bannerbanner
Night Angels
Night Angels

Полная версия

Настройки чтения
Размер шрифта
Высота строк
Поля
На страницу:
6 из 7

Then she remembered Gemma in her room on Wednesday, fumbling nervously and dropping her bag on to the desk. It must have fallen out of the bag, and Gemma hadn’t noticed. She picked up the phone to call Gemma’s extension, tell Luke what she’d found, but then she put it down. Better see what she’d got first. Gemma must have been planning to take the disk with her. She put it into her machine, ran it through the virus scan, and opened it.

There were three files: JPG files, pictures. The file names weren’t very helpful – AE1, AE2, AE3. Roz was disappointed. She didn’t want pictures, she wanted some of Gemma’s work files. She double-clicked on one and watched the picture form on the screen.

At first, her mind wouldn’t process the image. Then she was…what? Shocked? Embarrassed? Amused? No wonder Gemma kept these in her bag, not lying around the department. It was a picture of a woman – of Gemma – naked, sitting on a patterned quilt with her knees drawn up and her arms resting on them. She was looking over the top of her arms, straight at the camera. Her eyes gleamed with suppressed laughter. Her legs, below the drawn-up knees, were parted, exposing her to the camera’s eye.

She opened the next file, not knowing if she should, or if she wanted to. Gemma, standing this time, her wrists held above her with a rope that was stretched painfully tight, pulling her up so that she was standing on tiptoe. Her eyes looked directly out of the screen, challenging and inviting. The third file showed Gemma on a bed with her hands tied again and again pulled above her head. Her knees were bent and her legs were splayed. She was wearing a basque that was laced so tightly it bit into the flesh. The background was dark and shadowy. Roz sat in silence. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t understand why the pictures were stored on the disk. Why would Gemma be carrying them around in her bag? Who did she plan to show them to?

Hands touched her shoulders and she jumped. She swung round, and Luke was behind her. Her heart hammered in her throat and for a moment she felt sick. ‘Luke! Shit! You scared the life out of me!’ She tried to catch her breath.

‘What have you got there, Roz?’ His voice was quiet and even. He didn’t apologize for startling her.

‘It’s…’ Her voice sounded artificial, and before she could think what to say, his hand was on the mouse and he ran through the other files. Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then he closed them and took the disk out of the drive.

‘Gemma’s, I think,’ he said.

‘Luke…’ She didn’t know what to say.

‘It’s OK.’ His voice was carefully empty of expression. ‘We took those a couple of months ago. They were just photographs.’

That was true. They were just photographs. But Roz felt angry with Luke. She wished she hadn’t seen them – or wished, at least, that it hadn’t been him who had taken them. Gemma had put them on a disk and was taking them somewhere. Why? She looked at Luke, who was holding the disk between his thumb and forefinger, his eyes narrowed in thought.

‘It’s none of my business,’ she said. She could hear her voice sounding cold. ‘I thought…’ What? What had she thought? That the files would contain some explanation for Gemma’s disappearance?

He met her eyes. He seemed distracted, as though he was thinking about something else. ‘No, no problem.’ His voice was detached, that flash of anger in his office gone as fast as it had come. He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Well, you know something you didn’t know before.’

She knew that she didn’t know Luke as well as she had thought. She felt as though she didn’t know him at all.

Snake Pass, Sunday morning

As Sunday dawned over the Pennines, it became a fine winter’s day. The sky was cloudless blue and the air was still. The temperature had dropped, and the ground glittered with frost. It was a day to bring the walkers out, and Keith Strong had decided to get ahead of the rush and make an early start. He knew the Peak well – he worked as a part-time ranger, keeping an eye on visitors to the park, offering a helping hand, getting walkers out of difficulty, taking part in rescues when things went drastically wrong. In the Peak, rescues usually meant someone had been stupid – tried to walk the path up Mam Tor, the shivering mountain, in high-heeled sandals (really, he’d seen it), gone on the tops in bad weather without the right equipment, gone climbing on the edges without safety gear. Today, he wasn’t working; he was out just to enjoy the countryside. His mate, Tony, was driving over to Manchester first thing, and Keith had persuaded him to go via the Snake and drop Keith off at Doctor’s Gate. He planned to take the path up Devil’s Dyke, following the route of the Pennine Way, and walk across to the Flouch Inn. It was a long walk and a hard one, but the weather was right, and he needed a day out. It would do Candy good as well.

Tony dropped him on the straight stretch of road before Doctor’s Gate. ‘I’m not stopping on that bend,’ he said. Keith raised his hand in thanks as Tony drove off, shouldered his rucksack and set off up the hill towards the culvert. He kept Candy on the lead for the road bit. She was obedient – all his dogs were well trained – but she was young, and she was excited and full of energy. It wasn’t worth the risk. She pulled at the lead and he spoke firmly to her, but he let her pull again as the hill got steeper. It made carrying his rucksack up that incline just a bit easier. As soon as they reached the culvert and crossed the road, he let Candy off the lead and she ran ahead up the dyke, sniffing eagerly, dancing with enjoyment. Keith reflected, not for the first time, that it was much easier to make a dog happy than a woman.

He let Candy explore. There were sheep, and at this time of year they could be in lamb, but Candy knew better than to chase them. He sat down on a rock to tighten the laces on his boots and put on his gaiters. Frost or not, it could be muddy up on the tops. He noticed the car with the half awareness of distraction – he was planning his route – and then with annoyance. Its red intruded on the landscape, and, anyway, it shouldn’t have been there. He thought that people who couldn’t manage to make their way here without a car should walk somewhere else. He knew he was being inconsistent, and that irritated him more.

He thought that the car was parked a bit oddly. He called Candy back, and she came bounding down the path with a piece of heather root in her mouth which she laid at his feet, looking at him expectantly. ‘Leave!’ he said, as he walked towards the car. It was pulled right in, close to the rocks. Getting it in there must have damaged it – Keith couldn’t see any way that careless parking would have brought it so far in. He checked the front and back. The number plates had been removed. Right. It was probably stolen, then. Joyriders? It seemed unlikely they’d go to the trouble of half hiding a car up here. Maybe it had been used in a burglary, a get-away car or something. The idea quite appealed to him.

Candy was exploring, her heather root forgotten. She was round the passenger side, sniffing at the wheel, her tail up and her ears perked with interest. Then she froze, her ears forward, her eyes intent. Her tail was down now, cautious, as she lowered herself in stalking mode and peered under the car. She was making little whining noises in her throat. Keith got hold of her collar and hauled her back. ‘Daft dog. You’ll get covered in oil under there.’ Candy looked up at him, and moved round to the other side of the car, still low to the ground, still cautious. Keith followed her, interested now. She moved slowly up to the driver’s door, her nose testing the air, the whines turning to low growls. She pressed her nose against dark stains that had splashed the sill. She scratched at the door, whimpering.

The driver’s door was hard to reach because the car was parked up against the rock. Keith tried the handle, and the door opened a short way. A smell like – he couldn’t quite find the comparison – like a city alleyway, like a…It was the smell of sweat and the geriatric ward, the ward where his mother had died, the smell of ammonia and decay. The smell made him step back and Candy jumped straight in, and began burrowing in the foot-well. Keith grabbed the thick hair on her hindquarters and hauled her out. She squealed. There were dark stains round her muzzle. It was hard to see the inside of the car, but they looked like the same dark stains that were on the dashboard and on the steering wheel, with smudges on the seat and, now he came to look, on the windows. It reminded him of the thick, black mud from the bogs and stagnant pools of Cold-harbour Moor up on the tops. Had someone fallen in, come back to the car to clean up and change?

He went back round to the passenger side and tried that door. It opened. He snapped a command at Candy who was trying to get past him again into the car, and looked round the interior. The glove compartment was hanging open and empty. There was nothing in the car itself. He touched the driver’s seat. It was damp. He checked the boot. It was locked. He shut the car door and scratched his head. He’d better call in, report this to someone. But the hills on either side were blocking the signal to his phone. He’d need to walk right up the path before he was high enough above the rock faces and the steep sides of the dyke, and the signal came back. He set off, whistling for Candy to follow. She raced past him, leaping over the rocks, stopping to look back at him, her mouth open and her tongue hanging out. It was half an hour before he reached the top, breathing hard after the steep climb, feeling his boots heavy with the dark peaty mud that clung to them. Candy was worrying a stick now, her energy undiminished.

He checked his map and took a compass bearing, more to keep his hand in than because he needed to. A kestrel circled in the sky above him. Then he headed off across the hills with Candy bounding ahead, detouring off the path into the heather, disappearing from view and waiting for him to catch up. It was a beautiful day for a walk.

Hull, Monday

Anna put her bag down on the floor, keeping it carefully between her feet. She could feel the eyes of the cloakroom attendant on her. Should she say something to the woman to account for her dishevelled appearance, or should she just act as though nothing was wrong? Her heavily accented English tended to produce a hostile response. Get back to where you came from! She ran water over her hands, and squeezed liquid soap on to her handkerchief. She needed to clean herself up. She needed privacy. She needed a cubicle. There was a queue, and she shuffled forward, keeping her head down. No one would be looking for her here. No one would be looking for her at all. It was a coincidence, just an accident, just…

A cistern flushed, and she jumped. She could feel the sick coldness coming over her. If she passed out here, someone would call the police and then…Before anyone could move, she pushed ahead and went into the vacant cubicle, pushing past the woman who was coming out. She could hear a muttering behind her: ‘Excuse me! Who does…?’ ‘There’s a queue…!’ She bolted the door behind her and sank down on to the seat, her bag under her feet, and put her head down until the cold dizziness passed. She was tired. She was so tired. And she was hungry. Get away, get away, get away. But it wasn’t that easy. She didn’t know where to go. She had no money, she had no papers. She had, had to get the stuff from her room. She couldn’t leave it, not now, not after all the work and all the time and all the planning.

She felt as though her head was floating and the things she was hearing came from a distance. She had spent the last three nights walking around the city centre – Keep moving, keep moving – huddling herself up on park benches during the day; dozing off, feeling the treacherous warmth creeping through her, waking with a jerk as she began to slump off the seat. While she still had money in her purse, she had ridden on the buses, on the top deck because she didn’t want to be seen from the street, drifting into a doze as the true warmth began to bring the feeling back to her face and feet and hands, and jerking awake, aware, suddenly, that she was alone, and footsteps were coming up the stairs.

‘…in there? I said, Are you…’ She jolted upright in a wash of cold. The door was rattling. For a moment, she couldn’t understand what the voice was saying. She was shivering and she couldn’t control it. She took a deep breath. Calm, calm. ‘Fine,’ she said, relieved that her voice came out steady. ‘Just, a little sick. In my stomach.’

She could hear voices, footsteps. She couldn’t work out what they were saying. She wiped the damp, soapy rag over her face, rubbed hard until her face felt clean. She untied her scarf and pulled her hair firmly back, then she tied it again, tightly. There was no mirror in here. The action made her feel a little better. She picked up her bag, and opened the cubicle door. She could feel the eyes of the queuing women on her, and could see the cloakroom attendant watching her again. She managed a smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Just a little sick…’

The woman ignored her. Anna could hear the voices as the door closed behind her: ‘…back to where they…’ She was walking through the furniture department now, and there were mirrors on the walls, and free-standing mirrors, and mirrors on dressing tables and wardrobe doors. She could see a woman in a crumpled jacket and stained trousers with her hair jumbled up under a scarf, a bag bulging under her arm. She stopped and turned round. The woman was there behind her, and in front of her as she moved faster down the aisles, and the woman twisted and turned and followed her until she came up against some railings and there was nowhere to go.

‘Can I help you?’ The young man wore a suit. His mouth was pulled down and his nostrils flared slightly. Yes! Help me, Anna wanted to say, then she realized that he didn’t see her. She was just garbage, a nuisance, something to be disposed of. She could smell her clothes, a sour, unwashed smell. Suddenly, her eyes were full of tears, and she battled them down. He wasn’t looking at her now; he was looking round, looking for someone to help him.

‘I wanted the way out.’ Anna’s voice was just a whisper. He put his hand out to steer her in the right direction, then withdrew it. He pointed instead, and she saw that the top of the escalator was just opposite where she was standing; the rails were a balustrade protecting the top of the stairwell. She felt her way round the edge, afraid she might fall, not trusting her eyes to find the way for her. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.

He followed her, and watched her on to the escalator. She saw him talking to a man in a peaked cap with epaulettes on his shirt who followed her as she went down one, two, three floors, and there was the way out in front of her. The cap and the epaulettes made her legs shake as she walked until she reached the safety of the street.

She was going to have to go back to her room.

6

Hull, Monday

The Sleeping Beauty investigation intrigued Lynne. She had no intention of stepping on to ground that belonged to others, but Roy Farnham had invited her opinions and expertise, and now he was going to get them. She enjoyed the challenge. Her work was demanding, often stressful, frequently distressing, but, above all, it was interesting, and no matter how stressful the cases, she managed to keep herself, the essential Lynne, separated from the things she saw and the things she had to do. She sometimes thought that was her main skill as a police officer. Maybe it was the same skill that made a good concentration camp guard, she didn’t know.

She pulled the files out of her in-tray, and spread the contents across her desk. Two women: Katya, in the mud of the Humber Estuary, and the nameless woman on the rocks at Ravenscar. Was Farnham right in thinking that there might be a connection between these two deaths, and between these and the Sleeping Beauty?

She read through the reports, slowly and carefully, making notes as a point struck her. Everything pointed to Katya having committed suicide, but…She had been seen walking in the direction of the Humber Bridge a few hours after running away from the hospital. One sighting was inconclusive – a driver coming out of Hull on the A63 had seen ‘a woman in a red coat’ walking by the side of the road. But the other witness had given more detail. He’d mentioned the woman’s dark hair and the heavy metal buttons on the coat.

Her body had been found three days later. The pathologist had been inconclusive about the length of time she had been dead. He thought probably not more than forty-eight hours. ‘Water, mud, it makes it difficult, Inspector,’ he’d said when she had asked him if he could clarify the rather vague conclusions of his report. ‘A private guess?’ Lynne had asked, but he had refused to commit himself. The cause of death was also inconclusive. There was nothing to show that she had drowned, so the crucial question – had she been dead before she entered the water? – was unanswered.

‘They don’t realize,’ the pathologist had said, tiredly. ‘Jumping into water from a height, they might as well jump on to concrete.’ The head injuries were probably, but not conclusively, post-mortem. ‘You get post-mortem bleeding in head injuries when a body is in the water,’ he said. ‘And the gulls took the soft tissue. There wasn’t much to work on. I can’t be definitive in this case. Sorry. It’s possible we’re looking at vagal inhibition here – that she went into cardiac arrest as soon as she entered the water. The shock of cold water can do it.’ He shook his head again. ‘Let’s see what the lab tests show.’

Lynne looked through the next file, the anonymous woman who had been found at Ravenscar. As with Katya, the cause of this girl’s death was undetermined, but there was a bit more information here. She had probably died no more than fifteen hours before she was found, and circumstance suggested that she had probably died within a time period between early evening and midnight. The blow that had shattered the bones of her skull would probably have been fatal, but that blow had been post-mortem. Other, ante-mortem, injuries were not sufficiently severe to have caused death, the most recent being some bruising that had not broken the skin. The pathologist had speculated that they could be looking at an accidental death here, something that had happened in the course of sex that had got a bit rough – a bondage game that had got out of hand, something like that.

Lynne looked at the laboratory reports. There was some alcohol in the woman’s bloodstream, but no other drugs. She had clearly been a user if the track marks were anything to go by, but she hadn’t used within the forty-eight hours preceding her death. She’d eaten shortly before she died – there was bread in her stomach.

She thought. Three women, possibly prostitutes, two of them dead from an unknown cause or causes, all anonymous, and all with severe damage to the face, sufficient to obliterate the features. All dumped in water – a good way to destroy forensic evidence – and all killed somewhere other than where their bodies had been found. She could understand Farnham’s concern, but she could also understand his circumspection. She had been involved in a high-profile investigation a couple of years before, where a man had been stalking and killing women in South Yorkshire. She knew it was easy to start crying ‘serial killer’ on the basis of very slight connections.

Farnham had given her a photocopy of the business card found on the floor of the hotel bedroom. Angel Escorts. It wasn’t an agency she had come across locally, which suggested that it wasn’t one of the places operating under the cover of a massage parlour or sauna. A lot of escort services were internet-based these days. If the Beauty had worked for one of these agencies, then her picture would be on their website. Lynne was equally sure that once they realized what had happened, she would vanish from the site as if she had never been there.

It might be too late already. The Beauty had died on Thursday night or Friday morning. It was now Monday – plenty of time for a website to be cleaned up or even removed completely. She logged on, checked her e-mail – all rubbish which she deleted without reading – and then started searching. There was an abundance of sites offering escorts. Some were subscription sites that you had to pay to enter. She ignored those for the moment. If Angel was a straightforward escort agency, then they presumably wouldn’t deter potential clients by charging them. They’d want them to browse.

‘Angel’ was a popular name. She found several listed. She made a note of contact numbers, and went on looking. She was hoping for a site with pictures, a site where you could hire a woman online; presumably, a local woman. None of the Angel Escorts she’d found mentioned the east coast. She narrowed her search to the local area. Now, the number of possible sites was much smaller. There were three she’d looked at already, and a site that said simply Escort Services Links. OK, she’d try that.

The screen went black – a porn site cliché. Then there was the warning that the site contained adult material. Lynne pressed the ‘enter’ button, and the name, Angel Escorts, appeared in pulsating red. Pictures began to form with strategically placed lettering to encourage the browser to go further into the site. A tiny picture of a woman fellating an anonymous penis. She’s young, free and willing! Another picture: a young face, fair hair, pigtails. Her blouse was open, exposing her breasts. Fresh teens! Lynne wondered what kinds of clients might greet a woman who had advertised on this site. 100% free live anal video feed! Lynne looked for the link to the escorts. Meet our girls. OK. She clicked on the button.

Ten small photographs of women appeared – Lily, Jasmine, Rose, Jemima, Suzy…The pictures provided links that allowed a customer to browse further and inspect the attractions of the merchandise. Four of the women were clearly eastern – Korean? Lynne wondered. Filipina? They looked seductively and submissively at the camera. Lynne clicked on a couple of the pictures to get an idea of how the site operated. The sequence of pictures for each woman was almost identical. Shots in skimpy clothes and underwear, standard nude shots, the general range typical of glamour photography. There was a brief text in which the woman expressed her willingness to be a warm and talented companion for an hour or a night. I am toned and flexible. Tell me your most secret fantasies and I will make them come true. She was reminded of girlie mags, but the difference between these and top-shelf magazines was that you could, should you choose, buy one of these women for a short time. A man could lift her down from the top shelf and play with her, though he’d need a good income to do it regularly. She wondered how much of the money the women actually managed to keep. She knew from the work she’d been doing recently that the men who bought these women had a taste for, or a yearning for, an elusive exotica, a dehumanized sex toy. They saw these women as fair game for their more…outlandish…tastes. But – Lily and Suzy and Rose…It was a pseudo-exotica. Fish and chips in Spain. Pie and peas in Tenerife.

The dead woman was Caucasian and white. There were four who fitted the bill. Their initial photographs were too small to give her the detail she wanted, so she checked through each one. The pictures appeared and vanished on the screen, a procession of exposed breasts, offered buttocks, pouting mouths. She paused on one, Jasmine, and then on another, Terri, who looked like possibilities, but in each case the build was wrong.

She moved on to the next one. Jemima. Jemima had dark brown hair and a slight build, like the Sleeping Beauty. Her initial picture had been a bit different, everyday, a woman in jeans and a tight T-shirt, smiling at the camera. The picture reminded Lynne of someone. She looked fresh and outdoors and innocent. But it made the contrast all the more effective. The other pictures of Jemima were unusual and striking. They were all nude shots, but the standard poses had become studies in light and shadow, the chiaroscuro creating a dramatic, almost sinister effect. There was one where ‘Jemima’ was looking into the lens with her knees tucked up under her chin. She could have been unaware of the extent she had exposed herself to the camera – the pose was almost casual – but the rather mischievous glint in her eye said otherwise. It was an engaging picture.

На страницу:
6 из 7