Cold Courage (26 page)

Two hours. In London traffic! I guess that’s better than nothing.

‘Let’s do it,’ Lia said.

Lia opened the door a crack and watched as Elza returned to the other women and suggested that they go straight over to the beauty parlour.

This suggestion surprised them, but no one objected. They could see that Elza had her reasons.

There is no question who their leader is.

The women collected their shopping bags and coats and left the café. Slipping out of the toilet, Lia saw Elza explaining something to the waiting boy. The whole group set off up the escalator to the beauty parlour.

Paddy still gave no sign of knowing her, but Lia heard her mobile beep. The text was from Paddy.

‘Situation resolved?’

Lia controlled her urge to march straight over to talk to him. Someone might still see them. Returning to the toilets, she rang him.

‘No, the situation is not resolved,’ she said. Quickly she summed up Elza’s story.

‘I have to go with her to Sangley Road. I don’t know whether you should come with us. Elza might lose her cool. Can you follow close?’

Paddy asked about the risks of visiting the house, but since it was clear that Vanags only went there in the evenings after closing up the shop, Paddy didn’t see any specific obstacle to their visiting.

‘But you have to remember we don’t have any real information about who is in that house. There could be someone there who isn’t
being held prisoner and they could attack us. Or someone could be surveilling the place from nearby,’ Paddy pointed out.

‘And this time no genius brainwaves,’ he added.

She left the café and made her way down to car park. Paddy kept Lia just in sight as she looked for the beauty salon’s rear door near the loading docks.

Soon Elza appeared at a door. She smiled, but Lia could also see the mixture of fear and tension in her face.

‘For six years I have wanted to do this and been afraid of doing it,’ Elza said.

Quickly Lia directed Elza to the taxi rank. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Paddy head towards his own car.

They found a queue of black taxis and no other customers waiting.

‘I’ve never taken a cab in London. They always take us places in their own cars,’ Elza said.

First they navigated smaller streets to reach the Chelsea
Embankment
and then cross Vauxhall Bridge. Elza watched with dull eyes as the scenery passed.

She looks more resigned than unhappy. People can get used to almost anything.

She asked Elza about her working conditions, quietly so the cabbie couldn’t hear.

Elza and the other women in the flat on Vassall Road had come to London to make money. An elegantly dressed woman with
expensive
jewellery who visited Riga from England, also a prostitute, had promised them they would. Afterwards they had realised that Vanags had hired her to lure them in.

‘I know there are a lot of girls in prostitution who have been forced into it, but we knew what we were coming to London to do,’ Elza said.

What she and the other girls had not known was that they would be forced to live in a virtual prison.

‘Kazis likes to screw three or four nights a week. We just have to put up with it. But we don’t have to sleep with their little thugs. Kazis says we don’t have to. He wants to keep us in good shape.’

They had a few rights, mostly based on practicality. The pimps avoided hitting them so they would look good for the customers. But
there were certain clear limits. You couldn’t tell the clients about yourself. You couldn’t lock doors inside the flat, not even the toilet. You didn’t leave the flat except to visit the corner shop. You couldn’t keep in touch with anyone outside.

‘They have guns, but they don’t have to use them. We know what they can do.’

The conditions for the women in the brothel on Creed Lane were worse.

‘It’s because they’re in the middle of the City.’

‘How is it possible for there to be a brothel there at all?’ Lia asked, surprised.

Where could they maintain a flat like that in amongst all the office buildings and government agencies? And the rents in the area were so high.

‘There are at least a dozen, in basements and back rooms,’ Elza said.

Creed Lane was a pedestrian precinct. Every morning a large, black van drove to one of the buildings there. From it the prostitutes were taken under careful guard to an office where they accepted male clients in two rooms in the back. Customers flowed through the place, including businessmen, lawyers and maintenance workers.

‘The girls’ conditions are terrible,’ Elza said. ‘They have to work like conveyor belts.’

The women were never allowed out of the office, and all they had in addition to the back rooms was a bathroom. Breaks only came occasionally, when the offices in the Square Mile were closed.

That was why Anita Klusa ran away, Elza said. It must have been unbearable there.

When Lia and Elza arrived in Catford, Lia noticed Paddy’s car already parked on Sangley Road. That was when she noticed her uneasiness: the entire taxi ride she had been out of breath, and her heart was racing.

The drive from Shepherd’s Bush had only taken forty-five minutes since it was still the middle of the afternoon. They couldn’t hope for the traffic to hold, so they could stay at the house only for perhaps twenty minutes.

After asking the cabbie to wait, Lia showed Elza number 182.

Elza looked at the covered windows and nodded.

They walked around behind the end-of-terrace house. Lia had decided with Paddy that the back garden was the best way to approach whoever was living there. Lia checked that no one else was in sight as they opened the gate and stepped in.

Slowly they walked up to the back door. Lia moved to the side, up against the wall, and motioned to Elza to do the same. This was one of Paddy’s precautionary measures: if someone discharged a weapon from inside, they would be out of the line of fire.

The house looked completely empty. Blackout curtains covered the windows. None of them even twitched.

Lia had thought about trying to get the attention of those inside by knocking on the door, but Elza got straight to the point.

‘
Labdien
!’ she yelled in a loud voice.

‘Labdien! Te Elza Berklava.’

They waited for a moment. Nothing came from inside.

Elza repeated the greeting as well as her own name.

Silence. Lia looked at the other gardens in the row. The chilly December weather was not luring anyone outside. She saw Paddy standing behind a fence, a few dozen metres away.

Elza looked at Lia and then spoke towards the door again. And although Lia did not understand anything but the name – Daiga – she realised what Elza was relaying.

Daiga was dead.

The silence lasted for a moment. Then suddenly from inside, directly behind the door, came a woman’s cry. Lia did not need any help to understand what was going on.

Time stopped. All that existed was the wail of a mother, a cry of agony choked behind a hand.

Elza placed one of her hands on the door, caressing the dark, painted surface.

She said something in Latvian, comforting Daiga Vītola’s mother.

From behind the door came another voice, a young woman, who said something to Elza.

‘Ausma?’ Elza exclaimed.

Elza spoke feverishly, and someone replied from inside. Questions flew in both directions. Over this exchange of words floated the
mother’s hoarse lamentation, which she continued to attempt to stifle with her hands.

Elza interpreted the conversation for Lia.

The women had been prisoners since the spring. Vanags had brought them there directly. He had told them he would kill them instantly if they attempted to escape, made a noise or did anything else that might make others notice them. Vanags had said that the doors and windows were wired with explosives that would detonate if they tried to get out.

‘But I don’t believe that,’ Elza pointed out.

Lia instinctively took a step back. However, she had to admit that the explosives threat sounded unlikely.

Elza continued the conversation. Daiga’s mother’s name was Henriete and the daughter was Ausma Vītola – Daiga had been using her maiden name in recent years because she wanted to forget her husband.

Henriete and Ausma were not in any distress, but they were very afraid.

Ausma believed that Vanags would force her into prostitution. He had made advances at her several times, but by screaming the women had made him back away. Vanags had announced that if the girl wasn’t any fun, he intended to get his money’s worth for her.

Lia checked the time: already twelve minutes had passed.

She considered what to do. Could Paddy get the grandmother and daughter out of the house? That would take tools and was unlikely to go unnoticed in the neighbourhood.

‘The problem is that if they stay here, Vanags may realise they have been in contact with us. And if we take them away and report it to the police, Vanags could do something to you or the other women on Vassall Road,’ Lia said.

Elza stared at the ground, her face turned white.

‘I don’t believe they can stay quiet about this long,’ she said, motioning at the mother and daughter behind the door.

Henriete asked Elza with whom she was speaking.

‘She’s a Finnish woman, Lia, who wants to help you. She found you,’ Elza replied in English.

Behind the door, they understood.

‘Thank you, Finnish Lia,’ Henriete said in English.

‘We need time to decide what to do,’ Lia said. ‘Tell them they have to wait a little, but we’ll be back soon.’

‘
Nē
!’ Ausma’s shout came straight away. ‘We aren’t staying here!’ she continued in English.

Elza said something to the girl in Latvian, and she quieted down. Lia pulled Elza to the side.

‘Convince them to be quiet just for tonight,’ Lia said. ‘When Vanags comes to bring them food, he mustn’t notice anything. Tomorrow we’ll help them get out.’

I have no idea how we’re going to do it. But do it we must.

The convincing took some time. While Elza calmed Ausma down, Lia phoned Mari and reported on the situation.

Lia looked at the clock on her mobile: twenty-one minutes. They had exceeded their time limit.

‘Now we have to be hard,’ she said to Elza.

Elza nodded. She ordered the women to be quiet and wait.

‘We’re going to come back,’ Lia said, knowing she was saying it as much to herself as to the two women who were to remain behind the locked door.

As they climbed back in the taxi, Elza said nothing. She simply cried.

Lia calculated they were six minutes late already.

‘Please do hurry,’ she said to the cabbie as she asked him to take them back to Shepherd’s Bush. He replied that he would do his best.

As they started back the way they had come, towards the Old Kent Road, Lia wondered at what seemed a circuitous route, but assumed the driver knew his trade. But after travelling for only twenty-five minutes, the traffic took a turn for the worse. Apologising, the cabbie informed them that it appeared an accident on the
roundabout
at Elephant & Castle had snarled up the entire area. There went their timetable.

Lia asked Elza to call her friends at the shopping centre to tell them she was going to be late. Elza did not have a phone – she and the other prostitutes were not allowed anything like that – but she rang the beauty shop on Lia’s mobile. There the staff called one of Elza’s friends to the phone. The conversation was brief.

‘They’ll be fine,’ Elza said after ringing off. ‘They can tell the carder whatever they want. But if Olafs comes looking for us, things will go wrong.’

‘Olafs? Who is he?’

Olafs Jansons was the gangster who ran the women at the Creed Lane brothel. He frequently drove Elza and her friends to the Westfield mall and back to Vassall Road. Elza described Jansons: he was a tough bodybuilding type with a shaven head.

The bald man. Of course he had to come from somewhere.

Jansons was the number-two man in the gang that maintained the Latvian brothels. He had started as a guard but had risen to manage Creed Lane. Above him was only Vanags.

‘I know he’s beaten people to within an inch of their lives,’ Elza said. ‘Customers who didn’t pay and an enforcer from a rival gang.’

The taxi was moving again, but still at a crawl. Lia felt as though her brain couldn’t process all of her questions quickly enough. Where was Paddy?

‘Give me a sec,’ Lia said and rang Paddy.

Paddy answered immediately, informing her that he was just a few cars back and had been watching them the entire time. Lia explained the problem. The line was quiet for a few seconds.

‘How far do you think the budget will stretch?’ Paddy asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Lia replied. ‘Quite a way.’

She thought of Mari and the wealth she never wanted to speak about in specific terms but which seemed elastic enough to allow her to accomplish whatever she wished.

‘All right,’ Paddy said. ‘We’ll stop at the roundabout. There is one faster way to Shepherd’s Bush, but it will cost six thousand pounds. I’m ringing off now. I have a call to make.’

Lia turned back to Elza, whose eyebrows were raised.

‘Now you are just going to have to trust me and my bodyguard,’ Lia said.

At Elephant & Castle, Paddy edged ahead of the cab and led them to a car park, where Lia threw some banknotes at the bewildered driver.

They gathered on the pavement and Paddy pointed at the roof of the next building down.

‘There.’

They ran into the building, one of London’s countless office blocks. In the lobby, Paddy cast about for the lifts and led them to the closest one. They sped up to the topmost floor.

Once there, Paddy went out first, glancing to either side and
nodding
for them to follow. They passed two office doors. All the time, Paddy was scanning for something. Finally he found what he was looking for: a plain door with a sign that read ‘Staff only’.