After the Fire (Maeve Kerrigan) Page 31

  Her thin face was wary, like a fox’s.

  ‘Could you tell us your name? Or a name we can call you?’

  ‘Drina.’ One word wasn’t enough for me to place her accent. It thickened the consonants.

  ‘And a last name?’

  She shook her head, very definite.

  ‘Where are you from, Drina?’

  ‘I want to stay here. I want to claim asylum.’

  Una Burt took it on the chin, even though it was a complication we could have done without. ‘We can try to help you with that. At the moment we’re just trying to establish how you came to be in this country with no documents.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘You were working as a prostitute, is that right?’

  Another shrug, this one less certain. Drina suspected a trap.

  ‘The men who brought you to the UK – they made you work as a prostitute.’

  A nod, quick and furtive. ‘Not my choice.’

  ‘When did you come here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her eyes flicked around the room as if she was looking for a clue, and I realised that she was wary of committing herself. Claiming asylum was a difficult process, full of traps for the unwary. We’d be lucky to persuade her to be specific about anything.

  ‘You’re safe now,’ I said. ‘We’re just asking you a few questions, okay?’

  A nod.

  ‘Maybe we could talk about the flat,’ I suggested. ‘How long had you been there?’

  ‘Two, three months.’

  ‘Did you work there?’

  ‘No. They took us. We went in a car to another place. Other girls there. Lots of different girls. It was nightclub.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said levelly, and I knew she wasn’t going to give us a single word that would help us if she could avoid it. ‘We were in back of club. Other girls were dancers, or hostesses – this is the word? But we were in back rooms.’

  ‘What did you do in the back rooms?’ Una asked and was rewarded with a look of frank bemusement.

  ‘The men came there.’

  ‘Many men?’

  A nod.

  ‘English men? Albanians? Russians?’

  ‘All different.’

  ‘Did the club have a logo? Branding?’ I tried again. ‘A picture they used on everything?’

  ‘Birds. Two. Like this.’ She held her hands up as if they were darting at one another.

  ‘Any particular type of bird?’ Una Burt asked.

  She pushed her lips out, puzzled. ‘Black. I don’t know.’

  Tom Bridges might be able to help us identify a particular club, if he knew of one associated with Sajmir Culaj. Drina was being more helpful than I’d expected.

  ‘What about the other girls in the flat?’ Una Burt asked. ‘Do you know their names?’

  ‘Elizabeth, she was the black girl. And Maggie. Magda, I think, but they call her Maggie because it’s easy.’ Drina sniffed. ‘Always a name that people can say. Makes it easy.’

  ‘Surnames?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you tell me anything about them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Drina,’ I said quietly. ‘Do you know what happened at Murchison House after you ran away? Do you know what happened to Maggie and Elizabeth?’

  Her eyes were wide. ‘No.’

  ‘They died, Drina. I’m sorry.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘They were locked inside the flat and they weren’t rescued in time.’

  She took a little panicky breath. ‘I thought—’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She looked down and I could practically see the walls going up between us, the barriers she was determined to erect between herself and her past. Shut it down, lock it out: if it doesn’t touch me, it doesn’t matter. Make someone desperate enough and you can separate them from their very humanity.

  Which meant it was time to have a crack at reuniting Drina with hers.

  ‘Is there anything you can tell us about Elizabeth and Maggie?’ I asked. ‘We’d like to find out who they were, even if we can’t do anything else for them now. We’d like them to have names. We’d like to tell their families what happened.’

  She looked up at me and there was something like surprise in her eyes. And whether it was a coincidence or not, her English suddenly improved, the syntax smoothing out, the words coming more easily.

  ‘Elizabeth was from Liberia. She had a little sister there.’ Drina swallowed. ‘That’s all I know. She missed her. She wanted to go home.’

  ‘And Maggie?’

  ‘We didn’t talk.’ And that was all I was getting.

  ‘What happened the day of the fire?’

  ‘Nothing. It was day like any day. Waiting for evening. We went to club late, at ten, eleven at night. So day was for rest. We didn’t talk much. We stayed in bedrooms. Was better not to talk.’

  ‘Were you afraid they were listening to you?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, surprised. ‘They knew what we do. Always. Maggie would not speak to me for this reason. We were both beaten, when we tried to talk.’

  It was no kind of life they’d endured.

  ‘What happened on the day of the fire?’ Una asked. ‘Anything different?’

  ‘It was just the same. We were waiting. Then I noticed the smoke.’ She swallowed. ‘We started to try to get out. We were screaming for help. And the man came.’

  ‘This man?’ I showed her Ray Griffin’s picture.

  ‘Yes. He had been before.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘I was scared. We were afraid. I thought he would not let us leave if we asked him. We were never allowed to leave unless it was time to go to the club. And he didn’t know what to do, I could see. I kicked him and I ran.’ Her bottom lip trembled. ‘I thought other girls were coming too. Behind me.’

  ‘He locked them in.’

  ‘Stupid,’ she whispered.

  ‘Did you know he was chasing you?’

  She nodded. ‘I went down one floor then through the door. I thought I could hide. He was on the stairs. There was much smoke – I thought he would go past me.’

  ‘But the fire was burning on the tenth floor,’ I said.

  A vigorous nod. ‘So much smoke. Smoke everywhere. I waited for as long as I could and then I ran down. I didn’t see the man again. I went outside and I ran as far as I could. I thought they would come after me. I couldn’t wait.’

  ‘Did you see anything strange on the way down? Anyone behaving oddly?’ Una asked.

  ‘Just scared people.’ Drina tried to smile. ‘I was thinking of myself. Only myself.’

  ‘It’s understandable.’ Una pushed her chair back. ‘We’ll write up a witness statement based on what you’ve told us and get you to sign it.’

  She shrank a little. ‘I don’t want to go to court.’

  ‘We might not need you to,’ Una said briskly. ‘There’s a very good chance this man will plead guilty before the trial gets under way. But if we need you to give evidence, please do. The men who did this to you and Maggie and Elizabeth don’t deserve to get away with it.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘We can protect you from them. I promise you. There’s nothing to fear.’ Una’s voice rang with sincerity, which was unsurprising, since she believed it wholeheartedly. I wasn’t so sure she was right.

  And I wasn’t so sure the interview was over.

  ‘Hold on a second.’

  Burt had got to her feet. She sat down again, looking at me with surprise. Drina was back to looking wary.

  ‘In your property – the things they took out of your pockets and bag in custody – there was a SIM card, but no phone. Where did the SIM card come from?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is it yours?’

  I could see her thinking, trying to work out how damaging it would be to tell the truth. ‘No,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Whose
is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Three people died last Thursday. One of them was a man, a politician. Geoff Armstrong.’

  ‘I don’t know him.’

  ‘I can show you a picture if you like. Medium height, grey hair. Mid-fifties. Ringing any bells?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We found his mobile phone in pieces near the tower. Someone had thrown it out of the window. But we didn’t find his SIM card.’

  Drina had the glazed look of a trapped animal. It made me think I was right. I made sure I sounded certain when I went on.

  ‘If we examine the SIM card in your property, are we going to find out it belonged to Geoff Armstrong?’

  She shook her head, stunned.

  ‘Someone killed him, Drina. Someone strangled him and threw him out of a window, and if you’ve got his SIM card you’re going straight to the top of my list of suspects. This is your chance to get in first. Do you want to tell me what happened? The truth, I mean?’

  She thought about denying everything, thought about it for longer than I would have liked, but in the end she said something that sounded true to me. ‘I didn’t kill him. He was already dead when I went in.’

  Una Burt stiffened beside me but she managed to hide her surprise when she spoke. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I was in the corridor on the tenth floor. The smoke was terrible. I was coughing, choking. I crawled to the door because I could see it was open. I thought I could hide in the flat for a few minutes by the window. But when I went in, I could hear crying.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I went in further. I wanted to get to the window and I wanted to see what was happening. There was a woman there, crying. And the man, he was on the floor. His eyes were open but he was dead. She asked me to help her. She wanted to get his body out of the window but she couldn’t lift him.’

  Oh, Justine … I hated that she’d lied to us. I hated even more that I’d believed her.

  ‘And you did?’ Una Burt raised her eyebrows. ‘Didn’t you have other things on your mind, like escaping from the fire and the man who was chasing you?’

  ‘Of course. But she needed help.’

  ‘And you needed money,’ I said quietly. ‘Lots of it. You had no cash, no cards, no ID. You took whatever cash you could find from him, didn’t you?’

  ‘He didn’t need it any more. Anyway, he didn’t have much. Ten, fifteen pounds.’

  ‘You missed two hundred pounds in his back pocket.’

  She clicked her tongue, annoyed. ‘I should have checked. The woman threw the phone away. She dropped the SIM card and I picked it up. I meant to get rid of it.’

  ‘Did you? Or did you mean to keep it? The SIM card would have told you who he was, wouldn’t it? Knowledge is power. The more you knew, the better you could exploit the situation.’

  Drina blinked at me, all innocence. ‘I just forgot to throw it away.’

  ‘You left his watch and his signet ring – why?’ Una asked. ‘They were valuable.’

  ‘I only wanted money. A watch, a ring – people can say, “Yes, that belonged to my father.” People remember watches and rings. Money has no owner.’

  I nodded. ‘And you wanted more money, didn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘The woman gave it to you. You had over a thousand pounds in cash on you when the police picked you up at the truck stop. New notes. If you’d earned it from prostituting yourself, it would have been in fives and tens and twenties, not consecutively numbered new twenties.’

  She bit her lip. ‘I needed to get away. She owed me. And she was rich. She could help me.’

  I was thinking of Justine Rickards, of the money she’d been saving for her operation. ‘What was the woman’s name?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Where did she live? On the estate?’

  ‘I don’t know. We took a taxi to a hotel near a motorway. She paid for the taxi and for a room for three nights. She came back after two nights with money. I didn’t think she’d come, but she did. I didn’t see her. She put it under the door.’

  ‘Did she give you a way to contact her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Describe her.’

  A shrug. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Height.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Hair colour.’

  ‘She had a scarf over her head.’

  ‘Skin colour.’

  A shrug. ‘White.’

  ‘White? Are you sure?’ I didn’t mean for my voice to be as sharp as it sounded.

  ‘Yes. Of course. Like you.’

  Justine Rickards was light-skinned, but there was no way on God’s earth anyone could have confused her skin with my sun-hating Irish complexion.

  ‘White,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, this is what I’m saying, white.’

  ‘Eye colour?’

  ‘I didn’t notice.’

  I sighed, frustrated. ‘Age?’

  ‘Old.’ She looked at Una. ‘Same as you, maybe.’

  The chief inspector’s mouth twitched. ‘Right. Thank you.’

  ‘If I showed you a photograph of her, would you recognise her?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Drina,’ I said. ‘This is important.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She didn’t sound it. ‘I can’t say anything more.’

  Whether she couldn’t or wouldn’t, there was no budging her. I persevered for a little while and got nowhere. When I emerged from the interview room, Derwent was waiting outside the door.

  ‘That was nice work.’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Where does it leave us?’

  ‘Looking for a white woman who wanted Armstrong dead. Someone who carried pepper spray. Someone who was made murderously angry to discover he’d been sleeping with someone else.’

  ‘His wife.’ Derwent stuck his hands in his pockets. ‘He’d warned her to arm herself. I never believed she didn’t know exactly where he was. There’s vague and there’s wilful ignorance.’

  ‘Go and see her,’ Una Burt said. ‘Put her under pressure.’

  ‘Two minutes,’ I said. ‘There’s something I want to check first.’

  Chapter 31

  THE HOUSE LOOKED empty. The curtains were drawn at all the windows, even though it was mid-morning, and there was an indefinable air of abandonment to the place. Derwent rang the doorbell for a good long time, his eyes on me throughout, as if it was my fault that no one was answering. Eventually, I saw a figure approaching the door. It was the housekeeper who’d been making soup the last time we visited the Armstrongs. She looked terrified when she saw us.

  ‘We wanted to speak to Mrs Armstrong, please. Is she here?’ Derwent asked.

  A nod and she stood back to let us come in, her hands plucking the little apron she wore. The sound of footsteps on the stairs made me look up. Elaine Lister was running down the steps. She stopped when she saw us.

  ‘Oh. I thought it was a delivery or the press again.’

  ‘No. Just us.’ Derwent frowned up at her. ‘Where’s Mrs Armstrong?’

  ‘She’s in bed, I think.’ Elaine came down another step. ‘She hasn’t been feeling too well.’

  ‘Can we see her?’

  ‘Is it just an update on the case?’

  ‘Yes,’ Derwent said easily. ‘We just need a quick word with her.’

  ‘Unless it’s urgent, I’m afraid—’

  ‘We really do need to speak to her,’ I said, not having the patience to negotiate with Armstrong’s secretary any longer.

  ‘Of course.’ She gave me a tight-lipped smile. ‘I’ll get her to come down.’

  ‘No need.’ Derwent took the stairs two at a time, arriving at Elaine’s side before she had time to protest. ‘We can speak to her up here.’

  ‘Oh. I’ll just go and see.’ Elaine looked at the housekeeper, a look that sent the woman scurrying back to the kitchen. Then she led us up the
stairs, not hurrying, until she reached a closed door. ‘Wait here, please.’

  She tapped on the door, then went in without waiting for an answer. I looked around, noting the paintings on the walls, the oriental rugs, the general air of wealth and privilege. It felt like a glamorous sort of prison to me, with paid warders to control every aspect of the inmates’ lives.

  The door opened again. ‘You can come in, but not for long.’

  The room was dark. It smelled sour, as if the windows hadn’t been opened for a long time. Cressida Armstrong was in bed, sitting up against some pillows. She looked thinner than on our previous visit, and the half-closed eyes made me think she was dopey with drugs.

  ‘Can we have some light in here?’ Derwent asked and Elaine opened one set of curtains, the heavy oyster-coloured silk sweeping back to reveal an elaborate, highly feminine bedroom.

  ‘Mrs Armstrong. Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she muttered. Her words were slurred.

  ‘What’s she on?’ Derwent asked Elaine, his irritation obvious.

  ‘Whatever the doctor prescribed. She was anxious. She was finding it hard to sleep.’

  ‘Cressida, are you listening to me?’ Derwent sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Cressida, I need to talk to you about Geoff.’

  ‘He’s gone.’ She dragged her eyes open with an effort. ‘He’s left me. All alone.’

  ‘She wasn’t like this the other day,’ I said in a low voice.

  ‘It took a while to sink in. She enjoyed the attention at first. The excitement.’ Elaine looked at Cressida. ‘Then she realised what it meant.’

  ‘Cressida, do you have a mobile phone?’ Derwent asked.

  ‘In my bag.’ She gestured at a handbag that was on a chair near the bed.

  ‘Can I look at it?’

  ‘Of course.’ Her eyes closed again, her head tilting back. Out of it.

  Derwent pulled on some gloves and went through the bag, his movements deft and careful. The first thing he took out was a small can of pepper spray, which he put on the table by the bed. He set her mobile phone beside it and pointed at the pepper spray.

  ‘That’s not legal.’

  ‘Geoff bought it for her. She wouldn’t have known anything about it being legal or illegal. You can take it away if you want.’