Close Call

Chapter 30

It was almost eight when Liz left the hotel. Milraud would be spending the night there in the other pair of interconnecting rooms, under the watchful eye of Dicky Soames and his colleagues, before returning to Paris with them as close escorts. There was no way Liz was going to be responsible for losing the man whom Martin Seurat had spent so many years hunting.

In the dark, Thames House looked like a lit-up half-filled egg box: unoccupied offices were dark, but enough officers worked late hours to dot the heavy masonry façade with the lights of their midnight oil. In her office Liz found a handwritten slip from Peggy: Halliday rang. Said call him any time. He has news.

When she reached Halliday there was the background noise of a raucous party going on. ‘Hang on a minute,’ he shouted. Gradually the noise subsided, until she could hear only traffic whizzing past in the background, tyres wet from rain. Halliday must have stepped outside from whatever club he was visiting. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said.

‘It’s Liz Carlyle; I got a message to ring you. But I don’t want to interrupt the party.’

‘I’m working, believe it or not. I’m drinking vodka and tonic without the vodka, and waiting for the barman to offer to sell me three grams of coke. I thought I’d better take your call outside. I’ve got some news for you. Not good, I’m afraid.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘We raided Slim’s with Immigration – that’s the club owned by Lester Jackson. We arrested half a dozen girls working upstairs – they were “hostesses” but they were doing more than serving drinks. All from somewhere in Eastern Europe most likely but they didn’t have a set of papers between them.

‘Normally that would have been enough to close the place down, and maybe let me squeeze our high-flying friend Mr Jackson a bit. But he wasn’t there and he didn’t seem to care, and I now know why. He had a leading brief go to the lock-up by breakfast time, and bob’s your uncle, it turned out all the girls had proper papers and valid passports – the solicitor claimed he’d been holding them on the girls’ behalf.’

‘What sort of passports?’

‘Bulgarian – every one. And now that it’s in the EU that means they can work here, come and go as they please. Not that I believe for a minute their papers were kosher. None of those girls speaks Bulgarian.’

‘How do you know? Do you speak it?’

Halliday laughed. ‘No. But one of the cleaners at the police station is from Sofia. She said the girls couldn’t understand a word she said.’

‘But you had to let them go anyway?’

‘Yes. No choice. They’re all living in Manchester, so it’s not up to me. I would have tried to work the prostitution angle, but Manchester SB couldn’t be bothered. These days it’s hard to convict unless you show the girls involved are either under duress or illegal immigrants. None of the girls would make a complaint so we couldn’t do either.’

‘Too bad,’ said Liz, though she wasn’t very surprised. Jackson seemed unlikely to jeopardise his club by laying himself open to a single police raid.

Halliday paused and Liz heard the sound of a bus passing. As it died down Halliday went on, ‘That isn’t good news, but there’s worse to come. I had a source in the club – an older woman who functioned as a kind of “mother” to the working girls. Name of Katya.’

‘You “had” a source?’

‘Katya was found strangled in the kitchen of her digs two mornings ago. The uniform thought it was a burglary gone wrong but it doesn’t ring true to me. There was no sign of forced entry, nothing taken. One of her flatmates found her when she came home from work.’

‘Do you see a connection with the club?’

‘Yes I do, not that I can prove it.’ He hesitated, then finally said, ‘The thing is, when we arrested the girls we took Katya in, too. But she was released hours before the others were. I don’t know why – she was the only one sprung early. It would have looked peculiar. I didn’t ask for her to be let go, that’s for sure.’

Liz sensed he was very upset by this. She said encouragingly, ‘Maybe Forensics will find something.’

‘I don’t think so. The killer was very careful. Her place was in the Greater Manchester area and the CID guys there have made it a low priority.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Either because they reckon it’s a one-off and won’t lead anywhere, or because they know where it leads and have been warned off.’

‘What does that mean?’ She didn’t like the sound of it at all.

‘Ask your friend in Manchester Special Branch.’

He’s not my friend, thought Liz, but there was no point in saying this. She asked, ‘This woman Katya, did she have a Bulgarian passport too?’

‘I don’t know what passport she had, but I know she wasn’t from Bulgaria.’

‘Then where was she from?’

‘One of those funny ex-Soviet countries – the ones that end in “stan”. Hers was called Dagestan. At least that’s what she told me. Never heard of it myself. Have you?’

‘Yes,’ said Liz flatly. She had heard of it quite recently. ‘Listen, I wonder if you can help me with something.’

‘Just say the word,’ said Halliday so breezily that Liz wondered whether perhaps there had been some vodka in his tonic after all.

‘You remember I told you that we’d learned that Jackson was connected to an arms dealer.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Well, we’ve now had confirmation that he’s involved.’ She hesitated, then decided she had to trust him – so far at least, he had been completely straight with her, unlike her old friend McManus. ‘I think there might be a connection between his role in this arms deal we’re investigating and his usual business at the club – bringing in the women, I mean.’

‘What kind of connection?’

‘Not sure yet.’ Liz was working largely on intuition now; she couldn’t give Halliday any specifics because she didn’t have any. She went on, ‘That’s where you could be of help. Can you keep an even closer eye than usual on what goes on at Slim’s?’

‘Yeah, I can do that. But what am I looking for?’

‘I know it sounds rather pathetic but I can’t actually tell you. Anything that looks stranger than usual. It’s about bringing stuff into the country. Importing stuff that could be arms but it probably wouldn’t look like that.’

‘If you seriously think he’s into weaponry, it would probably be wise to run it by Manchester SB, just to be diplomatic.’

‘Do you have to? I thought you said Slim’s was on your patch?’

There was a pause, then Halliday said, ‘No, I don’t have to if you’re not going to.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘I see you don’t trust McManus either.’

The overnight team outside Dinwiddy House had had a busier time than expected. At twenty past seven in the evening Zara had emerged, dressed now in a black hoody and jeans and carrying a small backpack. He had walked to Euston Station and after collecting a ticket from a pre-paid ticket machine, boarded a train for Manchester Piccadilly. Two of the team had accompanied him, while the Ops Room had dispatched another team to Manchester to be ready to meet the train, in case he stayed on all the way to Manchester.

Which he did. At Manchester the original team handed him over to the new team, which went with him, first on the metro to Manchester Victoria station and then on a local train, from which he got off at Eccles.

By this time it was past eleven o’clock and Liz in bed was on a conference call link to the Ops Room in Thames House. ‘Eccles,’ she said. ‘What on earth can he be going there for? Does anyone know anything about Eccles?’

Peggy, in her flat in Muswell Hill, a few miles further north from Liz, was in on the call and also searching the internet. ‘Eccles is part of Salford, about four miles from Manchester. The interesting thing is that it has quite a large Yemeni community. There have been Yemenis in Eccles since the 1940s,’ she read out from a website. ‘Large numbers came in in the 1950s. There’s a Yemeni Community Association. Perhaps he has friends there.’

Meanwhile the team in Manchester was reporting that they had followed Zara to a small terraced house, No. 31 Ashby Road. The door had been opened by a lady, probably in her late sixties, in traditional Muslim dress, who had kissed Zara and welcomed him into the house. They hoped Liz did not require overnight watch on the house, as it was a very quiet neighbourhood and therefore it would be difficult to remain unobserved. Liz had agreed that they could stand down for the night; it seemed most unlikely that anything was imminent. She and Peggy would meet in Thames House at seven in the morning and decide what to do next about Zara.