The Black Shepherd

by Steven Savile

  She heard the sound of an approaching car, then saw the headlights cut across the night as it came up the dirt track. It took a lot longer for it to reach the turning circle in front of the cabins than she’d have expected, meaning the real road was a lot further away than she would have guessed.

  Frankie watched it pull up outside Elsa’s office.

  When he finally stepped into a puddle of light from one of the few spotlights illuminating the compound, she realized the driver was Tomas, the driver who had brought her here.

  He opened the rear passenger door.

  She saw John.

  The second door opened, and another man climbed out of the car. She didn’t recognize him.

  She watched them a little while longer, but it was impossible to see what passed between them.

  The stranger deferred to John, she saw that much. He let him walk ahead, he nodded as he spoke.

  She watched them enter the building. The chances were good that her bag was still in the back of that car, and with it her lifeline back to Laura. But could she risk trying to get out there to retrieve it?

  It was a big risk, but at what point did risk outweigh reward?

  She dug her fingernails into her palm, focusing on the sharp stab of pain.

  Going out there was stupid.

  Going out there wouldn’t help find Irma.

  What could she do?

  Realistically?

  Sleep.

  FORTY-THREE

  There had been no sentimental farewells. Mirjam dropped him off at the airport with twenty minutes to spare before the gates closed.

  Laura had managed to arrange an interview with Maria Bartok three hours before her deportation back to Moscow was scheduled. Ten-minute sit down. It wasn’t much, but it was a lot more than he had any right to expect, given a couple of hours ago he’d had her down as the body on the mortician’s slab.

  He’d come straight from the airport, leaving his carry-on with reception as he took up a seat in the empty waiting room. It didn’t take long before a uniformed customs agent came through to collect him.

  ‘Mr Ash?’ a man in uniform said. ‘Lennart Pettersson.’ He held out a hand.

  Peter shook it. He offered the Swede his badge.

  ‘I’ve not seen one like that before.’

  ‘I’m special,’ he said, chuckling.

  ‘That’s what my mother used to say, too. I understand you’re here to see Maria?’ He nodded. ‘Are you able to tell me what this is all about?’

  ‘That depends upon whether it will affect whether I get to speak to her.’

  ‘I’m just curious, to be honest. She doesn’t strike me as a particularly remarkable young lady, and as you say, you are special.’ He handed Peter’s ID back.

  ‘Honestly? We think she might be able to help us with the people who brought her out of Russia.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘We believe she was brought into Sweden as part of some sex-trafficking operation. Organized cross-border crime. Traffickers bringing young girls into the EU.’

  ‘And you really think she’s going to help you? She is being sent back to Russia. You cannot offer her salvation. What do you have to bargain with?’

  ‘My charm? I know, it wears thin really fast. Right now, I suspect fear is my best hope. She’s being sent back to where they picked her up. They’re going to know she’s back, they know she’s been in custody, they’re going to think she’s talked. Or at least they can’t risk the fact she might have. The only safety I can offer her is taking them off the streets.’

  ‘Which you can’t do in Russia.’

  ‘I’m not going to lie to her.’

  ‘But you’re not going to put her right if she jumps to the wrong conclusion, are you? That’s the sin of omission.’

  ‘I’ll take it up with my Father Confessor later. Right now, she’s all I’ve got, and I’m trying to make a difference for another girl who I think is a prisoner of the same people.’

  ‘Then let’s get on with it. I don’t need to remind you that this is voluntary. If Maria decides at any time that she wants to end the meeting then we end it.’

  ‘Understood,’ Peter said.

  Pettersson led him through a series of corridors to one of three interrogation rooms. He keyed in a four-digit code which let them through a security door.

  Just a few metres along the corridor he stopped and opened another door, into Interrogation Room Two, and stood aside.

  Peter looked through the door to see a waif-like girl sitting on one side of the table. He felt like he knew her life story in that second. She was vulnerable, frightened, and still showing the physical marks of abuse that had finally brought her to this place of relative safety. His heart broke for the kid, and that’s all she was, but for ten minutes he couldn’t look at her as a human being, he had to look at her as a cop, and that meant turning his back on every instinct for compassion and vengeance, and just focusing on asking the right questions.

  He knew there wasn’t a single thing he could offer her that would make her life better.

  ‘Maria,’ Pettersson said. ‘This is Peter Ash.’ The girl looked up, wondering what fresh hell had just been brought to her door. ‘He’s with a group called Eurocrimes Division. He’s a police officer. I’ve had a chat with him, and he just wants to ask you a few questions. We can stop this interview any time you feel uncomfortable. You don’t have to answer any of his questions, but maybe it’ll help another girl like you if you do. Is that OK?’

  The girl nodded.

  ‘OK then, I’ll leave you to it. How about I go and make you both a nice cup of coffee?’

  Peter nodded. ‘Sounds good.’

  He waited until the door closed behind him before he took a seat on the other side of the table.

  ‘Hi, Maria. I don’t know how much Mr Pettersson has told you—’

  ‘Lenny. We call him Lenny.’

  Peter nodded. ‘I’m going to speak quite frankly, Maria. I’m not going to sugar-coat things or use pretty words, because that won’t help either of us. I spoke to someone who knew you in Tallinn. She seemed to think that you’d been brought into the country by traffickers and were being forced into prostitution. Is that right?’

  ‘Who did you speak to?’ the girl said. She lifted her face to look him in the eye for the first time. Through the dark patches he saw a surprising defiance.

  ‘She wouldn’t give me her real name.’

  ‘But she was happy to give you mine.’

  ‘We had found a body in the woods outside of the compound you ran away from. She thought it might be yours.’

  ‘That’s not how it was.’

  ‘Then talk me through it, Maria. Tell me what happened to you. Help me understand.’

  He needed to keep her talking. Ten minutes wasn’t long. But it was a lot less if half of it was lost to silences.

  She looked at him like he was crazy. ‘It wasn’t what they promised. It wasn’t a new life. They wanted me to fuck men for them.’

  He looked at her again, properly this time, and realized that dressed the right way she could have passed for maybe fourteen or fifteen, which was another nail in his heart.

  ‘They promised me a better life. I believed them. I wanted to believe them.’

  ‘I know it’s got to be hard talking about this stuff, but I really need you to help me understand.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ Maria Bartok said. ‘I remember hearing someone … we weren’t supposed to be listening. I was in the kitchen, they were in the chapel, I heard them say they needed one of the girls to get close to someone. A man. I don’t know who he was, I never heard his name. They were going to use one of us to get to him.’

  ‘Get to him how?’

  ‘Blackmail. They needed him to do something. It was part of the grand plan. That’s not what they called it. They had another word for it, but I didn’t understand it.’

  ‘OK,’ Peter said. It was a pretty short list of people you’d bribe
with compromising photos, or video footage. The KGB might have gone, in theory, but the FSB and SVR weren’t averse to using the same kompromat tactics. It went all the way back to the Stalin era. The earliest stuff often included doctored photos, planted drugs, grainy film footage of the target in bed with prostitutes, all fairly primitive entrapment techniques by modern standards. Now, of course, it was a lot more sophisticated, even if it was still more often than not sexual in nature. It was about cybercrime.

  The door opened. Lennart returning with their drinks.

  He set them down on the table, all smiles.

  ‘They had someone … a policeman.’

  Peter already knew the answer to the question, but he wanted to hear it from her lips anyway. ‘Do you know his name?’

  She shook her head. ‘Sorry. I just know they were going to use him to help get me close to the man. I had to run. I couldn’t do it.’

  ‘OK, Maria, that’s fine. You’re not in trouble here. I’m looking for the people who smuggled you out of Russia. Not you.’

  For the first time since he sat down at the table with her, Maria Bartok’s expression changed completely. Peter saw the confusion in her eyes. ‘I wasn’t smuggled,’ she said. ‘It was an organized trip. I came over to work with a charity. They had my passport and everything. The Church I was involved with arranged it all. One World.’

  Peter Ash saw the look on the Lennart Pettersson’s face change when the girl said the words One World.

  His first thought, like a punch to the gut, was that the man had some sort of connection to the cult. He refused to think of it as a faith. The more he learned, the more disgusted he became with the so-called Church.

  He knew he was being stupid, seeing things in the shadows when there was nothing but the normal darkness of man there.

  ‘They were good to me while I was in Russia,’ Maria Bartok explained. ‘They looked after me when no one else was interested. They gave me something to do with my life. They gave me meaning.’

  He nodded, but really he was just trying to encourage her to open up. His questions were always going to be the same blunt traumas. He needed her to find her way through this, to open up.

  ‘At first I used to help in a home for the elderly, people without other family to care for them. I volunteered. I liked it there. We used to sing and tell stories and they seemed to enjoy it. It wasn’t very glamorous, but it meant something. It was making a difference. One World funded the home. They had a couple of volunteers on the staff who helped out, and they explained that One World ran a series of missions, and that we could sign up to work in other countries, helping other branches of the Church deliver kindness to the less fortunate all over the world, like their name suggested. Most of us had never left St Petersburg, let alone travelled to somewhere like London or Rome. It was exciting. We were getting to do something good with our lives and experience something incredible.’

  ‘Which must have felt terribly exciting. When did they tell you where you were going?’

  ‘They didn’t,’ she said. ‘It was always talk of all these incredible-sounding places like Vienna and Prague, Dubrovnik and Madrid.’ She shook her head, like she still couldn’t imagine a world where these countries and the adventure they must have represented to the young girl from St Petersburg existed. She picked up the coffee that Lenny had put in front of her.

  ‘So you got away from them in Tallinn?’

  She took a sip at the coffee, nodding. ‘There was this place in the forest. They call it the compound. It’s like an army barracks. We had travelled for hours and hours. It was the middle of the night when we got there. We didn’t even know which country we were in.’

  ‘What about your passports?’

  ‘We travelled as a group. The Church coordinators sorted everything out for us, including the visas. None of us had even owned a passport before. You have to understand we weren’t the kind of kids who got to explore the world on our gap years.’

  ‘Tell me about the compound.’

  ‘It was a long way from the road. Very remote. At night the sky was pitch black. You could see thousands of stars. There was no reflection from the world, just the night sky. It was beautiful.’

  Which wasn’t what he’d asked, and he was conscious of the time getting away from him.

  ‘How did you get away?’

  ‘One of the other girls, not one that had arrived with us, another one that had come in from some other branch of the Church, had gone missing. She’d run off into the forest and the whole place was going crazy. They tore the woodland apart trying to find her. There was something about that moment that changed everything for me. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t lived through it, but I hadn’t thought of us as being prisoners until then. They went after her with dogs. They’d told us they were going to introduce us to our husbands. I remember that. I remember thinking it was a joke, you know, like hey, here’s your camp buddy, you look after each other.’

  ‘But it wasn’t a joke?’ Peter pushed gently.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I knew I only had this small window when everyone else was looking the other way. So I got dressed. I was going to run, until I saw the car and realized they’d left the keys in the ignition. I drove for a couple of kilometres. Not as far as I wanted. I didn’t get clear of the trees. The weather was awful. A snow storm. I hit something. Maybe a moose. The car died. I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t just sit there. I could hear voices, and the dogs barking, but they were getting further away. I stood there in the snow, freezing, terrified. I wanted to run but I couldn’t make my legs move. I kept thinking they’d know, they’d have to know that I’d run, and they’d hunt me down with the dogs.

  ‘Then I heard the gunshot and my legs started working. They killed her. They must have killed her. The dogs went crazy. All I could hear was this frenzied barking. I knew I had to run and keep on running and not stop, not even when it got light. So I did that. Even when my legs buckled from exhaustion and I was on my knees, heaving for the next breath, somehow I found the strength to push myself back to my feet and run on.

  ‘And when I thought I couldn’t go on, I saw it, this old VW Camper Van that looked like it had been dumped at the side of the road. I climbed inside. It was damp and reeked, but I’d slept in a lot worse places before that, and after. I got lucky, the snow really came down. We’re talking thirty centimetres in a few hours. It buried my scent and my tracks. I slept the night in the van, then walked to the main highway. I saw a couple of cars I’d seen at the compound, at one point. I figured they were looking for me, so I hid off the side of the road. I was able to hitch a ride into Tallinn, but even there in the big city I knew I wasn’t safe. I had to keep moving. I had to get away. Somewhere they weren’t.’

  He looked at the clock. His ten minutes were up, but if Lenny wasn’t dragging her out of there to wait in line to be deported he wasn’t going to tell him to do his job.

  ‘Did you know the girl? The one who ran first?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘She was assigned to a different building. They arrived a few hours after we did. It was the middle of the night. When we arrived, they took us to a communal area and we got to know the girls who were already there, but with it being so late, I think they were going to do that in the morning.’

  ‘And you definitely heard gunshots.’

  She nodded. ‘Just the one. You know the sound when you hear it. I grew up around that sound.’ She didn’t explain in any more detail than that.

  Peter didn’t push it.

  ‘And this was six months ago?’

  Maria Bartok nodded.

  Meaning the body in the woods was going to remain nameless, at least for now.

  ‘Can I ask you one last question, Maria? Do you know what was going to happen to you when you left the camp?’

  ‘I heard someone talk about Germany, one group was going to Berlin, but we were meant to be going to London.’

  So One
World were looking to develop compromising intelligence on someone in London. It was a big city, ten million strong. That was a lot of people with the potential to be blackmailed. He wasn’t really narrowing things down here.

  ‘Does the name Irma Lutz mean anything to you?’

  ‘No. Should it?’

  ‘She’s missing. We think she might have joined One World and been taken out to the compound.’

  ‘I hope you find her.’ She looked over at Lenny, who still stood in the doorway, and told him, ‘I’m tired, Lenny. I’d like to go get my things before the plane leaves. Is that OK?’

  ‘Of course,’ the guard said.

  Peter Ash pulled his badge, and from behind it one of the crisp new Eurocrimes Division business cards they’d given him before he left Bonn. He gave it to the girl. ‘If you think of anything that might help me find Irma, please, call me.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said slipping it into the pocket of her jeans. ‘But I don’t remember much. I wasn’t there that long. I wish I could help you.’

  FORTY-FOUR

  The detention centre wasn’t far from the airport buildings, but the shuttle bus didn’t run back to the terminals so he had to wait for a taxi.

  Lenny had given him another coffee, this one in a plastic mug, and left him to wait on the pavement outside. It was just easier, the guard explained, not a punishment. The driver would need clearance to get through the gates. It made sense. It might not be a prison by name, but it was in practice.

  He didn’t object. He needed to fill Laura in, anyway.

  ‘Any joy?’ she asked as soon as the line went active.

  ‘Some. Maybe not how we figured it. Maria escaped from the place in the forest. She wasn’t there long. She took advantage of another breakout. She basically confirmed they were expected to have sex with men, but I got the impression it wasn’t straight prostitution, which kinda surprised me.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘You know the old KGB technique of kompromat? Same deal. They’re using these girls to get close to people they want to manipulate. She was being groomed. They were going to get her close to someone pretty influential in London. She didn’t know the target.’