Night Angels. Danuta Reah

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