‘I guess not.’
‘So you can buy Dan a beer when you see him.’
‘If I can get hold of him I will. He’s not answering his phone.’
‘I know – I tried him first. Probably out of network coverage or his phone’s run down.’
Kirsty nodded.
‘So, my Jane Doe. What’s her name?’
‘Adriana Kisslinger. She was twenty-seven.’
‘What was her offence?’
‘Prostitution. She was offering executive bed baths in the hospital she was working at, apparently. The ward sister didn’t approve.’
‘And it’s illegal in Romania?’
‘Prostitution is, yes. Ironic, isn’t it? Romania is listed as one of the biggest sources of human trafficking in the world.’
‘I know. Thanks again for this, Wendy.’
‘Like I said-’
‘Yeah, yeah. I know,’ Kirsty interrupted. ‘I will when I speak with him.’
Chapter 74
Hannah Shapiro looked up, surprised, as I walked towards her.
She was standing, holding on to one of the poles in the doors section of the carriage. Surrounded by more excited women but, whereas their faces were bright with anticipation, hers was crumpled, her haunted eyes still free of make-up. They welled with tears as I quietly said her name. She spun round and walked straight into my enfolding arms.
I hugged her tight to me. She was wearing an oversized white raincoat and not much beneath it.
Which was good news. She might have just had her underwear on but at least she wasn’t strapped around with explosives. After a moment she stepped back a little and I was glad that she did. Like I said, Hannah had grown quite a bit since I had last seen her.
‘What happened?’ I asked her.
‘They took my dad, Mister Carter. They’ve taken him.’
‘How?’
‘When the train stopped in the tunnel. There was someone outside, waiting. They went through those.’ She pointed at the connecting doors.
They had got off the train the same way I had got on. But it didn’t make any sense – they could hardly have walked back through the tunnel. Not with the trains running.
‘Did you recognise any of the men who took you?’ I asked as daylight filled the train once more as it pulled into Baker Street station.
Hannah shook her head. ‘They were wearing masks when they jumped on us in the street. And I never saw their faces in the house they kept me in. I was in the dark the whole time.’
‘And today?’
‘This morning they were all painted black. They painted me, too.’
I nodded. ‘I saw you but we couldn’t get to you.’
‘I know.’
‘And this afternoon they were all wearing comedy Take That face masks.’
‘Where did you get on the train?’
‘I don’t know. Out in the country.’
We stepped out onto the platform and she wobbled a little, holding my arm to steady herself and then gripping it harder.
‘How are Chloe and Laura?’ she asked, her voice even more tremulous.
‘Laura suffered a cut to her arm but she’s okay.’
‘And Chloe?’
‘Is still in hospital, Hannah. But she’s going to be fine.’
I figured that if I said it confidently enough it might make it so. People were still pouring out of the train, heading for the eastbound platform of the Jubilee Line. A guard was waiting for them to clear so he could whistle the train on. I went up to him and told him that I had seen an unattended bag on one of the storage racks over the seats.
It held up the train long enough for me to have a word with the driver. He had stopped in the tunnel due to signalling. It was a common enough occurrence when a train was waiting for traffic to clear ahead. There would be trains doing the very same thing now because we had backed up the system.
Fifteen minutes later and we were outside in one of Private’s mobile offices. A large black van with blacked-out windows and a state-of-the-art communications system inside.
We had put a transmitting device on Harlan Shapiro, strong enough to track from above the tunnel. That section wasn’t very deep, after alclass="underline" it was classified as subsurface, not really underground at all. The device was disguised as a tie clip and the signal it was broadcasting translated as a flashing dot on our computer monitor displaying a map of central London. I called up the schematic of the London Underground system and superimposed it. Sure enough, the flashing light corresponded with where the train had stopped in the tunnel. The dot wasn’t moving.
‘He can’t still be down there,’ said Sam who was standing beside me with Del Rio.
Hannah Shapiro was sitting huddled on one of the bench seats along the left side of the van, holding a cup of tea but not really drinking it. I guessed she was lost in dark memories and darker imaginings about what might be happening to her father. Personally, I was kicking myself. Harlan Shapiro had been the target all along. Never mind the golden egg, they had wanted the golden goddamned goose.
I moved the remote-control mouse and clicked it, this time synchronising Google Street View with the flashing symbol.
‘Son of a bitch,’ I said out loud.
‘What is it?’ asked Del Rio.
It was unlikely he would know what it was. Not a lot of people in London did, either.
We were looking at a bricked-up building. A series of arches all filled in with the same dark grey brick as the rest of it. It looked like a church or a Victorian orangery, maybe, if the arches had been filled with glass. Up until a few years ago, the building had housed a Chinese restaurant but now it was standing empty, waiting to become part of the infrastructure again as a substation. It had been built in 1868 and closed in 1939 when England was at war with Germany and the USA was still watching from the sidelines.
‘It’s Marlborough Road,’ I said.
‘Which is?’
‘Marlborough Road Tube Station,’ I explained. ‘One of many old Tube stations hidden throughout the Underground network. The platform for it isn’t even underground – they walked up and out and could be anywhere by now.’
‘So where does that leave us?’ asked Del Rio.
I looked over at Hannah Shapiro looking into her mug of hot tea as if the answers might be found within it. Somehow I doubted it.
‘It leaves us with a job to do,’ I said determinedly. ‘And I know just where to start.’
Chapter 75
DI Kirsty Webb was feeling the kind of excitement she got when the ‘tide’ of a case changed.
She’d considered taking the information to her superiors but she would have had to explain where and how she had got the identification.
She didn’t want to do that. It could cost her her detective-inspector status. It would certainly cost her the shot at the promotion she wanted and the move to Manchester that she’d thought she wanted – and wasn’t the hell sure about now. Damn Dan Carter! Why did she have to go and jump into bed with him again like some drunken teenager!
Kirsty shook away the thought and concentrated on her computer screen. Adriana Kisslinger had come into the country over a year ago and had worked on a temporary basis at a number of hospitals. Moving around London as an agency nurse: Northwick Park Hospital, the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. Then, bingo, she had also worked a three-month stint at Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire. After that nothing was showing for a few months. If she had been working anywhere she’d been doing it off the books. Unless she had gone back to her sideline, of course. Not every prostitute filled in a tax return.
A couple of calls later and Kirsty had Adriana Kisslinger’s last known address. It was in Punch Bowl Lane in Chesham.
Chapter 76
Back in the office I had assembled the troops.
The bad feeling in the air was palpable. We had brought back Hannah Shapiro. But no one was celebrating. Harlan Shapiro had known what was at stake. He had been very clear: he had lost his daughter once – he wasn’t about to lose her again. Whatever the cost. And he knew full well it was not just a monetary cost.