Big Sky Read online

  Nadja had been roused by something and then she’d fallen asleep again. Andy had been there. For a moment she thought he was going to look after her, and then she remembered what had happened to her. To her sister.

  She woke again and heard Katja say, “You’re Mark Price.” Her sister shook her and said, “Nadja. It’s Mark Price.”

  The plums were purple. Like bruises. She could almost taste them. She was awake now.

  House of Mirth

  “Jesus Christ,” Ronnie murmured. “What is this place?”

  “Watch out, there’s blood here,” Reggie said. There was a bloody handprint on the wall, like a cave painting, and more stains and drops on the heavy old lino on the staircase. “Fresh. Don’t slip in it,” she added as they followed the trail. Bloodhounds, Reggie thought. They’d had a look around downstairs and even without the blood there were enough signs to tell them that something very nasty was going on in this place.

  There was a dog tied up in reception and they had eyed it warily at first, before realizing it was a patient old Labrador who wagged her tail in welcome when she saw them enter the building.

  “Hello, old girl,” Reggie whispered to her, rubbing the velvet bone of her head.

  Upstairs, the door to the first room they came across was wide open, and inside they caught a glimpse of a hellish tableau of broken, frightened women. There was a man bleeding on the floor who was moaning, probably too articulate to be dying, as he was vociferously claiming.

  “DC Ronnie Dibicki,” Ronnie said, holding her warrant aloft like a shield. Reggie followed her into the room and it was only then that they saw the gun. “Vincent Ives,” Ronnie murmured. Reggie considered a Tae kwon do move on him, kicking the gun out of his hand (Hi-yah!), but it seemed too dangerous given the number of people in the room and the likelihood of one of them getting shot in the process.

  Ronnie chose the softly-softly approach. “Mr. Ives,” she said gently, as if she was a kind teacher talking to a schoolboy, “do you remember me? Ronnie Dibicki. We talked the other day, in your flat. I’m asking you to put the gun down, before anyone gets hurt. Can you do that?”

  “No, not really. Sorry. Can you come in the room, please?” Vince indicated with the gun, quite politely, like a cinema usher. Reggie remembered how he had swept the crumbs off his sofa before they sat on it the other day. She glanced at Ronnie. Were they really going to walk willingly into a hostage situation?

  Apparently, yes.

  Inside, the room was crowded. It reminded Reggie of Barclay Jack’s dressing room at the Palace yesterday—a nightmare version of it with, as far as Reggie could tell, a completely new cast of characters. Thankfully there was no ventriloquist’s dummy this time. Finding Jackson Brodie at the heart of this melee seemed par for the course, somehow. He was a friend to anarchy.

  Vincent Ives was pointing the gun at a man who was cowering in the corner of the room. “Arrest him,” he said to Reggie. He moved closer to the man and held the gun over his head, execution style. “He’s called Stephen Mellors and he’s the mastermind behind all this. Because if you don’t arrest him, I’ll shoot him… It’s one or the other, you choose.”

  There was no harm in arresting the man, Reggie supposed, she could always de-arrest him later if it turned out he hadn’t actually committed a crime, although what were the chances of that, given the circumstances they all found themselves in? It seemed more likely that other crimes would be added, not subtracted. So, after a moment’s consideration, she complied. “Stephen Mellors, I am arresting you on suspicion of…” Reggie hesitated, unclear as to what exactly she could charge him with. She was furious with herself because she glanced over at Jackson Brodie, looking for authority. Somehow he was still the senior policeman in the room. The senior person, if it came to that.

  She sighed with frustration at herself, at him, but took his advice. “Stephen Mellors, I am arresting you on suspicion of assault causing grievous bodily harm. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

  They say that in moments of crisis time slows down, but for Reggie it suddenly sped up. Everything happened so quickly that it was difficult later to piece it back together.

  It began when one of the girls gasped loudly and wobbled unsteadily to her feet. She looked like someone waking from a long, long sleep. She was tiny—shorter even than Reggie—and was sporting two black eyes and a bloodied nose. Small animals only. Having levered herself to her feet, she stared fixedly at Stephen Mellors before pointing at him and saying, “Mark Price. You’re Mark Price.”

  She leaned down and shook the girl who was slumped on the floor next to her. They were so alike they had to be sisters. “Nadja,” she said, trying to rouse her. Reggie could make out the words “It’s Mark Price,” but the rest of the conversation was in what she was pretty sure was Polish. Reggie turned around, looking for Ronnie to translate, but Ronnie, she realized, had disappeared. She must have gone to try to get help.

  The other girl—Nadja—rose up from the floor and, in a surprisingly energetic move for someone who had appeared to be half-comatose moments before, she grabbed the gun out of Vince’s hand. Stephen Mellors, who seemed to recognize the girl, twisted around, trying to scrabble away from her, but there was nowhere to go. He was already up against the wall in more ways than one and there was no mouse hole for the rat to take shelter in. Nadja raised the Browning, her arm steady, her aim true, and shot Stephen Mellors in the back with it. Then she raised her arm again and said, “For my sister,” and shot him a second time.

  The sound was deafening, ricocheting around the room for what seemed forever. It was followed by a moment of profound silence. Time, which had been moving so quickly, was suddenly suspended, and in that space the two girls stood silently with their arms around each other, staring at Stephen Mellors’s lifeless body. Then Nadja, the girl who had just shot a man in the back in cold blood, turned and looked straight at Reggie and nodded to her as if they were members of some secret sisterhood. Reggie couldn’t help herself, she nodded back.

  Reggie Chase,” Jackson Brodie mused.

  “Yes. Detective Constable Chase, actually.”

  “You’re a detective? In Yorkshire?”

  “Jeeso. You don’t own the county. Could you stop being amazed by everything, Mr. Brodie?”

  They were sitting in a major incident van waiting for someone to take a statement from them. They’d been given tea and biscuits by a PCSO. Clearly the whole situation was going to take hours to unravel. When the dust had settled, Stephen Mellors was dead and Vincent Ives had disappeared. Andrew Bragg had been carted off in an ambulance. (“That was our Mr. Bragg?” Ronnie said. “We looked everywhere for him.”)

  The trafficked women were handed over to the MSHTU and a place of safety. “Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking Unit,” Reggie said, explaining the acronym to Jackson in case he didn’t know. But there was nothing modern about any of it, was there? Reggie thought. From the pyramids to the sugar plantations to the brothels of the world, exploitation was the name of the game. Plus ça change.

  “You became a detective? In Yorkshire?”

  “Again, answered, yes and yes. And don’t flatter yourself that you had any influence over either of those things.”

  “And who is he exactly?” Ronnie asked, staring rather belligerently at Jackson.

  “Just someone I used to know,” Reggie said crossly, answering on Jackson’s behalf before he had a chance to explain himself. “Used to be a policeman. Used to be from Yorkshire,” she added. Used to be my friend, she thought. “I saved his life once.”

  “She did,” Jackson affirmed to Ronnie. “I remain indebted,” he added to Reggie.

  Ronnie had managed to escape and alert the authorities and thus missed the details of the denouement.

  “It was pandemonium,” Reggie reported to Ronnie, dunking a digestive
in her mug of tea. “And over in seconds. Vincent Ives dropped the gun and Andrew Bragg managed to grab it off the floor and shoot Stephen Mellors with it.”

  “He didn’t look capable of grabbing anything,” Ronnie puzzled. “He seemed ready for the last rites. And why would he shoot his friend?”

  “Who’s to say?” Jackson said. “Criminals, they’re a law unto themselves. They turn on each other all the time. In my experience.”

  “He’s seen a lot,” Reggie added helpfully. “He’s very old.”

  “Thanks. Thanks, Reggie.”

  “You’re welcome, Mr. B.”

  Fake News

  “A detective?” He was having trouble getting his head around this grown-up version of Reggie. A very antagonistic version, it had to be said. It turned out he owed her money and he did have a vague recollection, hooked up from the seabed of memory, of borrowing money from her shortly after Tessa, his evil fake wife, had drained his bank account. It was only after he had signed an IOU in her notebook that Reggie relented. A little. “It’s good to see you, Mr. B.”

  “Good to see you too, Reggie.”

  Most of the witnesses in the room weren’t in a state to have actually witnessed anything and only Jackson and Reggie were able to give anything approaching a coherent version of events, and even then there were some confusing loopholes in both their accounts.

  Jackson had good witness credentials—ex–military police, ex–Cambridgeshire Constabulary, currently working as a private investigator. He had been present, he said, when Stephen Mellors arrived at Silver Birches armed with a baseball bat. Vincent Ives had brought the gun to the scene with the apparent intention of protecting the girls who had been trafficked. “Armed siege” was a slight exaggeration. Vincent Ives’s motives, Jackson maintained, had been for the greater good—wasn’t that the standard by which everyone should be judged? Unfortunately Ives had dropped the gun and it had been picked up by Andrew Bragg, who proceeded to shoot Stephen Mellors, albeit in self-defense, when he tried to attack him with the baseball bat. This sequence of events didn’t entirely satisfy the police (Where was the gun? Where was the baseball bat? Big question marks), but it satisfied Jackson. Bad people were punished, people with good intentions weren’t crucified. And girls who took justice into their own hands weren’t penalized when they had already suffered more than anyone should. Killing in self-defense was one thing, but shooting someone in the back, not once but twice, was unlikely to be ignored by the Crown Prosecution Service.

  Andrew Bragg had already been wounded before they arrived, he testified, but had no memory of the event. He was rushed from the scene by ambulance to the hospital, where he underwent an emergency splenectomy and a transfusion of several pints of blood. “Not as bad as it looked,” the surgeon said when he came out of the operating theater. The patient remembered nothing about what had happened, not even who had shot him.

  “You should write crime novels,” Reggie said to Jackson. “You’ve got a real talent for fiction.”

  By the time the Armed Response Unit had arrived, Stephen Mellors had already been dispatched to the great necropolis in the sky and both Vincent Ives and the gun had disappeared.

  It was at the bottom of the sea now, thrown off the end of the pier at Whitby during high tide, everyone’s fingerprints washed away for good. Jackson’s, Vince Ives’s, and those of the girl who shot Stephen Mellors. After she had killed him, Jackson gently prized the gun out of her hand and quietly pocketed it. Nadja. Nadja Wilk and her sister, Katja. They came from Gdansk, where they had worked in a hotel. Real people with real lives, not just ciphers for the tabloid newspapers. Foreign sex workers released from House of Horrors in police raid. And Girls trafficked into prostitution involved in violent shoot-out. And so on. The news’ afterburn went on for a long time. The triumvirate—Tommy, Andy, and Steve—had been the top dogs in a trafficking network, a web, the strands of which reached far and wide. Untangling it took some time. It was too late for most of the girls they had brought over, already long disappeared into places where no torch was bright enough to find them. But the seven in the room in Silver Birches were rescued and all went home eventually. Taking their harrowing statements took a long time. Jasmine flew home on the same plane as the coffin of her friend Maria.

  Perhaps they would recover, perhaps they wouldn’t, but at least they were given that chance, and the person who had given them that chance was Vince Ives, so Jackson reckoned he ought to be allowed to avoid the gallows of the media and the courts.

  “Do the right thing here, Andy,” he had said to Bragg as he knelt by his side, listening to the approaching sirens growing louder. And to make his point he pressed his thumb into Andy Bragg’s gunshot wound. Ignoring his shrieking, Jackson said, “You don’t remember anything that happened. Complete amnesia. Okay?”

  “Or?” Bragg groaned. He was a bargainer, Jackson reckoned. Did he want to bargain with God? Was that what Pascal’s Wager was?

  “Or, I’ll finish you off right now and you’ll go straight to hell. Do the right thing,” Jackson said again. “Take some responsibility for all the pain and suffering you’ve caused. Confess your sins,” he said, appealing to the man’s inner Catholic. “Find redemption. Absolution. And Andy,” he added, putting his lips closer to his ear, “if you don’t keep your mouth shut about who shot Stephen Mellors, I’ll hunt you down and tear your heart out and feed it to my dog.”

  When he retrieved Dido later she gazed at him inquiringly. She didn’t look as if she would be a particularly eager participant in the promised gore fest. He gave her a dog treat instead. She really did seem to prefer the ones shaped like bones.

  High Noon

  Love was hard to come by, but money was easy. If you knew where to find it. In a safe, of course, where else? When they renovated High Haven, Tommy had installed one, a sturdy, old-fashioned one, a vault. It stood in the corner of the office, drilled into the floor, and came with a big key and an even bigger double-handed lever on the front, just asking to be turned. It could have played the central character in a heist movie. It was a safe that said, “Look at me, don’t bother looking for anything else.” It contained, however, only a thousand pounds or so in cash, which was small change to Tommy.

  The safe also contained some odds and ends of jewelry, trinkets, really, alongside a few documents that looked as if they might be important but weren’t. “So then,” Tommy had explained to Crystal, “if someone breaks into the house in the middle of the night and holds a knife to your throat” (Why were they holding the knife to her throat and not his? Crystal wondered) “and tells you to open the safe, it won’t matter.” (A knife to her throat wouldn’t matter?) “You can open this one and they’ll think they’ve gotten away with our loot.” (Loot? It was Tommy who thought he lived in a heist movie, not the safe.) He kept the “important things”—their passports and birth certificates, his “investment” Richard Mille watch (criminally expensive), Crystal’s diamond bracelet, her diamond pendant necklace, and twenty thousand pounds or so in twenty-pound notes—in a different, somewhat smaller safe, one that had been drilled into the wall of the study and that hid itself behind an indifferent print of yachts at sea called Sails at Dawn. “A safer safe” was what Tommy called it, pleased with this ruse.

  “Your old man must be really paranoid,” the man who had fitted the safe had laughed. He was from the straightforwardly named Northern Safe Installers (“All our engineers have enhanced DBS checks and vetting to BS 7858 standards”) and spent most of the day hammering and drilling in the study. “It’s like Fort Knox in here,” he said.

  “I know,” Crystal said, handing him a well-sugared mug of coffee and a four-finger KitKat. She kept a special supply of treats for workmen. They respected her for it and proved eager to please her with all sorts of extra little jobs. (“While you’re here, do you think you could just fix…?” and so on.) Tommy said it wasn’t the four-finger KitKat that made them want to please her, it was her tits and her arse. Crystal
wondered sometimes—if she was substituted overnight by a replica, a really good robot (a “high-functioning android,” Harry supplied), would Tommy notice? “Two safes,” she said. “I know. You’d think we were hiding the Crown Jewels.”

  “Three,” the safe installer corrected, intent on labeling the various sets of keys.

  “Three?” Crystal queried lightly. “He has gone overboard, hasn’t he? He’s a one, Tommy. Where’s he putting the third one? There’s hardly any room, surely?”

  The second phone. The third safe. The fourth musketeer. Five gold rings. Just one, actually, and it was brass, not gold—a recessed ring pull, fitted flush into a floorboard.

  “Better safe than sorry, I suppose,” Crystal said.

  “Funny,” the safe fitter said.

  Later that evening, when she looked in the study, she found that Tommy was in the process of hanging Sails at Dawn in front of the second safe. She could see that he had covered the hiding place of the third safe with the heavy metal filing cabinet. It was too bulky to move on a regular basis so she supposed the third safe was intended for long-term storage, not everyday use. She wondered if he had already filled it, and if so, with what?

  “Good, eh?” Tommy said, standing back to admire Sails at Dawn, or rather what it concealed as he had no interest whatsoever in art. “You would never know anything was there, would you?” No, she agreed, she wouldn’t. He was cheerful, almost gleeful. They had only just moved into the house and she was pregnant with Candy at the time. Crystal Holroyd, the newly crowned Queen of High Haven.

  He handed her two sets of keys and said, “They’re the spares, for if you need to get into one of the safes for your jewelry. And just take whatever cash you need when you want it.” When she first married him she had found it hard to believe how generous he was. Really landed on my feet, she thought.