After the Fire (38 page)

Derwent pulled a face. ‘We’ll see what the CPS make of it. They won’t be keen if the girl gives us a different story about what happened.’

‘Do we have a name for her?’ I asked.

‘Not yet. Her fingerprints aren’t on the system. We’ll circulate them through Interpol and see if anything comes up in another jurisdiction.’

‘I take it she’s not saying anything.’

‘Not yet.’

‘Who’s interviewing her?’ Derwent rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, playing it cool. He might as well not have bothered.

Una said, ‘I was thinking of doing it. With Liv, or you, Maeve.’

‘You think she’ll respond better to women?’ Derwent shook his head. ‘No way. She’s been told what to do by men for months, maybe years. She won’t respect you. She’ll think she can get around you.’

‘You don’t think you’re going to be able to intimidate her into talking, do you?’ Una shuddered. ‘Spare me.’

‘Take Kerrigan with you, then.’ Derwent grabbed my arm and literally pulled me forward. ‘Liv’s all right but Kerrigan is better. She’ll get inside the girl’s head.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, surprised.

‘Wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true.’ He levered himself off the edge of the desk he’d been sitting on and walked off. I was glad he hadn’t waited to see if Una Burt took his advice. She’d have loved to disappoint him.

‘Well?’ She raised her eyebrows at me, challenging me. Give Liv an opportunity to shine, or act as if I was entitled to take her place? What was the right choice? Ambition or holding back? Liv needed to recover her reputation after being on sick leave for so long. It would make her more confident.

But then again, her career wasn’t my concern, even if we were friends. Someone like Derwent wouldn’t think twice.

What it came down to, in the end, was the case.

‘Let me do it,’ I said quietly.

‘You think I should pick you over Liv?’

‘She’s a good interviewer.’ I hesitated. ‘I’m better.’

Una nodded, slowly. ‘All right. But you’d better prove it.’

I walked away from her feeling like Judas. But I didn’t feel as if I’d done the wrong thing, even when Liv glanced up from some paperwork and smiled at me, all unknowing. I loved her, but I was better.

Nonetheless, when Ben Dornton walked into the office and nodded to Una Burt, I felt my heart begin to thump. I stood up to join them, aware that Derwent was watching me.

‘We’ve got her in interview 1.’

Una Burt nodded. ‘Let’s give her a cup of tea. Make her feel at home.’

‘Did she say anything on the way here?’ I asked.

‘Not a dicky bird.’ Ben shrugged. ‘We did try.’

‘Do you have her property?’

He handed me a plastic bag. ‘Knock yourself out. All logged and checked by the custody sergeant in Ashford.’

I flattened out the bag: cigarettes, a lighter, a fold of crisp banknotes with a paper band around it, some coins, a SIM card, a badge with a kitten on it, a short, blunt pencil, an open pack of chewing gum. No ID of any kind. ‘Did she have a phone?’

‘Nope.’

‘Dumped it?’

Dornton shrugged. ‘Maybe. Maybe she didn’t have anyone to call.’

The interview room was cold when I walked in. The girl sat at the table, her head down. Her hair was similar in colour to Melissa Pell’s, but hers was dry from bleaching, the ends ragged and broken. She glanced up when I sat down at the table, beside Una Burt, and I felt a jolt. She was younger than Melissa, and me, but her eyes looked a hundred years older. She was tiny in a zipped hoodie and jeans, and her legs jigged constantly under the table.

‘All right,’ Una Burt said. ‘Do you need an interpreter?’

She shook her head briefly.

‘Just to explain why you’re here, we have a few questions for you about the fire in Murchison House last week. You’re not under caution at this point. We want to speak to you as a witness.’

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.’