After the Fire (18 page)

‘Pell’s spent a fortune on private investigators trying to track his wife down,’ Pettifer said. ‘Like I said, he seems like a nice bloke.’

‘Or a husband trying to get control of his wife after she’s run away from him,’ I said tartly. ‘I don’t know why you’re taking him at face value.’

Pettifer glared. ‘And I don’t know why you aren’t.’

‘Because when I spoke to Melissa Pell in the hospital she was terrified of him. Not faking. Not insane. Terrified.’

‘Why were you talking to her?’ Burt was frowning. She was speaking to me but looking at Derwent. ‘I thought I told you—’

Pettifer’s innate sense of fairness resurfaced in the nick of time. ‘Kerrigan helped us out. Mrs Pell wasn’t all that keen on talking to two men.’

‘It didn’t take long,’ I added, lamely.

‘Can we find out if the husband has an alibi?’ Derwent was still very tightly wound. ‘Or if he knows a bloke who knows a bloke who’s good at setting fires?’

‘It’s worth a look,’ Pettifer admitted. ‘You can see a motive there. Make her feel unsafe, make it clear the boy’s better off at home – get custody, if it comes to that.’

‘And her injuries?’ Derwent looked round. ‘Maybe it was a good way to get rid of her for ever so he could have the boy to himself.’

‘Assuming he knew where she was,’ Burt pointed out. ‘Assuming he knew someone who was prepared to attack her and start a fire that killed three people. I know a lot of bad guys and I’m not sure I could find someone to do that all that easily, even if I could afford to pay them what I’d need to.’

‘I don’t get the impression money is a problem,’ Pettifer said. ‘We’re going to Lincolnshire to speak to him tomorrow. We’ll see what we can find out.’

‘Okay, who else?’ Burt said. ‘Oh, the family in 101.’

‘The Bellews,’ I said. ‘There’s something strange about them but we haven’t got to the bottom of it yet. The dad says he’s a handyman but he was a bit vague on the details. They seem to have plenty of cash. The granny was worried about a safe in her flat, but wouldn’t say what was in it.’

‘Proceeds of crime?’ Burt suggested.

‘I wouldn’t put it past them. You thought the same, sir, didn’t you?’

Derwent had been staring into space. He came back to the present with a start. ‘Yeah. They’re on my list. Can’t forget the fire started beside their home.’

‘How’s the little girl?’ Burt asked.

‘The same. Still in intensive care. We haven’t gone near her,’ I said. ‘We did speak to her mother.’

‘This is where we got the description you gave me,’ Colin Vale said. ‘The man with the cap and the zip-up jacket.’

‘That’s the one.’

‘I haven’t found him yet,’ Colin said. ‘I have a few possibles, but nothing definite. No caps at all.’

‘Give us whatever you’ve got and we’ll show it to her,’ Derwent said. ‘I don’t think she’s a great witness but the sooner she has a look the better.’

‘Right.’ Una Burt looked at her board. ‘I want to talk about the eleventh floor. Who’s been dealing with the bodies in flat 113?’

Ben Dornton raised a hand. ‘That would be me. And Liv and Pete.’

‘Has Dr Early done the posts yet?’

‘Yeah.’ Dornton looked sick at the memory. ‘For some reason I’ve gone right off barbecue.’

There were worse things than a body that had fallen out of a tall building I thought, staring at my notebook. At least I hadn’t had to get through a PM on burned bodies. I’d never have made it.

Dornton was still talking. I tuned back in to hear him say, ‘The fire actually splits bones if it’s hot enough. The doc said their brains would have boiled. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.’

‘Did she find anything suspicious about the bodies?’

‘Two things,’ Liv said, composed as ever. ‘They were both young women who hadn’t had children. Both had a number of old injuries – broken ribs, a broken arm in one case, a fractured jaw. She noted it but she couldn’t really tell us very much about the injuries or how recent they were because of the heat damage to the bones. They were definitely old, healed fractures, but the broken arm hadn’t been set properly, she said.’

‘Okay. What else?’

‘The dental work. Dr Early called in a dentist friend of hers who had a look. In her opinion, one of them was Russian or had spent time there. They looked at the second victim too. From her skull shape and the condition of her teeth, they were fairly sure she was African.’

‘You mean she was black. That doesn’t mean she was African,’ I pointed out. ‘Plenty of British people with African ancestry.’

‘Yes, but the dentist said the wear pattern on her teeth was distinctive. He said she was probably from somewhere in West Africa – Nigeria, somewhere like that.’

Two young women from very different backgrounds, living together in a small flat where the door was locked from the outside.

‘Trafficked,’ the man by the door said. His arms were folded and he had one foot braced against the wall behind him. He looked completely relaxed to be addressing a room full of strangers, his voice pitched just loud enough to carry to the back. ‘Almost certainly trafficked. Brought to the UK to work in the sex industry but the chances are they don’t see a penny of what they earn. They’ll have started out as economic migrants and more than likely the UK won’t be the first place they’ve worked as prostitutes or strippers or whatever these girls were doing.’

‘Sorry, everyone, I should have introduced Tom Bridges,’ Dornton said. ‘I asked him to come along because he knows a bit more about people-trafficking than I do. He’s a DS on the human traffic task force the commissioner set up last year.’

‘The fact that your victims weren’t known to their neighbours and they were locked in the flat tells us they were effectively imprisoned,’ Bridges explained. ‘Their movements were strictly controlled by whoever was using them to make money.’

‘How can you tell they were working in the sex trade?’ Liv asked. ‘Just because they were young women, that’s not a safe assumption, is it?’

‘It’s more than likely.’ He sounded apologetic, which was nice of him as it certainly wasn’t his fault. ‘The majority of people trafficked into the UK are here to work in the sex industry, and the majority of them are women. Women also work in domestic slavery – housekeeping roles, but they aren’t paid. These women were at home in the middle of the day. They worked at night.’

‘Somewhere there’s an empty street corner or a deserted pole,’ Belcott said. ‘What a waste.’

I whipped around. ‘They weren’t just sex workers. They were people.’

‘People who could have told a customer they didn’t want to do what they were doing. If they were walking the streets they could have walked away. They made their choices.’

I couldn’t believe he was actually arguing with me. ‘They were locked in. They died in screaming terror. That wasn’t a choice.’

‘We find the women who escape traffickers are very reluctant to trust anyone,’ Bridges said. ‘Especially us. They’re not used to police forces they can rely on, for the most part. They expect us to be corrupt at best, involved at worst. And they don’t know if any interaction is a test. If they ask for help from someone who seems kind and he tells their pimp, they get a beating. If they try to run away and they get caught, they get killed. If they get away, the traffickers go and find their families in Nigeria or Romania or China or wherever they started out, and they beat
them
up. They rape their kids, their siblings. They kill their parents.’

‘Why bother?’ Belcott asked. ‘Why don’t they just grab a new girl and move on?’

‘Because it’s hard to move humans across borders legally, and even harder to do it illegally. A bird in the hand is worth at least two trying to enter the country. Humans are worth more than drugs. A girl can make tens of thousands for a gang. But they need to keep them scared. That makes the girls obedient.’ Bridges shrugged. ‘It’s worth their while. They hurt one girl or her family, the word spreads to the others. I promise you, I’m not exaggerating how they operate. They bring the women here or wherever they start out – Germany, France, Russia – and the women cooperate all along the line, thinking they’re coming to a new life. And they are. It’s just not the one they were promised.’

‘How do we find out who they were?’ I asked Bridges. ‘We don’t have faces for them, let alone names.’

‘We probably won’t ever know. Not unless Interpol sends us a missing person report that matches the details and we can test familial DNA. For now, we have nothing on these women. We don’t know who was running the show. We don’t know what they were even doing, or where they were working.’

‘There’s one other thing we don’t know,’ Dornton said. ‘There were three of them in the flat, according to the neighbours. Three bedrooms in the flat. Three sets of belongings. Three toothbrushes in the bathroom.’ He looked around the room, knowing we couldn’t answer him, asking anyway. ‘So where is she? Where’s the third girl?’

‘COMING OUT?’

I straightened up from where I’d been kneeling by my desk, unplugging my mobile phone from its charger. ‘Oh, Mal, I don’t know. I’m a bit tired.’

His shoulders sagged a little. ‘Yeah, I know. Everyone is. Next year I’ll try and have my birthday on a day we aren’t dealing with a massive arson.’

‘I think we’d all appreciate that.’ I bit my lip. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Another time.’ He managed a smile as he moved away and I remembered with a pang what it was like to ask the team to come out for a drink for the first time – the first test of whether you were popular and valued or just that new DC who no one really knew.

‘I’ll come for a bit,’ I said, impulsively.

He turned, transformed by delight. ‘Really?’

I’d had some sleep. About three hours, total, before Derwent had collected me to go to Armstrong’s postmortem.

To be perfectly honest, that was about what I averaged on a normal night.

‘I’m sure. I might not stay for very long,’ I warned.

‘That’s fine. Brilliant.’ He gave me two thumbs up, grinning widely, then headed off with a noticeable spring in his step. It was so easy to make people happy, I thought, pawing through my bag to find some lipstick. And at least I had everything I needed with me.

‘Kerrigan …’ The word was drawn out, the tone silky and dangerous. Derwent was sitting on his desk chair, leaning well back, rotating a few inches to the left, then the right. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Getting ready to leave the office.’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

I brushed blusher onto my cheeks, then smiled at him.
If you think I’m going to ask you what you
do
mean, you must not know me very well
.

He sat forward, leaning his elbows on his knees. ‘Playing a little game?’

‘Nope.’ I was concentrating on my mouth. The margin for error with red lipstick was too small to take risks.

‘Why are you going out for a drink with him?’

‘I’m going out for a drink with the team. Are you coming?’

A frown. ‘Haven’t decided.’

‘Think fast. The clock’s ticking.’

Around the room, people were pulling on their coats. Liv was plaiting her long dark hair, her fingers flying. She looked surprised, then pleased when she realised I was getting ready too.

I threw my make-up into my bag and picked up my phone, thumbing through screens, tapping in one quick update after another on various sites.
Heading out for team drinks in the local! Mine’s a gin.
The chirpy tone set my teeth on edge.
Heading to Red Velvet later for dancing. Who’s with me?

Derwent was still watching me. ‘If you’re expecting me to do something exciting, you’re going to be disappointed,’ I said mildly.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Absolutely nothing. Goodnight.’ I picked up my bag and crossed the room to where Liv was waiting for me. I didn’t have to look back to know that Derwent was still watching me as I left.

I stood in the corner of the pub, half-listening to Dave Kemp telling me about an arrest a friend of his had made.

‘The mum keeps going on about how he’s not there. She says he’s in Spain, says she hasn’t seen him for two weeks. And the whole time the kid is standing behind her in the hall.’

‘Ha ha,’ I said, because it was expected. Three drinks in. More people were arriving, letting a rush of cold air into the pub every time the door opened. It had started raining and my enthusiasm for heading out into the night was low. The trouble was that I couldn’t stay. Mal was at the centre of a crowd, his eyes shiny from pleasure and a lot of alcohol consumed much too quickly. His shirt had pulled out from his trousers on one side. I needed to fight through to the bar and buy him a drink before I left, but Dave was blocking me in, whether he knew it or not. I stared over his shoulder, nodding when he paused for a response. The door opened again and Derwent prowled in like the Prince of Darkness he fondly believed himself to be. Raindrops sparkled like stars across the shoulders of his coat. He passed through the crowd, acknowledging greetings, muttering a comment that made Chris Pettifer throw his head back with a shout of laughter. He clapped Mal on the shoulder and leaned past him to order from the barman, who hurried to get him his round. I glanced down the bar, seeing frowns from customers who’d been waiting to be served. It would take more than a frown to shame Derwent into behaving himself.

But this was England. And the worst Derwent had to fear was someone saying, quite clearly, ‘Wanker.’

It might have been possible for him to ignore it completely, but of course Derwent wasn’t that person. He stopped in the act of getting his change and turned. ‘Sorry?’

‘I said, “Wanker”.’ It was a guy with artfully tousled hair, a media type if I had to guess from his t-shirt and his designer jeans and the trainers that were too ridiculous to be anything but a cult brand. The girl he was with looked away, her expression pained. She ran a hand through her hair and licked her lips and Derwent glanced at her, then stared with that single-minded focus I knew too well. Skinny jeans, tight top, cascading hair. Subtle as a manicured brick. Derwent’s type in more ways than one.