Throwaways (2 page)

After we saw the story on the news and listened to a procession of tight-lipped commentators inferring that by their “choice of career” these women had given up any right to expect not to be abducted and murdered, Tommy and I decided to “look into things.” We told ourselves that there was no obligation for us to get involved. We’d already put our lives on the line and weren’t looking to do so again against someone who could well be another Suffolk Strangler. At least that’s what I told myself. The truth was I’d got an adrenaline rush out of getting revenge and being a kick-ass. I wanted more. For me, there was no going back to my old life, because the person in that life was now a stranger to me.

Tommy’s eyes were filled with concentration as we’d worked out a plan. “Before we can do anything we need to know everything we can about the victims. Their families, their friends or any ties they might have.”

“We can glean as much as we can from the papers and the news,” I said. “Speak to their families.”

Tommy nodded. “I have a friend in the force. He’ll help us with some info. He worked with our Sammy.”

Tommy’s brother had been an undercover cop. He’d been killed by the same man who’d ordered the murder of my parents and brother. The bastard had eventually been killed by his own daughter, but only because I couldn’t kill him first. Whilst I was sad about her death, I’d have danced on her father’s grave, after lighting a bonfire and having a barbecue. Hate wasn’t a strong enough word to describe my thoughts towards him. He’d taken so much from me.

“We should talk to the women who work the same streets as they do,” I said. “Maybe they’ll know something.” Tommy didn’t look so sure, so I carried on. “It wasn’t like those women worked
as city bankers. They were mixing with sordid little men who can only get their rocks off with a woman they paid to go down an alleyway for a quick fumble. Pathetic bastards.”

Tommy grinned. “Christ, Nancy you’re pretty judgemental about the punters.”

The vein in my forehead throbbed. “And, I shouldn’t be? Don’t you read the papers? These punters couldn’t care less that they’re fuelling those women’s addictions. Or that they’re no better than rapists because they have sex with girls who’ve been sex trafficked; many of them kids.”

Tommy held up his hand in surrender. “Fair enough. But, we’ll need to tread carefully. They’ll already be jittery; I don’t want a stiletto heel through my skull.”

“We could always offer money for information,” I said. “That might get them to tell us things that they wouldn’t tell the cops.”

Tommy sucked in his cheeks. “Nah. These women are scared shitless. It’d be better if…”

He paused mid-sentence.

“If what?”

I hated it when he clammed up like this.

There was an awkward moment as he stared off into the distance, flexing his arm until it cracked. Eventually he said, “Nah, you couldn’t do that.”

Reaching over, I pinched his arm. He didn’t flinch, but then with biceps like his it probably hadn’t registered.

He swallowed and this time he met my gaze. “They’d be more likely to talk to you if you were one of them.”

He was right. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

Seeing his serious expression, I couldn’t risk a jibe. I needed something to lighten the atmosphere, because the thought of walking the same streets as a murdered woman sickened me. “Crikey, a few months into our relationship and you’re already pimping me out. Should I be worried?”

Now he smiled, but it quickly faded. “Obviously it’d be as a
last resort,” said Tommy, his mouth tight, “You wouldn’t have to actually turn tricks. Just act like you are. Put on a show. Make yourself believable. We need the other girls to see you as one of them, so they’ll confide in you and tell you where to find Kim.”

Shit
. The full implication of what I’d agreed to do started to sink in, and my stomach felt like I’d swallowed a lump of lead. “What am I meant to say if a punter comes over and rolls down the window?”

“Tell them you have a regular appointment to keep with a cop. That’ll scare them off.”

Tommy had an answer for everything.

“But, you going on the streets is a last resort, Nancy. You know that even with me nearby, it’s dangerous. Anything could happen.”

He’d get no argument from me on that score.

“You know I’d do it, but my hairy legs would give me away. Glasgow’s not ready for the Ladyboys.” The glint in his eyes made me chuckle.

Tommy went back to being serious “It might not even come to that. Most people are harmed by people they know. Husbands, boyfriends, relations, even parents. So, we concentrate on family first.” He paused. “We’ll need a cover story.”

I’d come up with a plan that I thought would work. “We can say we’re journalists doing a story on their daughters; trying to find out what happened to them.”

Tommy didn’t agree. “The press have been door-stepping these poor bastards for weeks now, writing all sorts of lurid tales about their daughters’ descent into prostitution. Painting them as junkie whores. They’ll just slam their doors in our faces and tell us to fuck off. Who can blame them? I’d do the same thing.”

He had a point. “But how else do we get them to talk to us? We can’t say we’re the police. They’ll expect to see some ID and when we don’t have it they’ll call the cops on us.”

The last thing I needed was the ever diligent Detective
Inspector Waddell on my case; the man was as tenacious as a terrier down a rabbit hole. He already suspected I’d been up to no good, which was hardly surprising when one of the men who murdered my parents and raped me, ended up tied to a bed, in his manky boxers, with the word “RAPIST” carved into his stomach Lisbeth Salander style. Not that I’d been a complete psycho. I’d shown him some mercy and had drugged him first. He and his mate had shown me no such mercy when they’d raped me again and again, before abandoning me to die alone in a puddle of my own blood.

Tommy outlined his plan. “We tell them we’re relatives of one of the missing girls and we want to find out what happened to her and the others. That way the families of the other women might talk to us.”

“That might work,” I said. At least they’d be sympathetic and less likely to chase us from their doors.

So, that’s what we agreed to do. But first we had to learn as much about the missing women as we could before we spoke to anyone.

Whilst I headed off to the Mitchell reference library where they kept newspapers on microfiche, Tommy went off to speak to his police contact. Between us, we’d get what we needed.

“Let’s look at what we do know.”

We’d turned Tommy’s once orderly apartment into investigation central. We had a large whiteboard like the one we’d seen on police shows. On the board we’d pinned a picture cut out of a newspaper of the once stunning Suzy Henderson, the former law student who’d once been a model. The photo was a shot the newspaper had got from a modelling agency of Suzy pouting as the wind machine blew her black curly hair, making it look like it was full of volume. A year after the photo was taken she was working as an escort to pay off her student loans and cover the cost of a new modelling portfolio. By the age of 21, she had a cocaine habit (she’d starting snorting coke when she’d been a model to keep her weight down), had been kicked out of college and was told she was “too old” for modelling.

Next to Suzy, we’d pinned a picture of Sheena Andrews, a smiling teenager in a slinky party dress at her 16th birthday party. It was hard to believe that seven months later, the fresh faced teen had been picked up by the police for soliciting in Glasgow’s red light district. Like Suzy, her fall from grace had been pretty spectacular. Straight A student at a fee paying school so prestigious that there was a waiting list for the pleasure of forking out 12 grand a year on school fees, to 20-quid-a-time streetwalker. Unlike Suzy Henderson who was currently languishing in a mortuary drawer, Sheena’s fate was less certain. She’d been alive when her finger had been bitten off. The teeth marks matched Suzy’s dental records. Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine how Sheena’s finger came to be bitten off.

Tommy had no idea either and he’d seen some terrible things in Iraq. Things he only hinted at because he wasn’t that big on talking about his past.

“Could he have forced Suzy to do it? To bite off Sheena’s
finger? Say at gunpoint?”

Tommy was pinning a picture of Tanya Baker, the third woman to go missing on our board, and turned round. “Nah. The pathologist told the cops he was pretty certain the finger had been bitten off as Suzy was in her death throes, in one go. He said if she’d been ordered by her captor to bite it off there’d be hesitation bites. Not one clean bite, although they’d have to see Sheena’s hand to be sure.”

I’d been concentrating hard on the picture of Sheena, hoping that by looking at her we’d somehow become connected and I’d have a moment of blinding insight and understand what had happened to her.

Instead, I asked Tommy if he thought there was any chance she was still alive.

He didn’t blink. “I think she’s dead. If you were involved in something like that, if some mad bastard dragged you off the streets, killed someone in front of you, you would go to the police or tell someone. But, nobody’s heard from Sheena, so she must be dead.”

I wasn’t ready to believe that. “Unless she’s too scared to come forward and has gone into hiding. Holed up somewhere.”

Tommy leaned over and put a hand on my arm. “I hope you’re right, but her finger was bitten off. There’d have been a lot of blood. If Sheena had been restrained in any way, she might not have been able to stench the flow of blood.”

He didn’t need to spell it out: Sheena could have bled to death or she could have got an infection.

Wrapping my arms around myself to beat the chill snaking its way up my back like icy fingertips, we talked about Tanya Baker. If any of the women were destined to be abducted and murdered it would have been her. Tragedy didn’t come close to describing her hellish life. She’d been put into care at the age of four when her heroin addict dad bludgeoned her mum to death with an ashtray and jumped out their high-rise window to his death
leaving little Tanya alone. She had no traceable family.

She’d spent most of her childhood in the care system because she was deemed a problem child and would wake up screaming in the night. Once she’d stabbed an Action Man in the eye with a pair of nail scissors because he was “a bad daddy” before hurling the doll out a window. The words that her various social workers had scrawled in her file time and time again were unplaceable, unstable and unadoptable. By the age of nine, she’d been written off. They stopped trying to place her with a family. God knows the impact that would have had on the kid knowing that she’d never have a proper home.

Were the social workers too overwhelmed by the kids they had in their care to pay attention to one very troubled little girl? That was the question the
Daily Scot
newspaper had asked when they’d printed the leaked notes. Yep, someone had betrayed Tanya again by handing over her confidential files.

Tanya had last been spotted getting into a black Honda Civic. One of the other girls had written down the number plate. It’d been traced back to an elderly schoolteacher; the car had been stolen from outside her home. The vehicle was later found abandoned on waste ground, gutted by a fire. If any of the missing women had been in that car we’d never know.

Tanya Baker was the odd one out of the trio. She never had the chance of a decent life. Not like Suzy or Sheena. And she had nobody to miss her. The police only found out she was missing after a friend claimed Tanya had stolen money from her and went to the station to report the theft. The cases had only been linked because she’d gone missing round about the same time as Sheena and Suzy and was known to walk the same streets.

“What else did your police contact tell you?” I said, then paused and added, “What was his name again?”

Tommy raised his George Clooney eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

He was keeping it a secret. Considering everything we’d gone
through together, he should have been able to trust me. It rankled that he didn’t.

We didn’t have a picture of the fourth missing woman. She’d called herself Kim, but she spoke with an Eastern European accent and the police didn’t know a thing about her, including whether she was really missing. They suspected that she’d been sex trafficked by an Albanian gang. The last time she’d been seen she’d been climbing into a silver BMW with blacked out windows.

“Tommy, how do we know that Kim has even gone missing? From what I’ve read, these sex traffickers often move their “merchandise” around. Makes it tougher for the police to close down their trade in misery.”

I’d done my research. The gangs who trafficked these women were merciless; the girls were their property to be owned and traded and to do with whatever they wanted. Usually they’d been lured to the UK with the promise of jobs in top hotels and restaurants. Only when they arrived, they were stripped of their passports and belongings so they couldn’t leave and ordered to work off “their debt.” For some that meant being placed in brothels up and down the country run my madams who had often originally been sex trafficked themselves and hardened by their experiences. For others it meant working the streets.

Tommy winked at me. “My, Miss Kerr, you have been hitting the books.”

“Treating Kim like she’s missing might ruin our investigation.” Already I was talking like a cop. “There’s also a chance she’s just moved on.”

“Good point. We’ll count her out for now. We don’t even have a picture of her – just a vague description.”

“What?” My tone’s sarcastic. “Your snout can’t help you with that?”

Tommy tutted. “A snout’s a civilian informant. You need to get a handle on this police lingo if we’re gonna do this.”

Of course I knew that: I’d just been winding him up.

Tommy went serious. “You know what you said about Kim? That she might not be missing?” I nodded. “Just because these four sex workers are missing doesn’t mean all the cases are linked. The only ones we know for certain are linked are Suzy Henderson and Sheena Andrews.” He was right. “So, we need to focus on Suzy and Sheena.”

For the first time, he’d used their first names. They were starting to become as real to him as they were to me.

With all the details written down, we decided upon a course of action. There was a slim chance that Sheena might be alive, so we’d start with her parents. We’d pose as the concerned cousins of Tanya Baker to try and get them to speak to us.

There was also a good chance they’d tell us to get lost.