Screams in the Dark (12 page)

She sat up on the bed and swung her feet onto the floor, rubbing her face gently. Her eyelashes were still wet from crying in her sleep again, yet the troubled dream seemed like hours ago. They say you actually only dream for a few seconds before you wake up, but it never felt that way in Rosie’s dreams. Hers were powerful protracted dramas buried somewhere deep in her psyche, lying in
wait for her to sleep so they could torment her. Rosie’s dreams were big stories in full Technicolor, but the end was always the same. Always the tears, and the phone ringing and ringing, the way it had that day.

She hadn’t had the dream about her mother for nearly a month now, though since she’d returned from Kosovo she’d been plagued by other nightmares. But last night her sleep took her somewhere different, standing under a streetlamp in the rain, shivering in the cold, and waiting for TJ to come out of his flat as darkness fell. Eventually he emerged, with his arm around a pretty girl who was giggling as they walked along the street together. They’d been so engrossed in each other, they didn’t even notice her as they strolled past her. But further down the road she could hear their shrill laughter, and when eventually they looked over their shoulders, their faces turned into her mother and father. She’d woken herself up shouting for them to wait, not to leave her alone.

Rosie threw a towelling robe around her nakedness and padded into the kitchen to prepare breakfast. Hopefully the jag of strong coffee would make her mind so busy she could push last night away. She switched on her mobile phone and saw there were four missed calls from TJ, and one message. Last night she’d sat watching the mobile shudder and ring on the sofa beside her, but she couldn’t answer it. She couldn’t trust herself to speak to him until she dealt in her head with the shock of seeing Kat coming out of his flat. Get it in perspective, she told herself. What did you actually see? she asked
herself. There could be any simple explanation. She knew they were friends, they’d worked together in New York. Christ! They worked together now. Maybe TJ was helping her with her vocals for a new song she was learning. Any simple explanation could be made as to why she saw her there last night. But it didn’t make the pain and the paranoia any easier.

She picked up the mobile and listened to TJ’s message, her stomach tweaking at the sound of his voice. ‘Rosie, ‘Where the hell are you, woman? I got a missed call from you and been calling you since. Thought you might fancy a bite to eat. Give me a bell when you get this, sweetheart.’

Paranoia. Insecurity. That’s all it was. She settled down on the sofa with her breakfast and plonked on Sky News. She would phone TJ later and meet him tonight. By then, she hoped she’d have got her head around it. Her mobile rang, and Matt’s name came up on the screen.

‘Hi pet,’ she said.

‘Rosita. Howsit going, darling? I hear we’re off out this morning.’

‘We are Matt. We’re going on an adventure. A wee spying mission.’

‘Shit. I’m still traumatised after the last one.’

‘Yeah, but it was a lot of fun though. I mean who else has got dinner-party patter like you and can rattle off stories like that?’

‘True. As long as we keep on living to tell the tale. Where we off to?’

‘Out of the city. Will tell you when I see you. Listen
Matt, I’m not going into the office. Can you pick me up here? I just have to jump into the shower and get sorted. Give me forty minutes.’

‘No worries, Rosie. If you need me to scrub your back give me a shout.’

‘I think I can manage. Text me when you’re outside.’

She hung up.

*

To Rosie’s surprise, the location Jan Logan had given her wasn’t that far out of the city, but what did surprise her was the building itself – if they were at the right place.

‘I can’t believe they’re actually doing this in a slaughter-house.’ Rosie looked out of the windscreen at the flat-roofed, long, low building in the distance.

‘I know,’ Matt said, firing off some shots with his zoom lens. ‘But if we can knock this off, it’s a great headline in itself. Slaughterhouse of Horror … Slaughter of the Innocents … Nazi-Style Slaughter of Asylum Seekers.’

‘You’re in the wrong job, pal,’ Rosie chuckled. ‘You should be on the back bench.’

‘No end to my talents, darlin’. I’m not just your ordinary monkey pushing buttons you know.’ He rested his camera on his lap.

They’d been sitting at the edge of the farm road where they hoped they wouldn’t be seen by traffic, but could still see at a distance any movement at the sprawling building a few hundred yards away. In the past two hours, there had been nothing except one small delivery van going in.

Rosie had been astonished when Jan phoned her from Spain and told her that the place where Tam had made the pick-ups was actually a slaughterhouse on the outskirts of the city, on the road towards Loch Lomond. It had been out of commission for over a year, and to the outside world it was closed. There were padlocks and chains on the main gates and the high wire fences were topped with razor wire. From where Rosie and Matt were sitting it looked as if nobody got through the gates without prior arrangement. There was no one guarding the front gates, but when the delivery van had arrived, someone came out from the building and let them in just far enough to take the package. Matt had taken pictures with his long lens of the package being handed over and the van leaving. There were only three vehicles parked out in front of the building, inside the gates. One looked like a big refrigerated van, the other was a jeep, and the third looked like a big luxury saloon car – a Vauxhall Carlton, Matt had said, when he zoomed his camera in. He’d managed to capture an image of its number plates.

‘I should be able to get someone to run them through for me,’ Rosie said. ‘That’ll give us a handle on who owns what.’

‘But if they
are
doing grisly operations in there,’ Matt said, ‘it must be almost impossible to keep it tight just among the few people involved. How do they do that? It’s so horrific, there’s always the danger of someone who might blab. Look at Tam Logan, for instance.’

‘Yeah,’ Rosie said, ‘but look what happened to him. This mob don’t mess about with traitors.’ She opened a packet of peanuts and gave Matt a handful. ‘The thing is though, the building itself might be a front for something else. If it’s an abattoir, then there could quite easily be areas of it that are under lock and key that nobody else goes into. I don’t know the set-up in these slaughter-houses, but maybe there’s an area that only certain people can go into, where they prepare the meat for the butchers’ shops. Maybe that’s where they do the cutting up.’ She shrugged. ‘Just thinking.’

‘Yeah. Makes you wonder what might be in your pies though,’ Matt grinned.

‘Thanks for that, Matt. I think I’ll just have the fish fingers for lunch.’

‘Or you could have just the fingers, madam. They come in all sizes. And I’m told the braised thumbs are particularly tasty, not to mention the poached penis sweetbreads …’

‘Right, Matt,’ Rosie stopped him. ‘I get the picture, you sick bastard.’

‘Just saying, that’s all.’ Matt chucked a peanut into his mouth.

‘But I do get your point,’ Rosie said. ‘It must be hard to keep everyone quiet – though if it’s only the trusted foot soldiers from big Al Howie’s mob, then I think they’ll know to keep it really tight. Especially after they’ve been told what happened to Tam.’ She turned to him. ‘How the hell are we going to get inside that place?’

‘Well, other than go to the Refugee Council and declare yourself as an asylum seeker who’s lost the will to live, I’d say it’s impossible.’

They needed some luck, Rosie thought. Although the breaks had come, there was a long way to go. She already had Tanya revealing the details of her affair with Murphy, but that in itself was a story more for titillation than a major revelation. Tanya had given her a lead with that list of names and addresses of refugees, and Rosie had already been around most of them, managing to glean from neighbours roughly when they disappeared. All of them had vanished without trace – not even a word to neighbours that they were moving out. But in the world of refugees, keeping quiet about yourself was how they lived – just in case they did decide to slip off the radar and go to work illegally. There was no way of telling why they’d vanished. Her mobile rang and she pulled it out of her pocket. No name or number.

‘Rosie?’

‘Yes?’ She didn’t recognise the voice.

‘Hey, Rosie. Christy Larkin. Howsit going?’

‘Fine, Christy, thanks. Working away. You okay? Did you manage to make that wee enquiry I asked you about?’

‘I did, Rosie,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m phoning you. Can you talk at the moment? I’ve come out of the office to speak to you.’

‘Sure. Fire away.’

‘Okay. I looked up that name – Milosh Subacic, the one you gave me. I checked it for refugees coming in here to
Glasgow and there’s nothing. No trace. I even checked over the past three years, but nothing.’

‘Really? That’s a bit strange, isn’t it?’

‘Well, not really, Rosie. If he didn’t come through Scotland or Glasgow, then we wouldn’t have him on our register, unless he’d come to us later, got registered and was living here.’ He paused. ‘Well, I checked with one of my colleagues down in London. I’ve got a mate down there who kind of thinks along the same lines as me. He’s a good guy, so I asked him to check, and he did.’

‘And?’

‘He found him. Milosh Subacic. He came in here about five years ago, towards the end of the Bosnian war. A Bosnian Muslim apparently, arrived like a lot of others at the time, during all that ethnic cleansing. He came in through London and was living somewhere in Hackney.’ He paused. ‘But the thing is, Rosie, that’s all there is on him. Just basic details of when he came in and stuff, then his file seems to stop dead. But my mate knows other ways to track people through the system, so he tried to find his file through another means. But when he got it, the name came up with this no access red line through it.’

‘No access?’ Rosie asked.

‘Yep. No access. It’s a kind of flag that means everything from there on is shut down on him. When you come across a no access on a refugee it usually means something dodgy. Like maybe they’ve discovered something about his background, or he’s a criminal on the
run, and he’s disappeared. They like to keep that quiet.’

‘Christ.’ Rosie could see all sorts of possibilities. ‘Maybe that’s not even his real name.’

‘Took the words out of my mouth, Rosie,’ Christy said. ‘He came here as Milosh Subacic, but I suppose he could be anyone. Or he could be who he says he is, but they’ve found he’s a thief or something, or a rapist – anything.’

‘But why no access, Christy?’

‘Can’t know for sure, Rosie, but it could be because he’s gone missing and they have something on him and are trying to find him. Could be something like that. But it’s not right. My mate says he can’t go into the file any more because if you hit on someone like that and it comes up no access and you do it any more than once, then it registers somewhere and you get your collar felt by one of the suits.’

‘I see. That’s a pity,’ Rosie said. ‘But you did brilliant anyway, Christy. What you’ve found is great and is definitely a help.’ It wasn’t really, Rosie thought, it was inconclusive, but it was useful. And it deepened the mystery over who this Milosh character was.

‘No problems, Rosie. But hey, do you want the good news?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ she said. ‘From where I’m sitting right now, I’d love some good news.’

‘Okay. But it will cost you a drink – maybe even dinner?’

Rosie could picture his cheeky grin. ‘Depends on what you’ve got.’

‘I’ve got a picture of him.’

Rosie made a little triumphant clenched fist.

‘You have? What a star! How did you manage that if the file was closed?’

‘There are ways. My mate says there was one on his early file that he was able to access. It was obviously somebody’s mistake and the picture should have been removed before they made the file no access – but it’s a result for us. The pic is about maybe five years old. He emailed it to me. So what’s your email? I’ll send you it right now.’

Rosie gave him her email. ‘That’s absolutely brilliant, Christy. Really. You are definitely getting a good dinner.’

‘I’ll be looking forward to that Rosie. You bet I will. Listen, I have to go now. I’ll nip round to a friend’s office and email it from there, as I don’t want to do it from work.’

‘Thanks, Christy.’

‘And, Rosie, I take it there’s something well dodgy about this character Milosh?’

‘I’m looking at him, Christy. It’s part of the investigation. But it’s all very top secret at the moment, so if you can just forget this conversation?’

‘What conversation? See you.’ The line went dead.

Rosie turned to Matt. ‘We need to get to the nearest hotel where I can get to the internet.’

‘So let’s go.’

*

It was nearly seven, and only the Vauxhall Carlton remained parked outside the building. The jeep had gone an hour earlier with two thirty-something men who had locked the gate behind them as they left. Rosie and Matt waited.

‘I wish he would hurry up,’ Matt said, ‘I’m starving.’ He kept the lens fixed on the area.

‘I think we should follow him at a distance, if it’s at all possible, when he does come out. See if we can find where he lives.’

‘Might be difficult in this road, but once we get out onto the main drag, if we can keep him in our sights, that’s if he’s our man, we—’ Matt straightened up. ‘Someone’s coming out, Rosie.’ He zoomed in. ‘Looks like it’s him. Come on my son … Game on. It’s him!’ He kept clicking away.

Rosie sat up and shook herself to life.

‘Brilliant.’

They waited until the car was well down the road before they sped out of the farm road and followed. There were two cars in front of them, but Matt could still keep his eye on the Carlton, as they tailed him all the way into the city centre.

‘It’s too busy in here for him to even think anyone’s behind him,’ Matt said. ‘Doesn’t look like he’s going to the West End though, he’s heading down towards the Clydeside.’