She quickly activated the central locking, then pulled away with a squeal of tyres. Fresh adrenalin surged through her body. Something wasn’t right about Ivy’s reaction to The Glue Pot. She had been terrified. Why?
Erika didn’t care how late it was, or how deprived she was of sleep. She was going to check out that pub.
11
Erika drove back over to Forest Hill, and parked a couple of roads back from the high street in a quiet residential area. The pub was halfway up the high street, a two-storey brick building with a wine-coloured frontage. The Glue Pot was written in white, the ‘t’ trailing away to a cartoon of a paintbrush hovering above a pot of white glue. It was an irritating sign, both naff and clueless. There were four windows, two on each storey, with thick stone sills. The windows on the first floor were dark. Of the two below, one was boarded up, leaving the other to glow murkily behind a net curtain.
Despite the cold, the outer door was wedged open. A sign promised that if you bought two glasses of house wine, you could get the rest of the bottle free. Erika went inside and found the bar was accessed via an inner door with badly cracked safety glass.
The bar was almost empty, with just two young men sitting smoking at one of the many Formica tables. They glanced up at her as she passed, taking in her long legs, and then returned to their beer. A small dance floor to one side was filled with old stacking chairs, and a Magic FM jingle played over the sound system, introducing the opening bars of Careless Whisper. Erika went to a long, low bar at the back that was framed by hanging glasses. A dumpy young girl was sitting watching Celebrity Big Brother on a tiny portable television.
‘Double vodka with tonic, please,’ Erika said.
The girl heaved herself up, reached for a wine glass, then pushed it against an optic, keeping her eye on the screen. She was wearing a faded Kylie Showgirl tour T-shirt stretched to capacity over her large bosom and dumpy frame. She adjusted the back of the T-shirt, pulling it down over her large backside.
‘You looking for an au pair? Childcare?’ the girl asked, presumably having picked up on Erika’s slight accent. Erika detected the hint of an accent in the girl, too, Polish? Russian? She couldn’t place it. The girl pushed the glass against the optic again.
‘Yes,’ said Erika, deciding to play along. The girl pulled out a plastic bottle of tonic water, and filled the wine glass up to the brim. She placed the drink down on the bar, then slid across a square of card and a biro.
‘You can put a card on the board for twenty pounds. New cards go up every Tuesday. Twenty-three fifty for that and the drink,’ she said.
Erika paid and sat down, taking a gulp of the drink. It was warm and flat.
‘Why didn’t you send your husband?’ asked the girl, watching to see what Erika wrote on the card.
‘Like I need my husband to drink more!’
The girl nodded with familiarity. Erika moved over to the small corkboard the girl had indicated, which was on the wall beside the bar. It was plastered with hundreds of cards, one over the other, handwritten in Slovak, Polish, Russian, Romanian – all advertising construction jobs, childcare, or au pair positions.
‘Is it always this quiet?’ asked Erika, looking around at the empty bar.
‘It’s January,’ shrugged the woman, wiping ashtrays with an old cloth. ‘And no football.’
‘My friend got her au pair from an advert here,’ said Erika, coming back to her bar stool. ‘Do you get many women in here? Young girls? Looking to be au pairs?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘My friend said that there was a girl looking for work, that I might meet her here?’
The girl stopped wiping an ashtray and regarded her with a cold eye. Erika took another sip of her drink then pulled out her phone. She scrolled through to the picture of Andrea and turned it round.
‘This is her.’
‘Never seen her,’ said the girl, a bit too quickly.
‘Really? My friend did say she was in here just a few days ago . . .’
‘I didn’t see her.’ The girl lifted up a wire tray half-filled with empty glasses and went to leave.
‘I’m not done yet,’ said Erika, placing her police ID on the bar.
The girl hesitated and put the wire tray back. When she turned, she saw the ID and looked panicked.
‘No it’s okay, I just need you to answer my questions. What’s your name?’
‘Kristina.’
‘Kristina . . .?’
‘Just Kristina,’ she insisted.
‘Okay. Just Kristina. I’ll ask you again. Have you seen this girl in here?’
The girl looked down at the picture of Andrea on the phone and shook her head so furiously that her cheeks wobbled.
‘Were you working here the night of the eighth? It was a Thursday, just over a week ago.’
The girl thought about it, and shook her head again.
‘Are you sure? She was found dead earlier today.’
The girl chewed her lip.
‘Are you the landlady?’
‘No.’
‘You just work here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who’s the landlady, or landlord?’
Kristina shrugged.
‘Come on, Kristina. I can find out this information easily, with the brewery. And those men were smoking in here, despite the smoking ban. Do you know how much that would cost in fines? Thousands of pounds. And then there’s the illegal employment agency. You just charged me twenty pounds to advertise. I could make a call and have a team of officers here in five minutes, and you’d be responsible . . .’
Kristina started to cry. Her huge chest heaved, her face went red and she scrubbed at her beady little eyes with a corner of a tea towel.
‘If you can just answer a couple of questions,’ said Erika, ‘I can make sure that you are seen as an innocent employee.’
Kristina stopped crying and caught her breath.
‘Okay . . . It’s okay, Kristina. Nothing bad is going to happen. Now, please, look at this photo again. Did you see this girl here on the night of the eighth? That was last Thursday. She was abducted and murdered. If you can tell me anything, you might help me find whoever did this.’
The girl looked down through swollen eyes at the picture of Andrea. ‘She sat there, in the corner,’ she said, finally. Erika turned and saw the small table by the dance floor. She also noticed that the two men drinking had gone, leaving half-full pints.
‘You’re sure it was this girl?’ said Erika, holding up the picture on the phone again.
‘Yeah. I remember how beautiful she was.’
‘Was she alone? Did she meet anyone?’
Kristina nodded. ‘There was a young woman with her, short blonde hair.’
‘As short as mine?’ asked Erika.
The girl nodded.
‘Anything else?’
‘They had a drink, or two, I don’t know, it was a really busy night . . . and . . . and . . .’
Erika could see she was becoming more worked up and scared,
‘Go on, Kristina. It’s okay, I promise.’
‘Then I don’t know when she went, her friend – but when I looked again, there was a man sitting with her.’
‘What did he look like?’
The woman shrugged. ‘Tall, dark . . . They argued.’
‘What do you mean, tall and dark? Can you be a bit more detailed?’ said Erika, trying to hide her frustration. This was a real breakthrough, but Kristina was being too vague. She made a decision and pulled out her phone.
‘Kristina, I want you to come with me to the station, and do what we call a photofit of the woman and man you saw Andrea sitting with.’
‘No, no, no, no,’ Kristina started, backing away.
Erika dialled the number for the duty desk at Lewisham Row. It started to ring. ‘Your information could lead to us finding out who killed this woman, Andrea.’