The rest of the afternoon flew by in a whirl of activity, mainly setting up systems to support the enquiry and ensuring everyone knew how to process data so it would be most useful. Information from the teams out in the field would pass to officers here. Everything would be entered in the computers and the most salient facts written up on the boards in the incident room.
At four-thirty Richard took a call from the forensic science lab. ‘She hadn’t been drinking and no evidence of recreational drugs,’ he told Janine.
‘What did we have on stomach contents?’
‘Just partially digested coffee and biscuits.’
‘So she’d not been wining, or dining, or clubbing it.’
Richard began to add the notes to the boards. ‘Domestic then?’ He paused and looked at her, marker in his hand.
‘It’s unusual,’ Janine shook her head, ‘most domestics, they panic. If they do cover their tracks it’s token. This – the weights, the river, the face – it’s very extreme. I know we can’t rule anything out but I reckon there could well be more to it.’
Richard cocked his head inviting her to elaborate.
She shrugged her shoulder. ‘I don’t know. We’ll just have to find out, won’t we?’
Marta knew as soon as the policewoman on the television news began speaking. She felt the skin on her face contract, her ribs tighten, her tongue thicken in her mouth. A falling sensation, as though the ground had staggered beneath her. She was alone in the sitting room, the other girls busy working. They had been jittery all day, ever since Marta told them Rosa hadn’t come back. No one had said very much, just asked the same questions as Marta had: where can she be, is she all right, what has she done?
Marta tried to trick herself again, to pretend it was all a silly mix-up, ludicrous to think it could be Rosa. Then the policewoman said about the mark on her leg and she knew it was true.
Oh, Rosa. She swallowed, gagged a little. Went through to the kitchen to get a drink. The water was clean here, tasting sweet and peaty. Not like home. Home. I was like a rabbit in a cage, Rosa had told her. A two-bedroom house in the suburbs outside Krakow had housed Rosa, her mother, her elder brother, his wife and child and her younger brother. Rosa slept in the living room. I couldn’t breathe, she had said. No space to turn round, no privacy. Like Marta, she had tried to get work but there were so few jobs, and the ones she could go after were poorly paid, the conditions miserable. Packing, cleaning, waitressing. Rosa had dreamed of another life. A job that paid for some nice clothes, a bedroom, independence. It wouldn’t happen in Poland but in Italy, the UK, Germany…
