Cath Staincliffe - Hit and Run

‘Interior designer? Hypnotherapist?’

‘Bouncer,’ he told her. ‘At the Topcat Club. Harper reckons he’s good on the door.’

She felt her scalp tighten and a tickling in her wrists. ‘Is he now?’ She ended the call and got straight onto Butchers. ‘You seen Mr Stone?’

‘Just left him, boss. Him and Gleason covering for each other. Stone’s an arrogant prat.’

Janine told him about the connection between Stone and the club. ‘I want you to get back there, bring them in. Time we had a proper chat.’

‘Pleasure,’ she could hear a note of gloating in Butchers’ voice. ‘Just made my morning, boss.’

Marta had barely slept, a dull ache in the centre of her, a sick fear about Rosa. It could happen to her… She imagined Rosa’s family receiving the news. Terrible news from the UK. Rosa’s family had been farmers for generations, working the same acreage on the central plains. Raising pigs, growing cabbages and potatoes. If things had been tough under communism they had been even worse in the wrench of change to a free market economy.

‘We tried to sell some land,’ Rosa had told Marta. ‘But no one was interested. My father thought he had a jewel, a crock of gold but it was like trying to sell shit to a bishop. The prices fell so low that it wasn’t worth driving the pigs to market. They cost more to feed than he could sell them for. Yet people were still hungry. ‘People have to eat,’ he used to yell. I almost felt sorry for him.’ Rosa hated her father; she often called him the swine, the pig. He’d been a rough bully who had played the tyrant in his home and had few friends even among the other farmers.

Rosa’s mother had moved to get work in Krakow, stacking shelves in a small supermarket. The journey took an hour each way. ‘We all moved there and my father stayed at the farm. It was better for us. He went a bit mental – no one to make him feel big.’

Then Rosa’s father had died. It had been three days before he was found and by then the last few pigs were going mad with hunger. There was no phone at the farm. No way to keep in touch. The authorities had been promising a connection for years. ‘Not that the old bastard would have bothered,’ Rosa told Marta.

The family had argued about the land. Sell it for a song or keep it. Neither of her brothers would consider taking it on and Rosa wasn’t interested. Up to her neck in pig shit and cabbage stalks? No, thanks. In the end, a compromise had been reached. A cousin would lease it for five years, for a pittance, stop the place going back to the wild.

In the months after her arrival, Rosa had become depressed. She couldn’t stomach the work. There was nothing to do but wait it out. Marta had tried to jolly her along, talking about what they would do when they had saved enough money. Marta would open a little shop, maybe a beauty salon. She’d always liked cutting hair and had a knack for it. Maybe Rosa would be discovered and become a model? Or do her teaching? Rosa nodded her head. She could teach English conversation to Polish kids – or Polish to people planning to travel there. Who’d want to learn Polish, Marta thought, aid workers? But she said nothing because Rosa was looking a little brighter and she didn’t want to spoil it.

At Easter, Rosa seemed much better. She was dancing at the club by then and that made all the difference. She was allowed to get the shopping too. That weekend she had brought a packet of cheap felt-tip pens and fresh eggs back from the mini-market. She hard-boiled them and handed them round when the others appeared for breakfast. The girls teased her, groaning at the sentimentality, joshing her for being old-fashioned. Petra drew a face on her egg rather than a pattern but they soon fell into reminiscing and the talk turned to food. Here all they ever ate – oven chips, pizzas, ready meals – was plastic food: ready in ten minutes and hungry again ten minutes later. But at home…

Soon they were inventing favourite menus, boasting about the sweetest cakes, the spiciest sausage, the most perfect pieroji. ‘Thick and glossy,’ Marta had said, ‘meat soft as butter and every vegetable you can imagine.’

How often did we actually eat like that, Marta thought; how often did we go hungry or put up with cabbage and potato day after day? Their daydreams were a far reach from the reality of life back home. But dreams didn’t cost anything.

After they had eaten the eggs, Rosa had pulled a bag from the drawer where she had hidden it; spilled the bars onto the table.

‘Chocolate!’ They chorused.

‘With tea, proper tea,’ Marta decided. Shunning the instant coffee and the milk, she found glasses, made drinks with sliced lemon and sugar.

Marta climbed quickly out of bed. The air was nippy and goose pimples rashed her arms. Rosa had been happy then, she thought, that Easter morning. I could write maybe, tell her family about that. Her kindness, buying us treats and recreating a little piece of home.

Richard tried not to be distracted by the skimpily dressed girl giving it her all on the pole. The rest of the club was deserted, plunged into gloom but the girl swayed in an isolated pool of light. Harper was watching from a table nearby. The place was chilly and the cold seemed to intensify the aroma of stale beer and cigarette smoke that the soft furnishings soaked up.

‘Bit early, isn’t it?’ Richard drew up a chair beside Harper.

‘Audition – we’re one girl down.’

Richard gave him a look.

‘The show goes on.’ He was unapologetic.

‘Lee Stone, your doorman – were you aware he had a criminal record?’

Harper shrugged.

‘Car theft amongst other things. He’s helping us now with our enquiries into the hit and run accident.’

Harper’s attention shifted sharpish from the dancer to Richard. He frowned. ‘You think Stone nicked my car?’ Surprise was replaced by outrage as the full meaning hit home. ‘I’ll bloody have him… The bastard!’ He ran a finger round the collar of his shirt.

‘Any trouble between you?’

‘Nothing that I was aware of. And I think I’d have known; he’s not exactly subtle.’

‘So why would he steal your car?’

The girl hooked one knee round the pole, arched backwards, her hair almost sweeping the floor, one hand running slowly from her collarbone, over her breasts and down to her thigh. Richard wrenched his gaze back to Harper.

‘Search me. But if you do find out let me know, won’t you?’ He shook his head with disbelief. ‘Bloody idiot.’ He gestured to the dancer to stop. Moved to turn off the music. ‘Thanks, love, I’ll give you a bell.’

The girl nodded, wandered off to get dressed.

‘I’d book her,’ Richard muttered. He leafed back a couple of pages in his daybook, to the notes of Harper’s first statement. ‘Rosa didn’t turn up for work on Monday. What about Stone?’

‘It’s his day off.’

‘But they both worked Sunday?’ Harper nodded.

‘Anything going on between him and Rosa?’

‘No, I’d have noticed. I don’t like him round the girls.’

‘Why’s that, then?’

‘Bit rough round the edges, nasty mouth on him. They shouldn’t have to put up with that.’

‘Anything physical?’

‘Once or twice, harassment, copping a feel. I made it plain to him, any more of it and he’d be out.’

Richard nodded, wondering whether Stone’s harassment had involved Rosa this time and whether it had got out of hand. Whether sexual assault had led to murder?

At the police station, introductions had been made for the tape and Janine and Butchers faced Stone and a duty solicitor across the table in interview room one.