Carnal Acts (4 page)

Suzana felt the weight of the man, then his prick. He was the eighth, she reckoned, and it was more painful than usual – as if her body, aware of what she was planning, was resisting the abuse it had become accustomed to. At least the man with long hair and moustache was the one wearing the nipple clamps, but he might soon attach them to her. The street light was making yellow rectangles around the blacked-out glass, but she had no clear idea of the time. Evening, and a lot of noise. Leka had been right. There was some sort of festival going on.

The man grunted and then cuffed the side of her head, saying words she didn’t understand. Except she did. Bitch, whore, cocksucker, cunt. The tone meant they didn’t need translation. She lay still for a moment and then something broke inside her, a zigzag crack across the surface of her mind. Using all her strength to shove him off, she went to the floorboard and pulled it up, then ran back and jabbed the fork at the pig’s groin. He
let out a shriek like a lamb that had been castrated, though she could see the fork hadn’t done that much damage. She stood over him, the weapon quivering as she aimed at his eyes. He curled up in a ball and didn’t see as she grabbed his jacket, the wallet weighing down the breast pocket.

Trying to control her breathing, Suzana opened the door. A burst of noise came from the men on the ground and first floors. Leka was standing on the top step down the hall. She was at him before he realised, ramming the fork into where she hoped his right kidney was and wrenching it out. He screamed and went down the stairs head first, his chin bouncing on the uncovered wood. She ran barefoot over his prone form, waving the fork around and making the men move back – many were dressed as women or what looked like old-fashioned fighters. One of Leka’s pig friends was guarding the next stairs. He stepped forward to see what was going on. She missed his eye, but the fork pierced the side of his forehead. She let it go and it vibrated as he bellowed. That gave her the chance to pull the combat knife from his belt and slash it at him as she slipped past.

It was impossible to calm her heart or regulate her breathing now. She heard herself screech like a witch in the folk tales, men retreating in panic as she headed for the street door. There stood the skinny runt who gave Leka orders, a long knife in his hand. He had once made her stick a finger up his ass before he ejaculated over her breasts.

‘What have you done, shit girl?’ he said, in Albanian. ‘You’re dead meat.’ He made a horizontal cut that drew blood on her upper chest, narrowly missing her neck.

Suzana lowered her head and charged him, straightening her right arm. The knife sank into something soft and she felt an expulsion of breath on her scalp. She tried to pull the knife out but the bastard had a hand on it. Stepping to the side, she screamed again to scare off the nearby men, pushed the bloodied whoremaster aside before pulling open the front door. There were more men on the steps leading to the street. She ran past
them, shrieking, and bounced off a traffic light in the middle of the road. It was only as she made contact that she realised it was someone in a cardboard costume. Then she was running away across the asphalt.

After she turned several corners and found herself in a quiet area, she remembered that she was naked apart from the jacket she had stolen. Naked, with her feet and chest bleeding, but free. Then she heard pounding feet behind her and scrabbled for purchase on a high gate.

Joni kept her distance from the group of young people as they went past the high walls of a run-down factory. It seemed they’d lost interest in the fireworks – or perhaps they knew a good viewpoint down here. She looked over her shoulder. The golden abbey in its shroud of lights was still visible, but not much else of the town centre stood out. The tingling had turned into a more painful prickling sensation, as if insects were crawling around in her brain. There seemed to be some connection with the youth in the traffic light she’d tackled on the embankment. He and his friends turned left behind a dilapidated building. Others followed them. Joni kept her distance as they reached a narrow street of three-storey Victorian buildings that would have been occupied in the old days by people who had worked their way up from the slum housing further out from the centre of Corham. At the far end were the lights of a dingy pub, people standing outside to smoke. About a hundred yards before it, on the
left-hand
side, a crowd of men was gathered on the steps of one of the houses. The crawling sensation in Joni’s head worsened, then she heard a high-pitched scream. A few seconds later the people outside the house, who now included Nick and his mates, parted suddenly and a slim figure appeared.

The woman had tousled black hair that reached down to an over-large leather jacket. She wasn’t wearing anything on the bottom half of her body and her right hand was covered in blood. She shrieked and ran into the cardboard traffic light, then continued in the opposite direction, turning right at the corner thirty yards before the pub. Joni sprinted to the steps and saw a thin man at the top. He was on his back, groaning and clutching a knife in his abdomen. The words he spoke were in a strange language.

‘Nobody move!’ Joni ordered, pulling out her warrant card. In the first few weeks she had felt that it was someone else’s despite the presence of her photograph – she was only gradually getting used to the Pofnee crest. She knelt by the wounded man, aware that people were rapidly taking their leave, brushing past her as she went. ‘I said, nobody move.’ She pointed at the traffic light. ‘Especially not you, Nick. You’re a witness.’

She called the dispatcher at Force HQ and asked for an ambulance, as well as for DI Sutton and the Corham Major Crime Unit. But the tingling was still with her. The woman – she had to find the woman. Looking through the open door, she saw other scantily clad females peering out. It was obvious what the house was. Then a man staggered along the corridor with what looked like the handle of a piece of cutlery sticking out from the side of his brow.

Joni glanced around. Heads down, men were hurrying away, including one with a beard and monk’s robe and another she’d seen recently. She couldn’t keep them all there, but Nick wasn’t going anywhere. She pulled out her cuffs – she never went anywhere without them – and closed one round his wrist and the other round the railing outside the house.

The moment she started after the half-naked woman, the crawling in her skull faded. She was a couple of back streets away from the brothel when there was a series of tremendous cracks and booms. The night sky filled with coloured lights that briefly blinded her: fireworks just when she didn’t need them.

When she could see again, she made out the woman climbing over a high gate and dropping into the dark.

Heck and Ag were in front of the TV, paying minimal attention to the news. After tea, they had played Cluedo and Heck had duly lost. The kids had complained about their bed times, but Ag was firm. In the end they went mildly enough, Cass following them to the foot of the stairs, her tail thumping against the wall. Kat seemed to have made up with her current beau and was all smiles, looking forward to a chapter of Malorie Blackman before she dropped off. She picked Adolf up when her mother turned away and took him to her room. He would sleep half the night on her duvet and then go out the window to crunch baby rabbits’ heads.

David had declined to play, preferring to consume a bottle of murky local ale while reading a book about industrial architecture. He had worked his way up to a low-level management position at the steel works before they were shut down and he hankered after the old times. At seventy-six, he still worked three shifts a week at a DIY store outside Corham. His wife, Olive, had died in 2001 after suffering from emphysema. When Heck had been seriously wounded, David had thought his world would end. But his elder son was tough, even if he wasn’t yet what he had been. Peter, two years younger than Heck, was all right, but he was practising law in Chicago and rarely came home.

‘I’m off,’ the old man said, closing his book. ‘Get to bed, lad. You’re worn out.’

‘Night,’ Heck said, waving a hand. He was glad Ag had agreed that David could live with them after Olive died, but sometimes the old bugger got on his nerves. He had his own sitting room in what had been the cow shed, but he liked company. ‘Don’t forget to brush your hair,’ he called after him.

David laughed. There was no brush in existence that could get through his tangled locks and that was the way he liked it. Heck had threatened to take sheep clippers to him when he was asleep, but he knew his son wouldn’t dare. They lived to take the mickey out of each other and without the thatch Heck would be bereft.

‘Honestly,’ Ag said, squeezing her husband’s arm. ‘I’ve got boys in Year Three who are more mature than you two.’ She smiled and kissed him on the cheek.

‘It was Year Two last week,’ Heck said, returning the kiss.

Ag settled back on the sofa and pulled him closer, then planted her lips on his. ‘Fancy messing around?’ she said, when she came up for air.

Heck frowned before he could stop himself. ‘Well, Mrs Rutherford, this is most irregular.’ In truth, it was. His interest in sex had gone walkabout when he was on sick leave and it hadn’t really returned. On the few occasions they’d made love he struggled to reach orgasm, though he made sure Ag did. She was loving, imaginative, even daring in her suggestions, but he wasn’t able to respond fully. The thirteen years he had on her and the surgical violence done to his gut were undermining him in the worst possible way.

Ag had managed to get his zip open and was doing things with her tongue that most men of his age would have to pay for. And she was definitely having an effect. Then his mobile rang.

‘Ignore it,’ Ag said indistinctly.

But, of course, he couldn’t. He wasn’t on duty, but he was still responsible for major crime across a huge area. And it was May Sunday…

‘Rutherford,’ he said, his voice rising as Ag applied her teeth.

‘It’s Morrie, sir. We’ve got a situation.’

Heck listened to what he was told and hung up. Five minutes later he was in the Cherokee on his way to the scene.

Joni’s breath was even as she took long strides to the gate at the end of the street. The lighting was poor and she couldn’t see a sign of anyone behind the metal bars. She looked around. The houses on both sides appeared to be empty, no lights showing. The residents would be out on the streets. The two-up two-down buildings didn’t have basements so there was nowhere to hide. Besides, she was sure the half-naked woman had gone over. What she found harder to understand was how she’d done that. The gate was at least ten feet high. Joni was pretty sure she could make it, and even made an attempt to jump and grab the top. It would have been hard and she had to get back to the brothel in Burwell Street. Although she wasn’t responsible for Corham major crime, she didn’t want to hand the case over to Morrie Simmons completely.

Then she saw a trail of blood high up on the gate. The young woman hadn’t looked much more than five feet eight. She must have either been as fit as a special forces operative or extremely desperate. Remembering the damage she had done to the men back there, Joni wasn’t sure which applied.

‘Hello?’ she called. ‘Is anyone there?’ She paused, aware how ridiculous she sounded. ‘I can help. Really.’

There was no sound in the derelict factory beyond the gate.

‘Please, listen to me.’ Joni thought of the woman, naked apart from the jacket she had presumably stolen from one of the men inside the house and bloody; perhaps she was injured. ‘I can help. Please, come back.’

Stupid, she said to herself. The poor woman probably can’t even speak English. The others looked distinctly foreign, with their dark complexions and the rings under their eyes. And she’ll be scared of anyone who comes after her.

Then she had a thought. Could the wounded man have been speaking Albanian? She knew that many Albanians understood Italian. She took one of her cards from her wallet, turned it over
and wrote in that language, ‘I can help. Please call me on my mobile number. PLEASE!’ She pushed the card under the gate.

As she jogged back, Joni was struck by an intense sadness. She knew exactly what deprivation and cruelty could do. It was one of the reasons she had joined the Met after Oxford. She was going to help the women, especially the one who had escaped. She was a victim, no matter what she’d done.

Joni, atheist that she was, had always been one for missions.

‘What?’ Heck said, surprised. ‘Joni Pax is down here?’

DI Morris Sutton nodded, his comb over shifting precariously. He was forty-four, overweight and a recently reformed, and
bad-tempered
, smoker. ACC Dickie hadn’t been keen on having him at Force HQ, never mind heading up the MCU in the Corham conurbation, but Heck had insisted when the initial planning was being done. Morrie was a good cop, even if his manner was abrasive and he had problems with women, gays and ethnic minorities. Ruth Dickie’s idea, put into operation when Heck was on sick leave, was that Joni would erode the former and latter of those prejudices, even though she was DI responsible for major incidents outside Corham and thus had a much larger brief. The fact that both Simmons and Pax reported to Heck meant they would have to cooperate. Sutton was Heck’s sop to the Major Crime Unit in Newcastle, where he and Morrie used to work. He wanted to show that Ruth Dickie didn’t get everything she wanted, as well as build bridges with the officers, many of them senior, who resented both his past involvement in the anti-corruption unit and his new position. That was one reason he had declined promotion to detective chief superintendent – the others were that he wanted to stay as close as possible to investigations and that he was unsure how he would perform after he’d been wounded.
He had the impression he’d played into the ACC’s hands. She was building her fiefdom and could exercise more control as he was still only a DCI. It also saved money from her budget.

‘Where is she then?’ Heck asked, looking around. There were few men in the street now, only some locals standing behind the crime scene tape that had been unrolled. The lad in the traffic light was still attached to the wall, but the cardboard box had been lifted off his shoulders. He looked longingly at the bystanders, waving listlessly at another young man who departed shortly afterwards.

‘She went after the woman who wounded the victims,’ Sutton said. ‘I’ve tried her mobile, but she’s not answering.’

‘We’d better organise a search party. The fugitive is probably armed.’

‘People say she wasn’t, at least not any more. What about the knocking shop?’

Heck raised an eyebrow. ‘Forgotten the procedure, Morrie? Search it from top to bottom. There are usually drugs and weapons in these places. This time we might get lucky and find something that’ll incriminate the fuckers who run the dumps.’

‘One of the women said she was from Albania. I think the wounded men were too – they don’t look English – but I can’t get confirmation.’

‘Albanians, eh? Surprise, surprise.’ Clan-based criminal organisations from that country had spread all over England, controlling prostitution and moving into the drugs trade. There had already been some vicious fights with long-established Newcastle gangs. ‘If they’re pimps or heavies, they won’t open their mouths.’

Paramedics had removed the prone figure from the threshold, as well as another man who’d been found unconscious with a punctured kidney at the bottom of the stairs leading to the second floor. Both were alive but urgently needed surgery. The traffic-light boy had seen another man stagger off down the street with a piece of cutlery in his head. A couple of WPCs were looking after the five working girls, none of whom could speak
much English. Social services and the Border Agency had been informed, but would take their time to show up on the Sunday night before a bank holiday.

‘I can squeeze the women,’ Morrie Sutton said. ‘Get them to talk.’

‘Talk?’ Heck said, with a laugh. ‘Know much Albanian, do you? Even if they speak English, they’ll pretend they don’t. Then a lawyer in a sharp suit will turn up and bail them out. Unless the girls identify the men, we won’t be able to prove the scumbags were even involved with the place. You know how scared they’ll be of saying anything. And none of the customers is going to talk voluntarily.’

‘What if we find an interpreter?’ Sutton asked.

‘A lot of them speak Italian.’

Heck turned on his heel. ‘Joni,’ he said. ‘DI Pax. Glad to see you’re still in one piece.’

‘I lost her,’ Joni said, her breathing regular.

‘Didn’t you hear your phone?’ Sutton demanded.

‘I was undertaking a high-speed pursuit, Morrie.’

‘Not high-speed enough.’

‘That’ll do,’ Heck said. ‘What was that about Albanians speaking Italian?’

‘They get Italian TV from across the Adriatic,’ Joni replied. ‘And there’s been a lot of trade between the countries since the end of communism.’

‘A lot of illegal immigrants too,’ Sutton added.

Joni looked at him. ‘And legal ones, would you believe? I spent four months in Bari. Plenty of Albanians actually get their papers sorted and work in the city.’

‘So you think you’ll be able to get something out of the girls?’ Heck asked.

‘I can try. How many are there?’

‘Five,’ Sutton said. ‘Plus the one you let get away.’

‘Shut up, Morrie,’ Heck ordered. ‘All right, we need to make sure social services and the UKBA keep them in the vicinity. In
the meantime, we’ll take them into custody overnight so you can talk to them.’

‘Em, hang on, sir,’ Sutton said. ‘This is a Corham MCU case.’

‘Jesus, Morrie, no one in your team can speak Italian, right?’

‘Don’t think so,’ the DI muttered.

‘While DI Pax has an Oxford degree in the language. With French, if memory serves. What’s your problem?’

Morrie Sutton shook his head. ‘Nothing, sir.’

‘You should be thanking your colleague for her offer of help, not glowering at her.’

‘I’ll wait till she comes up with something useful, if you don’t mind, sir.’

Heck raised his eyes to the night sky.

‘I’d like to have a word with the traffic light too,’ Joni said. ‘He’s about the only witness we’ve got.’ She looked at the faces behind the tape and saw none she recognised. ‘His mates seem to have left him in the shit.’

‘I can handle that,’ Sutton said.

‘Do it together,’ Heck said. ‘Joni cuffed the boy.’

‘And followed him from the town centre.’

Morrie Sutton stared at her. ‘Why did you do that?’

Joni raised her shoulders.

‘Women’s intuition?’ Sutton scoffed.

‘Maybe.’ Joni smiled. ‘You’re forgetting something.’

‘And what might that be?’ Heck asked. He wasn’t a female-cop hater like Morrie, but he didn’t like being strung along any more than the next man.

‘Traffic light – his name’s Nick – didn’t only see the woman close up. He saw the men who came out of the house – the customers. Judging by their rapid departures, I don’t think they want their names in the papers.’ Joni gave Heck a more expansive smile. ‘Who knows? Maybe we’ll catch a town councillor or a paragon of local business who had his pants down.’

Heck exchanged glances with Sutton. Neither of them looked hugely enthusiastic about the prospect.