Marta steadied herself against the sink, looked out across the red brick walls of the backyard, the roofs opposite with their TV aerials and chimneys. Pigeons clustered on one.
As Marta had before her, Rosa had asked around – did anyone know of work in the UK? Scraping together enough to pay her passage, she had arrived nine months after Marta; came in the same way. A lorry from Krakow market to Prague. At a place near there, a service station, they had transferred to a minibus. Ten of them in all, in Marta’s group. Giggling and excited but falling quiet whenever they saw a police car or approached a border. Coming in from Poland they didn’t need visas. Once they were through customs the driver, a sullen man called Josef, took their passports back. The boss would keep these until their resettlement fee had been paid. He had arranged jobs and accommodation for the girls.
Marta had known dancing was a euphemism from the start. But what did it matter? If you switched off while you were working, avoided trouble with the clients, it was only a job. Inside too, not like picking fruit for ten hours a day like some did, stooped over in all weathers or working in an unheated shed packing meat or stinking fish. Marta sent a little money home knowing it made a real difference and she saved a little. One day she would move on. This was just the bottom rung but it didn’t mean she’d be stuck here for the rest of her life.
The police didn’t know the woman from the river was Rosa – would they find out? What if they came here? What if they found Marta and the others? The thought brought a swirl of nausea with it, a sour wash at the back of her throat. She raised the tumbler and drank again, her fingers pressed tight and pale around the glass.
*****
At six o’clock Janine turned off her laptop, packed her bag and turned off the lights in her office. She found Richard in the incident room. Several DCs were still staffing the phones and taking calls a result of the appeal for information. A cleaner was emptying bins and clearing away paper cups and food wrappers from some of the desks.
Janine shrugged into her coat. ‘Right, I’m calling home and then I’ll be at the hospital.’
It was dark now and from the office they could see the city lights: the red neon letters spelling out CIS at the top of that tower, the stacks of office blocks with row after row of rectangles aglow, below and in between glimpses of streets smothered in the haze of orange street lights and strung with the endless pulse of white headlights and red tail lights.
