Behind Closed Doors (5 page)

‘To be honest, we all thought it was the dad.’

Lou looked round in surprise. It was the woman who had spoken. Lou tried to work out who she was, but drew a complete blank. It bugged her – she was normally better at faces than this.

‘Go on,’ Waterhouse said.

‘He was all sorts of weird, wasn’t he?’ she said, looking at Lou for support.

Lou nodded. Who the hell was she? She couldn’t remember – there had been loads of them on the case initially, several women, but none of them fitted. The dark hair, peppered with grey… slim figure. Lou stole a look at the woman’s ID badge, hanging around her neck on a non-standard issue lanyard. It was a Federation one, she realised. Was she a Federation rep?

‘He was helpful,’ the woman continued, ‘without any of it actually being useful – and then he was keen to go back to the UK with Juliette. She “couldn’t miss her schooling”. One minute he was out rooting through the undergrowth, organising search parties with all the tourists and ex-pat Brits who were showing an interest, then all of a sudden he’d booked a flight for him and his daughter and he was off. And then, what you said about the forensics, ma’am – there was a suggestion that they’d found blood in the room – the parents’ room, not the one the girls were in – but the Greek police didn’t secure the scene properly and the place was cleaned. We took a couple of our CSIs out there but we didn’t find anything.’

She must have been one of the original lot who went out to Rhodes, Lou thought. She couldn’t remember there being a woman on that team.

‘So the father wasn’t arrested?’ Waterhouse was back looking at Lou.

‘No. We had nothing to arrest him for,’ Lou said. ‘When we interviewed him —’

‘We’ve all seen the transcripts,’ Waterhouse interrupted.

She glared at him. ‘I was going to say this: he came across as personable one minute, aggressive the next. He was getting up out of his seat, fiddling with his glasses. Then he would sit perfectly still, calm. You don’t get a sense of that from the transcripts.’

The man sitting immediately to her right – young; fair hair with too much gel on it – straightened in his chair. As if he was expecting the meeting to descend into a physical brawl at any moment and he wanted to leap for the door.

For a moment, Waterhouse stared her out. Then he looked away, his cheeks colouring as though he was hot or dangerously angry. ‘Anything else?’

Much as it pained her to provide him with anything other than a single-finger salute, Lou didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of shutting her up. ‘Yes, actually. I believe there was a crime series going on at the time, with young women going missing from Rhodes and Corfu. From what I understand, Scarlett wasn’t included in the series because she didn’t fit the criteria. For a start she was so much younger – the others were all in their late teens, early twenties, all on holiday with groups of friends rather than parents. They were multiple nationalities, too; none of the other missing girls were British.’

‘How many?’

‘There were five, I think,’ the other woman said. ‘Two went missing from Rhodes, three from Corfu. The Greek police were reluctant to get us involved with that, too.’

Waterhouse considered this. He must have read about it in the file, Lou thought, and he probably knew more about it than any of them. As a DC at the time, Lou had only had access to a tiny part of the investigation. The senior officers at the time – all of whom were now retired – would have had the overview.

‘Right then, tasks. Caroline, I want you to direct the debrief interview. You can have Terry and Dave, if you need them. Josh, you’re liaising with SOCA or the NCA or whatever the fuck they’re calling themselves today, and the UK Border Agency. Once we’ve done that, we need to bid for a surveillance team on Maitland and another one on Lewis McDonnell – Andy and Tim, you’re on that, right?’

Wait
, Lou thought. ‘Hold on. You said Maitland and McDonnell?’

Waterhouse breathed out heavily through his nose, laid his hand flat on the grey cardboard file on the desk in front of him. ‘Yes?’

‘I’m assuming you’re talking about Nigel Maitland. What’s he got to do with it?’

Nigel Maitland – suspect in the murder of Polly Leuchars, the case that had pretty much consumed Lou’s every waking moment for the last year. Nothing they’d had had been able to touch him. She’d known SB were looking at him, but even though they’d tried to get some more intelligence, something useful, Major Crime had drawn a complete blank.

Everyone was looking at her again, the way they had when she’d first walked in. Waterhouse clearly wasn’t going to share anything that hadn’t been prised out of him like a crumbling cork from a bottle. It was Caroline – the one with salt-and-pepper hair, whom Lou suddenly and conclusively recognised as Caro Sumner, then DC with the Metropolitan Police, who had been on attachment to the investigation and had, once, appeared in front of the press with a statement that had gone horribly wrong – who finally spoke and shared the crucial bit of information.

‘We think he’s the one who trafficked her.’

She had slept. It hadn’t been for long, since when she opened her eyes she felt as shattered as when she’d closed them. She had dreamed that she was awake, running, fighting – exhausting dreams about hope and hopelessness, as though her brain was spending the downtime trying to work its way towards a solution, and finding none.

The room she was in held a dirty mattress on which she was lying, and a bucket which she had used last night. She could smell the urine and her own body odour. Her hands were covered in dried blood, crusted around the edges of her fingernails. She rubbed it off her palms and felt her nose carefully, then her eyes. The ache blended seamlessly across her face, and the skin of her nose felt tight and hot. By squinting she could see the bridge of her nose: it was wider than normal, and even in the half-light the colour of it looked wrong. It looked bruised.

She pushed herself to a sitting position and leaned back against the wall, waiting for the pounding, dizzying feeling to subside. She felt as if she was going to be sick, saliva flooding her mouth, and she gulped it back. The door of the room, a rough splintered wood with a space of a couple of inches at the bottom, was closed.

It was worth checking. She stood, gingerly, keeping her head low, her hands on her knees. The nausea swelled and subsided.

It was locked. Even the bottom of the door didn’t move against the frame when she gave it a boot. The impact, as feeble as it was, jarred her head.

‘Hey!’ she called. ‘HEY! Let me out, you stupid Greek fuckers!’

Silence. Had they gone, left her behind?

She crossed to the window. It was small, head-height, and the window was pushed open as wide as it would go on a lever. Beyond that, metal bars prevented it opening further. She stood on tiptoe to try to look out, but all she could see was scrubland – uneven ground, dusty-looking trees, and low hills in the distance. No buildings, no vehicles, no people. No sign of life.

Then the hopelessness hit her like a wave and the tears welled up and spilled over her cheeks. She dabbed at them with her sleeve. Her face hurt, her head hurt.

‘Mum,’ she sobbed. To her own surprise – ‘I want my mum…’

The tears lasted a while – long enough for it to be properly daylight, and for the heat to start to penetrate into the room – and then her eyes were dry and sore. She sat on the mattress and waited for what would happen next.

The patch of sunlight had moved from the corner of her room around to the floor.

Scarlett had screamed, given up screaming because nothing happened, no one came; the only result was that it made her head hurt. Eventually she had lain down on the mattress because there was nowhere else to sit.

The dog started barking. It sounded further away, muffled, as though it was in another building some distance from where she was. Again, that throaty bark of a big jowly dog. She had even begun to picture it. Jaws big enough to crush a human skull.

And then she heard voices, from a way off – as though they were approaching the house. A male voice, then a response from another man – a laugh.

And a woman, a girl. High-pitched voice. She couldn’t understand what was said but heard the tone of it – she was pleading. Afraid.

The door opened a few moments later and Scarlett got to her feet, thinking they were going to pull her out of the room, but instead two women were shoved into the room with her. The man at the door was not either of the men who had brought her here. The door shut as both women started yelling in a language she didn’t understand. The man outside the door shouted something and the tone of his voice – or perhaps they understood him – made them stop; both of them stepped back and away.

The door opened again and he threw in a polythene shrink-wrapped bundle. Bottled water. A pack of six 500ml bottles of water that landed on the floor and bounced once. Then the door closed again.

The two women pounced on the bottles of water, fought over them. The polythene was ripped, the bottles tumbled out over the floor and before she could help herself Scarlett was there with them, grabbing at the bottles before they were gone or busted and spilled.

Somehow despite all the pushing and shoving they managed to end up with two bottles each. Scarlett retreated to the mattress, clutching the bottles to her chest, watching the two newcomers. They were talking to each other in hushed, desperate whispers. Other than fighting over the water they had barely acknowledged her presence, and now they were sitting cross-legged on the floor facing each other as they drank.

The dark-haired one was taller, lankier, her back a long curve; the wrists protruding from her long-sleeved T-shirt were bony, angular. The other one had bleached hair, dark at the roots, half-tied into a knot to one side of her head, long greasy strands of a fringe that she was growing out either deliberately or for want of a hairdresser falling across her eyes. Both of them looked grimy, in need of a good wash. But then she probably looked the same.

‘My name’s Scarlett,’ she said at last. She felt tears starting again.

The blonde one was talking, and carried on as if she hadn’t heard. The dark one turned her head and stared at Scarlett.

‘Do you speak English?’ Scarlet whimpered. Her voice sounded off-key, thick, as if she was bunged up with a head cold.

‘A little,’ the dark-haired one said. The blonde one still hadn’t so much as cast a glance in her direction. And then she raised a hand, the palm flat in Scarlett’s direction. She said something to her companion, the language foreign but the meaning clear from the sharp tone. An instruction:
Don’t talk to her. Don’t trust her
.

‘What’s your name?’ Scarlett said, gulping back a sob.

‘Yelena.’

The blonde girl started yammering, louder now, the flat of her hand striking the top of the other girl’s head.
You idiot.
Yelena answered back, shouting, and for a moment there was this top-volume incomprehensible argument going on between them, until the door opened and the man came in, the one who had brought the girls in.

He shouted at them and they shouted back. The blonde one stood, in his face, her head doing the ghetto-style tilt-shake to give him some attitude, and he watched her calmly for a moment, then pulled a gun from his waistband, raised it before any of them could say or do anything, and brought it down with a crack on the side of her head.

She dropped to the floor, face-first. Her head made a loud smack as it hit the floor. Yelena cried out and the man raised his hand to her too. She shut up instantly, hand over her mouth, eyes wide, backing off until she was in the corner of the room.

He said something else, calmly. Pointed the gun at Yelena, then at Scarlett, then at the motionless girl on the floor.
Keep quiet, or it will be worse.

He went, shut the door behind him. Yelena rushed to the girl, who hadn’t moved. Lifted her head, stroked her dirty hair away from her face. There was blood on Yelena’s hands; the girl must have cut her head when she fell, or when he had hit her. Yelena was crying now.

Scarlett felt strangely calm, her own tears gone. She opened the second bottle of water and took a few sips, watching.

There was a lot of blood. She thought the girl might be dead.

After a period of time during which the blonde girl had not moved, Yelena had banged on the door until the man returned. She spoke to him quietly, without anger, but with a desperate pleading sadness that seemed to get through where the yelling and screaming had not.

He said something to her and she sat next to Scarlett on the other end of the mattress, her back to the wall.

Then a second man came in, a giant of a man with a shaven head and a black vest that revealed immense, hairy shoulders. He looked at the blonde girl and the blood and said something to the other one. Then he picked the girl up as though she weighed nothing, under her arms, her head lolling, throwing her over one shoulder. The blood from the wound on her head drip-dripped on to the bare concrete floor. He carried her out, leaving the smaller of the two men standing in the doorway, staring at Scarlett and Yelena. The way he was looking at them made Scarlett feel uncomfortable and then, when he continued to stare and didn’t look away, scared. A minute later the giant came back with a bucket of water, which he splashed on to the blood on the floor. Then they both went. The door shut fast.

‘I’m sorry,’ whispered Scarlett, because she had nothing else to say.

Without looking at her, Yelena turned on to her side and curled up on the mattress, her back to Scarlett, the soles of her dirty trainers and the white skin of her lower back above the tight stonewashed jeans all that she was prepared to share.

For some reason, having someone else in the room with her made Scarlett think of Nico.