Night Angels

‘…and then there’s the report for the appeal court, and that’s it.’ She checked her watch. ‘Peter Cauldwell wants to see me.’ She raised an eyebrow at Roz in unspoken comment. ‘I’m meeting him in half an hour.’

Reports! That was what had flashed into Roz’s mind. Gemma’s analysis of that tape they’d got from the Hull Police. Gemma had said that she was going to phone her report through today, but she’d wanted to discuss something with Roz first. Roz frowned. She couldn’t think what kind of problem Gemma might have had with it. It had seemed a fairly straightforward request, though the tape itself had been…odd. The report would probably be on Gemma’s desk. She could check it to see if there were any obvious problems, then phone it through herself. Gemma could finish off the hard copy and get it in the post over the weekend. If the report wasn’t there…Then Joanna would have to know.

Luke, or Gemma’s report? The report had priority. She turned back down the corridor to Gemma’s room and switched on the computer. She knew the password – she and Gemma often needed access to each other’s files. She scrolled through the list of documents: acoustic profiles; fundamental frequency analysis of…There it was: draftreport hull. Roz opened the file and went over the details, reminding herself of what exactly Gemma had been doing. The tape from Hull was a police interview with a woman who was possibly Eastern European. It had been sent to Gemma to try to ascertain the geographic origins of the woman more closely.

Roz flicked through the correspondence. The officer who had contacted Gemma was a Detective Inspector Lynne Jordan. The request that came with the tape was clear. DI Jordan wanted to know where the woman, who was clearly not a native speaker of English, came from. There was very little information about the tape itself.

Roz had listened to the tape with Gemma, and had found the words, which were halting and difficult to decipher, disturbing. She wondered what had happened to the woman whose voice was on the tape, why DI Jordan was not able to ask her directly where she came from. Was she pretending to come from somewhere else, an EU country, something that would allow her to stay in the UK? Had she run away? Had she already been deported? Had she died?

He [they?] hit…I say no, he [they?] make, he…

Not Roz’s business. She hit the print button and skimmed through Gemma’s draft report on the screen. When the report had printed, she read it in more detail. It was typical Gemma; very thorough, very clear, and, as far as Roz could see, complete. Maybe Gemma had sorted the problem out, whatever it was. She wondered what Gemma had wanted to discuss with her. She tapped the report against her chin, thinking. Wednesday afternoon, late, Gemma had come to Roz’s room to say that she had to go to Manchester in Joanna’s place the following day. ‘Joanna’s only just told me. She said you’d fill me in on the details.’ She’d looked annoyed. She’d dropped her bag, fumbling for her notes, then the pen she was trying to uncap had flown out of her hand across the room.

Roz had explained about the meeting. ‘I think Joanna will want you to pick this one up,’ she said. ‘It’s your area.’ The Manchester team were partners in the grant bid for the analysis of the English of asylum seekers.

‘I’d have preferred a bit more notice,’ Gemma said, with some justification, Roz had to admit. ‘I’ve got that report to do. I told Detective Inspector Jordan that I’d be putting it in the post tomorrow.’

‘Phone your findings through. You can put the report in the post so she’ll get it on Monday. She’ll get the information she wants on Friday, that’s the main thing. Is it finished, the analysis?’

‘Yes. I’ve done what she wanted. It’s just…There was something I wanted to…’ She checked her watch. ‘Oh, God, look at the time. I’ll have to go. I’ll run it past you on Friday. It’ll keep.’ Looking happier, Gemma had left.

Whatever it was that had been worrying her, Roz could find no trace of it. Gemma had identified the woman as a Russian speaker, with language features that suggested she came from East Siberia. She had pages of analysis to support her findings. Roz flicked through them. Everything looked fine. She printed out the transcript of the tape and looked at that. Three of the lines were marked with an asterisk: 25, 127, 204. That was the only sign of something not completed, and there was nothing to show what had made Gemma mark those lines.

With the feeling that her legitimate investigation was now turning into snooping, Roz flicked through Gemma’s diary to see if she had a to-do list that might clear things up. Nothing. Aware that she was now looking at things she had no business to look at, Roz dumped the report on her desk and went to find Luke.

The door to his room was pushed to. Roz opened it and went in. An audio tape was playing, a crackle of background noise, tape hiss and, buried under it all, voices. Luke was standing by one of the computers, looking at the screen display. An acoustic profile appeared on the screen. Luke highlighted a section. He didn’t look up, but said, ‘Coffee’s in the pot.’ He usually had coffee on the go to feed his caffeine habit, and Roz – and Gemma – came to Luke’s room, rather than the coffee bar or, worse still, the machine. He was locked in a war of attrition with Joanna, who liked clear lines of demarcation – coffee in coffee lounges, books in libraries, work done at desks.

Roz looked over his shoulder at the screen. ‘What’s that?’ she said. He seemed distracted.

‘It’s that surveillance thing from Manchester. They want this tape cleaning up. If they’d get some decent equipment it’d save them a fortune,’ he said. He was sampling the background noise to remove it from the tape; a simple job now there was software that could handle the whole process. He pressed a button on the keyboard, and the tape played. This time, the voices were free of the obscuring noise, but they were distorted, wavering and echoey. He hit another key, and the screen cleared. He turned round and looked at her.

‘Have you got the results from our last run with the software?’ she said. Luke was working with her on her analysis of the police interview tapes.

‘I got those on Wednesday. Don’t you ever listen?’ He hit a key and the screen in front of him went blank. He looked across at her now. ‘So. Roz. No coffee, then?’

‘I’ll have some while I’m here.’ She took a cup down from the shelf and filled it. The coffee was thick and black. ‘You?’ He shook his head, leaning back against the desk, waiting to see what she wanted. ‘Gemma,’ she said. ‘Joanna was really pissed off. Have you heard anything?’

‘Like what?’ He seemed slightly defensive, the way he always was with her, these days. For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to say anything else, then he added, ‘She was going to come across to mine last night, after she got back, if she wasn’t too tired. She said she might phone, but she didn’t.’ He shrugged.

‘Oh.’ Roz didn’t know what to think. She told him about the e-mail.

‘That’s shit,’ he said.

Roz was irritated. Joanna seemed to be holding her responsible for Gemma’s absence, and now Luke was being obstructive and difficult. ‘Come off it, Luke,’ she said. ‘It’s there in the mail. All I’m asking is, has she been in touch with you? And you’re saying that she hasn’t. That’s all I wanted to know.’

He ignored her, and stared into space, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. ‘That’s shit,’ he said again. There was a slight frown on his face now. ‘What time was the mail?’

‘I don’t know. Last night, I think.’

‘Why would she stay over in Manchester? It doesn’t make sense.’

Roz was surprised. She hadn’t really thought about it. She’d been annoyed that Gemma hadn’t phoned in the first place, and then hadn’t had the courtesy to follow the message up with a phone call this morning, but had assumed that she was tied up with the rigmarole of garages, repairs and all the rest of the hassle that came with a broken-down car. ‘How do you mean?’ she said.

‘Why didn’t she get a train back? She knew the meeting was important.’

Roz thought about it. It still didn’t seem a matter to spend much time on. It was a bit odd, but Gemma would explain when she got back. ‘Maybe she couldn’t get to the station,’ she said.

‘That’s what I mean. If she couldn’t get to a station, she must have been on her way back when the car broke down. She wouldn’t have been able to find a hotel either. She’s got AA. They’d have got her home if the car was too bad to fix at once. If she was still in Manchester, why go to all the expense of a hotel? Get a train, come in for the meeting, go back later and pick the car up. Simple.’

When she thought about it like that, it was odd. ‘I think…’ she said, when the door flew open and Joanna was there. She looked at them, and Roz could see the picture it formed in Joanna’s mind, she and Luke leaning against the desks, drinking coffee, chatting. She felt guilty, and she felt irritated with herself for feeling like that. She suppressed the instinct to put her cup down and start explaining. ‘Problem?’ she asked. Joanna was frowning.

Joanna’s face cleared as she looked at Roz. ‘No,’ she said. Then she turned her gaze on Luke. ‘The Barnsley analysis. I said I needed the report today.’ And you’re wasting time drinking coffee and gossiping.

Luke held her gaze for a minute, then as the silence began to get awkward and Roz could feel the tension in herself, a desire to start talking to break it, he said, ‘It’s on your desk. I put it there last night.’ He smiled. ‘After you’d gone,’ he said.

Joanna’s pause was barely perceptible. ‘Don’t just dump things on my desk, Luke. Put them in my in-tray.’ She cast a critical eye over the coffee pot, the cups, the clutter on the desks. Roz glanced quickly at Luke, and was surprised to see a gleam of laughter in his eyes.

Joanna had obviously decided to quit while she was ahead, and turned her attention to Roz. ‘I’m going to see Cauldwell now,’ she said. Suddenly she looked pleased. ‘I should be free in about half an hour. We need to talk about the new staffing. I’d like to get started on that this weekend.’

Roz checked her watch. ‘I’m lecturing in five minutes,’ she said. ‘I’ll come along to your room after. Three?’ That would give her time to get something to eat.

Joanna gave this some thought. ‘Two-thirty,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a lot to get through.’

So much for lunch. Luke had turned back to the computer. Ignoring his grin, Roz said, ‘OK,’ and followed Joanna out of the room. She realized, as she pulled out her file of lecture notes, that they hadn’t resolved anything about Gemma.

Roz’s undergraduate lectures were always popular. She offered them as a small part of the linguistics module that the English Literature undergraduates had to follow in their first and second years. Anything with the word forensic in aroused the curiosity of the students, and Roz tried to fill the lecture with interesting examples of the way the theory they had been struggling with could be applied. Though a lot of their work was to do with the individual features of the human voice that made each one distinctive, possibly unique, she focused on the less technical areas of the work of the Law and Language Group, work dealing with threatening letters, contested statements and confessions. High-profile cases, the ones that had a bit of glamour.

She told them about a recent case where the recorded keystrokes on a word processor showed that an apparent suicide note was most unlikely to have been written by the dead woman – an experienced user of word processors. ‘Whoever wrote that note didn’t know how to use the machine – they used the “enter” key the way you’d use carriage return on a typewriter. And there’s other information recorded on a computer that people don’t know about: dates and times that can tell you if a document is what it claims to be. On the other hand, you can’t say which actual machine a document was written on, whereas each typewriter had its own idiosyncrasies.’

She showed them a signed witness statement where extra lines had been interposed to make the witness incriminate himself, and the ways in which analysis had identified the different authorship. The students were quiet, attentive.

But as she talked, her mind was not really on the familiar lecture. She made her usual jokes, put examples up on the screen, answered questions, all on autopilot as she thought about Gemma and about what Luke had said. He was right. Of course Gemma would have come back, unless it was so late there were no trains. And that was ridiculous, because those meetings never went on after about four. Maybe she’d stayed for something to eat, maybe planned a wander round, gone sightseeing down Canal Street…But it didn’t seem very likely. Not Gemma. That reminded her of the call she had to make to DI Jordan over in Hull.

She thought about the voice on the tape, the woman whose spoken English was rudimentary, single words, a few phrases, unclear with tape hiss and the background noise of a hospital, footsteps, metal clashing on metal, voices in an incoherent babble. And the woman’s voice, quiet and uninflected, which made the things she said more shocking, more disturbing. ‘He [or was it they?] hit, she kept saying, and, ‘He beat up…’ and a phrase which Gemma, who knew Russian had translated as, I don’t know how to say it, and home, and he kill me, and go, and other words, men all days and I say no, he [they?] make and hurt. And here the unnaturally calm voice had wobbled as though the woman was swallowing tears. She remembered the impersonal terms in Gemma’s report that turned the words into patterns of sound, the sentences into structures divorced from meaning. She remembered Gemma’s face as they listened to the tape together, puzzled and alert, and she wondered again what it was that had been worrying her.

Hull, Friday afternoon

The call had come through at eleven-thirty. By midday, the scene was secure and the investigating team was moving into place. A young woman, dead in the bathroom of one of the cheap hotels on the road out of the centre, to the east of the city. The first – and easiest – assumption was that the woman had been a prostitute who had fallen foul of her client. The Blenheim was a known haunt of the local prostitutes. She had been severely beaten – her face was smashed beyond recognition – and there was evidence of other injuries on her body. By one, John Gage, the pathologist had finished his work at the scene. ‘You can move her now, unless there’s anything you need to do before she goes,’ he said, wincing slightly as he stood up from where he had been kneeling by the bath.

Detective Chief Inspector Roy Farnham stood in the doorway, his hands carefully in his pockets. The photographer had finished, and the Scene of Crime team had moved through the small bathroom, bagging evidence for removal. ‘What have you got?’

Gage looked up, still pulling faces as he worked his stiff legs. ‘I’m too old for crawling around on bathroom floors,’ he said. ‘Hello, Roy, didn’t see you there. Well, she’s been dead for a few hours, but I’ll need to get her on the table before I can be more specific than that. Cause? I don’t know yet. There’s ligature marks round her neck. She’s got head injuries that could have been fatal, but she’s taken one hell of a beating. Whoever it was – he’s a nasty piece of work.’

Farnham wasn’t going to argue with that. But Gage hadn’t answered the question he needed answering. ‘Is it another one?’ he said.

Gage shot him a quick look. ‘I’m not guessing anything before the PM, Roy. The others – there were no ligature marks.’ He looked down at the body. One of the investigating team was leaning over the bath now, carefully cutting through the rope that bound the woman’s wrists to the heavy mixer taps. ‘I’ll get her printed, and get the stuff to the lab as fast as I can. You’re not going to get an ID from her face.’

Farnham looked, and looked away. ‘Can’t you patch it up a bit?’

Gage shrugged. ‘After a fashion. You’ll be better IDing off the prints. Or you might get something off her watch – it’s engraved.’

Farnham looked round the cramped room, and pushed at the wall behind the bed. It was thin – a partition. ‘The other rooms down here were occupied last night. Someone must have heard something.’

Gage looked doubtful. ‘She may not have been killed here. There isn’t enough blood. It’s possible the running water washed it away, but…You’ll need to get into that drain.’

Roy Farnham contemplated the prospect of trying to find a murder scene and felt depressed. One of the SOCOs came over to him. ‘Sir?’

Farnham looked at what the man was showing him. It was a card in a clear evidence bag, like a business card, that had been dropped on the floor of the bedroom. In one corner there was a silhouette: a woman kneeling with her hands crossed behind her head. The lettering was fine italic, Angel Escorts, with a phone number. At the bottom of the card it said, International escorts. Our pleasure is to give you pleasure. ‘OK,’ he said. He made a note to get on to Vice, see what they knew about this Angel Escorts place.

The photographer had finished. Farnham nodded to Gage. ‘All right,’ the pathologist said to his waiting assistants. ‘Get her out of there.’

Farnham watched as they moved the woman’s body carefully, sliding plastic sheeting underneath her to prevent the bloodstained water from dripping on to the floor. He looked inside the bath as they lifted her. Gage was right. There was very little blood, just a diluted wash that left a dark tidemark as it moved with the disturbance of the water. It was possible the killer had cleaned up after himself, got rid of the blood and debris from the death. The room was awash with water. Farnham needed the people who’d been in the other rooms that Thursday night, to see if they’d heard sounds of a fight, the sound of water running late, anything that would help locate what had happened.

Once the body had been removed, he found it easier to work. It became a job, a problem-solving task. With the woman still there, it was more personal, involving anger and disgust at the things that human beings were capable of doing. He wondered why they did it, women who sold themselves to strangers. It had to be more than money, for the women who walked the streets or who went to hotel rooms with men who ordered them over the phone, the way they ordered pizza brought to their door. So many of them ended up dead – from drugs, from violence, from self-harm. This was the third one within the last two months, and there were disturbing parallels between the deaths. His superiors weren’t convinced there was a link, but Farnham had a bad feeling.

He wondered what the story was of the woman in the bath. She had looked so small and broken.

The priest was only sixty, but he often felt like an old man. He had spent his life in inner-city parishes, a life that had been properly devoted to poverty, chastity and obedience. He had seen a steady decline in the power and influence of the church that had been his life from his earliest memories. And now he was tired.

He walked slowly down the aisle, the words of the canonical offices in his mind, the ritual of the prayers working like an automaton on his tongue, but always real, always meaningful as he whispered them into the hushed silence, into the still, close air of the sacred, of the transcendence that was God.

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts…Sometimes the words came back to him in the old Latin – long gone, and for good reasons – the old Latin that he remembered well and sometimes missed. Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus…The church was silent and empty. It was carved out of the stone, reaching up into the high vaulting of the roof spaces, where light diffused through the lacework of the windows, dappling the colours from the stained glass against the stonework of the pillars. The flags on the floor were worn smooth with the feet of worshippers, penitents, communicants. Now, the feet of occasional tourists wore away the names cut into the memorial stones.

He read the familiar descriptions as he walked. Libera me! Deliver me, O Lord! The plea was still legible, but the name had vanished from the permanence of the stone decades ago. Requiescat in pace. Rest in peace. The statues waited in niches and on plinths with banks of candleholders in front of them. There were boxes for offerings, and candles that could be lit in memoriam, for a soul gone before, as a plea for mercy and forgiveness for the souls of dead sinners. The holders were empty, unused, the metal tarnished now. He could remember when each saint had its row upon row of devotional candles burning steadily in the shadows, scenting the air with the smell of burning wax.

His curiosity was taking him to the furthest corner of the church, where the side aisle met the transept. In an obscure niche, a statue stood, some forgotten saint, cowled and tonsured. The statue may have been painted once, but now it was grey stone, caught in the moment of stepping forward, one hand raised in blessing, or in threat. The eyes, smooth and blind, watched from the shadows.

The priest paused in his slow procession. Though the bank of candleholders here was smaller, he had noticed recently that some of the sconces, always the same ones, held candles recently burnt down. His hand touched a blackened wick lightly, and it crumbled away. But it was warm, and the metal around two of the sconces was encrusted with wax that had dripped over weeks and months. Under the third candle, the wax deposits were less, as though this one were less used than the other two. No one cleaned the darker corners of the church. The candle sconces were used so seldom that no one thought to check. He sighed for the days when cleaning the church was in itself an act of worship. But someone had come here to place a light in the darkness, a light to ask for mercy or forgiveness, a light to shine on the road of the dead, a light to ask for their souls to be remembered.

4

Hull, Friday

The woman had been found three weeks ago in the mud of the Humber Estuary as the tide went out. The cause of her death wasn’t clear. There were marks of recent violence on her body, healing bruises that suggested she had been the victim of intermittent, casual abuse. Witnesses had seen her walking late at night near the bridge, her distinctive coat standing out in the frosty dark. People who plan to jump will often stand for a while contemplating the means of their oblivion. Detective Inspector Lynne Jordan wondered what had drawn the woman to the restless, surging Humber. But her interest wasn’t in the death of this woman, it was in her life.

Lynne Jordan was after contraband – but not the usual alcohol, tobacco and drugs that made their way past the barriers intended to prevent their import. The contraband she was looking for was more tragic and far more problematic. Social and political upheavals have their cost. The naïve optimism of the West may celebrate the death of an ‘evil empire’ but the East has a clearer view. A curse. May you live in interesting times. The communities of Eastern Europe were being torn apart by the forces of change that brought wealth, corruption, poverty, war and death in their wake. The contraband that Lynne was looking for was some of the human flotsam from that upheaval.

Lynne’s job was to monitor her patch for women who had been brought into the country illegally, or who were overstaying their visas, and working as prostitutes. It had been a problem in London, in Manchester, in Glasgow – women brought to the country and then prostituted to endless numbers of men six, seven days a week.