, though she was unsure as to why he needed to visit in person given the fact she had nothing to tell him that wasn’t already in the files. Nevertheless, an hour later he was drinking coffee on the other side of a table from the woman. The cafe promised better coffee than the homogenous chains that littered the city with their green-tailed mermaids. It was also quiet, meaning they could talk.

  ‘It’s a long way to come for a cup of coffee,’ Mirjam Rebane said, her English flawless, though Peter caught a trace of an unexpected accent. She raised the cup to her lips even though the contents must be too hot to drink. Europeans, he was quickly coming to realize, all had asbestos-lined mouths when it came to their coffee-drinking. ‘All the way from London?’

  ‘Bonn.’

  ‘You were in Germany?’

  ‘We’re based there now. Long story. Centralized investigation. It’s meant to make the job easier.’

  ‘You don’t sound convinced.’

  He shrugged. ‘Judging by your accent it seems like you’re a long way from home, too.’

  ‘The curse of family, I’m afraid. My mother. She was from Liverpool. I’ve never set foot outside of Estonia. Not even to go and worship the sun. So, tell me, Mr Ash, how do you think I can help you?’

  ‘It’s a long shot,’ he said, ‘and there’s no real reason to think your girl in the woods is mixed up in this in any way, but we’ve had reliable intelligence that young girls are being trafficked through Tallinn into the Eurozone.’

  The woman pursed her lips. ‘What do you need from me?’

  ‘Anything you can tell me about Tallinn, really. Russian communities in the city. Places where girls might take refuge if they managed to escape the traffickers. Support networks. Anything that might be relevant. This isn’t my patch. I’m coming in here blind.’

  She nodded again. ‘It’s possible. But we must be honest for a moment, Peter, even if my colleagues were aware of such survivors, I’m not sure that they would be willing to talk to you.’

  ‘It’s got to be worth a shot.’

  ‘I can make a few calls, but no promises.’

  ‘That would be something. The Russian authorities aren’t being particularly cooperative.’

  ‘I can imagine. Do you need to see the body?’

  ‘Only if you think I’m going to see something the pathologist missed.’

  ‘Do you perhaps have superpowers? X-ray vision?’

  ‘I have Laura,’ he said, earning a laugh from Mirjam.

  ‘Is she your boss?’

  ‘We work together, let’s put it that way,’ he said, feeling that reflected a more accurate position. ‘I’m a field agent, she’s support staff, but the reality is she runs the show.’

  She drained her coffee. ‘Ah, so you just don’t want to admit she’s your boss? I know plenty of men like you.’ Her grin took the sting out of the words. ‘I’ll give you a call this afternoon and let you know how I get on, who knows, you might get lucky?’

  Peter resisted the temptation to say anything stupid, and instead, said his goodbyes.

  When she was gone, he leaned back in his chair.

  He fished out his phone and called the number he had been given for Annja Rosen.

  There was no reply.

  ‘Hi, Annja, my name is Peter Ash. I work in Eurocrimes with Frankie Varg. I’m in Tallinn and would like to meet up with you for a chat tomorrow if you’re free? You can reach me on this number, any time. Thanks.’

  Done, he punched in the 007 code to check on Frankie’s position.

 
She was still down by the docks.

  IN THE DARKNESS …

  The girl felt a sense of panic as she was lowered into the darkness, the harness cut tight beneath her arms. She accepted it. This was her test. Her challenge. The hole would not break her. She would stay true. All she wanted in this world was to be accepted, to be part of the family. John had promised her this was the final test, the hardest of all. So many had failed, but she was special. He promised her that, that she was special, that she could do this.

  And she believed him.

  She had arrived wearing a blindfold that covered her ears and nose as well. They didn’t remove it until the door closed behind them and she stood in a narrow corridor.

  She faced a stranger.

  He was a brute. A giant of a man. But his voice was soft. Gentle even. Like his soul. ‘We are all one family,’ she said, trustingly.

  ‘One World,’ he assured her, even as he buckled her into a harness and lowered her down into the hole.

  It was deeper than she could have imagined. Impossible for her to claw her way out of if she panicked.

  ‘It will be over soon,’ he promised, no more than a silhouette now.

  And still she felt herself sinking lower.

  Fear.

  She had to overcome her fear.

  That was the test, surely.

  But it was hard.

  She clung on to the rope so desperately her knuckles hurt. Even as she hit the dirt floor she couldn’t let go.

  She struggled to stand, trying to orientate herself in the darkness. She craned her head upwards, to the opening where the brute looked down on her.

  ‘Release the harness and step away from the rope,’ he told her.

  A moment later the rope grew slack.