Night Angels. Danuta Reah

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?’