Power Shift Page 27

  ‘And Mihail is safely under lock and key?’

  ‘Absolutely. Oh, and one of your neighbours remembers letting him in as she left your flats, so you’ve him to thank for your fire, too. Are things better now?’

  ‘All the damage has been repaired. And though I weep nightly for my little dog, Mr Bassett has given me a cat.’

  ‘What a stupid bastard Mihail was,’ Meg declared.

  Marie winced delicately as if trying to establish herself as a verbally pure lady once more.

  ‘If he’d had the sense to come forward and say he’d been misled by a nasty gang and could he go Queen’s Evidence he’d almost certainly have got away with it, you know. Apart from sex with a minor,’ Meg added.

  ‘The same goes for the whole lot, Haxhi included. It was him they found with the petrol can in our front garden.’ It still felt strange to say ‘our’.

  ‘What? Haxhi must have been in it up to here.’

  ‘We’ve had these long chats with the DPP—you know how it is. And apparently had Vladi simply sent Natasha over here then joined her, he—and Haxhi—would have got away with a minimal sentence, living off immoral earnings.’

  ‘That’s a mere two years on average!’ Meg exploded. ‘But what about bringing her in illegally?’

  Kate nodded. ‘For all that the EU wants to crack down on people-traffickers, it hasn’t got round to sorting out its legislation. Of course, if he’d brought her into the country himself in the back of a van the charge would have been more serious—and the penalty—but it’s not so much a loophole as a great gaping gap.’

  ‘So the lorry firm wasn’t involved?’

  ‘You sound almost disappointed. The Met got them for all sorts of violations of maintenance and driver hours. But that’s all. There was quite a sizeable group of under-age prostitutes in Manchester, but they went up by coach and train. All quite legitimate.’

  Marie Constantinou asked, ‘And will poor Natasha have to stand up in court and face these terrible men who have brought so many poor girls over here?’

  Kate shook her head. ‘She’ll be allowed to sit behind a screen—possibly even give video evidence. A little irony you’ll all enjoy,’ she added, ‘is that poor Vladi is so disturbed by events at home—we suspect he’s annoyed a rival gang—that he’s asking for asylum here.’

  ‘I hope he’ll find it. For about twenty years. And then gets bunged back for the jackals to fight over him.’

  ‘A nice liberal approach, Meg! One thing, the girls are finding comfort in numbers. Manchester and Birmingham Social Services are having a professional little bicker over them, but it makes sense for those who’ve applied to stay over here to live together. Poor Natasha, there’s no home for her to go to, not where she’ll be safe, anyway.’ Kate stirred her coffee.

  At least Meg waited till they’d withdrawn to the ladies’, leaving Maria Constantinou to enjoy an unexpected cigarette, before she asked the question Kate was dreading.

  ‘And how are things back at Scala House?’

  She doubted if she’d get away with a shrug. Nor did she. ‘Not easy,’ she admitted. ‘We’re terribly short-staffed, for a start. Jill Todd put in for an urgent transfer, on personal grounds.’

  ‘Which saved you having to do it for her, at least. Was she having an attack of conscience over all that dirt she was dishing about you and Graham Harvey? Oh, yes, all over the place.’

  ‘Not least to Graham’s wife. I think even Jill was embarrassed by the consequences of phoning her to tell her about me. She sent a little note—no, I didn’t quite get round to opening it, and it happened to be a casualty of the fire.’

  ‘Just happened? Well, I don’t blame you for holding a bit of a grudge.’ ‘Quite a lot of a grudge, actually.’ Kate raised her left hand, the scars livid. ‘Pain in some places, loss of feeling in others—and nowhere like full mobility, not for a few months yet, they say. It’s quite hard to forgive Graham Harvey, too—his silly bravado driving his car to a place where it could be seen’

  ‘But he couldn’t have known it was going to be on TV.’

  ‘Couldn’t he just! His wife did the PR for the event: it was her doing that the TV people were there in the first place. They’ve spirited him off on some training course.’

  ‘So he’ll be transferred out of your hair?’

  ‘Promoted out of my hair, probably—but into some very out-of-the-way area, I hope.’ It was time to turn the subject. ‘I’m going to be a godmother, by the way. One of my team’s going to have a baby—a bab, she calls it—and wants my benign influence on the poor little thing.’ If it was a girl, the other godmother would be Kathleen Speed. Helen had talked about having Neil as a posthumous godfather, but knowing rather more about his end than the rest of the team Kate had suggested a living one like Dave Bush might be preferable. Zayn had even been floated as an ecumenical possibility.

  However much they’d wanted Neil to be innocent, they couldn’t prove him anything but guilty. The jacket in the bin-liner had been entirely unstained, but the accident investigation team had found another bloodstained one in a ditch near the scene. The theory was that Neil had been trying to sling it out of the car while it was still moving and lost control. It was all a matter of skidmarks and angles, and Kate could make very little of a very few people had been told the truth: the consensus was that Neil had been a good enough officer to have the edges blurred a little. Ronnie Hale had been confirmed in post as a full sergeant. She’d agonised with Kate over whether to hold a traditional celebratory booze-up Ronnie thought it inappropriate, but didn’t want to appear mean, so she’d put into the collection for Neil’s family the money she reckoned she’d have spent, and everyone seemed content.

  As. yet, no one had managed to pin anything on Mr Choi. Kate didn’t know whether to be frustrated or secretly pleased. She and Dave had persuaded him that paying for flower-bed maintenance would be the best way of thanking her and commemorating indiscriminately the dead officers—anything to stop the memorial he’d immediately wanted to erect at his expense.

  It was time to return to Marie Constantinou.

  As they walked across the thick carpet between the well-spaced tables—Kate had decided that it should be a memorable treat to acknowledge at least some of the effort they’d put in—Meg turned to Kate and lifted her left wrist. ‘And do we have to wait for this to heal properly before we see a ring?’

  But Kate only laughed, pointing. Madame Constantinou, tireless and resilient Madame Constantinou, had fallen asleep and was snoring gently.