Night Angels. Danuta Reah

‘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.