Price to Pay, A (2 page)

Most men, she suspected, had no idea that most women possessed this ability. That and superior peripheral vision. If the guy two places to her left knew about the vision, he wouldn’t be glancing quite so obviously at her chest. The conversation between the two middle-aged officers at three o’clock carried on.

‘Worrying thing is, I bought my daughter a similar thing.’

‘A refurb?’

‘Yeah – off the internet. Ebay.’

‘Piss cheap?’

‘Absolutely. Don’t get me wrong, it’s quality; she does all her coursework on it. Skypes the wife using its built-in webcam most evenings.’

‘Where’s she studying?’

‘Down in Bristol. Medicine.’

‘And you’ve no idea where it came from originally?’

‘Nope. Some big corporation, I’d assumed.’

‘You assumed. Did you check the hard drive?’

‘Wouldn’t know how to. The place selling it said the memory of every computer is wiped clean, checked for viruses and all that—’

The doors opened and Superintendent Graham O’Dowd made straight for the empty seat at the table’s mid-point. Conversations began to rapidly die.

‘I paid an extra twenty-five quid for a year’s warranty,’ the officer hurriedly whispered. ‘That was it, job done.’ He sat back and crossed his arms. Like every other person in the room, his attention was now on O’Dowd.

The superintendent placed a laptop on the table and switched it on. A moment later, the wall-mounted screen behind him came to life. A cursor started moving about, files opened, slides flashed up and were quickly minimised. The room watched in silence, collectively trying to sneak a preview.

O’Dowd finally looked up. ‘OK, gents – and ladies.’ His flinty eyes settled on Iona for an instant. ‘Apologies to be dragging you in at six in the afternoon.’

Iona glanced at the row of windows: black. How she disliked mid-winter. Dark when you got up, dark when you went home. Only the promise of Christmas four weeks away lifted the gloom.

‘The reason is that things have started to move very fast on this. I’ll start at the beginning; apologies to those of you already up to speed. Three days ago, a final year student at the University of Manchester purchased a refurbished laptop from a seller of such things hawking his wares in the student union. This is the laptop he purchased.’

The image on the wall above him was of a sleek-looking piece of kit. Gun-metal brushed chrome casing, embellished with silver letters: DELL. A tape measure had been placed alongside it to give a sense of scale.

‘Our student takes his new purchase home and – while waiting for it to boot up – has a root through the carry case it came with. Also made by Dell, black leather.’ He brought up a new slide. Like the laptop, the carry case had been photographed from directly above. As O’Dowd had said, it was made from black leather that shone at one edge where the photographer’s flash had caught it. ‘In one of the inner pockets, he finds several sheets of A4.’

He clicked on one of the minimized slides. Iona’s glance rose above the head of her boss. It looked like a profile you might find on a dating web site, but one where all details of the match-making company had been removed. The face of an attractive blonde girl smiled out at the room.

‘Meet Shandy, if that’s her real name, which I doubt it is.’ O’Dowd was now speaking more quietly, his gaze fixed on his screen. ‘As you can see, according to this, Shandy is seventeen. She has blue eyes. You’ll also see her physical measurements listed: height, weight, bust, hips, even feet. You’ll also see at the bottom a more worrying category: the fact she has her own passport.’

The implications started branching out in Iona’s mind. Some kind of escort agency? One that specialized in overseas stuff? Why else would the form mention a passport? Surely an international angle. Trafficking. Did the girl know or had she been duped? She looked happy enough at being photographed. Proud, even.

‘OK, most of you – I would hope – are concluding this is sex trade stuff. You might be thinking the sex trade normally works in reverse: namely, that third-world or eastern bloc girls are trafficked into western countries. And you’d be right.’

The cursor moved down once more and a new slide took over the screen. ‘This is Rihanna, sixteen. A print-out of her profile was also in the carry case.’

Iona looked briefly at the new face on the wall. Pretty, again. The girl had black hair, tied tightly back like Shandy’s. Iona then focused on the final category. No British passport. She went back to the face. Was that a puncture hole in the left nostril? ‘Sir, neither girl is wearing any kind of make-up or jewellery.’

O’Dowd’s hand paused over his keyboard. ‘True.’

Iona felt the attention of her fellow officers shifting to her. Most faces looked at her expectantly, non-judgemental. But a few had that air of anticipation you see on the faces of people watching YouTube clips. The skateboarder going for an overly ambitious jump. The mountain biker losing control on a steep path. For those officers, the demise of their former DCI was all down to Iona. And now they waited eagerly for her to fall. She cleared her throat. ‘I don’t know if the resolution is there, but that could be a hole in her nostril – a piercing.’

The mass of faces turned back to the image.

Iona shrugged. ‘You’d have thought for normal sex-trade stuff, they’d have been made to look … I don’t know … glamorous. Seductive. Those shots seems very plain. More natural.’

O’Dowd tilted his head. ‘Good point. Not sure where it’s going, but good point.’

‘It’s the sort of thing modelling agencies do,’ Iona replied. ‘Test shots for when they’re considering whether to take a girl on.’

As Iona began to jot her own observation down, O’Dowd nodded. ‘I’ll see if our people can confirm if the mark is a piercing. Next up is Aisha.’

Some murmurs broke out before someone spoke from across the table. ‘Christ, Iona.’

She looked up from her notepad at the officer. ‘What?’

Nodding at the screen, he said uneasily, ‘Haven’t got a sister, have you?’

For one crazy moment, she feared it would be Fenella’s face up on the wall. Her eyes cut to the new slide. Of course it wasn’t her, but – oh my God – the officer had been right. The girl was mid-to-late teens, oval-faced, button nose. Even her hair was cut in a similar style to Iona’s collar-length bob. Whereas Iona’s eyes were a striking emerald, the girl’s were a deep and lustrous chestnut. But apart from that …

‘Hard to judge what this one’s ethnicity might be,’ O’Dowd stated.

Iona considered her own: a mix of a Scottish mother and Pakistani father. The resulting skin tone meant people took her nationality to be anything from Spanish to Turkish to Mexican. Iona skimmed the girl’s sheet: she was even five foot three, almost the exact same height. Her eyes continued down to the base of the form. A passport holder.

‘Wasn’t she on the news recently?’ someone else asked.

O’Dowd rested his chin in the crook of his forefinger and thumb. His middle finger began to brush back and forth across his lips. ‘Correct. Can you remember where?’

The officer who’d spoken puffed out his cheeks. ‘
Manchester Evening Chronicle
website? Did she win something …’

‘She jumped off the flyover which crosses the M60 at Denton. It was six fifty-one in the evening, three days ago. She landed in the fast lane and was run over by at least seven vehicles.’

The silence in the room seemed suddenly more intense. A chair made a tiny creak as someone moved their legs. Iona felt coldness wash across her scalp. She could sense eyes on her. She glanced about, causing at least four colleagues to break off their stares. It was creepy.

‘There’s footage from a motorway camera in the central file, but you don’t need to watch it. Not right now, at least,’ O’Dowd announced. ‘Fortunately, about the first thing the student who purchased the laptop did after leafing through the sheets of paper he found was go online. And the first site he clicked on was the
Manchester Evening Chronicle
’s: where he saw Aisha’s face looking back at him.’ He scribed a series of semicircles in the air. ‘Four weeks ago, she went missing from council care and was featuring in the “Have You Seen This Person?” panel the
Chronicle
runs on their site’s homepage.’

He lowered his hand to click on another slide. Another sheet, topped by the words Croydon Social Services. ‘The girl’s real name was Teah Rice, mixed race – mother British, father unknown. The mum’s had another three kids since Teah, all taken into care. The last two as soon as they were born, while the mum was still on the maternity ward. Teah was born in Croydon, south London. Entered the care system aged twelve and was moved to a home just outside Stockport in August. It was assumed she had absconded to head back to her haunts round Croydon. Police down there were keeping an eye out for her. Everyone keeping up so far? Because it’s about to get much, much murkier.’

‘Sir?’

O’Dowd nodded at the officer. It was the one Iona had listened to chatting about his daughter’s laptop before. ‘Why was she up here? Has she got family in these parts?’

‘No. The opposite, in fact. She was moved up here because – thanks to an abundance of cheap, large houses – Stockport is the UK’s number-one choice for care home providers setting up shop. Young people are sent from local authorities all over the country.’

Iona felt herself frown. Stockport was five minutes on the train from Manchester. For kids put into care homes there, what about their existing social networks, their old school or familiar adult faces? She wasn’t the only one to give a sad shake of the head.

O’Dowd sat forward. ‘The purchaser of the laptop – somewhat unsettled, as you would be, by these developments – decides to go back to the person he bought the thing from. He wasn’t quite sure what he was going to ask – considerations which all became irrelevant when he got to the shop the laptop seller had occupied.’ He reached for his keyboard again.

A photograph taken at street level appeared. The bricks above the shop’s main windows were blackened where smoke had billowed out. The flat above it had also been gutted by the fire, judging from the sooty smears trailing away on the wall above window frames that were devoid of glass. The roof had collapsed in at the centre, exposing the charred remains of the rafter at its apex.

‘It’s suspicious,’ O’Dowd stated. ‘The fire investigation officer thinks accelerant was splashed around the ground-floor premises. It’s also a murder scene, since the laptop seller’s body was found on the first-floor landing. This is a bit gruesome.’ He clicked to a new slide. ‘Eamon Heslin – one-time owner of PCs To Go.’

The man’s blackened corpse was arched back, as if he’d died screaming. His hands, bound together at the small of his back, were rigid like claws. The carpet he was lying on was almost completely burned away and the floorboards beneath glistened wetly. Water from the firefighters’ hoses, Iona thought.

‘Despite appearances,’ O’Dowd said, ‘he was probably dead before being incinerated. Muscles and tendons contract with heat, giving that appearance of … well … agony.’

The DCI rested his chin as he’d done before, middle finger flicking up and down. ‘So, we have some profiles suggesting a sex-trafficking ring, but possibly one taking girls from the UK overseas. Teah Rice was in council care. The identities of the other two – the names Shandy and Rihanna will have to do for now – need looking into. Urgently. We have a murdered seller of refurbished laptops.’

‘What was the type of laptop this student purchased?’ asked the officer who’d purchased his own daughter a second-hand model.

O’Dowd consulted his notes. ‘A Dell Latitude, if that means anything to you.’

‘A Latitude? How much did it cost?’

‘Two hundred and seventy-five pounds, with some pirate software, a mouse, keyboard and the leather carry case all thrown in.’

‘For a Dell Latitude?’ the same officer scoffed. ‘I bought my daughter a very basic netbook the other day from one of these internet outfits that sell refurbished gear – and that was three hundred and fifteen pounds with a year’s warranty. Latitudes are top of the range; I’d say it was a knock-off.’

‘It’s now with the Tech department who’re trying to access its hard drive and ascertain where it came from, along with how many other profiles for girls might be stored on it. But I think you’re right: it would suggest our laptop seller took ownership of an item he shouldn’t have. And it would seem the actual owner was very keen to have it back.’

‘Did the shop this Eamon character owned – had it been ransacked?’ The question came from someone sitting behind Iona.

‘The Fire Investigation boys are yet to confirm that. The place was a right shit-heap, apparently. Guts of computers lying everywhere. Shelves full of monitors, crates of gubbins. He built them to order, as well as installing and maintaining systems – plus mending ones with cracked screens and viruses. That sort of stuff.’

He clicked on an interior shot from the shop. It looked like Heslin had a hoarding problem. ‘What didn’t get roasted took a thorough soaking when the firefighters arrived. We’ve sent a team to comb through it, but we don’t expect to recover much evidence from the scene itself.’

Iona half-lifted a hand. ‘Sir, I’m probably missing something obvious here: why is the CTU involved in this? I haven’t seen any terrorist threat so far.’

‘No – you’re absolutely right. The reason why we’re all over this is about to become very clear. Let me bring up the fourth and final profile.’ His hand reached for the keyboard once more.

E
mily Dickinson squinted at the stream of headlights flowing towards her along Oxford Road, hoping for a more substantial pair that would indicate a bus. Wind gusted specks of rain beneath the roof of the shelter and she tried to burrow down more deeply into her duffel coat.

OK, so she knew the weather wasn’t going to be like it was in her home town of Brighton. But the rain up here seemed a near-continual annoyance some weeks. She’d started thinking that, even on dry days, the bloody stuff was there, waiting in the wings for a reappearance.

The duffel coat was the business, though. Far too expensive for her student budget, but what she’d saved through the laptop she’d got off the guy in the student union – what a win! Dad had given her £600 for computer stuff. She’d got a Dell Latitude, all the software she needed and a nice carry case for £300. Even with the £125 she’d spent on the duffel coat, she was still up £175.