Hit and Run (4 page)

One night, after they’d silenced the machines, she had heard the howl of a wolf, her blood thrilling at the sound and a prickle of fear at the nape of her neck. She’d never seen a wolf, though her babka, her grandmother, swore they were still there if you looked carefully. Not so many, of course. A lot of the forest had gone now; they’d cut back the tall, dark green conifers, and the wolves and the bears had retreated to the wild places in the mountains.

Marta remembered a trip to the forest for her name day when she was small. She had woken to presents and flowers and cards and her father had borrowed the car from the schoolteacher. The three of them, plus Babka, had travelled for an hour and a half to one of the big lakes. A rare adventure for, apart from that day, Marta couldn’t remember any other such family outings. Sometimes she wondered if it had been a dream. Babka had brought food: soft pierogis filled with lamb and blintz dusted with sugar. When she bit into the blintz and the jam oozed out the wasps had come whining around. Her parents had lit cigarettes and blown smoke at the pests.

They had been able to swim in the lake, the ones closer to home weren’t safe. ‘Chemical soup,’ her father always said. ‘Strip you to the bone and melt your eyes.’ But here the water was clear and silky, achingly cold. As she struggled in, her feet slipping on the muddy stones, Marta felt the cold stun her feet and her calves. She stumbled and fell in, losing her breath at the shock of the icy wave on her back. The lake was filled by the melted ice from the mountains.

The chill water had set her father coughing and she’d had a sudden flight of fear. What if he collapsed? How would they get home? But he smiled at her, through the spasms, nodding his creased red face in reassurance.

Marta’s mother was careful not to get her hair wet, sticking her neck up like a swan and moving her arms gently without breaking the surface. She was the picture of elegance, scolding Marta if she came too close with her whooping and flailing about.

Afterwards, her fingers blue and her teeth chattering, Marta sat wrapped in a scratchy towel eating the last blintz while the adults argued about the government.

Later, she went for a walk with her father, along the lakeside. The air was rich with the sharp scent of pine, the trunks of the trees dotted with the honey-brown clusters of resin. She rolled a piece between her fingers, sticky and crunchy like melting sugar, and sniffed at it.

There was one point where the undergrowth was thicker and a couple of boulders offered a stopping place. Her father paused, leaning his hand on one of the rocks. He tested the air. ‘Smell that.’

Marta breathed in. A foul smell, like fly-blown meat. She felt her gorge rise.

‘Bear.’

Her eyes had widened and her nerves started. What if the bear heard her father coughing? She didn’t want to get eaten by a bear. Not on her name day of all things. Her father obviously agreed and they had made their way back to the women and told them there was a bear about.

Marta shivered in the chilly Manchester night. She listened again. No sound from the other rooms, or downstairs. Everyone asleep. What could she do? Nothing. Maybe Rosa had worked longer, got held up? She tried to settle herself with the explanation but knew it to be feeble. She turned the light off, closed her eyes and pulled the cover up over her head. Resorting to prayer, she rattled off a decade of the Holy Rosary, not because she particularly believed any longer but because the rhythm of the words brought some comfort, distracting her a little from her worries about Rosa.

*****

Janine rang Connie en route to the press conference, while refreshing her make-up in the women’s toilets. She examined her reflection: not bad given her broken nights. Concealer disguised any shadows beneath her large blue eyes.

‘Connie, it’s Janine. There was an accident outside school this morning,’ she told the nanny, ‘a little girl got knocked down. Tom might be upset when you pick him up.’

‘Did he see it happen?’

‘No, thank goodness. But some of them did, it’ll be all round school.’

Janine put her make-up away and slung the bag over her shoulder.

‘How’s the little girl?’

‘Don’t know; she’s in intensive care.’ She used her free hand to open the door. Richard was still waiting for her in the corridor with an official release from the press office. She took it from him, began scanning it as they walked briskly towards the conference room. ‘And I’ll be working late, so–’

‘You know I’m going out?’ Connie interrupted.

‘Yes. I’ve asked Pete to come over for six-thirty.’ Pete was her main fallback now. Her stalwart neighbour and good friend Sarah had moved away for a better teaching job and her parents were getting past the point where she felt able to rope them in as babysitters. Pete worked as an air traffic controller at Manchester Airport. His availability depended on his shift pattern but it only took him twenty minutes to get to Janine’s from work.

‘How’s Charlotte?’ Janine asked Connie.

‘Fine. Sleeping a lot.’

‘Not at night, she isn’t,’ Janine muttered.

Journalists with notebooks, cameras, microphones were gathered waiting for them. Richard and Janine took seats behind a table at the front of the room. Janine read from the prepared statement, ignoring the flashes from the welter of technology pointed at her.

‘This morning the body of a young woman was recovered from the River Mersey. We’re treating the case as murder. She is a white woman, believed to be in her twenties, five foot six inches tall, with a slim build and long dark hair. We think she also has an identifying mark on her right thigh. We would like to appeal to the public to help us find out who she is. If you know of anyone answering that description who has gone missing, then please ring in straight away and let us know.’

She paused and then invited questions.

‘How was she killed?’ A young reporter with severe black clothing and hair to match.

‘How long has she been dead?’

‘Was she drowned?’

Others joined in and Janine raised her hands. She would take them one at a time but there was little she could add to the information she’d already given them. The questions and her ‘no comment’ or ‘we can’t say at this point in time’ were part of the familiar jousting between the force and the media. Keeping relations sweet was essential: inappropriate or inaccurate coverage could seriously hamper their efforts while responsible reporting could generate help and vital information from the general public. All a matter of balance. And Janine reckoned she was good at balance, juggling home and work, seeing all sides of a story keeping the plates spinning. Must be circus blood in my veins, she thought wryly as she nodded to the journalists.

The rest of the afternoon flew by in a whirl of activity, mainly setting up systems to support the enquiry and ensuring everyone knew how to process data so it would be most useful. Information from the teams out in the field would pass to officers here. Everything would be entered in the computers and the most salient facts written up on the boards in the incident room.

At four-thirty Richard took a call from the forensic science lab. ‘She hadn’t been drinking and no evidence of recreational drugs,’ he told Janine.

‘What did we have on stomach contents?’

‘Just partially digested coffee and biscuits.’

‘So she’d not been wining, or dining, or clubbing it.’

Richard began to add the notes to the boards. ‘Domestic then?’ He paused and looked at her, marker in his hand.

‘It’s unusual,’ Janine shook her head, ‘most domestics, they panic. If they do cover their tracks it’s token. This – the weights, the river, the face – it’s very extreme. I know we can’t rule anything out but I reckon there could well be more to it.’

Richard cocked his head inviting her to elaborate.

She shrugged her shoulder. ‘I don’t know. We’ll just have to find out, won’t we?’

Marta knew as soon as the policewoman on the television news began speaking. She felt the skin on her face contract, her ribs tighten, her tongue thicken in her mouth. A falling sensation, as though the ground had staggered beneath her. She was alone in the sitting room, the other girls busy working. They had been jittery all day, ever since Marta told them Rosa hadn’t come back. No one had said very much, just asked the same questions as Marta had: where can she be, is she all right, what has she done?

Marta tried to trick herself again, to pretend it was all a silly mix-up, ludicrous to think it could be Rosa. Then the policewoman said about the mark on her leg and she knew it was true.

Oh, Rosa. She swallowed, gagged a little. Went through to the kitchen to get a drink. The water was clean here, tasting sweet and peaty. Not like home. Home. I was like a rabbit in a cage, Rosa had told her. A two-bedroom house in the suburbs outside Krakow had housed Rosa, her mother, her elder brother, his wife and child and her younger brother. Rosa slept in the living room. I couldn’t breathe, she had said. No space to turn round, no privacy. Like Marta, she had tried to get work but there were so few jobs, and the ones she could go after were poorly paid, the conditions miserable. Packing, cleaning, waitressing. Rosa had dreamed of another life. A job that paid for some nice clothes, a bedroom, independence. It wouldn’t happen in Poland but in Italy, the UK, Germany …

Marta steadied herself against the sink, looked out across the red brick walls of the backyard, the roofs opposite with their TV aerials and chimneys. Pigeons clustered on one.

As Marta had before her, Rosa had asked around – did anyone know of work in the UK? Scraping together enough to pay her passage, she had arrived nine months after Marta; came in the same way. A lorry from Krakow market to Prague. At a place near there, a service station, they had transferred to a minibus. Ten of them in all, in Marta’s group. Giggling and excited but falling quiet whenever they saw a police car or approached a border. Coming in from Poland they didn’t need visas. Once they were through customs the driver, a sullen man called Josef, took their passports back. The boss would keep these until their resettlement fee had been paid. He had arranged jobs and accommodation for the girls.

Marta had known dancing was a euphemism from the start. But what did it matter? If you switched off while you were working, avoided trouble with the clients, it was only a job. Inside too, not like picking fruit for ten hours a day like some did, stooped over in all weathers or working in an unheated shed packing meat or stinking fish. Marta sent a little money home knowing it made a real difference and she saved a little. One day she would move on. This was just the bottom rung but it didn’t mean she’d be stuck here for the rest of her life.

The police didn’t know the woman from the river was Rosa – would they find out? What if they came here? What if they found Marta and the others? The thought brought a swirl of nausea with it, a sour wash at the back of her throat. She raised the tumbler and drank again, her fingers pressed tight and pale around the glass.

*****

At six o’clock Janine turned off her laptop, packed her bag and turned off the lights in her office. She found Richard in the incident room. Several DCs were still staffing the phones and taking calls a result of the appeal for information. A cleaner was emptying bins and clearing away paper cups and food wrappers from some of the desks.

Janine shrugged into her coat. ‘Right, I’m calling home and then I’ll be at the hospital.’

It was dark now and from the office they could see the city lights: the red neon letters spelling out CIS at the top of that tower, the stacks of office blocks with row after row of rectangles aglow, below and in between glimpses of streets smothered in the haze of orange street lights and strung with the endless pulse of white headlights and red tail lights.

‘You’ve not heard anything?’ he asked her.

Janine shook her head. ‘Don’t know whether that’s good or bad.’ She’d rung an hour ago and been told there was no change.

Shap came over, his eyes bright, eyebrows raised. ‘Think we’ve got something on the murder, boss. Several calls coming in about a woman, Rosa, worked at the Topcat Club. Never showed up last night.’

‘You’ll take a look?’ she said to the two of them.

Richard nodded.

‘Place in town, back of Victoria Station, belongs to a Mr Sulikov,’ Shap said. ‘Couple of the callers wouldn’t leave their names but we’ve one from another dancer there.’

‘Dancer?’ Janine queried.

‘It’s a lap dancing club.’ She could see Shap fight to keep the grin from his face. ‘Someone’s got to do it, I suppose.’

Janine was halfway down the corridor that housed the intensive care wards when she spotted Debbie and Chris Chinley in the parents’ lounge.

Debbie was small, petite, fine-boned. She had large brown eyes and black, curly hair, Ann-Marie her spitting image. By contrast Chris was a stocky man, big-boned with huge hands, a thick neck and something of a boxer in the square shape of his face. He nearly always had stubble around his chin – the sort of man who had to shave twice a day. Both worked tirelessly for the PTA at school. And Debbie was one of the parents who volunteered to help read with the children who needed extra support.

Now they sat side by side. Chris had a bleak, blank look on his face while Debbie’s was hidden in her hands, though Janine could see her shoulders jerking. Janine’s stomach clenched. Bad news.

Janine knocked lightly on the door and went in. Chris gazed at her, shook his head. The man looked absolutely desolate.

‘I’m so sorry.’ Janine went to sit beside Debbie who looked up, her face smeared with tears and make-up, her nose swollen, lips cracked.

‘I’m so … so sorry.’ Janine repeated.

Debbie, tearing a soggy tissue in her fingers, turned to her. ‘They said they did everything they could but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough.’ Her voice rose and faltered. Janine put her arms round her. Could there be anything worse, she thought? She blinked hard and listened to the woman weep.