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For Rob Warr of Highbury, Muswell Hill and Hove

‘How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.’

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

PROLOGUE

The Girl from Belgrade

She already had her passport in her hands, ready for her first encounter with authority, and as she held it out to the man she saw, in the weak glow of the Belgrade streetlights, that he had a small stack of passports. They were not all burgundy red like her Serbian passport. These passports were green and blue and bright red – passports from everywhere. The man slipped her passport under the rubber band that held the passports together and he slipped them into the pocket of his thick winter coat. She had expected to keep her passport.

She looked at him and caught a breath. Old scars ran down one side of his face making the torn flesh look as though it had once melted. Then the man clicked his fingers a second time.

She stared at her kid brother with confusion. The boy indicated her suitcase. The man wanted the suitcase. Then the man with the melted face spoke in English, although it was not the first language of either of them.

But she gripped her suitcase stubbornly and she saw the sudden flare of pure anger in the man’s eyes.

The suitcase was the second thing he took. It was bewildering. In less than a minute she had surrendered her passport and abandoned her possessions. She could smell sweat and cigarettes on the man and she wondered, for the first time, if she was making a terrible mistake.

The boy was shivering. Belgrade is bitterly cold in January with an average temperature of just above freezing.

She hugged him. The boy, a gangly sixteen-year-old in glasses that were held together with tape on one side, bit his lower lip, struggling to control his emotions. He hugged her back and he would not let her go and when she gently pulled away he still held her, a shy smile on his face as he held his phone up at head height. They smiled at the tiny red light shining in the dark as he took their picture.

Then the man with the melted face took her arm just above the elbow and pulled her towards the lorry. He was not gentle.

In the back of the lorry there were two lines of women facing each other. They all turned their heads to look at her. Black faces. Asian faces. Three young women, who might have been sisters, in hijab headscarves. They all looked at her but she was staring at her brother standing on the empty Belgrade street, her suitcase in his hand. She raised her hand in farewell and the boy opened his mouth to say something but the back doors suddenly slammed shut and her brother was gone. She struggled to stay on her feet as the lorry lurched away, heading north for the border.

By the solitary light in the roof of the lorry, she saw there were boxes in the back of the vehicle. Many boxes, all the same.

Birnen – Arnen – Nashi – Peren, it said on the boxes. Grushi – Pere – Peras – Poires.

‘Kruske,’ she thought, and then in English, as if in preparation for her new life. ‘Pears.’

The women were still staring at her. One of them, nearest to the doors, shuffled along to find her space. She was some kind of African girl, not yet out of her teens, her skin so dark it seemed to shine.

The African gave her a wide, white smile of encouragement, and graciously held her hand by her side, inviting the girl from Belgrade to sit down.

She nodded her thanks, taking her seat, and thinking of the African as the kind girl.

Eight hours later the women stood outside a service station, taking turns in the cracked and broken bathroom in a last desperate attempt to keep clean.

The girl from Belgrade looked at the cars on the motorway. The winter sun was rising milky white on what looked like miles of farmland, as barren as the surface of the moon.

The man came out of the toilet, pulling up the zip of his trousers with one hand and clicking his fingers with the other.

‘No more,’ he said, and the women must have looked confused. He impatiently snapped his fingers in their faces. ‘No stops no more,’ he explained, rolling his eyes at their inability to understand his fluent English.

‘No stops,’ the kind girl said, her face splitting in that wide white smile. ‘No suitcase. No time.’

They all laughed together. It was the last time they laughed. For it was cold inside the lorry now, far colder even than midnight in Belgrade in January. At first she thought it was because the ground was steadily rising and they seemed to be passing through mountains.

She touched the metal door next to her and it was so cold that it burned her fingertips.

The blood drained from her hands, flooding deeper into her body, trying to protect the organs that kept her alive, and she felt that the icy air had seeped into her blood like poison.

She stamped her feet, flexed her hands, trying to bring some warmth to them, some movement, some life.

‘So cold,’ the girl from Belgrade said, feeling foolish for stating the painfully obvious.

And so they sat like that for a while, with her numb hands squeezed together inside the kind girl’s gloves, palms pressed against palms.

But then her feet began to hurt. And it was so much more than cold. It was the presence of a blinding, aching pain. As she stamped her feet, she felt the muscles in her neck and shoulders tighten. She moved her head in a horizontal figure of eight, the way she had seen her mother do when her neck was tight, and it made not the slightest difference. She saw the kind girl begin to shiver and watched with silent horror as the shivering became a kind of trembling.

She looked around at the other women. One of the women in a hijab was already in something deeper than sleep.

She looked at the kind girl and saw that there were icicles hanging from her thick black eyelashes and the sight of them sent a flood of terror through her.

She stood up, abruptly pulling her hands free from the kind girl’s gloves, suddenly aware that the freezing cold that first gripped her hands and feet had now spread everywhere.

She banged on the windowless slab of steel that separated the back of the lorry from the driver’s cab. She could smell cigarettes. She could hear voices. A man and a woman.

But she kept banging on the wall of the driver’s cab, the other women silent behind her, although some of them were watching her with half-closed eyes.

Long after she had given up and slumped down next to the kind girl – was it hours or minutes? – the lorry finally stopped. She could hear the sound of big diesel engines, distant voices and – was she dreaming? – what sounded like the horn of a large ship.

She got on to her numb feet and stood alone at the back of the lorry and hammered the door until her hands were bruised and bloody. But the man who drove was as good as his word.

The cold had reached her brain now. She dropped to the floor. Her mind was cloudy. She was going to do something very important – she was certain of that – but now the plan had somehow fled from memory. She stood up and stared at the other women, dumbfounded. What was this glacial fog inside her head? She was very afraid now – a wild, unnameable fear that skittered across her heart and clenched her teeth.

Above and beyond everything else, there was exhaustion like nothing she had ever known. She sank to the floor again and knew that she would not be getting back up.

Where was her brother? Why were they apart? They had no one in the world but each other. They should have stuck together. Where was that boy? She would remember if she could only concentrate. Sleep now, she thought. Worry about it all after your long sleep.

Her eyes jerked open and she stared at the kind girl without recognising her face, although suspecting she had seen it somewhere before.

Now the trembling was more violent and her entire body spasmed with a terrible will of its own. There was a young Asian woman sitting directly opposite and her eyes were wide open and yet she was sleeping. And she knew, somewhere deep inside her foggy mind, that it was the sleep without end.

The faces of the other women seemed to melt in the darkness, dissolving into shapes that had nothing to do with human faces. Then one of the women stood up and began removing her clothes. Ripping at them, not bothering with buttons, desperate to be free of them.

‘I am burning,’ the woman said in English, and then abruptly sat down, curled into a foetal ball and closed her eyes.

The girl from Belgrade stared dumbly at the boxes that seemed to crowd in on them. Birnen – Arnen – Nashi – Peren, said the boxes.

Grushi – Pere – Peras – Poires. Pears in what felt like every language except for Serbian, every tongue on the planet except her own.

She could hear her mother calling, saying her name loud and clear, even though her mother was five years in the grave.

So she held the kind girl – she had forgotten to do it before – and she kept holding her, long after the kind girl’s trembling had stopped. It was all silence in the back of the lorry now and the silence was matched in the world outside, for at some point in the endless night, the lorry had stopped, and remained stopped, even though nobody came to open the door.

She could no longer see the steam of her breath. Indeed, she was no longer aware of the need to breathe.

PART ONE

The Woman Who Fell Through the Ice

That’s why Chinatown was deserted. If the public thinks the police have found a dead body then they get out their phones and settle down for a good gawp, but if they think we have found a bomb then they will get on their bikes.

The lorry was outside the Gerrard Place dim sum restaurant that marks the start of London’s Chinatown, parked at an angle with its nearside wheels up on the pavement.

The lorry itself looked no different to the convoy of lorries that were lined up bumper to bumper all down one side of Gerrard Street, making their early morning deliveries to the shops and restaurants of Chinatown. But half up on the pavement and parked at a random angle, this lorry looked dumped, as if the driver couldn’t get away fast enough, and that makes our people think only one thing.

Under the bobbing red lanterns that hailed the lunar new year, Chinatown was abandoned apart from armed response officers in their paramilitary gear, paramedics from half a dozen hospitals, firemen from the station on Shaftesbury Avenue, uniformed officers from New Scotland Yard, detectives from Counter Terrorism Command, dogs and their handlers from the Canine Support Unit, and our murder team from West End Central, 27 Savile Row, a short walk from Chinatown.

It was actually a lot of people, all wound up tight, and our breath made billowing clouds of steam in the bitterly cold air. But there was nobody who was not meant to be there.

The public – the deliverymen to Chinatown, the early workers cutting across Soho to their offices in Mayfair or Marylebone or Oxford Street – had scarpered as soon as the police tape went up and the word went out. Only one local was still here – the elderly Chinese man who had seen the lorry and dialled 999. He was a short, sturdily built man who had probably spent a career carting crates of Tsingtao beer into the stores and restaurants of Chinatown, and there was a hard-earned toughness about him despite the modest frame.

The weak winter sun was still struggling to rise above the rooftops. January’s feeble attempt at a sunrise. Without looking at my watch, I knew it must be around eight by now. I sipped a triple espresso from the Bar Italia, my eyes on the abandoned lorry, as DC Edie Wren interviewed the Chinese man.

The man shook his head. ‘As I believe told you, Detective, I saw no sign of the driver.’

His accent was a surprise. He spoke with the buttoned-up formality of a BBC radio announcer from long ago, as if he had learned his English listening to the World Service.

‘Just the lorry.’ He gestured towards it. ‘Parked on the pavement. The driver was already gone.’

The man, never tall, straightened himself up to his full height, his back stiffened with wounded pride.

‘I have had a British passport for many years. But what’s that got to do—’

‘Just answer my questions, sir. Did you touch the lorry? Is there any reason why we might find your fingerprints on the vehicle?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I called 999 and the police came immediately. And they said it could be a bomb.’

I lifted the POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape and held it up as a handler ducked under with her sniffer dog. The handler was a young uniformed officer, shockingly relaxed, and her dog was a brown-and-white Springer Spaniel that pulled on its lead, anxious to get cracking.

‘Good girl, Molly,’ the handler said, and we all watched the pair of them approach the lorry.

The Canine Support Unit uses the kinds of dogs who struggle to get adopted at rescue centres – high energy, endlessly curious dogs that don’t know how to stop moving. The same qualities that are all wrong in a household pet are a huge plus in a sniffer dog looking for explosive devices.

Molly sniffed the chassis of that abandoned lorry as if it was a long-stemmed rose.

I looked over at a slight, bespectacled woman who was standing with an armed officer whose face was entirely covered by a ballistic helmet and a balaclava.

She was holding a skinny latte from the Bar Italia – cops favour the Bar Italia because the coffee is so good and because it stays open for twenty-two hours a day – while he was holding a SIG Sauer SG 516 semi-automatic carbine assault rifle. The woman was my immediate boss, DCI Pat Whitestone, and the man must have been the commanding officer of CTU. I nodded and DCI Whitestone acknowledged the gesture with a salute of her coffee.

A fireman from the station on Shaftesbury Avenue fell into step beside me. He grinned at me, bleary with exhaustion, and I guessed he must have been kept on after pulling the graveyard shift. Over one shoulder he carried bright red bolt cutters, four feet long, and as we reached the lorry, he swung them down and set the steel jaws against the rust-dappled lock that secured the back door.

I stared into the darkness and the cold hit me first. The temperature in the street was in the low single digits. But in the back of that lorry, it was somewhere below freezing.

Two lines of them, facing each other, their backs pressed against the sides of the lorry.

All young, all silent, none of them moving, as though they had died where they sat. There was a thin coating of frost on their faces.

Some of them had their eyes open. Some of them had ice hanging from their mouth, their nose and their eyelashes. The ice had stuck and clung and froze wherever there was moisture.

Some of them had their clothes ripped, as though they had been assaulted. There was no smell of death in the back of that freezing lorry, and yet death was everywhere.

I looked down at Edie Wren, her notebook still in her hand as she bent at the waist, her hand pressed up against the shuttered window of the dim sum place, waiting to retch. Nothing happened. She straightened up and stared at me, her freckled face even paler than usual.

I turned back to the paramedics. They were at the far end of the lorry, working back to back, each crouching over the woman closest to the cab.

DCI Whitestone stood at the open doors of the lorry, staring into the darkness. She shook her head as her eyes took in the unmoving women, her gaze settling on their torn clothes.

‘I’ve found passports,’ she said. ‘From the cab. Under the dashboard. How many bodies you got in there, Max?’

‘Count again,’ Whitestone said. ‘Both of them. The bodies and the passports.’

I counted the women in the lorry. Edie counted the passports in her hand. The passports were of blue and red and green. These women were from everywhere.

‘Turkish, Serbian, Nigerian,’ Edie said. ‘Syrian, Syrian, Syrian. Afghan, Iraqi, Iranian. Pakistani, Chinese, Somalian.’ She held them up to me. ‘And another Turkish,’ she said. ‘There are definitely thirteen passports.’

The two women closest to the back door were locked in an eternal embrace, like figures from the last hours of Pompeii. The way they clung to each made them look like sleeping siblings, although one of them was ebony black and the other had skin as white as milk.

I touched the wrist of the young black woman. Then I touched the wrist of the young white woman. And I could feel nothing but the cold.

‘Leave it to us, will you?’ she said. ‘It’s different when they freeze, OK? Different to anything you’ve ever seen before. Their heart rate and breathing slow to next to nothing. Just because you can’t find a pulse doesn’t mean they’re dead.’

‘Chances are they did that to themselves,’ she said, more patiently now. ‘There’s an old saying about hypothermia – you’re not dead until you’re warm and dead. That’s what happens right at the end. They believe they’re burning up.’

The black woman’s eyes were open. But the white woman’s eyes were closed. I felt for her pulse again but I could feel nothing. Her skin was colder than the grave.

Then I had her in my arms and I was screaming for an ambulance and hands were reaching out to help me get her out of the back of that death truck and on to a stretcher that we loaded into an ambulance parked in the middle of Shaftesbury Avenue, the swirling blue lights piercing the frozen winter morning. We tore through the city, the sirens howling at the world, telling it to get out of our way.

‘You’re safe now,’ I said, trying to stay on my feet in the back of the rocking ambulance, squeezing her hands, trying to get some warmth back into them. ‘We’re getting you help. Don’t give up. Stay with me.’

If you have a cardiac arrest in London – or if your heart rate has fallen off a cliff because you are freezing to death – then paramedics and ambulance technicians have the authority to bypass the nearest Accident and Emergency department and take you directly to one of eight specialist heart attack centres, immediately doubling your chances of survival.

The ambulance sped north and I stayed by her side until she was rushed into the Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Free in Hampstead. And then I waited. After I had downed two cups of scalding black coffee, a doctor came out to see me, a young man of around thirty who looked as though he hadn’t slept since leaving medical school. Dr Patel, it said on his name tag.

‘Hana has severe hypothermia. Which is easy to diagnose and hard to treat. She’s suffering from what we call afterdrop – her core temperature is continuing to fall after removal from cold stress. And her core temperature is likely to drop for the next few hours. We are going to give her a heart-lung bypass where we withdraw blood from the body, warm it up and return it to the body. She’s on a CPB pump to maintain blood circulation and keep her oxygenated.’ He paused. ‘Do you know how long she was exposed to sub-zero temperatures? Anything at all about her medical history?’

‘Hypothermia is next door to death, Detective – it suppresses heart and brain function and the internal organs all stop working. Do you understand? Everything that keeps you alive suddenly stops.’ He ran a hand through his already thinning hair. ‘We’re not even allowed to declare someone dead until their body is warmed to a near normal body temperature.’

When I arrived at West End Central, a stocky Chinese man in his sixties was standing under the big blue lamp that marks the entrance to 27 Savile Row.

I recognised him as the man that Edie had been interviewing before we opened up the lorry, the man who had called it in. They must have taken him to the station for a longer interview and now they were done with him. He looked at me warily as I came up the steps.

‘I’m not sure I was very much help.’ He glanced back at the entrance to West End Central. ‘I told your colleagues everything I saw but I don’t think they believe me.’

I was struck once again by his formal, old-fashioned English and I could feel the gap between the courtly, well-mannered country he imagined when he first heard the language coming out of a radio in Hong Kong and the harsher reality he had found in London.

And I believed him – he had not seen the driver and he didn’t have much more to tell us. I could see he felt ill used.

‘Keith Li,’ he told me, one of the generation of Chinese who had automatically adopted an Anglo name, usually the kind of name that the British had stopped using two or three generations ago.

‘In China, I was a teacher.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘In England – nothing.’

Whitestone and Edie were wearing blue nitrile gloves and poring over the passports of assorted nationalities in red and blue and green they had spread out before them like a deck of cards.

Trainee Detective Constable Billy Greene was at a workstation, his long, gangly body hunched up as he scrolled through still black-and-white images of vehicles, their number plates showing in yellow and black at the foot of the screen.

And there was a tiny middle-aged man with milk-bottle glasses sitting between Whitestone and Edie who was also wearing gloves, and sliding what looked like a Syrian passport into some kind of clunky silver box. The machine resembled a computer printer from when the world was young. He looked a bit like a mole.

‘The Royal Free are going to call me when she comes out of the ICU. How many more made it?’

‘None,’ Whitestone said. ‘The rest of them were pronounced dead at the scene. It took the Divisional Surgeon quite a while. Apparently it’s hard to tell when they freeze to death. Something to do with the heart rate slowing to next to nothing. So we have eleven dead.’ She tapped a burgundy passport with a golden coat of arms. ‘And Hana Novak fighting for her life at the Royal Free.’

‘So we still have that thirteenth passport,’ Edie said. She nodded at the man with the silver machine. ‘Ken here is from Visas and Immigration at Heathrow.’

‘I’m the Questioned Documents guy,’ Ken told me. ‘Running your passports through my VSC40 here to see how many of them are kosher.’

‘It reads microchips, assesses paper quality and scans surface features such as visa stamps,’ he said. ‘It sniffs out fake watermarks, bogus metallic strips and home-made ink.’ He grinned shyly at me, warming to his theme. ‘Basically it’s a lie detector for travel documents.’

His gloved hands danced lightly above the passports. The dark red of Iran. The deep blue of Syria. The green of Pakistan. The burgundy and gold of Serbia. And two Turkish passports – one in maroon and one in green.

‘There are a thousand ways for a passport to be forged,’ he said. ‘Passports that are genuine but have had the photograph changed on the ID page. Passports that are real but have had bogus stamps inserted. The VSC40 sees through them all.’

Ken’s profession explained his mole-like appearance. I imagined that most of his working day would have been spent in a darkened room at Arrivals at Heathrow Airport. And I had no doubt that he would not have been brought to West End Central unless he was the best in the business.

‘These passports are all as fake as a nine-euro note,’ Ken said, allowing himself a smile of professional pride. ‘We see the best forged passports in the world at Heathrow. But this bunch is not the best in the world. This is amateur hour. Apart from this one. This one is real.’

It was the passport that Whitestone had tapped. Ken held up a burgundy-coloured passport with two inscriptions in gold Cyrillic script either side of a gold coat of arms. I pulled on a pair of blue nitrile gloves and took the Serbian passport. Hana Novak’s solemn young face stared out at me from the identity page.

She had long, straight brown hair that looked as though it had been curled up at the end by some kind of heating tongs. It was a curiously moving attempt to look attractive from a young woman who was already beautiful, even if she did not know it yet.

‘I wouldn’t expect these passports to be decent forgeries,’ Ken said. ‘The back of a lorry is the budget option for sneaking into the UK. At Heathrow we see people – professionals from Damascus and Baghdad – who have paid fifteen grand and more for bogus travel docs that have been made by a master.’

‘These people smugglers,’ I said. ‘Are they more likely to fly someone in than put them in the back of a lorry?’

‘Depends how much money you’ve got,’ Ken said. ‘If you’re a big spender, you can get a speedboat from Dunkirk to Dover for twelve grand. But if money’s tight, you can buy a passage to England for as little as a hundred quid in Calais. They sell it as a guaranteed entry on social media – and these traffickers have hundreds of accounts online – but really that hundred quid just buys you one attempt to squat in the back of a lorry heading for Dover. Not that they confine themselves to the south coast these days. As security tightens up around Dover the smugglers’ speedboats are heading for Portsmouth, Whitstable, Tilbury, Hull – you name it. And if they make it, most of them can stay forever. Nobody gets shipped back to a war zone.’ He indicated the passports. ‘I’ll tell you something about these girls.’

‘I’ve found the lorry,’ Billy Greene said, excitedly swivelling in his chair. ‘Got it on ANPR.’

Automatic Number Plate Recognition is the system we use for storing registration numbers, even for vehicles that we are not looking for at the time. Around eight thousand ANPR cameras photograph over thirty million numbers every day, and the details are stored for two years.

‘The lorry is a five-ton refrigerated Sinotruk that was bought for cash at an auction in Kent last summer,’ Billy said. ‘It’s a Chinese make, although the plates were Turkish. That’s what they do – the people smugglers – they pick the rides up for cash at auction. Makes it as hard to trace as a pay-as-you-go phone.’ He turned in his chair to peer at his screen. ‘It entered the UK yesterday on the last ferry from Dunkirk. Landed at Dover.’

‘So we’re assuming the owner of the thirteenth passport wasn’t driving?’ I said.

‘It’s unlikely,’ Whitestone said. ‘Because the owner of the thirteenth passport is a woman and the drivers who smuggle in illegals are all men. At least, that’s how it has been until now. It’s not an equal opportunities profession. Find the thirteenth woman and then you find the driver. Find the driver and you find the scumbags who run the whole stinking operation.’

‘Perhaps he looked in the back, realised the women were dying or already dead, and panicked,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he didn’t get paid. Perhaps there was nobody there to meet him.’

‘But why was it below freezing in the back?’ Edie said. ‘He smuggled a lorryload of girls into the country and then froze them to death. It makes no sense.’

‘The big ports see these refrigerated lorries all the time,’ Ken said. ‘Before I was in Heathrow I worked in Dover. Their refrigeration works just like your central heating – on either a timer or a thermostat. The cold air kicks in when the temperature gets above a certain level or at a specific time. My guess would be that it never crossed the driver’s tiny mind that those women could freeze to death back there. There’s no market for dead women. He didn’t turn the refrigeration on deliberately, and he didn’t know enough to turn it off until it was too late. He’s unlikely to be any kind of criminal mastermind.’

Whitestone nodded grimly. ‘The driver’s fear seems to be a major component in every possible scenario.’ I saw she was trembling with anger. ‘This is not a trafficking offence, Max. This is not smuggling illegals. We have eleven dead bodies at the morgue. I want these bastards for murder.’

‘The women each had one small bag,’ Edie said. ‘That’s clearly all they were allowed. The contents are remarkably similar. They each had a little bit of make-up and they each had a phone, and the batteries were all dead by the time we found them. We’re charging the phones and calling in the relevant translators to examine text messages.’ She indicated the United Nations of passports before her. ‘It’s going to be a lot of translating. And the embassies are not going to be any help because it looks like only one of the passports is kosher. We can’t ID the dead if they’re travelling on a fake passport.’

Whitestone pulled off her gloves and went to stand before the giant map of London that covers one wall of MIR-1.

‘Are we working on the theory that Chinatown was the final destination?’ I said.

‘It’s unlikely those twelve young women were coming here to pick potatoes in East Anglia or collect cockles in Morecambe Bay. They were coming to London, Max. And they were coming to do one thing.’ She exhaled hard. ‘I want to put the squeeze on every pimp between Chinatown and the Watford Gap. You’ve got a CI in Chinatown, right?’

‘The Filipina,’ Whitestone said with a touch of irritation. ‘Ginger Gonzalez.’

‘Ginger’s not really a Criminal Informant,’ I said. ‘She’s more of a friend.’

Ginger Gonzalez ran one of the most successful prostitution rings in the city, although she preferred to call her business – Sampaguita, named after the national flower of the Philippines – a social introduction agency.

She had once helped me bust a paedophile ring wide open. She had arranged company for my colleague DC Curtis Gane when he had been paralysed in the course of duty and needed someone to hold in the last days before his death. I believed the end of his life had been made easier by Ginger.

‘Your friend puts wealthy men in contact with beautiful young women, right?’ Whitestone said.

Ginger found Sampaguita’s clients in the swankier bars of London hotels – the Coburg at the Connaught, the American Bar at the Savoy, the Rivoli at the Ritz, and the Fumoir at Claridges – and then put them in contact with the ever-changing stable of young women who were on her books.

Whitestone bit her bottom lip, as if I was testing her patience to the absolute limit.

‘She can call herself what she likes, Max, but I call it pimping. Do you really want to give her a pass?’

I was certain that the lorry in Chinatown was nothing to do with Ginger. There was no coercion involved in what she did. She was a businesswoman.

‘Those women in the back of that lorry? I bet they were all good kids, too. Your first job is interviewing Hana Novak in the hospital. But then you’re coming back here and we are going to see your friend, Max. That’s your second job.’

‘Ma’am, why are you so certain they were coming here to go on the game?’ Edie asked Whitestone. ‘We don’t know that for sure, do we? They might have thought – I don’t know – they were coming here to be models, or dancers, or waitresses.’

‘But the men who brought them in knew,’ Whitestone said, looking at me. ‘Didn’t they?’

By the time I got up to the Royal Free they had moved Hana Novak from the ICU to a small private room where the lights were low and the temperature was warm and you could hear the buzz of traffic drifting up from Pond Street as they slowly climbed one of the steepest hills in London.

The nurses had tucked her up to keep her comfortable and, with only her face showing above the bedding, she looked very young.

‘We’re trying,’ I said. ‘Her passport’s real. Probably the only one of the bunch that is real. We’re in touch with the Serbian embassy about next of kin.’ I looked from the young woman in the bed to the doctor who had done his best to save her. ‘We should hear soon. But I don’t know if it is going to be soon enough. How long has she got?’

‘She’ll slip away soon,’ he said. ‘She’s not in any pain.’ He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. I don’t think I had ever seen a man more tired. ‘But there was too much internal damage before we reached her.’

As soon as Dr Patel was gone, I took the only chair in the tiny room and pulled it close to the bed. When I spoke, my voice was as soft as a prayer.

But if she heard me, she did not speak, and if she knew I was there, then she gave no sign, and so I sat by the bedside of Hana Novak and I stayed there until she had gone.

There was no sign of what we had found outside the dim sum restaurant in the freezing sunrise. It all seemed a lifetime away. The white lorry had been impounded by forensics. The police tape had all come down and been neatly disposed of. And the only clue that the dead bodies of twelve young women had been discovered on this spot was the tide of flowers that was piling up by the entrance to Gerrard Street.

DCI Whitestone glanced at the flowers as we walked through the archway to Chinatown, and I knew she was in no mood to go easy on Ginger Gonzalez, whatever favours my friend had done for us in the past.

‘We have to talk to her,’ I said. ‘I don’t see that we have a choice.’

Halfway down Gerrard Street there was an open doorway by a duck restaurant where a long queue of stylish young Cantonese queued for a table. We went up a short flight of stairs to a white door with a simple sign.

SAMPAGUITA

Social Introduction Agency

Without knocking we went inside a small white room. It was almost nothing – just a spartan little cube of a room above a Chinese restaurant. Ginger Gonzalez was sitting behind her desk.

She was a thirty-year-old Filipina and everything about her proclaimed that she was a high-flying London businesswoman – the giant iMac, the well-thumbed copy of that morning’s Financial Times on her desk and her black-rimmed glasses. The only thing that made her look as though her career possibly was not in the financial sector were the tattoos that I knew ran down her lower inner arms.

Ginger’s studious face broke into a smile when she saw me and then faded immediately she saw Whitestone.

There was a scented candle in a small glass holder on Ginger’s desk and it disguised the smell of Peking duck that drifted up from the restaurant below. Whitestone stared thoughtfully at the flame, leaving it to me.

‘One hundred metres away from where we are now,’ Whitestone said, picking up the scented candle.

‘It’s terrible,’ Ginger said in an accent that hovered somewhere between Manila and Manhattan. ‘I left flowers.’

‘Big of you,’ Whitestone said. She put down the candle. ‘Remind me again how it works.’ She gestured towards the door. ‘You know. Your Social Introduction Agency. What would I find if I Googled Sampaguita?’

‘We? That’s the royal “we”, is it? Or do you mean you and your whores?’

Ginger folded her hands. ‘What I mean is that I prefer to make personal contact with clients,’ she said pleasantly.

Whitestone almost smiled. ‘In other words, you pick up men in bars and then you put them in touch with one of your girls?’

‘Spare me the waffle about how respectable you are.’ She nodded at me. ‘I know that you and Max are friends. And I know that you have helped him – and our people – in the past. But here’s the problem. You run a prostitution ring.’ She again raised a hand. ‘You can call it what you like, but we both know that is what it comes down to.’ She pushed her spectacles up the bridge of her nose and nodded to the window. ‘And first thing this morning a dozen young women who were being brought into the country to make a living on their backs – whether they knew it or not – were found at the end of this very street. And now they’re all dead.’

Whitestone continued as if Ginger had not spoken. ‘Max here might believe whatever rubbish you tell him, but not me. See, you make it sound far too much like Pretty Woman. You make it sound almost romantic. Lonely, rich men and willing, beautiful women.’ She laughed. ‘You make it sound as though the men are all Richard Gere and the women are all Julia Roberts. And it’s not quite like that, is it?’

‘Ginger. We have no leads,’ I said. ‘We’re on a cold trail. So anything you can—’

Whitestone hurled the small glass candle against the wall. It shattered with a crack like gunshot. Without the scent of the candle, the room began to fill with the smell of roasting meat.

‘No, it’s not always like a remake of Pretty Woman. That’s true. Sometimes the men are less than gentlemen – especially as they are all rich, privileged men who are accustomed to being obeyed and getting what they want. And – although I have a rigorous recruitment programme – my staff are constantly changing and on occasion they are not as honest or reliable as I would wish.’

I saw the first flash of anger in Ginger’s eyes. ‘None of my girls are forced into doing anything they do not want to do. There is no violence. There is no coercion. I have been out on my own since I was sixteen years old—’

‘I don’t care what you feel about me,’ Ginger said. ‘But I know the law, Detective. It’s illegal to buy sex from anyone who has been subjected to force – and none of the staff at Sampaguita is ever subjected to force. It is illegal to buy sex from someone under the age of eighteen – two years older than the age of consent – and none of my staff gets a job without verified photo ID. And prostitution itself is not illegal – only soliciting in a public place, running a brothel and kerb-crawling.’

‘And pimping,’ Whitestone said quietly. ‘Don’t forget pimping. That’s illegal, isn’t it?’

Whitestone got off the desk and went to stand by the window. It was dark now and Chinatown blazed with its nighttime colours of red and gold.

‘I could shut down your little business tonight,’ Whitestone said. ‘If the judge is sufficiently senile, then he might buy your line about Sampaguita being a – what is it? – Social Introduction Society. My guess is that would be laughed out of court. My guess is that you would get done for causing or inciting prostitution for gain. And – again, this is just my opinion – I think you would serve a custodial sentence.’ She looked back at Ginger. ‘You tell me – could you do jail time?’

Also by Tony Parsons

PROLOGUE

The Girl from Belgrade

PART ONE

The Woman Who Fell Through the Ice

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