Читать книгу Night Angels - Danuta Reah - Страница 12

Lynne Jordan sat in Roy Farnham’s office, wondering if she was pissed off at the delay, or pleased that she had actually been called in. On the whole, she decided that she was pleased. There had been no overt hostility to her arrival. It was more that a lack of interest meant that things she should be notified of, things that were clearly or possibly within her area of responsibility were just not passed on to her. Michael Balit’s attitude was not uncommon. Prostitutes were prostitutes, the argument seemed to go. Sometimes they got killed. Illegal immigrants were illegal immigrants. Sometimes they got killed as well. Lynne could remember a conversation at a dinner party, where the wife of a colleague had held forth with indignation about a young man who had tried to smuggle himself into the country riding on the roof of a Eurostar and had electrocuted himself. ‘He’s occupying a bed in intensive care,’ the woman, a nurse, had said. ‘Someone else could be using that bed. It makes me so angry.’ Lynne had wondered what, exactly, the woman thought should have been done with the injured man, but didn’t ask. The answer would probably have depressed her.

Farnham was afraid they had a prostitute killer on their patch, a street cleaner, or a man who wanted to kill women and found that prostitutes made the easiest prey. And if the previous two were illegal immigrants, women in the situation that Lynne was just starting to monitor, how much easier would they have been to catch and kill? ‘How many have there been?’ she said.

‘That’s the problem,’ Farnham said. ‘Until this one – it’s inconclusive. There’s the woman from the estuary, the one you’re trying to identify…’ Katya, Lynne supplied mentally, ‘…and there was something up the coast at Ravenscar.’ Lynne listened as he ran through the details. The body of a woman had been found just over two months earlier on the shingle below the plummeting cliffs of Ravenscar in the incoming tide. Lynne looked at the report and the photographs. The woman had been small, five foot three, and thin. She had a tattoo on her left wrist, a spider in a web that formed a lacy bracelet round a wrist that should have been chubby with disappearing puppy fat, and she had needle marks on her arms and on her thighs – the tattoos of the heroin user. The pathologist had put her age at around seventeen. Her body had been washed clean by the sea, leaving her with weed tangled in her hair and round her legs. She had been battered by the pounding tides. Her skull had been shattered, leaving the face distorted, the mouth smashed. It was still possible to map young features on to the wreckage that remained, which was more disturbing than if it had been smashed to a pulp. She had been found early one Sunday morning by a walker who had made his way down the precipitous path to watch the sea.

There was no identification, but the dental work suggested she was Russian. ‘Russian, no record of her arrival. They think she was working as a prostitute. That’s too many parallels,’ Farnham said. ‘Have you heard anything on the street?’

Lynne hadn’t. ‘I’ll ask around,’ she said.

‘The women usually know something about what’s going on,’ he said. ‘And you’re looking for an identification on the Humber Estuary woman? Any progress?’

‘I’m trying to narrow down her place of origin,’ Lynne said. ‘She might have been reported missing.’ She explained about the tape and Gemma Wishart’s now overdue report.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Keep me posted.’ He looked down for a moment. ‘We might have another one,’ he said. He told her about the woman found in the hotel the previous day. Another faceless woman. ‘But we’ve got a cause of death. This one was strangled. We got the call around midday Friday.’

‘Do you know when she was killed?’ You, not we. Lynne was always careful with her language. She wasn’t on the murder team, she didn’t want anyone to think she was poaching on their turf.

‘Thursday night some time.’

‘And they didn’t find her until lunch-time? How come?’

Farnham shook his head. ‘It’s a mess,’ he conceded. ‘The manager, a woman called Celia Fry, went on a hunt for a missing cleaner. According to Fry, they were short-staffed Friday morning. The cleaner started doing the rooms. Later on, Fry comes down to find her because the upstairs rooms aren’t done, and she finds the vacuum in the middle of the passage and the linen basket out, and no sign of the cleaner. She’s a bit pissed off about this and she starts looking round, and that’s when she finds the Sleeping Beauty in the bathtub.’

‘And the cleaner?’

‘No sign of her. That’s where I thought you might be able to help us.’ He looked across at her. ‘There’s nothing on the books for her and the manager is trying to pretend she doesn’t exist. Casual worker, student, stuff like that. I think she’s wishing she’d kept her mouth shut in the first place.’

‘You think she might be someone who’s working illegally?’ Cleaning was a largely unregulated area. ‘I’ll need more information.’

‘I told her to expect full checks on all the systems and all the accounting within the next week. Did wonders for her memory.’ He grinned, and checked through the folder. ‘Name of Anna Krleza. Age about twenty. Five foot two, three. Shoulder-length dark hair. According to Fry, she’s only been working in the hotel for a week or two. She was supposed to be bringing in her national insurance and P45 any day. Fry says she was getting suspicious about the delay.’ He raised a sceptical eyebrow at Lynne. ‘I’m looking for her. But you’re the one with the contacts.’ He pulled another file across his desk. ‘Do you know anything about a firm called Angel Escorts?’

‘You think she was killed by a client?’ He didn’t respond, but waited for her to answer his question. ‘I don’t know any escort firm called Angel, not operating around this area. But a lot of the agencies operate online these days. Basically, they claim to act as contacts agents – the girls give their details and the agency passes them on to clients.’ She shrugged. The sex-for-sale sites on the internet were blatantly brokering prostitution, but they were hard to track down, the ones who operated from cyber-space, and the ones that had a more terrestrial reality kept themselves within the law by careful wording, or sufficiently within it not to attract scarce police resources.

‘Mm.’ He was noncommittal.

Lynne pushed. ‘Why do you think she was on the game?’ she said.

‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘But I think she might have been. The Blenheim’s a bit of a giveaway. And she was wearing some specialist gear – one of those corset things, laced. Bondage stuff. And the room wasn’t booked out to a woman. It was a man, single booking, made that evening by phone. A sales rep, apparently.’ He checked his notes again. ‘Name of Rafael. That’s with an “f”, not a “ph”.’ He read the question in Lynne’s face. ‘No luck yet. He scribbled something in the hotel register. We’ve got someone looking at it, but I don’t think it says anything. The phone number doesn’t exist, and he didn’t give a car registration. He booked in as normal, paid his bill – they do that if they want to get off first thing – and that’s all anyone saw of him.’ He rubbed between his eyebrows with his thumb and index finger. ‘Anyway, the name – Angel Escorts, Rafael…’ He looked at Lynne. ‘There’s an archangel called Rafael.’ Lynne knew. She was surprised that he did. ‘Client’s joke or killer’s joke? Or are they the same person?’ He frowned. ‘We found this card.’ He pushed it across to Lynne. She looked at it. International women. That was why Farnham thought she might know it. She kept her eyes on the card, letting her mind wander over the possibilities as she listened to him. No address. No URL. Just a phone number.

‘The phone’s a pay-as-you-go,’ Farnham said, anticipating her question. ‘We’re waiting to get some location information on it – at least find out where it’s been used. Nothing so far. We need an ID.’

She was about to ask how far they’d got with that, when he pushed a photograph across the table to her. She looked at it, looked away then looked more closely. ‘Christ.’

Farnham nodded. ‘He beat the shit out of her.’ Lynne looked at the photographs, at the woman’s destroyed face. The body was small and slender; the hair, which had been brushed back from the ruined face, hung in loose curls. Lynne tried to imagine the features that had been obliterated, and the faces of dead women from her past flickered in her mind. And more recently. Anonymous, dead women. The woman at Ravenscar, Katya, and now…she heard Farnham’s voice in her mind. The Sleeping Beauty.