Power Shift Read online

  ‘I’ve already set routine inquiries in train. No response yet. We’ve already talked to the security guard on the night shift. He’s less than forthcoming—we wonder if someone’s put the frighteners on him. But he may be plain pissed: that’s his usual state. As a precaution, I’ve told my teams always to patrol the area where Bates was last seen in pairs. I’ve got a Cantonese-speaking officer interviewing one of the big cheeses in the Chinese community this afternoon. The trouble is, sir, much as I’d like to have preserved the scene, without Bates being officially listed as missing, I don’t see how I could have caused what would inevitably be a huge disruption in a very busy area.’

  Oxnard peered through a gap in his Venetian blinds. The brilliant sun lit his face as if in a noir movie. ‘Like the disruption that RTA at Spaghetti Junction yesterday’s still causing. The heat from the lorry fire burnt away half the road surface. Know anything about that, Power?’

  Quite a lot, as it happened. But that was between her, Pat and Rod at the moment. ‘Not on my patch, sir,’ she said neutrally.

  ‘But the truck was coming from your patch, I should think. He’d been delivering tomatoes or some such. It’d be nice if you could find a bit out before some MIT comes sniffing round. Get on to it, will you, Power?’

  ‘Right away.’ She looked at him with wide-eyed innocence. ‘Extra resources, sir?’

  He gave a snort of laughter. ‘You off your head?’

  She gave a concise account of her staffing position. ‘And to make matters even worse, I’m having to keep tabs on an East European child prostitute. In fact, I shall be seeing her in this building in about five minutes…’

  ‘Here? Steelhouse Lane? What’s wrong with Digbeth? That’s where she should be. With the unit there. Why you should be anywhere except at your desk is beyond me. Haven’t you got enough work to do?’

  Since she couldn’t give herself an honest answer to the last of his questions, she replied to the others. ‘Different venues and different routes each morning, sir. You see, I think we may be talking to a victim of a major people-trafficking ring. According to NCIS—’

  ‘Talked to them already, then?’ It sounded like praise.

  ‘Sir. The people most likely to be involved have an international reputation for nastiness. I don’t want to expose Natasha or the officer involved in debriefing her—do you know Meg Walker, sir?—exposed to any danger. Or the civilian interpreter for that matter. Wouldn’t look good in the media, sir. Which reminds me, have they got wind of Phil Bates’s disappearance yet?’

  ‘As soon as he becomes a missing person they’ll know.’ He returned to his desk and collapsed into his chair. the press office will make the statement and you will say absolutely nothing, Power—get that? Whatever you think of the official version.’

  ‘You’ll make sure they bear in mind the family’s on the warpath, sir?’

  He nodded, allowing a grim smile to flit briefly across his military features ‘I shall indeed, Power.’ His snort wasn’t hostile.. ‘They told me you’d tell the chief how to wipe his arse, given half a chance: I reckon they were right.’

  Kate made it down to Reception just in time to greet the interpreter, wrapped this time against the weather with much greater style. She’d flung about her the sort of fur stole that would have been at home on a fifties movie star but was these days little short of animal-rights bait. For the first time she realised how glamorous Madame Constantinou must have been. Those cheekbones, that jaw must have been spectacular before jowls sagged and fronds of neck wrinkles arrived. Her legs, with barely a vein showing, were still excellent for a woman in her sixties, ending in neat feet encased in frivolous high-heeled ankle boots with fur cuffs that Kate rather coveted. It would have been good to talk to her about her past and how she came to be here. And to ask what had made her change her image so sharply. But now was not the moment. Meg Walker and Natasha were bustling in, and it was time to embark on the saga once again.

  This time, however, Kate had her own agenda. ‘I want to skip part of your story,’ she told Natasha. ‘I’m happy for you to tell it the way you want afterwards, but in the meantime I need some information about your journey here to Birmingham.’

  Madame Constantinou raised rather over-plucked eyebrows heavenwards, rolling her eyes in amusement. Meg minutely shook her head. So Natasha’s reaction to the request didn’t altogether come a surprise. Her eyes and teeth and hands and stamped feet and raised voice came together into a magnificent tantrum. After she had ranged round the interview room like a caged animal in pain, she quietened down enough to deliver a few words in a thrilling hoarse whisper.

  ‘Don’t tell me, she wants me to go fuck myself,’ Kate suggested, as Madame Constantinou struggled to frame a translation.

  The response was a chilly smile. ‘You have the gist, Inspector. She says it is her story and she will tell it her way or not at all.’

  As if in confirmation Natasha, tossing her loosened mane, stomped off to a corner, turning a speaking back on her audience.

  ‘Natasha, I really need to know what happened to you in Birmingham.’

  She responded with another torrent. Kate thought she might have picked out the word ‘whore’—though to whom it applied wasn’t immediately apparent. Then Natasha returned to the table, in a huge dramatic torrent of tears.

  Kate left the room, motioning Meg to follow. They leant, as if exhausted already, against the corridor wall. ‘Come on, you’re the mother of teenage girls. You must know how to handle them better than this.’

  ‘I’m afraid mine need wheedling, and often straight bribes. I’ll go and have another bash, shall I?’

  Loath to hang around in the corridor like a naughty schoolgirl waiting to be admitted to the head’s study, Kate headed for the ladies’ loo. And found the mirror occupied by her old boss, DI Sue Rowley, peering anxiously at a spot.

  ‘I’m practically begging the doctor for HRT and there I go sprouting teenage zits,’ she said, as if she and Kate had last seen each other two minutes ago. ‘Who’d be a woman? Hey, Kate, girl, you look very fine in your formal feathers!’ Grinning, she hugged her. ‘I’ll swear you’ve grown an inch.’

  ‘On the contrary, I’ve just been cut down to size. I’ve got this teenage tom having a mega-tantrum in Romanian, and I can’t deal with her.’

  ‘What’s upset her?’ Sue turned back to the mirror, dabbing extra foundation on the pimple.

  Kate explained. ‘Perhaps the Romanians have arcane rules governing their story-telling and I offended her by asking her to break them.’

  ‘Or perhaps she’s a stupid drama queen needing a good slap. Which, alas, you’re not allowed to give her. Oh, just tell her straight that if she doesn’t pull her finger out, you’ll have her sent back as an illegal immigrant. She may not have much English but I’ll bet my pension she’ll know those words. Time for a cuppa before you go back to Scala House? Graham’s at the dentist’s.’

  Natasha had responded to the treatment Sue Rowley had suggested with a magnificent sulk but a modicum of co-operation.

  ‘Some time in London you decided you had to escape from—well, whatever you had to escape from?’ Kate suggested.

  Natasha shrugged. That would emerge only when she was good and ready.

  ‘But you didn’t have any money for a train or a coach. What did you decide to do? Did you hitch a lift?’ She curled her thumb. ‘No? OK. Now, you’ve already told us that you came in the cab of a container lorry. Had you ever met the driver before?’

  ‘No! Never. And I wouldn’t know him again, before you ask!’ Madame Constantinou translated deadpan.

  “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” So what did he look like, this kind lorry driver?’

  Natasha shrugged. So did Kate, getting ostentatiously to her feet.

  ‘Was he old or young? A fatbelly?’

  No, he wasn’t a fatbelly, emphatically not. With the hint of irony now becoming familiar, Madame Constantinou suggested that he was nei
ther as young as Kate nor as old as herself.

  ‘About Meg’s age, then? About forty?’

  Natasha shrugged again, most elaborately. Kate seethed. ‘As young as Vladi?’

  No response. If she hadn’t already had a breather, Kate would have called one. The other women needed a break too. Catching their eyes, she led the way out But she shook her head when Natasha followed, gesturing her back into the room with the flat of her hand.

  ‘And we, ladies, will have coffee and biscuits, and she, poor dear, will have none.’ Kate turned in the direction of the canteen.

  Meg demurred. ‘I think it’s that she really doesn’t want to tell you anything about this man. Not that she’s just being awkward.’

  ‘You mean she might be trying to protect him?’

  Madame Constantinou nodded. ‘She is a very bright child, although her education and upbringing have been deplorable. Recollect those pictures she drew. She has a very good visual memory.’

  ‘Should we ask her to draw this man?’ Meg asked doubtfully. Kate shook her head. ‘That won’t do any good if she’s protecting him. I wonder why—’

  ‘If he is in danger she will be loyal,’ Madame Constantinou declared.

  ‘He’d only be in danger if Vladi and Co. knew him and his part in her escape,’ Meg said slowly.

  ‘You think she wasn’t escaping from London, but simply being taken elsewhere? On Vladi’s instructions?’ Kate asked.

  Meg pulled a face. ‘Could be. But why take her by lorry? Not car or train?’

  Madame Constantinou declared, ‘The sooner we hear the whole story, the sooner such details will emerge.’

  Kate nodded. Somehow she couldn’t dismiss it as a detail. It seemed a vital part of the story. But there was no point in offending someone she depended on utterly. She bit her lip. ‘This may sound silly … Look, what if she thought her saviour was in here? Already in our protection, or under arrest or whatever.’

  ‘How could she possibly think that? We could tell her—but—she’s fly enough to know we’re lying.’

  ‘Quite. But if she saw someone like him.’

  ‘And how do we know what he looks like?’

  ‘We don’t. But—and I have to protect my source here, sorry—I have a clue as to what he might look like. More specifically, and absolutely between ourselves, might have looked like.’

  ‘You, mean he’s dead?’

  ‘Let’s just say, Meg, that we have a corpse. A lorry driver’s corpse.’

  ‘Oh, the poor child! Someone who was kind to her!’ Madame Constantinou wailed.

  Kate bit her lip. Where had her feelings gone? The way of all police feelings, if they got in the way of an investigation. And Natasha herself was holding things up, quite deliberately. So, was it worth the gamble? Was it unethical? ‘Look, why don’t you two take her down to the canteen for however much food she wants? I’ll see if I can put my plan B into operation.’

  ‘You’re not going to upset her?’

  ‘I want to shock her into saying something—anything, Meg. It’s not just Natasha—don’t you think Vladi and his mates are treating countless other kids just as they treated her? And the longer she pisses us about the more kids they can abduct and rape.’ Perhaps she was convinced herself. She headed up to Sue Rowley’s office before she could change her mind.

  ‘Black officer? Male, female?’ Sue looked puzzled but unfazed. ‘What do you want to borrow one for, anyway?’

  ‘I want a male, aged just short of forty, about five nine. Plain clothes. And all I want him to do is stand and talk to me in the canteen. With his back to someone.’

  ‘This sounds a bit dodgy to me, Kate, and that’s a fact. Better tell your Auntie Sue what you’re up to.’

  Kate explained.

  Hand on phone, Sue recapped. ‘You want this guy simply to talk to you, not to pretend to be anyone, not to entrap anyone. Just to jog a teenage girl’s memory. So if the chief gets to hear of this he’ll simply pat you on the head and congratulate you on using your initiative.’

  ‘Hole in one.’

  Eyebrows raised heavenwards, Sue dialled.

  ‘Didn’t you play football or something?’ Marcus Ford was asking.

  ‘Play! No, when I came to Brum I got inveigled into coaching a boys’ team. I sometimes have a hankering to go to a match, but I rarely give in.’ Out of the tail of her eye she could see Natasha, shoulder hunched from the others, digging into some of West Midlands Police’s less healthy options—cake, a couple of doughnuts and a glass of milk. She was gazing into space,

  eyes unfocused. She didn’t look especially unhappy, though Kate couldn’t have blamed her. She simply had the patient, enduring look of a badly beaten donkey. The poor kid needed a hug and a lot of love and all she was going to get was a nasty shock. What the hell are you doing, playing God like this?

  She drifted Ford in the direction of the servery. ‘Do you play?’

  ‘Had a trial for West Brom once.’

  ‘Premier League! Keep looking towards the food, Marcus, if you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘They weren’t then. Are you sure this, is OK, Inspector Power?’

  ‘In this situation, I’m Kate. It’s a short-cut. The girl’s got what I think’s invaluable information, and I have to make her cough. Oh, she will sooner or later, but I don’t have that sort of time. Brace yourself. I’m just going to wave.’ She did. Natasha registered nothing. ‘So, what are you working on now?’

  ‘Depends—what’s the latest bee in the Home Secretary’s bonnet? Well, I’m working on that!’

  They’d reached the counter. ‘What can I get you? I’m going to wave again.’

  ‘A bowl of that soup. Then I can work through—Jesus!’ There was a piercing yell, not a scream. ‘Joe!’

  ‘Better turn round. The poor kid’s got to realise sooner or later.’

  Natasha dashed at Kate, fingernails at the ready. ‘Not Joe! Not Joe!’ she screamed. And then she simply subsided into Kate’s arms.

  Marcus patted her ineffectually on the shoulder and stood with a bowl of soup in one hand. ‘You can tell you’re a bloody inspector,’ he grumbled, ‘leaving me to pay when it was your shout.’

  Kate hardened her heart again. ‘This Joe you thought I was talking to, Natasha, who is he?’

  No answer.

  ‘And why should you think I might be talking to him?’ No answer;

  ‘Let me tell you what I think. I think Joe was the kind man who drove you to Birmingham. I’d really like to know why he drove you here.’

  Natasha tossed her head, but less convincingly than usual.

  ‘What happened, Natasha? I really need to know. Because I think that if Joe was kind to you, he might have put himself in danger. Don’t you?’

  Chapter 15

  Madame Constantinou translated deadpan Natasha gave a repeat performance of her hunched shoulders and sulky silence

  ‘If it hadn’t been for Joe, you’d be stripping in a seedy club, wouldn’t you?’ Kate insisted, standing Why not show anger in her body language as well as her voice? She-had-to know whether Joe had been a lorry driver genuinely responding to a thumb, or if he’d been supposed to take her somewhere, as part of Vladi’s gang If only she could trust Natasha—she had to admit that there was no real reason why she didn’t, but she wondered whether the girl might have been telling them what she thought they wanted to hear. Or, if she’d liked Joe so much, that she might have been deliberately misleading them ‘Or you’d be having sex with fatbellies again? And now—because he helped you—Joe may be in danger’ Then, more in sorrow than in anger, she continued, ‘Is this the way to help him? You know what Vladi’s friends can do when they, put their mind to it. Think of Joe being beaten up by a gang of thugs. Apart from anything else,’ she added, when all the pleas failed, ‘they may make him tell them where you are. If we could protect him, that wouldn’t happen.’

  The policewomen watched the play of emotions as Madame Constantinou translated. At last
it seemed that self-interest won the day.

  Natasha muttered.

  ‘She will tell you after lunch,’ Madame Constantinou announced, with a sardonic curl of the lip. ‘Meanwhile, she is so very, very hungry.’

  ‘These bloody delaying tactics,’ Meg Walker muttered.

  ‘Quite. Meg, stay here with her.’ Kate patted her mobile. ‘I’ve got to take some phone calls—I’m supposed to be running a nick, for God’s sake—and then we’ll have sandwiches in here. Madame Constantinou, tell her she can have a proper meal when we’ve finished. And not before.’

  Out in the corridor she learnt that the Scala House world was turning satisfactorily without her, according to Helen Kerr, who didn’t seem to have the same reservations about eating on reception duty as Kate had had.

  ‘Now, the good news is that Mrs Speed’ll be with us tomorrow, her says. And I had a message for you to ring this sergeant out in Kingstanding or somewhere. Funny sort of name.’

  ‘Guljar? And Kings Heath, not Kingstanding?’

  ‘Could be. Me pencil broke while I was doing me shorthand, see, gaffer.’

  ‘Any other news? About Phil Bates?’

  ‘Nah. Come on, gaffer, everyone knows he’s done a runner, don’t they?’

  ‘Remind everyone I want detailed reports on paper or e-mail for when I get back,’ Kate responded, voice crisp with Natasha-induced anger. ‘And get Dave Bush to call me as soon as he’s finished with Mr Choi. The instant. OK? Though with luck I should be back by then…’

  Guljar responded second ring. ‘Yes, I’ve just picked up this rumour about Phil Bates,’ he said. ‘They say he might have won something on the lotto on Saturday.’

  ‘Do they indeed? A lot? And who are they?’

  ‘His drinking pals. A couple of lads from this station and a few lowlifes. Boozers, all of them.’

  ‘So it’d be worth checking his house to see if he’s taken a passport.’

  ‘You haven’t already?’

  ‘He’s, not officially a missing person, is he? And everyone told me not to prioritise this, didn’t they?’