Night Angels
Danuta Reah

for Alex

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

It had been a game at first. The dark BMW had pulled out of the car park behind her and followed her along the main road back into the centre of Manchester. ‘Bloated plutocrat,’ she’d muttered, using the epithet she’d heard Luke use when he saw someone in possession of some consumer item that he, in truth, coveted. The BMW had followed her back on to the motorway, and the driver hadn’t, to her surprise, used the capacity of his car to vanish once the three lanes opened up in front of him. Or at least, she kept seeing its dark sleekness, sometimes in front, sometimes behind, but never far away. She began to look in her mirror more closely, trying to see the driver to see if it was the same car each time. The windows were tinted – pretentious git. Another Lukeism. She got the impression of fair hair – blond? white? She couldn’t tell.

The light was starting to fade as she left Manchester, and by the time she got to Glossop, along the straight road, past the high stone walls, past the shops, it was dark. She slowed down as she came to the square. The street had been busy when she’d driven through that morning, the pavements full of people ducking in and out of the shops, jaywalking with that infuriating insouciance that seemed to imply it was her responsibility to get out of their way, heads turned away from her as though, having seen her, she was no longer their concern, eyes watching out for the cars and lorries coming in the other direction.

She had hated the morning drive. The worst had been the congested city centre, where she had got lost travelling too fast to read the signs, missing her lane, harassed and flustered by the horns of drivers who knew where they were going and were determined to cut the newcomer ruthlessly out of the pack.

Then, the journey back had been something to look forward to. The meeting would be over, and she would be on her way home. The roads would be quiet, and after the hassle of the city driving, she’d have the quiet of the countryside, the drive across Snake Pass and the bleak height of Coldharbour Moor, the winding road down between Kinder Scout and Bleaklow, past Doctor’s Gate and then to the gentler wooded slopes past Lady-bower, across the emptiness of the moors that always seemed to prolong the journey more than she expected, then the outskirts of Sheffield and she could relax.

The drive back through Manchester had been quieter, the motorway busy, but no longer crowded with impatient cars that hung on her bumper and threatened in her mirror. The long urban sprawl past Ashton and Stalybridge was almost peaceful, almost monotonous. Except…

She thought she’d left the BMW when she’d come off the motorway and followed the A57 signs towards Glossop. She was starting to relax, to realize that the day was over, it had gone well, she had done well, everyone would be pleased, when it was there again, a couple of cars in front. The light had gone now, and the streetlamps were lit. It was hard to make out the details, but it looked like the same car.

What was she worrying about? That someone else was following the route that she was? Loads of people must be. It was just that this was a distinctive car. And it’s kept pace with you all the way from Manchester. It may not even be the same car. How many dark-coloured BMWs were there on the roads? And how many did you see this morning?

She was at the turn now, where the road signs to Sheffield directed you towards the Woodhead Pass. She ignored the sign and turned right towards Glossop and the A57, towards the lonely, narrow road so aptly named the Snake, the road that crossed the Pennines from the south-west of Sheffield. After Glossop, she would be travelling through countryside until she reached the city. She seemed to have lost the BMW at last.

Now, as she slowed approaching the square, she would have been glad of some signs of life. It was drizzling, the water obscuring her windscreen. She turned on the wipers that scraped and clunked. She needed to replace the blades. The closed shops were dark and unwelcoming. A takeaway shone yellow light on to the pavement, but it looked deserted. There must be people in the pubs, but the rain was keeping them off the streets. The empty pavements reminded her of long winter nights to come, the gleam of the wet flagstones made her shiver.

She peered through the darkness, looking for a phone box. She’d half promised to go round to Luke’s when she got back. She needed to contact him, let him know she was running late and probably wouldn’t make it. Now the tension of city driving didn’t seem so bad. It was the dark night on the tops, the lonely drive through that bleak landscape and then the long, winding road back towards Sheffield that disturbed her. Suddenly, she hated the prospect of driving across the hills on a winter’s night, though these days, the winters were rarely cold enough to close the high roads. She could remember drives from her childhood, crossing the Pennines with her father, driving between high banks of snow, trusting the route the plough had pushed through the drifts.

There. She knew there were phone boxes in the square. She pulled up on to the cobbles, and hurried across, cursing as her foot slipped into a puddle and her shoe filled up with icy water. Limping, feeling her toes start to chafe, she pulled open the door of the booth and fished around in her purse for some change. As she listened to the ringing phone, she checked her watch. Seven-thirty, at least another hour before she would be home, then a large gin, no, a whisky mac, a vice Luke had introduced her to at Christmas, then into a hot, foamy bath, and then bed. She could almost taste the slight burn of ginger on her lips.

The phone was still ringing, then she heard the click, and Luke’s voice: ‘Leave a message and I might get back to you.’ The answering machine. She felt a stab of – what? – anger? with him for not being there when she needed to talk to him. That’s not fair! She heard the beep, and said quickly, ‘Hello, I’m in Glossop. It’s about half past. I got held up so I’m going straight home. I’ll be there in about an hour.’ She waited to see if he would pick the receiver up – sometimes he waited to see who was calling – but there was no reply. ‘See you tomorrow,’ she said, her voice sounding small and rather bleak.

She hadn’t really needed to talk to him, she told herself as she ran back to the car. The thing was to leave the message. Except she’d relied on talking to him, just to have that couple of minutes’ communication before she began the climb on to the dark tops to face that lonely journey across Snake Pass. She put the key in the ignition, then stopped. A cigarette. She’d have a cigarette. She was still stressed after a hard day. It would make sense to take five minutes to relax before the next stage of her drive. In fact – she looked round quickly, but the road was still empty – in fact she could do better than that. She fished around in her bag for the little pouch, for the small roll-up Luke had given her the previous evening. Had she brought it? Yes!

She sat quietly, breathing in the smoke, holding it in her lungs and slowly releasing it. She felt herself relax and her dread of the lonely drive receded. Her head began to feel pleasantly giddy, and the light from the streetlamps shattered and danced in the falling rain. Enough. She had a drive ahead of her. She adjusted her seat and fastened the belt. She fiddled with the mirror before she realized that she was just postponing the inevitable. Her anxiety had turned to somnolence, and she would happily have stayed where she was, enjoying the cocooned silence of the car. The sooner she started, the better.

She turned the key in the ignition, and put the car into gear. She glanced in the mirror, let the clutch in and moved off. A car pulled out behind her and followed her along the road. She wasn’t the only person heading over the Snake that night. Car lights behind her would be some comfort, make her feel less as though the world had ended and she was the last survivor of some catastrophe. But as they travelled along the last straight before the road began its climb, the car behind pulled out and overtook her smoothly and effortlessly. Bloated plutocrat. She watched with detachment as the tail-lights disappeared, the afterlight dancing in the darkness ahead. She was more stoned than she’d realized. She’d better be careful.

She shivered and turned up the heater. The air roared and blew, bringing the smell of the engine into the car. Her feet were hot, but the rest of her was chilled by the cold air that seeped in through the loose-fitting windows and the rattling door.

She was climbing up the hill outside Glossop now. The road curved to the right past a house that glowed a warm light on to the road, then turned left, rock on one side, a drop on the other. The climb was long and steep, and she changed down to third, then second. The engine roared. There were white wisps in the air in front of her, and suddenly she was into a bank of fog, her lights reflecting in a white glare. She slowed down, peering ahead, wiping the windscreen futilely, trying to see. Then it was clear again, the lights shining on to the wet road, illuminating the rocks, the moorland grass, a sheep tucked into a lee of stone. She was nearly at the top, and the road flattened out. There was just wilderness round her now, flat peat and grassy tussocks and bog. Her headlights reflected on water, sullen pools in the dark ground. Soon, the road would start dropping down, past Doctor’s Gate, between Bleaklow and Kinder Scout, down between the thick trees, and on through the empty night.

She was in a half-daze as the road disappeared under the wheels. Home soon, home soon. It was a soothing mantra in her head. She thought about Luke and wondered if she should phone him when she got back. It had been good these past few months. She was going to miss him…Lights were dancing and drifting in the darkness and she watched them with incurious interest. The car swerved, and she jerked back to concentration. The smoke had been a bad idea. Grimly, she wound down the window, flinching as the rain spattered on her face and arm. Lights ahead? She remembered the car that had passed her as she drove out of Glossop. Bloated plutocrat…She tried to get a picture of it in her mind. Dark, it had been dark…

Without warning, her engine cut out. What the…? She pumped the accelerator. Nothing. She looked at the petrol gauge. Still half full. She’d topped it up that morning. The car rolled forward, slowing. She pulled into the side of the road as the car rolled to a halt. How…? Her headlights shone on to falling rain and blackness. She was cold. Her fingers were clumsy as she fumbled for the key in the ignition. The starting motor whined, but the engine was dead. She tried again, and saw the headlights begin to fade. Quickly, she turned them off. The battery was old. She should have turned them off at once.

She sat there, staring into the darkness, hearing the rain hitting the roof and doors. The wind had a thin, whistling sound. Then she saw the lights ahead. Suddenly, out of the darkness, two lights coming towards her. Like a car, only…Reversing lights, a car was reversing towards her, fast. A big car, a dark car? She turned the key in the ignition again, and again as the whine of the starting motor faded to nothing.

The engine was dead.

2
Sheffield, Friday, 7.30 a.m.

It was a cold morning. The rain of the night before had frozen on the ground, leaving the pavements shiny and treacherous underfoot. Puddles were patterns of white frost where the ice had shattered. The sky was clear as the sun came up.

Roz shivered as she got out of the car and the cold caught her. She saw her breath cloud in the air. The car park was deserted this early in the day, and she was able to park directly in front of the Arts Tower. She craned her neck to look up the height of the building. On windy days, when the clouds were moving, she would sometimes stand like this and watch until it looked as though the building was racing across the sky and the clouds were still. She pulled her briefcase off the back seat and locked the car door.

She checked her watch. Seven-thirty. Plenty of time. She ran the arrangements for the meeting through her mind. Roz was the senior research assistant for the Law and Language Group, a small, recently established team in the university, headed by Joanna Grey. When Roz had come to Sheffield a year ago, she had joined the linguistics department, hoping to pursue her research into interviewing techniques. Joanna, ambitious and dynamic, had encouraged her to develop her skills in computer modelling and analysis of language and had then guided her into the field of forensic linguistics, an expanding area that looked at all aspects of language in its legal context.

As she settled in to the new department, Roz had realized that Joanna was carefully building a team. Roz had done her early research into the subtexts of interviews, the meanings that lay below the surface of candidates’ responses in these situations, and Gemma Wishart, a recent Joanna appointee, specialized in the English of Eastern European speakers.

Joanna had staged her coup with care. She had got the support of her current Head of Department, Peter Cauldwell, for two grant applications, one to analyse police interview tapes with a view to designing training material and software, and the other to develop systems of analysis that would identify the regional and national origins of asylum seekers. At the same time, she had pursued her aim to set up an independent research group with the various boards and committees within the university who were, at this time, all for the idea of self-funding groups.

Once she had got her money, Joanna had made her bid for freedom and set up the Law and Language Group as an independent research team. She had a year to prove that the group could be an income-generating unit. The grant money kept them afloat, and they also kept up the routine legal work that had come Joanna’s way for years: the document analysis, the analysis of witness statements, the retrieval of documents from computers, work with audio and video tape.

Today’s meeting was the first of a series with the people who could, if they withdrew their support, put an end to the project tomorrow. Everything had to run with the smoothness, efficiency and effectiveness of a well-written piece of programming. These were the money people. They didn’t want to know about philosophies of pure research, or the abstractions that the true research scientist could chase for months and years. They wanted to know that Joanna and her team could deliver.

Joanna’s timetable had run into an unavoidable snarl-up. She had had a meeting the day before, and was relying on Roz to get everything organized. ‘I’ll be in well before nine,’ she’d said, before she left. ‘I’ll pick Gemma up on my way in. Just make sure everything’s set up.’ Roz could feel the slight adrenaline tension of responsibility as she pushed through the main doors. The porter greeted her as the doors closed behind her. ‘Morning, Dr Bishop.’

She nodded, a bit abstracted. ‘Morning, Dave.’ The familiar smell of the university closed round her. She usually climbed the stairs to her department – her concession to keeping fit – but this morning she was wearing her meeting gear, and her shoes weren’t designed for stair-climbing. She ignored the lift and stepped on to the platform of the endlessly moving paternoster elevator, drawn by its regular clunk, clunk. She was carried up past the blank wall between the ground floor and the mezzanine, the floor numbers appearing on the wall above her head, gliding past her and opening up on to the lobbies which then sank away under her feet as she was carried higher and higher.

She stepped off the moving platform as it reached her floor, timing her exit with the expertise of one familiar with its regular use. The department was silent apart from the distant whirr of a floor polisher as the cleaners wound up their early-morning routine. The corridors were dark, their shadowed length interrupted by swing doors. She unlocked the door of her office, dumped her bag and got out the folder of material that she and Joanna had prepared for the meeting. She sorted out her notes for the presentation, read through them and ran the details of the morning through her mind, making sure that she had covered everything. Success, as Joanna kept telling her, was not just a matter of showing the right action and the right figures; it was a matter of presenting yourself as a success. This was why Joanna’s suit came from Mulberry; this was why she had dipped into her own pocket to buy the porcelain coffee cups, the good coffee.

Roz looked at her watch. Nearly eight o’clock. She needed to check the meeting room, make sure that Luke had done his bit and all the equipment was set up and working, and she needed to make sure that coffee had been ordered and would arrive on time. She locked the door of her office behind her, her mind running through and through the things she needed to do. The corridor where they were based ran round the lift shaft and the stairwell. It was empty, the lights dim and the office doors locked. She paused as she left her own office, looking at the sign on the door: DR ROSALIND BISHOP, RESEARCH ASSISTANT. Next door, Joanna’s office: DR JOANNA GREY, HEAD OF DIVISION. Then the double doors with the exit to the stairway before the turn. Joanna had been very clear about the arrangement of the rooms. She and Roz next door to each other on one arm of the L, forming what she called her executive corridor, establishing, she explained, just that important physical distance between the two of them and Gemma, their post-doctoral research officer, Luke, the technician, and the new research assistants, whoever they may be. Roz had regretted that loyalty to Joanna had stopped her from passing that one on to Luke. He would have enjoyed it.

Someone was on the corridor ahead of her, walking away from her, but the lights were off and it was too dark to make out any detail. It was too tall for Joanna. Whoever it was disappeared round the corner towards Gemma’s room. She pushed the second set of doors open. Either her eyes were playing tricks and it was Joanna – or possibly Gemma, she amended – or else it was someone who shouldn’t be in the section at this time.

The corridor was empty by the time she was round the corner. Whoever it was must have gone round the next corner heading back towards the lifts. She shrugged, dismissing the matter. She was standing outside the door of Gemma’s room now. She looked at the piece of paper tacked on to the wood: DR GEMMA WISHART. She frowned. Gemma’s contract ran for a full year. What would it cost the department to keep its signs up to date? Though there were the new research assistants coming, and Joanna had plans to put one of them in the same room as Gemma. Perhaps she planned anonymous labelling for the door – RESEARCH ASSISTANTS. She went on down the corridor.

Next to Gemma’s room was the meeting room. Roz unlocked the door and looked in. Everything was set up. The blinds were angled to keep the morning sun off the screen, the tables were together with the right number of chairs – a small detail but it was the details that Joanna would have her eye on, that gave the sense of efficiency she wanted the group to project – and the overhead projector stood ready by Joanna’s chair at the head of the table. She pressed the switch and a square of light appeared dead centre on the screen. Luke must have stayed late last night and set the room up.

She checked her watch again. It was nearly ten past eight. Joanna should have been in by now. They’d agreed to get together before the meeting and go over some of the main points. She was outside the computer room now, the end of Joanna’s domain. Roz always called the computer room ‘Luke’s room’, because it was where he was based – where he had been based before he’d been transferred to Joanna’s newly formed group – and where he was usually to be found. There wasn’t space for a separate technicians’ room. Joanna wasn’t happy with the proprietorial attitude Luke took towards this space. She had talked to Roz about her plans to base the new research assistants in here for some of the time, to take away his exclusivity. Luke was the only member of the team Joanna hadn’t chosen herself and she made no secret of the fact that she didn’t like him, and wouldn’t be sorry if he left. ‘I want people with first-class minds,’ she had said to Roz once. Luke, with his 2.1, apparently didn’t come into this category, no matter how good a software engineer he was. Joanna had her blind spots.

She pushed the door open, and the fragrance of coffee drifted into the corridor. Luke was there, sitting at one of the machines, his chair pushed back, his foot up on the rungs of another, a mug in his hand. He hit a button on the keyboard as she came through the door, and the screen darkened. Then he swivelled round in his chair. ‘Roz,’ he said. His voice was neutral. She and Luke were wary with each other these days.

‘Hi. Thanks for getting everything set up.’ For all his insouciance, Luke was efficient.

He didn’t respond to that, but just said, ‘You want to run through the slides?’

‘Are they all set up like we had them yesterday?’ He nodded and put his mug down on the desk. He was wearing jeans and trainers. That was going to go down a bomb with Joanna. She wondered if he ever thought about compromising, just a bit, to keep Joanna happy. ‘Just show me the first one, the one we changed.’

He tapped instructions into the machine, and she looked at the slide showing the group’s income projections for the first two years. It looked impressive now that the European money that Joanna had managed to get against all the odds was highlighted. It was impressive. ‘That’s great,’ she said.

Luke was still looking at the screen. ‘We need a group logo,’ he said.

Roz gave him a quick look. Luke had no time for concepts like corporate identity, mission statements, quality procedures, the kind of management speak that Joanna was so keen on. His face was expressionless. She matched his air of bland imperturbability. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, perhaps you could design one.’

Luke’s mouth twitched as she caught his eye, and then they were both laughing. ‘Thanks, Luke,’ she said again, meaning it. She knew that everything for the meeting would work without a hitch. He’d have made sure. ‘I’ll see you later.’ She checked her watch as she headed back towards Joanna’s room to see if she had arrived yet.

Eight forty-five. Joanna should definitely be here. She began to feel worried. It wasn’t like Joanna to be late, especially not for something as important as this meeting. She felt the tension in her stomach and made herself relax. She headed back along the corridor, through the swing doors. She paused by Gemma’s door, then unlocked it and looked in. It was empty, the desk clinically neat, the in- and out-trays empty. A pattern drifted across the monitor. The screensaver. The computer had been left on. It should have been switched off. Joanna would go spare if she saw it. Anyone could get access to Gemma’s data with the machine on and unattended like that. She shut it down and looked at her watch again. It was eight-fifty. She and Joanna were supposed to get together at nine and run through the agenda, checking for last-minute hitches. Peter Cauldwell would be looking out for a chance to put the knife in. The meeting started at nine-thirty. She felt an unaccustomed panic grip her.

Damn! She took a couple of deep breaths. She ignored the sinking feeling in her stomach, and pulled her mind back from rehearsing disasters. There was no point in worrying about something going wrong, because nothing would go wrong. Joanna would be here. If there were any problems, she would have let Roz know. Repeating this as a kind of mantra, she made herself relax.

The air sparkled with frost. Out beyond the university, out to the west of the city, the Peak District was bathed in the light of the winter sun. Along the top of Stanage Edge, grey millstone grit against the dark peat and the dead bracken, ice glinted, making the ground treacherous. Ladybirds were suspended in the ice, red and black, a frozen glimpse of summer. The road cut across the edge, went past the dams at Ladybower and Derwent, and began the climb to the pass over the hills. The heights of Kinder Scout and Bleaklow looked almost mellow in the light, their deceptive tops inviting the casual walker to wander just that bit too far, just that bit too high.

The traffic was slow on the road to the Snake Pass. It was an uneasy combination of business traffic coming from the west side of Sheffield and leisure travellers who wanted to meander, enjoy the scenery, park and sometimes walk. As the road climbed higher, the traffic became lighter as the landscape became more bleak, the hills more threatening. Walkers who had come to climb Bleaklow from Doctor’s Gate noticed a car pulled off the road into the culvert. An old Fiesta, red, rather battered. Maybe it belonged to an enthusiastic walker, out on the tops early.

Hull, Friday, 8.00 a.m.

The clouds were low and dark, with the threat of rain or snow. The traffic was heavier now, as the rush hour began to build up. The Blenheim Hotel was at the cheaper end of the market, one of a row of Edwardian terraces, converted from residential use years ago. The hotel was a Tardis, small and narrow on the outside, endless and labyrinthine inside. Every door led to another door. Every staircase led to another staircase. The corridors got no daylight, and the lighting was dim. This may have been accidental, or it may have been for reasons of economy, but it was fortuitous. The dim lighting concealed, to a certain degree, the worn, stained carpet, the places on the walls where the paint was cracked or dirty, where the paper was starting to peel. The cleaner was already at work as the last visitors were finishing breakfast in the downstairs room that doubled as a bar. The smell of beer and cigarettes greeted the breakfasters as they came down the narrow flight of stairs from the entrance hall, following the signs that said ‘dining room’. The stairs were too narrow to be a regular flight, were probably the remainder of the back stairs from the days when the hotel had been a private house, from the days when the area had been prosperous, residential and middle class.

Some of the breakfasters had undoubtedly spent the evening before in this room, leaning against the bar or fighting their way through the crowds, and the smell of the beer triggered queasy memories.

Rows of individual cereal packets stood on the bar, with jugs of very orange orange juice. The waitress came to the table and took the orders that arrived in the form of pink bacon, flabby on the plate with a slightly rancid smell, translucent eggs, sausages that oozed as the knife went in. The smell of frying temporarily overlaid the smell of beer and tobacco.

Mary’s husband had phoned in. She’d been in an accident the night before. ‘Been drinking, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Mrs Fry had said to Anna. ‘You’ll have to manage on your own for this morning.’ Her voice was impatient. Anna always managed. She was young, and when you needed work the way she needed work, you managed. Mrs Fry knew that. So now Anna was working on her own, and already the old witch was hassling her, saying she wasn’t fast enough, the rooms weren’t going to be done in time, she’d have to speed up. She muttered Mrs Fry’s litany to herself – ‘Haven’t you got any further, Anna? Hurry it up, Anna!’ – as she worked her way along the passage. She was at the second back staircase now. There were three rooms in this part of the hotel – a different part from the one containing the bar and restaurant. This was at the back of the house and opened on to a garden, more a yard, where the bins were stored, where a few shrubs fought against the litter that was thrown down from the alley that ran behind the terrace. She picked up the cylinder cleaner and carried it down the narrow stairs, knocking it against the walls as she went. There was always the sour smell of damp down here, faint but unmistakable.

The first room was a shambles. Anna screwed her face up. The damp was overlain by a smell of stale alcohol and cigarettes, sweat and old perfume. An empty bottle – whisky – was on the floor by the wastebasket, and a glass with a cigarette end dissolving in the bottom was on the floor by the bed. The ashtray was full. There was a used condom on the bedside table. She pulled new gloves out of the pocket of her overalls. She brought her own gloves these days. Mrs Fry always said, ‘Oh yes,’ when Anna said that she needed new gloves, but somehow the supplies were never replenished often enough. She switched on the bathroom light. Better to know the worst.

She dumped the used sheets and towels on to the floor of the corridor. She couldn’t get the laundry cart down the narrow stairs. She would have to gather the pile up in her arms and carry it. She looked at the towels and made a grimace of distaste. The second room was better. Its damp smell was overlaid with the smell of soap and toothpaste. The bed was disordered, as though the occupant had leapt up in haste, scattering the sheets and thin quilt. There was talcum powder on the carpet, and the print of a bare foot. But the bathroom was respectable, the toilet flushed, the bath mat damp, the towels neatly folded on the rail.

She checked her watch. She had nearly caught up. The rooms were supposed to be done by ten, or Mrs Fry would have something, a lot to say about it. She wouldn’t get rid of Anna though. Anna had managed to keep this job for five months. She didn’t complain to anyone about minimum wages. She was reliable. She’d never had a day off in the time she’d worked for the hotel. She was never late. She kept out of the way of the guests. She always finished her work and she always did it properly. People never complained about the rooms that Anna had cleaned.

Down here in the basement, she could have a cigarette. She could have a break. The extractor fan in the windowless bathroom was roaring away. She reached into the pocket of her overalls and took out her cigarettes and lighter. Five cigarettes a day. Her ration. She lit up, leaning against the bathroom wall, blowing the smoke towards the fan. She hated the smell of smoke.

The last room in the basement was cramped and uncomfortable. She pushed past the closed bathroom door, stumbling on something, and ran her eye over the room. The wardrobe was small, crammed against the narrow back wall next to the French windows that opened on to the yard. The window nets were damp with condensation and stuck to the glass. The dressing table was against the long wall opposite the bed. The gap was so narrow, Anna had to turn sideways to squeeze between them. The room was…She looked round. The bed appeared unused, but there were clothes thrown across it – a woman’s jacket and skirt. A shoe lay in front of the French windows. The other shoe was in the narrow entrance way. She’d trodden on it on her way in. The occupant must not have checked out yet.

Anna stripped the bed and dumped the pile of clean linen in the middle of the mattress. Unused or not, the beds had to be changed. She picked up the shoes and put them in the bottom of the wardrobe, put the skirt and jacket on a hanger. Maybe this occupant was one of the rare visitors who stayed for more than one night. The room was cold, unlike the stuffy dampness of the other basement rooms. A line of cold seemed to run down her back, and a draught blew around her ankles. She buttoned her cardigan up round her neck.

The vacuum cleaner was plugged in from the corridor. She switched it on, but the poor suction told her the bag would have to be changed. More time. She dumped the full bag in her cleaning tray and, with the speed of familiarity, fitted a new one and gave the small expanse of carpet a thorough clean. She ran her cloth over the skirting boards and over the surfaces of the dressing table and the small bedside table. The ashtray was unused, and the tea tray untouched. Something sticky smeared under her cloth, leaving a brown stain. She rubbed it clean. She felt dissatisfied with the room, as though she’d forgotten something important. She looked at the nets sticking to the window, and decided to wipe the condensation off. It might get rid of that…that was it! – that slight taint in the air that made the room feel unclean. For a moment, she thought she smelt burning. A sense of unease, a sickness, began to stir in her stomach.

The window moved as she wiped it, and she realized that it was open slightly. Someone had opened the French windows and left them ajar. That was why it was so cold in here. Why would someone do that? Running away rather than pay the bill? And leave a good suit and a pair of shoes? Someone who wanted fresh air? And leave the room so insecure? She shook her head, puzzled. If there was one thing she’d learnt as a hotel cleaner, it was that you couldn’t explain the way people behaved away from home. She pulled the windows shut, slamming them to lock the bar. The smell was probably coming from the bins in the yard. It would go now that the windows were closed.

Just the bathroom to do now. Anna had left the bathroom until last. She looked at the white painted door off the narrow entrance lobby to the room. It was shut tight. Guests usually left the bathroom door open, the steam drifting out into the room with the smell of soap and shampoo, or less pleasant smells; towels carelessly dumped on beds, on carpets, on chairs. She put her fingers on the door handle. She didn’t want to open that door. Stupid fancies! She pressed the handle down and pushed. The door stayed shut. She frowned. Locked? Now she came to listen, there was a trickling sound and the sound of water running in the pipes. She knocked. Silence. Surely, if there was someone in the bathroom, they would have come into the room and told her to leave the cleaning until the room was free. She checked her watch. She had lost all the time she had gained earlier. She was running late again. Mrs Fry would be down shortly to find out what she was doing. The thought galvanized her, and she pressed the handle down harder and pushed against the door. This door stuck sometimes, she remembered now. But there was a feeling of sick anticipation in her stomach. Something in her mind was trying to make her turn away. Don’t look! Forget!

The door resisted for a moment then flew open. She was suddenly in the bathroom, in the hot, steamy air, and the smell was there, heavy like the smell in the meat market at home. Sour. Cloying. Unclean.

The drip, drip of the water as she creeps through the bushes. The smell of burning is still in the air, but it is a smell of old burning. Ashes, the remains of a fire. Fires mean warmth and parties and music and voices. Voices! She stops, listens. Silence, just the dripping of the water. But coming through the smell of burning is something else, heavy, sweet, rotten.

She can see the house, now. It’s just outside the village, on the edge of the trees. The burning must come from the village, of course, not from her house. She peers through the leaves. She listens for the sound of her mother calling to the children, or her father laughing with the men as they took a break. They’ll all be worried. She’s been gone, what, two nights? Three nights? ‘I’m back…’ she whispers, looking through the leaves at the shell of her house, at the bundle lying half in and half out of the door, tiny on the ground, with the sole of a shoe pointing towards the bushes where she is hiding. The rain must have put the fire out. She can see the water dripping from the eaves and the remains of the roof.

Her foot squashed in something and she looked down, recoiling instinctively, mechanically wiping her foot on the carpet. The floor was wet. Something dripped on to her neck and she jumped, turning round. Condensation was dripping from the ceiling, and the walls glistened. A steady trickling sound came from the bath as though the shower was running, just a bit, turned down very low. The shower curtain was pulled across, pink and translucent. The water ran and trickled, gurgling in the pipes, making the plughole of the basin echo.

Someone was in the shower. That was her first thought. Someone in the shower who ran the water in a slow dribble, someone who ignored the sound of movement, the vacuum, the banging and knocking attendant on cleaning. Someone…The broken door in front of her now. Through there, mother, father, the table where they all sit to eat and talk and the little ones running around and the smell of… Sour, rotten.

Slowly, she put out her hand and pulled the curtain back.

She thought it would be her mother.

The woman – it was a woman, she could still tell that – was slumped in the bath. She looked…broken, like a toy that had been dropped and crushed. Her face – Krisha…? – her face, like Krisha’s doll, they’d trodden on Krisha’s doll and the doll’s face was distorted and smashed, the eye sockets and eyes not quite aligned, the mouth cracked into a feral grin. Krisha’s doll! Water dripped from the woman’s hair as it trickled from the shower. Ribbons. It’s like… Her first thought was that there should have been more blood. Then her legs felt weak and she was cold all over. Her mouth was full of saliva and she was dizzy. She couldn’t stop herself. Her knees thumped on to the floor. She felt the wetness on the floor seeping through her stockings on to her legs. Her hands slipped on the side of the bath, trying to keep her from falling down into it. Don’t let it touch me!

She pulled herself to her feet, turned on the basin tap full blast, splashing water on to her hands and face, on to the floor again and again and then again, trying to make the place clean, restore order, do her job. She pulled the towel off the rack, felt wetness on her hands, let it fall to the floor. There was something floating in the toilet. She flushed it, and again, and again. Her eyes jumped frantically from towel rail, to basin, to tooth glasses, to the bath…No! She stared at the floor, concentrated on the pattern of cracks on the tiles.

There was something on the floor between the lavatory pan and the bath. A piece of paper, no, a card, like a business card, stuck to the wet floor, something that could have fallen out of the pocket of someone sitting there, sitting next to the bath, maybe talking to the person who was having a shower, who was…the sound of the water as she creeps through the bushes… There was a stench of burning in her nostrils. Her stomach heaved. Litter on the floor. Mechanically, she reached down, picked up the card and looked at it.

Then she was back in the bedroom, her legs shaking, holding on to the door, the walls, anything to help her get out of there. She had to find someone, she had to get help, she had to…had to…

She had to think.

She opened the vacuum cleaner and took out the bag she’d put in before she’d cleaned the room. The old bag was full to bursting, but she managed to get it back in without tearing it or spilling too much of the contents. She refolded the new bag and pushed it down into her overall pockets. Her hands were shaking. She scooped up the bedding and the towels and carried them to where the laundry basket was waiting at the top of the basement stairs. She listened. The distant sound of traffic. Footsteps along the corridor overhead. Quick. She had to be quick.

She pulled out some of the bedding and shoved her load down into the bottom of the basket. She piled the dirty linen on top, keeping back a set of sheets and towels. Back down the stairs. She dumped the linen on to the floor where the sheets she had moved had been minutes before. Shut the door or leave it open? Her bag and coat were in the back kitchen. She dithered for a moment, then stepped back into the room, closing the door behind her. She went over to the French windows and pushed down the bar. She wouldn’t be able to close it behind her. Then she was in the yard, past the bins, along the road to the next yard, past another set of bins to the back door. She pushed it open. No one. She grabbed her coat and her shopping bag, and, not waiting to change into her outdoor shoes, hurried down the road towards the bus stop. She flagged down the first bus that came along, and didn’t relax until it was around the corner and heading along the main road.

The woman’s face formed itself in her mind. And Krisha’s doll, smashed on the floor. Soldiers’ toys. The air seemed to smell of old burning. Got to run, got to run.

3

Despite its importance, Roz found the meeting tedious. She was interested in the research side of their work, and though the funding was crucial, she didn’t share Joanna’s taste for the politics and the dealing that the money side generated. She suppressed a yawn and glanced across at Luke, who was leaning back in his chair, his eyes veiled, occasionally jotting something on the notepad in front of him. He looked distracted as well. Roz watched Joanna do her stuff, outlining the financial and the research projections for the team, putting forward her staffing proposals, neatly turning away from anything that strayed into areas where the picture was less rosy. Joanna was good. She was better than good. No one, watching her now, would believe the state of tension she had been in before the meeting started. She had arrived at five to nine, held up because she had been round to pick Gemma up – something they had agreed on Wednesday, apparently, so that Gemma could brief Joanna on the outcome of her trip to Manchester before the main meeting started. Only Gemma hadn’t answered her door, and Joanna had wasted time trying to rouse her before she had concluded that Gemma must not be there.

Roz frowned. It wasn’t like Gemma to be unreliable. What was worse, she hadn’t phoned but had sent an e-mail some time the previous evening. Joanna had found it when she checked her mail before the meeting to see if any last-minute changes or apologies had arrived.

Please accept my apologies for tomorrow’s meeting. The car has broken down and I will have to stay in Manchester tonight. I will contact you as soon as I get back to Sheffield.

Gemma

Joanna had gone thermonuclear. Then she had put it all away for later consideration and taken Roz briskly through the meeting strategies.

Roz let the voice of the representative from the university grants committee fade into a background drone as she studied the other delegates. There was Peter Cauldwell, Joanna’s nominal line manager, who was watching her with a sceptical smile. Whatever Joanna proposed, Cauldwell would oppose. He and Joanna had clashed too many times in the past to be a good team now. One of Joanna’s more urgent plans was to take her group out of Cauldwell’s sphere of influence as soon as she could. There was the grants committee representative. He was the one who could stop Joanna now, today, if she failed to convince him. There was the representative from the Academic Board, whose support was crucial in these early stages, and there was a representative from the vice-chancellor’s office. As Luke had said the other day, ‘All the university brass out to watch Grey nail Cauldwell’s scrotum to the table.’ She caught his eye across the table, and felt a childish impulse to laugh.

Peter Cauldwell was speaking now, his voice that of modulated reason as he explained why Joanna’s plan for autonomy for the Law and Language Group was a waste of time and of valuable resources. ‘There are small departments all over the country who pick up the forensic work,’ he said. ‘And there are a few private firms. We’re an academic institution. We need to use this money’ – the grant money Joanna had managed to get for the group – ‘to build on the research we’ve carried out so far. I’ve no desire to end our forensic work, but I think we can accommodate it within our existing structures.’

Joanna smiled, and Roz again caught Luke’s eye. Under the guise of shifting his position, he ran his finger across his throat. Joanna began running her presentation slides, talking briefly to each one as she did so, demonstrating the amount of money and support she had managed to attract in the last six months. Her charts had been put together so that the income Cauldwell’s group attracted overall was also shown, apparently incidental to the figures that Joanna wanted the meeting to study. Her small team had, according to the chart she was using, attracted more grant-based and commercial funding than Cauldwell’s much larger team had managed in a year. Roz knew that these figures didn’t show the true picture. Peter Cauldwell’s group had been involved with a long-term project that was coming to an end, and the new grants that were coming in were either not yet available or were quietly sidelined into different compartments to ensure that the staffing and equipment budgets were properly supported. Cauldwell, like all good heads of department, was a genius at stretching the funding he got to the maximum. But on paper, his figures looked bad, and Joanna knew it.

By one, it was all over. Roz, headed back towards her office, was waylaid by Joanna who was looking pleased. As she had every right to, Roz thought. Joanna’s main problem now was likely to be a knife in the back. She remembered Cauldwell’s sour face. He wasn’t going to forgive Joanna – forgive any of them – soon.

‘It went well. I think I’ve put paid to Cauldwell’s hash,’ Joanna said cheerfully. ‘We’ll get our extra staffing now, or I’ll know why.’ She looked into the distance, calculating. ‘We’ll need more space. This is just the start.’ Her eyes focused sharply on Roz. ‘What about Gemma?’ she said.

Roz was used to Joanna’s abrupt subject switches. She wondered why Joanna should expect her to know any more about Gemma’s absence than Joanna herself did. ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said. ‘Luke might know something.’

Joanna maintained her intense stare. Roz, used to this quirk, waited for Joanna to formulate her response. ‘Luke?’

Roz sighed. Surely Joanna must at least be aware that some kind of relationship existed between Luke and Gemma. Gemma, academically brilliant, was quiet and self-contained away from her computer and her books. She had come to Sheffield after a spell at a Russian university, and Roz sometimes got the feeling that Gemma – for all she produced work of a high standard – was not committed to what she was doing, had ambitions in other directions. And then she had taken up with Luke.

Though she tried not to, Roz had minded. She and Luke had been friends from the time Roz had first arrived in Sheffield a year ago. They were both unattached, both – apparently – avoiding serious commitment. They had a shared taste in clubbing, in dancing, in music. Luke could be reckless, fuelling his tendency to wild behaviour with bouts of drinking, and his occasional nihilism appealed to something in her. It had been a friendship she valued. And then a few months ago, under the influence of a bit too much music, a bit too much wine, they’d spent a night together, an intimacy that they had always avoided, never talked about, and one she had shied away from afterwards. There had been an awkwardness between them after that. Roz’s promotion to Joanna’s second-in-command had put a further strain on the friendship, and once he became involved with Gemma it had dwindled to almost nothing.

Joanna was still looking at her blankly. Roz shook her head. ‘I’ll see if Luke knows any more,’ she said. Joanna thought about this in silence, then moved on to discuss outstanding projects. Something flickered in Roz’s mind, and she made a note to go and check Gemma’s schedule. There was something…She shelved it and listened to Joanna as she wound up.

‘…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.

The trade was spreading. Escort agencies around the country now offered ‘a selection of international girls’. The women were effectively kept in debt bondage. A woman’s travel documents, if she had any, were confiscated. From her earnings – only a fraction of the price the pimp charged for her services – she had to pay the charge for being brought into the UK, and had to pay high prices for accommodation and expenses. They tended to be kept in flats, enslaved by debt and fear, not allowed out without a minder. They were young, some of them were very young – a team in the north of England had found eleven-year-old girls on one of the premises they raided – and most of them were too frightened of the British authorities to seek help even if they could escape. Hull presented Lynne with an interesting problem. It was a large city, a major port, but it didn’t have an immigrant community as such, in which the women could hide or be hidden. Or it hadn’t until the dispersal programmes had started to move asylum seekers out of the crowded centres of the south-east and to dump them on to the stretched provision of the northern cities: Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle, Hull.

The support organizations that had been hastily set up were either circumspect or hostile in response to Lynne’s queries. ‘Not my responsibility,’ Michael Balit, the Volunteer Co-ordinator who worked with the council and some of the refugee organizations, told her. ‘I don’t have time to spend looking for exotic dancers or nannies trying to boost their income.’ He caught Lynne’s eye. ‘Look, prostitutes can take care of themselves. It’s a police matter. Your business. Let me know what’s going on. Keep me informed. I’ll pass on anything relevant that comes my way. Now, if you’ll excuse me…’

The woman had been very young. She had been found in the old docks area in a distressed state, and had been brought to the casualty department of the Infirmary by one of the workers from a refugee support group. The hospital had called the police, but the woman’s English was limited and she was in shock so very little of her story was clear. Lynne had listened to the tape an astute officer had thought to make while they were talking to her at the hospital. Though she had seemed willing and eager to talk to them, something had frightened her, and she had run away. One of the officers, a young woman herself, had said to Lynne, ‘She was OK with us. With me. But she seemed a bit…’ she made a gesture at her head to indicate mental confusion. ‘She kept talking about cats. The medic who examined her said he thought she might have been raped, so we were going softly, softly. But she was in distress, so I went to get the nurse again, and when I got back, she’d gone.’ The officer described the woman as – almost – oriental, with the rounded face and high cheekbones of the east. Her hair was raven black, and under the blue of death her skin was sallow. The security cameras had picked her up leaving the hospital alone. She had paused at the entrance, looking round, allowing the camera to catch her picture, hunched into the coat the support worker had given her when he drove her to the hospital. That was the last they had seen of her until her body had been found by a walker, in the mud of the estuary in a frenzy of ravenous gulls.

And the gulls and the tearing tides had done their work. The woman’s face was gone. All that was left of her was the battered body, the raven black hair, the coat, its Christmas red an ominous and incongruous marker of the last place she had stood, abandoned on the bridge – and the interview. The Senior Investigating Officer on the case, Roy Farnham, had sent it through to Lynne with a request for any information that she might have to help him. ‘We don’t even know, yet, if we’re dealing with a murder,’ he’d told Lynne when she spoke to him. The post-mortem findings had been inconclusive, the cause of death undetermined, but the dead woman had been in the early stages of pregnancy.

The little Lynne knew about the dead woman was assumption. Her nationality – she spoke Russian – and, possibly, her name. She said twice on the tape something that sounded like ‘Katya’, but the tape quality was poor. The material on the tape suggested that she had been working as a prostitute, but so far Lynne had found nothing that would give her any more information on the woman.

Unless her inquiry on the tape came to anything. A couple of months ago, she’d attended a seminar on developments in analytical techniques – these seminars were held regularly, and Lynne found it useful to keep up to date with what technological tools were available to help her. She’d remembered the seminar as soon as the Katya tape came into her hands. A woman from one of the South Yorkshire universities was touting for trade. She had talked about the ways in which apparently incomprehensible tapes could be cleaned of background noise and restored, the ways in which the actual machine a tape had been recorded on could be identified, and – here Lynne had paid close attention – how the nationality of a speaker could be determined by the way they spoke English. The woman had been talking in particular about establishing the regional and national origins of asylum seekers, but Lynne could see immediate applications to her own work.

The woman hadn’t particularly impressed her at first. She’d seemed a bit intimidated by the scepticism of the officers present, a scepticism that was honed on long experience of botch-ups, courtroom fiascos and ‘experts’ who flatly contradicted each other using identical material. But Lynne had rather warmed to her when she was recounting the success they’d had in convicting an obscene phone caller from a message he’d been unwise enough to leave on an answer-phone. ‘And you tracked him down from that?’ one of the group had asked.

‘Oh no,’ the woman had replied. ‘We helped to convict him on that. I think it was the phone number he left that tracked him down.’ She’d looked up from her notes at that point, and her eyes had glinted with laughter. Lynne had made a note of her name – Wishart, Gemma Wishart. She’d sent the Katya tape to her as soon as she’d got it from Farnham with high hopes that at least they could find out where the woman came from.

Which reminded her, the report was supposed to be in today. She checked the post in her in-tray but there was no sign of it. She phoned Wishart’s direct line, but she got a secretary who told her that Wishart wasn’t available. Lynne identified herself and asked about the report. ‘I’ll see if I can find someone to talk to you,’ the secretary said, her voice sounding uncertain, and left Lynne to drum her fingers on hold before someone finally took her call.

‘This is Dr Bishop,’ a voice said. ‘I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I’m a colleague of Gemma Wishart’s.’ She started talking about a car breakdown and Lynne had to cut her off. ‘I’m sorry,’ the Bishop woman said again. ‘We’ve been held up by Gemma’s – Dr Wishart’s – absence. I can give you the details of the report now, if you want.’ Lynne made notes as the other woman spoke. Katya, according to Wishart’s report, was from East Siberia.

‘How certain is she?’ Lynne’s geography was rusty, but she had a feeling that ‘East Siberia’ covered an area that was considerably larger than the British Isles. ‘Can she be more specific?’ If they could pinpoint the area more closely, they might be able to identify Katya, assuming her family or friends had reported her missing.

‘You’ll need to talk to Gemma if you have any specific queries, but…’ There was the sound of pages turning. ‘She says, “The accent is consistent with the area of north-east Siberia.”’ She rattled out some technical detail about vowels and devoicing and intonation. Lynne made minimal responses as she thought about it. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to go with the information. She thanked the woman, cutting her off in the middle of something about acoustic profiles, and rang off on the promise that the full report would be in the post that day.

She put the Katya file to one side. She could think about it again when the report came through – Monday now, probably. It was irritating. Academics tended to operate on a different timescale from other people.

It was nearly a month since ‘Katya’s’ death. There was very little chance of getting a line on the woman’s real identity. When the pathologist’s final report came through, her death might be formally recognized as a suicide, and she and her unborn child would lie in an unmarked grave in a foreign country. Some corner of a foreign field that is forever…where? In the absence of any obvious cause of death, in the absence of any identification, there was very little that the investigating officers could do.

Sheffield, Friday evening

It was dark by the time Roz got home. She lived on the east side of the city, away from the expensive residential suburbs. Pitsmoor had trees and quiet roads, rows of terraces and big, detached houses. Burngreave Cemetery, the small park and a recreation ground provided green spaces among the shops and houses and roads. But the area was run-down. Shop fronts were boarded up. Low property values meant that landlords left their rentals to decay. As the streets became more unkempt, graffiti started to appear on walls and bus stops. The signs of regeneration struggling in the city centre had made no impact here.

Pitsmoor suited her with its varied and varying community. And she had fallen in love with the house from the moment she saw it. She loved the square bays of the double front, the high hedge of privet and bramble and rambling roses, the stone lions that guarded the steps, the wide entrance hall and wooden stairway, the huge, flagged kitchen with the old range, the labyrinth of conservatory and outhouses that led from the back of the house to the double garage that reminded her that Pitsmoor had once been a place where the wealthy, or moderately wealthy, of the city lived. She even found the house next door an asset; a house like the one she lived in, but one that had stood empty for too long and had been vandalized into dereliction.

Everyone had said Roz was crazy when she bought the house. She’d been in Sheffield for three months, and knew she was going to stay for a while. ‘Not Pitsmoor!’ they’d said, and ‘Wait until you’ve had a chance to look round.’ But the house had reminded Roz of the house where she had lived with Nathan, and Pitsmoor had reminded her, just a bit, of the place she had left. She was happy.

She stood at her back door now, looking at the derelict house. A tree was growing out of the oriel window, and fringes of ivy and dead grasses hung over the eaves. On summer evenings, she could sit in the yard and watch the pigeons flying in and out of the holes in the roof where the slates had been removed by weather, time and local children. She shivered. It was getting cold. The moon was nearly risen now, and she had things to do. She went back inside.

She put bread under the grill to toast, and opened some beans. She wasn’t in a mood to cook. She ate a spoonful of beans out of the tin while she was waiting, leaning against the side of the cooker, her eye on the bread to catch it in that moment of transition from pale brown to charcoal. She wondered if Gemma was going to phone her, or if she should try and make contact herself. She remembered the tape that Gemma had been working on. The recorded voice had sounded emotionless, probably because the woman was concentrating hard on finding the right words. But she knew…Shit! The toast! She turned off the gas. The toast was just about retrievable. She tipped the beans into a pan and put it on the hob, dumped a plate on the table and took the toast over to the sink to scrape off the burnt bits.

She sat at the kitchen table to eat, staring at the window that had become a square of darkness. Friday night, and here she was alone in her house, eating tepid beans on toast, planning an evening’s work, and happy, contented, to be doing that. It seemed such a short time ago that she had been a student, and Friday night would have meant clubbing, hitting the town with her friends, going to parties, having fun. Maybe she’d tried to recapture that time with Luke.

Then there had been her time with Nathan. Friday night still meant the weekend, still meant special times, but it was time that they wanted to spend together or sometimes with friends…And then there had been the isolation of his illness. Their friends had tried, but a lot of them had disembarked. They hadn’t been able to cope, and in the end, nor had she. She twisted her wedding ring round her finger. ‘You find out who your true friends are,’ her mother had said philosophically.

And now, she was a successful research academic, well on her way up the ladder, and Friday night was just another evening – an evening without the immediate demands of the next day’s work, so one that could be used to catch up with longer term projects. Her book, for example; unimaginatively titled An Introduction to Forensic Phonology. She picked a couple of stray beans off her plate. She could try and get that tricky fifth chapter sorted out. She licked the tomato sauce off her fingers, washed her plate and the pan and left them to drain, then collected her briefcase and went into the downstairs room where she usually worked.

Privet pressed against the bay window, shutting out the light. The room was cool and cavernous, a huge mirror illuminating its shadows. The mirror had been left in the house by the previous owner. It was old, the gilt chipped, the glass slightly distorted and marked. The reflected room looked drowned, softened in the dim light. Roz stood at the far end of the table and saw her face a white blur in the shadows. Her gold-rimmed spectacles reflected the light and obscured her eyes. She took them off. She didn’t really need them. She untied her hair, and let it fall round her shoulders. The imperfections in the glass made the light waver like a candle flame, made her reflection look as though she was swimming through deep water, pale face and fair hair floating in the brown shadows. Rosalind. If there be truth in sight, you are my Rosalind. Nathan used to say that to her, Mozart on the tiny cassette player that was all they could afford, the gas fire combating the draughts from the ill-fitting windows and rattling doors of their flat. You are my Rosalind.

Work, she had work to do. She turned on the desk light, its pool of illumination dispelling the shadows in the mirror. She had brought one of the laptops from work, more powerful than her own machine. She wanted to try out some new software that Luke had recommended, as well as work on the book. She switched the machine on, and sorted through her disks while she waited for it to boot up. She realized, as she looked at the files on the machine, that this wasn’t the laptop she usually brought home, it was the new one, the one that Gemma had been using. She’d thought that Gemma had taken it to Manchester. She must have taken the older one. Maybe she hadn’t wanted the responsibility of the more expensive machine. Roz tried to imagine what Joanna would say if it got stolen or damaged, and decided that Gemma had made the right decision. That made her uneasy about the security in her own house. Break-ins were not unusual in Pitsmoor. They weren’t unusual anywhere these days. Gemma had lost her sound system just a couple of weeks ago when her flat had been burgled. Roz decided she’d lock the laptop in the cellar head before she went to bed.

Gemma. Ever since her conversation with Luke…Gemma should have been in touch at some time during the day, or she should have phoned this evening to let someone know she was safely back. Joanna would want to know how the Manchester meeting had gone. Maybe Gemma had been in touch with Joanna, bearded Gren-del – Luke’s occasional name for her – in her lair. Roz wondered if she should phone. But Joanna was going out this evening; she’d mentioned it to Roz on her way out. ‘Must rush. I’m going to the concert tonight.’ Joanna probably wouldn’t welcome the intrusion, especially not if she’d already been reminded about Gemma’s delinquency by a phone call.

Luke. Luke would have heard. She tried his number, but she got the answering machine. He must be out. She held the phone against her ear, thinking. Then she tried Gemma’s number, without much hope. Nothing. She was seeing Joanna tomorrow evening. She’d find out then. She pushed the problem out of her mind, and turned to the computer. Gradually, the work absorbed her, and the problem of Gemma retreated to the back of her mind. The hours passed, unnoticed, as she sat there in the dark, in the pool of yellow light, the words scrolling up and up the screen.

Hull, Saturday, 9.00 a.m.

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.

Sheffield

Saturday evening found Roz at the entrance to the block containing Joanna’s flat. The building was low – three stories – and set back from the road. The front overlooked the park and the back looked on to a wooded hillside. It formed an enclave of rural seclusion in the centre of the city. Roz sometimes wondered how Joanna afforded to live here on an academic salary. She rang Joanna’s bell, and gave her name as the intercom crackled incomprehensibly at her. She straightened her shoulders and pushed the door open. She found Joanna’s parties a bit of an ordeal, and she wasn’t sure why she had been invited to this one. She’d queried this with Luke as she left work on Friday. ‘You’ll be the cabaret,’ he’d said, without looking up from his screen. ‘Take your fancy knickers.’

Thanks a bunch, Luke! She was at Joanna’s door now, and Joanna welcomed her with the social kiss she never used with Roz at other times. She took the wine that Roz had brought with a quick glance at the label. Bringing wine was probably a faux pas, Roz reflected as she and Joanna exchanged meaningless social pleasantries. Joanna was wearing a black dress of impeccable elegance and looked beautiful. Roz told her so, and for a moment a look of genuine pleasure appeared on her face. ‘We’re in here,’ she said, ushering Roz into the lounge. Roz envied Joanna this room with its huge windows that filled the whole of the far wall. She had spent an afternoon here before Christmas when the Arts Tower was closed, going through some spreadsheets in preparation for the finance meeting, watching the winter sunset turn the clouds grey and brilliant red, the sun an orange fire through the trees.

She felt the cloudy softness of the carpet under her feet as she crossed the room, nodding to one or two familiar faces as she followed Joanna to where a small group was admiring one of the paintings. Joanna performed the introductions quickly. There was Mark Bell who Roz knew by sight; an influential member of the grants committee, one of the new breed of industry-based academics. ‘And this is Petra, Mark’s wife,’ Joanna went on. ‘I don’t think you’ve met Jim, Jim Broadbent. Jim’s with Ashworth Lawrence.’ One of the biggest legal firms in South Yorkshire. Roz had recognized the name – another man with influence in both the legal and academic worlds. She found herself wondering if Joanna had any friends who were just that – friends. Presumably, Roz’s role tonight was to sell the Law and Language Group to these people whose influence stretched beyond the confines of the university.

‘And you may have met Sean Lewis,’ Joanna was saying. ‘He completed his doctorate at MIT. He’s with Martin Lomax’s team.’ The computer department. ‘Sean, this is Rosalind Bishop.’

Roz found herself looking into the appreciative eyes of a very young man. ‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ she said.

He smiled. ‘I’m sure we haven’t.’

Joanna pressed a glass of wine into her hand and Roz, tasting its almost astringent coolness, decided that her bottle of supermarket Chardonnay had certainly been a gaffe. She looked at Sean Lewis, wondering why Joanna had made a point of introducing them. ‘MIT,’ she said. ‘That’s an impressive alma mater.’ Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She wondered what someone with a doctorate from that institution was doing in Sheffield.

He seemed to pick up her unspoken question. ‘It’s where it’s all happening,’ he said, ‘but it’s a bit one-sided. Great if you’re a total geek – they’re all like, “Work, work.” I’m more, “Get a life.” There’s a lot of places I haven’t been yet. They don’t understand that over there.’ He shrugged.

Roz nodded, amused. She had spent most of her early working life focused on getting her toe-hold and pulling herself up the ladder. So had most of her contemporaries. It had seemed, then, possible to put other things on hold. She found Sean’s attitude refreshing.

They talked for a bit longer, then she did her duty and circulated, talking about the politics of the health trust with Jim Broadbent, and the importance of PR with someone she knew she knew, but whose name she couldn’t remember. Then the groups reformed and she relaxed for a moment as she listened to the swirl of chat around her; something about hospital funding on her left, something about the current state of theatre in Sheffield to her right, something about the plight of the universities and the role of research in modern technological societies from a group in front of her. Roz listened to them talking about the new Home Office regulations, about the hidebound administration of the university, before Joanna took them through to where food was laid out.

The dining room was a minimalist contrast to the soft comfort of the lounge, with a polished beech floor, and a table that gleamed with crystal and candlelight. Roz looked at the impressive buffet and wondered again where Joanna found the time to do all the things she did.

Joanna came towards her with the young man, Sean Lewis, in tow, and Roz wondered what she was up to. Whatever. It was just for an evening, and Sean was attractive and entertaining company. Their talk was impersonal, work-based, but there was a subtext that Roz was aware of inherent in the way he stood slightly closer than necessary, the way that when their eyes met he maintained the contact, the way he stood forming a barrier between Roz and the rest of the room. You’ve pulled, Bishop. Luke’s voice, in her mind. It made her want to smile, but she kept her face serious.

Sean seemed genuinely interested in her thoughts about the Law and Language Group, and talked quite knowledgeably about it. He understood her interest in the research side of the group’s work. ‘It’s the technology and the software every time,’ he said. ‘Take the grants, develop the prototypes and then get out there, market them yourself.’ He thought they were wasting their time with the criminal work. ‘Pissing about with tapes,’ he said dismissively.

Roz was suddenly alert. This young man was clearly a high-flier. His field was computing and software. He seemed well travelled, talking about America, Europe, the Far East. Attending one of Joanna’s parties was hardly the way he would choose to spend an evening. He looked as if he would be more at home in one of the notorious Sheffield clubs. She wondered what the attraction was.

She could see Joanna glancing across at them, a speculative gleam in her eye. She understood, now, why Joanna was so interested in Sean Lewis and why she wanted him and Roz to get on. If Joanna could pull it off, he would make a perfect replacement for Luke. It wasn’t as far-fetched as it seemed. Joanna had talked about enhancing the post, giving the software researcher control of the European grant work. He wanted to travel. He could still pursue his own interests – in fact, a link with a successful research group would be an asset. He smiled at her and helped himself to a piece of asparagus off her plate. Making a pact with the devil? She wondered if she should be using a long spoon.

5
Sheffield, Sunday

The phone woke Roz at seven. She swore and pulled her head under the blankets. Let the answering machine take it. She was due a lie-in. She hadn’t got back from Joanna’s until after two, and she’d been woken up again in the small hours by a gang of youths, fighting and shouting in the road outside. Now she just wanted to sleep. Who’d phone her at this time, anyway? Her mother? Not even Paula would phone at this time on a Sunday. Then the voice on the machine penetrated, and she sat up, grabbing for the phone. ‘…your lazy arse out of bed, Bishop…’

It was the old Luke, the friend who had never had any compunction about rousting her out of bed in pursuit of some enterprise that had caught his fancy. ‘It’s the middle of the night, Luke! For Christ’s sake!’ Then she remembered Friday. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m round at Gemma’s,’ he said. ‘There’s…’ Suddenly his voice sounded uncertain, the new Luke, slightly wary, slightly withdrawn. ‘I’m not quite sure. Maybe I shouldn’t have called you.’

‘Oh, come on, Luke. I’m really going to go back to sleep now, aren’t I? What’s wrong? Is Gemma ill? Is that why she didn’t come in yesterday?’

‘Gemma’s not back,’ he said, after a pause.

‘Luke…’ She felt an uneasy sensation in her stomach. ‘Has she been in touch? Anything?’

‘Nothing. But…’ Again the un-Luke-like uncertainty.

‘Don’t you think we should call someone – the hospital? Maybe she had an accident.’ Or was she being melodramatic?

‘I did that bit yesterday. I told you that car shit didn’t make sense. There wasn’t anything. But then there wouldn’t be.’

‘Why? What did they say?’ There must be something, or he wouldn’t have phoned. ‘I’ll come round, shall I? To Gemma’s?’

‘I don’t know…’ That uncertainty again. She tried to remember any time, in the year she had known him, when Luke had asked her for help.

‘I’m coming round,’ she said.

There was a moment’s silence. ‘OK. See what you think.’ He hung up.

Roz looked out of the window, trying to assess the weather. She didn’t bother with curtains. Her bedroom looked out on to the derelict house, the oriel window visible from where she was lying. She rolled out of bed on to the floor. It was the getting-up technique she’d adopted in her teens, when the act of getting out of bed had seemed impossible to achieve. Her fatigue had retreated, but she knew she would feel it later. Getting old…The shower pulled her further awake. She put on jeans and a warm jumper, stuck a croissant under the grill and switched the kettle on. Fifteen minutes later, the half-eaten croissant in her hand, she was reversing the car out of her gate.

Gemma rented a flat in Hillsborough. Roz had picked her up there once or twice, but had never been inside, she realized, as she pulled up outside the small terrace, behind Luke’s bike, a Vincent Black Shadow that he devoted more time and care to than he devoted to himself. ‘Brings out the geek in me,’ he’d admitted once to Roz. He must have been looking out for her, because he opened the door as she came through the gate.

She followed him into the house. The entrance hall and stairway were common territory, and had the dark, uncared-for look that areas of transit often have. Gemma’s flat was on the ground floor, her door to the left of the entry. Roz looked round as she went in. It was – presumably – pretty much like any of the furnished flats on offer in an area that had a large transient population. Gemma had draped the chairs with pale throws, and painted the walls a light, neutral colour, as though she had tried to make the room non-intrusive, a background to her presence. Here and there were patches of colour – the green of a plant, a peacock blue table lamp, a brilliant tapestry on one wall, cushions embroidered in scarlet. Roz was drawn to the tapestry. It seemed to glow with life in the stark room. She looked more closely, admiring the brilliant colours and the intricate weaving of the threads.

Luke came up behind her. ‘Gemma got that when she was in Dudinka,’ he said. Gemma had spent three years in Russia, mostly at the Siberian university of Novosibirsk when she was studying for her PhD. ‘They gave it to her when she left. She’s going to go back there, when her research money runs out here.’ Roz was surprised. She’d thought that Gemma planned an academic career in Britain – or America.

Luke turned away from the tapestry. ‘Through here,’ he said. He led her through a small kitchen – more of a lobby than a kitchen – to the bedroom, which was at the back of the house. It was smaller than the front room, and was sparsely furnished with a bed, a small chest of drawers, and an empty hanging rail by the chimney breast. Under the window was Gemma’s desk, with her computer. The screensaver wove intricate patterns in ever-changing colours. Luke went over to it. ‘Look,’ he said. He clicked the mouse to open the documents window, and then jerked his head to bring Roz over. She looked at the screen. The documents window was open, but there was nothing there, no files or folders, just empty space: 0 objects. 0 bytes.

Roz looked at it, and looked at Luke. He shrugged a shoulder. ‘Last time I saw this, Tuesday night, that would have been, she had loads of stuff on here,’ he said.

‘Maybe she wiped it – for space,’ Roz said. ‘Maybe it’s all saved on disks.’

Luke pulled open the desk drawer. ‘She keeps her back-up stuff here,’ he said. The drawer was empty. ‘Anyway, Gem keeps all her stuff on her hard disk. She says it’s easier to keep track of. And she has back-up disks for everything.’ He folded his arms and looked at her, leaning against the desk, waiting.

Roz wondered what he wanted her to do. She wondered what she should do. Gemma had gone to Manchester on Thursday and attended a meeting. She had definitely been there – Joanna had checked on Friday. She was due back on Thursday evening. Luke had said that he expected her to phone – or half expected her to phone. She was certainly expected in the department on Friday morning. The meeting had been the main focus of Joanna’s attention for the past month. Gemma had sent an e-mail with a lame excuse. She hadn’t come back, and she had apparently wiped her document files from her hard disk before she went. Luke was still watching her from by the desk, waiting to see where her thoughts took her. ‘The police?’ she said.

‘I did that as well,’ he said. ‘Yesterday.’

‘And?’ It was like pulling teeth.

‘They weren’t that interested. They took details, but they didn’t see any reason to worry. Gemma does go off sometimes, weekends. Said to leave it until Monday. They thought I was overreacting, thought we must have had a row. Lovers’ tiff.’ He said it lightly enough, and she wondered why he was worried, if Gemma was in the habit of taking unplanned trips. There didn’t seem much point in asking him. He wouldn’t talk to her these days. ‘I just thought there was something wrong. Thing is, I hadn’t been round here then.’

‘What do you mean?’

He jerked his head impatiently. ‘Just look round you, Roz.’

She looked, and the implications of the empty hanging rail hit her. She went over to the chest and opened the drawers. They were empty. ‘All her stuff’s gone,’ she said. That meant that wherever Gemma had gone, she’d planned it, but the sense of unease stayed with her.

‘First prize for observation, Bishop.’ Luke had turned back to the computer and was moving the cursor across the screen.

‘Look, did you two have any kind of, you know…?’

‘Any kind of what, Roz?’

‘Any kind of row, or disagreement or something that would have upset her. You know what I mean, Luke.’

His expression didn’t change. ‘If I knew of a reason for her being away, I wouldn’t be looking.’

So that’s a ‘no’, then. ‘If Gemma deleted those files, should you be planning a raid on them?’ she said. She was beginning to understand that Gemma must have personal reasons for going away and that Luke knew more than he was telling her. She wasn’t prepared to be the patsy in whatever complicated game he and Gemma were playing. He smiled at her and waited. You haven’t thought it through, Bishop. ‘You’ve already looked,’ she said.

‘It’s no problem getting deleted files back,’ he said. ‘But…someone’s taken a bit of trouble here – all I’m getting is gibberish.’

So Gemma had done more that just issue a delete instruction. ‘Can’t you get them back at all?’

‘If I…I don’t know. Probably not. Not from something like this.’ He frowned, looking into space, thinking. ‘I don’t think Gemma could have done it. She could have wiped her hard disk, no problem. She knows how to do that…’ Roz reflected that she herself had managed to achieve just that, once, without either meaning to or knowing exactly what she’d done. ‘But she’d have needed a bit more for this.’

Roz thought about it. She wondered how she would tackle the problem if she wanted to take stuff off her hard disk in such a way that it was permanently removed. You couldn’t work in her field without knowing how easily such files could be retrieved. If she wanted to do it, she’d probably ask Luke. But if she didn’t want Luke to know…She thought she might have been able to come up with some kind of a solution. She just wouldn’t be 100 per cent confident that the files would be permanently deleted. And that, presumably, wouldn’t be too difficult to find out. ‘Gemma could have done it,’ she said.

Luke shrugged. He clearly thought she was wrong. He shut the machine down and stood up. ‘I’m going into the department,’ he said. ‘I’m going to look on her PC there.’

The Arts Tower was quiet on a Sunday. Students were using the library, and people were riding the paternoster – a university never really closes down – but the milling crowds of weekdays, of lecture and seminar days, weren’t there. They rode up in the paternoster in silence. N floor was deserted, the lights out, the corridors dim and empty. Luke led the way to Gemma’s room and used his master key to open it. Roz looked round. Everything was as neat and ordered as it had been on Friday. She remembered being in here, looking for Gemma’s draft report. She realized the significance of that as Luke switched the computer on, and felt a relief she couldn’t quite account for. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten. I looked up one of Gemma’s files on Friday. There was a report she had to get in. Everything’s there. Or at least the files I was looking for were there. I…’ Her voice trailed off as she looked over Luke’s shoulder. The computer was flashing a message at them, white letters on a black screen: error, error, error.

Luke looked at her. ‘It may have been here on Friday,’ he said, ‘but it isn’t now. It’s been wiped.’

Roz pushed her hair back from her face and shook her head. ‘I can’t think of anywhere else to look,’ she said. Whoever had wiped Gemma’s machine, they’d done a thorough job. The painstaking removal of files from her home computer would have taken a bit of time. Here, the hard disk had been reformatted. Everything was gone.

Roz and Luke had gone through the desk and the filing cabinets in Gemma’s room, checked the shelves, the window sill, the pockets of the lab coat that hung on the back of the door. Roz wondered why it was there. She’d never seen Gemma wear it. They were looking for Gemma’s back-up disks. Luke straightened up from the filing cabinet, and for a moment, his face was unguarded. He looked anxious, confused, and there were lines of tension around his mouth and eyes. He saw she was watching him, and made an attempt at a smile. ‘What’s the point in wiping the computer and leaving the back-ups?’ he said. ‘They’re not here.’

‘Whoever did it might not have known…’ Roz was still hoping the back-up disks that Gemma should have kept would turn up. Maybe they’d missed something. She turned back to the desk.

‘They aren’t here, Roz. Stop wasting time.’ He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans, and looked round the room, his face angry now. ‘I told her we needed an automatic back-up system.’

‘Who?’ Roz pushed the desk drawer shut. He was right. There was nothing here. They’d looked everywhere. She pushed her glasses back up her nose, then, irritated by them, she took them off.

‘Grey. I told Grey.’ He ran his hand through his hair and moved restlessly round the small room. Roz pulled open the top drawer of the filing cabinet. She didn’t want to admit he was right.

‘You think Gemma did this? Came back yesterday and wiped everything off her machine?’

He reached past her and slammed the filing cabinet drawer shut. ‘How the fuck should I know?’

The anger in his tone froze her. She knew that Luke could be volatile, but she’d never seen that sudden rage in him before. She stepped back, moving away from the filing cabinet, wanting to put some distance between them. She tried another question, tried to keep her voice normal. ‘Why the blitz job on the hard disk here? Why did…whoever…wipe the whole disk, and just do the files on the other machine?’

He didn’t look at her, kept his hand on the filing cabinet. ‘I don’t know, Roz.’ His voice was tightly controlled. ‘Work it out for yourself.’

She looked at his rigid stance. Suddenly, it was like stepping back two years and seeing Nathan’s confusion transform into fury. Then, the only thing to do had been to get out of the way, fast. Until the night she hadn’t made it. She had been woken up by the sound of him moving round the house, the confused stumbling, and had got up as she had done before. And he had been there at the top of the stairs, his face twisted with anger and panic. She could still see his face, his arm drawn back. Then his fist had slammed into the side of her head, her hand had grabbed at the banister rail in a futile attempt to save herself in the frozen moment of her fall before the pain and the fear hit.

She couldn’t deal with Luke like this. ‘I’ll be in my room,’ she said, after a moment.

He didn’t look at her. ‘OK.’

She walked along the empty corridor past the stairwell, her footsteps echoing on the lino. A security light was a red glow on the ceiling, and light from the lobby cast a faint gleam at the end of the corridor. Roz went towards her room, trying to think the situation through. Her mind was dividing down two paths: one, the main one, was concern for Gemma, a feeling of queasy uncertainty that told her something was wrong. Luke said he’d been in touch with the police, and that they hadn’t been concerned, but that was before the discovery of the missing files. Or would the police say that showed Gemma had meant to leave, that she had wiped all her files because…because what? Because she had something to hide?

That was the second strand of Roz’s concern. If Gemma had gone deliberately, the implications for the group could be serious. Roz closed the door of her room, and leant against it. The silence closed round her. She needed some time to think, and, she realized, she needed to contact Joanna. Joanna had to know. She dialled Joanna’s number, but got the answering service. She hung up. She’d better plan what she was going to say. She pushed a pile of papers out of the way to reach her notepad and a pen. The papers were her Monday’s to-do pile. The various tasks snagged her mind, and she leafed through the stuff as she tried to work out what, exactly, to say to Joanna.

That reminded her about the draft report for DI Jordan. Gemma needed to complete it and send it off. But Gemma wouldn’t be there. Suddenly, she was sure of that. Whatever had happened, Gemma would not be back soon, maybe not at all. Roz would have to check that report, phone the rather brusque DI Jordan and explain why it was being delayed for another day. She remembered Joanna’s ebullience on Friday. She dreaded telling her.

A disk that had been concealed in the pile of papers slipped out and fell to the floor. She frowned as she picked it up. She was very careful not to leave disks lying around, careful to keep them filed and classified where they could be found as soon as they were wanted. She must have been distracted on Friday. She picked it up to see what it was. No label. That was odd. She never, never, put anything on a disk without labelling it. It must be someone else’s, but who would leave this in her office?

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.

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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