A Perfect Death (19 page)

But I digress. It is Jeanne who interests me more. A Jeanne de Minerve is mentioned in manorial records of the time and there
is also a reference in the chronicles of Morre Abbey to a gift of a chalice from Stephen de Grendalle on the occasion of his
wife Jeanne’s baptism. The question is, why would a woman be baptised twice into the Catholic church? Is it not likely that
she was a convert from another faith? Catharism, for example? De Grendalle was clearly a devout man who was probably torn
between love or infatuation for Jeanne and hatred for her supposed heresy.

However, as it turned out, religion was to be the least of his worries.

(From papers found in the possession of Professor
Yves de Demancour)

After reading Michael a bedtime story and packing the dishwasher, Wesley poured himself and Pam a glass of wine and slumped
in front of the television like millions of other overworked citizens. At that moment he didn’t feel like thinking. Or doing
much else, come to that.

Pam looked up at her husband and smiled shyly. ‘Thanks for getting the wine.’ She took a long drink and put the half-empty
glass down on the coffee table with a satisfied sigh. ‘How’s the case going?’

‘We’re still trying to find Nadia Lucas but she seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. And Gerry and I went to
see Sir Martin Crace today.’

‘What was he like?’

‘Very civil. Very charming. Told us bugger all, as Gerry would put it.’ He hesitated. ‘It looks are though there might be
a people-trafficking connection.’

Pam raised her eyebrows. ‘Really?’

Wesley cleared his throat, wondering whether he really wanted to go into the details, whether he wanted to bring the sordid
business into the haven that was his home. But Pam was waiting eagerly. He didn’t have much choice.

‘A Lithuanian girl was found half naked wandering down Morbay promenade by some community support officers. She’d escaped
from a brothel. Poor girl was terrified and, once she was taken to Morbay nick and they’d got hold of a translator, the whole
story came out. Apparently she’d paid these men to bring her here in a van and she’d been promised well-paid work as a waitress
in London.’

‘But when she got here she found out it wasn’t food she was expected to serve up?’

‘Precisely. She was brought to Morbay, kept prisoner in a brothel and … Anyway, she came here with a friend who’s now disappeared.
She tried to escape and now we fear the worst. Gerry and I are wondering whether the woman burned alive in Queenswear …’

Pam nodded, serious. ‘Yes. It’s exactly the kind of thing these bastards would do. Punishment –
pour encourager les autres
.’

To encourage the others – or to let them know what happened to those who tried to escape so that they were cowed into submission
and obeyed their captors without question. Pam had probably got it right.

‘Still doesn’t get you any nearer finding out who killed Ian, though, does it?’

She was right again, Wesley thought. Ian Rowe might have been involved in some dodgy things in his
time, but smuggling Eastern European girls into the country to work in brothels probably wasn’t one of them.

Pam suddenly looked away and focused on the moving images on the TV screen. ‘I keep thinking about Ian, you know,’ she said
softly. ‘I can’t get him out of my head. He was there one minute and …’

Before Wesley could answer, the doorbell rang.

Wesley was pleased to see Neil on the doorstep. Pam was in danger of getting maudlin and a bit of company would do her good.
Besides, he’d been wondering how things were progressing at the Grandal Field site and now he had a chance to find out.

Neil sat down heavily on the sofa in the spot Wesley had kept warm, and accepted a glass of red wine. He was staying in Queenswear,
at a place belonging to the parents of one of the archaeological team, conveniently empty as they were spending the summer
in Spain, so that meant he could walk back into the centre of Tradmouth and catch the passenger ferry over the water. He slumped
back, as if he was settled for the night.

‘I had a visit from Boudicca today.’

Wesley knew he was referring to Una Gibson and not the queen of the Iceni. ‘Why? You found some human bones?’ he asked, suddenly
interested. Where bones were, Una often followed.

‘No. I wanted to ask her about Ian Rowe. She met him about six months ago, you know. In Exeter. He told her he was back for
his mum’s funeral and that he’d been working for Crace. Your name was
mentioned, apparently. She told him you’d joined the Plods.’

Wesley smiled to himself. This solved the puzzle of how Rowe had known about his choice of career when they’d met in Carcassonne.
‘What else did he say?’

‘He mentioned a girlfriend who worked for some professor in France. And he asked her what she knew about the Cathars and she
said sod all. She reckoned he was going to come up with some conspiracy theory or other … Holy Grail and all that. He hinted
that he knew something that could make him rich.’ He grinned. ‘Cathar treasure maybe?’

Wesley rolled his eyes. ‘How could he fancy himself as Indiana Jones when he failed the exams?’

‘Anyway, by this time he was starting to get up Una’s nose.’

‘He always did.’

‘I wasn’t too keen on him myself,’ said Pam quietly. ‘But it’s still a shock – him dying like that.’

‘Have you been to see Martin Crace yet?’ Neil asked eagerly, breaking the short, respectful silence that followed Pam’s remark.

Wesley nodded.

‘What was he like?’

‘Cooperative,’ Wesley replied noncommittally. ‘So what else did Una have to say?’

‘As a matter of fact Rowe told her that his mum had been a big pal of Crace’s...implied that was how he got a job with him.
But she thought this was a load of bullshit.’

Una could well be right, Wesley thought, wondering
why Rowe hadn’t told him about his mother’s connections when they met in Carcassonne. It didn’t seem the sort of thing Rowe
would fail to mention out of modesty. And Crace hadn’t mentioned it, which seemed to support Una’s opinion.

Neil poured himself another drink. ‘I’m still trying to track down the excavation reports for the Grandal Field dig in the
nineteen eighties but I can’t find them anywhere.’ He frowned. ‘I’m wondering whether Maggie March had them with her when
she had the accident. Maplin said her car was burned out.’

‘They’ll probably turn up,’ said Wesley, closing his eyes and taking a sip of wine, thankful that Neil’s little problem wasn’t
likely to add to his workload.

Gerry Heffernan had wanted to speak to Yelena at the refuge first thing but the interpreter, who seemed to have recovered
from her domestic crisis, had said she wouldn’t be available till nine thirty at the earliest so they didn’t really have much
choice in the matter.

Wesley was silent as he drove out to Morbay.

‘You look knackered, mate,’ Gerry said, from the passenger seat.

‘Neil came round last night. He’s staying in Queenswear and he caught the last ferry back. Cut it a bit fine but that’s Neil.’
He paused for a moment while he negotiated a roundabout. ‘Paul Johnson’s getting hold of Nadia’s phone records and I was thinking
about going through her things. I’ve asked Nick Tarnaby to look at the footage from a CCTV camera outside the bank a few doors
away from Nadia’s house.
It’s bound to have caught the mysterious visitor’s car. Let’s just hope we can get the registration number.’

‘I’m not holding my breath.’

Wesley indicated and turned the corner into a street of red-brick Victorian terraced houses. The part of Morbay, well away
from the promenade, that the tourists seldom if ever saw. ‘This is it. Davenham Street.’

Wesley slowed the car down. The women’s refuge wouldn’t be easy to find. That was the point. It would look like any other
house in the street. There would be no sign outside.

However, they had the house number and, once Wesley had found a parking space, they made for the front door, their warrant
cards at the ready. The women who lived here would be wary of males.

They were expected, which made things easier, although Wesley couldn’t help thinking that it might have been better if he’d
gone there with Rachel rather than the boss. Gerry’s intentions were good but sometimes he gave off the wrong signals.

A tall woman with spiky peroxide hair said little as she showed them into a room strewn with discarded toys and told them
to take a seat. The interpreter, she said, had just arrived and was with Yelena, who seemed to be drawing some comfort from
being able to talk to someone in her own tongue. Wesley thanked her politely and they sat down on a stained and sagging sofa.

After five minutes the door opened and two women walked in. The taller of the pair was plump with wild,
dark hair. She was dressed in a long skirt and baggy T-shirt and looked the comforting type. The other was a young woman in
her early twenties, painfully thin with sharp features and fair hair scraped back into a tight ponytail. She looked at them
with frightened, pale-blue eyes and her flesh had a pallid, pasty look, as though she hadn’t seen the sunshine for a long
time. Wesley had seen that look on prisoners serving a long sentence in jail. It was easy to tell which one was Yelena.

He gave the girl a reassuring smile and held out his warrant card for her to examine. He kept his movements slow and unthreatening,
as if calming a terrified animal.

The tactic seemed to work. As soon as she realised Wesley was sympathetic, Yelena wanted to talk. In fact the plump interpreter
was finding it hard to keep up with her nervous stream of chatter.

After twenty minutes they had the whole story. How Yelena and her friend Anya had longed to come to England to earn money
and see the sights. They’d been offered the earth by a couple of men they met in a café in their home town. The men knew someone
who was opening an upmarket restaurant in London and who was looking for reliable staff. He paid good wages and had a flat
available for his staff to use. All the girls had to do was to find their fare. They had expected to fly but, when the mode
of transport had been a battered blue transit van, they were disappointed but not suspicious, even when they’d been told to
hide in the back when they were going through
passport control. It was when they’d arrived in London that things turned bad. They were taken to a run-down building with
bars on the windows and locked doors, where they were beaten and injected with drugs.

Wesley could guess the rest and he didn’t really want to hear it. But he sat there and listened to the interpreter speaking
the words, hesitating sometimes, her voice cracking with emotion. After the beatings and the drugs came the men – sometimes
ten or fifteen in a day. The girls were allowed to take their meagre meals together but each worked, as she put it, in their
own shabby room. Little more than a prison cell. The drugs, she said, gave some relief from the pain. But not much.

‘So what happened to Anya?’ Wesley asked gently.

The interpreter asked the question and listened carefully to the answer before relaying it to the two policemen in English.
‘One of the men left a door unlocked by accident one day. Anya took her chance and ran out. They chased after her. Yelena
here says she never saw her again and when she asked what had happened to her, she was told she’d been punished.’

‘Had Anya had any dental work? Fillings?’ He looked at the interpreter anxiously but she seemed unfazed by the question. The
answer was a shake of the head. Yelena didn’t know. But she didn’t think so.

Then Yelena spoke again and the interpreter hesitated before translating her words. ‘Yelena is afraid that Anya might be dead,’
she said, a slight tremor in her voice. ‘They are very wicked men. Men without hearts or souls.’

Wesley caught Gerry’s eye. They couldn’t argue with that.

‘We’ll get you moved, love,’ said Gerry slowly and clearly to Yelena, as though she was bound to understand. ‘Somewhere out
of Morbay. Somewhere safer. And if you can help us find the men who did this to you … I’ll send a woman officer round to take
a statement and she’ll need to ask you some more questions. We need to find the place you were kept and get a description
of the men. That OK?’

The interpreter said her bit and Yelena nodded in reply.

Wesley was now beginning to suspect that it was Anya who had died in that field at Grandal Farm. As far as Yelena knew, Anya
had had no dental work. Their victim had looked after her teeth – not that it had done her much good.

There was nothing more they could do for now. They smiled reassuringly and left. This was a job for uniform and Vice now –
the brothel and the men had to be found and dealt with.

As they drove away Wesley felt a deep sadness and, when he glanced at the unusually silent Gerry Heffernan, he guessed he
was feeling the same. But neither man spoke until they reached Morbay University. Wesley knew that it was best to put some
things out of your mind. But he couldn’t stop thinking about those two girls, full of excitement as they travelled to a new
country – as his parents must have been when they travelled to England from Trinidad to study at medical school – only to
find cruelty and evil in the
place of hope. The thought almost made his eyes prick with tears.

Gerry’s voice made him jump. ‘What are we hoping to find here, Wes?’

‘I want to see Nadia’s colleagues, just in case anyone knows anything about her disappearance. We’ll start with Professor
Demancour. I’m sure he’ll be able to point us in the right direction.’

‘Unless he’s got something to do with it,’ Gerry observed. ‘You’ve met him – what do you think?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Wesley answered. His mind was racing ahead. ‘Perhaps we’re looking at this thing from the wrong angle, Gerry.
We’ve taken it for granted that Nadia is a potential victim but what if she killed Ian Rowe for some reason? What if she’s
our killer?’

‘Tying up that woman in the field and burning her alive? Can you see a woman doing that, Wes?’