“I know you feel utterly lost right now, but the only way for you and your family to find your way through this... nightmare is to look the reality of it dead in the eye. You won’t believe this, but I know what you’re going through. I have experienced awful things, endured terrible pain, and burying your head in the sand is the worst thing you can do. For your girls, for your boys, for yourself, you need to take on board what I’m saying. See Alan for what he was—good and bad—and deal with it. Your church may well want to instigate financial investigations of its own and I’m sure we will have more questions for you. Fighting us is not the way to get through this. You need to help us and we will help you in return.”
Eileen finally looked up.
“I want to catch Alan’s killer,” Helen continued. “More than anything else I want to catch Alan’s killer and give you the answers you need. But I can’t do that if you’re fighting me, Eileen. So please work with me.”
Helen’s entreaty was sincere and heartfelt. There was a long pause, then finally Eileen looked up.
“I pity you, Inspector.”
“Excuse me?”
“I pity you because you have nofaith.”
She hurried out of the room without looking back. Helen watched her go. Her anger had dissipated and now she just felt pity. Eileen had believed absolutely in Alan and would never truly come to terms with the fact that her mentor, her rock, was in fact a man of straw.
39
DC Rebecca McAndrew had been on the hunt for only a few hours, but already she felt tarnished and dispirited. She and her team had hit the high-end brothels first. They were far busier than she remembered. The recession had driven more and more women into the sex industry and the sudden influx of prostitutes from Poland and Bulgaria had further flooded the market. Competition was up, which meant that prices had come down. It was an increasingly cutthroat business.
Next they’d moved on to the student campuses, where they found a depressingly similar picture. Every girl they talked to knew of at least one fellow student who’d turned to prostitution to fund her studies. It was more and more a feature of everyday life as grants were cut and students struggled to pay their way through the many years of study. But the anecdotal tales of alcohol dependency and self-harming suggested that this new phenomenon was not without its costs.
Now Sanderson and her team were in the Claymore drop-in center, a free health-care service run by a combination of National Health Service workers and generous-hearted volunteers. Anyone could turn up here and receive free treatment, but it was in a grotty part of town, the queues were long and you always had to keep one eye on your possessions, so it generally attracted the drunk and the desperate. Many of the center’s clients were young prostitutes—girls with infections, girls who’d been beaten up and needed stitches, girls who had young babies and simply couldn’t cope. It was hard not to be moved by the awful situations they found themselves in.
Rebecca McAndrew often cursed the long hours that came with her job—she had been single for over two years now, partly because of the night work—but she realized the sacrifices she’d made were nothing compared to those made by the women who worked at Claymore. Despite being exhausted, despite being painfully short of resources, they worked tirelessly to help keep these girls together, without ever judging them or losing their tempers. They were modern saints—not that they were ever acknowledged as such.
As the team interviewed and questioned, a paradox struck Rebecca forcefully. In a world where it seemed harder and harder to find meaningful connections with other people—love, marriage, family—it had never been easier to find paid companionship. The world was in the doldrums, the country still in the grip of recession, but one thing was clear.
Southampton was awash in sex.
40
The streets were dark and so was Charlie’s mood. After her bollocking by Helen, her first instinct had been to hand in her warrant card and run home. But something had stopped her and she was relieved now, ashamed of her thin skin. What had she been expecting? Helen didn’t want her back and Charlie had played straight into her hands, allowing her enthusiasm to compromise her investigation into Sandra McEwan.
She burned with shame—what had happened to the talented cop she used to be?—and that shame drove her on now. Having failed in her first attempt to unmask Alexia’s killer, Charlie had gone back to basics, hitting the streets in search of information. Perhaps by talking to the street girls who seemed to be at the heart of McEwan’s war with the Campbells, she could dig up a lead. Schoolchildren were wandering home; it was only a little after four p.m., but already darkness was beginning to descend. That creeping, suffocating gloom that winter does so well. Charlie’s spirits dropped a notch further.
The prostitutes who hung about the port were happy enough to take a look at Charlie’s photo once they realized she wasn’t going to bust them. Their memories were hazy, but one long-serving girl eventually pointed Charlie in the direction of the Liberty Hotel, a filthy and dilapidated place that rented rooms by the hour rather than by the day. Charlie had visited it before and her heart sank at having to return. It was a place full of loneliness and despair.
She pressed the buzzer. Once, twice, three times before eventually the door opened a crack. She shoved her warrant card in the face of the Polish thug who “greeted” her. Snarling, he let her inside, turning his back on her as he stalked up the stairs. Charlie knew he’d be little help—his job was to see all but say nothing—so she focused her attention on the working girls who appeared with impressive regularity from behind the many closed doors. The building was a tall terraced house, set over four floors. It was astonishing to consider exactly how much copulation took place here every night. Used condoms littered the floor.
Charlie was talking to a girl named Denise, who was seventeen at best. She and her boyfriend had a drug habit and clearly it was up to Denise to earn the money for both of them to indulge. Why do these girls value themselves so cheaply? This was the bottom end of the market—the more expensive girls plied their trade in the north of the city. Down by the docks you were expected to do anything for a few pounds, however painful or unpleasant.
A lot of coppers treated prostitutes like dirt, but Charlie always found herself wanting to help them. She was already maneuvering to get Denise away from her parasitic bloke, guiding her in the direction of a refuge she knew, when suddenly all hell broke loose.
A scream. Long, loud and desperate. Then the thundering of feet charging downstairs, doors being slammed, pandemonium. Charlie was on her feet and racing up the stairs. As she turned the corner, she collided head-on with a terrified prostitute. It knocked the wind out of her temporarily, but still the screaming went on, so Charlie dragged herself onward, past more worried faces, forcing the breath back into her lungs as she mounted the stairs. As she reached the top landing, she was surprised to find that she had blood on her shirt.
The screaming was coming from the last door on the right. Removing her baton from its holster, she extended it, ready to fight. But as soon as she entered the room, she knew that she wouldn’t be needing it. The battle had already been fought and lost. In the corner of the room, a teenage prostitute was screaming incessantly, frozen by shock. Nearby on the blood-saturated bed was a man. His chest had been ripped open, revealing his pulsating heart to the open air.
Suddenly it all made sense. The reason Charlie had blood on her shirt was that she had collided with the killer as she fled the scene of her latest attack. Stunned, Charlie turned to run after her, then paused. The man was still alive.
Charlie had a split second to decide. She hurried over to the man, pulling her coat off and clamping it to his chest in an effort to stem the blood loss. Cradling his head, she urged him to keep his eyes open, to talk to her. Charlie knew that the killer had such a good lead that she had probably got away and her best chance of IDing her was to prize some information out of her victim before he died.
“Call an ambulance,” she barked at the screaming girl, before returning her attention to the man. He coughed up a hunk of blood. The mist of it settled on Charlie’s face.
“Can you tell me your name, love?”
The man gurgled but managed nothing.
“The ambulance is on its way now. You’re going to be okay.”
