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‘Look, did you two have any kind of, you know…?’
‘Any kind of what, Roz?’
‘Any kind of row, or disagreement or something that would have upset her. You know what I mean, Luke.’
His expression didn’t change. ‘If I knew of a reason for her being away, I wouldn’t be looking.’
So that’s a ‘no’, then. ‘If Gemma deleted those files, should you be planning a raid on them?’ she said. She was beginning to understand that Gemma must have personal reasons for going away and that Luke knew more than he was telling her. She wasn’t prepared to be the patsy in whatever complicated game he and Gemma were playing. He smiled at her and waited. You haven’t thought it through, Bishop. ‘You’ve already looked,’ she said.
‘It’s no problem getting deleted files back,’ he said. ‘But…someone’s taken a bit of trouble here – all I’m getting is gibberish.’
So Gemma had done more that just issue a delete instruction. ‘Can’t you get them back at all?’
‘If I…I don’t know. Probably not. Not from something like this.’ He frowned, looking into space, thinking. ‘I don’t think Gemma could have done it. She could have wiped her hard disk, no problem. She knows how to do that…’ Roz reflected that she herself had managed to achieve just that, once, without either meaning to or knowing exactly what she’d done. ‘But she’d have needed a bit more for this.’
Roz thought about it. She wondered how she would tackle the problem if she wanted to take stuff off her hard disk in such a way that it was permanently removed. You couldn’t work in her field without knowing how easily such files could be retrieved. If she wanted to do it, she’d probably ask Luke. But if she didn’t want Luke to know…She thought she might have been able to come up with some kind of a solution. She just wouldn’t be 100 per cent confident that the files would be permanently deleted. And that, presumably, wouldn’t be too difficult to find out. ‘Gemma could have done it,’ she said.
Luke shrugged. He clearly thought she was wrong. He shut the machine down and stood up. ‘I’m going into the department,’ he said. ‘I’m going to look on her PC there.’
The Arts Tower was quiet on a Sunday. Students were using the library, and people were riding the paternoster – a university never really closes down – but the milling crowds of weekdays, of lecture and seminar days, weren’t there. They rode up in the paternoster in silence. N floor was deserted, the lights out, the corridors dim and empty. Luke led the way to Gemma’s room and used his master key to open it. Roz looked round. Everything was as neat and ordered as it had been on Friday. She remembered being in here, looking for Gemma’s draft report. She realized the significance of that as Luke switched the computer on, and felt a relief she couldn’t quite account for. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten. I looked up one of Gemma’s files on Friday. There was a report she had to get in. Everything’s there. Or at least the files I was looking for were there. I…’ Her voice trailed off as she looked over Luke’s shoulder. The computer was flashing a message at them, white letters on a black screen: error, error, error.
Luke looked at her. ‘It may have been here on Friday,’ he said, ‘but it isn’t now. It’s been wiped.’
Roz pushed her hair back from her face and shook her head. ‘I can’t think of anywhere else to look,’ she said. Whoever had wiped Gemma’s machine, they’d done a thorough job. The painstaking removal of files from her home computer would have taken a bit of time. Here, the hard disk had been reformatted. Everything was gone.
Roz and Luke had gone through the desk and the filing cabinets in Gemma’s room, checked the shelves, the window sill, the pockets of the lab coat that hung on the back of the door. Roz wondered why it was there. She’d never seen Gemma wear it. They were looking for Gemma’s back-up disks. Luke straightened up from the filing cabinet, and for a moment, his face was unguarded. He looked anxious, confused, and there were lines of tension around his mouth and eyes. He saw she was watching him, and made an attempt at a smile. ‘What’s the point in wiping the computer and leaving the back-ups?’ he said. ‘They’re not here.’
‘Whoever did it might not have known…’ Roz was still hoping the back-up disks that Gemma should have kept would turn up. Maybe they’d missed something. She turned back to the desk.
‘They aren’t here, Roz. Stop wasting time.’ He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans, and looked round the room, his face angry now. ‘I told her we needed an automatic back-up system.’
‘Who?’ Roz pushed the desk drawer shut. He was right. There was nothing here. They’d looked everywhere. She pushed her glasses back up her nose, then, irritated by them, she took them off.
‘Grey. I told Grey.’ He ran his hand through his hair and moved restlessly round the small room. Roz pulled open the top drawer of the filing cabinet. She didn’t want to admit he was right.
‘You think Gemma did this? Came back yesterday and wiped everything off her machine?’
He reached past her and slammed the filing cabinet drawer shut. ‘How the fuck should I know?’
The anger in his tone froze her. She knew that Luke could be volatile, but she’d never seen that sudden rage in him before. She stepped back, moving away from the filing cabinet, wanting to put some distance between them. She tried another question, tried to keep her voice normal. ‘Why the blitz job on the hard disk here? Why did…whoever…wipe the whole disk, and just do the files on the other machine?’
He didn’t look at her, kept his hand on the filing cabinet. ‘I don’t know, Roz.’ His voice was tightly controlled. ‘Work it out for yourself.’
She looked at his rigid stance. Suddenly, it was like stepping back two years and seeing Nathan’s confusion transform into fury. Then, the only thing to do had been to get out of the way, fast. Until the night she hadn’t made it. She had been woken up by the sound of him moving round the house, the confused stumbling, and had got up as she had done before. And he had been there at the top of the stairs, his face twisted with anger and panic. She could still see his face, his arm drawn back. Then his fist had slammed into the side of her head, her hand had grabbed at the banister rail in a futile attempt to save herself in the frozen moment of her fall before the pain and the fear hit.
She couldn’t deal with Luke like this. ‘I’ll be in my room,’ she said, after a moment.
He didn’t look at her. ‘OK.’
She walked along the empty corridor past the stairwell, her footsteps echoing on the lino. A security light was a red glow on the ceiling, and light from the lobby cast a faint gleam at the end of the corridor. Roz went towards her room, trying to think the situation through. Her mind was dividing down two paths: one, the main one, was concern for Gemma, a feeling of queasy uncertainty that told her something was wrong. Luke said he’d been in touch with the police, and that they hadn’t been concerned, but that was before the discovery of the missing files. Or would the police say that showed Gemma had meant to leave, that she had wiped all her files because…because what? Because she had something to hide?
That was the second strand of Roz’s concern. If Gemma had gone deliberately, the implications for the group could be serious. Roz closed the door of her room, and leant against it. The silence closed round her. She needed some time to think, and, she realized, she needed to contact Joanna. Joanna had to know. She dialled Joanna’s number, but got the answering service. She hung up. She’d better plan what she was going to say. She pushed a pile of papers out of the way to reach her notepad and a pen. The papers were her Monday’s to-do pile. The various tasks snagged her mind, and she leafed through the stuff as she tried to work out what, exactly, to say to Joanna.
That reminded her about the draft report for DI Jordan. Gemma needed to complete it and send it off. But Gemma wouldn’t be there. Suddenly, she was sure of that. Whatever had happened, Gemma would not be back soon, maybe not at all. Roz would have to check that report, phone the rather brusque DI Jordan and explain why it was being delayed for another day. She remembered Joanna’s ebullience on Friday. She dreaded telling her.
A disk that had been concealed in the pile of papers slipped out and fell to the floor. She frowned as she picked it up. She was very careful not to leave disks lying around, careful to keep them filed and classified where they could be found as soon as they were wanted. She must have been distracted on Friday. She picked it up to see what it was. No label. That was odd. She never, never, put anything on a disk without labelling it. It must be someone else’s, but who would leave this in her office?
Then she remembered Gemma in her room on Wednesday, fumbling nervously and dropping her bag on to the desk. It must have fallen out of the bag, and Gemma hadn’t noticed. She picked up the phone to call Gemma’s extension, tell Luke what she’d found, but then she put it down. Better see what she’d got first. Gemma must have been planning to take the disk with her. She put it into her machine, ran it through the virus scan, and opened it.
There were three files: JPG files, pictures. The file names weren’t very helpful – AE1, AE2, AE3. Roz was disappointed. She didn’t want pictures, she wanted some of Gemma’s work files. She double-clicked on one and watched the picture form on the screen.
At first, her mind wouldn’t process the image. Then she was…what? Shocked? Embarrassed? Amused? No wonder Gemma kept these in her bag, not lying around the department. It was a picture of a woman – of Gemma – naked, sitting on a patterned quilt with her knees drawn up and her arms resting on them. She was looking over the top of her arms, straight at the camera. Her eyes gleamed with suppressed laughter. Her legs, below the drawn-up knees, were parted, exposing her to the camera’s eye.
She opened the next file, not knowing if she should, or if she wanted to. Gemma, standing this time, her wrists held above her with a rope that was stretched painfully tight, pulling her up so that she was standing on tiptoe. Her eyes looked directly out of the screen, challenging and inviting. The third file showed Gemma on a bed with her hands tied again and again pulled above her head. Her knees were bent and her legs were splayed. She was wearing a basque that was laced so tightly it bit into the flesh. The background was dark and shadowy. Roz sat in silence. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t understand why the pictures were stored on the disk. Why would Gemma be carrying them around in her bag? Who did she plan to show them to?
Hands touched her shoulders and she jumped. She swung round, and Luke was behind her. Her heart hammered in her throat and for a moment she felt sick. ‘Luke! Shit! You scared the life out of me!’ She tried to catch her breath.
‘What have you got there, Roz?’ His voice was quiet and even. He didn’t apologize for startling her.
‘It’s…’ Her voice sounded artificial, and before she could think what to say, his hand was on the mouse and he ran through the other files. Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then he closed them and took the disk out of the drive.
‘Gemma’s, I think,’ he said.
‘Luke…’ She didn’t know what to say.
‘It’s OK.’ His voice was carefully empty of expression. ‘We took those a couple of months ago. They were just photographs.’
That was true. They were just photographs. But Roz felt angry with Luke. She wished she hadn’t seen them – or wished, at least, that it hadn’t been him who had taken them. Gemma had put them on a disk and was taking them somewhere. Why? She looked at Luke, who was holding the disk between his thumb and forefinger, his eyes narrowed in thought.
‘It’s none of my business,’ she said. She could hear her voice sounding cold. ‘I thought…’ What? What had she thought? That the files would contain some explanation for Gemma’s disappearance?
He met her eyes. He seemed distracted, as though he was thinking about something else. ‘No, no problem.’ His voice was detached, that flash of anger in his office gone as fast as it had come. He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Well, you know something you didn’t know before.’
She knew that she didn’t know Luke as well as she had thought. She felt as though she didn’t know him at all.
Snake Pass, Sunday morning
As Sunday dawned over the Pennines, it became a fine winter’s day. The sky was cloudless blue and the air was still. The temperature had dropped, and the ground glittered with frost. It was a day to bring the walkers out, and Keith Strong had decided to get ahead of the rush and make an early start. He knew the Peak well – he worked as a part-time ranger, keeping an eye on visitors to the park, offering a helping hand, getting walkers out of difficulty, taking part in rescues when things went drastically wrong. In the Peak, rescues usually meant someone had been stupid – tried to walk the path up Mam Tor, the shivering mountain, in high-heeled sandals (really, he’d seen it), gone on the tops in bad weather without the right equipment, gone climbing on the edges without safety gear. Today, he wasn’t working; he was out just to enjoy the countryside. His mate, Tony, was driving over to Manchester first thing, and Keith had persuaded him to go via the Snake and drop Keith off at Doctor’s Gate. He planned to take the path up Devil’s Dyke, following the route of the Pennine Way, and walk across to the Flouch Inn. It was a long walk and a hard one, but the weather was right, and he needed a day out. It would do Candy good as well.
Tony dropped him on the straight stretch of road before Doctor’s Gate. ‘I’m not stopping on that bend,’ he said. Keith raised his hand in thanks as Tony drove off, shouldered his rucksack and set off up the hill towards the culvert. He kept Candy on the lead for the road bit. She was obedient – all his dogs were well trained – but she was young, and she was excited and full of energy. It wasn’t worth the risk. She pulled at the lead and he spoke firmly to her, but he let her pull again as the hill got steeper. It made carrying his rucksack up that incline just a bit easier. As soon as they reached the culvert and crossed the road, he let Candy off the lead and she ran ahead up the dyke, sniffing eagerly, dancing with enjoyment. Keith reflected, not for the first time, that it was much easier to make a dog happy than a woman.
He let Candy explore. There were sheep, and at this time of year they could be in lamb, but Candy knew better than to chase them. He sat down on a rock to tighten the laces on his boots and put on his gaiters. Frost or not, it could be muddy up on the tops. He noticed the car with the half awareness of distraction – he was planning his route – and then with annoyance. Its red intruded on the landscape, and, anyway, it shouldn’t have been there. He thought that people who couldn’t manage to make their way here without a car should walk somewhere else. He knew he was being inconsistent, and that irritated him more.
He thought that the car was parked a bit oddly. He called Candy back, and she came bounding down the path with a piece of heather root in her mouth which she laid at his feet, looking at him expectantly. ‘Leave!’ he said, as he walked towards the car. It was pulled right in, close to the rocks. Getting it in there must have damaged it – Keith couldn’t see any way that careless parking would have brought it so far in. He checked the front and back. The number plates had been removed. Right. It was probably stolen, then. Joyriders? It seemed unlikely they’d go to the trouble of half hiding a car up here. Maybe it had been used in a burglary, a get-away car or something. The idea quite appealed to him.
Candy was exploring, her heather root forgotten. She was round the passenger side, sniffing at the wheel, her tail up and her ears perked with interest. Then she froze, her ears forward, her eyes intent. Her tail was down now, cautious, as she lowered herself in stalking mode and peered under the car. She was making little whining noises in her throat. Keith got hold of her collar and hauled her back. ‘Daft dog. You’ll get covered in oil under there.’ Candy looked up at him, and moved round to the other side of the car, still low to the ground, still cautious. Keith followed her, interested now. She moved slowly up to the driver’s door, her nose testing the air, the whines turning to low growls. She pressed her nose against dark stains that had splashed the sill. She scratched at the door, whimpering.
The driver’s door was hard to reach because the car was parked up against the rock. Keith tried the handle, and the door opened a short way. A smell like – he couldn’t quite find the comparison – like a city alleyway, like a…It was the smell of sweat and the geriatric ward, the ward where his mother had died, the smell of ammonia and decay. The smell made him step back and Candy jumped straight in, and began burrowing in the foot-well. Keith grabbed the thick hair on her hindquarters and hauled her out. She squealed. There were dark stains round her muzzle. It was hard to see the inside of the car, but they looked like the same dark stains that were on the dashboard and on the steering wheel, with smudges on the seat and, now he came to look, on the windows. It reminded him of the thick, black mud from the bogs and stagnant pools of Cold-harbour Moor up on the tops. Had someone fallen in, come back to the car to clean up and change?
He went back round to the passenger side and tried that door. It opened. He snapped a command at Candy who was trying to get past him again into the car, and looked round the interior. The glove compartment was hanging open and empty. There was nothing in the car itself. He touched the driver’s seat. It was damp. He checked the boot. It was locked. He shut the car door and scratched his head. He’d better call in, report this to someone. But the hills on either side were blocking the signal to his phone. He’d need to walk right up the path before he was high enough above the rock faces and the steep sides of the dyke, and the signal came back. He set off, whistling for Candy to follow. She raced past him, leaping over the rocks, stopping to look back at him, her mouth open and her tongue hanging out. It was half an hour before he reached the top, breathing hard after the steep climb, feeling his boots heavy with the dark peaty mud that clung to them. Candy was worrying a stick now, her energy undiminished.
He checked his map and took a compass bearing, more to keep his hand in than because he needed to. A kestrel circled in the sky above him. Then he headed off across the hills with Candy bounding ahead, detouring off the path into the heather, disappearing from view and waiting for him to catch up. It was a beautiful day for a walk.
Hull, Monday
Anna put her bag down on the floor, keeping it carefully between her feet. She could feel the eyes of the cloakroom attendant on her. Should she say something to the woman to account for her dishevelled appearance, or should she just act as though nothing was wrong? Her heavily accented English tended to produce a hostile response. Get back to where you came from! She ran water over her hands, and squeezed liquid soap on to her handkerchief. She needed to clean herself up. She needed privacy. She needed a cubicle. There was a queue, and she shuffled forward, keeping her head down. No one would be looking for her here. No one would be looking for her at all. It was a coincidence, just an accident, just…
A cistern flushed, and she jumped. She could feel the sick coldness coming over her. If she passed out here, someone would call the police and then…Before anyone could move, she pushed ahead and went into the vacant cubicle, pushing past the woman who was coming out. She could hear a muttering behind her: ‘Excuse me! Who does…?’ ‘There’s a queue…!’ She bolted the door behind her and sank down on to the seat, her bag under her feet, and put her head down until the cold dizziness passed. She was tired. She was so tired. And she was hungry. Get away, get away, get away. But it wasn’t that easy. She didn’t know where to go. She had no money, she had no papers. She had, had to get the stuff from her room. She couldn’t leave it, not now, not after all the work and all the time and all the planning.
She felt as though her head was floating and the things she was hearing came from a distance. She had spent the last three nights walking around the city centre – Keep moving, keep moving – huddling herself up on park benches during the day; dozing off, feeling the treacherous warmth creeping through her, waking with a jerk as she began to slump off the seat. While she still had money in her purse, she had ridden on the buses, on the top deck because she didn’t want to be seen from the street, drifting into a doze as the true warmth began to bring the feeling back to her face and feet and hands, and jerking awake, aware, suddenly, that she was alone, and footsteps were coming up the stairs.
‘…in there? I said, Are you…’ She jolted upright in a wash of cold. The door was rattling. For a moment, she couldn’t understand what the voice was saying. She was shivering and she couldn’t control it. She took a deep breath. Calm, calm. ‘Fine,’ she said, relieved that her voice came out steady. ‘Just, a little sick. In my stomach.’
She could hear voices, footsteps. She couldn’t work out what they were saying. She wiped the damp, soapy rag over her face, rubbed hard until her face felt clean. She untied her scarf and pulled her hair firmly back, then she tied it again, tightly. There was no mirror in here. The action made her feel a little better. She picked up her bag, and opened the cubicle door. She could feel the eyes of the queuing women on her, and could see the cloakroom attendant watching her again. She managed a smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Just a little sick…’
The woman ignored her. Anna could hear the voices as the door closed behind her: ‘…back to where they…’ She was walking through the furniture department now, and there were mirrors on the walls, and free-standing mirrors, and mirrors on dressing tables and wardrobe doors. She could see a woman in a crumpled jacket and stained trousers with her hair jumbled up under a scarf, a bag bulging under her arm. She stopped and turned round. The woman was there behind her, and in front of her as she moved faster down the aisles, and the woman twisted and turned and followed her until she came up against some railings and there was nowhere to go.
‘Can I help you?’ The young man wore a suit. His mouth was pulled down and his nostrils flared slightly. Yes! Help me, Anna wanted to say, then she realized that he didn’t see her. She was just garbage, a nuisance, something to be disposed of. She could smell her clothes, a sour, unwashed smell. Suddenly, her eyes were full of tears, and she battled them down. He wasn’t looking at her now; he was looking round, looking for someone to help him.
‘I wanted the way out.’ Anna’s voice was just a whisper. He put his hand out to steer her in the right direction, then withdrew it. He pointed instead, and she saw that the top of the escalator was just opposite where she was standing; the rails were a balustrade protecting the top of the stairwell. She felt her way round the edge, afraid she might fall, not trusting her eyes to find the way for her. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.
He followed her, and watched her on to the escalator. She saw him talking to a man in a peaked cap with epaulettes on his shirt who followed her as she went down one, two, three floors, and there was the way out in front of her. The cap and the epaulettes made her legs shake as she walked until she reached the safety of the street.
She was going to have to go back to her room.
6 (#ulink_17cf97a6-4623-51fa-8e60-e4a3c11e4ef8)
Hull, Monday
The Sleeping Beauty investigation intrigued Lynne. She had no intention of stepping on to ground that belonged to others, but Roy Farnham had invited her opinions and expertise, and now he was going to get them. She enjoyed the challenge. Her work was demanding, often stressful, frequently distressing, but, above all, it was interesting, and no matter how stressful the cases, she managed to keep herself, the essential Lynne, separated from the things she saw and the things she had to do. She sometimes thought that was her main skill as a police officer. Maybe it was the same skill that made a good concentration camp guard, she didn’t know.
She pulled the files out of her in-tray, and spread the contents across her desk. Two women: Katya, in the mud of the Humber Estuary, and the nameless woman on the rocks at Ravenscar. Was Farnham right in thinking that there might be a connection between these two deaths, and between these and the Sleeping Beauty?
She read through the reports, slowly and carefully, making notes as a point struck her. Everything pointed to Katya having committed suicide, but…She had been seen walking in the direction of the Humber Bridge a few hours after running away from the hospital. One sighting was inconclusive – a driver coming out of Hull on the A63 had seen ‘a woman in a red coat’ walking by the side of the road. But the other witness had given more detail. He’d mentioned the woman’s dark hair and the heavy metal buttons on the coat.
Her body had been found three days later. The pathologist had been inconclusive about the length of time she had been dead. He thought probably not more than forty-eight hours. ‘Water, mud, it makes it difficult, Inspector,’ he’d said when she had asked him if he could clarify the rather vague conclusions of his report. ‘A private guess?’ Lynne had asked, but he had refused to commit himself. The cause of death was also inconclusive. There was nothing to show that she had drowned, so the crucial question – had she been dead before she entered the water? – was unanswered.
‘They don’t realize,’ the pathologist had said, tiredly. ‘Jumping into water from a height, they might as well jump on to concrete.’ The head injuries were probably, but not conclusively, post-mortem. ‘You get post-mortem bleeding in head injuries when a body is in the water,’ he said. ‘And the gulls took the soft tissue. There wasn’t much to work on. I can’t be definitive in this case. Sorry. It’s possible we’re looking at vagal inhibition here – that she went into cardiac arrest as soon as she entered the water. The shock of cold water can do it.’ He shook his head again. ‘Let’s see what the lab tests show.’
Lynne looked through the next file, the anonymous woman who had been found at Ravenscar. As with Katya, the cause of this girl’s death was undetermined, but there was a bit more information here. She had probably died no more than fifteen hours before she was found, and circumstance suggested that she had probably died within a time period between early evening and midnight. The blow that had shattered the bones of her skull would probably have been fatal, but that blow had been post-mortem. Other, ante-mortem, injuries were not sufficiently severe to have caused death, the most recent being some bruising that had not broken the skin. The pathologist had speculated that they could be looking at an accidental death here, something that had happened in the course of sex that had got a bit rough – a bondage game that had got out of hand, something like that.
Lynne looked at the laboratory reports. There was some alcohol in the woman’s bloodstream, but no other drugs. She had clearly been a user if the track marks were anything to go by, but she hadn’t used within the forty-eight hours preceding her death. She’d eaten shortly before she died – there was bread in her stomach.
She thought. Three women, possibly prostitutes, two of them dead from an unknown cause or causes, all anonymous, and all with severe damage to the face, sufficient to obliterate the features. All dumped in water – a good way to destroy forensic evidence – and all killed somewhere other than where their bodies had been found. She could understand Farnham’s concern, but she could also understand his circumspection. She had been involved in a high-profile investigation a couple of years before, where a man had been stalking and killing women in South Yorkshire. She knew it was easy to start crying ‘serial killer’ on the basis of very slight connections.
Farnham had given her a photocopy of the business card found on the floor of the hotel bedroom. Angel Escorts. It wasn’t an agency she had come across locally, which suggested that it wasn’t one of the places operating under the cover of a massage parlour or sauna. A lot of escort services were internet-based these days. If the Beauty had worked for one of these agencies, then her picture would be on their website. Lynne was equally sure that once they realized what had happened, she would vanish from the site as if she had never been there.
It might be too late already. The Beauty had died on Thursday night or Friday morning. It was now Monday – plenty of time for a website to be cleaned up or even removed completely. She logged on, checked her e-mail – all rubbish which she deleted without reading – and then started searching. There was an abundance of sites offering escorts. Some were subscription sites that you had to pay to enter. She ignored those for the moment. If Angel was a straightforward escort agency, then they presumably wouldn’t deter potential clients by charging them. They’d want them to browse.
‘Angel’ was a popular name. She found several listed. She made a note of contact numbers, and went on looking. She was hoping for a site with pictures, a site where you could hire a woman online; presumably, a local woman. None of the Angel Escorts she’d found mentioned the east coast. She narrowed her search to the local area. Now, the number of possible sites was much smaller. There were three she’d looked at already, and a site that said simply Escort Services Links. OK, she’d try that.
The screen went black – a porn site cliché. Then there was the warning that the site contained adult material. Lynne pressed the ‘enter’ button, and the name, Angel Escorts, appeared in pulsating red. Pictures began to form with strategically placed lettering to encourage the browser to go further into the site. A tiny picture of a woman fellating an anonymous penis. She’s young, free and willing! Another picture: a young face, fair hair, pigtails. Her blouse was open, exposing her breasts. Fresh teens! Lynne wondered what kinds of clients might greet a woman who had advertised on this site. 100% free live anal video feed! Lynne looked for the link to the escorts. Meet our girls. OK. She clicked on the button.
Ten small photographs of women appeared – Lily, Jasmine, Rose, Jemima, Suzy…The pictures provided links that allowed a customer to browse further and inspect the attractions of the merchandise. 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 was a sudden rush and a young man shot round the corner, bounded past her jumping the stairs three at a time and vanished round the landing below her. His ‘Sorry!’ seemed to hang in the air after he was gone. Students. Youth. Roz was mildly amused by the display of energy and heedlessness. It shook her out of her weather-induced depression. She’d lost count of her floors. She checked the number on the landing and began her jog up the next five, feeling slow and cumbersome in comparison to the lithe young man.
She arrived on N floor not too out of breath and allowed herself a moment of satisfaction that lasted until she came through the door of her office and found Joanna waiting for her. Roz glanced at the clock as Joanna said, ‘I expected you in earlier today.’
It was only ten past nine, but it was the worst day she could have chosen to be late. ‘Parking,’ she explained. ‘Is there any news about Gemma?’
Joanna’s face was set. ‘This arrived, just this morning. Posted in Sheffield on Saturday.’ She was holding a letter, pleating the paper between her fingers. ‘You’d better read it.’
Roz looked at Joanna, and took the letter. It was written on official university stationery and dated Friday:
Dear Dr Grey
