‘I’ve been in plenty of houses like this,’ said Cooper. ‘What’s the big deal?’
‘Upstairs,’ said Fry.
The stairs creaked ominously and the carpet was frayed into tattered ribbons, as if by the constant passage of many pairs of hobnailed boots.
The same smells met Cooper on the landing. Upstairs, heavy floral patterns predominated. Massive red flowers on the wallpaper, even bigger blue flowers on the rugs. In the two first floor bedrooms upstairs, he could hardly see an inch of carpet. Three mattresses lay on the floor of each room, the piles of disarrayed blankets suggesting that they were regularly used. Clothes were hung on rails and behind the door, cardboard boxes were full of shoes and underwear, a yellow high-vis jacket hung over the side.
‘Some of these properties have owner-occupiers and have been made really nice internally,’ said Fry. ‘Well, where else could you buy a three-bedroom house for seventy thousand pounds?’
‘Not in Edendale, that’s for sure.’
Cooper thought of the Swanns’ home in Over Haddon. That was a three-bedroom property too. But the difference in price between the two houses was probably somewhere in the range of three hundred and fifty thousand pounds. What was it they said about property? Location, location, location...
‘But a lot of these houses are rented,’ said Fry. ‘Landlords charge about four hundred and fifty pounds a month. If you can get nine or ten people in them, that’s very cheap.’
‘So where’s the third bedroom?’
She pointed upwards. ‘Attic.’
The trap door opened to reveal an extending ladder. In the attic, Cooper couldn’t reach the walls, but he had to duck to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling.
‘It’s the same in here,’ said Cooper. ‘Mattresses and blankets.’
‘This is more than just a house in multiple occupation. These men were being exploited.’
Cooper came back down the ladder and stood on the landing.
‘Why have you shown me all this?’ he said.
‘Detective Superintendent Branagh asked us to bring you in and make sure you were up to speed with the operation.’
‘But why?’
‘Because,’ said Fry, ‘the next house we raid may be in your area.’
‘And what do you suggest I do in the meantime?’
‘We want LPUs like yours to gather information,’ she said. ‘It’s only by obtaining intelligence on the ground that we can get a complete picture. You and your team are best placed to do that.’
‘I suppose we are,’ admitted Cooper.
Outside, the occupants of the house had been driven away in the police van. As Fry and Cooper left in her Audi, they drove through a new housing development that had been built right next to the Model Village.
Cooper noticed that the roads were called Sunflower Close, Orchid Way, and The Spinney. Now, that could be in Edendale.
23
Back in the marketplace, only the takeaways were open. A car was parked outside the Shirebrook Xpress on the corner of Market Street, someone picking up a pizza or a couple of burgers. Cooper could smell the waft of frying chips from Deep Pan Kid, where the only movement was from two women in orange tabards behind the counter. A solitary black-and-white cat strolled across the empty market square.
Fry took him round the back of the row of shops and showed him the taped-off stairway.
‘This is where your murder victim lived?’
‘Yes. We thought Krystian Zalewski might be a slave-trafficking victim,’ she said. ‘One who had tried to escape from his captors and had been punished.’
‘A punishment that went too far?’ said Cooper.
‘Exactly. But when a knife is involved, it can easily end up worse than you expect.’
‘But you’re not sure now that it’s the right explanation.’
‘No. He’d been living in this one-bedroom flat for four months on his own. There are plenty of HMOs in the area, but this isn’t one of them. The landlord, who owns the shop downstairs, says he never saw anyone else coming to the flat.’
‘But the access is from this stairway in the backyard,’ said Cooper.
‘True. And the landlord locks the shop at five o’clock and goes home, so he wouldn’t know who came here in the evening, or during the night for that matter.’ Fry shook her head. ‘In some ways, it’s a classic set-up. Krystian Zalewski had very little contact with anyone else. He was living in a place where people could come and go without being observed for sixteen hours of the day.’
‘And he worked at a car wash,’ said Cooper.
She nodded. ‘A car wash. On the surface, that seemed to clinch it. But his employers say they had no problems with him, never noticed anything to give them cause for concern. Zalewski was a hard worker, always turned up on time. But he showed none of the indications of being trafficked. He was clean, had a change of clothes, didn’t seem ill-treated or malnourished. In fact, he brought sandwiches to work every day and sometimes offered to share them with his co-workers.’
‘Sounds pretty normal.’
‘Yes, it does. We’ve had officers visit the Polish shops, and the staff at Zabka recognise him. They say he came in regularly and bought groceries. Basic stuff, but enough to keep a single man fed.’ Fry raised her hands in a gesture of futility. ‘No, Krystian Zalewski wasn’t being trafficked. He was just a migrant worker, trying to make a go of it. But because he was such a loner, we couldn’t be sure.’
‘I wonder how he was regarded by the local people,’ said Cooper.
‘That we don’t know. The landlord is the only person we’ve found who can claim that he knew Zalewski. And he only collected his rent once a week.’
‘No other conversation at all?’
‘Oh, he spoke to his tenant a couple of times to explain to him what was supposed to go in the wheelie bins. He hadn’t quite grasped the idea of recyclable and non-recyclable.’
‘Have any of us?’ said Cooper.
Fry ignored the remark.
‘The owner of the shop was a complication,’ she said Fry. ‘His name is Geoffrey Pollitt and we already had him under observation.’
‘You’d been tracking him? Why?’
‘It was over quite a different matter. He has far right connections.’
‘A known extremist?’
‘He’s a middle man. Two years ago he bought a lock-up shop on the marketplace at Shirebrook. The tenant’s lease hadn’t been renewed when its term expired, so the shop was standing empty, with its shutters permanently down. When we went to have a discreet look, we realised there was a large storeroom at the back of the shop, with delivery access from one of the side streets.’
‘It must have rung alarm bells when there seemed to be links between slave trafficking and the far right.’
‘You’re not kidding. We would have moved in on Pollitt eventually, but we were in the process of gathering information.’
‘Which can take for ever,’ said Cooper.
‘We have to be cautious.’
‘And the death of Krystian Zalewski put a spanner in the works.’
‘It meant we had to respond, of course. It gave us a justification for turning over the flat and visiting Mr Pollitt.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing. Before he worked at the car wash, Zalewski was employed at the distribution centre just outside Shirebrook. There are thousands of Poles and other East Europeans working there, most of them on zero hours contracts through agencies. Zalewski got into trouble, broke too many rules about timekeeping, and the agency let him go. There’s nothing in it as far as the slave trafficking inquiry is concerned.’