Peter Robinson: Strange Affair

In a way, Annie wished that Banks had been granted permission to attend; she would have liked him by her side. But these operations were strictly regulated and there was no way they were letting Roy Banks’s brother be a part of it. She had talked to him on the phone late the previous evening, and he had told her about his visit to the Albion Club. In exchange, Annie had told him what Dr. Lukas had told her about the late girls and Carmen Petri.

On the prearranged signal, the SO19 team battered down the front door and stormed into the house. Annie and Brooke, unarmed, had instructions to wait outside until the place was secured, then they would be allowed in to question any witnesses or suspects. Brooke was unusually quiet. Annie felt herself tense up as she heard sounds from inside the house – shouts, commands, a woman’s scream, something thudding on the floor.

But there were no shots, and she took that as a good sign.

She had no idea how long it took, but eventually the team leader emerged and told them the house was secured. There had been one guard armed with a baseball bat and three other men, none of them armed. The rest of the occupants were young women. They had best take a look for themselves, he told them, shaking his head in disbelief.

Annie and Brooke went inside. It was a shabby place, in poor repair, with old wallpaper stained and peeling off in places, no stair carpet and only dirty linoleum on the ground floor. The smells of stale sex and cigarette smoke permeated the air. Little light got in through the windows, so the officers had turned on all the lights they could find, mostly bare bulbs, and they hardly flattered the scene, just gave it an extra harsh edge.

The seven girls were all in a small room upstairs. Probably more lived there, Annie guessed, but they would be out working the streets around King’s Cross. No matter what the time of day, business never stopped. The area had had a bad reputation for years, and Annie remembered how the girls were once called Maggie’s Children because they came down on the trains from the north when all the jobs disappeared up there. These days they might be known as Putin’s Children, Iliescu’s or Terzic’s.

The SO19 officers searched the place as Annie and Brooke went over to the girls. The sparsely furnished room smelled of sweat and cheap perfume and the girls were all dressed in skimpy clothing – tight hot pants, micro skirts, thigh-highs, see-through tops – and their faces were garish with lipstick and eye makeup. Some of them looked high; none looked much older than fifteen. Beyond the fear in their expressions Annie could see only resignation and despair. This was truly the generation of lost girls Dr. Lukas had described, she thought. Christ, she wanted to take them home and scrub the makeup off and feed them a decent meal. Most of them were skinny, and some had sores on their lips. Several of them were smoking and that added to the cloying atmosphere of the room.

Other rooms in the house were equipped with beds and washbasins, but this seemed to be a general sitting room. The four men the SO19 team had found had all been handcuffed and bundled out into the van. The girls had been checked for weapons as a matter of routine, then left alone, a guard on the door.

“Ma’am?” One of the team stood at the door and beckoned to Annie. “I think you should see this.”

He led Annie to a room no bigger than a cupboard. Inside was a young girl, naked but for the thin sheet another officer was wrapping around her. She was painfully thin and blood crusted the cleft between her nose and upper lip. She was alive, but her eyes looked dead. The only other thing in the room was a bucket, its stench abominable.

“Get an ambulance,” Annie said. She helped the girl to her feet, keeping the sheet wrapped around her, and slowly took her back to the others. One of the girls ran forward and took the newcomer in her arms, mumbling endearments, and helped her sit in an armchair, perching on the arm beside her.

“Can you speak English?” Annie asked.

The girl nodded. “A little.”

“What happened to her?”

“She’s new,” the girl told her in heavily accented English, still stroking her friend’s hair. “She would not do what they tell her so they lock her up and beat her. She has not eaten for three days.”

Brooke was trying to talk to the other girls, but it didn’t appear they spoke English. Whatever the reason, they all seemed afraid of him and no one would say a word. Most of them wouldn’t even look at him. Annie thought she understood why. She took him aside. “Look, Dave,” she said, seeing his crestfallen expression. “It’s not your fault, but they don’t know you’re a decent man. They don’t know any decent blokes. It might be best if you went down and questioned the men.”

Pale, Brooke nodded. “You’ll be okay?”

“I’ll manage,” said Annie. She touched him gently on the shoulder and he left.

“What will happen to us?” asked the girl on the chair arm, who seemed to have taken charge. She had dark hair down to her shoulders, thin arms and a pale complexion.

It was a good question and Annie wasn’t sure she knew the answer. The object of the raid had been to take Happy Harry Mazuryk and, with any luck, find Carmen Petri. Annie didn’t know if Harry had been one of the four men arrested, though from what she had seen in passing, none of them matched his description.

“You’ll all be taken good care of,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Veronika.”

“Right, Veronika. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“I can’t tell you anything. He will kill me.”

“No, he won’t,” said Annie. “We’ll put him in jail.”

“You don’t understand. He wasn’t here, only his stupid guard. Those other men are here for…” She made an obscene gesture with her hips.

“Where is Hadeon Mazuryk?”

She flinched at the sound of his name. “I don’t know.”

“Okay,” said Annie. “What about Carmen? Do you know Carmen Petri?” She looked around at the frightened girls. “Is she here?”

They all shook their heads. One started crying. Annie turned back to Veronika. “Do you know Carmen?”

Veronika nodded.

“Where is she?”

“She is not here. Carmen is one of the special girls.”

“What do you mean?”

“She is very beautiful. She speaks very good English. She does not have to go out to the street. Men come to her. Pay more.”

This was what Annie had heard from Dr. Lukas. Still she wondered whether Carmen had been killed. “Do you know where she is, Veronika? I really need to talk to her.”

Veronika turned to the girl in the sheet and stroked her hair again, then she looked back at Annie, her face stern. “There is another house,” she said. “I have talked to Carmen. She has told me. She is there.”

Banks didn’t regret too much being barred from the King’s Cross raid. He had been on such operations before and generally found the paramilitary elements quite tedious. He did, however, want to know the results, which was why he was sitting anxiously at the kitchen table early with his morning coffee and newspaper, mobile beside him at the ready.

He was still puzzling over what had happened between Roy and Lambert at the Albion Club that Friday, and the best he could come up with was that Lambert had proposed something Roy didn’t approve of and became worried he’d give the game away. Their friendship went back to university days and they had got up to all sorts of things together. They had been out of touch for a long time, though, and Lambert probably didn’t know that Roy had redrawn his moral lines.

If Lambert wanted Roy to come in on importing abducted teenage girls for the sex trade, as Annie suggested was happening, then Roy would probably have balked at that, Banks thought. If he had been ignorant of the true way in which the girls were forced into prostitution, as Dr. Lukas had told Annie she was, then he would have found out via Jennifer, who had talked with Carmen Petri and learned something of the truth on the Monday of the week she died. The timing was important here. Roy might have been on the verge of getting involved when he found out the truth after Carmen told Jennifer, and Lambert spent the next few days trying to convince him it was okay. Then something else must have tipped the balance, something Roy found out on the day he disappeared.