Night Angels

There was that sense of familiarity again. Lynne frowned, trying to pin it down, but it was elusive. She needed a clearer view of the woman’s face, something she could show to people who might know. She moved on to the next picture, and stopped. Here, Jemima lay on the same bed, on her back. Her legs were bent, the knees spread. Her hands were above her head, the wrists crossed. Lynne tried to magnify the top of the picture, but it was too dark. She couldn’t tell if the wrists were tied to the headboard, or if the woman was gripping it, but her arms looked taut. Her face looked relaxed and inviting. She was wearing a white basque and stockings.

Lynne took the crime-scene photograph out of the folder she’d brought back with her. The woman’s body was positioned with the hands tied above her head, wrists crossed. Her legs were drawn up, the knees pushed to either side of the narrow bath. The garment she was wearing, twisted and stained though it was, was a white basque. The hair, which was thick and glossy in the photograph, was dull and wet. The face was a smashed and bloody palimpsest. But the slim arms, the small breasts, the narrow waist, they were the same.

There was a knock on her door, and without waiting for a response from her, the person outside pushed the door open and came in. It was one of the men on Farnham’s team, one of his DCs, she couldn’t remember the name.

‘Don’t just walk in,’ she said briskly.

‘Sorry, ma’am.’ She saw him clock the computer screen. She could read his face. Nice work if you can get it. ‘DCI Farnham sent these across.’ The rest of the crime-scene photographs. So Roy Farnham was serious about working with her.

She indicated her in-tray. He put the files down and was about to go when she summoned him back and pointed at the screen. That sense of familiarity…she didn’t want to waste her energy on trying to remember, and then, weeks or months later, see a singer or a soap star with a passing resemblance to ‘Jemima’. ‘Who does that remind you of?’ she said. She could see him running several possible responses through his head. Probably a – what, twenty-year-old? – young man wasn’t the best person to ask, not with a picture like that. She sighed and moved the screen back to Jemima in her jeans and T-shirt.

Now, he was looking properly. He shook his head and looked at her expectantly. ‘No one,’ he said, waiting for the answer.

‘OK. Thank you…’

‘Stanwell,’ he said. ‘Des Stanwell. Ma’am.’ He looked at the picture again. ‘She looks like some kind of posh student type, something like that. Not…You know.’

She knew. ‘Thank you, Des.’ She waited as he shut the door behind him. She needed prints of these pictures, but she wasn’t linked up to a colour printer. She started downloading the Jemima pages, drumming her fingers with impatience at the sluggish way the files came through. As she waited, she remembered that she hadn’t checked her post. She flicked through it, and noticed with annoyance that the promised report on the Katya tapes had still not arrived. She waited for the download to finish, and picked up the phone.

Sheffield, Monday, 8.30 a.m.

Low pressure settled over the city and Monday began for Roz in uniform dullness, the sky a still, opaque grey. She drove to work through the rush-hour queues, feeling a lethargy creeping into her spirit. Nathan had always hated days like this. ‘Why would anyone bother with getting up? Come on, Roz, phone in. Tell them you’re sick. Come back to bed.’ Why was she thinking about Nathan? As she edged her way into the lines of traffic, as she stopped and started in the queues, she tried to think of other things. The day ahead of her presented a range of distractions. Gemma. There were tutorials Gemma was supposed to run that would need covering or cancelling. There was her work programme. Roz would need to go through all of Gemma’s outstanding work and see where…Except that she couldn’t. All her files and all her back-ups were gone. And then there was Roz’s own work. She had to complete the next stage of the research proposals by the end of the week. She had a seminar at twelve. She had an appointment with the PhD student she was supervising who was her preferred candidate for one of the research posts Joanna was planning…And Gemma. She banged her fist against the steering wheel in frustration, jumping when the horn sounded. She smiled apology to the driver ahead, and made herself concentrate. She felt like turning the car round and heading back along the almost empty carriageway away from the city centre. Very constructive, Roz! Days like this happened. She just needed to prioritize.

The traffic was so bad that she was later than she’d intended, and there was no space in the car park. She had to waste time weaving in and out of the side streets looking for somewhere to leave the car without getting a ticket or, worse still, getting clamped or towed away. The steps into the Arts Tower were alive with students when she finally arrived from the parking space she’d found a good five minutes’ walk away, and the entrance was blocked with queues for the lifts and the paternoster. Roz pushed her way through the crowds, nodded a good morning as she passed the porters’ lodge, and took the doors to the stairs. A climb of thirteen floors was a good way for someone with a basically sedentary job to keep fit. Her routine was automatic. Walk up the first five, run up the next five, and walk the last three so that she wouldn’t arrive red faced and sweating.

As the doors to the stairwell closed behind her, she was in silence. The stairs were concrete and breezeblock, the steps covered in grey-flecked lino, the light the flat glare of fluorescent tubes. There was no daylight. She concentrated on her climb, feeling her energy start to come back after the initial fatigue. It was claustrophobic on the stairs, with just the high closed-in stone and the steps above and below her. For a moment, it was almost as if she was alone in the building, then she heard a door above her open and bang shut, and the sound of feet moving fast. The echo on the stairs was confusing, making it impossible to tell until the last minute if someone was climbing up or coming down.

There was a sudden rush and a young man shot round the corner, bounded past her jumping the stairs three at a time and vanished round the landing below her. His ‘Sorry!’ seemed to hang in the air after he was gone. Students. Youth. Roz was mildly amused by the display of energy and heedlessness. It shook her out of her weather-induced depression. She’d lost count of her floors. She checked the number on the landing and began her jog up the next five, feeling slow and cumbersome in comparison to the lithe young man.

She arrived on N floor not too out of breath and allowed herself a moment of satisfaction that lasted until she came through the door of her office and found Joanna waiting for her. Roz glanced at the clock as Joanna said, ‘I expected you in earlier today.’

It was only ten past nine, but it was the worst day she could have chosen to be late. ‘Parking,’ she explained. ‘Is there any news about Gemma?’

Joanna’s face was set. ‘This arrived, just this morning. Posted in Sheffield on Saturday.’ She was holding a letter, pleating the paper between her fingers. ‘You’d better read it.’

Roz looked at Joanna, and took the letter. It was written on official university stationery and dated Friday:

Dear Dr Grey

Personal circumstances make it impossible for me to continue with the Law and Language Group. Please accept my resignation effective from today’s date. I apologize for not giving you full notice of my intentions.

Yours sincerely

Gemma Wishart

Roz was thrown into confusion. She remembered the discussions they’d had the week before, Gemma’s concern that she might be late with her report for DI Jordan, her assessment plans for her students, her research schedule. She couldn’t believe that Gemma had been planning, then, to leave her job, suddenly and without warning. She clearly hadn’t discussed it with Luke, or he wouldn’t have been stirring up the police and the hospitals. She remembered his words on Sunday: ‘She’s going to go back there, when her research money runs out here.’ He and Gemma had talked about the future, but he hadn’t known about this. What had happened? What kind of trouble was Gemma in? Personal circumstances…

‘Aren’t you worried?’ she said. ‘About Gemma?’ Gemma was Joanna’s protégée. Joanna had spoken to Roz often enough about the brilliant future she thought that Gemma could achieve.

Joanna frowned, staring into space. ‘Gemma’s been planning to leave for a while,’ she said. So Gemma had discussed this with Joanna as well as with Luke. It was just Roz she had kept in the dark. ‘She’s put in several applications for funding to go back to Novosibirsk,’ Joanna went on. ‘I don’t want to lose her, but I supported her. The university there is excellent, and if that’s the direction Gemma wants her research to take, then she will be better off there.’ There was a faint line between her eyes. ‘I didn’t expect her to do it like this,’ she said. There was silence for a moment, then Joanna gave herself a shake. ‘I don’t have time for this now. We have the situation here to deal with. I had that Jordan woman on the phone half an hour ago, asking about her report. I can’t find it.’

Roz remembered the report. She’d promised to put it in the post on Friday, and she’d forgotten. ‘I’ll deal with that,’ she said with evasive diplomacy.

Joanna nodded. ‘I want to go through Gemma’s desk and her filing cabinet as well,’ she said. ‘I need to know exactly what’s missing.’

Hull, Monday

Lynne went over the statements that Farnham’s team had taken after Katya’s body had been found. Katya had been taken to the casualty department by someone called Matthew Pearse, a volunteer worker at a refugee support centre down near the old docks. Lynne read through his statement. She had understood that Katya had been found on the street, but now she came to read Pearse’s statement, she realized that Katya had actually come to the support centre seeking help. Pearse had seen the condition she was in and had taken her to the Infirmary. It had been the obvious decision, and the sensible decision, but, with hindsight, the wrong one.

Lynne needed to talk to Pearse. The statement gave an address in the Orchard Park area of Hull, but no phone number. She didn’t want to trail all the way across the city and find him out. Maybe she could track him down at this support centre. She needed to know when he was likely to be there. OK, the Volunteer Coordinator, Michael Balit, should be able to help her there.

Balit was his usual, unhelpful self. ‘Matthew Pearse?’ he said. ‘What do you want with him?’ It would have been easy to pull rank on him, tell him to co-operate as she was in the process of an investigation, but she knew that Farnham wanted to keep things low-key for the moment. The Michael Balits of this world existed to give her practice in the skills of patience. She reminded him of the Katya incident, and indicated that her inquiry was part of an ‘i’-dotting and ‘t’-crossing piece of bureaucracy. ‘We just need to close our file on the case,’ she said with vague mendacity.

He accepted this at face value. The place where Pearse worked was called the Welfare Advice Centre, he told her. ‘We don’t use the word “refugee”,’ he said. ‘For obvious reasons.’ There had been a series of racially motivated attacks on people since the dispersal system had sent groups to Hull, stretching the social services to the limit. ‘So the voluntary sector had to step in,’ Balit said. The advice centre was based in the old docks area, part that was still awaiting gentrification. ‘We’ve taken over one of the derelict buildings down there,’ Balit said. ‘It used to be a shop. We were using it to store donated furniture. We still do, but we cleared out some office space, put a translator in place and set up.’ So he clearly could get things moving when he had to. Perhaps he just didn’t see that Lynne’s work was his problem.

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