Strange Affair (37 page)

Susan Browne arrived in Eastvale from Derby at four o’clock, just after Annie had left for the station, bearing the positive fruits of the very discreet DNA comparison, and more.

She told Templeton on their way to Roger Cropley’s house that DI Gifford had made inquiries at Cropley’s software firm in London and found that he regularly left late on Fridays and that he had left late on Friday the twenty-third of April as there had been an office party that evening to celebrate a lucrative new contract.

Cropley was clearly not thrilled to see the two detectives on his doorstep late that afternoon. He tried to shut the door, but Templeton got a foot in. “It’s better if you let us in,” he said. “Otherwise I’ll stay here while DS Browne goes for a search warrant.”

Cropley relaxed the pressure on the door and they entered, following him into the living room. “I don’t know why you
won’t leave me alone,” he said. “I’ve told you time after time I know nothing about any murders.”

“You mean you’ve lied time after time,” said Templeton. “By the way, this is DS Browne. She’s come all the way from Derby just to talk to you. Say hello.”

Cropley said nothing, just stared at Susan Browne. She sat down and smoothed her skirt. “Mr. Cropley,” she said, “I’ll come right to the point. When DC Templeton here first came to me with his suspicions, I was skeptical. Now I’ve had time to think about things and make a few inquiries, I’m not too certain.”

“What inquiries?”

Susan slipped a folder out of her briefcase and opened it. “According to my information, you left your office in Holborn at about eight o’clock on Friday, the twenty-third of April this year.”

“How do you know that?”

“Is it true?”

“I don’t remember. How can you expect me to remember that far back?”

“It’s true according to our evidence. That would put you at Trowell services around the same time as Claire Potter.”

“Look, this is absurd. It’s nothing but circumstantial.”

“On two other occasions you left late,” Susan went on reading, “two other women were either followed or assaulted shortly after leaving the M1.”

“I haven’t assaulted anyone.”

“What we’re going to do, Mr. Cropley,” Susan went on, “is take you down to the police station for further questioning. There you will be fingerprinted and photographed and a sample of your DNA will be taken. Once we have –”

The door opened and Mrs. Cropley walked in. “What’s going on, Roger?” she demanded.

“They’re harassing me again,” Cropley said.

His wife looked at Susan and Templeton, then back at her husband, an expression of scorn on her face. “Maybe you deserve it,” she said.

“Do you know something, Mrs. Cropley?” Templeton asked.

“That’s between me and my husband,” Mrs. Cropley said.

“A woman has been murdered,” Susan said. “Raped and stabbed.”

Mrs. Cropley folded her arms.

Susan and Templeton looked at one another and Susan turned back to Cropley, who had gone ashen. “Once we have the photographs we’ll be showing them to every worker in every café and petrol station on the motorway. Once we have your DNA we’ll compare it with traces found at the scene of Claire Potter’s murder. You might have thought you were thorough, Mr. Cropley, but there’s always something. In your case it’s dandruff.”

“Dandruff?”

“Yes. Didn’t you know we can get DNA from dandruff? If you even left one flake at the scene, we’ll have it in the evidence room and we’ll be testing it.”

Cropley looked stunned.

“Anything to say?” Susan went on.

Cropley just shook his head.

“Right.” Susan stood up. “Roger Cropley, you’re under arrest for suspicion of the murder of Claire Potter. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

As Cropley walked out, head hung low, between Browne and Templeton his wife turned her back and stood in the centre of the room rigid as a statue, arms still folded.

Annie was half an hour late as she made her way through the crowded pavements of Covent Garden to the restaurant Dr. Lukas had mentioned on Tavistock Street. She had just missed the 4:25 and as the 5:05 was a slow train she had to catch the 5:25, which arrived on time at 8:13. On the train, she rang Dr. Lukas at the centre, but was told the doctor wasn’t there that day. She left a message, which she couldn’t be sure Dr. Lukas had received, and then she had phoned the restaurant to leave a message there, too. She also rang her usual hotel to book a room for the night. The desk clerk recognized her name and voice and got so chatty it was embarrassing.

Well, Annie thought as she dashed into the crowded restaurant, Dr. Lukas had said she would be waiting, and there were worse places to wait. She spotted the doctor at a corner table and made her way over. It was a small restaurant with intimate lighting and white linen tablecloths. A blackboard on the wall listed specials and wine suggestions. There was music playing, but it was so faint Annie couldn’t make out what it was. It sounded French, though.

“Did you get my message?” she asked, sitting down and catching her breath.

Dr. Lukas nodded. “It’s all right,” she said, tapping the paperback she was reading. “I have my book. I was prepared to wait. They know me here. They are very understanding.”

Annie browsed the menu, which was decidedly traditional, and decided on ratatouille. Dr. Lukas had already settled on
bouillabaisse. Once they’d got their orders in, the doctor poured Annie a glass of Chablis and topped up her own.

“I’m sorry I made you come all this way,” she said, “but I couldn’t possibly tell you over the telephone.”

“It’s all right,” said Annie. “I had to come back anyway. You’re going to tell me everything?”

“Everything I know.”

“Why not tell me before?”

“Because the situation has changed. And things have gone too far.”

The waiter appeared with a basket of bread and Annie broke off a chunk and buttered it. She hadn’t eaten on the train and realized she was starving. “I’m listening.”

“It’s very difficult for me,” Dr. Lukas began. “It’s not something I’m proud of.”

“Helping the girls?”

“Not that so much. If I hadn’t done it, who would?”

“Is it about Carmen Petri?”

“Only partly. To understand what I have to say, you have to know where I come from. Lviv is a very old city, a very beautiful city in many ways, with many fine ancient buildings and churches. My mother was a seamstress until arthritis made her fingers no more use. My father was a mining engineer. My parents remember when Jews were rounded up and killed by the Germans in the war. You hear about the massacre at Babi Yar, near Kiev, but there were many, smaller massacres elsewhere, including Lviv. My parents were lucky. They were children then and they hid and were not found. When I lived there, Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union. I grew up in a modern part of the city, ugly Stalinist blocks. We were poor and ill-fed, but there was a strong sense of community, and sometimes you could even believe in the ideals
behind the reality of the revolution. When Ukraine became an independent state in August, 1991, things were chaotic for a while. Nobody knew what was going to happen. That was when I left.”

Annie listened, interested in Dr. Lukas’s story but curious as to where it was leading. Before long, their food was served and Dr. Lukas poured more wine. As if reading Annie’s mind, she smiled and said, “You might be wondering where all this is going, but please indulge me.” She talked more about her childhood, the state school, unsanitary living conditions, her ambition to become a doctor. “And here I am,” she said. “Ambition fulfilled.”

“You must be very proud.”

Dr. Lukas frowned. “Proud? Yes. Most days. Then about a year ago a man came to see me at my home. I remembered him from school, from the building in Lviv where his family lived, close to mine. He said he had heard I was a successful doctor here through his parents, who had read an article about me in the local newspaper. It’s true. Many people left Ukraine but their stories continue to be of interest to those who have not experienced the world outside.”

“What did he want?”

“When he was at school he was a bully. When he got older he and his gang terrorized the building we lived in, extorting money, burgling apartments, selling black-market goods. Nobody was safe from him. Then suddenly he was gone. You can imagine how relieved we all were.”

“But he turned up here, in London?”

“Yes, he told me he travelled all around Europe, learning the ways of the free world, the free economy, and his training in Lviv served him well.”

“He’s the man who sends the late girls to you, isn’t he?”

Dr. Lukas said nothing for a moment. She had turned pale as she was talking, Annie noticed, and her bouillabaisse sat mostly uneaten in front of her. Finally, she whispered, “Yes. That’s what he is now. A pimp. When he first came to see me it was because one of his girls had problems with her periods that made her unreliable. Then he realized what a good idea it would be for me to be their unofficial doctor, so to speak. And that was the start of it all.”

“And this has been going on for a year?”

“Yes.”

“And how many girls have you seen during that time?”

“Maybe fifteen, sixteen.”

“All pregnant?”

“Most. Some had sexually transmitted infections. One had a bad rash in her pubic area. One girl was bleeding from her anus. Whatever it was, he sent them to me at the centre after it was closed for the day. I would get a phone call telling me to stay late.”

“Why did you help him?” Annie thought she knew the answer to the question as she was asking it, but she needed to hear it from Dr. Lukas. A noisy party across the room broke into gales of laughter.

Dr. Lukas looked over at them, then she turned to face Annie, her expression sombre. “He told me he would kill my parents back in Lviv if I didn’t do as he said or if I told anyone. I know he can do it. He still has contacts there.”

“What’s changed?”

“My parents are no longer in Lviv. They have left for America to live with my brother in San Francisco. I was waiting to hear confirmation that they have arrived. They telephoned me today.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t care about me,” said Dr. Lukas. “Besides, he’s not going to hurt me. I’m far too useful to him alive.”

“If it’s any consolation,” Annie said, “he’ll be in jail.”

Dr. Lukas laughed. “Yes,” she said. “Running his empire from a cell. And on the outside someone will replace him. Another monster. The world has no shortage of monsters.” She shook her head. “But it’s gone far enough. Poor Jennifer…that man…”

“Roy Banks was his name. What about Carmen Petri?”

Dr. Lukas gave Annie a curious look. “That was the beginning of the end, really. Carmen.”

“What do you mean?”

“Until Carmen, I could turn a blind eye, could even believe that what I was doing was good and that the girls had better lives as prostitutes here than they would in their wartorn villages and towns back home. I didn’t know the truth. Like everyone, I thought they chose to do what they did, that there must be something wrong with them to start with, something bad about them. I was naive.”

“How did Carmen change this?”

“The girls wouldn’t talk. I asked them about their lives but they refused to tell me anything. They were too scared. Carmen…she was a bit more confident, more intelligent…I don’t know. Perhaps it was even Jennifer, the way she was kind to her. Whatever the reason, Carmen did let something slip.”

“What was that?”

“She told me that one of the new girls had been locked in a small room and beaten because she refused to perform some vile sex act. She also told me that the girl had been on her way home from school in a small village in Bosnia when two men abducted her by knifepoint and forced her into prostitution. She was fifteen. That was the first time I realized that these girls
didn’t start out one step from prostitution in the first place, that there was nothing ‘bad’ about them. They were normal girls, like you and me, and they were forced to do what they do. Like me, they fear for their families back home. Those who have families. These poor girls…. He has them smuggled from Bosnia, Moldavia, Romania and Kosovo. Many are orphans because of the wars. When they have to leave the orphanages at sixteen they often have no money and nowhere to go. His men are waiting for them on the doorstep. The girls are terrified of him. They won’t talk about what happens, but I’ve seen bruises, cuts sometimes. I didn’t ask questions, and I am not proud of that, but I saw. Then Carmen…she spoke out.”

“When was this?”

“A week last Monday.”

“What happened to her?”

“Nothing, as far as I know.”

“She’s not dead?”

“I don’t think so. I can’t see why she would be.”

“But if they thought she told you and Jennifer what was really going on…?”

“I don’t think they knew what she told us, and she’s too valuable to them.”

“But they must have found out something,” Annie said. “Jennifer and Roy Banks are dead. When Jennifer told Roy, he must have started digging, asking questions. He had contact with people who…well, let’s just say he knew criminals.”