Night Angels. Danuta Reah

there.’

      Farnham watched as they moved the woman’s body carefully, sliding plastic sheeting underneath her to prevent the bloodstained water from dripping on to the floor. He looked inside the bath as they lifted her. Gage was right. There was very little blood, just a diluted wash that left a dark tidemark as it moved with the disturbance of the water. It was possible the killer had cleaned up after himself, got rid of the blood and debris from the death. The room was awash with water. Farnham needed the people who’d been in the other rooms that Thursday night, to see if they’d heard sounds of a fight, the sound of water running late, anything that would help locate what had happened.

      Once the body had been removed, he found it easier to work. It became a job, a problem-solving task. With the woman still there, it was more personal, involving anger and disgust at the things that human beings were capable of doing. He wondered why they did it, women who sold themselves to strangers. It had to be more than money, for the women who walked the streets or who went to hotel rooms with men who ordered them over the phone, the way they ordered pizza brought to their door. So many of them ended up dead – from drugs, from violence, from self-harm. This was the third one within the last two months, and there were disturbing parallels between the deaths. His superiors weren’t convinced there was a link, but Farnham had a bad feeling.

      He wondered what the story was of the woman in the bath. She had looked so small and broken.

      

      The priest was only sixty, but he often felt like an old man. He had spent his life in inner-city parishes, a life that had been properly devoted to poverty, chastity and obedience. He had seen a steady decline in the power and influence of the church that had been his life from his earliest memories. And now he was tired.

      He walked slowly down the aisle, the words of the canonical offices in his mind, the ritual of the prayers working like an automaton on his tongue, but always real, always meaningful as he whispered them into the hushed silence, into the still, close air of the sacred, of the transcendence that was God.

      Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts…Sometimes the words came back to him in the old Latin – long gone, and for good reasons – the old Latin that he remembered well and sometimes missed. Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus…The church was silent and empty. It was carved out of the stone, reaching up into the high vaulting of the roof spaces, where light diffused through the lacework of the windows, dappling the colours from the stained glass against the stonework of the pillars. The flags on the floor were worn smooth with the feet of worshippers, penitents, communicants. Now, the feet of occasional tourists wore away the names cut into the memorial stones.

      He read the familiar descriptions as he walked. Libera me! Deliver me, O Lord! The plea was still legible, but the name had vanished from the permanence of the stone decades ago. Requiescat in pace. Rest in peace. The statues waited in niches and on plinths with banks of candleholders in front of them. There were boxes for offerings, and candles that could be lit in memoriam, for a soul gone before, as a plea for mercy and forgiveness for the souls of dead sinners. The holders were empty, unused, the metal tarnished now. He could remember when each saint had its row upon row of devotional candles burning steadily in the shadows, scenting the air with the smell of burning wax.

      His curiosity was taking him to the furthest corner of the church, where the side aisle met the transept. In an obscure niche, a statue stood, some forgotten saint, cowled and tonsured. The statue may have been painted once, but now it was grey stone, caught in the moment of stepping forward, one hand raised in blessing, or in threat. The eyes, smooth and blind, watched from the shadows.

      The priest paused in his slow procession. Though the bank of candleholders here was smaller, he had noticed recently that some of the sconces, always the same ones, held candles recently burnt down. His hand touched a blackened wick lightly, and it crumbled away. But it was warm, and the metal around two of the sconces was encrusted with wax that had dripped over weeks and months. Under the third candle, the wax deposits were less, as though this one were less used than the other two. No one cleaned the darker corners of the church. The candle sconces were used so seldom that no one thought to check. He sighed for the days when cleaning the church was in itself an act of worship. But someone had come here to place a light in the darkness, a light to ask for mercy or forgiveness, a light to shine on the road of the dead, a light to ask for their souls to be remembered.

       4

       Hull, Friday

      The woman had been found three weeks ago in the mud of the Humber Estuary as the tide went out. The cause of her death wasn’t clear. There were marks of recent violence on her body, healing bruises that suggested she had been the victim of intermittent, casual abuse. Witnesses had seen her walking late at night near the bridge, her distinctive coat standing out in the frosty dark. People who plan to jump will often stand for a while contemplating the means of their oblivion. Detective Inspector Lynne Jordan wondered what had drawn the woman to the restless, surging Humber. But her interest wasn’t in the death of this woman, it was in her life.

      Lynne Jordan was after contraband – but not the usual alcohol, tobacco and drugs that made their way past the barriers intended to prevent their import. The contraband she was looking for was more tragic and far more problematic. Social and political upheavals have their cost. The naïve optimism of the West may celebrate the death of an ‘evil empire’ but the East has a clearer view. A curse. May you live in interesting times. The communities of Eastern Europe were being torn apart by the forces of change that brought wealth, corruption, poverty, war and death in their wake. The contraband that Lynne was looking for was some of the human flotsam from that upheaval.

      Lynne’s job was to monitor her patch for women who had been brought into the country illegally, or who were overstaying their visas, and working as prostitutes. It had been a problem in London, in Manchester, in Glasgow – women brought to the country and then prostituted to endless numbers of men six, seven days a week.

      The trade was spreading. Escort agencies around the country now offered ‘a selection of international girls’. The women were effectively kept in debt bondage. A woman’s travel documents, if she had any, were confiscated. From her earnings – only a fraction of the price the pimp charged for her services – she had to pay the charge for being brought into the UK, and had to pay high prices for accommodation and expenses. They tended to be kept in flats, enslaved by debt and fear, not allowed out without a minder. They were young, some of them were very young – a team in the north of England had found eleven-year-old girls on one of the premises they raided – and most of them were too frightened of the British authorities to seek help even if they could escape. Hull presented Lynne with an interesting problem. It was a large city, a major port, but it didn’t have an immigrant community as such, in which the women could hide or be hidden. Or it hadn’t until the dispersal programmes had started to move asylum seekers out of the crowded centres of the south-east and to dump them on to the stretched provision of the northern cities: Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle, Hull.

      The support organizations that had been hastily set up were either circumspect or hostile in response to Lynne’s queries. ‘Not my responsibility,’ Michael Balit, the Volunteer Co-ordinator who worked with the council and some of the refugee organizations, told her. ‘I don’t have time to spend looking for exotic dancers or nannies trying to boost their income.’ He caught Lynne’s eye. ‘Look, prostitutes can take care of themselves. It’s a police matter. Your business. Let me know what’s going on. Keep me informed. I’ll pass on anything relevant that comes my way. Now, if you’ll excuse me…’

      The woman had been very young. She had been found in the old docks area in a distressed state, and had been brought to the casualty department of the Infirmary by one of the workers from a refugee support group. The hospital had called the police, but the woman’s English was limited and she was in shock so very little of her story was clear. Lynne had listened to the tape an astute officer had thought to make while they were talking to