Big Sky Read online

  He’d given her a Patek Philippe last year for her birthday, the real McCoy, bought it in a jeweler’s in Leeds. The man behind the counter was suspicious of his cash, but he explained it away by saying he’d won on an accumulator bet. “A Yankee at Redcar,” he felt it necessary to elaborate. The watch cost a small fortune. You could have bought a whole terrace of houses in Middlesbrough for the same price. Could probably have bought Middlesbrough itself, if you’d been so inclined. He told Rhoda it was a fake that a client had brought back for him from Hong Kong. Rhoda had only worn it once, said it was too obvious that it wasn’t genuine. (“And stop buying me watches, for heaven’s sake, Andy. I’ve only got one wrist and it’s you that has the problem with timekeeping, not me.” She had two wrists, he thought, but didn’t point that out.)

  “Oh, and by the way,” Rhoda said, “I forgot to tell you, because you came in so late last night…” She paused to make the point.

  “Yeah, yeah. Very sorry et cetera. What?” he prompted. “What did you forget to tell me?”

  “The police were looking for you yesterday.”

  “The police?” he repeated cautiously.

  “Yes, the police. Two detective constables. Girls. Looked like they should be in primary school. They came by in the morning and then they were back again in the evening.”

  “I wonder what that could have been about,” Andy murmured, reaching for the coffeepot again. He noticed a little tremor in his hand as he poured. He wondered if Rhoda saw it.

  “Maybe they think you murdered Wendy,” she said.

  “What? I didn’t kill Wendy!” he protested.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure? Of course I’m sure. I haven’t seen her in weeks.”

  “You daft ha’p’orth,” Rhoda snorted with laughter. “I was joking. Do you honestly think they’d suspect you? They said something about paperwork. Have you not been paying your parking fines again?”

  “Yeah, that was probably it.”

  “Or maybe they were asking about Vince—you know, if you’d seen him. You were drinking with him, weren’t you? Night before last? You might be able to provide an alibi.”

  “You think they suspect Vince?”

  “Well, it’s usually the husband, isn’t it?” Rhoda said.

  “Is it?”

  “Those sausages are about to catch, by the way.”

  “But Vince? Surely not.” He removed the sausages from the grill, scorching his fingers. “I don’t think he’s got it in him. Wouldn’t have the nerve, would he?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Rhoda said. “I’ve always thought Vince was a bit of a dark horse.”

  “Really?”

  “It was pretty nasty—her head was bashed in with a golf club. She was found in the back garden, wearing next to nothing. Makes you wonder what she was up to.”

  “How do you know all this?” Andy puzzled.

  “Trish Parker,” Rhoda said. “She’s the mother of one of the blokes that discovered the body. She’s in my book club.”

  “Your book club?” Andy didn’t know which was more startling—that Wendy Ives had been murdered or that Rhoda was in a book club.

  “First rule of book club,” Rhoda said, “there is no book club. Are you going to let that toast burn as well?”

  So that’s the full English for you, Squire, or the full Yorkshire, as we like to call it here,” Andy said, delivering a plate weighty with the promise of a heart attack to the man in Lundy. “And for your good lady, two perfectly poached eggs. Free-range, organic, sourced from a farm up the road.” (Or Morrisons supermarket, as we also like to call it, he thought.) What did the police want? His stomach was flip-flopping with fear and the smell of the eggs wasn’t helping. The performance of breakfast bonhomie wasn’t coming as easily as it usually did.

  Had the police been in touch with Tommy as well? As soon as he could, he darted out into the hallway and called him, but his phone went straight to voicemail. Before he could think of a message to leave he heard a shriek coming from the breakfast room, closely followed by Rhoda’s shrill hulloo as she hunted him down.

  “Andrew! For Christ’s sake, you gave one of the lesbians black pudding!”

  It took Andy nearly three hours to get to Newcastle. A truck had shed its load on the A19 and the police were still directing traffic around the carnage of white goods. He felt a twinge of sympathy for the big cardboard boxes that were scattered along the hard shoulder like so many fallen soldiers. One box had split open to reveal a washing machine lying forlornly, battered and bruised. It made him think of Wendy Ives, her head bashed in with a golf club.

  What kind of club? he pondered idly as he crawled past the shamble of boxes. What would he choose himself for that kind of job? A wood, perhaps, but then you wouldn’t be looking to drive Wendy’s head any distance onto the fairway, would you? A short iron might be best, an eight or a nine? He decided on a putter. The thin end of the wedge, he thought. Would crack a skull like an egg. His thoughts were interrupted by the sudden realization that it was a Holroyd Haulage truck that had lost its cargo. Tommy would give that driver hell.

  Andy tried Tommy again, but he still wasn’t answering his phone.

  He felt as though he’d already put in a long shift by the time he was hustling Jasmine and Maria out of the Quayside flat and into his car. Their belongings seemed to have bred overnight in the dark and it took him forever to load all their stuff into the trunk. His phone rang with a number he didn’t recognize and he let it go to voicemail.

  They’d hardly gotten going before he had to stop at a service station and buy them burgers. He had one himself because his stomach was howling with hunger, having been cruelly deprived of its bacon sandwich, but the burger only served to make him feel more queasy. He took the opportunity to listen to the voicemail. A Detective Inspector Marriot needing a quick chat with him. If he could call her back? No, he couldn’t. Hadn’t Rhoda said that the police who were around at the house were constables? And now an inspector was calling? He was beginning to feel hounded. He tried Tommy again, but he still wasn’t answering his phone—either of them. He had a bad feeling and it wasn’t just on account of the burger. Why was the long arm of the law reaching out for him?

  They passed the Angel of the North and he pointed it out to Jasmine and Maria, “That’s the Angel of the North, girls,” as if he were a tourist guide. They oohed and aahed a bit as if they understood.

  Was it male or female? he wondered. Angels were sexless, weren’t they? Andy liked to think the Angel was standing over him protectively, but in reality he supposed it was standing in judgment. Really, if he hadn’t been driving he would have put his head on the steering wheel and wept at the pointlessness of it all. “Soon be there,” he said, grinning encouragingly at them in the rearview mirror.

  He had to stop again at a Roadchef outside Durham so the girls could go to the toilets. While he was waiting he bought bars of chocolate and cans of Fanta, which seemed to be their drink of choice. They took forever in the Ladies’ and for one paranoid moment he wondered if they’d absconded, but they returned eventually, giggling their heads off and chattering in their incomprehensible language.

  “Can I offer you a cold beverage, ladies?” he said with ironic chivalry after he’d herded them back into the car. More giggling.

  They reminded him of a Thai girl he knew in Bangkok a couple of years before he married Rhoda. She laughed at everything he said, admired everything he did. It made him feel like the most amusing, interesting man who ever lived. It was all an act, obviously, but did that matter?

  He’d thought about bringing her home, marrying her, having kids—the whole shebang. It hadn’t worked out, though. “Changed my mind,” he told Tommy at the time. The truth was that it was the girl who’d changed her mind. She had one of those weird Thai nicknames—Chompoo. Something like that, anyway. Shampoo, Tommy always called her. Tommy was out there with him at the time, they were dealing with “the Retreat,” as they’d
always referred to it, although in fact it had no name, just a street number on the outskirts of Pattaya. Chompoo was a Buddhist nun now, apparently.

  Tommy had gotten involved with Bassani and Carmody a few months before Andy had been drawn in. He’d been doing a bit of protection work for them—he was still in the ring at the time and he was a handy pair of fists if they got themselves into trouble. A heavy, a “minder.” Nowadays he refrained from the dirty work. He had a couple of “deputies,” as he called them—a couple of sociopathic thugs called Jason and Vasily. Andy always presumed Vasily was Russian but he’d never been interested enough to inquire. They did anything that was asked of them. It was disturbing.

  The so-called Retreat in Thailand had been a place for Tony Bassani and Mick Carmody and their like-minded friends and acquaintances to go and “relax.” A lot of those friends and acquaintances were in high places, exalted, even—at least one judge, a chief magistrate, a handful of local councilors, senior policemen, barristers, an MP or two. At the Retreat they could indulge themselves with a compliant, docile local population. Perhaps “compliant” and “docile” weren’t quite the right words. Abused and exploited, maybe. Underage kids mostly—they were ten a penny out there. And at the end of the day, Andy had justified to himself, nobody was holding a gun to their heads. Except that one time, but that was best forgotten. That had been the beginning of the end for Tommy and Andy. “Time for a sharp exit, don’t you think?” Tommy said.

  Andy had never met any of them, not even Bassani and Carmody themselves. Sure, he’d seen them at the Belvedere—on the green, in the clubhouse with their wives on a Saturday evening—but introductions were not made, discretion being the order of the day.

  It had been Bassani and Carmody’s solicitor who approached Andy. He was an ambitious greenhorn of a bloke who’d only just finished his articles. Bassani and Carmody had recently jumped ship from an older, established legal firm and presumably the pair of them chose the new guy because he was keen on money and not at all keen on moral scruples. He’d acted for them in a conveyancing dispute and they’d “liked the cut of my jib,” he said.

  His clients, he told Andy, needed a travel agent and he would be acting as their intermediary. “Fair enough,” Andy said. He thought the solicitor was a bit of a pillock. (Andy had a good ten years of maturity and cynicism on him.) The bloke was acting as if he was in the mafia and Al Capone was his client. This was the late nineties and, if anything, he reminded Andy of Tony Blair. Smooth hail-fellow-well-met Teflon type. His clients, he said, wanted to set up a holiday property, a retreat from their stressful lives in the UK. They and their friends would need their travel arranged. He was doing the paperwork (“the legals”) and he was looking for someone to do the legwork out there.

  “Like a real estate agent?” Andy puzzled.

  “Kind of,” the solicitor said.

  “So,” Andy said, “where do these clients of yours fancy for this holiday property? Benidorm? Tenerife? How about Ayia Napa—that’s increasingly popular.”

  “We were thinking Thailand.”

  “Oh, very exotic.”

  “Well, they’re gentlemen with exotic tastes. We’d like you to go out there and have a look.”

  “Me?” Andy said.

  “Yes, you,” Steve Mellors said.

  The property was not to be in their names, Steve Mellors informed him, Bassani and Carmody had a company for the purpose—SanKat—which sounded like a hygiene company to Andy’s ears, one of those where they went in and changed the roller towels in the Gents’ or emptied the contents of “feminine hygiene” bins. It was years before he learned that it was an amalgam of the names of their eldest daughters—Santina and Kathleen. You had to wonder about that.

  Andy knew who Bassani and Carmody were, of course. Everyone did. They were influential all the way along the East Coast, fingers in lots of pies. Bassani the ice-cream emperor, Carmody the owner of amusement arcades and funfairs. They were in local government, well known for their charity work, Carmody had even been Lord Mayor for a term, clanking and swanking around in his regalia. They were the kind of men who wore gold signet rings on their fat fingers and had more than one flatteringly tailored dinner jacket hanging in their wardrobe. The kind of men people fawned over because they do you favors—building warrants, planning permissions, liquor licenses, private-taxi-hire contracts—it was all in their purview, for a price. Sometimes that price was silence.

  Andy hadn’t known much about the other stuff, the earlier stuff that had formed the basis of their trial. The “parties,” the kids. He knew now that there was a lot more that hadn’t come out, a lot of people in their circle who hadn’t been identified. Years of wrongdoing, going all the way back to the seventies and eighties. All those friends and acquaintances in high places had been trading kids with each other for years. Untouchables. Were they the men that Carmody was supposedly getting ready to name now? Most of them were dead—perhaps that was why he was prepared to talk.

  It was years after the Retreat had been disposed of that Bassani and Carmody were arrested, and by then Andy and Tommy had cut themselves free and no one ever discovered the connection between them. Steve too, of course, had long since ceased to be their legal counsel. When they went to trial they had a pair of North Square wankers defending them in court and there was no sign of the young solicitor who used to handle their affairs. They kept schtum, named no names, and Andy wondered if it was because they were afraid of retribution—on themselves or their families. They’d dealt in some nasty business with some powerful men over time, the kind of men who could easily arrange for you to be accidentally knifed in a prison shower.

  During their trial there’d been rumors flying all over the place. A “little black book” was one of them, but no one had ever produced it and no one ever discovered the names of those men who had traded kids for decades, men who had gathered in each other’s houses for “special parties.” But Andy knew their names because he’d arranged their travel when they’d flown in and out of Bangkok. He’d seen their passports. He had photocopies. And he’d kept all the paperwork. You never knew when you might need insurance. The little black book. Not little, nor black, nor a book, but a computer file, on a memory stick, hidden with Andy’s overflow of cash in the attic of the Seashell.

  After they had parted company with Bassani and Carmody, the three of them—Steve, Tommy, and Andy (the Three Musketeers, Steve called them, stupid name)—had started with the girls.

  Anderson Price Associates was Steve’s idea. A recruitment agency, legit-looking, “completely kosher.” Just girls, because there was always a demand for girls, always had been, always would be. Not job lots. Bring them in one at a time, two by two at the most, like on the ark. Straightforward trade, no small children, no refugees. Just girls.

  Tommy was quick to agree, but then he thought the sun shone out of Steve’s arse, for some reason.

  Andy hadn’t been so sure, but Tommy said, “Don’t worry so much, Foxy, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.” And it was.

  Anderson Price Associates was the official shiny recruitment face of the operation. Andy’s firm, Exotic Travel, funneled the girls into the country. Supply and demand, that was the foundation of capitalism, wasn’t it? They had girls coming out of their ears. “Exponential,” Steve said.

  They weren’t press-ganged or shanghaied off the street, they came of their own free will. They thought they were coming to real jobs—nursing, accountancy, care homes, clerical work, translators, even. People sold bread or shoes or cars. Anderson Price sold girls. “It’s just business,” Tommy shrugged. “No different to anything else, really.”

  Anderson Price Associates, in the shape of Steve, recruited them on Skype from what he referred to as his “second office.” It was a trailer really, a mobile home on an old site of Carmody’s, but it was impressive, right down to the authentic background noises of a busy office.

  A lot of the girls had skills and qualifications. Much goo
d that did them once they were shackled to an old hospital bed in Silver Birches and being forcibly injected with drugs. Steve called it “breaking-in,” as if they were horses. After that they were distributed. Sheffield, Doncaster, Leeds, Nottingham, Manchester, Hull. The choice ones to contacts in London, some even found their way back into Europe. The white slave trade, alive and well in the new Jerusalem.

  And, after all, who was going to suspect a bunch of middle-aged white blokes in a seaside town? The focus for the police, for the security services, was elsewhere—Asian pedophile gangs, Romanian slavers. So here they were, hiding in plain sight, supplying the limitless needs for sex in pop-up brothels, saunas, and places that were even less legitimate, less salubrious. (You wouldn’t think that was possible, but it was.) Trade was good.

  Figures were meticulously kept, all the accountancy done beneath the cloak of the dark web. Anderson Price Associates was the umbrella that oversaw everything, but Anderson Price was, essentially, just Steve. The thing about Steve was that he enjoyed the game—the power and manipulation and lies, he enjoyed fooling the girls. That old mobile home of Carmody’s was more like a hobby to him—a refuge too, perhaps. Other men had sheds or allotments, Steve had the mobile home.

  They stopped again at a Sainsbury’s Local on their way into town and he bought the girls a Ginsters pasty each and more Fanta, and some rancid coffee for himself. He couldn’t believe how much they could eat. “Hollow legs, eh, girls?” he said. Still, he thought, they probably weren’t going to get much from now on, may as well treat them. They twittered something unintelligible in response that he supposed translated as gratitude. He could feel his unlooked-for conscience trying to push its way out of the darkness and into the light. He pushed it back down and said, “Here we go, girls, we’ve reached our final destination,” as the sprawling, dilapidated building that was Silver Birches came into view.