‘Could he have killed her?’
‘Harper?’ Marta seemed sceptical.
‘When you said bully boys…’
‘Lee Stone,’ Marta suggested.
Not Harper then? What had his role been – just to keep quiet? Or had he told Sulikov Rosa was talking about leaving – had he set the wheels in motion and then walked away?
Janine watched a magpie land across the other side of the yard by the rubbish bins. It bounced a step or two and then began to stab at something on the ground. Its mate joined it. The harsh calls of the birds echoed round the concrete square. Two for joy, Janine thought. Hard to see from where she was standing. Did they have that rhyme in Poland? Did they have magpies?
‘You don’t know where Rosa was heading?’
‘I thought she was going into work. Well, that’s what she said but now, thinking of it, she was…’ Marta struggled to find an English word, ‘a little strange, like she was hiding something.’ She nodded. ‘She was running away.’
‘Since then – have you heard anything, from Lee Stone or Harper? Have they said anything at all that might help us?’
‘We’ve not seen them.’ Marta finished her cigarette, dropped it on the floor into a convenient puddle. It died with a little hiss.
Janine thought again of the bleak room that had been Rosa’s home, of the squalid life she’d led, servicing men at the brothel and then gyrating for them at the club. Putting her hopes in Harper. And it had all ended with one of the men, maybe Stone, strangling her.
The other two girls appeared, lighting up as soon as they emerged through the double doors. They both looked pale and tired.
‘The girls,’ Janine said, ‘some of them, they must know what they’re really going to end up doing. People must know it’s going on.’
‘Oh, you know do you? You have experience, yes?’ Marta said hotly. After a moment she added in a softer tone, ‘Maybe we know. But there’s always a chance, something better here. Back home, nothing.’ She shook her head very slowly. ‘No hope. Nothing.’
Harper’s solicitor, a bullish looking man with a bad complexion and an excellent tailor, had arrived and sat with his client facing Janine and Richard. Harper looked anxious, a frown lodged between his eyes, his fingers tangled together on the table in front of him. A small tic fretted at the left side of his jaw.
‘You’ve rather a lot of explaining to do,’ Janine told him. ‘Let’s start with Rosa Milicz, shall we?’
‘She danced at the club…’ he began, sounding weary at repeating the same information.
